14 November, 2007

A drive around the block

You bought what?

It seems I made just a bit of a boo boo when I purchased a DVD drive recently. The specs on it were very nice (supports DVD-R,+R,-RW,+RW,-RAM, CD-R, etc etc). The price was even better. So I bought it, and brought it home, but it wasn't until about half an hour after I actually got it home that I realised I'd made a small mistake in purchasing it. Yes, it works fine. No, it wasn't misrepresented in its advertising. So, I can't actually take it back because it doesn't work, or it doesn't do the job advertised in its marketing. No. My problem was, I didn't click to the fact that it was only a DVD reader, and not a writer. I could have saved myself the purchase cost of that drive, and added a bit of money, I might have had a writer. Never mind, it'll go into fatty as a reader, fine. Solaris recognises it, Ubuntu recognises it.

But the sun is eclipsed by the moon

Yes, I've reinstalled Eclipse, after upgrading my JDK, of course. I was aware of Callisto (Eclipse 3.2) but wasn't aware of Europa (Eclipse 3.3) so I had a pleasant surprise when I got to the download site all ready to download my copy. I'd already grabbed J2SE6 and docs to go with it, and I'd also upgraded my copy of NetBeans to 5.5 as well as installing a couple of useful plugins for non-Java coding. So I went ahead and downloaded Europa. I must say that Netbeans is considerably smaller than Eclipse, by some really significant margin. That was reflected in the long time it took to download both Eclipse itself, and some of the other plugins I wanted. On top of that, there are way way more plugins available for Eclipse. I'm still not sure yet what I'll use on an ongoing basis, though I have downloaded pretty much anything I'm likely to use, as well as possibly stuff I may never use.

Back to the books

I've been getting back into books recently, reading a bit of Stephen King (good writer, that), Thomas Harris (Hannibal fame), and Stephen Donaldson. Incidentally, he's just come out with a second part to his "Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" series. As with his other previous series, this one looks like it'll be another three-parter too. I ended up finishing "Firestarter" in just over a week - not fast for me, but faster than I have been reading books up until recently. With that in mind, I've got out two other Stephen King novels: Christine, and Cell. Anyhow, guess I've nothing else much to say.

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