Maven RC1 was announced yesterday, as you may have seen. Its well worth the download, with a bunch of bugfixes and the new plugin downloading and dependencies.
The RC cycle will ramp up now with no new features being introduced, and important bugs getting fixed. I'm personally working on integrating some of Jason's new code to fix the memory leak and improve performance for large reactor builds.
I was quite surprised to see a discussion on The Server Side. Its not often I read the discussion threads there, but I think I'll follow this one to see what people are having to say about it.

Maven RC1 will probably be released next week, which rolls up a lot of the recent fixes. There is also a focus on getting the plugins out with a new release each, as they are now on their own release cycle.
One of the useful features is the ability to specify a plugin as a dependency, and Maven will automatically download and install it.

I've been listening to "The Official Fiction" by Something for Kate for a couple of weeks, and I highly recommend it. A very consistent sounding album with some catchy songs. Deja Vu is definitely one of the best songs on the album, but I can't fault any of them.
I was interested to see google searches in my referrers today. Checked them out for curiosity and it seems I now top the listings in a vanity search for "Brett Porter"... but now I'm wondering who was looking for me :)

I can't believe I'm still discovering neat new things in IntelliJ. Ok, so that's partly to do with not having done a lot of development since I got it, which is unfortunate.
Some of the things I've been discovering today are:

• The stats in the console window for Junit tests


• those inheritance annotations in the left nav that helps you navigate your hierachy


• showing the top of a scope just above the top of the window when at the bottom and it has scrolled off


• the annotation of comments as thin gray bars in the right nav - good for locating big chunks of commented out code :)

I'd recommend checking them out. Build 915 is much more stable than 908, and they have several new features over the 800's - I wonder if they are getting close to a release? (we get free upgrades until the end of September, so I hope so! :)
I still can't seem to get the hotswapping to work (not that I use it often) though, nor the error reporting through the proxy. That's a shame because there are a couple of errors I have noticed.

I've been playing with DBUnit recently, and it is pretty much everything I was looking for.
I'm surprised I hadn't heard about this earlier among all the other *Units. dIon gave a neat little demo of it at SJUG last month, including the always important availability of a Maven plugin that he wrote.
Goodbye 2000 line test database setup code! :) Now I just navigate the site generating test data in real time on a clean database, and then run maven dbunit to generate the XML. To update, put it back in the original state with dbunit:import-dataset then repeat, or just edit the XML by hand. Very nice.