yup, I'm a sucker I bought this kick-ass t-shirt. Dont be to jealous now you can get our own at http://thebignoob.com

Just post them here so everyone can see them and leverage it!

Thanks in advance!
Josh

Now that I am pushing 31, life has changed quite a bit. I work, eat and sleep. Sometimes I just work and sleep forgetting to do the eating part (probably due to the execessive amounts of caffeine). I decided that this is a one way ticket to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc.. and turned over a new leaf about 2 weeks ago. I started swimming and doing strength training, but I really wanted to start running. Funny thing happened was I was checking out the Degrafa website and saw the chart examples Joe Johnston did mimicing Nike+ charts. I was curious and went to Nike+ and realized they made shoes that could communicate to your iPod Touch or Nano. Being the tech savy dork I am, I went out and bought a pair of shoes this afternoon, got the Nike+ iPod Kit, bought some Nike DryFit apparell and ran my first 2.33 miles. Unfortunately, being the tech savy dork I am I forgot to turn on the workout option on my iPod before I started running and it only captured .85 miles of my workout... doohhhh!!!

Anyway, so I created one goal and one challenge, both are pretty much the same. I set a goal to run 50 miles in 4 weeks and I also setup a challenge for anyone who wants to join me to run 50 miles in 4 weeks or less. The person who runs 50 miles first, wins. You get nothing of course, except a virtual trophy and my personal congratulations via this blog!

So what are you waiting for!! Go get some cool shoes, the kit and lets go run! The Nike+ site has some really cool features where you can set goals for yourself, enter challenges that other people have created and a lot of other neat ideas all crammed into their site, which is running via Flash 9 :)

Well all went well for like a week, than all of a sudden  I started getting this crazy error.  I kept getting a message saying "Invalid Parameter Binding(s)" and it wasnt even the new columns I just added, it was something else entirely.

I did some digging in my cfdump of the cfcatch error message, I discovered that for some odd reason Coldfusion was converting a bit into a integer even though both my bean, ActionScript Value Object and the cfqueryparam were all set to a boolean value / cf_sql_bit.  So when flex sent over the data to CF all was well, but when it sent the data to the DAO.cfc to do a save/update into the database the cfqueryparam was sometimes doing it right and sometimes doing it wrong, it was really -- really hard to duplicate the error message, but here is what it the message was returning in the cfcatch: (I am providing a very small snippet)

You can see how at first the class was java.lang.Boolean, value was true and sqltype was cf_sql_bit, but later the java class type changes to java.lang.Integer, value to 0 and sqltype is still cf_sql_bit. The code never changes the item to a 0 or a 1 and my bean is a Boolean datatype, not a integer. I am still a little puzzled as to why this happened, it rarely occurs therefore its nearly impossible to duplicate on my own.

Ray Camden blogged about something similiar happening to him late last year and it turned up to be a caching issue when dealing with cfqueryparams in a query that is cached either in the app scope (in my case it was Coldspring, which is cached in the app scope).

Anyway, odd as hell figured I would put this out there wondering if anyone knows a fix besides putting some spaces in the queries and restarting CF. Again I have no idea if that fixed my issue or not, I wont find out until I get another mysterious error message or a phone call from a frustrated user.

When change occurs in a company, especially big strategy changes and this change is managed poorly people learn from this.  They decide right off the bat to be critical and as soon as the change starts making their working lives miserable they fight it and if the change has already occured, the next time change happens in the working place they become extremely adverse to any change, overly critical and darn right resistant.  That's right resistant -- and who could blame them?  If change is managed poorly in any company (big/med/small) it affects more than the people driving the change, it tarnishes the employees trust in the idea that change is good and should be embraced.  So how do you avoid this issue or even deal with an environment/company that has a sour taste in it's mouth from a poorly managed/implemented change?  You apply Change Management principles, yes there is such a thing.

I managed to plow through a very long book, as interesting as it was -- it was had some dull moments.  "Diffusion of Innovations" by Everett M. Rogers (no relation).  In this book Rogers talks about getting an idea, technology or any new thing really diffused or accepted by a particular group of people.  This group could be an organization, a social group, a customer, a client, your mom and dad... it could be anyone.

• "There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new order of things....whenever enemies have the ability to attack the innovator, they do so with the passion of partisans, while the others defend him sluggishly, so that the innovator and his party alike are vulnerable" -- Niccolo Machivelli, The Prince (1513)

Ha, even in 1513 people knew that change was tough!! I digress, so back to Rogers theory of change and how to get it right. Rogers believes there are basically four elements in diffusion, below is a list of those four elements and Rogers definitions from his book.

1. The Innovation: an idea, practive, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption.
2. Communication Channels: The essence of diffusion process is the information exchange through which one individual communicates a new idea to one or several others.
3. Time: The time dimension of the diffusion process, highly coupled with the communication piece, has 3 parts 1) the innovation-decision process (adoption or rejection by the individual) 2) the relative lateness or earliness by which the innovation is adopted 3) the third is the rate of adoption by the number of members who are the adoptees
4. Social System: Here is the big hitter, this is where people get involved and screw it all up (not a Rogers quote).  Defined as a set of interrelated units that are engaged in joint problem solving to accomplish a common goal. -- (so they think, the problem is that everyone has different views of what the goal is and this makes things messy)

The four main elements are pretty straight forward, you need something to apply diffusion (innovation introduction), you have channels that you use to communicate this innovation in a time frame to a particular social group.  This social group either rejects or accepts it over a period of time.  Rogers believes that in order for a innovation to be widely accepted in the social system it must be communicated well and within a certain time frame. In order to gain acceptance of lets say a new process/strategy in a large company you would need executive sponsorship (aka a Champion) that really does care, stays on top of it and doesnt forget.  The second item is a change agent, someone who can sell the idea to the social system and remind the champion about how great this innovation is so they dont forget. This person takes the vision and makes it a reality with the help of a qualified team.  The main job of the change agent is to help the social system understand the innovation, which in turn would help the eventual acceptance of the innovation.  

I constantly see change being pushed in companies, schools, churches with little change management.  Have you ever sat in a meeting where people are seriously angry because the management team constantly changes their mind, modifies the innovation over and over again, creating rework, anxiety, etc...?  Well I have, about 75% of the time it's because there wasnt any serious thought given into how the innovation would be diffused into the organization and because of this the innovation doesnt have near the affect it could of had if it was managed better in terms of change management.

I won't go on and on about Roger's theory of "Diffusion of Innovations", I recommend you read his book if you're curious enough about this topic.  It has helped me in my job countless times and I believe it definitely applies to RIA technology projects.

• References: 
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
  • "Diffusion of Innovations" by Everett M. Rogers
    

-- Peace out

To grab the feed you need to subscribe to the 360|Flex channel in AMP:

1. Install AMP
2. Click "My Favorites" menu at the top.
3. Click "Add RSS Feed" at the bottom.
4. Paste: http://sessions.onflex.org/1733261879.xml

You can read up on the full details here.

First off, this anouncement to me means that Cairngorm is not dead, it is very much alive and the Adobe Consulting team are working to come up with a strategy and execution plan to make it better with the help of the community (hence the open source piece).  I think this is great, it demonstrates Adobe's committment to the project. 

I encourage anyone who uses Cairngorm in their Flex/AIR Applications to get involved in the forums by providing your thoughts on how Cairngorm could be improved to help you and your team when creating Rich Internet Applications.  Alistair also mentioned in his post about reviewing the bugs that have been posted and voting on them based on their importance (to you). 

I am really looking forward to the discussions and how it will shape the future of the Cairngorm MVC Framework. 

• Adobe Cairngorm Open Source Site
• Alistair McLeod's Announcement - Cairngorm Moved to Adobe Open Source
• Steven Webster's Post - Cairngorm 3 - Adobe Consulting Led but Community Driven
• Alistair's Follow Up Post - Cairngorm on Adobe Open Source - 1 Week On
• Steven Webster's Post - Call for Representatives on the Cairngorm Committee
• Cairngorm Open Source Forums
• Cairngorm Bugbase

My family moved from Vegas to a small town in Southern Missouri (Branson).  Las Vegas had a huge music program in the school district, there I really did a good job of being one of the top young violinist in the city.  I held first chair in the cities youth orchestra a couple years in a row, I was on my way of really being a Master at something (so I was told). 

When we moved, unfortunately there wasn't a orchestra program, so I started playing the French Horn in Band and my violin started taking second in terms of my focus.  At this time in my life is when I started doing all sorts of things, Track, Football, Band, Jazz Band, Violin and Choir.  You could say I was really good at Music, but I wasn't a master... I think doing all those things really helped me become the person I am, however that tendency to do it all stuck with me and frankly it's now become quite annoying and even a hinderance in some cases.  As I have become older I want to be really good at a couple things or at least one.  I want to lead, go the distance, you know what I mean right?  Do it better than others!

At work, I work mostly alone or with one other person who has similiar skill sets, unfortunately because of this I don't get to work with a UX guy, CF guru, Flex master, Flash animator, etc... I have to figure it out myself and get it done.  I also don't get the opportunity to bounce ideas off more than one person, something I really believe is extremely valuable in learning and expanding your knowledge on a technology. I know there are Pros and Con's to this, you could argue there are more Pro's, but a really Big Con that seriously bothers me... is the lack of being a Master.

So I have decided that I want to get more specialized in what I do for a living, I have about 3 choices-

• Flex/AIR
• UX
• Coldfusion

I see a lot of great things coming out of the community from people who are really focused in a skill set and because of that they are producing some awesome work. 

So, back to why I posted this, I am curious what the community thinks about this, do others struggle with this same issue?  How do you deal with it?  Also, what focus do you think is more needed than others (UX, Flex, AIR, CF, LC, Other)?  Let me know!

Reminds me of this statement:

The greatest revolutions come not by the discovery of something that was not known before.
They happen when someone radically changes something that was always there

In this example SearchMe took something like a search engine (already known) and totally redesigned its use, giving users a new experience to a common task such as searching for something on the web.  I like it, cant wait to see more experiences like this across the web. 

Read this for yourself and please feel free to comment your thoughts/opinions.

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/06/14/cocoa-for-windows-flash-killer-sproutcore/
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/06/16/apple-adopting-sproutcore-for-web-applications/

PS: The first link talks about the Flash player being Proprietary... does this guy know about the openflash that was announced? I guess not...

I wanted to start playing with the new LiveCycle DS 2.6 functionality and I wanted to integrate 2.6 with Coldfusion 8. What I found on Adobe labs wasnt really clear enough to me on how to install 2.6 into CF 8.01, maybe it was just me but I like things explained fairly throughly in terms of instructions. I found some good resources after googling last night and decided I would just combine what I found on my blog for others as a reference. So grab a beer, sit back and relax, because its really easy to do if you know "exactly" what to do.

You can download the below instructions here as a PDF file.

Step 16: Unzip the Flex 3 Compiler Module for ColdFusion 8 ZIP file that you downloaded in Step 3 into the ColdFusion wwwroot directory (for standalone Windows in the default location, that is C:/ColdFusion8/wwwroot). Overwrite the existing files (which you have backed up)

Step 17: Copy the new "fds" SWC libraries from the lcds.war file (temp/lcds/WEB-INF/flex/libs) to the ColdFusion WEB-INF/flex/libs directory:

- Copy the temp/lcds/WEB-INF/flex/libs/fds.swc file to the ColdFusion8/wwwroot/WEB-INF/flex/libs directory.
- Copy the temp/lcds/WEB-INF/flex/libs/player/playerfds.swc file to the ColdFusion8/wwwroot/WEB-INF/flex/libs directory.
- Copy the temp/lcds/WEB-INF/flex/locale/en_US/fds_rb.swc file over the ColdFusion8/wwwroot/WEB-INF/flex/locale/en_US/fds_rb.swc file.

Step 18: Unzip the latest Flex 3 SDK in a new folder (create this folder) called 3.0.1.1732 in your Flex 3 SDK install directory. (Mine was: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3 Plug-in\sdks)

Step 19: Open up Flex Builder 3 or Eclipse (if your using the plugin version). If compiling in Flex Builder you should update the SDK at least to revision 1173 that you already downloaded in Step 4. Now go to: Window > Preferences > Flex > Installed Flex SDKs and add the new extracted SDK and name it Flex 3.0.1.1732

Step 20: Restart ColdFusion.

Step 21: Write some code and test it, you can use the Flex Builder 3 Wizards to do something rather quickly. Just make sure you compile the Flex App using the new SDK we installed in Step 19.

If you want to revert back to LC DS 2.5 in CF 8 just open your backup and overwrite the 2.6 files, make sure you delete the three new Flex messaging files we added in Step 12 and to overwrite the cfgatewateyadapter.jar file with your backed up one. (Dont forget to shutdown CF first before you do any of this)

References:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/LiveCycle_Data_Services:Integrating_with_ColdFusion_8
http://www.adobe.com/support/coldfusion/downloads_updates.html
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/livecycle_dataservices2_6.html
http://www.onflexwithcf.org/index.cfm/ColdFusion

http://www.macworld.com/article/133798/2008/06/wwdckeynote.html?lsrc=top_1

Enjoy!

WebManiacs overall was good, I had a couple small suggestions on the food and length of the conference, but overall the sessions that I attended were very informative.  You can listen to the cast for all the details.

I recall that I said I would upload my notes from the conference, unfortunately two things occured.  I procastinated a little bit and didnt get them up before I left for business travel and my notes are on my macbook which is at home. So I will have my notes from the conference uploaded by the weekend (if nothing crazy happens). I will update this post and include the file here, so stay tuned in a couple days.

After 642-845 and 1z0-042, a lot of professionals who don't have the aptitude for 642-552 or 642-436, go for 642-426 instead.

So what does this have to do with Blogs and RSS you might ask?  Well its simple really.  Now since we have been bringing in new blood, that new blood is pushing new ideas, new ways to communicate across the company.  You guessed it internal Blogs, Wikis and Forums oh my! Since the average age group is so high at my company many of the employees simply do not know what a Blog is, much less what RSS is and how it can help them sift through all the information on the blogging web.  This poses a big problem if we are using them internally to share information and communicate.

Now its not their fault, many of the new employees grew up playing with NES, Cell Phones, PCs, SMS texting, the Web, Blogs, Social Networks, etc... the previous generation at my company simply did not.  So it is our job (the younger generation) to help them get up to speed.  I was tasked to help a couple groups get up to speed on what Blogs are and how RSS works.  I originally tried to just tell them... that wasn't a good idea.  The reaction was like looking at a bunch of deer stairing into high beams.. frozen in place.  I decided on a new route instead of trying to explain what a Blog is and the problem with trying to keep up with the information on them I went with the "Pictures are worth a thousand words" approach,  afterall sometimes pictures (or videos in this case) are simply easier for everyone to relate to.  This is when Google really comes in handy, I googled what my question was in front of everyone and on the fly I got a pretty good selection of hits.

I found two great videos that are titled: "Blogs in Plain English" & "RSS in Plain English" both are from the company CommonCraft.   Hopefully they will be of use to if you find yourself in a position similiar to mine.  The group I was talking to after watching these two short videos, understood completely and had all sorts of ideas on what they could blog about and how it could help their department/team/organization.

Laura did a pretty good job with the MangoBlog engine, it really has a lot of potential.  My only fuss is the docs need some love, I learned a lot about the MangoBlog engine by skinning my own.  There is still a lot I don't fully understand, in time hopefully I will. The Mate Docs (Flex Framework by AsFusion) are put together really well, maybe Mango Docs will aspire to them ;)

Oh quick note,  Mark Aplet also skinned a really nice theme.  He has the CSS talent I lack :)  Nice job Mark, you can download his skin here.

Today internet marketing is so much more exciting with all the advertising giants entering the game. This is not about web design courses or simple web site hosting anymore. This is not about picking the domain names only either.

Ben Forta kicked off the event with a couple charts on where CF is now, and where its going.  He emphasized more on LiveCycle integration, Flex Integration and BlazeDS.  There was some confusion as to what exactly the difference is between the LiveCycle DS ES & Blaze DS... Adobe really needs to fix that so it's not so confusing.  He also talked a little bit about the CF Open Process Initiative.  I wont get into the details, but he basically talked about a bug tracker, a improved enhancement request process and a custom advisory board.  Ben Forta also hinted at some future CF 9 improvements one that I thought was being hinted at was AIR integration in CF 9.  He also "hinted" at a CF IDE, basically he said improving the developer experience... so you can read into that how ever you want.  I basically read it to say "CF IDE".  Enough said.  Overall Day 1 for me was pretty good, I attended a couple classes later in the day that I really liked.  One was ColdSpring, I learned more about the AOP capabilities of Coldspring than I knew before the class thanks to Matt Woodward.  I also attended a couple sessions on the new cfdocument and cfpdf capabilities.  I already have a couple use cases for the cfpdf capability when combining multiple pdfs into one.  I hope to have a sample on this blog in a couple days.

Day 2:

Day 2 for me was extremely beneficial.  I really took a lot back from the MXUnit session.  I do test on my CFC methods, but nothing like what these guys do.  I plan on using MXUnit in the very near future.  Another session that I thought was really great was the new Ajax tags in CF8.  After going to that session and than going to a Spry session, I realized (at least from my knowledge) that I dont need to use Spry, CF8 has a lot of functionality and it can be extended.  Spry seems to be more for Dreamweaver users & Designers who want to add Ajax functionality to HTML sites.  Not really sure why Adobe added this capability when they also added some very useable Ajax features in CF8.  If anyone can enlighten me, I am all ears :)  There was a awesome Cryptography session, it was great, but it was right after lunch and there was a lot of information thrown at the audience in a very short amount of time.  The basic run down was try to avoid using cryptography if you can, its not for the faint of heart and can be a pain to get it done right... oh and per the speaker the CF8 Cryto stuff sucks, he recommends that you use the Java classes instead.  I also sat in a session by Matt Woodward on the difference between all of the LiveCycle DS products.  Matt broke down the differences of each one and this helped shed some light on what Blaze DS has and what it doesnt have.  Very helpful.  The last session I took was on Transfer ORM.  The speaker from Fig Leaf was pretty excited, a bit over excited probably due to all the coffee he drank through out the day (LMAO - he had a huge jug full of coffee).  Anyway, I have been wanting to start using Transfer ORM for awhile now, I think after this session I am actually going to move to it on my next project.

Summary:

Overall the first two days of WebManiacs was good Fig Leaf did a excellent job with the facilities, food/snacks, and the sessions. What I took away from it was basically this:
- Learn and use the AOP parts of ColdSpring (when needed)
- Definitely start using MXUnit for my CF development
- I now know the difference between all the LiveCycle DS ES Products (Thanks Matt!)
- Start using Transfer ORM to handle your DB stuff
- Dont waste time learning Spry, just use the CF Ajax Tags for now since it handles so much for you out of the box

I will post all of my notes and links to some presentations on Friday/Saturday once the conference is over.  I have three days left of Flex/AIR sessions and so far they have been awesome!