Summer!

Hooray, it's summer! (I define summer as the period of time between Spring and Fall semesters, not by the progress of the earth around the sun.)

I'm setting up my home machine to do some work on FindBugs over the summer, and since my Ubuntu 6.10 was getting a bit stale, I decided to upgrade. I happened to have a CD burned with Kubuntu 8.04, so I backed up my essential files and let the installer rip. So far, it seems nice. It took a bit of getting used to KDE rather than GNOME. Overall, KDE seems less polished than GNOME, but more configurable. I'm using Amarok to play my music files, and it appears to be significantly better than Rhythmbox. (See previous post to see my ranting about how much I dislike Rhythmbox.)

Out of curiosity, I installed the Ubuntu openjdk package, and tried running Eclipse on top of it. So far, it seems to work quite well! It's exciting to finally have a usable free Java implementation. Major kudos to Sun for open sourcing the JDK.

There is a weird bug on Ubuntu/Kubuntu 8.04 with Eclipse: here is the bug report. The workaround described in the bug report does seem to fix the problem.

I bought a new monitor, an Acer AL1916. Newegg was having a special for $159, with free shipping. Now (at long last) both of my monitors are the same size and resolution.

I finally started some work on FindBugs today. First project: implementing exclusive type qualifiers. (This is part of implementing support for JSR 305 type qualifiers in FindBugs.) Bill Pugh has a nice presentation about JSR 305 which explains all of the goodness.