Urban Terror

This is a fun old game I used to play a lot about 5 years ago. It kind
of fell by the wayside as I kept upgrading hardware and software.
But this new version 4.1 installs easy and runs great on my
hardware with Ubuntu 9.10. Urban Terror no longer requires an
installation of Quake 3 Arena.

Urban Terror

It's an online first-person shooter.
There are versions for Linux, the Mac, even (retch) Windows.

I must have played for about 4 hours today. This is what vacation
is all about.

Spring Roo

Yet another tool for automated application creation,
like Appfuse or Grails:
Spring Roo.

Using Firefox as Eclipse's external browse

My environment for this is Ubuntu 9.10, Eclipse Galileo (3.5).
I started out thinking this would be about a one minute
configuration change. Go to Window->Preferences, click on
Web Browser, select 'use external web browser' and 'default
system web browser', done, right?

Oops, that's not quite what I want. I always already have
Firefox open and when I clicked on something that used
a browser like Help->Help Contents, it would open a new
tab in one of my existing Firefox windows instead of opening
a new browser window in the same virtual desktop as
Eclipse.

I found Mozilla Command Line Options and decided what I
needed was a command like 'firefox -new-window URL'. I
tried this at the command line and it seemed to do the right
thing - bring the URL up in a new window of the existing
browser session.

Now all I needed to do was configure this in Eclipse.
I created a new web browser (Window->Preferences,
General->Web Browser) like this:

Name: Firefox
Location: /usr/bin/firefox
Parameters: -new-window %URL%

I tried that and numerous variations. It felt like Eclipse
was just ignoring whatever I put in 'Parameters'. The URL
would always open in a new tab instead of opening a new
window.

Frustrated, I finally edited 'Firefox' to this:

Name: Firefox
Location: /home/lmulcahy/bin/firefox-new-window
Parameters:

and wrote the firefox-new-window script as follows:

#!/bin/sh
echo $@ > /tmp/firefox-new-window

I tried Help->Help Contents again and found this in
the output in /tmp:

-remote openURL(http://127.0.0.1:55895/help/index.jsp)

Well, now we're getting somewhere...
Eclipse is adding '-remote' to my command line
and it's also enclosing the URL in 'openURL()'.

To make a long story short, here's my firefox-new-window script
now. This does just what I wanted:

#!/bin/sh
URL=`echo $2 | sed 's/.*(\(.*\))/\1/'`
/usr/bin/firefox -new-window $URL

Is it just me or does this seem like a pretty gross Eclipse bug?

Emacs features I miss in Eclipse

It's been about 2 years since I bit the bullet and abandoned my
beloved Emacs in favor of Eclipse for Java coding. I don't
really regret this. Eclipse's many features offering specialized
support for Java (things like Organize Imports, Generate
Getters and Setters, all the refactoring commands, etc.) make
this a no-brainer. Yet I still find myself occasionally dropping
back into Emacs for these indispensable features:

• Defining macros on the fly with M-(, M-) for repetitive changes.
  
• M-X sort-lines. If I'm working on some kind of list like a list of JAR files in a classpath where the order doesn't really matter, I like to have them in alphabetical order. Eclipse doesn't really give you any way to do this.
  
• Dired (file manager)
  
• Split-window (C-X 2), split-window-horizontally (C-X 3).
• All the downcase/upcase/capitalize commands.
  
• Case-smart search and replace. I'm constantly repeating the same search and replace 2 or 3 times in Eclipse because Eclipse can't figure out that if I want to change 'string1' to 'string2', then I probably also want to change 'String1' to 'String2'. Emacs just quietly Does The Right Thing.
• Comment-dwim (M-;) Inserts end of line comments, aligned at a preconfigured column or just at the end of the line if the line is already longer than that column. If a comment is already present, aligns the comment to the appropriate column and places the cursor at the beginning of the comment. Does multiple lines if a region is selected. Works the same way in Java, Perl, C, etc. using the appropriate syntax for the language. Great for adding a short comment to every element of a list neatly aligned in the same column. DWIM stands for 'do what I mean'.
• Indenting and filling that works for comments.
  
• Ironically, Emacs' compact and lightweight memory footprint, by comparison.