Just a Thought...

Wicket, Spring, Hibernate, Testing... Yeah, it's like that.

Berin Loritsch — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:57:00 +0000

I have to deliver a product using Java. Due to politics and approved baselines, etc. I can’t use Ruby on Rails. I’ve done my own thing in the past, and so this time I decided to save some time by incorporating Wicket, Spring, and Hibernate using auto-wiring, and attributes. Getting it all to talk together took the better part of a day, but I got it to deploy and run fine.

I’m an avid unit tester, so I was happy to learn that Wicket has some facilities to make testing a bit easier without forcing you to create your own Servlet mock objects. I was really happy about that, so I decided to try it out. Unfortunately, I ran into a rather nasty roadblock. Spring was complaining about the ContextLoaderListener not being loaded. It’s defined in my web.xml file, but the autowiring requires the spring context to be loaded in a particular location. Finding out how to fix that problem took me the better part of half a day.

The problem is that Wicket hides the ServletContext object away from you. You can’t add values, because the test framework is initialized on construction. Attempts to obtain the ServletContext and manually add the Spring web application context just weren’t working. That’s because it is configured when the WicketTester object is constructed and ignored after that. I needed to be able to inject my own ServletContext with the Spring integration taken care of. I finally figured it out here, because the forums just working for me. Please note that this is tested with Wicket 1.4 and not any of the earlier versions:

final MyApplication app = new MyApplication();
tester = new WicketTester(app) {
    @Override
    public ServletContext newServletContext(final String path) {
        // web context
        ServletContext context = new MockServletContext(app, path);
        // spring context
        XmlWebApplicationContext spring = new XmlWebApplicationContext();
        spring.setServletContext(context);
        // configure spring
        spring.setConfigLocation("classpath:application.xml");

        // put spring where Wicket can find it
        context.setAttribute(WebApplicationContext.ROOT_WEB_APPLICATION_CONTEXT_ATTRIBUTE, spring);
        return context;
    }
};

So let me explain what I did. I created an anonymous subclass of the WicketTester class so I could override the factory method “newServletContext” to inject my spring configuration. Done properly, the wicket folks can take care of this by providing a SpringWicketTester subclass in their spring integration library. The SpringWicketTester would let you specify the location of your Spring configuration file, and it would override that method for you. For now, you’ll have to do it yourself.

I put the WicketTester initialization in a subclass of the JUnit TestCase class. That way I don’t have to repeat myself for setting up my Wicket testing.

Ruby IDEs Come of Age

Berin Loritsch — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:07:00 +0000

There’s nothing better than finding that sweet spot with developing your software where your tools work with you, and all is right with the world. With Java that started when JetBrains introduced their IntelliJ IDEA product. That product changed the way we think about integrated development environments, and even the open source alternatives like Eclipse imitated the features included in the IDEA product. At some point they specialized differently, each with their own set of pros and cons.

The Ruby development environment lagged seriously behind with people content to use glorified text editors.

Ruby on Rails brought a whole new community of developers to the Ruby platform, many who were curious malcontents from the Java arena like me. For folks who were used to the IDE integrating with your version control system, and even your issue tracking system, going back to text editors alone wasn’t going to cut it. Yet, so strong was the pull from Rails that some enterprising folks started creating a Ruby IDE: RadRails. RadRails is now a plugin for the Aptana web development platform, and Eclipse based tool. Aptana was my IDE of choice for quite a while. Since I was already used to Eclipse, and I had a set of plugins that I already enjoyed using, there really wasn’t much reason to switch. Except for this nagging feeling things could be better. I was still sorely missing refactorings, decent intentions, and working type-ahead for the Ruby API. Sure I was aware of the technical limitations, but I knew it could be done.

I limped along until I noticed that the Ruby Language had made Ruby 1.9.1 the new official Ruby. It had Rake and RubyGems as standard components, so there will be no issues with the stinking Linux distros that refuse to make an RPM for RubyGems. It’s all included. Of course, there are still some growing pains with some gems. Check out Is it Ruby 1.9 for details (they have a sister site for JRuby in case you are interested). I had an upgrade project ahead of me that required some features from Ruby 2.3.x, cleaning up, and security enhancements. Since I had to re-implement the site anyway, Ruby 1.9 was measured to execute faster, and I had the liberty of doing so, I decided to make Ruby 1.9.1p243 the new baseline.

That’s where my troubles began. It wasn’t just the Gems either. The IDEs just couldn’t handle it. They turned into glorified text editors with the ability to track commits. The debug feature was broken.

I remembered the Zen like experience that I had with JetBrains IDEA from the Java world, and knew they also had a product for .NET. I hoped they had a product for Ruby, and sure enough they have the RubyMine product. If you are looking at Ruby 1.9, or Rails 2.3.3+ don’t look at RubyMine 1.1.1. Look at their new RubyMine 2.0-beta. This is what Ruby programming should be. The price point is currently $79 USD with the current promotion, but normally it is $99. That puts it in the range that mere mortals like me can afford. It works quite nicely with Ruby 1.9, and even Rails 2.3.4 (although that wasn’t the version they developed against). I have my refactorings, my intentions, my effortless subversion integration. Formatting works. It’s fast. Type-ahead doesn’t flake out. Debug works (made possible with coordinated efforts between myself, the debug-ruby-ide gem maintainer and the JetBrains team—the latter two doing the heavy lifting). Let me tell you, JetBrains is as good and responsive as they always were, and the Ruby community is like the Java community used to be, but better and more pragmatic.

Aptana and RadRails will catch up, it’s a matter of time. However, JetBrains RubyMine works now, and it works better and faster than Aptana. On Windows, RubyMine performance is acceptable (on par with Eclipse), but on Mac it sings. Eclipse/Aptana’s performance doesn’t change no matter what platform you are on.

While I’m at it, I do have a major gripe with the Eclipse baseline. As a developer, I have a list of plugins I depend on because those features don’t come out of the box with Eclipse. However, the Eclipse developers who are ever moving forward, break the plugin API and the plugins I need to use. I can’t download a version of Eclipse and expect it to work properly. Then, if I have to hunt around for an older version, God help me. At least Aptana goes through great efforts to provide a stable and usable baseline. OK Eclipse, how is it that you provide an IDE for developing enterprise applications, and you don’t bundle the plugins for Subversion, CVS, and GIT? If Aptana can do it, why can’t you? It’s unthinkable that a responsible developer will touch code without the safety net of a version control system. Give them tools out of the box so they don’t have to separately install these plugins. Support the open source projects around you, so open source version control systems should have preferred status. And don’t release a version of Eclipse until you’ve got those plugins working with it. Really. I mean it. It helps you out in the long run.

Web Accessibility

Berin Loritsch — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:08:00 +0000

I’ve been spending a lot of time looking into accessibility for web sites to finally get a grip on what needs to be done. Sadly, it is overlooked by the big guys when it doesn’t really have to be so hard. There are several types of disabilities including:

Visual (full, partial, or color blindness; Photo-Epileptic Seizure [PES] susceptibility)
Motor control (full or partial disabilities preventing the use of a mouse)
Cognitive disorders (dyslexia and the like)
Auditory (full or partial deafness)

The main issue with accessibility is the lack of knowledge and reasonable resources available to help. In particular, the tools that are needed to support people who have the disabilities are expensive and complicated. There are tools available that everyone can have at their fingertips that will help. Most are Firefox plugins, some require you to use an external site. Below are a few of the resources I’ve found:

The folks at WebAIM have several good recommendations. For example, you know those “edit in place” controls on Flickr? You can make them keyboard accessible by applying the attribute “taborder=’0’”. The control will be in the page’s natural tab order. I did a little experimentation and the control supplied by Script.aculo.us can take care of all these things for you. The only issue is that IE 6 won’t put the control in the tab order unless it is in the original markup. Dynamically changing the DOM to put it in won’t put the control in the tab order with that browser.

Web Design 101

Berin Loritsch — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:25:00 +0000

This is a departure from the film and darkroom printing posts, so apologies and I’ll be back on that later.

I’d like to think I’m a pretty good application designer, although some of the things that I’ve seen on other sites have left me a bit jealous. Face it, I didn’t have a background in web design. I know what I should be able to do, and what it ends up looking like. The problem is familiar to anyone who has designed for the web: IE and non-standard implementations of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. The way it’s supposed to work is you whip open the standards, see what CSS can do for your style, and do it. When you see impressive use of CSS from the CSS Zen Garden you start thinking, why can’t I do that?

I come from an application development background, where we can design our desktop apps with nice grid based layouts and do all kinds of fancy things. From there I went on to web development, and have always been frustrated with my inability to escape using tables for layout. Tables are great for lining things up, but they can cause their own issues when you start incorporating AJAX and other goodies. Then you have to worry about what your client’s browsers can do and what they can’t do. At least I don’t have to worry about Netscape 4 and it’s 30 second lag time to sort out nested tables anymore.

So, I think I’ve solved the worst of my problems. I solved the nonstandard JavaScript implementation problem by using Prototype.js which really made it easy to take care of AJAX support for tags and made some of my complex form handling easier. I was still doing my own JavaScript implementations of type-ahead controls and the like. Then I discovered Scriptaculous which took the pain out of 90% of the more advanced control issues I had.

But what could be done between the presentation hell that Internet Explorer puts me through compared to other browsers on the market? IE positioned things just a bit off, and handled the positioning of divs a little crazy as well. If I was going to both have a nice visual grid layout and use markup the way it was intended, I needed a solution like prototype and scriptaculous to help me out. Enter Blueprint CSS to take away the pain and suffering of using divs to align your content. Now blueprint provides some nice little “plugins” that use CSS to do pretty buttons or decorate links with graphic icons all with pure CSS. The graphic icons degrade gracefully as IE 6 does not support the type of selectors it uses. However, the library included a couple PNGs with transparencies. So what does one do about the fact that IE 6 does not render that nicely? Fix it up with Unit PNG Fix of course.

Now my header looks like this:

    <head>
        <title>My Site</title>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/screen.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection">
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/print.css" type="text/css" media="print">
        <!-- Fix nonstandard IE spacing -->
        <!--[if lt IE 8]><link rel="stylesheet" href="css/ie.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection"><![endif]-->

        <!-- Site CSS -->
        <link type="text/css" href="css/mysite.css" rel="stylesheet"/>

        <!-- Fix IE6 PNG transparency issues -->
        <!--[if lte IE 6]><script type="text/javascript" src="lib/unitpngfix.js"></script><![endif]-->

        <!-- Prototype.js/Script.aculo.us  -->
        <script type="text/javascript" src="lib/prototype/prototype.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="lib/scriptaculous/scriptaculous.js"></script>
    </head>

It seems like a lot, but it makes my life so much easier. I highly recommend Head First Web Design as it covers all these wonderful concepts and more.

Print a Month Project

Berin Loritsch — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:44:00 +0000

Starting in July, I’m starting a new project to help sharpen my skills and maintain a consistent production. The basic principles are as follows:

Every month I take a new picture
That picture is then manipulated and prepared to the best of my ability
The final result is a matted print

The goals are to fine tune my process, try new techniques, and increase my proficiency. The reason for dealing with a print is is for the work to reach its full potential.

Why every month, and not every week or every day? Mainly because I want to have an attainable goal. Something that is reasonable for me to do, yet will push me. Due to my schedule between work and church, I have far less time than I really want in the darkroom. I’m trying to make better use of my time in the darkroom. Additionally, the goal of one print a month allows me to really dig deep into a print and experiment with ways to make it better through dodging, burning, toning, or more creative approaches.

"Beyond" the Zone System

Berin Loritsch — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:14:00 +0000

In the process of trying to coerce a working system in my darkroom, I purchased the book “Beyond the Zone System” because I know it has a lot to help understand sensitometry. What appeals to me is the ability to both test the speed of your film and the development time within 6 sheets. Since Ansel Adam’s film speed test takes seven sheets and an unknown amount of sheets for the dev test (at least one but in practice a few more), I’m all about conserving resources. The cost of the sheet of film is only one part of the cost—it’s the investment in time that I’m most concerned about.

BTZS starts out with a nice little overview of how paper and film work together to make the finished image. It also has a review of all the types of math and graphing theory that pertains to this testing process. The math’s not that hard, but the problem is in the way it’s presented. You can tell the author has a wealth of information, and he tries to make it accessible all in one or two chapters, but you almost end in confusion.

Where my head really starts swimming is when he gets in to calculating film speed. With Ansel Adams, it’s simply a density of 0.1 over film base+fog. The author covers the history and the pros and cons of how film speed was calculated over time, instead of just choosing one and teach how to do that one. It’s useful information, but the alternatives could be moved to an appendix to make that section more accessible.

With a proper handle of the basics of how the film and paper relate to each other, you can intelligently make decisions on exposure, development, and printing decisions. The road to understanding taken in the BTZS approach is very technical, which is not for the feint of heart. However, once you’ve learned the basics, you learn useful bits of information. For example, changing development times is similar to changing apertures—they both follow the same geometric progression of numbers (4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16…) to produce the same changes in final density. Shutter speed times and film speed numbers follow the same progression of numbers.

If you are serious about understanding more about how your materials work and respond to light, this book is definitely something you should have in your library. It will take time to “get it”, but once you do it will help you with your final results. You have a better understanding of why you choose a particular density for your print materials. You also have a better understanding of how zones don’t equal stops of exposure—yet the two still relate predictably.

Confronted with Concept Art

Berin Loritsch — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:35:00 +0000

I’ve been going through Jeff Curto’s History of Photography podcast which has been very good and educational. Not surprising since this is Mr. Curto’s lectures from the class he teaches at the College of DuPage. I did get out of it what I wanted, which was exposure to history’s famous photographers. However, there is one thing I can’t wrap my head around; which is not Mr. Curto’s fault. It’s this whole thing with concept art. The music world has an equivalent called “performance art”. I don’t think it’s so much that I don’t get it, but more that I don’t want to get it.

To me, concept art or performance art is what happens when your left brain attempts to do the job that belongs to the right brain. In essence you as the viewer or artist are supposed to thrust your own intellectual ideas on the object of art rather than allow the art to speak for itself. In essence, it seems to me like the mental masturbations of someone pretending to be an artist telling the world that this boring or non-existent thing is art. For example, someone sits at a piano for 30 seconds in an outdoor setting, closes the piano and takes a bow. Someone erases another person’s painting and calls it art. It takes no skill to do these things. You are supposed to contemplate the ingenious mastery of perception or some other such nonsense.

Sure I come to art with a preconceived notion that art is supposed to be beautiful. I can get abstract art. Art is always introduced by folks like Michelangelo, DaVinci, etc. We then learn about impressionism such as the wonderful works of art by a Claude Monet. I can even get Picasso. So when I see photographic art in the same style I can wrap my head around it. I can understand it. I can see the beauty in the subject, even if I may not particularly enjoy the subject.

What I don’t get is how something that looks amateurish is supposed to be a modern interpretation of art. It almost seems to me as if the art community has become so inbred on its own philosophies and community that it has lost touch with the world. The people who buy these pieces of “art” don’t do it because they enjoy what it looks like, but rather because they look at it as an investment. I have to wonder if the concept art will truly be remembered a hundred years from now?

Do I consider myself an artist? Hardly. Sure I am pursuing photographic art, but I don’t count myself to arrived. In many ways, I want the art to challenge me and impress me. Not to challenge my understanding, but to challenge my skill and knowing what is possible with the medium. I’m forced to deal with left brain functions all day with my job, when I view art I want to exercise the other half of my brain. Concept art (and in the same vein performance art) fails to challenge me or impress me. My daughter created better work when she was nine.

Diving in to film testing and random thoughts

Berin Loritsch — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:15:00 +0000

I’ve been having mixed results in the darkroom, so I’m in the process of at the very least improving my consistency. Part of that process is testing my film and development time for what I like to shoot. It hurts my feelings to use so much precious 4×5 film for the purpose—but I’ve learned something. My instinct to shoot at half the rated speed for my Fomapan (or Arista.EDU Ultra) film was right on the money. However, the development times for Rodinal 1:50 I got from Digital Truth are way off for the way I develop. When I tray develop, I am constantly agitating and rocking the tray back and forth. As a result I have way more contrast than I should.

How do I know? Well I do have an X-Rite 810 densitometer, which can be found on ebay for a reasonable cost. I don’t plan to use it all the time, but while I’m getting my process under control it’s becoming quite valuable. I found the minimum exposure that produced .1 over film base+fog which gave me an ISO of 100 for the Fomapan Creative 200 film. Great. Now, I’m trying to find the right development time that will give me a density between 1.25 and 1.35 for a Zone VIII exposure. The first time through I accidentally made the exposure for Zone VII (that’s zone 7 instead of 8), and used the recommended 10 minute development time for Rodinal 1:50. The density I got was about 1.89. So let me spell it out, it was way above what it should be. My second attempt corrected the exposure (more exposure, more density) and halved the development time to 5 minutes. The density I got was now 1.69, which is still way above what it needs to be. My two choices now are to dilute the developer or to use less agitation. If the time is below 5 minutes you will see some variance in results depending on how quickly you stop the development. I’m not done testing yet, and it is going much slower than I’d like because I don’t have but a few minutes at night to do one test.

Film testing is not a fun task, but in many ways I think it is necessary to go through to at least establish your custom times. The goal is to spend less time fighting my negatives to get a reasonable print and more time enjoying the results. The problem I’m running into is a lack of consistency in my negatives or detail in the highlight areas. The negative has it, but the paper can’t reproduce it readily. My scans came out nice but the prints were a lot more contrasty. Now I know why.

After I get my Arista/Foma film development process down, I may experiment with using my Silvergrain Tektol to develop the film. I’ll start with paper strength at 5 minutes and adjust density by adjusting my dilution or time.

Recreating Yesteryear Photographically

Berin Loritsch — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:44:00 +0000

Many people have considered what makes a photograph look old. Of course, the best way to find out is to look at some old photographs yourself. The question becomes a bit muddier when you have to consider who took the pictures? Was it a professional, was it an average Joe? What kind of equipment did they have? Many old pictures are plagued by being just out of focus because the focus screens were just off. One obvious difference was the use of black and white film. They didn’t have color on one piece of film back then. In the 40s color was done by three frames of film each with a different color filter (red, green, blue). The composite became the color rendition. Color film didn’t make it onto one frame until the 50s. Even then, it was no where near as stable as the black and white film.

The archive of pictures I inherited from my grandpa was all shot on two types of film: Plus-X and Tri-X. The formulations have changed over the years, as has the backing (the original backing is not “safety” film, so it degrades over time). I’ve also noticed the exposure is all over the place. Mostly from using the “Sunny 16” rule. The sky was plain white, or there wasn’t a whole lot of shadow detail. The things that we take for granted now were not in existence then. Meters were either very expensive and only for the elite pros, or they just didn’t exist at all. These technical challenges aside, there is one thing that separates yesteryear pictures and pictures of today—and that is on the creative side of things.

Back in the day, a portrait was a formal thing. You dressed up for the occasion. Even the informal pictures had a certain class about them. I’m not necessarily romanticizing the past, but things have changed in the past 60 years. What is socially acceptable, and what is not. How people dress. The expressions on their faces. 60 years ago the world had finally ended its second war, a war that spanned both hemispheres of the globe. These people have a depth of character and presence in their eyes that you aren’t going to see in today’s average person. There are certain parts of the world today that have been ravaged by war for many years, and you’ll probably be able to see the same character in the eyes of people from those regions. But if you are in America, Western Europe, or even Japan most people have forgotten the horrors of war and what it does to a soul. Even if you had the equipment to make sure everything was in focus, and the exposure was nailed every time, you would still notice a difference between pictures of people 60 years ago and today. If you truly want something that looks retro, you have to put yourself in their shoes. Pay attention to all the details such as clothing, architecture, etc. Maybe you want to add mistakes to make it even more believable. It’s just something to think about.

The "Rules" of Photographic Creativity

Berin Loritsch — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:42:00 +0000

Creativity is a very important aspect of photography, no doubt. From the particular exposure decisions we make to the timing and lighting, all of these require creative thought to get what you have in your mind’s eye. However, there are certain things that have been foisted on us that we hold to be “truths” or unbreakable rules of photography. Some people will tell you that there are no wrong answers—I don’t agree with that, but there are some questions that allow for a range of correct answers. For example, what should your exposure be in open shade at ISO 100? There is more than one answer to that question, and the answer is affected by whether you want some motion blur, or frozen motion, what photographic filters are you using, etc. But that is not the crux of where I’m going right now. There’s other things that are on the line.

“Thou Shalt Never Delete Any of Thine Pictures”

Says who? Think about this one a minute. Let’s say you do sport photography, and for every 1 good picture you have 40 that are either unusable or just average. If you shoot RAW, each picture consumes at least 10MB of space. Each game might consume upwards of 4GB of space. Are you going to keep all of these pictures indefinitely? Think about it, once the season is over and everything that is going to be done with these pictures has been done is there any reason to keep them? You can at least consider removing all the lackluster pictures. Storage is “cheap”, but it is exhaustible. Particularly in times of recession, you have to think about cutting loose the chaff. That’s not to say all work should be thrown out due to the fact there can be new uses for it. However, if you can’t think of a use for a picture now, and you aren’t particularly attached let it go.

You can learn from older pictures, but you should still be pressing forward and trying new things. The older pictures can be a source of inspiration, yet not every one of them will lend itself that way. Some people have been known to destroy negatives after a run has taken place, and I’ll be the first to tell you that there are some that I’m seriously considering destroying. Think about what would happen if you had a fire and lost everything. Your negatives (if you still shoot film), your hard drives, etc. and you had to start over. How many of you would really think about going back and re-shooting everything that was lost? I for one wouldn’t. I’d take it as an opportunity to re-invent myself based on the experiences I’ve had so far.

“Thou Shalt Use the Rule of Thirds, It is the Blessed Path”

The rule of thirds suggests that if you place your subject in the “power points”, your picture will be better. For example, if you dice your viewfinder with lines marking the thirds vertically and horizontally you will have a more “powerful” composition if you put something on those lines or where they intersect. This is a very useful compositional guideline, something we’ve taken from the great painters of yore. However, if you want your picture to be at rest, or static, that bulls-eye picture they tell you is wrong may just be thing the doctor ordered. Powerful is not always the emotion or reaction you want from your viewer. The rule of thirds is a very useful compositional tool, but there are other compositional tools you can use as well. Things such as repetition, diagonals, s-curves, color, contrast, etc.

If the rule of thirds is your only tool, you are a one trick pony and you are condemned to be “stuck”. Instead try to master how light and color affect the mood of your photograph. It’s amazing how a little fog, or some stray light highlighting your real subject improves the emotional impact of a picture. Use the light available, or possibly create your own light. Sometimes engineering the light in your picture is the only real way of getting what you want. If you can, walk around your subject 360 degrees. You might find a better viewpoint to improve the impact.

“Thou Shalt Not Allow Thineself to Enter Into a Slump”

It’s nearly impossible to think creatively all the time. We have times where we are “in the zone” and we intuitively think sideways. Then we have times where we either fall into a rut or are at a loss for the next big idea. The fallacy is that there are those that are creative and those that are not. The truth is that we all have creativity. The challenge is to look for inspiration. It’s OK to fall into a slump at times, because you have to think creatively to get out of it. If you are a one trick pony, learn a new trick and see where it leads you. If you have a variety of tools at your disposal, then it’s time to look in odd places for inspiration. Change your surroundings, give yourself a project. Give proper thought to the things that excite you and why they get you excited.

With all your doing, don’t forget to rest. Sometimes what you need to do is let go of a problem for a while and let the answer resurface all by itself. How many times have we been under crunch time, and you’ve been beating your brain all day, only to have the answer come to you when you are in the shower the next morning. When your mind doesn’t need to be actively engaged it’s OK to let it wander and see where it leads you. You can gain inspiration out of where your mind goes. Then you start thinking about how would you portray that in a picture. So it’s OK to let yourself enter a slump. That slump is usually the step before your next burst of creativity.