Norio - eclipse

Dynamic working sets

litrik — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:28:41 +0000

If you have a lot of projects in your Eclipse workspace you should check out the Dynamic Working Sets plug-in.

It allows you to define working sets based on a regular expression. If a project name matches the regex it will be included in the working set.

It sure beats adding new projects to existing working sets all the time. Really handy to keep your workspace organized.

Problems with Eclipse buttons in Ubuntu 9.10

litrik — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:44:44 +0000

After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) some buttons no longer work in Eclipse 3.5. Clicking has no effect but keyboard shortcuts still work.

It looks like Eclipse is doing some ~~nasty stuff~~ advanced hacking in SWT on GTK. This bug is fixed in 3.6M2 but you can work around the issue in Eclipse 3.5 by launching Eclipse through the following small shell script (assuming Eclipse is installed in /opt/eclipse-3.5):

#!/bin/sh
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
/opt/eclipse-3.5/eclipse

Open source licenses

litrik — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:28:44 +0000

Yesterday I went to a "A new approach to licensing" a Profoss conference about open source licensing.

Even though most of the speakers were lawyers (speaking a funny kind of English), I did learn quite a few things:

"Distribution" has a different meaning in US law and European law.
The real power of the EUPL is that it shows the growing political/economical importance of free and open source software.
Licenses that have compatibility clauses might have loopholes to relicense something with a more permissive license. For example: 1000 lines of EUPL + 1 line of GPLv2 results in 1001 lines of GPLv2 which means you've lost the Affero-specific clauses.

Bruno Lowagie, the author of iText, gave a very interesting presentation about his struggle with software licensing and how the inclusion of iText in the Eclipse Callisto simultaneous release helped him to clean up dubious pieces of source code.

Zombie perspectives

litrik — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 11:38:53 +0000

When you install and uninstall Eclipse plugins you might end up with some zombie perspectives on your perspective switcher:

They have the standard perspective icon and when you click on them a perspective opens where most of the views are missing (because all code related to the perspective has been uninstalled).

Bug 217974 deals with this issue and even though there has been some activity lately there is no fix yet. Here's a way to get rid of these icons:

Write down the tooltip text of each of your zombie perspectives.
Close Eclipse.
Edit the file .metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.ui.workbench/workbench.xml in your workspace directory.
Delete the <perspective> elements that have a child element <descriptor> with an attribute label that contains the tooltip text.
Restart Eclipse.

The zombie icons should be gone now.

Operation in progress...

litrik — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 08:44:35 +0000

"Operation in progress..." and a whole bunch of "Read timed out" errors is all I get when I try to upgrade my Eclipse installation from 3.4.1 to 3.4.2.

It is also painfully clear that the current update manager (aka the 'new update manager') has problems coping with all these network time-outs. There's no way to cancel the whole update. I'll have to sit through all time-outs (one for each jar) because the update manager dialog is modal.

Wouldn't it be nice if the p2 update manager supported Friends Of Eclipse? That would be awesome!

Eclipse community in Belgium

litrik — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:27:08 +0000

Next week a couple of Belgian companies are kickstarting a number of regional Eclipse user group meetings in Brussels.

Everybody is free to join.

I won't be able to make it next week but I look forward to attend this type of meeting in the future.

Plug-in idea: Keep Eclipse views sorted

litrik — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:22:17 +0000

Wouldn't it be great if Eclipse would keep all views in a stack sorted alphabetically? This way I wouldn't have to manually reorganize my views after opening a new one.

Is there a plug-in that enforces this? Or is this something that can't be done with the current public API and needs to be done by the Eclipse platform itself?

Using an aspell dictionary in Eclipse

litrik — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:59:20 +0000

Eclipse has built-in support for spell checking but it only includes two platform dictionaries: English (United Kingdom) and English (United States). Fortunately it is possible to use any aspell dictionary in Eclipse.

Here's how I enabled the Dutch aspell dictionary in Eclipse (on Ubuntu):

Execute

sudo apt-get install aspell aspell-nl gawk

Execute

aspell dump master nl | awk -F/ '{print $1}' >dictionary.txt

In Eclipse's preferences, open the page "General > Editors > Text Editors > Spelling".
Enter the path to your dictionary.txt file in the field User defined dictionary.
Restart Eclipse.

Based on this.

Subversive: try performing 'cleanup'

litrik — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:58:53 +0000

Earlier today I was struggling with Subversion in my Eclipse installation. I'm using Subversive 2.0.4 with the SVNKit 1.5 Implementation in Eclipse 3.4. When I tried to add a directory to version control using the Team > Add to Version Control... menu item, an error occurred.

*** Add to Version Control
svn add "/home/litrik/workspace/be.norio.drupal/build/lib"
svn: Working copy '/home/litrik/workspace/be.norio.drupal/build' locked;
     try performing 'cleanup'
*** Error (took 00:00.010)

When I tried to run cleanup using the Team > Cleanup menu item, this error was logged:

*** Cleanup
svn cleanup "/home/litrik/workspace/be.norio.drupal/build"
svn: Error processing command 'modify-entry' in
     '/home/litrik/workspace/be.norio.drupal/build'
svn: Error modifying entry for 'lib'
svn: 'lib' is not under version control
*** Error (took 00:01.023)

A does not work. Try B. B does not work. Do A first. Ad infinitum.

I decided to switch to Ubuntu's command line svn client, hoping that it would allow to get me out of this deadlock. When I went into the /home/litrik/workspace/be.norio.drupal/build and entered the svn cleanup command another error was shown:

svn: This client is too old to work with working copy '.';
     please get a newer Subversion client

Apparently the subversion client included in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) is version 1.4.6. My Eclipse Subversive plug-in is already using 1.5. After installing the 1.5 subversion command line client using these instructions I was able to run the svn cleanup command and switch back to Eclipse to add the directory to version control. All's well that ends well.

I still wonder how I ended up in that deadlock situation in the first place...

Expectations and the paradox of choice

litrik — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:00:51 +0000

There is an interesting presentation by psychologist Barry Schwartz at TED called "The paradox of choice". He explains why people are not better off when there is too much choice.

He claims:

Some choice is better than none. But it doesn't follow from that, that more choice is better than some.

His explanation makes sense:

The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose.

I think he has a valid point. A point which is also true in software:

How does a customer know which of the 6 (different?) versions of Windows Vista he should choose?
I'm using Ubuntu but maybe another distribution would be better for me. There are so many distributions to choose from.
There are a dozen WYSIWYG editor modules for Drupal. How do I pick the right one?
After you install 6 Eclipse projects the update manager contains more than 40 update sites showing hundreds of available plug-ins. When I want to install something extra, how do I know which plug-in I should select?
Which of the 417 Docbook elements do I really need to write my text?

I'm not saying that there should be no choice at all but very often there is simply too much choice and investigating all possible options takes too much time. Luckily Barry Schwartz reveals how to be happy with the choices you make:

The secret to happiness is "low expectations".

You can watch the presentation below or over at TED: