Category Archives: Technology

eclipse photon (4.8) for the mac

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eclipse.org went with a mountain peaks as the website theme for the release of Photon. Fun and fitting. The Eclipse site prompted me about the cookie use policy. Another change since last year, but not unexpected.

The matrix comparing the packages is still clear. The Java version is a subset of the Java EE version. I chose the later since it has the JavaScript tools built in. Unlike the last few years, a sponsored/commercial version wasn’t featured prominently. In fact, I didn’t notice one at all. Vaadin and JRebel do show as sponsored/promoted plugins in Eclipse Marketplace though so no risk forgetting about them!

Installing

I like to download and install a fresh Eclipse so I don’t have random plugins I’ve tried throughout the year. I downloaded the installer first which is a nice small, well relatively small, (55MB) file. I choose “Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers” and an installation folder. This took a few minutes. I saw messages go by about it being slower than usual to download Eclipse plugins from various servers. Presumably because Photon has only been out a few days and lots of people are downloading.

I got a prompt from Oomph to accept /plugins/org.eclipse.rse.ui_3.3… as unsigned content. I accepted, but was a little surprised.

Then I was able to open Eclipse

 

Installing the plugins

Already installed were:

  • m2e (maven)
  • BuildShip (gradle)
  • EclEmma (code coverage)
  • JUnit (3, 4 and 5)
  • eGit (git)

The significant plugins I chose to re-install are listed in this table.

Plugin Purpose
Eclipse Tomcat Plugin One click launch for recent versions of Tomcat. (This is the successor to Sysdeo and Mongrel)

Problem/resolution

I got a PKIX error. But clicking through it still allowed me to install so I didn’t have to update the certs or anything.

Unable to read repository at https://devtools.his.de/tomcatplugin/updatesite/content.xml.

sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target

This is a known issue. In my case, it was caused by the eclipse.ini automatically picking up my Java 11 early access install. After changing it to point to Java 8, things went better. This allowed it to pick up the cryptography jars and work as expected.
SonarLint I reply heavily on SonarLint. It gives you static analysis findings in Eclipse. I also included the SonarLint Java Configuration Helper so it can see the version of Java I am using. (I”m on Java 8 right now so this is redundant at the moment. But I’m ready for when Java 9 comes out.)
Subclipse I trouble with Subversive in Eclipse Oxygen so I switched to Subclipse. I would have needed to switch this year regardless as Subversive is no longer supported.
Eclipse Memory Analyzer For finding memory leaks.
Freemarker IDE Freemarker syntax highlighting and macro assistance. Unlike with Eclipse Oxygen, this worked on the first install attempt.
Pydev Python plugin/perspective
Contrast To spot potential security issues. See my impressions of the Contrast plugin.
Bytecode Outline I’ve been looking at bytecode a good fit for the book to make sure I understand why things are happening. This plugin makes it easy. The version number has hex towards the end; maybe the number from github?
Pitclipse For mutation testing coverage

 

What excites me

  1. When searching using open resource/type, exact matches take precedence (vs files you looked at with similar name.) Also, it now shows the path in the workspace regardless of whether the filename is a duplicate. Both are nice usability improvements.
  2. The UI changed for the debugger. I like that you can see more variables in the debugger view without having to scroll or resize the window.
  3. There’s now a workspace option to “Sort library entries alphabetically in Package Explorer”. This makes it easier to find things than the default order (which is the classpath.)

What I didn’t like

  1. On Mac, the default font changed from Monaco to Menlo so keywords show in bold instead of just color. This was more of a “change is hard” thing. The first day, I didn’t like the new bolding. I wasn’t used to it so the keywords looked different. By the second day, I was used to it and it was just readable as the original. (I know I could have changed my workspace default back to Monaco if I continued to not like it).

Other interesting features

  1. Eclipse now supports Rust. I haven’t used it, but Rust is supposed to be an up and coming language.
  2. Eclipse supports Java 10 out of the box. Not that interesting because Java 10 came out in March. But good to know that Eclipse is staying current. I imagine there will be an Eclipse 4.8.1a in September or October for Java 11 support since Java 11 comes out in September. Eclipse did this for JUnit 5 so there is definitely precedent.
  3. JUnit 5 is included. This doesn’t excite me because I had been using 4.7.1a which also had JUnit 5 support. But if you are upgrading from the release a year ago, it is definitely exciting!

QCon 2018 – Data, GDPR & Privacy

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Title: Data, GDPR & Privacy – Doing it right without losing it all
Speaker: Amie Durr

See the table of contents for more blog posts from the conference.

Goals: send right message to right person at right time using right channel (ex: email, text, etc)

One company handles 25% of all non-spam email traffic

Confidence

  • We don’t trust brands with personal information. 2/3  overall. Nobody in room.
  • Employees at GDPR  compliant companies also don’t believe their company is

Recent thefts

  • Ticketfly – emails and hashed passwords.   Shut down their website
  • Panera – email, name, phone, city, last 4 digits of credit card number
  • MyHeritage – email and hashed passwords
  • Myfitnesspal – name, weight, etc

Need to consider

  • What do you store?
  • For how ong do you store it?

Data and privacy regulations

  • CASL
  • CAN-SPAM
  • Privacy Shield – for data leaving Europe
  • GDPR – EU
  • Future: Germany, Australlia, South America
  • Not about specific regulations. Need to care about data an privacy. Part of   Brand. Customers will leave

Supply for data scientists far exceeds supply

Build trust without stiffling innovation

  • accountability – what do with data, who responsible, continuing to focus on data perception,  audit/clean data, make easy to see what data  have and how opt out/delete
  • privacy by design – innovate without doing harm, don’t want to get hacked, be user centric, move data to invididual so no storing, what is actually PII vs what feels like PII. Anonymize both

Remember user data. If the user types it in, could be anything in here

What they did

  • dropped log storage to 30 days. Have 30 days to comply with requests to delete data. So  handled by design for log files
  • hash email recipients
  • Remove unused tracking data
  • Communicated with customers
  • Kept anonymized PII data, support inquiries, etc
  • some customers feel 30 days is too long so looking at going beyond law

Can delete parts of data vs everything (ex:: stack overflow)

brand and pr vs actually keeping user safe [like what happened with accessibility and section 508]

My take

Good talk. I liked the level of detail and concrete examples. I would have liked a refresher of GDPR. But there was enough to tell me what to google. That helped with what didn’t know (or forgot).

 

completing pathways levels 3 and 4

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See my main Presentation Mastery Pathways page for some context.

 

Level 3

The required project in my path is a 5-7 minute persuasive speech. I did mine about Pathways! There was good content on how to approach a persuasive speech.

Level 3 is where you get to start electives. See my pathways comparison for a list of the choices and what they entail. I chose “Using Descriptive Language” and “Active Listening”. The former is just a 5-7 minute speech that is similar to what we did in the old CC. The later is being table topics master.

I picked these two because my goal was to get through the first four levels before Pathways launched in New York so I would have access to all the projects for reference. So I wanted to pick projects where I already knew what to do. On my second path, I plan to pick electives that are new such as using presentation software or making connections through networking.

Level 4

In my path, the required level 4 project is a 5-7 minute speech on managing a difficult audience. I really like this project. Before I presented at a public conference, I gave a club speech called “The Case of the Interrupting Audience.” I gave club member specific annoying/distracting things to do. This Pathways project is similar. Audience members get assigned roles and you have to practice handling them. Excellent addition to Toastmasters! I lost my train of thought twice during the interruptions.

There is one elective in this level. I chose holding a Question and Answer session since I was doing that anyway for Pathways.  There are a lot of fun looking electives in this level like blog posting, running an online meeting and creating a podcast. There are some less technical ones like public relations and project management as well.