Have fun at EclipseCon!

It's chilly this morning in North Carolina (28 degrees F) so I'm a bit envious of all of you folks out in California for EclipseCon 2007 this week. I expect you all to keep the rest of us informed with lots of blogs and pictures of your experiences!

I have three special requests:

1. If you take any pictures be sure to upload them to flickr and tag them with 'EclipseCon 2007'. Please indicate whether or not it's ok to use the pictures elsewhere (for example I might put together a gallery for ZDNet if there are enough pics). Here are the pics for last year if you'd like to reminisce.
   
2. I'm a huge Dilbert fan so if somebody could get Adams' autograph for me I'd be eternally grateful.
   
3. If the new Ambassador has a party this year, be sure to go and get to know a few new people. Last year's party was a blast. The best thing about Eclipse is its community, and that means you. (Just be careful not to stand between Steve and the beer cart, that could be hazardous to your health. :) )
   

Have fun!
--Ed

If I'm going to screw up, why does it have to be so public?

Grrr. And... Yargh. That's my reaction to seeing a story I wrote get picked up not only by Digg but by ZDNet's "Must Read News Alerts".

Normally that would be a good thing, except the title used for the story was "How to get 66.6 TeraFlops for $600". If you go to the link, it says "How to get 520 GigaFlops for $600". Just a tiny difference.

While the original title was much cooler, it was wrong. I didn't discover the error until about a half hour after hitting the 'Publish' button. The 66.6 TFlops number was based on two sentences in the GeForce 8800 Architecture Technical Brief. The first says:

Teraflops of raw floating-point processing power are combined to deliver unmatched gaming performance, graphics realism, and real-time, film-quality effects.

Teraflops, plural. Later it says that the card has 128 stream processors and that:

Each stream processor on a GeForce 8800 GTX operates at 1.35 GHz and supports the dual issue of a scalar MAD and a scalar MUL operation, for a total of roughly 520 gigaflops of raw shader horsepower.

Hmm, so if each stream processor gets 520 GFlops and there are 128 stream processors that works out to 66.6TFlops, right? Well, that's what it looked like to me. But if you look closely, 1.35 GHz times 3 flops per cycle = 4.05 GFlops per processor, not 520. The 520 number was for the whole card (128 * 4.05 = 518.4).

Doh!

Since ZDNet's blogging system doesn't let me preview my articles, I do my final editing pass after clicking 'Publish' so I can see the article in context. It was during this pass that I saw the numbers didn't add up and I went back to double-check the figures. I corrected the article, but by then the damage was done. People were starting to comment on it, and it had been dugg. One poster said that a card that delivered 66.6 TFlops "gives new meaning to 'fast as Hell'". Heh.

To make matters worse, when I got the ZDNet email alert several hours later it also had the wrong title. It's really too bad because it would still have been noteworthy with the smaller number. I sent a note to digg's feedback address to see if they could fix it there, but got no response.

Mea culpa. Sometimes, the internet is a little *too* fast.

All I can say is, "The devil made me do it".

Is this thing on?

EclipseCon 2007 is weeks away so you'd think that the buzz it generates would be showing up in O'Reilly's Buzz Game. But it's not - why not?

Hmm... it's interesting to note that 15 people buying stock in Eclipse could close the gap with NetBeans on market capitalization.

Phear my bandwidth

Who says Eclipse is big?

Resume pruning

Inspired by Kevin Donlin's article on "Clearing deadwood from your resume", and illinidk's succinct review of Peter Norvig's resume, I decided it was time for some housecleaning. I don't remember when I started a resume for the first time, but it must have been more than 10 years ago. Since then it had grown into an 8 page monster! Using Kevin's advice, I was able to cut it down to 3 pages. Have a look and let me know what you think.

GWT book, subversion diversion

Most of my free time lately has been going into a new project - an e-book on the Google Web Toolkit to be published by the Pragmatic Programmers. I have about 50 pages of rough draft written so far, covering topics such as why you would want to use GWT, how it ties into your web pages, developing in Eclipse, the differences between hosted and web mode, remote procedure calls, and more. The e-book is supposed to be about 60 pages so I'm happy with the progress so far. If you are interested in GWT and have some ideas about what should be in the book, let me know. See also my new site at www.gwtpowered.org.

This is my first project with the Pragmatic Programmers and things are working pretty well so far. One thing I like is that I don't have to use MS Word to write the book (both Manning and O'Reilly required that). The format is in XML, but actually I don't directly write in XML most of the time (I'll have more to say about what I'm using in the future). The XML files are checked into a repository (Subversion) just like source code. It beats the heck out of sending zips containing MS Word doc files to your editor, and trying to keep it all straight with naming conventions containing the date.

Speaking of Subversion, I'm using Subclipse for the book development because Subversive doesn't support svn:externals yet. Both of these plug-in teams have proposed Eclipse projects (subclipse - subversive) so it'll be interesting to see how that works out.

Subclipse developer Mark Phippard noticed I was using Subclipse because of a ZDNet image gallery on Google Code that I posted, and pointed out a new version was available. This version (1.1.4) works much better with Eclipse 3.2, though it was still being pretty slow when saving files. When I complained to Mark about this, he had a fix for me the next day that sped it up by a factor of 10 or more! This fix will undoubtedly make it in the next Subclipse build. Thanks Mark!

Call for discussion: "User experience" project

I'm stirring up trouble again, this time trying to get people talking about the Eclipse user experience. Visit the eclipse.foundation newsgroup and add your two cents. An HTML interface to the group is available if you don't like using news readers.

And by the way, why isn't eclipse.foundation listed on this newsgroup page?