ZenLinux Blog

Now that I’m settling back into some serious Rails development, I’ve been increasingly annoyed by this bug where the Compiz window manager (which provides all the fancy 3D effects on my Ubuntu system) causes dialog boxes in Java applications (e.g, NetBeans) to appear blank on an intermittent basis. Thankfully, it’s been fixed! You simply need to run jre 6u10.

This fixed version of Java is packaged by default in the Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex repositories. For those of us still running Hardy Heron, I can confirm that using the Intrepid packages works without problems. There is also a bug filed in Launchpad lobbying to have 6u10 included in Hardy as an update.

Just a reminder that tonight is the NH Ruby and Rails User Group meeting in Portsmouth, NH. Details here. I’ll be giving a demo of NetBeans 6.1 and cool things you can do with it, and Nick will be talking about Rack. Update: I’m sorry I was unable to make it to the meeting this evening. I managed to injure my back during the day and was in rough shape all afternoon and evening.

NetBeans 6.0 has been a boon to my coding productivity, but as I’ve been using it more, I’ve also encountered some of its problems. The most annoying of which are bugs in the HTML/RHTML indentation engine. See issue 109262 and issue 120491 to see what I mean. The most maddening thing to me is that there is a facility to disable the indentation engine in the advanced options, but it doesn’t work. So I have been wasting a considerable amount of time fighting with the inconsistent formatting “style” NetBeans has been trying to enforce.

I’m hoping that the 6.1 milestones will be stable enough to use – where some of these bugs have reportedly been fixed – and am planning to try them out starting on Wednesday, when 6.1M2 will be available.

NetBeans 6.0 final (my Ruby/Rails/C/C++ IDE of choice) was released a couple of days ago. Pat Eyler posted on his blog an interview with Tor Norbye, which outlines many of the spiffy features of NetBeans 6 and some of the challenges in writing IDE tools for a dynamic language such as Ruby.