I have been writing a lot of software lately, and frankly it feels good to get back into harness for a while. The software, part of the Obot Advanced Research Projects Administration (OARPA), has been running day and night doing calculations. One of my runs has been going for days and says that it will finish next October. Oops. I bumped the close button when I checked on it. C’est la vie. (Actually, closing it wasn’t a problem because the code is restartable1, but I was going to stop it anyway because it wasn’t giving any useful results. I’ll try another tack.)
Anyway, this is why I haven’t been blogging much. I really get sucked into the task when I’m writing code, and then there are the other projects. For the 100th time in the last few weeks, I’ve told myself that I’m finished with the code. But then I think of just one more small tweak to make it nicer.
Gotta go. I just thought of something really cool ….
1The program saved its state when it closed. I haven’t put the code in to actually do the restart, but I could. It’d take about half an hour. Another run is 19.8% finished, and should complete on February 11.
I’ve been finished with my umpteenth rewrite of my wine catalog for weeks. But when I went to deploy it, I forgot that I had added a couple of fields to the development database that hadn’t found their way into the production database. Then instead of just manually updating the production database, I thought I’d put in code to detect the problem and correct it auto-magically. Then I had to play in a Croquet Tournament and its been too hot to sit in the office upstairs for very long. I think I’ll just use FlameRobin to fix the database and be done with it.
Having deployed database applications to a customer base for a lot of years, that auto-update code can really come in handy. This database I have now has one table with 48 million rows, something an order of magnitude bigger than anything I did when I was working.
I hope your CPU has a good heat sink and fan.
At least it’s not overclocked.
I run my calculations on 3 cores, leaving one for general things on the computer. It seems to work well.
Not a lot of software is designed for multiprocessors, and at least for what I would usually do, the computer is woefully underutilized.
Does anyone know what the holdup on the re-education camps is? There are millions of Birther-patriots that need to be incarcerated before the next elections come around.
I thought we were up to an even billion by now! 😉
For the massive number of Birthers we have rolled out this one..
http://rebeccabarger.typepad.com/.a/6a010536f33d08970c0115705617e1970b-800wi
Trouble with the general contractor (Shanghai Urban Construction) and the number of change orders they have been issuing.
“For the 100th time in the last few weeks, I’ve told myself that I’m finished with the code.”
Surely you know that a program is only finished when it is no longer useful or used.