Maven Maven and Maven

I have been battling with installing maven for my new project....now this thing has been showing me hell. I downloaded all the stuff, and the atlassian pdk.
Now I followed all the instructions they had on their page, for some reason, they prefered to use jdk 1.4, but for me, that didnt matter anyways.
So I did all the exporting environmental variables, got the thing to work, created the maven archetype(Directory skeleton for a particular kind of project).
Now I had a full screen(Oh did I mention I got a new phillips flat screen yesterday?), filled with weird looking linux commmands...then since I Wasnt going to kill myself, I exported the whole thing into my eclipse IDE with the command eclipse:eclipse.......this frigging download took 29 mins approximately. When I was rejoicing that it had finally worked, came the hard part, getting eclipse to compile and build this thing.
Maven uses a test/development life cycle method. The first stage is compile, then some tests, and then an install. These stages are called "goals" in maven terminology.
I wasnt making any progress, so I installed the maven plug in for eclipse. Now I began suffering because for maven to compile, it needs to download all the dependencies from the local maven repository(29 minute download...remember?), and if it doesn't see what it wants, it begins to bitch like a starving cat.
I got so many errors. imagine getting an error called mojo:ActionMojo:execute, or some crap like that...reminds me of a friend in school who saw a line of code commented as "suicide".
Now I have been trying to get this to work all day with no avail. Now its hinting that one of the POMS for the dependencies its trying to download is faulty. Mavens proponents say its better than ant, but for some reason, I find that doubtful.
Anyways, back to the grind...this thing must and will work, if I have to beat it with a stick...

In case anyone sees this, this is an example of some of the crap eclipse feeds me:

2/19/08 4:27:46 PM CET: [WARN] POM for 'seraph:seraph:pom:0.7.17:provided' is invalid. It will be ignored for artifact resolution. Reason: Not a v4.0.0 POM. for project seraph:seraph at /home/ade/.m2/repository/seraph/seraph/0.7.17/seraph-0.7.17.pom
2/19/08 4:27:50 PM CET: [WARN] POM for 'oscore:oscore:pom:2.1.0:provided' is invalid. It will be ignored for artifact resolution. Reason: Not a v4.0.0 POM. for project oscore:oscore at /home/ade/.m2/repository/oscore/oscore/2.1.0/oscore-2.1.0.pom
2/19/08 4:27:50 PM CET: [WARN] POM for 'cargo-test-runner:cargo-test-runner:pom:8Aug07:provided' is invalid. It will be ignored for artifact resolution. Reason: Not a v4.0.0 POM. for project cargo-test-runner:cargo-test-runner at /home/ade/.m2/repository/cargo-test-runner/cargo-test-runner/8Aug07/cargo-test-runner-8Aug07.pom
2/19/08 4:28:14 PM CET: [WARN] POM for 'seraph:seraph:pom:0.7.17:provided' is invalid. It will be ignored for artifact resolution. Reason: Not a v4.0.0 POM. for project seraph:seraph at /home/ade/.m2/repository/seraph/seraph/0.7.17/seraph-0.7.17.pom
2/19/08 4:28:25 PM CET: [WARN] POM for 'oscore:oscore:pom:2.1.0:provided' is invalid. It will be ignored for artifact resolution. Reason: Not a v4.0.0 POM. for project oscore:oscore at /home/ade/.m2/repository/oscore/oscore/2.1.0/oscore-2.1.0.pom
2/19/08 4:28:27 PM CET: [WARN] POM for 'cargo-test-runner:cargo-test-runner:pom:8Aug07:provided' is invalid. It will be ignored for artifact resolution. Reason: Not a v4.0.0 POM. for project cargo-test-runner:cargo-test-runner at /home/ade/.m2/repository/cargo-test-runner/cargo-test-runner/8Aug07/cargo-test-runner-8Aug07.pom
2/19/08 4:28:30 PM CET: Parsing error /home/ade/.m2/repository/seraph/seraph/0.7.17/seraph-0.7.17.pom; org.codehaus.plexus.util.xml.pull.XmlPullParserException: Unrecognised tag: 'logo' (position: START_TAG seen ...\n ... @9:11)
2/19/08 4:28:30 PM CET: Unable to read search-portlet/pom.xml; org.eclipse.core.runtime.CoreException: Parsing error /home/ade/.m2/repository/seraph/seraph/0.7.17/seraph-0.7.17.pom; org.codehaus.plexus.util.xml.pull.XmlPullParserException: Unrecognised tag: 'logo' (position: START_TAG seen ...\n ... @9:11)

Do I sound pissed off? You bet I am.... :-)

so far...since last year

Havent posted in a long while. So this is gonna be a bit messy.
I am working on my thesis in Hardware Acceleration. Basically you have an application, and you are looking for ways in which it can run faster in hardware. So you profile the code using tools like gnuprof, and then you can detect which functions in the code are the most computationally intensive. You then have to merge the functions, because you want to reduce the amount of times you reconfigure your FPGA when you run the code, and also by merging, you should achieve some speedup.
Now, the thing is that merging isnt so easy. You have to consider some criteria, i.e the number of times the function is called, and also, the data dependencies which might exist between the functions. We have a tool that can generate control flow graphs (CFGs), which show the rest.
The application I am using is the h264 decoder, its open source, written in c, and I am going to write about it as a chapter in my thesis. I also had to remove the pthreads it had, to make it serial, and do some profiling. That included some call graph generation by the way.
On the other side, my web development skills are improving. I finished the tag search extension to the LDAS application (a web based Java/LDAP application) given to me, and now I am going to work on developing a JIRA portlet, as an interface to opensearch.
I wonder if its possible to run two different coding interests at the same time, but It should be.
And for the assembly assignment, I got a grade of 8.5, and I got a 9 as a final mark for compiler construction. Yup......all that reading of the grammar files, and generating assembly code paid off......we got the highest mark in the lab...68/70.
Cheers, and later!