Selfmanagement or "Getting things done..."

Yesterday a colleague of mine told me about a really interesting blog entry . It is on "Getting things done" (GTD), a selfmanagement methodology.
First I thougt "ok, yet another self- and timemanagement method" but today I had enough time to have a closer look to GTD. Now I think I'll try to integrate some of the concepts in my personal planning acitivities just to figure out if the concept helps to make my everyday life more efficient.

Just installed chandler on my xubuntu. Chandler is a free GTD tool that can be used on your desktop as well as via a web interface, too.
By the way: if you experience problems while installing it on your xubuntu machine because chandler is asking for libicu36 - here. it is.

How about you? Do you follow any methodology to manage yourself/your time? What pros and cons did you experience?

Eclipse SDK 3.4.1 under xubuntu 8.04

Today I wanted to install eclipse on my rather old desktop machine which runs on xubuntu 8.04. First I tried to use the package manager as described here. I did not trust my eyes when I first started it up: Eclipse 3.2! As I need Eclipse 3.4 I removed the just installed old eclipse and downloaded the lastest release of Eclipse SDK directly from eclipse .
After "un-taring" the whole thing into "/opt" with the sudo command I followed the forum thread as mentioned above to use Sun's JDK instead of the built in GNU Java. Everything worked fine until I started the brand new eclipse with my normal working user.... I got the following exception and the workbench didn't come up:

me@mymachine:/opt/eclipse$ ./eclipse
!SESSION 2008-11-08 18:28:24.055 -----------------------------------------------
eclipse.buildId=M20080911-1700
java.version=1.6.0_07
java.vendor=Sun Microsystems Inc.
BootLoader constants: OS=linux, ARCH=x86, WS=gtk, NL=de_DE
Command-line arguments: -os linux -ws gtk -arch x86

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 4 0 2008-11-08 18:28:24.525
!MESSAGE Error reading configuration: /opt/eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/.manager/.fileTableLock (No such file or directory)
!STACK 0
java.io.FileNotFoundException: /opt/eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/.manager/.fileTableLock (No such file or directory)
at java.io.RandomAccessFile.open(Native Method)
at java.io.RandomAccessFile.(RandomAccessFile.java:212)
[....]

Damn! Another round of googling... . Unfortunately Google only spit out one post - in italian. Luckily with some knowledge of french I figured out that the exception must be a sort of permission problem.
A snippet from this weblog finally solved the permission problem.

Before launching eclipse with root user make sure all files in /opt/eclipse are owned by root user:

clebeaupin@atalante:~/tmp$ sudo chown -R root:root /opt/eclipse

Yeah! Now I can start coding... :-) Perhaps this description could help someone who is also struggling with this problem.

Performance Tuning for Eclipse Ganymede

As a java developer I am using Eclipse at work. By adopting to Eclipse Ganymede some days ago, we encountered serious performance issues, especially while the workspace was compiling. The complete IDE was blocked while building the sources, even on a dual core system with 4 GB RAM.
After googling a while, we found out a combination of VM parameters that seem to work fine. Here's what is currently running on my machine (a dual core with 3 GB RAM): __path_to_eclipse__ -showlocation -vm __path_to_java_6_vm__ -vmargs -Xms1024m -Xmx1024m -XX:PermSize=512m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -Dide.gc=true -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+ExplicitGCInvokesConcurrent
With this configuration, I am able to work while the thousands of projects are compiling happily in the background. ;-)
What are your experiences using Eclipse as a Java IDE concerning performance?

Brontosaurus eggs

After a long day at work (btw: even though it is Friday today) I just walked in the local supermarket to "hunt" something to eat for "dinner". Something healthy, with lots of vitamines and... some tasty red wine (because it is weekend now ;-)). An this is what I found (besides the red wine, of course): Brontosaurus eggs. Here's a picture of these little-fruit-with-the-funny-name: Brontosaurus eggs
Ok, and now, I'll switch it off, that slow grey box in front of me (= my laptop) and I'll try those primeval eggs. I am curious about what they'll taste like. :)

lastfm

I just heard about lastfm from some colleagues a while ago. Yesterday it was so rainy that I spent some hours in front of my computer to check this site out - now I am nearly addicted.

Its nice to enrich your music collection, to find songs "you've heard somewhere a while ago but you don't know the title nor the interpret", ... or to just spend a rainy, quite evening. :o)

And the best: it even worked on my machine (a rather old laptop with really slow celeron inside).

Perhaps you want to enjoy it too: http://www.lastfm.com