sampa : colin’s blog

Maven 2.0.4: released April 11, 2006
Maven 2.0.5: released February 14, 2007.

I’m really glad Maven 2.0.5 is out, it fixes quite a number of important issues (along with some more more minor stuff and enhancements). But for a tool which should be one of the key enablers of an agile and frequent release process, something seems broken somewhere if it takes 10 months to put out a point release when there are enough issues of this magnitude.

Of course, Maven is mostly built by volunteers, with limited resources. Should it be held to a different (less than ideal) standard because of this? I don’t think so. There first of all seems to be a decent amount of developer activity, but even in the face of more work than time/people to do it, I would argue the project (like any software development activity) when working on bugs and requirements needs to triage the list of things that are worked on, and focus on a regular and more frequent release process. Anything else is ultimately damaging to people’s confidence in using Maven… It’s interesting that on the dev list, as far back as Nov. 2006 there was a thread asking for the release of 2.0.5, with mention of user frustration after no release in more than 5 months, with many serious issues fixed. Bad enough; how did that become 10 months?

So last night I went out trick or treating with my kids and my brother and his son. At one house, the kids collected their goodies and started walking back to the street, and with the door open and the homeowner still standing there, my 5 year old nephew took a look at the Coffee Crisp bar he had received, and yelled out, “Daddy, can you throw this away? It’s hydrogenated!”.

Looks like my brother has been putting the fear of trans-fats into his son…

I’ve used update sites for various Eclipse plugins over the years, but for the most part have manually downloaded and linked to WTP. Now that Callisto is ready, I decided to go the update manager route. After installing a bare Eclipse SDK, I selected the Callisto site, picked the WTP components, BIRT, and all their dependencies, and let it go ahead and download.

After 10 minutes, I found the update manager stuck with a message that it was unpacking a certain .gz file that is part of the download. The dialog was still quite live, so after seeing that nothing was changing (71% completion percentage) I hit cancel. Now the cancel button is greyed out, but nothing else has changed. It looks like I’m going toi have to simply kill the Eclipse process.

Not a great start for Callisto on my system…

Update 2006-7-4: On a 2nd attempt, same story, different archive. org.apache.cactus_1.7.2.v200606181221.jar.pack.gz is stuck. The status bar says 69% forever.

Basing your business around open-source is pretty tough sometimes, but it all becomes worth it when you get a private forum message like this:

“You guys are clowns for making me register to be able to browse your archives.
CLOWNS.” –AnnoyedInSF

Of course, this genius couldn’t figure out that in fact you don’t have to register to view messages on the Spring Forums, nor did he leave a working email address to tell him so. So Mr. AnnoyedInSF at IP address 206.169.112.210, thanks for making my day. The sweat and tears have definitely been worth it.

Irony aside, it’s amazing what a sense of entitlement habitual use of open-source engenders in some people. Considering the huge amount of value they are getting for nothing, would it actually be that big a deal if for some reason access to the Spring Framework forums did require a registration?

There’s already been a decent amount of blogging about Google Calendar (such as this entry), so I’m not going to talk about most features. In general, it’s a pretty powerful, very nice to use (due to extensive use of Ajax) calendar app.

It lacks some key group/multi-calendar related functionality compared to some alternatives such as AirSet though. We’ve been using AirSet for a while now, finding it quite powerful.

What’s nice in airset is that when you are working in one calendar, when you add an entry, you can specify that you wish to have that entry also show up (share it basically) with some of the other calendars (AirSet actually calls calendars ‘groups’, which makes some sense, as they’re really calendars for groups of users). But this is true sharing, the entry is in only one calendar. In Google Calendar, it seems the only thing you can do is copy the entry to that other calendar. Then they are completely separate entries. Changes to one don’t get propagated to the other.
On top of that, AirSet also allows you to in any calendar (group) set it up so it automatically shares events to other calendars (groups). Other calendars can see the events, but not modify them. In this way you can have calendars that have their own events, but also act as aggregators for events from other calendars.
While this kind of functionality may be of little use to somebody managing just their own calendar, it’s very useful for handling calendars in a group scenario. A group can have a calendar focused around a specific type of task, but the event will still show up on other calendars that are meant to group everything together. Even in a family scenario this is very useful, much more powerful than just (what Google allows) having separate calendars, and checking off which ones you wish to see.