Tag Archives: Work

Reliable Internet Access

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It seems that people I work with have Internet problems a whole lot more often than I. I feel quite lucky that my cable modem provider, Time Warner Cable, has been pretty rock solid for the last 6+ years that I’ve had them. There have been a few issues in that time, but nothing that I can really remember. I did have a problem with their DNS servers that drove me crazy, so I started running my own. I handle my own email, so I don’t have to worry about that either. The “pipe” that Time Warner provides is fast and reliable. What more can I ask for in a provider?

The Joys of Working at home and being self employed

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I’ve been working at home for about 6.5 years and have been self employed for almost 3. When I tell people I work at home, they usually respond that it must be nice. Well, it takes a certain kind of person and attitude to work at home. My first experience working at home was when I lived in Portland, OR and the company I worked for had basically shut its doors, but kept me on board for a few months. As I was relatively new to Portland and the weather was just awful (it was in the winter) I absolutely hated the experience. After I left Portland and moved back to San Diego, I chose to work at home, while still working for a company in Portland. Since it was now my choice to work at home, things were much better. Working at home gives me the flexibility to goto the gym when I want, run errands when I want, and work when I want. With all this flexibility comes a few downsides. The biggest being that I can work all the time; now that I’m self employed, the more I work, the more I get paid, so it sort of makes me want to work more. Some days I like working at home, occasionally the silence and lack of interaction gets to me.

As for being self employed…I’m not sure that I could work for anyone again. The ability to take off when I want without permission is great. The tax breaks are definitely worth being self employed. The big downsides are that if I don’t work, I don’t get paid which causes me to work a lot more than if I had an employer and if I’m sick, I don’t work and don’t get paid. This, of course, can lead to a lot of stress.

Overall, being self employed and working at home agrees with me.

Hard drive failure

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One of the worst things that could happen to a computer happened today to me. The hard drive on my PowerBook failed. It started making funny noises yesterday and then today it stopped spinning. Given that I’m a bit paranoid about backups, I said to myself, “this isn’t a problem as my backup is 2 hours old.” Then my elated thought turned to disappointment when I realized that my 2 hour old backup is sitting in the bank vault where I had just been a few hours earlier to store my backup. The good news is that my 9 day old backup boots my PowerBook thanks to SuperDuper!. So on Monday morning I’ll drive over to The Chip Merchant, plunk down $150 + tax for a new 80 GB hard drive, then goto the bank which doesn’t open until 9 am. Then I have the fun task of disassembling my PowerBook and putting the new hard drive in.

To add to my backup strategy, I’m going to get additional TrayDocks and have 2 backups at home so that this doesn’t happen again.

Cocoa NSAutoreleasePool

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Autorelease pools are extremely convenient for not having to worry about memory allocation and freeing the allocated memory, similar to the Newton days with its garbage collection. A problem that I’ve been aware of with autorelease pools, but promptly forget all the time is that if you are in a tight loop and keep creating autoreleased items, you’re going to run out of memory and crash. For instance, in the following block of code, without even realizing it, a new autoreleased NSDate is being created once every tenth of a second. If you are processing data for say 3 minutes, you have created 1800 of these that aren’t being released.

while (running)
{
	[NSThread sleepUntilDate:[NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSinceNow:0.10]];
}

Now that I’ve thought about this, 1800 doesn’t sound all that bad, however, if you keep doing this without giving the OS a chance to do the autorelease cleanup, you’ll run out of memory. A better way of doing this is:

while (running)
{
	NSDate *newDate = [[NSDate alloc] initWithTimeIntervalSinceNow:0.10];
	[NSThread sleepUntilDate:newDate];
	[newDate release];
}

This way you won’t have anything lying around. Hopefully this will save a crash or two and lots of time scratching my head figuring out why it is crashing when I can’t reproduce the problem.