Friday, August 15, 2003
Is it just me or is this Ben and Mena?
Getting back to the geekiness…
As you might by now know, I’d run my life via Jabber if I could. I subscribe to RSS feeds via Jabber and have a distributed todo list in Jabber (code release soon). My bugtracker sends Jabber notifications if you specify an address, and it’s my preferred IM protocol (FYI I use Psi as my client).
[aside: the new Psi Bugtracker is very very cute and I’m sure it’ll give me, er, “inspiration” for new features. It would probably rank quite highly on my previous bugtracker review, if it was a) open source and b) allowed normal users to add things. Looks fully-featured though.]
Anyway, Harness the power of log4j with Jabber is an article from IBM Developerworks explaining how to do exactly what it says on the tin. Potentially very useful for catching critical errors and instantly notifying a developer/support person. This is definitely getting integrated into my code.
Today also sees two methods of doing the same thing: finding which JAR file a class is in. Norman Richards uses a shell script whereas the IDE folks he mocks can now actually use the Eclipse JAR Class Finder plugin.
Keeping to the Eclipse theme, I know it’s massively popular, and clearly very powerful, but I think I find it too powerful. I use Editplus for all my needs, and it seems to do perfectly well. Eclipse just confuses me with its perspectives and workspaces and completely idiosyncratic method of working with projects. Although, in the process of moving our SourceSafe repository over to CVS this week (using the very good, and very simple vss2cvs), I discovered it has excellent CVS integration. Really, really good stuff. Much better than Visual Studio which kept corrupting our SourceSafe repository (or so I’m told), and it might not be as comprehensive, but far better than WinCVS which has so many usability issues I don’t even know where to start (again FYI, as if you care, I use TortoiseCVS for all my CVS needs).
Incidentally, IBM Alphaworks has lots of RSS feeds, which I didn’t know before. Go look and subscribe.