That’s soo awesome. I’m sitting on the plane back home to Germany. They have free wireless Internet so I can catch up with the day and read Planet Eclipse during the flight. Unfortunately, my battery will die soon.

OK, looks like I’m celebrating Eclipse’s 5th birthday here. I’m in Toronto for the next two weeks (till Nov. 10th). BTW, my birthday is tomorrow so it’s very close to Eclipse’s birthday. I’m wondering how many from the community are celebrating their birthday on the same day?

I’m staying at the Holiday Inn Midtown (near St. George subway station). So if you want to meet for a beer or two and chat about Eclipse or that other great stuff referred to as “partying” just drop me a mail.

After building Callisto the Eclipse Foundation continues enjoying the space. This time the guys launched the Eclipse Space Shuttle to build an Orbit around the Eclipse Ecosystem. The Eclipse Orbit is the eagerly discussed repository for shared components to be reused by the different Eclipse projects and - of course - within the Eclipse Ecosystem.

Although I like this idea I still would see more of this happen at the root source, i.e. in the repository of the originating component. Basically it’s just about adding a MANIFEST.MF file with some cool entries to the project and republishing it as a jar conforming to a specific naming schema. I would wish more Open Source projects would provide this out of the box. Even if you don’t use OSGi or Equinox it’s still a great way to document your dependencies.

Finally it’s vacation time. My wife is coming to Toronto today. I’ll pick her up in a couple of hours at the airport. We’re planning to make a tour from Toronto to Niagara Falls, Washington D.C., New York City, Boston, Montreal and Ottawa.

This time I disabled all Bugzilla mails and setup a feed in RSSOwl. Thus, I still see which bugs changed after my vacation without going through all the mails.

After beeing five and a half year with my current employer I decided to leave for a new opportunity. I had an amazing time at Intershop and worked with many, many great people here. I’m very thankful that I got the opportunity to be part of this company.

I came accros a job posting that turned into a fantastic opportunity with a Canadian company. They also have a German subsidiary, which is only 20 minutes away from my home town. But I’ll start working in Toronto (which is really close to the Eclipse Foundation ;)) in March for a period of 6 months.

They want to enhance their product with rich client capabilities. Thus, one of my first tasks will be evaluating rich client technologies like AJAX, .NET Smart Client and Eclipse RCP in the context of their product. This will be really exciting.

Although my wife was not very excited about this she encouraged me making the final decision. Canada is a really interesting country. Although I have been told that I’ll miss most of the cold temperatures I can’t wait working there for a few months. I’ve heard a lot positive things from friends that already visited and also lived in Canada.