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.

Yesterday, my Maxtor D740X 40GB hard drive starts giving errors and making weird sounds. I go to the Maxtor website and look for the warranty conditions. After having provided the serial number into a form, the website tells me that it's still under warranty until February 2005 and that when I send them the drive, it'll be replaced or repaired.

However, I first have to download, install and run PowerMax which will check my hard drive thoroughly and display an error message number. This is needed, otherwise they wont give out an RMA number. Now, PowerMax is a floppy image that only extracts under windows, so I have to reboot to Windows and search a floppy. Half an hour later I find one tucked way in a box. Then I notice that I even failed to connect the cables for the floppy drive when I installed the PC, so I shut it down, open it, fix the damn thing and boot again. Now I write the image to the floppy and reboot my computer. It launches the disc analysis and half an hour later I know that 6a676678 identifies my personal private hard drive failure.

Now I go through the whole online RMA wizard, since otherwise they wont accept me sending the drive. At the end it's clearly detailed that I have to send them the drive into proper packaging (got knows where I can find what they want) and that it should be sent through a tracable courier like DHL, Chronopost, Fedex, ... and that is all at my expense.

Wooow! Hang on for a minute how much do these drives cost nowadays, let's see Diamondmax Plus8 of 40GB .. dumdiedum ... 53 euro. Now, let's give a call to Chronopost how much it costs to send from Belgium to Ireland ... dumdiedum again ... 63,21 euro!!!

Holy cow, aren't I glad that I have a 2 year warranty on this drive! I can throw it away with the garbage and it's still under warranty!
What a fun way to spend a day.