Ah, finally jumping to the search box...

and direct selection of the next search hit - by the tip of ones finger!

Introduction: http://www.google.com/experimental/

Query: http://www.google.com/search?esrch=BetaShortcuts&q=your+Query

Petition to stop increasing number of software patents in Europe

Disclaimer: This might be of interest to you, if you live in the European Union and have at least indirectly to do with software development or business.

Ordinary copyright is already enough protection, if you ask me. Or do we need more of this:

1. Shopping cart: Electronic shopping cart -
   EP807891
2. Picture link: Preview window -
   EP537100
3. Support system: Support system based on answers to questions -
   EP915422
4. Rebate code: Allow rebate codes to be entered by customers -
   EP929874

This is so ridiculous - sad enough, but also a risk for your business, if you belong to the group outlined in the disclaimer above.

As you might know, the European Patent Office (EPO) is beyond democratic control. It has a financial interest in granting patents. They cannot care about the side effects for small and medium companies that have to deal with software. Although the European Parliament rejected the last software patent directive, it has no rights for legislative initiatives.

So, now there is a petition by the citizens to get an initiative going, since this at least is possible:

http://petition.stopsoftwarepatents.eu.

You can sign the petition online as an individual, company, association or company alliance/group.

I signed.

headless buckminster now does coverage using emma

Thanks to Achim Demelt, the headless version of Eclipse Buckminster also can do coverage reports since a couple of weeks. (It does work for RCP projects plugin tests as well!)

I'd recommend to use it as a buckminster script:
emma -l /plugin.project.name/junit.launch -o output/path/TEST-all.xml
emma -m -l /plugin.project.name/plugin.junit.launch -o output/path/TEST-plugin-all.xml --xml output/path/coverage.xml

This is how you invoke it from console:

buckminster --scriptfile your.script

Useful buckminster commands:

buckminster --help
buckminster listcommands
buckminster junit --help
buckminster emma --help

If that does not help - the guys on the forum are spot on and friendly.

Download and installation of buckminster as headless product are described here: http://www.eclipse.org/buckminster/downloads.html

Note, however, that you need version 3.6 for the recent junit and emma features.

Note as well, that you need to specify your installation directory as absolute path, when following these install directions.

RCP Builds - *good news*

;-) Nice to know, that there are actually people who did survive such efforts ;-)

http://dev.eclipse.org/blogs/iamkevb/2009/08/19/building-native-swt-libraries-with-hudson

Now, if these happy hackers follow-up to share some exemplary job configurations and pointers to relevant build files, they might actually save some unfortunate chosen ones to get out of darkness as well. ;-) Hehehe, I know someone that would really appreciate that ... Cheers!

Using relative file paths when running as a service/daemon app...

Most service wrapper tools for Java allow for setting the current working directory. This way you can set your apps base to the same path as if you were running it manually.
If you don't, and if you're using Windows, your service will run in the system32 directory and any relative file paths will be expanded from there...

Java Service Wrapper has the wrapper.working.dir property
Apache Commons Daemon has the --StartPath parameter

RINSPEED sQuba

This diving car is just so freaking awesome.
Just watch and enjoy: http://www.rinspeed.ch/pages/cars/squba/squba_video.html

Please stop flooding blogosphere and link-sharing-sites with yet another boring Top 10 compilation...

..some people seem to be very fond of blogging their latest "Top 10 this-and-that"-compilations, which in almost every case puts me off from the beginning. Well, no rule without exceptions... so here are some, that made into my list of notable reads - despite their title:

http://www.sundog.net/index.php/sunblog/entry/top-ten-most-infamous-software-bugs-of-all-time/
http://eclipse.dzone.com/articles/top-10-mistakes-eclipse-plugin