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I've been busy in bursts this week at work, with things being piled on top of me one minute, then seemingly hours with nothing. I'm keeping happy though, being left to pretty much potter and do as I want as long as I'm being productive, and that I am. This makes me happy on a number of levels. For example, because I was able to spend time thinking and pottering - today I have been able to dig and thoroughly investigate several problems which have been bugging.
I used Sysinternals' Process Monitor in anger for the second time in my geeky career. I've played with it every now and then and thought it would prove useful, but never managed to find a use for it! We had a weird problem where multiple clients sharing "ini" files occasionally seemed to be overwriting changes made by another client, when as far as we could tell there was no reason for the clients to do so unless specifically asked to. As Process Monitor shows every file write, read (and also every registry read and write) I was able to show that despite all rational thought, our software does write when it shouldn't be. That changes a ticket from vague suspicion which may get looked at once and overlooked to a ticket with a definite cause, and an easy fix.
(With some help, I must admit) I've been able to find the dodgy data in a database (Derby database) which was preventing reports (OpenReports/Jasper Reports) from running. A table with over 700,000 records in it had 4 rows with slightly dodgy data (a spurious character in front of what should be there), all from the same source. However this source had another ~20,000 rows which were fine. Don't know where to start there looking for the root cause without asking the customer to do some seriously long term network traces. Though the amount of data collected would be manageable, so maybe it's the answer.
I've been raising tickets left, right and centre on our new pre-production units. We really do have some silly problems... things which we've fixed time and time before, things which we've left out intentionally that customers have shouted about loudly until we changed them. AND WE'RE DOING IT AGAIN! I sometimes want to go to the people in development and bang their heads together until they get a clue, alternatively we should get them on the phones for a few hours, see how they cope with the real world situations.
I've been preparing some kit for sales peoples' demonstrations, which isn't exactly thrilling but it does move me firmly in their direction :)
I used Sysinternals' Process Monitor in anger for the second time in my geeky career. I've played with it every now and then and thought it would prove useful, but never managed to find a use for it! We had a weird problem where multiple clients sharing "ini" files occasionally seemed to be overwriting changes made by another client, when as far as we could tell there was no reason for the clients to do so unless specifically asked to. As Process Monitor shows every file write, read (and also every registry read and write) I was able to show that despite all rational thought, our software does write when it shouldn't be. That changes a ticket from vague suspicion which may get looked at once and overlooked to a ticket with a definite cause, and an easy fix.
(With some help, I must admit) I've been able to find the dodgy data in a database (Derby database) which was preventing reports (OpenReports/Jasper Reports) from running. A table with over 700,000 records in it had 4 rows with slightly dodgy data (a spurious character in front of what should be there), all from the same source. However this source had another ~20,000 rows which were fine. Don't know where to start there looking for the root cause without asking the customer to do some seriously long term network traces. Though the amount of data collected would be manageable, so maybe it's the answer.
I've been raising tickets left, right and centre on our new pre-production units. We really do have some silly problems... things which we've fixed time and time before, things which we've left out intentionally that customers have shouted about loudly until we changed them. AND WE'RE DOING IT AGAIN! I sometimes want to go to the people in development and bang their heads together until they get a clue, alternatively we should get them on the phones for a few hours, see how they cope with the real world situations.
I've been preparing some kit for sales peoples' demonstrations, which isn't exactly thrilling but it does move me firmly in their direction :)
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