Keyword filtering, or I hear the ’70s are making a comeback!

July 23, 2007 by Nitin Dahyabhai.

It’s a strange thing thinking about the evolution of interfaces for microcomputers. We started out with command lines, and then went to smarter command lines, and then swapped those out for GUIs. Browsing for the right command using windows, icons, and menus was supposed to be easier than trying to recall arcane command names and options, and yet here we are going back the other way. The rise of feature-laden applications and operating systems has led us back to relying on text, again, as Google Desktop finds itself preinstalled on my newest work machine and both Apple and Microsoft tout the built-in search facilities of their latest Operating System offerings.
And how is Eclipse related to this? Adopters probably realized early on that adding each preference page into their products had a cost: it made it harder for a user to find the important one. Eclipse 3.2 brought us the org.eclipse.ui.dialogs.FilteredTree control and used it in the Preferences and project Properties dialogs, helping to alleviate some of that problem. It searches the names of the individual pages for matches against what the user types into a text field, automatically benefiting from string externalization of the page titles. But did you know you it can go deeper? I present the org.eclipse.ui.keywords extension point. It allows you to define a list of keywords which can then be used for additional hits in the filter field, allowing a search on formatting to reveal WTP’s formatting-related preference pages:

Not bad for a extra couple of words.

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On the eve of Europa

June 28, 2007 by Nitin Dahyabhai.

Looking back on the eve of Europa’s release, it’s hard to quantify just how much has happened since Callisto was unleashed upon the world. No doubt there will be many metrics reported within the next few days, builds done, plug-ins created, disk footprint altered, etc., but one number caught my eye: 45585. Well, 45586, now, and still counting. Bug 149295 has the strange honor of being opened at 9AM on June 30th, 2006, the minute that Callisto was meant to be released. That’s 149,294 entries in the system going from October 10, 2001 to the middle of 2006. And where do we stand now? The most recent bug I’ve seen opened is 194881, meaning that 45,486 entries have been added in the last year alone, and we’re still going.

Have you thanked your webmasters today?

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This doesn’t look good

May 8, 2007 by Nitin Dahyabhai.

The infamous capacitor leakage that my desktop’s motherboard was widely known for has finally happened. And being 5 years old or so it’s going to be a pain to find an exact replacement.

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This is my gift. It is my curse.

April 30, 2007 by Nitin Dahyabhai.

Here’s an odd combination of things that made me wake up just after 5AM today.

Fact: my apartment has large windows in every room. This allows for plenty of natural light to enter during the day and was one of the main reasons I chose to live here.
Fact: while I listen to music a lot it’s not usually very loud. This means that for someone my age, I have almost perfect hearing. Those high frequency tones that they say only teenagers can hear are only quieter for me, not completely absent.
Fact: the head my bed has always been adjacent to the large window in my bedroom.

Result? One of my neighbor’s alarm clocks just woke me up.

Have a great week people!

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What the…?

April 20, 2007 by Nitin Dahyabhai.

This was almost full when I went home last night.

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Oh, come on!

March 27, 2007 by Nitin Dahyabhai.

Call me crazy, but it was a proud moment when they delivered the name tag that went on the door of my first office. It just felt so official, even almost 7 years ago. Rummaging through some papers on my desk just now, I was surprised to find that the flyer for the IBM Reception at EclipseCon listed all of the IBM presenters attending the conference. There were quite a few of them…wait a minute…NOOOOO!

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EclipseCon 2007 WRUP

March 16, 2007 by Nitin Dahyabhai.

Eclipse 2007 was a unique experience, despite being in the exact same location as last year’s conference. I think it was a far more user focused event than the previous two years, signifying a possible shift in the demographic that Eclipse is reaching. Also, it was the first where I was presenting without much guidance from my mentor, David (although thankfully in partnership with Amy Wu). And then there was the Sumo wrestling…

Sunday

As is usual for me when traveling, I pack almost directly from the dryer into my suitcase. This has the unfortunate effect of keeping me up late into the night and ensuring that I arrive at the airport groggy and grumpy for a trip that would have me in the air for at minimum 7 hours. I remember not getting much sleep last year, either. Compounding all of this is the usual anxiety that someone who only speaks publicly once or twice a year is bound to have. I did have the forethought to spring for a new set of headphones that I could wear comfortably for the entire day. I had worn a set of Sony MDR-Q22LP headphones the last time I was on a plane, spring-loaded over-the-ear clip-ons that are perhaps the most comfortable I’d ever found, at least to me, but they were terrible at keeping out any background noise. To my surprise, noise canceling earphones have come down in price quite a bit and the pair I’d picked one up a few days earlier proved to be quite handy. Besides isolating me from outside noises it also canceled a fair amount of the engine noise of the plane. Even sitting next to the engines on the second leg of the trip, it made the time fly by (with the help of old episodes of The Office , to which I’d finally relented to watching and was enjoying tremendously). Being able to take a much-needed nap in peace didn’t hurt, either. Arriving earlier in the day than I’d expected, I had dinner in the hotel bar with some friends from Red Hat and then tried to get some sleep for the big day ahead.

Monday

While we’d completed our presentation before leaving for the conference, I was still unsure of their contents. As with the slides I’d used for EclipseWorld 2006, it was tricky to find a balance between putting in just the talking points and putting in large amounts of technical detail that would make for useful reference later. Chris Aniszczyk had mentioned in the IRC Committer channel that he was preparing parts of his tutorial as cheat sheets , the prevailing opinion from last year being that you can’t legitimately design a session for unknown attendees whose experience ranges from “never used Eclipse” to “stepped through source code” with the expectation that everyone would finish every step within the time allotted. Tutorials requiring that the attendees be able to leave with ready-to-run code also led us to create a plug-in project template for a simple web deployment descriptor editor, hoping that this with the cheat sheets would allow the attendees to proceed at their own pace with the two of us roaming the room for more on-on-one discussion.

The morning passed without incident, but as the presentation time approached, I still hadn’t thought of a grandiose way to open the tutorial. A humorous anecdote? A disarming question? At the least I was sure my old friend the “dramatic pause at the start” wasn’t the right way to go (it worked in college, really). I don’t remember what I ended up saying, but I don’t think it mattered in the grand scheme of things. As usual, I’m sure I spoke way too fast, but that was a constant problem for me even during my Public Speaking course back in college, some (incoherent mumbling) years ago. Except for some glitches setting up our 2.0M5 development milestone build (such as the little-known fact that WTP 2.0 effectively requires JRE 1.5 ), I think it went pretty well. I then went to a short tutorial on Java Web Application Development with WTP and had an enjoyable dinner with some other WTP Committers.

Tuesday

For me, the highlight of the day was a talk showing off Lotus Notes 8.0 (formerly known as Hannover), the first version to be built on top of Eclipse RCP. Some elements of the application remain native for backward compatibility, and they mentioned some interesting usability issues they ran into that led them to the UI that was shown. If nothing else, the prospect of being able to write full-fledged plug-ins for it opens up a world of possibilities. If Eclipse was originally built to integrate development tools, Notes 8.0 has the potential to integrate all sorts of communication and collaboration software.

The receptions afterward were an interesting mish-mash of things. For one, with a limited number of tickets for drinks, even for a soda, I followed Ben Konrath’s suggestion of trying a non-alcoholic beer.

It was mostly out of curiosity, as I don’t drink alcohol, but the flavor reminded me somewhat of BAWLS. IBM held an “Asian-themed” reception (although they seemed to ignore that India is in Asia) that included, of all things, Sumo wrestling. Sumo wrestling’s just something I’ve been wanting to try out for a while, and as the evening wore on (and after some folks I know had left), I did. Now, bearing in mind that my opponent was noticeably taller than me and that the suit made it impossible for me to bend my knees, the outcome was no surprise.

Wednesday

I attended the keynote on Wednesday morning. It was fairly entertaing with a lot of ideas and notions put forth, some of which I disagreed with, but some, such as that Open Source software tends to be the crappiest available, were surprising. In a perfect Free Market, that would tend to be true since the low cost of acquisition would drive inferior proprietary solutions out of business, leaving the remaining proprietary solutions clearly superior to the Open Source ones. My biggest problem with this notion is that it enforces the excuse of “hey, it’s free” for when something goes wrong.

Gerry Kessler and I hammered out some API details that should make things easier on folks working with custom tag libraries. Wednesday also saw the What Sucks About Eclipse panel take place. Expecting there to be nothing but venting and haterade, I skipped it but in my absence a few interesting questions were asked, including why there are so many different XML editors around from Eclipse.org. The answer is three-fold.

1. Timing. Eclipse 1.0 debuted in late 2001 while WTP’s initial source contribution was in the Summer of 2004. You had to be able to edit Ant scripts and plugin.xml files somehow before that.
2. Dependencies. WTP’s XML Editor and DTD and XML Schema models require EMF, and EMF is not part of the Eclipse SDK.
3. Feature sets. The other editors aren’t so much general-purpose XML editors as editors that understand the syntax and their own problem domain. They don’t have DTD and XML Schema support under them, nor are they aimed at being extensible to the extent that WTP’s is.

The evening ended with a mass gathering in the hotel bar with the staff struggling to keep up and the attendees overrunning the entire place. I may be developing a taste for near beer.

Thursday

As I was feeling oddly under the weather on this day, I again missed the keynote. I did make to to the Usability and User Interface Best Practices panel, though. Being extensible is a huge strength of Eclipse, but the lack of an overall UI design can easily lead to a cluttered UI when lots of unrelated plug-ins are thrown together. It’s not a simple or easy problem to solve, especially when not everyone’s even paying attention. While there are guidelines that address some issues, but it’s good to know that there are folks keeping an eye on the future.

Friday

Back to Raleigh, back to working on WTP 1.5.4 and 2.0M6. And then there’s the planning for next year…

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There, I said it.

February 26, 2007 by Nitin Dahyabhai.

Comforted by the fact that most attendees have likely already signed up and chosen their tutorials, I’m boldy going to suggest you meet the SSE team at EclipseCon 2007 and attend our short tutorial on extending our editors. Editors may not be the glamourous part of any IDE, but it’s a crucial one if you write code at all, and if your source editor messes anything up, users tend to be extremely vocal about it.

It’s no mean feat trying to support 6 source languages competently while chasing the feature set of the standard-setting Eclipse Java Development Tools. Of course there’s also the task of reacting to those rare changes that have them catching up to, and sometimes inadvertently breaking us, while still providing just enough framework for other folks to do some truly interesting things that we’d never focused on. In any case, our team doesn’t look to be getting bored any time soon.

Here’s hoping we can continue the tradition of our team not dying in a fiery dramatic crash like we almost did last year.

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WoW, that’s a lot of people

January 16, 2007 by Nitin Dahyabhai.

The 16th is the official “street date” for the Expansion to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. As they did two years ago when the game was first released, midnight launches were held by EB.

It’s hard to tell because of the low light level, but only half of the line stretched across the entire front of the strip mall building. The rest were curved around the outside of the nearly-full parking lot (you can see some of the more brightly dressed folks in the distance), and it wasn’t even midnight, yet.

While the original release was two days before Thanksgiving (with many people taking Wednesday off already), I just don’t see the point to waiting in line for hours to pick up a game I’m likely not going to have time to play until the weekend, especially when I’m working tomorrow.

It doesn’t make the picture any less funny to me, though.  NERDS!

Posted in Games and Geekery | No Comments »

24 Premiere party

January 14, 2007 by Nitin Dahyabhai.

Dave’s pretty good about hosting parties for my weird coworker friends (as my weird gaming friends call them), and being a huge 24 fan, he hosted one for its premiere. A good time was had.

Drac Bauer–I gotta remember that one.

Posted in Arts and Entertainment | 1 Comment »