This week I learned...

• bug.gd is a web site dedicated to finding explanations and workarounds for every cryptic error message your computer can generate (with a little help from you).

• The Canadian Standards Association charges Canadian citizens hundreds of dollars for (copy-protected) CD-ROMs containing the detailed regulations they're required to follow to do their work.

• Mississippi medical examiner Stephen Hayne claims he performs 1500-1800 autopsies each year. According to the article, “People who have visited Hayne’s practice during an autopsy session have described seeing as many as 15 bodies opened at once, with Hayne and his assistants smoking cigars, sometimes even eating sandwiches, as they go from one body to the next.” It's not just gross. Hayne performs about 80% of the state's forensic autopsies. He tells prosecutors what they want to hear. He testifies in court. People go to jail. I couldn't put this article down. Must read.

• The Jikes Research Virtual Machine is a JVM written in Java. (The garbage collector is written in Java, too. In fact the garbage collector is pluggable, which makes Jikes RVM a nice testbed for experimental new GC strategies.)

• An “on-the-fly” garbage collector is one that is neither “stop-the-world” nor “fully concurrent”— that is, it neither stops all application threads at any point while it collects, nor works entirely in a separate background thread. Instead, it asks each application thread to pause periodically, at their convenience, to do some GC work.

• Xiao-Feng Li, a developer on the Apache Harmony JVM project, has a blog on programming language runtime implementation techniques. The posts often focus on GC.

• In C++, static_cast<B2 *>(d), where d is of type D * and B2 is the second base class of D, does not compile to a simple addition operation, even though the offset of the B2 within D is a constant known to the compiler. The catch is that if d is null, the result must be null. So the compiled result includes a conditional branch, essentially (d == NULL ? NULL : (intptr) d + some bytes).