Blogs

Ever since giving up last year and jumping into the social network fray I've been looking for a good status update viewer and aggregator. I'm trying to keep up with updates from a growing list of family, friends, and peers on Twitter, Facebook, and occasionally Flickr. I'm using Ping.fm to cross post status updates. I've tried the dedicated clients and plugins, but none worked for me quite as well as EventBox.

I had started a post highlighting the recent Eclipse PDT 2.0 release but now find myself dropping the post and the Eclipse IDE altogether. Instead, I'll share why I've switched from Eclipse PDT to NetBeans.

It's common practice to skip the use of elements in simple forms. The most common example of this are site search forms. The following example uses a JavaScript event handler attribute to clear the input's value which also serves as the input's label.

Add jQuery code assist to Eclipse WTP on Mac OS X

I'd recently run across a nifty patch for Eclipse WTP which adds jQuery code assist to WTP's stock JavaScript features. The installation instructions looked simple enough, back up the original WTP JavaScript jar file, download the jQueryWTP patch, run it, and voila, jQuery development gets a little faster in Eclipse. Unfortunately, it wasn't that easy.

During my first attempts, the jQueryWTP patch installer wouldn't run on Mac OS X 10.4.11 at work. The patch wouldn't run on Leopard at home either. Neither the jQueryWTP project nor its SourceForge download page provide Java or WTP version requirements. All screenshots I've seen show installation on Windows. After a lot of flailing, I was eventually able to get the patch installed. Here is an archive of my trials and tribulations.

I recently needed Java 6 to install an Eclipse patch. As you're probably aware, although Apple updated OS X 10.5 Leopard to Java 6 they probably never will provide updates beyond Java 5 for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. The good news is that if you're running an Intel-based Mac, you can keep your Java environment up-to-date with SoyLatte, which is part of the OpenJDK BSD-Port project.