Zibblog

For anyone that doesn’t follow that sort of thing, the 3.2 release (Callisto) of Eclipse was released the end of last week. I just started playing around with it at home since I don’t want to destabilize my work setup, and it seems to work fine with all of the plugins that I use on a daily basis. Lately, I’ve found the following add ons to be really good.

• PHPEclipse – It’s not super fancy, but it has some nice little features like refreshing an internal web browser on file save.
• RadRails – I’ve started playing around with Ruby on Rails and this is another set of plugins that provides some nice integration, especially if you’re a windows user.
• Ruby Development Tool (RDT) – RadRails is built on top of this one, which provides a lot of the Ruby editing framework.
• Subclipse – Subversion + Eclipse. If you want to use this with Callisto, then I recommend reading this page.

There’s a lot of smaller plugins, but these are the main major ones that I always install. Recently, I started playing around with eclipse plugin development and I found the EclipseZone forums to be a really good place to find answers to detailed questions about anything related to eclipse. At some point, I’ll probably blog about the plugin that I play around with every once in a while for packaging and editing firefox extensions. When the source isn’t quite so hacked up, I’ll throw that up too.

My daily RSS reading tends to involve reading blogs of friends (usually only 2 or so posts a day across all of my friends), read daily tech news from places like techcrunch and valleywag, read a little bit of comic book news, and glance through a bunch of everything else across the 167 feeds that I subscribe to (most of which are only 1 or 2 posts a week). Mostly, I use FeedDemon, which has the concept of groups of bookmarks called News Bins. Every so often, I try and clean these out and do a post, but I thought that there must be a better way. After some searching, I found a old post on the subject that contained a link to a style file to turn the display for a news bin into a plain list of links that you can then copy and paste wherever you want to. From that, comes the following links. Enjoy

• ~stevenf: More on Tech Complexity. “So, if we (again the royal “we”, people who produce computer-ba…
• NY Times: What Netflix Could Teach Hollywood
• On Writing A TV Pilot
• One Hundred Rules for NASA Project Managers
• The Four-Day Week Challenge
• web2.1 blink tag
• What’s New in Eclipse 3.2 – Usage Tips & Tricks
• The Myth of Keeping Up

I decided the other day that since I finally have much of my condo cleaned up, organized, and otherwise fixed (at least until more plumbing issues rear their ugly hair), I should start getting more productive again. One thing that means is starting to get back into the swing of blog posting. If for no other reason than to organize my thoughts. This week should bring more content to the zibblog, but I won’t promise that the content will actually be good.

The other day, I felt like I’d gotten to the point on my windows pc where there was simply too much clutter. Too many old registry entries, half uninstalled applications, etc., so I figured that I’d reinstall windows. At this point, I put in the install CD, started up the machine, and watched it try and find a driver for my SATA hard drive. Alas, it was unsuccessful. I then remembered that when I first installed windows, I was installing onto an IDE drive which I’d replaced with the 10k rpm drive. After some searching, I found some drivers and a floppy disc image, so I figured I was all set.

If you’ve ever seen my shuttle pc, you’d know that it doesn’t have a floppy drive. This is why I keep around a floppy drive that I can connect to the motherboard in case I have to do this sort of thing. After connecting up the floppy drive, it found the correct drive, but windows still had some issues doing the install. A few google searches later, I found out about “slipstreaming” a windows installer (this is where all of my windows using friends think “duh, why didn’t you think of that in the first place”). It turns out that there are programs like nLite that will allow you to take an existing windows installer and modify it to include other drivers, service packs, etc. I was pretty impressed with how easy it was to point nLite at the drivers I had found, create a CD with the drivers included, and do the full windows installation from CD.

The other day I had one of the scarier computer related experiences that I’ve had in awhile. After a weekend afternoon of cleaning my office, I left my shuttle pc on and went for a run. When I got back, I was checking my email when I suddenly got a blue screen. I didn’t think a whole lot of it, but when I tried to reboot my computer, it seemed to have issues restarting. At this point, I realized that I should have heard the integrated case and cpu fan come up to high speed on reboot, but I didn’t hear anything at all. Once my computer had stopped burning (okay, it wasn’t burning, but it was really really hot), I tried to figure out what had happened and traced it to a bad fan header on my motherboard. Luckily, the motherboard had an extra fan header, so after picking up a $2 cable at Fry’s I was able to get it up and running again. Crazily enough, it’s now been running for a week without any problems, which is a testiment to the robustness of the Pentium 4.  I believe the moral of the story is that you should be saving to buy an Intel Core 2 Duo when they come out because you current computer is going to blow up sometime.

If you’re not an RSS junkie or a Web 2.0 slut, you may have missed the debut of Share Your OPML (share.opml.org) from Dave Winer. For anyone that doesn’t know, OPML can be boiled down to an XML format describing a tree of data (an outline as XML). Currently, this is usually used as a list of your RSS feeds. Most RSS aggregators will allow you to import/export OPML and there are even some interesting utilities like Grazr for looking at your OPML. Anyway, I have been waiting for a while now for someone to come out with a really cool, feature rich OPML site to make people sit up and notice the promise of OPML.

Nope, this isn’t it yet. Before I’m going to really care, I want features like the ability to keep a shared opml in live sync with my newsgator feed list so that I can just subscribe to a list of feeds. Right now, it just feels like it is a place for hosting OPML files with some stats built into the site. That being said, I’ve got a lot of hope that features like this are coming at some point.

If you go to the site, there are 2 main features: Most Prolific Subscribers and Top 100 Feeds. What’s interesting is on Sunday night (of minor note is that at the time, I was eating a cinnamin roll … I love cinnamin rolls … they’re like crack, just cheaper), I went to the prolific subscribers page and out of 100 spots, the highest # of feeds for any one person was 1441 and the lowest was 122 (if you’re interested, the list that I use with Newsgator is about 150). What prompted this post was the fact that the #1 person on the list now “subscribes” to 8808 feeds. How is that possible? (More importantly, why aren’t I subscribing to that many feeds?)

The Top 100 Feeds section is what has probably gotten the most press at this point. Some people (like techcrunch) think that it will become the new hot site list. I don’t know if I’d go that far. Right now, it’d only take 100 subscribers to get into the top 100 list. More importantly, the list is heavily skewed toward tech sites (as evidenced by the fact that techcrunch and engadget help lead the pack). Taking that into account, there are a lot of good sites in the top 100, so I’d recommend taking a look.