Sunday, May 05, 2013

This is an old post which remained as a draft...
 
Nightmare with Eclipse
       Had heard much about "Eclipse : the open source Java IDE". Just wanted to try out.
Had tried long back (almost a year from now).  But didn't find it appealing enough as the
other IDE that I was using at that time "Idea from IntelliJ" was par above it. The version
that I had used at that point of time was 2.0. Had done all the setup and the look and feel
was good. The act ended at that point. Never thought I would come back to it.
     1 year after, I (for some reasons...)  had to try the latest version. Downloaded it and
the greatest thing I liked was that there was no installation and anything required. Just
unzip it and run it. I didn't get it running in the first try. It required JDK 1.4 and my
system was holding onto JDK 1.3. So referred the README and there found the way
to run it with a VM as the option.
     eclipse -vm $JVM_PATH
     Got it running and it was late, after configuring all my sources I realized that there
was nothing related to Java in the Menus. No Syntax highlighting and nothing. So what's
this: wasn't this a Java IDE. Suspected my system Java configuration for this and
gave up not knowing what to do. Lot of time passed just reading the Help ...no use though.
The ultimate rescue : search in google. Luckily someone in some part of the world had
faced similar problems and so stepped onto this link
     http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=165604
     This is stupid....No where in the documentation does it mention that Java Develppment
Tool (eclipse-JDT-3.0.zip) has been moved out of the platform SDK and it is a separate plugin that is to be downloaded explicitly. With the 2.0 worship it was packaged into the
core distribution. All my curses to the guy who made this decision ..or the guy whose responsiblity was to document this stuff. So that was the end of all my woes. Am I not to bark against them for all this pain and loss of time (approximately 4 hours) for just getting my project up.

Spelling hint

Came across this useful hint for resolving making myself clear with the spellings of english words involved i and e in succession.

"e before i only after c"

Blind Earthworm

I never paid much attention to the earthworms previously. Yeah, I used to see many of them particularly in the rainy season and sometimes digging the wet mud. We used to use them as bait for catching fish, but it never occurred to know more about them. Only recently I found them interesting, when I saw one of them going on the walkway in my apartment. I noticed it was blind and just to confirm it picked it up and displaced it by 180 degrees and there it was just following the new course going in the direction I put it. A quick search resulted on this page which had many interesting facts about earthworms:-
http://www.biologyjunction.com/earthworm%20facts.htm

Dew worms can live for approximately six and a half years.
They do not have eyes but they do possess light- and touch-sensitive organs (receptor cells) to distinguish differences in light intensity and to feel vibrations in the ground.
 Earthworms are hermaphroditic meaning each worm has organs of both sexes.
 Earthworms respire through their skin, and therefore require humid conditions to prevent drying out.

Squirrel's Nest

While I was walking around my apartment community today, I noticed a squirrel carrying grass in it mouth onto a Pine tree. It caught my attention and I followed the squirrel to find that it was actually making a nest on the Pine tree. It was kind of a surprise that squirrel's live in/make nests. I never thought about it and I didn't know they make nests on trees like birds. I came home and googled to find some interesting facts about squirrel's over here:-
http://www.squirrels.org/facts.html
Some interesting excerpts:-
Squirrel's belong to the order "Rodentia", with 1650 species, it is the largest group of living mammals.  It also comprises forty percent of all present day mammal species. 
Squirrels chew on tree branches to sharpen and clean their teeth. That's why you may see many small branches on the ground around large trees. They will also chew on power lines for the same reason, this has caused many major power outages throughout the country. 
A female squirrel will choose the strongest male during mating season, but is unlikely to breed with that male again. This is natures way of reducing inbreeding,  and to preserve the species. 
A squirrel will break the shell of a nut with its teeth, then clean the nut by licking it or rubbing on its face before it is buried. This action applies a scent to the nut which helps the squirrel find it later, even under a foot of snow.