Monday, May 7, 2007

Sunday, May 6, 2007

Eclipse 3.3 M7 News

Eclipse 3.3 M7 News

http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/S-3.3M7-200705031400/eclipse-news-M7.html

Here are some of the cool features:

**Quick access To quickly access UI elements such as views, commands, preference pages, and others, use the new Quick Access dialog, available under Window > Navigation and bound to Ctrl+3 by default. Start typing in the filter field to see matches. For example, to open the console view, type Ctrl+3 followed by "con". One of the first matches will be to open the console view. You can use the arrow keys to select a different match for a given filter string. Press Enter to select the highlighted entry. This will execute the command, or open the view, perspective, or wizard etc.

Ctrl+3 shot 1

Your previous choices will be remembered and shown the next time the dialog opens. If you enter the same filter string again, the entry you picked last time will be selected automatically.

Ctrl+3 shot 2

Using the initials of the words you are trying to find, you can narrow down your choices using very few letters. Here are two examples of this:

Ctrl+3 shot 3

Ctrl+3 shot 4


**
Editor area drag and drop

Dragging external files (i.e., from the Windows file explorer) on to the editor area of a workbench window has the same effect as
Open File
. Also, you can now drag an editor between workbench windows associated with the same workspace.


**Double-click + mouse move to select words in editors
Words can now be selected using double-click + mouse move.

**English spelling dictionaries An American and a British English dictionary are now part of the SDK:

Picture showing the dictionary section from the Spelling preference page

Spell checking is now enabled per default. The feature can be disabled with the new Disable Spell Checking quick assist.

Tip: It's recommended that you set a user dictionary to collect custom words that are not part of the lexicon. This can be configured on the General > Editors > Text Editors > Spelling preference page.


Introduce Parameter Object refactoring

Introduce Parameter Object is a new refactoring that replaces a set of parameters with a new container object. All calls to the method are updated to pass the new parameter object class.

Use cases:

  • group parameters which logically belong together; e.g., Date start, Date end, String newValue, String oldValue
  • reduce number of parameters
  • provide useful defaults in the parameter object
  • pass the parameter down the call chain

To execute the Introduce Parameter Object refactoring, select a method, invoke Refactor > Introduce Parameter Object, select parameters that should be used as fields and give meaningful names.

Screenshot showing the the Introduce Parameter Object refactoring dialog

The following code snippet

Method before refactoring

will be modified to


Method after refactoring

Sunday, April 15, 2007

EclEmma - Overview

EclEmma - Overview
Useful Eclipse Plugin for JUnit Testing and Code Coverage.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Agile Toolkit Podcast

Agile Toolkit Podcast
This site looks pretty neat.

Friday, April 6, 2007

Good Talk on Find Bugs

Find Bugs is a static analysis tool for Java. It also has a plugin for Eclipse. I've tried it out and it works great.

Here is a talk by William Pugh one of the lead developers at Google describing the project.

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Brian Goetz: Publications

Brian Goetz: Publications
A lot of good java articles.

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Richer is poorer

Money Talks: A Brain Image of a Microeconomic Theory: Scientific American
It seems That the law of diminishing marginal utility has some more evidence. Apparently the poorer you are the more motivated you are to win games with small rewards. Rich people just don't seem to have that drive to earn a few extra bucks.

ScienceDaily: The Psychology Of Baseball

ScienceDaily: The Psychology Of Baseball: "Arizona State's Rob Gray has used a virtual hitting simulation -- something he describes as a 'purposefully simplified' video game -- to help determine what cues help hitters make contact with the ball. In a 2002 study, he varied the speeds of the virtual ball randomly from about 70 to 80 m.p.h., and hitters failed miserably, with batting averages of about 0.030. That'll get you cut from a T-ball team. But in the same simulation, hitters fared much better -- with batting averages of 0.120 -- when pitches were thrown at just two different speeds: slow (75 m.p.h.) or fast (85 m.p.h.). It's the randomness, not an over-powering fastball, that fools hitters. Gray's conclusion: 'It is clear that successful batting is nearly impossible in the situation in which pitch speed is random and in which no auxiliary cues (e.g., pitcher's arm motion or pitch count) are available to the batter.'"
If the Cubs could try this maybe they'd have a pitching staff this year.

Computers getting closer to seeing

Omni Brain : Immediate recognition software

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide

Top 10 Lifehacker Firefox Extensions
Good comments below as well that will give you even more.
I really want to create a Firefox with all the extensions I need and put it on the portable apps version. It's difficult to keep all my firefox's in sync. And when I am somewhere else I feel lost.

Monday, April 2, 2007

Letting people do what they want as long as they don't hurt anyone else is a good thing.

news @ nature.com - Cancer patients opt for unapproved drug - Internet trade pre-empts clinical trial.

This seems like a really interesting notion. What is the issue with allowing terminally ill patients to experiment on themselves? If the information that they share as to the results of their treatment it totally open and I think that we could save a lot of lives faster.

The other option is to force these people to not be able to take a chance that may save their lives when they have no other chances left. If we could open up the clinical trial system to something like this we would more rapidly find the cure for diseases.

I think that this comes down to my core Libertarian Philosophy: "Letting people do what they want as long as they don't hurt anyone else is a good thing."™


Why?

Well as long as it can be agreed that a treatment does not pose a risk to other people and the patient understands the risks to themselves, increasing the sample size and more rapidly undertaking clinical trials will lead to a better knowledge of how the drug is going to perform.

Forcing the drug to go through several stages and a long lengthy trial and review process that cost millions and millions of dollars is not going to do anything to ensure the safety of the drug above and beyond a well diversified cheap process without so much government regulation.

As long as the information that is garnered from a distributed clinical trial is shared openly then any negative side-effects will be rapidly uncovered and fully disclosed. Patients and their doctors could then decide impartially how to proceed with treatment. When a doctor recommends a treatment a patient could go the neutrally controlled site and read about it's effects.

Sunday, April 1, 2007

First!

This blog is a replacement for my old one which was crazy-party-land.blogspot.com