I went with an Amazon gift certificate since I want to buy a new camera (suggestions welcome as I need to order real soon now) before my next trip and getting a gift certificate avoids the 9% counting fee normally charged. With the help of John I captured the redemption efforts.
In other random updates, over the long weekend all of Gilman Manor, both past and present, went out to California for Shaun and Meg's wedding. It was a wonderful custom ceremony in a beautiful bay area setting. Minus some very stiff winds the weather was perfect. I captured a few pictures during the festivities.
While out there for the long weekend we also explored San Francisco and visited a few places I'd not been on my previous excursions around the city. In particular we walked around and explored Golden Gate Park. My camera doesn't do macro very well (hence part of my desire to replace it) so only a couple of shots from the Conservatory of Flowers were worth posting. I didn't take any at the Japanese Tea Garden, but exploring the area reaffirmed by desire to visit that part of the world.
Lastly, in between fighting colds, food poising, and bad weather my hiking has been suffering. One weekend just to do something I took a trip up to Breakheart Reservation. No difficult climbs but a nice woodland stroll with many nice views of Boston. The top of Castle Rock had the best views (if you ignore the nearby power lines).
]]>Rough Buzzword time line: Jan 2006, started coding; Oct 2006, First public demo; Fall 2007, opened up for real use.
He gave a quick demo of Buzzword. On startup that an issues with new unsupported browsers. They have support for latest Safari but it isn't released yet. Big advantage of online word processor is like Google Docs you can get at it from anywhere. Better than Google Docs because you aren't confined to email only like editing capabilities.
Document browser with support for sorting by last changed, last viewed, role on document, date, number of pages.
Google can't do pagination. Showing picture import, resize, and text wrapping around it. Layout is all done on the fly. Has a nice ruler that no one knows about.
Three models (in the MVC sense used):
document (persistent user content, hierarchical, moving text is just a tree operation), layout (transient position of content, updated after every keystroke), and display (flash/flex objects on the display list, mostly tracking what is part of the flash player).
Primary loop is: hit a character, inserts into document, fires events, triggers layout, visuals, and redraw.
Document internals: Containment (document) versus Inheritance (run).
Buzzword has a built-in inspector. View and set properties manually. Exposes raw data structure.
Typically when using a tree component you can hook it up to XML. With ITreeDataDescriptor you can plug directly into your own custom data structures. Your application should have debugging tools built into it. Flex's easy to use out of the box components without much styling are a good enough interface to create these tools quickly.
Question about why should someone trust Buzzword for documents?: Basically just need to "trust us". SWFs are not over SSL but all documents are. Adobe practices good data security. Need to ask "how bad would a security breach be for Adobe?" and understand they don't want that to happen.
Created a way to test the real application through a system called "LiveTest". Needed to test correctness of document model after every command. Not a replacement for QTP as it is focused on state of internal models. Internally everything is done via command pattern.
To test some feature it records document model after changes to create known good state. Windows/IE used as platform using ActiveX control to write out state into files. These can later be rerun to compare that the same results are produced each time.
Question about how much effort it took to build the test harness? Not sure, maybe 10% of total time.
Comment made about inability to type in full screen mode. It's a security concern which is why its disallowed.
Commands run during a live test know how to output an ActionScript version of themselves that can be pasted into a .as file to create the test file. Could send to server and compile and send back a SWF, but wanted a light-weight solution. Pieces of test are broken into anonymous function, one for each part. Done to work around issue that if ActionScript runs for too long Flash player freezes. Cooperative multiple tasking. Separate functions can run and return control back to UI.
Question about generating ActionScript code versus interrupting XML? Going through API on top of Buzzword to make testing possible. Built this way to ensure you have a good API. Being bale to set breakpoints in code versus XML is very handy.
New code needs to be referenced so they have a file that pulls in all of the tests so they are compiled in.
Manual training of the test. Took XML snapshots of document and layout and wrote them to disk. XML documents have representations of model objects. Has green thumbs up or red thumbs down. Good discipline about running all test before doing a check in.
Test success based on final XML matching checked in XML. On test failure outputs error files and do text compare of expected and actual. Almost no test is visually analyzed, mostly look at raw XML.
Question about sharing the tests? Yes, every developer has all tests, checked into source control.
Question about if you started over today would you change anything? Wouldn't use IE to write files, probably use AIR instead. Might consider an XML representation for capturing test steps. Do use FlexUnit for lower level API testing.
Question about why not QTP? Why doesn't Adobe provide more testing frameworks? Testing tool capturing at a much lower level than QTP. Could refactor testing tool to be more generic.
Question about how something gets retrained? New kind of break, causes document model to change. May cause new XML to be written out and tests will fail. Now need to generate new XML.
Question about how much of the code is covered by the tests? Look to FlexCover.
Question about handling documents from older versions? Can upgrade documents when opened. Have tests that exercise that process. May have fringe cases that cause problems but hasn't been an issue, yet.
Document organizer testing is harder, need to get into correct state, initialize test user with known set of documents.
Browser tests are only running in IE. Haven't really looked at memory profile under multiple browsers.
]]>April 6 was the less than ideal hike up Monadnock. As you can see we had foggy conditions, snow on the trail, and a fairly brutal summit with high winds. Given the trail conditions the lack of crampons made for some slippery conditions. We ended up doing just the White Dot Trail up and back: 3.8 mile, 1807 feet gain, 3h25m.
Yesterday I went back to Monadnock and ended up going a little peak bagging nuts. Since I was hiking solo I left my route with my housemates but I ended up deviating from that a little (see below), which was bad since I did get lost for a short while... All the trails were snow free and the conditions were excellent. Besides needing to put my jacket on for lunch at the summit, I was fine in a t-shirt and shorts. I've yet to find a trail map with inter link distances to get the tally, but my route was: White Dot Trail, Cascade Link, Pumpelly Trail, Monadnock Summit, Dublin Trail, Marlboro Trail, Marian Trail, Great Pasture Trail, Monte Rosa Summit, Fairy Spring, White Arrow Trail, Do Drop Trail, Cliff Walk (with a little side adventure losing the trail and getting lost on the south eastern side and then finding the trail again after scrambling up some rocks), Bald Rock Summit, Smith Connecting, White Cross Trail, Spruce Link, White Dot Trail. ? mile, ? feet, 4h30m.
Today I braved a 50/50 chance of rain (I lost) weather report and headed north to hike Mt. Pierce. The hiking was great but with the weather the way it was, I had no views. The sun started to poke through about half way down and the roads were dry by the time I got back to the parking lot. Compared to my other hikes this was a very deserted route. I met two other solo hikers on my way up and one couple on the way down. The lower portion of the Crawford Path up to the Mizpah Cutoff was mixed wet rocks and the packed snow route. Everything north on Crawford from the cutoff to the peak and back via the Webster Cliff trail and the Mizpah Cutoff was just the packed snow route.
The rain made the snow route a little mushy and easy to ascend with just my boots. Near streams that crossed the path the snow was starting to crumble and I dropped at least one piece of the path into the water as I walked over it. Stepping off of the packed snow path plunged you at least knee deep if not waist deep as I unfortunately found out during one misstep. Descending I had to put on my crampons to stay on the snow path instead of slip sliding my way down.
I didn't spent that much time at the peak (besides snapping a few pictures) since visibility was very limited. Instead I descended to the closed Mizpah Hut and ate lunch on the rocks outside. I'll definitely want to head back sometime when the views are better, probably as part of hitting some of the other nearby peaks. 6.6 mile, 2450 feet, 4h15m.
]]>The writing style of each major section does match its theme. Which is why I may have found the Industrial (scientific) section the most interesting, while the Pastoral (pseudoscience) less so, and the Personal (new age) a chore to read. Despite the major differences in the quality of the material the book does prompt one to consider where your food comes from.
]]> The first section focuses on corn. One of the key reasons that corn is grown so much is the seed market. Given parents A and B the seed they produce C (F-1) has better yields than either parent. But C's children (F-2) are genetically worse producing yields up to 1/3 as poor [31]. Big business has an interest in this because to get consistent high yields requires buying new seed from them every year.Some other tidbits:
The second section had plenty of information about organic farming and the fact that the USDA organic guidelines specify an approved list of non-organic additives that maybe used. Another big take away form this section is that even though animals maybe fed organically it doesn't mean that the animals quality of life is any better or that it's being fed its natural diet.
The last section had a couple of tidbits I seem to think I knew but probably forgot. In both cases really not at all related to the subject matter.
With all of that said, what will I change about my food buying or eating habits? Not much, at this time. I already eat healthy and try my best to support local businesses.
]]>The tie between The Nerd Voice and an earlier piece in the book, Democracy and Things Like That, hinted at the expanding and opinionated role media is playing in the elections. While many find it easy to blast Fox News the fact that The New York Times (the opposite side of the spectrum) was one of the key players in misquoting Gore demonstrated to me what I've often seen in technology, that the best doesn't always win. I see similar issues with Obama and can only hope this election doesn't end with the same result.
]]>The magic is the call to BindingManager.debugBinding(). The argument is the destination of the binding. The translation syntax is a little clearer if you aren't using an inline binding. For example the text2 binding above could also be written like this:
<mx:Text id="text2"/> <mx:Binding source="text1.text" destination="text2.text"/>
Using either syntax, when the program is run I get the following output:
Binding: destString = text2.text, srcFunc result = Initial Text Binding: destString = text2.text, error = TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference. Binding: destString = text2.text, srcFunc result = Initial Text Binding: destString = text2.text, srcFunc result = Changed Text 0 Binding: destString = text2.text, srcFunc result = Changed Text 1 Binding: destString = text2.text, srcFunc result = Changed Text 2
The most interesting part of this output is the "TypeError" message. Normally errors like this are hidden from you on purpose by the binding mechanism. Now instead of having to set breakpoints in the framework it's possible to easily see just what is going on when a binding fires.
]]>It isn't that I don't want to read the book or think that it won't help. Almost anything I read I expect to generate some tangential ideas or realizations. My hangup is that reading it would be conforming too much to a pragmatic life, which I already associate myself with. Rash is not a word people typically use to describe me.
]]> I find myself writing this blog entry instead of reading that book or possibly working on a project of interest. The latter causing no end of "why didn't I" moments when I see others producing what I was thinking about. I say thinking about not planning or working on since very rarely does an idea go beyond thinking for me. The act of writing that prompts me to add that some projects do get done as most of my previous blog entries for this year attest to.This maybe just a feeling that I could be doing more? That brings to mind the concept of "personal velocity" as introduced to me in "The Acorn Principle" by Jim Cathcart, another book I started to read, put down and haven't picked up again. While I know some of my own limitations and am mostly comfortable with them, I'm positive in other areas I'm my own harshest critic and think that I could be doing more when in fact I may already be operating at 110%.
While this entry hasn't done much beyond ramble somewhat coherently over a few short paragraphs, the behind the scenes process has been much more cathartic. It has helped me remember some great articles from writers more eloquent then me that address similar material. In particular "Good and Bad Procrastination" by Paul Graham and tangentially related "Set Your Priorities" by Joel Spolsky.
]]>For anyone not familiar with Antennae here is a brief description:
Antennae is an open-source project designed to automate the building and testing of Flex applications. It uses Ant and Java to provide cross platform utilities to compile Flex libraries, Flex applications, generate FlexUnit TestSuites, and run FlexUnit tests in an automated manner. Antennae also defines a framework for building complex projects with multiple dependencies and intelligently handling recompilation.]]>
