Maven dependency management

I've been using Maven for the last couple of weeks. So far
the cool feature for me is dependency management. Where before
(with Ant) I'd create a lib directory, collect a bunch of JARs
there, configure them in Eclipse and also in the Ant build.xml,
now I just need to add dependency elements in the Maven pom.xml.
It's a major automation of something I had to do by hand before.

Yet, sometimes this seems to break down. Yesterday I added a
dependency for log4j, and Maven claimed log4j was dependent on
3 other packages, including jmx and jms. That makes no sense.
Furthermore, it couldn't just download these dependencies and
was asking me to download and install them into the repository
by hand. Besides the extra work, that means the build will
work for me but not for other developers on the team.

There's a good discussion of this problem here. See also
this.

Emacs W32

This version of Emacs is easier to install than the FSF version,
which requires some manual steps. Not that anyone should use
Windows, of course...

Ubuntu 10.10

I'm finally getting dragged kicking and screaming out of Ubuntu
9.10 as the repositories have shut down. I'm trying 10.10 on my
laptop today and here are some things I'm noticing.

The issues I mentioned here with the window manager decorations
disappearing are not in evidence. It's running compiz. glxgears
reports an abysmal 60 FPS so this is definitely not going to be
a games box. 'System -> Administration ->Additional Drivers'
did not offer a vendor graphics driver (as expected since the AMD
graphics device is in 'legacy support' status).

I set 'select windows when the mouse moves over them' and 'raise
selected windows after an interval', but a lot of the time the
windows do not pop up.

I installed squid. Where the heck is /etc/init.d/squid? How am I
supposed to stop and start squid? (Answer is here).

Hibernation works.

(Update 7/6) I just had my window manager fail. Suddenly
about 20 windows were stacked in one virtual desktop
with no way to switch away from the one on top.
CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE also quit working. However I
was able to use the log out button on the panel. Hope
this isn't going to be an everyday occurrence.

(Update 12/12/2012): Sadly, 10.04 was the last release of Ubuntu worth using.  Even prior to the switch to Unity (i.e. 10.10) there were huge problems.  I tried a lot of different things this year including Xubuntu 12.04 but finally settled on Mint 13 MATE.