Another item of conversation today (Carrie was showing me the * Idol in the UK in which someone sings Nessun Dorma) was 1990 and why choosing Nessun Dorma is always a greatly received song in the UK (or is it an English thing?).
Here’s a superb article about why it’s got its own special place in our culture.
As it often does, Jet Set Willy came up in conversation today. For those who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, watch this video from the Yanks can’t wank series.
Came across a very cool site which annotates Pratchett’s books with explanations for some of the phrases. It’s interesting reading through to see the ones I missed.
I was searching for my favourite quote (from Reaper Man):
“LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?”
A colleague of mine has written an article for The Server Side on what the current state of play is for Java WS. Should you use Axis2 or CXF, or stick with the devil you know - ie) Axis1?
Axis, Axis2 and CXF: Surveying the WS Landscape
I guess Bjorn also needs to update it to include the new Spring WS 
Last night I released 2.4 of the Release Status plugin. It continues to be a lot of fun, and user responses on the Atlassian plugin page continue to drive bugfixes. New features were added too.
A couple of new symbols were added to show that you’ve either missed a deadline or completed all your issues - they immediately proved useful as I spent Friday getting to 100% on my work workload just to see the 
and do my part to avoid the 
.
It adds the ability to show a random project - this will be a nice one to put on the Apache front page I think. The only oddity is that sometimes it vanishes when it hits a project that has no versions. Lastly it adds an adaptive mode for the currentuser/alluser toggle. Early in the project it uses alluser, as it gets passed 50% it switches to currentuser to get over the hump, and then as it hits 95% it switches back to alluser to tie up the loose ends. I suspect the inexpertly chosen numbers will need tweaking.
Fun, fun, fun.
This is a minor bugfix release, unless you’re on JIRA 3.10 already in which case it’s bloody essential to stop the nasty Exceptions. Thanks go to Mark Derricutt for reporting this and Vincent Eggen for nudging me to get it fixed.
For more, see the webpage.
I need to hit submit more often and not let the drafts build up. Here’s the ‘Recent Drafts’ list on the RHS of my edit window:
Probably all lots of crap.
With superb timing, the company I left 4 months ago have now been sold (see article at The Times). Must not think about all the unvested share options which could have become cold hard cash.
Looks like Tom Copeland (PMD fame) has followed Ceki G?lc? (log4j fame) in releasing a manual via a small-town publisher. Number one thing I like from the table of contents? Tom’s last chapter lists other open source projects that do similar things. It helps suggest that the book is an open approach to documentation instead of an attempt at marketing. Something to add to the bookshelves.
