Category Archives: Uncategorized

RIP, Dell Dimension 9200

My old Dell Dimension 9200 computer broke yesterday. I took a look at it today and couldn’t figure out what the problem was. Just diagnostic lights 1, 2, and 3 lit, which according to Dell’s Users Guide means “other failure.” … Continue reading

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Problems with RejectedExecutionHandler and Futures

I’ve been working with [cc_java inline=”true”]ThreadPoolExecutor[/cc_java] and [cc_java inline=”true”]RejectedExecutionHandler[/cc_java]. The executor framework provides a convenient way to distribute concurrent tasks to multiple threads, and the different [cc_java inline=”true”]RejectedExecutionHandler[/cc_java] policies, [cc_java inline=”true”]ThreadPoolExecutor.DiscardOldestPolicy[/cc_java], for instance, enable your program to shed load if … Continue reading

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Rice University Centennial Celebration

A lot of good things turn 100 this year, apparently. After attending the ACM Turing Centenary Celebration, I attended the 100th homecoming of my alma mater, Rice University. It was a great time to return, as many of my friends … Continue reading

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ACM Turing Centenary Celebration, Raw Notes

Here is a raw transcript of my hand-written notes from the ACM Turing Centenary Celebration in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. Please note that these are my thoughts and impressions, not necessarily those of the speakers, and that … Continue reading

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An Addiction, or Two?

I absolutely love my Kindle Touch. I’ve already read two books, which embarrassingly is as much as I read all last year. I was skeptical about how easy it is to read, but it’s just as good as reading on … Continue reading

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A Fantastic Dinner

On Wednesday night, I went to Chez Shea in Seattle for dinner. It was fantastic. The food was delicious, and our waitress was great: knowledgeable, polite, attentive, but not pushy. As appetizers, we had new potatoes and braised fennel salad … Continue reading

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Showers, Chance of Rain, Rain

Weather forecast for Seattle: Showers likely. Cloudy with chance of rain in the evening. Then rain likely after midnight. I’m not even kidding. Those are the first three sentences of the current weather forecast on my phone.

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Communication

Something anyone writing a paper or doing a presentation needs to keep in mind: Communication. Here’s the mouseOver text for the image: “Anyone who says that they’re great at communicating but ‘people are bad at listening’ is confused about how … Continue reading

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Input/Output Redirection in DrJava?

On the AP Computer Science mailing list, there was a teacher who wanted to do input/output redirection and who asked why the following didn’t work: java LetterCounter < input.txt The Interactions Pane in DrJava is not a DOS command line … Continue reading

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BSD License for the Reflection-Based S-Expression Parser

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a class in Java that uses reflection to create a parser for S-expressions, based on a class hierarchy. Today, a reader had found the class and wanted to use it in … Continue reading

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Photography Class

I went to a “Capturing True Emotion” photography workshop today. I’ve had my Canon G12 for over a year now, and I’ve passed my trusted Canon A610 on to my mom, but I still haven’t used the G12 very much. … Continue reading

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Seattle, a Winter Wonderland

Before I moved to Seattle, people told me it “never snows in Seattle.” In the first few months of 2011, I had already found that to be incorrect. But today, more snow fell than I’ve seen here before. It’s really … Continue reading

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People Who Crash into Cars I’m in Continue to Suck

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

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A Grammar Change Saves the Day

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

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Where Citations Come From — xkcd: Citogenesis

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.

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Back from SPLASH 2011

I returned from SPLASH 2011 in Portland tonight. I attended only the Educators’ Symposium on Monday and the first day of the conference proper, but it was worth it. And how could it not be, given that it was so … Continue reading

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John McCarthy Died

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

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It’s Not Warm on Mt. Rainier

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

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Lost My Phone

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

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Three Logicians Walk into a Bar

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

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