Shortly after taking up mountain biking two years ago, I bought myself a GPS – a Garmin Edge 705. I had been using an iPhone app before that but soon found that it quickly drained my battery. I didn’t want to be out in the woods and not know where I was or be able to call somebody. That’s why I decided to get a dedicated GPS device. Or at least that’s how I justified getting a new expensive toy…

Once I had the Garmin I started uploading my mountain biking rides on Garmin Connect, as well as tracking my exercise on DailyMile.com. Additionally I was looking at my rides using Garmin BaseCamp and Google Earth to see how things looked in 3D!

At some point I bought a copy of Desktop GIS but I don’t remember when or why I did that. I remember going through some of the examples but eventually losing interest and finding the software they used to be very buggy.

The main place I started out mountain biking at was Graham Hills Park in and some members of the Westchester Mountain Biking Association were asking for an updated map of Graham. Since I own Adobe Illustrator I decided to take a stab at making something that looked good using the GPS tracks, print outs, hand drawn maps and Google Maps and Google Earth.

It was well received and I ended up working with Westchester County Parks to put together an official map. You can download the final map here: http://wmba.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/graham-hills-park.pdf

At the end of last summer another trail project was starting up. This time it was the New York – New Jersey Trail Conference working with the WMBA on some multi-use trails up in Yorktown called the Yorktown Community Trails. I offered to help out with the maps of those parks and have been working on them the last few months.

One of the painful parts of using Adobe Illustrator for making maps is getting images/screenshots from various applications and sites to line up correctly. Once that’s done tracing trails is fairly easy. I have things organized into several layers to make it easier to manage styles, colors and layer order. Another painful step is getting contour lines into Illustrator. On top of aligning everything correctly, it can be quite time consuming and wrist stiffening to trace all the contour (height) lines that make a hiking/biking map more useful. To cap it all off, all these lines are just that – lines. They have no data associated with them. Nothing about the trail name, length, height or difficulty level. So I started looking at GIS again to see if it could help me produce equal quality maps that also contained data which I could use to style the maps.

I started by taking a course on GIS by the GIS masters (or at least the giant), ESRI. ESRI produces a number of GIS applications and they are all insanely expensive for somebody doing volunteer work in their spare time. But they have a 60 day trial of their software so I figured I might as well see what all the hoopla was about. I put several hours into Getting Started with GIS and ended up getting a 100% on the final exam. Woo! Go me! It was an insightful course and definitely taught me a number of things.

I had to keep in mind that the software is several thousand dollars so I needed to check out some cheaper alternatives. I’m a Mac user so it reduces the number of available applications a bit. After playing with a number of different applications (from expensive to free) I’ve settled on Quantum GIS. It’s a free multi-platform GIS application that supports a good number of features and is also extensible using Python or C++.

I’m still figuring out my map making workflow, but it currently goes something like this:

1. Pick the park I want to make a map of
2. Collect GPS data of trails from the park (either by riding their myself or finding routes online at places like Garmin Connect)
3. Combine the GPS data using GPSBabel
4. Load the GPS tracks into Quantum GIS
5. Use the OpenStreetMap plugin to get roads, areas and points of interest from the surrounding area for reference (and for street data)
6. Use U.S. Geological Survey’s Earth Exporer to find heightmaps for the park area.
7. Use the Clipper plugin to trim the heightmap data to the area of interest (this makes QGIS work faster since I don’t have a bunch of data I don’t care about)
8. Use the Contour plugin to generate contour lines. I sometimes generate them ever 5 meters and every 25 meters. This lets me make the 25 meter ones a little bolder for easier reference.
9. Create a new Vector (Lines) layer in which I refine the GPS tracks into discernible, named trails with blaze color information.

So far I’ve gotten my QGIS maps to look pretty close to the ones I’ve made in Illustrator.

There’s still plenty to figure out. Some of the things I still need to work on are:

• Figuring out how Map Units work in QGIS so I can
• Generate things like trail length and a working Scale Bar
• Use symbols for Bridges that scale correctly with the size/zoom level of the map
• Figure out how to turn heightmap data in meters into feet (assuming the map should use feet instead of meters)
• Master the vector editing tools.

I’ve been bringing some of my older, less relevant computer books in to work. I figured somebody might be able to make use of them and some of them are worth lending out to people.

I did a decent amount of mountain biking this month, though I haven’t checked my weight in a while. There were a lot of good season opening rides this month that had a lot of people riding.

It started with a ride at Stewart Airport on the way up visiting Kim’s family in Albany. One of the guys on the Stewart ride suggested we check out a trail in Albany which we ended up doing and having a lot of fun riding and exploring. We even brought Kim’s brother-in-law Paul along for the ride and he seemed to like it a lot.

Unfortunately by the time we got back home I discovered a tick on my leg. We removed it and my doctor put me on antibiotics in case it was a deer tick. I seem to be fine and don’t show any signs of lyme’s disease but those antibiotics were not enjoyable. They were not kind to my guts or my energy level.

I went up for a small amount of trail work in Yorktown, which consisted of putting in a kiosk at one of the trail heads. You can see a sped up version of it here:

Another fun and popular ride was at Cunningham Park in Queens. I brought my camera and got a few good shots of people having fun.

I’m finally also getting back to my first park, Graham Hills Park. I’ve been there about 4 times in just the last week.

The IMBA Trail Care Crew was in the area (hosted by NYCMTB) running some classes on Land Management, Mountain Biking Benefits and Trail Building. I video taped two of the presentations and got some time lapse footage of the work we did in Highbridge Park. Those will be up eventually, as they are all pretty large movie files. Working in Highbridge makes me definitely want to ride there soon. It’s a bit intimidating!

My friend Bert let me try out his 29er at one of the Graham rides. It certainly made some sections easier to roll through but I’m still up in the air about what kind of bike I want to get next.

One of the things my Uncle left me was a Gibson Corvus electric guitar. It was something he was always having me check eBay for cause he thought he might get a decent amount of money for it. Well he’d be happy to know I got a decent chunk of change for it finally. I ended up bringing it to the new guitar shop in town called Rock Island Sound and they managed to fix it up and sell it on ebay. I’ll be using that money to help get a new iMac that I’ll be using for recording songs.

The rumor is that the new iMacs will be coming out tomorrow, so hopefully that means I can do some new, fresh recording this weekend. I’m glad I took the time to save up for it because I’ll have the newer model and be able to bump up the specs on it a little bit.

I’ve also decided to drop Game Development as a goal for this year and focus on song writing and recording. It’s a much more rewarding way to spend my time.

Except for a single minor post (Sharing Code across Velocity Templates in Anthill Pro), I haven’t done much with my new blog.

I’m still working my way though Agile in a Flash and the interaction of now both authors have made it a fun and insightful experience.

I recently discovered an option in the Pomodoro App I use that let’s you add your Pomodoros to iCal. These allows me to easily review just what I was working on during the week.

My birthday was this month and Kim got me the book Personal Kanban which I’m trying to pair with The Pomodoro Technique. I’ve only done it for a few days, so it’s hard to tell how/if it fits at work right now.

Kim and I also gave it a try at home to get through a bunch of tasks we needed to accomplish in anticipation of my parents staying with us for a bit. It worked out pretty darn well though, somewhat ironically, my parents didn’t end up staying with us. They will in another couple weeks though, so perhaps will put our home Kanban board to use once again.

Another tool I’m giving a try is the iPad app Awesome Note. I got this for Kim a while back but never really used it myself. I decided to give it a try for the various projects and hobbies I’m involved with. It’s a little nicer than Things in the sense that it makes things feel a little more organic and energetic. May should help show if it’s useful for helping me get things done and figuring out new goals and passions.

An upgrade issue left me unable to attend DevOps Days Boston, which bummed me out a little bit, but I at least ended up selling my ticket to somebody else.

At work somebody introduced me to Sinatra, which is a Ruby DSL for building simply dynamic web sites and Heroku, a service for hosting Ruby web apps.. I put this together with Markdown (which I discovered doing the Maven book) and created http://notes.buildndeploy.com/, which I’m using to write up and share notes I make about various languages, technologies and tools.

I ended up registering www.buildndeploy.com and moving that site from WordPress to Posterous since they don’t charge you for custom domain names. I’ve also been getting rid of domain names I no longer need and moving the ones I’m keeping to keep to DNSimple, a cheaper and infinitely better alternative to GoDaddy. Between the notes site and the main site I’ve gotten a decent amount done with this effort.

My mountain bike map of Graham Hills Park was finally signed off on and is now availale: http://wmba.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/graham-hills-park.pdf

I’ve been steadily saving for a new iMac but slowed down my savings just a little bit when rumors started popping up about them coming out with new models in June or July. I had originally targetted forgetting one in April. Lately the buzz has been saying late April/early May. Either way, I should have enough put aside to get a nice iMac.

In the middle of March Kim and I attended PAX East with her sister, brother-in-law and my friend Dan and his girlfriend (also named Kim). The highlight of the show was seeing Jonathan Coulton play which really got me thinking about writing music again. I’ve started noodling around on my guitar more and recording some ideas in the back room of the apartment, which I’ve been doing a lot of clean up on.

JoCo’s lyrics got me thinking about opening myself up to writing about what I know more. I also realized that while I’ve treated programming as something I should always try and read and learn more about, I’ve never treated music that way – I always felt like songs should come from some inherent, untrained magical ability. I realized this was a stupid notion and picked up the book Writing Better Lyrics, as well as a thesaurus and a rhyming dictionary. The thesaurus has been pretty neat and interesting to flip through. I’ve been making an effort to do Object Writing every morning as suggested by the lyrics book. I’m about 12 days in with a couple of missed days here and there. I’ve also been working on “worksheets” for my songs to try and cultivate more lyrics and ideas for them.

Just today I dropped off my electric guitar and bass at the new guitar shop in Tarrytown called Rock Island Sound to get them set up and have their electronics checked out. I also put two other guitars on consignment since I never use them. That helps clear out the back room some more and hopefully bring in a little extra cash. I might use that to get one of the pretty guitars they have there though…

Yesterday I put a lot of time into rearranging our bedroom. I moved the bed to the back of the room by the windows instead of off to the side. This makes the room and space for each of us symmetrical. I also got rid of the big computer desk I’ve had for probably 10 years. I want something simpler and easier to move. The big desk had to be taken completely apart just to move it to another room. I’m not interested in dealing with it anymore.

I’m still using Google Voice for texting but am pretty disappointed in the iPhone App for it. It’s always hanging and crashing and the UI can be quite flakey fairly often. I also ended up going over my new data limit this month for the iPhone so it almost negated the savings on the cheaper text and data plan. This month should be better.

Another daily (workday) habit I’ve been doing is reading a card from the Agile in a Flash card deck and reflecting on it via Twitter. I’ve even engaged with the author himself, Tim Ottinger, on Twitter, asking questions, getting feedback and generally being challenged to think more and do them each day.

In the money/budget category… well, my budget was a little shaky towards the end of the month, but overall I think it was okay. One of the smarter buying choices I made this month was passing on getting an AirPort Extreme and just buying a NetGear WAP using the Best Buy gift certificate my brother got me for Christmas. (Update: The day after this post I saw this article which some might be interested in: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/04/04/is-the-airport-extreme-worth-the-price/)

I only managed to get out on my mountain bike twice this month, and that was two days in the same weekend. The weather was less than agreeable in the beginning of the month but there were a few days here and there I should’ve gotten out on my bike but just didn’t. I need to step that up in April. Getting my gear in order and ready to go (especially for evenings) would be a big help. I’ve been considering thinking about getting an actually single speed mountain bike and a couple of friends have suggested getting a 29er, so I’ve been looking at bikes likes the Trek/Fisher Marlin Single Speed. No solid plans yet on that front though.

The lack of riding this month also means a lack of losing any weight :-/

The game designing and mapping have taken a back seat lately, so I ended up removing those categories from my Google Reader account. It was becoming a burden to keep up with them so I decided it was best to just remove them. Another small amount of simplification I’ve made in my online life is shutting off email notifications from Facebook. I’ve found this helps make it less distracting and results in less email to clean up after.

I was thinking this was another dud month as far as progress and accomplishments are concerned, but after seeing all I’ve written about above I feel pretty good about it.

• February was my first real budget test. Overall I did alright, with a few items going over a little bit, but enough were under to keep things even. I started making a list of things that I could do to help reduce my spending even more.
• We brought our restaurant spending down, but I think we can do even better next month. I think we gave in to restaurant meals too early in the month.
• I removed/reduced a few features on my cell phone account, so that brings it down by $20. I think next month I will remove texting all together and bring it down another $10. I’ve switched to using Google Voice for texting.
• I’m going to slow down the savings to a new computer, mainly because Apple might be announcing new iMacs in June. I was planing to buy one in April.
• I’m putting money towards “buying a house” but I also need to start putting some towards an emergency fund. That’s something I need to sort out.
• I should look for some ways to bring in a little extra cash to put towards savings.
• I’ve been working with the desk I have instead of buying a new one, but I really need to get a new chair. I don’t have any comfortable desk chairs so it makes my time at the desk limited and uncomfortable.
• Not much in the way of mountain biking this month. The weather has sucked (lots of snow). We did manage to get out a couple of times to ride on the street/sidewalk, though.
• I posted two blog posts on http://buildndeploy.wordpress.com/ and have been working to interact with people on Twitter. Ideally I’d be posting once a week, so perhaps I need to start breaking up the post ideas I’m working on.
• I started work on a “book” and am learning/using Maven to do it. I also have another idea for a “book” and am considering doing a PragProWriMo in March to accomplish it.
• Spent a little bit of time looking at cloud computing. Set up an Amazon EC2 account and also gave http://cloudbees.com/ a try, which I’m digging.
• I put in for attending two conferences at work. One is about DevOps and the other is about Continuous Integration. They’re both in the next couple of months.
• Still slacking on the exercise and am starting to feel pretty cruddy about it. Need to find the motivation to step that up.
• Not much progress in the lighter living department this month. Just a few minor trimmings here and there. I’m still considering digitizing my music collection to make my CD collection take up less/no space. I did group my CDs alphabetically by artist the other but now I need to sort each grouping. Very time consuming, but if I’m going to rip them I think it makes sense to do them alphabetically.

For March I need to get back to biking, keep working on my career and watch my budget.

• I set up a budget for myself that will have its first real run in February.
• I increased my 401k contribution.
• I started saving for a new computer.
• I’ve gotten rid of several speakers that were taking up a lot of space.
• I’ve gotten rid of some old electronics like a TV, my original Xbox and some other things.
• I shredded a ton of old papers, bills, etc.
• I’ve avoided buying  any new music, movies, TV shows, apps and books, mostly due to budget and having things to finish already.
• I haven’t gotten a new desk (due to the budget) but I cleaned up the big one I have and have been good at keeping it clean and ready to use.
• We’ve been buying groceries to make dinner (with Kim) more and eating out much less.
• I’ve been buying and eating just oatmeal for breakfast.
• I put together a compilation mountain biking video for my friend Bert for this birthday.
• I’m continuing to work on maps for a new set of hiking and mountain biking trails in the Yorktown area.
• I started a blog for my career endeavors and made a few posts already: http://buildndeploy.wordpress.com/
• I started a Twitter account for my career endeavors: http://twitter.com/#!/buildndeploy

In the exercise department, I’ve only gone running once so far and haven’t been biking yet this year. It’s been pretty cold and we’ve gotten a lot of snow this month, so I’m okay with how much I exercised in 2011.

The only thing I haven’t made any progress on yet is Game Development. Not unless you count playing the Xbox 360 as “research”.

I’m pretty pleased with what I’ve gotten done so far and looking forward to seeing what else I can accomplish in February. I’m almost excited to see how my budget works out and then will review at the end of the month and make additional adjustments.

Lighter Living

Although I do need to lose weight again (see next goal) this is about reducing the clutter and physical objects in my life. I’m not entirely sure where the drive is coming from, but I feel like I need to reduce the amount of stuff I have. I’ve already started making some progress by getting rid of a few things and putting side things I want to sell or donate.

There’s a pretty big list of things to get rid of, but summarized they are:

• get rid of unused game/RPGS
• get rid of aging, unused musical equipment
• get rid of unused electronics
• get rid of outdated/irrelevant computer books
• consider digitizing my entire CD/DVD collection and getting rid of the cases
• prefer digital copies of music, movies and books over physical copies
• switch to a simpler, lighter, cleaner work desk

Losing Weight

At some point last year I managed to get myself down to around 190. But due to less biking, less exercise and probably some bad eating habits, I’m back up to around 215. So I need to make a stronger effort to get my weight back down. My ultimate goal is 180 but I’m first going to shoot for 195 by the middle of the year. To accomplish this I need to:

• watch/limit my calorie intake (using Lose It! On the iPhone)
• avoid snacking on bad foods, like cookies…
• more mountain biking (see below)
• some other form of exercise when I can’t bike (most likely running)
• maybe getting back to yoga

Mountain Biking

I feel like I had an okay year of mountain biking this year. I don’t think it was quite as good as my first year perhaps. I want to step it up again.

My mountain biking goals for this year will be:

• get out to ride more, at more locations and more diverse trails
• work on my mountain biking skills
• lead more rides via Meetup.com, including evening rides
• volunteering for more trail maintenance
• creating quality maps for trails in my area
• maintain or improve my bike repair skills
• make more/better mountain biking videos
• demo lots of different bikers

Game Development

Last year I got back into game development a little bit. The release of the Unreal Development Kit had me exploring bringing an old Marble Madness inspired project back to life. Frustration with UnrealScript and the UDK development cycle got me looking at the Unity engine instead. I made an investment in books about Unity, Blender and Game Design/Development in general. It’s always been an interest of mine and I’d like to finally develop something to fruition. The goal here is to release a playable, finished, quality game.

Career Development / Involvement

My IT career has gone through several different areas: technical support, building computers and networks, system administration, graphic design, web design, web development, technical lead and software architecture. I am now the Build & Deploy Architect in the Infrastructure team at my company and it’s a good fit for me. I work at automating and improving processes, removing human error, creating standards and generally trying to improve things. This feels like a good place for me and I want to start working at some real goals for it. A long term goal is writing a book that guides developers through a number of practices such as version control, scripted builds, continuous integration, scripted deployments, unit testing and source code analysis. But before that I think I need to get some real experience under my belt. So some goals to get me there include:

• creating a build monitor at work and making it publicly visible
• going to more conferences
• communicating with the different groups I work with more (developers, qa, operations, infrastructure, support, managers)
• create and maintain a blog with articles and examples

So there are my goals for 2011. Reading it over makes it seem like a lot but there are 12 months in the year and I’ve already taken steps towards a number of my goals, so I feel like they’re doable.

I got my Garmin GPS back in August of 2009 and according to my Garmin Connect account I’ve logged 91 rides and 700 miles since then. I’m sure there are a few that are missing due to a dead battery or import problems.

I started using DailyMile back in September of 2009 and so far have logged 703 miles and burned 475 donuts! (they have neat stats!) DailyMiles really is a great site and I think people should check it out for recording all kinds of exercising activities. I track my biking and yoga on there.

My technical skills have been progressing a little slow but I’ve been purposely cautious so I don’t hurt myself. I love the sport so I’d hate to be knocked out of it for too long. I do want to step up my technical skills which means I need to step up how much I’m riding and pushing myself a little bit more.

I’ve also gotten involved in my local mountain biking group, the Westchester Mountain Biking Assocation. In fact, the link to their site is a newly organized site I put together in WordPress. The design is a WordPress theme, so I can’t take credit for that.

I’ve also been working on a mew map of Graham Hills Park using Adobe Illustrator which is very close to being finalized. I may tackle a map for Sprain Ridge Park next, but I want to wrap up the Graham one first. I dabbled a bit in some GIS and Cartography applications but am not sure that’s something I want to put too much more effort into. I’ll see what I feel like once the Graham map is finished. Still, it’s really nice to hear that my map has helped get emergency services to people more efficiently or helped new people enjoy the park more.

The newest project I’m involved in is a new set of trails being planned in Yorktown. So far this has mostly just been physical labor, but I’m okay with that. I’ve been reading up on cr

eating mountain biking trails, so I’m hoping that knowledge will become helpful in this project. There are some more experienced people involved so I’m ready to take a back seat and just learn what I can from the experience.

My friend Kate got me into yoga a few months ago and I feel like that has been helping me out in a few different ways. I should really step up how much I go though, because I need to take better advantage of my membership.

My weight has gone back up a bit since it was down to 193 and I need to make some stronger efforts to get it back down again. I’m not up at 240 again, but it felt nicer to look at myself when I was under 200. Hopefully stepping up the biking and the yoga (and lowering my calorie intake) will help me get back down.

In July, Kimberly and I competed in the Columbia Muddy Buddy which was a two person team race where you trade off mountain biking and running, along with a number of obstacles including a giant mud pit at the end. This was a lot of fun and required me to take up running for a bit – something I hadn’t done since high school! In our group we placed 10 out of 29 teams and placed approximately in the middle of the 400+ teams that participated. We both felt that was pretty good for our first time competing in an event like this.

spilth.org has been sitting on WordPress for quite a while now and the blog portion of the site will continue to be hosted there via http://blog.spilth.org/. The main host/domain (http://www.spilth.org/) is now handled by http://flavors.me/ which aggregates data from a number of different sites I use and combines them into a nice little design. I stumbled across it today and was impressed with how quickly I could set something up. It’s like friendfeed meets tumblr but much slicker and prettier.

I was checking out the different services that flavors.me supported and decided to give http://soundcloud.com/ a try for hosting my songs. So far I’m impressed with their service as well.

Photos are still on flickr. Videos are still on vimeo. Tweets are still on Twitter. And I still really like last.fm.

I decided to dump/ignore wikia for now since I don’t ever use it. I’ve lost interest in a bunch of sites like foursquare, 43 Things, blip.fm, etc, so I decided to remove the links to all those profiles and make the blog a lot simpler. I may try one of the other WordPress these, though, since this one is devoid of even search or categories.

I had heard of the technique before, as well as the Pragmatic Programmer book Pomodoro Technique Illustrated. Thanks to fellow geek Rachel Ober I was made aware of the free Pomodoro book, which I promply downloaded into the Books folder of my DropBox account making it seamlessly available on my work computer, laptop and iPhone without thinking.

I read through the first chapter to get a quick idea of how it’s done and gave it a try today. It went very well (I completed 8 pomodoros!) which I think is pretty good for my first stab. The experience didn’t come with out some revelations.

I had to curb my email checking

I had to shut off my email alerts. The little “ding” sound was just too distracting to hear every few minutes.  I could just close my email client but it’s Outlook and takes too much time to start up every time.

I had to curb my instant messaging

I had to shut off audio alerts for IM as well. Within 5 minutes of starting my first Pomodoro I got IMs from 5(!) people. It was really tempting to flip back to my IM client to see what people wanted but I managed to ignore them for another 20 minutes.

I could just shut off my IM client as well, but I do use it for work communication (as well as communicating with friends). I do have a work specific IM account, so I could always only allow co-workers to contact me through it.

I should make an effort to talk to people in person instead of IM. It does make me chuckle to think that I could potentially be interrupting somebody else’s Pomodoro though.

During my Pomodoros I set an away message mentioning that I was trying the Pomodoro Technique. In the future I might even link to the site.

I had to separate Pomodoro specific apps and sites from interruptive ones

For a brief period during the day I tried to keep my Pomodoro task and interruptive tasks on separate computers (my work desktop and my personal laptop) but security limitations of our wireless network made it impossible to only do work on my laptop.

Another approach to the above is to use Mac OS X’s Spaces feature to separate out the Pomodoro you’re working on from other interruptions. I used this today and it definitely helped keep me focused. I’m sure there’s a number of Windows equivalents.

Yet another little technique for separating out work from distractions is to use different browsers. In my case I was using Firefox for my Pomodoro work and Chrome for anything that would be interruptive but I didn’t want to close completely.

Questions

My experiment also left me with some questions, some which hopefully the rest of the free book will answer and others that I may find my own answers to over time:

• How do handle/categorize meetings? Track them? Ignore them? What if they’re more than 30 minutes long?
• How do you deal with dependencies? What happens when you can’t start your task until somebody completes something you’re relying on? Should you track this? I suspect that information could be useful.

After Effects

It’s funny how even throughout writing this blog post I was tempted by several interruptions but I found myself realizing they were all things that could wait a few minutes.

I used MacPorts to install Maven with the following:

sudo port install maven

I created a simple project using the following:

mvn archetype:create -DgroupId=org.spilth.rpgam -DartifactId=rpgam

And then tried to generate an Eclipse project file using:

cd rpgam
mvn eclipse:eclipse


The command failed with the following error in the output:

[WARNING] Unable to get resource ‘jline:jline:jar:0.9.1′ from repository central (http://repo1.maven.org/maven2): Specified destination directory cannot be created: /Users/brian/.m2/repository/jline/jline/0.9.1

It suggested I manually download and install jline. I was not down with this because, well, I thought Maven was supposed to take care of this stuff for me – I shouldn’t have to manually download and install stuff!

Upon looking in my ~/.m2/repository directory I noticed that some directories were owned by root and some by me. I’m not sure how or when this happened but I fixed it with the following:

sudo chown -R brian /Users/brian/.m2/

This fixed the problem and successfully created a .classpath and .project file for Eclipse.

I also started my own Maven cheat sheet.

Lastly, I learned that you an open a Finder window for the current directory from Terminal by using:

open .