Did it: I finally won a bike race!

This weekend, I finally reached a goal I've had for a long time:  I won a full-on organized cycling race, despite running into 2.5 trees and having one complete wipe-out.

Back before Model-Glue, I weighed in at 180lbs and was racing for Evolution Cycling in Northern Virginia.  I never won a race, but I came near the podium a few times and usually finished in the top half of the field.  Fast forward six years to November of 2009 at Adobe MAX and I was topping 205lbs, was only riding 1-2 days a week, and my diet was going downhill.  While Dale's M.S. diagnosis a month later wasn't how we wanted to flip a switch, it's shocked us both into getting ourselves healthier.  She's doing great - last week was symptom-free except for a foot tingle Saturday night! - and I'm back to 180lbs.

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11 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 10:33 AM - Categories: Off Topic

Modifying Liferay services - Thanks, ColdSpring!

At work, I've been working on an implementation of Liferay, an open source portlet server that has a focus on content management and collaborative / social applications.  It's a good-sized departure from ColdFusion development, but I'm finding that what we in the OO ColdFusion community have learned over the past 3-4 years makes us perfectly suited to this level of J2EE development. 

On this project, I'm mainly serving as an architect and product designer, but I hit a feature / change I wanted to implement that needed to occur at the service level.  At first, I was scared - I mean, this is the big-bad scary complex world of Java.  However, once I looked at how it was put together, I realized that it's nothing but the same concepts we in the OO ColdFusion world.  Here's all I had to do:

1. Subclass (extend) the service component I needed to modify (SocialActivityLocalServiceImpl, which provides an activity feed)
2. Open a Spring beans file (ext-spring.xml)
3. Redefine the bean tag to point to my custom subclass
4. Restart Tomcat

Now that's JEE the way it should be!  Big thanks to Dave Ross and Chris Scott (and others) for knocking out ColdSpring - as well as improving my CF apps, it's taught me concepts I can definitely take elsewhere.

0 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 9:32 AM - Categories: Joe Drinks Java | OOP

Linux Flex Builder canned - who cares?

I have a feeling that I'm shaking a beehive by saying it, but when I read that Flex Build on Linux was "canned", I have to admit that my reaction was "Who cares?"

Linux represents about 1.05% of desktop OS market share.  If Adobe's crunched the numbers on it and found it an unviable market, why shouldn't they focus on making Flex Builder 4 better for the 99 out of 100 developers who can run it?  Heck, Linux users would probably be better served by getting new features that are runnable under a VM or dual-boot than by a continually-patched Linux distro of FB.

Subjectively, I've worked in some fairly high-end Flex shops around the U.S., and I've yet to run into a Linux workstation that was any more than a VM that a developer ran for personal apps on their corporate OS X box.

15 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 9:08 AM - Categories: Off Topic

Changing a Flex DataGrid item's look / feel based on data state

0 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 8:37 AM - Categories:

Using Swiz's DynamicChannelSet with push / polling / JMS

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Raymond Camden leaves Broadchoice

8 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 8:37 AM - Categories: Off Topic | See Also |

Sean Corfield leaves Broadchoice, joins Railo

1 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 8:33 AM - Categories: Off Topic | See Also |