Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Meet the Eclipse Directors in Berlin

I was asked to arrange for a community "Stammtisch" while the Eclipse board of directors is meeting in Berlin next week. It is the first time that the Eclipse board has ever met outside of the USA.

Everybody is invited to join us:

Date: Tuesday, 2009-06-16
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Restaurant: Bavarium
Location: Europa Center, Berlin
Registration: Doodle poll

The Eclipse Foundation will pay for the drinks and the room has capacity for 50 persons. There are no technical sessions planned!

Thursday, June 4, 2009

When the Whole is Less than the Sum of its Parts

I did not know that this scenario is called Reductionism in ancient literature! I only stumbled on it now when I tried to track down why my daily backups started failing recently. Hold your breath:


The other week I installed a new anti virus tool because it better integrates with my software firewall and the rest of that security suite. In fact it found some new potential infections but I did not care too much because detection is heuristics-based. To be safe I kept all those files in the quarantine folder. I even activated the auto-quarantine feature. Anti virus now looked like a good part of my system.


Now my daily backups: For a long time they also were a good part of my system but since last week they did not complete successfully anymore. The same meaningless error message every time. Not cool!


I found out the reason (well, Google helped a lot): The backup by default copies all changed files to a temporary folder. Including my quarantine folder! The new anti virus tool eagerly detects a new infection and moves the file back to the normal qurantine folder, while the backup process is trying to work with it. Bang!

I saw this thing in the computer history museum in Palo Alto ;-)

Amazing how complex and interrelated the problems of modern computer systems can be. My mother used to be kind of a luddite but nowadays she claims to have fun with the computer and the net. I wonder how she would cope with such stuff?


All this reminds me to the recent discussions about technological complexity and simplicity of the real world:

How to explain EMF?

Why is RCP, EMF, p2, databinding... so hard to learn?

If Only it Were That Simple