- A Concurrent Affair - https://www.concurrentaffair.org -

Haven’t Written in a Long Time

Wow. I haven’t written in my blog in a long time. I guess it has to do with the fact that the school year has really started again; in fact, I already graded my first assignment. I also updated the website a couple of times, made changes to solution code, and held office hours. I love holding office hours: I really get the feeling again that I’m helping people.

Not writing anything doesn’t mean I didn’t do anything, though:

I’ve been working on a poster for the annual Corporate Affiliates’ Meeting. Once it’s done I’ll make it available online again. Fortunately and unfortunately, not too much has changed from last year, so I used a lot of last year’s poster. I added the two-VM approach, though, and compared the buffered version with the unbuffered one. Unfortunately, the graph for the comparison is very small, and I can’t figure out how to get more space to make it bigger. I may end up taking it out again.

I also wrote an instrumentor that creates a decorator for a class: It generates a class file for a “class B extends A” that has the same methods as class A, but B’s methods just forward to the corresponding methods in A. This should allow me to easily generate decorators for Object and String so I can add fields. I haven’t had time to test this, though.

In other news, my Palm Tungsten E finally died. This entire year I’ve had problems with power draining really fast. Now the battery seems so damaged that the Palm sometimes just hangs and the display begins to fade. Of course, it might also be something else, but I’m pretty sure that the device is dead. I considered buying a replacement battery for $50, but that requires soldering (which I can do, of course) and might not fix the problem. So I bought a new PDA, a Palm Tungsten E2, for $195, and I’m hoping to eventually get a $50 mail-in rebate.

The Tungsten E2 is the direct successor to the PDA I had before, so naturally it is very similar. There are a few improvements, though: First of all, the PDA feels a little bit lighter, and all the buttons are a bit recessed. That’s good, the PDA shouldn’t accidentally turn on as often anymore. The E2 is also Bluetooth-enabled, but I haven’t had a chance to test that yet. It also has a brighter display, supposedly longer battery life, and if the latter turns out to be false, it has non-volatile memory, so the data doesn’t get lost even if the battery goes out. That’s a dream come true. Everything looks very nice so far, but I can’t get the included “Media” application to work. It transfers pictures to the Palm, but they don’t show up in the application. That’s really sad. Now I can’t brag with pictures of my beautiful ex-girlfriends anymore.

Time for food.

Update

I deleted a few incompatible “Photos” application files and performed a hard reset. Now the “Media” application works like a charm.

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