Just got back from the NFJS Dessert Southwest Software Symposium or NFJS DSSS from now. I attended David Geary’s Introduction to JSF and two presentations by Dave Thomas on Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I had seen a presentation on JSF from a sales-engineer in the past so I had some curiosity about this framework. It is certainly something exciting but I certainly have to give it some more research time and attention.

Both presentations by Dave Thomas on Ruby were great, his style and personality help as well to get the point across. A little interesting note is the fact that not only is Dave presenting Ruby at a Java conference, but the fact that the room is full is even more impressive. Some people left before the RoR presentation but I am sure they walked away interested enough to give Ruby a look in the future. His RoR presentation ran out of time but he made his point and it was loud and clear: RoR will have a place in the IT shop in the not so distant future.

He asked to get together with him to look over his testing approach or any other questions we might have. I took him up on it and we are going to take a look at his approach to test-driven development on Rails. I might also ask him about his thoughts on how to best take an already developed application and migrate it to RoR. I would be really interested in his thoughts in doing so.

Overall it was a good first day, I wish I could’ve attended the intro to AOP with AspectJ presentations but hopefully I can pick up that material from the presentations. Tomorrow (7/30) morning I am planing on checking out the unit testing with Jython from Stuart Halloway and Killer Web UIs from David Geary. The afternoon is still up on the air for now. More updates tomorrow!

Tomorrow starts the Desert Southwest Software Symposium organized by the No Fluff Just Stuff folks. I attended last year’s conference and walked away with a few ideas to improve our development environment.

This year I will be catching a couple presentations on Ruby as well as some about test-driven development. Instead of focusing on our platform, I would like to address our actual development methodology. I will post more details about the presentations that I actually end up attending.

After a long pause in the space program, Shuttle Discovery lifted off today from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The main purpose of this mission, Return to Flight, is to evaluate new procedures and changes made to the shuttle since the Columbia disaster in 2003.

Later in the day, news outlets started talking about the possible source of some debris spotted by a camera, one of many, installed to monitor the orbiter and its external fuel tanks. According to NASA officials, they will identify the source of the debris but do not anticipate any problems for the mission. More visual data will be collected and analyzed to decide whether repairs are needed to the shuttle.

7/29 update: I wanted to keep this entry updated for personal/historical reasons only. It should be noted that after much analysis, a foam fragment indeed came off from the fuel tank but did not strike the orbiter. In addition, over the last couple of days, the crew have identified several small areas where the heat tiles were damaged. However, these are normal in nature and have been part of any shuttle mission in the past. The mission will continue as planned, with some repair work being done on the International Space Station.

Based on analysis so far, it appears Discovery has not sustained any damage that would prevent a safe return to Earth on Aug. 7. Early indications are that Discovery has less damage than Shuttles on previous flights.

note to self: I should really create new category of "historical" events like this one, maybe something to add for a future version

It has been a while since I last posted anything that has to do with the web. One of the main reasons that I started this site was to have a place to experiment and play with the latest stuff which I really have not been doing too much of.

I started working with Flickr and its API to import my photos onto this site’s photo section. I was able to import the most current photo, its comments, other meta data related to the image as well as the thumbnails for the 4 next most recent images. However, I know there is some work that needs to be done with it since I would like to enable some caching functionality and do more with the photo sets that I currently have hosted on Flickr. I will make a point to come back to work on this section of the site.

I am also working on a new application gathering some weather data, starting with monitoring weather information for the city of Scottsdale. The application should scale to other cities but I am starting with just one to test some concepts that I have in mind. I am in the process of collecting data right now but I should be able to start working with the display pieces in the near future. I am planning on integrating some AJAX functionality into this project as a learning experience. It should be a lot of fun although nothing too earth-shattering.

I am also looking into a couple of projects at work which will give me the biggest exposure to multiple technologies. I am going back to an ASP project, while looking into Java Struts and a little Ruby on Rails. I will be looking into RoR because of the hype that it is currently being raised and see how we can leverage its RAD properties for our office projects.

This is not a movie review or anything of the sort but you should really go watch Wedding Crashers, it is worth every single laugh (and there is plenty to go around). I was a bit worried that the movie would be too long for Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn to be funny for the whole thing but they actually were.

The supporting cast was brilliant as well, specially Isla Fisher playing the character of Gloria Clear. I will not give anything away here but she will keep you laughing for days after you watch the movie. If you have not watch it, you are really missing out so stop reading this and make it a point to go watch this movie.