TUESDAY IS A BRIGHT, SUNNY DAY

Finally, some sun here in North Jersey, literally and figuratively. After a frustrating few days wrestling SWT, the Eclipse Plugin Development Environment and Lotus Expeditor, I’ve finally crested the hill of understanding all the pieces I need to start coding my supersecret “I can tell you, but then I’d have to kill you, application.” Note to the interested: To have a preference page display in Symphony you must categorize the org.eclipse.ui.PreferencePage extension point, which is not the case when coding a plugin for, say, the Notes client. Reference this issue here. Also the display you (may) want is the one in the parent (i.e. org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Composite parent.getDisplay()). Unresolved open question: Do Eclipse plugin developers truly understand the framework or do they just hack the toolkit examples? (Please respond to his discussion thread or @jakemonO on twitter. Observation: The Symphony developer support forums are not heavily trafficked and are barely usable. Someone needs to buy a clue here and either create some Nabble groups or open a getsatisfaction account. It’s the way things are done in 2009, people!

My  shiny new (matte finish, actually) business cards finally came with my skills wordle printed on. Too late, I learn that I can be a tad dyslexic (not really, just careless) with numbers. So now I have to carefully dispose of 500 beautiful misprints. Any creative ideas?

Having met my PDE goal for the day (whew) I’m on to my other great task, namely continuing my ramp-up on Ruby and Rails. As webdev frameworks go, it’s the bee’s knees. I’ve given up on my longstanding quest to find a visually oriented development environment that can do for me in the web space what Notes and Designer can do for me in proprietary space. RoR is code-centric, to be sure, but it’s clean, simple and consistent in enabling good MVC practice, excellent persistence support, extensible and vibrant -it’s my breathe of fresh air after a deep dive into Strongly Typed (read: anal retentive) Java Land.