A Wicket Diary

My powermac with ATI 9650 video card has a strange problem. If you look at this blog style, you should see a grayish background on top of a white background.

When I look at my blog I see just a white background. The light grayish background has disappeared in white.

I tried looking with other browsers (Camino, Firefox and Safari) but they give the same results: white background. I tried calibrating my display card, but that also gave the same results. My 23″ cinema display and my 17″ Ilyama display both give the same result: white background.

I also captured a screenshot from my laptop computer that doesn’t show this problem and looked at it on my mac: white background. So it isn’t some HTML rendering problem.

So I guess it is a problem with my 9650 card that I find hard to solve. Has anyone had this experience also?

UPDATE

I just disconnected my secondary monitor and now I have the gray background back! It seems that this is a power problem of the card.

And now that I have switched the connectors, I can use both displays at once without having gray problems. This really was bugging me for a while, so I’m glad I figured this one out. Lesson learned, back to work.

“It kind of makes me feel as if I’m working with the Esperanto of the web framework world.” - Geertjan Wielenga

On Geertjan’s blog, Geertjan shows his affection for the Wicket web framework as he is writing tutorials for Netbeans modules, and creates excellent IDE support as an afterthought. IDE support is critical for many developers, and with Eclipse (Wicket Bench) and Netbeans support for Wicket the future is bright!

In other news, I just released the second beta for Wicket 1.2. The release is available for immediate download and coming to a SourceForge mirror near you in a couple of hours.

Help us finalize Wicket 1.2 by downloading this release and test it. And while you are browsing the SourceForge servers, why don’t you vote for Wicket along the way?

As I am in the progress of learning the ropes of subversion, and becoming appalled by the support for subversion in Eclipse when compared to the CVS support, I am learning to like subversion.

A little gem while releasing Wicket 1.2-beta2 struck my mind. My previous, CVS era, modus of operandi was to select all my projects in the workspace and tag them at once as “WICKET_1_2_BETA2″, so the projects current state would be traceable when a bug emerged.

To my amazement, this feature doesn’t work in Subversive, probably the best subversion integration currently available for Eclipse. You can’t select multiple projects, and tag them as a version. “Ah, well” I thought, “Then I’ll do them by hand one at a time”. Can you imagine the following scenario, tagging all the projects in my workspace? Here is a list of the projects that need to be tagged:

1. wicket
2. wicket-extensions
3. wicket-examples
4. wicket-quickstart
5. wicket-spring
6. wicket-spring-examples
7. wicket-spring-annot
8. wicket-spring-annot-examples
9. wicket-spring-cattr
10. wicket-spring-cattr-examples
11. wicket-auth-roles
12. wicket-auth-roles-examples

That is quite some work when you have to do each project on its own. Especially with the GUI speed of Eclipse including Subversive on OSX. So I tried versioning the Wicket core project and Subversive or sourceforge presented me with “502 bad gateway”. So that’s a clear no go on the Subversive versioning.

At this moment I decided to go to my bookshelve and pull out the ‘Pragmatic Version Control using Subversion” from the Pragmatic Programmers. And then it struck me: Why didn’t I just do a serverside copy of the trunk to a tag. We’re working with Subversion now. So I downloaded the OS-X subversion client from Metissian, and installed the package.

One note: don’t forget to add /usr/local/bin to your path variable, otherwise you’ll keep staring at a command prompt that says: svn: command not found.

From there on it was plain and simple:

$ svn --username dashorst -m "Releasing Wicket 1.2-beta2"
       copy https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wicket/trunk
           https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wicket/tags/WICKET_1_2_BETA2

That was it! Now we are the proud owner of a new tag in subversion, with the name WICKET_1_2_BETA2, and the whole repository state has been reflected in this tag. Now that is something to write about.

Subversion: though the Eclipse support sucks, it is subzero -> cooler than cool.