Data Center Works Inc

Stories

• Profiling the Unprofilable. In a customer enaggement, we needed to profile a library we dynamically linked to. Since prof wouldn't do the job, we promptly wrote libprof. (November 2007)
• Strength-Reducing the Task of Porting. Porting can be seriously hard, but we stole a trick from mathematicians to make it easy: we strength-reduce it into something that's not hard at all.
• Drilling Down Through Flint. Lint programs report far too much, especially when you want to locate a particular problem. However, the "flint" program and some vendor lints can be convinced to look for just one thing. This is a story about how to drill down for particular problems.
• Cores, cores everywhere, and not a drop to drink, or how our accountant was feeling like Coleridge's ancient mariner, with a few important core files buried in a pile of useless ones.
• The story of Thud and Blunder, or how to diagnose and prevent crashes with linker libraries, and therefore without changing the programs you're concerned about.
• Sherlock Holmes on Log Files The consulting detective's rule works for log files, too: when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
• Daylight Savings Time Changes. In 2007, Canada is following the U.S in starting daylight savings time on March the 11th and ending it on November 4th. The update is to install one new file and run the timezone compiler, described in the link at the beginning of this line.