I recently had a paper rejected from ECOOP '09. It sounds like it was close to getting in, and it's possible that the review summarized below tipped the balance. I've paraphrased most comments to protect the guilty. A running total of the error count is displayed in parens.

> "This paper appears to be very carefully worked out. However I have ( Read more... )

So, I was using a package that was apparently incompatible with the LNCS template, but since TextMate was running pdflatex in batch mode, it just ignored the error and continued (and the TextMate output window didn't say anything!).  Turns out the conference needs the file to compile with no errors (go figure), and so I had to scramble to fix it.  ( Read more... )

I just can't get a break ( Read more... )

I just had a surreal experience dealing with a parking ticket. The Pittsburgh Parking Authority has a really stupid speech interface when you call to deal with your ticket. It asks you what you want to do, but you can only say two things!  "Pay a ticket" or "get information".  I said, "speak to customer service," and I also pressed 0 at the same ( Read more... )

Ok, most of you probably know how I feel about diamonds, but an ad I saw the other day is really over the top.  There is an ad in the bus station across the street from Whole Foods that reads:

Sleeping on the couch?

We have a diamond for that.

I find this incredibly disgusting. 

This is f***ing ridiculous.  Due to type erasure, you can't create an array of a generic type T without having an object of type T and using reflection to make an array of the same type.  But if you create an Object array, you can't cast it to a T array either, since an Object array that will always contain T's is not the same as a T array (as it ( Read more... )

I just want to create a damn pair.

(actual code follows)
new Pair>(result, new ArrayList())

Sigh. In a civilized language, this would be simply "(result, nil)".

I just don't get it--why is it, after all these years of research and innovation, the best programming environment we have so far is really, in the grand scheme of things, quite mediocre.  Now, I really do like Eclipse, but I mean really--it's 2005 ( Read more... )

Yes, I know I can fake it with anonymous classes, but it's SOOOO ugly, especially if you're using generics...

In today's edition of the continuing "I hate Java" series, Donna talks about the lack of higher-order functions ( Read more... )