I’ve been collecting my own usage data—along with usage data from several foundation employees and some other volunteers—using the Usage Data Collector (UDC) for quite some time now, so we already have several months’ worth of data. Recently more members of the community have picked up the EPP builds that contain the UDC and have started to provide even more data. The information that’s been collected so far shows some interesting results.

The UDC currently collects the following sorts of information:

• Bundle lifecycle events (start, stop, install, uninstall, etc.)
• Workbench window activations, and deactivations
• Perspective changes
• View and editor lifecycle events (open, activation, close)
• Command invocations

At this point, we have only made very crude reports of the results, that are generally concerned with ensuring that the UDC is itself working right. Here are some highlights:

• We have been getting about a 1000 event records each day from each participant.
• We have participants from fourteen different countries.
• The bundles from the Eclipse Top-Level Project are used more than any others.
• Our current population also makes heavy use of PDT, Mylyn, and the XML editing support from WTP.
• BIRT, DTP, and EMF are closing the gap.
• Building SQL queries makes my head hurt.

I’m looking forward to the EclipseCon keynotes this year.

I’ve only read a few things from Cory Doctorow, but I’ve really enjoyed those few things (take a gander at this bit of work if you want a taste). I hear that he’s a pretty entertaining presenter. I’m also very interested in what Fake Steve Jobs, Dan Lyons, has to say. I read his blog every day and, excusing the recent US party leadership candidate bashing, it is quite often one of the highlights of my day. Finally, it’ll be interesting to hear what Microsoft’s Sam Ramji has to say about Microsoft’s take on open source and Eclipse. Microsoft always tends to be well-represented at EclipseCon (very often graciously greeting our community leaders as they come off stage after winning awards), but—I’m quite sure—never this openly.

The Early registration deadline, February 14th, is approaching. Register now.

Last week, I quietly rolled out an addition to Eclipse Corner that shows the Eclipse projects and releases that an article is compatible with. The change also provides, when appropriate, a link to Bugzilla entries concerned with the article (so you can more easily make comments or suggest corrections for an article). I used an update to Grant Gayed’s Custom Drawing Table and Tree Items article as my first test, and then rather quickly firmed things up with James Bruck’s Defining Generics with UML Templates (for which I believe I still owe James some swag). I’ve added the information to a handful of other articles and will continue to add the information as I work through the remaining articles a few at a time.

At this point, I find the presentation of the information a little on the ugly side, which I’m sure you’ll agree. Also, the wording around the info box is a little odd and could probably use a little tweaking. Feel free to make suggestions (on Bug 203345); I do want this to look as pretty as possible…

It’s pronounced “eep!”, as in “meep, meep”, the sound that the roadrunner makes.

The Eclipse Examples Project (EEP!) proposal is live and is looking for feedback and input. The idea behind the project is to provide a home for examples of applications, plug-ins, etc. built using Eclipse technology. We’ve already collected together a good group of interested folks along with a handful of eager committers. If you want to participate, please let me know (via the newsgroup).

We’re also looking for a second mentor. Architecture council members: this will be an easy one to mentor; look at the committer list… this group already knows what’s going on…

The Eclipse Examples Project, which will be created under the Technology top-level project, is ready for your comments on the newsgroup.