I’ve had my Eee for a few days now and just tried to run Eclipse on it. For fun as an experiment, to see if it works. I will probably never do any Java developement on this tiny machine but it does work, without problems although I haven’t tried any project of size. Anyway, here’s what it looks like. I kept some common views open so you can see how that looks like but hid the toolbar, with the toolbar it got a bit too cramped. In the second screenshot the appearance is set to the excellent Extended VS Presentation plugin.

One of the projects I’m working on at the moment is a text editor written in Java. I’ve thought about making my own editor for a long time and since a while it’s one of the things I dabble with in my spare time. There are a few good text editors written in Java out there already like Jext and JEdit, so does the world need yet another one? Well, probably not, but I like the challenge and figured it could be a fun exercise so I’m having a go at it. That’s not saying I don’t take it seriously.

So, what’s the current status? I started with the actual text editing component(the part that response to user input and outputs text in an area displayed on screen), which is the most important part of the editor. If that’s no good the whole editor will stink and no one will ever want to use it, including me. I could have chosen to use an existing component for this part but again, curiosity led me to start from scratch, hopefully it will be at least as good as existing solutions. Time will tell how (un)wise that decision was. At the moment the component works but lacks quite a few features. Currently I’ve paused almost all work on that and focus now is on the bigger picture, more on that and other details soon.

Check out the specs of this little nugget, the Asus Eee PC 701:

• 7″ screen
• 0.92kg
• built-in WiFi 802.11 b/g
• 4 GB solid-state disk
• 512 MB RAM
• ~ £ 200

Now that’s a neat kit! It’s not a power house but well sufficient for web surfing and text editing. Needless to say, I want one! Unfortunately it’s doesn’t seem available in the UK yet but it’s possible to pre-order in some places, like Clove for example.

You’ll find the full spec and details here.

For a really nice video review, go to Unwired.

Not many days before writing this post I decided to put up this blog. I’ve had that idea before. The difference now is that I’m not writing the blog software myself, that’s the reason it actually happened.

Some of my projects I’ve been working on over the years have been blog and forum software, but new ideas and projects have come in the way of actually getting any of it to production quality. It happens all the time, I like programming, I love it, and when I have an idea it’s just great to do some prototyping and try it out. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to lose interest in previous projects, most go cold.

It’s actually not bad jumping on new things, it’s a great way to learn new stuff. I don’t regret a keystroke on any project, ok, well, some, but all of them put together has taught me what I know now. Anyway, this time round I didn’t do the usual “put up a blog? great, I’ll just write the software…”. I don’t have time, or interest to do so at the moment.

So thanks WordPress team, it was a pleasure configuring this blog!