My apologies for the late blogging on this -- lots of projects going on these days, taking time away from blogging (but I'm hoping to fix that soon).

Tonight at Saccfug, Seth Duffey will be giving a presentation on ColdFusion Security. We'll also be doing our Software Giveaway -- and if you're brave enough to drive to the meeting in this crazy weather we're having today, you deserve to win! :)

More details and directions are available on the Saccfug Site. See you there!

-nolan

This Tuesday (today/tomorrow, depending on when you read this), Seth Duffey will be giving an introduction to "Software Development with Scrum".

No ColdFusion experience required! Bring your other developer friends to participate in the fun! :)

More details can be found on the Saccfug site.

See you there! -nolan

Tonight at the Sacramento CFUG, Seth Duffey will be giving an introduction to ColdSpring. This will be a great first-look at ColdSpring, dependency injection, and all that ColdSpring has to offer.

More details are available at the Saccfug site. Hope to see you there!

This Thursday (June 18), we (the Sacramento CFUG) has a special joint meeting with the Sierra Multimedia User Group, and the Nor Cal Flex User Group. We'll be showing off parts of the new version of ColdFusion, the new IDE "Bolt", as well as features in the upcoming Flex Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst.

The fine folks at AcademyX will be hosting the meeting. We'll have the usual assortment of pizza, some new tshirts, and possibly other goodies to share as well!

More details can be found on the Saccfug website. Hope to see you there!

This Tuesday night Sean Corfield will be speaking at our Sacramento ColdFusion User Group. He'll be speaking on Ralio, showing off some its features, answering questions, and so on.

More details (and a link to the webcast hopefully) can be found at www.saccfug.org. Hope to see you there!

-nolan

Here's the playlist from my show on KDVS:

1. The Brodys "Rope Burn"
2. Tough Luxury "Pleasure Box"
3. The Athens "Suzannah"
4. The Kimberly Trip "Cliche Love Song"
5. Jeff Pitcher "So You Don't Have To"
6. The Nickel Slots "Come Back"
7. Sal Valentino "I Love You, I Do"
8. Christian Kiefer "Bad Dreams"
9. Noah Nelson "E and T unlike X"
10. Plastic dBo Band "Wake Up"
11. Deftones "Digital Bath"
12. Far "Man Overboard"
13. Bag of Kittens "I Used To Say Your Name"
14. Ghetto Moments "I Feel Done In"

Thanks everyone that listened, and to DJ Oddy and KDVS for hosting me. And thanks to the dude that called in and thanked us for playing the Deftones and Far tracks. It was good to know somebody was actually listening. :)

-nolan

I try to keep this blog mostly technical in nature, but once in a while something from other facets of life seem fun enough to share here too...

This Tuesday night at 8pm PST I'm going to host a "local music" show on KDVS radio. We'll be playing music by bands from the Sacramento/Davis area, and babbling in between about whatever local music trivia I can think to provide. KDVS is 90.3 for you local guys...far away friends can stream it from http://www.kdvs.org/listen/

-nolan

Tuesday June 2nd 8 - 9pm PST 90.3 KDVS or http://www.kdvs.org/listen/ The "local music" show - bands from Sacramento/Davis! All ages! Free! :)

Hey Mr DJ I thought you said we had a deal.
I thought you said 'you scratch my back
and I'll scratch your record'.
I thought you said we had a deal!
-they might be giants

Continuing with my notes from the cf.Objective talks...

Code Less, Code Smarter: Taking Code Reuse to a Higher Level
Jeff Chastain
(www.alagad.com/go/blog for all the presentation materials)

Jeff gave a good look at several techniques to help with building OO applications. Nothing was really framework-specific, but more ideas such as building an AuthenticationService.cfc, so you can abstract out whether your app's login system is based on LDAP, or a SQL database, or something else -- the app no longer cares about those details, only if it got back a "yes, the user can log in" message from your AuthenticationService.cfc.

He also touched on DSLs (domain specific languages), a common topic, brought up at several other discussions. I don't know if this was intentional or not, but Jeff's talk gave a very quick, high level look at DSLs, which worked perfectly first thing in the morning...considering that other presenters went into more detail later in the day. :)

The slides were a good mix of useful bullet points and things on the lighter side (little jokes, pictures to keep our interest, etc). (This is something I keep meaning to add to my presentations, but haven't actually done yet.)

Jeff knows his stuff, speaks clearly, is easy to understand, and doesn't go so fast as to lose anyone in the audience. When presenting on high level OO topics, it's pretty easy to lose people in the audience, but I didn't see any indications of this happening here (based on the few people I talked to afterwards). All the slides are available here. It's well worth a look, especially if things like "service layers" still seem like "just a lot of extra typing" to you. ;)

-nolan

Finally, a few minutes to start posting my notes/reviews of the various cf.Objective() presos! I'll do these more or less in the order that I attended the talks. Hopefully the info will be useful to some of you...

Introduction to Flex 3
Theo Rushin

Theo gave a very clear, well put together introduction to Flex. He went over some basic code, building a sample app for the audience, and gave a good first-look at the Flex Builder environment. Theo showed how easy it is to drag and drop components into a Flex app ala Visual Basic, wrote a little code, and poof...he was up and running (as expected).

My only critique would be for a more real-world sample application, as I find that helps the light bulbs click for the audience at times. However, I know how hard it can be to come up with a good real-world example that's not too complex for a beginner audience. Something already prepared so things like "setting a break point" can be demo'd quickly might be nice next time.

If you're new to Flex, this was a great introduction. Hopefully Theo's slides are available on the web (apparently I didn't write down the URL for his blog).

-nolan

I got home late last night from CF Objective (stayed in town through the weekend to visit with friends and do some touristy things). Overall it was a great experience, and well worth the time/money! This was my first CF Objective, and I must say it was incredibly inspiring! I learned quite a few new things, and am excited about blocking off time to implement them in my current projects.

The keynote was very informative. Nice to know that our "dying language" ColdFusion has done nothing but grow steadily over the last few years -- the keynote mentioned somewhere around 800K estimated CF developers now! We also got a nice sneak peak at some of the things coming in CF9, the new Bolt IDE, and Flex 4 (including a name change, that's already been blogged everywhere, so I won't get into that here).

Thanks to Troy Pullis for coordinating the Star Trek IMAX outing on Thursday. I'm by no means a die-hard Trekkie, but this movie was so well done, that didn't matter! I highly recommend it, even if you are only peripherally familiar with the Star Trek story lines (or just like well produced sci-fi movies).

It was great to meet some of the folks that author blogs I've been reading over the years -- Ben Nadel (who was easily one of the nicest people I've met in ages), Jason Dean (thanks again for carpooling us to/from the Star Trek film, and for dropping me at the Light Rail), Dan Vega, Bob Silverberg and everyone I'm forgetting due to jet lag. :)

I took notes on the various presentations which I hope to post later; they need to be cleaned up before they'll be of any use to other people. Hopefully time for that soon, but with all the new things I learned, it'll be hard to prioritize everything! :)

Now if you'll excuse me, I want to rewrite all my apps with DSLs, Transfer ORM, ColdSpring, Flex, ValidateThis, Model-Glue, and Peter Bell's IBO library. ;)

-Nolan