Persiflage and Piffle

Wayne Beaton’s just written up a blog entry about Making Eclipse Plug-ins using JRuby or Groovy. I certainly agree with his opening statement :

Warning! if you have no experience building plug-ins, this post will probably mean very little to you.

… but if you do have an awareness it’s a good read.

It’s set me thinking about how I could use it but so far have failed to find a single example that would have helped me out. That said, it definitely falls into my cool category and is something I may well be looking to shoe-horn into a solution in the future.

I’ve not disappeared completely, just been busy. My hard disk failure caused me to re-evaluate my development O/S and (after purchasing a couple of new HDs) I’m up and running with Ubuntu. I never bothered to re-install XP; getting all my stuff up and running was a breeze. That includes things like Eclipse development tools, importing MySQL databases to get my private wiki running, Bugzilla, Subversion, et.al.

I’ve not completely binned Microsoft, I’ve got Vista running on another machine; but here’s another Microsoft bug bear. I tried to use the Vista backup utility to store data to a SAMBA share on Linux; unfortunately it doesn’t work.

There’s an article about it on the Samba mail lists here. I can write to the shares from Vista using normal (e.g. explorer, word, notepad, etc.) mechanisms. For info: I’ve not got a domain setup, just a workgroup and so the creds are not sync’d between the two machines.

If anyone’s got any bright ideas (other than re-compiling Samba) I’d be very interested to hear them.