What I’d love is an ice cream party Beer, ice cream, brownie, cookies. Often they feel just a bit too formal and corporate, not really the open source style of fun and agile. Of course… not everyone is the sugar addict that I am. Lots of work hitting me at the weekend means I’ve backslid back to the point of putting sugar on my weetabix. Weaning myself off of that again is going to be painful.

It’s because of a nice new feature called favourites whereby users can signify the filter they like by clicking on a star, rather than have a billion filters rammed down their throat. My filterlist plugin allows similar, but as always it’s a bit of paint on the top while the new change is at the core of things.

More importantly imo is the addition of favourites to dashboards. You can now go searching for others dashboards (if they’ve shared) and select it as a favourite so it appears in your screen.  It’s a bit iffy in that when you start managing your dashboard you get a copy of the default and not just the default as a favourite - bit of a legacy user experience I suspect and I still need to test whether you can get back on the default dashboard whilst still also hooking up to another dashboard (say a product release dashboard etc).

Atlassian also extended their personal license to the JIRA space. At last. We used JIRA to move from KY to WA and it was a happy experience (it was in a private corner of the osjava JIRA… don’t tell Mike et al). Now we can use JIRA to fix up the new house and have such components as ‘Bathroom (Our)’ and release versions of ‘2008-09-14′ - ie) a release each week. It also gives me somewhere to test my plugins, which was getting painful on the 30 day demos.

I started to put both Confluence and JIRA on the machine, but it’s OS X and that means installing a database which is a pain in the arse on OS X. So just JIRA for now on HSQL. Random request to the Atlassian guys - give me a JIRA/Confluence personal license download which integrates the two in a single Tomcat/HSQL. I’m sure it’s not hard to do myself… just lazy

Lastly - there’s an AtlasCamp in November. I’m bummed that I can’t go, but it clashes with ApacheCon and I was already signed up (which thankfully means I don’t have to choose between the old community I belong to, and the new community I like to code in).

Looking up again though - it’s back. Apparently the BBC know that the US are going to sweep the beach volleyball - 23-21, 17-21, 15-4, but NBC are still on the first or second set. Either NBC are lying through their teeth, or I really need to start paying attention to stock market results on the BBC from now on.

So in the US, the US are beating China by 4 medals in a close-run race. GB are down in fifth place, with France and Belarus both appearing high (France in 6th, Belarus in 13th). In G/S/B UK land, we see the US a league behind China by 16 golds, GB are in third (winning the important(???) Ashes against Australia at the moment), France are found down in 11th and Belarus are in lowly 41st.

Removing my own national preference - it’s tricky to decide in the abstract which method is better. A bronze medal could either be a failed gold, in which case 19/22/22 is a terrible score for the US, or it could be a 4th place on paper managing a better performance (or an out of this world performance from an unknown).

It’s easier when comparing the nation’s though. Comparing GB vs France - 11/6/8 vs 4/9/12. The same number, but clearly a happier time this year for GB (so far anyway). China vs US - 35/13/13 vs 19/22/22. Seems hard to me to consider the US ahead on that stat.

In other news… Why GB I wondered? Looking at this Wikipedia page it appears that rather than having the UK and Ireland as two teams, the two teams are GB and Ireland and athletes from Northern Ireland can choose whom they wish to compete for. I wonder if they can go back and forth or if in deciding that they are stuck with that team.

UPDATE: Brain clicked in and I decided to check out the Olympics websitefor the definitive method of sorting. Appears to be G/S/B (with a rank-by-total ordering to the side):

olympics.com

However I’ve a sneaky suspicion that in Atlanta it was the other way around. ie) The host nation ‘owns’ the Olympic site.

Download from the links on the confluence page:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/Filter+List+Plugin

Let’s show Phelps finishing again because who cares about a couple of European’s winning a long distance swimming race (live), and then let’s go to an advert break. No wonder the focus is on short sprints in the US, NBC can’t handle anything that takes longer than 2 minutes of their precious advertising time.

Evenings are filled with packing and driving delicates up to the house. I’m looking forward to it all being over and falling into a deep sleep at the new place.