You’ve all had “feature freeze” phases during your software development life cycle, right? But what about a “bug fix freeze”? That’s what our team’s in right now. Due to the fact that we’re going to be doing a major demo to our mentors on July 4th, our MBA intern is pushing us all to work on features instead of fixing bugs. This simply goes against all programming principles I hold dear and everything I live by. Have I been living a lie?

There might still be some download/mirror/synchronization issues at the moment, but with any luck, you should be able to download Eclipse 3.3, with the simultaneous release being “codenamed” as ‘Europa’. You can find out what are the new and noteworthy features in this release right here.

Happy hacking all!

The code that I wrote back in April was IP approved yesterday by the Eclipse legal team. The eRCP team is going to take it from here now, although I’ll naturally be trying hard to keep tabs on the thing. I don’t know when they will get to it, but it will definitely be “happy times” when they do.

Can Ian Murdock, father of Debian, help bring Java to the Haiku platform? Only time will tell. But let it be known, though, that yours truly, will be praying hard.

My oh my, why can’t every studio produce fight scenes that are as awesome as NOMAD’s? Coupled with the awesome soundtrack that was playing in the background, this episode’s fight scenes were truly awesome. I know that I’m often critical about people that note that something is “the best” of some category upon experiencing something new because I often wonder whether they actually compared this new “best” with the old “best” properly to allow any first impression to settle first before judging. However, I have to say that compared with all the other fight scenes that have been in sola, this episode’s takes it over the top. I am given the fight that I yearned for greatly back in episode nine and this just didn’t disappoint at all.

One thing that I didn’t totally get from this episode was why Matsuri stabbed Aono with the sword near the end. You could say that the sword doesn’t actually work if you don’t actually will it and place your life on the blade or something, but then how would it have worked if Takeshi had just stabbed Matsuri? This bit’s a little fuzzy here and I’m curious as to whether this is actually a loophole or not. It’s possible that this may be addressed in the next episode, but if it’s not, I’ll just ask around on some forums or something and check out what others have to say about this.

From the looks of it, the prediction I made in episode eleven about the series concluding in the early parts of episode thirteen should be correct. The question I posed then still holds though. Why should Aono continue living if Yorito is gone? Will she have her memories wiped out and just live on as a normal person? I don’t think that’s going to happen and I sure hope not as that’s a rather lame way to conclude this awesome series. sola, I’ve followed you faithfully for the last few months and you have brought me great viewing pleasure (as well as listening pleasure thanks to the amazing soundtrack), let us meet again one last time when the last episode airs. :)

Well, I’m back from my camping trip with a lot of bug bites but at least I’m alive. On the blogging front, I intend to devote a detailed entry to the event in the near future. With this entry I just might get Gallery going on my website…but, probably not. I’ll also be writing up an entry for the twelfth episode of sola which I just finished watching minutes ago. I also have a few uncategorized entries planned but as they are (shockingly) “generic” and really serves no purpose for my readers, I’m not going to enumerate them here.

This next week’s going to be rather action-packed since it’ll be my team’s last work week before we present a somewhat-workable demo to our mentors on July 4th (although let it be known that we are way behind schedule, regrettably). We’ll be having a “Future Blue Day” event in the Ottawa lab on Tuesday which is some kind of a student-oriented…thing, at IBM, losing a whole work day right there, yikes. On Wednesday there’s a golf tournament thing in the afternoon-evening-ish time range which I now realize is actually in direct conflict with my intent of watching Live Free or Die Hard on its opening day. Dang, I really dropped the bomb this time by accepting to go on this stupid tournament.

On Thursday and Friday, I’m going to be at Algonquin Park’s Eco-Lodge doing some canoeing and then on Saturday and Sunday I’m going to be camping at Whitefish Lake (quite literally, as in, sleeping in a tent). So if you’re looking for me and I ain’t around, you now know why. Drop me an email if you need anything and I’ll try to get back to you on Sunday night or on Monday. No I can’t get back to you before then because there is no Internet access out in the wilderness. And of course, power outlets will be scarce to none, so it’s like how is Remy going to write code? I guess I’m not going to be writing code.

Alright, so nothing much happened in this episode. Now I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed by this, so there you have it, I was a little disappointed by this. This really goes back to the question I raised after viewing the last episode of just what exactly are they going to be talking about in the last three episodes of the series? I’m going to guess that the series will probably reach its conclusion around the beginning of episode thirteen and then the rest of the episode will just show what the surviving characters are doing (this of course assumes that some person or persons have actually died).

So will anyone actually die? Is this really the end of Mayuko and Takeshi’s role in this show? Personally, I don’t think that we’ve seen the last of them. It’s obvious that Mayuko is concerned about Matsuri, so she may have a second thought and try to come back and stop her. I don’t know what Yorito’s going to be doing, but I hope he does something besides dying (or disappearing or whatever). After all, he really hasn’t done anything of importance throughout the series if you ask me.

With episode twelve, I just might get what I wanted out of episode nine if Aono and Matsuri’s going to go at it. I’m not sure as to what Matsuri is up to carrying that sword around though. My own theory would be that she’s going to somehow get Aono to kill her with the sword. I don’t know how the whole reverting process for yakas is going to play out and all, but that’s just a minor detail per se. So anyway, if Aono returns to normal, will Yorito cease to exist? Is that how Matsuri and Yorito are planning to both leave this world? How does that bring happiness to Aono? I don’t know. Disregarding all that, I really do hope that there’s an awesome fight in the next episode, the music that was being played at the end of this episode was simply amazing. I hope all that build up isn’t going to be for naught.

Ever wanted to add something to that ‘Run As’ context menu? Yeah, I had to today, and it wasn’t pretty. Let me tell you, that org.eclipse.core.expressions.propertyTesters ain’t no fun. It makes no sense and it just didn’t work out for me.

So instead I just ended up contributing my own content types with the org.eclipse.core.runtime.contentTypes extension point and then hooking that into the contextualLaunch element of the org.eclipse.debug.ui.launchShortcuts extension point. Just take a look at the plugin.xml files of the org.eclipse.ant.core and org.eclipse.ant.ui plug-ins and I guarantee that you’ll be good to go.

I’d paste some of that XML stuff, but it seems that WordPress for some reasons doesn’t want to render tags properly regardless of whether I put them in a code, a tt, or a pre block.

So this episode rules out my original theory of Yorito being spawned from the thoughts of Aono and/or Matsuri from before. Thinking back, I should’ve really at least ruled out the Matsuri out of that equation since it was clear that Matsuri found it odd that Yorito actually existed. Looking at a different question, how will Yorito die? Would Aono have to die first? How is Matsuri going to disappear with Yorito? Will they? I guess since yaka powers don’t work on the sword, you would think that Yorito would’ve died…except he didn’t. With Matsuri’s death, will Mayuko or Aono return to normal? Will both of them refuse and just accept their fate?

With three episodes left, I’m curious as to what else this series is going to throw my way. Nearly all information has been revealed already (or so we think), so I’m not sure as to how the rest of the episodes are going to play out. I think one flashback episode that was dedicated to telling the story of the original Yorito would be a good idea as I’d like to learn about what his original plan for showing Matsuri the sky was. As my train of thought lead from sola to Kanon (as sola is authored by the main writer of Kanon), then to AIR, I’m wondering if the thirteenth episode will actually be a real episode or not since AIR’s thirteenth episode was just a recap episode. sola’s thirteenth episode is going to be named ソラ, so this could really go two ways. I really hope that it’s going to be an actual episode.

The series is shaping up to end in a manner similar to AIR. The series is not over yet but you have a general idea of what’s going to happen in the final episode. You know how it’s going to end but you wish it would end differently. This powerful thought of “wishing it ain’t so” is the key reason why AIR is a series that is so dear to me. Though you never know, they could pull a 『舞-HiME』 even though I can’t really see that happening. Of course, to be completely fair, I wasn’t expecting that series to end the way it did, so I guess sola could possibly do the same and end up being a huge disappointment.