Older blog entries for derupe (starting at number 6)

I recently notified MARC about a problem with their dtds [ MARC Authority/Classification Record and MARC Bibliographic/Holdings/Community Information Record]. Man! They are fast. They have incorporated the changes already!

I'll regenerate the dtdtrees and post it on my site.

just got off the phone with Gurney's. This has been one frustrating experience. (one of the few online purchases that I regret).

I placed an order with them (online) in Feb (yeah February) and I haven't received all the plants yet! I ordered 7 items and I received some of them in a trickle one at a time. Three items are yet to come (after more than 2 months!).

I should have made this puchase from a local store instead of going online.

Whats frustrating is not just the delay, but that the customer service doesn't seem to have a clue when the items will be shipped. Every time I've called them up I've got the reply "It should be in a weeks time". I called April beginning and heard that. Then on April 23rd, same reply. Today, she said that it should be shipped in a week and a half.

I spoke to the supervisor and she said that the plants are available in the warehouse, but she isn't sure how many orders are waiting before mine (hey, there are ppl waiting for more than 3 months here?) and that it should be shipped in 2 weeks (inconsistencies inconsistencies!). She apologized for the inconvenience (but that doesn't help, I want my plants!).

Now thats one site that I'll avoid.

But still hopeful that someday ... I will receive the plants :)

Mark Pilgrim has listed some of the software that he finds essential. interesting read.

ok. Here's my 23/5:

Dizzy with jet-lag we tried to sort out this business of costs in Gilgit, how much hiring a jeep would be for instance.

Been thinking of listing out the eclipse plugins I use, for a while. And when I saw a list I had made earlier - in my old mails - thought I'll finally sit down to write it.

First, if you are looking for a plugin, the best place to start would be http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net/eclipse/search.jsp (which is specifically for that purpose). You may also want to try sourceforge and freshmeat.

These are a few plugins that I use and found useful.

For static code checking -

PMD
Site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pmd
A very good tool when it comes to java source code analysis. I run it on the code before doing a code review (though these days I haven't been doing much of code review). [hmm. I appear in the credits section of pmd]

JLint
Site: http://www.willowriver.net/products/jlint.php
As the name suggests, this plugin uses JLint under the covers.

FindBugs
Site: http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/
I use this java code analysis tool alonside PMD.

checkstyle
Site: http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/
It checks if your code adheres to standards. I don't use it much though :o.

call hierarchy
Site: http://eclipse-tools.sourceforge.net/call-hierarchy/download.html
Tool for showing the possible call hierarchies. Nice tool to understand new code or to debug a problem.

For UML Modeling

omodo
Site: http://www.eclipseuml.com/
A nice tool that I use for generating the class diagrams from the source code for my open source development. Though I continue to use Rational Rose for designing for my projects at work.

Other plugins

java2html
Site: http://www.java2html.de/eclipse.html
I thought that this was neat if I need to publish any code with all the syntax highlighting. I still have it on my machine, but haven't used it. But I still feel that I might use it someday. ;-)

metrics
Site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/metrics
Yeah. the name says it all!

I finished generating the Kaprekar series for 2-digit to 50-digit numbers. While my pc was still chugging along for larger digits, I looked for "patterns" in the first 50 entries.

I've placed the results in the kaprekar site in a section titled Playing with numbers.

I was browsing through some of my old mails today and found two bugzilla links that I was monitoring (this was around 2 years back).

Both the bugzilla requests (for mozilla) were regarding bookmarks. Like many others, I find maintaining my bookmarks more difficult than it ought to be. I have a set of bookmarks on my home pc, on my two office pcs and my laptop. Its impossible to keep them in sync ... in fact I've given up on trying that. So that is why I was looking for any bookmark enhancements to Mozilla.

One of these requests was for support of XBEL and another was for support for color coded bookmarks.

The former request will help in moving the bookmark store to an XML format - this will possibly help in what I was looking for. I feel more comfortable manipulating an XML file and trying to keep them in sync rather than a non-standard "html" file.

The second request was to highlight certain entries in the bookmark. Here I would rather that they take a step further and make the bookmarks display the more frequently visited bookmarked site (visited either via the bookmark or directly) highlighted. This will surely help when you have too many sites in a single folder. Maybe the less frequently visited sites could be hidden on initial view and then displayed on user trigger.

Unfortunately both the requests are in a New (!!!) status. Maybe I ought to check them two more years later ;-)