This Old Blog

There's a new revision to the Eclipse Platform Project Draft 3.1 Plan . This last one was published August 5th (Friday). It's a good idea to pay attention to these when they come out, especially with regards to the plugin APIs. The first milestone (M1) should hit the streets on or about August 12th. According to the draft plan, version 3.2 won't be finally released until sometime in 2Q2006. Since they only have four milestone releases listed so far, and the fourth is targeted for mid-December, I have to wonder what is going to happen in the next 3-6 months after the December milestone release. I hope it comes out a lot sooner. Here are some of the proposed items for 3.2 that I'm most interested in. Support logical model integration. The Eclipse Platform supports a strong physical view of projects containing resources (files and folders) in the workspace. However, there are many situations where plug-in developers would prefer to work with a logical model that is approp...

So writes Paul Clinton for CNN. And that's actually one of his kinder remarks. I knew this was going to be a stinker of a movie for the following reasons: The original was a stinker. Jessica Simpson . The trailers . Jessica Simpson (I may be well beyond the 18-34 age demographic for T&A, but I ain't dead). Since I refuse to spend $8 to see this cinematic roadkill, I'll let the poor sods who have seen it speak to its quality. The film's only redeeming feature is the end credits, which show extremely funny outtakes from the movie. Unfortunately, they come about 103 minutes into the 106-minute film. Paul Clinton, CNN Online The Puke of Hazzard But the "meanness" of the movie is what truly ruins it... When will the movie industry come out of their bubble and realize that Americans aren't the bad-to-the-bone, morally corrupt characters that they portray every time a movie tries to "keep it real"... Yahoo User Review Looks like we ...

I like to use images with my posts, especially my technical posts. And the images I like to use are PNG. Most of my images are screen captures that I edit and save with The Gimp on Windows XP. Unfortunately, when I upload the images using "Add Image" feature that was just added to blogspot, blogspot converts my PNGs to lossy jpegs. Very lossy jpegs. For some images this isn't a problem. For technical images where I'm trying to show some specific detail, it's a disaster. I just realized this was happening from an email comment. I'm now looking to host my images on some other service, such as Flickr, and then link back to them. I know that blogspot is free and that the conversion of PNG to jpeg is to save server space, so I shouldn't gripe, I guess. But I am working to fix all the jpeg corruptions, and I hope to have it in place by the weekend. Update Well I just tried out Flickr, and it's worse than blogspot. Not only are they converted to jpeg but they...

The NetBeans site has published an article on running the Amazon Web Services Sample with NetBeans 4.1. I thought I'd pull the sample down and run it in Eclipse, just to see what would happen. Turns out that Eclipse runs it just as well if not better. Of course, Your Mileage May Vary, but at least it was fun running it under Eclipse. Setup The Amazon Web Services Sample requires that you register as an Amazon Web Services Developer before you can download and use it. Registration is free. Once installed and built the sample application will make web service requests to Amazon. Each Amazon web services request requires a subscription ID parameter, which you'll receive via your email address after registering. If you don't have Java installed, pick it up from your favorite Java download site . Make sure you at least have Java 1.4.2 installed. The Amazon sample application runs against 1.4.2_08. I had 1.5.0_04 installed on my notebook, so I had to download and install 1.4.2...

After reading the latest status report on Java 6 (Mustang) I downloaded and installed the latest Java 6 drop (build 45). I then ran some quick and dirty tests to check out some of the improvements mentioned in the status report. Note that I'm running both versions of Java under Windows XP SP2 on a Gateway M680 with a 17" LCD screen. Feature : Improve Windows Look and Feel Bug IDs : 5106661 Status : 5106661 integrated into b14, remaining work ongoing The look and feel is indeed looking better. The following screenshot shows SwingSet under 5 on the left and SwingSet under 6 on the right. The look under Swing 6 uses the same windows widgets you see in Window's File Explorer. Feature : Improved text quality and capabilities Bug IDs : 4502804 , 5057760 , 4871297 , 4726365 Delivered : b39 This feature has indeed been delivered. The following is a comparison between two samples of source code in the SwingSet demo app. The difference between the selection of the fonts as well as...

Just a short note to the NetBeans' folks. NetBeans has a module that allows you to import Eclipse projects into NetBeans. It appears that it only works for Eclipse 3.0.x projects. I've since moved on to Eclipse 3.1. Well, when I read how one developer felt that Eclipse failed to meet his enterprise java development needs , I got all fired up (again) to give NetBeans 4.1 (not 4.2) another chance as my primary IDE. To start with I tried to import a project I was currently working on from Eclipse to Netbeans. So I went to the NetBeans website import pages and attempted to follow the simple and clear directions. The problem I found is that the NetBeans import plugin only works for Eclipse 3, not Eclipse 3.1. When I attempted to import a project out of an Eclipse 3.1 workspace, NetBeans 4.1 failed. It did not recognize the workspace and would not allow me to pick the project to import. And as you can see below, the workspace directory structure does exist and it works quite well fo...

The PayPal phishers are getting bolder, if not dumber, by the day. Consider this little missive that landed in my Gmail spam folder today: Security Center Advisory! (grabs your attention, doesn't it?) We recently noticed one or more attempts to log in to your PayPal account from a foreign IP address and we have reasons (sp) to belive (sp) that your account was hijacked by a third party without your authorization (well duh! i guess it's ok if i give my authorization?) . If you recently accessed your account while traveling, the unusual log in attempts may have been initiated by you. If you are the rightful holder of the account you must click the link below and then complete all steps from the following page as we try to verify your identity. Click here to verify your account (a bogus link was here) If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choise (sp) but to temporaly (sp) suspend your account. Thank you for using PayPal! So, let's recap for a moment. I get...

Because of possible problems with the launch of Discovery , the Russians have offered to bring the shuttle crew home in three Soyuz spacecraft in January or February if they "work really hard". The Russian's are even thinking of sending the Soyuz to the moon . And all this, with a 40 year old workhorse. It may not be pretty, it may not be big, but it was there to help out the International Space Station when the shuttle fleet was grounded over two years ago, and it's been the ISS' lifeboat because of the failure of NASA to deliver the X38 Crew Return Vehicle . NASA canceled it April 29th, 2002. Because of the limitation of three crew in the Soyuz (not the Soyuz's fault) the crew of the ISS is limited to no more than 3 crew (two since Columbia, as a cosmonaut needs to pilot Soyuz back). As with so many (should I say all?) of the NASA projects, the X38 was cut when the ISS budget hit $5 Billion over budget in February 2002. Now we subtract one number from 38...

Just when I finally felt comfortable with Apple, and after I enthused about how I was ready to buy an Apple Intel system if only it was available, now comes this report off of Slashdot that the Intel version of Mac OS X is using TCPA/TPM DRM . In fact it turns out, via Slashdot, that there is at least one Wiki devoted to MacOS X on Intel called OSx86 . The primary reason for DRM at this point seems to be to keep the Mactel version of OS X from booting on anything other than a legitimate Apple Intel system. As if that's really going to stop the hard core from running the system on anything other than an Apple Intel system. The sad thing is that I would actually pay good money to buy Apple OS X for Intel from Apple. Limiting my purchasing choices to just Apple and Microsoft for a moment, I am far more inclined to give my money to Apple than I am to Microsoft. Right now. But if Apple keeps this up, I will more than likely run a hacked version of Apple OS X for Intel, provided from s...