I just finished explaining my girlfriend how to use Subversion and thought I'd check up on the status of the GUI clients out there. After some searching, I stumbled into one I had never seen before, and it looks great! It's called SvnX and you can get it from here.

It's very close to what I had been looking for since the beginning. It even offers repository browsing and checkout. Another nice touch is the integration of Apple's FileMerge, which is one of the nicest diff and merge utilities that I have ever seen.

At last I will not have to regret the Bitkeeper GUI tools anymore!

After many months of hard work we finally released Bamboo to the public. It is a Java forum web application that values clarity and ease of use over superflous information and features. It has been running for many months on several high-traffic websites and we have fine-tuned the application after much real-world user and administrator feedback.

The current release candidate has only been fully tested on PostgreSQL, but the final release with also run on other databases.

The installation shouldn't take more than 5 minutes if you already have a database installed, just follow what is described in the documentation. For your convenience, we've recorded all the required installation steps in a step-by-step quicktime movie.

In short, the ready-to-run war archive just has to be deployed in your servlet container. After starting the server, you simply have to access the application and the setup wizard should assist you with all the rest.

If you want to play with Bamboo before installing anything, just go to the demo installation.

We hope you like the forum application we created and welcome any remarks or suggestions you have.

RIFE has been a member project on java.net ever since Sun started the initiative. All this time we were put in the general Java Tool community. Only a little while ago, the Java Enterprise community has been created on java.net. The java.net staff has reparented RIFE under it without any incubation since they consider the project meets their stability requirements (the version number only indicates feature completeness).

Today, Maarten Stolte put the new version of The cAos Foundation website, caosity.org, online. It has been totally built with the RIFE web application framework and integrates other sub-projects like Drone (IRC Bot, Logger and Gateway) and soon also Bamboo (Forums). Here's what Maarten has to say about his experience with the technology:

"Working with RIFE feels very good. You just know it's made by people who have built sites for quite some time, and have been through the same troubles as you have been through. Everything makes alot of sense, and even for someone without prior Java knowledge like me it's pretty easy to get started with."

Glad you like our work Maarten and good luck with the rest of your efforts!

Finally my dual G5 2,5 Ghz 2GB with the 30" screen arrived. It just took a few hours to get all my apps installed, all my data transferred and my environment to be configured to my liking. Initially I feared that the screen would be too big or that the quality would be somehow sub-par. None of this however, the screen nicely spans my sharp visibility range and you can still see most things without having to shift focus too much. The quality is breathtaking. It's really great to code on this screen. The characters on screen almost feel 'solid' and you can put your IDE and browser right next to each other without having to switch desktops. The PowerMac also rocks, the speed increase over my 1Ghz G4 Powerbook and 2Ghz PIV Workstation is present in everything I do. Just for fun I tried setting Unreal Tournament 2004 to 1920x1200 with all details cranked up to the highest level and the game just flies along as if it was the most normal of things. This NVidia card really seems to rock, can't wait for Doom3 and World of Warcraft to come out for Mac.
This is one of the investments I'm most happy with ever, it's been a long time since I sat in front of a new computer and feel really excited about the upgrade.