We made it!!!! Awesome guys! (dance) And a big BOOOO for the guy who unplugged the transmission cable in Vienna! @=
Finaaaaale!
Eric | June 25, 2008University ranking the Google way
Eric | June 22, 2008As 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.
Skype emoticons for wordpress
Eric | June 20, 2008I just installed (skype) emoticons for WordPress. Isn’t that great? No I can be much more concise when I write my blog entries, such as: (flag:de) (yes) — (flag:tr) (no) 😉
Bodden.de now PicLens enabled!
Eric | June 19, 2008
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 😉
TAs End Strike by 91.5%, Reject Administration Back-to-Work Offer by 97.5%
Eric | June 19, 2008For those of you who have been following news about the TA Strike…
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 monitoring solution to the data races in the JDK
Eric | June 16, 2008A 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.
Protected: Von Formel 1, Besuch aus Deutschland und einer Ueberdosis weisser Margarine
Eric | June 15, 2008Data races in the JDK!
Eric | June 14, 2008At the moment I am doing some more work on evaluating tracematches ahead-of-time. One tracematch patten that we use in our benchmarks we called ASyncIter, a simplified version of which looks as follows:
tracematch(Collection c) {
sym sync after returning:
call(* Collections.synchr*(..)) && args(c);
sym iter before:
call(* Collection.iterator()) && target(c);
sync iter {
if(!Thread.holdsLock(c))
error(``Have to synchronize iterator at ''+thisJoinPoint);
}
}
This tracematch reports an error if you create a synchronized collection and then iterate over this collection without holding a lock on the collection object. According to the JDK javadoc this is forbidden as it can lead to a race condition. One has to use synchronized collections as follows:
McGill in the movies
Eric | June 13, 2008
Photo by Claudio Calligaris
I am sure you already saw the latest trailer of Get Smart. Part of that movie was actually shot on McGill campus. Watch for yourself (and pay attention to the red car – at around 1:31):
TA strike coming to an end
Eric | June 13, 2008
Yesterday McGill’s teaching assistants voted 96.2% in favor to accept a recommendation made by the conciliator a few days earlier. I think that the recommendation is a fair compromise and in particular it does not contain any strange loopholes no more like they did exist in the original proposal that McGill tabled some weeks ago. All that’s missing now is a proper back-to-work protocol. Once that’s negotiated and ratified the strike will finally be over – yeahhh!
The back-to-work protocol might cause another long debate though because McGill wants to avoid the lawsuits that AGSEM is currently running against them but on the other hand still does refuses to pay any compensation to people who were fired because of the strike. On the other hand McGill is running out of time as the case will go before the court in a little more than a week.
