I’ve been reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen… It is excellent. He’s got an amazing talent for character development. And that’s really all that this book is… there are plot elements intertwined that move the story along, but the truly interesting parts are the different layers of the characters and their relationships to one another. The author is rather pompous, as Nat points out, and a real sense of East Coast snobbishness seeps through to the characters… but really, I think it fits the characters well.
I haven’t gotten to the part with the talking turd yet, though.
The only thing that really bothers me about it is the family patriarch. He just doesn’t fit the mold of a 70-year old man from the midwest. His manner of speech is just wrong and it really irks me.
At work I’ve been trying to track down what appears to be a race condition involving file descriptors in rcd. Evidently it’s writing data to an fd which was closed and then is being reused as the connection between rcd and rug, causing rug to traceback. We’ve only seen it from one of our customers, and I’ve only succeeded in duplicating it about 3 or 4 times in several hundred runs on their machines, and never with rcd straced. Sigh.
I am a little surprised that there doesn’t appear to be a file descriptor debugging library, since it seems to me that these types of bugs would be fairly common. Basically what I want are: (a) strictly increasing numbers for file descriptors and (b) some sort of protection if you try to write to a file descriptor that has been closed. A segfault or even a SIGUSR signal would be fine. If I don’t find something, I may have to write one.