I didn't realize it until I arrived, but the Milwaukee show last weekend was the 100th NFJS show. I'm honored to be invovled with this group of developers and speakers. I just wanted to take a moment and say "Thanks" to Jay Zimmerman for continuing to hit the road and keep the shows going. And also to everyone who's attended. There would be no...

How do you keep yourself sharp, personally and professionally? Especially now that I work for myself, I want to push myself to make sure I keep learning new things. A tutorial a day? Or a week? No less than that. Try to pick out something each week that you don't know how to do. If it's something you need to know, all the better. For me that...

Are you a fan of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and in the RTP area? If so, come out and join us on our first meeting. Thursday, March 22nd we'll get together at Frankie's (near Briar Creek) and have a combination kick-off meeting and also a shared event with the agile-carolinas group in Charlotte. Dr. Laurie Williams will be...

Starting this weekend in balmy Milwaukee, the No Fluff Just Stuff tour kicks off and I'm doing a lot more shows this year. So far I'm scheduled for Boston, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Portland, Reston, and Denver. And that's just the next two months! :) I'm also headed to Rails Conf this year and I might be speaking at OSCon on extending Ruby and...

Have you seen the "Five Things You Don't Know About Me" tags going by? David Starr tagged me and I'm finally getting around to posting my five things. I'll bet you didn't know I once removed asbestos... asbestos removal paid for the first half of my college education. When you see all those blogs trying to run up their Google Adsense revenue by...

Dave Thomas was going back through his notes about the meeting in which the Agile Manifesto was crafted and found some real gems. It reminded me of a topic I've been meaning to blog about for some time. The next time an acolyte of some methodology or another tries to force you into their favorite practice, "Because It's Agile!", ask them to...

I'll be speaking (locally for a change!) tonight at the RTP Java User's Group. The topic is Agile Testing Strategies... it's the same talk I gave at the Charlotte JUG in January and in Denver last fall. In development, just like in testing, we're often given work to do but rarely given a strategy to reach those goals. Test automation is a topic...

Once your Rails application starts to get serious, you start measuring it's performance. And you immediately realize that Rexml is slow. Real slow. It's still fast enough for most applications, but when you start thinking on the enterprise level, you don't use Rexml... you look for alternatives. And when you start searching and asking people,...

This took me several days to dig out, so I thought I'd blog it and maybe save someone else the research time we lost. FireFox truncates your HTML to 4,906 characters when you're creating HTML elements (createElement). So when you're developing, it looks like you're seeing random HTML weirdness. By the time you've got 4k of data, it's pretty...

If you haven't made it to a RailsEdge yet, then you've missed an incredible event. The instructors are simply an all-star lineup. Where else do you get to learn Rake from Jim Weirich, the author? Rails tips from Dave Thomas? AJAX from Justin and Stu? There were experts on every facet of Ruby and Rails. The audience was also a great crowd...

One of my new consulting clients has redefined Rails performance for me. ChaCha is a very cool, human-powered search engine. If you don't like your results, you ask a Guide to help you search. Free of charge (it's ad supported), they'll walk you through search results until you find what you need. This is a great feature for your parents and...

A few weeks ago I had Yet Another Hardware issue with a machine. My home lan server is a little old, but still fine for home use. It's a dual Opteron with two gigs of memory... overkill for a home server, but it's paid for. :) However, the power supply went out again... The box is three years old and I've replaced a few power supplies, the...

I'll be speaking tonight at the Charlotte Java User's Group. The talk will be one of my No Fluff talks called Agile Software Testing Strategies. It's not remotely a Java only topic, so if you're interested, please come out. Next month Jason Rudolph will be speaking on Getting Started with Grails, which should be great talk as well. I'd intended...

This year has involved a lot of change for me and I keep getting email from friends asking how it's all gone. In true geek fashion, I decided to write a blog entry with all the relevant information. I'll still answer everyone's email, but I thought this would be a bit more efficient. The biggest news of the year was leaving SAS and working...

I was at a client meeting this weekend and after everyone arrived and set up, we realized the facility had no WiFi. Of course, they had advertised WiFi, but they didn't have coverage in the room we were using. Then I remembered that my Mac Book Pro could share an internet connection, although I'd never used the feature. I plugged in my EDVO...