John Pizzarelli at the Bronx High School of Science

We found out that John Pizzarelli was performing at the Bronx High School of Science today. Since both my wife and I really enjoy his music we decide to go. The tickets were fairly inexpensive, only $25 apiece. Unfortunately we were twenty minutes late. Who knew that driving 30 block on Jerome Avenue would be do difficult?

John led a four-piece band today, with his brother Martin on bass, and two people I did not know playing piano and drums. I've seen John Pizzarelli play three other times, and typically it was John, Martin and Ray Kennedy on piano. Fortunately, the pianist and drummer cooly showed their stuff. He also had an occasionaly guest violinist whose name I cannot recall, but was clearly talented (and apparently very young, only two years out of college.)

Every set I've seen John and his band play has been significantly different from the others. I finally realize that I can't expect to go back and hear the songs I liked from the shows before. He seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of American standards (a la Jonathan Schwartz, whom John seems to be able to imitate to comedic effect) and now I hope his next show is entirely different, though I hope he doesn't take I Like Jersey Best out of rotation.

An unexpected surprise was a 3 or 4 piece set with the Bronx Science High School Band. High school bands are high school bands, that's for sure, but this band could definitely beat up my old high school band. That segment was fun and a little sweet.

After the show, John sat in the lobby, signed CDs and chatted with guests. He's friendly and warm, and was very happy to pose for a quick photo. I didn't have high hopes of my G1's camera quality, but this time it came out pretty good.

Why were they performing at the Bronx High School of Science? It seems as though John's son is a student there, and if the program is any guide, John has been playing fundraising concerts for his son's school for many years.

Finally, we were told that tomorrow is John's birthday, so, hey, Happy Birthday, John.

Sometimes it's just plain difficult to contribute to Eclipse

Case in point: today's irritation.

John Atherton taught me about some fantastic Eclipse core developer tools during his talk at EclipseCon. After downloading then and trying them out, I found that the Resource Delta Spy was exactly what I needed to debug a particularly gnarly problem. Yet, for a reason which I will not describe in detail, the plug-in doesn't do exactly what I want it to: I decided to check out the code and make a change.

If I download the source at dev.eclipse.org/cvsroot/eclipse / HEAD / org.eclipse.core.tools, I get compiler errors because the code at head has constraints in its manifest that require Eclipse 3.5. So I looked for an earlier version in the Versions subtree, and found a version v20050225. This version doesn't have any version constraints in MANIFEST.MF, but it also doesn't compiler with a 3.4.2 instance, because some classes moved from org.eclipse.osgi.framework.stats to org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.stats.

This isn't the first time I've had a problem trying to find the right piece of source at Eclipse.

Is it just me or does trying to contribute to Eclipse seem like a sisyphean effort? What's the magic incantation?

(Update: Really I just want the view to show more than 2048 characters of data. That's a useful amount of data for a toy resource delta, but doesn't help when I have to test a substantive change.)

Twitter at EclipseCon

Well, EclipseCon is finally over. First, I'd like to thank everyone for the great job they did. I was told they put extra effort into making interesting sessions, and it showed.

Good 'ol Ian Skerrett, my favorite marketing guy, arranged for attendees to use their Twitter accounts to talk about the conference by including the #eclipsecon tag in their tweets.

I spent a couple of hours this evening calculating the number of times a user used the #eclipsecon tag. (Thanks to the Twitter Search API and Perl.) You can view the full per-person counts here, or read below for the top 20, along with a full distribution of tweets per person:

User #eclipsecon tweets oisin 148 eclipsecon 146 IanSkerrett 93 lorifraleigh 78 njbartlett 61 douggaff 49 alblue 49 peterfriese 48 motodev 47 darinrs 46 michael_scharf 41 waynebeaton 40 irbull 39 rfarrjr 37 jplmichael 36 jeffreynorris 34 BryanHunt 34 ericcloninger 33 vineetsinha 32

I was just below this list at #21, with 31 tweets. (Actually, just 30, but I'm going to tweet about this too, so I fudged.)

See ya next year.

Update: I should have commented on the word cloud. I find it super interesting. I only removed four or five phrases (the ones that come to mind are eclipsecon, http, tinyurl and com) and if you look past some of the common English words (demo, day, thanks, rt -- should have removed 'rt') there are those technologies and phrases that seemed to get the most traction: rcp, e4, amazon, p2, cocoa, glassfish, equinox, and my favorite: @ianskerrett.

To non-techie friends on twitter and the facebook: Sorry about this week

Hey there: this week is EclipseCon. It's a technical conference in Santa Clara revolving around the software tool called Eclipse. So, most of my tweets are going to be about EclipseCon, at least until Thursday. (These tweets wind up as status updates on The Facebook.) So, sorry about that.

If you're on The Facebook, you probably wonder why my status messages say "#eclipsecon". Well, that's basically a meta-tag indicating what my message is about. Then, people who want to know what's going on at EclispeCon, they can just look at the realtime results at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23eclipsecon. (Interested in Battlestar Galactica? Search for #bsg. Same goes for #lost, or #chicken, or whatever.)

So, you know, I kinda likes the Twitter. You should try it, and if you do, we can follow each other.

Saturday night with Uncle Floyd

Last night, Beth and I went to see Uncle Floyd perform at the Maplewood Public Library. The last time I saw a New Jersey legend perform at a local library was when I went to see John Pizzarelli at the Mamaroneck Library in 1994.

With the exception of occasionally seeing Uncle Floyd on his TV show, I didn't know what to expect. Though it was a small crowd of 25 people, Uncle Floyd was shockingly funny. It's clear he's done the same jokes for many, many years ("I'm the only working comedian left with a Bella Abzug joke.") and yet he was solidly funny. It's also a bit of a retrospective into yesteryear, with jokes about old-style remote control-free TVs, and Alfalfa and the Little Rascals.  Some cultural jokes were too early for me, and there were jokes that people younger than me would certainly not get.

Aided by his trademark plaid outfit and bow tie, Floyd was shamelessly self-deprecating, lamenting that after forty one years in show business he finally made it to the basement of the Maplewood Library.

For ninety minutes we all had a great time.

License To Recite Fox in Socks

Do you have one of these? Mine is almost fifteen years old.

Only three of these were ever made. I will buy anyone chocolate who can tell me who received the other two (limited to the first ten correct guesses.) I will add ice cream to that if they can also tell me who the fourth person was. And if you're one of those people, do you still have it?