Eclipse 3.0 RC2

I had been using Eclipse 3.0 RC1 for the past week but it was sluggish and I ran into a few hangups, so when I saw that Eclipse 3.0 RC2 was available, I got right on it.  Definitely better.  Startup is faster and shutdown takes only a second.  Nice.  I think I'll stick with this one until the final release is out which is due end of this month.  Eclipse bug count looks healthy although Platform UI and SWT team seems to be struggling a bit.

Downloading Eclipse took forever btw.  They have mirrors but mirrors are troublesome to use because it forces the user to find the package among the mirrors to download.  They should use BitTorrent IMHO and turn the mirrors into seeds.  BitTorrent needs to be more location-aware (actually route-aware) though.

Impact of Offshoring

According to a survey commissioned by Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 2.5% of jobs lost are due to offshoring.  AFL-CIO thinks the survey is faulty.  My own experience suggests the number is bigger, at least in the Silicon Valley where I work.  At one company I have worked with for many years, it's engineering department was downsized to barebones and replaced with a large growing team of engineers in India.  2.5%?  Not even close

Bush Slept With Washingtonienne?

Here is a picture of Jessica Cutler (aka Washingtonienne), who blogged about her attempt to sleep with different men everyday of the week in Washington D.C., and Wonkette, supposedly a well-known blogger who apparently enjoys poking politicians with her blog.

Meanwhile, confusion reins across the language barriers.  At least one Korean newspaper (Sports Seoul) misinterpreted a National Enquirer article and reported that Bush himself, and not his appointee, slept with Jessica Cutler.  While neither papers are pillars of journalism in their respective countries, I thought it was hillarious that Korean readers are nodding their head as if they expected such naughty behavior from American Presidents.

In their defense, I think the National Enquire headline (Bush Sex Scandal) put them in a wrong frame of mind.  Below is the snippet from the Korean article, just in case they fix and deny later.

게다가 더욱 충격적인 사실은 부시 대통령이 댓가를 지불하고 관계를 가졌다는 것이다.

'내셔널 인콰이어러'지와의 인터뷰에서 커틀러는 "나는 부시와 관계를 가진 것에 대해 후회하지 않는다． 그러나 일기를 쓴 것에 대해서는 지금 후회하고 있다"고 밝혔다． 또 그는 "나는 블로그가 나의 친구들에게만 공개될 것이라고 생각했다． 많은 사람들이 이런 글을 올리지 않나?"라고 반문했다.

Korea, A Nation of Spoons

I think Korean food is wonderful.  After all, I have eaten it all my life and I still eat it three meals a day (thanks to my wonderful wife).  But what I haven't noticed until recently is how Korean cuisine is uniquely 'spoon-centric'.  Other countries use spoons as well, but they are usually brought out only when there is a need (i.e. soup).  In Korea, spoon is the primary utensil.

As long as I could remember, I had a spoon and chopstick with my name on them.  By that, I don't mean my name was inscribed on them, but I could recognize my utensils by the shape, color, feel, and sometimes smell (well, I was a little paranoid when I was little).  With every Korean meal, my spoon and chopsticks were laid side-by-side like a couple married for life.  Which is the male?  The spoon, of course.  It's masculine and uncompromising where chopsticks are feminine and versatile.

Why is Korean cuisine so spoon-centric?  Because a proper Korean meal comes with a bowl of rice and a bowl of soup for each person.  The spoon is used for both the rice and the soup.  The chopstick is used mainly for the side-dishes where, in China or Japan, chopstick is used for practically everything.  Also, there is usually a shared soup in the center for which spoons come in handy.  These center-soup is usually served piping hot and has a name that ends with either Tang or Jhigae (i.e. Maewoon-Tang or Kimchi-Jhigae).

Hmm.  This post made me hungry.

Update:

FatMan Seoul is the blog to visit if you want more stories and mouth watering photos (thanks to James for this wonderful tip).  I particularly loved the photos in the Dak-galbi post.  Yum!

No Citadels For You!

Maciej Ceglowski has an amusing tilt to his writing style.  Despite being a staunch Francophile, he trounces French army colorfully:

Right – with the most powerful army in Europe, you stood idle and let Germany rearm in explicit contravention of a treaty signed with you just a dozen years before. And then you did nothing when Germany began an unprovoked war with Poland, preferring to dig in to your fortifications rather than strike the weakly defended German industrial heartland with your ninety seven combat divisions. When the decisive attack finally came, almost a year after the start of hostilities, you disintegrated with stunning celerity. Your greatest living war hero completely discredited his country serving as the leader of a collaborationist rump wartime state, and your conduct during and after the war was ambiguous at best. You brought shame upon your country in Algeria and Indochina. You conducted nuclear tests in the South Pacific way after that had gone completely out of style.

You sank a fucking Greenpeace ship.

NO CITADELS FOR YOU!

LL, LALR, and GLR

If you are like me, you have a tattered copy of the Dragon book on your bookshelf and have a fading memory of LL(k) and LALR(1) lores gained through your battles with Yacc, Bison, JavaCC, and ANTLR.  Mostly, you remember wasting a lot of time wrestlig with the tool.

What I didn't know was that new parsing algorithms have appeared on the scene while I was busy in the ready-to-ship world: GLR (Generalized LR) and Earley.  Actually, they are old algorithms whose latest implementations have now become competitive with the more popular yet more restrictive cousins.  For more info on why they should be considered alongside LL and LALR, read John Aycock's Why Bison is Becoming Extinct.

Here are some popular GLR and Earley implementations to get you started:

  • ElkHound - C++, BSD, sep. scanner (supposedly fastest)
  • DParser – C, BSD, scannerless
  • SGLR – scannerless

Earley implementation:

You might also want to read Current Parsing Techniques in Software Renovation Considered Harmful.

R.I.P. Orkut

Orkut is now a spam-filled waste and inappropriate for professional use.  What a waste of a good opportunity.  I am now starting to appreciate LinkedIn's more conservative approach.

Creative or Reactive

If the history remembers me, I would like to be remembered as someone who constantly struggled against the limits of creativity.  While I have been accused of excessive creativity by many, I am constantly and painfully aware of how incidental creativity is.

My mental model of human brain is a bed of wax on which a steel ball of consciousness rolls about.  The model captures my belief that thinking itself changes the person and affects how the person thinks in the future.  More one travels the same path, the channel of habitual thoughts deepens and thus raises the necessary force needed to escape the channel into new areas.  Events happening around us affect the direction and momentum of the moving ball.

From this perspective, being creative means possessing a oddly shaped mind that reacts in uncommon ways to common events and brainstorming aggregates oddity for higher yield.

Smart TODO Patent

Automatic handling of TODO comments in source code is something Eclipse has been doing for a while now but Microsoft has been granted a patent the feature.  The patent was filed on March 6, 2000.  I forget when Eclipse had the smart TODO feature.