Real-Life Mass Transit Horror Stories

Well, just one: On the way home today, the bus arrives at a stop, and a girl begins to step down the stairs to the door at the back of the bus. The door just won’t open for her, and the bus begins to pull away from the stop. The girl is livid. “Stop the bus,” she yells, “I’m trying to get off!” The bus stops quickly, and the girl tries once again to get off the bus. »

Oh Ubuntu, why must your Java VM be so terrible?

Ubuntu has finally let me down. Breezy has, for some time now, had eclipse in available, using gcj (a gcc frontend that compiles java source to native code). Tonight, I figured I’d install eclipse at home, and play around with writing plugins. For added fun, I might grab a copy of Sun’s java VM, and do some benchmarking. I was certainly willing to sacrifice portability for speed in this case, but it would be interesting to see just how much speed I was getting. »

Maven: buy the razor, get the blades for free

Build tools are tricky things. Make and Ant lack key features for larger projects, like dependency resolution. The GNU autotools add more power to make, at the cost of extreme complexity. Project structure (e.g. directory layout) . Do you leave all your source files in the root directory, or create sub-directories? How do you divide the files into the directories? All of these combinations require a more powerful (and therefore more complex) build tool. »

Autonomic Pilot

I’ve become the new build monster master at work. This means that I have to keep the nightly builds running, and watch for anything strange happening during the unit and functional tests. Should anything peculiar happen, I’ve got to either fix it myself, or find someone who can. I will spare you my personal opinion on the effectiveness of assigning one person to be the build master. The other night, herk and I were talking about my new role. »

Dang, that's nasty

Mike was kind enough to point out the wikkid-cool new interface to the graduate course descriptions page. After slapping my forehead a few times, laughing hysterically, having a stiff drink, then praying to God, I decided I had to take action. I created a stronger, faster, better than before version using javascript and css, viewable here. My new implementation of the graduate course descriptions page retains the hard to use ugly-as-sin interface of the current page, while adding the following features: Content stored in regular google-parsable html. »

University Unlearning: Optimization

Many professors would encourage students to try and write the fastest executing program for a given assignment, possibly awarding bonus points to whoever won. During class, they would point out ways to decrease execution time, or decrease memory usage. Such pearls of wisdom included “passing function parameters as bit vectors will save on memory usage”, and the ever-popular “right shifting an integer is equivalent to dividing by two, only faster!” If it ain’t broke… There was one thing, however, that I never heard: optimization is bad. »

It's a re-remix!

Firefox rules. To see why firefox rules, follow these two steps: Get firefox. Get greasemonkey. Now you can start having fun. Possibly the coolest grasemonkey script is Book Burro. When viewing a book on amazon.com, barnes and nobel, etc, Book Burro displays the price of the book from competing websites in a cool little floating window. Last night, I hacked Book Burro to work with chapters.ca and amazon.ca, so now us Canadians can comparison shop with only a single tab open at once. »