Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Today I try to debug with Eclipse. Apparently if you break on any method that takes a few seconds to complete and then try to do anything (step, resume, disconnect) you'll get a timeout exception in eclipse. Bug #95542 tells you all about it. Although the Sun JVM is probably at fault, since it doesn't allow asynchronous messages to be passed to it from a debugger, Eclipse really needs to be on top of this and provide a solution in the current release. It looks like the fix will be pushed out to version 3.2 (current version 3.1.1).
Friday, November 11, 2005
Rome: Total War Kicks Butt!
Where else can you pretend to be Alexander the Great, Hannibal, or Julius Caesar? I'm playing as as the Greek Cities now. They are pretty easy to play. I simply line up my infantry in front. Put them into a phalanx and wait for the enemy to impale themselves on it. It's pretty simple. Just gotta remember to tell the archers to stop shooting once the enemy gets close. I end up shooting my own soldiers in the back when that happens.
Where else can you pretend to be Alexander the Great, Hannibal, or Julius Caesar? I'm playing as as the Greek Cities now. They are pretty easy to play. I simply line up my infantry in front. Put them into a phalanx and wait for the enemy to impale themselves on it. It's pretty simple. Just gotta remember to tell the archers to stop shooting once the enemy gets close. I end up shooting my own soldiers in the back when that happens.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Senseless "Copying resources to the output folder"
Dear Eclipse, why do you feel the need to keep copying resources to the output folder when I can't possibly see why you would need to?
Today I decided to try remote debugging on Eclipse. For those of you who don't know, remote debugging is where you start a process and then later, after its already running, use your IDE/debugger to connect to it and control the process/introspect whats going on in the program. Now Eclipse, if you've already got the darn thing running, why compile everything? I mean, you already got the source code in hand just let me start debugging. Even worse, I started you up hours ago and you've squandered all that idle cpu time and are now wasting my time doing something you should have been doing all along. If this program is written in a way that causes it do defensively compile everything all the time, doesn't it make sense to try and keep itself in a precompiled state?
Dear Eclipse, why do you feel the need to keep copying resources to the output folder when I can't possibly see why you would need to?
Today I decided to try remote debugging on Eclipse. For those of you who don't know, remote debugging is where you start a process and then later, after its already running, use your IDE/debugger to connect to it and control the process/introspect whats going on in the program. Now Eclipse, if you've already got the darn thing running, why compile everything? I mean, you already got the source code in hand just let me start debugging. Even worse, I started you up hours ago and you've squandered all that idle cpu time and are now wasting my time doing something you should have been doing all along. If this program is written in a way that causes it do defensively compile everything all the time, doesn't it make sense to try and keep itself in a precompiled state?
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Why I hate Eclipse
I'm trying desperately to like the open source IDE Eclipse but I'm finding it incredibly difficult for me to switch from IDEA's IntelliJ. Not to sound like a sales rep, but I mean IntelliJ is so good about doing the smart thing without me even thinking about it. For example when I try to use a new class, IntelliJ automatically underlines the class name and adds a little tooltip over it to tell me that it doesn't recognize the class, but instead of just stopping there it allows me to press Alt+Enter so that it can automatically import the package that contains that class. It doesn't simply highlight the class and put up a little red dot next to the line that I'll have to click. Obviously I'm typing when the IDE realizes that I want to use a new class. There should be no need for me to switch to the mouse in the middle of my typing. That's what makes the IntelliJ feature so great. Not only am I keeping my fingers on the keyboard, its informing me of the most appropriate key stroke to use in my situation.
My second problem is that its just ridiculously slow. I think the problem is not so much that it is slow, but that its not telling me why its slow. That's an important distinction because if I knew what it's spending its time doing, then I could find ways to reduce it. To give you an example, the other day I saw a message no Eclipse saying "java" and one of those progress bar popups informing me that there is an action going on that "blocks user operation". Mind you, I'm not running this class, I believe I was merely opening up the project, but apparently I needed to wait for this "java " to complete whatever it was doing. I found out later that there was a typo in that class and the class probably wasn't compiling. Did Eclipse give me any clue as to what it was doing? Nope! I had to wait 10 minutes and compile all my classes outside of Eclipse to figure it out.
Some ppl say that IntelliJ is slower. Even if it was true, it sure doesn't feel that way. Sure you may experience the occasional time when the IDE pages out its working set of used memory to disk, only to have it page right back in when you shift your focus back, but thats a fault of your OS. Do yourself a favor and go buy an extra gig of ram and turn off file paging in your OS.
I'm trying desperately to like the open source IDE Eclipse but I'm finding it incredibly difficult for me to switch from IDEA's IntelliJ. Not to sound like a sales rep, but I mean IntelliJ is so good about doing the smart thing without me even thinking about it. For example when I try to use a new class, IntelliJ automatically underlines the class name and adds a little tooltip over it to tell me that it doesn't recognize the class, but instead of just stopping there it allows me to press Alt+Enter so that it can automatically import the package that contains that class. It doesn't simply highlight the class and put up a little red dot next to the line that I'll have to click. Obviously I'm typing when the IDE realizes that I want to use a new class. There should be no need for me to switch to the mouse in the middle of my typing. That's what makes the IntelliJ feature so great. Not only am I keeping my fingers on the keyboard, its informing me of the most appropriate key stroke to use in my situation.
My second problem is that its just ridiculously slow. I think the problem is not so much that it is slow, but that its not telling me why its slow. That's an important distinction because if I knew what it's spending its time doing, then I could find ways to reduce it. To give you an example, the other day I saw a message no Eclipse saying "java
Some ppl say that IntelliJ is slower. Even if it was true, it sure doesn't feel that way. Sure you may experience the occasional time when the IDE pages out its working set of used memory to disk, only to have it page right back in when you shift your focus back, but thats a fault of your OS. Do yourself a favor and go buy an extra gig of ram and turn off file paging in your OS.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)