I made a little movie (1.8Mb mpeg4) of the jetboats that I caught with my little camera. Karen’s camera does much better video – so I may try and get that out too. This video is all of a minute or so at 320×240.

Way more pics than are reasonable to post to a blog entry, so I picked a few and figured I’d point you all at Flickr for the rest.

Another one of those jetboats hurtling by at 80mph – this is just off land that Karen’s family owns on the Rogue River, upstream a bit from Dunn Riffle.

Speaking of the crew – here’s Karen, Pat, and Bill – all set for watching the upcoming maniacs on the river.

It was a long course for the race, and we followed the next day in a jetboat excursion (hellgate excursions) like this one, tearing around between races. In particular, we did the whitewater excursion – which was the entire length of the course and all area that I’d rafted on – but never all at once.

And while you’re out there, you might as well take a pic of the other excursion boat that is tearing around nearby. They do a really good job of spotting and watching the river for folks – but then you really need to when you’re heading through rapids at 30+ mph.

A couple of pics from the boat along the Rogue River.

I thought I was going to bed, but I had to download the pictures from the weekend. Here’s the teaser:

What goes 80 mph through class 2.5 rapids?

crazy people driving jetboats on Memorial Day weekend.

But it was neat watchin…

more pics coming, including some video of the boats (no sound though – grabbed it with the camera)

I’m starting to get into using Maven (specifically Maven 2) as a java build tool. It does a truly wonderful job at managing the dependency sets for larger projects, but it has an incredible drawback – it is incredibly unhelpful about telling you how to use it.

When you download, install, and run maven for the first time, it really gives you no useful messaging. It tells you that you need to tell it about goals, tasks, and so forth. Issuing “mvn –help” doesn’t lead into any help files, and if you’re looking for something quick to get started – well, you’re screwed.

Mostly. Fortunately, there is some decent documentation out there. The first “quick and dirty” doc is an article at OReillyNet entitled Maven 2.0: Compile, Test, Run, Deploy, and More by Chris Hardin. It will get you in the door and functioning.

The second, and far more detailed, is the book Better Builds with Maven which is basically being published by mergere – who appear to specialize in helping people “do maven”.

Thank goodness for these resources, or the world of people wanting to use maven would be screwed.

I hadn’t checked in a while, so it was really cool to see that Selenium has released version 0.70 of their web testing framework back on May 14th. What was originally known as Selenium is now broken out into several components – the selenium core with all its javascript goodness for testing in browser, and a new and spiffy selenium ide for recording and developing test cases.

They even show off a screencast of recording a test with the ide (a firefox plugin).

Jesse is posting a nice series (if you’re into asp.net anyway) on building a web application – unfortunately, the example he’s giving is yet another web-based bug tracking application.

The problem is that his series is too good – I have this sort of terrible fear that in the next few years we’re going to see a proliferation of these “intern made” bug tracking systems that don’t integrate with crap, even though it all seems like it’s oh so possible.

Please, please – pick a different app next time. There’s plenty of really awesome bug tracking applications out there. Frankly, the world doesn’t need many more of those. What they need – what would be FAR better – is some good test case management software. Try that one! It’s a real pain… And the best in open source test case management is lacking much competition… give them a run for their money. We could use the competition there.

This is just too good – Zac White created a logic circuit simulator with Quartz Composer. That’s just awesome. Completely useless for me, but boy does it bring back memories (the UI is a hell of a lot nicer than what I used to use with spice too!)

Thanks for the link Gus!