Blogs

Our trip is now only 2 months away so I thought it was about time that the trip’s blog went live… MegèveSki MegèveSki, because we can…

I sympathise with Christopher Baus’ frustrations… I think that’s probably just par for the course; I like to tell myself that I gave up blogging for anyone else but me ages ago, I’m probably fibbing. Arguably my most successful blog posting was this one about accessing bluetooth on XP via Winsock… Or perhaps it was this one, also about bluetooth on XP. Or, maybe, this one, about, well, you guessed it.

Christopher Baus suggests that Robert Scoble’s blog lacks focus and that his blog is mostly noise, “He’s always blogging about something, but really nothing at all “. But Chris, surely that’s the point of Scoble’s blog? As Robert himself says “if you don’t think I’m taking you to enough cool blogs, or writing enough cool stuff, there’s a very easy solution. Unsubscribe.”. I did that quite a while ago, but I’m glad he’s still out there and that other people subscribe to him on my behalf…

I’ve just about finished the auction server performance tuning. Our thrash test that uses 200 concurrent clients all responding to every bid with a counter bid has gone from averaging 40 incoming bids per second and 3700 outgoing bids per second to 180 incoming and 18000 outgoing. The peak incoming and outgoing were nearer to 1600 and 52000… I’m pretty pleased with the improvements and eventually decided to put the thoughts of lock free list traversal on hold, we don’t need it.

Previously, on Practical Testing: we added a multi-threaded version of our timer queue that manages timeouts automatically. This time we’ll integrate our new timer queue into an application that uses the old version of the code and, along the way, discover some functionality that the original version supports but that the new version currently doesn’t. One of the original reasons that we designed this timer queue was to handle per socket, read timeouts in our IO Completion Port based server framework.

Preparation for the ski season continues. Yesterday my latest purchase from amazon arrived; Waxing and Care for Ski and Snowboards. As we’ll be putting down a few more tracks than normal this season I thought it wise to try and avoid having to pay for servicing the skis too often and finally learn how to do it myself. Luckily I have plenty of old skis laying around to practice on… Looks like I need to buy lots of new tools; cool!

I’m currently looking at “lock free” access to the linked list that stores the set of clients to communicate with. Ideally we’ll be able to add to, delete from and traverse the list from multiple threads without needing to lock and synchronise. There are lots of references available, so far these two (1 and 2) look good from a quick scan of them whilst they were printing… Wish I’d kept up my ACM membership as it looks like the definitive works are available as conference proceedings on their site (then again, I often find that the definitive work isn’t necessarily the best starting point).

I’m currently working on a simple auction server for a client using The Server Framework. You can think of it as a specialised chat server, of sorts. One of the things it must do is broadcast messages from one user to a set of users. This is relatively easy to implement in a crude way in The Server Framework but it’s not nice. Time to refactor towards niceness… The lack of niceness in the quick and dirty implementation of broadcast messages is the fact that the message must be duplicated for each client that will receive the broadcast.

I’m currently working on a small auction server for a client using The Server Framework. It’s a relatively simple server, messages come in, are validated and are then broadcast to interested parties and logged. Yesterday we shipped the first cut of the source to them and I was a bit concerned that our simple test app could thrash the server so easily. Admittedly the first cut of the code hadn’t been tuned at all and the logging implementation was fairly Mickey Mouse but I was a little concerned.

I’ve been reading mostly fiction recently. I’d kinda stopped reading anything non-technical for far too long; there was always some new techie book to read, but there always will be… I used to read masses of fiction, mostly SF and fantasy stuff; but recently I’d only read fiction when on holiday, and then only as a backup to the techie stuff I had with me… That changed, on holiday, when I read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.