The Goldfish Chronicles

Matt Raible recently posted about Artifactory, another M2 repo manager/proxy/visualizer in addition to Archiva and Proximity (and various public ones like mvnregistry(url not responding), mavenregistry(url not responding) and searchj.org). One of the quoted comments is that Archiva is Alpha/doesn’t work/feels dead etc - and I’ll completely agree with that. Recent events have taken away the time I was spending on Archiva (documenting and small bugfixes), but my general view is that you shouldn’t get tied to any of these things until there is an actual release. So apart from playing, I would be hesistant to ever be committed to something that was built from SVN.

Looking at Artifactory, I’m not that impressed (don’t take that as defence of Archiva, I’m not strongly impressed there either). It was very slow to start, mostly because its repository browser is at the filesystem level I’m guessing and very widgety. This is a mistake in my opinion, the fact that the repository exists at the filesystem level doesn’t mean we have to view it that way. HTTP Server can take care of that quite happily if that’s the feature you need. It does however view the repositories as separate elements. Archiva rolls them all into one, and that I don’t like (as an ex-manager of England liked to say).

My use case for these tools is a bit different from many I suspect - I don’t care about the proxy stuff, I want something to help me look at a repository. Visualization. The search works well enough in Artifactory. I’m looking at it in Opera, so clicking on the item itself is buggy - and it’s just a dump of the pom. So still a lot needed there feature-wise. Archiva - if you can get it working has some nice info when you get down to the artifact level.

And that’s it from the user/visualization point of view. There’s a Security menu, but its greyed out (minor bug… grey out the menu too). All in all, there’s not a lot here feature wise. Quality wise is of course another matter. Archiva has problems running on the central repository (or did… maybe they’re fixed? OutOfMemory issues), but I doubt that this would feel usable against the central repository either.

(Note, I used their online demo as mentioned in Matt’s blog. I haven’t looked at their actual released version)

Looks like the House of Lords will be all elected. I don’t want to say that inheritance is the right way for a second house, but I don’t see any value in a second house if it has the same structure as the first one. Maybe if the voting system is different - ie) keep the House of Commons geographical and make the House of Lords completely non-geographical. People can vote for someone to go into the House of Lords from a big list of 6,000 or however many people stand for it. Otherwise it’s a waste of time and we should call it House of Commons A and House of Commons B.

I happened to be on my old Win laptop and clicked on the onjava.com bookmark. Not a site I’ve looked at recently. I opened a few articles and the size of the adverts was a little surprising - trust me, there’s an article on Derby somewhere down the page. I can only hope it’s a technical error.

I downloaded a version of The Venice Project sometime back onto my rarely used Windows XP laptop. Started it up, adapted to the interface, looked through the content, found only really one bit of content that I liked which was a Green Day video, so I sat and watched that while working on the Mac. Good news is that it worked pretty happily on my underpowered graphics card. Things were a bit choppy, but I put that down to network rather than the machine.

I enjoyed watching that, especially given that I only have 20 channels of cable and they’re complete crap. I didn’t turn it on again, mostly because I didn’t get any feeling that there would be new content. I recently upgraded to the Joost install and yes, there wasn’t much new content. One has to feel that the BBC/YouTube deal is a big loss for Joost. The advertising was the same each time - for chewing gum of some kind.

However…. there’s a however to this story. I watched the one video concerning Green Day performing American Idiot in concert. It’s an album I’d heard of but never bothered with. I liked it - so I bought it from Amazon for whatever cost it was ($10->$15). In fact it’s my “live life” album at the moment to enthuse me into doing things (James’ Laid is my “life sucks” album for when I cba to do anything).

So on that level of things, Joost is a success. I watched one video. I spent $10 because of it.

One idea I’d noted down recently to work on was a JIRA plugin for putting static HTML on the front of a JIRA. It seemed like a pretty useful thing to have - a versatile way for an admin to hack a solution on quickly rather than coding something. I scribbled down my notes…

* HTML portlet. Let's you put bits of hardcoded HTML onto the page.
This allows for adding nice links to things, and pretty much anything
else you want. It could be done as a bookmark system a la Roller, but
that would mean doing webwork in the admin screen I think.

“Yes”, I thought, “the Introduction portlet could be used for that, but that doesn’t make much semantic sense and you’d be limited to just the one”. “Such a simple idea”, thought I, “it’s a wonder it’s not been done before. “.

Obviously that should have been a great big warning sign right there. Fortunately I didn’t spend anymore time on it… then while doing a JIRA upgrade last night I happened to click on the Portlets Plugin and saw that accompanying the 16 enabled plugins was a lonely disabled plugin named “Text (text)”, with a description of “Display any text, formatted as HTML.”.

So, if, at the beginning of this post, the idea of a HTML portlet sounded good for whatever hackish need you have, go and enable this plugin and have at it.