Tomorrow night (Thursday), I’ll be speaking at the C# SIG. Since I’ve been watching so many TED videos, I’ve come to think that NO ONE should expound for 2 hours on any single subject – the quantity is just overwhelming. To that end, I’ll be breaking up my time and doing not 1 but *2* presentations.

Building a Castle: Introduction to Windsor

Getting introduced to Castle Windsor can be a daunting thing, I know since I’ve gone thru it. But under the covers, there is a great power. This talk will introduce the concepts as well as the methods to harness and take full advantage of all that power without getting overwhelmed.

CodeRush Ninja Training

If your not using a productivity tool, you’re ripping off your customers and wasting your time. We will take a look at how CodeRush can help you to be more productive in code and have a great time doing it. With a little practice, you can learn to be a CodeRush ninja too.

Come sign up and I look forward to seeing you there.

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.

One of the things I absolutely love and have shown off to more than a few people, is how quickly my Mac goes in and out of sleep mode. It means that I can open and close with abandon and not really have to worry about it affecting my productivity. It also means that when I realize I’m running late, I can drop the lid and don’t have to twiddle my thumbs very long (sans Solitaire/WebSudoku) while I wait for everything to spin down. I love this – when it works. Occasionally when I attempt to wake my machine, I will get a totally black screen with no login prompt. The machine appears to be awake but the screen isn’t active. Closing the lid does not put it back to sleep so I have to power cycle the thing to get it going again. I know, I know, everyone is going to give me grief about how Mac just works and whatnot but it’s total bollocks. EVERYTHING has issues. Live with it.

Tweak It

Never one to stop fiddling and exploring, I recently ran across this post where a guy was complaining that they’d messed with the sleep behavior between his trusty Powerbook and the new MacBook. He detailed a tweak that made this already great (albeit occasionally flaky) feature even better along with a good explanation of the details of the change. He claims it’s more reliable but I haven’t had it long enough to say one way or the other yet but I can tell you, my MBP sleeps and wakes nearly instantly now. The only thing that this tweak takes away from you is the ability to swap out batteries while the machine is in sleep mode. Since I didn’t even imagine I could do that and I’m not really sure I would do that anyway since I don’t have any spare batteries, I didn’t feel like I was giving anything up. I’m duplicating the tweak here for reference purposes and you “lazy” folks who aren’t going to go read the original post:

From the terminal, you should check your current mode using:

pmset -g | grep hibernatemode

Then set you machine to use mode 0:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

And reboot.
If you’d like to clear out the file where the memory was being written to, you can use this:

sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.

Background

Recently, I’ve decided to work with Ruby a little more and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around a number of new things. I’m working to put together a series of posts that will detail my exploration but I ran into a nasty issue and wanted to get something up to help anyone else who falls into this little pit.

Setup

I have been using Heroku in my explorations and have come to truly dig their service. These guys know what the heck their doing and really make me feel like I do as well. Anyway, since I needed a CMS for the project I was working on, I grabbed Radiant and started playing. It worked quite well out of the box for me and was supported on Heroku (directions here) so I installed several of the extensions that I needed and pushed it up to Heroku.

Uh oh. No worky.

I pulled down the logs from Heroku, I sent emails to everyone I could think of, I Googled, I re-pushed (yes, I know that’s the definition of insanity), I even shook my fist at the bash shell but could not get it to work.

Resolution

Along the way, I came to find a couple of rather important pieces of info. Heroku doesn’t support Git on the server side (like git-wiki). And Git has sub-modules. These two important details, and the fact that I was unaware of the previously, is what lead to me to grab a copy of what was on the production server (the bundle command on Heroku) and dissect it. The extension directories were completely empty. Because of the sub-modules, Git wasn’t pushing them to Heroku and so the extensions weren’t loaded. Removing the sub-modules and then adding the files from the extensions, followed by a re-push and I was back in business.
Hope this help.

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.

This Friday, Improving Enterprises and Microsoft are putting on a 1-day FREE (as in beer) conference to showcase agile methods in a .NET ecosystem. I will be giving my “Refactoring To Patterns” talk on the development track but there will also be two other tracks (Biz/PM related & Requirements/QA related) and number of knowledgeable speakers. I’m really looking forward to hanging out with folks and sharing ideas on how we can better promote and utilize the systems we work with to adopt agile practices and principles.

Regardless of whether you’re new to agile concepts or already moving towards adoption, you will have an informative and good time. If you’re interested, go sign up while there are still spaces available.

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.

If you’ve ever wondered if you could get into speaking at the local user groups but just haven’t been sure where to get started, then this is the group for you. Whether you need help with that bad case of stage fright or you’re just looking for help in getting that deck/code combo just right, we can help.

And you are??

This group is comprised of some really passionate folks with diverse experiences and styles in technical speaking. We hope to create a highly interactive and focused group that will help to grow and hone those skills that you need to be effective and interesting as a speaker. Come join us and see if we can help you find your voice – hey, we’ll even help you find a speaking spot once you’re ready.

Details

We are happy to announce that we are finally ready to have our first meeting (or so we believe). Granted, this is as new to us as it is to anyone so I’m sure that it’s going to be a process but I’m really looking forward to see what comes of it and I know that we’re going to have a good time helping folks. If you’re interested, please go sign up on CodeZone so we can get you on the attendance list as well as letting you know about future events.

Hope to see you there.

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.

Having only thrown myself into the community relatively recently, I was honored (and a bit surprised) to have been given this award. I look forward to the opportunity to continue sharing the things that I’ve learned and spreading the motivation to become a better developer. I want to thank my family for putting up with my extracurricular activities and being supportive of me following my passions. Also, a thank you to Microsoft – I take back like 3 of those things I said about you last week.

Next on my list of awards to achieve, an honorable hair mention from Justice Gray…

I believe that anyone not using a productivity tool with their IDE is wasting time and, quite possibly, ripping off their employer/client. I don’t care if it’s CodeRush, Resharper, CodeSmart, or whatever but you should get a tool, get familiar with it and use it for everything it’s worth. I enjoy using the CodeRush/Refactor Pro! tools. As a matter of fact, I feel like I can’t hardly use Visual Studio without them. The only drawback I’ve found with CodeRush is that discoverability is just not there and with the vast array of capabilities, a lot of folks would rather do without than flounder so I’m hoping that this will help to ease that learning curve.

This “episode” is the first in a series screencasts I’ve been trying to put together for a while and I’m hoping that it will introduce the new user and maybe even show some existing users a few things that they didn’t know. I’m certainly no professional video editor so please excuse the quality while I try to find the right mix but I would appreciate your feedback.
Anyway, we’ll take a look at the structure markup that CodeRush does to help enhance readability and decorate code to make certain aspects visually evident. And we’ll be introduced to the mnemonic templating system and how just a few keystrokes can turn our intent to code.

Randy tagged me with this meme so here goes…

What I was doing ten years ago

I had always believed that I was supposed to become a doctor; an orthopedic surgeon, specifically. But in 1998, I realized that it was not what was in my heart and I had to go a different direction. Unfortunately, at that time, the direction didn’t much matter to me so long as it was away from medical school. I was working at a buddy’s ISP (Internet Service Provider) and slinging drinks at a local bar. It was fun for a time and I am where I am today because of my experiences but I can’t say that I always made the best decisions. I’m just thankful that I had my family and friends around for support and that they were there when I was ready to move my life in a more positive direction.

Five snacks I enjoy

1. Granola
2. Starburst jelly beans
3. Mixed nuts (but not the cheap crap with all those peanuts)
4. Salt & Vinegar Kettle Chips
5. Whatever is closest to my keyboard

Five things on my to-do list today

(This one is a really hard one for me since I have my to-do list split into contexts – I’m a GTD guy, what can I say)

1. Call Lewisville Shoe Repair re: boot resole
2. Call Adam Keys re: lunch next week
3. Hang up all tools over workbench
4. Upload starting codebase to Google Code for presentation
5. Locate host service for CodeRush screencasts

Five favorite recipes

1. Italian Egg Scramble
2. Man-Mac
3. Sausage & Peppers
4. Genius – 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration
5. Thermite – sorry, not handing this one out

Five jobs I have had

1. Bag boy at country club
2. Graphic artist and typesetter at college newspaper
3. Skiptrace
4. Veterinary technician
5. Grocery clerk

Five bad habits

1. Talking to myself a little too loud
2. Snore (like it’s my job)
3. Monitor touching when explaining/reading code
4. Knowing I’m right
5. Reminding people around me of #4

All the places I’ve lived

1. Chicago, IL
2. Louisville, KY
3. San Antonio, TX
4. Medina, OH
5. Hillsborough, NJ
6. Oxford, OH
7. Denton, TX
8. Flower Mound, TX

Five Random Things

1. I sweat like a person twice my weight.
2. I placed at state in 8th grade Science Olympiad.
3. I went by the name “Michael” for a while.
4. I collect antique fountain pens.
5. Nutmeg is toxic if injected intravenously.

Five people I’m tagging

1. Tom Opgenorth
2. Brett Bim
3. Chris Koenig
4. Jason Portnoy
5. Joe Ocampo

On Wednesday, July 9th, I’ll be giving a talk at the North Dallas .NET User Group called “Refactoring to Patterns (Not the Book)”. It’s not going to be some dry, academic talk with and bunch of UML and “Hello World” examples but an example using “real world” code like what you and I work with in our every day lives. The main patterns we’ll focus on for this web application are Model-View-Presenter and Adapter. My intent is to show the things that I’ve discovered in journey towards better, more maintainable code and provide ways to apply that knowledge in a realistic fashion. This is going to be a code intensive talk and, hopefully, a very interactive one.

Here’s the sign up form – I hope to see you there.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the Google Code repository that contains both a start and end copy of the solution so you can see and try the refactoring that was demonstrated.

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.