I’ve had a very frustrating day so far, and it’s far from done. I’ve been trying to trace through the execution under two different conditions, one of which works and one of which doesn’t. It’s been extremely slow going. Even with everything that could consume memory exited (including IE and the client app after it fires off the report request), my machine is swapping like mad.
Clicking the next instruction arrow in Eclipse takes roughly 30 seconds (I timed a few at 22 and 24 seconds, and a few at 36 and 38 seconds, so average it). Waiting for it to then actually show you the current value of a variable in the Variables window seems to average about 1 minute, although I’ve seen it as short as 30 seconds and as long as 2:30.
If I had a decently fast machine, I would have been finished this tracing (and likely found the bug) before lunchtime.
I have to just keep reminding myself that I’m being paid the same if I fix one bug a week or if I fix 10 a week. If this is the equipment they’re going to give me, then they’d better be prepared to accept the pace that equipment forces on me.
It wouldn’t be so painful if I could spend those 30 second pauses reading Stack Overflow, but until I fired it up to post this rant, I’ve been keeping IE closed.
Update Just to top it all off, about 4:30 today I accidentally clicked the “step return” which returned me out of the method I was painfully stepping through, meaning that most of my afternoon’s work was for naught.
Not allowed to use your Treo at work, or does that website not play nice on a mobile browser?
I know I couldn’t live wihout my iPhone to kill those down moments (and sometimes hours) at work.
No, the Treo browser kind of sucks. That’s why I keep hoping that either Apple will put a keyboard on the iPhone or somebody will bring out a Google Phone that doesn’t look like a pile of crap. Or maybe the new Palm phone that they showed at the Consumer Electronic Show today will come out soon.
I think that most heavy iPhone users would agree that once you get used to it the iPhone keyboard is *almost* as good as a physical keyboard. When I first got it I wasn’t so sure of that myself, but since I’ve adjusted (and put plenty of faith in the thankfully quite capable auto-correct feature) I can type at a brisk pace on it now.
I find myself appreciating the extra screen real-estate that the virtual keyboard provides more then the lack of a physical keyboard anymore.
IMHO I wouldn’t let that be the only thing keeping you away from the iPhone. I just upgraded to the 16gig 3G from my original and I’m still quite enjoying it. As much as I’ve looked at alternatives (including the Gphone) they just can’t do it at the level/slickness of the iPhone yet.
There is a company which ran the numbers and found out they can save a six-figure number by buying a 1000 iphones (including a data flatrate). This was supposed to be a christmas present, but in my division its not due until april. So, in the meantime i got myself a new nokia-cellphone 6000-something, but it is not nice (gps barely working, nokia maps suck golfballs through a gardenhose), buy hey, company paid for it. Personally, i use a motorola razr v3, which has a nice menu and just works (but no gps and no maps). The nokia-phone can be connected to a laptop to surf the web, which the iphone cannot, i heard. Haven’t researched that yet, company does not make much profit lately and is kicking out some temporary workers, so maybe I’m looking for a new job, too, before actually getting the iphone… who knows?