Before and on Christmas most people think about people in need, and hopefully donate something. Not necessarily money, but presents as well.

But after Christmas there are lots of unwanted presents and things you don’t need, don’t like or will ever use. In most cases these items end up in the trash, at some shelf or, at best, being returned to the store.

Thanks to @bruncedric and the Eclipse Webmasters we were able to quickly start a test of Mattermost at https://mattermost-test.eclipse.org.

“Mattermost” is a Slack/HipChat/… like web messaging system (aka webchat). I don’t want to go into too much detail of the system itself, but the main idea is to have a “faster-than-email” communication form for a team of people. Comparable to IRC, but more HTML5-ish. It also features a REST API, which can be used to automate inbound and outbound messages to the different channels.

The core idea of Package Drone is to extract meta data from files and generated some sort of repository index. And although Package Drone’s main focus is on OSGi, we did want to implement a YUM repository adapter and for this we needed to extract metadata from RPM files.

While preparing for EclipseCon Europe 2015 (a few weeks back I have to say, it was a great conference) I again wanted to a have a small mobile helper. So instead of forgetting (again) about it, this time I briefly wrote it down. So here it is.

Dear Google,

Today it happened again. I left my mobile phone at home. I realized that before entering the train, so I went back, grabbed it and went back to catch the next train. This gave me a few minutes to think about that ;-)