Author Archives: Mathias

About Mathias

Software development engineer. Principal developer of DrJava. Recent Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Computer Science at Rice University.

Fun in the Snow, Work from Home

Today is the third snow day in a row. I’m glad that my job offers me the flexibility to work from home, because the last two days, it was dangerous out there, and now it is just nasty. I can’t … Continue reading

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Seattle, a Winter Wonderland

Before I moved to Seattle, people told me it “never snows in Seattle.” In the first few months of 2011, I had already found that to be incorrect. But today, more snow fell than I’ve seen here before. It’s really … Continue reading

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People Who Crash into Cars I’m in Continue to Suck

The accident last week was the second time that I was involved in a car accident (it happened more often if you count cars hitting me on a bike). The first time, a Houston rapper rear-ended my friend’s car, with … Continue reading

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A Grammar Change Saves the Day

At work, we deployed the latest version of our code on Wednesday night. It included a new query language. We used ANTLR to do the parsing. We had never tested the new queries in a production setting, but the deployments … Continue reading

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Happy New Year (?)

Happy new year! I haven’t written in a while, but I’ve also been busy. You know the story. I’ve done some traveling in private matters, but mostly it was large scale designs and some important improvements for work. I took … Continue reading

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Where Citations Come From — xkcd: Citogenesis

via xkcd: Citogenesis. Something similar actually happened with the Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who used to be the German Minister for Economics and Technology and later the Minister of Defense, before it became clear that he had plagiarized his doctoral dissertation.

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DrJava DefinitionsPaneMemoryLeakTest fails on Mac

I submitted a bugfix for a problem with the debug panel when no debugger is available. I noticed that on the Mac, the DefinitionsPaneMemoryLeakTest now fails: 1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526   [junit] DefinitionsPaneMemoryLeakTest                26.92 sec    [junit] … Continue reading

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Awful King County Metro Changes Coming Up

I just found out that King County Metro is planning to cut off service for Route 27 at 12th Avenue at non-peak times. This is awful. Route 27 is the only bus that takes me directly to my office. It … Continue reading

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Back from SPLASH 2011

I returned from SPLASH 2011 in Portland tonight. I attended only the Educators’ Symposium on Monday and the first day of the conference proper, but it was worth it. And how could it not be, given that it was so … Continue reading

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John McCarthy Died

John McCarthy, Turing Award winner and one of the luminaries of computer science, died yesterday. I’ve spent the evening after the SPLASH Educators’ Symposium listening to McCarthy’s OOPSLA 2007 keynote speech (mp3). John McCarthy was one of the earliest collaborators … Continue reading

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It’s Not Warm on Mt. Rainier

I wanted to check if I could squeeze another weekend of camping in this year, so I went to weather.com and typed in Mt. Rainier. It looked great: 23 Celsius on Saturday (73 Fahrenheit). That did seem a bit odd, … Continue reading

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Better Number Highlighting in DrJava More Difficult

Getting the lexing right for the syntax highlighting will be a little bit more work than I thought. Right now, DrJava tokenizes numbers like 3.14 separately as “3″ “.” “14″, and then it highlights “3″ and “14″ as numbers. That … Continue reading

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Additional Java 5 Syntax Highlighting Errors in DrJava

While adding syntax highlighting for underscores and binary literals introduced in Java 7 to DrJava, I discovered that a few other numbers aren’t syntax-highlighted correctly. Some of these problems go back to the beginning of Java, others go back to … Continue reading

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Lost My Phone

I lost my phone on the bus this morning. I stepped off the bus, went into a store, realized my phone wasn’t in my pocket, turned around and saw the bus drive away. Shoot. I immediately changed my Google password, … Continue reading

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Three Logicians Walk into a Bar

I love it. This came to me from Spiked Math by way of Language Log, one of my long-time favorite nerdy blogs.

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Registered for SPLASH 2011

Last night, I registered for SPLASH 2011. I’ll only be there for the Educators Symposium and the Tuesday conference sessions, though. It was a bit of a tough call, but I figured taking vacation days for something I’m still passionate … Continue reading

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Dissertation and Numbers

I received the bound copies of my dissertation yesterday. They look nice, but they’re kind of thin, for so much work. Including front matter, there are 157 pages. Some more numbers: The source code for my dissertation project has 35,979 … Continue reading

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No More NDR2 Streaming Radio?

A few days ago, something really bad happened. The live stream of my favorite radio station, NDR2 from Hamburg, Germany, stopped working for me. For the last few years, NDR2 has been the music I listen to, when I’m at … Continue reading

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Suggestions for Better Java 7 Support in DrJava

I just looked through the new language features in Java 7, and experimented with them in DrJava. None of the changes are supported in the Interactions Pane, and there will be a lot of required work to make these things … Continue reading

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Presidential Active Lifestyle Award

I just completed the PALA challenge: Five days of exercising at least 30 minutes, for six out of eight weeks. I’ve run about 72 miles (115 km), biked several times, and I’ve zumba-ed (if you just look at the instructor, … Continue reading

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