Java driving me nuts

I'm starting to get involved with a java development group at work, and I'm trying to get tomcat set up on my Debian box at home.

It's not going smoothly, and unfortunately no one has replied to my post to the debian-java mailing list, although it's been several days.

If someone here could offer me a clue, or advise me where else I should be asking, I'd be most grateful.

It seems that all my java experiences are going like this. It's not so much that it's a steep learning curve, it's that certain pieces of information I need are nowhere to be found.

CD BABY

I finally placed an order with the independant CD store that all the anti-RIAA slashdotters always mention. I talk about what I ordered over on LJ.

While they're really cool, I have two problems with their site

1. They don't encourage price shopping, and
2. They don't say how long any of their CDs are.

I wrote a little perl script to get around (1): it takes one of their "all artists of a given genre" html pages, fetches all the prices and outputs the html with the list sorted in price order, and with prices displayed. (I'll be putting it out on my hacks page once I get it a little more user-friendly.)

But shopping on price alone is not enough; the shortest CD I bought was 37:29 and the longest was 70:02 -- that's a huge difference. Duration isn't everything, but it's certainly an important factor.

I wrote to CD Baby asking them to include this information in their CD descriptions. I don't know how they'll respond, but if more people request the same thing (hint hint), I guess they're more likely to notice.