One of the first things that I tried to do with the latest release of my TickShifter tool was to run it on itself. Of course, that didn’t work. There are several reasons why the tool might have had problems running on itself but I thought I’d addressed most of them when I dealt with the issues around getting multiple copies of the tool running at the same time. The problems there were mostly around the names that I used for the named kernel objects that were required; the control program communicates with the dll that it injects so that it can control the dll’s operation and collect data.

As I mentioned a while back, I’ve been working on adding rudimentary GUIs to my debugging and testing tools. In fact, both the deadlock detection tool and the time shifting tool are both functional enough for real world use but the command line interfaces make them harder to use than they need to be. I’m not yet 100% sure of the form that the final GUI should take, but I’ve pressed on with my initial GUI development to produce a reasonably complete GUI for the cut down, demonstration tool, TickShifter.

Well, I figure that I’ve written about these debug tools that I’ve been working on for long enough. The time has come to make one available for other people to use and abuse. Given that I hope to sell some of these tools eventually I’ve decided not to give away early versions at present. Much as I will need feedback I think a properly structured beta program would be better for that.

Given all the publicity that this blog has received recently over my relationship break-up I thought it might be a good idea to give any new visitors a jumping off point into some of the more popular technical pieces. Believe it or not, this blog isn’t all about network snooping and infidelity. More often than not it’s about C++ on Windows, Test Driven Development and my opinions and whinges about software development issues.

I’ve fixed the MT-Blacklist problem and so comments and trackbacks are now working again.

My hosting provider has changed something in their perl instalation which means that MT-Blacklist (the thing that protects this blog from comment and trackback spam) is broken and not doing its job properly. I’ve located a fix but need my hosting provider to help me apply it. Until they do I’ve disabled comments so that I don’t have too much crap to clear up once the problem is over. Sorry for any inconvenience.

When I came back from skiing in Colorado I had a bug report from a client and it took me a fair while to isolate the problem for them. The report suggested that a server that I’d built for them a while back was deadlocking in certain situations. The server had always had deadlock problems due to a couple of poor design decisions that I made early on and I’d built a tool to help me remove the potential for deadlock from it by analysing its lock acquisition patterns - the code was too complex for me to do this analysis by just looking at the code and although I should rewrite the poorly designed section of code I don’t have the time to do so (and it only causes problems when I make changes to the code, which doesn’t happen very often, and the problems can be caught by running my tool).

I’ve been looking at my web server log analysis and I have three peaks in my graphs for the last few days. The first big peak, 6,000 hits per hour, was on 28th March when my relationship break-up post was on the front page of digg. The traffic then tailed off and dropped down to around 130 hits an hour on the 30th. The second peak, of 500 hits per hour, occurred when a link was posted on The Register and stayed on its front page for a while.

My relationship break-up posting gets linked to from CNN.com… And, of course, they put their own spin on it… However, as I mentioned in a reply to one of the comments on the original posting… “Actually, I wrote a much longer piece with much more detail and decided that I didn’t need to publish it. I just needed to write it. To get it out of my head, in much the same way that I wrote about my sister’s tsunami experience.

Typical. My usual subject matter isn’t interesting enough to get onto digg.com, etc. but a throw-away post about using Ethereal to catch my partner cheating gets on the front page… Ah well, such is life :) I’ll just try and write more interesting technical postings and in the mean time appreciate the kind words, the linky goodness, the traffic spike and correspondingly increased adsense revenue…