Somewhat recently, I encountered an issue where my expected user input is an arbitrarily long list of words. While I could get the word count, I had no reliable way to know whether all of the ajax requests had been completed before firing an event that created a list of definitions for each word. I had several realizations in my quest: I could do the entire process synchronously. However, this meant that one bad ajax return or error could cause the entire process to hang.

Prologue Last week I had the following mortifying experience: I tried to ssh into my box hosted at RackSpace and nothing happened. It simply hung, and never prompted me for my password. Commence panic. I determined that port 22 was, in fact, open, and I was connecting to the machine at some point. nc -zw3 monicalent.com 22 Connection to monicalent.com 22 port [tcp/ssh] succeeded! telnet monicalent.com 22 Trying 198.