I have always pondered this question. I ponder it seemingly every week when I listen to the news. No matter how large of a crime a lawyer participates in, it seems they never get disbarred. Let’s take a story most of you have been familiar with.

Back in 2005 we started seeing articles like the summary posted here:

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud093005.htm

(search for Navistar once you get to the page.)

In a 2006 Business Wire press release we read the following:

As part of the review of accounting issues, the company’s audit committee has completed an independent investigation into the propriety of accounting and auditing confirmation matters relating to vendor rebates in fiscal year 2005. T he investigation was conducted by an independent law firm and found no evidence of fraud or intentional misconduct.

You can find the article here:

http://ir.navistar.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=199251

Not long after this, October of 2007 in fact, we started seeing articles which contained the following:

The independent investigation also identified instances of intentional misconduct that resulted in some of the company’s smaller, but in some cases material, restatement adjustments. “ Most of the individuals who were involved in instances of misconduct are no longer employed by the company,” Navistar said.

http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/10045683/c_10023908

In October of 2009 we started seeing articles like the following:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Navistar-SEC-settle-apf-2643276182.html?x=0&.v=2

One cannot follow this progression without asking why did the SEC not disbar all of the attorneys involved in the 2006 statement. It’s rather obvious they were either willing participates in a cover up, or simply saying what they were paid to say without performing much (if any) of an investigation. The timing of the 2006 article made it appear as a rather obvious attempt to stop investors from bailing on the stock. It soon became obvious nobody was buying the bullshit, hence the back peddling in 2007.

My concern here isn’t with the sear sizzled books fresh from the barbecue, nor with the “deal” the SEC did on our behalf allowing the company to not admit any wrong doing (even after the company issued a statement saying evidence of it had been found.) No, My issue here is that the SEC didn’t serve the public interest by forcing disbarment of all lawyers involved in the 2006 release. We are never going to stop corporate fry cooks (accountants) from serving up mouth watering financial statements which have no basis in fact until we make it a death penalty offense. That is simply a given. We cannot begin to hope such frauds will be uncovered if the offenders can simply pay lawyers to say things which have no basis in fact in order to continue duping investors. At a minimum, the SEC settlement should have demanded disbarment for all.

So, even though you know better than to weight down an editor with a project environment bolted onto it, you have decided to learn/use Eclipse. At least, for some project (perhaps a Source Forge project) someone has mandated that you use Eclipse. Since your desktop OS is Ubuntu, that means you need to get Eclipse running on Ubuntu. You open up Synaptic and see quite a few packages with Eclipse in the name or description. Most importantly, you find the Java Development Tools and know that you will be doing your development with Java.

You try installing this, and click OK on the additional dependencies which are flagged as needed. After a bit you exit Synaptic and find Eclipse on your KUbuntu menu. It starts up. You tweak a few settings (like changing delete line from CTRL-D to CTRL-K so it matches Kate) then decide you are ready to start learning. You’ve already done a bit of Java coding and really aren’t into plunking down yet another $40 on a Java book which is going to burn half of its pages regurgitating the free Java language information, so you search around and find the free Eclipse and Java tutorials here:

http://eclipsetutorial.sourceforge.net/

Mark Dexter has done quite a job putting together this tutorial. While I have a few issues with some of the things taught, I find this to be a completely remarkable effort. As someone who authors advanced technical books, I know the level of effort it took to create such a series of lessons. (My issues are more philosophical than technical.)

You download and run the first tutorial without problems. There are some minor differences between the version of Eclipse he is using and the current 3.5.1 shipping with Ubuntu, but you manage to work your way through the tutorial as long as you don’t leave it on pause too long or run too many in sequence since there seems to be some kind of resource leakage in the video playback software used by both Opera and FireFox. (It appears you need to restart the browser after every fourth lesson or so. Putting a lesson on pause while you go to lunch is a definite no-no.)

Once you have complete this tutorial, you feel pretty good about your Eclipse installation. It seems that things went well and you believe you have all of the correct packages installed. Then you start the persistence tutorial. Once you get to the portion of the tutorial which tells you to open the generated XML file and view it in Design mode, the wheels come off the cart. The file gets opened up in raw text mode, not even “source” mode. There is no syntax highlighting nor is there a pair of tabs which will let you toggle between modes. Frantically you pause and back up the lesson to see if you happened to have missed something. No, even after you watch that little piece five times, you cannot find anything you didn’t do correctly. Life is sad.

Desperation sends you searching on the Web to find any and all places mentioning Eclipse, XML, and Ubuntu together. You find quite a few message threads with a phrase like “Are you using the version of Eclipse found in the distro? That has never worked for me…” Life is sadder still.

You download the Eclipse Java kit from the actual Eclipse Web site and install it into a local directory. This kind of sucks because it is no longer on the KUbuntu (or Ubuntu) menu and you need to create a shell script in your bin directory to invoke it. You also have to nuke your hidden “.eclipse” folder since the two versions don’t like to play nice. After you start it up though, the XML file opens just like it should. Thinking that it is simply a missing jar file you painstakingly compare the jar files in the Ubuntu distro plugins directory with the local version. A lot more than one are missing. It’s more than 50 and less than 200 which simply aren’t there. More angst. Do you just try to copy them in via sudo, or do they need other files in other parts of the tree?

More frantic Web searching, but now you are searching for Eclipse, Ubuntu, and missing files. If the deities your worship choose to smile on you, one of your searches will lead you to this site:

http://blog.yogarine.com/2009/10/eclipse-plugin-packages-for-ubuntu.html

There you will find someone who really went above and beyond the call. The went out and created debian packages for all of the missing files they could identify, and they did it for the current version of Ubuntu/KUbuntu. In case the blog is not accessible for some reason the source you add to Synaptic is:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/yogarine/eclipse/ubuntu karmic main

Then you need to import his key from the command line:

wget http://www2.yogarine.com/eclipse-ppa.key -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

Finally you can perform the installation from the command line:

sudo apt-get install eclipse-pdt

Something like 111Meg later, your installation completes. This installs a lot more than you need for the tutorial, but everything you need for the tutorial will finally be where it is supposed to be. You find this out when you start up Eclipse from the KUbuntu menu, open the XML file, and see the designer come up.

Whoever Yogarine is, they are awesome!

One thing worthy of note: Even after you apply all of these patches/fixes/missing files, when you click on Help → Software Updates → Find and Install, the process will die with the following:

Network connection problems encountered during search.

Unable to access “http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo”.

Error accessing site stream. [Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd]

Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd

Error accessing site stream. [Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd]

Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd

Unable to access “http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5″.

Unable to access site: “http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5″ [Server returned HTTP response code: “403 Forbidden” for URL: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5.]

Server returned HTTP response code: “403 Forbidden” for URL: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5.

Unable to access site: “http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5″ [Server returned HTTP response code: “403 Forbidden” for URL: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5.]

Server returned HTTP response code: “403 Forbidden” for URL: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5.

Hopefully someone will find a work around for this.