Can't sleeeeeep...

It's 4:46 am... and time to go to bed. Thought I would update my journal before I went.

Yesterday.. and wee hours of this morning have been a rollercoaster of events to stress out both sides of my chi. It started off with confirmation of our first OEM agreement (*wohoo for us*) today (as in we are gonna have cash flow), and the understanding we are gonna be BUSY for the next little while. No worries, I like positive stress like that. If it only ended there.

During some QA of our latest stuff, we found a weird bug where half of a socket stream was phantomly closing. This makes it extremely difficult (ie: impossible) to communicate when one half isn't listening. You may get away with this sort of communication with yer spouse... but not when dealing with socket comms. Spent all day battling with this... thinking it was some weird thing I was doing on the Java side, or even on the embedded C daemon. Couldn't for the life of me get anywhere.

Decided to take a break and watched Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring on DVD (It came out today.. do you have yer copy yet?) and invited some of the guys. Kevin, Rick, Warren, Alan, Andrea, Wim and myself enjoyed the splendors of a good DVD, projected on the wall at around 8ft by 6ft. Mixed with surround sound... good Caffine induced soda and popcorn... it was very "theater like". I think I will do that more often.

On a side note, thanks to Warren I now have a USB scanner for my drawings for a bit. (A gift he brought me when he came by to check out the movie setup) He lent me his while he is away since mine is not able to work. (Stupid proprietary SCSI card that isn't supported in XP *grumble*). With Darren's suggestion for the Adobe tool, I should be able to get this into Illustrator without to much difficulty.

After everyone left, Kevin and I decided to get back and tackle this phantom connection issue. Well... at around 4:15 this morning we had a break through. More to the point, Kevin found that it had nothing to do with my code at all, but rather a sequencing issue between some daemon code and a script he wrote. Tie that with the fact I found out that the socket wasn't actually dead.. but rather LOCKED... and everything started making sense. (Note to self.... read Javadocs more often... socket.isInputStreamShutdown() is a nice [but rarely used] function to have access to) It seems sometimes they don't like to play together and said daemon child hangs trying to access the same file(s) as the script... and bombs. Moved the script file access away in somewhere safer... and the new ISO fixes the problem. (We hope). We will fire it through QA in the morning... umm... now.

Time to get some sleep.