the corner office

This blog has been up and running at the new host for over a month now, with no hassles, so I cancelled my DDN subscription yesterday. The old colinp.dominodeveloper.net URL is no more, and thus passes the end of an era. Cue violins.

I have nothing but good things to say about my time with Domino Developer Network though. In two years I had no performance or uptime hassles, and the one or two minor support issues I had were sorted out quickly and competently. If you need Domino hosting, thumbs up and all that.

Today is Freedom day, and this year, I'll be doing the same thing I did last year. With fewer subjects on my plate this year though, I'm less stressed. Hurray!

Also, I've taken leave tomorrow so with it being Mayday^WWorkers Day on Monday, I'm having me a 5 day weekend. Hurray!

On the topic of profiling, this is something I was going to write about a few weeks ago.

If you Google for 'Eclipse profiling', at the time of writing this the first Google page mentions the open-source, all-but-abandoned Eclipse Profiler (I blogged about it last year).

Only at the bottom of the page is there mention of the Eclipse project's own profiling tool, from the TPTP (Test and Performance Tools Platform) project (full name of the profiling sub-project: TPTP Tracing and Profiling Tools Project, which thankfully hasn't been abbreviated to TPTP TPTP). It seems to have next to no mindshare, and not just because nobody can remember what its name is.

The TPTP used to be known as the Hyades project and I think many people stayed away from it because it just looked too complicated to actually do anything useful with it. Extra downloads, a heap of dependencies, cryptic documentation and a half-hearted link to a set of slides from some conference explaining how it all worked. I know that was the case with me. However, I finally sat down and worked my way through the setup docs, and wasn't too hard to get going. The real treat was starting to use it. I'll just say that the TPTP profiler is just plain sex-ay (with a 'grrr'). So far, it's solid, it's powerful, it's documented, and above all, it's straightforward to use.

I haven't played much with the memory profiling, and I haven't used the separate profiling agent, but the method analysis is brilliant. Not only do you get the usual 'amount of time in this method' sort of information, but there's a graphical tool which shows your call stack on a time line, to get a visual cue of what your program is doing and how long methods are running for (across multiple threads, including GC... heaven!). You have detailed per-method stats and time line graphics, and something else which is partly eye candy but can also be really handy - your call tree can be displayed as a UML sequence diagram - inter-object and inter-thread.

Well worth checking out.

Russ Olsen has a post titled Five Truths About Code Optimisation (via Bob Congdon). It's a good read, and it seems that point number 2, 'Rest assured, you don't know where the problem is' has struck a chord with a lot of people. That's because it's just so damned true.

It's easy to catch other people doing it, but despite learning the lesson over and again, I do it all the time myself. I've learned that a good corollary would be this:

keep your hypothesis to yourself until you've had a chance to prove yourself wrong

(By the by, Russ' blog is now added to my aggregator. Reading back through his old posts, it's an excellent resource).

I was reading this BBC article about men being more likely to make lousy decisions when distracted by purdy ladies (via Foreign Dispatches). The revelations are hardly ground-breaking, but if you're ever in one of those 'uh, would you repeat the question please?' situations you can now blame it on science.

What is interesting is how they measured whether men have high testosterone levels:

The men's testosterone levels were also tested - by comparing the length of the men's index finger compared to their ring finger.

If the ring finger is longest, it indicates a high testosterone level.

I never knew you could do that. I duly held up my hand and compared my fingers. High octane all the way, baby!

Hey ho, I hadn't noticed that there's a new Pdf viewer for Gnome, called Evince. I gather it has become the One True Viewer. This is a Good Thing, because none of the existing PDF viewers for Gnome were particularly good, in my experience. Acrobat Reader was proprietary and bloated, gpdf lacked even basic features like searching and text selection... ironically, the venerable and dated xpdf was probably the best of the lot, which wasn't saying much. GUI design has come a long way since Motif was state of the art. Evince seems to get it right. If you're using Gnome and not (yet) using Evince, give it a try.

I discovered a new word this weekend: 'sharity'. There seem to be a few unrelated software products with that name, but it also refers to music buffs who rip their old, out-of-print vinyls to mp3 and share them on the Net. Since these albums have never made it to CD, and might never make it to CD, the copyright implications seem fairly innocuous.

I can't imagine these vinyl free-for-alls will last forever though (as one blogger said, all it'll take is for someone to post a bunch of 80's Madonna vinyls and they'll all get sued), but in the meantime, following these 'underground' bloggers, many of whom are encyclopaedically clued up, is a cool way to expand one's musical horizons.

The blog's been quiet, I've been busy. I'm all Java'd out and have been spending some quality time in the lands of C and C++, and immersing myself in Kraut rock. Life is good.

Saw V for Vendetta. I can understand why it caused a bit of a stink. Notwithstanding the fairly obvious digs at contemporary US politics, the themes are universal: don't trust governments, sacrificing liberty for safety is a perilous choice, the day will come when the lowly ones will rise up and make the bugger's eyes water, etc etc. Under the broad stroke of 'totalitarianism', the movie takes on interventionism in all its forms, from nanny-statism and social engineering to save-me-mummy militarism and nationalism. It's classic liberalism 101 with knives and Natalie Portman. Cool.

Commentary have moved from a local to international hosting service, because their growing bandwidth requirements were about to become rather costly. On local mailing lists I follow, 'go overseas' is probably the standard answer when people ask about hosting.

It might not be a bad thing to start a 'Proudly NOT South African' meme. If it took off, it might highlight the problem that local hosting providers face.

Telkom's monopoly and overpriced bandwidth costs means there's no way that local companies can compete with international providers, even for local traffic. This isn't abstract 'Telkom is Evil' ranting, this is a very clear instance where local companies, and consequently our local economy, and currency, are being hurt because of Telkom.

Then again, maybe not. I'd fully expect some wally to suggest that the solution to help local companies is to just ban people from hosting overseas.

My brother-in-law-to-be was here for a couple of days, and he's taken my old Honda CX500 down to Durban. It's going to a good home. He and his in-laws, aka the 'after-Wednesday-night-family-dinner-amateur-motorbike-restoration-club' were looking for a new project, and will be giving it a good dose of TLC and restoring it to its former glory.

I haven't ridden the bike in maaaaany years, and was well past realising that I'd never get around to fixing it up like I'd always wanted to. I'm glad I was too lazy/sentimental to flog it over the years, though. Now not only will the old beauty get the treatment she deserves, but I'll get to take her for a few spins when she's done ;-).

(Apropos: Rocky Oliver's bike post).