assertTrue

Getting Started with ActionScript 2.0 and AsUnit

2008-05-11T23:38:00-07:00

It seems a “London/Cambridge-based Actionscript developer” posted an excellent tutorial for ActionScript 2.0 and AsUnit.

Just wanted to make sure folks could find it!

Is RubyGems running really, really slow on OSX? How about 60 second delays for HTTP requests?

2008-05-04T14:36:00-07:00

Ali and I ran into an interesting Ruby bug on OSX Leopard last week and I thought I’d share the result of our finding….

Basically, we were requesting a 2k RSS feed from a url that had two sub-domains as in:

http://sub1.sub2.example.com

The request worked fine if we hit the server with only one sub-domain as in:

http://sub2.example.com

In the first example, the request would hang for exactly 60 seconds and then return the result. When we tried with a third sub-domain, we got a 120 second hang and then an error.

After digging through the Ruby sources, it looked like the problem was in the TCPSocket C implementation so I threw an email up on the Ruby list.

Turns out the fix is that if you’re trying to use Ruby networking features that sit on top of TCP on OS X Leopard, you may need to add the following to your code:

require 'resolv-replace'

Found the fix in this thread.

I also added this line to /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb (around line 11) and RubyGems is suddenly much, much faster.

REST on IT Matters from Thoughtworks

2008-04-18T09:44:00-07:00

I recently discovered a great podcast that is put out by Thoughtworks. I can’t remember at the moment who turned me on to this thing (probably Ali), but it really is fantastic.

http://www.thoughtworks.com/what-we-say/podcasts.html

Podcast #4 “REST – Representation State Transfer” is well worth a listen. Especially for those of us that build SWFs and even more so for those of you that push for binary data protocols.

In a bit of a meta joke, there doesn’t seem to be a link directly to the REST entry, so as this post gets older, the link above will become less meaningful!

I’m sure much of this is old news to many of you, but some key points that I took away were:

Test-Driven Development with Sprouts in San Francsisco on Thursday

2008-04-15T17:03:00-07:00

Just getting a quick note out to everyone in the San Francisco Bay Area.

There’s been a last minute setup of the Silicon Valley Flash User Group (Silvafug) and I’ve been asked to present Sprouts.

Of course I’ll be giving the now-traditional 5 minute ‘up-n-running’ demo that everyone is probably sick of seeing, but afterward I’ll be getting into some nuts and bolts of how Sprouts works in my own Test-First development process.

Paul Robertson is speaking for the first half of the evening on “AIR: Windows, Menus, and the System Tray.” which I’m really looking forward to!

At the time this post went to press, the Silvafug website hadn’t yet been updated, but according to this email, the event is scheduled to go from 5:30pm to 9:30ish at the San Francisco Adobe building (601 Townsend Street).

For those of you that don’t know, this means that we’ll be at the Mars bar from about 9:30-ish onward!

Hope to see you there.

Github - making great choices

2008-04-09T10:11:00-07:00

I’ve been flirting with Git for awhile now, but haven’t gotten around to using it on a ‘real’ project yet.

For me, it has been an amazingly useful tool for exploration and personal projects where I’m the only developer and I’d rather not go through the trouble and commitment of creating a real subversion repository on our servers.

As I’ve been using it more for these kinds of projects and some of them are growing beyond the initial conception, I’ve been looking into what it would take to host a git repository remotely.

As it turns out, some folks have put together an clean solution over at Github.

Will he finally start wearing Shoes?

2008-04-08T16:33:00-07:00

Those of you that know me know – I wear flip flops.

I wear flip flops all the time.

I wear flip flops to business meetings, interviews, first dates, fancy clubs, I mean everywhere.

I wear flip flops even when it’s a rainy, windy, San Francisco, 40-degree, summer day!

I suppose you can take the boy out of Florida, but, well, youknowhowitgoes….

In addition to the cold toes, it now looks like there might be another good reason to wear Shoes.

Why the Lucky Stiff of Ruby fame has come out with a new (and not-quite-ready) cross-platform, native component, open-source, GUI toolkit called Shoes.

I’ve been spending an awful lot of time lately thinking about this problem. By lately, I mean something like the past 10 years. I’m definitely excited to look more closely at this project as he’s claiming support for all kinds of media, drawing apis and even native components.

I’ll be looking into this Shoes-thing more in the coming weeks and I’ll be sure to let you know what I find.

In unrelated non-technical, but still somehow nerdy news, I may have found a new favorite musician and music site today.

Check out muxtape which is a fantastic exercise in clean, semantic, UI for media (I dare you to view source).

Be sure to listen to the Kimya Dawson track at the bottom of the link above.

Nice.

What do I really want?

2008-03-31T22:50:00-08:00

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time lately considering and pondering what it is that I really want from my tools.

In an unrelated, introductory message to a random netizen, I just found myself emitting the following statement:

“I want to write clean, elegant, code that results in simple, expressive user experiences. Nothing available today truly satisfies this desire for me.”

Flex 3 SDK released in Sprouts!

2008-02-25T08:02:00-08:00

The Flex 3 SDK was released by Adobe yesterday and this morning, I’m pleased to announce that Sprouts already supports it.

To take advantage of the new Flex 3 SDK, you’ll need to remove your existing sprout gems, clear your sprout cache and make a minor modification to any newly created rakefiles.

Here are the steps you should take to upgrade your sprout gems:

AsDoc and COMPC now supported in Sprouts

2008-02-25T00:24:00-08:00

I just got some enhancements into the Sprout packages that provide full support for asdoc and compc.

The AsDoc support is especially handy because it gives the full terminal interface, but also allows you to generate documentation against any already defined MXMLC task without duplicating all of your configuration!

A Rakefile might look something like this:

desc "Compile the main application"
mxmlc 'bin/SomeProject.swf' do |t|
  t.input = 'src/SomeProject.as'
  t.source_path = 'lib/yourlib'
  t.source_path = 'lib/asunit'
  t.source_path = 'test'
  t.source_path = 'src'
end

desc "Generate documentation"
asdoc :doc => 'bin/SomeProject.swf'

That’s it!

You just set an MXMLC task as a prerequisite for an asdoc task and the configuration options are inherited.

The latest as3 bundle gem automatically adds something similar to all of your new project rake files.

You can always get the latest Rubyforge gems with the following:

sprout -R
sudo gem update sprout

Be sure to let us know if anything doesn’t work as expected!

Creating Custom Generators with Sprouts

2008-02-21T10:25:00-08:00

As Sprouts starts to pick up momentum, we’re starting to get questions about creating custom generators. So I thought I’d throw a quick post up to share the info more broadly.

I’m actively working on the ‘developer’ gem so that you will eventually be able to stub new sprout gems for tools, libraries, bundles, tasks and generators. Unfortunately that gem isn’t quite ready yet so for the time being, you’ll have to build your generators manually.

If you’re looking for code generators within the context of an existing project, here’s how to do it: