Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Flock Browser

Been having a play with this new Flock browser which is supposed to be very good at integrating with RSS feeds and weblogs etc. It seems to be closely linked in with del.icio.us and that allows you to create your own account with a public web page containing your favourite feeds. See mine here. That's all quite fun, and it reminds me of the Start.com rich user interface which similarly allows you to create a sort of portal of RSS feeds.
If you browse from within Flock, it's a one-button click to add a new feed to your own del.icio.us account and therefore to your portal page.

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Eclipse Debugger

Am, as ever, pleasantly surprised by how easy Eclipse is to use. The Java debugger works fine, even when remotely connecting to a Weblogic instance. Like the IntelliJ IDEA debugger, it is nice and fast. Unlike the JBuilder one.
I don't know if there's some cunning way round this (if anyone reads this and does know, please tell me!), but I can't find a way to tweak a return value in the debugger so that I can change the path the code takes.
It's OK if there is (for example) a boolean return code variable which is predefined, because you can certainly change that.
e.g. if you have
boolean rc = false;
rc = myObject.doSomething();
log.debug(new StringBuffer("doSomething() returned: ").append(rc));
Then you can just change the rc after the method has been executed. But if you try to make a decision based on what comes back from the method, without having a separate variable for it, I don't know how to change it!
e.g. if you have
if (!myObject.doSomething()) {
log.debug("It was false");
} else {
log.debug("It was true");
}
then I can't think of a way to change it.
Maybe that means it's good practice (or at least helps with debugging!) if you hold a return code (or truth value) somewhere in a variable. It would be good if I could figure out how to do it though - there's plenty of places where you would naturally want to use the second approach and not declare extra variables where you don't need them...

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