Summer of Code: writing PHP plugins
Toomas finished the official part of the google summer of code program. It was an honor to be the mentor and I had/still have a lot of fun with him.
Grab The PHP writing plugin for Eclipse from the update site and check it out if it works for you!
Sorry, but java6 and eclipse 3.3 only! (jsr-223 scripting engine starts from java 6)
Quercus GPL-licensed PHP Fragment is not mandatory - the plugin supports also javascript (and possibly all JSR223 scripting engines).
Have fun and let him know if you find some cool usage for it. Commenting at his blog is a good start.
I had to disable comments at my blog :(
A cool feature would be to write a small snippet that sends selected text to some rafb/etc pastebin and prints the url to the eclipse console view.
Forget the Procrastination
I’m writing this story while riding on a train to Tartu, moving at 70km/h. Where else could I have that much free time with 4KB/s internet. This time it’s not technology that gets my attention, it’s too old fashion. Today I want to share my thoughts related to Procrastination.
Procrastination is the new popular disease that threats everyone just like did stress years ago. Back then everyone admitted that stress is bad and people were trying hard to notice the stress in very early stages. Contrarily, Procrastination is taken as something to be proud of - like a habit of a genius.
John Perry at his website propagates Structured Procrastination to get over the unexisting productivity that you get from the Procrastination. The principle idea is to make something seemingly important your top priority task and just don’t do it - take next from the list. He claims it would cure the Procrastination and boost your effectiveness.
If you are hi-tech Procrastinator then you have probably also familiar with Paul Graham essay on Procrastination
I don’t believe any of this “tweak your lazyness” methodology that tells you Procrastination is something to be OK with. You don’t have to play with yourself and think out hacks to overcome Procrastination. You can do this but then you never get the effectiveness you are dreaming about.
You have to force your discipline, make effectiveness a habit! Start small, start planning your day.
Don’t start by making plans for a lifetime and next 2 years! If you don’t have the habit of acting small, how do you think you can make big actionable planning if you fail with one day planning? You need a plan for sure, but you have to fix the root first. As they say - think global, act local.
I’ll describe something that helped me to get out of this spiral when there was so much to do, so little time available and I still ended up by not doing anything.
Just take a paper and put down everything you want and could do tomorrow. If you are a real Procrastinator then you end up with a big list and everything seems feasible. At the end of the next day you probably notice that you managed to complete just a few tasks, or.. as a real Procrastinator.. you complete none.
Don’t worry, we know how to fix it! Take your list and calculate plan for tomorrow:
X = (y/a)*2+1 a - total number of tasks, y - number of completed tasks
Meaning, if you failed, just complete 1 task. If you finished 5 tasks out of 10, try to finish remaining 3 tasks tomorrow. Believe me, you’ll become extremely happy person after you manage the skill to complete at least 80% of your daily tasks for at least one month. After that it becomes natural habit and just keep practicing! :)
Let me know if any of this made sense to you!
Happy planning, work hard and take time to relax, dear Procrastinator :)
PS. Still, I think Paul Graham essay is excellent, he just tends to label everything as Procrastination and some of his examples are not signs of Procrastination!
PS. It finally makes sense why blogging is so popular in US - commuting takes a lot of time and train is the best place to blog.
All time best usability
Why blondes never buy Kia? ’cause they have Nokia.
How many engineers you need to find out your Nokia phone model number?
To find out that I own Nokia E61 I had to:
- Open the case
- Turn off the mobile phone to safely remove battery
And yeah, My Model Number is just right there - hidden under battery and unaccessible without powering it off.
Is it really that confidential? Not important anymore?
Isn’t the whole business of Nokia to ship same hardware with differently shaped models. Isn’t most of the marketing budget spent on visual branding connecting it with the worst of all times brand names like 5110, 6110, 7110, 7210, 7210i, 7232, 1232, 6539, 2252, 7174, 5343, 6465i, E51, E52, E61, N61, N72?
Now that I have powered off my phone… What was my PIN code? :-D
Four is the Magical Number - and so is 5920
5920 is the number of pixels you get horizontally when being a Codehooper with serious need for more screen real estate. 6149440 pixels in total.
Featuring our widget-guru Ivar at his new workspace :)
PS. Sorry if someone has commented here over last few weeks. Almost thousand spam comments is just way too much to moderate - feel free to call or snail-mail me.
Google and $4500 are waiting for your Eclipse contributions
Google has started it’s annual Google Summer of Code program where hundreds of university students are paid to make open source contributions. Each successful submission is honored with $4500 to student’s bank account (local taxes apply) and $500 to Eclipse Foundation.
Eclipse is one of the participating open source organizations and previous years have been shown amazing impact on the Eclipse ecosystem in general. Several students are now active community members and continuing their path in Eclipse world.
Google SoC 2006 had it’s little impact also on the open source and free Eclipse plugin Mylar which got 2 SoC slots. Mylar success has been breathtaking and within one year this newcomer has positioned itself in top of the eclipse open source plugin arena. Mylar beauty is that it can be used for very simple things like browsing your issues/issuefilters in Trac,Bugzilla,Jira,XPlanner etc. At the same time Mylar concept is much more complex trying to have invisible context trackers to highlight only important bits within given task/context.
Now back to the point!
It has not yet been decided how many $500+$4500 slots are allocated to Eclipse this year but last year Eclipse got 11 slots (11x$5000).
To make the Google SoC a success Eclipse needs very strong proposals and students, so… Hurry up and think about it!
From my own experience one should seriously consider if he is able to spend most of the summer for hacking with the code : ) I did but still regret a bit all the sunshine I missed in this usually dirty Estonian weather..
The project proposal deadline is in 6 days - March 26th!
Links to get you started:
- http://code.google.com/soc Official Google Summer of Code 2007 homepage
- http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Google_Summer_of_Code_2007_Ideas Eclipse project proposal ideas
- + always warm and welcoming #eclipse channel at freenode IRC
