Running as Root

I just don't feel funny this week.

Before I started putting the comic directly on my blog, I had a few other episodes of Flat Organization. Since many people never click through to my BitStrips page I'm going to lump all of the "missing" episodes into this one post. I could post them individually but that seems more annoying and like it would require more effort. Apologies to those that have already seen these.

Unfortunately this week's comic just feels like I'm getting more and more bitter. Maybe the next one will be funny.

There are quite a few little cameos in The Incredible Hulk but the one I was happiest at having spotted was Rickson Gracie. Remember in Portuguese that 'R' sounds like an 'H', so it's pronounced "Hickson." Unfortunately they've listed him as an Akido instructor despite the fact that he's a bad ass in the family business of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I know it doesn't sound like it, but that's a colossal fuck up in martial arts land. Besides that it's a fair movie but after all the rumors about heavy editing changing the nature of the film I'd really like to see what the original "Norton" version was like. Maybe 25 years from now we can have 8 versions of it like Blade Runner.

Yeah, I'm not doing so well at sticking to the new "publish once a week" experiment. I either need a new rule allowing overflow or need to be more willing to stockpile these crappy jokes.

While I'm going to try and publish once a week, I have a hard time sitting on finished comics. I just can't resist the temptation to do two this week.

As I mentioned in the last post I'm farting around with applets for work. You may remember that the applet was hammering the server whenever it couldn't find a resource in the jars. Of course, everything the applet needs is already in the jars so if it's not in them then it's not on the server either. It's all because the AppletClassLoader tries to load stuff from the codebase on the server if it fails to load it from the jars.

As part of the fix of setting codebase_lookup to false I did some very quick, unofficial benchmarking. The test environment was an EC2 deployment I've been messing around with–the smallest instance. I timed the startup time of the applet and counted the number of server hits during startup. To further minimize variablility, I did this after the jars had already been cached. This roughly corresponds to the startup time of a visitor to the site that has already successfully launched the applet. The results were as follows:

codebase_lookup - true (default setting)
Startup time: 35 seconds
Server hits: 442

codebase_lookup - false
Startup time: 7 seconds
Server hits: 34

When the the applet does hit the server to look stuff up in the code base, it doesn't just do it at startup. Some libraries that don't cache failed attempts to load a resource keep on hitting the server. In our app it's XFire and a lot of non-existent "aegis.xml" and "doc.xml" files as well as a whole bunch of "BeanInfo.class" attempts thanks to java.beans.Introspector. Each of these attempts takes a tiny bit of time and puts an annoying 404 in the access logs. It's hard to say what the distributed sluggishness of the app will be because of all these little attempts, but it's definitely non zero. It also has an affect on server side scalability when each client is potentially 13 times more chatty with the server than it needs to be.

An additional concern I have is that some of this cavalier attitude toward resource loading in these libraries also happens on the server side. How many failed getResourceAsStream attempts am I not seeing and what impact are they having on overall server performance? At the current traffic levels it's probably insignificant but the idea of that much inefficiency spread out throughout the app kind of bothers me.

I switched jobs recently and although the current company used to do daily stand up status meetings ala Scrum/XP/Agile/Wagilefall, they had stopped at some point. As near as I can tell, they stopped because they couldn't keep the meetings short and on track. I expressed to my manager(s) that I thought it'd be great to start doing them again and lo and behold we had one on Monday.

Of course, the first issue that came up was the notion of the correct time. Inevitably when you try to start a meeting "on time" you get bogged down with the fact that no one thinks they're late because their clock says they're not. In the past I've used web based atomic clocks, but I'm now convinced that anyone planning to start meetings on time has to invest in a digital clock that synchronizes with the official time. I further suspect that anyone thinking that the people they work with are too mature to have this "argument" is probably wrong. We also haven't settled on the "punishment" for being late. I'm a big fan of cash fines though.

Bitstrips now has real RSS feeds. I've made a Feedburner feed for Flat Organization that points to the Bitstrips feed for the comic, if anyone is interested.

At the same time, I've added a feeds page to this blog with nearly all of my available RSS feeds, including a new super feed (made with Yahoo! Pipes) with everything in it to save people the trouble of subscribing to everything individually.