A rabbit killed my Internet connection

First off, kudos to the Comcast technical support person that came out to my home and quickly diagnosed the issue with our cable connection. It seems that rabbits around our parts have a taste for coaxial cable insulation (the black plastic covering of the cable). Our Internet service went on the fritz about a week ago. All my attempts to get it back online proved futile. Coinciding with this outage was the recent irrigation system work on Thursday. So I was all ready to place blame on the irrigation installers.

The Comcast technical support person stopped out a couple of days ago and inspected everything. He said he'd like blame it on the irrigation guys too because then they can bill the irrigation guys for the work and materials to fix it. Nope, the insulation on the coaxial cable was nibbled away very close to the house, two sections, each of about 2 inches in length. The Internet connection has been restored and the Comcast guy put some electrical conduit around the cable where it comes out of the ground and into the house to deter the rabbits from doing this again.

Understanding Flash window modes for embedding HTML rendering in Flex app

An excellent write up about Flash window modes. I'm attempting to use an IFrame in my Flex application to punch a hole into the Flash movie and allow HTML rendering in my Flex application. When doing this, one needs to understand window modes. I'll probably have more to say about the IFrame solution in Flex, but for the meantime, here are some very relevant links:

http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=e5141

http://ccgi.arutherford.plus.com/blog/wordpress/?page_id=171

http://ccgi.arutherford.plus.com/blog/wordpress/?p=173

http://ccgi.arutherford.plus.com/blog/wordpress/?p=133

http://www.deitte.com/archives/2007/09/html_in_flex_wi.htm

Getting Hibernate to format generated SQL

Use the configuration property hibernate.format_sql to have Hibernate format generated SQL. This feature needs to be used in conjunction with the hibernate.show_sql configuration property. Both need to be set to true to get nicely formatted SQL. Very handy for understanding what Hibernate is doing.

flexcover: A code coverage tool for Adobe Flex

Found this interesting tool for Flex development. I've been using dbUInt Flex testing framework to do TDD with Flex. Having a code coverage tool will be very helpful for my TDD efforts.

Understanding Flex transport protocols

I've been doing some investigation of Adobe Flex remoting and messaging protocols. I've used the HttpService before and was somewhat underwhelmed by its performance. Recently, I've looked at BlazeDS and the AMF3 binary protocol. AMF3 seems much faster than transporting XML over HTTP. Well, James Ward has an excellent Flex application that quantitatively demonstrates this performance difference.

http://www.jamesward.org/census/ (Source code here)


Very well done and quite informative.

First Flex app up and running with BlazeDS

Well it took me a while and a lot of browsing the web for the proper incantations, but I finally got a Flex app up and running with BlazeDS 3.x. Their reference documentation is not very clear about the Flex compiler arguments that you need to specify to reference the services-config.xml and to specify the servlet context root. I have a document of the steps that I went through, with screenshots, so others might have an easier time with this. BlazeDS remoting seems very quick and performant. For my application, I built a new Java web app up from scratch and did not use any of the turnkey stuff. In hindsight, it seems that magic revolves around the Flex compiler arguments. This Flex app also uses Cairngorm microarchitecture framework, which seems pretty straightforward to use. Next up is to hook in Spring and Hibernate on the Java server side.

Silverlight 2.0 does have unit testing

Seems that Silverlight 2.0 does have some unit testing potential.

http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/2008/03/31/silverlight2-unit-testing/

Excellent tutorial on Cairngorm framework

If you do anything of any substance in Adobe Flex, you'll undoubtedly come across the Adobe Consulting Cairngorm framework. It can be a rather daunting framework to grasp at first, but David Tucker has an excellent multi-part tutorial to guide you on your way. Very much recommended.

http://www.davidtucker.net/category/cairngorm/

MSTest tools don't seem to work with Silverlight 2.0 projects

I've been playing around with Silverlight 2 beta in Visual Studio 2008. I tried to create a Test project in my Silverlight solution and add a Silverlight project as a reference to the Test project. No go! Complains about Silverlight assemblies can only be referenced by other Silverlight assemblies. This sucks...I wanted to drive a lot of my design of non-visual classes in the Silverlight project using tests. I assume that NUnit testing won't work either. Could be very interesting developing for the CoreCLR.

Sonos ZoneBridge now installed

Added the ZoneBridge to my Sonos music network tonight. Very easy to install--it's pretty much plug and play. My ZonePlayer is now connecting wirelessly to my ZoneBridge and the ZoneBridge is connected to my Airport Extreme access point in my living room. Not bad for about 20 minutes of configuration and software installation and setup. I have a pair of Definitive Technology ProMonitor 1000 speakers connected to the ZonePlayer ZP100. Sounds great.

Sonos Music System up and running

Received our Sonos music system today. For more information, go to http://www.sonos.com. I bought the Controller 100 and ZP100 Zone Player combo for $699. Set up the computer software on my Macbook. Installation on the Mac is effortless and I literally had it playing music from my NAS device in 5 minutes. Looks like it uses Windows Networking (aka SMB or CIFS) to access music libraries. I have a 1 TB Western Digital MyBook World NAS device connected to the network where I've been burning my WMA files to. Haven't tried Ogg Vorbis or iTunes collections yet. I absolutely love this music solution. Great out of box experience. Kudos Sonos!

BTW, I also purchased a Zone Bridge from Sonos, but have not connected that to the network yet. I post more when I get that online.

New Airport Extreme

Man, these Apple products are like crack! Now that I have the MacBook, I wanted to upgrade the living room wireless access point. Went out to the Apple Store and ordered an Airport Extreme. Super easy to setup, very small and stylish, and it seems to run great. I'm using it in bridged mode and 802.11n only (radio set at 5 GHz). Hopefully I'll be able to use wireless outside in the backyard pool area. Highly recommended!

New MacBook!

Just bought my first Mac...a black MacBook. I bought it with 1 GB of RAM, but immediately went to Newegg.com and purchased 4 GB of RAM to replace the original 1 GB that came with the system. So far so good. My Dell XPS went on the fritz late last week. It looks like the nVidia video card went to hell and now none of the operating systems will boot up on it. And the Dell is off warranty, so it's going to cost me some money to get the thing fixed. Oh well. So I'm rolling with the MacBook. For Windows, I'm going with VMware Fusion on the MacBook.

Continuous testing using Fireworks

This past weekend I installed the Fireworks plugin for IntelliJ IDEA. Fireworks will periodically check your source directories and if anything changed, will run all the tests (after recompilation) without you, the developer, having to initiate the test runner. There are some things that I'd like to see different in the plugin (e.g. the ability to exclude integration tests from continuous build), but overall, it's a worthwhile tool for the arsenal. One other gripe is that Fireworks pops up the compilation dialog. I think I can actually get this to work in the background by tweaking an IntelliJ preference. You can still use the test runner within IntelliJ; Fireworks just ensures that you're running tests more often. Thumbs up!

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Fireworks IntelliJ IDEA plugin for continuously running unit tests

Just installed the Fireworks plugin for automating the running of unit tests. Very cool. The plugin installs a tab that changes its icon depending on whether the test suite running successfully or not. Very similar to autotest in Ruby's ZenTest gem. Very nice complementary tool for TDD. Definitely a good find.

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Compiz Fusion on Kubuntu 7.10

sudo apt-get install compiz compiz-kde compizconfig-settings-manager emerald

Alt-F2 to run compiz -replace
Alt-F2 to run emerald -replace

Configure Compiz and Emerald from KDE Menu, Settings.

Very, very cool. Much better than Vista and Mac OS X.

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Issues when attempting to build native Ruby extensions on (K)Ubuntu Linux

Just a friendly reminder that anyone attempting to install Ruby gems for Mongrel, ruby-debug-ide, or anything else that needs to build native extensions will need to install build-essential and ruby1.8-dev Ubuntu packages into their (K)Ubuntu Linux system prior to installing the gems. Seems like an easy thing to remember, but I didn't, and ended up wasting a lot of time dorking around with it.


$ sudo apt-get install build-essential ruby1.8-dev


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NetBeans 6.0 is an awesome Ruby on Rails dev environment

I've been doing some Ruby on Rails stuff lately. Nothing serious, just playing with the platform right now. I've been using Aptana Studio 1.0.2 on my Kubuntu box here at home and it's worked really well. Today, I thought I'd try out NetBeans 6.0 and see how it's Ruby on Rails support is. One word--AWESOME!! It's much nicer than Aptana (which is really quite good in its own right) and for newbies like me trying to get their feet wet with Ruby on Rails, it's done very nicely. NetBeans is quite quick on my dev machine here at home. I really like the integration with Ruby and Rails that Sun has built here. Kudos to the NetBeans group for providing a top notch Ruby on Rails dev environment. BTW, I'm using Ruby 1.8 and Rails 1.2.4. I may try JRuby at some point, but right now I'm fine working with stock Ruby and Rails.

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dpuint for real Adobe Flex unit/integration testing

I've been really underwhelmed by flexunit and its inability to properly unit test Flex UIComponent implementations. Well, it looks like I'm not the only one. Digital Primates have a new unit and integration testing toolkit for Flex that is quite nice and really supports testing of Flex UIs. I've been using it for a few days and it's much better than flexunit.

http://code.google.com/p/dpuint/

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Flex Builder for Linux Alpha 2 out!

Seems to bundle the new Flex 3 SDK Beta 3.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/

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