Eclipse: All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Eclipse: All Your Base Are Belong To Us

If you don't recognize "all your base are belong to us"--here's a Wikipedia article about how this fractured English expression became part of the popular culture. And that's about how I feel after banging my head against the Eclipse wall yesterday and this morning. But I did get Eclipse to do the following:

1. Let me update both the application and applet forms of the plotting tool that I wrote about ten years ago, to teach myself Java. The somewhat more demanding type checking of Java 1.6 is now happy with my code.

2. Let me determine the cause of, and fix a couple of minor bugs that have been sitting there this whole time.

3. Let me create the JAR files so that the web pages here and here use the new and improved version.

4. Reminded me how much I learned about OOP and Java after writing this sometimes repulsive piece of dreck. (There's a reason that I am not posting the source.)

There's still an awful lot about the Eclipse user interface that causes me to shake my head and wonder what alien species came up with this, but it does work, and I am sure with time, I will also learn to think of it as my friend.

This, of course, assumes that anyone will hire me. I am beginning to get this discouraged feeling that 51 may not only be too old to work for a startup, it may be too old to work anywhere as a software engineer. I am finding plenty of positions for which I am qualified--but when they find out that I am planning to move there and fly home on the weekends (maybe every other weekend), the reaction is stunned silence.