Archive for 2007

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Eclipse NoClassDefFoundError near installFont on startup

Monday, October 8th, 2007

At work and at home I use Eclipse as my IDE of choice for Java development, along with Eclipse-in-disguise Aptana for web development. I’ve never had a problem with Eclipse on Windows or on my Mac, but on my Linux machine (and many of my co-workers’ machines) Eclipse tends to crash rather violently. I suspect that it isn’t Eclipse at all, but the primitive P4WSAD Perforce plugin. I don’t use Perforce at home, so that might be the difference. Anyway, what happens is that in the middle of doing something Eclipse will run out of PermGen memory, throw up some errors, and die in the least pleasant way possible. When you try to start it back up, you get something like this:

 !SUBENTRY 1 org.eclipse.team.core 4 0 2007-08-20 16:58:25.979
 !MESSAGE Could not instantiate provider com.perforce.team.core.PerforceTeamProvider for project SampleProject.
 Exception in thread "Thread-1" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError
         at org.eclipse.ui.internal.themes.ThemeElementHelper.installFont(ThemeElementHelper.java:101)
         at org.eclipse.ui.internal.themes.ThemeElementHelper.populateRegistry(ThemeElementHelper.java:57)
         at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench$28.runWithException(Workbench.java:1426)
         at org.eclipse.ui.internal.StartupThreading$StartupRunnable.run(StartupThreading.java:31)
         at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.RunnableLock.run(RunnableLock.java:35)
         at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Synchronizer.runAsyncMessages(Synchronizer.java:123)
         at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.runAsyncMessages(Display.java:3296)
         at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.readAndDispatch(Display.java:2974)
         at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.runUI(Workbench.java:2309)
         at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.access$4(Workbench.java:2219)
         at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench$4.run(Workbench.java:466)
         at org.eclipse.core.databinding.observable.Realm.runWithDefault(Realm.java:289)
         at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.createAndRunWorkbench(Workbench.java:461)
         at org.eclipse.ui.PlatformUI.createAndRunWorkbench(PlatformUI.java:149)
         at org.eclipse.ui.internal.ide.application.IDEApplication.start(IDEApplication.java:106)
         at org.eclipse.equinox.internal.app.EclipseAppHandle.run(EclipseAppHandle.java:153)
         at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.runApplication(EclipseAppLauncher.java:106)
         at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.start(EclipseAppLauncher.java:76)
         at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:363)
         at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:176)
         at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
         at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
         at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
         at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:585)
         at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.invokeFramework(Main.java:504)
         at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.basicRun(Main.java:443)
         at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.run(Main.java:1169)

Further digging reveals that the culprit is definitely the Perforce plugin. To fix it, you need to go to where Eclipse is installed, and move the plugins/com.perforce.* files away. Then start Eclipse, which will start but complain about the missing plugin. Then shut down Eclipse, move the plugins back, and start up again. You’ll need to reconfigure any Perforce windows you had open, but at least Eclipse will start.

This seems to be caused by Eclipse crashing after running out of PermGen memory. To prevent future crashes, edit eclipse.ini in your Eclipse install directory. It should look something like this:

-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m
-vmargs
-Xms40m
-Xmx512m
 -XX:MaxPermSize=256m
-Dosgi.bundlefile.limit=100

The -XX:MaxPermSize is especially important for preventing Eclipse crashes. The other option, --launcher.XXMaxPermSize only works in Windows.

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Posted in Java | View blog reactions | 12 Comments »

Updated RIAA Radar Greasemonkey Script

Monday, October 8th, 2007

Some time ago I came across the RIAA Radar site, which uses Amazon’s E-Commerce Web Service to cross-reference the labels musical albums are published under with known RIAA members. The idea is that you can use the service to help restrict your music purchases to labels that do not affiliate themselves with the RIAA, and by extension the RIAA’s strongarm tactics against music fans. I liked the idea but didn’t want to have to visit the site every time I looked at an album. Fortunately the site had a Greasemonkey script called RIAA Radar that would automatically insert a little icon on the Amazon detail page indicating whether it was from an RIAA label or not. Unfortunately, the script was broken. I went ahead and fixed up the script, as well as optimizing it and expanding its functionality. Since the site’s maintainer never accepted the revised version, so I’ve been maintaining a fork ever since.

RIAA Radar Greasemonkey Script example

Anyway, with the launch of Amazon’s new MP3 Downloads store, I figured I could get RIAA Radar working with that too. It turned out to be pretty easy, and I was able to fix a bad URL in the script while I was at it. So the script should serve music fans even better as they browse the DRM-free music available at Amazon.

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TopProcess Sidebar Gadget – Now with memory usage display

Monday, October 8th, 2007

I didn’t think I had anything more to do with my TopProcess Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget after its minor update a couple months ago. However, I got a suggestion emailed to me from a TopProcess user that was easy to implement and adds a lot to the gadget. So, TopProcess now allows you to choose between measuring the top consumers of CPU, and the top consumers of RAM. So all you need to do is add two copies of the gadget to your sidebar, and set one to track memory and one to track CPU. Check it out (Firefox users will not be surprised that it always sits at the top):

In CPU mode it displays percentages, and in RAM mode it displays absolute memory footprint values. Remember that some apps (like .NET or Java apps) look like they’re taking a lot of memory, but will give it back when you get low on RAM, so it’s not a worry if they gobble up some extra RAM when you’ve got it. Of course, for most native apps (like Firefox or Photoshop), the value displayed in TopProcess represents a less flexible chunk of resources.

A couple of bugs and less-than-desirable behaviors have been fixed, too. Whenever you change settings the changes will be reflected in the gadget immediately, and turning text fade off and then on again won’t cause text to overlap in a big mess. Also, some of the comments on the Windows Live Gallery page for TopProcess suggest that people have been seeing performance problems with the gadget. I haven’t actually seen any problems myself, but I went through the code and tightened it up a bit here and there – hopefully it’ll work better for those people.

So pick up the new version, rate it on Windows Live Gallery, and enjoy the new functionality.

PS: I was holding this back until my friend could come through with the Russian and Japanese translations, but he’s just too busy and I had to fall back to Google Translate. I apologize if the translations are awful. If you would like to help fix them, or to translate TopProcess into your favorite language, please contact me.

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Posted in Sidebar | View blog reactions | 4 Comments »

WebLinkLabel Windows Forms Control

Sunday, September 9th, 2007

While I was updating my PopupNotify control today, I realized that I had created another useful little control for XBList that I hadn’t released, the WebLinkLabel Control. This simple control wraps the standard LinkLabel control to make it easier to embed multiple hyperlinks in a label, each of which will load up a URL in the user’s default browser when clicked. It’s not the most complex thing in the world, but it has proven useful for inserting help links into XBList’s error dialogs, so I suspect it might be of some utility to others. Using it is about as simple as using a standard Label. Just drag the WebLinkLabel onto your form, customize it however you like, then assign a specially-formatted string to the Text property. You use “url” tags to specify where you want links, like this: “Hello, this is text <url=http://brh.numbera.com>with a link in it</url>.” You can of course have as many links, pointing to as many different URLs, as you would like. If you want to get that formatted string back out, use the LinkText property, or if you want to get a flattened view out (“Hello, this is text with a link in it.”), use the Text property.

This code is licensed under the LGPL, like the other XBList bits I’ve released. As usual, I would appreciate it if whoever uses this code would email me to let me know how they’re using it, just for my own amusement. You can download the control right here.

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New Version of the PopupNotify Windows Forms Control

Sunday, September 9th, 2007

A couple years back I posted the source of XBList’s tray notification control on my site as the PopupNotify control. I licensed it under the LGPL so people could use it for their own applications. While I requested that whoever used it should let me know, I’ve never received any email about it until this week, when somebody wrote to tell me that they had been using it but it didn’t work on Vista, and they wanted some help getting it to work. Despite the fact that I would rather they had told me about this beforehand, I’ve taken this as an opportunity to update the component. I just pulled out the current version of the control that I’m using for XBList, which has a much prettier Vista-style look, less P/Invoke calls, and other .NET 2.0 improvements. I’ve left the 1.1 version of the control around for anyone who wants to use it but hasn’t updated to .NET 2.0 yet.

The new, Vista-style popup

Hopefully this component will continue to be useful to other developers, and they’ll let me know if they’re using it in their projects, since it’s just so much more fun to release stuff for free when you get to see it in action.

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Posted in .NET | View blog reactions | 3 Comments »
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