Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

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 →

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.

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 →

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 →

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 →

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

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 →

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 →

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 →

The program for PPPJ 2011 is available now. Of course I am excited about the Habanero Java and DrHabanero papers from Rice, but the University of Lugano paper Portable and Accurate Collection of Calling-Context-Sensitive Bytecode Metrics for the Java Virtual … Continue reading →

When I use Android’s speech-to-text to enter my name, I get “Matt yes I can.” I like it! Although I’m still looking for replacements of the incredibly shoddy SplashData applications SplashMoney and SplashID, which constantly crash on Android, I am … Continue reading →

My apt building was struck by lightning Monday afternoon, and that fried half the building, apparently. Power was off for a day, the elevator is broken, and it killed my DSL modem and an ethernet card, even though both were … Continue reading →

I’ve noticed that SplashID crashes as well. I think I will try to find a replacement and than ask SplashData for a refund. $60 for this collection of fail is way too much. Jorte is pretty nice as a calendar, … Continue reading →

I have found that SplashID is buggy too. It crashes every other time I start it. I guess it’s time to say goodbye to SplashData. They don’t have their act together anymore. I found Jorte to be a pretty good … Continue reading →

How embarrassing. Gmail’s auto-completion changed for me today because I merged contacts on my Google and phone accounts. I frequently forward emails to “me” to have them stored on my private email as well, but “me” wasn’t me anymore. Instead, … Continue reading →

Yesterday I ended up buying a new phone. It was a pretty difficult decision, and I’m not nearly as sure that I made the right decision as when I bought my Palm Treo 755p over three years ago. Initially I … Continue reading →