There's been plenty of positive feedback on the AJUG meeting the other night. Conor and Mike both viewed it as a success. I'm looking forward to going to the next one and meeting a few more people.
Looks like dIon has done a great job pulling Maven's CVS HEAD back into shape, but it may still be a short while off being usable for most projects. The new code has succeeded tremendously at its aim though, bootstrapping with all the plugins in 8 minutes on my home machine using just 16M of RAM - fantastic! Previously it was several hours if I wanted to wait for the swap to thrash through, or about 1/2 hr if I wrote a shell script to re-run maven for each plugin.

I've found other peoples blogs pretty for finding out whats going around the place, so inspired by a presentation from Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian; I thought it might be time to share some opinions of my own.

I think I'll mostly rave on about Java, including my favourite toys like Maven and IDEA. We'll see :)