Chase Brammer Thinking in Code

2011 Goals

• Finance
  • Continue no consumer debt
  • Be more frugal
  • Buy a home in Logan
  • Start putting away money missions, weddings, etc

• Work
  • Be more involved in local developer groups
  • Show my worth to the company and get a raise
  • Respond quickly to all communications
  • Go above and beyond to innovate and create
  • Publish my git application successfully

• Family & Friends
  • Surprise Lindsey with a special date, flowers, etc once a month
  • Be patient with crying baby
  • Spend time individually with each of my brother-in-laws
  • Have weekly family planning meeting

• Mind
  • Blog once a month
  • Continue reading 2 books a month
  • Set and review goals weekly
  • Write down more of my ideas
  • Read less fantasy novels, more business/historical novels

• Spirit
  • Be involved in a charity somehow
  • Daily Scriptures Study
  • Study Book of Mormon
  • Take notes in church meetings
  • Read Elder Hales new book
  • Daily couple prayer
  • Focus on Charity
  • 100% HT

• Body
  • Drink no soda
  • Regularly attend spin/rip60 classes at work
  • Complete the Ragnar Relay
  • Ride LOTOJA, Seattle to Portland, and 3 centuries
  • Run a marathon
  • 400 miles a month cycling (summer months)

I am on The Flex Show!

I did an interview with the guys over at The Flex Show last month about Analytics in Flex. It was a fun interview because those guys are fun guys to talk to. Go on over and give it a listen.

Flash Platform Analytics with Chase Brammer - The Flex Show Episode 114

360Flex Presentation Done!

New Toy – Intel NAS (ss4200-e) with FreeNAS

Recently I got a gift from my wife's company Calculated Research and Technology, for helping them out with a few things.  I was lucky enough to get an awesome Network Attached Storage (NAS) device!  Toms Hardware says it's performance is the best in its class, and its price is about 1/3 of all the others on the market.  I got the Intel ss4200-e NAS device, which is sometimes branded as Fujitsu Seimens Scaleo Home server .  For those who don't know what a NAS is, it is a place for a a set of hard drives to act as one big fast hard drive (called a RAID), and have that data always be accessible to your home network.

Problem is, is that you need to have special hard drives from an approved list to get the machine to work.  I didn't want to do that, and I didn't want to run the crappy (from what I have read) OS that the device ships with.  So, I slapped four 2tb drives into this bad boy and now have an awesome NAS to store all of my media.

However, getting it all setup was a problem.  Here are the things I tried, that failed:

• Booting to the default OS on the device.  Failed because I don't have approved drives
• Booting to an Ubuntu live usb stick, I installed the image, but for some reason still unknown to me, I couldn't get the USB stick to persist the OS data between reboots

Finally, I installed FreeNAS on the system, and that has been working like a charm.  I am running the whole OS from the USB stick so that the drives can all be dedicated to storing data.

Here is how I got it all to setup right

1. Download the FreeNAS embeded install, for my it was the x86 architecture
2. Follow this guide to format a USB stick to be bootable, and copy over the img.  This is the OSX way of doing it.
3. Put the USB stick into the NAS, then boot the NAS to USB by starting with the system shutdown, then holding down reset button then holding down the power button together for about two seconds.  You will see the drive lights on the front light up, and the center light will go amber.  Don't worry about the Amber, that means that it is booting from USB.
4. point to your browswer to http://freenas.local or the default IP of 192.168.1.250  For me, the default IP didn't hold for some reason, but I was able to look on my Routers admin page to see what IP address had been assigned out and get to it that way.
5. Once into Freenas, you just need to follow the guides on the freenas.org website to setup and install

The one thing that I would like to do, but don't know how, is move FreeNAS from the USB stick to the embedded DOS (Disk on Storage) on the device.  If anyone knows how to do that (terminal?) let me know.

Speaking at 360Flex (again)!

Yup, the guys at 360Flex are cool, and not just because they put on the best Flex conference in the industry, but because they let me be a part of it!

I get to go hang out with a bunch of cool guys in my industry and in San Jose California, maybe see my Brother why I am out there, speak, and relax.  All in the name of work! If you want to come hang out with some awesome people and attend a great conference, you should get yourself a ticket here

I will be presenting this:

Title: Flash Analytics Throwdown

Description:  Clients will ask, and you will be forced to choose your analytics weapon.  Learn about Adomniture's and Google's analytics tools and how you can use them to drive business.  The session will be divided up into three sections.  Firstly, the high level details about the qualities and business benefits of each.  Second, a simple walk through of how to use the tools.  And lastly, how to implement and deploy those tools in your applications.

A first date with Unit Testing in Flex 4

Unit testing is a topic that has creates a variety of opinions.  For a lot of people it is like a first date, the first time they try to take out unit testing for a spin it seems like it is fat, slow, and impedes what you want to get done.  For others, it is love at first sight.

To be honest, I still struggle to decide if I want to include unit uesting in my relationship with each new project I take on.  I know that it is needed, and that it really is best practice, but then I get thoughts like

• "Is Unit Testing this really mission critical?"
• "This is just a small project, it really doesn't need it"
• "Crap, I don't like Test Driven Development"

Even though I murmur about the different times to use Unit Testing, as Flex and Flash move into become a bigger players in developing true business applications, the more we need to verify a applications functionality.

What is cool about Flash Builder 4 and unit testing, it that we finally have a unit testing solution that is actually built into the IDE.  It seems that the wars between FlexUnit, FlexMonkey, Structured Log Testing, and AsUnit was won by Flex Unit when they were crowned by Adobe to be integrated in the IDE.

If you need a refresher in what unit tests are, and why they are important, check this out.

So let's take a first date with unit tests in Flash Builder 4.

1) Create a project and create a simple class that will do some business logic that we want to test.  In this example the standard bank account example is used that makes deposits, and makes withdrawals.

package
{
public class Bank
{
public function Bank() { }
 
private var _balance:Number;
 
public function get balance():Number {
return _balance;
}
 
public function set balance(v:Number):void {
_balance = v;
}
 
/**
* Deposit some money into our bank
* @param ammount
* @return
*
*/
public function deposit(ammount:Number):Number {
_balance += ammount;
return balance;
}
 
/**
* Withdraw some money from our bank
* @param ammount
* @return
*
*/
public function withdraw(ammount:Number):Number {
_balance -= ammount;
return balance;
}
}
}

2) Now it is really easy to create a test case, just right click the class you want to test, and create a new test case off of it

This will name the class what it should be named, in our case BankTest.as and insert all of your stub functions to setup/tear down the test case.  You will also notice one extra file created in your directory, called flexUnitCompilerApplication.  This just exists to be the application that runs when you execute the test cases, it will also show you a nice pretty dialogue when all your tests run successfully.

3) Configure your test case.  Below is a sample.

package flexUnitTests
{
	import flexunit.framework.TestCase;
 
	public class BankTest extends TestCase
	{
		// please note that all test methods should start with 'test' and should be public
 
		// Reference declaration for class to test
		private var classToTestRef : Bank;
 
		public function BankTest(methodName:String=null)
		{
			super(methodName);
		}
 
		//This method will be called before every test function
		override public function setUp():void
		{
			super.setUp();
			classToTestRef = new Bank();
		}
 
		//This method will be called after every test function
		override public function tearDown():void
		{
			super.tearDown();
		}
 
		/* sample test method
		public function testSampleMethod():void
		{
			// Add your test logic here
			fail("Test method Not yet implemented");
		}
		*/
 
		/**
		 * Do a test deposit
		 *
		 */
		public function testDesposit():void {
 
			//Reset our balance to zero
			classToTestRef.balance = 0;
 
			//An ammount to deposit
			var ammount:Number = 1000;
 
			//Deposit the ammount
			classToTestRef.deposit(ammount)
 
			//Check to make sure that this deposit posts to the balance successfully
			assertEquals(ammount, ammount);
		}
 
		/**
		 * Do a test on a withdrawal
		 *
		 */
		public function testWithdrawal():void {
 
			//Reset our balance to zero
			classToTestRef.balance = 1000;
 
			//An ammount to withdraw
			var ammount:Number = 400;
 
			//What the end ammount of our withdrawal should be
			var endAmmount:Number = 600;
 
			//Withdraw the ammount
			classToTestRef.withdraw(ammount);
 
			//Check to make sure that this withdrawal posts to the balance successfully
			assertEquals(endAmmount, endAmmount);
		}
	}
}

Now just run your test!  See, it is that easy!

If you are successfully you will see two screens where you can see the results of your tests.  The first, will be in the browser, but the most usefully one will be right inside you IDE where you can see what test executed successfully and which ones didnt!

So there you go, that was a nice easy first date with unit tests in Flash Builder 4!

Download the source files.