IDE Goodness

Rarely will you hear me enthuse over a software product, but in my never-ending search for the perfect development environment I ended up giving Eclipse another try. Eclipse was a horrid product in the 1.x and 2.x days (at least in my opinion) because the learning curve was too steep. But they really got it right with 3.0.

The best part for me, since most of my coding is in Python and Perl as opposed to Java, is that the editor has plugins that support those languages better than any other editor I’ve used. It’s object parser can find modules and subroutines in any of the three languages I typically write in, and it’s got tight CVS integration with its project structure. That exactly how I like to work, and if it keeps me from constantly running to the shell that’s a good thing.

The main point of this blog entry is so I don’t forget the URLs for when I have to install Eclipse on another platform or reinstall it. So here they are:

Eclipse: http://www.eclipse.org/
PyDev: http://pydev.sourceforge.net/
Perl EPIC: http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net/

To load those two modules into Eclipse you’d got to the add features section and add sites with those URL’s listed above and postfix “updates/” to them.

Some good reading

In the grocery store the other day, what should my gaze stumble upon but this:

Fulk Me

On quick glance, what does that look like to you? That’s right, Fuck the Reluctant. Now that’s my kind of novel. Don’t know about this “Fulk” stuff, though. Should you, for some reason be interested in this new piece of historical/romantic fiction, check the author’s site here.

Hanging Out

You might be aware that I went through some tough times with Amanda about 8 or so months ago. There’s some good news finally. She’s doing really well, and coincidentally so am I. We’ve started hanging out some again and we’ve had a really good time.

I mentioned making sushi the other day. She came over and we made it together. I did take a picture, which I think I mentioned previously. The meal turned out pretty well and doesn’t look half bad either.

Sushi Dinner.

Of course, she’s up to her old tricks as well. What did she manage to do almost as soon as she came over? Locked her keys in her trunk. She was trying to find them and I went outside to look and said, “yup, they’re in your trunk.” “How do you know?”, says she. Well, this is how I knew:

Car Keys

A few minutes

So here I sit in a class where I’m being learned on J2EE application servers. Finished my exercise two hours ago. Waiting for the two thirds of the class that can’t figure out what they’re doing. For the most part these exercises are just performing the very specifically spelled out actions that the book prescribes you to do. If you can follow directions you should be able to do this stuff. Not that it’s not a good way to learn, and not that I haven’t had my share of mistakes that I needed to correct, but really… Just follow directions, people – it’s not that hard.

I’ve been feeling way better recently. That’s led, in part, to the decision to keep the cats. It’s also enabled me to go out and do some stuff that I’ve been wanting to do for a while. Among the more entertaining of these things was a decision to put the sushi making kit I got a few months ago to use. I have some photos of the end results (which really don’t look all that bad) as soon as I have both my camera and my USB equipment in the same state. But I can tell you that they were pretty damn good for a first effort. I have some crab in the freezer, ready for the next attempt – California rolls. Looking forward to trying those out.

Speaking of.. I’m actually in California at the moment for this class. And sushi is going to be on the menu tonight. I keep hearing that sushi in Ohio sucks compared to sushi on the coast. Time to find out. A plate full of raw fish and a bottle of saki – sounds like a good time to me.