I need to figure out a timing bug in Struts, the evil webapp framework from hell. Timing issues are a bitch to resolve in the best of time, but in Struts, you'd prefer to have your appendix taken out with a rusty spoon while fully conscious.
Tag: computers are evil
Oy
I'm glad it's friday, cause I can't really take any more of this week. Quack. Quack. Quack. We were supposed to release the new version of PRIDE to the general public this week. It didn't happen, and it's not looking good to happen next week either. The problem is that we're waiting for things that are out of our hands.
Pride is a repository of proteomics data. Groups can submit their experimental results for peer review and collaboration. We have tons of data right now but it's all private. The groups haven't published it to the scientific community at large so it's not available yet. The only source of public data we have hasn't given us the data files that will work in the new version, and only they can make them. Joy. We can't release without public data, it's ludicrous.
Other nasty item: Oracle is a pig. We did all our testing on local installations of mySQL on our laptops and it runs fast and smooth. We dump all the data on it and still, it's fine. We dump the same data on Oracle and now the database queries take roughly 60 times more time. What used to take 5 seconds now take 5 minutes. We need to talk to the DBA group to tune our database, but that's not going to happen overnight. We can deploy to a mySQL database on the EBI systems network, but we're waiting for them to greenlight it and give us access.
So, basically, we're waiting on people.
Quack.
Some days feel like this
I want this day to eb over
I'm not having the best of days today. So far, I've done nothing productive. Not one damn thing. While trying to fix a small annoying bug, I managed to bring down the whole framework I'd been working on. I don't know how I did it but it takes talent to kill a whole server. *grumbles* I got everything back up and running, but the bug is still there. Since this is something only a small number of people use and very infrequently at that, it's going to on the backburner cause there are more important things to deal with. This was supposed to be a quick fix but ended up wasting the better part of my day.
What's also aggravating me is that I need to get a test version up and running so that we can beat the shit out of it with functional tests before it goes live. Unfortunately, it won't deploy. It should. Everything is there for it to be up and running. It just doesn't want to. Fuck it, I'm going for coffee.
Keep your various body parts crossed
I'm testing the loader code I've been working on for the past week. For the past 28 minutes, java has been using 100% of my CPU and about 500MB of RAM to do its number crunching. If all goes well, in just over an hour and a half, it'll be done. If all doesn't go well, it'll blow up in 1:28 hours….
Update: it's now later and, as expected, it blew up. What's annoying as hell is that it blew up somewhere unexpected, not where I wanted to test it!!! GAH!
2nd update: Ahem, I rock. I've just increased my code performance by 1000fold. Instead of taking 17s to parse 50 records, it now takes 15ms. Everything is now safe and sound and loaded in the database. I am a happy bunny.