I am going through one of those patches where I’m pretty unmotivated to post up here. There doesn’t seem to be much point in posting just for the hell of it, but as it’s been over a week since there was any activity here at least I can at least prove I am still alive.
There are a couple of things occupying my mind at the moment, after the idea of moving popped into my head recently it has rather taken hold , I have viewed a few places in London and there are a three estate agents coming to casa White at the weekend to see what they think it’s worth. I really find it very difficult to judge as the housing market is all over the place at the moment. Whether a move happens is all down to what they value it at, more than if I can find anything in London as there are loads of decent flats around. As always you will be the first to know what happens.
This sort of thing does raise an issue about blogging for me. I often wonder what level of details about my life I should go into. I could, for example, write every little bit about the upcoming property market activity, or I could just go quiet on the whole thing (as I have in the last week) and then pop up in 3 months time to say that I have moved. I really like Jake’s moving house blog but I just know that I am not dedicated (or into DIY) enough to do something like that myself. Something I’ll have to decide how to play as I go along I suppose.
The other thing getting my attention is a nerdy problem with a Java agent.
<Non techies look away now>
I have a scheduled agent which has to open several large views to get document collections from. The environment that the agent runs in only allows a ten minute execution time so I have multi-threaded it to try and get as much done as possible in the short time frame. But there is a problem which I just can’t think of a good solution for.
The view opening is performed by a thread to allow other work to continue while the index is updated, but if a view is being opened when the agent is terminated the agent manager hangs. It appears that an interrupt to the thread opening the view is ignored because it is I/O blocked. Eventually, when the view is open, the thread continues but by that time the agent manager has already hung so even though it terminates itself, no more scheduled agents will run on the server. Not good. Even worse than that is that the server has to be completely restarted as the hung agent manager won’t shut down properly.
I have tried to work around the problem by adding a timer so that the agent doesn’t try to open a new view in the last minute of execution time but even then the problem still happens every couple of months. The views which are trying to be opened are very big so can take some time to open, not good design I know but it’s the nature of the requirements.
If anyone has any ideas I’d be very grateful to hear them.
</Non techies look away now>
