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December 26, 2004
Reflections of the Week Gone Past
Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and whatever other holidays there might be.
Things I've learned this past week...
1 Do NOT decide that building a custom modified version of PostgreSQL and running it on a production server is a good idea. Yeah, I know, what was I thinking?
2 Airlines suck. It's not as if the holiday travel push was a surprise, they had 360 days to prepare for it. Despite that, and some beautiful weather the entire flight, I was delayed because somehow they had no airplane.
3 The C# garbage collection system cannot be set to a more aggressive scheduler without computations. It can, however, be told that it sucks and should REALLY do it's job RIGHT NOW. This kind of kills app performance, but when your application starts throwing OutOfMemoryExceptions because the GC refuses to clean up that 2MB allocation that was 14 iterations ago... your app sucketh.
4 Trying to buy a TV is awful. I can't fathom paying 5000$ USD for a high definition tv, nor can I see it being environmentally wise to buy a $400 tv only to be tossed out in a year. Yes a 1500$ USD tv can be purchased, but who really wants to squint at 25" LCD screen from about 20' away? Not me.
5 Having missed the initial release of the song, Manu Chao's "Bongo Bong" has completely addicted me over the past month. It's bad. I can even pretend to know the French portions of the song.
Posted by Dan at 12:12 AM | Comments (0)
December 12, 2004
Fear of Folding
My entire life, I've been accused of being a not-folder. This is a slightly misleading label, as all code I've ever written was designed to be code folded. Well, at least it was once I discovered the feature in VIM. The label is applied to my clothing and means of folding/storing it to preserve the non-wrinkled look. Personally I don't often care if it's wrinkled or not, but the general public seems to make a fuss about looking proper.
Various people in my life have tried to correct my folding (parents, friends, girlfriends, etc), each reaching a point of frustration and discontinuing their attempts. Enter an article on Readymade that shows the 3 second fold (link thanks to JWZ). I've now got a completely new AND unorthodox means of folding. My laundry will never be the same...
Posted by Dan at 01:22 PM | Comments (0)
December 06, 2004
Compiler Bugs in C#
I've been working with C# a lot recently. Mainly because I've been limited to a Windows development environment, and I figured why not go learn something new. In my travels, I've come across this interesting bug:
double out_val, my_val, clip_val;
//
// do some code here to set my_val and clip_val
//
out_val = (my_val < clip_val) ? clip_val : my_val;
The above statement works perfectly fine for almost all cases of testing, except one. When my_val gets a value that can be seen as NaN or +Infinity, the statement fails in a most peculiar fashion. The if portion of the test correctly executes, meaning it knows which is greater, but despite the proper logic the compiler will always select the else case.
One of my co-workers and I tried to debug this through the disassembly, but decided that our time was better spent working around this bug. Eric seems to think that there might be a way to violate the C# security model with this behavior, but hasn't been able to prove anything on that yet.
Posted by Dan at 10:05 PM | Comments (0)
December 04, 2004
Yet more junk
It seems that whenever I attempt to let things be, it never lasts. Somehow my MT2.6 install became corrupted in a recent series of server crashes. It's very odd, but essentially I decided to upgrade to MT 3.1 at the time. Nice new pretty interface, and it seems very similar to what I've been used to. Only it took me a few extra days to figure out the upgrade system. Apparently the instructions are not all that inclusive. Thanks SixApart.
Posted by Dan at 01:13 AM | Comments (0)