So now you have a choice between the Hudson butler and an ass-kicking Chuck Norris on your build page.

Chuck can be activated on a per-hudson project basis. It’s off by default.

Enjoy. Activating Chuck is so much better than working on EclipseCon presentations

The Eclipse community has a fine tradition of taking over the Hyatt bar on the night before EclipseCon. Let’s continue that tradition.

Please sign up if you can come!

Gandhi said you must be the change you wish to see in the world. I was given a unique opportunity to change things and am looking forward to it. Look for me to strengthen the state of Eclipse on Linux and improve the state of Git tooling at Eclipse. On top of that, I get the opportunity to spread the Eclipse and OSGi love to the JBoss folks.

I look forward to seeing everyone at EclipseCon and enjoying some frosty beverages.

What was in the package? A brand spanking new copy of the Equinox OSGi book.

In my biased opinion, this is best OSGi book on the market. I’ve had the honor to see the book evolve while it was written. Through that experience, the OSGi tooling at Eclipse (PDE) improved significantly. The authors were kind enough to nag inform me when things didn’t work the way they desired and I did my best to fix everything.

Why is this the best OSGi book on the market? First off, the authors know their stuff and have been working with OSGi before it was cool. Second, the book comes with one of the best example OSGi applications I’ve seen. Third, kind words are said about me in the Acknowledgments section

The only downside, my last name was spelled wrong in the Acknowledgments section (will be fixed in second printing).

So what are you waiting for, grab the book and play with the Toast example.

If you want hands on training from the authors of the book and me, please attend our tutorial at EclipseCon! It’s not too late to register!

I hit up Bojangles.

The fried chicken in Austin just isn’t the same. And yes, I have no shame.

So yesterday I strolled over to a happy hour being hosted by Mozilla because I’m all about having free beer, especially since free beer related to open source projects taste better. On my way over, I noticed Mozilla Firefox has a sweet car…

Upon closer examination, I was officially envious of Mozilla’s marketing prowess and budget.

I mean, the BMW M57 engine and desert racing drivetrain setup, what else more could you want?

The web guys have all the fun.

Through the work of the Eclipse Architecture Council (in particular, Dave Carver) we now have a set of basic documentation guidelines at Eclipse that projects can reference. There’s actually some good stuff in there with pointers to other open source projects on how they handle documentation (e.g., Ubuntu). However, there was one missing piece from those guidelines that always bothered me. For most Eclipse.org projects, the barriers are too high to contribute to the documentation because you generally need access to the source control system and commit access (on top of learning what format the documentation is).

For awhile, a few of us had the thought of leveraging the Eclipsepedia wiki as a source and generate documentation from that. If you use the wiki, all people need is a Bugzilla account and learn simple wiki markup in order to contribute documentation; people don’t need to be committers to contribute documentation! The Mylyn project pioneered this approach with their user guide and FAQ through the usage of WikiText. The only problem with the WikiText approach at the time was that there wasn’t an easy consumable example for people to use and learn from. Thankfully, this won’t be a problem anymore.

At EclipseCon 2010, David Green and I will be giving a talk on Documentation: Single-Sourcing, Crowd-Sourcing And Other Voodoo. As part of preparing for the talk, we created a nice example people can use when exploring WikiText. The example takes the wiki page of the example itself and generates some Eclipse help content from it. You can grab the actual code for the example from GitHub.

We hope the example serves people well and that more Eclipse.org projects start looking to source their documentation from the wiki. If you have any questions, feel free to let us know.

Otherwise, please join us for our talk at EclipseCon if you can.

On top of that, EclipseCon is less than 10 days away and I’m not done my presentations and tutorials yet.

The only reassuring thought is that I think I’m not the only one that is procrastinating a bit, right ?

On top of that, we’re nestled next to Chuck Norris! It’s good to be next to Chuck.

Ok, maybe it’s not the “Eclipse” I want it to be… but let’s consider it practice for when EclipseCon rolls around.

Another cool Eclipse-related academic item I just saw was Code Bubbles. I also know that GEF3D has done some work in academia. Heck, the Mylyn project got its start as an academic project for awhile. I wonder if there’s something more we can do to make it easier for academia to participate in the Eclipse ecosystem and benefit from it. Here are some ideas that popped out in my mind…

• Should we have closer ties to academic conferences
• How about a list of all academic publications that use Eclipse technology
• How about having an “open source technology incubator” that lets people take a project and build a business (e.g., Mylyn -> Tasktop)
• Amend EclipseCon to accept position papers and have them published in a Eclipse focused academic journal

For those living in academia, what do you think? What would benefit you?