Software is too expensive to build cheaply...

9 months of intense development later, our first big integration project, with Tourico Holidays, went live today, with an additional 1000-odd hotels appearing on our site (with more to come). A good example is Texas, where we had only a few hotels outside of the major cities and we now have about 90 (plus more inside the major cities, of course).

I've spent most of the last year involved in an intensive project that really drained me - hence the lack of blogging. I want to blog in a positive fashion this year, so I'll start by getting a lot of gripes off my chest. :) Call it things that suck.

Here's a short list, before I define what I mean by "suck":

• Maven2
• EJB3 Persistence
• Hibernate, caches, and the way they can kill your database.
• Maven2 (it just sucks a lot!)
• No Java 6 on the Mac
• No "next/previous word" keyboard navigation in the Mac terminal
• Mac Firefox, drop-down boxes, and tabbing

and I'm sure that there's more that will come to me. Today, I'm doing Maven - the rest will come later.