Category Archives: Ramblings

Ramblings of a somewhat more personal nature.

90 Days

Posted on September 16, 2010 by Mathias

90 days and two re-send requests, and the Texas DPS still hasn’t managed to get me my drivers license. I think I also have a dysnumeric mail man, though. So maybe the DPS mailed it, but someone else received it. … Continue reading →

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24 Hour Fitness “Personal Fitness Consultation”

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Mathias

I signed up for a membership at 24 Hour Fitness. The free neighborhood pools in Houston are closed now that the summer is over, and I wanted to continue being able to swim. Two of the gyms nearby have swimming … Continue reading →

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Is iConcept Press a Vanity Press?

Posted on September 11, 2010 by Mathias

I received an email from iConcept Press this morning: Based on your paper: Test-first Java concurrency for the classroom (2010), we would like to invite you to submit a chapter to our book project under the working title: Java in … Continue reading →

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Two Pieces of Fail

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Mathias

I encountered two pieces of fail today already. Fail number 1: Absolutely no place to park my bike. This has been pretty much the case ever since the undergrads have been back. Rice built two new colleges right next to … Continue reading →

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That’s Just Past Perfect

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Mathias

README files written by some non-native speakers of English are killing me right now. What is it with all the past perfect tense?! All of these files had been put into the folder foo/bar, and the build files had been … Continue reading →

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Dumbest Bug Report of the Month

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Mathias

I think this bug report we just received is a promising candidate for Dumbest Bug Report of the Month: Summary: something is missing? Initial Comment: i\’ve just download it. haven\’t start yet (backslashes present in original) That’s it. No more … Continue reading →

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WTF TX DPS?

Posted on July 27, 2010 by Mathias

WTF… After being on hold with the TX DPS for 19 minutes, they just hung up on me. Thanks, it’s not like dealing with you is a huge waste of time anyway. I had to renew my TX drivers license … Continue reading →

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javac Regression and Unit Tests

Posted on July 22, 2010 by Mathias

Joseph D. Darcy posted an informative article on writing regression and unit tests for new Java language features using JCK. This would have been useful for the Mint co-author who was supposed to write tests but ended up doing absolutely … Continue reading →

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My Name is Not _______

Posted on July 7, 2010 by Mathias

I’m lucky to receive about three or four emails from recruiters and companies per week, asking me if I want to interview. I’m flattered, but perhaps that is also making me a bit picky. I understand that I’m not the … Continue reading →

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Dull Boy

Posted on June 19, 2010 by Mathias

Two-hour code tests on a Saturday make Mathias a dull boy. Two-hour code tests on a Saturday make Mathias a dull boy. Two-hour code tests on a Saturday make Mathias a dull boy. Especially when they start half an hour … Continue reading →

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PLDI 2010 Was Great Fun

Posted on June 9, 2010 by Mathias

PLDI 2010 in Toronto is over, and I have to say it was great fun. I met some old friends again, like Gregory and Luke, chatted with old acquaintances, and made many new connections. There was concurrency and parallelism everywhere, … Continue reading →

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At PLDI 2010

Posted on June 7, 2010 by Mathias

I’m at PLDI right now. Toronto is nice, the tutorials on Sunday were great, and so were most of the paper sessions. The downsides are the lack of outlets in the conference rooms, and the virtually complete lack of WLAN … Continue reading →

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Hudson Server Swapping Itself to Death

Posted on June 4, 2010 by Mathias

After fixing the DrJava unit tests that failed and before heading to PLDI tomorrow, I thought I’d start up our Hudson server again. Unfortunately, it pretty quickly starts swapping itself to death. I don’t know what changed. Did our memory … Continue reading →

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Back in Houston for a Bit

Posted on June 3, 2010 by Mathias

I’m back in Houston for five days again. I was looking forward to sleeping in my own bed again, but that turned out to be less comfortable than I expected: My air conditioning unit had broken again, and it 31 … Continue reading →

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Enerjy Fault Proneness Analysis of DrJava

Posted on May 12, 2010 by Mathias

I just read that a company called Enerjy did a “fault proneness” analysis of many Java open-source projects, and DrJava was among them. We rank in the lower half, but just above Eclipse. I don’t exactly know how the rules … Continue reading →

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ClassLoader.definePackage

Posted on March 26, 2010 by Mathias

I received a bug report yesterday that Class.getPackage() wasn’t working for user-defined classes and classes written in the Interactions Pane: I was trying to run one of our assignment projects on DrJava and kepts getting a NullPointerException because getPackage() returns … Continue reading →

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UPS Went Poof

Posted on March 26, 2010 by Mathias

This morning, my uninterruptable power supply (UPS) for my computer went poof. It really made that sound, and then there was a chemical smell in the room. It had acted up a few times in the last couple of months, … Continue reading →

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10.4 Programs, A Dying Breed

Posted on March 2, 2010 by Mathias

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 … Continue reading →

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ReLooper for DrJava?

Posted on February 27, 2010 by Mathias

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 … Continue reading →

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Anonymous Inner Class Surprise

Posted on February 16, 2010 by Mathias

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"); … Continue reading →

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