Recursive Call Waiting.
Recursion and I do not get a long well. There are a lot of little reasons, but it is mostly because Recursion is much older than me and because of that difference in ages, we don't have much in common. Like I hate referring to myself to answer a question I asked myself which I referred to myself to answer earlier, etc. That and it's a Toronto Maple Leafs fan. I just know it is, anything that crazy has to be a Maple Leafs fan.
But really Recursion and I don't get along because it only takes one time for you to fall for its cute laugh, nice smile and charming allure before...*BAM*, your system blue screens, and the resulting call stack is totally blown to the point it takes some funky debugging to figure out what in the name of Maurice Richard you did to make that nastyness happen.
The last time something like this happened it was because a piece of 1394 hardware kept storming a callback in my test driver, so I ended up having to put a cap on the number of times that particular callback routine could be invoked. As it turns out it was actually a bug in the firmware for the test device which, thankfully, the IHV fixed, but it is something I tend to look for when I write drivers. "Is this something that could be 'attacked' by external recusrion?" So here is Patrick's 2nd law;
Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed.
An object that is in motion will not change its veolcity (accelerate) until a net force acts upon it.
Or in my little universe of weirdness;
A routine which is exposed externally can be called as many times on as many threads as decided by the caller.
Yes, that's Newton's first law, and yes, it holds a less direct relation to programming (especially Recursion) than my frist law, but it's my blog, so :P
So unlike Recursion, Interlocked APIs are my friends, Recursion is not. It's an acquantance, somebody I would say "hi" to at a party, but I would never loan it money or drive it to the airport or babysit for.
On a totally unrelated note...
Last night (or really, earlier today) we had to take our 19 month old doggy to the emergency room (at 1am). She was panting incessantly, her eyes were glossy, her pupils dialated and she was trembling. I listened to her heart, thankfully it did not sound as if it was racing and she seemed coordinated, so I ruled out a seizure (I'm not a vet, but I did sleep at a Holiday Inn once) but it isn't something you want leave untreated. Panting fine. Dogs get hot, that's how they cool down. Big pupils, fine. It's dark and that's how you get more light in to your eyes. Trembling is where I draw the line.
The vet told us it was likely a reaction to something she ate. As our dog is primarily an indoor dog (well exercised outdoors as well as in...she is an Aussie afterall) we back tracked it to her last visit in our backyard for her potty / roaming break, which was around 8pm. The doctor suggested it might have been a mushroom or an allergic reaction to an insect bite or something rather innocuous like that. Tell me it is innocuous when your dog is panting like it has run a marathon, her eyes look like she's been to a party on Haight/Ashbury in the late 60's and her body is a quiver like she's just seen Tom Jones.
So today my wife decided to look around to see if she could find the root cause and she found a patch of mushrooms which one appeared to have a nibble off of it. Turns out my dog was having a bad trip. Had I known that, I would have put on Dark Side of the Moon for her.
Seriously though, it took about 2.5 hours for her to come down off that buzz. The vet wanted us to send her emails letting us know if she seemed to be calming down and so forth. Then at 8am our normal doggy doctor called us to see how everything was. The dog was fine but I, on the other hand, was working on 2.5 hours of sleep at that point.
If they sing, they must know the words to the song...right?
