Category Archives: personal

Personal anecdotes, musings on cats or other existential writings.

US Elections’08 made in Hollywood

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I think the script writers in Hollywood are taking notes, because this year’s election in the US are just incredible. It feels like a horror movie made by Sam Raimi (I love his Evil Dead trilogy!) where humor, slapstick and horror mash into a brilliant movie.

As an outsider I can’t believe what the GOP (Republican Party) was thinking when they picked Sarah Palin as the running mate to McCain. Sure she’s better looking than Mrs Clinton (who never got into a final for a beauty pageant I think), but those are not assets you’d want near the Oval office (even Bill Clinton has experienced that).

Every interview with Mrs Palin I’ve seen on youtube and TV (yes the US elections are a hot topic in the Netherlands as well), can be taken straight out of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In fact, Saturday Night Live actually used a transcript of a Sarah Palin interview in one of their sketches (Tina Fey does a perfect portrayal of Mrs Palin IMO)

Like P. Diddy, I’m scared that this Caribou Barbie will be one breath away from becoming the most powerful leader on this planet. Especially in these times with 2 wars, a huge economic crisis, a gargantuan debt, aging, troubles with Iran, Syria, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, etc. These are not the types of issues that a beauty queen has to answer questions about.

Here’s a thought: maybe John McCain really doesn’t want to win the election, but wants to ensure that Obama will be the next president. That would mean that McCain puts an enormous trust in the intelligence of the citizens of the USA. As he’s a proud patriotic citizen I can imagine having such a profound trust in your People. There’s just one caveat: these are the same people that voted Bush Jr. into the oval office twice in a row.

Thanks to John Gruber for providing the P. Diddy and Caribou Barby links.

A farewell to Maurice Marrink

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It is with great sadness that I must report the staggering loss of my good friend and colleague, Maurice Marrink. Maurice and his brother Michel died in a tragic car crash friday August 1st 2008.

Maurice Marrink

Maurice was a dear co-worker, project member and good friend. He was always enthusiastic, willing to lend a hand and above all friendly. Coming from the northern parts of the Netherlands, Maurice could be quite stubborn at times-a trait that is invaluable when working as a software engineer, especially when working in a group of strong minded people.

Maurice was a great asset to the Wicket community since Wicket became open source. The Wicket team was fortunate to have Maurice on board since last March. He was committed to the continued success of Wicket and the Apache community as a whole.

Maurice has guided students that created the initial Wicket Dojo integration (Wicket 1.1 timeframe, before Wicket Ajax). He put a lot of effort into creating two security frameworks for Wicket, with the latest and greatest open sourced: the Wicket Security framework (aka Swarm/Wasp). He had many good ideas on the future of Wicket and integrating his projects into our core distribution.

Within Topicus he was one of the pillars of our company-professionally, and even more important: culturally. He was always organizing and attending social events, nerd nights, cart challenges and board gaming evenings. Just two weeks ago he was our hero when he arranged tickets for a pre-screening of Batman: The dark knight at our local IMax theatre.

Maurice was notorious for his drinking habit: he drank Coca Cola (pure, no extras) by the gallon. Panic struck when we ran out of it: how can the world turn without coke? I think that the Coca Cola stock will drop a bit with the loss of Maurice. Not only his love drinking the Coca Cola gave him a reputation. When he went on skiing trips, it became an adventure-without any sign of fear Maurice dove down any piste of any color (the darker the color the better). He enjoyed performing jumps at various occasions in half pipes and the occasional bump on the piste-if there was a chance to get airborne, he took it.

I had a lot of good laughs with Maurice, especially because he was the inventor of the Not Invented Here syndrome. He has created at least 2 web based security frameworks, and implemented an almost complete service layer, even when Spring was already the uncontested market leader in that space.

Maurice was the ultimate software engineer: always improving on what he has created, endlessly caught in the infinite loop of tweaking, refactoring, tossing it away and starting all over again. His only weakness was his love for creating abstractions of abstractions of abstractions, and making things more generic with each iteration. This lead to class names such as AbstractReusableHibernateDataProviderRegistryHandler (a made up name, but you get my drift). You can imagine that this is a problem in discussions about the internal framework where your tongue and brain try to combine the 9 concepts in the right sequence.

We’ve had lots of discussions about our favorite fantasy authors, recently Terry Goodkind. He had a list of authors I have to read which I keep forgetting. Writing down stuff was never my strongest point.

I am proud to have worked with Maurice for more than 4 years. It is rare to meet someone with a similar mind and such a gentle spirit as Maurice’s.

Maurice, I miss you. All my thoughts and good wishes are with you and your loved ones. May your soul find peace.

Martijn Dashorst

Ted talk: My stroke of insight

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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:

IBM Support for Wicket, contracts signed

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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!

Bonaire diving pictures

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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.

Moray eel looking for a fightWe 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.

FirewormThe 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.