I’ve seen a few Maven articles and posts that say things along the lines of ‘What’s missing from Ant is all the project management facilities that Maven gives you.’

Bunkum.

Project management capabilities are not ‘missing’ from Ant, any more than advanced avionics features are ‘missing’ from JUnit.

Ant is a build tool. That’s what it was designed to do, and that’s what it does.

I’m still not sure what Maven is. It seems to try to do too much of everything, and not enough of anything. It seems to be a good fit for open source projects where your deliverable is a single library jar, but causes immediate pain when your project needs require you to stray from its predefined notion of how to to structure a project. That, and it’s incessant downloading of unstable ‘SNAPSHOT’ jars of every open source project known to man are what have made me a defiant maven-sceptic.

Great site for all those games from years ago that still remain unsurpassed. If you have never played Starflight or Starflight 2 you don’t know what you’ve missed.

http://www.the-underdogs.org/

Ahh, nostalgia.

My colleague Dan has written his first ever article (probably the first of many) for the JDJ, entitled Test-Driven Development Is Not About Testing.

It was picked up by TheServerSide and promptly hijacked into a discussion about why TDD is a bad way to test software. Hello? Did you read the title?

I hate dieting. I don’t care how how you spin it, its a form of deliberate starvation. Or controlled malnutrition in the case of low carb/high fat diets.

Why do something to yourself that makes you miserable and need quantities of sleep more usually associated with hibernatory creatures?

Just because your clothes no longer fit, you get out of breath walking up stairs and your lifespan is shortened is no reason to give up the privilege of eating vast quantities of easily available food that living in western society affords.

The management would like to apologise for the use of the word ‘naked’ in the previous post. Which if you’re reading this on the main web page is in fact the next post. In which case the management would also like to apologise for using the word ‘naked’ in this apology for the use of the word ‘naked’.

Thank you.

So here I am ripping my CD’s into iTunes and blogging because I’ve got nothing better to do while I’m waiting, and half of them appear to have evaporated. So far I’ve found about 15 empty boxes. I know its been a while since I listened to a lot of them but where the hell are they? Did they feel unloved? Get bored? Take a slow boat to China? Am I going to open a cupboard door in the near future and be felled by a cascade of naked discs?

Come on Sun, when’s 1.5 being released? Java’s boring at the moment, give us something new to play with.

Personally I am looking forward to having fun with all the new concurrency constructs, and I’m hoping that the (mysteriously missing from 1.4) non-blocking form of multicast sockets will make an appearance.

Fascinating. Frequency of blog posts appears proportionally related to current interest level.

And for some reason I appear to have written that last sentence in the style of ‘the architect’ from Matrix Reloaded.

So, there I was in the middle of the world’s most profound blog post ever, when I mistyped a word, and purely by instinct hit ctrl-w, which in IDEA is the shortcut key to highlight a word. Turns out in mozilla its the shortcut key to close the window.

Bollocks.

Downloaded the windows version of iTunes last night. Told a few colleagues about it this morning, who did the same – and we discovered that the windows version also includes the Rendevous-based song sharing capability!

Very cool.