Sure, you can uninstall Flex Builder and reinstall it after you’ve updated eclipse. To my mind that is just too time consuming; so with that in mind I set about having a hunt within my eclipse folder to try and work out what I need to add / change in a fresh eclipse install to re-link the Flex Builder plugin.

If you want to see how I got on read on…

Update

Thanks to Sean Corfield there is a quicker way to update a new installation. All you need to do is add the Flex Builder Plugin update site that is located in your Flex Builder plugin installation folder. For example mine is /Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3 Plug-in/com.adobe.flexbuilder.update.site.

I had seen this folder in the directory, but assumed it was used to update the plugin not the eclipse installation that was utilizing it. Doh! :p Thanks again Sean :)

Feel free to read on though if you want to know how to do it manually :p

The first thing you’ll have probably noticed is that when you install Flex Builder as a plugin of eclipse, is that a new .jar file (startup_fb.jar) is placed within the root of your eclipse folder. Personally I don’t really have much idea what this .jar does, but given the fact it’s called startup_fb it’s pretty likely it’s used to start the Flex Builder initialization first time or every time eclipse is run.

The next addition that Flex Builder makes to your eclipse install is that it places a file that links to the Flex Builder plugin installation folder in a folder called links. The file itself is called com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.osx.link on OS X and com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.link on Windows, but it is just a plain text file – as it happens mine points to /Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3 Plug-in (as I’m on a Mac).

Now here is where the digging comes in. If you just copy these two files in to your fresh eclipse install nothing will happen. Not a sausage, nada. So first call of action was to look through the various folders in the eclipse installation to see if there are any com.adobe.xxx packages within them. Surprisingly there aren’t.

So after a bit of logical thinking I started to hunt through the main configuration file for eclipse. It was here that I finally got a break-thru. It appears that there is a folder called org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator that contains a file called bundle.info and it is in here that I finally found what I was looking for. As you can see from the image below, this file holds the bundle references to amongst other things all of the Flex Builder files.

With this final pieces of the jigsaw in place I was finally able to reconnect Flex Builder to a fresh installation of eclipse, and if you want to be able to do it as well here are the actual steps.

• Install a fresh copy of eclipse, but don’t delete the old version yet. (I called mine eclipse-new, you can rename it at the end)
• Copy start_fb.jar to the root of your new eclipse installation
• Copy the Flex Builder link file com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.osx.link if you’re on OS X, or com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.link if you’re on Windows, to the ‘links’ folder in the root of your new eclipse installation (If you are using Ganymede – 3.4 or greater you’ll need to create this folder)
• Open up the bundles.info file located in you old eclipse installation/configuration/org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator in a text editor
• Copy all of the Flex Builder related entries – use the file reference as a guide as not all of the packages have Flex in the name
• Now open up the same file, but in your new installation and paste those entries at the top and save it
• Start up your new clean eclipse install and bask in your 1337 s1<i||z :p
• If all went to plan you can now close eclipse, delete the old version and rename the new one – job done.

That’s pretty much it. If this seems a bit overly complex, don’t worry – I’m putting the final touches to a screencast that you can use to walk you through this process should you ever need to do it :)

I’d also like to thank Pablo for taking the time to interview me

Here’s a snippet…

- How would you introduce yourself and your job to a non-technical person?
“Hi I’m Mike Jones and I am lucky enough to get paid for my hobby.” – In my experience most non-technical people who ask what you do, (think meeting friends of friends for an evening in the pub), as soon as they hear you do something with computers it immediately marks you as technical support for the rest of the evening :p. I have been known to say that my job is an office clerk to avoid such awkward moments…

- How did you get started with Flash?
I first got in to Flash in 1996, when it was still called Splash Animator by Futurewave. I was doing a degree in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University in South East London and my visual studios manager called me in to his office to show me the MSN homepage. What I saw changed my view of the internet profoundly; looking back it doesn’t seem particularly ground breaking, but they had a small navigation system on the left hand side of the homepage and actually opened and closed in a smooth fluid manner, providing access to sub sections of the site. This was the first time I had ever seen Splash Animator and over the course of many days I downloaded and transferred it on a dozen or so 1.44MB floppy disks back to my meagre P90 at home. Twelve years on and I’m still enamoured with the technology.

My main criteria are:

• Widget enabled – Although I’m not that fussed with all these Flickr etc widgets, I’m more after the ease of inclusion that Widgets offer
• Flexible layout – Not fixed width
• Three Column – Perhaps two vertical and one horizontal…
• Magazine style – So probably a static front page, or “current article” element on the home page

If anyone has any suggestions please feel free to leave a comment :)

I personally have so much time wasted with the brief, ambigious conversations that they employ to try and engage me so that I will be a candidate for them or from the other side of the fence, trying to find potential candidates, that today I thought I’d post up a few pointers for all the recruiters out there.

Just to clarify this, these are generally the cold calling recruitment agencies who have scraped my details from one of the job sites they are subscribed to. Not the recruitment agencies I actually approach myself (and I’m sure that alot of you out there will have had experience of a few if not more of these :p).

Enjoy…

As a Candidate:

• Every client you have is not “one of the largest digital agencies in [London]” so stop keep using that tired and played term – no one is fooled.
• When you call someone PLEASE have all the facts to hand: Is it a contract or perm? Duration? What is the day rate? Whereabouts are they located? We have better things to do than waste 5 minutes on 1 minutes worth of information.
• Have our resumes to hand and please at least give them a cursory glance over so you are aware of what we do in a professional capacity.
• If I’m actively looking to change company please don’t phone me and provide details of a job at the company were I already work if you have an up to date resume which details this.
• Don’t call us because your search returned a hit for Tree Surgery in which our details appeared. If it’s not our current expertise or day job we can get a bit annoyed!
• PDF is not a dirty word – perhaps we actually applied a style to our resumes that we didn’t want you to ruin by tacking on your cover sheet and deleting of all our contact details…
• You are not working for MI6, therefore I fail to see how “is it safe to talk?” comes in to it. You keep your numbers private so if we didn’t want to talk to you we’d have just rejected the call.
• Your slice of the pie means the client pays more and we receive less, a necessary evil as you are providing a “service”. However don’t try and be our mate, because you aren’t. You are business associates. Learn to live with that.
• If we tell you how much we charge for a day rate please don’t attempt to negotiate it down as we’re not a market traders. You guys never lower your rates so why should we.

As an Employer:

• Please don’t call me with candidates I need to recruit for the company I work for, then try and poach me for another company – This is unethical and just rude. You are not a “cheeky chappy” by doing this!
• Likewise if we have a recruiting requirement “more” is not better than “less”. So please don’t just send over all the hits from your 30 second database search.
• If the candidate is unsuitable and you have been informed of this STOP KEEP SENDING THEIR RESUME OVER! :p

Now don’t get me wrong there are a lot of decent recruitment agencies out there and they are providing a good service, however these few tongue-in-cheek points above can make the business relationship a lot easier and smoother if they all just took the time to be organized and succinct.

If you have any additional points that should be added please feel free to leave them in the comments :D

However the other day I was trying to phone a client and my phone just kept disconnecting – literally the moment it actually made the connection – this continued on and off for the entire day. I initially thought it was one of the apps on my phone getting a bit too clever for itself and taking out the connection. Further investigation though discounted this. So at that point it was time to call T-Mobile Business support…

Long conversation short, it seems that T-Mobile are doing work on providing improved levels of 3G coverage over a greater area of the UK. The knock on is that you will likely get random disconnects when trying to make calls if you have 3G active.

The way around this is to turn off the 3G and just use GSM. To do this go to Tools > Settings > Phone > Network > Network mode and select GSM as opposed to Dual mode. Now that sorts out the connection drops, but the real kicker in this saga is the fact that they are doing this work all over their network for at least 2 months and Business support couldn’t confirm where exactly they were doing it (well obviously it is where I am at the moment). So no real solution, more of a work around while this goes on.

The Business support bod then went on to assure me that 3G wasn’t that important “…as it is only used for video calls…”. Yeah right – Data, hello!

If it continues I’ll be resorting to a good old letter of complaint.

Anyway, I’m back on Tiger and happy to be there, missing Spaces a bit, but missing Ruby / Rails etc more, oh well time to roll my own I suppose.

Firstly I have disabled Spotlight from indexing ANYTHING. This seems to be a bit drastic, but it pretty much stopped 90% of my issues straight off the bat. Secondly, I have disabled anything to do with iDisk or .mac (including mail accounts). This seems to have restored the stability and calm I was used to with Tiger. I have yet (touch wood) had a single lock up or crash since doing this.

So for all of you out there still having problems try this, YMMV but it might just sort it out. Now I can get back to developing…

So I backed up all of my files (both on a network and on an external disk, this time opting for a totally fresh installation. Boy that was an eye opener. It appears that Leopard disks may not be created equal as one would assume – After this installation I went on to install XCode tools – This crapped out, my disk saying there were “issues” with the package and I need to take it back to Apple (something I will be doing next week).

OK, well that botched installation (as XCode has started to install stuff and it resulted in a VERY unstable machine), was duly wiped and yet another installation was attempted – all I can say at this point is that goodness it wasn’t Windows as those installs take days! Anyway after this installation everything seemed fine and Apple had just released the 10.5.1 update. Then the lock ups started, intermittent keyboard lock ups, programs just stopped responding (force quit wouldn’t quit them), trying to mount DMG’s or extract zips failed with all manner of errors. Bizarrely enough a reboot resolved all of these- until they started to happen again. The my iDisk started to complain, by complain I mean I noticed it wasn’t doing what it should. Finally this was just one hard reboot too many for Leopard and I got a massive corruption of the drive – it would crash as soon as it tried to load the boot loader.

So on to install number 4 (if my calculations are correct). Now during all my “fun and games” I started to notice some constants, lock ups and apps not responding, plus DMG’s failing to mount all appeared to be linked with .mac running an automatic synchronization, or iDisk having it’s own attempt at auto syncing (as it always fails now). So I have turned all of these off and all seems to be stable. For the moment at least.

Now iDisk and iSync worked perfectly until they released 10.5.1 so perhaps if the fix for the security hole in “back to my Mac” has screwed it all now. That way if none of it works no-one can connect – Problem solved.

Oh and yesterday I lost sound – It bongs on startup, Leopard is convinced I have no audio hardware. Thankfully Audio Hijack fixed that issue.

Am I pissed at all these issues? Well yes and no. Yes, as I rely on this machine to do my client work on and if it goes down it costs me revenue (and potential data loss). No, because I run a lot of bleeding edge stuff, a lot of my old apps are not confirmed as Leopard compatible and well if it annoys me that much I could go back to Tiger.

What does really piss me off is that Time Machine doesn’t support network backup if you don’t happen to have a shiny new XServer running Leopard Server….

Would I recommend you upgrade, sure go for it…If you like installing stuff :p

The whole thing kicks off at 12:30 with coffee and registration, then the keynote with Andrew Shorten (fingers crossed he’ll do it in his “Holmes” costume). I have the luxury of going on quite early (14:45 – 15:45) after Andrew. I’ve decided to present an overview of Flex Builder, the Flex framework and provide some productivity and development tips on bending Flex Builder to your will. Below is a synopsis of my talk.

The Flex framework can appear slightly at odds for those approaching it from a more creative background. While it shares the same lineage as Flash the process by which you create and develop within Flex may initially appear difficult to grasp. In this session Mike will gently ease you into what the Flex framework actually is as well as giving an overview of the Flex Builder IDE, warts and all.

If you want to know what’s happening when here is the whole schedule