The details of what and how are unimportant, but for the record, selecting just one menu item in Eclipse lost me three days due to the data recovery process. Eclipse is both good and evil; yin and yang; it giveth and it attempt to taketh away. In the mists of time, this will all be forgotten, as will the baking heat of those three particular lost days, because the good news is that despite the heat, I managed to retrieve my work from the incremental backup I made on Thursday, and by 02:00 on Monday I’d reintegrated every improvement since.

So a small level of paranoia data rentention diligence is a good thing, because eventually, even if you avoid the nightmare of a disk failure, you’re bound to press the wrong button: as I did.

The moral of the story is this: backups work.

The subtext to the moral of the story is this: more backups work more.

Yes it took three days to get back to where I was, but that’s better than nothing. To improve matters should I make the same mistake again, I’ve now set the backup process to run every two hours rather than every night.

Obviously all this scrambling and backtracking had an effect on me, and in last nights dreams I found myself in the company of several soviet officers who showed me, on a post it note, several passwords that I have previously used; before passing me a pile of 132 column dot matrix printout (with the tear off tractor edges still attached) containing logs of my computer usage from the last several years.

Maybe it is paranoia after all.

There’s some very nice features that I doubt I’ll use, but that’s the beauty of a good tool, until you start to use it regularly, you don’t know that you need the features.

I’ll be using it to ensure my spam filters are optimally written in future.

My development box has 3Gb RAM so that I don’t have to suffer swapping, but windows still does it. The KeepResident plugin could make my coding life far happier.

For the uninitiated this means it lets you look at the low level code which is generated when a .java file is compiled. If you’ve ever read Bill Venners book Inside the JVM, you’re probably going to like this. For the serious developer this plugin is a huge step in the right direction, providing a very useful new aspect on the code.

The diff capability is really cool, and I’d love to see it extended so it’s capable of diffing the bytecodes from different compilers without having to manually generate the class files (i.e. i prefer to use jikes for releases and would like to be able to select xyz.java and compare output from Jikes vs the Sun JDK).

In the mean time, any partial migration to PNG necessitates the inclusion of some hacky workarounds in order to display different icons for different parts of the UI, something which is not desirable because there’s wasted time both in hacking it and unhacking it later.

Robust PNG support is also important because it will help pave the way for SVG based icons. SVG icons can include complex transparencies and PNG is the most likely intermediary format for icons to be converted to before being blatted to the screen.

SVG based icons are important because they are scaleable – resulting in Eclipse UI components that can be appropriately rendered, regardless of screen size or resolution. This will have an effect on the uptake of the Eclipse RCP for small screen (read: mobile) devices as well as other specialist uses.

With any luck, bug 35040 will make it into the next Eclipse release since it’s now in the top 10 most voted for bugs, and seems to be moving up the list.

Add your vote here. Note: to do this you need a buzgilla account, you can create one here.

Looking at the list of fixed bugs, 76 were of major, critical or blocker status, and only 5 were enhancements. This reflects the intended purpose ironing out any v3 teething troubles.

Still to do however:

1. Stop showing the triple, just show the RDF object value
2. Display resources and Literals in different twisties within the Properties View (and add user preference)
3. You may also notice that the content of the RDFX View tree has been frigged – this is currently a big to do.
4. Also, for twisties, are cases where there are multiple values for a particular property.
5. Add a lookup for the Property Name so that if it has a “plain english” value defined somewhere it can be used – (using schemas notes added on this later).

Really; read it before you start to code anything in Eclipse.