Eclipse 3.1 is out -- and unavailable

Eclipse 3.1 finally has been released. So far for the good news.
The bad news is that the eclipse download page is unavailable (no obvious mirrors). Searching through mirrors like the German one at fht-esslingen do not yet have the complete download as they seem to compete with downloaders around the world for the sparse capacity out of the main eclipse download page.
Perhaps the eclipse foundation should have asked the NetBSD guys how they do it. At NetBSD, when a release is finished, it will be published on the ftp server where only mirrors can pick it up. Later (after a day or two) the directory is opened for the whole public. This worked for years now.
Perhaps with eclipse 3.2 ...

1. JUGS SIG JBoss Meeting

Yesterday was the first meeting of the SIG Eclipse within the Java User Group Stuttgart (JUGS).

Thomas Diesler of JBoss, Webservices lead and the person responsible for J2EE 1.4 certification, gave a presentation about the upcoming EJB3 standard and some JBoss specific additions to it (like e.g. Annotations for MBean definitions). He also talked about the upcoming POJO-container that Adrian is currently working on.
After his presentation, we had Pizza, sponsored by Janine Eastwood of JBoss and a Q & A session afterwards.
Later on we talked about the future of the SIG and the interests of the individual SIG members. Next SIG meetings will be on 1.9.2005 and 3.11.2005 again at the Alte Scheuer in Degerloch.
Last but not least there was a vodka tasting organized by the three russian guys from iMedic.

It was a good first meeting with about 50 attendees.

Of course I had a printed copy of my JBoss book with me for attendees to glance at it.

Schumi is our hero.

Now, as Ferrari no longer dominates Formula 1, they can only win when fourteen other drivers just don't start, as (amongst others) reported by La Times in Grand Prix Is Where Rubber Meets Road.
So Michael Schumacher only had to compete against the underpowered teams like Minardi and he was even able to win then.

Lets celebrate Schumi and his victory!


NOT!

iX-Eclipse-Conference

Tuesday and Wednesday I have been on the iX-Eclipse-Conference in Heidelberg. Besides giving a talk myself on plugin development, I met some nice people, had fun and did learn quite some new things on Eclipse.
Erich Gamma did a keynote presentation on Eclipse 3.1 news. One of the things I remembered, was his description on how the team made sure that Eclipse 3.1 got faster in respect to 3.0. Basically, they set up a series of unit tests, which measured the runtime of some code and compared it to some reference timing (pseudocode):

public void testFoo()
{
startTimer();
runSomeCode();
endTimer();
commitTimingResultToDatabase();
assertFaster();
}

So this fitted in the framework, one is used to.
More important, they did learn a lesson: It is not enough to measure things, but to have someone (e.g. the community) to kick ass if there is too much red in the results.

Apple - Intel deal

In addition to my comment at Otaku, Cedric's weblog: What Steve isn't telling us

Universal binaries are available for Mac OS X for the last 10 years. Ok, it was called NeXTStep at that time though :-)
So go and google for 'fat binaries' and 'NeXT' to see what is available.
No one prevents you from supplying an app in three flavours:
- fat
- ppc
- intel

I guess, for Apple this is one of the few ways to survive. With the nice centrino chpisets, even Win* notebooks are not too bad these days. And they are way cheaper anyway.

The porting bit is not too hard if you ever contributed to an OSS like NetBSD. So I beleive that the Mathematica port only took two hours.

I think that Apple just needs some more time to e.g. offer new iBooks that are at least that performant than the average Centrino one, but still consume less energy.

By the way: when do you really need to care about byte ordering anyway? It is mostly only relevant when you want to access hardware directly (i.e. device drivers) or you want to use some assembler code to speed up compilation or when you design a new lower level networking protocol where you want some well known 'on the wire ordering'.
If you just write normal apps in C, Objective C or Java you don't care at all.
And for the other apps it is not that hard as for example NetBSD or mcntp prove.

Stuttgart-Lauf

Like last year I participated in the Stuttgart-Lauf. This time - again without practicing - I was over two minutes faster on the 7,6km run (which lead to hand measured 44:19).
The event again was great fun, so I will try to participate next year again.

Eclipse plugin versions

While preparing my presentation for the upcoming iX-Eclipse-Conference, I also tried 3.1rc1 and thought to switch my example plugin to Java 5.
There currently is a problem when one of the plugins uses Java 2, the export wizard of eclipse doesn't work (See my comment on bug 84767).
But worse than this: there is no environment option to tell a user "this plugin needs Java 5" (98269). There are options for the OS or the windowing system used though.
So the recommendation is either to use a custom build with the right environment set or to restrict plugins to Java 2/JDK 1.4.