Zzz

The Voice of Optimism is chirping again. Being greatly optimistic about stuff. Want to stare it down. What are you so happy about?
Been too busy this week to continue my story, if anyone's still waiting for the 3rd instalment. Part 3 should be out soon! In 2 weeks!
Every day, I go over The Plan and Motivation. It's been consuming my mornings and evenings, well any time when I have spare time. Hopefully it will work for me... Time to start registering for a real

Birthday present!

Hehe this might seem presumptuous but I thought it would be good :p Remember hogy's list last time we were in school. Well, worry not... I'll prob be getting it all myself anyways :p
1 book 4 of stephen king's dark tower. I think I still need book 6 too... Blain the train wants his riddles!
2 psp
3 ds
4 wii
Ha ha all sound pretty expensive hor.
5 >22" monitor! Now got good reason to buy liao. Soon!
6 more war hammer books!

Of exploding windows

So yesterday... Upon reaching home, I did the usual stuff... Locked the door, took off shoes, etc, and flipped on Resurrection. After I came out from my shower and went to her, what greeted me, was the wallpaper. That was all. No icons, no task bar, nothing. Ok... I thought, giving it the 3 finger salute. It's happened before, I'll just run explorer manually from task manager. Clicked run, and typed down explorer. Bing. Error. Can't find the resource. Blink. Huh. Typed down the whole path. Still the same... Typed in c: same error. Wth! Restarted... Also the same ... Was feeling traumatised now. Booted to last good config. No luck there. Finally managed to safe boot. Turned off all the services, no dice. Created new user, same... In fact, it actually got worse. I couldn't click on certain tabs in task manager. Doing that would cause task manager to disappear. Very traumatised, I returned to safe mode and poked arnd. No weird processes... Registry looks fine... No spy ware... Virus scan is clean... I had a gut feeling it was my firewall, as it was the most recent thing that I changed, but I've booted with the new version before, and I'd booted with both anti virus and firewall off... Well, I finally came across an article mentioning the same thing happening to Vista with the same anti virus (avast) and firewall (comodo). Nothing on desktop, can't run anything on task manager. So I uninstalled the firewall, and it worked! Yay! ... Now give me my 2+ hours and undo my trauma -_-

Databases and sessions

Haiz after some testing, having 1 session per user might not be such a great idea after all. It's fantastic in the sense that dirty checking is done automatically and such, but if there's any problems with the graph, you're pretty much screwed. Not sure how easy it would be to ensure that there are no errors in the graph. Technically speaking, there shouldn't be any errors at all, otherwise the app won't work. Also, is there a way to test first? Hmmm. Sigh. Going to work on 1 with mini sessions and detached objects and see how it is. But I'm not sure how the detached objects will function in a multi user environment. The Hibernate folk also say don use detached objects... Haiz... Hmmm...

Is it so hard...?

To find a free mobile offline rss reader? Well, I can hear you say, there's tonnes of them arnd! Yes I know, I'm using Nokia's widsets and it's pretty good. But what I want is a reader which will download everything and cache them for true offline reading. I want to simply launch the program, do my stuff, it downloads automatically, so when I'm on the train or something, I can just go through the articles. Just tried out news gator, which promises to be an offline rss reader. Well, I can launch it offline, I can read stuff offline, only problem is I'd need to have clicked on the items when I had a connection first, otherwise it's empty. Grrr! Don't tell me I have to really write one myself? Urgh

Of bugs and gory

Spent the day checking, checking, and hunting bugs. The Application does work, but if you were to liken it to a house, then it'd be ... Look there! An ant! Look there! A few cockroaches! It's always times like this where this sense of hopelessness comes in... So many bugs.. Tucked everywhere... Fix one, find another two... How do those professional systems get released? But then again, all systems have bugs. :P
Had a revelation on Tues while with Ad. The lectures teaches us, in software engineering, that many projects are delivered late, due to wrongful interpretations of specs. After some experience, I'd be more inclined to say (at least for gov projects) that the bulk of the delays are at client side. Ppl squeezing vendors, but sitting on their asses when they are supposed to input. But that's government for you... Haiz

The day before V day

Finally... After 2+ weeks of struggling and banging head on keyboards, The Application, with database support is starting to become meaningful. Monday and yesterday were the days of great battle. Finally sat down and wrestled with The Beast, The Connection Leak. Now she's running trim and slim.
But of course, there's still tonnes of work to be done... After so long, she's still far from ship shape. Still too many queries being run, a bunch of spurious save queries begging to be removed, bugs to be fixed, missing functionalities to be patched, and proper methods to be called at the proper times... The latter goes hand in hand with the first. But so many calls to trace through @_@ good thing she works even with these issues.
Well, at least patched a few bugs today... Will have to verify it tomorrow, but it feels right, logically. Just need to streamline the solution. Then at the end of it all... Still need to neaten things up and see if stuff needs refactoring. @_@ zzz
But I digress, this should be a V day post, lest the readers complain ü but hmmm nothing much to mention about it, just feel blase about the whole thing. I'm afterall, practical :p
Need to get started on entry 2 of my story soon... Was meaning to do it after this post, but apparently this took long enough for me to reach my stop. Heh

Palindrone and on .. and on ..

Created a new blog .. palindrone.blogspot.com.. for stories only!

Things I've learnt today

So today, I finally found out why The Application was hanging randomly. Oh it has been doing it a few times, but somehow either I get distracted by another pressing crisis or it just goes away. But today, it decided to rear its ugly head, and what best time to do so but at 6pm?
Sessions shouldn't be the problem, I thought. After all I AM closing the query session. The account with fewer contacts was fine too. After some debugging, I found the location of the hang, an innocent query statement which had been called a number of times with no problems at all. My initial gut feel was that it was a null pointer somewhere, but after staring at the innocent function, I decided, on a whim, close to 715, to increase the connection pool. Being the lavish sort, I bumped it up to 2000, from a meagre 10. Ran the test case again, and it didn't hang. Yay go home!
Of course... Still need to look into it. The solution is simple. Not enough Vespine gas. Well that belies a bigger problem. You're saying, 1 user with 20 over contacts can't survive using a connection pool of 10? I don't know how Hibernate manages its connections, but I think 10 should have been enough. Also, The Application is issuing a distressing amount of queries, repeated ones too. It shouldn't be doing that. Well I guess that's the penalty of designing without a database and tacking it on later... Whoever said grafting was easy?

Headache again...

As titled.....

Dinner!

Went over to Liang Court to have dinner. Look at that big plate of sashimi! No I didn't eat any of it, I don't eat raw stuff! The rest of the food was good though... Too bad didn't take pictures of the rest :p was totally ala carte for once. But deeply regret not ordering a bowl of rice at least, they serve good rice!

Urgh...

So... After a long time of head banging, I've managed to graft version 1 of the db. Tacked it on like the skin of a created Chaos Space Marine... Will need some optimizations but basic usage is there. So I decided to get some stress testing done, well at least if even if not a lot of stress, some reads and writes would be good. So I asked ck for his class, since he wrote a stress test package then.
Added it into the project and gave it a whirl... Single client was fine... But the stress test was horrible, exceptions here and there. And the horrible strange error of encryption, which was causing errors if too many clients connected at once.
Managed to fix that bug... Apparently a single Cipher object did not like being called in different objects.
After fixing it, I started to take a look at the mysterious exceptions which were coming from the stress test. To his credit, I probably patched some stuff which were lying dormant. After patching everything I could think of though, the damn thing was still giving off exceptions, and worst of all, it was at random spots. The worst bugs are them random ones, and I was partially traumatised. Why does this come up at this run, but it doesn't on another? Finding it strange, I looked at his logic. To my surprise... It was random... Apparently once the client had signed in, it could run any of a set of methods. It was pretty dumbfounding. Well, being random is fine.... But not when some methods have prerequisites. How can it be correct for a client to send a message to another when it hasn't even downloaded the contact list yet? The aim for this class, if I'm not mistaken, is to form an idea on how much load the server can handle. To do that, you need clients as close to real ones as possible... Gah! <_<

Headache...

Having a headache again... Urgh...

Misty Mountains

Ok... No more jioing disinterested ppl into doing things or watching movies. If you're not interested, just say no. I'll either catch it myself or via other means.

Edit: zz this was supposed to be the first post.. not the last .. damn emails!

Did I mention that I have a splitting headache ><

Anger Management

It's shocking to myself too, the depth of reaction. For a long moment my thoughts were clouded and I had a headache. Not sure what's going on too, it's probably yet another geyser of repressed stuff reaching its maximum pressure.
Someone remarked a few days ago that I always sound so cheerful. Ha ha, it's kinda funny. The exterior is completely out of sync with the interior. The typed words sound as bright as day, but deep in it's cold and dark.
The sense of loss is here again... Everything I've loved, everything I've lost... Hmmm so many things lost. So many which can't be regained.
Been feeling restless too... Feel like how Eldaris would feel, being trapped in a cage, how he would stretch his wings against the boundaries, chafting at his bounds. The sense of restlessness and entrapment. Feels odd.

Eye Poker

... Have you ever had the thought, whenever you held a particularly sharp pen or a screwdriver, of poking someone in the eye with it? <_< Thoughts like that always come to me when I'm holding something like that. Today's one was pretty vivid: I was looking over at the screwdriver I had on my table and it occurred to me... What would happen if I took it, walked up to somebody, said Hey, and then poked him in the eye with it... Would I miss? Would he be able to block it? Would it go into the brain? My mental picture showed me a ruined eye, with bits of stuff ... Flowing out. Then after that... What would happen? Shall I go back and sit calmly at my seat? Or just walk out. Keep walking till someone catches me. <_< kinda weird huh... Never thought of it go such a graphical sense before too...