Muley Point (Jan 08 2009)

I actually should be programming all day, but when I dive head first into such activity I have to take frequent breaks to let the CPU in my head cool off as I draw odd diagrams on the dry-erase board to solidify the logic and pseudo-code tumbling around my brain. During these moments of respite I may tend to more enjoyable things, like messing around with the raw data pipeline, or figuring out why, all of a sudden, we're not sending out any work.

The last thing was due to a problem we're seeing more and more around here. As we ramp up doing actual science where hitting the science database with one-off queries that somewhere contain the phrase "order by." This seems to give informix fits when it's busy. Apparently we need to free up, or create, more resources so the db engine has more scratch space to do sorting. Otherwise it jams up in a slow, quiet manner, and nobody notices until we observe side effects - like the traffic graph dropping to zero. So we're looking into that general problem now.

- Matt
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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

... jams up in a slow, quiet manner, and nobody notices until we observe side effects - like the traffic graph dropping to zero. So we're looking into that general problem now.

Wait... this project does like... real science??!


Kidding, kidding.

I concur with the above. If someone wants to somehow use this massive power to help me predict lottery numbers I could find my way to sharing the proceeds with SETI :)

Otherwise I will simply continue paying my stupid tax. (Buying lottery tickets more out of amusement in examining the probability of my ticket against the actual results. Sometimes even at the thought that people realistically expect that one day it will happen to them. "Someone has to win.")
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-W
"Any sufficiently developed bug is indistinguishable from a feature."