Re: OT: Switch it off and back on ...

[Matt Maier]

I think the stuff I read about crash-only said that it's normally
implemented in a hierarchy. So you try to restart little processes. If they
come back up and work correctly then nothing else is affected. If they
don't, then you crash the larger process. And so on.

On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 3:27 PM, Richard Gaskin 
wrote:

> Matt Maier wrote:
>
> > I was reading about "crash only" programming a while ago. It like
> > using the "turn it off and back on again"approach as a part of normal
> > business. Since all of your systems need to be able to recover from a
> > crash anyway, why bother programming a graceful shutdown? Just set
> > them up so that they can pick up where they left off and crash them
> > if anything isn't running perfectly.
>
> http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2016-July/228647.html
>
> :)
>
> I like the simplicity of crash-only.  But I currently enjoy a
> below-industry-average support cost; I can't imagine how big of a multiple
> of that average my support costs would be if I rebooted the user's machine
> instead of providing a more graceful degradation.
>
> Still, tempting
>
> --
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World Systems
>  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
>  
>  ambassa...@fourthworld.comhttp://www.FourthWorld.com
>
>
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OT: Switch it off and back on

[Francis Nugent Dixon]

Hi from Beautiful Brittany,

I've always been in favour of this practice, without questioning why !

I run an old version lof LiveCode (5.5). Quite often, I save a modified
version of my stack, and then try to Quit LiveCode.
I get the same message asking me to Save or Cancel, and LiveCode is
now totally blocked. I have to Force Quit (on my Mac), and then reload
LiveCode. My first Save worked OK, so I never lost anything. I waste about
one minute of my life Force Quitting and reloading LiveCode.

This happens regularly, but I live with it. For the same reason when I
select a button and by mistake hit backspace, and my button (and
its script) disappears into thin air (recent question to you), doesn't
bother me in the least. I save my stack after every few lines of script
and so if I absent-mindedly delete my button, I have a backup taken
a few minutes earlier. 

Software was never perfect - I know ! I've been writing it for 50 years !

Reminds me of the joke where 4 software engineers were in their car,
and suddenly it stopped for no apparent reason !
They discussed the options (engineers do this !) and then decided that
if they all got out of the car and got back in again, the problem would
disappear. That's life - Live with it   ! ...

-Francis

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Re: OT: Switch it off and back on ...

[Peter TB Brett]

On 09/08/2016 06:08, Matt Maier wrote:

Because we're capable of building systems more complex than we can
understand. So there are always ghost states it can get into that we didn't
prepare for.

I was reading about "crash only" programming a while ago. It like using the
"turn it off and back on again"approach as a part of normal business. Since
all of your systems need to be able to recover from a crash anyway, why
bother programming a graceful shutdown? Just set them up so that they can
pick up where they left off and crash them if anything isn't running
perfectly.


At the conference, the "vulcanbot" continuous integration service was 
mentioned several times.  This is a microservice I created to facilitate 
our development workflow by linking our GitHub repositories to our build 
farm.


vulcanbot uses _exactly_ crash-only error handling; whenever something 
unexpected happens, it quits (generating informative log messages), and 
then gets automatically restarted by systemd.  In practice, this works 
incredibly well.


  Peter

--
Dr Peter Brett 
LiveCode Technical Project Manager

LiveCode 2016 Conference: https://livecode.com/edinburgh-2016/

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Re: OT: Switch it off and back on ...

[Richard Gaskin]

Matt Maier wrote:

> I was reading about "crash only" programming a while ago. It like
> using the "turn it off and back on again"approach as a part of normal
> business. Since all of your systems need to be able to recover from a
> crash anyway, why bother programming a graceful shutdown? Just set
> them up so that they can pick up where they left off and crash them
> if anything isn't running perfectly.

http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2016-July/228647.html

:)

I like the simplicity of crash-only.  But I currently enjoy a 
below-industry-average support cost; I can't imagine how big of a 
multiple of that average my support costs would be if I rebooted the 
user's machine instead of providing a more graceful degradation.


Still, tempting

--
 Richard Gaskin
 Fourth World Systems
 Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
 
 ambassa...@fourthworld.comhttp://www.FourthWorld.com

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Re: OT: Switch it off and back on ...

[Matt Maier]

Because we're capable of building systems more complex than we can
understand. So there are always ghost states it can get into that we didn't
prepare for.

I was reading about "crash only" programming a while ago. It like using the
"turn it off and back on again"approach as a part of normal business. Since
all of your systems need to be able to recover from a crash anyway, why
bother programming a graceful shutdown? Just set them up so that they can
pick up where they left off and crash them if anything isn't running
perfectly.

On Mon, Aug 8, 2016 at 9:26 PM, Alex Tweedly  wrote:

> My wife is always annoyed / amused that my stock response to any
> non-trivial computer / broadband / phone problem is the magic "power-cycle"
> method. As she says "4 years getting a BSc in Computer Science, 25 years in
> the electronics design and software business - and that's the best you can
> do". I suspect the most annoying part for her is that it nearly always
> works :-)
>
> Anyway, today that technique just worked again - when even I didn't expect
> it to. Her new iPhone (two weeks old) was in trouble - it wouldn't charge.
> We tried multiple different connector cables, and power sources just to be
> sure - but it just wouldn't register the power supply, and power was down
> to around 10%. So I made sure we had a current iCloud backup, installed
> Telegram on her iPad while she still had some charge left (to get the SMS
> to confirm the main phone number) so she could still get/send messages (and
> let the main contacts know via What's App). And then (with NO expectations
> of success) switched it off and back on - and the darn thing is now happily
> charging.
>
> Why can't we build tech items that don't suffer such problems and get
> fixed by this solution 
>
> -- Alex.
>
>
>
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Re: OT: Switch it off and back on ...

[Kay C Lan]

On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 2:26 AM, Alex Tweedly  wrote:
> Why can't we build tech items that don't suffer such problems and get fixed
> by this solution 
>
Well God couldn't do it with all his creations but instead ensured
there was an impossible to ignore signal of when to switch off at the
end of the day and when to get back to work next morning. Of course
only man tries to ignore the unignorable, burns the candle from both
ends, and tries to work non-stop for stupidly long periods of time but
the effect is inevitable, like the objects man makes, they stop
responding like they should and must be given the opportunity to be
'reset'.

So if 'man' is the most complex of all creations, maybe we should take
the hint and just build in an unignorable signal that our lesser
creation needs to be turned off and back on every so often ;-)

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OT: Switch it off and back on ...

[Alex Tweedly]

My wife is always annoyed / amused that my stock response to any 
non-trivial computer / broadband / phone problem is the magic 
"power-cycle" method. As she says "4 years getting a BSc in Computer 
Science, 25 years in the electronics design and software business - and 
that's the best you can do". I suspect the most annoying part for her is 
that it nearly always works :-)


Anyway, today that technique just worked again - when even I didn't 
expect it to. Her new iPhone (two weeks old) was in trouble - it 
wouldn't charge. We tried multiple different connector cables, and power 
sources just to be sure - but it just wouldn't register the power 
supply, and power was down to around 10%. So I made sure we had a 
current iCloud backup, installed Telegram on her iPad while she still 
had some charge left (to get the SMS to confirm the main phone number) 
so she could still get/send messages (and let the main contacts know via 
What's App). And then (with NO expectations of success) switched it off 
and back on - and the darn thing is now happily charging.


Why can't we build tech items that don't suffer such problems and get 
fixed by this solution 


-- Alex.



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