Fate of the Fry

This video triggered my admittedly weird humor quite spot on...

Foxy

Firefox 3.5 is out. I know, old news here. But the old fart^W^Wexperienced user that I am I usually wait for a couple of days until the dust has settled. I don't know about other platforms as I am too snobby to use any but the Mac version has improved tremendously. It feels quicker and that hardly ever happens with a new piece of software. Sites heavy on Javascript like GMail feel like you're on Safari now :P. And the scrolling! Finally as smooth and snappy. Not to mention the new porn^Wprivacy mode. Good job, guys!

Uptime

Just as I was about to blog that Leopard's sleep mode is finally stable that dang thing froze again. Well, at least 10.5.6 gave me somewhere between 40 and 50 days of uptime. Much better than the two weeks maximum I got before. Let's see what 10.5.7 will do...

Wir sind China

I guess you can only really understand the headline if you are German. Or if you are seriously studying Germany. Anyways, this picture found on mediengestalter.cc should be fine for anybody with a brain. Which clearly excludes German politicians.

Ursula takes action

Germany goes China

It seems they are really doing it. As a nerd I will never be able to vote for one of the big parties again. Ever. Well, at least I can move to countries like China or Iran now without sacrificing too many rights. Clearly, Germany likes its walls.

(J|Str)uggling with Eclipse Updates and Plug-Ins

The Eclipse guys are working a lot on the update mechanism. Which they should btw, because it is still a PITA. Switching to a new Eclipse version takes way more time than it should. I seem to be able to upgrade my whole operating system quicker than Eclipse. (Yeah, screw those Mac OS fanboys.) And I am not even talking about porting home-brewed plug-ins. Anyway, intro-rant over, now for some info.

Now that 3.5 is almost out we dared switching from 3.3 to 3.4. Yeah, I know, we're conservative uptight lamers. Anyways, I used to keep all the plug-ins I collected from random sites separate from the standard ones supplied by eclipse.org. Once you knew how, it worked alright. With the update manager you could create a new extension location (like a directory Eclipse-3.3-Plugins somewhere in your home) that looked like this:

Eclipse-3.3-Plugins/
  eclipse/
    .eclipseextension
    features/
    plugins/

Standard eclipse directory structure except the special file .eclipseextension. An empty file does the job.

Then, when you downloaded extensions you just told the update manager to store the stuff in that location and you were good. When you switched to a new Eclipse version you copied the file configuration/org.eclipse.update/bookmarks.xml from your old Eclipse installation to the new one to keep all your update sites. Not exactly what I call user friendly migration but it worked. Much better than manually adding all the update sites again.

I did that when switching to 3.4. Unfortunately that seems to deactivate Eclipse's new p2 Update Manager mechanisms and enable the Update Manager's compatibility mode. So I googled and read for a few hours. Because I ain't got anything else to do, haha.

In short: fiddling with Eclipse's plugins and features directories is no longer encouraged. I didn't really find a way to add an external directory for plug-ins, though. The option you seem to have with 3.4 seems to be the dropins folder.

There you can either have a standard Eclipse directory structure like outlined above or have plug-ins directly or group them in subdirectories or even have traditional link files. See the p2 document.

After having spent half the day with that, um, stuff, I went for the quickest option and created a symbolic link to my plug-ins directory:

Eclipse-3.4/
  ...
  dropins/
    eclipse@ -> /Users/thm/Apps/Eclipse-3.4-Plugins/eclipse

And no, I don't have the feeling I am an expert on that. I just wanted to make it work. Tomorrow I will try to add all my update sites and see where they are stored. grep(1) is my friend.

Even Macs are just computers

Every now and then even my Mac bugs me. For some so far (to me) unknown reason Spotlight hogged the CPU the other day. CPU usage was permanently above 150%, as reported by Activity Monitor. After a while that otherwise silent thing turned into a jet plane ready to take off. That's what fans at 6000rpm sound like. Plus the hard disk was grinding away so the machine was barely usable.

Googling did not really reveal anything except an article that gave me a hint that I still have to investigate: maybe Spotlight got stuck on a file. Although I think a grinding hard disk is evidence that Spotlight is not exactly stuck. Smells like some kind of endless loop, rather, and not one on a single file.

Anyways, the only quick way out of it was disabling Spotlight altogether. Great.