Day: May 12, 2006

I’d love to help you, buddy, but I’d prefer to keep my license

I got a curious email just now.

Good Afternoon- I got your name through the Rochester Flying Club website. I live in Hemlock and work in Rochester. I am looking for a
way to be in two places at once…..I have two children graduating from college on the same day in different parts of New York State. My
daughter graduates from [college in upstate NY] at 10:30 in the morning and my son graduates from [another college, near here] at 4pm in the afternoon . There isn’t time to drive between the two, but there might be time to get to them both if we fly. I’m hoping that you or someone you might know would might be interested in flying 4 of us from [first location] to [second location] on the afternoon of May 21st. If you can lend any assistance, I’d love to hear from you.

I feel for the guy, and this sort of need to be in two places at once is a pretty compelling reason to become a pilot. But if I, or any other private pilot, were to take him up on the offer, the FAA would be all over the pilot for offering an illegal charter. Plus there is the little matter that for his four person family, the pilot needs a six seater, and at 4pm on the 21st I’m going to be flying the club’s 6 seater home from the rec.aviation fly-in.

Still scratching my head.

I’m still working on the problem in Rants and Revelations » That’s a head scratcher.

I wrote the thread spawning test program, and it ran 18,000+ iterations overnight on a test machine without the slightest hesitation. I pored over the code to see if there was a “Dining Philosophers”-style lock contention issue. I examined the logs for other programs on the system. And I’m still no closer.

I have a horrible suspicion that the lock up is actually in the database code somewhere. And also, that instead of using threads and locks to make sure I respond to the events quickly but don’t do more than one event at a time, what I really need is an job queue, so I can monitor if a job is taking too long, just kill it and start the next.

But of course since I don’t know where the lock up is actually happening nor can I reproduce it, I’m not sure how to know if my changes are going to fix anything.