I’ve spent the best hours of Sunday afternoon (after the F1 race in the UK, that is) and some hours this night to test a possibly new and revamped version of the Eclipse plug-in for tuProlog through the use of features and update sites. No problem whatsoever in Eclipse Europa. However, at the first install, Eclipse Ganymede did not recognize the existence of any extension in the branding/main plug-in for the feature… OK, well, I probably had something wrong in the build configuration for that plug-in, so I tried to do some changes here and there… but to no avail. What definitely pissed me off was that, while through the update site and feature Ganymede still showed an inexplicable behavior, running the plug-in as a Runtime Eclipse Application worked just fine.

This night I also discovered that the tuProlog Eclipse plug-in had no problem running from the dropins folder, one of the “great advances” of p2, the new installer framework in Ganymede. Finally, completely upset by the illogical behavior of the platform when it came to “correctly” installing the plug-in, I had a look into the plugins directory, just to find that older versions of folders and jars from the tuProlog plug-in were still hanging in there, even if the plug-in had been long uninstalled. So, I did exactly what “officially” you should never, never do: I manually deleted the offending files, and tried to reinstall the plug-in from p2.

Hey, it worked.

Then again: I uninstalled it from p2, then changed a couple of things in the about.mappings file for the branding plug-in… and tried to reinstall the whole plug-in, via the regenerated feature and update site, from within p2. Guess what? Those changes didn’t show up. Again, the older version was still on disk after uninstalling, restarting, jumping on one foot, and praying in chinese to a greek divinity.

Given that p2 is also storing configurations of installed plug-ins in a historic fashion, I like to think that what I experienced was a caching problem, but that’s just because caching problems have been a pet peeve in our open space at work, lately. Whatever really is, it definitely is a problem: the usual idea of uninstalling a piece of software and then reinstalling it maps quite naturally to a reset; if you change that mental mapping, you should have a good reason to do it… and click counts are not that good a reason, sorry.

Just for completeness: to have Ganymede see the oh-so-important brand changes, I had to do again the manual uninstall dance. This time, when I tried to reinstall the plug-in, p2 complained. What followed was a mix of restarts, use of the dropins folder (a couple of times, since the first time the plug-in didn’t show up even from there), and a general state of tiredness, but in the end the world turned up to be happiness and glee.

I hope to see the problem solved in the future… at least, not to experience it anymore with future Eclipse releases. In the meantime, I’ll return to bed, and try to finally get a good sleep.

You have already installed Ubuntu 8.04, right? Everything was fine, you got Firefox 3, perhaps even installed a beta of Firebug since 1.05 does not work with it, played around with some applications… you know, the usual things people do when upgrading an OS.

But, have you seen the new anti-aliased emacs? No, really, have you seen it? If you didn’t, you have to.

So, install emacs-snapshot.

Then, set the default font to some anti-aliased font, perhaps such as monospace, or Bitstream Vera Sans Mono; probably it doesn’t matter if you do it through .Xdefaults or through .emacs. Just do it. Then run emacs-snapshot, open whatever file you like, and…

Flames.

After noticing the new NetBeans 6 release, packed with goodies such as Ruby support, I decided to give the Sun IDE another chance for non-web development, and started trying it with the projects I (am supposed to) maintain. Since I supposed to feel more comfortable in Java-land, I picked tuProlog first. The first task was, of course, to set the IDE up in a proper way.

I checked the services out of tuProlog Subversion repository. Well, I tried to, really: I was indeed immediately blocked by NetBeans missing an external Subversion client. Installing it was easy, but it was an absolutely unnecessary burden on my part, since pure Java clients do exist, and NetBeans competitors make good use of them.

After managing to pick up sources, I found another surprise. NetBeans puts SCCS code in a folder, and creates projects in a different folder, by importing the code, or starting from a build.xml file if you use any. Supposing you want to keep any NetBeans-related code in a single location, this weird, a bit quaint behavior forces you to use folders with different names for code and project using that code. That is a minor glitch, however, one I could easily learn to live by without too much trouble.

But… which kind of project do I need to build from the SVN sources? I tried starting from scratch, but I wasn’t able to import and edit the already existing build.xml file for the project; so I tried to set up a project from the existing build.xml file, but then I wasn’t able to properly set up testing libraries for all the packages (yes, apparently you have to do it manually for each package) in the sources. (The almighty Marco Fabbri succeeded, but manipulating directly the project.xml file under NetBeans covers.) So, what have I missed? How people manage to use NetBeans with existing sources, comprising build files, checked out from an external repository? Is just source code already configured as a NetBeans project easy to use from within NetBeans? I’m really struggling with this kind of mental wanderings…

So stuck, and so lean to start using Eclipse again.

Well, have you noticed that the latest PhD comic strip changed overnight? (I mean, my night; I don’t know the time zone of my less-than-25-on-average readers.)

This is what currently appears on their site:

But yesterday night (that is, uhm, at least 20 hours ago) the third and fourth scenes (what’s the proper English term? I can’t remember it… I don’t even know if I have ever know it!) were different!

Third scene

Mike Slackenerny: Do I really have that much independence?
Professor Smith: Given how much I’ll ignore you, yes.

Fourth scene

Mike Slackenerny: Have you ever done a post-doc?
Professor Smith: Heavens, no! I wasn’t that lame.

So, uhm, I wonder: why has it ever been changed?…

(Oh, and if you have noticed this post categorized as personal, well, yes, it’s because it’s personal.)

It may be of interest to some of you that Luke Amdor started hosting RubyFIT on GitHub. This GitHub thing seems to have really been going viral, at least as far as the Ruby world is concerned.