Murder by death
Fresh off the AP wire: Student Slain to Death Near U of Chicago. I didn't realize the writers' strike included journalists.
I'm having a good time scientifically tracking down what's hanging my home computer. It's been a classic "divide the problem space" exercise. It happens in XP but not Ubuntu, so it's not the hardware. It happens when running dissimilar foreground applications, so it's none of those. That leaves background apps, so I started disabling half of those and seeing what happened. A couple of slices later, I think I've nailed it -- and I'm sad to report that the current prime suspect is BOINC, the platform on which SETI@Home runs. Since disabling that two days ago, I haven't seen a lockup (knock wood). There are reports on the web about similar (mis)behavior under XP Pro with a dual-core processor, too. With any luck, this means my machine will be stable in both XP and Ubuntu from here on out.
Meanwhile, my day job is in an uproar over performance issues with our product. Everything's fine most of the time, but periodically it slows to a crawl...and nobody can figure out why. There's evidence that we're seeing several unrelated or loosely-coupled problems, none of them reproducible with any test case we've tried so far. In the best Murphy tradition, they seem to hit most often during critical demos. In a further WTF odditiy, they seem significantly more likely to happen around 11am PST. (Yes, we've checked for competing cron jobs and the like...nada.) So I've been at the office late, and seeing httpd config files when I close my eyes. I sure hope we nail this down soon; it's driving me crazy.
It's hard to believe that in only 10 days I'll be flying to Houston for the next Kaaba session. I'm really looking forward to this one, for some reason, even more so than I do normally. As usual with Kaaba, I wish there were more free time to explore the host city; I've never been to Houston before, and I love wandering around new places. But at least I'll get a taste.
Finally, a bit of good news:
laurellady is updating her journal again, after a long hiatus. She's done several good posts recently. Enjoy.
I'm having a good time scientifically tracking down what's hanging my home computer. It's been a classic "divide the problem space" exercise. It happens in XP but not Ubuntu, so it's not the hardware. It happens when running dissimilar foreground applications, so it's none of those. That leaves background apps, so I started disabling half of those and seeing what happened. A couple of slices later, I think I've nailed it -- and I'm sad to report that the current prime suspect is BOINC, the platform on which SETI@Home runs. Since disabling that two days ago, I haven't seen a lockup (knock wood). There are reports on the web about similar (mis)behavior under XP Pro with a dual-core processor, too. With any luck, this means my machine will be stable in both XP and Ubuntu from here on out.
Meanwhile, my day job is in an uproar over performance issues with our product. Everything's fine most of the time, but periodically it slows to a crawl...and nobody can figure out why. There's evidence that we're seeing several unrelated or loosely-coupled problems, none of them reproducible with any test case we've tried so far. In the best Murphy tradition, they seem to hit most often during critical demos. In a further WTF odditiy, they seem significantly more likely to happen around 11am PST. (Yes, we've checked for competing cron jobs and the like...nada.) So I've been at the office late, and seeing httpd config files when I close my eyes. I sure hope we nail this down soon; it's driving me crazy.
It's hard to believe that in only 10 days I'll be flying to Houston for the next Kaaba session. I'm really looking forward to this one, for some reason, even more so than I do normally. As usual with Kaaba, I wish there were more free time to explore the host city; I've never been to Houston before, and I love wandering around new places. But at least I'll get a taste.
Finally, a bit of good news:
laurellady is updating her journal again, after a long hiatus. She's done several good posts recently. Enjoy.