Eric Bodden

19°C

I am happy to announce the availability of my latest publication (joint work with Klaus Havelund, to appear at ISSTA 2008). This time it’s about how to detect data races in multi-threaded Java programs using three novel pointcuts that we implemented as a language extension to AspectJ, and using a novel algorithm called Racer that makes use of these pointcuts. We applied our implementation to the NASA K9 Rover Excecutive and found 70 data races, only one of which was known to NASA developers, although extensive studies had been performed on the code, using all sorts of error detection tools, at a time where 68 of these races were already present!

Download the paper here, or continue reading…

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In case you didn’t know yet: McGill’s Teaching Assistants have been on strike for serveral weeks now, demanding, among other things:

• a sufficiently fair representation of TAs within McGill
• an official person that will act as a negotiator when it comes to working overtime or other TA related grievances
• a workload form that describes precisely what the TAs task are (and not!) for the given term
• and a substantial pay rise.

AGSEM, the TA union has been negotiating with the McGill administration since October but only after a strike was called in early April did McGill begin to move. The first moves were however to intimidate current TAs by firing them from additional jobs that some of them had, as invigilators or research assistants. Whether that’s actually illegal or not is currently being fought out in court, but no matter how this process is going to end, it certainly is bad for McGill’s reputation in general.

To find out more from the union’s point of view, watch the following video or go to http://www.agsem.ca/. (links to media coverage included) To find out more about more about McGill’s point of view click here or here.

Das Jahrestreffen 2008 der RWTH Alumni America wurde ausgerichtet von Alumni Gerd Schroth und seiner Frau Waltraut. Das Treffen war hervorragend organisiert und alle Teilnehmer sprechen den beiden Ihren Dank aus. Auf dem Programm standen dieses Jahr die folgenden Highlights:

• Freitags: „Hinter den Kulissen Tour“ am Flughafen Atlanta
• Besichtigung des Operations Control Center der World Headquarters von Delta Airlines
• Führung durch einige der architektonischen Highlights, insbesondere mehrerer Hotels erbaut von John Portman und des Fox Theatres
• ein Grillabend zu Hause bei Familie Schroth
• Samstags dann: Tour durch das CNN Centre
• Tour durch das Georgia Aquarium
• Empfang und Dinner mit dem Chairman der Deutsch-Amerikanischen Handelskammer, Dr. Eike Jordan, im Capital City Country Club Brookhaven.
• Sonntags: Besteigung des Stone Mountain auf eigene Faust

Trotz der erheblichen Flugverspätungen durch American Airlines in dieser Woche schafften es zum Glück fast alle Teilnehmer wohlbehalten nach Atlanta, so dass wir mit 32 Teilnehmern mit der bisher grössten Teilnehmerzahl aufwarten konnten.

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As I am preparing to hold COMP 520 in Fall, I just read through Michael Schwarzbach’s excellent new version of this lecture. He has one set of exercises on name resolution containing this funny example:

public class java {
    public class lang {
        public class Object {}
    }
}

Give this code to javac and it will bail on you:

mucuna /tmp $ javac java.java
An exception has occurred in the compiler (1.6.0_05). Please file a bug at the
Java Developer Connection (http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport) after checking
the Bug Parade for duplicates. Include your program and the following diagnostic
in your report.  Thank you.
java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.sun.tools.javac.comp.Flow.visitIdent(Flow.java:1214)
at com.sun.tools.javac.tree.JCTree$JCIdent.accept(JCTree.java:1547)

Funny, eh?

Last weekend I attended the annual meeting of the Association of Alumni, Friends, and Supporters of the RWTH Aachen University in North America, this time in Atlanta, Georgia. The meeting was organized by our local fellow Gerd Schroth. The organization was excellent, so thanks a lot for that!

We visited the Hartsfield/Jackson Airport (Delta Airlines’ main hub), the Delta world headquarters and its Operation Control Centre and had a guided tour of some architectural highlights (including the Hyatt and Marriott Hotels which each have a gigantic atrium, and the Fox Theatre, which has a very unique style because it was once built for the Shriners).

We finished up the first day with a fabulous German dinner at the Schroths’ place.

On Saturday we visited the CNN world headquarters and the Georgia Aquarium. This night’s dinner took place at the Capital City Club Brookhaven.

Rainer Schuhmann both stayed until Monday and so had enough time to climb Stone Mountain on Sunday afternoon. What a great view!

And all that for only rundabout 150$! Isn’t that a great deal? So if you are an RWTH Alumni and live in the U.S., Canada or Mexico next time there can be no excuse for not joining us

I just returned from a trip to Germany and to AOSD 2008 in Brussels. It was truly a great conference. The research talks were almost all really interesting, I did some great networking and the social program was absolutely outstanding (I just say chocolate tasting and beer tasting!). Some of the talks that I enjoyed most were Aspect Oriented Test Case Instantiation by Benz and the keynotes by Daniel Wiese and Philip Wadler (Mr. “Super-Lambda”). Unfortunately I missed the third keynote because of the social events in the night before

I stayed a few days longer to visit the Programming Technology Lab at VUB, specifically Charlotte Herzeel and Pascal Costanza. Thanks for having me and thanks for all the interesting discussions!

I uploaded some photos to my gallery. In the next days I will be adding photos from our RWTH Alumni meeting which I am currently attending in Atlanta. 

Today we released version 2.2.5 of Soot, our program analysis and transformation framework for Java. Release 2.2.5 contains some exciting new features, for example:

• Manu Sridharan’s demand-driven refinement-based context-sensitive points-to analysis, based on Spark
• a new Thread-local objects analysis, which Halpert et al. used for automatic lock allocation
• an improved version of our nullness analysis, due to Julian Tibble, and
• Instance Keys, static representatives of runtime objects.

Furthermore there have been several improvements to the Soot Eclipse plugin to enhance its ease of use.

More information and installation instructions here.