Friday, November 28, 2008

SWT Ribbon again

Chris Aniszczyk posted short info about SWT Ribbon created by Emil Crunhorn.

I was just a little bored today - America has Thanksgiving so we had not had a lot of work in support - and I have tried to run SWT Ribbon under my Ubuntu 8.10. I have to admit I was 100% sure it will not work.

Check the result:

DemoCamp in Poznan

So this week we had the DemoCamp in Poznan. It was the 3rd time and I'm really impressed by how it has changed over time.

First DemoCamp was at the University, lecture style. Lots of attendees, most of them students, tough topics like g-Eclipse and Equinox. Feedback for us was that yes people in Poznan are interested in Eclipse.

Second DemoCamp, together with Ganymede release in June. This time as an informal evening event with beer and pizza. Lightning talks really astonished me! Suddenly it had turned out that there's more RCP developers around than we know. We received some interesting questions too.

And now this week's evening event. We planned for 3 demos and lightning talks session, but I noticed that after second demo, we could have stopped already. People started talking, gathering into groups and discussing their own topics. Amazing!
Topics, I heard of, ranged from "where does Eclipse name come from (FrED)?", thru modeling (promoted tirelessly by Grzegorz), to use of AOP for tiers separation.

This time was special also because of the guests we had: The Embarcadero's big guy, trying to fit delicious polish beer and the new era of SQL development on a very narrow table; an incognito Platform committer from Krakow teaming up with his GSoC student, and our new Platform.UI committer Chris. There were also some unexpected guests like famous traveller Mr. Wallet from Berlin, and some Scottish couple :-) Thank you all for visiting us!

See more pictures..

Monday, November 24, 2008

DemoCamp Poznan

I wish to thanks organizers, speakers (excluding me), and attenders for great atmosphere. I don't want to go here with summary of that event (probably Jacek will do it, and for sure better than me). I want to put here only small reminder.

During lightening talk I pointed out the idea of hackathon. During summit there was toast application presented and as it is a example of capabilities of Equinox ready to hack, why not ? So if you want give it a try please contact the authors (details on the wiki).

Another Eclipse commiter among Eclipse enthusiasts from Poznań!

Last week Christopher Daniel from our team was officially announced a full commiter on the UI component of the eclipse.platform project!
Congratulations Chris! Make the Platform even better then it is now! :)

Friday, November 21, 2008

The Worldwide Kindness Day

My Rational Application Developer was very very kind today to me while I was doing some kind of tracing:

Time to load bundles: 14
Starting application: 1594
Application Started: 18245
I LOVE YOU
Valid-responses ok error M E Removed New-entry MT Created Remove-entry Clear-sticky Checked-in Merged Clear-static-directory Update-existing Copy-file Set-sticky Valid-requests Mod-time Notified Set-static-directory Template Updated Module-expansion
valid-requests

That's an example!

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Eclipse Tip - Ctrl+1 and 'if's

Quick assist can do a lot of work for you. This flash shows what kind of manipulation you can perform on 'if's. Please use next/previous button to navigate between slides.











If you need more info, please go to Eclipse Help.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Eclipse Summit Europe 2008 daily report


but before I'll start let me show you my way to Eclipse Summit this year ;)

As I am student (really ;) ) I've got the student discount. Following the rule of savings I have flight to the Germany ;) . It was investment in time and money, train is twice as much time and $ painful. Anyway it was very lively travel. I took one car, one plain, one RE, one S-bahn to get to Ludwigsburg. I booked the chipest accommodation possible but it has at least three drawbacks:

  • It is far to far form the city center.
  • There is only one bus every half hour.
  • breakfast are served till 9am.


But as I pay for everything from my pocket, money counts (lets say I don't like to spend on myself ;) )

Maybe later one I'll report on how Ludwigsburg looks like for me (first time I made whole trip by foot) but now let me say few words about conference itself.

There were 4 sessions today. the choices were sometimes hard. one not wisely made.
Talking only in superlatives I've heard several good speeches, I have some interesting conversation between them and I've seen how huge power is Eclipse community. As I have barely no time today (well it is rather matter of not having internet at my room, even hostel) I'll sum-up what I heard today tomorrow.
Of course I'm not the only person with camera at this event (Ed will probably present bunch of nice photos) but let me show you one (that how it started).

P2 Tip: how to customize default list of update sites?

If you'd like to ship your product together with P2, but containing custom set of update sites in "Help -> Install New Software", then:
1. Go to "Help -> Install New Software -> Manage Sites"
2. Shape the list using Add/Remove/Modify, and press "OK" when you're done
3. Copy org.eclipse.equinox.p2.artifact.repository.prefs and org.eclipse.equinox.p2.metadata.repository.prefs from eclipse/configuration/.settings/
to your final build configuration directory

By default Eclipse comes with two sites configured this way - linking to ganymede release train and updates.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Eclipse DemoCamp Poznań!

Hello,

We'd like to invite you to Eclipse DemoCamp in Poznan - a part of word-wide series of events organized by Eclipse community. We're meeting on Monday evening, November 24th, in Piwnica 21 pub. Starting at 18:00.

We'll be promoting Eclipse as an IDE and RCP platform, this time with our special guest - Wassim Melhem - committer on Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment project, who is currently working on commercial database tooling based on Eclipse. Dawid Weiss from Poznan University of Technology will tell a few words about combining Carrot search engine, and finally Bartosz Michalik will show his work on PDE Product Customization - a heaven (and hell at once) for all RCP integrators.

As always, this time again, you'll have chance to sell yourself, your product, share experiences or even rant a little bit during lightning talks. Last time they were really popular, so prepare good, as you may have to fight for your 5 minutes on stage :D

To better support discussions, we'll have some free beer, pizza and DanceDanceRevolution for most excited Eclipse fans ;-)

All details are at http://wiki.eclipse.org/DemoCamp/Poznan. Please register there (directly on wiki, or by sending email to one of organizers).

Sunday, November 16, 2008

DemoCamp's shape

Going to demo camp with presentation is always difficult, especially if you need to travel from Poznan to Krakow (both cities are in Poland). The main problem is that Krakow is in dead zone. It does not matter which transport medium (a car, a train or even a plane) you select, it always takes 6 hours or more to get from one city to another.
You can easily imagine my big astonishment when I saw people that travelled even longer to give their lightning talk and listen to other presenters (including me with RAP). I invited them also to Poznan, which is much closer then Krakow, but they gently refused - they wanted democamp to be similar to conference rather than informal talk, where people share with their Eclipse experience.
I am a little bit said, because we have resigned from fixed schedule in Poznan to be flexible and to encourage our guests to start talking. Eventually our program has been received as rather "poor", and the democamp is considered as an event in its starting phase. This is basically not true, as Jacek (in cooperation with others) is putting a lot of work to get everything working correctly and everybody to be happy.
So, I'd ask a general question: What are you expecting from demo camp you are going to attend?

Regards,
Chris

Saturday, November 15, 2008

I have seen this before

Martin Fowler's latest post shows quite interesting use of Open Source. In one sentence: let the customer to develop your Open Source solution and charge him for that.
This is quite similar to Eclipse approach (maybe except charging), isn't it?