Ruby and Rails conference update

The preparations for Ruby and Rails 2007 in Amsterdam are progressing quite well. We are proud to have Dr. Nic fly in to give a presentation. Also the rest of the conference is already well filled with many speakers. Mind you, the official announcement has not been done yet!

We are only searching for more people that want to present a quickie. A quickie is a presentation of 5 minutes sharp. You could use it for example to show some cool stuff. So if you are around in June, and you made something new, or saw a nice new feature somewhere, feel free to e-mail us at danny at rubyenrails dot nl.

Update 2007-04-23: Unfortunately Simon Willison canceled. He felt too much out of place on a Ruby and Rails conference.

Turmoil in Wicket land

The impossible task faced by the Wicket team is finally coming to an end. For months and months work was done on 2 branches (1.3 and 2.0), with a third in maintenance mode (1.2). Three branches is realy too much for a group of volunteers. For the uninitiated: the 1.3 and 2.0 branches differ in one major big way: 2.0 has one extra argument to each and every component. Another large difference is that 2.0 supports generic models. For the rest, most new features and fixes were added to both 1.3 and 2.0.

So what are the options? It seems that the 'constructor change' will be dropped. This means that the 2.0 branch will be abandoned. All other 2.0 only features will be ported to 1.3. Users that use the 2.0 beta code from svn will have to migrate to 1.3.

Is this good news? I think so! If this turns out to be true, the excellent work of the Wicketeers will be much more focused again. Furthermore, all the good new features will be available for Wicket users of all branches!

Update 2007-03-19 And yes, it did turn out to be true:

I think it is time to close the vote and count our blessings. [...]

7 +1 binding votes, [...] 4 abstainees, and no non-binding votes.

This wraps it: we will drop the constructor change and migrate all features of trunk to branch 1.x in 2 releases: everything non-Java 5 goes into 1.3 and java 5 specifics into 1.4

Martijn

Vooraankondiging Ruby En Rails 2007 (Dutch)

Binnenkort is het weer zover. Een nieuwe Ruby En Rails dag. Vorig jaar was het een zeer geslaagde, zonnige en gezellige dag waar veel Rails en Ruby enthousiastelingen aanwezig waren.

Ook voor dit jaar zijn we bezig om weer een dag te organiseren. Er wordt druk gezocht naar een lokatie (waarschijnlijk Amsterdam) en we zijn aan het inventariseren welke sprekers uitgenodigd worden. Waarschijnlijk zal het allemaal plaatsvinden op 31 mei, maar het is 7 juni geworden.

Heb je zelf nog goede ideeën of verzoeken m.b.t. sprekers op deze dag, surf dan naar Ruby en Rails en laat iets achter in de comments. Je kunt ook een e-mail sturen naar danny at rubyenrails.nl.

We zijn op zoek naar sprekers voor:

• Presentaties van 45-50 minuten;
• Lightning Quickies™ van 5-15 minuten.

Mogelijke onderwerpen:

• Handige Ruby libraries (gems)
• Rails plugins
• Interessante real-world toepassingen van Rails
• Tips & truuks, leuke vondsten, enzovoorts

Update 2007-03-20 De datum is intussen vast gezet op 7 juni. Ruby en Rails 2007 wordt gehouden in het gebouw van de Hogeschool van Amsterdam nabij het Amstel station.

Mule patch accepted

Another product that accepted my patch. Till today I was proud to have patches in the following products:
- Xml2Db (specification for an aspect of the API, no code, long time ago)
- Struts (something with generating session ids, not long ago enough)
- Wicket (MixedUrlEncoding, other patches pending)
- Spring (a small documentation error)

Today this is extended with: - Mule (MailMessageAdapter potentially adds "null" string)

These were all small things, but I am still proud I was able to move open source further :)

For the future: I wrote a Camping application to manage a virtual e-mail domain for Postfix. My plan is to convert this to a Radiant extension and make it available under the MIT license.

Wicket to the recue!

My previous site (for the municipality of Amsterdam) is barely finished, and I have already convinced my next client (where I work as a consultant) that Wicket is more suited for them then Spring MVC. Life is sweet! Spring MVC has a lot of Spring quality, but the programming model is just not what I want to work with. Wicket to the rescue!

More Ubuntu experiences - continued and discontinued

Che promised and delivered. Almost.

The boot time was indeed fast. Che had compiled the wacom-linux kernel module so the Wacom tablet worked fine. Even dual head worked, well almost...

Problem 1: The screens were in the wrong order. The second screen is standing to the left of the main screen. No problem, just one one word changed in xorg.conf, reset and done.

Problem 2: The Wacom tablet driver still thinks that the second screen is to the right of the main screen. No idea how to solve this. Che thought this would require a code change and recompilation of the wacom-linux kernel module.

Problem 3: The external screen gets the wrong resolution. Whatever we tried, we could not get it to run on 1850x1050, the optimal Dell 2005fpw resolution. Bummer.

So again, after 2 additional hours of hacking, I am back with MS Windows. Perhaps, if time permits, I'll erase the Ubuntu partition and try familiar SuSE this week.

Note: fear not if you have one of the newer Dell Latitude D620s with nVidea graphics. Dual head works a lot better on these then on my older D620 with Intel graphics.

More Ubuntu experiences :(

Having little to do for a couple of days, I decided it was time to move to a real OS on my work laptop, a Dell Latitude D620. One of my colleagues very enthusiastically recommended Ubuntu. Having read a whole lot of other enthusiastic stories about Ubuntu, it was time to give it another try. This time it was to be Ubuntu 6.10.

Stupid me.

First of all GParted just gave me an "Error" while resizing my Window's NTFS partition. That was it, just "Error", no details whatsoever. About an hour later I had tried to downloading the latest GParted iso. Luckily this did work.

Second problem was the line "BUG: soft lockup detected on CPU#0!" during startup of Ubuntu. After this the system froze up. No where to go for, my enthusiastic colleague did a google and find out that the wireless driver crashed when the hardware kill switch for the radio was on. Bummer. I flipped the switch, rebooted and Ubuntu now started. It did take a good 2 minutes longer, just to find out there is no access to a wireless network. (Why do you think the switch was off?)

Third problem was the mouse. Well, actually I do not have a mouse but a very nice Wacom Graphire3 tablet. The tablet kind of works (I could move the mouse pointer) but you can not always reach the edges of the screen. You know, like the place where the menu is located. This really annoyed the hell out of me. Luckily Firefox was already installed so I searched the internet for solutions. I found several and none of them worked. There was one guy with the same setup as me who had worked on it for 3 days! After 4 hours of messing around I found a workaround by setting the mouse acceleration a lot higher.

Today I gave it another try. The older Latitude D620s have a really bad completely sucking low contrast LCD screen that is totally unfit for anything serious. So I decided to configure my kick-ass 20" wide-screen Dell 2005FPW. I found a post on how to configure dual head but to no avail. Boy what a bummer.

Now, I am back on Windows XP and Cygwin. Don't get me wrong, I am a big Linux fan, running it for ages already, and usually avoid MS programs (even on Windows). I liked the looks of Ubuntu and I still do. But as long as it does not run with my hardware, I will not use it.