In the unlikely event that someone else has this problem - just putting it out there.
I’ve been using Java Service Wrapper - its great - to wrap a java loop that is polling SQS. It was working on my local Linux distro - Ubuntu (8.10)- in dev. But it was time to get it out to the Prod server - which is also Ubuntu - though the version is different - its the one that EC2 on Rails is built on (8.04 I believe)- I kept getting Segmentation Faults.
After beating my head against the wall for a couple of hours I decided to use another version. So I uploaded 3.2.3 instead of 3.3.3 and it worked.
Anyway, go figure, it seems to be working now.
Picking up Flow again - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book about optimal experience - and reading through it tonight, I happened on this passage which made me think of the postmodern condition
Anomie - literally, “lack of rules” - is the name the French sociologist Emile Durkheim gave to a condition in society in which the norms of behavior had become muddled. When it is no longer clear what is permitted and what is not, when it is uncertain what public opinion values, behavior becomes erratic and meaningless. People who depend on the rules of society to give order to their consciousness become anxious.
Thinking about this in the context of games. Games are not fun without rules.