I have to admit I was pretty excited about this race, and at the same time somewhat concerned. I had just spent the past 3 months in a hotel in Detroit for a project for work, had little to no motivation to ride during the week after working 10+ hour days and couldn’t find much time to ride on the weekends when my family hadn’t seen me all week. I had no idea what to expect and was hoping for anything other than “Epic Fail”. Read the rest of this entry »
Iceman Cometh and Goeth
10 11 2008Comments : No Comments »
Tags : iceman, mtb, racing, singlespeed, team mysinglespeed
Categories : Cycling
RE: The Simplicity Manifesto
5 11 2008At one time or another I signed up for a free subscription to Visual Studio Magazine, probably because it is free, and occasionaly I’ll read an article if it catches my eye. Today I happened across an article titled “The Simplicity Manifesto” and thought it could be interesting, and that it was.
I didn’t get far into the article before I ran across this statement.
Outside of Apple Inc., simplicity and elegance don’t carry much weight in the development community.
Obviously this guy must have been hiding under a rock for the last decade and never heard of Agile development, or read anything by guys like Bob Martin, Kent Beck, or Martin Fowler. I know in my own day to day development I try to strive for simplicity and elegance, as do many of the developers I’ve worked with in the past, even the ones who don’t practice some sort of Agile methodology.
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Tags : .net, simple
Categories : Rant
It’s Movember
4 11 2008Someone I know turned me on to this charity event called Movember. The official website describes Movember as follows…
Movember (the month formerly known as November) is a charity event held during November each year.
At the start of Movember guys register with a clean shaven face. The Movember participants, known as Mo Bros, then have the remainder of the month to grow and groom their Mo (Australian slang for moustache), raising money and awareness along the way for men’s health and the fight against prostate cancer.
I’m participating this year as the men in my step-father’s family have had bouts with Prostate Cancer, including my step-brother who was barely 30 when he had to go through chemo.
If you’d like to donate here is the link to my “Mo Space” http://us.movember.com/mospace/1930291
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Tags : charity, movember
Categories : Rant
Testing Legacy Code
31 10 2008The company I work for, Pillar Technology, recently created this really slick tool called Verde to generate unit tests for legacy code. I have to admit at first I was very skeptical as I had seen some pretty ugly legacy code out there. To make sure we’re on the same page here I personally define “Legacy Code” just as Michael Feathers does in his article “Working Effectively with Legacy Code” as code that has a lack of tests around it. So by this definition code that was written even last week could conceivably be considered “Legacy” if there is a lack of tests.
So to get to the point, now that I’ve had some time to look at the tool, I’m rather pleasantly surprised. I’ve seen this tool in action, and generate a bunch of integration tests for a service layer for an application, which will allow you to refactor confidently. Jump over to the website (http://frogyourcode.com) and check it out.
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Tags : agile, tdd, testing
Categories : Rant
Microsoft targeting Java developers for Silverlight
14 10 2008There was an article on ComputerWorld yesterday titled Microsoft woos developers under the Silverlight. It would appear that Microsoft is now targeting Java developers for their Silverlight RIA platform.
Microsoft is funding a French open-source project to build tools that would enable programmers to use the popular open-source Eclipse framework to write Silverlight applications, said Brian Goldfarb, a director in Microsoft’s developer platform division, in an interview last week. This should also let Eclipse programmers share their Silverlight applications with developers working in Microsoft’s Visual Studio framework, Goldfarb said. The project is being hosted on SourceForge.
So I decided to look into this Eclipse plugin to see what it was all about. The plugin homepage can be found here. Those of you who know me, know that I’m no Eclipse fanboy, I’m more of an IntelliJ kind of guy, but I find this announcement rather intriguing. It would appear that Microsoft is finally taking an interest in a plugin for Eclipse that would allow people to do C# development using something other than their own product. Next thing you know Microsoft will be announcing Visual Studio will be migrating to the Eclipse platform and .NET developers will now have an IDE that doesn’t completely suck. Sorry Microsoft, but if it weren’t for ReSharper, developing in Visual Studio would be unbearable.
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Tags : .net, eclipse, ide, microsoft, RIA, silverlight
Categories : RIA
Resurrecting XPlanner
7 08 2008As you may have heard, I am currently writing a book (http://manning.com/allmon) on how to integrate Flex into a Java based web application. When we started this project, we had many ideas for what we were going to do for a sample application to use throughout the book. Too many titles out there either use trivial or incomplete examples that work well to showcase as much of the technology as possible but usually fall short in giving the user a clear picture of how to develop an end-to-end solution. So my co-author and I, through suggestion from a fellow developer, decided to base our sample application on the XPlanner project.
Read the rest of this entry »
Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags : book, flex, java, RIA
Categories : RIA
Flex on Java MEAP bestseller
17 06 2008Today I noticed that Flex on Java is now listed at #8 on “Manning’s Bestselling Early Access Titles” on their homepage (http://manning.com).

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Categories : Uncategorized
Maven archetype for Flex-Mojos
12 06 2008As I was going through and creating the sample project for the book I’m working on (http://manning.com/allmon), I realized that there wasn’t a Maven archetype for creating Flex projects using Flex-Mojos. The closest I found was an archetype that someone has created for using the israfil maven plugin, but I wasn’t satisfied with using that plugin and changing the pom to use the Flex-Mojos plugin…so I created a Maven archetype for generating projects to be used by Flex-Mojos.
Comments : 6 Comments »
Categories : Uncategorized
Finally made the switch
6 06 2008I was inspired by Matt Raible’s post here, so I thought I’d share a picture of what appeared on my door step this week.
I’ll post up some opinions after I’ve had a chance to play with it more. I’ve decided to make an effort to not treat this as a Windows PC with a prettier interface, and will be attempting to fully immerse myself in the Mac experience and take the time to learn how to use it like a Mac.
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Categories : Uncategorized
It’s Not Just a Race, It’s an Adventure
5 05 2008Wow, no wonder they call it an adventure race. Team MySinglespeed.com made it’s first adventure race appearance at this years Spring Adventure Challenge put on by the folks at GRAAR. My teammate Steve Bassett and I arrived at Owasippe early Saturday morning for our first foray into the wonderful world of adventure racing, neither of us not quite sure we’d gotten ourselves into. One thing was for sure, we were going to have a little fun Team MySinglespeed style no matter what.
We couldn’t have asked for better weather for a spring race than what we had. It was probably in the high 40’s maybe low 50’s that morning and the sun was shining. The other racers added to the great experience we had. Before the race even began, another team was nice enough to give us a sheet of contact paper to laminate our passport (boy have we got a lot to learn). Throughout the race we kept running into the same people on the trails and during the orienteering sections, and everyone was joking around with each other. When many of us got lost during the mountain biking section, the other teams were helping each other out to point them in the right direction instead of ignoring them and letting them continue to be lost. It was rather comical to split from another group only to see them about 15 minutes later, and realizing none of us really knew where we were going.
When it was all said and done, Team MySinglespeed took 15th out of 29th in our division and 32nd out of 58 overall, but we were the only single speeders out there. It kind of became a joke on the trail whenever we would run into other teams and they would realize that we were riding single speeds. One team remarked as we passed them on the trail, “Single speeds eh? You guys should be done by now”. To which we simply replied jokingly, “We’re on our second lap around…”.
It’s now official though, I’m hooked on adventure racing. You can be assured that you’ll see Steve and I out there racing again.

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Tags : adventure racing, singlespeed, team mysinglespeed
Categories : Cycling





