http://www.joelhainley.com Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:38:25 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm still getting used to exercising with a heart rate monitor(HRM) but I think it was a good purchase because I find myself drifting off during the running and the bicycling after a while and the HRM starts beeping at me when I'm not pushing myself enough. The downside of ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/12/04/30-day-exercise-challenge-day-4/ Pretty easy getting going this morning. I'm not too sore so this morning I bumped up the reps on the leg lifts and bumped up the weight on the bench and military presses.  Tomorrow is another 3 mile run, kinda looking forward to it for some strange reason.  Day 3 : ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/12/04/30-day-exercise-challenge-day-3/ The house was cold this morning, always difficult to get the day started when the house is cold. I felt like a slug when I got up, and definitely didn't feel much like going running. It doesn't bode well for the success of this 30 day challenge if I'm already ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/12/02/30-day-challenge-exercise-day-2/ 30-Day challenges are a bunch of fun, you learn a lot about yourself, get a chance to work on your self-discipline and it gives you something to write about on your blog. Which is useful because I don't update this enough. Anyways, in the spirit of some of the other ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/12/02/30-day-challenge-exercise-day-1/ I was building out some .NET based web services for a Flex project I've been working on and bumped up against something that gave me a bit of trouble. When you create a .NET Web Service there is a namespace attribute associated with the service. Here's an example (in c#) ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/11/01/a-quick-note-about-net-web-services-adobe-flex-and-namespaces/ I haven't been doing enough bicycle riding for the last six months. Because of this, riding my fixed gear as my "daily driver" was becoming more and more difficult. So I decided to change my main cog until I get back into shape. While I was ordering parts I also ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/10/30/adventures-in-night-riding/ So I haven't written about the CPMC since may. I finished the ride in May and was starting to feel that I wasn't prepared mostly due to the fact that my recovery times from the century were about 1.5 weeks and then I had very little time for building more ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/09/12/cpmc-the-current-status/ I just finished reading a book called Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ( I still have to go look it up in Amazon when people ask me who wrote it ). The book was great with lots of great things to think about and it also put into words a lot ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/08/28/book-recommendation-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi/ There's a programmer party down in the valley that I've been attending at somewhat regular intervals for the last couple of years called Super Happy Dev House. Mike and I were invited to the party by the elusive Nathan the Kraut ( this is Mike the Quaker's nickname for him ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/07/27/announcing-cacklcom/ Stage 2 of the CPMC ( Century Per Month Challenge ). This century didn't come at the best time for me. I was right in the middle of finals for some classes I took this semester, in fact I had a final on Saturday and then another on Monday with ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/05/20/mays-century-monticello-solano-century/ I've been working on a new set of features revolving around tracking user's statistics relating to their performance with the question pools. I am now tracking information about each question a logged-in user sees, whether they answer it correctly and a timestamp. At the moment this information is simply being ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/05/13/new-features-for-hamtestingcom/ Chico Velo's Wildflower Century was the start of my quest to ride a century a month for the next year. My cousin lives in Chico along the park and offered to let me stay at her place Saturday night so I went up Saturday afternoon. We stopped by the registration ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/05/02/aprils-century-chico-velo-wildflower-century/ The first time I did some work with PHPUnit I was writing out tests in preparation for some refactoring. So I put together a bunch of tests for my utility classes, and pure logic classes etc, database access classes, etc. So everything was trucking along wonderfully, things are falling into ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/04/30/phpunit-and-global-variables/ http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/04/24/the-good-old-days/ One of the things that you notice if you are around development/engineering teams enough is that there is normally the existing solution, and the "next iteration". Much has been written about the "second system" phenomenon and all of the pitfalls and failures that have resulted by second system thinking. Today ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/03/17/one-developers-view-of-maintenance-work/ There's no doubt that today web services are hot, all of the commercial platforms ( J2EE, .Net, etc ) have tools that make the development of web services very easy. There are also a bunch of tools that are out there that help people generate their WSDL's and can generally ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/03/03/php-soap-a-simple-php-web-service-example/ 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 ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/02/29/february-2008-bicycling-recap/ 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 ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/02/29/hamtestingcom-seo-results-the-first-two-weeks/ 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 ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/02/22/bicycling-2008-2009-the-plan-twelve-centuries-in-twelve-months/ 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 ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/02/20/setting-up-googles-reflexutil-for-debugging-flex-applications/ 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 ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/02/19/setting-resolution-on-vmware-guest-running-on-windows-xp-host/ I've been taking a psychology class over at DVC and while going through some assigned reading came across a section titled "Behavioural Dieting". I'm not sure if this is what Dr. Phil, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and others suggest but I thought it was interesting, and might be of interest ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/02/15/behavioural-dieting/ So you're bumping along doing some work in Adobe Flex using the flex sdk and you need to get some debug information about what's going on in one of your applications. You know that the guys using Adobe's Flex Builder IDE have source level debugging but you don't have the ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/02/12/how-to-configure-flex-for-writing-debug-information-to-a-file/ History   I finished the basic functionality of hamtesting.com in July 2007. I wrote the whole thing in Ruby/Rails in a week and then spent some time trying to deploy it, dealing with a bunch of issues related to inefficient xml processing etc, making it play nicely with apache and whatnot. While ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/02/12/hamtestingcom-needs-some-seo/ Ask anyone, “Would you like a big pile of money?” and iff there are no strings attached I doubt very much that they would turn you down, and even if there were, you’ll probably still get quite a few takers. However, ask those same people, “what IS money?” and you’re ... http://www.joelhainley.com/index.php/2008/02/11/money-a-meaningful-viewpoint/