A Wicket Diary

The connection here is awful, I experience almost 100% packet loss when trying to connect to the internet using the KPN Hotspot. And it costs me about 45 euros to get the right of not being able to use internet. This is highly frustrating, as even complaints don’t get through.

Combine this fact that I have a Mac, which is of course not supported by the KPN, so I could call the support desk, but they would directly tell me that I have an unsupported platform and that I should go make love to myself.

Fortunately one of our readers on the wicket development list was smart enough to mention the TLA ‘MTU’. This sparked me to go and see how pinging would work out. So I set up a ping to the dutch news site “nu.nl” and saw that all 64 byte messages came through (though with about 1-10% packet loss). When I set the size to 2048, no reply came back. Setting the size to 1024 (or rather 1016 to compensate for the additional 8 bytes that is added to the ping message), I still got a 1-10% packet loss, but I got replies back.

Browsing through the man pages of ifconfig gave me the option to modify the MTU of my wireless connection:

sudo ifconfig en1 mtu 1024

This sets my wireless network to broadcast 1024 sized packages instead of 1500. And immediately everything started to work again.

So the recipe to get your wireless connection to work is to try pinging a known website with different package sizes and see which one works best. Then setting that on your wireless connection.

The veil has been lifted. Thoof is now officially in private beta (and I got to play around with it a bit). Given that the famous (from Revver and other successful website) entrepreneur Ian Clarke is behind this effort and that Jonathan Locke is one of the architects behind the site, the foundation is solid.

VentureBeat writes:

Like Digg, Thoof provides a synopsis of articles on its home page —this includes headline, brief summary, and tags to designate topic matter. It then provides a link to the article, and sends the reader to the original source.

That’s where the similarities with Digg end. It doesn’t let otherreaders rank the articles for you. Rather, it offers articles to youbased on what knows about you, such as IP address (which providesgeographical location), the browser you use, your operating system andthe site you were on when you clicked through to Thoof — all of whichoffer subtle clues about you. Then, additionally, as you searcharticles, it tracks the tags of the articles you read. Finally, it maysoon begin asking you a random question from time to time, to gathermore information.

Thoof was also covered by Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch and he seems sceptical, as most of the previous attempts (SearchFox, Findory and more) did not succeed or even ended up in the deadpool. Many of the comments seem to share the sentiment. However, Ian Clarke explained more of the new selection algorithm behind the site, and if it works, I predict a bright future. In the private beta run I already saw a couple of links I liked (and I hadn’t even clicked!).

Now this may look to the regular reader that I’m promoting a web site because a friend is working on it, but there’s more to it: it is Wicket based (which is one of the reasons Jonathan was asked to come aboard I presume). If it is a successful endeavor (and I trust Ian Clarke to be correct here), then it may become the biggest website running Wicket.

I like the unobtrusive Ajax functionality they built in: when you click the header of a story, the browser sends a notification to the server using Ajax, and then replaces the story panel with a ‘this story has been read’ variant). In the mean time the news article has been loaded in a new window.

If you have some Wicket experience, you can see how they construct their pages based on the markup: ListView or Repeaters, and Panels and Behaviors have been put to good use. I expect there will be some tweaking going on (removing superfluous span tags, or too enthousiastic use of Ajax component replacement) but on the whole it really looks great.

All in all, a very exiting time for Thoof and its creators, and I hope they succeed.

Eelco writes on the mailinglist after some (luke warm) discussion on how to test the new custom serialization Johan is building into the next Wicket versions. This is what he wrote:

Hi all,

We’re (Johan mostly) are experimenting with custom serialization to
see whether we could speed things up a bit (which doesn’t mean what we
have now is bad btw).

For anyone working on 1.3: we could use your help testing that
feature. The only thing you need to do is turn it on on your
development machine, by doing this in e.g. your application’s class
init method:

Objects.setObjectStreamFactory(new wicket.util.io.WicketObjectStreamFactory());

And then just report any issues you encounter to this list or the
developers list. Of course, if you have tweaks, test reports etc,
that’d be even cooler.

The default can be set like this:

Objects.setObjectStreamFactory(new IObjectStreamFactory.DefaultObjectStreamFactory());

which is based on JDK’s serialization. If you don’t configure
otherwise, that is what is used.

Thanks,

Eelco

So please help us out here and use the new WicketObjectStreamFactory in your development efforts and create bug reports if/when you find anything wrong.

The promise of this custom serialization is that it will improve the throughput and memory footprint of your Wicket application considerably. So help yourself, your employer and the Wicket community by testing the new serialization.

This time I agree completely with the Microsoft marketing department: Microsoft Office 2007 is the best Microsoft Office for 10 long years. But I probably have other reasons than they have. Finally they removed the annoying paperclip from the suite.

Clippy-be-gone-forever.

Now, if they also ditched that infuriating search dog in Vista that plagues Windows XP…

Ohlo just surfaced on my radar. Ohlo is a open source catalogue, similar to the O’Reilly codezoo effort. We have Swik, Freshmeat, etc. How many of these efforts can the internet bear?

Ohlo does looks like a good effort. They parse the code repositories and base some of their statistics on that. A lot of sourceforge projects will fail the test as many will be flagged as one man, inactive projects.

Strange thing is that for the maven project (which is pretty heavy under development) they say that the activity is in decline. Probably the pointer to their repository was not correct.

Is such a catalogue any good? I think it is. I usually try to stay away from one man shows, and projects that haven’t seen much development (unless the software tracker shows no bugs and the project is feature complete). This catalogue shows in a blink of an eye the status of a project and adds nice qualities to it.

Their summary for Wicket:

+ Large, active development team
+ Well-commented source code
! Apache Software License may conflict with GPL

They flag the Apache Software License as conflicting with GPL. Apparently this is caused by one file in our repository trunk which is GPL licensed. The one problem I have is that they are able to discover one file with GPL code, but don’t provide a link to which file that is. Anyway, I doubt this will still be a problem in the next weeks. We are removing all (L)GPL code from our code base as our effort to incubate at Apache continues. The comments in our code seem to please the Ohlo gods:

Wicket is written mostly in Java. Across all Java projects on Ohloh, 35% of all source code lines are comments. For Wicket, this figure is 51%. This high number of comments puts Wicket among the highest one-third of all Java projects on Ohloh.

They conclude this factoid with the comment that the Wicket team is a [...] helpful and disciplined development team.

Read more on Wicket at Ohlo. Oh, and you can stack Wicket, which is something like telling that it is part of your software stack.