You can see some photos at Andrew’s blog post. I especially like this one :

Eclipse Booth

We had a whole bunch of people come by the Eclipse booth, and to my surprise at least 60% didn’t even know what Eclipse was. Another 20% kinda knew what it was but never tried it. The rest knew what it was and at least have tried it once. Only a few people actually used Eclipse. That was kind of surprising to me, even though I knew that Eclipse wasn’t very well received by the Linux crowd. Andrew’s presentation was well received from what I heard, so hopefully that will help with spreading the word about Eclipse. I think that the efforts of the Eclipse linux distros project is well worth it, and will help really help people use Eclipse on Linux.

OpenMoko

I had my Neo1973 with me and was playing around with it in the booth most of the day. A *lot* of people came by because they saw it and wanted to play around with it too. So that was fun. Yesterday I flashed the latest OpenMoko image to the phone and was actually able to make phone calls out of the box, which was very exciting. I even used the phone all day as a cell phone, and was surprised how long the batter actually lasted: most of the day. Of course I connected it to the computer once in a while because I was shuttling files back and forth. But since I always have my laptop with me anyway, that’s not a problem so I hope to start using the phone full time soon.

I think I’m also going to go to FSOSS, since it looks pretty interesting and it’s going to be a good break from school. See you there.

There’s going to be a pretty huge turnout of Red Hat folks from Toronto , so it’s going to be fun seeing everyone again.

I’m also going to have my Neo 1973 phone there (which is currently on loan to Sami). Since the Fedora and Eclipse booths are right next to each other I hope Sami and I can have a lot of fun playing with it.

Come say hi if you’re there!

• Files (for a single %files section)
• Scriptlets (i.e. %post, %prep, etc.)
• Changelog
• Default (for everything that is not one of the above)

What I noticed is that the default partition never got used, instead the IDocument.DEFAULT_CONTENT_TYPE partition was used for this. After digging through the code for a while and “fixing” what seemed to be the places that caused this, I ended up completely foobaring the partitioner.

Turns out that the Eclipse Text framework doesn’t support having a different default partition, and will happily barf in your lap if you try to force it.

Morale of the story children: Don’t $@!% with IDocument.DEFAULT_CONTENT_TYPE.

I’ve personally never been to it, but heard great things from those who have. So I decided to evangelize it at UofT and volunteered to become the head delegate, which means I get to (try to) herd a whole lot of sheep into coming.

So if you’re a university student in Canada, and interested in software engineering and software development, check it out! It will be a blast!

I guess this is one of those things.

Here’s a bunch of questions I encountered today that’s supposed
to help you judge whether someone will be a good Consultant. This is not
really specific to IT consultants, but the point is useful anyway.

————————

Q1.  How do you put a giraffe into a refrigerator?

The correct answer is:  Open the refrigerator, put in the giraffe, and close the door.

This question tests whether you tend to do simple things in an overly complicated way.

Q2. How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator?

Did you say, Open the refigerator, put in the elephant and close the refrigerator?

Wrong Answer

Correct Answer:  Open the refrigerator, take out the giraffe, put in the elephant and close the door.

This tests your ability to think through the repercussions of your previous actions.

Q3.  The Lion King is hosting an animal conference.  All the animals attend… except one. Which animal does not attend?

Correct Answer:  The elephant.  The elephant is in the refrigerator.

You were the one who just stuffed the elephant into the refrigerator.

This tests your memory.

Okay, even if you did not answer the first three questions correctly, you still have one more chance to show your true analytical abilities.

Q4. There is a river you must cross but it is used by crocodiles, and you do not have a boat. How do you manage it?

Correct Answer:  You jump into the river and swim across. Have you not been listening? All the crocodiles are attending the Animal Meeting.

This tests whether you learn quickly from your mistakes.

According to a consulting firm using this test, approximately 90% of the professionals tested answered incorrectly but many preschoolers answered several answers correctly.

One conjecture: most professionals don’t have the analytical powers of a four-year-old.

————————

Now, I fully realize that this isn’t a “ask this questions on a job interview” kind of advice, but more like “here’s something to break the ice”. But I would bet large amounts of money that some bozo hiring manager in some consulting company will actually use this as a criteria for hiring someone.

If you just one of those people that want to try it now, awesome! You have 2 options:

1. You want to just try it out for a bit but not really use it for editing specfiles:

Just check out the org.eclipse.cdt.rpm.editor plugin from :pserver:anonymous@sourceware.org:/cvs/eclipse (hint: copy paste that string into the Eclipse CVS checkout dialog), under the rpm module, and just run it as an Eclipse Application. Click on the Run menu, Run. Then right-click on Eclipse Application, click new, pick the plugin in the plug-in tab, and run. You can now create a new project (just a general project is good) and import your specfile into it. You can now edit the specfile with the specfile editor, which will open automatically for files ending with .spec.

2. If you want to actually use it for anything more than just a cursory glance you don’t want to have 2 Eclipse instances around, unless you’re very RAM-happy. Here’s what you do:

From :pserver:anonymous@sourceware.org:/cvs/eclipse checkout org.eclipse.cdt.rpm.editor and org.eclipse.cdt.rpm.editor.feature (under the rpm module) into your workspace. Now create a new project, this will be an Update Site Project, under the Plug-in Development category in the New Project wizard. Note that you need the PDE installed for this, under Fedora all you need to do is ‘yum install eclipse-pde’. Now double-click on the site.xml file in your new project, create a new category, under that category add a feature, select the org.eclipse.cdt.rpm.editor.feature project in your workspace as the one to add. Now click on the ‘Build’ button. This will create a local update site in your workspace. You can now use this to install the plug-in.

Go to Help-> Software Updates ->Find and Install, pick New Local Site on the second page, and pick your newly created update site. Now if you want to update the plugin, all you have to do is CVS update the plugin in your workspace, hit build in the site.xml of the update site. And then go to the Find and Install dialog again. Only instead of installing a new feature pick ‘Search for updates’.

Enjoy.

Here’s a short screencast of how it looks.

I’d love to hear what other people would find useful as part of the editor, this would be great to help us determine the direction for the near future.

We spent a couple of hours on it and got it kinda working. It wasn’t really an editor because it didn’t have any extra editing features, but we did get some syntax highlighting done in addition to figuring out at a high level how Eclipse editors work.

Last week I spent some time fixing up our work on the editor. It still not much, but I have working and pretty nice looking syntax highlighting working right now. Take a look:

The squigly white line in the middle is my amazing artistic skills when combining 2 shots .

Now I’m trying to figure out how to do content outlining, and the next step after that would probably be formatting or simple error highlighting. In the slightly further future we can have things like content-assist, validation (a.k.a. not-so-simple error highlighting), validation with external tools like rpmlint, and other goodies.

A lot of these features require parsing spec files, which right now isn’t that easy. I haven’t found any source of information that have a precise/formal definition of spec-file syntax. Basically I want to know 2 things:

• What are the rules that rpmbuild/rpmlint use for reading or validating a spec file.
• Is there a library that I can interface to that would do this for me?

I thought initially that rpmlib would be able to do the parsing, but the docs I read on it suggest that that would be outside of rpmlib’s scope.

Any ideas out there?

P.S. you can check out the editor at pserver:anonymous@sourceware.org:/cvs/eclipse under the rpm module. (Tip paste the CVS string pserver…/eclipse into Eclipse’s new CVS repository wizard).

He’s made great progress, and yesterday we pushed an update of eclipse-changelog 1.1.0 into both devel and the FC5 updates-testing repository. This version has a ChangeLog editor, which has nice color highlighting, and also allows you to jump to a file by Ctrl-Clicking it’s name in the ChangeLog. A modest, but very nice start. I think this plugin can become much more useful and usable with a very minimal amount of love. If you use Eclipse, give it a twirl.