A Concurrent Affair

MacOS 10.4-compatible programs really are a dying breed. First, VLC stopped supporting 10.4 in new versions (last 10.4-compatible version is release 0.9.10), then Eclipse stopped supporting 10.4, and now VirtualBox has dropped support for 10.4 as well (last 10.4-compatible version is 3.0.12). I guess it’s high time for a new MacBook (Pro), but I want [...]

I received a message from Danny Dig, the project lead of the ReLooper project. ReLooper is a refactoring tool that enables Java programmers to parallelize loops over arrays or vectors using Java’s upcoming ParallelArray framework. I assume Danny searched for all Java projects on SourceForge and contacted all “expert programmers” of those projects.

I know [...]

I had no idea that the following code was allowed:

1234567public class AICSurprise {     public static void main(String[] args) {         new Object() {             public void foo() { System.out.println("foo"); }         }.foo();     } }

I thought foo() could not be accessed from outside the class, because the [...]

When I run Soot to create a call graph of DrJava, I get the aforementioned HotSpot Java error on Windows with Java 1.6.0_18.

On Mac OS X 10.4 with Java 1.5.0_19, I get a “Bus error” (Java exit status 138). On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with Java 1.6.0_18, I get a “Segmentation fault” (Java exit status [...]

I’m trying to create a call graph of all of DrJava using Soot. DrJava is a cross-platform application that has some classes that get compiled and used only on certain operating systems; for example, the com.apple.eawt package is only used on the Mac. That means that Soot doesn’t normally find these classes when generating the [...]

Sometimes I have those moments when something small that I did brings me tremendous joy.

This just happened when I was using DrJava with Soot. I don’t know the Soot framework, so the “Additional Javadoc URLs” feature that I introduced some time in 2009 comes in really handy.

I just entered “http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/soot/doc” as URL, and now I [...]

Building emacs22 to replace emacs21, so I can install yasnippet, so I can install scala-tool-support, because I can’t install Eclipse since it requires Mac OS 10.5 and I only have 10.4 because Apple doesn’t support Java 6 on 32-bit Macs…

Sitting on a couch in the lobby at work, because my spiffy i7 Dell desktop runs [...]

So far, it seems like 2010 is a year of broken things.

Mr. Coffee, my coffee maker, broke. I loved the guy, so I immediately replaced him with his younger brother.

The power supply fan in my Dell at home is close to dying. It makes a terrible, agonizing rattling sound. I bought a replacement power supply, [...]

Great. I’m starting to get flooded by out-of-office auto-replies from the AP CS mailing list again.

I keep monitoring that mailing list for mentionings of DrJava, so I can make sure we help high school teachers with potential problems. I just posted a reply, reminding a user to also install the JDK when installing DrJava. Unfortunately, [...]

Memories can be strange. A lot of people around me are probably now having memories triggered by (turkey) smells. I have memories triggered by numbers.

Our Hudson build server just notified us of a unit test failure after a recent commit. It was a:

java.lang.NullPointerException at edu.rice.cs.drjava.model.definitions.CompoundUndoManager$1.run(CompoundUndoManager.java:216)

The line number, 216 immediately hat [...]

Open source is not the same as public domain material. It is not content that is not owned by anyone.

The fact that we give something away for free does not allow you to just steal it.

DrJava is an open source project, made available under the BSD license. We freely distribute our source code and hope [...]

I’m in the process of porting some scientific code originally written in Fortran, which was then ported to Java, which was then ported to Habanero Java, back to Java, while maintaining a Habanero Java feature called array views. It’s incredibly frustrating… I wish I could replace myself with a short shell script.

Update

Wow, I wish Java [...]

Sometimes it’s interesting to compare Wikipedia articles in different languages. I just read something about the last school shooting in Germany, the one in Winnenden in March 2009, and decided to search the web for it. The English Wikipedia article came up first, probably because I am located in the US.

I expected the German version [...]

Twenty years ago, on 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down.

I remember the day, but the TV coverage doesn’t belong to my most intense childhood TV memories: It feels like this event is bracketed by stronger memories of the Challenger disaster and Chernobyl in 1986 and Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 1990/91.

The German radio station [...]

Last Tuesday I went back to the DPS to renew my drivers license — temporary visitors now have to do that once a year. I took exactly the same documents with me that allowed me to get a drivers license last year (passport, visa, I-20 immigration form, I-94 immigration form, current drivers license, enrollment verification, [...]

Funny feature request of the day: Zoom In Zoom Out

I would like to request you to please kindly add Zoom in Zoom out feature in print preview. Please do it as soon as possible bcz we are having difficulties to view the code clearly as we r having eye problem.

(Emphasis mine.)

I’m afraid this has rather [...]

I’m hating SourceForge again, and this is a very frequent thing.

This time, I’m hating it for two reasons:

News submission is broken. I made a new DrJava development release, drjava-20091021-r5004, but I can’t post a news release, because the submission website just goes nowhere. I filed a ticket, but as usual, SourceForge [...]

A while ago, I was told by our one-and-only client of Mint that the version of DrJava with Mint does not display Mint as a compiler, even though it is included in the jar file and therefore should be available. I couldn’t reproduce this, so I set it aside for a while.

Yesterday I realized that [...]

At the Rice Computer Science Affiliates Meeting, I just listened to an interesting talk by Keith Cooper about the PACE (platform-aware compilation environment) project.

Keith mainly talked about resource and configuration detection, e.g. detecting cache sizes and alignment. Moshe Vardi commented that it was “a high-tech solution to a low-tech problem” that could be solved with [...]

When testing ConcJUnit some more from inside DrJava, I noticed some weird behavior. I had a JUnit 3.8.2 version of a test, and an equivalent JUnit 4 version. Run independently, they behaved as expected (which in my line of work usually means the tests failed), but if I ran them in sequence, then the second [...]