Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

Just checked out the Eclipse SVN site and apparently the issue with dashes in new PHP filenames has been resolved. I upgraded my work copy to the latest nightly build and things seem to be going well. (The October 1st integration build might be better stability-wise, but I’ve had good luck with the nightly builds.)

For the record, after the upgrade, loading my workspace took about five minutes (Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz, 1GB RAM) with no discernable progress bar or CPU activity. Eclipse effectively looks like it’s frozen. Be patient; it’ll load eventually.

PDT, though, is about the single most useful tool I find for PHP development at work. The next front-runner is WinSCP, which has a really neat feature, Keep remote directory up to date:

This feature lets you have complete synchronization between a remote SFTP server and your local Eclipse workspace. It also supports private key encryption.

As a pair to WinSCP, I also use PuTTY, with anywhere from one to five sessions open at a time. PuTTY offers a neat tunnelling option, which I’ve mentioned before.

You can also access internal servers using one of these tunnels; for example, if I want to connect to a remote desktop session on host 192.168.1.101:3389 on my internal network, I’d use the following syntax:

Source port: 127.0.0.2:3389
Destination: 192.168.1.101:3389

Then, after establishing the SSH connection, using the 127.0.0.2 alias in Remote Desktop lets me connect to the machine behind the NAT traversal firewall.

Notepad++ is another program I highly recommend as a replacement for Notepad. If you can’t use TextMate because you’re not on a Mac, Notepad++ is an acceptable substitute. It offers some neat syntax highlighting features, and saves session history even when you exit.

Paint.NET is also a decent image editor, allowing you to verify hex values for colours and perform some minor tweaks to images without incurring the load time and aggravations in Photoshop.

It must be a banner day for Eclipse projects, since the primary IDE I use for both work and personal projects has been released as a 1.0 version at eclipse.org.

The primary download mirror from eclipse.org is fairly slow (I’m pulling about 50-60K/s from my work connection from it, when normally I get much speedier downloads), at least for the full-sized Win32 large package. I’d suggest you use an alternate mirror - the OSU Open Source Lab mirror seems to be pulling in the ZIP file fairly well. It also hasn’t percolated to all mirrors yet, so try a different one if you’re unlucky with the first.

I’m going to check and see if the minor file naming bug in RC1 made its way out to the final release; stay tuned.

Update: Wow, we’ve got a UI and a pain-in-the-rear bug when trying to create filenames with multiple periods:

I might decide to report this to the Bugzilla site, but last time I did, apparently the description and sample code I provided wasn’t really needed.

Update 2: Apparently this will be fixed in the next integration build, but it’ll still probably have an ‘illigal’ spelling error.

Update 3: The typo should be picked up in the next nightly.

Update 4: The typo and bug has been fixed in the N20070920 build, but still doesn’t allow the creation of filenames with dashes. Might have to report this one.

Just heard the news that IBM’s launched a free office suite called Lotus Symphony. I’m currently installing it; apparently the entire package is based on Eclipse, which should make for an interesting environment. Since I do most of my development in Eclipse, it’ll be interesting to see how they’ve expanded on the IDE to create an office suite inside it.

The site was a bit slow for me earlier, so here’s the direct link to the IBM signin page, which was significantly faster than the Lotus site. To install, run the IBM_Lotus_Symphony_w32.exe file, then run setup.exe from the same folder.

There’s been a lot of whinging and amateur-lawyering over the past few days (including a massive dupe on Slashdot), about a controversy surrounding an app called TestDriven.NET. As far as I understand the situation, the primary developer is currently in a whine-fest with some people from Microsoft about licensing for a Visual Studio 2005 Express add-in. Basically, you can’t extend Express without a mad UI hack, and according to Microsoft, said extensions violate Express Edition’s license.

This sort of patent, licensing or “you’re violating the product’s ethos” crap irks me in a different way. At work, I have nearly free reign to develop applications in whatever language I feel like. As long as it suits the business case, I could crank out Java, Python, VB6 - most of the existing stuff I’m updating is a combination of Visual Basic 2005 and VBA automation. I use all of the languages in VS2005, as well as some optional components (managing an SQL Server 2005 installation is somewhat interesting.)

As part of an organization, generally “getting a license” is preferred to snagging some copy of an application off BitTorrent. At IBM, the software requisition process could take a week or two to get rolling, unless your manager put a “please expedite this” note along with it. With the license, you’d have to renew it after a certain period of time - although I was probably subject to this more than most people, since I’d request six months for each term, and end up needing to extend that three times over the course of my time there. Aside from that, I can recall a certain internally licensed program had to be updated with a license file nearly every two weeks.

My current experiences have been the opposite. Most software is available on the public network share, and it’s an average time of one day between my request for a program and its receipt.

The crux of all this is that if I wanted Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite, SQL Server 2005, whatever the newest Exchange Server is, and any other ridiculously expensive application (for an individual, at least) and asked for it tomorrow, I’d likely have it by Friday. So why, instead of using Windows Server 2003, IIS 6.0 with ASP.NET 2.0, and Visual Studio Expression Web Designer, would I pick up a copy of Eclipse 3.2 with the PHP Development Tools extensions and crank away on my latest project with that?

Partially because I know PHP very well and am aware of its idiosyncracies and language features.

Partially because this Microsoft nonsense has left me wondering where the hell I stand using Express editions of their products.

Partially because Eclipse actively encourages UI extensions - in fact, you can’t even really consider Eclipse an IDE first of all, because it’s more of a Java UI framework.

Formal unit testing is not something I’ve done much of in my line of work. I’ve written and executed testcases, and contributed code/XML/documentation to fix deficiencies in said testcases. But when I move into needing formal testing, I don’t want to be beholden to someone’s mad licensing whims.

I’ve said my piece, in any event.

One of my “most desired features” for my Windows box is something that I’ve referred to as a merged mountpoint. Last night I made a significant amount of progress towards implementing this feature on my own. Here’s some background information:

Most users have one hard drive in your system, usually C:\. This drive will probably have your Windows installation, Program Files, Documents and Settings, and a few temporary files to start off; depending on how much stuff is installed, you’re looking at about 10GB taken up with a typical “workstation” installation. With a 120GB drive, that leaves you (after formatting and space conversion) about 100GB to work with.

On my system, I have random utilities, other applications like Visual Studio and Eclipse, and a few games. All in all, my 120GB C:\ is down to about 60GB for random media files, like music and video. I could probably fill this space up in about a week if I was really going at it, too.

If I add another hard drive to the system (D:\), there’s another 120GB of space, but it’s on a different physical drive. I have a choice to make - do I start installing programs and utilities to the D:\ drive, or do I start locating any new media files on D:\?

Hit the jump for more details…

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