What, you may ask, is an Unconference?

As per Adobe's MAX site:

Visit the Adobe ColdFusion® unconference area to participate in advanced tutorials and code show-and-tells. Share your latest cool code creations and explain how you built them.

Like last year, this year's ColdFusion Unconference will be organized and run by Ray Camden, with an assist by Scott Stroz.

Unlike last year, this year I will be helping out, as Ray's "Grunt Brute" (his term, not mine). I don't know exactly what the job description is, but with a title like that, could I really have said no? (Side Note: It wouldn't be the first time I've had a lapse in good judgment. I could tell stories, but my mom reads my blog and she's disappointed enough in me as it is. Every family get-together it's, "Oy, why ColdFusion? It's a dead language!" She tells her friends I'm a Ruby developer. But I digress...)

I'm looking forward to doing my part in helping to make all 3 days of the Unconference as memorable as possible. Ray recently posted a Call for Speakers/Comments, so if you'd like to set up a session, or have comments as to something you'd like to see, please drop either Ray or myself a line.

Hope to see you in October!

I have a confession to make. I don't know what "Agile Programming" is. At least, I didn't before reading "Becoming Agile ... in an imperfect world" by Greg Smith and Ahmed Sidky (In the interest of full disclosure, I was fortunate enough to receive an advance copy from the publisher).

I'd heard the term before, but I didn't really know what it meant to be an Agile programmer. What comprises Agile? Is it an abstract concept or are there explicit steps to take in order to "get there". How do you know when you're "there"? More importantly, is it worth investing the time to become Agile?

I got as far as page 4 before two of my questions were already addressed (What components comprise Agile development, and how do I know that I've achieved Agile development?). I took that to be a good sign. A sign that the authors know who their audience is, and will do their best to deliver the answers that their readers are looking for.

I'm a big fan of Mozilla's Firefox browser for web development. It's got a number of tools that I just couldn't imagine doing without. ColorZilla, Web Developer Toolbar, and of course, Firebug (just to name a few).

But as time went on, I found that Firefox could be a memory hog. I had a handful of plugins installed, but not many. And no themes. But on more than one occasion, I'd see Firefox's memory consumption start to increase dramatically.

Enter Google's Chrome. Ironically, in spite of the name, there was very little chrome to be seen. It was a nice, lightweight browser that I eventually transitioned to for day-to-day browsing. Development continued in Firefox, but I really enjoyed Chrome as a lightweight alternative for browsing.

Last week, I made the switch from PC/Windows to a Macbook Pro (blog entry on thoughts of a PC guy making the transition to OS X to follow eventually). Unfortunately, Chrome isn't available (yet?) for OS X. Well, back to Firefox as my "full time" browser.

Not surprisingly, my previous post on my Master Cleanse experience garnered reactions that ran the gamut from curious to supportive to "that's a load of woo". Most posts that I've seen on the subject garner the same widespread reaction.

What I've not seen much of is any sort of consistent follow-up posts by people who have done the cleanse. I've seen mostly positive reviews by those who have tried it (a few "I just couldn't do it" too), usually with a good amount of "success". Of course, "success" in these cases can be somewhat of a subjective term. If a person loses 30lbs in 30 days, can that be considered a success if they gain it all back over the next 30? And why is it that so few are willing to post those ongoing entries?

Not sure this will become a "regular thing", but I do want to take the time to address my first 3 weeks post-cleanse, and talk about whether or not I still consider my cleanse a "success".

Today wraps up day 30 of a master cleanse. I dropped a total of 29.1 lbs, and plan to go another day (or maybe two).

Over the past year or so, I've been way too sedentary. More so than usual. I'd sit in front of the computer at work all day, come home, and sit in front of the computer all night working on a side job. I wouldn't say I was obese (altho my Wii Fit would disagree), but I was definitely as heavy as I'd ever been, and I wasn't happy about it.

My wife and I are both Google Calendar users. We like the convenience of having access to our calendars anyplace we have web access, and we like being able to see each other's events on our own calendars.

A few weeks back, I spent the better part of a weekend trying to get my iPhone set up to sync email, contacts, and calendar. For contacts, I'm not quite sold on Google Contacts at this point, so I'm sticking with Outlook. Google Mail syncs easily enough with the iPhone via IMAP. But the calendar... the calendar was a source of great frustration.

Outlook was able to read (but not really sync with) a single Google calendar, but I was unable to get it to do multiple calendars. Additionally, the iPhone would only see the "main" Outlook calendar, and as I hinted at above, the Google calendar events weren't imported into the main calendar, but rather read as a separate calendar. iTunes didn't provide the option to sync with any other calendar but the main Outlook calendar. Strike 1.

After some searching, I found out that Google provides an app that would let you truly sync your Google Calendar events with Outlook (e.g. actually import the events into the main Outlook calendar). It wasn't perfect. It ran at a scheduled interval so lacked "real time" synchronization. If I added a Google calendar event, and then synced my iPhone 5 minutes later (prior to the sync app running), the new event wouldn't make it onto the iPhone. Also, it could only do a single calendar. We'll call that a foul ball. Strike 2.

A couple of nights ago I noticed that Google was now offering Google Sync. It's still in beta (but really, what Google product isn't?), but seemed like it would finally allow me to sync my Google calendar (and my wife's) with my iPhone.

Home run!

Google Sync runs by setting up the account via MS Exchange on the iPhone under "Mail, Contacts, Calendars". After doing this, use the iPhone's Safari browser to navigate to http://m.google.com/sync and choose which calendars you want to sync. Yes, it allows you to sync any calendar to which you have access via the web. Awesome. One note... if you're using Google Apps (or Google for Domains), Google Sync must be set up under the "Manage Your Domain" area.

With Google Sync, there's 2-way synchronization between the iPhone and Google Calendars. Events added to the phone show up online, and events added online show up on the phone. The synchronization is done via Push, so no need to even connect the phone to the computer.

On the phone, events from different calendars are distinguished via little circles with different colors. I'd like to see the ability to assign a specific color to a specific calendar added. But that's really the only qualm I have with the setup. Other than that admittedly minor point, this is a fantastic solution.

Today in the #coldfusion channel on IRC (DALnet), somebody asked about a downloadable version of the ColdFusion documentation. I first suggested that he look at his local system since you can include the docs as part of your CF install, but he apparently didn't choose this option.

I did a quick Google search to see if they could be downloaded easily, since it's really just static HTML files, and came across a pretty neat AIR app by Brian Love, appropriately titled CFDocs on AIR.

The project looks to be about a year old, and according to Brian, was originally a project that he undertook in order to play around with AIR. It was a heck of a choice, because not only did he get some exposure to AIR, but he put together something that has a good deal of value. The application shows an alphabetical list of all of ColdFusion 8's built-in tags and functions, shows tags and functions by category, and is searchable.

When I posted this to the #coldfusion channel in response to the original question, a couple of people commented that they hadn't seen this yet and also thought it was a worthwhile effort. Since it seems to have flown under the radar since its release, I thought it'd be worthwhile to get the word out and mention it here.

Nicely done, Brian. Thanks for making this available.

Download CFDocs on AIR.

After picking up my new iPhone a few weeks back, one of the first things I did was purchase a case. I wanted something to protect it from accidental drops, as well as something to protect the screen from scratches. I'm not a big belt-clip fan, so whatever I chose also needed to be fairly unobtrusive so that I could keep the phone in my front pocket.

The first purchase I made was the iSkin Solo. The Solo offered both a protective case as well as a screen protector. I ordered it online, so didn't have the opportunity to get a good feel for it beforehand other than reading reviews (which were mostly positive). As noted, this was the "first purchase", and not the solution that I ultimately went with.

Registration... check. Hotel room reserved... check. Flight booked... check. Sunday February 22nd I start the cross-country journey from San Jose to Sarasota for a week of training with Hal Helms.

The course is Real-World OO Programming, and I've been looking forward to this since I first read about it on Ben Nadel's blog a few months back. I've been struggling with the transition from procedural guy to OO guy, and I think a classroom environment might do well to help me over some of the hurdles. I've gone through a few books, and I think I understand the foundations at a conceptual level. Sitting down with someone like Hal will help put those concepts into practice, I think.

I've been a big fan of Hal's since he and Jeff Peters did the aptly-named Helms and Peters - Out Loud podcast. Topics ranged from writing code to planning to running one's own business. Very diverse topics but always relevant. I always found that both Hal and Jeff just had a way of conveying their meaning very effectively. The material never sounded dry or forced. I'm really looking forward to 5 consecutive days in a classroom environment led by Hal.

Big thanks to my company, Amcom Technology. Amcom's a relatively small shop, and this particular course is a bit more than what they're used to paying for conferences. I appreciate that they recognize the difference here (5 full days, 8 hours per day, small classroom environment) versus a traditional conference and that they agreed to foot the bill.

I also need to send out a thanks to Hal and company, for deciding to include the cost of the hotel in the price of the training (and not increasing the price of the training). It's probably fairly safe to say that I don't think I'd have been able to make it if it were a case of paying for the class, and paying for airfare, and then paying for a six night hotel stay.

Anybody else going? If so, my understanding is that the free hotel stay is only valid 'til the end of January. Also, I've seen a few discount codes posted... but not quite sure if I'm supposed to be re-posting them. If you're aware of a code, and you're aware that it's OK to post, feel free to leave it in the comments for others.

UPDATE:
Register with code "charlie" and receive a $250 discount! Are you still here? GO GO GO!

Oh, and if anyone else is arriving in Sarasota at 10:45pm Sunday evening and wants to split a cab from the airport, let me know

It's been almost a month since Joe Rinehart, one of the superstars of the ColdFusion community, and an all-around good guy, revealed that his wife Dale had been recently diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS).

To get right to the point, some folks in the community got together and organized an effort to collect some funds to try and help offset the cost of medications and treatment. Please visit http://www.helpsupportjoeanddale.com to read a little bit more about the effort, and to help out if you can.

I know times are tough for many. I know there may be people saying, "That's really terrible and my heart goes out to them, but I've got problems of my own so I can't help out right now." I can sympathize with that. Hell, I can empathize with that. On the personal side of things, we're dealing with a house in FL that we've not been able to sell since we left over 2 years ago. It's pretty much devastated our finances. Believe me, I understand. I might even have thought that way myself. But here's a little story that might help explain why I'm going to do what I can (aside from "Every little bit helps", which is true, of course).

Last year at cf.Objective(), I was sharing a hotel room with Scott Stroz, who is good friends with Joe. One night, at roughly 1:30 am (my memory's spotty on this, but it was late), Joe came knocking on the door looking visibly concerned/upset and asked Scott if he could come over to his room for a bit. Turns out what had happened is that while in his room, Joe heard a commotion coming from the room next to his. A commotion that clearly involved a woman being hit by somebody. He went over to the room, knocked on the door, and got the woman out. She was a bit shaken up, for obvious reasons. Joe wanted to call security, but she asked him not to. She knew this person and wasn't comfortable turning him in. After some lengthy discussion, Joe convinced her that calling security was the best course of action. She relented, and he made the call. Security came up to his room, and handled the situation from there.

I'm not quite sure what would have happened if Joe didn't get involved. But I do know that night likely would have ended much worse for her.

You might be wondering how this relates to the current situation. I thought a lot that night (and since that night) about what Joe did. Not only what Joe did... but what most other people would have done. Even what I would have done. Most people, I believe, would have turned up the TV to drown out the noise, and gone to sleep figuring it wasn't their problem. Why get involved? Maybe some would have made a call to security before turning up the TV. Surely that's getting involved "enough"? It wasn't for Joe. I'd imagine that he was concerned about what might happen in between the time he called security and the time it took them to get there. In any event, what it boils down to is that he knew somebody was in trouble (somebody he didn't even know), and acted on it immediately, with little regard for his own safety, in order to get that person out of harm's way.

Being in the ColdFusion community, I know as much as most of you do about Joe Rinehart the professional. He's intelligent, he's innovative, he enjoys teaching others, and he contributes a good amount of his own work back to the community. That night showed me quite a bit about Joe Rinehart the person. I know that if it were somebody in my family that needed help, it wouldn't matter what was going on in Joe's life. He'd do something to help. If it were someone in your family, he'd do something to help. There are precious few things in this life that I'm 100% sure about. That's one of them.

The http://www.helpsupportjoeanddale.com page will be up for as long as it needs to be. If you can't give something today, I urge you to give something when you can. I'd appreciate it if you could share the link with others, both inside and out of the ColdFusion community.

Thank you.