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”
Category: Geekery
Some thoughts on overtime
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”
inittab, telinit, and Ubuntu
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.
Sigh
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”?
Updates and backups
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.