Wicket RAD 0.4 has been released, the full announcement is here, and you can grab the files here.
This is a lot less of a major release compared to 0.3, it is more of a cleanup and refinement release with API improvements, and minor new features and bug fixes. It also includes a sample application and code to display some of the capabilities of Wicket RAD.
The timing is not an accident either, as it is timed on purpose to match up with the London Wicket User Group meetup next week, where I will be presenting Wicket RAD.
Maven repositories and more documentation will be forthcoming, hopefully very soon baring any problems. Information will be posted on the Wiki.
I got my BT phone bill today, and every time I get it I am once again taken aback by the sheer stupidity of their payment terms:
Let’s see, it is the 31st of July today, evening, after bank closing. BT demands payment by the 4th of August, that would be monday. So effectively, they demand payment within two business days of me receiving the bill! Furthermore, consider that most UK banks will take three business days to process a payment! Finally, consider that the bill is for the period ending the 1st of July..
Reasonable? I don’t think so. What if I was away on holiday for a week? Or God forbid, two weeks? What then? Late payment penalties?
How about sending out a bill in good time, so I have plenty of time to pay? Or is that a bit hard for a former government monopoly?
Idiots.
A reposting of a previous entry just as a reminder to anyone who may be interested:
I will be holding a presentation/introduction to Wicket RAD at the next London Wicket User Group meet-up on the 6th of August at 6:30pm. The meet-up is held at Google UK’s head office, which is very close to Victoria Station in central London.
There will also be a couple of other interesting presentations, and the events are usually very enjoyable, and for those who want to, there are usually beers in a close by pub afterwards.
Details and a registration form for the LWUG event can be found here.
The main coverage of this is on my Swedish language blog, but it’s interesting to put here anyway:
I posted yesterday about how Swedish blogger Henrik Alexandersson had been reported by “FRA” (a swedish spying agency) for publishing classified government documents that may have indicated that they had been illegally wiretapping innocent Swedes for the past 12 years at least. The coverage has been picked up by The Register from other sources as well, for the English speaking of you.
After well founded rumours from police sources of an arrest warrant out for mr. Alexandersson, the authorities seem to have backed off for the moment, as they saw the Streisand effect come into full swing – the attempts to censor and silence critics by thinly veiled threats of legal action backfired royally, at this time, by my own count, at least 40 other bloggers have copied the classified documents in question and republished them (including yours truly).
In other words, the attempts to supress free speech in order to cover up possibly illegal government activities didn’t work quite as planned – they roared at one blogger, the whole blogosphere roared back, with some help from the mainstream media and a lot of help from an incensed public opinion.
The republishing of the documents on various blogs became first page news at Dagens Nyheter, Swedens largest morning newspaper among other things.
A list of republishing blogs to-date can be found here on my Swedish language blog.
There is another discussion on TSS with the analogy between bridge building and Agile software development.
I believe this analogy is deeply flawed, and the signature “zippy doodah” hits the nail by putting the analogy in the correct context:
“Could you build a bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn this way?” Perhaps you should phrase the question in the form of a requirement.
“Could you provide access to Manhattan from Brooklyn using an agile methodology?”. Sure in the first iteration you would use a Ferry Boat. In the next Iteration you would upgrade the Ferry Boat to a Steam Power ferry. As demand increased you would create a fleet of ferries and add more Ferry Landings on the Brooklyn side and the Manhattan side. Finally as demand surged you would begin the construction of the bridge while continuing to provide service( provide value) to your stakeholders(Brooklynites needing access to Manhattan). By the way this happens to be the actual historical evolution of the Brooklyn bridge.
If the city had attempted to build the bridge before the economic base of the city had been established the bridge would likely have been cancelled due to funding…just like many large waterfall IT projects.
You just need to have a little more imagination, and perhaps a few interests outside of IT and engineering to get use out of this analogy.
Swedish blogger and civil rights activist Henrik Alexandersson has been reported for “freedom of speech” violations by the head of FRA (Swedish National Defense Radio Establishment), the government agency that is responsible for surveilling the contents, origins and destinations of all phone calls, internet traffic and text messages passing through swedish networks, regardless of suspicion or not.
Alexandersson published a classified document on his blog some time ago that had been leaked to him, that proved how FRA had been conducting illegal surveillance against innocent Swedes for more than ten years. It is this offense that has landed him in trouble and deemed him a “threat to national security”.
In other word, the messenger gets shot for whistleblowing about the illegal conduct of government agencies.
To show solidarity with Alexandersson, I hereby publish the same classified document in this post (click for a larger image). Credit to the swedish “Pirate party” for starting this initiative.
Do not sit idly by and let this pass unnoticed!
I no longer reside in Sweden, but I will not sit idly by and see how freedom of expression, privacy and the foundations of democracy are smashed into the ground.
(The title of this blog post is taken from this classical movie scene).
I’ve decided very late in the game to update my “Web 2.0″ credentials by giving Facebook a second chance, and start micro-blogging on Twitter (blogging here will continue as usual).
For those not familiar with Twitter, it is simply a service where you regularly have to answer the question “What are you doing right now?” in less than 140 characters. In other words, an effective way for the voyeurs out there to keep track of what I’m doing.
You can follow me here: http://twitter.com/wfaler
A LOT of organizations have a build manager for their software development, or even in some cases a dedicated team for build- and configuration management.
To me, this is a big, red flag that the organization is doing something seriously wrong.
In todays age, with all the build tools and other tools for automation that we have at our disposal, there is absolutely no need whatsoever to have a dedicated team for building and configuration management.
I can understand that organizations need to have a defined process, and maybe an “owner” of certain environments (such as a production. staging or testing environment), and that people shouldn’t deploy on an ad-hoc basis to such environments.
But that is still no reason for having a whole team of people dealing with a build – a reasonably organized and talented development (or maintenance) team should be able to create a build script and process whereby building a software release is as easy “pushing a button” and then providing whoever is deploying an application with a file to do so.
If you feel the need to add people just to manage a build and configuration management system, take a step back – more likely than not, you could just pinpoint the problem and find a way to automate the relevant process.
I think it is common knowledge that Windows Vista is the most useless pile of shit that Microsoft has crammed out of its nether regions since Windows ME.
But for every day I am forced to use it (at work on my laptop), it dawns on me even more:
Last October, Vista automagically deleted everything in my home folder that was created prior to a specific date. I did not delete anything myself, the files just vanished from the face of my hard drive.
In the last few days I have come across a new problem: I have a bunch of folder in my users home folder that are locked to read-only. No amount of changing permissions changes this. I can’t edit the files, I can’t delete the folders, I can’t add to the folders. The folders are simply locked and completely uneditable.
Tonight when I get home, I’ll take my chances with Ubuntu’s disk trashing bug and install it. Nothing could possibly be more crappy than Vista, hence I will risk burning my HD rather than continue using Vista.
I have an iPod Touch, not an iPhone, but I recently updated the software to 2.0, so I could download apps from the app store, and I found the one application to rule them all, the one application that has persuaded me to eventually get an iPhone once they become easier to come by:
NetNewsWire, and RSS reader. Why is it so good? Well, it is available for Mac as well (and there is a compatible, but not as good Windows client), and it does what I have always been looking for: it syncs the read status of my feed across devices over the internet. In other words, if I read a feed on my iPod or Mac (or even their web client), it will turn up as read in the other device.
Seamless syncing of feeds, perfect!
I have already found the app useful on an iPod touch alone (combined with that of my Mac at home), syncing over Wifi.
But for an RSS junkie like me, being able to read my feeds anytime, anywhere is brilliant. Enough for me to get an iPhone very soon.
