Category: Rant

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.

New Years Resolutions

1600×1200, 1080p, … sorry, I’m a geek, what can I say?

Real resolutions:
– break 20 minutes in the Baycreek time trial
– finish the Long Lake Long Boat Regatta long race (9 miles)
– figure out if I want to continue flying or not.
– develop an ajax web site, using either GWT or jquery or ruby on rails or something
– diet
– exercise
– get a better job
– once more subject myself to the psychological torture of trying to get more treatment for my pain

Update: Today’s discovery is that if you use the WordPress “Publish on a later date” to queue up a post like this, the LiveJournal Crossposter plugin doesn’t see it.

What happened there?

StackOverflow reputation tracker

Somehow overnight, I got 80 new points from votes, but somehow my net reputation went down 133 points without any of my other questions or answers getting any down votes. I have no idea how that happened, but I don’t like it.

Update: It turns out that Jeff Atwood decided to implement some “fraud detection” and removed what he thought were “suspicious” upvotes. I should consider myself lucky – Konrad, who had the second most points on the system, lost 6,000 points and Daok, who was pretty high up in spite of the fact that English is obviously not his first language, lost 5,000.