Category: Rant

Harsh

When I was on the cross country ski team at University of Waterloo, we had our own temperature scale. From warmest to coldest, it was

  • Cold
  • Damn Cold
  • God Damned Cold
  • God Damned Fucking Cold
  • Harsh

Back then, because we spent so much time out in the cold and were pretty damn fit, I think “Harsh” was around -40, which is the temperature we experienced for the entire week of our first Christmas Ski Camp. That’s where future Olympic silver medalist and future several time wearer of the Malliot Jaune and Malliot Blanc in the Tour de France, Steve Bauer, showed me how to put a plastic bag down my shorts to prevent a painful frostbite.

These days in my aged and infirm state, “Harsh” is what we have been experiencing the last couple of days. It was 7°F when I drove home tonight, and in the cold today I broke my new snow brush and my very fancy and expensive sunglasses that I bought in Oshkosh last year. Plus my gas mileage is in the pits because the engine has to run to keep the owner warm.

Tip jar service?

Man this off-line blogging is a blessing and a curse, isn’t it?

Now that Amazon Honor System has gone away, what other options do I have for soliciting donations on my navaid.com website? I get most of my donations through PayPal, but some people preferred to stay away from PayPal for some reason. Amazon has a donation service, but only for registered charities.

We’re only talking about $5 or $10 a month, so it’s not like I need a full ecommerce solution.

Debugging, no molasses

I discovered the secret to getting Eclipse debugging to not be painfully slow. The secret is to reboot (or possibly just log off and on again) and then make sure you don’t start IE or Outlook or anything else except Oracle, jboss and the app. At that point I’m using just a hair over 2Gb of memory and it’s hardly swapping at all.

I’m sure it would be a huge violation of their security policies, but I’d love to bring in my laptop to see how of does at this. Not only does it have a faster processor and twice as much ram, but it also would allow me to have only Oracle, jboss and the app running on the desktop box while Eclipse ran on the laptop, freeing up half a gig of ram on the desktop.

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.