Category Archives: Ramblings

Ramblings of a somewhat more personal nature.

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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A HotSpot Java Error, a Bus Error and a Segmentation Fault

Posted on January 30, 2010 by Mathias

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). … Continue reading →

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Java Bug 4396719 – Mark Sweep stack overflow on deeply nested Object arrays

Posted on January 29, 2010 by Mathias

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 … Continue reading →

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Sometimes I Love Myself

Posted on January 25, 2010 by Mathias

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 … Continue reading →

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IT Hell

Posted on January 22, 2010 by Mathias

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… … Continue reading →

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Broken Things 2010

Posted on January 17, 2010 by Mathias

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 … Continue reading →

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Out-of-Office Auto-Replies

Posted on December 21, 2009 by Mathias

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 … Continue reading →

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Remembered Number Significance

Posted on November 25, 2009 by Mathias

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 … Continue reading →

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Open Source: Don’t Steal What You Can Have for Free

Posted on November 18, 2009 by Mathias

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 … Continue reading →

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Boring Backport

Posted on November 13, 2009 by Mathias

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 … Continue reading →

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Wikipedia and the Right to Know vs Right to Privacy

Posted on November 12, 2009 by Mathias

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 … Continue reading →

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Twenty Years Ago

Posted on November 9, 2009 by Mathias

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 … Continue reading →

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Ridiculous Texas Bureaucracy That Doesn’t Make Anyone Safer

Posted on November 9, 2009 by Mathias

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 … Continue reading →

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Funny Feature Request of the Day

Posted on October 31, 2009 by Mathias

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 … Continue reading →

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A Repeating Pattern of Hate: SourceForge

Posted on October 23, 2009 by Mathias

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 … Continue reading →

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Two Confusing Errors

Posted on October 19, 2009 by Mathias

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. … Continue reading →

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More Artificially Complex Problem Spaces

Posted on October 15, 2009 by Mathias

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 … Continue reading →

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AWT Exception Handler Cannot Be Reset After Exception

Posted on October 15, 2009 by Mathias

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 … Continue reading →

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And the Annoying Twit of the Month Award Goes to…

Posted on October 10, 2009 by Mathias

And the annoying twit of the month award goes to… this guy, a student at the Ozarks Technical Community College, for his truly legendary effort of generating 38 support emails to us without considering that the problem might be in … Continue reading →

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Confusing Hudson Test Failure

Posted on October 9, 2009 by Mathias

After moving our Hudson server to a new server, we started to experience a very confusing test failure in the Java Language Levels module. The test that failed was AdvancedLevelTest.testShouldBeErrors. It compiles the files in javalanglevels/testFiles/forAdvancedLevelTest/shouldBreak/ and makes sure that … Continue reading →

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