December 2006 Archives

The last two weeks have been euphoric. I graduated with my bachelors of computer science. I was promoted to the lead webapps position. Christmas is right around the corner, and I get 9 days off. The snow has been posh for the skiing.

This semester was mostly independent study. Very much in the spirit of a senior year. I got A's in both my computer classes; automata/algorithms and operating systems. I got a B in an elective journalism survey class.

Commencement is in May, but I don't think I'll walk. No need to spend the extra money on accessories. I went to Olivia's first graduation. It feels like roll call for a full football stadium. It takes hours for the 5 seconds of glory. I might send out an announcement and have a party at the house after the holidays when things are less hectic.

Gifts are not necessary. If you absolutely must send me a graduation gift, then send me something associated with your favorite form of exercise or exercise accessory. Now that I have more time I need to lose the "college weight."

Everything is shipping with tomcat these days. Heck it even comes in some of the HP printer toolbox stuff. Many suites of programs run multiple copies of tomcat (or other java services). Then you have a bunch of java's running and you can't tell them apart. You've probably found some tricks for finding the different java's in your program suite. Maybe your using the memory signatures, specific ports or you memorized the CLASSPATH. Here's a trick to help tag your tomcat's on unix. Use the -D switch to java to define a value that the program won't use but you can parse for in process lists. I use the CATALINA_OPTS variable in my startup scripts like

CATALINA_OPTS="-Duaa=manager"

Then that string is prepended to the java command line. It doesn't affect the program in anyway (unless you pick a really bad value that the program happens to actually use). But that simple string will help you tag your java's in the wild like this

    root   358     1  2 06:42:10 pts/1    0:03 /opt/ElluminateLive/_jvm/bin/java -Duaa=manager -Djava.endorsed.dirs=/opt/Ellum
    root   343     1  3 06:42:10 pts/1    0:02 /opt/ElluminateLive/_jvm/bin/java -Duaa=license_mgr -server -Xmx64m -Djava.awt.
    root   366     1  3 06:42:10 pts/1    0:02 /opt/ElluminateLive/_jvm/bin/java -Duaa=communication -server -Xms1536m -Xmx153

It's that doldrum time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Most of the shopping is done. The tree is up. Olivia has canned all manner of tasty fruits. We are all geared up to ship out presents. We are going to celebrate Christmas morning with Rob & Larissa here at the house.

The skiing has been mediocre. We had one good dump at the beginning of the season. But it was not followed by any other snow. Then recently we have had some snow, but the temperatures have been too warm to sustain good trail conditions. The classic skiing in the woods is always good.

Mainly life has been about work and school. Work has a number of year end projects that have to be delivered between the fall and spring semesters. Both projects involve clustered load balanced application servers and require tracking a lot of complex details. Then I'm finishing out my last semester toward my bachelors computer science. It has been a challenge to keep motivated as all my classes are self study. Automata and complexity is particularly challenging.