Please Stop This Thing, I Want to Get Off: Living the Merry-Go-Round of FAIL

There’s this pattern of application failure I’ve ended up dealing with a lot over the years. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Our scene opens with a multi-tiered client-server application, let’s say, for the purpose of argument, that it’s a web app. There are web servers in the front, usually with some sort of load balancer in front of them, then maybe a middle tier application server (SOAP, J2EE, that kind of thing), and some kind of shared state/storage at the back, let’s call it a SQL database.

Published at September 16, 2010 ·  5 min read

The Rules - At Least As I See Them (Well, the First Two)

Since I’ve been dealing with computers, I’ve developed some rules of thumb. The first rule seems obvious, although I’m constantly surprised by the people that break it. It is:Rule 1: Never run a command on a computer that affects the communications path through which you are connected to that machine.This is slightly more complicated than it sounds - especially when configuring routing protocols in routers. You change things such that you lose your routes from where you are to that machine, and it’s time for Plan B.

Published at September 13, 2010 ·  3 min read

A Tale of Two Table Views - my UISearchBar Race Condition that I finally found

OK, so I finally found my race condition, I’d talked about here and here. So, in my KidChart app, I have a UITableView that has a list of all behaviors that people can pick from: and in the search box above, people can start typing to narrow down existing behaviors and then click on one so they don’t have to scroll as much. As soon as the UISearchBar gets focus, it does this:

Published at September 8, 2010 ·  2 min read