It’s sometimes been said, by many people, that turning the computer off at night and starting it up again is bad, because it puts an undue wear on the processor and components inside when you switch on or off the electric current.

This is almost entirely, completely false.

However, I think, some day, it should be measured the cost of turning Microsoft Outlook on or off. Whenever I come back to work, turn on the computer again, and start Outlook, I just let it sit there for a few minutes until Outlook has stabilized itself. It sort of steps out of the cave like a burly caveman who haven’t had his coffee yet, and who realizes that there’s been a time gap since he last was lucid, panics for a brief moment, and then proceeds to spend the next few minutes rummaging about in a frenzy and doing everything at once, until he finally comes to his senses again and idles back.

It’s pretty much come to the point where I usually start by opening Mozilla Thunderbird instead, go through the mail briefly, and then press the little Outlook button to wake up the caveman. In the meantime, I can go get coffee, say hello to my colleagues, chat a little, and when I come back, the caveman has just about come to his senses again, and I can continue working.

I wish I knew why.

Threading, as a software method, is bad.

The idea is good in itself: Make the program execution split up in several threads, which all run independently; creating an illusion that the program is doing several things simultaneously – and, if you have multiple cores, processors or hyperthreading, the program actually does several things at once.

It is a wonderful way to scale – letting ten users work with the same program, or hundred users, is all a matter of how many threads you create.

But from experience, we’ve realized that threading is very hard to pull off without glitches. Why?

• It has proven very difficult to isolate threads from each other: They all access the same data, so you need data isolation through locks. But sometimes it’s hard to predict – especially in a GUI environment – which data that require locks or not. We’ve discovered instances where deeply embedded components were not “thread-safe” but actually used the same data source.
• When threads collide, they do so unpredictably, and can be a nightmare to find. A program can run 10.000 queries without problem, and query 10.001 will crash the whole program.
• It is very difficult to debug, and exponentially more so to observe thread collisions in a debugger.
• Threading problems are more likely to occur in production systems that development systems.

.NET and Java do mitigate these problems somewhat, but still doesn’t solve the fundamental problem – that threaded programming is hard, error-prone, and can lead to very serious failure in production environments.

Erlang, the language developed by Ericsson, solves this in a wonderfully simplistic way. The main difference between a process and a thread in a conventional system is that threads share global data between them, whereas processes all reside in different address spaces and thus share no global data. Erlang doesn’t have any global data, and thus, the distinction disappears. As they say,

“If you think Java is stable, Erlang is rock steady.”

So, is there a way to mitigate this situation? There just might be.

What if there was a way to split the process into separate “services” that share no data between them? What if it was possible to create a message-based system of requests and responses, where the system itself would be able to create services as needed? And if the only way to communicate between these services would be through some kind of message system which is guaranteed to be stable? (WM_COPYDATA comes to mind.)

One might argue that copying data back and forth in the system is slower, more memory-consuming, and less efficient. But if we are indeed approaching a paradigm shift in programming, where the limits of a single CPU has been reached, it only makes sense to adopt a different methodology to work in a multi-CPU environment. More threads, more concurrency, more CPU’s running more threads simultaneously – then the problem of increasing speed can simply be dealt with by, basically, adding more CPU’s. Instead of tuning each thread at the expense of computational stability, you tune the available services and the overall flow of the system, which is one of the cornerstones in highly parallel environments. (Think of a brain.)

Of course it would pay off to fine-tune individual components/threads/services as well; the advantage of the service-based setup is that it would be remarkably easy to extract one service and test it, simulating a virtual testing environment around it.

Such a system might very well be implemented in Delphi, in a similar way as Erlang, by building services that run as threads and operate on Windows message queues. And since, ideally, no data would be shared between them, it would make no difference whether the individual components were in-process or out-of-process. Building on the Serialization module I built earlier, this might be quite easy to accomplish.

Likely candidates would be, for instance, our internal web server than I’ve never been able to make as stable as I want it.

In the beginning was cacls.exe. This little command-line utility could edit access control lists in the NT filesystem. It was deemed by some to be inefficient and underpowered.

So when Windows Server 2003 came along (and Vista, mind you), Microsoft shipped an updated version called icacls.exe which was more competent in some areas, and less competent in some areas.

Looking at the situation, Microsoft realized that icacls was insufficient, and wrote another tool called xcacls.exe. This was more competent, but also underpowered.

So they wrote another version, called xcacls.vbs, which finally – after four iterations – offers users the capability to remove inheritance on folders from the command prompt. The functionality has always been there in the GUI, though.

It makes me wonder if anyone – anyone – writes scripts for Windows. On the other hand, given the crappy cmd.exe, maybe it’s no surprise no-one does.

Tickle is a pretty fun website with tons of tests. If, for some unexplainable reason (yeah right) you have nothing to do on a Saturday night, it’s a fun way to goof off.

I took a “work quiz” and came upon this question.

At first, I didn’t understand the question. And then I had to laugh out loud.

I have never, ever, during my entire time (6+ years) at Vision, been without a huge backlog of projects in the pipeline.

Is that normal?

I found chart the other day, obviously humorously intended, depicting the average amount of time spent on different activities during web design.

It’s more accurate than you think. I’ve done a lot of time trying to build css-only sites, only to give up and fall back to good ol’ tables. Tables have a way of working that’s fundamentally accepted by every browser. And once to do some magic tricks with tables, such as using a little positioning adjustment, things just work.

CSS is nice, sweet, and powerful. But it’s just too much trouble.

Wish Delphi had it. (Yeah, the Win32 one, too.)

I have fought the good fight. I have stood on the high ground and battled with the enemy. And I have lost.

It’s not that much of a battle, you know. I’m just trying to make Microsoft’s Internet Information Server to accept a new IP address. I have fought the configuration dialogs, I have wrestled in the early morning with httpcfg. I have stared down registry settings; stood face to face with knowledge-base articles; googled for many an article and bellowed with rage at the mute, silent error dialog.

“Network location cannot be reached.”

I edit the configuration; remove ip adresses at will; create new websites. I restart the website, restart the IIS, beat it with sticks and stones. I revert the configuration to the original settings, inspect the network card settings. I ipconfig, netstat and ping. I restart and restart again. And nevertheless, that impenetrable brick wall still looms in front of me. It… just… won’t… understand…!

“Network location cannot be reached.”

I am a user of Microsoft server products. I am a weary soldier on the battlefields of the Internet. I am a broken man.