I guess this is computing-related, but mostly soccer.

We're soccer fans, have tickets to two games for this year's FIFA World Cup in Germany, and wanted to see if we could get any more. The ticket sales were divided into various phases - the important part being that most of the previous ones were lotteries, but the phase that started today is first-come first-served. This is a recipe for having a swamped web server, and sure enough, that's what happened. At noon CET (that's 6:00 @#$@@#%@ a.m. where I am) they opened up the ticket sales, you got a page listing what games had tickets available, could check off some boxes, click the submit button, and after a short pause you'd get a server error message with a nice ID number that changed each time. Actually, I doubt it was the web server as such, because the static pages still worked - so it was presumably the back-end.

I assume that some people didn't get error messages, because the tickets did disappear. Eventually the page changed, apparently manually, because it switched to being in German, being served with type text/plain, and indicating that there were no tickets at all. At other points it just redirected you back to a main ticketing page, but with a URL that had a 404 in the file name. However, all is not lost, as tickets will be being added to the mix over the next two months. FIFA's advice on this is to check the web site frequently.

This is kind of annoying, so naturally I decided to automate the process. I wrote a little Smalltalk script that checks the web page every five minutes (to be at least marginally polite), regexes through the result for indications of available tickets, and if it sees any it emails both of us to check the site, quick. If I'd had an easy hookup from the computer to, say, an air raid siren, I might have done that to reduce the latency, but an email will have to do for the moment.

All of this, though, seems like a really bad idea on FIFA's part. They knew for a year or so that this was going to happen, and still the infrastructure obviously wasn't ready for it. And I don't imagine I'm the only person to think of automating at least this first part of the process, rather than sitting in front of a computer hitting the refresh button constantly for two months. I was hesitating to blog about it and give away my great idea, but a good five seconds convinced me that anyone with the ability to write such a script would think of it almost immediately. That's probably a smallish subset of football/soccer fans, but is still going to be an awful lot of people.

Overall, I'd say they're in for a couple of months of a great many hits on that web site.