Hello, World

I guess that title is not that original, but I would like to introduce myself.

I am a PhD student in B.C. Canada studying Information Visualization and Program Understanding. I am also interested in Model Driven Development and I am using these techniques to design and generate visualization for complex information spaces. I did a Master's and an Undergrad at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. I have also studied Reverse Engineering and I have an interest in language design and compiler construction.

I work with Eclipse pretty heavily. I run the GTK version of Eclipse on Debian and usually keep up with the latest milestone releases I hope to apply many of ideas to Eclipse. I currently have hacked or worked with the following Eclipse Technologies.
GEF/Draw2D, EMF, SWT, Workbench, Mylar, ATL, JDT, RCP, BIRT,
I have also used (but not extended or modified any code for)
VE, TPTP, WTP, GMF

I am also working on my own project called Zest. Zest is a set of information visualization components for Eclipse. Zest follows the same architecture as JFace and allows developers to quickly create graphical visualizations without any graphical code. Developers need only provide their content providers and we handle the rendering. This project is still very very beta, but we are getting there.

Other than that, I am really enjoying the West Coast! I enjoying camping, hiking, biking, running, and canoeing. I am teaching first year CS which is a treat. I really enjoy helping students understand complicated problems. While we may think that many of these things (trees, recursion, polymorphism, etc..) are easy, these students remind me of how so many people struggled with these concepts!

- Ian

Planet Eclipse Gone Crazy!!!

Boy have things changed on planet eclipse in a hurry. There is usually action (6 posts a day or so), but right now it seems we are getting 6 posts an hour! As one poster put it, planet eclipse on steriods. All the fuss is because of EclipseCon, the annual conference on Eclipse and Eclipse Technologies. I attended EclipseCon last year, and it was one of the best conferences I have ever been too. Due to teaching requirements and funding (I am a grad student teach my first course ever) I was not able to make it this year. I want to say *thanks* to all the planet eclipse bloggers who have kept me informed about the commings and goings at EclipseCon!