turker.out.println

A new Eclipse site is launched. It is called EclipseZone.

It is described as “an online community by and for Eclipse users everywhere”.

[via eclipsepowered]

Eclipse 3.1RC1 is available for download for the last week or so. I think I am going to wait until the release comes out because it is kinda painful for me to setup my development environment again for the new release.

I started using Eclipse 3.1 M6 release this week. The killer feature to prompt to switch was the new functionality to redirect console output to a file added to the Common tab of launch configuration dialog. I found out about this when I was searching for some information on how to add such a functionality to the special launch configuration I was writing.

Apart from that feature, I am feeling very positive about Eclipse 3.1. I think the platform is a little faster and there some other nice features that found their was into the release. Some I noticed immediately are:

• Open Existing Project screen now lets you just to select the contaning folder and all the projects in the folder are listed below with check boxes near them. This makes it real easy to open multiple projects in your workspace.

• There is now a Dynamic Help button which opens up the help right next to the IDE. This makes it easier to browse help for a quick look up since you do not have to switch between windows. This is pretty much looks like Visual Studio help column.

• Run-time Workbench configuration in the Run Configuration dialog is changed to Eclipse Application. Settings seem to be mostly the same except from the name which gives the feeling that you are developing a new application rather than a plug-in.

• Class members are colored blue now. What I mean is that if your class has the member isChecked and if you do code this.isChecked, the part after the dot is blue. I am not sure why this is preferred. On one hand, it makes it easier to distinguish the members in code, but on the other hand, it is a little mixed up with strings in quotation marks.

• It is possible to the CVS console now. You can switch to CVS console after you do a CVS operation and see what went on during or after a commit, update, or any other CVS operation.

I am sure I will notice many changes but those were the most apparent ones to me in a short usage time. I was pleased to be able to port my 3.0 project to 3.1 without any problems. I am eagerly waiting the next milestone releases and eventually the 3.1 release.

I was working on creating a launch configuration in Eclipse using an external tool which would be SSH. I needed to setup passwordless SSH connection to the remote machine. I had done it before but something had changed and I had to do it again, I followed the simple procedure that I found, but it wasn’t working for some reason. I finally found a small missing step which was not shown in many places at MickBlog. The trick for me was just to change the mode of authorized_keys to 644. So, keep this in mind if you ever need a similar setup. I iterate the procedure below:

. Type ssh-keygen -t rsa on the local machine and accept the default location for the file
. Enter a passphrase when prompted. You will be asked this instead of the password when you ssh to the remote machine. You may leave it blank but that would degrade security
. Enter the passphrase again
. Transfer the id_rsa.pub file to the remote machine (e.g. scp id_rsa.pub login@remoteip:~)
. On the remote machine type cat id_rsa.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys
. On the remote machine type chmod 644 .ssh/authorized_keys
. When you ssh to the remote machine, you will be asked to enter your passphrase instead of the password. If you left the passphrase blank you will simply be logged in without entering anything

As I mentioned, hackyEclipse is an Eclipse plug-in that collects productivity metrics. It gathers Activity, File Metric, and Unit Test data in Eclipse and sends to hackyStat server. The sensor used to only support JDT. I recently joined the development team of hackyStat, which is distributed under GPL licence, to add CDT to the mix.

As of now, I added support for C/C++ files and projects. Currently, hackyEclipse also gathers data on CDT regarding open/close/save actions on files or projects. It also monitors the builds and detects and records build errors. In addition, with the limited refactoring support of CDT, hackyEclipse also monitors changes on CDT elements, like addition of a new class to the project.

Hackystat is an experimental testbed for personal metrics validation. There are several tool sensors for several development tools. You can read more about the tool sensors here.I am mainly interested in the Eclipse sensor, namely hackyEclipse. It is a plug-in for Eclipse and collects productivity metrics about the developer’s usage of the platform. You may read about it in more detail herenIt currently supports only the Java Development Tool. However, I am in the process of developing C/C++ Development Tool functinality. More on that will come later.