Eclipse Subversive does not frustrate me anymore… Now I use EGit!

A considerably time ago, I wrote down my frustration on using the Eclipse Subversive Plugin. At that time, I was annoyed just because refactoring did not work properly. Now, Subversive has gone worse.

SVN itself does a good job tracking history of moved and copied files, even if directories are moved or renamed. By 2009, the Subversive plugin stopped supporting this features and a simple directory rearrangements may now lead your local copy to an irreversible inconsistent state.

Since then, people were tired of gathering Subversion plugins and dependencies over several repositories. But why using Eclipse central repository, if you can reinvent the default install procedure? Subversion is now able to add automatically the repositories and gather dependencies for you. The hack, however, works only once. If you are required to reinstall Subversion, then it might be easier to reinstall whole Eclipse.

Subversion introduced potentially useful keyboard shortcuts that never worked. And staying for weeks on the same workspace is not recommended: label decorators will eventually disappear until you reset all your preferences in your workspace. People used to carry their ‘portable’ workspace with them will notice that suddenly Subversion suddenly stops recognizing SVN projects checked out by it.

Meanwhile, there has been increasing network concerns. Subversion does not follow proxy configuration from Eclipse preferences. Recently, connections over SSH started to fail randomly, leaving incomplete and inconsistent checkouts.

Faced by all that many ‘challenges’, I found myself wondering about the benefits to continue with Subversive. A trial with with EGit (Eclipse Git Plugin) was smooth and pleasurable. I do not have to tell that I moved all my repositories to Git.

I still like SVN, although I already consider it an ‘aged’ technology. There are many nice tools that work well with SVN. However, I cannot recommend Subversive anymore if you want to make good use of Eclipse+Java+SVN . Instead, Eclipse+Java+Git are an appealing trade off for those looking for simplicity, power and productivity. Just install the EGit plugin.

Firefox memory footprint

Firefox is releasing one new version after the other. And each new version, Mozilla claims to have enhanced memory usage to reduce the amount of resource required to load each page. Is that a valid claim?

As a curious computer engineer, I decided to install several legacy Firefox versions and compare the amount of memory required to load two greedy pages: http://www.gmail.com and http://www.spiegel.de.

Here are the results.

One observes that at Firefox 3.6, reading emails from gmail suddenly doubled memory usage. And from Firefox 4.0 on, it requires the triple of memory. I suspect that gmail also loads more content on newer versions since Firefox enhanced javascript support.

But a similar behavior also happened for http://www.spiegel.de news journal, although not as intense as for gmail: memory has grown nearly 3 times!

Although the results are no scientific measures, I believe that they show the greedy memory consumption tendencies from Firefox, and that probably Mozilla was not really successful to “enhance memory usage”.

Eclipse subversive plugins frustrate me every day…

Please apologize, but I really need to expose my anger to the subversive plugins. The statement on Subversive – SVN Team Provider that “At the same time project is stable and had a long history on the previous location at the the Polarion.com” is really a very bad joke.

About the Transcend SDHC Class 10 8GB memory card

The “Class 10” label on Transcend card suggest that is should work 2½ as fast as the my plain 3 years old Kingston SDHC Class 4 8GB memory card. Indeed, I was disappointed to realize the opposite: Transcend class 10 was on average about twice as slow as Kingstone class 4.

Create a front page for WordPress that does not show up twice

Note: I think this is not an issue anymore, since WordPress finally created the “menu” design feature. There is no need anymore to create front pages to show content as tabs at the top of the page. The “menu” feature is a much superior than front pages.

Several people wonder how to configure WordPress to show ones own page when opening the blog (also called front page). There are instructions on wordpress support.

If the theme of your blog happens to show your front page twice (duplicated front page), then you will need to adopt a workaround, as I will discuss.

The expected solution: As explained on WordPress support, create your own front page and another empty page. Go to Settings->Reading, select “A static page”, set yout page as the “Front page” and the empty page as the “Posts page”.

The Bug: WordPress will show all top level pages (that have no parent) and both pages chosen at Settings->Reading->A static page. Your homepage satisfies both criteria, therefore it is added twice. Blame WordPress, this has not been fixed for years!

The ugly workaround: Back to your pages, edit your front page. At the attributes you will find a combo to set the “Parent page”. Select any other page, eg. your empty blog page and save the changes. This will mess up the hierarchy of your pages, but that is the price you pay for the workaround.

A poem about Subversion

I found an interesting poem from Peter Kriens about SVN (subversion) that was posted to the Eclipse committer mailing list. Really interesting how frustration can encourage your imagination in others arts besides computer programming.