One of the biggest problems with Eclipse is that there is no clear upgrade path from major versions, for example 3.5->3.6. What I ended up having to do for years is back up the old release, download and unpack the new release, and then try to migrate all the settings by importing and exporting left and right. Not so pleasant.

Turns out, as of Eclipse 3.3 (though I've only tried it with Eclipse 3.5), it's possible to successfully complete an in-place upgrade without doing any wiping or voodoo hackery. I've successfully completed this on 2 of my machines and now need to share it with the rest of the world.

Step 1. Go to Help > Install New Software… > Available Software Sites or Windows > Preferences > Install/Update > Available Software Sites. I personally prefer the former way because it results in fewer clicks but both end up in the same place.

Step 2. Everywhere you see 3.5, press Edit and change it to 3.6. Similarly, change "galileo" to "helios". For example, you should end up with at least these (if you don't have these, just add them):

http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.6

http://download.eclipse.org/releases/helios

Note: you may also need to update other repositories (for example, Galileo was compatible with CDT 6, while Helios needed CDT 7).

Step 3. Press OK, then go to Help > Check for Updates. You should see the progress in the Progress tab – let the magic happen, restart when prompted, and after a few minutes, you should have a working upgraded version of Eclipse.

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Everyone who uses SVN knows that most repositories are set up to allow viewing of their contents via a web browser. For example, here's the trunk of WP Plugins SVN: http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/ and here is the current trunk version of a specific file, let's say http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt.

The Problem

However, what if you wanted to view a specific revision of a file or directory in your browser?

Let's say I wanted revision 100,000 of http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt

Normally, on a command line, you'd do something like

svn co http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt stats
cd stats;
svn up -r100000 readme.txt

or simply

svn export -r100000 http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt

However, how would you do this in your browser? Trying something like ?r=100000 or ?revision=100000 parameters doesn't work.

The Solution

Here is the syntax to get a specific revision of a file or directory:

1. Take the root of the repository (in our case, http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org)
2. Append this string !svn/bc/REVISION_NUMBER right after the repository root and before the directory or file path.

Going back to our example:

• http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/!svn/bc/100000/stats/

  shows the stats directory exactly as it was at revision 100,000 and

• http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/!svn/bc/100000/stats/trunk/readme.txt

  shows our readme.txt at 100,000.

And that's how you do it, folks. Happy revisioning!

Update: this post is now sponsored by Wirefly Learn where you can find cell phone news and reviews, as well as comparisons and videos.

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The Update

To update your Hero, go to Settings->About phone->System updates->Firmware update.

The update took about 10 minutes to install, weighed 3.7MB or so, and rebooted the phone twice – once to install and once to reboot after the installation, so make sure you don't need to make any important phone calls during that time.

After the update, I immediately noticed the broken application icons (issue #4 on my bug list) fixed. The phone seems is definitely quite a bit snappier, which I hope points in the direction of some fixes in the battery and lag department (issues #1 and #2).

Since there don't seem to be any official details out from HTC or Sprint at the moment (I found out about the update by doing a random Google search and arriving at a random Facebook post), I cannot see the final bug fix and feature list, but here's what I managed to gather so far from my own observations and online [1] [2]:

What's New

Fixes

• broken app icons are fixed. This issue was also known as the boot caching issue
• broken app names are somewhat fixed. Some of mine weren't but I reinstalled them and so far they display correctly
• the major battery draining 100% awake SMS and letting the phone go to sleep after boot bugs are fixed. I've gone ahead and uninstalled HandcentSMS to see if my visual voicemail notifications will come back (they seemed to have gone away after I switched to Handcent)
• not receiving SMS when low on space is fixed
• memory leak related to bluetooth is fixed
• dialer app using too much CPU bug is fixed
• daylight savings time calendar issue is fixed
• the stereo headphone issue is fixed

Improvements

• the phone is a lot snappier – the lag is pretty much gone in a lot of cases but it's still there in others, especially in the Phone app and the browser. For example, I killed the browser and started it again – it took 20 seconds before google.com was loaded, 10 of which I spent staring at an almost completely white screen
  I have a feeling it is due to fixing something with the cleaning up of the old uninstalled apps. My theory is that the Hero didn't uninstall the apps properly, perhaps leaving their cache behind, thus slowing down more and more as I tried out more and more apps
• Update: I just charged the battery and I think the battery charged a lot faster than before, which is a really good sign
• loading of app lists seems to be a lot faster. By that I mean any time the phone shows a list of installed applications, it seems to show up a lot faster than before (Add shortcut, Manage, etc)
• camera quality is improved

New Features

• app search – if you push the search button from anywhere inside the Market app, it now pops up the app search dialog rather than the regular google search
• there are 2 new icons during a phone call: mute and speaker. I took a photo of this, which you can see below
• the green Android dude looks more 3D-ish now – a minor but nice UI change

Problems

• a lot of users are reporting that some of their apps, including paid ones, have gone missing
• the haptic feedback (vibrate on press) in the Phone app is now permanently on, even though I turned it off in the keyboard settings. I am fairly sure it's either a bug or a new "feature" that we didn't want, as it doesn't respect phone-wide settings

Miscellaneous Notes

• the update did not fix the all-day event 1 day too early notification problem
• I did not find an update for the voicemail app that some people mentioned (mine is at v5.0.0.32)
• the "linked program is no longer installed on your phone" problem that I'm having with my Twidroid shortcut every time I update it is still there (it goes away after phone reboot)

Overall, I'm very happy that Sprint and HTC are coming through. I was really afraid they would wait for the next big thing (Android "Eclair" 2.0) instead of releasing the necessary bug fixes but, thankfully, that didn't happen.

What else did you notice with the new upgrade that I missed? Is anything broken?

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If you use VNC to remotely connect to your machines and are having problems with certain applications not showing changes (redrawing), this will, hopefully, solve the problem for you.

The symptoms are simple: you load a program but only the program outline and maybe the first frame would show up. After that, nothing would update, even though the user in front of the remote computer can see everything updating fine. For me, it is happening with all Java based programs (SmartSVN, Charles – amazing program btw!, etc). Here's what's happening to my Charles application – it never even sent the first frame, simply showing the desktop and not updating:

The problem may be confined to RealVNC only, or at least any VNC program that uses a special mirror driver. You can tell whether your VNC server uses a mirror driver by looking at your Settings->Desktop options under "Optimise screen capture (mirror driver)":

The Solution

I'm not sure if it's Java's fault or the mirror driver's but, as it turns out, the mirror driver does not properly work with Java based programs, at least at the moment. Disabling it, or switching to application hooking fixes the problem. There is most likely a benefit in using a mirror driver as it is probably optimized better than other methods, but it's not worth keeping if you are having problems with it.

The easiest way to disable the setting is to uncheck the checkbox above. You can also alternatively go to Expert options, find the UpdateMethod variable, and switch it to 0 or 1. I am fairly confident the setting of 1 is less resource intensive than 0, so I went with it.

My Java programs are fixed and redrawing fine now.

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A question I recently saw on Stack Overflow titled Faster way to delete matching [database] rows? prompted me to organize my thoughts and observations on the subject and quickly jot them down here.

Here is the brief description of the task: say, you have 2 MySQL tables a and b. The tables contain the same type of data, for example log entries. Now you want to delete all or a subset of the entries in table a that exist in table b.

Solutions Suggested By Others

DELETE FROM a WHERE EXISTS (SELECT b.id FROM b WHERE b.id = a.id);

DELETE a FROM a INNER JOIN b on a.id=b.id;

DELETE FROM a WHERE id IN (SELECT id FROM b)

The Problem With Suggested Solutions

Solutions above are all fine if the tables are quite small and the SELECT/JOIN is fast. However, in large scale situations with replication, these queries could potentially lock up the tables from writes and severely aggravate slave lag because, as I mentioned in the MySQL Slave Lag (Delay) Explained And 7 Ways To Battle It post, replication is single-threaded.

Thus, if a single UPDATE/DELETE query takes a considerable amount of time, when it propagates to the slaves, they will be stuck executing it and doing nothing else, lagging behind more and more.

My Thoughts And Solution

I have personally dealt with having to delete many rows from one table that exist in another and in my experience it's best to do the following, especially if you expect lots of rows to be deleted. This technique most importantly will improve replication slave lag.

So, here it is: do a SELECT first, as a separate query, remembering the IDs returned in your script/application, then continue on deleting in batches (say, 50,000 rows at a time). This will achieve the following:

• each one of the delete statements will not lock the table for too long, thus not letting replication lag get out of control. It is especially important if you rely on your replication to provide you relatively up-to-date data. The benefit of using batches is that if you find that each DELETE query still takes too long, you can adjust it to be smaller without touching any DB structures.
• another benefit of using a separate SELECT is that the SELECT itself might take a long time to run, especially if it can't for whatever reason use the best DB indexes. If the SELECT is inner to a DELETE, when the whole statement migrates to the slaves, it will have to do the SELECT all over again, potentially lagging the slaves because of how long that SELECT will take. If you use a separate SELECT query, this problem goes away, as all you're passing to the DELETE query is a list of IDs.

Do you have another opinion or see a fault with my logic? Feel free to share in the comments.

P.S. One thing to be careful about is, of course, potential edits to the table between the times the SELECT finishes and DELETEs start. I will let you handle such details by using transactions and/or logic pertinent to your application.

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I'm happy to report that Beer Planet's PR went up yet again on this update, from 3 to 4 and my buddy Thaya's PR went up from 2 to 3. He's been blogging a lot more about WordPress, and I think he'll surpass me very soon, thanks to his ingenious plugins.

Is it time to check your site's PR? You can use the Google Toolbar, Firefox plugins, like Search Status, or a range of websites that provide this number, like this one.

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I came up with 2, depending on how detailed the information needs to be, which I'm about to share in this post.

1. If you want exact file and directory names, you can run:

svn status -u

If any files need updating, you will see a * before the file name.

svn status wc
M     wc/bar.c
A  +   wc/qax.c

svn status -u wc
M            965    wc/bar.c
       *     965    wc/foo.c
A  +         965    wc/qax.c
Status against revision:   981

Or more verbose

svn status --show-updates --verbose wc
M            965       938 kfogel       wc/bar.c
       *     965       922 sussman      wc/foo.c
A  +         965       687 joe          wc/qax.c
             965       687 joe          wc/zig.c
Status against revision:   981

Parsing the output in Perl, for instance, should be trivial. A connection to the repository is established for this check, so be sure to catch in your code the times when such connection is not available.

2. If you only care about whether a specific directory needs to be updated or not, here's a quicker method:

svn info vs svn info -rHEAD

cd somedir;
svn info -r HEAD | grep -i "Last Changed Rev"
Last Changed Rev: 8544
svn info | grep -i "Last Changed Rev"
Last Changed Rev: 8531

If these numbers are not the same, an update is needed.

What can I be missing? Are there any other creative ways, or is svn update going to support dry-run? Feel free to leave a comment if you know something I don't.

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2

cd YOUR_BLOG_ROOT/wp-content/plugins;
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec svn up {} \;

What this command does is finds the top level directories in your WordPress plugins directory, then applies the "svn update" command to each, one by one.

The result is something like

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
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Fetching external item into 'akismet'
A    akismet/readme.txt
Updated external to revision 50666.
 
Updated to revision 8094.
At revision 8094.
U    share-this/sharethis.php
Updated to revision 50666.
D    wp-postratings/postratings-admin-js.php
D    wp-postratings/postratings-usage.php
D    wp-postratings/postratings-js.php
A    wp-postratings/postratings-js-packed.js
U    wp-postratings/wp-postratings.php
A    wp-postratings/postratings-admin-js.js
U    wp-postratings/postratings-css.css
U    wp-postratings/postratings-options.php
A    wp-postratings/postratings-templates.php
U    wp-postratings/postratings-stats.php
U    wp-postratings/readme.html
A    wp-postratings/postratings-js.js
U    wp-postratings/wp-postratings.pot
U    wp-postratings/wp-postratings-widget.php
U    wp-postratings/postratings-uninstall.php
U    wp-postratings/postratings-admin-ajax.php
U    wp-postratings/wp-postratings.mo
U    wp-postratings/readme.txt
U    wp-postratings/postratings-manager.php
A    wp-postratings/postratings-admin-js-packed.js
Updated to revision 50666.
At revision 8094.
...

With such mass updating, of course, an incompatibility in one of the updates can break the whole blog. In my case, it happened to be the latest version of wp-sticky. I identified it by disabling wp-super-cache first, then disabling each updated plugin one by one. Once identified, I did the following:

1
2

cd wp-sticky
svn log | head

That showed me the latest commits by the author as well as the SVN revision numbers. I then used this information to revert one revision back by doing:

1

svn up -r 50489

The following command showed a diff of what exactly changed in that revision and broke everything:

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svn diff -r50489:50490

Once everything was stable, I emailed the plugin author to tell him about the bug (heya, Lester). Be careful not to run 'svn up' on this directory again until the bug is fixed as it'll persistently update to the latest version.

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