Moving to Wordpress

I'm consolidating most of my blogs and moving them to Wordpress. You can catch my new blog posts here:

www.redefinedhorizonsblog.com.

The Sunburned Surveyor

Setting Up SWT Development on 64-Bit Windows

I've been tinkering with Eclipse RCP programming. I'd like to build a program for managing SurveyLISP modules using Eclipse RCP or maybe Netbeans RCP. The first thing I started work on after getting simple RCP skeleton together, was how to set-up a tree browser for modules using SWT and JFace. It took me a while to get Eclipse set-up to properly run SWT code on 64-Bit Windows.

Here are some suggestions that might help others attempting to do the same thing:

- To use a tree viewer you need both SWT and JFace. You can download SWT as a stand-alone library, but you need to steal the JAR files for JFace from an Eclipse installation. Check out the JFace page at Eclipsepedia for the list of JAR files you need to import into your Eclipse project to run JFace code.

- I couldn't find an easy option to download a 64-Bit package for SWT that would work on Windows. There was only a link for the 32-bit SWT library for Windows on the SWT downloads page. However, I did a little url hacking and found the 64-bit package was available on this web page. Download this file and add it to your Eclipse project's build path.

I hope that can help some other poor programmer trying to get started with SWT and JFace on a Windows 64 Bit computer.

The Sunburned Surveyor

Good Article on Source Code Comments

Visual Studio Magazine has a good article on if programmers should use source code comments. I believe the article presents a concise summary of the source code commenting debate. The article is written for Visual Basic programmers, but I thought it was applicable to any number of other programming languages.

The Sunburned Surveyor

Magazines from The Pragmatic Bookshelf

I found a monthly programming magazine from the Pragmatic Bookshelf recently. I just got done skimming the magazine for January. It appears to have some good conent, and an appealing graphical design. I commend the publisher for putting together a high-quality free magazine for programmers.

I wanted to share the link to the magazine with my blog readers. I hope you will enjoy the magazines.

The Sunburned Surveyor

The Specification Design Pattern

The Code Project has a series of articles that discuss, and show how to implement, the specification design pattern.

I thought the articles were an excellent resource on a design pattern I had never heard about or conciously used in my own code. The articles are written for Visual Basic .Net programmers, but I know the specification design pattern can also be applied in Java programming. I hope to use it in my own Java code when appropriate.

The Sunburned Surveyor

Russia Looses 3 GLONASS Satellites in Pacific

GPS World has reported that Russsia lost 3 GLONASS satellites in the Pacfic ocean when a launch when bad on Sunday Deceber 5, 2010.

Apparently the glitch as caused by bad data loaded into the software that controlled the rockets used to power the satellites into orbit.

That was an expensive programming mistake. Software testing anyone?

The Sunburned Surveyor

Setting Up a Fallback Font In Java

One of the OpenJUMP programmer's posted a link on the Jump Pilot Project Development mailing list today. The link is to an article that talks about setting a fallback font in Java. The article looked like it could be helpful to other Java programmers that work with internationalization, so I wanted to post the link here.

The Sunburned Surveyor