At last – all the months of hacking, cajoling and in some cases swearing at the RCPNews application have come to the point where it all has to work; specifically, in Monday’s demo that I’m doing on automated builds of plugins. I’m pretty confident that something’s going to go wrong, but I’m not sure what yet … if the wireless network is down, or if there’s no wired network near the presenter’s desk, it’s going to be a short trip :-) Still, mistakes are good because you can learn from them, and the point of a tutorial is to encourage learning, so I hope that people make lots of mistakes. At least, ones that I know how to fix would be good. If you’re not coming to the tutorial, you can still make mistakes on your own time – the instructions and presentation are available for your perusal. I’ve also printed out 40 copies to take with me since the tutorial has at least 30 registered attendees, although to save paper it’s printed duplex with 4 sheets per page.

I also had the good fortune to meet a bunch of people at the Hyatt tonight, including (alphabetically) Chris, Denis, Donald, Ed, Gunnar, Ian, John, Martin, Patrick, Scott and Wolfgang. At least, that’s what I remember, but after the odd Guiness I could well have missed a few (or even started imagining people; it’s hard to tell). Still, at least I’ve got photographic evidence that I was there, so I wasn’t imagining that. And for anyone who isn’t going to recognise me by the back of my head, I’ll be (probably the only) one wearing a Guiness tie tomorrow. After all, it was St Patrick’s day on Friday …

I’ve also posted my recommended track of where I’m likely to be (wow, that was quick – it’s already made it to the EclipseCon website!) which works out quite nicely for me, since I’m likely to remember where I’m supposed to be going now. Oh, and I’ve updated my article on the Eclipse launching process and classloaders since I got it gratuitously wrong in the first iteration … thanks to Jeff McAffer for saving me from making too much of an idiot of myself. But he can’t save me from the ties that I’ll be wearing this week; that’s all my own work!