Is Bing It On Rigged or is this Google Retaliation?

I find the image screenshot below extremely humorous and I found it while looking at the upward trend of people typing "bing" into google. So after looking at "bing" in trends I decided to look at bingiton in trends. That is when I noticed related terms as in the image below.

Yahoo, Microsoft and Google - YPN is the key for Yahoo

I like to keep an eye on the Search Engine world and like to think I know quite a bit about the SEO/SEM side of things. But even if I don't it seems abundantly clear to me.

Launch YPN (Yahoo Publishing Network) Yahoo! Lets assume that Yahoo does not have enough advertisers to do a national, much less a global, launch of YPN. This is where Google comes into play. Google could fill in with their adword/adsense inventory and share money.

Google - Are you listening? Do you want Microsoft and Carl Icahn to completely dismantle Yahoo? Maybe you do, less competition right? But it seems quite clear to me that Google has a soft spot for Yahoo and a big F U to Mr. Softie (MSFT).

Why the hell can't Yahoo, after 3+ years in beta, get YPN launched? This would probably make share holders happy (make me happy, and yes I own Yahoo stock). It would quite rapidly increase revenue both gross and net for Yahoo.

It's issues like YPN that is causing Yahoo to flounder and now on the brink of complete disassembly by Mr. "Make lots of Money and not give a shit about the company" Icahn.

WAKE UP YAHOO - WAKE UP GOOGLE - M$FT is lurking in the shadows..

Screen Refresh Problems in Eclipse RCP Solved!

On my current project I was having some serious problems with screen refresh and I finally found a work around. The problem was I have a 4 pane perspective setup with 4+ views. The left half of the application area is a PDF viewer. When a user (me doing testing) would open a new PDF the fragments of the filedialog would remain overlayed during opening of the new PDF as well as the other views shifting over into the PDF area. The reason is because I had to do a HideView then ShowView. If I just did a close/open document function call in my swing PDF component the pdf component (I use icesoft IcePDF) would not always work. I am pretty sure this is due to the SWT to AWT bridge I have to do. So now here is the code to fix it!

Shell shell;
shell = getSite().getShell();
PDFView view = (PDFView)getSite().getPage().findView(PDFView.ID);
getSite().getPage().hideView(view);
shell.update();

Just doing a shell update seemed to do the trick, you may want to also look at this code if the above does not work for you. Look at the comments out code and it may be useful to you.

Shell shell;
shell = getSite().getShell();
// Display display = shell.getDisplay();
// Point shellSize = shell.getSize();
// shell.redraw(0,0,shellSize.x,shellSize.y,true);
PDFView view = (PDFView)getSite().getPage().findView(PDFView.ID);
getSite().getPage().hideView(view);
shell.update();
// display.update();

Numeric Only in Eclipse RCP SWT Text Widget

If you wanted to make an Eclipse RCP SWT text field numeric only here is a simple validation you can do. More to come on this as I need better support then this for like money fields, etc.

Text startText = new Text(group, SWT.BORDER);
startText.setText(txt);
startText.setLayoutData(new GridData(GridData.FILL_HORIZONTAL));
startText.addListener (SWT.Verify, new Listener ()
{
public void handleEvent (Event e)
{
String string = e.text;
char [] chars = new char [string.length ()];
string.getChars (0, chars.length, chars, 0);
for (int i=0; i < chars.length; i++)
{

if (!('0' <= chars [i] && chars [i] <= '9') && (chars[i]!='.'))
{
e.doit = false;
return;
}
}
}
});

Blackberry Outage for All Americas

My Blackberry isn't working and just OUT. Blackberry / RIM has said this is a severe critical outage that affects all 12 million users in the Americas. RIM has no official response to the cause or how long this will last. The last time we had this problem it was approximately 24 hours so this could be even worse.

Want to take bets how long? Post a comment and lets see who is closest!

Hold your breath berry-crackers! This could be painful!

Desktop Tower Defense

If you need a break and just want to get away from work, life, family or friends I highly recommend this entertaining game call Desktop Tower Defense. It is a free online flash game and can provide many hours of playing. See if you can beat my current high score of 6400. Enjoye

QTJava and Eclipse RCP

I have not posted in a while but thought I would do a quick post before the year ends and follow up with more detail later. Right now I am trying to get QTJava API into my Eclipse RCP application. Thanks to a friend (thanks Rick!) I have some code to help with a problem with QTJava for Eclipse RCP on the Macintosh OSX platform. Isn't that ironic? Under OSX the whole movie canvas is shifted 16 pixels right and 16 pixels down (I believe that is the offset issue, will double check in followup post). So one needs to "trick" Eclipse to think the canvas paint area is correct. I will post some code examples in January once I have all the code in and working. Stay tuned.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!

IFolderLayout and Multiple Tabbed Views in Eclipse RCP/SWT

I ran across another issue that needed fixing this week. It isn't a very big problem but I figured even the little problems can be hard for some to solve since I consider the RCP / SWT documentation to be so weak.

This most recent problem had to do with having multiple views in an IFolderLayout. I had two as you will see in the image below (look at top right of image circled in red) with the table being the currently displayed view, albeit with no data.


Now what the user may do is click on the chart preview in the window on the left side view (It is a PDF viewer). The problem I had is the chart view, which is the "hidden" view on the right behind the table view, would not come to the fore ground.

This is a simple fix once you know what to do. I have a function called public void updateChartView(IWorkbenchPage page) which gets called to update the chart with new data or whatever. All I needed to do was, using the IWorkbenchPage passed was to call page.bringToTop(view) If you attempt to use activate(view) you may get errors.. How did I get my view in here? I did this: ChartView view = (ChartView)page.findView(ChartView.ID). This only works if you have one instance of chartview but there are primary and secondary id's used in another form of findView if you have multiple instances of the same view.

So by adding the bringToTop(view) function it now works properly when the user clicks on the left chart preview. See below:

Communication between Views using eventLoopIdle

I have been working on an application that is now up to 3 swing components embedded in my Eclipse RCP / SWT application. This has become problematic having these 3rd party components to communicate properly with each other. While it is easy to communicate with these other components embedded in other views I was having a problem with RCP not properly repainting the screen. So I have come up with a work around that works for me and I thought I would share it with any other Eclipse Rich Client Platform developer out there that may be struggling.

If you open up ApplicationWorkbenchAdvisor.java - there is a function in there called public void eventLoopIdle(Display display). In this function I put my calls. I used my Application Singleton class to facilitate communication. By adding a semaphore type variable I can see if other views need to go and update their screen. In my specific case a user has a view of a PDF and when they click on an action object this needs to send the file information to a chart window that then opens the file clicked on in the PDF view, parse it and display the chart with the give options defined by the PDF link.

If you have any questions on this just email or leave me a comment. Good luck!

Problems Exporting your Eclipse RCP?

Today one of the students (PhD level) came to me with a problem I had encountered before while exporting my Eclipse RCP project. Normally you click on the export wizard on your project.product page and everything works fine. But occasionally you have a problem and when you look at the log file it generates in an annoying zip file you see nothing in there or maybe some warnings. This should be working, why is it failing? Well every single time this has happened to me it was because the generated eclipse.exe file become exclusively locked. This is under Windows XP Pro. I have no idea if this is happening to people on other platforms.

You can't just delete everything in your old export folder, because the delete fails.

So how do you fix it? Well these are the only solutions that work for me:

1) If in a hurry, export to a new folder.
2) If not in a hurry, reboot your computer, remove the old folder (or all its contents), run eclipse and export your project.

Why this is such an easy answer it is surprising how many people bang their heads against the wall on this one.

Tabbed Views in Eclipse RCP

Tabbed Views in Eclipse RCP sounds really complicated but Eclipse has made this really easy. Just follow these simple instructions and you will be off and running with multiple tabbed views.

1. Open your perspective.java file (If you don't have this file yet, you are in trouble!)
2. in public void createInitialLayout(IPageLayout layout) you should have some code that looks similar to this:
   layout.addStandaloneView(ItagTreeView.ID, true, IPageLayout.LEFT, 1.0f, editorArea);
   layout.addStandaloneView(ChartView.ID, true, IPageLayout.RIGHT, 0.5f, ItagTreeView.ID);
   layout.addStandaloneView(FormView.ID, true, IPageLayout.BOTTOM, 0.5f, ItagTreeView.ID);
   
   // create a folder for multiple analysis views so that they will open up
   // in tabs next to the table view.
   IFolderLayout folder = layout.createFolder("Tables", IPageLayout.BOTTOM, 0.5f, ChartView.ID);
   folder.addPlaceholder(AnalysisView.ID + ":*");
   folder.addView(TableView.ID);
   
   The above code has 4 views and the table view is it. Our AnalysisView is a 2nd tab under the TableView.
   
   You can see instead of calling addStandaloneView we call createFolder. The "folder" is how we combine several views to make a tabbed view presentation.

I hope that this will help anyone struggling to add tabbed views for an Eclipse RCP application. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to contact me.

Java Application from Existing Source in Eclipse

For many newer people you may not find good documentation on how to quickly and easily create a new Eclipse project from existing java files. This is really easy if the source has an ANT build file but if you don't it becomes a little less obvious, at least until you have done it once or twice. Thus I thought I would blog about this simple yet not-so-well documented functionality.

Steps to create a project in eclipse from existing java files.

1. Create an Empty Workspace in Eclipse (lets call it Test)
   
2. Now Using your file browser go to the folder where the new .classpath and .projects are. This will be your "Test" folder under the workspace folder.
3. From here drill down to your src folder. In this directory drag and drop the top level of the source code you have, for example mine is "com" folder and under this are all my packages and java files.
   
4. Go up to the same level as the src folder and go down into your lib folder.
5. In here copy all required JAR files that your java files have.
6. Now go back into Eclipse and on the left under your Package Explorer right click the src folder and pick refresh. Do the same for your lib folder.
7. Now right click on your project (in our example Test) . Select Properties. Pick "Java Build Path" on the left. Then click "Add External JARS.." on the right. Add all the .jar files you did in step 5.
8. Thats it! You now need to do run and define what it is you're running but that is self-explanatory.

Good luck and leave me a comment if you have any questions or problems.

Eclipse RCP Views - How to communicate between them

When I was starting out my Eclispe program life, which was not very long ago, I had quite the dilemna of how in the hell would I have ViewOne communicate with ViewTwo, three and four. After talking to a good friend of mine he introduced me to an old idea that still works great. Use a class called ApplicationSingleton. This class is really very handy and I thought I'd talk about it here with a simple example.

---

public class ApplicationSingleton {
static private ApplicationSingleton instance;
private ItagTreeView.TreeParent chart;

public static ApplicationSingleton getInstance() {
if (instance == null) {
instance = new ApplicationSingleton();
}
return instance;
}
private ApplicationSingleton() {
super();
}
public void SetCurrentChart(ItagTreeView.TreeParent tp) {
chart = tp;
}
public ItagTreeView.TreeParent getCurrentChart() {
return chart;
}
}

---

Now to talk about some parts of this class.

1. We include a private variable of our class called "instance"
2. From our application code we make calls to getInstance(), such as this:
   TreeParent tp = ApplicationSingleton.getInstance().GetCurrentChart(); The first time we call getInstance it will make an instance of this class.
3. By using setCurrentChart() we can store our variables in view1 and in view2 we can use getCurrentChart.
   

Using this method allowed me to have two distinct view communicate. One view was my ChartView and the other was my FormView. I also tied in a TreeView so when a user double clicks a chart node it grabs the data for that node and displays a chart and resets the form view for the given chart.

Easy, right? :) If you have any questions or comments I'd love to hear them!

Slush Bucket for Eclipse RCP

I have been developing an Eclipse RCP application for one of my clients. I sure wish I had started to blog it from the very beginning as I have learned so much that isn't documented properly online or in the books I have. I guess it's better late then never so here we go.


The latest stumbling block I ran into was that Eclipse SWT (their replacement to Java Swing) did not have slush buckets or also referred to as a pick list. So I decided to code my own. Now that I have I thought I would post my working code for others to use.

Below is the code as I have it and I will also throw in some very important notes about the code below the code. Such as my use of an Application Singleton class. My way of coding it may not be the most efficient, I really don't know, but it works for me and while searching for this type of code I noticed a lot of other people needed help on this too. So I helps some other Eclipse people out there!

Label loglabel = toolkit.createLabel(sectionClient, "Logistic Regression Independent Variables:");
Composite logGroup;
logGroup = new Composite(sectionClient, SWT.FLAT);
logGroup.setLayout(new GridLayout(3, false));
logGroup.setLayoutData(new GridData(GridData.FILL_BOTH | GridData.GRAB_VERTICAL | GridData.GRAB_HORIZONTAL));
List list = new List (logGroup, SWT.BORDER | SWT.MULTI | SWT.V_SCROLL);

GridData g = new GridData(SWT.CENTER, SWT.CENTER, true, true, 1, 1);
g.heightHint = 150;
g.minimumWidth = 30;
list.setLayoutData(g);
list.setToolTipText("The source list of fields you can choose. \nHighlight the fields you wish to have as independent variables \nin the logistic regression and move to the right list box\nusing the center buttons.");
list.setItems(data[0]); // 0 is the headers
ApplicationSingleton.getInstance().setSelList(list);
Group middleGroup;
middleGroup = new Group(logGroup, SWT.FLAT);
middleGroup.setLayout(new GridLayout(1, false));

Button bright;
bright = new Button(middleGroup, SWT.PUSH);
bright.setText(">");
bright.setLayoutData(new GridData(SWT.CENTER, SWT.CENTER, true, true, 1, 1));
bright.addSelectionListener(new SelectionListener() {

public void widgetSelected(SelectionEvent event) {
List list = ApplicationSingleton.getInstance().getSelList();
int [] selections;
selections = list.getSelectionIndices();
List list2 = ApplicationSingleton.getInstance().getTargetList();
for(int i=0; i < selections.length; i++)
{
list2.add(list.getItem(selections[i]));
}
list.remove(selections);
}
public void widgetDefaultSelected(SelectionEvent event) {
}

});
Button bleft;
bleft = new Button(middleGroup, SWT.PUSH);
bleft.setText("<");
bleft.setLayoutData(new GridData(SWT.CENTER, SWT.CENTER, true, true, 1, 1));
bleft.addSelectionListener(new SelectionListener() {

public void widgetSelected(SelectionEvent event) {
List list2 = ApplicationSingleton.getInstance().getTargetList();
List list = ApplicationSingleton.getInstance().getSelList();
int [] selections;
selections = list2.getSelectionIndices();
for(int i=0; i < selections.length; i++)
{
list.add(list2.getItem(selections[i]));
}
list2.remove(selections);
}
public void widgetDefaultSelected(SelectionEvent event) {
}

});
Button bfullright;
bfullright = new Button(middleGroup, SWT.PUSH);
bfullright.setText(">>");
bfullright.setLayoutData(new GridData(SWT.CENTER, SWT.CENTER, true, true, 1, 1));
bfullright.addSelectionListener(new SelectionListener() {

public void widgetSelected(SelectionEvent event) {
List list2 = ApplicationSingleton.getInstance().getTargetList();
List list = ApplicationSingleton.getInstance().getSelList();
String [] strings, strings2;
strings = list.getItems();
strings2 = list2.getItems();

// Combine both sets and move it all to the right
String[] temp = new String[strings.length + strings2.length];
System.arraycopy(strings, 0, temp, 0, strings.length);
System.arraycopy(strings2, 0, temp, strings.length, strings2.length);
list2.setItems(temp);

list.removeAll();
}
public void widgetDefaultSelected(SelectionEvent event) {
}

});
Button bfullleft;
bfullleft = new Button(middleGroup, SWT.PUSH);
bfullleft.setText("<<");
bfullleft.setLayoutData(new GridData(SWT.CENTER, SWT.CENTER, true, true, 1, 1));
bfullleft.addSelectionListener(new SelectionListener() {

public void widgetSelected(SelectionEvent event) {
List list2 = ApplicationSingleton.getInstance().getTargetList();
List list = ApplicationSingleton.getInstance().getSelList();
String [] strings, strings2;
strings = list.getItems();
strings2 = list2.getItems();

// Combine both sets and move it all to the right
String[] temp = new String[strings.length + strings2.length];
System.arraycopy(strings, 0, temp, 0, strings.length);
System.arraycopy(strings2, 0, temp, strings.length, strings2.length);
list.setItems(temp);

list2.removeAll();
}
public void widgetDefaultSelected(SelectionEvent event) {
}

});

List list2 = new List (logGroup, SWT.BORDER | SWT.MULTI | SWT.V_SCROLL);
g = new GridData(SWT.CENTER, SWT.CENTER, true, true, 1, 1);
g.heightHint = 150;
g.minimumWidth = 30;
list2.setLayoutData(g);
ApplicationSingleton.getInstance().setTargetList(list2);
Button bRedrawChart;
bRedrawChart = new Button(logGroup, SWT.PUSH);
bRedrawChart.setText("Redraw Chart");
bRedrawChart.setLayoutData(new GridData(SWT.CENTER, SWT.CENTER, true, true, 3, 2));
bRedrawChart.setToolTipText("After selecting the Indepenent Variables\nfor your Logistic Regression Click Redraw.");
bRedrawChart.addSelectionListener(new SelectionListener() {

public void widgetSelected(SelectionEvent event) {
Button b = ApplicationSingleton.getInstance().getY1LogButton();
b.setSelection(true);
ApplicationSingleton.getInstance().getCurrentChart().doY1Logistic(true);
List list2 = ApplicationSingleton.getInstance().getTargetList();
String [] strings;
strings = list2.getItems();
ApplicationSingleton.getInstance().getCurrentChart().setLogX(strings);
ChartView view = (ChartView)getSite().getWorkbenchWindow().getActivePage().findView(ChartView.ID);
view.loadNewChart();
}
public void widgetDefaultSelected(SelectionEvent event) {
}

});

So in my code I am doing a slush bucket to determine which columns of data should be used for logistic regression. With that said, the biggest challenge was how do I expose variables, such as the list boxes, to the selection listener events? Well you write a class called "ApplicationSingleton" that sets and gets variables that then can be used anywhere in your application by doing a getInstance of the one ApplicationSingleton class we have.

So I hope this helps and if you have any questions please let me know!