A big part of every programmer’s life is debugging. Easily the majority, in my experience, and I like to think that I’m not a lot worse than average at this programming thing. Given that so much time is spent on it, the tools used can have a material impact on the quality of life of a debugging programmer.
On Linux, the debugger of record is gdb, which is often to the practice of debugging as a gasoline aquarium is to fire prevention. I’ve been playing with some C++ software over the weekend, and this has given me occasion to experience the joys of gdb anew:
(gdb) p *this Segmentation fault
[…time passes, work is repeated, hopes build again…]
(gdb) p _server Segmentation fault
Maybe 6.0 will be better, but then maybe not:
Specifically, if you set a breakpoint in a constructor or a destructor, gdb will put a breakpoint in one of the versions, but your
program may execute the other version. This makes it impossible to set
breakpoints reliably in constructors or destructors.
I wonder how much MSVC costs around here.
Mike gets a cookie for alerting me to a security hole in Movable Type, which makes it possible to send email to anyone through the mt-send-entry.cgi thingy. Reminds me of the bad old days with formmail.
I also renamed the comment script to reduce the amount of comment spam we see here. Blah.
Goddamned spammers.
5 computers arrived for me today (3 of them mine, for dogfood work; one for each of Andrei and Vlad), and I set them up. Holy crap, is it loud and hot in this office. My machines seem to be perfectly happy — kudos, indeed, to the people responsible for the VNC installer in Fedora Core and for open-carpet! Andrei’s machine isn’t so happy, so I think he’ll be getting someone to replace part or all of it.
Tomorrow I get to finish setting up Lustre and pdsh and distcc and all the other nice toys for making use of a handful of machines, and then beat the crud out of them. And maybe find a way to make them quieter, good heavens.
Update: pdsh and distcc are done, and it’s a beautiful thing.
: SPECS; pdsh -l root -w alpo,purina,iams uptime iams: 10:40:41 up 2:20, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 alpo: 10:39:48 up 5:53, 1 user, load average: 0.06, 0.16, 0.08 purina: 10:39:29 up 3:15, 1 user, load average: 0.10, 0.22, 0.09
This diary, and various other sites hosted on this machine, were experiencing some very slow web service for about 24 hours, for which I offer apologies. See, Joe and (much more significantly) Nat were clever enough to get their sites listed on OSNews, and that resulted in our poor little Apache serverpool getting pretty much stuffed. I’ve moved nat.org to its own server pool now, so once the DNS records propagate things should be pretty much back to normal. Many thanks to Dan from island.net, for his unreasonably-quick response to my DNS-update pleas.
Today I called my wife to see how she was. She had a headache. I told her that I purchased three computers today — which is true. I think she took it pretty well, all things considered.
I was going to go to NYC this weekend, to visit George and hang out at the GNOME conference, relax a little, you know. Earlier this week, though, I decided that I’m not really sufficiently back to my usual self to engage in high-density travel, so I cancelled those plans. I was looking forward to seeing all those crazy folks, but I think this was the right decision. There’s always the new year, and suchlike.
Apropos nothing whatsoever, I think Madhava and Beltzner will appreciate this visualization of election results. Don’t you?
What’s more fun than the Pope? The pope with a giant kitten. (Or, honestly, even a small one, on a stick.) There are more. So, so many more.
(Via Scattershot.)
(Edit: direct links to the images didn’t work, bah.)
Apparently Fox has seen something resembling the light, and they’re now considering bringing back Family Guy. 35 frickin’ episodes!
As if that weren’t sweet enough, it looks like these guys are remaking Stunts.
The demo is shaping up nicely, and some of the far-flung CFS crew are chipping in to extend the geographical reach of the filesystem in question. I put together a little ball of networking twine and UML bubblegum to contribute a Canadian mount:
bash-2.05b# df -h /mnt/lustre Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on sc03_dual_eth3 15T 1.3T 12T 10% /mnt/lustre
Robert and Eric managed to also join us from California and Bristol, but the main demo component will be joining the party over the impressive SC2003 WAN.
I fixed some real bugs today, too, so a good show all around.
This past weekend featured the 7th and final Annual 711 Crawford Cocktail Party, of which there is now photographic evidence available from both Anatole and Madhava.
Some things just don’t go together, but I think it’s clear that Tyla and I do.
Copious and insufficient thanks to our ever-gracious hosts, for their tireless and classy efforts.
A handful of my esteemed co-workers are down at Supercomputing 2003 working on, among a tutorial and other things, our contribution to the crazy Bandwidth Challenge shenanigans.
Apparently the tutorial — in which a small horde of people is being tutorialized as I write this very entry — is going quite well, so things are off to a good start. It’s pretty exciting, even for those of us who are cheering from megametres away.
Now that people are doing real sciencey stuff on top of our baby, I think things are going to pick right up around here. Not that there’s really been a lot of thumb-twiddling recently anyway, but.
Addendum: zoom.
I can’t find my Windows XP CD, which is really too bad, because our Windows installation is pretty busted right now. Neither it nor my 98SE CD are in their usual homes (the operating-systems section of my massive software CD wallet), which is consistent with them being used for some sort of installation, perhaps on my computer. But then, I find myself asking, why would they be outside arm-and-chair-rolling reach of the computer? Perhaps Tyla hid them, that I might be further motivated to clean the office.
In what I hope is not some sort of freakish alchemical transformation, there are also two gold earrings in the office (small ribbon-hoops, about the size of a nickel, width of about 1cm) to which neither Tyla nor I have any rightful claim. I don’t think they’re Mehmet’s.
Day 4 of my new wonder drug, and the nausea hasn’t made its previously-daily appearance. I still can’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes, so I can count the number of useful work-things I’ve accomplished this week on my antennae, but that’s up from the heartbeat-span I was working with on Monday and Tuesday.
I have a truly daunting backlog of work, but I’m now back to being enthusiastic about it, instead of feeling like I’ll never get through it, or that I’m going to be fired at any minute. Speaking only for myself, I greatly prefer the current situation. All sorts of exciting things are going on around me at work, which helps buoy my spirits, and later this month I’ll be able to talk about them in more detail.
Well, the anxiety is already diminished a bit, I’m not nearly as tearful (I actually heard the National Anthem this morning and didn’t get choked up, which is pretty amazing), and I didn’t have a lot of trouble getting out of bed this morning. (Considering I didn’t get to sleep until like 5:30, that’s a little frightening, actually.)
On the down side, I have a bit of nausea — happily, not enough to keep me from enjoying a light Quizno’s lunch — and absolutely no ability to concentrate. Focus Factor Zero. Apparently these are both normal first-day effects, so I’m not too worried. (If I do indeed end up with the off-and-on pattern for just treating the most troubling episodes with drugs, I will need to remember to start this protocol on a Friday, I think.)
Some of this might well be placebo effect, but the onset and half-life periods for Effexor are ridiculously short, so it’s quite likely that I’m actually getting some real, honest-to-goodness, doctor-I-smell-toast neurochemical assistance.
I am very much looking forward to tomorrow, when I will be rested, have a gym visit in the morning, and generally return to earning my keep, Lustre-wise.
Not a lot of traffic, hereabouts, in the last week or so. I was down fully or partially for 4 days with a cold, but with modern instruments we can now distinguish a reason from an excuse.
The reason is that I’ve been gently, seductively sliding into a wee little depression, and that sort of thing is specially formulated to interfere with goal-directed behaviour, as it were. There are other, more important goals being impeded than just this screed-sack, of course, but that’s a discussion that I should have with my parole officer.
It’s the winter, so it wasn’t completely unexpected, though it’s worse than my usual downward cycles. You’d think — unless you know me at all — that I’d be better predicting my mental weather, so that I could tell a summer shower from Hurricane Andrew (an overstatement, really; I’ve never had severe depression, as professionals use the term), but I really never seem to know until it’s been too long and too dark for me to pretend that it’s just a little blip.
The recent addition of a gym membership to my monthly expenditures was intended to help with this little issue, and while I do feel great when I leave the gym, the endorphins apparently aren’t enough. Or they’re not sticking around long enough. Or something; it’s just not pulling the nose up sufficiently.
In what I hope is a sign of things to come, I actually managed to get to a doctor today to get some new medication, and I have high hopes. Celexa worked OK, I guess, in that it was vastly superior to being miserably depressed, but I didn’t like how I felt when I would not otherwise be depressed. Disconnected, a little out of step, I don’t really know how to describe it. And, honestly, being on drugs for the rest of my frickin’ life isn’t as appealing as it once seemed.
So the new plan is a new drug, which only takes (we hope) a large handful of days to take effect, and which I can go on and off as my adorable little mental illness requires. I’ve read some mildly terrifying things about the withdrawal process, but reading about medication on the internet is generally an excellent way to find the ends of the spectrum. People who are taking more than 4 grams of brain candy are a little out of my league, thank heavens. We’ll see how it goes in ~5 weeks, when I expect I’ll want to start tapering off. Hmm, maybe just before Christmas isn’t the best time for that sort of thing.
Also, I think I will now be starting on a strict bacon and sour cream diet, which should help my mood immensely.