Older blog entries for neoneye (starting at number 5)

Some bugs lasts longer than others, some is hard to identify and yet others is just a pain in the ass. At one point you will be driven near madness, so that you do silly things because you think you are out of options. Admitted I have a bug (possible several bugs) which have been haunting me for too long. The amount of debug output has reached a point where it only confuses more that it helps. I have been thinking about using a multilevel logging system, but have so far rejected it. But now that I am near-crazy I consider it more that ever. It will definitly provide me with fine-graned information when I need it. I usualy just do a regexp search in the debug output. Howto tell if one has gone crazy?

Went to bed at 1000, but woke up at 1430. A total sleep of 4 and a half hour, not good. I am used to sleep roughly 7 hours and sometimes more. I feel dizzy and needs coffie, however I still feel wasted as if I had stayed awake while I should have been sleeping. Last night we switched to summer time which has displaced my sleeping-pattern by one hour in the wrong direction. I am beginning to consider when to force a transition upon myself, so normalization can occur. The temperature is 30.7 celcius inside my appartment, because its being hit by direct sunlight. Maybe the heat woke me up?

While fixing one bug you discover that another problem is also present, and when you dig into it you begin wonder how the whole program have been able to work? perhaps fixing the bug will break your program? Anyway it wasn't that severe but it got my attention. Even though it was hard to track, I added only 2 assertions to a testcase which exercises that cloning my iterator primitive works. However fixing that package, broke my regexp package. Programmers are like detectives, good at identifying what caused an action (the opposite of cause and effect). Hypotesis; programmers are better than detectives at solving puzzles?

Tonight I discovered that I have been working the whole week, under a false assumption, trying to solve a problem with nested quantifiers. No wonder it was difficult to understand what was going on, hounestly I never figuered it out. I think this could be the real reason why I recently have been visiting slashdot a thousand times and reading/writing newsgroups without solving any real problems. Damn it was hard to consolidate and identify this problem. I wrote bunches of testcases and carefully chose the input data. Is it true that humans learn from their mistakes?

Ever had days where you only switched back and forth between slashdot, the favorite newsgroup, checking mail, without accomplishing anything at all. Feeling dizzy and wasted. I don't have a TV and cannot watch DVDs and startrek, still I manage to not do anything! Hesitating too much initiating the next big choice in life. Luckily there is no expectations to what I do, so don't feel any stress that way. However I have some expectations to myself, which maybe is too high? Further more I have too many projects which I am working on, without feeling any progress. I think this is a pretty common geek situation. How does one avoid such wasted days?

My sleeping pattern is right now turned upsidedown, because I have no job at the moment. I have lots of spare time in front of my 17" LG flatron 795FTplus display which had seen its best days many years ago. Following such sleeping pattern is not recommendable, in the middle of the day people are phoning and disturbing you while sleeping. And one of my neighbours in the appartment is making lots of noise in the daytime. I can hear my left neighbour is just waking up now and Im just getting started! How does one normalize such sleeping pattern?