I’m in the Washington, D.C. area today and tomorrow doing some EclipseSource stuff.
Obama canceled our lunch plans, apparently he had some more important stuff to do.
If anyone is interested in talking Eclipse, Equinox or OSGi over a frosty beverage… let me know!
Yesterday, I had fun running The Rogue Trail Series: The Loop race. I managed to walk away with a time of 49:13 and placed 12th overall (6th in my age group). I could have ran a bit faster, the problem I faced was that I ran alone for the most of the race. That’s the downside of not blasting out of the gates… you sometimes end up in a position where you don’t have people to pace you to keep you up front.
Also, in my opinion, the terrain was a lot more technical than the first race in the series. The only thing missing was a little water… we had some in the last race and it was fun sliding around!
The final race in the series is on June 21st… my goal is to place in the top 10 somewhere. Wish me luck!
So I was having my espresso-laden coffee this morning at the Whole Foods HQ and what do I see?
For a second, I thought the Twitter bird came to get me because I didn’t update my Twitter status within 24 hours… however, I decided to use this serendipitous moment as inspiration to let everyone know that Eclipse has a burgeoning Twitter community. Furthermore, you can follow the Galileo release on Twitter!
Personally, I was a bit worried that the Twitter bird was going to use my MacBook as a toilet…
I don’t consider myself lazy, but there are certain things I don’t want to think about sometimes. For example, the Urbanspoon application on the iPhone has saved me from answering the question of what’s for dinner… I simply just have to shake my phone:
Mmm… burgers!
How is this related to Eclipse? Well, the Mylyn project just got a new feature based on one of my long standing requests:
Why is this useful? Well, there are times when I just want a task thrown at me versus something that I have scheduled in advance. I think it’s human to just want something new or different. The current algorithm I believe just picks a low priority task that’s not scheduled… it could be interesting to plug your own algorithm for assigning yourself a task. It could be as simple as a random task… it could be what is currently in place… or it could be something more sophisticated based on your preferences. Anyone have some thoughts?
Now only if I can shake my Macbook Pro to get Mylyn to assign me a task…
Note: If you want to try out this feature, grab the latest Mylyn 3.2 weekly build.
Howdy committers, if you checked your email recently, you know what time it is… the annual Eclipse Board of Directors elections is going on!
I have the honor this year to be up for re-election as a committer representative. I’ll try to keep this short of why I think I should earn your vote but it boils down to my passion around Eclipse. I’m the guy who tries to attract new projects at Eclipse, I mentor a slew of projects and simply have the desire to see Eclipse succeed. My two main goals as a committer representative this year will be to look at getting DVCS support at Eclipse and making it easier for committers to provide input to the Eclipse BOD. While I was on the board, I helped setup a blog and newsgroup to allow for a communication channel between committers and the committer representatives. However, this has been mainly one way (recently Doug Gaff has done a great job of providing notes)… I think we can do better and have some ideas on how to do improve this communication channel.
Also, as Boris mentioned, in previous years, the turnout has been lower than desired so it would be great if you found the time to vote this year.
So what are you waiting for, go rock the vote!
There was a nice press release about OSGi’s 10th anniversary yesterday. It’s amazing to see the technology go this far… especially when I consider the original mission of the Open Service Gateway initiative a failure. Back in the day, the promise was all about bundles in my car, internet-enabled toasters and refrigerators:
Ok, OSGi may not have revolutionized the home automation market, but it has indeed changed the software industry. In my opinion, it’s truly the first dynamic component system with a proper service model and versioning system. Once you have tasted modular software development with OSGi, it’s hard to do anything else. OSGi provides a way for you to setup boundaries and enforce them… this isn’t that easy in other systems. It’ll be interesting to see where the next few years takes us on the OSGi adventure…
Anyways… here’s to another million deployments and OSGi finally entering my household… let’s start with the fridge first please, I need bundles to control my caloric intake 🙂
If you’re interested in the topic of having Equinox Declarative Services ship with the Eclipse SDK, check out this mail thread on eclipse-dev. There’s also a bug open you can follow.
It would be great to hear from the greater Eclipse community about this topic.
Well, it seems that the recession has hit local for me. A couple of colleagues working in the Google Austin office have been hit. I hope that my colleagues at IBM, Microsoft and other large companies do OK in the upcoming weeks. If there’s any condolences… we at EclipseSource are always looking for people who love Eclipse and OSGi. If you’re interested, feel free to shoot me an email. I’d also recommend checking out the Eclipse Employment newsgroup for potential job opportunities too.
On the bright side… I always subscribe to comedy as the solution in tough times. You know things are rough when Lolcats starts doing pictures on the economy:
Meow.
I’m so filled with joy that I got my new copy of the EMF book:
It’s nestled in a nice comfortable place between the old EMF book and one of the BIRT books. I don’t know what that scary AJAX book is doing there… don’t ask.
In terms of book quality, I’m amazed at the amount of content that was packed into the new edition. If anyone remembers the first edition of the EMF book… the book was so good that the modeling guys managed to generate half the book’s content using EMF’s CodeGen facilities 🙂
I’m happy to report that in the second edition, the authors opted more for a handcrafted approach. All that generated javadoc that was found in the first edition was replaced with world class content on validation in EMF, running EMF standalone, change recorders and many other fun EMF topics.
So what are you waiting for? Why not order the second edition of the EMF book and help fulfill Ed Merk’s impossible fantasy of retiring off of book proceeds 🙂
If you haven’t heard yet, the EclipseCon 2009 committer shirt contest is going on now (go vote!) Here are my three favorites… first we have the classic polo which can be used in any office or meeting setting:
Next, we have the XML/XSL shirt which I give bonus points to because I imagine only Dave Carver wearing it:
Finally, royal purple is always in fashion for me so here’s my final favorite:
On top of all this fun t-shirt selection, I’d like to point people to an excellent post by Emil Crumhorn discussing how to add the workspace chooser dialog in an RCP application. I’ve done this in the past and it was tragically hard if you weren’t using the IDE application in Eclipse. I hope that in the e4 timeframe, we look at making this easier for people as the concept of a workspace is still useful for RCP applications. The only difference is that RCP developers may expose the workspace selection in a different fashion and not even use the term, “workspace.”
