http://www.concurrentaffair.org Blog about Mathias' work and play. Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:25:21 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This semester is now over, I have submitted the final grades for the COMP 202 class that I taught this semester. I'm sure I'll always fondly look back to this opportunity. Now I'm waiting for my grades, of course: for the instructor evaluations. We had an Othello tournament again, and it ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/12/23/merry-christmas/ I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7. Everything seems to work as usual now. I did have to update the WP-Email, WP-Print and WP-Sticky plugins, and regenerate the permalinks. Now, of course, the entire administration side of WordPress looks different, and I have to get used to it, but in general I ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/12/12/upgrade-to-wordpress-27/ "50 in 50" A presentation by Richard Gabriel and Guy Steele, containing fifty statements of fifty words each from the realm of programming languages. Probably the most entertaining computer science lecture I have ever watched. http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/11/21/50-in-50/ Now that my qualifying exam is behind me, I've got more time to focus on other things. I have to admit that the exam pretty much occupied all of my thoughts and hogged lots of time, to the degree that I didn't prepare as well as I used to for ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/11/18/antlrworks-and-openjdk-compiler-grammar/ I've been listening to Deutsche Welle Radio a lot lately, and today they had a quiz on their "Cool" culture show: "When a group of people are sitting around a table in Germany and start knocking on the table, what does that mean?" This is, of course, easy to answer for ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/11/13/knocking-on-the-table/ Corky and I are having problems on the CSnet machines when we are trying to check source out from Subversion: % svn co https://drjava.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/drjava/trunk/drjava svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/svnroot/drjava/!svn/vcc/default' svn: PROPFIND of '/svnroot/drjava/!svn/vcc/default': SSL negotiation failed: SSL error: decryption failed or bad record mac (https://drjava.svn.sourceforge.net) Has anyone else encountered this? I can't find any ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/11/07/sourceforge-subversion-problems/ I just wanted to mention two programs that I've found very useful: Integrity and Everything. Integrity is a very convenient, easy to use HTML link checker for MacOS. It's "donationware" and has helped me make sure I don't have any broken links in my work website, my personal website, and my ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/11/06/integrity-and-everything/ A few days ago, I got an email from Academia.edu, which seems to be something like Facebook for people in academia. It's a tree of universities, departments, faculty members and students. I originally wasn't too interested in it, but decided to fill out my profile anyway. There are profile pages that ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/11/03/academiaedu-and-publications-category/ I was reading this MixGen paper, and I came across this symbol in the antisymmetry lemma (5.13). It looked kind of like [tex]$\not\vdash$[/tex] and I thought maybe that was supposed to be the symbol for antisymmetry, but it wasn't defined anywhere. After minutes of confusion and scanning through the paper I ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/10/29/sometimes-i-feel-really-dumb/ Jevgeni Kabanov on dow.ngra.de made an interesting observation that I had noticed at one point when I was studying the new Java Memory Model, but that I had forgotten again. A shared volatile variable that thread A writes to and thread B subsequently reads from guarantees that thread B sees ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/10/28/volatile-for-synchronizing-non-volatile-data/ This post is just a mixed bag of things. First, a handful of things I'd like to achieve. I guess you could call them resolutions, although I'm haven't quite reached the point of resolving them yet: Learn to write the one-sentence email. A few people do this, and while it sometimes ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/10/27/mixed-bag/ Joey Gibson expresses exactly how I feel. I love Apple, but the state of Java on the Mac is probably beyond what's rationally bearable. http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/10/27/re-dear-apple-some-java-love-please/ I gave another presentation in our PLT seminar today. The title was "Annotations for Types and Expressions", but I really should have squeezed multi-stage programming (MSP) in there, because that was really the big benefit I want to achieve from adding annotations to expressions and statements. I've been feeling a bit ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/10/24/java-annotations-for-types-expressions-and-multi-staging/ Java Annotations for Types and Expressions Where: Rice University Computer Science Department, RAP Seminar When: October 24, 2008 As defined in Java 1.5, Java annotations can only be attached to very few targets: Classes, methods, method parameters, fields, and other annotations. The Java community intends to extend the list of targets and has ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/10/24/presentation-java-annotations-for-types-and-expressions/ Sometimes, trying to take a shortcut can make your life more difficult: Today I didn't plan on staying long after giving my two lectures, COMP 202 at 10 AM and COMP 311 at 1 PM, so I felt I didn't need to bring my notebook to do some "serious" work. ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/10/22/bad-shortcuts/ Yesterday, I finally went to the first symphony concert of my subscription. Originally, I was supposed to have gone to a concert over a month ago already, but it was the night that hurricane Ike hit, so I rescheduled it. The new concert was yesterday afternoon, Beethoven 2 and Tchaikovsky's ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/10/20/symphony-and-exams/ I added another user site to the DrJava website (and added the ones I found before but could not add): National University of Singapore: CS1101: Programming Methodology I also found out that DrJava is a FreeBSD package, which should make it easy to install on that operating system, and I discovered ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/10/17/drjava-user-sites/ I have address the fact that SourceForge disabled the interactive shell, which we mainly used to edit the DrJava website, by creating a mirror of the DrJava website at http://www.cs.rice.edu/~javaplt/drjava/ (something we have inconsistently done in the past), editing the website on CSnet, and then using rsync to transfer them ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/10/17/addressing-the-sourceforge-login-problem/ Invariant Specification and Multi-Staging using Java Annotations Where: Rice University Computer Science Department, Corporate Affiliates Meeting 2008 When: October 16, 2008 Java annotations allow programmers to attach metadata to programs. During normal execution, the annotations are ignored, but in contrast to comments in the source code, annotations can be manipulated programmatically at compile- ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/10/16/poster-invariant-specification-and-multi-staging-using-java-annotations/ SourceForge is a terrible mess now. The old and new documentation is all mixed up -- if new documentation is available at all, which is the exception, then the old documentation is easier to find. When I tried to figure out why SSH access to shell.sourceforge.net wasn't working anymore, I ... http://www.concurrentaffair.org/2008/10/15/sourceforge-removes-shell-access-becomes-terrible-mess/