https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/03/12/nobody-shows-up-anyway-donald-trump-jokes-about-democrats-canceling-political-rallies/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

It contains the same time series data as mine so I’ve decided to make this the first and last day that I update my site.

https://snrcalc.now.sh/covid19

Each day I’ll visit JHU’s GitHub repository and download the time series data for USA Confirmed Cases, Deaths, and Recoveries. I’ll import it into Excel and build Pivot Tables and Charts, then take a screenshot and upload it to my site.

Ideally I would import just the time series data to my website and then let you visualize it with charting software. One step at a time.

Many years ago, I used ArcGIS and a few other ESRI products, and your comments are consistent with my experience. I’ve never worked at ESRI and have no knowledge of their servers, but I’d imagine the current load is far more than they ever expected. I’d guess it’ll get even worse.

https://astrotuna.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/M35-NGC2158_L540x15s_R300x14.3s_G300x8.4s_B300x13s_calAignChannels_luminance100_S15-3-0_G94_SA35-25.jpg

https://astrotuna.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/M81_L250x90s_R90x85.3s_G90x50.2s_B90x77.8s_Rx0.83_Gx0.90_Bx1.00_S15-3-25_SA25-25_G92_SGB2_SH70_2020-02-24.jpg

The web address, arcgis.com, is one of many related GIS products offered by California-based ESRI. (GIS is short for Geographic Information System).

ArcGIS Online is cloud-based GIS mapping. Anyone with a credit card can open an account. ESRI maintains the servers and web application, you provide the data.

John Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) most likely has an account with ArcGIS Online. So, no actual coding of the web application is required by CSSE.

Apparently ArcGIS offers an administrative user interface that CSSE uses to layout the site’s appearance. More importantly the layout of the data file that feeds ArcGIS is designed using said user interface.

It is not far-fetched to think of ArcGIS as something similar to WordPress for bloggers. For my personal blog of astrophotography I use WordPress hosted by a company who is responsible for the servers and integrity of the system. I log into an administration interface and key-in a blog entry according to a set of rules imposed by WordPress. When I am done I click the Publish button. ArcGIS is similar.

JHU CSSE is responsible for collecting the COVID-19 data from dozens of worldwide sources and normalizing it into a format that is agreeable to ArcGIS. CSSE may have developed software to automate some or all of the task.

JHU CSSE makes their data available to the public through a GitHib repository. I’ve perused the “Issues” tab. There appears to be only one or two contacts at CSSE who handle an absolute avalanche of requests and bug reports. Many of the issues this past day were related to the site not being available.

With respect to today’s problems with the site It is unclear where the fault lies. Clearly CSSE is responsible for the drop-off in the update rate. At one point I measured a delay of 10 hours between updates.

On the other hand the site was exhibiting behavior that indicated the ArcGIS servers were having difficult meeting demand. Another possibility is that CSSE uploaded a file that was incompatible with what ArcGIS expected. One would hope that the file would have been flatly rejected without breaking it.

The latest word from CSSE at GitHib is that they are down for maintenance tonight. This is a bit disconcerting. If I were responsible for the project I would insist on having a “staging” server. All significant changes should be sent to staging so it can be vetted before rolling out to the public. The production servers should never miss a beat. If you break production you lose customers. Very simple.

https://babylonbee.com/news/nations-nerds-wake-up-in-utopia-where-everyone-stays-inside-sports-canceled-social-interaction-forbidden

Read the whole thing for the punchline.

“Sure, it’s a stupid “Hello World!” program but it is best to develop good habits early. I’m not sure they are teaching this at universities.” – Brian

Depends on the uni. I have two sons in the field, although with very different deep-geek specialties, and they told me that their design classes were very good.
That was a bit before the real deep dive into PC curriculum control, though.
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richf on March 12, 2020 at 8:34 pm said:
Regarding Computer Programmers : I used to be one, and I recall a saying from the period – “When it becomes possible to write a computer program in English, it will be discovered that programmers cannot write in English”.
* * *
And that was before most of them were from India and China.
However, I did have a t-shirt that read: FORTRAN Jock – I speak in GOTOs.