By barneyb on July 3, 2007
I made some mods to my bicycle reporting dashboard last night and just pushed them live. Highlights include being able to break down the charts by bike, route, or day of week, legends to support showing multiple series, control over the chart baseline (zero or autodetect), and formatting of the "elapsed time" axis labels.
Now that that's working right, multiuser is next on the list, and I'll probably throw a "route link" field in there as well so you can link to a map of your route if you have one.
Posted in biking, flex
By barneyb on July 2, 2007
So I got home this evening and wanted to record my commute with my new logger app, and guess what, it crashes Firefox. Roughly one-in-four loads of the app are successful, other attempts cause a segfault as the player tries to load the SWF. It seems to work better in SeaMonkey, but still not perfect. I know Linux is the "we don't really care" platform for Adobe (and Macromedia before), but I'd almost prefer no player at all to a crashy one. Anyone have any hints?
Posted in biking, flex, personal
By barneyb on July 2, 2007
While on my seemingly endless airplane rides, I finished up a first draft of my bicycle reporting app, and made it available at the seemingly random address of http://www.barneyb.com/bicycle/. ; ) Yes, it's Flex, and yes, I chose that platform of my own volition. It's still a little rough around the edges, but it's all functional, and I used it to record this morning's ride. Much better than using the command line MySQL client. Of primary interest is the graphs of the stats. I haven't gotten very far into them yet (was having some issues – surprise – getting the charts to work right for the more complex cases), but they're there, and the average speed one has a positive slope (yah me!).
There's a couple "weird" characteristics to the UI, but they have sound backing. First, the entire UI is modal-free excepting the login form. I didn't want to be stuck editing something and realize that I hadn't created some related entity and have to cancel out to create it. I also wanted to be able to view the listings while adding/editing entities, so all the forms show up in tabs along with the listings so you can easily switch back and forth.
Second, the whole UI is publicly available. I didn't want to build a separate admin area, so the editing UI doubles as the detail view UI. The "Save" buttons are disabled unless you're logged in, and that's backed up on the server-side, of course.
Last, while not easily apparent, is the security of the authentication without using SSL. Part of the AS3 Core Lib is MD5 hashing capabilities, so when the password is entered client-side, it gets hashed before sending to the server. This provided a nice solution to password transmission that didn't require an outward facing self-signed SSL certificate (which isn't very friendly) but also doesn't compromise passwords.
Once I get stuff a little cleaner, I'll post source. I'm also thinking of making it multi-user, but there are some weird issues (like handling public browsing) that would need to be dealt with. Time will tell what becomes of it.
I also added contextual ride history to the single-entry pages on my blog. I'd added it to the listing pages a while ago, but realized that a large percentage of my audience reads my blog via the XML feeds, so they never see the listing pages. So rides within 24 hours of a given entry will now show up on the single-entry pages.
Posted in biking, flex, personal
By barneyb on July 2, 2007
Much to Heather's delight, I returned home from CFUNITED this weekend with a Wii for her to play with. And much to my delight, I cracked open Zelda:Twilight Princess again for the first time in a few months. Can't play the GameCube version with the Wii controller (have to use the GameCube controller), but other than that it's been seamless.
Thanks again to Ben, the advisory board (who judged), and TeraTech.
Posted in personal
By barneyb on June 28, 2007
Joe Rinehart says that the codpiece is coming back. A huge proponent of genital decoration/protection, he managed to create a custom codpiece from his CFUNITED nametag. Truly an ingenious man. Next year we expect to see him sporting an authentic period 'piece.
Posted in random
By barneyb on June 25, 2007
I'm trying to find a GPS unit for myself, and am struggling. I figured since my blog has a fairly technical audience of varied backgrounds, there's probably a bunch of people out there reading who might offer some insight. Here are the specifics of what I'm looking for, in decreasing order of import:
- detailed 4-space (lat, long, alt, time) logging. Ideally configurable down to the once-per-second level.
- storage on removable media (like an SD card)
- quick-acquisition and accurate chip
- ability to do mapping/driving directions/POIs (standard "GPS unit" stuff)
- internal, rechargeable battery
- be a cell phone
- motorcycle mountable for power and stability (requires left-handed buttons, and only useful if it does mapping/directions/POIs)
- run JME (ideally with access to the GPS chip's serial port and removable media). This would theoretically alleviate the need for built-in logging, as I could write my own.
- car mountable for power at least, and probably stability
As you can tell, I'm not really looking for something mainstream. I'm looking for something that'll give me huge amounts of data about my whereabouts, specifically when I'm on my bicycle or motorcycle. I've found a handful of units that would probably do what I want, but the specs are very vague, so it's hard to tell for sure.
If anyone has any ideas, thoughts, or comments, I'm all ears….
Posted in personal
By barneyb on June 23, 2007
Another little gotcha to watch out for with Flex. If you have an ArrayCollection of Objects that are backing a DataGrid, you can add/remove objects from the ArrayCollection and the DataGrid will update. However, updating properties on the objects doesn't seem to update the DataGrid until you force a redraw via some other means (e.g. resorting the rows). In my particular case, the Objects in question were non-dynamic instances of a custom class that are [Bindable] at the class level.
This was unexpected to me, but on further reflection seemed quite explicable (though not necessarily reasonable). It seems that individual DataGrid cells ought to be bound to the property they're fronting, rather than only the rows being bound to the Objects. But with the way the internals of DataGrid work, the property selection is dynamic (using [] notation), which is unbindable directly. You can avoid it with a bindable function, of course, but it seems DataGrid (at least in Flex 2.0.1) doesn't do that.
I'll probably dig into this some more (since I really don't want to have a zillion executeBindings() calls all over the app). If anyone has any insight into this behaviour, I'd be quite interested to hear it.
Posted in development, flex
By barneyb on June 22, 2007
All the listy components in Flex (List, Datagrid, Tree, etc.) have a protected method called drawRowBackground which is in charge of drawing the background for a given row. You typically use it to color a given row based on some facet of the data the row represents (e.g. red background for rows with a negative bank balance).
With DataGrid, it's easy to use, just subclass DataGrid and override the method, parameterized so you can pass in a function to compute the color for each row based on the row index/data/original color/etc. With List (and since ComboBox uses a List, ComboBox too), it's a bit nastier.
For some reason, List will only call drawRowBackground if the 'alternatingItemColors' style is set for the List. So if you want to color your List rows, you have to supply that style, which you'll likely immediately be overriding.
With ComboBox, you use a ClassFactory for the dropdownFactory to instruct it to use your custom List implementation (that will do row coloring). In this case, however, it's not the List instance that needs the 'alternatingItemColors' style, but the ComboBox. The ComboBox passes all it's style attributes to the List that backs the dropdown when it's created.
Just for reference, here is my subclass of List to allow row coloring. The one for DataGrid is identical, except for the name and the class it's extending:
package views {
import mx.controls.List;
import mx.collections.IList;
import flash.display.Sprite;
public class RowColoringList extends List {
[Bindable]
public var rowColoringFunction:Function;
protected override function drawRowBackground(s:Sprite, rowIndex:int, y:Number, height:Number, color:uint, dataIndex:int):void {
if (rowColoringFunction != null && IList(dataProvider).length > dataIndex) {
color = rowColoringFunction(IList(dataProvider).getItemAt(dataIndex), dataIndex, color);
}
super.drawRowBackground(s, rowIndex, y, height, color, dataIndex);
}
}
}
Posted in development, flex
By barneyb on June 22, 2007
Got my new bike yesterday and rode it to work this morning. Whee! Definitely needs some tuning (seat height, handlebar placement, dérailleur tension, etc.), but it's quite nice. Integrated shifting alone is huge. I'll get a pic some time and post it, but for now, it's all for me. ;)
Posted in biking, personal
By barneyb on June 20, 2007
Saw this on The Daily WTF / Worse Than Failure: Crashing Las Vegas. Good ol' Windows.
Posted in random