I've never really liked Java or Eclipse, but today really just makes me loathe them.
I've been "working" on graduate research related to this DSP thing for many months now. And by working, I mean I'm supposed to be but have had so little time to devote to it that I really haven't done much of anything. I have to physically be at the computer the DSP card is installed in, otherwise I can't compile and run the code. The reason for this is that it's all done through Eclipse, and I have only SSH access which doesn't allow me to use the GUI. I know of no way around this. That means I've been able to code some from home when I had time, but I haven't been able to build and run anything in about five or six weeks.
Whatever. I took the time today to drive 25 minutes to campus so I could actually compile, run and debug some changes to this awful dead end of a project. I planned to spend 8 or more hours here if I needed to get something done. It's Sunday. I shouldn't have to worry about anyone else using the computer or anything getting in the way today. Parking is even free today.
Guess what? Eclipse magically stopped working at some point during the last month. I have no idea why. Trying to start it from a terminal like I always have just causes it to crash immediately and spew out an error about it exiting with code 13. Oh, code 13. I can fix that. That's totally obvious.
Whatever. I look it up and apparently that means the JVM doesn't match versions with Eclipse. Great. I check, and sure enough this is a 32-bit install of Eclipse and a 64-bit JVM. I wonder how that happened?
Whatever. I look around and find the instructions on how to configure Eclipse to use a specific JVM. I set that up with the 32-bit JVM that shipped with the freaking installation, and now it just dies silently. Exit code 0, which means everything was just fine, which it clearly isn't.
I would install another 64-bit copy of Eclipse and be done with it, but I can't do that. The compilers for this DSP make a lot of changes to Eclipse, so I have to use this one, and I have no idea how to correctly tell it which JVM to use. I would try installing another 32-bit JVM in my home directory and pointing to that, but there are so many environment variables and paths and other ridiculous configuration stuff that frankly at this point I'm just not doing it.
This is just stupid beyond words.
I am never going to get anything done on my research. The one chance I have time to work on it, I have utterly stupid technical problems preventing me from spending that time on it! Since it's Sunday, there's nobody here who can even help try to diagnose and debug it. I sure as heck am not going to try to play system admin and fool around with the main JVM install even though I have sudo access, because I'd probably manage to screw up the configuration even more.
Screw it. I'm going home where I can work on another project that I can at least get something accomplished on. Maybe it will lead into something I can use in my dissertation, because at this point I don't think I'll ever even get a topic for it, much less finish it.