Mun CS Games Winter 2011 Singles Competition!

Each Fall and Winter at Memorial University's Computer Science Department an ACM rules programming competition is held for their students. In the spring of 2010 I attempted to boost student interest by providing some prizes, this went over very well for all involved. Last Fall I continued the gesture, and this Winter continue it again.

The prizes!!!

The third place prize is being sponsored by IDBlue. The prize pack consists of a copy of Java Pocket Reference, a copy of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, a Mun water bottle, a Mun market bag, and a Mun pen:

The second place prize is being sponsored by Nomadica Group. The prize pack consists a copy of IEEE Spectrum magazine, a copy of Challenges for Game Designers, a copy of Project Management Secrets, a DVD of the movie War Games, a Mun water bottle, a Mun market bag, and a Mun pen.

The first place prize is sponsored by Jon Anstey. This prize pack consists of a copy of Camel in Action (personally auto graphed by the co-author himself!), a Mun water bottle, a Mun market bag, and a Mun pen.

Some lucky runners up will receive a loot bag containing a Mun pen and chips - yes bags of chips! We are that awesome!!!

The Winter 2011 CS Games (Singles) are tentatively scheduled for February 25th, 2011, in room EN2036 at 5pm to 7:30pm. There is a sign up sheet in the CS department head office, please contact them if your interested in competing - seats are limited (CS students only). When a link to the information regarding competition rules, and other details becomes available I'll update this post.

Apache Karaf 2.1.4 Released!

After several attempts trying to get the new Scalate based web site to update, the Karaf team is pleased to announce the availability of Apache Karaf 2.1.4.

This release of Apache Karaf is based off of the 2.1.x series branch, representing an update to Apache Karaf 2.1.3. It contains several bug fixes identified in the prior release, and introduces several improvements including; better behavior of the features-maven-plugin, documentation for making multiple configuration files available to the bundle context, and a more efficient bundle description for header display.

To help make the transition from Apache Karaf 2.1.0/2.1.1/2.1.2/2.1.3 to 2.1.4 easier I've put together the following table of changed dependencies:

Artifact	Karaf 2.1.0	Karaf 2.1.1	Karaf 2.1.2	Karaf 2.1.3	Karaf 2.1.4
jetty.bundle.version	6.1.22_2	6.1.25_1	6.1.25_1	6.1.25_1	6.1.25_1
junit.bundle.version	4.7_1	4.7_2	4.7_2	4.7_2	4.7_2
slf4j.version	1.4.3	1.4.3	1.4.3	1.5.8	1.5.8
spring.version*	3.0.3	3.0.4	3.0.4	3.0.5	3.0.5
pax.exam.version	1.2.2	1.2.2	1.2.2	1.2.3	1.2.3
pax.url.version	1.1.3	1.1.3	1.2.1	1.2.4	1.2.4
pax.web.version	0.7.3	0.7.3	0.7.4	0.7.4	0.7.4

*RELEASE version

For more information please see the release notes.

It's Friday night; Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

Pinky:  Uh, I think so, Brain, but why would I pour a bottle of wine into the Computer?
...

Well it IS Friday night and I am here pondering getting the Apache Karaf 2.1.4 release candidate process going. There has been a number of updates to the Karaf infrastructure so lets review them before we dive into the release candidate fun!

First off, the main Karaf web site is now powered by Scalate. This means that instead of editing a wiki page in place then saving it to publish, we now check out the site source code, edit and review it (in our editor of choice), then deploy it to website. See the 'how do I edit the website' page for more details.

The project's JIRA instance has now been upgraded to Altassian JIRA 4.2.2 by the Apache Infrastructure team. The new interface takes a little time to get used to, but it's soo much faster to use than before :)

Finally, we've added to the Hudson build profile a Karaf view. This simplifies the process of finding out the current build status of Apache Karaf's various versions.

Now that the above has been discussed, lets look at some changes to the Apache Karaf Release Guide. There have been two recent additions to the guide; the first regarding community awareness, and the second on publishing the Karaf manual.

To help communicate with the Karaf community more effectively we have established a procedure that we hope will help keep users & developers aware of new branches being created, and their status as they go towards a release. Generally these things are discussed on the project IRC channel, however that is not prominent enough to reach the whole community, so we'll now send out update or notice emails to our user/dev lists.

Now that we're moved to a Scalate based web site we now have a new procedure for generating our manual. This new system should help us improve the quality of our documentation by linking the manual to Karaf versions instead of packaging the old wiki's manual pages. Please note that this takes affect for Karaf version 2.2.x and higher.

Well, this is all neat. So let's get to the good part - the next Karaf iteration! Yes, lets move on to karaf 2.1.4 Release Candidate. We began discussing the status of 2.1.4 earlier this week on the dev email list; we have since then reviewed the reported JIRA issues and decided that this may be a good time to cut an RC. Issues that have not been resolved have been moved forward to 2.1.5, so I'll now start the process of updating the release notes for in-kit inclusion. This will be the first release with all the new infrastructure changes, so I'm hoping all will be clear sailing :)