I recently registered luxdb.org with register.com. Why? It was cheap. Lesson learned (again) – there’s always a reason for cheap. I eventually decided to consolidate this domain with some others I have registered at dyn.com (an excellent provider). When I tried to transfer, I found out you need an authorization code to effect the transfer. Makes sense – keeps people from stealing your valuable domain. The thing is, register.com has instituted a 4-5 day delay before they will send you the code, and even then, they may decide not to send it to you (if they believe there has been “suspicious” activity related to your domain). On the face of it, there might be some idea that they are acting on the customer’s behalf, but based on a cursory read of various angry posters to online forums, and on my experience, it seems pretty clear they are abusing this policy in order to try to prevent customers from leaving.

When I requested the auth code and saw the notice of the 4-5 day delay, I called customer service. I had to hold for 10 minutes, and then for another 5 minutes after I demanded the auth code from customer service (I was a bit peeved at this point), but eventually he did come through with the code, no questions asked. OK, fair enough – it was a little annoying, but I got what I wanted, gave the code to dyn.com and initiated the transfer. That completed after 3 days or so. The funny part is that the very next day I received this e-mail from register.com:

Dear Michael Sokolov,

You recently requested an auth code to transfer your “luxdb.org” domain name.
Your request has been processed and at this time it has been declined due to recent suspicious activity in your account.

Register.com is committed to providing the most secure and reliable domain services for our customers.
We have implemented specific security measures to help prevent unauthorized transfer of domains to another registrar.
The type of suspicious activity that could have caused your request to be declined includes:
– Multiple failed attempts to login to customer’s account
– Recent changes to the account holder’s name, email address, or login ID
– Attempts to access the account over the phone without authorization
– Recent changes to the accounts password
– Domain name lock not removed
– Recent changes to billing or credit card information

To receive your auth code, please call one of our customer service consultants at 1.888.734.4783. They will confirm you to the account and then fulfill your request.

Thank You,

Sandy Ross
EVP, Customer Service
Register.com

Here is my reply:

I hate to tell you this (actually it gives me a dirty pleasure), but you guys are morons. Your policy of delay and obfuscation is insulting and is probably losing you many more customers than it retains. Or maybe you’d rather be the company that serves the feeble and ill-informed. Anyway the transfer is already complete, so not only is this message an insulting lie, but it is completely null and ineffectual.

Very sincerely yours, a happily departed customer,

Mike Sokolov

This post demonstrates an easy way to test the effect of multiple concurrent threads running your software, using your existing unit tests.

Have you ever wondered whether your software is really thread safe? Whether it will stand up to the punishment of thousands of concurrent users when your site (or app) goes ballistic? Multi-threaded programming is notoriously difficult, and running software in a environment (like a web application server) that spawns multiple threads can often expose architectural problems that don’t arise in typical test scenarios. Running a set of tests in parallel is a good way to gain confidence that your code is thread safe.

Another benefit of running multiple tests at once is: they run faster! All modern computers have multiple cores, and many have multiple CPUs: when we run our tests single-threaded, we aren’t making use of all of that latent power we have just lying around.

Let’s say you have a test class called MyTestClass, and it defines a number of tests. Using the test runner we provide, you can run all of its tests in parallel by adding a single annotation (the standard org.junit.runner.RunWith annotation that comes with JUnit) to your class:

@RunWith (MultiThreadedRunner.class)

This runner plugs in to the JUnit framework by subclassing BlockJUnit4ClassRunner; this is the class that usually runs all tests from a test class. The runChild() method is called for each test that is run; we take that over and arrange for each test to run in its own thread. We also want to ensure that not too many threads run at once: each thread consumes memory, and, depending on the size of the test class, we may end up running hundreds of threads at once if we’re not careful, and run out of memory. Here is the code for runChild, which simply waits until there are fewer than maxThreads tests running, and then creates a Runnable called Test which actually runs the test:

    protected void runChild(final FrameworkMethod method, final RunNotifier notifier) {
        while (numThreads.get() > maxThreads) {
            try {
                Thread.sleep(25);
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                System.err.println ("Interrupted: " + method.getName());
                e.printStackTrace();
                return; // The user may have interrupted us; this won't happen normally
            }
        }
        new Thread (new Test(method, notifier)).start();
    }
 

Note that we keep track of the number of threads in a variable called numThreads. That is an AtomicInteger, which is a thread-safe primitive built into the standard JRE. We use it to ensure that the thread count isn’t updated simultaneously in two threads. Here is the core of the code for the Test class:

        public void run () {
            numThreads.incrementAndGet();
            MultiThreadedRunner.super.runChild(method, notifier);
            numThreads.decrementAndGet();
        }

All this does is keep track of the number of running threads. I haven’t shown the constructor and members used to track the test method and notifier, but as you can imagine, that is just straightforward copying of variables.

The only slight complication with using the code as shown so far is that JUnit will finish before all the tests do. It’s necessary to make the “outer loop” in the test runner wait until the last test has completed before it exits. Usually this happens implicitly, because tests are all run in the same thread, but now, when the runner starts a test, it returns immediately, while the test is still running. To solve this problem, we need to override the childrenInvoker method.

Couldn’t be simpler: just call the super method to do all the real work, and then wait until there are no more test threads running before returning. Does anybody see the potential race condition here? It’s possible that when the last test is run, childrenInvoker will return and test numThreads before that last test has a chance to increment it. In practice this doesn’t seem to happen since there will generally be several threads running already when the last test is started, but just to be safe, it is better to increment the threadCount in the main runner thread, just before calling Thread.start(), and then to decrement it in the child thread, just before exiting. The attached file has that change.

Download the source code here:
MultiThreadedRunner

Note that this code is distributed under the Mozilla Public License (2.0), which basically says you can use this code freely, embed it in your software, and even redistribute it, as long as it retains its license and attribution (includes the comments it has now saying who wrote it), and as long as any changes you make to the software are distributed under the same terms: also I encourage you to post any changes you make here so I can incorporate them.

I post this in the hope that it will save someone the headaches I suffered:

I found that certain web sites were unusable (super slow – minutes to load) in firefox on linux, although retrieving pages from the command line w/say wget worked just fine – python.org, for example, and the firefox addons site. It turns out that DNS records for these sites include ipv6 addresses, and I guess we can’t route ipv6 packets properly? I was able to fix the problem by disabling ipv6 on my box:

in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist I added
blacklist ipv6

Like many of my neighbors, I came home to a basement full of water last night. First thoughts – all the stuff that would be ruined; we quickly abandoned the pile of childcraft books, the old rugs, some boxes of breakfast cereal that hadn’t been put away yet. But my tools, some lumber, the leaf for the dining room table: it would be a shame if they were destroyed. We lifted them up out of the drink onto plastic tubs, tables, whatever. Later we’d assess the damage.

Then, a bucket brigade. My girls chipped in mightily: one in the basement, filling buckets with a bailer from the boat; one carrying up the stairs, and I was the anchor leg, carrying and heaving out into the street, while it continued to rain and sleet.

Finally the water was down to the well: a little-used foot-deep pit in the basement where the sewer pipe can just be seen poking up from the surrounding dirt. “Just five more minutes, girls!” I encouraged them. We got the water down about six inches. OK, time to eat some hot stew.

Sadly, after dinner, we found the water had risen almost to the top of the well again. Calls to all the late-night, big-box, home improvement stores were met with “Hello, this is Home Depot. We are all out of sump pumps, in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire.” I guess we weren’t the only ones. I pressed a little electric pump from the dehumidifier into service; it produced a thin flow, but seemed to be just holding its own: the water level held.

Update: this morning the weather is fine: sunny and dry. The water is receding. Time to begin the cleanup!

1. I live in one of the wealthiest parts of the only inhabited planet I can think of at the moment, but I still sometimes feel jealous of other people who seem to have it better than me.
2. I like to make things, especially things I’ve never made before; here’s a partial list:: a guitar, a virtual paper-folding simulation, a cryptic crossword puzzle, the coffee table my feet are resting on, a couple of sweaters, both long gone, a bavarian creme, also gone. Most of these things are misbegotten in one way or another, because perfecting a craft doesn’t happen if you keep skipping around like that.
3. I’d still like to write a novel, but the one I started kept growing and growing until I became afraid of getting lost in it with no way out, ever, and feared spending my whole life there. I saw that I could end up having written some all-consuming banality like Arcadia. Some time I’ll go back there and try again, though.
4. I am sometimes homesick for dirty old grumpy New York, but now everything seems so nice there. That city is too big for anyone to hold on to for more than a moment or two: it keeps getting polished with money and never remains the same.
5. 25 things is a lot to come up with
6. I never forward chain letters, or participate in group writing projects
7. I am not a team player, but people seem to tolerate me anyway. Maybe I am a team player. Or maybe people are actually finding me intolerable, like the woman on the train this evening who didn’t seem to like the way I blew my nose. OK, it was kind of loud, but she was really offended.
8. I like garlic. A lot.
9. I like to destroy things, especially other people’s preconceptions. This has probably tended to tie in to the whole “not a team player” thing.
10. I haven’t killed anybody, or written a symphony, or been to the moon, or made more money than Croesus, or taken over a small country in a bloodless coup.
11. My nose runs a lot, especially in the winter. I am starting to get some aches and pains that I am told will only increase. I have a small black spot on the sole of my foot that makes me feel stupid when I think about cancer and that I chose not to bother to have it cut out of my flesh with a sharp knife. Did I say it’s in the bottom of my foot?
12. The closest I have come to dying is when I drove a car off a cliff into some trees, but that was a long time ago, so I guess with hindsight we can see that I am closer to death now, in fact, as I sit in my cozy chair writing to you with my feet up on the coffee table that I made.
13. I used to think I was messy, but then I started a family and had dogs for a while. Now I am just a lazy neat freak, but the house looks about the same.
14. I don’t believe in God right now, but when I do, God exists. Sorry if that seems solipsistic, but this is 25 things about me, after all, and that’s just how I feel. I’m sure your God is always there for you – don’t get all defensive.
15. I can’t write anything about Ellen here because all the good stuff is secret.
16. I talk too much sometimes and too loudly; apparently it’s a family trait. I am trying to be a better listener.
17. I am very good at giving clear instruction, but terrible at enforcing anything. I am very good at following instructions, but can’t stand being told what to do.
23. Actually, about #8 – garlic is alright, but it’s definitely not one of the 25 most important things about me. I just liked the mood-enhancing short quality of the sentence more than anything else. Sorry, can I take it back?
18. Something about me you might not know is that my heart rate is really low.
19. Being competent has always been very important to me, and knowing the answer, too, but the more I think about that, the less important it seems.
20. I keep thinking there must be more to life than this, and then there is. But maybe I’m not unique in that regard. I think actually, that personality is overrated. Luck has a lot more to do with it. I’ve been very lucky, having made so incredibly many blunders, and yet I keep getting a second chance.
21. I like music that’s so weird that I don’t even like it, but every now and then I just want to sing along to the Beatles.
22. Virtue seems tedious to me. Of all the seven deadly sins, I think Pride is the best, followed closely by Envy. I’d like to invent a new one. Can Frivolity be a sin? Maybe not a deadly one, but it suits me. Humor is the best tonic for a bruised soul, and really the only attitude towards Death I can condone since the alternatives are so dreary. Maybe when someone I love dies, I’ll feel differently, but I think I’ll owe it to them to keep on laughing anyway.
23. When I die and people start rooting around in my stuff, they’ll find a lot of files called “TODO.” I hope someone will bother, but I wouldn’t wish that task on anyone I like.
24. 25 things is not enough to say what I want to
25. I’m right-handed, married, have three children, live in a house, drive a car, take the train to my job where I work with occasional complaints 240 days a year, eat red meat, green vegetables, white rice and drink coffee and beer and wine and water, go sailing and play soccer in the summer, get fat in the winter, stay up too late, get up too early, love my wife, fight with my wife, spoil my children, indulge myself far too much and go on far too long. Basically, I would say, to sum up, that I am just one helluva regular guy!

The National Puzzlers League’s (NPL) Enigma published this puzzle in its March 2009 issue; thanks to editors Hot, Trazom and Crax for numerous improvements:

disoriented-cryptic

Here’s some sweet footage of Tili’s birthday:

Tili