One of the things that stopped working as it should after my recent Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade was the Eclipse PDT installation that I had in place. Editing files went a bit haywire and creating projects had me pushing buttons with nothing happening. Whether this was a Java or GNOME issue, I don’t know but I found it happening too on openSUSE 11.2 (there should be more on that distro in a later entry). That was enough to get me looking again at Netbeans.

In both openSUSE (NB version 6.5) and Ubuntu (NB version 6.7.1), I plucked the default offering of Netbeans from the respective software repositories and added the PHP plugin in both cases. Unlike when I last gave the platform a go, things seemed to go smoothly and it looks to have replaced Eclipse for PHP development duties. Project scanning make take a little while but it’s far from annoying and my earlier dalliance with using Netbeans as a PHP editor was stymied by performance that was so sluggish as to make the thing a pain to use. Up to now, Netbeans’ footprints when it comes to its use of PC power never was light so I am wondering if dual-core and quad-core CPU’s help along with a copious supply of RAM. Only time will tell if these inital positive impressions stay the course and I’ll be keeping an open mind for now.

While I have been a user of WordPress since late 2006, I only began to start keeping tabs on its development following my hearing news of dramatic changes coming in what became 2.5. Since a pattern developing with bigger changes coming in 2.5 and 2.7 while both 2.6 and 2.8 didn’t add too much in the way of upheaval but rather evolved what was already there. With 2.8, theme and widget management got the once over while there were plenty of other tweaks that polished a well received forbear. The differences between 2.7 and 2.8 are discernible without breaking anything that shouldn’t be broken. In short, I rather like the result.

The reaction to 2.5 was mixed, to say the least, and that in part led to the dramatic changes in 2.7, especially with regard to the administration interface. I admit to having had doubts about these when I first saw them development and there was so much chopping and changing during development that stepping back until things settled down became a necessity. Even adding a ticket to the TRAC was problematical unless you had sight of what was happening behind the scenes because it became too easy to add an invalid ticket.

With the release of 2.8 into the wild, 2.9 is now on the horizon and I am inclined to suspect that we might see bigger changes again. For one thing, there was that interface poll a little while ago and who knows what impact that may have on what comes next. The structure of the administration screens may not alter that much but that still leaves changes to colours and icons with the aim of separating navigation from what else is on there, something that doesn’t trouble me at all. In fact, I don’t see very much wrong with how how things are right now and wonder if there’s any point in making too many changes at all. The forecasted incorporation of WPMU functionality is a bigger change that would mean the end of WordPress MU as a separate entity and would concern me more with the amount of under the bonnet re-engineering that would be needed. Add Google Summer of Code projects to this mix and 2.9 looks as if it could be a step change in the spirit of 2.5 and 2.7, if not in feel. Summer 2009 could be very interesting for WordPress and I only hope that it continues to work for me in the way that it does as we move from version to version.

Ubuntu development is so gradual these days that there’s almost no point getting too excited about new versions. Its being a mature Linux distribution means that updates aren’t that much of an upheaval and I must admit to liking it than way. Taking a look at the first alpha release of Ubuntu 9.04, otherwise known as “Jaunty Jackalope”, it seems that there isn’t a change to that gradual, some may call it glacial, approach. The biggest change that I noted was the addition of an encrypted private area to your home user area. In the times in which we live, I can certainly see that coming in useful though it may not set pulses racing in some quarters. OpenOffice is still at 2.4 and things don’t appear very different on the surface at all. Of course, things like kernel changes and such like could be going on under the bonnet without many of us noticing it.Saying that, it played well with VirtualBox and I seem to remember virtual machine trouble with early builds of 8.10 so that can be taken as a plus point. I suppose that it is a case of wait and see before there is anything more obviously defining about 9.04. Anyway, they’ve got until April next year…

It’s probably about time that I drew attention to Ubuntu’s The Fridge. While the strap line says “News for Human Beings”, it seems to be the place to find out about development releases of the said Linux distribution. Today, there’s a new alpha release of Intrepid Ibex (8.10) out and they have the details. As for me, I’ll stick to updating my 8.10 installation using Synaptic rather than going through the whole risky process of a complete installation following a download of the CD image. Saying that, it would be nice to see the System Monitor indicating which alpha release I have. I didn’t notice anything very dramatic after I did the update, apart maybe from the hiding away of boot messages at system startup and shutdown or the appearance of a button for changing display settings in the panel atop the desktop.

There was a time when I tested out a new WordPress release when it made its appearance but I now now keep tabs on development versions too. It helps me to be ready in ample time and avoid any ugly stuff appearing on either here or my hillwalking blog. On the surface, the changes made don’t seem so dramatic after the revamp of the administration interface that came with 2.5. Under the bonnet, a lot of bugs have been fixed and many behind the scenes features have been included for the first time. I’ll leave it for you to go to Planet WordPress or check out the relevant entry on the WordPress Development blog. You’ll find a Flash video tour of the latest version from Automattic below.

Of course, WordPress development doesn’t stop here and there are some considerable changes to the administration interface to come at some point if they ever make out into the mainstream from the crazyhorse branch. I’ll be continuing to keep an eye on how things go from here so as to be ready for whatever might be in the offing. For now, enjoy 2.6 but it’ll interesting to see where it all goes from here.

I have been running into a few woes on the home computing front that may or may not give rise to a number of posts on here. Having my Windows VM’s going awry on VMware is a more worrying development with my need to use a Windows-based application for my hillwalking mapping  but I am going to devote this entry to a spot of bother that I started to have with Eclipse, if only because I managed to sort that one out.

Up to yesterday, I had all my offline website development stuff in a single project area for sake of ease of testing. I suppose that I got led into this by my use of Dreamweaver and the way that it sets up what it calls Sites. Applying that same of working to Quanta Plus and Netbeans just chokes up the respective IDE’s and makes them less usable. Until recently, Eclipse escaped this because it seemed to check if a file had changed when you tried editing it and asked you if you wanted the latest version. This stopped in the last few days for whatever reason and it started to stall just like the others.

Naturally, I wanted to set it back as before so a certain amount of investigation was in order. I ended up refreshing my installation in /usr/lib, a manual extraction of the Eclipse PDT archive but that didn’t resolve the issue. In fact, it created another one but we’ll talk about that later. Creating a smaller project made it all work again and I’ll be building up a number of these.

The new issue pertained to the creation and selection of the Eclipse workspace. There was no problem using what I wanted it to use but it wouldn’t remember the setting. There was more blundering about before I happened on the cause: access permissions. I copied the new Eclipse files in as the root user and that meant that Eclipse couldn’t update its setting when I was running it under my own account. Running the editor using sudo sorted out the workspace selection issue for now but a more permanent fixing such as giving myself write access to the configuration directory and what’s in there remains an outstanding task.

The mention of the Eclipse workspace brings me back to the way that it was working before the upheaval hit me. It does keep a copy of every file that you edit in there and maybe more besides. Thus, having a copy of every file in the project would have meant that it didn’t need to do the constant churning being performed by Quanta or Netbeans. That’s impression that I have but I’ll sticking with smaller project bundles from now on. Learning all this was useful.