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 very happy with my Android phone.
As part of our knowledge (back) transfer, I wrote up these instructions for creating a fresh build of all parts of DrJava and then making a new release on SourceForge.
Note: Our build process is currently broken for Windows machines (see
“instructions below for building just DrJava”, step 6, “Make the
release and put it into Subversion”.)
Note: Which compile-??? targets you can run depends on the platform
you are compiling on. You need to be on a Mac to run compile-mac and
on Windows to run compile-windows. Since the compiled classes are
stored in Subversion, you can always do
ant clean jar
to just get all the class files without recompiling.
find .. -name plt.jar -not -samefile plt.jar | xargs -n 1 cp -v plt.jar
Building the DrJava application (not the libraries) and making a new release:
ant clean release-local To create a beta release: ant clean release-local-beta To create a stable release: ant clean release-local-stable
ant release ant release-beta ant release-stable
You may want to add -Dtest-repeat=0 to the command line (e.g. ant
-Dtest-repeat=0 release). That tells Ant not to run the unit tests.
You can leave it out, but we just ran the unit tests, so it should not
be necessary to run them again.
Note that this step may ask you for your SourceForge password if you
have never committed code to Subversion from the computer you are
working on.
Available for download at http://drjava.org . DrJava is a lightweight programming environment for Java designed to foster test-driven software development. It includes an intelligent program editor, an interactions pane for evaluating program text, a source level debugger, and a unit testing tool. In addition to bug fixes, thisrelease includes a number of new features introduced after the last release: Note: Java 1.4 compatibility has been dropped. To use DrJava, you will need Java 5 or newer. New features since the last release: - list of new features since the last beta/development release Bug fixes since last release: - list of bug fixes since the last beta/development release New features since the last stable release: - list of new features since the last stable release Bug fixes since the last stable release: - list of bug fixes since the last stable release
Dear DrJava Users: We have made a new <stable/beta/development> version available: <tag> You can download it from the DrJava website at http://drjava.org/ or from SourceForge.net by following this link: <link> You receive this email because you have subscribed to a DrJava mailing list.
Replace the <link> part with the link to the SourceForge page that has
the files for this release, i.e. the website you navigated to in step
19. Example: https://sourceforge.net/projects/drjava/files/2.%20DrJava%20Development%20Releases/drjava-20110205-r5425/
<!--#include virtual="beta.shtml"-->
to
<!--include virtual="beta.shtml"-->
and
<!--#include virtual="devrelease.shtml"-->
to
<!--include virtual="devrelease.shtml"-->
If you made a beta release, you want the hash mark for the #include of
the beta.shtml file, but not for the devrelease.shtml file. If you
made a development release, you probably want the hash mark for the
devrelease.shtml file, but not for the beta.shtml file.
<!--include virtual="beta_long.shtml" -->
and
<!--include virtual="devrelease_long.shtml" -->
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 behind surge protectors and UPSes. I just got a DGND3300v2 DSL modem/router to replace the dead 2Wire HomePortal 2700, and I’m setting up my firewall.
Do I have to enter the IP address of the computer in the LAN manually? I use DHCP and the IP can change. The HomePortal allowed me to assign firewall rules to a MAC. The same problem occurs with port forwarding.
Is that not possible with the DGND3300v2?
PS: The lack of gigabit ethernet on a product of this price is a sore disappointment, too.
Update
IP addresses can be reserved for MACs under router login > LAN setup> address reservation.
Update 2
Except in the latest firmware, V2.1.00.48_1.00.48NA, you can’t. Address reservation doesn’t work because of a Netgear bug *sigh*
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, but I still haven’t found one that allows me to enter time zones. Do Android users not travel?
On the other hand, Astrid is a pretty good task planner, and I think I’m getting the hang of Swype. I just wish the virtual keyboard were a little bigger. Using Swype is definitely faster than typing letter by letter, but the physical keyboard on the Palm Treo was better… at least before it broke. I should just get over it.
We have made a new development release available: drjava-20110205-r5425. You can download it from the DrJava website or from SourceForge.
Available for download at http://drjava.org .
DrJava is a lightweight programming environment for Java designed to foster test-driven software development. It includes an intelligent program editor, an interactions pane for evaluating program text, a source level debugger, and a unit testing tool.
In addition to bug fixes, this development release includes a number of new features introduced after the last stable release:
The language level facility has been changed to consist of two language levels, Functional Java (corresponding to the old Intermediate level) and Full Java. The old files can still be compiled, but DrJava will ask if it should rename .dj0 and .dj1 to .dj and .dj2 files to .java.
DrJava’s compiler support has been improved, and DrJava now supports compiling files with file extensions other than .java, .dj, .dj0, .dj1, and .dj2. This includes support for Habanero Java .hj files, provided the Habanero Java compiler is installed.
DrJava preferences like indent level can now be stored on a per- project basis (see “Project Properties”, “Advanced”).
Note: Java 1.4 compatibility has been dropped. To use DrJava, you will
need Java 5 or newer.
New features since the last stable release:
Bug fixes since last stable release:
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 calendar replacement, although I’m not happy with the way time zones are treated. What good is a calendar if I have to convert times in my head?
I do have my calendar items and contacts on my phone again now, so I feel less amputated now anymore.
The turn-by-turn navigation is pretty cool. It uses a lot of battery though, so I need to get a car charger.
I’m writing this using the Android WordPress app, by the way. It avoids having to scroll and zoom the website in the browser.
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, all the emails that I sent went to someone else (mexxx@xxxx.xxx) today.
I desperately need to re-train my muscle memory. I didn’t notice this until just now, 10 hours after the auto-completion changed.
I had used SplashMoney for Palm for years, and it was a fantastic product. When I got my new HTC EVO Android phone, getting SplashMoney was the first thing I did. Oh, what a disappointment that was.
This program is a real shame. It’s unusable. I’m tempted to ask for my money back, but that doesn’t get rid of how disappointed I am. This is not SplashMoney, it’s TrashMoney. And there are so many problems with this piece of software, as is apparent from this forum, that it’s surprising that the latest version is two months old.
What’s going on, SplashData? What are your release plans? What bugs do you promise to fix, by when? What missing features do you promise to deliver?
Or do I really need to ask for my money back and look for a different product?
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 had planned to buy a BlackBerry because it is great with text, and text is what I do. However, I got the feeling that BlackBerry OS had started to fall behind, and I didn’t want to replace an old phone with one that was also already on the way out. It also seemed like I wouldn’t be able to customize the phone as much. BlackBerries look like they have exactly one way of doing things. And I figured I would miss the touch screen.
I didn’t really want to buy a Korean phone (“Buy North American or European!”), but there isn’t much else left. So it came down to the Samsung Epic and the HTC EVO. I liked the idea that the Epic had a physical keyboard, but it turned out to not be so good. I’m also always a bit skeptical of devices with hinges. The user interface of the HTC phones also look better. So the HTC EVO it was.
Getting the new phone involved upgrading from the SERO 500 plan for $30 a month to SERO Premium for $40/mo plus $10/mo 4G data surcharge. But $50 a month before taxes isn’t bad for an unlimited everything plan.
There are many things the EVO does very well. Watching YouTube videos use great. Browsing the web is amazing. Reading RSS feeds and listening to podcast is slick. And in landscape-mode, even writing this blog post with the on-screen keyboard is enjoyable.
I have experienced a few downsides too, though. The SplashMoney application for Android is terribly slow, almost unusable. And for both SplashMoney and SplashID, the desktop sync is a lot worse than for the Palm. But maybe that will improve.
I really don’t know what phone I should get to replace my trusted Palm Treo 755p. I really think there won’t be a phone that can match its utility. It’s not a flashy phone (my friends call it “the brick”), but it’s useful. It has a great keyboard, at least before it started to break down after 3 years of use. It is customizable. Palm OS lets me do pretty much anything. It can do tethering. It has physical buttons to access common functions, so much quicker to use than just a touch screen. I can use it in my sleep. But it also does have a touch screen…
But I do need a new phone. The keyboard has been giving me trouble (the 1, 4 and i keys are bad), and obviously it’s not being maintained by Sprint or Palm anymore. My battery is also giving up, and I don’t really want to buy a new battery for an old phone. So, what phone to get?
I’ve been considering the BlackBerry Curve 9330 and the BlackBerry Bold 9650. It seems like the main advantage of the Curve is the price: $49 for the Curve, $199 for the Bold. But the Bold supports GSM networks, so I could use it when I’m in Europe, too. (But would I want to? International roaming is really expensive, and I have a phone that works in Europe. I just need to carry two phones.) The camera is also supposed to be better on the Bold. I was told by a Sprint store employee that the Bold does not have BlackBerry OS 6, but that appears to be incorrect.
On the other hand, while I like the BlackBerry keyboards, I think I may miss the touch screen a bit (even though I’m very much a physical keyboard person), and it seems like BlackBerries aren’t as customizable. So maybe Android? But the only decent Android phones are all Korean. Bleh.
The Samsung Epic 4G has a supposedly good slide-out keyboard. The HTC EVO 4G has a huge screen. Most people say they stop using a physical keyboard and start using Swype. Both apparently have Android 2.2 now. When it comes to battery live, I hear mixed reports. Both Android phones are $199 for Sprint.
I think I like Android better than BlackBerry OS, but I haven’t played with Android enough yet. Another downside (at least financially) is that the Android devices are 4G phones that require an additional $10 monthly charge.
There is a bit of urgency, since there may be another $10 monthly charge for unlimited data usage beginning on January 30, 2011, although I have read reports that this does not apply to SERO Premium plans.
I think I’ll have to go back to the Sprint store and play with the Android phones.
Update
Here’s a feature matrix:
| Feature | BlackBerry Curve | BlackBerry Bold | HTC EVO | Samsung Epic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | + $49 | - $199 | - $199 | - $199 |
| GSM | + | |||
| Keyboard | + | + | + | |
| Touch screen | + | + | ||
| Android | + | + | ||
| BlackBerry OS 6 | + | + | ||
| Outlook Sync | + | + | + (?) | |
| Google Sync | ? | ? | + | + |
I’m finally making some progress on a tricky computer repair I’ve been dealing with in my downtime basically this entire past week. The 10.5-year-old Pentium II computer that I have been using as web and media server in my home office started acting up. Initially, there were some kind of boot problems that made doing any disk access on the computer painfully slow. And I mean painfully. It would take days to open a folder. I haven’t figured out what it was, and repairs were impeded by the fact that the computer either rebooted straight away when booting in Safe Mode, or hanging with a blue screen when running Windows XP setup from the boot disk.
I decided to take out my SATA card, which allowed me to reinstall Windows. I was then finally able to make backups of most disks two days ago, but one of my drives had mysteriously shrunken from 250 GB to 33 GB. I found out that’s one of the magic BIOS capacity thresholds, but I couldn’t figure out how to reset the capacity. All tools I could find failed to reset the “host protected area” or change the “max LBA” values.
Today I finally found an old version of Seagate DiscWizard Starter Edition. It allowed me to remove the dynamic disk overlay that was there (unnecessarily, it seems) and change the “max LBA” to its native value. While I’m at work now, my computer is backing up those contents, and then I plan to wipe the drives and put my old drive image back on the system drive.
Computers. Helping you solve problems you wouldn’t have without them.
PS: I thought about just replacing the old computer, but it still works. After over a decade.
I just finished the review of the book chapter I had agreed to do for iConcept Press. It was an interesting survey chapter, written by non-native speakers of English, about a topic I’m familiar with, but on which I am by now means an expert. I therefore recommended acceptance with medium confidence.
Most of my comments were about spelling or grammar mistakes, or suggestions on how to reword parts to make the intention clearer. I don’t know the literature well enough to determine if important references are missing (the authors definitely cited most of their own work), but I did find that it completely ignored one part that it alluded to several times: There is a different way of specifying the way these systems work, and the way it is different from the currently prevalent approach was briefly mentioned, but the consequences, advantages, and disadvantages are completely omitted. Perhaps they haven’t been studied yet, in which case that should be stated, but otherwise I would like to see such a discussion.
Unfortunately, I don’t think this exercise of mine will get us any more information on whether iConcept Press is just a vanity press. I don’t see reviews by others, and there is obviously no program committee meeting to discuss the paper. Even if I had rejected the paper, acceptance wouldn’t tell us anything. The only interesting outcome would be if the paper were rejected in spite of my recommendation to accept.
Should I contact the editor or the authors? What would I ask? I can’t exactly ask “is this a vanity press?” or “why are you putting USD 626 into this?”
Update:
At least the editor has renamed the book from “Java in Academic and Research” to the more parallel “Java in Academia and Research,” although I still wonder why we need academia and research and not academia and industry.
Oh great…
Account Lockdown: Unusual Activity Detected
This account has been locked down due to unusual account activity. It may take up to 24 hours for you to regain access.
And all I did was send 86 MB of vacation pictures spread out across 21 emails. I hope my Gmail access gets restored quickly. It feels like a part of me has been amputated.
Update:
My access was restored, just about 15 minutes later. Thank you, Gmail team!
A Framework for Testing Concurrent Programs
(Presentation, PowerPoint, PDF)
Presents
Mathias Ricken
Ph.D. Thesis Defense
Title: A Framework for Testing Concurrent Programs
Date: January 10, 2011
Time: 9 AM
Location: Duncan Hall 3076
This study proposes a new framework that can effectively apply unit
testing to concurrent programs, which are difficult to develop and
debug. Test-driven development, a practice enabling developers to
detect bugs early by incorporating unit testing into the development
process, has become wide-spread, but it has only been effective for
programs with a single thread of control. The order of operations in
different threads is essentially non-deterministic, making it more
complicated to reason about program properties in concurrent programs
than in single-threaded programs. Because hardware and operating
systems influence the order in which operations in different threads
are executed, debugging is problematic since a problem often cannot be
reproduced on other machines. Multi-core processors, which have
replaced older single-core designs, have exacerbated these problems
because they demand the use of concurrency if programs are to benefit
from new processors.
The existing tools for unit testing programs are either flawed or too
costly. JUnit, for instance, assumes that programs are single-threaded
and therefore does not work for concurrent programs; ConTest and
rstest predate the revised Java memory model and make incorrect
assumptions about the operations that affect synchronization.
Approaches such as model checking or comprehensive schedule-based
execution are too costly to be used frequently. All of these problems
prevent software developers from adopting the current tools on a large
scale.
The proposed framework (i) improves JUnit to recognize errors in all
threads, a necessary development without which all other improvements
are futile, (ii) places some restrictions on the programs to
facilitate automatic testing, (iii) provides tools that reduce
programmer mistakes, and (iv) re-runs the unit tests with randomized
schedules to simulate the execution under different conditions and on
different machines, increasing the probability that errors are
detected.
The improvements and restrictions, shown not to seriously impede
programmers, reliably detect problems that the original JUnit missed.
The execution with randomized schedules reveals problems that rarely
occur under normal conditions.
With an effective testing tool for concurrent programs, developers can
test programs more reliably and decrease the number of errors in spite
of the proliferation of concurrency demanded by modern processors.
I went to a talk on Scrum yesterday, and it was very interesting. Scrum is an agile software engineering methodology, similar to Extreme Programming.
It features a list of externally visible features that need to be implemented, the product backlog. At the beginning of a sprint, which often lasts a month, the developers estimate which features they can implement during this sprint. Then they break the features down into tasks that need to be done.
Each task has a cost associated with it (basically the time it takes to implement, but it’s not really any real time span, rather something abstract, like jelly beans). The tasks are written on sticky notes.
During the daily Scrum stand-up meeting, all developers say what they did yesterday, what problems they had, and what they are going to do today. If they are out of tasks, they pick new sticky notes. If they are still working on the previous tasks, they re-estimate how much time is left for those tasks.
I really think that I should have taught COMP 402 using some kind of Scrum. A month-long sprint would have been too long, probably, and the class only met three times a week, but we probably could have done three week sprints?
Has anyone taught a software engineering/production programming class that used Scrum?
I received a review invitation for an article to be published in one of iConcept Press‘s journals today. I already wrote about iConcept Press earlier, when I wondered whether it was a vanity press. Considering the cost of publishing there, I still think it is a vanity press, but I’m willing to put up the effort of submitting a review to learn more.
I won’t submit a bad review if the paper turns out to be good, or even acceptably mediocre. I will perform an accurate review. Of course, that means we still may not find out whether iConcept Press is a vanity press or not.
I also won’t publicly disclose the authors or parts of the paper I am reviewing. I can tell you already, though, that the review is not double-blind. I know who the authors are. I wonder if or when they will find out that I reviewed the paper.
Happy new year!
The guys of COMP 410 had their final presentation last Wednesday. They got some pretty tough questions, and the state of the final product was not as polished as I would have liked it to be, but I think they pulled of something interesting. This is even more true since the cloud framework they were using was brand-new, not well documented, and not at all intended for this kind of processing.
The comments were mainly about the lack of an interesting, impressive demo that actually requires the cloud and that cannot just be run on one machine. That is a very valid point, but one has to keep in mind that the class was very small, and there was quite a bit of learning and programming involved for a group of four students.
All four of them say that they learned a lot, and that even their interviewing skills improved because of their experience in COMP 410. I think that alone probably makes the class already worthwhile. I’m definitely glad I was able to be a part of it.
Some (blurry) pictures of the students’ presentation. I noticed it was recorded on video. I’ll try to find out where that video can be accessed.
A Framework for Testing Concurrent Programs
(Presentation, PowerPoint,PDF)
Presents
Mathias Ricken
Ph.D. Thesis Proposal
Title: A Framework for Testing Concurrent Programs
Date: December 2, 2010
Time: 9 AM
Location: Duncan Hall 3076
This study proposes a new framework that can effectively apply unit
testing to concurrent programs, which are difficult to develop and
debug. Test-driven development, a practice enabling developers to
detect bugs early by incorporating unit testing into the development
process, has become wide-spread, but it has only been effective for
programs with a single thread of control. The order of operations in
different threads is essentially non-deterministic, making it more
complicated to reason about program properties in concurrent programs
than in single-threaded programs. Because hardware and operating
systems influence the order in which operations in different threads
are executed, debugging is problematic since a problem often cannot be
reproduced on other machines. Multi-core processors, which have
replaced older single-core designs, have exacerbated these problems
because they demand the use of concurrency if programs are to benefit
from new processors.
The existing tools for unit testing programs are either flawed or too
costly. JUnit, for instance, assumes that programs are single-threaded
and therefore does not work for concurrent programs; ConTest and
rstest predate the revised Java memory model and make incorrect
assumptions about the operations that affect synchronization.
Approaches such as model checking or comprehensive schedule-based
execution are too costly to be used frequently. All of these problems
prevent software developers from adopting the current tools on a large
scale.
The proposed framework (i) improves JUnit to recognize errors in all
threads, a necessary development without which all other improvements
are futile, (ii) places some restrictions on the programs to
facilitate automatic testing, (iii) provides tools that reduce
programmer mistakes, and (iv) re-runs the unit tests with randomized
schedules to simulate the execution under different conditions and on
different machines, increasing the probability that errors are
detected.
The improvements and restrictions, shown not to seriously impede
programmers, reliably detect problems that the original JUnit missed.
The execution with randomized schedules reveals problems that rarely
occur under normal conditions.
With an effective testing tool for concurrent programs, developers can
test programs more reliably and decrease the number of errors in spite
of the proliferation of concurrency demanded by modern processors.
Jason Eckhardt, a student of Keith Cooper, had an interesting COMP 600 talk about StencilDSL and simplifying writing certain stencil-based array operations:
Automatic Generation of Optimized Domain-Specific Operations
In previous work, we introduced a compiler-based algorithm for eliminating inter-iteration redundancies in array-based loop computations. This algorithm detects and transforms loops from ordinary programs using sophisticated analysis techniques. From that work we discovered that many of the codes amenable to our technique were concentrated in a few application-specific domains such as PDE solvers and image processing. Moreover, the loops in these particular codes exhibit a regularity or simplicity which can simplify the task of analyzing and optimizing them. We also discovered that these computations are often specified in the domain literature not as elaborate loop nests, but rather with simple matrices or other compact forms. In this talk, we discuss a prototype automatic program generation tool which allows the domain expert to specify computations in a simple and familiar way, while letting the tool generate the actual source code. By utilizing domain knowledge encoded in the specification, the tool generates optimized code by suppressing as many inter-iteration redundancies as possible. The result is a highly efficient program with little effort from the domain expert, and with no need for a programming or computer architecture expert to optimize the code.
I wonder how this would fit into Mint, especially since we used one of those stencil-based operations, a simple Gaussian blur, as benchmark example. Using eta-expansion as “the trick”, the staged generator might look exactly like the unstaged program.
But I definitely don’t have time to look at this right now.
