I try to keep this weblog as much about development as I can and not so much personal but I had to share this. Today I bought my first R/C vehicle in probably 20 years. I'm running it with a PowerMax 3300 NiMH 6 Cell battery pack. With this battery I get about 40 MPH. I bought two batteries so I'd have a bit less time between runs. I ran it twice today and it was a blast.

For the second time 3 days Ubuntu (8.04) has given me the partial upgrade request. The first time it happened I posted a thread and it had to do with dependencies not making it to the repositories at the same time. You can read about it in the thread I linked.

Now it's happening again.







Looking at the list of updates there are a bunch of OpenOffice items that are unchecked. I'm going to wait a day or so before trying to update again. I don't want to deal with the same things I had to the first time. Luckily it resolved itself quickly enough. I just hope this doesn't become a common thing with Ubuntu.

The first Release Candidate for Stripes 1.5 was released today. You can download it from here.

The development team believes this release to be production ready and only expect minor bugs to be found during this RC period. For a full list of changes since 1.4.3 see here

Last night I needed a way to quickly convert a large amount of pom dependency syntax into Ivy dependency syntax. A quick google search didn't reveal much so instead of wasting time searching deeper I wrote my own. I don't claim this to be perfect in any way. I wrote it as quickly as possible. Feel free to use it, modify it, or whatever.

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A friend of mine is getting ready to release an open source project and needed a quick way to put a common comment block at the beginning of every java file. I thought this would be a good chance for me to brush up on Groovy's slick File tricks and support. Yes, I know this has been done before and probably in Groovy as well, but it was a fun exercise. I would like some suggestions on how to make it better/leaner?

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