Eric Bodden

-1°C

We made it!!!! Awesome guys! And a big BOOOO for the guy who unplugged the transmission cable in Vienna! 

As I read today, Google has added website traffic statistics to Google Trends. I thought it may be interesting to compare the major Canadian universities…

As you can see both McGill and the University of Toronto clearly dominate the picture. Interestingly their traffic seems to follow the same pattern with a clear lack of interest in the early summer months and a peak in the fall (enrollment time?). Second is Vancouver’s UBC, followed by the University of Waterloo and Queen’s.

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I just installed emoticons for Wordpress. Isn’t that great? No I can be much more concise when I write my blog entries, such as: (yes) — (no)

Just after installing Firefox 3 yesterday I stumbled upon PicLens, a really fun image viewer which integrates nicely into firefox with this plugin. My webpage and gallery are now PicLens-enabled which means that after you installed the PicLens plugin all you have to do is move to my webpage or to one of the albums in my gallery and hit the little PicLens button at the top:

Note: Before you click, you have to wait until it turns blue. On my home page that might take a couple of seconds because the plugin will load information about all the images in my gallery. If you move to a single album in my gallery only the images in this album will be shown when you hit the button.

If you want to PicLens-enable your own Gallery2, you can download picLensRss.php here.

Have fun! I will

For those of you who have been following news about the TA Strike…

AGSEM writes:

In a General Assembly held [yesterday], a landslide 91.5% vote by McGill’s teaching assistants ended their 72-day strike. TAs are eager to return to work now that the parties have agreed on a collective agreement.

At the same time, TAs voted by an even stronger margin–97.5%–to reject the Administration’s Back-to-Work Protocol tabled [yesterday] morning. Members refused to accept a protocol that would inadequately address the TAs fired and suspended from their on-campus employment and would rather return to work and let their cases proceed in court.

A few days ago I blogged about a few really subtle data races that can easily be triggered in the JDK, when invoking methods like containsAll on synchronized (!) collections. In the following code you can get a race on sl2 because sl1.containsAll(sl2) synchronizes on sl1 only, not on the argument sl2!

List sl1 = Collections.synchronizedList(new ArrayList());
List sl2 = Collections.synchronizedList(new ArrayList());
sl1.containsAll(sl2);

Here are now two easy aspect-oriented solutions to this problem, first in form of a tracematch, then in form of a normal AspectJ aspect. You can download the tracematch here and the plain AspectJ aspect here.

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