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Well I'm back! Last night I returned from Italy on a Milan-Atlanta-Pittsburgh flight. Overall, the trip was great! Here's how it went down:

First off, I took the Pittsburgh to Paris flight. It was really great to fly direct to Europe and even thought it was a relatively small plane (757) they had those awesome TVs where you get to choose your own movie, TV & music, which made the flight fly by.

Genoa is a cool city. At first it looks pretty grungy, but the old city, with its tiny alleyways and the port on the Medditerranean were wonderful and made up for any other low points. We took full advantage of the Italian tradition of pre-dinner drinks, and I met a bunch of cool people from the conference.

The conference itself was also interesting. My workshop paper was fine, and ECOOP had more papers that I actually want to read than any conference I've ever been to before. I would say that 10 of 25 papers were interesting, when compared with the normal 3 or 4. Also Simon Peyton Jones gave a keynote, and I finally understand Haskell's Type Classes!

After Genoa I met up with Amy, a friend studying in Italy. We went to Milan for one day, which was fine, and then we moved along to Domodossola, a small city on the Swiss border in the Alps. I didn't really know what to expect, but we had an amazing time. There were two big highlights. First, we went to an Italian/Mountain folk festival where we ate ribs, sausage and listened to Italian folk music which was kind of like polka. The sausage was definitely the best I have ever had in my life! The next day we went to Lago Maggiore, the biggest lake in Italy. While it was full of European tourists, the scenery was awesome, so I didn't care. There were three tiny islands that we visited with palaces & gardens. The whole thing had the feeling of a Greek village. Definitely awesome.

Italy's great, and sometimes I sort of forget that. I definitely prefer the smaller places we went to over, say, Rome which is hot & crowded (but still great). It's great to be back!

So I am in Genoa!

Haven't done much so far, but I guess I found the hotel's wireless. The flight was really neat. I really enjoyed taking Delta from Pittsburgh to Paris, and the flight was mostly full, so I guess that's a good sign for Pittsburgh. We also had on-demand video in the seats, which makes all the difference.

Here in Genoa the weather is nice & sunny but humid I guess. I've been stuck in this organizational meeting for the student volunteers at ECOOP, and frankly it's not quite the streamlined operation I'd hoped it'd be, but whatever I guess I can't complain since it looks like I won't have too much work to do.

More when I do it! 

This is going to be a short entry, because I am just to about to go to a group meeting, and my parents are in town, so I'm running around like a crazy person. But I need to make you aware of some important facts!

Number 1! Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous have released two new mega-hits! You may have already heard over on Tom's blog-o-sphere, but have recorded two recently custom party songs (because, as you know, we write a new song for every party where we play!). The first song, Come With Me Iff You Want to Live, is about how in the future, man is at war with robots, and how a universal health care plan is man's last line of defense. We wrote it for a party at Gabe's house. The next song, Hurricane Dan (2006), is about a Hurricane. Specifically Hurricane Daniel, which hit Hawaii. We wrote it for Katrina's graduation party. It rocks, if I do say so myself!

Also, I am leaving for Italy on Saturday. I am super jazzed. I am going to Genoa for a conference (ECOOP, where I have a workshop paper, and another paper that I co-authored). Should be a blast. I am also going to travel around just a little bit after the conference is over, so wish me fun. I'll tell you all about it when I get back!

 I like Scala, and I am excited about it. But for some reason, every time I try to use it I encounter some minor annoying issue that sort of turns me off and prevents me from making more use of it. Not something significant mind you (type system, performance) but rather something simply annoying.

This time: I just read about improvements to the Eclipse IDE which would make it easy to create mixed Java/Scala projects, which would be great for Plural. So I downloaded it, installed it, and what do you know, I can't even create an object without a syntax error! This is definitely a bug, since I created an object using the wizards, but when I do it I get a syntax error, "Syntax Error: Delete these tokens" on my object declaration. This bug has been reported, but not fixed, and makes the plugin entirely unusable for me. Boo!

This is going to be a rather technical post. Sorry, but I couldn't find information about this anywhere online, or at least I was misunderstanding what information was available online. What I am going to try to explain is something that I just figured out. Let's say you are creating an Eclipse plugin, and part of the functionality provided by your plugin is some classes that will be usable by other programmers who are using your plugin. How can you make it so that the update site for your plugin includes the source code for your plugin, so that users can hover over class names, see the Java docs, etc.?

( Click here for the gory, gory details. )

I fixed my computer! I'd been having the same problem for about 2 weeks, which rendered my computer more or less useless. After 10 minutes it would freeze, and then each time I would restart after that, it would basically freeze immediately. The problem? My video card! I figured out that that was the problem when the screen was frozen on the Windows error recovery prompt (You know, the one that says, "Windows did not shut down properly, would you like to start in safe mode, etc., etc.), but continued to start up and eventually played the Windows login sound. I tried using my computer's built-in video card, which still has DVI output, and everything is now grand. During the whole process I remembered vaguely that when I bought this video card it needed at  least a 300Watt power supply but recommend 350 (or something like that) and I only had the bare minimum. I'll chaulk it up to that and move on.

I had a less pleasant experience this past week. Kevin, Maja and I have been attempting to pass the Enless Setlist 2, on Rock Band 2. That's where you play every song in the game (84) without saving or anything. You can pause it though, so we were definitely taking breaks. Anyway, we were doing fine, ripping through every song without dying until song #82, a catchy little number called "Visions," by Abnormality. Suffice to say that, a.) even though I was playing on hard, when I normally play on expert b.) Kevin & Maja were both playing on medium c.) we called over Tom VII, our designated RB ringer, we still could not beat this crappy song, and we gave up. It was so hard and completely a-rhythmic. Compounding this was some kind of synchronization issue with their TV, but it wasn't a problem at all before then. Harmonix, I hate you. I may be done with Rock Band. Here's video of a guy actually beating the song on hard.

This weekend I went to Washington D.C.! But not for very long...

You see a certain special lady found a super sweet deal on a flight to Europe, and that flight was leaving from Washington D.C. Because of her copious friends in that city, we decided to turn in into a mini vacation, one that started on Friday morning driving to D.C., and ended up with me driving back Saturday night by myself.

The trip was fun. We basically did no real touristy stuff. We mostly hung out with friends. For example, on Friday night we went to a Korean BBQ restaurant, which was amazing, and then to Asian style Karaoke, where I sang many songs over the course of four hours. Best song? Escape (The Pina Colada Song). Worst song? Land of Confusion, by Genesis. It's not so much a bad song as it didn't go over very well. No one else knew it, and the Karaoke video was full of wierd imagry (e.g., Adolph Hitler).

Saturday we went to a crepe place called Crepes A-Go-Go. Also very cool.

These days I mostly play my acoustic guitar. In fact, I last played one of my electric guitars on a regular basis back in high school. But, I do have two electric guitars, a Les Paul Delux from the 70s and a Guild Starfire III that I bought new, circa-1997, and pictured to the right. Guild is a funny company. They're mostly known for acoustics, not electrics. They got bought by Fender in 1995 or something, and since 2005 when they were merged in with Tacoma Guitars, they haven't made any electrics. Still, I always liked the Starfire, and I remember it playing well and sounding good.

Recently though I've been a lot more excited about electric guitar. I chaulk this up to some massive Guitar Hero sessions. Unfortunately, while my guitar still looks good, it's got some, uh, serious tuning issues since returning from its prolonged vacation. For one thing, it won't stay in tune for more than a couple of songs, even after I replaced the strings. Partially I attribute this to the Bigsby tailpiece. (Seriously, why did I ever get this? Did I think I was going to be in a Rockabilly band or something? The Starfire IV is basically the same guitar but with a regular tail. That's what I should have gotten.) But mainly I attribute it to the floating bar bridge, which I am only now coming to understand. Which brings me to my next issue.

The intonation of the guitar was also totally F-ed. For those of you out of the loop, when a guitar's intonation sucks, a string could be perfectly in tune when you strike the open note, but then flat or sharp when you strike a higher note. In my case, about 1/2 a step flat (!!!) when hitting the 12th fret.

See here's the deal: Basically for a very long time I did not understand intonation. I am only just beginning to understand how it works and how to fix it. On most guitars it's not too bad. Take this Epiphone Casino for instance. It's got a Bigsby, but it's also got a bridge that's screwed into the body, and a tune-o-matic bridge. With this guitar you can easily adjust the intonation by using a screwdriver and moving the little bridge piece for each string forward or backward.

Now check out my bridge. First, and more obviously, it's not no tune-o-matic. This is called a bar brige (I think) and it means that you cannot individually adjust the intonation for each string. That's not so bad. But if you look closely you will see that my bridge is NOT screwed into the guitar's body. Only the tension of the strings keeps it in place, so to adjust the intonation you just push it back and forth, which honestly feels really wrong. I wouldn't have done it if this forum I found hadn't confirmed that this was "best practice."

Anyway, the result is that it's much better, and I'm glad I know how to fix it, but it still needs a little work. My tastes in guitars has changed over time. At this point in my life, the only thing I care about at all is whether or not the guitar stays in tune. That's it! (Okay, this is not entirely true, but it's close enough.) My Acoustic, for instance (a Taylor 814ce) basically never goes out of tune, and always sounds great. I love it. My Guild still looks cool, and is sounding better, but still needs some TLC. Kids, get yourself a guitar that will stay in tune.

Today I made a screen capture demo of Sync-or-Swim, the static analysis program that I created with Kevin Bierhoff as part of my thesis research. You should definitely watch it now, even if you don't know anything about computers. If you want to actually be able to read the text, you should watch in HD, fullscreen.

Sync-or-Swim Video

The creation of the video was a little annoying. I needed it to be HD so that the text was actually readable. Here's how I did it:

1. Downloaded CamStudio, a great and free screen capture program.
2. Downloaded their lossless video codec.
3. Important: If you watch Vimeo to recognize your video as HD, it cannot have a 4:3 aspect ratio! To fix this I changed my screen resolution to 1280x768. I told Windows not to stretch the screen so that I saw black bars at the top and bottom.
4. Record and upload to Vimeo. Sweet!

Also, if you've been wondering why my rate of posting has dropped a bit, it's probably because I am putting more of the pointless stuff up on Twitter. If you want to follow me, do, but you'll have to request my friendship (nolacoaster). I still can't decide if I should be open or if I want the protection to post #juicytweets.

This weekend I drove to Columbus, OH for Owen's wedding. This is like the third one actually. There was one in Taiwan, one in Vegas (visa-related, I think...) and now one in Columbus where Owen's family lives. It was great. The food at the reception was particularly good. It was at a Chinese restaurant there. Highlights include a giant whole fish that was super moist and a big mound of lobster pieces. As you can see from the pictures, there were a ton of camera and A/V people getting in the way of my pictures. ;-)

This makes two weekends in a row that I am taking and posting pictures! I must be getting back into photography...

Since it's been rather difficult to find a listing of all the banks that were stress tested, and whether or not they passed, I thought I'd post this information. The data comes from this government document (thanks simrob ). See how your bank stacks up! Note that in reality there are different degrees of fail, and each bank that fails will have to raise different amounts of capital for reserve purposes.

American Express	Pass
Bank of America	Fail
BB&T	Pass
BNY Mellon	Pass
CapitalOne	Pass
Citigroup	Fail
Fifth Third	Fail
GMAC	Fail
Goldman Sachs	Pass
JPMorgan Chase	Pass
Key	Fail
MetLife	Pass
Morgan Stanley	Fail
PNC*	Fail
Regions	Fail
State Street	Pass
SunTrust	Fail
U.S. Bancorp	Pass
Wells Fargo	Fail

*My Bank


Update:
Okay, I finally found someone else's posting with details!

Just in case that you doubt we played Art All Night at 10:30am, now there are pictures to prove it. Thankspepperedjane!

Whoa, flickr now has statistics for user accounts, and they're pretty fun to investigate.

Check out the post-marathon bump that I got. 

And here are my most viewed pictures of all time.

Update:
Okay, so apparently the stats are private. Boo. What I can tell you is that this picture of a henna tatoo is the most popular, and it's been viewed 4787 times.

Yesterday was the Pittsburgh Marathon! It was a lot of fun to watch, although I can't say much about how fun it was to run. I took a bunch of pictures. Most people I know who would care have probably seen all of these, but for completeness sake I'll tell you who I saw!

My hardcore friends who run marathons include:
Jeff
Noam
Jonathan
Gabe S.
Emily
Gabe Z.
Stacey
Tom
Carsten
Mary
Thomas
Patrick

You guys rule! You make me want to start running again, so pencil me in... Great Race 2009. No, I am not doing any marathons, and even if I do one some day, I am not dumb enough to commit to one now, considering I haven't run since last summer. But it was really fun to watch, and I got excited by the prospect of running again.

In other news, I am trying to grow banana peppers in my back yard! If only I lived in a city with 6+ hours of sunshine a day, as the seedling suggests banana peppers require.

I just encountered something in Java that I thought was worth mentioning. It's not exactly a gotcha, but it's good to be aware of.

If you have a nested instance class, synchronizing on this in the inner class is not the same as synchronizing on this in the outer class. This may seem obvious, but it is worth noting because the inner class can refer to methods of either the inner or the outer class in a seemingly ambiguous manner (without explicit qualification). Here's an example program, and its output:


If you know how nested instance classes are implemented, this is not at all surprising. A separate class is created that takes as a constructor argument a reference to an instance of the outer class. So there are two separate instances upon which we are synchronizing.

Some pictures were posted from Cortney's party, where we played on Saturday!

Make sure to check out the Hummus rap.

Oh man, this weekend was really busy, but really fun. Those of you around Pittsburgh know that the weather was unbearably nice, and everyone was outside with their dogs and gardens and iced coffees and whathaveyous.

Friday night I joined some Pitt students who were celebrating the end of their semester. Thanks to the weather, a normal party turned into a porch party, which was quite a bit of fun. Only problem? I didn't get home until like two, even though...

The next morning I woke up at 9 or so for the 11am Urban Hike. It was the first one of the season! We were in the Mt. Oliver/Allentown area. That's sort of in between the south side slopes and Mt. Washington. It was really nice mostly due to the weather, but there was a good crowd, a couple people brought their dogs, and we even discovered a new park, Grandview Park, with great elevated views of downtown.

Than night, a Sick Ridiculous concert! We played at a party for our friend Cortney's birthday. The sound was really good for a party, and the fact that we had an extremely audience resulted in a large amount of fun being had by me and Tom. Thanks to those of you who were there. We wrote a new song about universal heath care and time traveling robots called, "Come with me if you want to live."

Today, we had another Sick Ridiculous show, this time at Lawrenceville's Art All Night. While the crowd wasn't quite what I heard it was the night before, it was surprisingly good for 10:30am. I did think our playing suffered a bit. I think we need more warmup or something, but it took about 15 minutes before we were clicking and sounding decent. Thanks DOUBLE if you made it out this am.

Then, lunch of Dim Sum, afternoon backyard sitting and dinner at the Grand Concourse in Station Square. I will go pass out now!

Man, it seems like everyone is defending or proposing these days!

Yesterday I went to Kevin Bierhoff's thesis defense. Since my work is based on his and also he is my friend, I thought it'd be a good idea to check it out. The defense was great. There was a huge turnout. He passed. The talk went well, if a little light on the technical details, but it was great for a general CS audience. Later that night we went to Bites & Brews to celebrate. Congratulations Kevin!

I also went to see Bite of Brecht, a play on campus that focused on the poetry of Bertolt Brecht. Among other things, it included the song Mack the Knife, which he wrote for the Threepenny Opera. I was expecting some avant-garde garbage based on the lukewarm review in the City Paper, but I actually found it to be quite entertaining. The music was good. The acting was good. There were some funny parts. It did seem to drag a bit at the end, but that was my only complaint. Check it out.

After spending a lot of time doing pointless things, I finally got SDL to work with Scala. Actually, there was nothing tricky about the fact that I was using Scala, that was just part of my original goal. You could equally well say I couldn't get SDL to work with Java. It was pretty obvious that I needed to download SDL.dll and the bindings for Java (both a jar file and some more DLLs), but even then things still weren't working. I was getting the dreaded java.land.UnsatisfiedLinkError. 

Turned out I needed to do three things...
- Add -Djava.library.path= as a VM argument, giving it there folders where both the SDL DLLs and the sdljava DLLs were located.
- Add System.loadLibrary("XXX") for each of the required DLLs into the code itself. This is difficult because it's kind of hard to figure out which DLLs are required! I used this tool to figure it out. 
- Lastly, the biggest problem was that I needed a DLL that I didn't have, SDL_image.dll. The tutorial I was using needed it, but I guess it didn't say or I didn't see where I needed to download it separately. You can get it here.