Joe Duffy has written an interesting piece over on "Generalities & Details: Adventures in the High-tech Underbelly" about problems with the CLR thread pool. Joe's a program manager on the CLR team at Microsoft, so he knows what he's talking about! I find the issues that Joe raises interesting as I spent some time designing a flexible thread pool for my C++ IOCP servers some time go and came across the problems that he's facing. In essence the problem is that you want to allow the thread pool to grow and shrink based on demand but you don't want it…

It seems that Vista contains lots of interesting new Win32 API calls and some of these provide built in support for deadlock detection... I guess my deadlock detection tool can operate differently on Vista then...…

I just realised that I hadn't posted to here in two months. As I said a while back, my head is not really in the right space for me to be as effective, or interested, in my technical stuff at present. I'm finding it very hard to get into "The Zone" and do any decent coding in the evenings; though have had the potential to have had so much time alone to do so. Recently things have been a bit better but I've been "keeping busy" with lots of non technical activities; see my ski, skate and climb blog for…

This is something that anyone living with a geek really needs to understand. I find it interesting that Rands has his set patterns of behaviour for getting into The Zone in the mornings. I'm very much a creature of habit and I actively "grow" new and effective patterns of behaviour as and when I recognise them... I hadn't really connected the successful completion of the patterns as being an enabling device for getting me into The Zone... Must look into that a little more when I get back. I also like the explanation of The Zone and The Place... Worth…

It's been a difficult few months for me recently. One of the things that has helped a lot was something that, thankfully, I discovered relatively quickly and have since refined somewhat. The refined version sounds very simple; "appreciate every moment" but it actually takes some practice to get into the habit. Once you do get into the habit you will find that it leads to a positive feedback loop of happy thoughts; which often leave you with a smile on your face which seems to encourage more happiness around you... Barry Kelly talks about the same thing in How to…