Attach Sources to your Maven Artifacts!
Improving the central maven repository
One of the key advantages of open source software besides being available free of charge is - well - that its source is available to developers reusing existing open source libraries.
Having the source available in your IDE when developing against an API is such a great thing that I wonder why so few open source projects care to make this asset easily available to their “customers”.
Using OpenOffice.org from Java Applications
A UNO Quickstart
OpenOffice.org is quite nice as a free and open source office suite that works on Linux and Windows and I use it quite a lot.
Besides its use as a desktop application it is not widely recognized that it can also be used as a backend document processing system by your Java application. Use cases are numerous: an invocice generating webapp in your intranet, prefilled document templates with content from a database or just an online inventory of your documents wiht support for on demand conversion to Microsoft Office formats or PDF.
Asterisk IMAP store for Voicemail
Using Dovecot, Astersik 1.4 and Ubuntu edgy
Since version 1.4 Asterisk supports IMAP as a store for voicemail. The IMAP integration allows voicemail to be managed either through your email client or by phone through Asterisk's voicemail application.
Sending email notifications for new voice messages has been supported since the very beginning, the news is that you are now operating on the same data store. That means if you read a message in your email client it is also marked read when you use the phone to query messages. It's amazing to see the MWI (message waiting indicator) on your phone switch off as soon as you select the message in your mailbox. Of course messages can also be deleted and forwarded using both systems.