The right tool

Stardate 57032.3 (03-23-2004)

Finding the right tool is important to productivity. I know this already, but it is good to remind myself of it from time to time. I wrote a program in C# about five months ago to replace an existing one that runs monthly testing. The old one was taking about ten hours to run. I wrote the new one to divide up the tasks into threads. It ran, but the threads all died one by one after a short time due to Oracle throwing an exception. The transaction object would get lost. I don't have Visual Studio .NET yet, so I have been using SharpDevelop. It's a nice IDE, but there is no debugger. I found one distributed as part of the .NET SDK. It works similar to the VS IDE, so it was easy to use. What I discovered is that Oracle does not like the isolation level on the transaction object to be anything other than unspecified. It doesn't make sense, but it works. With this, I was able to cut the testing time to one hour. Since the tasks can be divided into threads, it scales very easily. One hour should make everyone involved very happy.

I found out Monday I am part of a new team. The team was formed to upgrade the utility programs we and our clients use to move data in and out of the system. I should not have been surprised. I wrote a lot of the originals and the library code in 1995, and I have been vocal that they need some serious overhaul. These are the same ones I mentioned had been turned over to the Indians about a month ago. The model I came up with was used by subsequent developers, and was never modified much. As I look at it now, it was ok, but there were holes. Of course, there are also new technologies that were not available then.

The executives have shifted again. I find it interesting that most of them do not stay in one position more than six months or so. Another note I need to make. I have done some complaining about my supervisor, but there are good things to say about him. April applied for a supervisor job at the hospital. If she gets it, it will be a daytime position. This means daycare for Thomas, and about a hours worth of daycare for the other two. To cut down on this, I asked if I could work four ten hour days, which would limit the daycare and the costs to two days a week. Without hesitation he said yes. Other times I have asked to work from home, or for some time off, and he has agreed. He stays away unless there is something I need from him, trusting that I can do what is needed without micromanagement (I have been doing it long before he came along, which he is well aware of).

Today there were a couple of interesting driving incidents. On the way to work, near the north I-15 to I-215 interchange, I watched as two cars tried to move into the same lane at the same time. They did see each other, and both backed off. This happens quite a bit, but a few hundred feet down the road they did the same thing. On the way home, I saw a tow truck dragging a car out of the large pond at Bangeter and highway 201. The car had to have driven off the road and down a bank about 50 feet or so. I hope no one was hurt, but it was unusual.

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