Well, it's December 2, 2004 and I don't have a job and my company isn't making much money. For the thousandth time in my life, I've decided to try to write in my blog every day. It used to be that I thought it would be useful to keep a journal. It's the same thing now, only it's called a blog and it's public for anyone to see. Except that it's very private cause nobody really cares to look at it. It's like putting your credit card number in the middle of pi to 37,000 places and putting it on a billboard.

My topic today is short but hits on a recurring theme. Over the years, I've tried to learn to program. I've learned a little of a lot of languages. I got pretty good at Visual Basic. But I always wanted to learn Java. The problem is that every time I've gotten started it's always a hassle getting started.

The problem might have something to do with the fact that java runs on a lot of hardware using a virtual machine and for that reason there is some need to understand the generic glue that binds it to any specific operating system. The generic glue is setting the paths and this is where any tutorial goes from straightforward to bizarre.

So I was excited to try out Eclipse 3.0 as a new IDE, which stands for "something" develoment envoronment. It has some nice tutorials to help you get started. That's when it get humorous and frustrating. The tutorials work just like you want them too. They start with a very simple program and lead you through, hitting buttons and filling in a trivial amount of info. The first tutorial works fine and the program runs. That's great!

So you go to the next tutorial and you hit buttons and do trivial things and everything looks fine until they tell you to open a window and type in this:

-Djava.library.path=${system:ECLIPSE_HOME}/plugins/org.eclipse.swt.${system:WS}
_3.0.0/os/${system:OS}/${system:ARCH}

What the hell is this? Well it's a very cryptic way to set the path to the library they've used in the example, I think. Only you do it and it doesn't work. You can see one error already. You're using 3.0.1 not 3.0.0. So you change that and "nope."

So rather than typing in all the variables (which is what I think those dollar thingys are), you try the real path to where the libraries are. Nope. And you notice that the error says something about the path not fouud, but in the error statement you see that the variables get set to something reasonable but that every dot of the 3.0.0 (or 3.0.1) is turned into a slash and there are some forward slashes and backwards slashes. And you can't even figure out what the devil to do or who to turn to. So you go to the Eclipse site and the first thing you see is a link to some lecture by Eric Raymond, self-appointed god of open source stuff, on asking intelligent questions. And, god forbid, you don't want anyone to know you're an idiot so you are scared to ask why this stupid open source program can't just put in, by default, some mechanism whereby you can just navigate to the file and have the stupid path typed in like you can with software that you pay for. That's the problem with this open source stuff and in fact with the whole IT world in general. They want to make it just hard enough to do things, so that people who have a clue about how computers can be useful in other fields have to jump through hoops to get in the club and forget why they wanted to join in the first place.

Maybe I'll figure it out. I'll let you know.