Archive for January, 2010

When Eclipse Plugins Don’t

Quick Version If, after ‘installing’ a plugin for Eclipse 3.4 it’s not visible in Preferences or in context menus, check that your user account has permissions to write into the appropriate Eclipse directories – because Eclipse doesn’t warn you. Preamble For those who don’t know, Eclipse is an IDE heavily used for Java development. Like [...]

Posted on January 27, 2010 at 10:55 pm by Paul Brabban · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Development, Java

Installing Ubuntu 9.10 from a USB Stick

Linux distributions tend to come as ISO images – files which are images of CDs/DVDs. I’ve always burned the images to a disk to install, but I’ve been meaning to try setting up a bootable USB stick instead. Better for the environment, right? More importantly, I never seem to have a blank CD knocking about [...]

Posted on January 24, 2010 at 9:21 pm by Paul Brabban · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Ubuntu · Tagged with: 

Finishing up the Machine Learning Module

Well, the Machine Learning exam was this morning… another 5:30 am start to get to Manchester in plenty of time. My Top Tip for distance learning today has to be: if you have to attend classes, labs, exams – you know, stuff that you can’t really afford to miss, aim to be there an hour [...]

Posted on January 20, 2010 at 8:07 pm by Paul Brabban · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Computer Science, MSc

Perl is slower and faster than Java

Bit of a random one coming up… I needed to get an measure of the difference in performance between Perl and Java for a simple client application, so I wrote the traditional ‘Hello World’ app in both and ran a bunch of executions averaging over the time from start to end of execution. The net [...]

Posted on January 9, 2010 at 12:39 am by Paul Brabban · Permalink · 5 Comments
In: Development, Java, PERL