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20040623 Wednesday June 23, 2004

The First Day Today was a great first day on the new job. I rode my bike in - which took about an hour - and arrived around 10:00. The commute is beautiful - mostly on a bike path, and mostly along a river. It's too bad I won't be doing it more (I'll likely be working from home a lot). Most of the day was spent exploring Blue Glue, source code and the sample apps. I found out that Blue Glue (which is basically a development environment installer and configurer) on Windows has gotten much better since Out-of-the-Box 2.x. Now it skips most of the Windows installers and everything is installed through OpenLogic's Swing app. It was a fun day talking about open source and how things integrate together. I'm not used to talking with folks about my open source experiences and enthusiasm - so it was a nice change.

The best part was when I received my assignment for the next couple of days: upgrade the Maven sample apps to the latest version and enhance one to include build/deployment examples. I'm also responsible for writing documentation on the sample apps for developers who use them. While I'm not a huge Maven fan, I know that some people like it and it'll be cool to create a "how to" for those folks. On the ride home, I realized that I'm really enjoying what I do right now. I'm basically developing and writing for developers. I have no "business" clients per se - most are developers: both with Spring Live and Blue Glue. The downside is that developers tend to be a pretty smart lot - and if I screw up - they'll let me know about it. Oh well, open source rocks - it's cool to be working with it full time.

The worst part of the day was coming home to over 1000 e-mails - from not checking my e-mail all day. I've got a major spam problem since about 200 of those are from mailing lists and I was only interested in 20-30 beyond that. I'm thinking of changing my e-mail address. Rather than adding more junk filters - I need to eliminate the sheer volume - it's choking both Mail.app and Outlook - and I have a 2 MB connection! Posted in General at Jun 23 2004, 09:57:12 PM MDT 5 Comments

Comments:

I am very interested in hearing your views on why you are not a huge fan of Maven. At first, it didn't seem like something that would like but I finally got around to messing with it last weekend and actually starting liking it more and more. I think Maven works very well when you have mulitpule projects that use many of the same depenancies. The repositiory feature is a very handy thing to have in order to organize all of your dependancies in one place, also allowing different versions of the same library. This is a great feature if you use many open source components. Another great feature is the many plugins that Maven comes with. There are many that aren't listed in the documentation. It seems to offer a more organized way of running unit tests and metric tools as well as creating a site (smiliar to Forrest) for your project. Maven also allows you to use Ant tasks, although I haven't gotten that far yet. One of the peculiar aspects of Maven that I noticed is that it uses extensive use of Jelly, a scripting language based on XML syntax. I am a little skiddish about using XML as a scripting language (I'd much rather use a scrpiting language for scripting) but since I haven't writting anything in Jelly, I can not say if this a negative aspect of Maven. Overall, I think Maven has tremendous potential and would be interested in hearing your experiences with it and your new position.

Posted by Dave Keller on June 24, 2004 at 07:27 AM MDT #

I've been using aliencamel.com for about 4 months now and am very happy with their spam and virus filtering (according to their stats, I get about 80% spam). Their inbox is a little small (15MB I think), but I'd bet that will go up soon with all the free email providers increasing their space.

Posted by James A. Hillyerd on June 24, 2004 at 02:16 PM MDT #

I moved to everyone.net a year ago and have been happy. I get 5 accounts (10MB each) for $35/year. They have server side spam filtering, but the virus checker is an add on.

Posted by Ted on June 24, 2004 at 06:39 PM MDT #

I've been using SpamBayes (http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/) as an Outlook plugin for a month or two now, and it has weeded out the spam quite nicely. You might want to give it a try.

Posted by Lee on June 25, 2004 at 12:27 AM MDT #

Just wanted to note that I got an email from AlienCamel... storage went up to 50MB, and will be raised to 1GB in 4 weeks!

Posted by James A. Hillyerd on June 25, 2004 at 09:28 AM MDT #

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Matt Raible is the Lead UI Architect at LinkedIn. The opinions on this site are mine, not my employers.
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