A Wicket Diary

Ted talks are really astounding: in less than 20 minutes each talk knows how to captivate you and change your world view. Each talk I’ve seen so far was remarkable and a true addition to my life’s experiences.

But even this highest category of talks has differences in the way a talk grabs you. The talk by Jill Bolte Taylor about her stroke of insight was funny, informative and touching in a way you can’t imagine. In her talk she explains how the two halves of the human brain work. She even grosses out the audience by displaying a real human brain. This is remarkable in itself, but when she starts talking about her stroke, the talk begins to gain a life of its own.

The way Jill visualizes her experience really struck me. I urge you to see it for yourself, it is one of the most touching talks I have seen. Garr Reynolds from Presentation Zen describes the way how this talk affected him while he watched. It had the same effect on me:

“A bit unexpectedly, I was floored. In fact I was moved to tears, as was the packed TED theatre which gave her a huge standing ovation. Take some time today and watch this 18-minute TED presentation. This is such a wonderful talk.”

So take your 18 minutes and start watching now:

Just for the record: this is an early april’s fools joke, expanding on what Francis Amanfo sent to the user list. Thanks for this one Francis!

I’m quite disappointed that Francis Amanfo leaked the IBM internal memo that they will use, promote and support Wicket as their web development platform of choice. I am suprised that he got hands on the memo, and I hope that this will not in any way hinder my negotiations on my planned move to IBM. Now that it is out in the open, I think my NDA no longer holds, and I can speak freely.

Francis writes:

An IBM internal memo, written and signed by product manager, Tim O’Malley, has been leaked. Well, to be more direct, a friend of my working with IBM leaked this to me. In it, IBM praised Wicket as an innovative and state of the art web framework that stands up tall against all its competitors including JSF, Struts 2 and Tapestry.

In the memo, IBM mentions some of it’s frustrations with JSF and
about Sun not listening to them during the creation of the JSF specification. In the memo, IBM also praises the Wicket team as very hardworking and dedicated guys and is in negotiations to employ them into IBM and make them work on Wicket
and sell support under the umbrella of IBM.

The memo also goes further to announce IBM’s plans to integrate Wicket into it’s JEE offerings. To be more specific, Wicket would be Integrated into RAD 8 as the default Web framework, which it plans to release in the fourth quater of this year.
The memo also states IBM’s plans to create widgets, which it plans to market under the label WICKED Widgets, of all the standard Wicket components and enable drag and drop development in RAD 8. It would also make WICKED© widgets standalone for separate downloads.

My contract starts next sunday, so I’ll be packing my stuff into moving boxes. Being able to work on Wicket during office hours will make my life so much easier. Thanks IBM!

I overheard that one of our core committers is going on a holiday to the Maldives for diving, surfing and swimming. I know that we have another avid diver in our Wicket core team, and that he also makes underwater pictures (I just haven’t seen them yet). I’ve uploaded some of my diving pictures to my flickr account.

We had a small discussion on how to make underwater photographs, and having minor experience myself with some equipment I told them that you need:

• an external underwater flash
• a digital camera with a underwater house

The external flash is necessary because you loose a lot of light when you are already 3 feet under water. In crystal clear water that is not necessarily a problem, but when you are diving at 12 meters (40 feet), the light conditions are not favorable. Of course you could use your own internal flash, but then most photos will look like you’re in a blizzard instead. This has to do with the directionality of your flash light in relation to your photo. Head on flash will illuminate all particles between you and the subject. When you flash from a 45 degree angle, the particles most likely not be present as much.

The digital camera is necessary to get instant feedback. You will be underwater for at most 30 minutes or so, and have at most 2-3 dives per day. When you use an analog camera, your learning curve will be severely low. Missing fishes, wrong light, half fishes, too far away fishes etc. All these things can be prevented mostly by the direct, instant feedback digital camera’s provide.

As an example I uploaded my second diving trip photo’s taken on the fabulous island of Bonaire, using a Canon A-75 digital camera with an external flash. I’ll spare you the pictures we took the holiday before in Florida with an analog camera without external flash. Those were pretty pathetic.

I am not an authority on photography, but if you want to take pictures while diving, you’d better buy this minimum equipment.

With a flick of a switch I moved my blog from jroller to my own hosted wordpress powered blog. The movers did a great job at packing all my stuff here into nice boxes, and moving it to my new place, including the comments. Even though the moving service was very professional some china may have been broken.

Now why bother moving, and shelling out money for a service that is available for free? Several things triggered me to do the switch:

• speed: jroller has its bad days when it comes to speed. It hosts several hundreds of blogs and needs to serve them all.
• editor compatibility: several blog editors exist, but most of them don’t support the roller api. I’m typing this message using Flock, the social browser. Probably it is possible to direct Flock to be able to post to jroller, but I didn’t want to work with a half baked solution.
• own domain: I like being master of my own little universe, probably a left over from watching He-Man too much during childhood).
• wordpress: I think it is the best blogging tool around at this moment. Some of the templates are beautiful (vertigo squared, jillij) and more are available. On top of that the spam prevention for comments (akistmet) is great.
• statistics: being master of my own domain I get statistics for free with my subscription. Who, where from, when, etc.
• greener grass: when I read the blog of Nathan, I immediately thought: that is what I want: more control, more freedom

So here we are: on martijndashorst.com. I’m still contemplating splitting the Wicket part from my own private life ramblings. However, if I promise to keep the main writing about Wicket with a peek now and then into my personal stuff would you mind?

Soon to be launched: A Wicket Diary at http://wicketdiary.org

I have moved my blog from jroller.com to a shared provided server (didn’t want to open up my home network just yet). I didn’t want another huge blogging service such as wordpress.com, rather I wanted a bit more control over what I could do with the service. I installed Wordpress as my blogging application. Having my own (part of a) server is pretty sweet, too bad it isn’t Java hosted.

My hosting provider is bhosted, a PHP/mysql provider in the Netherlands, and I find the service pretty decent until now. Yes, the domain registration could be smoother, but I doubt it is any worse than other providers.

I wanted to preserve my old blog entries and migrate them to my new home. Unfortunately the wordpress installation doesn’t have a connection to jroller to download all posts and import them. So I searched the internets and found more people facing this problem.

Finally I settled on exporting my entries using the wordpress xml format, and thus preserving the comments made by other people on my blog. I then only had to go through 250+ posts to recategorize them (jroller didn’t put blog entries with category ‘java/wicket’ on the front page).

I really have to thank Zeusville for his efforts in creating the Wordpress export template for jroller.