There was a great BBC click podcast this week, covering some of the advances made in technology and music.  There was some interesting stuff around Bjork’s new music video and art exhibit, but also a section on IBM Watson research.  They did some interesting work on computer/musician collaboration with Alex Da Kid. They also discussed learning algorithms, used to identify vocal stem samples in songs, and attribute them to the original song.  Many vocal lines are sampled hundreds, or thousands of times, and it’s not actually clear how derivatives of original work have evolved.  Some interesting stuff in there - worth a listen.

Three years ago I wrote a detailed post with observations and advice on the Glastonbury Festival ticket sale, and how their website appears to work. Again, I was involved in the big refresh this year, trying to buy tickets for friends and family. I wasn’t successful in purchasing tickets this year, although my sister was able to buy two sets of tickets (I.e go through the checkout process twice). I also spent a lot of time dealing with a grey page, with connection errors and the like, like many people. Immediately after the sale, after the tickets sold out, the pages refreshed fine. This suggested to me that it’s not just about traffic this year - they are likely using IP rate limiting. This explains several things:

Old Article Comments

I exported these from my old wordpress blog, so they are a bit out of date, but I thought I’d keep them around for posterity.

[James Simpson] - Oct 0, 2016 Yep i know this struggle too - drop me an email for a collaboration approach. Although yes, it may be the case of rate limiting, there is more of an issue with actually getting connected in the first place. Think of the mass amounts of visitors over that short space of 45 min, its like an organised DDos attack on the servers… There is only so many concurrent connections a load balancer can take and redirect, and there will be thousands of people trying to get through that load balancer every second. It may be a good way to script something (which I am at the moment) to check for a connection straight through into the server, and then open a browser window with the same cookie/session id as if you were on a browser going straight through. It’s a hard one to call without knowledge of their server setup and how their scripts are set to load up pages or who gets access or not.

Note: Also see my updated 2016 post about this topic.

Tomorrow is that time of year again, when hundreds of thousands of people spend hours pressing their F5 key, in an often futile attempt to try to book Glastonbury Festival tickets. Although I have been successful the last couple of years anyway, this year I had the opportunity to do a bit of investigation beforehand, as they had a smaller ticket sale on Thursday evening.  Since we have baby in tow this year, will be caravanning, and couldn’t buy a coach ticket, but I could use the opportunity to check out the SeeTickets servers, and get an idea how their pages and queuing system work. This is also more important, since 15,000 of the tickets have already sold, there will be less available tomorrow than on previous years. When I first hit the site, right on the dot of 6pm, I refreshed a few times, and immediately got to the coach ticket selection page.  Here, you got to choose between Wednesday, and Thursday departures.  I clicked Wednesday, and immediately got a registration numbers form.  I was impressed - in the past I’d been stuck in a queue for a long time before being able to type my reg numbers in! So, I saved the page, so I could have a look at it later.  I clicked through, and had a look at all the pages, including the payment page. Over the next half an hour I refreshed the page a few times, until I got added to the normal queuing system.  This is a javascript based refresh which refreshes every 20 seconds, and polls the server for a booking slot.  I assume they use a session based queuing system, because although last year there were problems after typing in the registration numbers (because of a DNS configuration issue), the previous festival, once I got through to this screen, I had no further issues. Looking at this then, it’s fairly simple on how to get your booking slot - you keep refreshing the page until instead of showing you a queuing message, you get a page where you type in the registration numbers. What you are actually hoping the see, is this form:

Old Article Comments

I exported these from my old wordpress blog, so they are a bit out of date, but I thought I’d keep them around for posterity.

Lewis Cook - Sep 1, 2015 Great blog post. . Any chance of an updated blog post for Sunday’s ticket showdown?

chrisgilbert42 - Oct 0, 2016 Hi Lewis, hope you managed to get tickets last year/this year. I’ve noticed a few things that have changed this year, I’ll see if I can come up with an updated post soon. Won’t be quite as detailed, but does appear they are now using IP rate limiting (hence the advice to only use one device at once).