Atlantis, Discovery and Endeavor are Looking For a Good Home

Got a lobby (a big one) that needs a unique display? Got $42 million? Then you could get yourself a gently used and well maintained orbiter in a couple of years.

Want a retired space shuttle? They're up for grabs - Yahoo! News

Yeah, you know that you want one.

Tiny Resource Meter

I'm always on the lookout for lightweight tools, and this one (via Lifehacker) fits the bill nicely. It does what it is supposed to, giving me details on system performance, and does it while using limited resources. It's a portable app, running from an .exe and requires no libraries, packages, etc. It just works.

PESoft TinyResMeter

If you need a tool like this, check it out.

Venice under water

Venice under water - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Theater or Reality? Pakistan Practices Shooting Drones

Since August, the U.S. Military has been using drones to hit Taliban and al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan. While this has been officially condemned by the Pakistani government, there has been nothing more than words on the issue. Recently, the Pakistani military conducted exercises in targeting and shooting down drones.

Pakistan's Army Practices Drone Shoot-Downs | Danger Room from Wired.com

It's an interesting read, and the region remains worth everyone's attention.

Minority Report Interface

I use three monitors at the office. A 30in. Dell LCD as my primary, a Planar 19in LCD as secondary display, and my laptop (controlled by Synergy). I can code, see output, track email and IM, refer to docs, all without minimizing windows. It's crazy how dependent I've gotten on all the real estate when trying to get coding done.

All that, however, is dwarfed by this new interface, called g-speak, which will look very familiar to those who have seen the movie Minority Report. This interface is simply mind blowing, and I want my office converted by Monday. We can do that, right?



While this doesn't strike me as the best way to, say, write email, it does lend itself to data manipulation and review. And imagine having this in a Fusion Center of EOC for managing assets, reviewing imagery, etc. Very cool.

For more info, surf on over to the company's home page. http://oblong.com

SPIN Registry In the News

My latest project, the Special Needs INformation (SPIN) Registry, is being rolled out to our Beta test partners. As part of this process in Dothan, Alabama, we held a media event this week and this article came out of the interviews. Hey, AP, where are ya?

Houston County, FSU collaborate to track special needs residents | Dothan Eagle

Local TV station WTVY was also on hand and broadcast a nice piece. Here is a link to the broadcast.

This project is yet another opportunity where I get to write cool software that fills a pressing need. I do love my job.

For our official blurb, visit http://spinreg.org.

Performance Hits with CFQueryParam

Good article on some nuances with cfqueryparam. We all know that proper use of this tag can help you defend against SQL injection attacks, but I wasn't aware of the potential performance implications.

Coldfusion Muse: Can Performance Suffer With Cfqueryparam?

Need to look as making sure that my queries don't suffer because of static variables.

New ColdFusion IDE Announced

Adobe has announced they are working on a new official IDE for ColdFusion development. As a developer who isn't 100% happy with either CFEclispse or Dreamweaver (CS3) I'm thrilled to hear that a new supported option is coming.

Code named 'Bolt', the new product is based on Eclipse, and has a nice list of features. Check out the link below.

Bolt - Adobe Labs

Can't wait to give it a try.

Scrum Development

I am in the middle of developing my first application using a formal Agile development process, known as Scrum. Please note that I said 'formal'; all of my development experience has been 'agile', but typically closer to 'chaos'. Needs would change, scope would creep (or gallop, at times), and developers would find themselves caught between management and reality.

Chaos development is not all bad. I'm probably in the minority there, but I actually enjoy moving from project to project, constantly changing focus. Well, within reason. It's very very hard for a programmer to write good code when changing direction on an hourly basis. That's just not feasible.

In our current project, an application to assist emergency managers with special needs planning and evacuation, we are up against tight budget and time constraints. Since we are trying to fit this project development into a schedule that already contains other priorities, a formalized process that lets us accuratly track progress and time spent, while minimizing overhead and wasted time was a must.

Scrum, which can be explained better by others, is a process that we are adapting for our own use. Our Center has a very small IT Staff (we are not an IT shop) so it was easy to get buy in from the people that would be participating in the Scrum process. The thing about this that appealed to me is that while formal, it's still *agile*. If you get a new requirement, you can evaluate it, put it in the product backlog and deal with it later.

The iterative approach really appealed to me as well. The process is broken in to 'sprints' where a set amount of work is scheduled, then completed during the sprint. The idea is that at the end of the sprint, you have working software. There are a lot of other details about Scrum, but that's the highlights.

The point of post is how this has worked for us (so far) in developing a ColdFusion web application.

The first lesson is simple... it's not a scrum if you don't hold the meetings. One of the core principles of Scrum is the daily Scrum Meeting, help at the same time and same location every workday. We were lax on that during our first sprint (mostly because I dislike meetings) and I think we suffered for it. We will be doing better with that in the next sprints.

Second, this type of development process lends itself to me development style very well. I've evolved over the past ten years of writing ColdFusion from a script writer to a coder who prefers to work in objects and views. I spent some time writing C# apps in .NET and that experince made me a better CF programmer, by far. This process of working on defined chunks of code in iterative pieces meshes well with the agile/Scrum approach.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the way this method has let us manage this development project. As we approach beta and release, I'll post more.

Onion Break