My name is Wayne and I have a problem: I don’t really get IRC. That’s not to say that I don’t understand the technology. Heck, I even know a bunch of the more basic commands. I just have a really hard time keeping up with the conversations. My day is very interrupt driven and I find that when I take break from the IRC conversation, it takes me too long to catch up. Maybe I’m just trying too hard.
Over the past couple of days, I’ve been trying to stay connected with the conversation on irc.freenode.net/eclipse. I’ve been mostly lurking, but with the excitement of the impending Europa release, the conversations has been riveting (at least for 15 minute increments that I’ve been able to follow).
What’s made hanging around IRC easier is the fact that I’ve been IRC’ing from the comfort of the Eclipse workbench. I loaded the Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF) features from the Europa update site (they’re under the “Communications” category) and have been using the “Chats” view to keep an eye on the conversation. One of the things that I plan to explore in the coming weeks is the creation of a ‘bot that will listen to IRC for me and wake me up when the conversation twists in a direction I need to pay more attention to. Remy created a tutorial that’s available here. The tutorial paints a pretty clear picture of what needs to be done; and it looks pretty easy.
Here’s a screen shot of my workbench. The IRC view is at the bottom. The conversation is a little on the slow side at 22h30 before the big release.
As you can see on the top right, I’ve also been playing with the instant messaging and collaboration features (the ECF downloads page contains a pointer to where you can get the Yahoo IM, and Skype integration). It’s pretty cool stuff. Scott created a plug-in that joins ECF and the Sudoku Game I created; it allows folks to collaborate on a puzzle through ECF. It builds on the work that Chris did a while back.
Europa contains some other cool “remote” stuff. I’ve been using the Remote Systems view (bottom left) that is produced by the DSDP TM project. It allows you to browse, copy, and move files to and from remote systems using FTP, SFTP, Telnet, and more. I’ve been using to upload some screencam demonstrations I recorded for the new Europa downloads page (should be active on Friday morning).
All-in-all, there’s some pretty friggin’ cool stuff being produced by Eclipse projects.
