Category: Rant

Ever been so tired and overstressed you can’t sleep?

I’ve been exhausted for days now – I feel like I can’t keep my eyes open. It’s accumulated lack of sleep and stress from this project I’m on – I’ve put in over 55 hours a week for about 2 months now.

Last night I went to bed early to try and get some rest. But I found myself lying in bed awake in the middle of the night, worrying that if I didn’t get back to sleep soon I’d been even more tired and wouldn’t be able to finish the work I promised to get finished by Monday.

Believe me, that’s not conducive to getting back to sleep. It’s a great cycle of stress leading to lack of sleep leading to stress.

I want my weekends back. Although the first weekend I get off after this project is done will probably be spent comatose.

More discoveries

Somebody broke the build badly at work. Sometime two or three days ago, they split a library JAR into two JARs, but didn’t update the Makefiles for all the places that relied on the JAR. I didn’t discover this until today because up until now I wasn’t relying on anything new in the JAR, and so hadn’t noticed that I was using an old copy of the original JAR. Because I had to use the new stuff in the JAR to complete what I am working on today, I ended up going to work to fix the build. Which meant a long, long cycle of doing “clearmake clean; clearmake” to make sure things were really fixed.

Java has a very bad habit of deciding that a source file it just compiled two minutes ago needs to be recompiled. So it can be compiling stuff in package “foo”, but because package “foo” uses some stuff from package “bar”, it might suddenly decide to recompile something in “bar”. This is a problem because I recently added something to a package called “dcms” that meant it needed to include a new jar file in its CLASSPATH. But I didn’t know that a package called “ai”, which uses a file from “dcms”, would suddenly decide it needs to compile a file from “dcms”, and therefore the CLASSPATH in “ai”‘s Makefile needs this new jar as well. Or, if you’re a clearer thinker, you change the CLASSPATH in “ai”‘s Makefile so that it’s looking at “dcms.jar” instead of “src/dcms”. Unfortunately we’ve all had this bad habit of including paths to source in the Makefiles of other modules. I think we’re eventually going to end up with a monster “include everything” CLASSPATH in all Makefiles. Ugh.

Another discovery is that SpamKarma2’s “RBL check” seems to be hanging until it times out. I’m not sure if that’s due to the move, or maybe the RBL server is down? I don’t know how to check that. I spent way too much time this morning tracking down every missing “auto_increment” column in every table, and I think I have them all now, but maybe I missed one?

Another discovery is that the only version of php4-gd for my Debian system requires a lot of X Windows libraries to be installed. I had no intention of installing X Windows stuff on this system, since it will never have a graphic head on it. But on the other hand, without php4-gd, I don’t have a CAPTCHA check for SpamKarma2, which means I have to look a bit more carefully at marginal spam.

Ow ow ow ow

I had peridontal surgery this morning. Evidently my bad habit of sticking sharp things into the gap between my upper front teeth has caused the bone to erode to dangerous levels. They cut away the gum down to the bone, scraped away accumulated crud on the bone, applied something to make the bone grow again, and stitched it back up. It wasn’t all that bad while it was going on, except the novocaine made my nose numb. But now it’s done and the novocaine has mostly worn off. And I’ve got the pain you’d expect from having your gums cut open and the bone scraped, plus the stitches are irritating the inside of my lip. The pain killer they gave me is making me feel bleary and very sensitive to movement, and doesn’t seem to be doing anything about my mouth. And I can’t eat anything that involves “incising” with the front teeth for two weeks.

This is less fun than I thought it would be.