Atwood Did It

One thing I've noticed while trying to come up with consistent and solid blog posts for my blog is that, whenever I thought I had something interesting to say about coding, I would do a quick search and find that someone had already written about it. And usually, that someone was Jeff Atwood.

It happened enough times that I started hearing the voice of Professor Chaos (or more accurately: General Disarray) with each new idea: "Atwood Did It".
If you can stand South Park at all, do yourself a favor and go watch this full episode: http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s06e07-the-simpsons-already-did-it

And if you like reading about coding, go check out this guy's archives...or maybe go buy the book version at this point:  http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/coding-horror-the-book.html

I got into this guy's blog just before he and Joel Spolsky kicked off this little hobby project they called Stack Overflow (and I was one of the first/early listeners of the excellent weekly podcast they recorded while they built it).  How Atwood manages to churn out so many quality posts one-after-another is beyond me.

Custom Shortcuts in Eclipse

In the past I've posted on my favorite built-in key-bindings.  But with Eclipse you can actually bind any key combination to any 'command' using the eclipse platform command framework.

Here are some of the custom ones I like to set:
control + ; => next view
control + shift + ; => previous view

control + alt + W => close view

control + tab => next editor
control + shift + tab => previous editor

control + O in Task View => Open Remote Task

control + shift + ?

Editing Templates

You can also write a plugin to offer your own commands and templates.  Here are a couple I've written in the past.  If I'm feeling adventurous one day, I'll try to get back to this post and update it with the details.

Creating a Custom Template

sysout proposal for selected text (wrap the selected string in a System.out.println() ).

Creating a Custom Command

control+alt+L hack => goto line and select it

Previously, this required 3 separate actions:
Goto Line
End => goto line end
Shift + Home => highlight to line beginning

Virtual Worlds, A Fantasy

Second Life, Playstation Home, MMORPGs

Folks at work seem to think "virtual worlds" are the next big thing.
From a very smart dude that I totally respected:  "The internet 10 years from now will be an immersive, 3-dimensional experience".

Color me skeptical.

Or, quoting our other team lead: "Its just a bunch of Porn."