One more cup of coffee

heater.exe

(My wife claims this story proves what a geek I am. I claim that it's proof of resourcefulness.)

As some of you know, I've been spending a lot of late nights at work lately. One of the problems with working late is that the heating system tends to turn off late at night. This is partially due to the configuration of thermostats. At Microsoft, like many office buildings, heating and air conditioning is controlled by a single thermostat for some number of offices. If that office is warm (computers left on, door shut), the heating system will decide that everything is warm enough and that it doesn't need to provide any more heat to other offices.

Last night, it was starting to get sufficiently cold that it was having a noticeable effect on my typing speed. Dustin, one of the engineers I work with, commented that he once wrote a program to keep his computer busy. Another person suggested trying to put something cold over the thermostat in the other office.

So, a few minutes later, a nice cold can of Talking Rain water (note to the reader: Talking Rain is canned fizzy water that I've never seen in my life outside of a Microsoft building. Perhaps they are actually very popular in the Seattle area.) was balanced on top of the thermostat in the office next to mine, and I had written heater.exe, a simple C# program (heater.cs) that starts up and creates one thread for each processor that does nothing but spin. The threads are set to low priority, so any real work I'm doing (e.g., compiling) takes precedence and isn't slowed down. But anytime my computer would have been idle, it runs this instead, so the CPUs are constantly at 100% processor utilization.

Fifteen minutes after that, my office was nice and warm.

(I'm sticking with resourceful.)

Posted by Mike at December 12, 2003 11:12 PM