Expenses
No blogging last night, as I was working on expense reports. Somehow I doubt that work will appreciate that I had to stay up to 1am, but they'd certainly notice if I hadn't. Even so, I had to spend more time on them this afternoon.

As if that weren't enough, I've also filled in all the paperwork required to become a full-time employee. It's a little scary when you have no idea of the tax system in this country. It also doesn't help that I don't have an SSN.

I applied for an SSN last week (my first day in town), but they told me that USCIS (formerly the INS) have not yet entered our names into the system. Apparently that takes 10 working days. Getting an SSN after that will take another 10 working days. So it will take me a month to get the one piece of ID needed to do practically ANYTHING in this country.

It seems a little weird that it's this hard, given that every person who is given a work visa here will require an SSN. So why not process it all together and hand out the SSN with the visa? Not to mention that some official documents require a Resident Alien number, but I have to apply for that separately as well! I'm not sure where to get it either. Possibly USCIS.

In the meantime, Anne can't get an SSN because she's not entitled to work. This is despite the fact that her visa does allow her to work! It turns out that she has to go back to USCIS and apply for permission to work. Once she has that she can apply for her own SSN.

I'd hate to know what will happen to us if we have to talk to a doctor. We're insured, but won't they ask for an SSN?

Bus Error
It turns out that I was a little sloppy with some recent JNI code. If my Dictionary class failed to load in C, then it returned a null, as documented. However, I blithely stored this pointer and went on to use it.

Until now the Dictionary class always loaded, because I always made sure the dictionary files were available. But yesterday I started running a new set of tests in a separate directory, and they immediately reported: bus error.

I forgot how undescriptive a fault in C can be. :-)

It shouldn't have taken long to find this, but I used Eclipse to trace where the fault was occurring. While the GUI is slower on a Mac, for some reason the whole system brought my system to its knees. The trackpad was so jerky and intermittent that I started to worry that it would need fixing. It was only after tolerating this for an hour that I realized that the problem was not the trackpad, but that the machine was struggling too much. Shutting down Eclipse fixed the problem.

I'd be tempted to continue working from the command line, along with VIM, but Eclipse can't stand me fixing files outside of its domain. Why should it care?

At least I discovered the problem easily enough, and fixed it by bringing the dictionary files into the test area. I've also moved into the code and I now throw exceptions when a C library fails to initialize. I'm disappointed I hadn't done this in the first place, but at least I'll remember now (once bitten, twice shy).

BTW, has anyone else noticed that Intel (and x86 compatible) based systems report a segfault when dereferencing 0, while Apple and Sparc systems report a bus error? I always think of null dereferences as being segfaults, so I used to get confused when I saw bus errors like this. I wonder why there's a difference.