Risk Management Faux Pas #374: Pilot sacked after fly-by stunt

Andrew just pointed me to a rather amusing article documenting the impending career failure of an over-excited Cathay Pacific pilot, who decided that performing a fly by in a brand new Boeing 777 at an altitude of - wait for it - 28 feet would be an excellent career move.

Two facts strike me as interesting about this. The pilot was (a) 55, and therefore presumably aware that this kind of behaviour was unlikely to be well received, and (b) flying a plane containing 69 senior Cathay Pacific staff, including their UK chairman. Maybe he thought he'd sneak it under the organisational (or real?) radar...

Annoying issue with Maven Archetype plug-in

I've just spent an annoying fifteen minutes battling with trying to get Maven to download and use one of the ServiceMix archetypes. After some battling, it transpired that there's a bug in version 2.0-alpha-1 of the Maven archetype plug-in (or at the very least, there's a change in there that upsets the apple cart as far as the current repository goes). The solution seems to be to force Maven to use version 1.0-alpha-7 of the plug-in by either manually running:

mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-archetype-plugin:1.0-alpha-7:create ...

... or if you're using ServiceMix like me, editing your smx-arch.bat or smx-arch.sh file to include a similar change. This does all rather make me think that the Maven guys need to concentrate a little more on governance of change to their plug-ins. Replacing a plug-in that works with a plug-in that doesn't, and making the whole world adopt it by default is not a good way to make friends and influence people.

Next time you have brain surgery...

...it might be best to avoid:

• Rhode Island Hospital
• Muhimbili Hospital, Tanzania

In the former case, the hospital is "re-evaluating its training and policies". Perhaps they should start by investing in surgical gowns with "Left" and "Right" stitched into the seams.