TK Assembled
Hopefully not just another Wordpress Blog.
Installing Adobe AIR 1.x on 64bit Linux
Feb 10th
Adobe currently offers an installer for AIR for almost all operating systems. Windows, Mac, and Linux, all of the major platforms are covered. However, one installer is missing… a 64bit one for Linux. For those of us who are die-hard Linux users who also prefer the speed and power of running 64bit operating systems, Adobe AIR won’t just install out of the box and work. This article is to help you get Adobe AIR installed and running on your 64bit Linux system in no time flat.
Burning ISO images to CD’s and DVD’s in Linux
Feb 4th
Since we’ve already covered how to rip a cd or DVD to an ISO file in Linux, the next logical step would be to talk about how to burn an ISO image to a CD or DVD. Again, we’ll be attacking this question from our handy-dandy terminal, so open your favorite terminal and let’s get to work.
as3signals – An Awesome Solution to Events/Signals in AS3
Feb 2nd
There has been quite a lot of buzz lately in the community about a new library by Robert Penner called as3-signals. John Lindquist recently posted a video tutorial on using it, and I thought I’d follow up with a nice text-based tutorial explaining the common ins-and-outs of the library.
More >
Ripping DVD’s and CD’s to ISO format in Linux
Jan 22nd
There are many reasons why one would want to rip a disc to an ISO file. The ISO format stores the disc locally on your hard drive in a way that it can be easily and quickly burnt again to removable media. If you’ve ever wanted to keep a backup copy of some software on your computer, or you would like to store entire DVDs locally on your filesystem, Linux can help you out with that. The program “dd,” provided by most Linux distributions by default, allows for quick, simple ripping of CD’s and DVD’s from a terminal. Let’s get ripping. More >
Music Management in Linux: Ripping CD’s with abcde
Jan 20th
When one sets out to rip a CD in Linux, he is confronted by many options. The user can use a graphical music player such as Rhythmbox, Banshee, or Amarok to rip said CD, along with many other dedicated ripping solutions. I recently purchased Rosetta Stone Hebrew Levels 1 – 3 which comes with 12 (read ‘em, TWELVE) discs of audio companion material. Let’s just say I needed a way to rip 12 discs fast, preferably in a terminal. Enter abcde. More >
Flash Player on Linux – Installing Native 64bit Flash Player
Jan 20th
It seems that installing Flash Player on an Ubuntu desktop is getting easier and easier with every release of the popular Linux operating system. However, its still very apparent that there are still problems pairing the two together in some areas. In the past, it has been less-than-easy to install the 64bit Flash Player plugin in Linux. However, Adobe just released refresh to the alpha, so let’s see if it has taken care of some of the ease-of-installation problems. More >
Music Management in Linux: Using EasyTAG
Jan 18th
If you’re like me and you love music, you probably have thousands upon thousands of songs in your library. It’s good to have choices, right? If I want to listen to Led Zeppelin, then I should have that option. If I’m more in the mood for some instrumental folk music like John Fahey, I should be able to play it wherever I’m at. Managing the filenames and ID3 tags of such a library, though, is anything but easy. Enter EasyTAG, literally easy tagging and renaming for your entire music collection.
Installing Flash Player 10 Debug on 64bit Ubuntu
Aug 10th
I just finished installing the Flash Player 10 debugger on my 64bit Ubuntu machine. All props go to “Me and Ubuntu,” with the article located here:
http://meandubuntu.wordpress.com/2008/08/20/flash-10-rc-on-ubuntu-amd64/
It involves using nspluginwrapper and some other libraries to emulate a 32bit environment for Flash Player to run in. Totally rad.
http://meandubuntu.wordpress.com/2008/08/20/flash-10-rc-on-ubuntu-amd64/
It involves using nspluginwrapper and some other libraries to emulate a 32bit environment for Flash Player to run in. Totally rad.
Spring Actionscript 0.8: My Review
Jul 30th
Let’s face it. AS3 needed an IoC container. Spring Actionscript delivered it. In an older post, I compared Spring Actionscript and Parsley as IoC containers and the main thing missing from Spring Actionscript (that Parsley had) was documentation. Now, with the release of Spring Actionscript 0.8, that issue is solved. More >
[AS3] Flex Unit 4
Jul 28th
I just wired up the latest version of Flex Unit 4 and it is impressive to say the least. For the last week or so, I’ve been messing around with the version that ships with Flash Builder 4, but I wanted to get up with the latest because of all of the awesome goodies it comes with.
The thing I am really excited about is the new metadata-driven model. It’s almost as convenient to use as JUnit (but it still has a few things to improve upon). Finally, we’re able to have annotated test cases and test suites and thus are not forced to extend a class or implement an interface. All test-related configuration is done at runtime by the framework and via introspection. A great article that got me started can be found here on InsideRIA.
The framework seems incredibly intelligent. You can even specify if you expect a method to throw an error with a simple metadata parameter. If the test method does not throw that error, it is considered a failed test. I haven’t found anything about the actual framework that I don’t like. It is a huge improvement over previous versions of Flex Unit and a good step toward standardizing unit testing across platforms.
One cool thing that I found inside of Flash Builder 4 is how easy it makes it to run Flex Unit tests. By right clicking on an Actionscript/MXML file, you can choose to “Execute FlexUnit Tests…”, which I really like. The downside to this is that Flash Builder 4 currently prefers an older version of Flex Unit, and encourages you to manually extend a class and follow test naming conventions etc. The upside to running Flex Unit tests inside of Flash Builder 4 is that it will actually show your test results within Eclipse.
This alone is a feature that’s been missing for an extremely long time. Being able to run unit tests within your IDE is a huge productivity boost. Having to manually launch a SWF that displays its test results within itself is at least a few extra steps that bog down one’s workflow. Unfortunately, since I’m using Flex Unit 4 rather than the Flex Unit that ships with Flash Builder 4, I have to launch my tests and compile them separately, but at least we’re now moving in the right direction. Once you understand the flow of working with a LocalConnection, passing data from Flash to, let’s say, Java, really isn’t that hard. All you need is to master the AMF encoding, and the LocalConnection protocol, both of which have been done. Then, you connect both ends together, pass some nice data objects about test results back and forth, and when the tests are done, call flash.system.System.exit(0) to kill the Flash Player instance.
All of this could be done relatively easy through the use of an Ant task, making the tests completely automated. I prefer building my applications with Ant, since I can use Ant on any platform and at any time and get the same results. Making a project portable is what separates it from the pack. It’s easy to throw together a sloppy project that will only compile in a very specific configuration and setup, but with the right planning, you can have a nice project which builds in Ant, anywhere.
Anyway, I digress. Flex Unit 4 is definitely worth checking out. Go out there and start messing with it!Technorati Tags: as3, flex, flash, unit testing, testing, ant
The thing I am really excited about is the new metadata-driven model. It’s almost as convenient to use as JUnit (but it still has a few things to improve upon). Finally, we’re able to have annotated test cases and test suites and thus are not forced to extend a class or implement an interface. All test-related configuration is done at runtime by the framework and via introspection. A great article that got me started can be found here on InsideRIA.
The framework seems incredibly intelligent. You can even specify if you expect a method to throw an error with a simple metadata parameter. If the test method does not throw that error, it is considered a failed test. I haven’t found anything about the actual framework that I don’t like. It is a huge improvement over previous versions of Flex Unit and a good step toward standardizing unit testing across platforms.
One cool thing that I found inside of Flash Builder 4 is how easy it makes it to run Flex Unit tests. By right clicking on an Actionscript/MXML file, you can choose to “Execute FlexUnit Tests…”, which I really like. The downside to this is that Flash Builder 4 currently prefers an older version of Flex Unit, and encourages you to manually extend a class and follow test naming conventions etc. The upside to running Flex Unit tests inside of Flash Builder 4 is that it will actually show your test results within Eclipse.
This alone is a feature that’s been missing for an extremely long time. Being able to run unit tests within your IDE is a huge productivity boost. Having to manually launch a SWF that displays its test results within itself is at least a few extra steps that bog down one’s workflow. Unfortunately, since I’m using Flex Unit 4 rather than the Flex Unit that ships with Flash Builder 4, I have to launch my tests and compile them separately, but at least we’re now moving in the right direction. Once you understand the flow of working with a LocalConnection, passing data from Flash to, let’s say, Java, really isn’t that hard. All you need is to master the AMF encoding, and the LocalConnection protocol, both of which have been done. Then, you connect both ends together, pass some nice data objects about test results back and forth, and when the tests are done, call flash.system.System.exit(0) to kill the Flash Player instance.
All of this could be done relatively easy through the use of an Ant task, making the tests completely automated. I prefer building my applications with Ant, since I can use Ant on any platform and at any time and get the same results. Making a project portable is what separates it from the pack. It’s easy to throw together a sloppy project that will only compile in a very specific configuration and setup, but with the right planning, you can have a nice project which builds in Ant, anywhere.
Anyway, I digress. Flex Unit 4 is definitely worth checking out. Go out there and start messing with it!Technorati Tags: as3, flex, flash, unit testing, testing, ant