Literally, I had a coding nightmare. God damn it, I don't need to be anthropomorphising my Apache processes in my dreams.

When experimenting with whostyping.php the other day, I introduced an error that didn't affect anything at first, but which built up and ended with "SEGFAULT, Child process killed by SIGTERM," and an Apache error log file of about three gigabytes that spawned over the course of a minute or two. More text than I could read in a year, generated every second.

Last night I dreamed that the server was a circular pit dug into the ground, with a brass pole in the centre and a woman - it could have been The Watcher - whose job it was to walk around the maypole, serving requests. I changed something, closed the lid, realised I'd made a mistake within one second - one second, mark you - and opened the lid again.

The pit was now so deep that I couldn't comprehend it - in the corner of my eye was a scrollbar, and the bit that you dragged kept shrinking down until it was razor-thin (yes, I was looking through the eyes of a browser). I had enough time to realise - before my browser-eyes crashed completely - that I'd "loaded" less than point one of a percent of the pit, and that the pit was full of dead leaves and skeletons. Skeletons of The Watcher. Decillions of them. Because I let an error run for one second.

...which, as analogies go, is pretty much bang-on what happened a few days ago with whostyping.php.

...I need a holiday.

Vivid image. I think you should go to a nice mainland somewhere.

You have the most interesting dreams, CMJ, sir. This also makes a fine entry for the "You know you're addicted to II when..." list.

On the bright side, the Island is very noticeably faster now!

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Improbable Reference Links - goo.gl/MRBnb -------------- Land Registry (map of Places) ---- goo.gl/bpkRR

At first I wanted to be sad about the loss of the "who's typing" feature.

Then I noticed I could use timed combat at home over a connection that's noticeably slower these days what with my wife addicted to bandwidth-hogging Farmville on the other computer. (Don't even get me started! )

Now, I've reached the "hey, that's not bad! I can live with change!" stage.

Personally, I think this time of year is perfect for a vacation! You've done a ton of work on the island lately, Mr. Joe; I think you deserve some down time. But, that's just my little opinion.

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Something something unintelligible gibberish something.

Isn't that how bugs generally go though? mess up a word here or there on a server with...well...sometimes thousands of requests every second, or more, and suddenly, that pit of error swallows the server.

Also, am I the only person who reads "Dead leaves" and immediately thinks of that anime? (Worth a watch. Or two. Or three. However many it takes to actually see all the scenes.)

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Isn't sanity just a one-trick pony anyway? All you get is one trick: rational thinking. But when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh, the sky's the limit.