Screenshot of my Desktop
I always needed to personalise my system. In some ways, installing Linux was sort of personalising, till I got so used to that I couldn't leave it. It had been quite some time since I used Windows. However, when I needed to run Matlab for my course work, I had no option but to use Windows. Oh sure there is Linux version of Matlab and there is WINE and all. However, I am lazy. I didn't want to spend my time fooling around with all that specially when I had limited time to do my project. Well, whatever time I saved by not using WINE to run Matlab, I spent on personalising my copy of Windows XP.
I miss the console a lot. That was easily solved by Cygwin. The next part was the UI itself. I got litestep to take care of that. Litestep does have themes that emulate KDE or Gnome. However, I wanted to build my own. Starting with my Simplicity the default theme, I modified it to create my theme Titan. Yeah, have been watching too many cartoons.
What do you think of it? The thing with litestep is that most of the fancy stuffs are all on the mouse clicks and short cut keys. Well, still working on it. May be will post the new version soon ;)
Eclipse the Name
I must confess, I hadn't really thought much about the name Eclipse. Of course, it is not official but I certain Eclipse is a solar eclipse ;) IBM's dream to eclipse Sun.
Eclipse Interpreter
I must say, I am really getting used to Eclipse a lot and really liking it. The newest thing I have learnt to do in Eclipse is debug :) The fact that I can modify the Java source code and Eclipse updates the byte code in the running JVM is really cool. It gets rid of the compile and run cycle. Acutally, since I don't like the Eclipse monitoring my resources all the time. It is actually a step longer. I need to click on "build all" before I can continue.
Still it just builds my modified file and updates the JVM it is like having an interpreter. One thing I always loved about Jython was being able to edit the code and reload it from the shell. Well, this is just as good.
The main advantage is when I am using the application and am way into a long process, I don't have to start all over when I update my code. This certainly save a lot of time.