debugging

So today at work, about 3:30, my boss walks up with two sheets of paper, and says we've got a problem. He proceeds to show me a printing operation that takes about 45 seconds. So there I was, spending the next two hours frantically trying to figure out what the problem was, especially since we're trying to get a solid release out soon.

So the point is, when debuggin for a performance issue, the assumption of what is causing the problem is probably correct. I noticed that the server (it's a client/server architecture) was being hit very hard, and rather than just go down that path right away and check what I thought the problem was, I did it the hard way. Granted it only took two hours to find and fix, it still sucked that I didn't try to do the obvious.

But oh well, you live and learn.

quick one

here's a quick update for no one; at least that is what i'd guess as to who reads this.

life has been good, A.I. class has been alright, though the teacher really isn't that good at teaching stuff like edge detection (math stuff). Life in linux so far has been good. But I would really like a laptop (dell widescreen, w/ celeron) just to have on the side as a windows 'box' to use IE when necessary and to print stuff up with.

um, quick little link to my main site: @geocities

what's up

well, life has been good. just started the artificial intelligence class at sdsu for the summer (the other sdsu). been using linux a lot here on this athlon 3200 w/ nvidia 6800 oc. linux on the desktop is definitely nice.

hell, i hardly ever do admin type work. did install beep-media-player(bmp) which is the new xmms. supposedly it's just xmms plus gtk2, but don't believe em. bmp has better stream support, xmms never updated tags properly for what song was being played. i also installed streamtuner, which is a very nice way to view 'net audio streams. this is important since all of my data/music is on ntfs partitions, and i figure i'll leave it that way for now.

i haven't been using my sun ultra 60 too much, and the scsi cdrom just took a big crap, so that'll probably need replaced someday. the way i figure, that cdrom is probably original, and if it lasted about 7 years that's pretty good. at least i was able to install solaris 10 on it the first time i needed to. i haven't bricked the machine yet, so it's not too big of a deal yet that the cdrom is out of commission.

work has been going ok. but i'm not going to lie, working on a piece of software that has been in need of refactoring for years is not fun. this thing needed refactoring several features ago. hell, i don't even think the original release of it was designed that well. but life must go on, and after this feature it'll be rewrote from scratch. yea ... it's that bad! actually, if it were mine to decide, i'd refactor. there are a few ideas i have that if implemented would seriously simplify things, and allow for the next few features to be added pretty easily. but with the difference in design from win32 and current apps that must work on the internet or the desktop (hopefully) what exists now is not helpful at all. so the direction being taken is not a horrible one.

i've cut back on my drinking, which is a very good thing, yay. hopefully this next school year will go well, especially since it will be my last. the road up is a slow hard climb though, but it all starts this summer with my ai course. i figure one good year, should get my gpa up to 3.0-ish, which is acceptable, since my talents outweigh my lack of care for school (and good grammar and punctuation.)