I Put Her On The Guest List At The Show

...and now I get to watch her dance
Like the other weirdos do --
Ooh ooh-ooh-ooh ooh!

Implemented a full thread abstraction system for gzochi. It hasn't made me any happier. Maybe I'll port it to use dl*() instead of the preprocessor. I still can't figure out why this one block of code sometimes gets executed and sometimes doesn't -- valgrind doesn't report any memory problems, helgrind doesn't report any valid synchronization issues, and stepping through it in gdb makes the problem go away. Feels like a case of thread silliness / stack smashery, but I have no idea what to do about. Anyone, please, help me. Fuck.

Today was an easy day at work. I closed lots of bugs and made a concerted effort to make myself miserable by listening to Room On Fire. It worked!

Right now I'm watching some episodes of Bullshit! that Tom was kind enough to buy me. Yes, and I'm also wearing the Shrek 2 t-shirt, Tom, as a Dreamworks-gin scented tear rolls down my cheek. Katzenberg has won -- I love Shrek Brother.

Devlin, who's on the 12-to-12 right now, indicated that we'd rock out tonight. I'm pretty excited about that, since we're gonna try My Michelle, a song that rocks and, I think, is pretty easy to play on drums.

Just Don't Make Fun Of Mr. Jenkins, Mark

Okay, you guys guessed it -- yesterday was my birthday. I'm 23! Thanks to the "friends" for taking me out to a lovely dinner at Long (Dong) Tan.

The other day I switched gzochi over to libpth, a user-space threading library, having bought the hype about it being a better choice for server systems and more portable than LinuxThreads pthreads. Well, more portable it may be, but the syscall-catching context switching it does is absolutely re. tard. ed. I don't want to have to write my entire application around a semi-working concurrency schema -- like, if I ever have to call *_yield(), something's wrong. I think I'm gonna switch it back to regular old retarded kernel pthreads... maybe. I don't know. I'm getting kind of sick of the whole thing.

I found a small bug in the glibc manual and they fixed it. My name's gonna be in the Changelog!

John McCain

YES:

"The constitutional amendment we're debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans. It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them."

NO:

He said if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the Defense of Marriage Act or "state remedies to judicial activism fail," then amending the federal Constitution might be "appropriate."

YES:

...the decision in Massachusetts to legalize same-sex marriages does "not represent a death knell to marriage."

Fricative

Man, you guys like Six Feet Under? It's very pretty good.

I hung out with Kevin Wasserman for a while yesterday (Ed.: July 4th, actually). I love that guy! He's real into cigars now (don't worry, he still likes HDTV)

I'm happy because I made some thread improvements. They didn't fix the real fucking problem, which is driving me absolutely bananas, but more on that in a second.

It's been a while since I wrote anything here.

I'm struggling to pound out this e-mail to my old senior project adviser, asking for a grad school recommendation. Do I really deserve a recommendation? The project was supposed to be about molecular biology, and I didn't learn that much about molecular biology. I'm worried that he'll want me to come up to the 'Have to discuss it and want me to pour forth on whether or not I've ever had an original idea in my life, Richard Yang-style. These are the types of thoughts that are always sub-pathetic and irritating to hear from other people but that are no less completely consuming when you're having them yourself.

gzochi's got a Heisenbug. For the non-technorati among you:

Heisenbug is a term used in software programming to describe a computer bug that disappears or alters its characteristics when it is researched.

A common example are bugs that occur in a release-mode compile of a program but do not occur when researched under debug-mode, or some bugs caused by a race condition. The name is a pun on the physics term "Heisenberg Uncertainty principle", which is popularly believed to refer to the way observers affect the observed in quantum mechanics.

In my case it's a TCP message -- specifically, the one that delivers a "game entry token" to a user -- that never gets sent when I run gzochi-server from the command line, sometimes gets sent under gdb, and always gets sent under valgrind. After making myself crazy with it for the past two weeks, I've decided to ignore it and forge ahead. Hopefully it will present itself in a more obvious way later. But like I said, I did fix some other important stuff.

I had lunch with an old acquaintance yesterday. I'd been kind of hoping to rekindle our friendship -- we hadn't spoken much since 10th grade, really, mostly my fault -- but she was pretty concertedly ambivalent on the prospects of hanging out as far as I could tell. Or maybe she was just really depressed. Oh well, that's just the way life works.

My birthday's coming up. I could use a new wristwatch; mine loses time all over the place.