Author: Paul Tomblin

New iPod

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My 80Gb Video (aka “Classic”) iPod stopped working on me the other day. Everything else was fine, but the buttons and scroll wheel wouldn’t respond. I tried the “5 R” trouble shooting on the Apple web site, but that didn’t help. For some reason, I thought I bought this iPod last summer, but when I got to the Apple store, they said no, it was bought in 2006. And of course, I’d procrastinated about buying AppleCare and now it’s too late.

So with no other options, I bought a new one. This time I got a 32Gb iPod Touch. As you can see from the image, that’s going to take a bit of getting used to. Oh well. Maybe there will be wifi near work so I can actually see things on the web properly instead of dealing with the horrible browser on the Treo.

Debugging through mollasses

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.

Thoughts in the dentist chair

  • Is it just because I have a short soft pallete, or do other people find it nearly impossible to breathe when they have their head back and somebody forcing their mouth open and spraying stuff in it?
  • If we were really intelligently designed, wouldn’t the nasal passages connect to the lungs and the mouth connect to the stomach, with no interconnection between them?
  • Maybe it’s supposed to be like a four barrel carburetor where you open the mouth to get more air when you really need it?
  • I wonder if that thing they use to clean off the scale is called a “sonic screwdriver”?
  • Is that thing set to the resonant frequency of your skull on purpose, or is that just a lucky coincidence?
  • My hand has gone numb. I guess I’m clenching them a bit. No surprises there.

Well, I’m not going to get rich, but…

I just got a check for my share of the money Laurie Davis got from selling his new CoPilot for iPhone on the iTunes app store. If you just count the time I spent re-designing my database to accomdate the requirements of his app, writing the web app to provide the data for his app, and re-writing the load scripts to load in the new database format, I figure I earned about $50/hour. If you count all time I’ve spend on building and maintaining this database and web site, add in the money I’ve gotten from donations, and ignore the money I’ve spent on web hosting for navaid.com, and I figure I earned about $.00001/hour.

Still, it’s sure nice to have this check. Of course, my first impulse it is to blow it on something cool for myself, but on sober second thought I should probably bank (most of) it against a future jobless spell.