Touch of Death

After I had finished adding my new code to JUnit 3.8.2 and therefore created Concutest-JUnit 3.8.2 (yeah, versions… soon there’s probably also going to be a 4.2 version, because the JUnit people sneakily released versions 4.1 and 4.2 without me noticing), I decided I needed to add tests to JUnit 3.8.2 as well. No problem so far. However, when I standardized the packages, I started getting JUnit test failures and errors in the tests concerning the concurrent portion of the JUnit 4.0 stuff, i.e. the stuff I added to the JUnit 4.0 annotation-style code. So far, I haven’t been able to isolate the problem or even figure out when it started occurring. It seems like it has been there right from the beginning, when I transferred it over from the 3.8.2 style I had originally integrated into the 4.0 library. JUnit is so confusing on the inside, and JUnit tests of JUnit are a category worse, particularly when they are concurrent.

Something that has touched me a lot more, though, was the apparent demise of the hard drive in my MacBook (pictures). On Friday morning, everything seemed ok. I powered the notebook down, biked to school, opened it up at the 600 seminar, it worked for a few seconds, but then I got the spinning beachball of death (so much more pleasant than “blue screen of death”, isn’t it?). I did a hard reset, and after that it wouldn’t recognize the hard drive anymore. I tried to boot with the Mac OS installation CD, but it doesn’t even say a hard drive exists. Fortunately, Corky got us AppleCare, so everything should be all right. I found that the nearest Apple Authorized Service Provider, MacTronics, is conveniently located almost on my way to work. I’ve called in, described the problem, morsed a few serial numbers across the wire, and the nice lady on the phone said she would try to pre-order a replacement 80 GB hard drive for Monday. On Monday I should come in between 1 PM and 3 PM.

Hopefully it’ll be an easy thing. I really don’t have much time for a lot of trial and error, I just got done fixing up my home machine. I guess I should be glad both machines didn’t break simultaneously. I had some work-on-progress data on the MacBook that wasn’t backed up, but not too much. Installing all the applications will be cumbersome again, because… guess what? I don’t have a Ghost image with all the apps and settings. I don’t even know if there is an equivalent program for the Mac.

I sorely miss the MacBook already after just one day. It’s just the perfect combination of Unix environment, solid keyboard, nice display, good looks, pretty UI, decent stability. I really do a lot of work on it. So, hopefully I’ll have it back on Monday.

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About Mathias

Software development engineer. Principal developer of DrJava. Recent Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Computer Science at Rice University.
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