Just in case people visit here, I have put link enhancement into the posts.
Since I have built several RSS Aggregators, I know to put the tags into each post, and not the blog template. Anyone out there blogging, make sure to do that, or people will not see your cool styling and whatnot in their Feeds.
Postscript: that link went dead, we have removed all traces of it from this blog.
I have been working on a Web Service using Apache Axis2, and trying to keep everything free-threaded.
The service maintains data collection scans, and service requests (each on a separate thread) must interlock with the scan thread, possibly blocking until their "index" in the buffer becomes available.
Needless to say, Thank Deities for the java.util.concurrent package!
Internally, the service maintains a Session for each scan job. There are two important methods here, request() and close(). These are represented by two separate service APIs. Sessions are reference-counted, and the last call actually closes the session, which involves cancelling any in-process scan thread, without interrupting any synchronization going on between it and request() callers.
Of course, how do we make sure close() can operate safely? We have to know that no one is inside of request(), or we will mung up some synchronization somewhere.
This is where inspiration struck! The trick here is the ReaderWriterLock, which has exactly the semantics we need. Callers inside request() obtain the read lock, and callers inside close() obtain the write lock. This keeps everyone organized and off each other's toes.
Heh. I'm listening to a podcast and they are talking about Easter Eggs, those wonderful programming gems the more-industrious of us put in.
Personally, I barely have enough time to get the core stuff debugged, let alone providing special prizes sprinkled everywhere to debug too.
One place I worked at actually had one in one of their products. That was a fun time.
Anyway, one day one of my co-workers was working on some code, and I got involved, and we were noticing all of these if statements scattered all over the place, with seemingly unrelated operations going on, throughout the main algorithms.
Our boss had written most of the system, so curiousity finally got the best of us, and we had to ask.
"Oh that's the Wild One." he said to us, matter-of-fact.
And we're like, "Well what-the-fuck is the Wild One?"
And the story unfolded. He sat back in his chair, smiling.
"Go to the New File command, and enter W-I-L-D-dash-O-N-E for the file name."
It was wild, indeed!
Entering this part name triggered a whole series of random changes and additional behaviors:
It was fun for about 60 seconds, then you were done with it. Man, there were a lot of if statements devoted to that one!
Cue up the music....
Man I cannot believe I forgot to clean my coffee cup before I left for 3 weeks of vacation! It left a shiny Sanka-like residue in the bottom; I could only get it out with hot water. It did look like Sanka, and no, I didn't try it.
My only resolution this year is to use more functional programming techniques. Anonymous closures are the best! I just finally started using currying and I'm digging it. Of course you need a language that supports that, and some make it easier than others, but don't let that deter you!
