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  • How do you stay focused at work?

    - by BlairHippo
    Sometimes, the things I have to do for my job are interesting and engaging. Sometimes, they aren't. Occasionally, they really aren't. Do you have any particular strategies or tricks for dealing with those dull stretches when your brain would rather be doing anything other than what you're supposed to be doing, particularly when the Internet and its boundless opportunities for interesting Slack beckon?

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  • Overcrowded Windows XP Folders

    - by BlairHippo
    I know that, technically, an individual Windows XP directory can hold an immense number of files (over 4.29 billion, according to a quick Google search). However, is there a practical ceiling where too many files in one directory starts having an impact on reads to those files? If so, what factors would exacerbate or help the issue? I ask because my employer has several hundred XP machines in the field at client sites, and the performance on some of the older ones is getting "sludgy." The machines download and display client-defined images, and my supervisor and I suspect that our slacktastic approach to cache management could be to blame. (Some of the directories have tens of thousands of images in them.) I'm trying to gather evidence to support or contest the theory before spending time on a coding fix.

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  • Badwidth-Hogging Linux Server Causing Trouble

    - by BlairHippo
    We have a Linux server (2.6.28-11-generic #42-Ubuntu) that's misbehaving on a client site, gobbling up an entirely unacceptable percentage of the client's bandwidth, and we're trying to figure out what the heck it's doing. And the guy who had the sysadmin skillset has yet to be replaced. We're at a loss for what could be causing all that network traffic, and need to figure it out SOON. What log files should I be looking at to find this information? What analysis tools would you recommend for this task? Please note that I'm not looking for a tool that will allow me to analyze FUTURE traffic. The client is on the verge of shutting the machine off entirely; I need to figure out what it's been doing with the data I already have, if that's at all possible. My thanks in advance for helping a development monkey play sysadmin.

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  • Is it possible for competing file access to cause deadlock in Java?

    - by BlairHippo
    I'm chasing a production bug that's intermittent enough to be a real bastich to diagnose properly but frequent enough to be a legitimate nuisance for our customers. While I'm waiting for it to happen again on a machine set to spam the logfile with trace output, I'm trying to come up with a theory on what it could be. Is there any way for competing file read/writes to create what amounts to a deadlock condition? For instance, let's say I have Thread A that occasionally writes to config.xml, and Thread B that occasionally reads from it. Is there a set of circumstances that would cause Thread B to prevent Thread A from proceeding? My thanks in advance to anybody who helps with this theoretical fishing expedition. Edit: To answer Pyrolistical's questions: the code isn't using Filelock, and is running on a WinXP machine.

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  • Java Array Comparison

    - by BlairHippo
    Working within Java, let's say I have two objects that, thanks to obj.getClass().isArray(), I know are both arrays. Let's further say that I want to compare those two arrays to each other -- possibly by using Arrays.equals. Is there a graceful way to do this without resorting to a big exhaustive if/else tree to figure out which flavor of Arrays.equals needs to be used? I'm looking for something that's less of an eyesore than this: if (obj1 instanceof byte[] && obj2 instanceof byte[]) { return Arrays.equals((byte[])obj1, (byte[])obj2); } else if (obj1 instanceof boolean[] && obj2 instanceof boolean[]) { ...

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  • Is Java assert broken?

    - by BlairHippo
    While poking around the questions, I recently discovered the assert keyword in Java. At first, I was excited. Something useful I didn't already know! A more efficient way for me to check the validity of input parameters! Yay learning! But then I took a closer look, and my enthusiasm was not so much "tempered" as "snuffed-out completely" by one simple fact: you can turn assertions off.* This sounds like a nightmare. If I'm asserting that I don't want the code to keep going if the input listOfStuff is null, why on earth would I want that assertion ignored? It sounds like if I'm debugging a piece of production code and suspect that listOfStuff may have been erroneously passed a null but don't see any logfile evidence of that assertion being triggered, I can't trust that listOfStuff actually got sent a valid value; I also have to account for the possibility that assertions may have been turned off entirely. And this assumes that I'm the one debugging the code. Somebody unfamiliar with assertions might see that and assume (quite reasonably) that if the assertion message doesn't appear in the log, listOfStuff couldn't be the problem. If your first encounter with assert was in the wild, would it even occur to you that it could be turned-off entirely? It's not like there's a command-line option that lets you disable try/catch blocks, after all. All of which brings me to my question (and this is a question, not an excuse for a rant! I promise!): What am I missing? Is there some nuance that renders Java's implementation of assert far more useful than I'm giving it credit for? Is the ability to enable/disable it from the command line actually incredibly valuable in some contexts? Am I misconceptualizing it somehow when I envision using it in production code in lieu of statements like if (listOfStuff == null) barf();? I just feel like there's something important here that I'm not getting. *Okay, technically speaking, they're actually off by default; you have to go out of your way to turn them on. But still, you can knock them out entirely.

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  • Unable to access Java-created file -- sometimes

    - by BlairHippo
    In Java, I'm working with code running under WinXP that creates a file like this: public synchronized void store(Properties props, byte[] data) { try { File file = filenameBasedOnProperties(props); if ( file.exists() ) { return; } File temp = File.createTempFile("tempfile", null); FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(temp); out.write(data); out.flush(); out.close(); file.getParentFile().mkdirs(); temp.renameTo(file); } catch (IOException ex) { // Complain and whine and stuff } } Sometimes, when a file is created this way, it's just about totally inaccessible from outside the code (though the code responsible for opening and reading the file has no problem), even when the application isn't running. When accessed via Windows Explorer, I can't move, rename, delete, or even open the file. Under Cygwin, I get the following when I ls -l the directory: ls: cannot access [big-honkin-filename] total 0 ?????????? ? ? ? ? ? [big-honkin-filename] As implied, the filenames are big, but under the 260-character max for XP (though they are slightly over 200 characters). To further add to the sense the my computer just wants me to feel stupid, sometimes the files created by this code are perfectly normal. The only pattern I've spotted is that once one file in the directory "locks", the rest are screwed. Anybody ever run into something like this before, or have any insights into what's going on here?

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  • How do you keep track of what the industry is up to?

    - by BlairHippo
    A discussion elsewhere made me realize that I don't do a particularly good job of following the software industry. My exposure to new trends or technologies is haphazard at best, often limited to a "Hey, that sounds interesting" when I see people discussing something I'm not familiar with on SO. To abuse a metaphor, I'm quite familiar with the tree where I work, but I know too bloody little about the rest of the forest. How do other folks keep abreast of what's going on in the software industry? Are there any sites/blogs/podcasts/whatever that you find particularly valuable for keeping you informed of potentially useful new technologies or industry-wide trends? (My apologies in advance if this is a duplicate; this feels like something that ought to have been asked before, but alas, my search-fu has failed me.)

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  • HTML Special Entity Codes in Actionscript3/Flex

    - by BlairHippo
    I have a Flex/Actionscript 3 application that displays RSS feeds in a Text element. It strips out any HTML formatting present, but it's not handling HTML special entity codes properly -- it's rendering &mdash as the literal string instead of replacing it with an em-dash, etc. Is there any systematic way I can make it handle those codes properly, or am I going to need to manually replace those strings regex style?

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