Diverse City

Why I live in Guildwood...

Recyling boxes on the curb side
Little boxes made of PVC
Little boxes, little boxes
Make up this Divert City.

And the codeslave at the console
Gets up from the desk 'round noon
Needs to regroup and to refresh
And to clear his cobwebbed brain

So the codeslave at the console
Goes for a walk over to the ravine
Where it's calm, a little wavy,
And perspective comes again

And the dogs up on the hillside
Get mistaken for being twins
Though they are in appearance similar
They're by no means just the same.

(With apologies to Malvina Reynolds.)

p2'd

With Ganymede M7 just around the corner, and Eclipse 3.4M7 in the can, it's time for everyone to start playing w/ p2 again. It's come a *LONG* way from where it was in M6, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Equinox team. If you tried it then and got scared, please give it another look -- it's a much more user-friendly animal today. The promise presented at EclipseCON is coming true, despite some people's misguided attempts at humour last time around.

If you haven't tried converting an existing update site into a p2-enabled one, you should. I was very pleasantly surprised how easy it was.

And now, some Beatles for your Friday afternoon entertainment...

p2'd: it's not so bad
Took a sad song, and made it better
Remember to test drive it today
So you can help to make it better

p2'd: don't be afraid
You're now used to use Update Manager
The minute p2 gets under your skin
Then you begin to see it's better

And any time you feel a pain's p2'd, refrain
Don't carry the world upon your shoulders
Well don't you know that it's a nug who don't file bugs
Be they grit or Sisyphean boulders

p2'd: won't let you down
You'll have found the new Install Manager
Generate extra jars for your site
And you'll see that it's made much better

So try it out, yes, it's time for p2 to begin
Stop waiting for code freeze to download it
And don't you know that it's for you, p2'd
You'll do, the details you need are in the wiki

p2'd: works really well
Took a sad song, and made it better
Remember to let it into your heart
And you will start to see it's better

Na na na na na ,na na na, p2'd ...

The Beatles - Hey Jude

Team Effort

Digging through my email backlog, I found this post on the google-summer-of-code-announce list, which reminds us that it's time for the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards for 2008 (nominations due by May 15).

Then I saw this... ;)

Ubuntu has done more to promote a desktop Linux than any other distro before.

---

And yet as a company contributes so little development resources.

---

You clearly do not understand open source. Like someone said the other day, all companies work together in the Linux desktop: Red Hat fixes the kernel, Novell fixes the applications, and Canonical takes the credit.

It's all a team effort.

Anyway, while successes at Eclipse are *also* the result of team effort, these awards are for individuals (the good kind, not the Teflon kind), and you can invent your own award titles. Enjoy!

Welcome To The Machine

Looking for concert tix at Ticketmaster tonight, I got to talking about reCaptcha w/ SWMNBN, and found this video. Take a look.

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

In related news (or lack thereof), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has not yet been picked up for a second season. C'mon, FOX, surely Summer Glau beating people up trumps another *freakin'* season of Family Guy or American Dad??

Synch View Magic

Earlier this week, I opened bug 228701 asking for Mylyn filtering on the Synch view. (Please vote if you agree.) This afternoon in #eclipse-dev, Eugene pinged to ask why I don't simply use the Change Sets presentation in the Synch view, and Boris chimed in to tell me about bug 143419, "Strange tree rendering in synchronize view". Strange indeed.

I agreed I'd document my experiences with this view, but because Bugzilla is undergoing maintenance at the moment (thanks to our tireless webmasters!) and I want to share it while it's fresh, here's my account of how to make files vanish from the Synch view, though Mylyn continues to track them.

DO try this at home, as magic tricks in Eclipse are rare (e4 demo at EclipseCON with spinning views & scriptable UI elements notwithstanding), and this one's pretty cool.

Steps to reproduce

1. Install the latest Eclipse 3.4 I build (I've got eclipse-SDK-I20080422-0800-linux-gtk.tar.gz.)
2. Install Mylyn from its update site (mylyn-2.3.2-e3.4.zip).

   DO NOT unpack it first, just give the URL to Eclipse's new p2 / Install Manager or download the zip and hand it that. If you unpack it first, p2 doesn't seem to know how to find the features therein. But I digress...

   

3. Check out some CVS project into your workspace. I used :ext:nickb@dev.eclipse.org:/cvsroot/modeling/org.eclipse.emf/org.eclipse.emf.releng, from HEAD.
4. Open Mylyn's Task List view (Shift-Alt-Q, Q). Create a new Local Task or open an existing Bugzilla task. Enable the task.
5. Unfilter the Package Explorer view.

   This is one of my *very* few complaints about Mylyn -- I'm starting a new task w/ no context, yet it insists on filtering my view to show me my non-existent context, so I can't start selecting files on which to work until I unfilter the view. But I digress again...

6. Open the Synchronize View (Shift-Alt-Q, Y).
7. Configure the view as shown below:

   

8. In the Synchronize view, select the Change Sets presentation (the toolbar icon that looks like a file tree).
9. Create a new Synchronization. Type CVS, Resources to synch: Workspace. Hit Finish.
10. Open some files in the Package Explorer view, and edit them. Watch as they appear in the Synch view as items under your Change Set (ie., as changes for your Local or Bugzilla Task)

    It would be nice if the Change Set title included the bug number, or could be configured the same way that commit comments can be. Not crucial, just a handy enhancement. For now, the task's title is sufficient.

11. Pick some file in the CVS-backed project and copy it within the same folder. Notice how it appears in the Synch view as an outgoing addition.

    

    
    
    
12. Here's where the magic trick starts. Made sure your audience is still awake.
    
    
13. Disable your Task.
14. Copy some file (could be the same one as before, or a new one -- doesn't matter as long as it's in a CVS-backed project. The new file will appear in the Synchronize view under a new <Unassigned> Change Set.

    

15. Re-enable your Task.
16. In the synch view, select the new file from under the <Unassigned> Change Set.
17. As you select the file, it will be added to Mylyn's context for that task, and appear in the filtered Package Explorer. Note however that it didn't change from the <Unassigned> Change Set to your Task's change set. So begins the magic.

    

18. In the Synchronize view, select the Workspace presentation (the toolbar icon that looks like a file tree).
19. When you expand the tree, you'll see that your new file does appear as you'd expect. This tree should mirror what's in the Package Explorer (as in previous screenshot).

    

20. Switch back to the Change Sets presentation, and get ready for your exit with flourish.

    

21. Lo, that new file has vanished!

Image from Happy Tree Friends - I Get a Trick Out of You.
Courtesy of Mondo Media / YouTube. Used without permission.

Thunderbird for Gmail Addicts

In order to encourage myself to check the Eclipse newsgroups more often, and to possibly reduce my bandwidth usage (thanks to Rogers' new pricing plan), I decided to try to use Thunderbird for my mail instead of Gmail (in a browser such as Flock, Firefox, or Iceweasel).

Once you've got Gmail configured to do IMAP and Thunderbird configured to connect to Gmail, there are a few things you can do to get back the Gmail experience.

• To sync your Google Contacts w/ Thunderbird, use Zindus. This is required because Gmail's contact exporter only works w/ Gmail and Outlook. Note that this works best if you have no contacts already in Thunderbird -- or at least no duplicate entries.
  
  
• To get back some Gmail shortcuts (j/k to navigate, y to archive) & Gmail search expressions, install GMailUI.
  
  
• To set default sort order in views to 'newest on top':

  Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Advanced Configuration > Config Editor... > type "sort" > set mailnew.default_sort_order = -1

• To set message reply to be above the quoted message instead of below:

  Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Advanced Configuration > Config Editor... > type "reply" > set mail.identity.default.reply_on_top = 1

• To hide labels (mailboxes) which have no new messages, you can either select View > Folders > Unread, or you can click these tiny buttons to cycle the Folders view:
  
  
• To default-filter your mailboxes to show only unread, use View > Messages > Unread. Or, use View > Threads > Unread or Threads with Unread, if your prefer.

Four and Twenty

Congratulations to Marcelo on the second release of his Progeny project. In tribute, I've released like-named EMF & XSD builds this weekend. (You may remember an EMF 2.2 build named for Elena's new arrival.)

Because I have a bit of a fixation with numbers (and some people have a sense of humour), there's also a new UML2 build.

Derailment

Once a season, and only once a season, this question comes up. For the first time, however, it's finally been sparked by someone in the Southern Hemisphere, lending credence to the idea that "Fall" and "Winter" are too North-centric. The tabled replacement is:

Ganymede September Maintenance Release &
Ganymede February Maintenance Release

Here are my suggestions for how we could name the annual coordinated releases:

• Ganymede, Ganymede .1, Ganymede .2
• Ganymede, Ganymede ][, Ganymede ]I[
• Ganymede, Ganymede Refresh, Refresh 2
• Ganymede 8.06, Ganymede 8.09, Ganymede 9.02
• Ganymede, Ganymede Supper Car, Ganymede Caboose
• Ganymede, Ganymede Mark Twain, Ganymede End Train (my fave!)

Can you think of a better way to name the trilogy? Cast your vote in bug 227767!

Evil Dead The Musical: The Remake of The Reprise

Another day, another visit to the Diesel Playhouse for some beer, blood, bawdiness, and blood...

The new cast wasn't the same as the original one (naturally), but you can't go wrong with a quasi-midget-wrestler in the role of Cheryl, Ash's sister. And with Ryan Ward and Mike Nahrgang still in attendance, a good time was had by all, especially when Evil Scott got killed right in front of us and showered us with gore.

If you haven't yet seen the show, it's been extended to June 14.

Look who's still evil!
-- The fourth, and final? time

Submitted for your consideration

On the plane to and from EclipseCON, I had the opportunity to watch a couple of episodes of Dexter -- kudos to Air Canada's new inflight a/v system. I was immediately hooked. At the end of the following episode, I saw this interesting juxtaposition:

Still from Dexter S01E04 end credits.

Considering the moralizing tone of the show, I find it intriguing that one of the Bush family is being personally thanked for assisting get this show on the air.

After all, it's all about deception, wearing masks, and using people to further your goals.