Day: June 4, 2008

Go The Fuck Away!

I’ve ranted about the impromptu meetings that break out outside my cube in the past, right? Well, today it reached a new pinnacle of annoying: there were three separate groups talking, and because they were so noisy, each group was getting progressively louder and louder as they struggled to be heard over the other two groups.

After a minute or two of this, I went out and said very loudly “Excuse me, I’m not working too loud for you, am I?” One person laughed, but nobody stopped talking. About two minutes later, two of the groups went away but the one group stayed for another 5 minutes or so.

Next time I’m plugging my iPod into my speakers and blasting “Mao Tse Tung Said” at them.

Eclipse Part 2

This morning at work, I’m forcibly reminded of the other thing I like about Eclipse. Debugging. I had a guy come to me asking why this value wasn’t set at a certain part of the code, and so I put a breakpoint on it, attached to the running process with the Eclipse debugger, forced a schedule change, and when it hit the breakpoint, was able to single step through. I found the problem much quicker than if I’d had to keep adding “System.out.println” statements until I’d narrowed down the problem, like I would have in the past.

For 25+ years I’ve been debugging programs with print statements, core dumps (remember //SYSABEND SYSOUT=A?) and writing out the value of variables on a printout of the source code. Every now and then I’d step through something in dbx or gdb, but that was the exception rather than the rule. Now I can step through the code in the same editor I modify the source in, and actually fix it right then and there. I wonder why it’s taken me so long to discover this?

Eclipse

It’s now been 250 days since I started using Eclipse, first for a demo I was doing with GWT, and then for day to day programming. Yes, I’d used it a few times in the past, but I’d never stuck with it and gone back to vi/vim/gvim and ctags soon afterwards. I’ve got to say, I’m surprised. After 20 years of using vi, and having my fingers well trained for those particular commands, I can’t believe how much I’ve come to like and rely on Eclipse.
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