Daniel R.

Wow

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:00:36 -0500

While I'm still in a jet lagged stupor, I am back home. In summary, the trip was phenomenal. The varied Nepal landscape was a lush rich green fed by the first rains of the monsoon season. It made for hiking in cloudy mornings and rainy afternoons but the weather cleared during our summit of Kala Patthar and provided mesmerizing views of Everest along with the other almost countless peaks in every direction. I've got over 700 pictures I need to wade through so it will take some time to get the photos online but I'll try to get a few up in the near future to wet your appetite :)

Off to Nepal

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:53:28 -0500

Tomorrow I leave for an extended vacation trekking around Nepal. I don't expect to have any connectivity while I'm there so be advised any email or comments will be delayed even worse than usual. See you in July!

500!

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:21:52 -0500

MovableType tells me this is my 500th post. I think only a couple posts never made it out the door so you have that much drivel of mine for your reading pleasure. Should you want to, you can start at the beginning. Many of my early posts were links until I discovered del.icio.us and started using that to capture all my links. Along the way to 500 posts I switched jobs and started writing more technical articles (hint if you only want RSS notifications for technically related stuff try the Flex Feed). Lately I've been more on the personal side, too lazy to setup a separate blog for that, unlike some more motivated bloggers.

Wonder who I wronged?

Wed, 28 May 2008 10:00:55 -0500

I woke up this morning to find over 4,000 messages in my inbox. Seems I was on the receiving end of an email bounce bomb. Basically someone was sending out thousands of spam email messages and forged my email address as the sender/return-path for the messages. Given how these things work I'm sure my address was randomly selected out of some list, but my cynical side makes me wonder who I wronged :) At last count I've gotten over 17,000 messages. The incoming message rate is subsiding but at its peak they were coming in at 40-50 a second. Crazy.

Adobe's David Coletta on Buzzword's Automated Testing Framework

Fri, 16 May 2008 09:26:42 -0500

This past Tuesday the Boston Flex User Group held its second meeting. David Coletta from Adobe's Buzzword team spoke about Automated Testing Framework. This was a deeper dive into the topic he presented at Flex Camp Boston 2007. I counted about 50 people at the meeting. It was a very interactive session with a bunch of good questions coming from the audience. Below are my rough notes from the presentation.

Returning

Tue, 06 May 2008 22:04:00 -0500

I'm finally feeling like I'm returning to the real world after a multiple day buildup and long weekend spent watching prodigious amounts of television while battling the worst cold I've had in a long time. I frequently suspect that when I over extend myself too much my body fights back and lets a cold in since it knows that will slow me down. Well it worked. I'm completely off my training schedule as even biking to work brings out coughing fits, but thankfully I've still got over a month to get back into the swing of things. Besides generally being lackadaisical when responding to email my hermit nature over the past week only exacerbated the problem. Very tempting to just hit delete all and try an inbox zero.

My Kneecaps Hurt

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:09:39 -0500

As most of the regular readers of this blog know my big vacation for this year is going to be a trek in Nepal. I've been training for awhile now doing a bunch of different conditioning. I started off with cardiovascular on my bike trainer and doing the stairs at Harvard Stadium. I then rediscovered the beauty of hiking in the Blue Hills after a less than ideal hike up Monadnock. This weekend I returned to Monadnock for a much more enjoyable hike and then ventured up into the White Mountains.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:53:56 -0500

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan starts off strong but with each major section gets less informative and more autobiographical. This isn't to say that the later sections don't have worthwhile material, it's just that what material they do have is harder to find and not as thought provoking. I suspect if the book had started off with his tales of novice hunting and mushroom gathering I wouldn't have read the rest of it.

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 Partly Cloudy Patriot

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 22:46:01 -0500

It's hard to believe that it has been almost a month since I finished Sarah Vowell's "The Partly Cloudy Patriot". I know I've had some free time but it is only now that I'm getting around to jotting down my thoughts. This was a lighter read than most and as such it didn't generate as many notes, which has always been my primary motivation for writing about the books I read. I've lost track of the number of times I've done a Google search for something only to end up on my blog having forgotten I'd written down some thought a couple of years ago. Now back to the book. Overall I enjoyed the book but frequently found her writing to come off as whiny.

Flex 4

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 07:50:10 -0500

Some of the first hints about Flex 4 have been posted to the Adobe Open Source site. Great to see the future development of the Flex platform starting off this open.

Debugging Bindings with BindingManager

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 08:25:23 -0500

At last night's BFUG meeting Peter Farland demonstrated an undocumented class called BindingManager that is handy for debugging bindings in Flex. This class exists in both Flex 2 and Flex 3. Below is a quick example of how it is used:

Adobe AIR Linux Alpha

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:27:26 -0500

Adobe has dropped the first public bits in their effort to port Adobe AIR to the Linux platform. You can download them from Adobe Labs. Keep in mind this is an alpha release and everything definitely isn't there, yet.

Priorities

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 21:41:16 -0500

Lately I've been trying to figure out what my priorities are. This has been prompted by a number of factors one of which is that it is just the phase I'm in. It started off with borrowing the book "Getting Things Done" by David Allen. I started reading it but then "other things" came up and it has been sitting on my desk unopened for some time now.

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.

User experience considerations with SQLite operations

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:00:24 -0500

An article I wrote for the Adobe Developer Connection entitled "User experience considerations with SQLite operations" has been published. Its focus is on issues Allurent uncovered while working with a SQLite database on the Allurent Desktop Connection application for Anthropologie that was demoed at Adobe MAX 2007 in Chicago.

Antennae 1.2.0 Released

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 16:15:53 -0500

Antennae version 1.2.0 has been released. Grab it from http://code.google.com/p/antennae/. Highlights of this release include:

Changed to standard naming conventions for properties, targets, tasks, and directories
Updated support for AIR 1.0

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.