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: