cookies and code

In my spare time, I try to blog about locally owned restaurants at which my wife and I find ourselves dining at frequently, or just something we find along the beaten path, for the Brevard area. I am always frustrated with the quality of information I find on local restaurants when searching the web, so I hope the little I do contributes to community eatery search. With our new baby due in May, we’ve slowing been trying to acclimate to cooking more at home and dining out less. Consequently, my posts have been thinning out over the last few months, but fear not, other quality sources of information about local restaurants do exist.

I find myself always reading the online version of The Beachside Resident. They offer a monthly restaurant review with tons of details on the establishment, its ambiance, and its menu that gives a great picture of the restaurant. They don’t list prices and I have yet to see anything which denotes an inglorious experience, so sometimes reviews can get a little too shiny. The purpose of the column, however, seems to be highlighting local businesses, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Overall, definitely a great way to keep up with new places to try on the coast. This year they finally threw up an RSS feed, so now it’s even easier to watch.

The other publication I’ve started to use more recently is the Brevard edition of MetroMix from Gannet Press, maintained by the Florida Today. FL Today has slowly been building a nice directory of local restaurants in the Brevard area and its current incarnation, MetroMix, acts as a great directory of restaurants when you know what you’d like to eat. just not where. The foodie they have doing reviews has the rare and valuable quality of getting to the point about her experience. Her perspective is a little sugar coated at times, but she’s comes off as honest, which is refreshing. She lists prices, which is even nicer, and when the dining experience doesn’t go exactly planned, it’s easy to read into her words to understand what to watch out for if you choose to patronize the place. On a disappointing note, no RSS feeds, so you have to go to the content, just like all of the other FL Today web properties; catch up to 2009 already, even the whitehouse.gov has!

Worse case scenario, I’ll dive into Google Maps and look for inline reviews when searching. There is something about the anonymity of Google that let’s people share their true feelings when it comes to dining out. I find when people are being brash, it make it even easy to take their opinion with a grain of salt. It’s been a surprising source of information if you’re willing to dig a little. On a side note, I hope to eventually generate a KML document for Google Maps, so they can aggregate my reviews, so I can be one of those angry voices as well.

Good luck in your search of Brevard’s local restaurant scene. We’ve a diverse selection of establishments that has yet to leave me hungry, so I hope links help others to “get fed” as well.

There are very few places in the Brevard area I really enjoy sitting down for a beer at. Charlie and Jake’s is a great spot for some home brews, but you can only drink the same 6 beers so many times. When I really want my beer fix, there is only one place that comes to mind, Coasters Pub. Now Coasters isn’t a microbrewery, so maybe the comparison isn’t fair, but they do have a crap load (100+) of awesome beers available, most of which are available on tap.

My father-in-law and I have been patronizing Coasters for the last two years, but it never occurred to me to make mention on the blog of them; that may be because of the great beer selection, however. Coasters not only carries some of the most popular brands on draft, but they also keep a seasonal rotation of beers going year round. Check out the winter selection they’ve made available this time around. Now it’s important to note, that I am by no means a beer expert, but I’m having fun learning about it all each time I go into Coasters. Lately, I’m really digging on Michigan with the Bell’s Two Hearted and Oberon Ales. I was bummed this past Friday that Delerium Tremens was no longer available on draft, but I switched over to the darker Arrogant Bastard Ale and it was well worth it. They always keep St Bernardus Tripel on tap as well as PBR (see the board), so you really have the full spectrum available to you at the pub. I really like the Fall and Winter beer selections, so this is a great time to visit, IMO. Pints can range anywhere from ~$2 for the PBR to ~$20 for their most expensive bottle from what I’ve seen. I usually try to go during happy hour, which will get you about $1 off your pint’s price of anywhere from ~$6 to $10. When I’m in a good mood, I’ll take 2 St. Bernardus and I’m out.

Coasters not only has the best beer selection in Brevard county, but they have great food as well. When we go, we typically get 20 wings (~$14), the fish and chips (~$9), and the french dip (~$9). Although there are some typical bar food menu choices (e.g. – chips and salsa and queso, mozzarella sticks, etc), their menu is diverse enough such that if you don’t feel like the fried experience, you can probably find a salad or sandwich to your liking. I personally really enjoy the wings, they always know how to fry them just right, although they will bake them as well. The fish and chips is made with haddock and just freagin’ rocks; it’s beer battered and comes with beer battered fries. The french dip is a great as well with your choice of onions, peppers, and mushrooms along with mozzarella cheese on a hoagie roll. Nothing is better than those beer battered fries though after a couple beers.

On top of the tasty food, Coasters wait and bartending staff is always spot on. Our waitresses always are great about bringing us samples of the new beers on tap. From our experience, they have a great demeanor and our food is always brought out hot. It’s gotta be tough dealing with a huge bunch of beer drinkers day in and out, but they do a great job. Between the beer, the service, and the food, it’s really hard to go wrong with Coasters Pub. Any place that keeps a longer list of beers than wine is tops in my book. If you like good, quality beer and need a great pub to replace your boring watering hole, Coasters Pub is the place for you. Hell, they even use their website to get information out to the community, how can you go wrong?

Coasters Pub is located in the Walmart plaza at 971A E Eau Gallie Blvd, Melbourne, FL.

This morning after church, my wife and myself found ourselves looking for a place to have breakfast. I’ve reviewed a few places around the area, but I figured I’d list most of the places we thought of as a good option for breakfast:

• Blue Lemon Cafe – 1301 South Patrick Drive, Satellite Beach, FL
• Blueberry Muffin – 1130 N Highway A1A, Indialantic, FL 32903
• Breakfast at Lilly’s – 240 Highway A1a, Satellite Beach, FL
• Corey’s Bagels on the Beach – 692 E Eau Gallie Blvd, Indian Harbour Bch, FL
• Eddie’s Sunrise Diner – 55 E Nasa Blvd, Melbourne, FL
• Memaw’s Bar-B-Q – 600 E Eau Gallie Blvd, Indian Harbour Bch, FL
• Niki’s Rainbow Cafe – 570 Highway A1A, Satellite Beach, FL
• Simply Delicious – 125 N Orlando Ave, Cocoa Beach, FL
• Suntree Cafe – 718 S Patrick Drive, Satellite Beach, FL

I know these aren’t all the options by far, but these are the ones we’ve been to and always had good service and food. For anyone who lives in the area, what places would you recommend for breakfast?

Big thanks to Doug, Bill, Jim, Mike, Don, Boss boss, and everyone else who joined me for my presentation on Continuous Integration and Flex at Kennedy Space Center. I ended up running around an hour and forty minutes giving an overview of the Adobe Flex domain and continuous integration as a whole. Thank you everyone for taking the time out of your busy schedules to tough through the presentation; I hope I have failed you all equally.

As promised, below are links to the materials from the presentation that I used as well as links to other resources you may find helpful.

Subversion – http://subversion.tigris.org/
Apache Ant – http://ant.apache.org/
Flex Ant Tasks – Use the libraries included in the Flex SDK 3.2 distribution
Fluint Library and Ant Tasks – http://code.google.com/p/fluint/
mock-as3 – http://code.google.com/p/mock-as3/
Hudson – https://hudson.dev.java.net/
Example Application and Component – http://brianlegros.com/blog/files/example_apps.zip
Slides – http://brianlegros.com/blog/files/slides.pdf

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate email @ me at brianlegros dot com.

NOTE: The Fluint test runners and reports that you saw in my presentation were using a code base that has yet to be released by the Fluint team, but will be hopefully soon. We have a lot of great working going on at the Fluint project, so I’d encourage you all to check out the Google Code site as well as the Fluint mailing list.

Here’s the thing about proof-of-concept projects, they always get the high risk technology questions out of the way, but they never manage to expose the stupid gotchas that are coming down the line when you go to make them into a reality. Case in point, unit testing in Flex and continuous integration. In my last post, I spoke about how I got flex-mojos, ant, fluint, and Hudson all playing nice together. Please preface the following with the fact that I’m a terrible server admin, so there may be work arounds for the roadblocks I ran into, I’m just not aware of them.

So when our team went to deploy the PoC, we decided to use Windows. Our hope was that with the lack of headless support in AIR, Windows would provide us access to a windowing system even when a user isn’t authenticated thanks to the dreaded LocalSystem account. As expected, I was able to get Hudson up and running and the AIR test runner was working without issue while running as LocalSystem. I then needed to integrate a series of CI builds which we put together to automatically release our components. All of sudden, I had the need for user specific settings to interact with putty, plink, and SVN, then LocalSystem failed me. I setup a special user to run the service hosting Hudson and placed that user into the Administrator group to start; I figured once I had it working again, I’d restrict its rights … <crickets chirping>. So when I had finally gotten the automatic release builds working with the new user, I re-ran one of my previous CI builds only to find that the build would hang when the AIR runner for Fluint was executed. After hours of pouring over a solution (I even tried this registry hack for the service with no success), I decided that Windows just wasn’t going to work.

I decided to give Linux a shot and I have to say I had much better results; I chose Ubuntu for my PoC due to its simplicity for guys like me. As a nice plus, all of the SSH/SVN woes I experienced disappeared because I had a native SSH client and integration was just easy. I still had the issue however of needing to run AIR in a truly headless mode. I started with some tips I found on the Fluint mailing list and was able to get Xvfb up and running as a service. Integration with the Fluint Ant Task didn’t pan out easily though, so I again looked for another solution. I did some digging and as it turns out a lot of the Java/Swing folks had to solve the same problems we’re having to solve now before Java gained the ability to run Swing apps headlessly. I found this post on xvfb-run and it did the trick. In fact it worked out so well, that I went ahead and integrated it into the Fluint Ant task as an option. Effectively I just had it execute the AIR application with the “-a” flag so sysadmins who are picky about how xvfb-run is used may not like the lack of granularity I’ve built in, but it’s working for us. I know that FlexUnit has a similar issue since the Flash Player can’t be run in a headless-mode either, so this may be a good feature to add to the FlexUnit Ant task eventually too. On a side note, my changes to Fluint are being reviewed right now and it looks like I may get my branch merged into the next release fairly soon for anyone who is interested in finding binaries.

We’re still working to deploy on a different Linux distro at the moment, but I think we’ve finally managed to mitigate the risk of running a Flex build on a CI server for the different variations we’ve thrown together. If you see another post from me really soon, you’ll know the edge of the PoC sword got me again … stupid sneaky sword.