Matt White

A day in the office spent preparing for a major application release into the test environment, not entirely successful but we have knocked quite a few issues on the head so hopefully it won’t be a late one tomorrow.

It was all topped off with a farcical journey home where we were turfed off the train to wait for 15 minutes before being told to get back on again. Sometimes you really have to think that they wouldn’t know how to organise a piss-up in a brewery, well when I sometimes, I mean every time you set foot anywhere near a train.

I rushed home last night for an arranged appointment for someone to view my house but by the time they were an hour late and no-one had turned up I had to dash out. According to the estate agent they hadn’t heard anything so the viewer was just a no-show.

 

Now, that’s just rude.

A colleague I have been working with for almost 5 years handed in his notice today which is really bad news for everyone except himself. We’ll be losing a top member of the team and a good bloke to boot.

It’s an unfortunate side effect of the extremely high pressure project that a few of us are working on currently. Most of the guys are being pushed harder than I have ever seen before (luckily I am only on the fringes so have escaped a lot of the worst effects) and to make things worse they’re being given very little support by their “managers” who keep on agreeing increasing deliverables and shrinking timescales.

You know things are getting bad when copies of Death March start appearing on peoples desks.

I’ve just got home from helping Judith and Matt move into their new house. After picking up the rental van early this morning, we have just been lugging boxes and furniture for the rest of the day. With the weather being so warm and muggy it has been hot work but everything I can help with has been completed. Matt and Judith just need to upack all of the boxes and get the new place sorted out. Hopefully they’ll be very happy, certainly the house is a lot bigger than they had before so there’ll be room for all of the stuff they’ve accumulated since getting married.

Now a cold shower beckons to try and cool down.

My house has been put up onto Right Move today so hopefully I should start to see some movement over the next few days or couple of weeks. If you know anyone looking for a lovely 3 bed house in Ipswich, then you know where to send them!

After the estate agents had all finished on Saturday I spent the rest of the weekend having a massive clearout of the house starting in my office. I do try my best not to hoard things but even so I still managed to fill the car three times over with useless stuff that I kept for some reason over the years. Still the house is looking a lot less cluttered now which can only help when viewings start hopefully later this week.

I don’t often go to the rubbish tip run by the council (as was obvious from the amount of crap I had to get rid of) and since the last time I was there it has turned into a military run operation. There are loads of staff around policing what people dump and where, no longer can you just chuck all of the rubbish into the nearest skip. Instead it has to be sorted into electricals, metals, cardboard, glass, polystyrene, clothing and more. The whole thing is being run as an exercise in guilt, if you get caught putting stuff in the wrong place then woe betide you. I suppose as a strategy it is quite effective because it didn’t seem to be very busy the few times I was there, unless everyone was off fly-tipping on some poor farmers field!

Wow, a very busy day of house valuations and moving stuff around. An early start to get a rental van and load it up with some spare furniture I had. A couple of stubbed fingers and a broken table later all was done. Just in time for the first estate agent to come along. There were three in quick succession all saying remarkably similar things, they were within £5,000 of each other on the price, the only difference being their rates and marketing strategies. I have decided to go with Penningtons initially as they seemed to have the most integrated approach to marketing the house and also did not want to tie me into a very long exclusivity contract. We shall see how they do over the next couple of weeks or so.

Quite an interesting day all round really, but now my arms are sore so a quiet night in with a few DVDs, beers and a pizza beckons.

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>