Practice Pad
Technology, Programming, Music, Percussion, Drums and Stuff

My weight’s been all over the chart this week. I’ve not been as diligent as necessary, dietarily. I think it may be time to start the exercise.

/w

Week three weight: 204.6lbs
Weight lost this week: 7lbs
Total loss so far: 8.4lbs
Average per week: 2.8lbs

Yesterday I went fishing on the Upper Provo river, and didn’t get enough water. I think I’m fairly dehydrated, and that will be causing my weight to read lower than it should. Still, I’m glad to be back on track and moving in the right direction again.

/w

“Speed limit is 65 through there, and I clocked you at 84.”

The Highway Patrol officer had me dead to rights. I was on my way back from fishing on the upper Provo River with a couple of old buddies. We were talking about fish, life, old jobs, etc, and I wasn’t paying the best attention I could have. He was hunkered down around a corner in the median and caught me just FLYING. I figured the best policy was the honest approach.

“84?” I asked. “I was thinking it was more like 80, not that that makes much of a difference.”

“I’m going to need to see your license, registration and insurance, please.”

“Yes sir… here’s the license, and the other materials are in the glove box.” My buddy pulled out a big stack of stuff from the box. I grabbed the registration and insurance.

Then the officer went back to his car to “call it in”. I felt ok. I knew I was getting a ticket. I hadn’t even seen the guy until it was way to late to even fake it, while the cars around me must have, because the all faded away behind me right before I noticed him.

The two guys I was with have interesting histories with traffic stops. The classic car enthusiast has a tendency to get mouthy that has resulted in handcuffs and an electric blue early-’60s Camero being dragged down the street on a tow truck. The other fellow is the former head of security and safety at the local college, and has often been able to show his campus badge to the officer and be sent on his way. That said, the fellow is of Iranian birth and has had his fair share of abuse at the hands of local law enforcement merely for being the wrong color. Once, during a particularly intimate pat-down by a small-town cop, my friend was asked, “So, do you carry any guns, knives, chemical weapons? How about a bazooka?” to which my friend replied, “Yeah, I carry a bazooka. In fact, your hand is on it right now.”

I turned to these two ne’er do wells, and said, “no sense in lying to the guy at this point.” They tended to agree. “Keep it business like.”

I took solace in the fact that this would be my first ever speeding ticket, and that I had carried myself with dignity and integrity through the experience (not like the time I was pulled over for expired tags, and my license was ALSO expired, and the nice lady impounded my van. That time I broke right down and cried).

A few minutes later the officer was back at the window.

“I’m gonna let you guys split. Slow down!”

I was NOT getting a ticket after all!

“Thank you officer!” I called into the waning dusk as he walked away. “Have a nice night!”

That’s what I get for playing it straight. The fact that my traffic record is so clean was probably a big factor, but I think the bigger factors were 1) this particular cop was not a power-drunk high school drop out. 2) I gave him some respect, told him the truth, and was prepared to accept the consequences. He meets a lot of whiners and lairs every day, and I made sure that I was neither.

I then kept the cruise control pegged at 64 for the entire ride down the canyon.

/w

The trip to the North Fork Club killed me, apparently. I had thought that I had practiced sufficient restraint with the wonderful food in the dining room, but apparently not. This week, I’m back in the saddle. Gonna get it done.

/w

Lost approximately 4 pounds this week. This is good. I was expecting the first 5-8 pounds to come off quickly, and I’m shooting for an AVERAGE of 2 pounds over 20 weeks. I need to see if I can get a quick fat-axe before shot… Actually, I ought to take one weekly so that I can run them together as an animation. Now THERE’s a creepy idea!

/w

That’s the new goal. Currently, I’m operating purely in the realm of diet changes. I’ve cut out alcohol altogether, and also fried, greasy foods. No more cheeseburgers.

Yesterday was Week 1, Day 1. Week 1 Weight: 213.

Target weight: 173.

/w

Last night I was lucky enough to attend the Return To Forever concert at Kingsbury Hall. Simply amazing. These 4 dudes, who were on the forefront of the invention of jazz-fusion 25 years ago, walked in, sat down and played some of the hottest, groovingest music I’ve ever heard. The same material from a quarter of a century ago, and it still sounds fresh and hipper than almost anything else out there at the moment. I was almost able to arrange a lesson with the drummer, too.

Chick played in his customary style. Lots of crazy, processed synth. Chick’s technique and soloistic approach are distinctive, and he certainly didn’t disappoint. Stanley Clarke was the other real standout of the show, in my opinion. They played a set with him on upright bass, and he took an extended solo… during which, frankly, I’m not sure WHAT happened. I’ve never seen anybody play the instrument like that. I was sincerely afraid he was going to break it. Apparently there are examples of similar stuff from him on youtube. I’ll check that out and post it.

Anybody who’s going to be in position to see this tour who likes music AT ALL owes it to themselves to go see these masters do the funky fusion.

/w

At the office we’re having a memory-management issue on a very large multi-threaded application. Basically, we’re throwing so many threads that we’re running out of native heap space. We don’t seem to be having Java heap problems, the issue is within the 2GB process space limitation on a 32bit Windows machine. So, after considerable research, I’ve stumbled upon what I think might be the solution.

It seems that when a Java process spawns a new thread, it allocates a section of memory called the Thread Stack in the native process space. It’s basically setting aside resources for the thread to do whatever it needs to do. This is outside of the Java heap, but within the JVM runtime process, and therefore inside the native heap provided by the JVM’s host OS.

Internet sources vary on the default size of the thread stack, and it may vary from OS to OS, but I’ve seen people claiming the default thread stack size is 8k up to 32k per thread, regardless of the actual stack size requirements of the thread in question. So, depending on the complexity and size of the code in the thread, there may be a ton of resources being allocated that are just going to waste.

Here’s the little test app I ginned up to check this stuff out.

net/willyray/tests/threadage/MyThread.java

package net.willyray.tests.threadage;
public class MyThread implements Runnable {
	private int threadNumber;

	public MyThread(int threadNumber) {
		super();
		this.threadNumber = threadNumber;
	}
	//each thread will loop 100 times, printing out
	//it's number and how far it's gotten in the loop.
	public void run() {
		for (int i=1; i<=100; i++){
			//this whole sync-ed section executes
			//before the thread sleeps
			synchronized("synckey"){
			System.out.print(this.threadNumber);
			System.out.print(":");
			System.out.println(i);
			}
		}
	}
}

net/willyray/tests/threadage/ThreadDriver.java

package net.willyray.tests.threadage;
public class ThreadDriver {
	//create a certain number of threads and start them running
	public ThreadDriver(Integer numThreads){
		for (int i = 0; i<numThreads.intValue() ; i++){
			MyThread mt = new MyThread(i);
			Thread t = new Thread(mt);
			t.start();
		}
	}
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		if (args.length  != 1) {
			System.out.println("Usage: $gt;java -Xss
                                                   ThreadDriver “);
		} else {
		ThreadDriver td = new ThreadDriver(Integer.valueOf(args[0]));
		}
		}
	}

If I run ThreadDriver from the command line like so:
>java net.willyray.tests.threadage.ThreadDriver 10000
it creates 10,000 threads of my little counter class, and each starts counting, vying for processor time, and slowly making their respective ways up to a count of 100. I watch my Task Manager->Processes window, and I can see the Java process immediately skyrocket up to about 150,000k worth of memory usage. This is the highest on my list, topping both Eclipse and Firefox 2.

If I run it like this:
>java -Xss1k net.willyray.tests.threadage.ThreadDriver 10000
The -Xss1k argument tells the JVM to set the default stack size to 1024 bytes. I still fire the same exact code, doing the same exact work, but now my process runs in around 50,000k of memory.

Programming lesson: Sweat the small stuff, don’t trust the documentation, and take all questions immediately to the internet.

This Java memory management stuff is a real rabbit hole, but I find it kind of interesting. It makes a very perverse sort of sense when you really get down into the nitty-gritty of it.

Outstanding questions from this test rig: Are there performance hits from managing the threads in the smaller stacks? I can see where with less room to work with it might be a burden to manage the stack… still, at some point I’ll slap some kind of rudimentary timer on the thing and see what the results are.

Until next time…

/w

Yesterday was a big day. After a week of intellectually-intense web conference, I checked out of the hotel at 7:30am Eastern time, walked a half-mile to the McPherson Station, hopped a 15-minute metro ride to Reagan National, a 1h 35m flight to Cincinnati, then an almost 4 hour ride to Salt Lake City. At which point Becky picked me up for a 4 and-a-half hour ride to the ancestral cabin in Eastern Idaho to meet my parents and Charlie. All in all, the total travel time from the moment I checked out of the hotel to the time I arrived at the final destination (including the Kentucky layover) was approximately 14 hours and 30 minutes. Suffice it to say, my sitting-bones were hurting by then.

DC was generally good. Got in Saturday, and my man Rudi picked me up and drove me to the bizarrely-decorated Hotel Helix. My room looked pretty much exactly like the picture. Funky! The first two days of the conference were focused on ColdFusion, which is my core professional competency. These days were particularly useful to me, in terms of being able to mine the ideas of some of the heaviest hitters in the industry for the latest and greatest ideas. The next three days were about Adobe Flex which is an emerging technology (despite being on version 3) that puts the power of the Flash Player into the hands of non-developers in a useful and not-prohibitively-expensive way. I was less familiar with Flex, and many of the topics assumed a higher level of knowledge than I had. Still, I was able to re-jigger my schedule to get more “fundamentals”-based sessions.

Also, there were several extra-curricular activities that merit mention:

On Monday night continued my pattern of public drunken obnoxiousness that will eventually get me in terrible trouble. I met a cool old hippie dude at the bar who happened to be the VP of the Federal Employees’ Union. Then, moments later, I met a chemical company lobbyist, whom I promptly lit into as a scourge on the political landscape of the country. I knew I had crossed some kind of line when the old hippie was defending the lobbyist against my verbal onslaught. I think it was about the time I asked the bottom feeder how many people his company had killed this year.

Headache Tuesday, then met Rudi for a taste of real DC culture. Specifically a “chili half-smoke all the way” at Ben’s Chili Bowl. Hell of a chili dog, there.

Wednesday, I went out on walk-about. Saw the White House and various other landmarks. Good times.

Thursday I met up with a guy who’s aquaintance I had made on various drum-related internet fora, and who had always struck me as a righteous dude. Tim H. and I met up at Union Station, got a beer and some happy-hour appetizers, then wandered a bit, then found another beer (or 10) in a nice little bar with a guitarist in China Town. Good times, and good to meet a former figment of my imagination in the flesh.

Friday I stayed in, mostly, except for an excursion to the 7-11 and the Subway for a meatball sub. Good times.

/w