Category Archives: Java/Java EE

time warner’s cutomer service

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I’ve had the “pleasure” of dealing with Time Warner customer support two or three times in the last month.  (One time the queue was too long and I gave up.)

The one thing I liked

Time Warner lets you contact customer service via online chat rather than sitting on the phone.  It still takes forever, but at least one can do something else during that time.  The first time I was #41.  The second time I was #37 (and decided not to wait.)  Today I was #15.  The pace crawled today compared to the first time.   Now that we’ve gotten the good stuff out of the way, let’s go through what happened.

Contact #1

Saturday September 18th I contacted customer service to make sure they knew the cable was out in my building.  This was about a day and a half after a tornado hit my area.  Both Verizon DSL/Time Warner Cable were out in my building and DSL had just come back.  (luckily power was not affected.)  Now I figured someone else had already reported the cable being out, but was just checking in case.

Result: The rep said he would credit my account for the inconvenience.  That’s nice, but I have to complaint to get a credit?  They know the whole building didn’t have cable.  It should be automatic.  I’m a bit peeved you have to complain to get a credit.

Contact #1.5

My DVR was ok so I watched some recorded shows.  On Monday, I thought “surely it will have been fixed by now” and decided to reboot the cable box.  After all, it helps with computers.  After rebooting, my cable box couldn’t tell what time it was, what was on the DVR or that I was even a customer.  Not good.  I tried to contact customer service to ask about this, but the queue was too long and I gave up.

The high tech notification system

I found out the cable was back Tuesday when I threw out the garbage and noticed the super of our building put a sign on the elevator saying the cable was back.  Thank you!  I had tried when I got home and the cable was still out.  I wasn’t going to try again that night.

Contact #2

I got my bill e-mailed and no credit.  Sigh.  I thought we went through this on September 18th.  The rep I chatted with this time (Pablo) says there will be a credit of $19.42 on next month’s bill.  If  it isn’t done then, I’m giving up the time and calling on the telephone to speak to the supervisor.  That would be time to ask for *another* inconvenience credit for the time I’ve wasted with their lousy support.

False promises

The chat form asks if you want to be e-mailed a transcript.  I clicked yes and never received anything.  Why offer it if you aren’t going to send one?

And finally

And finally, I’d like to commend Con Edison,Verizon and the city/parks/etc for their prompt work in fixing things, removing trees/debris and overall making the area.

Pattern.MULTILINE

eclipse 3.6 (helios) – four good, 1 bad feature

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Last summer, I wrote “eclipse 3.5 – four good, 1 bad feature“.  A year later and Eclipse 3.6 is out.   I didn’t try it earlier because I was busy with the SCEA part 1 and Core Spring 3 certifications.  While I may not be part of the official blogathon this time, I decided to use the same format as I did last year for Eclipse 3.5.  Another big difference is that I’ve only been using Eclipse 3.6 for a couple days this time.

Getting started

Quick install with favorite plugins:

My Eclipse 3.5 workspace was in a good state so I decided to use it for 3.6 development.  I did make a copy of it in case I wanted to go back to 3.5.  It wasn’t too time consuming to download/install “Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers”.  The download was 206 MB, so I left that alone for a little while.  I also installed the plugins I use regularly as I wanted them installed before switching to do development in the new workspace.

  1. Sysdeo – For Tomcat with Eclipse.
  2. Ecl emma – For code coverage.
  3. PMD – For static analysis.
  4. Subversive – For Subversion connectivity.

Workspace setup:

None!  That’s right.  My settings were preserved.  Even settings for the plugins.  I was impressed with how smoothly this went.

Features

Favorite feature #1 – Subversive

The Subversive plugin was updated quite extensively with the Helios release train.  I have a lot to say on this so it is a whole other blog post.

Favorite feature #2 –Virtual Folders

Virtual folders are like a folder of shortcuts.  While you can’t put any “real” files under them, you can put other virtual folders and linked resources.  This has potential.  It means I can put related data together even if it lives in disparate places.

Favorite feature #3 – WORKSPACE_LOC

When you create a linked resource, you can define variables.  This has been the case in past releases too.  The difference is that you had to create a variable for the workspace location yourself.  Now it is built in.  Minor, yes.  But nice to not have to do.

Favorite feature #4 – Multiple quickfix

When writing Java code, “quick fix” is a convenient way to clean up your code.  Now if you have multiple instances of the same issue in a class, Eclipse offers to clean them all up at the same time.

And the worst feature

Code formatting. What happened? This used to work intuitively and well in Eclipse 3.4.  Yes 3.4.  You may have noticed it is my exact same pet peeve from Eclipse 3.5.  I was hoping they would fix it in Eclipse 3.6, but no such luck.  At least they introduce something new that bothers me more.

In Java, it gets rid of my careful placed (for readability) whitespace between lines. I checked the preferences and “number of empty lines to preserve” is set to one. HTML is much worse. If I format a bunch of lines containing one <input> per line, Eclipse turns this

<input type="hidden" name="action" value="moveAllSave" />
<input type="hidden" name="module" value="${moduleName}" />
<input type="hidden" name="source_forum_id" value="${sourceForumId}" />
<input type="hidden" name="log_type" value="0" />
<input type="hidden" name="log_description" value="bulk move from admin console">
into this
<input type="hidden" name="action" value="moveAllSave" /> <input
type="hidden" name="module" value="${moduleName}" /> <input
type="hidden" name="source_forum_id" value="${sourceForumId}" /> <input
type="hidden" name="log_type" value="0" /> <input type="hidden"
name="log_description" value="bulk move from admin console">

Huh? That didn’t happen before. I tried setting “never join lines” but it doesn’t take effect for HTML. I guess I’m not relying on the code formatting. Unfortunate as it will slow things down. But yuck. Just look at it.

If you tried Subversive before, it’s time to try it again

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Helios’ Subversive release is a vast improvement over previous versions!  If you’ve tried Subversive before and didn’t like it, it is time to try it again.

For those who aren’t aware, Subversive is an Eclipse client for accessing Subversion.  In March 2009, I blogged about both choices of Eclipse client: Subversive and Subclipse.

Installing Subversive in Helios

  1. Launch Eclipse
  2. Help > Install new software
  3. Choose “Subversive SVN Team Provider” and “Subversive Revision Graph”.
  4. Eclipse prompts you to restart the workspace
  5. Go to Subversion perspective
  6. Eclipse launches the “Subversive Connector Discovery” for you to pick a connector.  I chose SVN Kit 1.3.2.  Be careful.  The latest versions of the connectors are not at the top.

New Features

All the new features are documented on the wiki.  The biggest things:

  • Subversive is an incubator project and in the Helios release train.  This means it was designed to work at the launch of Eclipse 3.6.
  • Better tag awareness – I can now do a compare with tag and see list of tags for project.  It is also fast.  Not CVS level fast, but that is because of the way SVN data is stored – something a plugin can’t do anything about.  It is faster than before which is appreciated.
  • Can compare by tag/date/revision or generate a diff file
  • Revision Graph optional feature (see screenshot up top).  This was pretty much the only thing I switched to Tortoise SVN for and now it is in my main tool.  It is also easier to use than Tortoise’s version.  It has the following features:
    • Handles tags/branches/etc
    • If you mouseover a box, you see author, date and full commit comment
    • If you right click a box, you can compare to the trunk (which it calls ‘HEAD’ oddly enough), show history or branch/tag from that revision.
    • The image scrolls well.

What is still missing?

It’s still a pain to look at all the changes to a file.  This is something that is easy in CVS, but not SVN.  It is better than it was in the past release, but still a pain.  I recognize this is a number of operations in SVN, but it would be nice if a tool could automate it.  Since none of the other Subversion plugins have this feature either, I can’t call it a fault of Subversive though.

Comparison with Subclipse

In fairness to Subclipse, Subclipse also has an optional revision graph feature at this time.  Most of the logic from my previous post still applies.  I still like Subversive “just a bit better.”

What’s next?

I think the big question is whether Subversive will get promoted to actually be part of Eclipse.  It looks a lot more promising than 18 months ago.

—-

See my review of Eclipse 3.6 itself.