Blog Posts

As Chris pointed out the Eclipse community is really embracing IRC. I am a lurker on the #eclipse channel and the one thing that has always impressed me is the awesome support provided by the community. In particular, Remi Suen is machine in responding to questions. Yesterday, I found this...

Last week, I successfully fixed the Ubuntu 7.10 installation my laptop (a Dell D820). I had been experiencing several bizarre problems; most of them unquantifiable. It just didn’t work “right”. One of the more quantifiable problems was some Java instability. Java applications (at least while running the Sun JVM) just...

Understanding how and what people use in Eclipse has always been a challenge. To help address this issue, we are planning to introduce the Eclipse Usage Data Collector (UDC) in the upcoming Ganymede release. The intention of the UDC is to track how people use Eclipse, so as Chris has...

For those that like to be using the latest and greatest, the Ganymede M4 packages are now available from the Eclipse Packaging Project (EPP) download site. This year EPP is going to produce packages for each Ganymede milestone and release candidate. This will hopefully make it easier to test the...

Here’s a great time way to kill an hour… Add a table to your view and neglect to set widths on the columns. Hilarity ensues. Pebkac.

Dana Blackenhorn recently wrote two interesting articles about different approaches to open source development. The first article ‘ The open source development incline‘ identifies three basic models: At the top of the incline are what I will call proprietary open source projects, owned by one company. Sun works on this...

The deadline to send in a nomination for the Eclipse Community Awards is next Friday, January 25. In the individual category, we already have lots of great nominees. However, I know there are others that deserve recognition, so please take the opportunity to nominate someone you think deserves to be...

I’ve built two tables over the past two days and both of them are pretty expensive to populate. Leaving the user waiting while you run off and fetch all the data before you can display the table is bad form. To keep in your users’ good graces, consider using the...

The Eclipse workbench contains a collection of stacked views and editors. Some views change their appearance based on the active editor. The Outline view is a good example of this: it changes its appearance (sometimes quite dramatically) when a different editor is activated. The workbench provides a handy mechanism that...

It has been my belief that the next big thing for open source software (OSS) will be creating industry specific tools, frameworks and platforms. OSS is well established in the tools and middleware stacks but a lot of the benefits are also applicable to software higher up the stack. Recently...