The last week was still spent catching up from Ike. I got lucky, I got power back early, but until pretty much today, the area of Houston that I see on my bike commute to work had been without power. There are still lots of uprooted trees that need to be cleared, and the trash bags are piled high along the streets. Traffic lights seem to be working a bit better, and grocery stores are stocked again.
I was supposed to give a presentation right after Ike, but that day Rice was closed, and not only I was affected, so my talk got pushed back by a week. I finally gave it this Monday, on September 22, in the RAP seminar. It was titled Java Annotations for Invariant Specification and was about Java annotations in general, how I used them to specify and check program invariants, and how much easier that got once I had extended Java to support subtyping for annotations as well. The talk was generally well received, but many of the comments said I should have given a clear definition of what annotations are at the beginning, not interspersed throughout the lecture. I didn’t want to make it so syntax-heavy at the beginning, but I guess I was wrong. I also ran out of time towards the end.
After that, I spent the last two days configuring the JSR 308 prototype compiler on my Mac and my PC at home. It’s not as easy as it sounds, but I finally got it to work, except for the tests. Yesterday I also transferred the changes from xajavac that allow subtyping for annotations into the JSR 308 compiler. But that’s still a work in progress.
