Hello from another World

I finally gave in and surrendered to the aluminum-colored side. I’m now the proud owner of a MacBook Pro 15″ 2.2. I know the rumors says that Apple will release an update of the MBP very soon, but after having read a lot of rumors about when that should happen I came to this conclusion: If they release an update now it will most likely be a smaller update like LCD backlit screen on the 17″, the MacBook Air bigger touchpad with mouse gestures, and a smaller bump in processor, disk and perhaps VRAM. But having surpassed yet another expected release date (feb. 12.), I decided to get it now. I’m not really gaining anything from waiting a month or so for the updated version to finally reach a store near me. So what is it like to use it? Very nice! It’s really fast to work with, graphics are stunning and with 4GB of memory¹ this will be a perfect workstation the next couple of years. I felt right at home with Mac OS X Leopard because of a lot of similarities with Ubuntu, which has been my primary OS since the first release (having used Linux as the primary OS since 1999 though). I can’t wait to dig even further down into it, getting Time Machine to work with my home Ubuntu Server, finding out how I can “page up/down” in vi, play around with Garage Band, etc. etc.

¹ I installed them myself saving ~ $600 compared to buying them through Apple! It’s easy and the manual that comes with the MBP actually describes how to do it.

Carrot cake

Today I baked the all time favorite carrot cake: Enola Prudhommes Famous Carrot cake (Recipe in Danish). I will bring it to work tomorrow, to please my co-workers.While making it I took some action shots:

All the ingredients needed.

First mix oil and sugar.

Then add the eggs.

Then add all the “dry” ingredients (flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and cinnamon).

Add carrots and the pecan nuts.

The cake is ready to be baked in the oven at 175°C for 60-65 min.

While the cake is baking I prepare the icing from creme cheese, butter, vanilla and icing sugar.

The cake has finished baking, it has to cool before putting the icing on top of it.

Added the icing.

Decorate with pecan nuts.

Summer… at last

It looks like we are finally getting some good weather here in Denmark. It has been a very rainy summer this year and so far we haven’t had a single “bathing day” (a day where the water temperature is above 19° C). Last year we had around 45!

I hope the good weather continues because in one week I’m going on holiday. And we are not leaving the country.

Working indicator

I have always thought that 3D modelling was very fun. My problem is just that I have no talent for it. Therefore I need to put a lot of work into it if I just want to get something ok out of it. My all time favorite tool is Blender, an Open Source 3D modelling/rendering/creativity/etc. suite. Today I needed a larger working indicator than the one provided by Wicket. A very quick search on google didn’t really result in anything useful so I thought how difficult can it be to create it myself in Blender. And I was right! It wasn’t that difficult to do. It only took me about 3 hours to create what I wanted, which is little compared to how many days I can sit and become more and more frustrated on how bad I am at using 3D applications.

I’m quite happy with the result. I rendered it out in a 24, 32 and 48 pixels and used a combination of ImageMagick and Gimp to produce the following animated gifs.

I have no idea if these indicators break any patents, but if they don’t the images are available under:

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

Canon EF 70-300 IS USM

I have just received a new lens for my Canon EOS 350D. I have bought a Canon EF F/4-5.6 70-300 IS USM zoomlens along with a Hoya Pro 1 UV filter. It’s really a nice lens. I have read a lot good things about it before buying it and can’t wait to get outside to try it. I will post some pictures taken later today.

New design on my girlfriend’s websites

My [girlfriend][signe] has two websites. [One][signe] for her singer teaching/coaching and [one][runawaybride] for her wedding singer duo. Both website has now got a new professional look. One of her good mates designed them for her and I did the “programming”. Check them out (in Danish):

[][signe]

[][runawaybride]

Cool, eh?

[signe]: http://signestauner.dk/
[runawaybride]: http://runawaybride.dk/

Great little book about sharing

[][blogsite]

I’ve just found this [great little childrens book][blogsite] when surfing [del.icio.us][delicious]. I liked it so much that I decided to translate it into Danish. It took me about 1½ hour to translate it into a version zero-point-something. An hour later the [Danish version][da] was published on the site. It’s quite funny that I my name is actually mentioned in it because I’m the translater. Though I hope my last email with corrections will get integrated before too many reads it.

* [English version][en]
* [Danish version][da]

[blogsite]: http://dustrunners.blogspot.com/
[delicious]: http://del.icio.us/
[en]: http://www.dustrunners.com/Pig_and_the_Box.pdf
[da]: http://www.dustrunners.com/Pig_and_the_Box_Danish.pdf

Support for testing an AjaxLink in WicketTester.clickLink

I have begun extending the WicketTester to ease the testing of AJAX enabled Wicket applications
My first [patch][revision] extends the clickLink method into accepting clicks on
an AjaxLink. The method then invokes the onClick method on the AjaxLink.

This is a good way to simulate that a user clicks on an AjaxLink. At [Avaleo][avaleo] we use this
method a lot when testing that the flow is correct etc.

The next patch is going to be about actually testing that a component is added to an AjaxRequestTarget
when an AjaxEvent is fired. More on that later…

[revision]: http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.cgi/wicket?rev=6254&view=rev
[avaleo]: http://www.avaleo.net/

New server

I’ve just configured my new server, which are already running my [personal][billen] [websites] as well as my [girlfriend's][signestaunerdk] [websites][runawaybridedk].

The new server is a AMD64 3200+ with 2×250GB SATA discs configured in RAID1 (mirror). I also bought a 1GB RAM block, but either it’s damaged or else it simply don’t fit together with my ASUS A8N-VM. So right now I’ve only installed 512MB in it.

I have installed Ubuntu Server on it (of cause ), but it wasn’t as straight forward as I’ve hoped. The installer was ok for configuring the software raid, but for some reason it wouldn’t install grub on the harddisk. I had to manually do that and it was also then I found out that the installer hadn’t created a /boot/grub/menu.lst. But that was easy to create using update-grub.

But after that everything just worked perfectly (after the RAID partitions had been scrubbed)

If you are actually reading this post it also means that the new server is up’n'running and accesible from The Internet.

[billen]: http://billen.dk/
: http://i.billen.dk/
[signestaunerdk]: http://signestauner.dk/
[runawaybridedk]: http://runawaybride.dk/

Wicket 1.2 released

The [Wicket development team][wicket] has released the next major release of Wicket.
They have put a lot of effort into making it even more easy for us to develop
professional webapplications. Some of the new features which I think is particulary
useful is the new [AJAX][ajax] support and the WicketTester. (Read the full
[release note][release])

The WicketTester is a great way to test your components without having to use a
container for it. At [Avaleo][avaleo], we have used this the last couple of month since
some of the first beta releases of 1.2 and it really speeds up writing unit tests
for all the components, pages etc that we create.

The last month I have played around with the [AJAX][ajax] implementation and I most say that
it really is nice that you don’t have to do any Javascript yourself to make it work.
At the moment we are strongly considering using [AJAX][ajax] in our application so it’s
great that Wicket provides such a clean and simple API for it.

Just to mention some of the other new features which I believe makes a difference (at least
for me at the moment):

Taken from the [release note][release]:

* Nice URL support through URL mounting
* Spring support for injecting your business logic into your web pages in a non-intrusive manner, while still being able to use the convenient Wicket idiom for creating pages (using the Java new operator).
* Improved performance by replacing OGNL with our own object graph language parser

[wicket]: http://www.wicketframework.org
[ajax]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29
[avaleo]: http://www.avaleo.net/
[release]: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=10467093&forum_id=46143