EclipseCon 2006 :: 21 March Schedule

One cool thing about eclipseCon is the quality of the web documentation -- I especially like the capacity of anyone to post their own recommended track and the ability to see flexible color coding of recommendations. [If this is not obvious, be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page. I wish I had published my own track.
Here is what I'm looking at today:
Stein's keynote
Pollock's Your Action is My Command -- commands are new to 3.2
Franklin's Redoing Undo -- looks like it will have some material on headless eclipse -- I'm always interested in headless + Franklin is a Smalltalker. That never hurts.
Ward's keynote
Elder's Common Navigator Framework --- looks like its the best way to approach navigation
Merks' XML Binding --- I'd like to understand DOM vs EMF better.
I'll also attend the short talks in the Theater as they are more RCP oriented and
Instantiations demo of their new RCP tool at 8 pm.

Thus spake Joel

Joel Spolsky has not been my favorite writer; I almost skipped this morning's keynote type talk. Fortunately I did not. If nothing else, his characterization of K. R. was worth the trip:

He is so stupid he could not empty a boot full of piss if the instructions were printed on the heel.

Joel presented his magic formula for successful software:

1. Make people happy
2. Think about emotions
3. Obsess over aesthetics.

Always focused on the popular image of his audience, there were plenty of references, verbal and visual, to people, generally not of the same gender as the majority of the audience, wearing not all that many clothes.

Fortunately, his motivation for his three principles really was well done and informative. I now know I need to study the design of the Poupidou Center, a guy named Rapaile, and the principles of misattribution.

Who is K.R.?

FolderShare Syncs Files

Microsoft purchased a few months ago. Pretty cool.

Open Source at Eclipse: Callisto M5 and the Callisto Great Bugs Contest

Open Source at Eclipse: Callisto M5 and the Callisto Great Bugs Contest
While the plug-in archiecture of eclipse allows interoperation, or at least co-existence, between diverse tools and applications, tools are often based on different eclipse releases and conflicts are common. The Callisto project will bring several of the major projects into alignment and allow tools based on them to have a firm foundation which exploits recent progress. Callisto will be released with eclipse 3.2 which will appear in June 2006. [Major releases of eclipse appear each June.]
Projects based upon some combination of BIRT (OO Report Writer), Data Tools Platform, Eclipse Modeling Framework, Graphical Editor Framework, Graphical Modeling Framework, Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform, the Visual Editor or even the C/C++ IDE should probably start building on the current (M5) release of eclipse 3.2. There will be a few rough spots, but by the end of July a great deal of stability in the core components will exist.