Category Archives: Ramblings

Ramblings of a somewhat more personal nature.

ClassLoader.definePackage

Posted on March 26, 2010 by Mathias

I received a bug report yesterday that Class.getPackage() wasn’t working for user-defined classes and classes written in the Interactions Pane: I was trying to run one of our assignment projects on DrJava and kepts getting a NullPointerException because getPackage() returns … Continue reading →

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UPS Went Poof

Posted on March 26, 2010 by Mathias

This morning, my uninterruptable power supply (UPS) for my computer went poof. It really made that sound, and then there was a chemical smell in the room. It had acted up a few times in the last couple of months, … Continue reading →

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10.4 Programs, A Dying Breed

Posted on March 2, 2010 by Mathias

MacOS 10.4-compatible programs really are a dying breed. First, VLC stopped supporting 10.4 in new versions (last 10.4-compatible version is release 0.9.10), then Eclipse stopped supporting 10.4, and now VirtualBox has dropped support for 10.4 as well (last 10.4-compatible version … Continue reading →

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ReLooper for DrJava?

Posted on February 27, 2010 by Mathias

I received a message from Danny Dig, the project lead of the ReLooper project. ReLooper is a refactoring tool that enables Java programmers to parallelize loops over arrays or vectors using Java’s upcoming ParallelArray framework. I assume Danny searched for … Continue reading →

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Anonymous Inner Class Surprise

Posted on February 16, 2010 by Mathias

I had no idea that the following code was allowed: public class AICSurprise { public static void main(String[] args) { new Object() { public void foo() { System.out.println(“foo”); } }.foo(); } } I thought foo() could not be accessed from … Continue reading →

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A HotSpot Java Error, a Bus Error and a Segmentation Fault

Posted on January 30, 2010 by Mathias

When I run Soot to create a call graph of DrJava, I get the aforementioned HotSpot Java error on Windows with Java 1.6.0_18. On Mac OS X 10.4 with Java 1.5.0_19, I get a “Bus error” (Java exit status 138). … Continue reading →

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Java Bug 4396719 – Mark Sweep stack overflow on deeply nested Object arrays

Posted on January 29, 2010 by Mathias

I’m trying to create a call graph of all of DrJava using Soot. DrJava is a cross-platform application that has some classes that get compiled and used only on certain operating systems; for example, the com.apple.eawt package is only used … Continue reading →

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Sometimes I Love Myself

Posted on January 25, 2010 by Mathias

Sometimes I have those moments when something small that I did brings me tremendous joy. This just happened when I was using DrJava with Soot. I don’t know the Soot framework, so the “Additional Javadoc URLs” feature that I introduced … Continue reading →

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IT Hell

Posted on January 22, 2010 by Mathias

Building emacs22 to replace emacs21, so I can install yasnippet, so I can install scala-tool-support, because I can’t install Eclipse since it requires Mac OS 10.5 and I only have 10.4 because Apple doesn’t support Java 6 on 32-bit Macs… … Continue reading →

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Broken Things 2010

Posted on January 17, 2010 by Mathias

So far, it seems like 2010 is a year of broken things. Mr. Coffee, my coffee maker, broke. I loved the guy, so I immediately replaced him with his younger brother. The power supply fan in my Dell at home … Continue reading →

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Out-of-Office Auto-Replies

Posted on December 21, 2009 by Mathias

Great. I’m starting to get flooded by out-of-office auto-replies from the AP CS mailing list again. I keep monitoring that mailing list for mentionings of DrJava, so I can make sure we help high school teachers with potential problems. I … Continue reading →

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Remembered Number Significance

Posted on November 25, 2009 by Mathias

Memories can be strange. A lot of people around me are probably now having memories triggered by (turkey) smells. I have memories triggered by numbers. Our Hudson build server just notified us of a unit test failure after a recent … Continue reading →

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Open Source: Don’t Steal What You Can Have for Free

Posted on November 18, 2009 by Mathias

Open source is not the same as public domain material. It is not content that is not owned by anyone. The fact that we give something away for free does not allow you to just steal it. DrJava is an … Continue reading →

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Boring Backport

Posted on November 13, 2009 by Mathias

I’m in the process of porting some scientific code originally written in Fortran, which was then ported to Java, which was then ported to Habanero Java, back to Java, while maintaining a Habanero Java feature called array views. It’s incredibly … Continue reading →

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Wikipedia and the Right to Know vs Right to Privacy

Posted on November 12, 2009 by Mathias

Sometimes it’s interesting to compare Wikipedia articles in different languages. I just read something about the last school shooting in Germany, the one in Winnenden in March 2009, and decided to search the web for it. The English Wikipedia article … Continue reading →

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Twenty Years Ago

Posted on November 9, 2009 by Mathias

Twenty years ago, on 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. I remember the day, but the TV coverage doesn’t belong to my most intense childhood TV memories: It feels like this event is bracketed by stronger memories of … Continue reading →

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Ridiculous Texas Bureaucracy That Doesn’t Make Anyone Safer

Posted on November 9, 2009 by Mathias

Last Tuesday I went back to the DPS to renew my drivers license — temporary visitors now have to do that once a year. I took exactly the same documents with me that allowed me to get a drivers license … Continue reading →

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Funny Feature Request of the Day

Posted on October 31, 2009 by Mathias

Funny feature request of the day: Zoom In Zoom Out I would like to request you to please kindly add Zoom in Zoom out feature in print preview. Please do it as soon as possible bcz we are having difficulties … Continue reading →

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A Repeating Pattern of Hate: SourceForge

Posted on October 23, 2009 by Mathias

I’m hating SourceForge again, and this is a very frequent thing. This time, I’m hating it for two reasons: News submission is broken. I made a new DrJava development release, drjava-20091021-r5004, but I can’t post a news release, because the … Continue reading →

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Two Confusing Errors

Posted on October 19, 2009 by Mathias

A while ago, I was told by our one-and-only client of Mint that the version of DrJava with Mint does not display Mint as a compiler, even though it is included in the jar file and therefore should be available. … Continue reading →

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