Blackcap Blog

Published at 22:00 on 28 September 2017

I’ve been using the Eclipse IDE off and on for several years now, mainly because it’s something of a de-facto standard in the Java world, and I want to be something in sync with that world. Well, forget it. I’ve come to the conclusion that the annoyances outweigh the advantages:

1. The editor is nowhere near as powerful as a stand-alone editor. That should not be a surprise; it’s competing for the attention of the Eclipse dev team with so many other priorities. By contrast, the dev teams working on text editor projects are totally focused on making those editors better.
2. The editor is sluggish. It doesn’t respond as promptly to my keystrokes as any dedicated text editor I’ve used. This frequently trips me up.
3. It’s almost as if it has an artificial intelligence engine working away to decide whether or not I’d like auto-completion to be offered for an identifier… and then does precisely the opposite of what I want. The feature pops up unbidden and gets in the way when I’m rapidly typing, yet never appears when I’m paused, trying to remember the precise name of something. Typing Control-Space remedies the latter situation, but still.
4. Also, the auto-complete for things like parenthesis and quotes is thoroughly evil. It’s always introducing syntax errors into my code, because it comes up slightly too late; by the time it’s gratuitously inserting something, I’ve already gotten a keystroke or two in edgewise.
5. The default is to indent with hard tabs, and you have to change many settings to defeat this misfeature.
6. There is no simple, easy way (at least none I’ve found, and I’ve tried) to stop it from making files with lines that have trailing white space.
7. When upgrading to a new version of Eclipse, nothing is done to import settings settings from any previous version you were using.
8. When upgrading to a new version, the new version will create a new directory for its workspaces, instead of seeing if there is any existing such area in a default location used by a previous version. The default workspace path changes from version to version. There is no overriding pattern to the defaults.
9. There’s no way to do something as simple and basic as renaming a project in Eclipse Oxygen. If there is; it’s very well-hidden; the action is not listed in the same menu that creating, deleting, and copying projects are listed.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the mess with the workspace directories. I don’t need three separate, inconsistently-named, locations. Yet that is now what I have. And when I attempted to convert and old workspace into a new one, the conversion failed and left some projects inaccessible. I’m sure there’s a solution that would enable me to fix the problem, but it’s simply not worth continually expending effort at making an overly-complex tool behave itself.

So I’m in the process of reverting to a text editor and using that old reliable standby Ant to do the building of my Java projects. A pity, as some of what Eclipse offers (detection of errors as one types, being able to request auto-completion) really is helpful.

Published at 09:52 on 23 September 2017

As much as I disliked formalized higher education, my experiences would have probably been far more negative had I attended an elite private university like Harvard.

Published at 10:48 on 21 September 2017

Yes, that Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson’s wife, the ex-CIA agent. First she tweets:

Then 90 minutes or so later she makes a feeble attempt at walking it back:

And yes, it’s a feeble attempt. If she “zeroed in on the neocon criticism,” then why mention Jewishness at all, if the problem is neoconservatives? Why retweet the subject, which was “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars.” Not “America’s Neocons” or even “America’s Jewish Neocons”, but “America’s Jews” as a whole. The problem was identified as Jewishness, not political ideology.

That an article so titled would resonate with her (to the point of prompting an instinctive retweet) points to deeply-held antisemitic attitudes on her part. That’s a far bigger problem that a simple “Oopsie!” can atone for.

Published at 13:16 on 19 September 2017

Probably doesn’t even see the irony in making a speech that contains both this:

Rogue regimes represented in this body not only support terrorists but threaten other nations and their own people with the most destructive weapons known to humanity.

and this:

The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.

Published at 10:17 on 18 September 2017

I currently rent a tank from Suburban Propane. Because it’s a rented tank, I must also buy the propane from that supplier.

They’re changing me around $5.00/gallon. Current market price is about $1.50/gallon (I’ve checked). So I’m being charged over three times the market rate. Avarice, anyone?

On top of the $3.50/gallon price premium, I’m of course charged a yearly tank rental fee (even though the tank should be free, given what a cash cow monopoly pricing is for them).

Add it all up, figure in my average consumption, and I can expect the new tank to pay for itself in under 2 years, and possibly after a single year. So it’s basically a no-brainer.

When I called Suburban up to begin arrangements to terminate my tank lease, they of course mention their far cheaper rate for customer-owned tanks, as if I’m going to reward them for their past extreme greed. Fat chance of that.

The only worry is my current apparent inability to find an even remotely compatible employer. My superstitious side worries about jinxing things in favor of being compelled to relocate to someplace more affordable in the near future. That is merely a superstition, of course, but it still gnaws at me.