08.30.05

Donald Rumsfield Quotes

Posted in Religion/Philosophy at 12:23 pm by James

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

I found the quote first on: Rumsfeld’s Wisdom
Where the known meets the unknown is where science begins. Also found another reference to his quotes at: slate.msn.com. Of course you can always check out the source at dod.gov

08.22.05

Crocodiles immune against AIDS

Posted in health at 3:34 pm by James

Check out reuters.com story discussing the crocodile’s immunity to AIDs.

Crocodiles have a far better immune system than humans that acutally attacks foreign particles that enter the blood. I guess there are many things we can learn from one of the oldest creatures still living on the earth…

08.17.05

Creatures of habit

Posted in PL Research, health at 5:22 pm by James

I have been busily working on my research for the NextGen Generic Java compiler. I have spend the last couple days starting on this paper for SAC 2006. I was reviewing the list of type dependent operations supported by NextGen. In particular, I was double checking if NextGen currently handles casting correctly. I proceeded to create the following test case:

public class A {
   static class Box < T> { }
   public static void main(String[] args) {
        Box < String> s = new Box< String>();
        Box< ?> a1 = (Box< ?>) (Object)s;
        Box< Object> a2 = (Box< Object>) (Object) s;
    }
}

After executing this code, I inspected the resulting bytecode and discovered that casting was not working properly. So after some fiddling, I found the segment of code I need to modify. At the top of this section, I also found the following comment:


//TODO: cant cast Object to Box< String>
//will need to fix this case to support
//generic casts

So I’ve returned to fix a problem that I had skimmed over before, using the same basic names and types. Well I guess I like using Box< T> as an example. Still kinda funny though.