A slide is worth a thousand attendees

Giving a presentation at Eclipse Summit Europe?
Hoping to get a submission accepted for Eclipsecon 2009?

The newest feature rolled into the Eclipse Submission System can help you with both of these goals. This year we are trying out a new service called SlideShare.net. SlideShare is a lot like YouTube but instead of sharing videos SlideShare lets you share your presentations. Just upload your presentation slides and then start sharing them with the rest of the world. To add your slide to your ESE08/EC09 submission just copy the embed content and paste it into the 'Slides' section of your submission. For an example of how the slides will look, see the 'Automotive Symposium' for Summit 2008.

If you have any additional material you would like to make available (like code snippets or Eclipse project files) you can upload those to your own web site or any of the many free file hosting sites out there and then paste the URL into the 'Files' section for your submission.

So, with little over a week before Summit 2008 kicks off upload your slide now and help make make your talk stand out from the rest.

Vanity strikes the Portal

I have been slowly working on bug #197728, which is about adding more personal information into the Portal. A while back I added support for longitude/latitude data and just this week I got around to adding support for uploading an image. The next step in bug #197728 is to develop a web API to make some of this information available for mashups (like a map of where everyone is located).

So, for those of you who want the world to know what you look like or where you are, this feature is for you. Everyone else can just keep coding.

The Portal with a splash of Dash?

Been feeling that you just don't know what has been going on with the Portal? When was the last time you trolled through the open Portal bugs? Seems harder and harder to keep in touch these days.

Well fear not because the Portal has become part of the Dash project and now it is even easier to keep track of what your good friend the Portal has been up to. Check out the 'new and noteworthy' section every month to see all the great new features and refinements for the Portal.

The first M1 milestone has a little bit for everyone. For those how have left the fold there is the committer emeritus page. Project leads now have a new component to help them expand the list of committer emeritus by managing inactive committers. To replace those lost committers we now have a refined election process that requires a valid email address. And for those who like rounded corners we have made you happy too.

Till next time,
Darn Good Developer

Bugzilla and the Portal sitting in a tree...

There has been allot of work going on in the background on the Portal infrastructure to get it ready to take on even more tasks. The first thing you might have noticed (and was blogged about early) is the Portal has got some curves, but the progress hasn't stopped there.

Now you can login into the Portal with your Bugzilla login. There is one caveat to this, your Bugzilla email address must match your committer email address. The next obvious question is 'how do I know if my email addresses match?'. Simple log into the Portal with your committer login and scroll down to find your personal information widget. If the email address on file matches your Bugzilla email then you are good to go. If they don't match then you are only two clicks away from fixing it.

If you want to talk about multiple email addresses please leave those comments in bug #209838.

Thanks,
Darn Good Developer

How Babel can work for you

For those of you out there that don't read the Babel developers mailing list there is a great blog post over at blogs.ilog.com about JRules Rule Studio setting up their own Babel server in house. As one of the Babel developers it is great to see someone else out side of The Eclipse Foundation making good use of the Babel project. They have even managed to extend the server code to import projects stored in SVN as opposed to just CVS. Now if we can only get them to donate a patch to get SVN working for the rest of the Babel community.

LINK:
http://blogs.ilog.com/brms/2008/04/24/deploying-a-babel-server/

The Portland Ottawa Connection (or how Eclipsecon weather spoiled me)

Waking up and looking out side this morning the last thing I was expecting to see was snow.. rain yes, snow no. For a brief moment I felt like I was back in Ottawa. Only I live in Portland Oregon. No where close to the freezing cold shovel your roof weather of the Eclipse main office in Ottawa(and I complain when I have to clean my gutters out once in a while). The north west weather is generally just wet in the winter and less wet in the summer.

That week I just spent basking in the glow of this thing California's call 'the sun' must have soften me up a bit. Drinking beer in the sun with my shoes off while palm trees rustle in the wind, now that is living the hight life. I don't know what it is about palm trees but they always make me think of time off.

Then again there is something precious about it snowing while spring flowers are in full bloom. Part of what I love about living in the great north west, you never can tell what will happen next.

Darn Good Developer.

Updated: by 2pm it was sunny and warm(ish).