firstly, the concept of adventre is rob’s brainchild, but since the boy wonder was with me, this is the best possible description for yesterday’s episode.

background info
paige and i have been working with larry mowatt, a great/honest/ex-engineer realtor based here in dallas, to get our house sold and start looking for a new house. yesterday afternoon larry came over to give us a presentation and to sign some paperwork for putting our house on the market. rob is also in town on business for some tech meetings / side-by-side work for the next build of jboss tools. the night before rob came into town, i discovered that rx bandits were coming to oklahoma city (a mere 3 hour drive from dallas — a pittance for a true fan!). so the plan was for rob and i to leave for okie town once the realtor meeting was over.

fiberglass isn’t resilient
the meeting with our realtor was running a bit later than we had expected, and rob and i had to rush out to make to OKC in time to see the venerable bandits. as i was reversing the old corolla out the back of our garage, i failed to glance in the rear-view mirror, and felt a large “bump”. sure enough, as soon as i look out the mirror, i see larry’s honda pilot parked slight over the halfway mark in our driveway, and i had perfectly nicked the front bumper. i returned into the house sheepishly where i had to explain to my wife and larry the dumbass mistake i made.. luckily larry is a first class gentleman. took it all in stride and was very understanding and even joking/smiling about it. after i called and filed the claim with the insurance company, it was time to (safely) rush like hell to get to OKC. at this point, it was 6:30PM and the concert started at 8PM.

apocalypse please
to blow some steam, we put on tiger and the duke as long as we could stand, rolled down the windows and did some fun screaming on our way out of dallas. the poor peaceful commuters of denton county might think they are harboring a pair of white-boy psychotics, and they probably wouldn’t be wrong. once we had all the stress out of our system, we did some chatting and listening to some more music, and we made it to the venue a little after 9PM, just as rxb was tuning up and prepping for their show. as usual, rxb puts on the most energetic and amazing show ever.. 5 hours of driving time for 1 hour of live rxb is a steal in my book.
 

driving home
we got out of the concert around 11:30PM and stopped by at a b-dub’s for some grub before taking the 2 1/2 hour plunge. rob’s “1 job” for this trip was to make sure that i stayed awake and alert during the ride home. thankfully rob performed his task admirably, as we blasted fast-paced punk and sang along with the windows down the whole way home. we got back into dallas around 2:30AM, and it was time to call it a night.

My dad was photographed recently for a NHTSA Motorcycle Safety ad campaign, and the photos are pretty sweet. Check out the blog entry here:

http://rickrockson.blogspot.com/2007/04/my-15-minutes-of-fame.html

This is the day my bank account quivers in fear.
This is the day my wife hides all the credit cards and money in the house.
This is the day my N73 starts to feel separation anxiety.
This is the day I refresh ebay and froogle constantly.
This is the day my keyboard will short from excessive drool.
Yes, my friends.. today is the official N95 release day.

Just a quick rundown of the tech specs to wet the appetite:

• 5 megapixel camera
• HSDPA, WiFi, EDGE, Bluetooth
• Integrated GPS
• 2.6″ 240×320 265k colors
• Slider form factor
• Series 60 v3 Feature Pack 1 (A2DP, major droolage)

If you’re like me and have to deal with Eclipse’s PDE Build system on a regular basis, you’ll eventually find your build crashing without a lot of pertinent information. I’m writing this article to help those of you who are banging your heads against the wall trying to figure out why any of the tasks are failing. For the purposes of this article, I’m using Eclipse 3.2.2 SDK under Windows XP.

First of all, you’ll need to make sure you have the Eclipse SDK installed (with all the nice source plugins).. stepping through PDE code is gonna be hard without that. Next, you’ll need to make sure that your ant script is somewhere in the workspace under a Java project. I’ve created a simple java project called fetch-project with a simple ant script build.xml shown below:


<project default="main">
<property file="build.properties"/>
<target name="main">
<eclipse.fetch
elements="${type}@${id}"
buildDirectory="${buildDirectory}"
directory="${buildDirectory}/directory.txt"
fetchTag="${fetchTag}"
configInfo="${configs}"
baseLocation="${baseLocation}"
/>
</target>
</project>


and build.properties:

type=feature
id=org.jboss.ide.eclipse.feature
buildDirectory=C:/Build/rhds-build/eclipse
directory=${buildDirectory}/directory.txt
fetchTag=HEAD
configs=*,*,*
baseLocation=C:/Build/rhds-build/clean-eclipse


Now that we have a basic ant script that we can quickly edit and execute, let’s start setting up our project’s classpath so we can debug. First, you’ll need to add pdebuild.jar and pdebuild-ant.jar to your project’s build path. This can be done by following these steps:

1. Right clicking on the project -> Build Path -> Configure Build Path
2. Click on the “Libraries” tab
3. Click “Add Variable”
4. Click on the “ECLIPSE_HOME” variable, and then click the “Extend…” button
5. Navigate down the tree, select plugins/org.eclipse.pde.build_x.x.x/pdebuild.jar (where x.x.x is your specific version), and press OK
6. Repeat steps 3 and 4
7. Navigate down the tree, select plugins/org.eclipse.pde.build_x.x.x/lib/pdebuild-ant.jar (where x.x.x is your specific version), and press OK
8. Press OK to make the Properties window go away, and you should have a project structure that looks similar to this:

Next, we will need to point JDT to the source code for the two JARs we just added. This will allow us to set breakpoints, and step through the PDE Build internal code. Follow these steps:

1. Right click on “pdebuild.jar” under your project, and click on “Properties”
2. “Java Source Attachment” should already be selected. On the right side of the window we need to select the source attachment. Press the “Variable…” button.
3. Choose “ECLIPSE_HOME” and press “OK”
4. Now we need to extend the ECLIPSE_HOME variable and add the path to the source zip. Press the “Extension…” button.
5. Navigate down the tree, select plugins/org.eclipse.pde.source_x.x.x/src/org.eclipse.pde.build_x.x.x/pdebuildsrc.zip (where x.x.x is your specific version), and press OK.
6. Press OK to make the Properties window go away.
7. Right click on “pdebuild-ant.jar” under your project, and click on “Properties”
8. Repeat steps 2-4
9. Navigate down the tree, select plugins/org.eclipse.pde.source_x.x.x/src/org.eclipse.pde.build_x.x.x/lib/pdebuild-antsrc.zip (where x.x.x is your specific version), and press OK.
10. Press OK to make the Properties window go away.
11. Expand pdebuild-ant.jar, and under it expand org.eclipse.pde.internal.build.tasks. You should see a class named “FetchTask” there. Double click it to open it in the classfile editor.
12. If you see something like this, you are on your way

A note on debugging ant scripts in Eclipse. While Eclipse does have ant debugging support (right click on ant script > Debug As > Ant Build), it doesn’t support stepping through the actual implementation of the Java code of ant tasks. Luckily for us, there is a way around that using the antRunner Eclipse application.. so let’s set that up.

1. Click on the “Run” top level menu in Eclipse, then click on “Debug…”
2. Double-click on “Eclipse Application”.
3. In the “Name:” textbox, enter a name that you can remember. I called it “fetch-debug”
4. Looking a little further down you will see a “Program to Run” group, and under it two radio buttons. Choose the “Run an application” radio button.
5. From the application dropdown, select org.eclipse.ant.core.antRunner.
6. Click on the “Arguments” tab
7. In the “Program Arguments” text box, type in the name of your build script. In my example this was simply “build.xml”.
8. Further down in the “Working Directory” group, click the “Other” radio button, and press the “Workspace…” button to select a directory in the workspace.
9. In the window that pops up, select the project that you’ve created, and press OK. In my case this was “fetch-project”. The text box should say something like “${workspace_loc:fetch-project}”.
10. Press “Apply”, and then press “Close”.

At this point, the only thing left to do is to actually set a breakpoint, and debug our new Eclipse Application to inspect the code as it’s happening. I put a breakpoint on FetchTask.execute():

Next just “Debug” the new Eclipse Application you created by going back to the “Run” > “Debug” menu, and you should be hitting the breakpoint in no time! Note that if you are developing in an environment without plugin projects, when the breakpoint is reached, you may get a new editor that says “Source not found”. If you get this, click the “Edit Source Lookup Path…”, “Add…”, “Java Classpath Variable”,and repeat the steps above to point the configuration to the 2 source JARs under the ECLIPSE_HOME variable.

i want a seal rag doll

hear that? it’s the sound of a million microsoft office users grunting in dismay as they try to write a resume with no help. the years we’ve all come to love and expect our word processor to talk to us through personified paperclips are tragically over. good ‘ol clippy, you’ll never know how much we’ll miss you.

it’s been over 3 months since my last blog post and unfortunately there’s not really a good reason (or at least i can’t think of one) for my recent absence. hopefully the blogging will pick up again now that i’ve started a new entry, and all 10 of you that read this can be complete again. so where do we start? let’s do this bold headline style:

christmas schwag
santa was very good to me this year, piling in tons of geeky goodness. some of my favorites include: a new wedding ring, xbox 360, wii, xbox 360 hd-dvd drive,farscape seasons 1-4, tv b gone.

of cats and dogs
our loveable cat isis ran away about a month after we got juno (sometime late november/early december). we tried everything we could do to find her including visiting local pounds several times per week, posting lost and found signs, and lots of manual searching around our neighborhood. unfortunately we were never able to find her, and paige took it pretty hard. i talked paige into getting a new kitty to help her with the loss of isis and to bring a fresh face/playmate into the mix for juno. so late december we picked up our new kitten loki. you can see pictures of him on my flickr page here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arcaner
aside from that, juno is well into her teething phase, having lost at least 7-8 teeth in the past weeks. we’re taking her in to get “fixed” sometime soon (along with loki).. hurray for population control.

california knows how to party
rob and i headed out to pasadena a few weeks ago to give some JBoss training. the trip started off a disaster as it was below freezing here in dallas (around 28 or 29 degrees) and it was raining. my original flight sunday night was cancelled and i had to take the next flight going out monday morning. unfortunately, i had to rush from the airport directly to the training location, as the customer needed to get the training done ASAP. luckily though the timing ended up being perfect as we ended the class a full 3-4 hours early on thursday. while i was there i had a chance to catch up with some old friends, and as luck would have it, opie was also in orange county the same week (we both live in dallas and we were both in southern cali in the same week.. crazy). tuesday night i went out with an old coworker/friend brian and his wife melissa.. they’re 7 1/2 months pregnant and they are just ecstatic about it. i honestly can’t wait for that moment to happen to paige and i, but it will probably be a few more years down the road. wednesday night i got a chance to hook up with chris paschal a friend who i hadn’t seen in probably 7-8 years (maybe more). he has gotten himself into the acting scene near hollywood, and is performing regularly in an improv/sketch comedy group called “some dead hookers”. the timing was good enough that we were able to catch a show of them being challenged by another local improv group, and it was a really fun night. lots of laughs were had, and we were even able to fit in some good local seafood and a little bit of guitar hero in the mix. i recommend you check out chris’ sketch group token white people for some pretty funny 5 minute clips. thursday night i endured a nice 2 hour drive (hurray LA traffic!) to hang out with opie and KL. they took me to this korean (or maybe vietnamese? hell if i know) place in orange county that was pretty damn good… the amount of food we had to eat was pretty impressive, they called it 7-course beef.. it was definately a once-in-a-while kind of thing to do.