Silently Corrupting an Eclipse Workspace on Windows | Hacker News Reader

Silently Corrupting an Eclipse Workspace on Windows

blog.robertelder.org

74 pointsrobertelder18 comments

Seems like the author fell victim to a 2nd type of compression-related prank: using heavily artifacted JPEG instead of PNG for pictures of text.

More seriously dealing with dotfiles on Windows has always been frustrating. In general Windows special casing extensions left and right sounds like a terrible idea. In particular I wonder what kind of perversion lead Microsoft to think that it was a good idea to hide file extensions by default.

I just updated the site to decrease the compression on the images. I took the compression level from 30 to 80 at a cost of adding about 70k to the total page size. I often try to avoid using png for any images that don't need to look really high quality because the files sizes generally seem to be larger. Having said that I don't know much about the internals of these image formats, so I suppose I should read up on them one of these days.

May I ask why you don't use PNGs? For these types of screenshots I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up being smaller than the JPEGs while being lossless.

Thank you for taking the time to improve the images though, it's an interesting article nonetheless.

You were correct. I went back to do some experimenting on file sizes and I was able to update the images to .png with substantially better picture quality and a file size that was lower that the originals that had the artifacts. The page size is now about 20-30k lower than it was originally.

The biggest reason to not use jpeg for pictures of text [1] is that as more compression is applied it discards the higher frequency components first. Text being full of thin little lines (aka high frequency changes) is one of the first things to be mangled.

A quick little test I ran was to take a screenshot of my desktop and the file sizes were:

PNG: 735k

PNG (optimized w/ pngcrush): 589k

JPEG 80: 660k (minimal artifacts, but they can be seen on inspection)

JPEG 30: 313k (text regions are starting to get muddy and take more effort to read)

JPEG 10: 163k (this is like trying to read text in a colorblindness test, lot of distracting artifacts)

On a more positive note, I enjoyed browsing your Documents folder :)

[1]: IMO screenshots should use lossless formats in general

why would they have this limitation via the UI if you can open a command prompt and type "mkdir .test"? it makes no sense

I think it's because the file handling on windows is very extension-dependent. They probably assume that a dot marks an extension, and as such treat ".foo" as a file of type "foo" with no name, which is seen as an error.

This is all a clusterfuck honestly, since they rely on extension to figure out how to treat the files, but at the same time hide the extensions from the user by default. I can understand that extensions might look a bit "noisy" but then just gray them a bit to make the rest of the file name stand out, don't hide them completely.

"Unfortunately, I was unable to get this feature to work on Linux. This only serves to further prove that people who use Linux are boring and don't have much of a sense of humor."

The Linux equivalent is any time you tell bash "*".

This seems like it's just a bug, not some ill-considered intentional feature.

Sounds like you're one of those people who use Linux.

Yes, I believe the article was meant to be sarcastic...at least that the tone I was picking up

I never understood why Eclipse stores plugins in the workspace directory.

If you have multiple workspaces that you switch between, you have to install your plugins into each of them.

Because if there's more than one of you working on the same project, you want to keep your plugin versions in sync too, I assume.

But that sync happens at the Project level, not Workspace level.

The real prank here is obviously getting a friend to use Eclipse. I'm not sure you'll ever be forgiven.

It doesn't. .metadata/.plugins in the workspace contains just the plugin metadata(settings, temp files, caches etc) related to the projects in your workspace. Plugins themselves are stored in the eclipse installation directory (%eclipse_home%/plugins to be specific).

Oh my god, all that time my backups were worthless.

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