Monday, while sitting at work, my hard drive died in my laptop. So, Tuesday, I pulled up Dell's website and orderd a new 40GB drive. The website said "Normally ships within 24 hours", and I paid for overnight delivery. Worst case scenario, it should be delivered by Friday. Well, obviously, I don't have it yet. I got an email today from Dell saying that my order was delayed until at least August 13th, two weeks away. Now, I need this replacement drive yesterday, and I can't afford to wait 2 more weeks. What really urks me is that they couldn't have let me know this 3 days ago when I ordered it?
I called Dell and cancelled the order and went to TigerDirect.com and ordered a Seagate 40GB drive for less than Dell had it for. The best part though, it shipped 30 minutes after I ordered it. I should have it on Monday, and then I get to spend next week installing Gentoo on my laptop.
While sitting at my desk this afternoon, I started to hear my laptop making a clicking noise. I decided to power it down, not knowing what the cause was. When I booted it back up, the computer complained that it could not find the primary hard drive. WTF? I tried a few more times, all with the same result.
After searching the forums, there are a few things I can try so that I can at least boot up and back up my data, but it looks like I'm out a couple hundred dollars to replace the drive and rebuild the OS. I'm just really glad that I backed up my projects early yesterday. I did/will loose some data, but only a couple of hours worth. It could be worse, but not what I want to deal with right now. Guess I will seriously have to look at some backup device or method for my computers at home, and also start dumping my laptop to the backups. Hindsight is always 20/20.
On another note, I was able the other day to play around with a proof of concept at work related to the caching problems we have been having. Part of the problem is the sheer amount of data we have stored in reference tables that we would like to be able to cache, but the memory requirements with the current caching scheme are just immense. A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across an article introducing me to the Flyweight pattern of storing pointers to one copy of an object, instead of creating a new object that has (at least) the same base data and blowing the memory out of the water. This proved to be very effective in our situation, cutting the memory requirements for our current cache by more than 50%, and allowing me to cache a huge table (2 million records) that I was previously unable to cache. That memory requirement was cut by 80%.
Now I just need to share my findings with the larger group, and hopefully, they will be implemented.
Yesterday, Java.Blogs had an intersting post on Aspect Oriented Programming, or AOP. While I have plenty of other new technologies to keep me busy for a long time with some of the side projects I have going, this should prove to be an interesting subject to do a bit of reading up on.
Forune spit this out at me today when I logged in:
I did some heavy research so as to be prepared for "Mommy, why is
the sky blue?"
HE asked me about black holes in space.
(There's a hole *where*?)
I boned up to be ready for, "Why is the grass green?"
HE wanted to discuss nature's food chains.
(Well, let's see, there's ShopRite, Pathmark...)
I talked about Choo-Choo trains.
HE talked internal combustion engines.
(The INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE said, "I think I can, I think I can.")
I was delighted with the video game craze, thinking we could compete
as equals.
HE described the complexities of the microchips required to create
the graphics.
Then puberty struck. Ah, adolescence.
HE said, "Mom, I just don't understand women."
(Gotcha!)
-- Betty LiBrizzi, "The Care and Feeding of a Gifted Child"
I often wonder what my child will grow up to be. How intelligent will she be, what will she aspire to do. The typical daunting questions that every parent has. I just found this amusing, cause I can completely see Sarah growing up like this. (Except for the last part)
While perusing TheServerSide.com, I came across an article on data caching and performance. Since I have been involved with this at work quite a bit lately in our very large scale application, I take every chance I get to read articles talking about caching algorithms and their effect on the performance of a system. This article introduces the Flyweight design pattern to cache a list of products. Seems to me though that this is not needed in the context of the project I am working on due to the use of Entity Beans which are cached on the server themselves. This may be a lighter weight approach though, but without the ease of use of the CMP Entity Beans.
The toy that I found from this article is Jakarta's JMeter, which may prove useful when I start to do some of the performance analysis for my project. Not that I have time now to work on it as it is, but once performance measuring becomes a priority, I'll have to remember to take a look at this.
Found an interesting article while doing my daily blog reads over at Leo's Blog over at Computerworld. Basically, the Justice department is refusing to hand over supposed public data (at least through the Fredom of Information Act), claiming that "implementing such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major data loss, which would be devastating. In addition to running the risk of data loss, this is a new feature request which would be costly and take a considerable amount of time to implement."
I would like to know how much the moron whom came up with that lame excuse was paid! Maybe I can claim that next time they need some data here at work out in the counties, "Sorry, we would, but it would crash the system and the computers would just implode."