Darin Wright, Champion Among Men

Today I would like to make a post telling everyone that our manager, Darin Wright is indeed a champion among men (not just to get a promotion).

On the ride to work today, as Darin rides his bike to work every day, he was hit by a truck. Luckily he was not harmed in any way, and yes the driver was talking on his cell phone and not paying attention.

But this is not what makes him the champ.

The fact that he walked what was left of his bike home, fixed it, and then rode it to work (again), and then once he got here was still happy to be at work, is what makes him the champ.

Axesome.

Facebook is the new Eclipse Hangout

For all you Eclipse Committers (and Committer wannabes) who hang out on Facebook at least once in a blue moon, Mike and myself have started a new group for you. The group is called Eclipse Committers and is of the type: Internet & Technology - Software.

So join up, say hi, and let everyone see all the embarassing information you leave on your Facebook profile.

iClipse

For all those Mac users out there, Eclipse 3.3 comes with an important fix. You can now run and debug applications on more than the OS default VM. We discovered that an environment variable on the Mac (JAVA_JVM_VERSION) controls which VM gets launched. Eclipse now modifies this environment variable for each new process (VM) that gets launched, to match the user selected JRE.

Cleaning the bug buckets

Over the last few weeks the debug team has been going through the dreaded and controversial "Resolved - Later" bugs and feature requests. I wasn't able to come up with the right Bugzilla query to get exact statistics, but I know we had over 800 Resolved-Later bugs last month, and now we're sitting at 715. Not bad - that's over a 12% reduction! Some bugs had been fixed along the way (always a nice surprise), some had become irrelevant, some were re-opened to be addressed, and some were even re-opened with fresh patches to be applied soon.

Just another seven months and we'll have had a chance to look at each one :-) Be patient.

One Europa Experience

I swear I'm not just doing this for the free shirt. With only 2 weeks to go until it is released, I figured it was time for me to get a taste of Europa.

The coolest thing about Europa is that it should make it easy to install a large number of tools. Using Europa, you spend your time using the tools, not installing them.

Does Europa do a good job at this? I'm not entirely sure, my experience was far from perfect, but I can't say I regret it.

The good:

- The ability to see such a wide variety of projects in the update manager, choose the ones I wanted and have the manager select all the required plugins is great. I was unable to resolve dependency issues for the Buckminster project, but I'll just assume that it will be fixed in the next couple of weeks.

- Once I had Europa up and running, I found a lot of axesome tools, many of which use the platform and/or the JDT debugger framework. I was impressed by the functionality available, so a pat on the back to all the teams out there creating these open source tools.

The not so good:

- The welcome page seemed so empty and not helpful considering how many tools I had installed.

- The preferences dialog is scary. It is a strong encouragement to use the default settings. Expect to spend a long time going through it if you like having everything configured the way you like it. Oh and don't forget to export your settings when you are done.

- Before I could even close the welcome page, Mylar was helpful enough to open a dialog, preventing me from doing anything until I set some preferences. What is so important about the Mylar options that they need a dialog on startup vs a preference page. This dialog got even more annoying when I clicked the link at the bottom to watch a video about getting starte with Mylar. The progress bar showed up for a second and that was it. Once I closed the welcome page (after just hitting okay on the dialog with the default settings), I discovered several web browsers open trying to show me a video (which had been moved due to the renaming of the Mylar project).

- After playing around with some of my freshly installed tools, I checked the log. Sure enough, errors galore from multiple projects. Europa is only 2 weeks away. Having dozens of errors in the log is not going to make us look good.

- While I found the update manager to be an effective way to install the tools, Mike may not agree. For starters while using Europa, his chair broke. The handle broke right off. Oh and his Eclipse installation crashed and wouldn't launch again.

Overall, I like Europa and I think it goes a long way to make it easy for users to get the projects they need. Plus, users who use Europa to get a couple of tools they need are likely to try out some of the other projects available. But things really need to be polished in the next couple of weeks.

Whats Up Doc?

Ok, first off let me say I just couldn't resist on the title, I know it is corney, stupid, etc, but I had to let it out.

Todays post is about how much I love to write doc for our plugins and the number Z.

Writing doc is one of those things that we all hate doing, but we all agree needs to be done. This lack of enthusiasm is probably why it is put off until the very last minute in the release cycle instead of being done during the release cycle. I think deep down inside everyone really likes to write doc, as it takes us away to that magical "working but not really" place where we can spend hours and feel a sense of self worth....or not perhaps.

Let me leave this post on a positive note by saying how much I love to write doc.