Doughnut Token

The development team I am currently on has the common practice of using an integration token like many agile teams. Instead of using a stuffed animal like some teams to communicate that you are integrating or checking in code, we use the integration token built into the open source XP project management tool XPlanner. We started using this when we had an offshore component. We have continued using an on-line token because some of the developers do their best work in the evenings from home, and we still want to prevent each other from clobbering check-ins.

This week we experienced a new challenge. Two team members brought donuts in on the same day. There were so many donuts we could not finish them all in one day. So to prevent this tragedy from happening in the future, we started a new practice based on our agile experience. We implemented the first ever donut token. Now we should be able to spread out our donut enjoyment. Unfortunately, there are no known open source donut tokens available. If anybody is inclined to create one, make sure it includes a mobile component so the token can be checked from a Krispy Kreme parking lot.

Agile Web Development with Groovy and Grails at ITX Forum

I will be presenting "Agile Web Development with Groovy and Grails for the Java Platform" at the ITX Forum sponsored by Compuware on Tuesday May 27, 2008 from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm at the Compuware Columbus Branch located 8351 North High Street Suite 200, Columbus Ohio 43235. This is a free event. If you are interested in attending, please RSVP to sara.christian@compuware.com by Friday May 23, 2008.

Posted my Agile Development with Groovy and Grails presentation

I have given a presentation I call Agile Development with Groovy and Grails at CodeMash, the Columbus Ruby Brigade, and other places around Columbus, Ohio. Unfortunately most of the presentation shows the power of Groovy and Grails in demo but if you are interested you can download it at http://www.juddsolutions.com/downloads/AgileDevelopmentwithGroovyandGrails.pdf.

In addition, I offer to freely give this presentation to any companies or organizations interested in Groovy and Grails in the central Ohio area.

Announcing Polyglot Programming interview with Neal Ford

Recently, I had a chance to sit down with one of my favorite people, Neal Ford Meme Wrangler for ThoughtWorks, and ask him about about the term he coined, Polyglot Programming. In the interview, Neal talks about the history of the term and its recent interest. Neal also provides great insite into the Java platform and the languages that run on it including Java, Groovy, Ruby, Scala, Python and Haskle.

You can find the interview at the COJUG website.

Mounting HP Photosmart All-In-One printer SD cards on Mac OS X

I have an HP Photosmart 2575 All-In-One printer with flash, SD card, USB drive, etc reader. I have been frustrated since I started trying to use my card reader on my printer with my Mac. There does not seem to be an easy way to mount one of the cards with the HP provided software like I expected there to be. The only way I could get a card to mount so I could import my pictures into iPhoto was to run HP Photosmart Studio Software and start importing the photos from it. But the problem is it started importing my pictures to my Pictures folder as well as iPhoto and I had to remember to delete the duplicate photos from the Pictures folder.

Well after a year, I have solved my frustration. I figured out that HP was just using sharing to access the printer and the card became a drive on that share. Below is how I now mount my card without running the HP software.

Mounting SD Cards on HP Photosmart All-In-One Printers

1. Put card in appropriate slot on printer.
2. From Finder choose Go > Connect to Server.
3. Enter smb:// where ip address is the ip address of your printer.
4. Press Connect.
5. When prompted for user name and password select Guest and press Connect.

At this point, your printer should be added as a share and if you are lucky iPhoto will auto start.

Firefox 3 beta 5 Rocks

I know I have only been playing with it for two days but I am really impressed with Firefox 3 beta 5. I especially love the auto complete feature which not only shows you recent sites that match what you have typed so far, but it also shows the favicon and the title of the page.

Grails Integrated Framework Documentation

One of the things I really like about Grails is that it does not suffer from "Not Invented Here" syndrome. Instead or reinventing the wheel, it integrates with best of breed proven open source frameworks. It then goes on to make the integration seamless hiding much of the complexities of those frameworks. But sometimes you need to access those frameworks more explicitly and therefor you must learn there apis, configurations and other details. So, below is a compiled list of the documentation for the frameworks Grails integrates.

Groovy - User Guide - API & GDK
Spring Framework - User Guide - API
Hibernate - User Guild - API
SiteMesh - User Guide - API
Jetty - User Guide - API
HSQLDB - User Guide - API
JUnit - User Guide - API
Ant - User Guide
script.aculo.us - User Guide - API
Prototype - User Guide - API
OpenRico - Demos

New g-wizMOBILE CTO

I am excited to announce that in addition to my responsibilities at Judd Solutions, I have excepted the position as the g-wizMOBILE CTO. g-wizMOBILE is a service and product company targeting the mobile platforms of J2ME, iPhone, Android and WAP. Mobile is such an exciting and emerging market. I look forward applying my years of J2ME and enterprise Java experience to create exciting new products and help other companies trying to develop and deploy their own mobile applications.