Joel Hainley

The first full month of the year back on the bike. I did some decent riding this month, but I’ve also been doing a fair amount of hiking. Between the hiking and the long rides on sundays I haven’t been riding the fixed gear as much. I am starting to feel a bit stronger and my speed is picking up. I’ve also picked up a spinning workout that lasts about an hour that I’m trying to do once a week to give me a chance to really workout my cardio. I think I’m going to be getting a heart rate monitor so that I can focus my workouts and get more out of the time I spend on the bike.

Total Mileage in February : 310.99 miles

Multigear Mileage : 299.99

Fixed Gear ( track bike ) Mileage : 11 miles

It’s a good start and double of what I rode in January. However, I’d like to get to about 500 miles a month by April that’ll give me a good amount of mileage for each week but allow for me to have really focused workouts.

Well it’s only been two weeks since I wrote the original entry about hamtesting.com needing some SEO love. I’ve been pretty busy since then and while I’m not into the top page yet, I’m starting to build some traffic. If you look to the previous post you’ll see that my numbers were pitifully low.

I setup google analytics, google webmaster tools, and setup the google sitemap generator and have been tweaking the content structure of the individual pages, adding in meta tags, as well as making the content, and site structure, a little more friendly to search engines. All of this has been positively wonderful for getting some decent traffic numbers for my first couple of weeks at getting started with this.

The other thing that I’ve done is modified the home page to be an better explanation of how to utilize the site to prepare for your ham radio test. I’ve also given users the ability to simply browse the question pool without having to utilize the test preparation system or the review system to see the questions in the pool for the question they are interested in. There are some other user experience things that I want to focus on over the next couple of weeks that might significantly help with user retention. Here’s the numbers for the last two weeks ( please note : this information is from google analytics, my base numbers from the original post were from adsense, I’m not sure how closely these systems agree on any given data point . )

186 visitors
2,088 page views

So given that the totals for nov2007-jan2008 were 230 page views. I think I’ve hit my originally stated goals for traffic, so now it’s time to come up with some new goals. I’d like to work towards getting the trend to increase and figure out how to crack the first page on google’s results for some of the search terms I’ve identified as being good terms to focus on.

I’ve finally settled down on a challenge for bicycling for the next 15 months. I’m going to be spending the next two months building up my base and getting my speed and strength built back up. Not commuting anymore, it’s been hard to easily maintain my fitness level. You read it all the time in the bicycling books and magazines but I’ll say it again, commuting is a low pain way to keep yourself in great shape. When I was riding my bike back and forth to work every day I would get a minimum of a 16 mile day, and I rarely took days off, so I kept up a good base mileage even in the worst weather that Northern California could muster.

In April, once I have my base established and have regained some speed and strength, I’ll do my first century. I’ve assembled a tentative schedule for the next 13 months after that. I’m going to be riding a century a month and working on building up my strength, speed, etc. Most of the centuries through the spring, summer fall, will most likely be supported centuries, but into the winter the century schedule gets very thin and there aren’t a lot of supported centuries so some of these will probably need to be self-supported rides. This isn’t really a big deal though, during training for my first century a few years ago, I was regularly riding 85-90 miles on a Sunday long ride.

Please note : I’m not saying that I’m going to ride a total of 12 centuries so that they average out to 12 months, but I’m going to be riding 1 century each calendar month ( or as close to it as i can be there is one century that I was considering counting for  July of this year, that actually happens on the last weekend in June, but that might change. )  The idea here is that riding 12 centuries during century season isn’t that difficult given that you can get the time to take off every weekend for a couple of months to get it done, but that riding a century each month will keep me in shape year round without having to get crazy in the early part of the year with “building up my base” again.

So that’s it, now you have something to hold me to.  One century a month – 12 centuries for the 12 months between april 2008 and april 2009. I’ll be posting weekly mileage/training reports, and monthly recaps and hopefully chronicling my experience during this endeavor. Rock on!

(btw : My goals for 2009 aren’t complete yet, but all of this century riding through 2008 and into 2009 is working towards a goal of riding a double century sometime during 2009. )

Last time I talked about setting up logging for your Flex applications using the debug version of the flash player and configuring it to write to a text file. This is can be useful for debugging, but it’s not always the most efficient route for quickly getting to the bottom of a problem within Flex. Thankfully there are a few other useful tools that we can utilize to help us in our debugging. One of these tools is a project put out by Google called ReflexUtil.

For this article I’m gonna be using Adobe Flex Builder 2 to describe the process for  setting up ReflexUtil in your project. It should be relatively obvious how to add this to your project if you’re building everything using the flex sdk for development, if not let me know and I’ll post a note here about setting it up.

The process for setting this up is really well documented on the ReflexUtil website but if you haven’t used third party libraries in your Flex projects before you might spin your wheels for a few minutes. So here’s a step by step for getting things setup :

1. Download the appropriate version of ReflexUtil library from google code – there are versions for Flex 2 and Flex 3 so make sure you get the latest version for whichever version of Flex you are running .
2. Unzip the file and place it in your libraries folder – I have a master directory for all of my libraries, 3rd party and custom libraries, and I drop them into subfolders of this folder so that I have everything in one place.
3. Open up your project in Flex Builder and add the library to your project. If you’ve not done this before you just go to Project->Properties in Flex Builder then click on “Flex Build Path” on the left, once there you click on the Library Path tab on the right hand side. Then click “Add SWC” then browse to the location of the file for version I have installed in the project it is called ReflexUtil2.swc . Once you select the project a bunch of options will be availble for how to link the library to your project etc. You can get more details on things over at the Adobe documentation page that describes how to use SWC files in your Flex project
4. Now open up the application’s MXML file
5. Add <reflexutil:ReflexUtil /> tag within the application tags. ( in XML speak : make it a child node of the application element )
6. Add the ReflexUtil namespace to the application tag by adding the following : xmlns:reflexutil=”net.kandov.reflexutil.*”
7. When you run your application right click on a control and you will see some new options in the pop-up menu. Links to the ReflexUtil homepage, Open Reflex util and an option to inspect the control that has focus, and perhaps options to inspect a few more controls.
8. Click on one of the Inspect options. This will bring up a dialog bog that allows you to drill down through what could be thought of as the Flex DOM and actually modify things at runtime, layouts, values, etc. It’s pretty impressive.

That’s about it, there’s a lot of things you can probably think of that this might be useful for in your own projects. The ability to get in and muck with the UI in this way is really convenient, instead of constantly incrementing layout parameters, then recompiling, checking, then tweaking again. You can now  just pop up your ui and make adjustments until you have it the way you like, then just make a note of your settings.  It might be kinda useful to modify ReflexUtil to have the ability to write out all parameters to the debug file so that you wouldn’t have to write things down, perhaps the developers will do this.

The only other thing that really comes to mind at the moment is that you probably would want to remove ReflexUtil from your project when you put your Flex application into production. The ability of users to muck with things could be catastrophic

I have been using vmware to host specialized development and testing environments for various clients. With a reasonably powerful machine there isn’t a perceptible difference between a vm and a native install for your workstation plus it offers an impressive amount of flexibility for things. Backups are a snap, moving development environments around can be exciting as well. Thus far it has been a huge win.

I just installed a windows xp vm on my laptop and while my Debian install automagically setup the correct resolution, I wasn’t able to set the xp vm to a widescreen resolution within the vm. So I dug around and found that simply opening the file <yourvmname>.vmx and adding the following lines :

svga.maxWidth = “1680″
svga.maxHeight = “1050″

Save the file. Then reboot the vm. Go into the display settings in the vm and set it to the desired resolution, that’s all there is to it.

The one thing that I don’t know for sure is whether you need to have the VMTools installed for this to work. However I think the VMTools make the vm a little more useful on the desktop so it’s probably worth installing them.