Author Archives: Mathias

About Mathias

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

Pictures from Recent Journeys

I’ve done a fair amount of traveling again recently. It was exciting, and I got some much needed sun in the last two trips, but it’s good to be home again. For a while.

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Java Executors, Continuations, and Small Step Semantics

In my book club at work, we’re discussing the book Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz et al. This Tuesday, we talked about Chapter 8, Applying Thread Pools, and in particular about how to correctly size thread pools. Listing … Continue reading

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Practice Pays Off!

I reviewed the video recording of my first company-wide internal talk, which I gave twice together with one of my colleagues on October 23 and 25. Practice really pays off! I’ve never practiced this much for any talk, not even … Continue reading

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XPS 8300 Shortcomings

So, now that I have disposed of my old Dimension 9200, I realize that the new (well, year-old?) XPS 8300 isn’t really all that expandable. The Dimension 9200 absolutely crushed it in that category. In the Dimension 9200, I could … Continue reading

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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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More Hiking Experiences

I can’t write specifics about what I do at work, and lately in my free time, hiking is what I’ve been doing. At the risk of turning this into a hiking blog, here are some details about another hike I … Continue reading

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Three New Hiking Experiences

I’ve kept up my goal this month to go hiking every weekend. Among other places, I went to Marmot Pass, my first trip to the Olympic Peninsula; and a third trip to Mount Rainier this year, this time to Sunrise. … Continue reading

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So You Know What I Did This Summer

Loving the Northwest and my job. Three kayaking trips Two whitewater rafting trips Four days of hiking at Mt. Rainier Solo hiking day trip into the Cascades Business trip to Ireland and Romania I was too busy in Ireland to … 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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A Work Presentation, and a Comment by a Turing Award Laureate

I gave a presentation at work today to an audience of probably 100 to 150 people, describing my project of the last week. The project involved genetic algorithms for auto-tuning configurations, and I almost put the “Kanye – Gay Fish” … Continue reading

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Back from the ACM Turing Centenary Celebration

I just returned from two days in San Francisco, where I attended the ACM Turing Centenary Celebration. It was a truly geeky birthday for a dead guy: 32 Turing Award laureates attended and participated in panels and talks. I ran … 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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Three Years Left?

According to a Bloomberg article, I have about three years left before my employability as a software engineer will start to decline. There was some discussion about this on Slashdot. I particularly liked this comment, in response to why software … Continue reading

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My First 10 km Run

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I ran 10 km without stopping. It felt good. Last year, I had come close several times, but always decided to take it slow, maybe just run 8 km, and then something … 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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