Rants and Revelations

I’m in the middle of a big refactoring job for my work project. I’m basically restructuring all the classes that make database calls so that they use connection pooling with a per-thread “DatabaseHandle” that caches PreparedStatements. It’s a big job, and it’s going to take a LOT of time and concentration, which means that home is a far better environment to work on it than at work. The problem and dilemma comes because I was on a roll when I hit 40 hours for the week. I’m not allowed to bill more than 40 hours, and I’m sure as hell not going to do it for free. Nor can I work from home without prior approval and that’s not easy to get.

So my question is, do I quit now and hope I can quickly get back in the groove on Monday morning, or do I work on it this weekend and then when I’m done spend an equivalent amount of time at my desk at work working on personal projects, like my photoshop stuff? I’m thinking it’s probably safest, although nowhere near as productive, to shut down Eclipse right now and don’t look at it until Monday morning.

The rules, as quoted from Eminy’s LiveJournal:

You know the rules: 20 random consecutive songs from my library, first lines given here (or second lines if the first contains the title). You identify the song, and I’ll cross it out. Googling is cheating. N.B.: Items in square brackets are instrumental only, included here to preserve the consecutivity principle.

1. I have to swear by Almighty God Guns On The Roof, The Clash - Rob G
2. When we were young, we pledged allegiance
3. All you pretty women, bring it to my home
4. [skipped one in Bulgarian]
5. I’ve been [loved?], down in the delta
6. Her eyes they shone like diamonds Black Velvet Band/Galway Shawl, 4 To The Bar - Ayana C
7. Dust falls on the empty halls of my old school
8. Well, you could see it in his eyes as they strained against the night
9. Men and people will fight ya down (Tell me why!) Exodus, Bob Marley - Ian York
10. [Bach keyboard concerto]
11. [Red Shingle Bay, Many Hands]
12. He started out to be a tugboat man, but he never got the hang of a ratchet bar
13. [Something from Green Linnet]
14. Many’s the day I took for granted, breathing the air that silenced some
15. Ships may come and ships may go, as long as the sea does roll Jolly Roving Tar, Great Big Sea - Becca
16. Now come tell me Sean O’Farrell, tell me where you hurry so Rising of the Moon, Shane McGowan and the Popes - Ian York
17. [Mozart: Ave Verum Corpus]
18. High speed drift on a prairie road, hot tires sing like a string being bowed SteelSilver Wheels, Bruce Cockburn- Ian York
19. Well I’ve got a friend who’s a man (who’s a man?) Hateful, The Clash - Rob G
20. [Duologue, Rare Air]
21. I was a miner, I was a docker Between The Wars, Billy Bragg - Becca
22. [Marion Livingstone, Rare Air]
23. There’s a noble fleet of whalers, a sailing from Dundee Old Polina, Great Big Sea - CMD
24. In the merry month of June, when from my home I started The Rocky Road To Dublin, The Irish Descendants - Fnord Prefect
25. [skipped first line]He had a little tavern by the strand Yarmouth Town, Great Big Sea - Laura
26. [Infernal Dance of King Kashei, Stravinsky]
27. [Water Music, Handel]
28. [skipped first chorus]Said - said - said: I remember when we used to sit, In the government yard in Trenchtown No Woman, No Cry, Bob Marley - Ian York
29. [Trumpet Concerto, Wynton Marsallis]
30. [The Pigeon On the Gate, Casdh An tSugian]
31. The island, it is silent now, but the ghosts still haunt the waves Thousands Are Sailing, The Pogues - Ian York

I cheated a bit - I’ve got a lot of music on my iPod that I haven’t listened to or assigned a star rating to yet. I have enough time picking up lyrics on songs I’ve heard a few times, so I did this with my “4 or 5 Stars” playlist.

In anticipation of today’s announcement of the new MacBook Pro, I ordered the computer skin a few days ago from iToppers.com. Today the guy producing it sent me this image of what it’s going to look like.

I can hardly wait. I hope there is an airshow nearby where I can get the team to sign it.

A few hours ago I was complaining to a bunch of friends how annoying it was to do Photoshop with a ball mouse. My optical mouse broke (the first button went down and didn’t come back up) a few weeks ago so I’m using this old ball mouse, and no matter how carefully I clean the rollers, it seems that when I click and drag to the left, the mouse will stop. If I just move the mouse without with the button down, no problem, it follows it all over the place. But it takes multiple attempts to drag anything to the left.

One of my friends, Harry, is an extremely experienced graphic artist, and he said “forget the mouse, buy a Wacom Bamboo tablet”. At first, I was reluctant, because the logo for this thing looks like the word “Bamboo” drawn on an Etch-a-Sketch, which doesn’t say much for its drawing ability. Also, the Wacom promo stuff talks only about it as a device for mouse-replacement and handwriting, with absolutely nothing about using it for drawing or other artistic work. But I found a couple of user reviews where they pointed out it has force sensitivity, which is not something you need for handwriting and mouse-replacement. They said it was an excellent tablet for amateur artists, as well as something professionals might want to put in their laptop bag for use on the road. So on the way home from lunch we stopped off and bought one.

I’ve been using it continually since then, and as far as I’m concerned I should throw away all my mice and buy one of these things for every computer I use. I’m using it for general mouse-replacement and it’s great. The only thing I reach for my mouse for is for the scroll wheel, and that’s mostly force of habit since the tablet has scroll buttons on the top. This thing is extremely great.

Ok, the sky is actually clearing up a bit, and there are lots of blue patches. But on the other hand, it’s cold out, and I’m tired, and I’ve decided today is not the day to go flying for the first time since November.

• Knees : stabby
• Database code: not working 100%, but good enough to let QA start hammering it
• Due date: today
• Overtime: ending today
• Airplane: booked
• Weather: doubtful
• Other plans for weekend: massive amounts of sleep and TV watching
• Mood: cautiously optimistic

I’m coming down to the wire of this database re-architecture task. I’ve been working 60 hours a week for 8 weeks now on this thing, and it’s due this Friday. Unfortunately, I have come to the stunning realization that there is a gaping problem in my design.
Continue reading ‘Oops’ »

I’ve been thinking a lot about working overtime, mostly because I’ve been doing a lot of it. I haven’t taken a day off since the day after Christmas, as I struggle to meet an impossible deadline.
Continue reading ‘Some thoughts on overtime’ »

Sorry about this, but I’m going to use a blog post as my personal note pad once again.

Every time my colo box reboots, I need to restart some stuff that automatically restarts on my home box, mostly ssh tunnels. In the old days, I’d use “kill -1 1″ or “telinit -q” depending on how traditional I was feeling. That tells init(1) to re-read /etc/inittab and kill any of its daemons that isn’t in the file any more and start anything that’s in the file that isn’t running.

But Ubuntu has replaced the old inittab with files in /etc/event.d. And now, you restart those with a much simpler (but much harder for me to remember when I need to) “sudo start ssh_tunnel”. One of these days I’ll remember that.

See this dialog? I’m seeing a lot of it. I’m working on a very large project, and this one particular file is the main GUI for our system. The guy who started it was in love with Visual Age For Java, and didn’t like splitting his stuff into separate classes, and after I took it over I’ve pretty much continued along the same lines, so this file is over 10,000 lines long. Yes, you read that right, ten thousand lines of poorly documented code.

Just about every word you type into Eclipse in this file either leads to a long delay as the CPU maxes out and the disk churns, or this dialog. I’ve tried quitting everything else to provide more memory for it to work in (you’d think 2Gb of RAM would be enough for Eclipse, Safari, iChat and iTunes to get along, and you’d be wrong).

Sigh.

UpdateOk, what sort of moron declares a method to throw “Exception”?

Last night, in a parking lot I saw a bumper sticker that said something like “Live lightly so that others may live”. A great sentiment, except I saw it on a gigantic SUV. And not one of the semi-practical ones that looked like it was on its way to a cabin in the woods or was full of climbing gear and skis, I’m talking one of those pristine, shiny, leather seats and chrome monstrosities that never leaves the pavement.

Well, after I got home I tried Adobe Fucking Updater again. This time it popped up a dialog saying “no updates to be installed” so quickly I didn’t even notice how much RAM it was taking. Certainly a far cry from hours and gigabytes of memory that it took when I ran it at work.

Also, I did a Time Machine backup for the first time in a few days. I’d started it in the morning, but it was taking too long so I’d aborted it after about half an hour. I started it again when I got home, and expected it to take 5 or 10 minutes like it usually does, or maybe a bit longer because I’d just installed the Leopard 10.5.2 and Graphics updates. Instead it ground and ground and ground and finally finished 3.5 hours after it had started. I’m told this is because the disk was nearly full, and it had to re-arrange old backups to discard the appropriate old ones.

Adobe is not my favourite software company. I’ve ranted before about splash screens that cannot be moved or covered. Today I was browsing a PDF file in Safari, which was an excruciatingly slow activity for some reason. But then it got an order of magnitude slower, and I see the infamous “Adobe Updater” icon in the dock.

I try to pop up the Activity Monitor to see what’s up. It takes at least 5 minutes, and it shows Safari and Eclipse, the two main reasons for having this computer here at work, as “Not responding”. It also shows that Adobe Updater has an RSIZE of 1.4GB+, and a VSIZE of 3.0GB+, and both numbers are still growing. I kill the Adobe Updater, and Safari and Eclipse both take a while to finish swapping back in their active parts and start working again.

But 10 minutes or so later, the Adobe Fucking Updater starts again. This time I decided to humour it. I closed Eclipse and Safari and waited. And it didn’t take long for the AFU to take up all the memory I had, and then die. I think it got up to about 3.3Gb of VSIZE. And yet, doing a quick back of the envelope calculating, I’m pretty sure it could have sucked every Adobe software product I have on my disk into memory and still not used 3+Gb.

So what the hell is happening? Why is Adobe Fucking Updater so badly written? Why is it chewing memory like that?

I have a theory that it might have something to do with being behind the corporate web proxy (which also sucks mightily). Or it just might be that Adobe’s programmers are incompetent morons who should all be fired and told to never touch a computer again. Or more likely, both. When I get home tonight, I’ll try updating again and see if it really needs more memory than I’m willing to give it.

My back/neck pain is mostly under control thanks to a chiropractor, some stretches, and some adjustments to my work environment both at home and at work. So of course, that occasional stabbing pain I get in my knees has flared up. So far, only in the right knee, and so far only enough to make me wince rather than the full blown flare up which has, in the past, made me fall to the ground writhing in pain. I’m sure it will get there. In the mean time, I’m getting constant small stabs doing anything that puts more than 1/2 my body weight on that leg, such as going up stairs, or transitioning from seated to standing or vice versa.

I don’t know what it is about this 2GB thumb drive, but it’s incredibly slow in USB 1 mode, but not too bad in USB 2 mode. I tried copying this 600+Mb ISO to it from my Linux box with it formatted at ext3, ext2 and FAT32, and the fastest time was over 35 minutes. The same file to a 1Gb thumb drive in the same USB slot was only 11 minutes.

On my Powerbook, USB 2.0, that same file copied to the thumb drive in 2:43. Copying it to the 1Gb thumb drive took 2:04. So it’s only on USB 1 that the other one is dog slow.