After fighting with backups (check your backups, kids!), we've started getting the haus back online. Subversion repositories are back, read-only over HTTP at http://svn.codehaus.org/, the various distribution repos are back, such as http://dist.codehaus.org/. We did lose some commits in the SVN, and some deployments may be missing from dist. Now's the time to sanity-check.

We're continuing to work to get CVS, mail, and read/write access to Subversion back as soon as possible.

We truly appreciate all of the efforts to help, and your patience has been outstanding. We realize how painful downtime is.

Alas, it's been a bad month for opensource communities. SourceForge has had its share of problems lately, as did the ASF. And now, even the Codehaus is not immune. Our CVS/Subversion server is offline with an angry disk. We're trying to recover it, but preparing to restore from backups if need be. We have no ETA at the moment, but real-time updates will be available on irc.codehaus.org in the #codehaus channel.

We apologize to users who are left out in the cold, particularly those using maven with missing repos. I also hope no demos at JavaOne assumed we'd be online. Eh, what can you do? Plans for migrating the functionality of this machine to a shiny new box at Contegix are under way.

Shortly after the marriage of JBoss and RedHat, the JBossWorld conference will be happening in Las Vegas. Rebecca and I will be flying out there to hang out with Michael Neale and Mark Proctor of the Drools project. If you find yourself in Vegas around mid-June, look me up and we'll have a beer.

No.

I'd realized that my last blog praising the guys at Contegix existed only on my now-nuked old Typo-powered blog. And these guys rock so much that I wanted to make sure I had some praise for them still existing on the interwebs. So, to reiterate, Contegix kicks ass. As a managed-hosting provider, there is nothing more I could ask for.

It's 3am, and you decide you want a web-stats package installed on your server? By 3:15am, it's completed. It's always business hours at Contegix, and I can't remember the last time any request too more than 15 minutes from my initial email to having it completed. I'm a customer 3-times-over with Contegix, between the Codehaus, Radar Networks, and my own personal machinations. One day I'll make it to St. Louis to have beers with Matthew, Craig, Joe, Tony and the other folks there who keep my servers alive and sane.

Today, being a lazy Sunday, I surfed over to 37Signals and picked up a copy of Getting Real. I know I'm a few weeks late on this meme, but I truly enjoyed the book.

On the surface, after reading 177 pages, you could easily think that there was nothing concretely useful in the book. You could, but that'd be silly. The whole book enforces a different attitude. It's about agility, not only in development or management, but in the vision of the product you're producing. The best quote, I think is

Stick to what’s truly essential. Good ideas can be tabled. Take whatever you think your product should be and cut it in half. Pare features down until you’re left with only the most essential ones. Then do it again.

Ultimately, stop thinking about producing, and simply go produce. As my dad says, "the enemy of 'good' is 'better.'" The essence of your product is probably good (or you can hope). Alas, the desire to make it better can work against you, creating feature overload, delayed schedules, and a lack of focus in the vision. Get on with it already.

Last night I managed to pick up Best Reason to Buy the Sun by the Benevento/Russo Duo. Purely instrumental, they are an odd cross of Medeski, Martin Wood, Death Cab for Cutie, and The Bad Plus. For me, at least, it's one of the best CDs to sling code or manipulate a spreadsheet to. I'm amazed at what two guys can do. There's the guy on the drums, and the guy on the keys. And it's a wall of intricate sound much of the time.

We had the ups and downs about the Oracle acquisition rumor for JBoss. Then that died.

This morning, I just happened to wander by the RedHat site, and what do you know, but they are buying JBoss. Overall, RedHat will probably be a better opensource citizen in caretaking the JBoss property, compared to Oracle.

The new meme is tag everything of course. For some reason, everyone's definition of 'everything' does not seem to include tags themselves. We can already tag blog posts, pictures, podcasts and bookmarks. Soon, you will be able to tag the tags you tag things with. Imagine the power of the web once you can apply a tag to another tag. Limited beta will start soon, invitations to A-list taggers are being prepared.

Congrats to Sam Pullara and his team at Gauntlet Systems on their recent acquisition by Borland. Nothing sucks worse than a broken build, and Gauntlet seems to have taken continuous integration into a nicely packaged commercial software-as-a-service offering. Let's hope Borland doesn't screw it up. Anyone remember Together/J?