This is a bit off my normal discourse but, well, it may be of service to someone out there.  I recently (yesterday) received a new Lenovo T61p laptop.  Sweet.  1920×1200 screen, fast processor, big drive, …  I’ve spent the past couple days installing stuff and getting it setup. For the most part it has gone swimmingly.  For the most part.

Last night around 1230 I was finishing up some installs and decided to go to bed.  As is my custom I suspended the laptop, got up from the desk and headed off.  There was the normal “going to sleep beep” and as I walked away, the machine beeped again.  It was waking up.  Strange.  It had been suspending fine earlier. 

This sequence was repeated again and again over the following 1.5 hours always with machine waking up.  I tried all manner of things (wake on lan settings, turning off wireless, …).  No joy.  I was starting to believe that it was the physical act of getting up and leaving that was causing the machine to wake.  Enough.  Haunted laptop?  I turned the machine OFF and went to bed incredulous and confused.

This evening the experiments continued.  In the end, after another 2 hours of suspend and resume experiements witnessed by an outside observer (wife), the problem was tracked down to a combination of a power management setting on the Mouse Device and my chair!  No kidding, the chair. 

The mouse was set to “Allow this device to wake the computer”.  Makes sense that that would be a problem but I was being very careful not to touch the machine in any way thoughout the experiments.  In fact, wiggling the mouse, banging the desk, … did NOT wake the machine.

That’s where the chair comes in. It turns out that my chair makes a bit of a thunk sound when I get up and that particular vibration was triggering a mouse button/wheel and waking the machine.  Unplug the mouse (before suspend), OK.  Get up slowly/quietly, OK.  Mouse plugged into any of the three USB ports and the machine wakes up when I stand.  Again, I kid you not.

There is probably a lesson in there somewhere about assumptions and side effects.  I prefer to just suspend the machine and walk away shaking my head at how complex things are.

I remember a few weeks ago seeing a message about the Memory Analyzer project proposal. Some guys from SAP were going to open source some of their tooling to analyze Java heap dumps. I didn’t think much about it at the time other than “Hey, that’s probably a good idea”. The other day however, Andreas Buchen, the proposed project lead contacted me about being a mentor so I took a deeper look at what they are proposing.

There is a bunch of info on the SAP Wiki and Andreas has summarized it well in a newsgroup post. This is really cool! Their tool allows you to do all manner of queries and introspection of heaps.  You can look for leaks (why is that object still there?), check memory consumption (aka retained size), create your own queries, etc.

The real kicker for me was the classloader relative searching.  Under the covers, Equinox makes a classloader for every bundle.  So searches by classloader are just a step away from searches by bundle.  This puts the tooling in a much better context for Eclipse developers and, for example, lets you figure out what your bundle is doing with memory etc.

The other thing that is cool is its scalability.  They routinely work on multi-GB dumps and have a whole range of instant queries and fast approximations.

The Memory Analyzer project is quite niche and may not attract that many developers (there is lots of potential for people adding extensions) but as part of the broader suite of JDT and TPTP tooling it is a big win and will attract lots of users.  I encourage you to check out the proposal and show your support on the newsgroup.  Also, you might want to attend their talk at EclipseCon.

p.s., Don’t forget early registration for EclipseCon ends on Feb 14.  Spend your money on your loved ones not late registration for the conference.

What the heck? “Eclipse” and “runtime” in the same sentence? Most people think of Eclipse as a tooling thing. Or perhaps an RCP thing. Well, take a look at the EclipseCon program and you will see that Eclipse is that and a whole lot more. I thought selecting talks on the program committe was hard but choosing which talks to actually attend is going to be even harder!

To see what I mean, go to the EclipseCon site and pick any of the days on the left. Then scroll down to the track selector and check only Eclipse as a Platform, OSGi DevCon and Rich Client Platform. Now look at the program. It doesn’t matter what day you pick, you will be double or triple booked pretty much the whole time. It is going to be a very busy week.

To make matters harder, I found many talks related to runtimes and platforms that did not fit nicely into the canned tracks. Here are a few that caught my eye:

• Eclipse Riena Project
• eRCP vs Android et al
• Swordfish
• Eclipse Command Language
• Jazz Ajax Framework
• RAP vs GWT
• API Tooling

Ok the last one is tooling and I am biased by involvement but how could a runtime guy not jump with joy about tooling that helps makes your modules more modular and backward compatibility a reality?

Anyway, all up I counted about 25 long talks (including those above) and about 40 short talks related to Equinox, Eclipse in various runtime/platform guises, OSGi, etc. Hope a lot of them are being recorded…

Don’t miss the fun, go register before the Valentine’s Day deadline and spend the money you saved on something for that someone special. See you there.

Oh, and for you committers out there, don’t miss the Committer Hackathon on all week.  Get your team together and hack like crazy.

It is that time of year again — the elections for your committer and add-in representatives to the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors is here. This year the list of candidates is most impressive. Last year the committer rep candidate list was unfortunately dominated by IBMers (including me!). This year less than half the candidates are from IBM and Mik and me are from small Eclipse-related startups (yes, I left IBM). The better breadth of experience and focus is greater this year as well. There are candidates from the embedded, web and tooling platform areas of Eclipse. It would be good to have more than me waving the runtime flag but that will come as Eclipse broadens this year.

Regardless of what part of Eclipse you focus on, please check out the various mission statements and see which fit best with where you think Eclipse is and where it should be going. The coming year is going to be very exciting with lots of new projects, directions and challenges. Voting in the election is one way that you can help shape those changes. Voting starts on February 25th and goes until March 7th.