12 Sep 2005
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Personal
It has been a busy couple of weeks since I last posted. Audrey is doing great. She is a very easy baby. It seems that she and Elliot share a low key, go with the flow, temperament. (Hopefully I am not speaking too soon.) Catherine and I were a little worried that we might have used all those genes up with Elliot. Audrey is already sleeping 4-5 hour stretches at night, most nights, which is great for a baby her age.
Elliot seems so big now. Before Audrey was born he was a baby (or, at least, a very little boy). I suppose it is all a matter of perspective. Now that I compare him to a real baby is seems obvious that he is is not one anymore.
01 Sep 2005
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Personal
Audrey was born at 12:31 today. She weighs 6 lb 9 oz and is 19 inches long. Both Audrey and Catherine are doing great.
Audrey has bright red hair just like her mother, but there is a definite resemblance between Audrey and Elliot.
29 Aug 2005
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Personal
The worst is over at my parents house and they are fine. No damage to their house and none of the downed trees need to be dealt with immediately (they are not in road, etc). I am pretty amazed that their telephone is still working. Apparently, they talked to my brother not too long ago and he is fine.
When I tried to call my brother on his mobile phone I got this message, “Due to the hurricane in the area your call cannot be completed at this time.” I think it is a pretty interesting that the “your call cannot be completed” messages are customized these days.
29 Aug 2005
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Software Development
The garbage collector is not observable.
Every non-trivial application I have worked on, regardless of language, has had memory leaks. Even in garbage collected environments memory leaks happen. Given that, why would you design a GC’d language without providing observation hooks into the garbage collector? With Java your only, standard, option is ‘-verbose:gc’ which writes some information to the standard out. Not enough information, mind you, but some.
Unfortunately, I, and everyone else, use java on the server where standard out is useless. Repeat after me, there is no standard out. I could use -Xloggc to get that information logged to a file but that means the the file does not get rolled with the rest of my log files. And I still cannot do real time checking to see what my application is doing when the GC occurs. The whole thing is just so annoying when it could have easily been solved by allowing me to register a GC observer.
REXML could not parse this XML/HTML:
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29 Aug 2005
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Personal
It is very weird watching a category 5 hurricane head toward your family from thousands of miles way.
I grew up near Mobile, Alabama and my parents still live there. Luckily, (for my parents anyway) it looks like hurricane Katrina is going to make land fall quite a bit west of them but they will still experience hurricane force winds. My parents have boarded up, have experience riding out hurricanes, are not in a flood prone area and are far enough inland that the storm surge will not be a problem so I expect they will be a fine.
My brother lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and it looks like Katrina’s eye is going to pass pretty close to him. I am not too worried, though, he is young and can take care of himself. When I talked to him today he had not decided what he was going to do, but he did have several options, none of which sound too bad.
It is hard to tell how bad this is going to be, no one has experience with this class of hurricane. I have seen pictures of 12 foot thick (at the base) concrete sea walls that were moved 30+ feet by Camile and Katrina is the same strength but twice the size.
I especially feel for the people in New Orleans, it looks like they are going to bear the brunt of this hurricane. That would be bad in the best of conditions, but a city which is below sea level it is not the best of conditions. All we can do now is hope for the best.