My buddies over at Less Everything have struck yet again! I seriously dont know where these guys find the time to build these apps and do client work. They must have an attic full of little Rails coding squirrels cranking this stuff out for them for the small price of a few acorns a day.

This time they have released LessFriends. A neat little app that allows you to see the following status of you and your friends on Twitter. It shows all of your friends and tells you if they follow you back or not. Pretty neat. I was amazed at how many people do follow me back when I ran it the first time.

Im still not sure if there is a real benefit to the app other than just using it to help you do a little house cleaning on your friends list but that in itself could prove useful.

Another nicely designed app, go take a look if you use Twitter.

The Jacksonville ColdFusion Users Group (JaxFusion) is starting to get re-organized after some time off. One of the big changes is that the group will expand to not only cover ColdFusion related topics, but also Flex and AIR as well.

Another change will be the meeting location, we are looking for a new location near the Southside somewhere as Downtown was just out of reach for most people in the area after a long day of work. One of the requirements for a meeting location is a projector and preferably a decent internet connection. Since there are quite a few folks in the community now willing to present over Adobe Connect this will ensure some great presentations in the future.

So if you have a suggestion for a location or if you are a Jacksonville business willing to donate some meeting space once a month, please contact David Fekke at david@fekke.com.

The next RubyJax meeting is scheduled for March 20th and will be held at 7406 Fullerton St, Jax, FL, 32256 which is right across the street from the Avenues Mall.

See you there!

With the Jacksonville ColdFusion Group on somewhat of a hiatus (no meeting since August 2007) I decided to head over to the local Ruby on Rails User Group Meeting to see what was the haps in the Jacksonville Ruby community.

First off, let me say that I had no idea there was such an interest in Ruby on Rails right here in Jacksonville. To say the least I was shocked to find out that Obie Fernandez lives here and runs his RoR based consulting business HashRocket from Jacksonville Beach. For those of you not in the know, Obie is to the RoR community what Ben Forta and Ray Camden are to the ColdFusion community.

The meeting had a good turn out, Im not sure of the exact numbers but I would estimate around 20 people showed up. Since they had no formal presentation lined up, they decided to do some pair programming. Basically, taking one or two of the noobs like myself and pairing you up with one of the more experienced guys. For about an hour and 45 minutes I got to sit with an experienced RoR programmer who answered pretty much every stupid question I came up with and even helped me solve several problems in the RoR application Im working on as a learning aide.

Back 7 years or so ago when I was running the Jacksonville ColdFusion Group (Allaire days), we always struggled to get presenters so I ended up doing about 90% of the presentations. I sure wish I would have thought of pair programming back then. Its a great way to get some of the newer folks some personalized attention to help them out.

I suspect that getting presenters nowadays isn't quite as difficult with the introduction of Adobe Connect, but, if for some reason you find your next meeting without a speaker, consider pair programming, I bet you get a great turn-out!

A few weeks ago I posted about a mixup with my Amazon wishlist shipping address. Not long after posting that, Mike Potter of Adobe responded saying that he was the one that sent me the copy of the Flex book and that he would get it taken care of for me. Well, I wanted to publicly thank Mike for getting that straightened out for me!

Just having Adobe send me the copy of the Flex 2: Training from the Source book would have been great. However, Mike not only sent a Flex book, but the Essential ActionScript 3 book from Oreilly and a copy of the Total Training Flex 2 DVD!

All of this stuff is really good material! I am tearing through it right now and loving it! So thanks again Mike, hopefully we can catch up at a conference or something and I can buy you a beer!

Also, thanks to those at Adobe who take the time to support the developer community! Makes me proud to be a ColdFusion programmer!

First let me start off by saying that this is purely a rant post. Ranting is not something I usually do on my blog but I feel that this is warranted.

I just took the time to fill out the Adobe ColdFusion surveys that are listed on blogs all over the place today, I got there from here.

Now I may be taking this a bit personally but in the Platform and Vendor Support survey, there is a question about what framework you use. Now, why would you not list all of the major frameworks there? Yes thats right, Im talking about ColdBox. Instead you have an entry for a framework called cfango? What the hell is that? I did a google for cfango and found an actual project page on riaforge for the project but absolutely no info. No wiki, no blog entries, no code.

This really makes me question how in-tune with the community the people who put these surveys together really are. Im not just upset that ColdBox wasnt in the list and this vaporware framework was, I would be just as upset if FuseBox or ModelGlue or Mach-II wasnt listed. Mainly because it just seems like a half-assed question to me if you are going to provide answers that dont even exist.

Normally Im an Adobe fan boy, this just really tweaked me when I saw it. Surely whoever put those surveys together could have done a better job than that!

I logged on to Amazon today to search for a few Flex 3 and AIR books since Im really focusing on working with the two technologies more this year. So I found a few books and added them to my wishlist and ordered 2 others. As I was managing my wishlist, I noticed that my shipping address for my wishlist was different than the shipping address on my account.

I moved back in June 2007 from the Orlando area back to Jacksonville and I spent several hours one day updating all of my addresses on my online accounts including Amazon. But what I didnt realize is that your wishlist shipping address is not updated when you update your accounts shipping address.

So I immediately updated my whishlist address and even though I have never received anything on my wishlist from anyone other than close friends and family, I figured I would just check to be sure no one had sent anything.

As I changed the pull-down to show purchased items, wouldnt you know it, someone had sent me something. So I called Amazon to see if I could find out who purchased the item and how it was shipped so maybe I could track it down. Of course since I didnt place the order, they wouldnt give me any information about it other than that the order was placed on December 12th, 2007.

The book that was purchased was Adobe Flex 2: Training from the Source. Since I have read several other bloggers receiving this book from the Flex Team at Adobe, Im assuming thats who sent it.

So guys, if you are reading, I sincerely appreciate the recognition and effort you put forth! My apologies for not paying better attention to my wishlist stuff!

Amazon did state that if the package was returned to them as undeliverable, that you would be receiving a credit for the purchase.

Brian Legros has been sending the following info out about the Flex 3 Pre-Release Tour:

" The Adobe Developers of Greater Orlando (Adogo) user group has been selected as a stop on Adobe's Flex 3 Pre-release Tour. We're fortunate enough to have Ben Forta, Adobe's Senior Technical Evangelist, speaking to the group for this leg of the tour. The meeting will be held on January 21st, 2008 @ 7:00 PM in the Oleander Room at Westgate Lakes Resort and Spa (located at 10000 Turkey Lake Road, Orlando , FL 32819, parking at The Smokehouse). We'll be giving away a copy of Flex 3 and CS3 Web Premium, a pass to CFUnited 2008, as well as lots of branded schwag from Adobe and CFUnited. Food and drink will be provided to all in attendance while it lasts. Registration for this event is available at http://adogo200801.eventbrite.com/. Additionally, more information can also be found on our website at http://adogo.us.

Since this will be the only stop on the tour in the state, we would like to extend an invitation to all of the Adobe User Groups in Florida to join us for our meeting. We are attempting to promote this event as much as possible, but our channels outside of the Orlando area are somewhat limited. If anyone is open to helping, we are definitely grateful for any cross promotions you and your groups can provide for this event. "

Im seriously thinking about driving down for that! Im in Jacksonville which is about a 3 hour drive from Orlando so its not too bad. Anyone from Jacksonville interested in going? Maybe we could carpool and split the travel costs. I dont mind driving. I have a new 07 Nissan Titan Crew Cab 4-door truck that seats 5 adults easily so I have room for 4 people if they would like to go. I even have DVD players in the headrests for backseat entertainment during the trip.

If your interested in going, post a comment or shoot me an email and we can arrange the trip.

russ at angry-fly dot com

Thanks to the Teratech crew, Im going to be at CFUnited this year! Im super excited. Although early on in my ColdFusion career I used to make sure I was at the conferences, I havent been to one in years. The last conferences I attended were the very last Allaire developers conference and the first CFun that was held in Orlando, FL. Many many moons ago!

Im excited to finally go meet some of the guys that I have been talking too over the last few years and sit in on some of the topics that I have been really wanting to get into like the Flex stuff.

So if you are going, I will see you there!!!