Today, my paper: Making Offline Analyses Continuous has been accepted to ESEC/FSE 2013 New Ideas (NI) Track. The paper is in collaboration with Yuriy Brun, Alexandra Meliou.


The paper proposes to apply continuous testing techniques to databases to detect data entry errors where the user enters a valid but incorrect data to the database. Our prototype implementation, CDT, shows that the technique is feasible and imposes 13% overhead to normal database operations on average.

Let me start by saying that I only had one experience with http://www.abcgiftcards.com, and it was a bad experience. I know that one data point is not enough for generalization, but I still wanted other people to know my experience.

Background: I purchase considerable amount of stuff online, including digital media from iTunes. That is why, I try to track down discounts for iTunes gift cards. So far, I managed to get discounts up to 20%, which is quite nice when you think about it. I had experience with eBay and Best Buy with zero problems at all. I have bought around 10 iTunes gift cards from eBay and around 15 from Best Buy.

About one month ago, I decided to buy another gift card as my iTunes balance was close to hitting '0'. I searched Best Buy for discount, could not find any. I put some bids to eBay and again could not win. At that time, while searching the Internet for discounts, I find ABC Gift Cards. It looked legit, so I decided to give it a try. However, since this is my first time, I decided to buy $25 card, which had 7% discount at the time.

I received the code in a piece of paper attached to the receipt in one week. This gave the first warning. I understand that this web page buys and sells codes that are no longer wanted by the original owners, however why would not they send the original card? Do they buy codes from people without getting the original card and making sure that it is not scratched? If so, how do they even verify that the code is not used?

As expected the code did not work. iTunes told me that it has already been redeemed (but not by me). So, I decided to contact ABC Gift Cards customer service. After three days and leaving two messages to their customer services (because all customer  representatives were busy. I guess they either have very few customer  representatives, or they are having a lot of problems with the codes :-)), I finally talked with a customer representative and asked for refund. This was the response (more or less):
"Take a picture/scan of the receipt with the gift code clearly visible and send it to claims@abcgiftcard.com"
Looks simply, right? So, why this information is not available on the receipt, so that I could learn it without spending 3 days? Are they hoping that people will give up so that they don't have to refund eventually?

Unfortunately, the answer is I don't know. I am also not telling you whether to use or not use this service. Just realize that there are some sketchy things going on and know that for at least one person it did not work.

Have similar experience? Let us know by leaving a comment!

Last week, my recent paper: Making Offline Analyses Continuous has been accepted to ESEC/FSE 2013. The paper is in collaboration with Yuriy Brun, Michael D. Ernst, and David Notkin.


Put simply, the paper proposes a framework that considers existing analyses that work on program source code as black boxes. Using these black box analyses, then an author can implement a wrapper that transforms the analysis into an IDE-integrated continuous one. All ugly details about how concurrent developer edits are handled, when the analysis is run, and how the results are updated and shown to the developer are either completely handled by the framework or represented in the wrapper through a high-level API.

The framework is prototyped for Eclipse: https://bitbucket.org/kivancmuslu/solstice
Also, check out the example continuous analyses implemented so far:

1. Continuous testing: https://bitbucket.org/kivancmuslu/solstice-continuous-testing
2. Continuous FindBugs: https://bitbucket.org/kivancmuslu/solstice-continuous-findbugs
3. Continuous PMD: https://bitbucket.org/kivancmuslu/solstice-continuous-pmd

The camera-ready version of the paper will be available soon (around July 1st, 2013), and I am looking for future extensions!

I have been using Weebly for a while now, and I am quite happy. As a free service (with some forced self advertisement and limitations), Weebly does not offer a way to statically put files to your webpage. It makes sense as this is related to hosting, which one should be paying, but provided freely (as a subdomain of Weebly) by Weebly.

However, what if you already have a domain and hosting? In my case I already had hosting from GoDaddy and I bought a domain from GoDaddy, too. Weebly plays very nicely if you want to use your existing domain. You just have to forward your domain's IP to Weebly's IP. There are many articles, including this one.

So far so good, but what if you want to use your existing domain and continue hosting files under your domain. Well, this is the point where everything breaks down. As your domain redirects to Weebly by default, all existing files in your domain (that were uploaded by FTP) also point to Weebly, however they don't have counterparts (and cannot have) under Weebly's domain, so everything fells apart. 

At this point one can ask: why would you even need this? Well, in my case, a portion of my webpage is auto-generated from a database and the generated HTML code needs static links. When you add a file through Weebly's menu, you get a weird hashed link such as:
 http://www.kivancmuslu.com/uploads/1/8/0/4/18042401/6891725.png?135
which is almost impossible to statically encode in your HTML generator. Even if you don't generate HTML code, you could still want a static link for files that change frequently in your webpage so that you can change those files through FTP, without the need to republish your webpage. By static links, I mean something along the lines:
http://files.kivancmuslu.com/Publications/2012/MusluBHEN2012oopsla.bib
(e.g., more readable, more structural, does not change)

Now that I explained the problem, I can tell you that there is a (somewhat neat) workaround for this problem. You have to create a subdomain in your domain (I have created http://files.kivancmuslu.com and pointed it to /files folder) and then in your DNS settings make sure that your subdomain points to your actual (original) domain IP address (which should be default). Instructions to create the sub-domain (it was tricky for me to find it, even the second time). This way you should have two A-entries in your DNS management (note, this is just for verification, you do not really need to change anything manually here):

• @ (main domain) should map to Weebly's IP (so that your webpage redirects to the page you build at Weebly).
  
• files (your new subdomain) should map to your actual (original) domain address (so that whenever you link from this subdomain, it does not redirect to Weebly, but finds the file in your actual domain).

That is all I needed to do. Now I can upload whatever I need to a path under /files... and I know that I will be able to refer those in HTML using http://files.kivancmuslu.com/...

Questions or problems, let me know!

After using Windows 8 for a while and being very happy with its stability and speed, I decided to continue using Windows daily for a change. However, I was using Mac OsX for about 5 years in a row, so the question becomes: how to migrate from Apple realm to the Windows realm?

I guess the answer I came up with changes the question (so it is somewhat cheating), but works quite good for me for the last 2 weeks, so here it is. You should migrate from Apple realm to OS-independent realm! I will explain this sentence with examples:

1. E-mail, contacts, etc: iCloud > Google
I was using iCloud very frequently with all my iDevices and Mac. Guess what, Microsoft (and even Apple) has almost no support for iCloud (meaning mail, contacts, and much more). I don't actually blame Microsoft for this (it is not their job), but the pain is real. The solution (I have used) turned out to be Google. I already had gmail account that was forwarded to my iCloud account. Changed the forwarding the other way around and added my gmail account to Windows 8 Metro Mail app. My iDevices support gmail, my Windows computer support gmail, and guess what: even my Mac supports Gmail. For the rest of the iCloud:

• Safari > Chrome
  
• Contacts > Google contacts (there is an easy way to do this if you still have access to your Mac)

2. Photo Library: iPhoto > Picasa
On Mac, I had (and still have) a huge library in iPhoto. All images were carefully adjusted and face-tagged. Unfortunately, there is no iPhoto for Windows. I was looking for a solution that would allow me to transfer all the metadata for my photos to my Windows computer, however I started to believe that it simply does not exist. It also makes sense since iPhoto uses god-know-what format to store all these metadata and I doubt that Apple will make it publicly available.
The first option was Windows Photo Gallery. I have used it before and it worked similar to iPhoto, however it would have the same problem: what is someday I go back to Mac? Do I need to do everything from scratch again? 
So, I started for looking something less OS dependent. The first result was Picasa (again Google). For now (just tested barely) it works fine. Yes, it has less options (e.g., cannot upload to Facebook natively), but this is something I am willing to take for portability. 

3. Webpage Management: iWeb > Weebly
My previous webpage was created and managed by iWeb. You probably guessed it right, there is no iWeb for Windows. 
After some search, I came up with Weebly. For some aspects, not as configurable as iWeb, but for some aspects, it is even better than iWeb. iWeb was discontinued for some time, and as far as I can see Weebly is well-maintained. I have re-created my whole website in a couple of hours with very little hassle. It is WYSIWYG, but it also provides partial access to HTML if you are up to complex things and know what you are doing. Best part: it is OS independent.

4. PDF Editor for LaTeX: Skim > Sumatra
When you are using LaTeX, you need a PDF editor that supports automatically reloading the PDF when the underlying file changes. Most editors don't (since the final PDF is supposed to get modifications rarely). On Mac, I was using Skim, which is very good for this job, however it does not have a Windows version.
I used Sumatra on Windows before and decided to give it a shot. It still work quite well for displaying, however it is a shame that I did not manage to make forward and inverse search work on my 64-bit Sumatra installation. I really miss these features and I hope at some point I can fix it.

What still works?
Not everything is broken, when you migrate. Here are the things I can still use with minor modifications and/or issues.

1. iTunes
This was actually quite important for me as I have a good number of purchases from iTunes. For anyone who has no purchases from iTunes or Xbox store, I would definitely suggest to use Amazon for purchases as it provides the highest level of mobility. However, it you are like me and already settle with iTunes, there is a Windows version. It is buggy and worse than the Mac version, yes, but although slow, it works.

2. Java and most of the programming languages (and environments)
As long as you are not using Objective-C (apple specific) or .Net C# (Microsoft specific), luckily most programming languages and IDEs (integrated development environments) are supported for almost all platforms.

3. LaTeX and Professional Writing
LaTeX distributions are also available for almost all platforms. I was using TeXlipse (LaTeX plug-in for Eclipse), which does not seem to be maintained anymore, but is working pretty well. There was an issue with the viewer editor though: I had to switch from Skim (Mac) to Sumatra (Windows) (see above for details).

I guess that is all I remember at this point. As you can see moving from Mac to Windows needs some work but it IS possible. I guess I moved between platforms enough times that this time I decided to use more platform independent solutions. 

Do you have a program that you cannot replace on Mac/Windows? Let me know and if I find an alternative (or even better a platform dependent solution), I will let you know.