Wow, it’s the new year already.  A time for everyone to make new years resolutions to make promises that they’ll not keep.  This year I’ve decided to actually make a few resolutions for myself, even though I usually don’t make new years resolutions.  I’ve put a lot of thought into these and decided to not make the same resolutions that everyone else does about eating better and getting more exercise, as evident by the sudden influx of people at the gym these past few days, I’ve already resolved to doing that a long time ago and don’t need a special occasion to give me an excuse.  Rather I’ve made a couple of hopefully attainable goals for myself in this new year.

Finish Idle Projects

Over the past few years, I’ve started several projects that have never seen completion.  The trim in the bedrooms that has yet to be finished.  The drywall in the basement utility room from when we discovered that the previous owners of our house had tried to make a closet for the play room, and ended up walling in one of the basement windows.  The drywall patching in the bathroom where we discovered a gaping hole that the previous owners didn’t bother closing up, but rather hid behind the hideous giant mirror.  The book that I’m writing for Manning, granted this one has not sat idle like the other ones, but still needs to be finished.  Finally the cedar strip kayak that is about 90% finished and has been hanging from the ceiling of my garage for the past few years.  The kayak may be difficult to achieve this year as it is wholly dependent on how busy I am this summer as it needs to be fiberglassed, and the epoxy needs to cure at 60°F for like 12 hours, so I’m hopeful, but as long as I finish the other goals I’ll be happy.

Rediscover the joys of social gaming

A couple of years ago several of us used to have regular gaming nights where we would get together and game.  At the time it was HorrorClix, which as most collectible games do put a huge strain on my wallet.  So eventually the gaming tapered off and we quit getting together.  Last summer my sister in-law got my wife hooked on Settlers of Catan, who in turn got me hooked on Settlers.  I had forgotten how much fun a simple strategy board game could be, so I’ve resolved to breathing some life into the gaming nights that we used to host regularly, but this time we’ve decided to keep it simple (and hopefully cheaper) by playing non-collectible games such as Settlers or Axis and Allies, which are just as fun if not more fun.

Keeping it Simple

Lastly I’m resolving to keep things simple this year.  I’ve been reading Bob Martin’s Clean Code and it’s inspired me to work on improving my code quality this year, which really distills down to keeping your code simple, concise and readable.  Sometimes I forget that attaining that level of simplicity, is not simple at all.  It takes a skilled craftsman to take something as complicated as software development and make the resulting code appear to be simple.  I think Leonardo da Vinci said it best with “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”  So over the next year, I will be striving to keep things as simple as possible.

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”.

Tom (a.k.a. Purple Helmet) and I arrived in Traverse City around 5:00 and after a greasy dinner at Big Boy proceeded on to the Grand Traverse Resort to check in, pick up our packets and hang out at the Expo for a little while.  After browsing around and checking out the cool new Gary Fisher Superfly, and scoring a nice pair of rain pants for commuting, we ran into a fellow teammate Wayne Cook.  Wayne invited us to stay at his condo since he had a couple extra beds for the night.  So now instead of having to camp at the finish line we had a warm place to get a good nights rest before the race.  Wayne saved my ass a second time that night when he traded his 17 tooth cog for my 16 tooth cog I had purchased earlier that day.  I had gone to probably 5 bike shops that morning looking for a 17 tooth cog and was unsuccesful.

So after a second dinner we all decided to pass out sometime shortly before midnight so we could be well rested for the race.  Like I do before most big events, I was a crackhead and woke up about 6:30 and went down to check out the weather. Looked at the radar and noticed all the rain and snow just missing us to the south so the outlook was pretty good.

We arrived at the start line with plenty of time to spare, especially for me since my wave didn’t leave until like 10:55am. Boy was it cold. The worst part about it was that the longer I stood there, the colder it seemed to get. Finally when it was time for my wave to start, I stripped off my rain pants and sweatshirt and made my way up to the starting block. Once we got into the woods I grabbed some guys wheel and kept it. My cyclocross skills were dialed in for about the first hour of the race, there’s nothing like passing 4 or more people on a run up. About an hour into the race, still feeling good, felt like I was passing more people than were passing me, and was even starting to catch up to the tandems and the women. All was going good until right before the 3 mile to go marker I went to stand up and mash up a climb and both of my quads knotted up in tight little balls and forced me back down and eventually off my bike as I tried to work the cramps out. I decided I better take a gel and some water, walked the cramp out and got back on the bike.

When all was said and done, I finished mid pack #22 out of 43 in my class with a time of 2:39. I’m hoping Team MySinglespeed will make a showing at next years race because I may just be dumb enough to try it again next year.

At 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.

Someone 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.

http://us.movember.com/whatismov/content/What-is-Movember/

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

The 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.

There 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.

As 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.

For those of you not familiar with XPlanner, it’s a project planning and tracking tool for agile development teams.  We decided on XPlanner because we felt like it would be a good project that could very well represent the typical type of project that would be a candidate for refactoring to include a Rich Client front-end.  It is a project that is not brand new, hasn’t been maintained in over a year, doesn’t have the latest versions of all the popular frameworks, and best of all; it was not designed with the intent of replacing the front-end with Flex.

Soon after I began spiking the sample code for our application, I discovered that a bug in the way Apache Axis handles SOAP inheritance would force us to not be able to connect to the Web Services without some modifications.  This is not including all the changes we would need to make to integrate the BlazeDS server with XPlanner so we could take advantage of the AMF binary protocol.  So we were forced to either host a modified version of the XPlanner sources ourselves, detail the changes that must be made in our book, or attempt to contact the XPlanner maintainers to get the changes introduced to the main project.  I really didn’t like the idea of forking the project, and felt that providing a patch and making the reader apply that patch before following along with the code examples was less than desirable also.  So I decided to attempt to contact the project maintainer, and after a couple of unsuccessful attempts I finally heard back from the maintainer Jacques.

So to make a long story short, it looks like I may be taking over maintenance for the XPlanner project.  I am currently working with Jacques to figure out what needs to be done in the short term to get the latest release out the door, which is over 2 years in the making.  I’m very excited about the opportunity to breathe some life back into the XPlanner project, and it would appear that the direction that I envisioned for XPlanner falls in line with the direction that Jacques was hopeful to take before other commitments tore him away from it.

Today I noticed that Flex on Java is now listed at #8 on “Manning’s Bestselling Early Access Titles” on their homepage (http://manning.com).

As 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.

To use this new archetype all you need to do is type the following at the command prompt:

mvn archetype:create -DgroupId=<your groupId> \
  -DartifactId=<your artifactId> \
  -DarchetypeGroupId=com.codeadept \
  -DarchetypeArtifactId=flex-mojos-archetype \
  -DarchetypeVersion=1.0-SNAPSHOT \
  -DremoteRepositories=http://flexonjava.googlecode.com/svn/repository

Once the plugin is finished executing, you should see a standard maven project. In the src/main/flex folder, you’ll find not only a “Hello World!” Flex application named Main.mxml, but also an ActionScript class in the package you specified for your groupId called App.as.  You’ll also find the FlexUnit test for this class in the src/test/flex folder under the same package called TestApp.as.  Now you should be able to run mvn install and you should see a message stating that it ran 1 test and had 0 failures.

You’re now all set to develop your Flex application in a Test First fashion…

I 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.