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.

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.

over at amcom the boss has been asking us developer types to make use of the amcom technology blog a bit more than we had been. ok, a bit more than *i* had been (jon messer's been an animal posting about coldbox and transitioning from procedural to OO and is in the midst of a yet-to-be-published flex entry (rhymes with 'whizz')).

i've posted my first two entries, and will likely start transitioning to posting more frequently over there. if you're subscribed here, feel free to subscribe over there to follow me, jon, tariq, and the rest of the team.

as much as i hate to do this, i'm getting tired of the loser(s) posting WoW spam links in the comments. i don't particularly mind cleaning 'em up... but for the 3 or 4 people that actually cared enough to subscribe to the blog... i really don't like the thought of them getting the spam in return.

at some point, i may look into incorporating jake munson's cfformProtect or some other measure to try and eliminate the spam. but for now, between work and a couple of side jobs that i'm desperately trying to finish up, i simply don't have the time.

if anyone's interested, the spammer in question posted from the following IP addresses (updated 11 dec 2008). feel free to add 'em to your blacklist:

67.180.242.3
121.24.171.92
85.254.186.161
78.37.225.89
125.214.254.171
58.61.82.111
218.18.190.89
59.40.36.103
218.18.191.107
88.249.98.46
91.194.191.250
72.3.137.82
122.234.50.22
122.234.49.8
85.26.161.48
122.234.52.25
125.120.151.48
122.234.49.5
122.234.48.176
218.108.223.26

on one of my current projects, i needed to barcode a document (via CF) and subsequently read the barcode (again, via CF). the documents would be sent via fax and rerouted to the CF server.

because of its durability, my client wanted to use a data matrix barcode. as luck would have it, ryan stille had already gone through the trouble of putting together a CFC for reading and generating data matrix barcodes (thanks, ryan!).

the CFC is a wrapper for some java libraries that read and write barcodes. in the docs for the CFC, ryan suggests a company called Java4Less.com. i grabbed evaluation versions of the appropriate libraries to ensure they'd work, which they did. i then instructed my client to go ahead and make the purchase and told him which 2 libraries we needed. now, Java4Less offer up a few components and i've been a bit sleep deprived and long story short, one of the libraries that i told the client to purchase was not the correct library.

the purchase process involves making a payment, and then receiving a link where you can access the product(s) that you've purchased. payment was made... and shortly thereafter we got an email from one of the Java4Less guys double checking to make sure that we were ordering the right components (we weren't). i'm guessing that the incorrect component we requested didn't quite "fit" well with the other one, and sent up a red flag. but it was very cool that the company noticed that red flag, and acted on it.

i responded, explaining what we were looking to do and got a confirmation back that we had definitely ordered the wrong item, and that they'd make sure the right components were in place at the download link.

the customer service didn't end there.

the other night i was implementing the barcoding, and got errors while instantiating the reader. java errors. not being a java guy, i immediately panicked. fired an email off to Java4Less with the error message (big old cfdump), our JVM version, and anything else i could think of that would help them to isolate the issue. less than a day later, i got an email response that i was missing a jar file. one of the components (which come zipped) had 2 jar files. apparently i had only extracted one. disaster averted.

it's really been a while since i've seen that kind of customer service. both proactive (in the case of our incorrect order) and reactive (in the case of me being an idiot). if you find yourself in the market for one of the following products, you can definitely buy from Java4Less with confidence.

day 2 with chrome, and i'm still liking it quite a bit.

no, it doesn't necessarily "rule" (as stated by t. fleming in the comments on yesterday's post), but it's off to a very decent start.

it doesn't "rule" yet, because it's been available to the public for all of a day. it's in its infancy. it won't compete with firefox until such time that plugins are available (but i understand that's on the roadmap). there are some options that are lacking, or not at all available (or so hard to find that i'm under the impression that they're not at all available). how can i tell chrome to check for newer versions of the page with each page request? don't think i can. i'd also like a more robust means of organizing my bookmarks. oh, and i did manage to crash it earlier today. not even sure what happened... it just... crashed.

in spite of these "issues", i still like the browser. just like the gtalk client when it was first introduced (anyone remember... no file transfer options, no voice chat options...), it seems to be laser focused on doing what it's meant to do. browse web sites. i'm fairly confident that the additional "bells and whistles" will follow.

of course, the biggest issue surrounding chrome right now seems to be the EULA, which indicates that by using chrome, you're granting google permanent and irrevocable rights to your content, data, photos, and children. i'd been waiting to see someone at google step up and address this, and earlier today someone finally did. i'm sure there are those for whom this won't be "enough", and there still exists some paranoia about one company having such a far-reaching grasp. i remain of the mindset that, until they do something evil, something that gives me a reason to not trust them... if they're putting out a good product, there's really no reason for me to not try it. i won't try and convince anyone who feels differently... we're all entitled to our opinions, and i respect that. i'm simply stating mine.

some notes from day 2... liking the fact that it still doesn't crash as often as firefox, or seem to consume as much memory. noted that highlighting text on a web page and right-clicking gives you the ability to search google for that highlighted text (neat!). dragging a tab out of a browser window creates a new window. built in javascript debugger/console (that i've not yet had the opportunity to play around with).

still a fan, and looking forward to seeing what enhancements are added to this still very young product. yes, it's still rough around the edges... but there's very little denying that for a product this young to be as solid as it is points to a potentially very sweet mature browser in the (hopefully near) future.

the blogosphere and twitter are both ablaze today with talk of google's foray into the browser market with chrome. my first impressions, and some accompanying screenshots...

up until it was actually available, i'd not been following the story too much, so i hadn't seen screenshots or read about any specific features. my first impression upon loading it up was, "wow... there's like... no chrome". i haven't messed around yet with configuration options, but there's no status bar. no toolbar. it's literally just an address bar (which seems to also serve as an integrated search bar), and tabs. it's minimalistic in it's look, as is standard with most things google, but i like it. it's uncluttered, but i'm not sure the general public will see it as such. the plain design that i see as a plus could easily be seen as... well, plain.

which raises an interesting point. i'm not sure what market google is after. are they trying to be a mainstream browser and compete directly with IE and firefox? i don't know that i see that happening. but given some of the features that they've implemented, i definitely see them competing for the affections of techie geeks.

most web developers that i know generally use firefox for testing during development. why? the firebug plugin. this plugin is far and away one of the most useful tools ever created for debugging a web page's display and behavior in a browser window. out of the box, chrome provides a tool that will allow you to introspect any page element, and its functionality certainly rivals firebug's... as far as CSS goes. as far as i can tell, there is not (yet) any functionality to debug scripts or to monitor network traffic (useful for debugging AJAX calls). still, for core functionality, it's very slick for what it does.

in further appealing to the geek, right-clicking above the address bar brings up a "task manager" window. the window shows you how many tabs you've got open, as well as what resources (memory, CPU, network) each tab is utilizing. should you run into any issues with a particular tab, you can end that specific process. i haven't had the opportunity to test that yet, but if it works, that'd be a pleasant change from firefox, which generally crashes as an application if a single tab locks up. to further support my theory that google is targeting the geek audience, the task manager window contains a link entitled "Stats for nerds", which displays some fairly detailed data about the browser's memory usage.

overall web pages seemed to load noticeably faster than in other browsers. of course, gmail seems to work a treat, which is nice as i'd sort of gotten used to gmail crashing firefox (to be fair, this hasn't happened in firefox since the latest update. w00t!). i haven't done extensive testing, but some cursory browsing seems to indicate that both javascript and css look as i'd expect them to look.

bottom line is... i like it. i actually like it a lot. it's sleek, it's fast, and it's got some nice built-in tools to satisfy your inner geek. have you tried it? i know that a lot of folks seem to be hesitant, taking this as a sign of google's further intent to dominate all things web (which is not inherently a bad thing folks, if they do it right and continue to not be evil), but i think it's certainly worthwhile to give it a glance and judge it based on its own merits, rather than only a perception of the company that provides it.

*update* it was just brought to my attention that CTRL-SHIFT-N will launch the browser in "incognito mode". and yes, i can think of a situation or two where that could come in handy

click on the thumbnails below to embiggen 'em:

yeah, that was a stretch. serves me right for trying to come up with a witty title before i've had my full morning dose of caffeine.

this made the rounds a while back, but since then things have been relatively quiet and i'm afraid it may have fallen off of most folks' radars. joshua cyr is organizing a "non-conference" cruise. what's that mean? it means the best part of the average conference... you know, after the sessions, alcohol in hand, hanging out at the bar with your fellow developers sharing war stories and talking shop... without the pesky sessions getting in the way.

and the best part? it's on a boat. a big boat that sails from miami to the bahamas (and back). food? check. drink? check (um... gotta pay for those tho). white sandy beaches and inviting blue waters? check. people you talk to online but have yet to meet in person (or don't meet often enough)? yup.

i think it's a great idea and i applaud josh's efforts for putting it together and coordinating the effort. i'd love to attend, but living on the left coast means paying for cross-country airfare for a family of 5... and that alone would run me about 4x the cost of the cruise itself. but i'd like to see this succeed. i'd like to think that it'll be so successful that it'll be an annual event, and that maybe i can make it in 2010.

what about you? what are you doing feb 9-13th of 2009? check out http://www.riadventure.com/ for all the details.

many moons ago, i signed up for a twitter account. all the cool kids were doing it and damn if i'm not a lemming. i didn't quite "get it" tho. it's enough pressure to try and come up with a blog entry once in a blue moon that i think would hold a passing interest to one or two people. twitter is all about posting something "interesting" (assuming "what are you doing now?" is interesting) on a constant ongoing basis.

wasn't totally unexpected, but i failed at twitter. at any given time, i just didn't think i was doing anything worthwhile enough to hit the web site and update my status.

luke kilpatrick to the rescue. luke admonished me for being a bad twitterer, and i explained that updating my status on the website was just too much of a PITA. he then told me about twhirl, an AIR-based twitter desktop client, saying that he wouldn't be active on twitter at all without it. i downloaded it yesterday and took it for a drive.

*now* i see why people like twitter. aside from being a very cool app (i gotta start writing me some AIR stuff), it makes it ridiculously simple to not only update your own status, but also to keep up with the statuses of those people that you're following. think IM client on steroids.

if you're twittering without it, download it and give it a shot. if you're not twittering, sign up and then download it and give it a shot. feel free to follow me @ cgriefer