So I posted a question to the Confluence Forum but got no reply in three days :(. Should anyone be able to help me, the forum thread is here but I am also reposting here the text of the question:

I’m looking for examples and guidance in using the Search (v2) API in Confluence, specifically from a plugin.

I got hold of a SearchManager via Dependency Injection and obtained some results with code like the following

SearchQuery query = ...;
Search search = new Search(query, null, null);
SearchResults results = this.searchManager.search(search);

My problem is that I have no idea about which implementation of the SearchQuery interface to use and in particular how to specify a phrase to search for, since no subclass seems to provide for a way to set a query term.

Thanks in advance.

We’re looking for developers who would like to work for a small company with a strong orientation towards Open Source, as in wanting to actively participate in Open Source communities and give back as well as take. We like agility, focus, getting real. We like to communicate openly: Open Source is mostly about communicating with your peers, after all. We have strong international ties, so you could find yourself traveling a bit, mostly across Europe, but we can also offer telecommuting arrangements if you like working from home.

What we need mostly are young software developers who are well versed in the Java language and its platform. You will need to become familiar with one or more of the products of our partners. This means: Alfresco, Atlassian, JBoss, Terracotta, Hippo CMS and others. Ideally we’d like to have at least one product specialist for every one of those, helping customers implement solutions based upon them. Working towards this goal, we will define with you an appropriate learning path.

If you’re interested, send your resume (in text, HTML or PDF formats only; any other format will be rejected immediately) to recruitment@sourcesense.com. We’d love to hear your story.

What’s more amazing is that all he got was just a yellow card. What did he have to do in order to deserve a red card? Spit on the adversary’s grave?

For the record, this happened during the Hamburg vs. Werder Brema match in the Bundesliga. More shocking pictures here.

I was only briefly stumped because for some reason, hashing my password using openssl did not give the same result as hashing it via PHP. Turns out I had forgotten to use ‘-n’ with ‘echo’ D’oh!

Somehow I was hoping this OpenID stuff would have been a bit easier…

I’ve been traveling too much as of late and it shows, especially when you consider how seldom I have updated my blog. However, one of the joys of traveling to the US is that hotels will typically leave a complimentary copy of USA Today in front of your room every morning for your reading pleasure.

I don’t find USA Today to be a particularly good read, but the other day I was glad to find that their “Money” section carried a long interview with David “Mr. Strobist” Hobby. Kudos to David for having become famous: he certainly deserves it!

Beta 5, however, has this very annoying bug, at least on my Tiger-powered MacBook Pro: The Back and Forward navigation buttons are duplicated in the toolbar. Urgh!

Update: customizing the toolbar using the appropriate dialog box (View > Toolbars > Customize) to remove the extra navigation control fixed it.

• Website.
• Release packages.
• Subversion access.

This is my first contribution to the Alfresco Forge and it’s a very small thing, but hopefully the first of many more to come. As you might know, Alfresco is the leading provider of open source Enterprise Content Management systems and my employer, Sourcesense, is an Alfresco Gold Partner. Alfresco being an open source product meant that we were able to quickly and easily extend the existing Mail Action without having to reverse-engineer it. Try doing this with Sharepoint!

The Alfresco Mail Attach Action is distributed under the GNU Public License v2.

We just got back home from Morocco, where we had a wonderful time and saw some truly incredible places. The eyes are still brimming with the colors of a magic country (you can see some of them here).

I also managed to survive driving through the traffic of Marrakesh, which is quite a feat in itself.

Firing up my email reader yesterday night I was greeted by a slew of work-related news, about which I’ll probably write later, but not now.

Nokia getting their greedy, little hands on Trolltech

Bluesunrise becomes Hippo - Hippo Open Source Enterprise Content Management: “We are pleased to announce that Hippo, Dutch supplier of open source enterprise content management and portal software, has taken over all Bluesunrise activities. We may have a new name, but the core BlueSunrise team is intact and happy to continue providing the quality service you have come to expect. Being a part of Hippo means greater resources to better our service and create new and productive software.”

After all, the Hippo guys are our partners and, more important, they are good friends, so I cherish this acquisition and wish the best of luck to Hippo.

I have no idea how much they payed for Bluesunrise, but with the current valuation of the US dollar, it’s got to be peanuts . And to think that I’m still agonizing over which camera to buy!.

This is an old and tired debate and, when it starts up again with words like “clowns of cliche”, it doesn’t look like it is going very far this time either. Still I cannot resist throwing in my two cents of an opinion, which is that Ken is basically right and Michael, while not being totally wrong, is at least misrepresenting Ken’s position.

Michael is not wrong because, obviously, it would be foolish to say that the quality of the equipment you are using is not going to influence the quality of the product. But that’s not what Ken is saying. What Ken is saying, and what I agree with is that you will not get better pictures simply by using better equipment, unless you define “better” as sharper, cleaner, bigger, with more dynamic range or all these things together. Photography is art (well, at least we like to think that it is) and those qualities do not make a picture artistically worthier than a small, noisy, fuzzy, distorted Holga picture.

When Michael writes:

Discussing the merits of one tool over another is relevant. Some lenses, cameras and other photographic tools are better than others. In some cases they are objectively better, while in others their degree of betterness will be subjetive and will depend on the specific needs of a particular photographer.

It appears as he hasn’t ever read Ken’s website, because if he had he would have seen tens of articles discussing the merits of cameras and lenses.

So isn’t Ken a bit hypocritical by saying that cameras don’t matter and, on the same website, extolling the virtues of the latest Nikon offerings, like the D300 which he nominates “the world’s best amateur camera”?

And what to make of this?

4×5″ Cameras Still Rule the Roost: For serious photographers who need quality, versatility and convenience, 4×5″ has been the king for decades. I often point out that while Outdoor Photographer magazine does almost nothing but push the new digital products of its advertisers, their showcase and cover shots are usually made on 4×5″ cameras.

Well, what I think Ken is getting at (and I hope he is reading this and feels like commenting, in case I missed the point) is that a particular kind of camera, with particular qualities, will let you make a particular kind of picture, which you will not be able to do with an inferior camera. It’s true that you cannot shoot a great landscape picture with a pinhole camera, but it might as well be that the low-quality street scene shot with the pinhole camera is better (according to some subjective but shared by a sufficiently large number of people) than the perfectly sharp landscape. And it is not only possible, but highly probable, that millions of people will buy an expensive camera and hope to replicate an Ansel Adams masterpiece. They will usually fail and blame the camera for their failure. What they don’t realize is that their camera truly does not matter.

On the other hand, Ostatic is part of the GigaOM network and this fact, far from being a guarantee of success, might however help if they don’t just let it die on the vine, like O’Reilly did with CodeZoo. I sincerely hope so, since it’s my opinion that we need a site like this, to supplement the venerable Freshmeat.net.

For now I have subscribed to the blog and am hoping for the best.

Personally I’m not convinced the D60 is worth the extra $250 over a D40. I would just get the D40 with a 55-200mm VR lens and still have money to spare. But in any case I’m waiting for the D40 to decrease a bit in price before ordering it myself.

I just received my new Lowepro Slingshot 200 AW camera bag. It’s a great bag for photo gear, though it deserves to be filled with better content than what I can provide at the moment. In any case I’m sure it will come in handy during our upcoming trip to Morocco, where I plan to carry at the very least my Panasonic Lumix and a small point&shoot as a backup, and a video camera.

• D40 with 18-55mm lens
• D40x with 18-55mm lens
• D80 with 18-135mm lens

together with any of these three extra lenses:

• 55-200mm ($73 after $100 instant rebate)
• 55-200mm VR ($112 after $100 instant rebate)
• 70-300mm VR ($353 after $100 instant rebate).

But that is not all, because you can get an even better deal if you buy an extra battery with the D40. The price for the battery is about $40, but if you buy it together with the camera, you get an extra $74 discount, which means the combined price of the two items is less than the cost of the camera alone!

You have to add the items to your cart and the savings will be deducted as separate line items at checkout. Be sure to select Amazon as the seller, otherwise the deal won’t be there. You also have to be patient, because the D40 and the 55-200 VR won’t be shipping for 1-2 months. However, I just placed an order and got $174 in extra savings for the D40—which is already the cheapest good DSLR out there— together with the 55-200 VR and an extra battery, which makes this pretty much the deal of the century. Hey, I could sell all this stuff separately on eBay for much more than will have payed for it, but I figure I’ll just keep it all.

If you would like to get the same deal, you can either follow the links on this page, or use the ones on Ken’s page, depending on who you would like to get a small percentage of the sale price.

Update: Apparently the $100 instant rebate on the combined purchase of a camera and a lens is gone. I am glad that I placed my order on time.

Update (Feb 20): Just received the following email from Amazon.com:

We regret to inform you that an error caused an incorrect promotional
code to be displayed on our website. We are not offering this
promotion at this time.

In accordance with our posted policies on pricing, we are unable to
offer the item(s) you ordered for the incorrectly posted promotional
price. Therefore, we have cancelled the item(s) from your order.

Argh! I assume the error refers to the incorrect pricing of the extra battery. Well, I suppose I could live without that, but now even the $100 rebate on the extra lens is gone and the only option I’m left with is getting just the camera for just a little less than $500, which is not a bargain at all :(.

I went to Oxford and all I got was this crappy picture.

I had hoped to meet Richard Dawkins, but alas, I wasn’t so lucky. Maybe next time.