Archive for 2007/4
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The Robotic Arm of Oppression
-- April 24, 2007, 11:53 p.m.
I have seen the future, and I am back to warn the rest of you. In the future, the world is run by machines. It's very convenient. They don't judge. They don't try to exploit their position in order to make themselves feel better about their dead-end jobs. They'll happily continue to do the same menial tasks all day every ...
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When Doing More Stuff Takes Less Time
-- April 20, 2007, 12:59 p.m.
I have a performance test in my memcached client wherein I do 300,000 fixed-size sets and measure how long it takes me to completely process all of them. I added a lot of code last night to deal with more error conditions and expected it to have some impact on performance. I found that on my macbook pro (2GHz, etc...), ...
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Abstractions All Around
-- April 19, 2007, 3:10 p.m.
I just finished up a bunch of work with a domain-specific search language. We have various types of objects that come from various places and want a consistent way to locate them. My language is written in a language (jjtree) that compiles to another language (javacc) that compiles to another language (java) that compiles to a machine independent representation (.class) ...
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If You Wrote This Code, You Suck
-- April 10, 2007, 12:13 a.m.
I don't know who wrote the following code...somebody at Sun, but it's cost me my entire night: #if !defined(O_DSYNC) || !defined(O_SYNC) #define O_SYNC (0x0800) #define O_DSYNC (0x2000) #endif There I was building out my hadoop cluster. Everything was going pretty well on my laptop, so I decided to move it over to my FreeBSD box to get a real instance ...
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Heisenbugs and Assertions
-- April 5, 2007, 12:44 p.m.
According to wikipedia: A heisenbug is a computer bug that disappears or alters its characteristics when it is researched. In my experience writing such bugs, they're often due to race conditions or buffer initialization problems that go away when the timing is just right, or the right conditions occur. Last night, however, I discovered that I'd written a very explicit ...