soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

Some background first: I have been using eclipse for almost four years now and if there's something which keeps me going back to other editors, it is the word wrapping feature (or its lack of it).

First there was not such a feature, or it was enabled for simple text editors only - not the PHP editor. That meant you had to choose between text highlighting and word wrapping. In practical terms, you ended up ditching eclipse and using another editor, because it's just unpractical to keep remembering which file had long enough lines for deserving word wrapping and opening it with a different editor.

Then somehow the feature appeared but guess what? it's not available if you're using the new PHP plug in, Eclipse PDT, which I'm using because it's better.

I have found a Google Summer Of Code project exclusively dedicated to provide word wrapping in Eclipse. And I don't know if I should be happy or sad that such a thing deserves a project on its own. By reading at the author's blog, it seems there's a horrible mess with the editors. No wonder the options appeared and disappeared in each version.

This experimental plugin works, but it does strange things with the line numbers. The author warns about it so I'm not complaining about that, I'm just pointing at that. And the fact that there are little programs outside there (Crimson Editor, PSPad, TextMate…) which are able to do word wrapping without any fuss. Hey, it's even available with a couple of keystrokes in some programs!

So please Eclipse developers, instead of adding more superfeatures such as folding for and if blocks (which may be useful) could you please focus on this insignificant, apparently irrelevant feature which can become very annoying, specially when editing super long text strings in javascript? (or when trying to highlight a part of a very long line while making sure the mouse keeps on the same line and so it doesn't jump to the next line, thus ruining all the selection and you having to start from the beginning).

It would make all of us super happy and even the world would be a better place.

Please? please? Can I have one for Christmas?

I don't want to write an Eclipse word wrapping, volume 4.

I submitted some applications for several jobs at the beginning of past month, and my life has not been the same since then. At the beginning I just had a little time for having lunch from 12.30 to 13. All the other hours, from 9 to 17.30, were a constant riiiiing riiiiing riiiiing from stressed recruiters which most of the times didn't have a clue on what they were talking about and even more insisted in me describing the topics in which I was interested for a future job.

I even had to deter one of those brilliant recruiters asking stupid questions: are you really asking me to describe you what is AJAX? are you really interested in it? do you know what is XML? not at all? then why are you asking me this?

At the beginning I even thought that recruitment agencies did a good service, resulting in a good selection of apt candidates and removing the useless applications. But come in, how are they going to distinguish between a bad and a good candidate if they don't know what they are talking about?

There were too some agencies which were specialised in IT skills, and knew what they had to ask. Even though, they add too much overhead to the process. They ask you to fill questionaries, answer stupid tests which anybody can (and should) reply just by googling a bit - which makes the whole thing clumsy. Frankly, those questions are of no-use for day to day work. That kind of
superspecific questions about the TCP/IP protocol or a weird SQL query for Oracle server version blah will appear on a real-life job one time in 25 years, approximately. Even less if your work involves the development of web applications.
And that's not all. Since I got my current job -not by an agency but contacting directly the company- I still have had recruiters calls. Lots of them, actually. They are beginning to be really annoying. I finally have started to not to reply to any number which is hidden. But when you pick the phone, even if it's just for being educated, and after politely listening to their introduction you tell them that thank you but I got a job already, it's their turn for impertinence:

- So where do you work now?
- I'm afraid but that's not your business
- No, I can't do anything with the name, which company is it?
- I am not going to tell you, thank you
- And where is it located?
- Why do you want to know it?
- Could I know approximately how much is the salary?
(then I hang down the phone)

Come on, recruiters. Who do you think you are? You look like amateur gossipers, not skilled professionals on which an employee can rely! Would you trust a "somebody" calling you with a withheld phone number and asking you such kind of personal details?

Ridiculous…

Artículo 47 de la Constitución Española:

Todos los españoles tienen derecho a disfrutar de una vivienda digna y adecuada. Los poderes públicos promoverán las condiciones necesarias y establecerán las normas pertinentes para hacer efectivo este derecho, regulando la utilización del suelo de acuerdo con el interés general para impedir la especulación. La comunidad participará en las plusvalías que genere la acción urbanística de los entes públicos.

Nuestras ganas. Los poderes públicos están muy ocupados con otros asuntos más importantes que estas nimiedades. Y mientras tanto dejan que pasen cosas como ésta:

Aunque pensándolo bien, después de todos los arrendadores malnacidos a los que enriquecí durante mi época universitaria, no creo que sea una falsa alarma todo esto que transmiten los diarios. Por desgracia.

Me dicen que me han enviado un mensaje a Hotmail (pensaba yo que la gente había olvidado Hotmail en favor de gmail's y similares, dado que nadie quiere una invitación de gmail de las muchas que me quedan). Y decido entrar a ver que hay. Y me encuentro esto:

Me divierte la incongruencia: ¡Felicidades, alegría, te hemos borrado los mensajes, tiremos cohetes!

Así que, pregunta al público: ¿por qué seguís usando hotmail?

Y en esa pregunta va otra implícita: ¿por qué seguís enviando mensajes a [mi cuenta de] hotmail, si es posible que vuestros mensajes se pierdan en el limbo de msn?

En mi caso, no he utilizado nunca hotmail, únicamente me di de alta para msn messenger (de cuando sólo se podía acceder si tenías una cuenta de hotmail/msn, etc). Siempre me ha irritado la lentitud y la capacidad de autodecisión que tenía (mandando mensajes a la carpeta de Spam cuando no lo eran, borrarte los mensajes porque no has hecho login en N días, etc), aparte del poco espacio disponible y la asunción premeditada de que los usuarios son inútiles con un ordenador.

Por ejemplo, en los tiempos en que no había gmail, yahoo ofrecía un servicio que no te obligaba a hacer login en un mes, y si no lo hacías, tampoco te borraban los mensajes. De hecho, aún tengo mensajes de hace cinco años en la cuenta de yahoo :-O, y no he tenido que hacer ninguna pirueta para que me los mantengan. Aparte de que, por suerte, he tenido siempre acceso a alguna cuenta POP3 durante estas épocas, así que no dependía únicamente de servidores de acceso gratuito para tener correo.

Y a la segunda, implícita pregunta: siempre evito enviar mensajes a cuentas de hotmail. Hago lo que sea por encontrar cualquier otra dirección de la persona a la que quiero mandar un mensaje, no sea caso de que le pase como a mí y se le borren los mensajes, o mi mensaje llegue a correo no deseado… Incluso me estoy planteando dejar de utilizar la dirección de hotmail como id de messenger para siempre, a ver si a nadie más se le ocurre utilizar esa dirección para enviarme mails.

La gente, la gente es misteriosa. La gente y sus por qués, una incógnita…

So, if somebody of you notices that I'm not reading your blog anymore, don't worry. Just stop wondering (and mental wandering) about the blog concept in itself and start writing interesting content again.

I've had enough of metaphysical discussions about the motivations of blogging, the community around blogs, the power of blogs in the current society, how they can replace journalism, the pure information they can provide to the public, the endogamic blog awards and books about blogs (which aren't books but simple PDFs which I could also generate and distribute in my blog for talking about my blog and the book which is featured in my blog).

Enough is enough: I am unsuscribing from every blog which has used the word blogosphere in the last three days.

I'm also unsuscribing from blogs which do not have a decent RSS feed (i.e. incomplete summaries, wrong formatting, they get updated but do not say what so all articles appear the same, etc).

So if there's still someone there: please write content. Create it yourself. Stop talking about the same fuss which everybody is talking/copying and pasting. Be creative and interesting.