Archives week 48 of 2004

Nov. 29, 2004 - Dec. 5, 2004

Play in Design: The Ampersand (First draft starts... forgot how interesting this stuff is (well, to me, anyway)...)


Since the whole point of starting this blog was to prod me into doing some serious work on making my thesis work more accessible I suppose I should actually do some writing for it. So, the first sub-section of the "Play in Design" section now has a first-draft. There are 14 "Treasure Chest" sections in ...

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A blowout for grams (I rather sucked at pool this afternoon...)


Aunt Lil' dropped grams off and had lunch with us. After she and Rosey had left grams and I played 4 games of pool. She won three of them, with my sinking the black mid-game, scratching on the black, and sewering on the black.

Ah well, guess that's what happens when she doesn't go about ...

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I give up (How the heck can *that* be leaking?)


Somehow a test case which consists of creating a client, calling getTable( ) on it, and having it immediately raise a socket error when it goes to send is leaking. There must be something going wonky at the Twisted level. Maybe a deferred/callLater object getting left on the stack for every call? Maybe a demon? ...

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Take a step away from the computer (That's it, nice and easy...)


Frustrating (I'm gnashing my teeth at this point) to spend literally hours trying to whittle down a memory leak only to get close and find that it disappears. Mirages of memory leaks plague me. Now that I'm doing a gc run after each test case, and with a few other tweaks to try and filter ...

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I believe this bug is driving me nutty (But at least I have a date for the staff Christmas party...)


Okay, so I have the bug isolated... sort-of. I have two test cases which differ solely by 1 call. In the one case, there's a memory leak (beyond the garbage created by the bisect oid store). In the other, there's none.

The problem is, I can't see any way for the leak to fall out ...

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Leaks in the test-suite (Bisect OID storage seems to create unreachable tuples...)


The most obvious leak in the test suite turns out to be limited to the bisect-based OID storage module. Nothing to do with the real-world system :( . Haven't been able to figure out how the garbage gets produced, the tuples are just part of a big list stored inside the Agent object. The Agent ...

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Oh, yes, the memory-leak safari continues... (Just in case anyone cares...)


Tracking down the memory leak is not going well. So far each time I think I've isolated a test case that produces a leak it eventually stabilises at some memory level after an hour or two of operation.

There's something funky going on that I'm thinking may be a reference loop that's requiring the cyclic ...

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Enlightened self interest (Why even bother trying to sleep... well... other than to let my hands rest... which isn't happening with all this blogging)


The tension between left and right can be thought of as a pull between collective idealism and individualism.

However, the philosophers of the right, in explaining how a society without left-wing thinkers would work (i.e. without anyone willing to do anything they don't want to do) tend to eventually come up with the idea of ...

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Is stress the prod that gets evolution going (Do chemical alterations in the cell affect the accuracy of DNA replication, producing more mutations?)


A few coffees ago with Lara and Shane, we were discussing the age-old design versus evolution "problem". In my daily reading, I've just stumbled upon this article.

In the article they are just noting that stress is accellerating the reduction of the "protective" tails of the DNA strands (telomeres). Telomeres appear to act (speculation) ...

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