Tech: June 2004 Archives
June 25, 2004
So tonight I spent about 2 hours doing a focus group for a product under development. I can't say what product it was, or even who's developing it, because they made me sign an NDA. Still, it was fun, we got to see something new and non-public, got to give actual feedback that I know will at least be heard, and I got paid $75 for chatting about music and the Internet for two hours. (Yes, I can say that much--the product has to do with music and the internet. :-P)
I found the focus group by checking Craig's List for the local area, under "et cetera jobs". It seemed like an easy and reasonably fun way to make a little extra pocket change.
A couple of incidentals about the group: There were eight of us, and I was the only one who didn't have an iPod. Of course, as far as I could tell there was only one (maybe two) other person(s) who even downloaded music before buying said iPod; when I mentioned having downloaded the first version of Napster people seemed oddly impressed. Sometimes I forget I'm such an early adopter. :)
As for the product, it seems like a decent idea, something I would actually use, if the company pulls it off well--which I am not completely confident of, but then that's why the focus groups. :)
June 22, 2004
5 more days, plus a bit, until Jenny is back in town and life is back to normal. Been working so hard that I don't have the energy to do much by the time I get home (my current mantra is "just survive until July 17th"), but the imp of the perverse has seated himself firmly on my shoulders -- I can't sleep. I'm just all kinds of out of sorts right now. I guess having work scheduled out until October 11 for a hard July 12th deadline will do that to you, though.
I am at least proud of the work I'm doing. I was running our major application on my laptop today (just a Pentium M with 512 MB of RAM), and it handles at least 500 simultanous clients, each sending commands at random intervals between 0 and 1000 ms. Considering it's all code I wrote myself (in about 3 weeks), I don't know if that's more a tribute to my mad skillz or the ease of developing in C# -- the truth probably being, as it so often is, somewhere in the middle. (I'm so humble it hurts to be me sometimes... ;) ) The only reason the app starts to have issues at 500 clients is that it appears that the Winsock buffers start to fill up (probably due to the fact that 512MB - VS.Net - SQL Server - Outlook 2003 - misc other stuff does not leave massive amounts of memory lying around free) and the socket starts throwing WSAEWOULDBLOCK exceptions.
Anyway, I'll be interested to get the app onto our real server and see if/how far that extends the client limit.
And now back to your regularly scheduled non-programming post. ;)
Actually, I am toying with the idea of starting up another blog just for programming etc, to kind of segregate the content. Of course, it would mean that if I start posting to that more often than this blog Jen would beat me up, but maybe we can reach some kind of compromise. ;)
Okay, brain too fuzzy to write more. Going to try to sleep now.
