The Ankle Biter @ Quibbling.net

Chris O’Donnell’s daughter is getting a lesson in being a capitalist and entrepreneur.

Awesome.

It’s my little brother Ben’s birthday today! He turns two-dozen. I’d direct you all over to his blog to wish him a happy 24th, but he doesn’t have one (nudge nudge).

I feel like cooking something a little more ambitious this weekend. Trying to decide if I want to make soup or if I want to roast something. I had gotten an idea the other day that stuffing a chicken with apples and roasting it might be fun, so I did some Googling and found this recipe.

Me: “I just don’t understand how someone can work in something called ‘Windows’ all freaking day and yet not be able to grasp the concept of what a window is.”

Sri German: “Your problem is that you assume our users even know that they’re working in something called ‘Windows.’”

Me: “Good point.”

…that October is about the only month of the year when I really like my commute. I drive the George Washington Parkway every day and get to watch the leaves change. If I can do it safely, I will try to take pictures sometime soon.

It’s a good morning when you turn on your computer, check your iTunes RSS feeds, and find that a song you heard once when the band appeared on a daytime talk show 12 years ago, but has been stuck in your head ever since has been added to the iTunes store.

Whee. I took first shift on the help desk this morning while the Sri German finishes his vacation. It’s the morning after a new release. So the phone has been ringing off the hook.

First there was The Error Message From Hell. It was this complicated, un-helpful database error that cropped up whenever you tried to do, well, anything. How had we missed this in testing? Turns out, it was just one line of code- a database call hadn’t been closed properly, so these open queries were just sitting there, eventually causing overload on the database. We hadn’t found it because we’re a company of 10 people and can’t generate the traffic needed for that kind of error to crop up.

For you non-geeks: Think of our database as the guy at the end of the bucket brigade- it’s an imperfect analogy, but it’ll work. The user passes a request to the application, just by using the interface. So the User hands a “bucket” to the application. The application passes that request through to the database in the form of a query- so now the database is holding the bucket.

Ordinarily, the query gets closed and the contents of it are deleted from cache- the database dumps out the bucket. But since one particular line of code that would have caused that for one particular kind of query was missing, the bucket didn’t get dumped. So meanwhile, the user and the application are passing more buckets to the database and THOSE buckets get dumped, but there’s still that one full bucket. But then another user passed another bucket that didn’t get dumped.

Before long, the database is holding hundreds of full buckets, so many that it can’t accept any more. And then it starts screaming that the buckets are too heavy and it can’t take any more.

But instead of saying, “HEY! Too many queries are open!” it speaks in database language, which is to say, completely incomprehensible to anyone.

One line of missing code pretty much brought all our customers to a grinding halt this morning.

And then there was the Stupidest. User. Ever. But that’s another story, about how amazing it is that users can be completely baffled by interface improvements that actually make the system easier to use.

Everybody go wish Krempasky a happy birthday!

By the way, I fixed the headlight. All by myself.

Well, mostly by myself. I was having trouble holding the headlight steady in the socket while clamping the assembly back into place, so one of my neighbors offered to lean against it while I struggled to get the lever down.

On the whole, a very simple process if you’ve got good directions, but it requires a bit of upper body strength, so I struggled with it a little. But now I have two headlights again!

I was on my way to a friend’s place last night, and was about two blocks from her house, when I saw flashing lights behind me. Great. For what possible reason could I be getting pulled over?

So I stop. In a lane of traffic, because there’s no shoulder. And I wait. No one gets out of the cop car. The light changes, and still no cop, so I inch forward to see what’s going on. He flipped his siren on.

FINE. I’m stopped, get out of the freakin’ car already.

What is up with cops getting to demand your license and registration before they even tell you why you’ve been stopped?

As it turns out, my right front headlight is out. This is news to me, and it’s handy that someone pointed it out.

But then the cop goes back to his car to write the citation, and he took for-freaking-ever. I seriously sat there for 15 minutes waiting for him to come back. I watched the clock. While I was sitting 100 feet from an intersection, sitting through light after light.

It’s a fix-it ticket- I take the repair recept to court in December, and the ticket will likely be dismissed. So I decided to take care of it as soon as possible this morning, since my car was due for an oil change anyway. Problem is, apparently Beetles take some weird headlight bulb, so the garage that did the oil change didn’t have it. And no one anywhere near them had it either. So I’ll probably end up having to order it and figure out how to get it installed. It’s supposed to be owner-serviceable, right?