Rockin’ out my guitar at Sunday school

September 10, 2006 by 4 Comments

Today marks the start of me playing guitar with the children in Sunday school at my church. My guitar-fu is weak, but the only way to get better is to practice, right?

The idea is that the kids have been singing songs in Sunday school a capella, but it’s more fun to sing along to an instrument, right? So, I volunteered to play along on my guitar. Today, I played “Hallelu, Hallelujah!” and the kids sang! I think I played it a little too fast … and the voices of the 20-odd kids really drowned out my unamplified acoustic guitar, anyway. But, it was still lots of fun and I’m looking forward to doing it again next week.

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Filed Under: Believe it, or not 4 Comments

Tcl’2006, or why I don’t travel to conferences much

September 7, 2006 by 3 Comments

The annual Tcl conference, Tcl’2006, is going to be held in Naperville, IL, this year, during the week of October 9-11. At a bare minimum, if I only go for the technical sessions, the registration is $395 (with the $100 early-bird discount that ends October 1st) and covers October 11-13. Airfare from Newark (EWR) to O’Hare (ORD) on Continental, according to Travelocity.com, would be $173.60 round-trip, if I fly out the evening of October 10th and return the evening of October 13th (Flights 1193/1174). Hotel rooms at $99/night for those 3 nights will run me $297 plus taxes.

Not including meals and other incidental expenses (transportation to and from the airport, etc.), we’re talking close to $900 to attend. That’s a lot of money to be spending out of my own pocket. Given the attendees and speakers, it’d be worth it, but on top of existing expenses, it’ll be hard to come up with the money.

I guess I have a few weeks to try and scare up some consulting work to pay for it.

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Filed Under: Geeking out 3 Comments

del.icio.us/dossy links since August 28, 2006 at 09:00 AM

September 4, 2006 by Leave a Comment

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Why it might be a bad idea to fork/exec in a multi-threaded application

August 30, 2006 by Leave a Comment

Recently, the question of doing a Tcl [exec] inside AOLserver came up and I suggested using nsproxy to do it outside the main AOLserver process. This spurred a thread on the mailing list asking exactly why doing a Tcl [exec] inside the main AOLserver process isn’t a good idea. Finally, here’s what I wrote, trying to explain my understanding of the problem:

Considering the activity of this thread, let me contribute what I see as
the most common “problem” for AOLserver and Tcl [exec] …

Traditionally, fork() creates a copy of the process which invoked it,
which includes the memory allocated to that process. exec() overlays a
process with a new image and begins executing it. Since the typical
fork() immediately followed by exec() doesn’t write to its memory space
until the exec(), doing an actual copy of the parent process’s memory
then destroying it when it gets overlaid by the exec() is unnecessary.
So, in modern Unixes, an optimization was introduced: the parent
process’s memory is shared with the child and pages of memory are only
copied when they are written to–commonly referred to as “copy-on-write”.

This optimization is very wise in single-threaded applications: after
the fork() but before the child exec()’s, the parent process can only
do so much (i.e., cause pages to be copied) before the child releases
the memory by performing the exec(). However, in multi-threaded
applications, all of the threads in the parent process executing can
be writing to pages in memory, causing lots of copying to occur. In
the worst case, this can degenerate into almost 100% of the pages
getting copied, which means a fork could “cost” you 2x the memory of the
original parent process, depending on how many threads are active and
what they’re doing.

You might think “but, if I fork() and immediately exec() in the child,
how much can the threads in the parent process do?” Well, in Tcl,
[exec] doesn’t do an immediate fork() and exec(). There’s a handful of
code that’s executed in between. Without doing serious profiling,
there’s probably a non-trivial amount of instructions being executed,
all opportunities for context switching and execution of the threads in
the parent process. This problem is more visible in SMP systems with
many CPUs, where more threads in the parent process can be executed
while the child process is between its fork() and exec().

I’m not sure if this was “too technical” of an explanation. If it was,
please, don’t hesitate to ask questions. I want everyone to have a
decent understanding of the issue.

Also, to clarify: there’s no “danger” in executing [exec] from within
AOLserver. It “should” work — as long as you have sufficient free
memory for any pages that need to be copied — but, the impact to
performance can be costly. This isn’t a great concern in low-traffic
sites, but is certainly an issue when scaling.

This is one of the many reasons why nsproxy is good: it mitigates the
cost by doing all the fork/exec’ing in a single-threaded process that
has a small memory footprint, entirely outside the process space of the
main AOLserver process.

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This is not my beautiful chair!

August 30, 2006 by Leave a Comment

I worked from our NYC office yesterday and Julio Hernandez-Miyares was there, too. He decided to take a picture of me in front of some cubicle, to highlight the very Dilbertian nature of our White Plains office closing. For your viewing pleasure, here’s me in front of some overpriced non-permanent reconfigurable office furniture:

As an aside, the title of this blog entry (“This is not my beautiful chair!”) is a line from Weird Al’s Polka Party! “Dog Eat Dog”.

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What is the sound of one backhoe digging?

August 30, 2006 by Leave a Comment

To those of you who actually noticed that my blog was down yesterday on 8/29, I’ve finally found out why … according to Rich Dean, construction workers dug into Verizon’s lines:

Late this morning, the contractor working on Park Place in Butler apparently damaged Verizon’s underground telephone cables causing phone problems for customers in the area including the Butler Police Department Communications. The cables involved connect most of Butler and Kinnelon with their central office in Riverdale. In this instance Cablevision’s Optinmum phone customers probably won’t be affected like they are when the power goes out. I understand that the news media is being notified.

This little mishap managed to take out my DSL circuit around 11 AM and has been flaky since.

Who needs terrorists when we seem to do just fine disrupting our own lives?

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Shawn Christoper asks Dossy, “What do you do for AOL?”

August 28, 2006 by Leave a Comment

Fellow AOL’er Shawn Christopher emailed me a few questions in response my Ask Dossy post back in February 2006 and they got buried in my inbox. I ran across the email today and figured it’s about time I responded.

Shawn asks …

What is it exactly that you do for AOL. I belive reading
something from your KW: Phone info it’s something that deals with
programming Web Content however I’m not too sure.

Officially, my current title is “Principal Software Engineer,” which implies that I, well, engineer software … I’m not responsible for the programming of our web content. The confusion might be stemming from the previous name of the group I work in, which was “Web Services & Publishing.” Of course, none of this answers your original question, exactly.

Anything that you specifically “own”?

Philosophically, no. I’m a big believer in Extreme Programming, which advocates Collective Code Ownership. I’ve worked on a range of projects at AOL as well as lent a hand to project teams ad-hoc when they’ve needed help, but I don’t feel like I “own” a project. I’ve been responsible for plenty of things and certainly accountable for a lot, but I’ve never considered that to be ownership.

Even with respect to AOLserver, where I’ve been the Project Leader since May 2004, I don’t own the project. I see my role as being more a liason between AOL and the AOLserver community. I might also help facilitate discussion around features or bugs and ultimately serve as a decision tie-breaker when necessary. But, I still feel that the community owns the project and I’m just a humble servant trying to keep it moving forward.

Also what nationality are you because to be honest with you I thought you were female based on your name, it sounds like a femine asian name.

I’m a banana: half Japanese and half Korean, but born and raised in America.

Shawn, thanks again for the questions and I’m sorry it took me so long to post my answers. As usual, feel free to Ask Dossy anything … I may not answer in a timely fashion, but I do hope to eventually. :-)

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Personals for married couples? Make any sense?

August 28, 2006 by 13 Comments

The other day, I got an email from Susan Mernit (an AOL alumnus, now at Yahoo! Personals), that really got me thinking. I’m a firm believer that the best products are created by people who create them for themselves, to scratch an itch they have. Of course, this isn’t the only way to create great products, but I suspect it helps a great deal.

I’m married and have children. Online match-making sites don’t exactly cater to folks who aren’t looking to, well, find a romantic match. There’s a wellspring of social networking sites (MySpace, etc.) that purport to connect people, but there’s such a large population of singles out there that it seems most people you meet online are looking to find dates and/or hook up. Some online dating sites have gone as far as explicitly excluding married folks from even participating. Others imply that married folks are there to cheat on their spouses, or are looking to swing. What ever happened to, well, friendship? You know, the platonic kind? Are we really that sex-driven as a society and culture?

Of course, you have companies like eHarmony that boast extensive self-service tests that can be used to match you up with someone who is statistically compatible with you. For a long time, I’ve wondered: if my wife and I had both completed our profiles at eHarmony, would their system have matched us up? It seems that someone over there had a similar thought and they now have a service for married couples: eHarmony Marriage. This is great and I’m going to try and convince my wife to try it out with me. I’ve just registered and sent her an invite.

But, this still leaves a gap that I’m still looking to fill: finding friends. eHarmony could fill the gap by using their profiles to connect people who are looking to just make new friends. Not having used their service, I don’t know if they already do this, but all the promotional materials seem to heavily imply that successful use of their products results in marriages. There must be a sizable audience of married couples who are still interested in meeting new people who are likely to be compatible, but aren’t looking for a romantic relationship? Am I really that strange? Is the notion of a platonic match-making service so crazy? Personals for married couples, to meet other married couples and/or singles who want to make new friends?

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Filed Under: Geeking out 13 Comments

del.icio.us/dossy links since August 21, 2006 at 05:09 PM

August 28, 2006 by Leave a Comment

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Motorola HS850 headset and Treo 650, not so great

August 24, 2006 by Leave a Comment

After putting it off for way too long, I picked up a Black Motorola HS850 Bluetooth headset for my Treo 650. It’s simple to use and pairing it with the Treo 650 wasn’t bad. However, the range is really poor: if I wear the headset on my right ear, and put my phone in my left hand and extend my arm all the way out to the side, the headset becomes nearly unusable. Also, even with the phone and headset volumes maxed out, the audio is still too quiet at times. These all seem to be known issues in general with Bluetooth headsets and the Treo 650, unfortunately. I still really like the Motorola HS850 headset and would recommend it, but perhaps not if you’ve got a Treo 650.


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