Bah! I’m sick of C++. Now that I’m learning Java, C++ just seems lame. Then again, I haven’t done any C++ in about a year, so I’m not terribly sharp on that front. I spent a good two hours just wandering through my old books trying to remember how to do things like class specification files and the like.

On the other hand, it took maybe an hour to write an assignment for my Java class, add in extra features to the class, do exception handling and learn enough about Ant to create a build file to handle compiling for me. Oh, and I wrote a shell script and a batch file to launch them jar.

I’m almost afraid to turn in the version I ended up with. The assignment said to not bother with exception handling, so I’m not sure if all that other stuff would make me look like a know-it-all. I’m not, it was just fun to do all the other stuff and learn the basics of it. Whatever. back to my C++…

Note: Forgive the formatting, I need to change my styles.css to get ordered lists back.

I’m taking a Java course this semester and it was annoying not having access to Eclipse on the various computers in labs around campus. So I applied some of my Google-fu and found a way to install Eclipse on a USB stick.

The original instructions are here, way at the bottom of the page. I relocated them here and changed them to mirror my experience.

1. Download Eclipse and install it on your USB drive. I used EasyEclipse For Desktop Java from nexB.
2. Install a JDK on your or any other PC. The default installation path should be something like "C:\Programs\Java", containing a folder named "jdk1.5.0_xx"
3. Create a subfolder "JDKs" in your Eclipse folder (Depending on your drive letter and extraction path this should look like E:\Portables\Eclipse\JDKs
4. Copy the jdk1.5.0_xx folder into the JDKs folder. (like E:\Portables\Eclipse\JDKs\jdk1.5.0_xx) This can take some time.
5. Edit the file "E:\Portables\Eclipse\eclipse.ini" to

   -vm
   ..\JDKsjdk1.5.0_xx\bin\javaw
   -vmargs
   -Xms40m
   -Xmx256m

   (replace "jdk1.5.0_xx" with the actual folder name) This is more elegant than using a batch file due to being independent from drive letters and path variables.

6. Run "E:\Portables\Eclipse\eclipse.exe"
7. When asked for a workspace location, you can enter ".\workspace", which will create a workspace in your eclipse folder (like "E:\Portables\Eclipse\workspace\")
8. Additionally I trimmed down my JDK install by removing the samples and demos directories.