Dan’s Drivelings

As some of you know, one of my other interests besides programming is amateur radio. I am the “liaison” or team lead between our local group of volunteer examiners (VEs) and the American Radio Relay League’s (ARRL) group responsible for overseeing license testing for the FCC. Part of the responsibility of being team lead is ensuring that we have an adequate supply of written exams for the three different license classes.

In the past, the ARRL has provided us with a Windows-based program to generate exams from the question pool. The program worked well, but each time there were any changes to the question pools (which happens on the 1st of July in 3 out of 5 years), they had to create a new Windows installer package to disseminate to all the VE team leaders. That in of itself was a pain enough, but for those of us who are Mac and/or Linux folks it became a real hassle.

In today’s newsletter to VEs, I noticed that the ARRL had announced a new version of the exam generations software. When I went to download it, I was pleasantly surprised to find an AIR badge to install the program. It’s an HTML-based AIR application but a lot of thought was put into how it functions. It takes advantage of AIR’s built-in database to synchronize its question pools and answer templates with the latest approved versions as well as periodically checks to see if there are any updates to the program itself–all the things that we love about AIR. Oh, and since it’s an AIR app, it obviously runs natively on my Mac!

I’ve been kind of critical of the ARRL in the past in regard to the applications that they offer for use (some are pretty bad). This one however, really fits the bill for what those of us responsible for printing exams need to do on a regular basis. Hopefully, this will be the first of many applications that they develop on the AIR platform.

The 615Flex group is hosting a meeting tonight featuring Scot Clausing giving a presentation about Cairngorm.  For those that might not be familiar, Cairngorm is a “micro-architecture” used for building robust Flex applications. We had a (short) discussion on the email list regarding what barriers we as individuals have to building Flex apps the “Cairngorm way”.

My biggest challenge at the moment is just finding enough time to stay up to speed on everything (some might call it an excuse, but hey, I have to sleep sometime).  My primary bread-winning skillset at the moment is ColdFusion development. Adobe released ColdFusion 8 a few months ago and, while I’ve had it running on my Macbook Pro for development since it shipped, my clients are only now starting to migrate to the new version.  That translates into considerable amounts of time spent trying to figure out not only how to use the new features of CF8, but WHEN to use those new features.  

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Last night Ben Forta made  quick stop in Nashville to demo Flex 3 and AIR to the Nashville Area (Ben has posted a PDF of his slides at Flex.org).  The event was sponsored primary by 615Flex (the Flex user group in Nashville). I didn’t hear the final count of how many folks attended, but my guess is somewhere between 60 and 70 people were there.

Ben mentioned right at the top of the meeting that there wasn’t really any new stuff left to show off with Flex 3 since it had been in public alpha and beta for so long.  Nevertheless, he did demo some things that I’ve not really had a chance to play with in Flex.  I’ve not really jumped on the whole AIR bandwagon yet, but after last night’s demo, I definitely have a couple of ideas of how an AIR application could help some of my clients. 

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