NetBeans 5.5-beta painfully close to being useful
I've spent the past week or so checking out NetBeans 5.5 beta. It's got an incredibly well-integrated Maven plugin that makes life really easy, and I find that its interface is really intuitive and responsive. In short, it's a tool I'd really love to use. Unfortunately for me, I work on several development teams, and consistent code formatting really is critical, to help ensure SVN diffs are readable. This is one place where it seems that NetBeans is sorely lacking. I poked and prodded for hours, but have been unable to configure anything more than indentation level for wrapped lines. No way to specify where I want wrapped method arguments to go (aligned with the start of the arguments on the previous line, thank you very much). No way to tell it where I want throws and extends clauses to go. I even did some searching around via Google for third-party plugins that might make this possible, but the results are disappointing. After using NetBeans for a couple of days, I'm very motivated to use it, but this ...
Posted on May 30, 2006 11:57:11 AM EDT
#
All Hail the Penguin!
In the annals of our life, last weekend will go down as Big. Emily - my wife - graduated a week ago tonight with her Master's degree in 19th century US history. The ceremony was really nice, in many ways. No, it didn't escape the typical irrelevant and incoherent keynote speech. However, the ceremony was fast (lasted just over an hour), and came off pretty smoothly (no one fell off the stage). One thing that I really found remarkable was the overwhelming enthusiasm expressed by the audience for their graduates. You could really tell that these friends and family had an intimate understanding of the raw effort involved in earning these degrees. I don't want to give the impression that this occasion was marked only by solemnity. The accostinghooding of the Ph.D. candidates was improv comedy at its best. I'm sure you're familiar with the mortar boards worn by most graduates (the square hat that holds up the tassle). These look mildly funny by themselves, but the application of a hood whose opening is too small ...
Posted on May 12, 2006 11:13:33 PM EDT
#