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 every Monday off in December, and I still think that was a genial idea. Now it’s back to work without time off. It’s a marathon of sprints.

This year has not started so well for me, though. The girl I had been dating says she “needs some time.” I don’t know what that means. I don’t know if I am single or still in a relationship. Not that that really matters, I don’t have the nerve to meet anyone new right now anyway. I’ll just bury myself in work as a distraction.

On January 4, a woman drove her car into mine when she tried to squeeze into the left turn lane as I was stopped at a red light. So unnecessary. The damage isn’t bad, but it’s annoying. My car wasn’t even a year old. And now I have to deal with insurance and repairs. The hours wasted are what annoy me the most.

And yesterday I missed my bus because I ripped my shoelace when I put on my left boot. Argh.

Makes me kind of worry about Friday, January 13.

Route 27 is the only bus that takes me directly to my office. It already takes me 40 to 45 minutes with that bus; in fact, I can walk faster, which I do when the weather is nice. Coming back from work on the 27, or any bus for that matter, is already bad enough with the current service running outside of peak times. I would have hoped that service improves instead of being cut. I guess buses are really more intended for the homeless, who don’t care where the route ends, and not for people who aren’t going home from work at 6 PM yet, when peak time ends.

If these changes go into effect, I guess I’ll just drive every day. That means I’ll have to pay for parking, but I’m not going to change buses and spend two hours every day commuting in the company of the drunk, drugged, and unwashed when I can drive to work in under 15 minutes.

Now I’m setting up my quad-core desktop. I think I’ve gotten used to Windows 7 by now because my work laptop and media PC already use it, so I guess I can move on from my 10-year-old Windows XP (which I only started using in 2007, if I recall correctly).

I’m remembering how much I hate setting up computers and installing programs.

The computer seems nice, but it has surprisingly few USB ports: Two at the top, five at the back, and none at the front. Internally, it only has PCI-Express. I’ll probably have to invest in a PCI-Express x1 USB controller, and maybe in a PCI-Express x1 video card, unless I can get both the dedicated NVIDIA card and the on-board video port to work simultaneously. Got any recommendations?

Unfortunately, I just talked to the FedEx store where the package is supposed to have been held for me, and I was told the correct package has not arrived. I called the national FedEx 1-800 customer service number, and all they could tell me was that “tracking says it is at the store”. Obviously that is not the case, and tracking is wrong.

My package is still lost. Nobody I talked to knows where the package is.

James, a customer service representative on the FedEx 1-800 number, said I should talk to the Kent, Washington location, because that’s where the package was relabeled, but that location closed at 5 PM. I asked if he had a phone number, and James said yes, but repeated that the location was closed already. I asked if I could have the phone number anyway, and he said “no, it’s for internal use only.”

Great, thanks. You are so helpful. FedEx customer service strikes out again.

I will try to contact the FedEx store and the national FedEx customer service line again tomorrow, but I don’t have high hopes. FedEx has been tremendously unhelpful. Furthermore, it is not my job to find where my package has gone lost. I expect it to be delivered. I have paid for the merchandise; I want it delivered. Dell and FedEx can sort out the problems without me.

Update

I just drove to the FedEx store again. As I expected, but contrary to what Dell and the national FedEx customer service line told me, the package is not there. It is still lost.

Because I work, you know, I knew I wouldn’t be at home to accept it today either. Or tomorrow. I therefore requested FedEx to hold it at their store at 5963 Corson Ave S. I got a notice today that it was available for pickup. After work, I drove there, expecting to receive a nice Dell box.

Except it wasn’t a Dell box. I told Sarif, the FedEx employee there, that I didn’t think that was my package. We looked more closely, and I found a FedEx address sticker. I pointed at it, saying “That’s not me.” He, on the other hand, pointed at another FedEx address sticker, saying “That is you.”

Marvelous. You FedEx geniuses put my address sticker on someone else’s package when you tried to redirect my package to the FedEx store.

Sarif asked what I expected the package to contain. I told him it was supposed to be a computer from Dell. Sarif carefully opened the package and found some lighting products in it. Lamps. It’s not surprising that I didn’t accept the package.

Sarif told me that he would talk to his manager, and that I have to call FedEx customer service.

That’s what I just did. I talked to Brianna. Well, first I talked to a robot and had to dictate my tracking number. Then I talked to Brianna, and I had to give her my tracking number again. She also verified my name and the original address.

She then put me on hold, and when she returned, she had come to the conclusion that it’s Dell’s fault and that there is nothing FedEx can do. She says Dell must have put two address stickers on the box.

Yeah, maybe, but then why wasn’t it a Dell box? Unless, of course, Dell is also shipping lamps.

This is so, sooo, soooo clearly FedEx’s fault, but they won’t fess up.

Now I have contacted Dell and told them the package is lost. I need to wait 24 hours for Dell to get back in touch with me. Most likely, they will want to investigate where the package is and what happened. And then, in a week or so, when we all (except FedEx, perhaps) have agreed that it was FedEx’s fault and that the package is lost, I will have to wait a couple of weeks for a new computer to be built and shipped.

I hope it ships with UPS.

“This is to certify that, having fulfilled the requirements for professional membership,” I am admitted into the Association for Computing Machinery.

Why yes, I really did pay that membership fee. Which is the only requirement, as far as I know. And then I’m told to proudly display the certificate.

Now I have a useless membership card (I can just write down my membership number) and a silly membership certificate.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the SIGs, the magazines, and the Digital Library, although digital papers should really be free. I don’t need these membership documents.

70 minutes.

When someone complained that 80 degrees is kind of warm, and that summer already begins earlier, they checked for 75 degrees F (24 C). How much time?

18 hours. Not even a full day.

But today definitely is summer. All of Seattle was at Alki Beach, it seemed. It looked like the Playa della Something in Mexico or Spain. I ran 3.5 miles slalom around people, but I must have done something to my left foot, because my ankle hurt pretty badly. And I mean that, because running 3.5 miles a day is a piece of cake by now.

Alki Beach in July 2011. Same amount of Space Needle, many more women in bikinis.

Total fail. I should have done this myself, but that would void the warranty.

Update

Apparently the replacement motherboard that Dell gave the technician was broken worse than mine was. Now the technician put the one I had back in, but the hard drive isn’t working yet. But at least it’s booting again… Thanks, Dell, for the collossal waste of time.

Update

The repair guy showed up again, with another motherboard, and this time everything worked. Thanks!

While at Rice, I had the Perforce server running on my office machine, a RHEL4 server. I don’t have a Linux box at home, just two Windows machines. To migrate the Perforce server from Linux to Windows, I had to run the p4migrate script to find name collisions, since Linux is case-sensitive and Windows is case-insensitive. There were a handful of different files that would have mapped to the same file on Windows. Perforce customer service has been great, even for a user of the free version like me. Thanks again!

Running the Perforce server on a Linux machine made it really easy to run scripts as part of Perforce triggers. I just ssh into the same machine and run a script:

I haven’t migrated these scripts yet. I do run Cygwin on my Windows machines, of course, and I could set up sshd on them, but I’m wondering if that is still the right thing to do.

Furthermore, I really wanted to install the Perforce server on vector, the Pentium 3 machine I got over 10 years ago. Unfortunately, one of the hard drives crapped out again, and it’s a PATA drive. All drives are PATA drives. I think it may be time to retire vector.

I’m considering buying a new i7 desktop, which will become scalar, and then making the current scalar, my Core 2 Duo desktop, the new vector. But perhaps I should install Linux on vector then? What distribution? Ubuntu?

Many questions, and of course only a little time on weekends to do it.

If there were that many degree recipients during the last 100 years (and there weren’t), and if all of them are still alive (they aren’t), then there’d be 3.7 million people with a PhD.

As an upper bound, that’s a quite small number. Or, inversely, we constitute less than about 0.05% of the world population.

After that, I looked around for docking stations, and unfortunately, there aren’t many. The HengeDock seemed nice enough, though, so I ordered one.

The HengeDock arrived today. It was nicely packaged in a style that matches that of Apple, and it came with all the cables except for the Mini DisplayPort connector and the power adapter, which is understandable, those cost $30 and $80.

I began to feed the cables through the holes on the bottom, attached them to my notebook, and then attempted to insert it into the dock. Unfortunately, this is quite difficult. It took me a very long time to get them all lined up again with the holes on the bottom of the dock.

Once that was done, I struggled with lining up the cables so all of them make a connection at the same time, Most of the time, the power adapter couldn’t connect. Finally, I got that done, and I could actually work on a real monitor.

Unfortunately, when I pulled the MacBook Pro out of the dock, the Mini DisplayPort adapter came along. So I re-aligned everything and tightened the screws some more.

This is where the HengeDock has real problems. There are competing concerns of keeping the connectors in place and not breaking the thin pieces of plastic at the bottom. In the end, neither happened. The plastic broke and the connector still moved around.

Regrettably, I can’t recommend the HengeDock. It’s going back to the manufacturer.

Tonight, I replaced myself with a very small shell script. Instead of looking at each file individually, I simply used grep, sort and uniq:

% grep -o "Iteration 10" RSTestOne_normal_*.txt | sort|uniq -c
   3188 RSTestOne_normal_Dell9200Core2Duo_20110210-224947.txt:Iteration 10
     94 RSTestOne_normal_MacBookPro_20110118-102839.txt:Iteration 10
    219 RSTestOne_normal_MacBookPro_20110119-143932.txt:Iteration 10
    232 RSTestOne_normal_MacBookPro_20110124-155633.txt:Iteration 10
    227 RSTestOne_normal_MacBookPro_20110207-155452.txt:Iteration 10
    233 RSTestOne_normal_MacBookPro_20110210-170206.txt:Iteration 10
     98 RSTestOne_normal_MacBook_20110120-230432.txt:Iteration 10
     98 RSTestOne_normal_MacBook_20110218-164521.txt:Iteration 10
    316 RSTestOne_normal_MacBook_20110220-044628.txt:Iteration 10
    314 RSTestOne_normal_MacBook_20110221-055041.txt:Iteration 10

1. The program crashes, most of the time right after I enter my password.
2. The program is slow–I have a new EVO, but it takes seconds for an account to open, even though that was immediate on my 3.5 year-old Palm Treo 755p.
3. Why can’t I resize the columns?
4. Why can’t I select what columns to show?
5. Why can’t I change the sort order?
6. Where do I set up my scheduled transactions?
7. Where do I see the upcoming transactions?
8. I really need to have my desktop SplashMoney application running to synchronize? How pedestrian. There has to be a better way.
9. And the desktop sync most of the time doesn’t even find the desktop application anyway.

This program is a real shame. It’s unusable. I’m tempted to ask for my money back, but that doesn’t get rid of how disappointed I am. This is not SplashMoney, it’s TrashMoney. And there are so many problems with this piece of software, as is apparent from this forum, that it’s surprising that the latest version is two months old.

What’s going on, SplashData? What are your release plans? What bugs do you promise to fix, by when? What missing features do you promise to deliver?

Or do I really need to ask for my money back and look for a different product?

Most of my comments were about spelling or grammar mistakes, or suggestions on how to reword parts to make the intention clearer. I don’t know the literature well enough to determine if important references are missing (the authors definitely cited most of their own work), but I did find that it completely ignored one part that it alluded to several times: There is a different way of specifying the way these systems work, and the way it is different from the currently prevalent approach was briefly mentioned, but the consequences, advantages, and disadvantages are completely omitted. Perhaps they haven’t been studied yet, in which case that should be stated, but otherwise I would like to see such a discussion.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this exercise of mine will get us any more information on whether iConcept Press is just a vanity press. I don’t see reviews by others, and there is obviously no program committee meeting to discuss the paper. Even if I had rejected the paper, acceptance wouldn’t tell us anything. The only interesting outcome would be if the paper were rejected in spite of my recommendation to accept.

Should I contact the editor or the authors? What would I ask? I can’t exactly ask “is this a vanity press?” or “why are you putting USD 626 into this?”

Update:

At least the editor has renamed the book from “Java in Academic and Research” to the more parallel “Java in Academia and Research,” although I still wonder why we need academia and research and not academia and industry.

It features a list of externally visible features that need to be implemented, the product backlog. At the beginning of a sprint, which often lasts a month, the developers estimate which features they can implement during this sprint. Then they break the features down into tasks that need to be done.

Each task has a cost associated with it (basically the time it takes to implement, but it’s not really any real time span, rather something abstract, like jelly beans). The tasks are written on sticky notes.

During the daily Scrum stand-up meeting, all developers say what they did yesterday, what problems they had, and what they are going to do today. If they are out of tasks, they pick new sticky notes. If they are still working on the previous tasks, they re-estimate how much time is left for those tasks.

I really think that I should have taught COMP 402 using some kind of Scrum. A month-long sprint would have been too long, probably, and the class only met three times a week, but we probably could have done three week sprints?

Has anyone taught a software engineering/production programming class that used Scrum?

I won’t submit a bad review if the paper turns out to be good, or even acceptably mediocre. I will perform an accurate review. Of course, that means we still may not find out whether iConcept Press is a vanity press or not.

I also won’t publicly disclose the authors or parts of the paper I am reviewing. I can tell you already, though, that the review is not double-blind. I know who the authors are. I wonder if or when they will find out that I reviewed the paper.

Happy new year!

AdBlock Plus Problem in Gmail

The columns for some emails are messed up. The :: and the checkbox on the very left of the marked row are missing, the title goes in the column where the star normally is, and that column is too narrow, of course.

Has someone else seen this? I don’t know AdBlock Plus well enough anymore to figure this out myself, so I just reported the issue. Let’s hope this gets fixed soon.

In other news, Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard is nice, but they still didn’t fix the problem of Java GUI programs, particularly when run in a JUnit suite, stealing the focus. Setting up Spaces does not help, which is very lame. I had to set up a second user account again and then do the Fast User Switching.

Also annoying is the fact that MacPorts doesn’t seem to have some of the programs I got used to in Fink, but Fink doesn’t have binaries for Snow Leopard yet… And dedicated keys to control keyboard illumination brightness? Is that really necessary?

Embarrassing… But at least the unstaged code was equally wrong, so the benchmark is valid ;)

It’s really not a major issue. There seems to have been an NFS problem in the department network; I ran into it on my work desktop on Friday and rebooted. I suspect it’s the same issue here, and rebooting the Hudson server will probably solve the problem.

I didn’t find out about it, though, because there’s some kind of SSL certificate problem that prevented Hudson from accessing the SMTP server using SSL. This is a bit more serious. I tried to figure out how to add the certificate to the JRE key store, but gave up when i received the nice informative output

keytool error: java.lang.NullPointerException

I just ended up disabling SSL for SMTP. I’m surprised that it still works, but it does.

There is a severe defect. The HelloWorld Java applet (http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/getStarted.html) crashes in the Applet Viewer invoked by DrJava. Still it runs smootly both in IE8 and FireFox. It also runs OK in the Applet Viewer started separately, without DrJava.

There really is a problem. The HelloWorld applet throws an exception.

The problem is that we already execute the Applet.init() method in the event thread, and calling invokeAndWait in the event thread would cause a deadlock.

Arguably, this applet is implemented in a strange way. invokeAndWait should run the code immediately if it is already running in the event thread. I’ll see what I can do to fix this.

I would have preferred it if the reviewer had just filed a bug report and given us the opportunity to fix this first.