Coders for Christ

Can Your ChMS Do This?

nairdo — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:13:00 GMT

WARNING: This is probably going to be my yearly rant blog posting for 2012. Feel free to just walk away.

Ok, I'm pretty mad right now. I don't want to write this blog post, but I just can't believe what's going on and what I'm being told to do. This should not be happening and I want to do all that I can to make sure this sort of thing does not happen again. I'm reminded of the Holy Discontent talk at 2005 Leadership Summit that started me on the path I'm now on.

Let's back up a few months. We were told we had to upgrade from our mostly stable Arena 2010.1.x to 2011.1.500 because the background check service provider that we use with Arena was changing on 3/1. Up against the wall, we reluctantly upgraded. A month later (3/29) I got an email from Arena saying a known bug (in their new code; the code that was supposed to be the fix for the "problem") would be fixed in an upcoming 2011.2.400. Herein starts the real topic of this post. Why was I being told a bug fix would be put into a new release of the product and not a .600 patch fix? Semver (Semantic Versioning) is all but the standard way of doing things now, and even if you don't version using the X.Y.Z form, every software vendor knows you issue patches to fix bugs. You don't ask your customers to upgrade to a newer version (which in almost certainty) has it's own set of bugs and changes to deal with. Me and others complained, and today I was told the vendor is now going to create a .600 patch -- it should be ready in another month or so (around the end of May?).

What? Two+ months to issue a patch? Are you kidding me? What is this patchy philosophy?

A patch from a paid vendor need not take this long to issue. I understand QA testing for a full release takes time, but a full QA/test cycle is not needed for a patch because you should be changing only one piece of code and testing that one piece of code.

In the meantime, several times a week (we've had 10 failures out of approximately 30 requests in the past month) I was asked by the vendor to have our ministry assistant using the following steps to work around the problem:

Steps for identifying and retrieving outstanding background checks containing Alerts

1) Run the agent configuration utility on the Arena webserver and click on the background check agent. Go to the notifications tab and identify the email address that alerts are set to go to.

2) Access the noted account and look for an alert email containing the information shown below.
<IMAGE REMOVED>

3) If such an email is found, they will need to contact Melissa ****** at ABC @ 800-***-**** ext. *** or ***@serviceprovidervendor.com. Request that she email them the Name and URL of all individuals with an Alert on their record. They should receive a url for each person that looks something like: https://blahblahblah/foo/bar?ReportID=**********.

4) Once they receive the info from ABC, they would then do the following (access to Arena and SQL required):

1. In Arena, go to the affected background check and click on it. In the url it will provide you with the check id, take note as that’s the id in the arena database. Repeat for each check in the list that ABC provided.

2. Go to SQL and run:

select background_check_id,status,result,results_link from you_have_got_to_be_kidding_me where background_check_id = x (where x is the id number of the check). Only the id and status should have a value, result and result link should be blank.

3. Run:

update foo_bar_blah_check set status = 4, result = 'Complete - Record',results_link = 'URL that ABC provided'

where background_check_id = x

5) After they have completed step 4, they can either manually stop and restart their agents to pull the background checks now, or they can wait for the agent to cycle and pull down the background checks.

6) To determine if the background check record has been successfully retrieved, run:

select background_check_id,status,result,results_link, results_blob_id from more_fun_with_sql_tables where background_check_id = x

The check has been successfully retrieved if there is a value in the results_blob_id field, note the value and proceed to step 7.

7) To confirm the existence of the background check document, run:

select created_by,modified_by,file_ext,mime_type,original_file_name from big_blobby_table where blob_id = x (x being the value noted in step 6)

And to complete the process, updating the document so that it can be viewed, run:

Update that_big_blobby_table_again Set file_ext = 'pdf', Original_file_name = 'BackgroundCheckReport.pdf' Where file_ext like 'cfm?reportid=%'.

* I've changed certain tables/URLs/names for obvious security reasons and to protect the mostly innocent.

If I had the source code, I would probably just fix this myself instead of writing this stupid blog post. I realize I'm setting the Rock ChMS initiative which I've joined to meet these same expectations -- even though it's is a free and open source product. I just don't think it's reasonable to have to run broken in a broken state for two months while a patch is being assembled.

CrowdSync - All Your Phones Are Belong To Us

nairdo — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 16:22:00 GMT

An Idea

A few months ago Kim Vehon, from our Worship team came, into our office to share a video showing a bunch of phones hanging from wires flashing on and off. It's pretty cool. She wondered if we could do something like that during our Christmas services at Central. Building a "fat-app" to control a bunch of phones wired together did not seem like a challenge nor interesting enough to be worth pursuing.

A Better Idea

But then we started thinking. What if we tried to control the congregation's phones and what if we used only their existing 3G network connection? And, since hardly anyone would want to install an app from the market/store, what if it only used their phone's web browser? We also thought it should be built in such a way as to reduce the dependency on the network -- in other words the phone should get what it needs from the server and then be able to loose network connection without impact to the performance. Game on. I agree with Jason (tweet), this might be one of the funnest things I've worked on in a long time. Jason and I call our software CrowdSync...

Ultimately we also needed to generate a lights time coded "track" from a Christmas song (midi file) with each note being assigned to 1-4 colors. A person's phone would receive the track, be randomly assigned one of the four colors, and start playing the track in sync with the band. Sounded simple enough. Thankfully I found the C# MIDI Toolkit code from Leslie Sanford that reads midi files (thank you Leslie!) which I was able to modify in order to extract and generate our time coded light track as JSON data which looks roughly like this:

{ 
    startTime: 123578916,
    endTime: 12345667,
    ticks: [
                { notes: ["a"], time: 27, duration: 900 },
                { notes: ["b"], time: 982, duration: 900 },
                { notes: ["c"], time: 1940, duration: 900 },
                { notes: ["d"], time: 2908, duration: 900 },
                ...
           ]
}

The Time Problem

Pretty quickly we eliminated web sockets and other client-server signaling technology for a variety of reasons including lack of consistent device support, chattiness, lag, and timing control. We wanted to constrain ourselves in order to force us to think differently about certain problems -- such as the "how do we get all of these devices/clients to start at exactly the same time?" problem.

Initially we were thinking we could rely on the time from the phone's operating system. You might think two 3G Verizon phones would have the same time, right? Wrong. Very wrong. We saw phones that were off anywhere from several seconds to a few minutes. (Who knows how or where each phone is getting its time from? It doesn't appear they're using a common Network Time Protocol (NTP) server.)

After some medium scale client tests and experimentation, we came up with the following approach: Each client asks our server for the current time, calculates the delta (from it's local time), and repeats this about 20 times over the course of about 20 seconds. The error introduced because of network latency is reduced to a minimum because we use only the 'smallest' delta from our samples.

Once we've got the correct delta we calculate and shift the entire track's note times to represent the exact localized time each particular note should play (light up) on that device. Then we basically wait until the note's time occurs and set some CSS to play that particular note's light.

Other Stuff

Since not all browsers can handle HTML5, we had to keep things simple and used basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript (CoffeeScript). Other problems worth mentioning are: cell phone auto dimming, screen locking, and mysterious time lost as a result of certain mobile phone browser interruptions - such as screen lock and wake up. (On my Android phone, a screen lock and re-open would cause a simple JavaScript clock to become out of sync with correct time. It smells like a timing bug with the OS - but what do I know.)

Forward to November when it was decided that our system should also power the worship center's IMAG side screens with something cool, show an event count down timer, and the drive the band's click track. That ended up being a real blessing because we got to work on some really fun stuff. After more experimentation for the "something cool" part, and more ramping-it-up ™ with statements like "what if we could ...", we ended up programmatically building a Christmas Tree as colored circles on the HTML5 canvas to match our church's Luminous graphic.

We somewhat randomly plot circles in the shape of a Christmas tree using a little Math.sin() trick to get the curve we wanted. (Remember that stuff you learned in high school -- it really does come in handy!) The same JSON encoded light track data would be used to control the four sets of lights on the tree. We kept the same code base and ended up with some configuration settings to control whether the simple HTML/CSS (cell phones) or HTML5 canvas w/tree was being used (side screens).

Ultimately, the midi file click track turned into a full blown amazing score and arrangement of Carol of the Bells by Adrian Darsee in mp3 format. There was more fun getting the audio track to play which perhaps Jason will cover in his blog.

We also created a small admin panel as an Arena module so that the A/V tech guys at each campus could store the event start time for that service once they knew exactly when they wanted it to start.

Time Shifting Gotchas

Late in the game we discovered something unfortunate when we put it all together with all the other equipment (QLab, the worship center's A/V systems and side screens, a full 30 minute pre-service countdown, etc.). Not all seconds are created equal. I should have realized this, but somehow it failed to register. Due to NTP being used on the various systems, the QLab mac, the mac running Chrome for the IMAG, and our server would slowly drift by a 1 to .5 seconds during the 40 minute countdown. That's a big problem if you're trying to achieve millisecond synchronization. We turned off NTP as a work-around but realize it's something we want to address in future versions of CrowdSync. We're also going to implement all the server side stuff in Node.js.

Conclusion

The goal was for each person to "be the light" and "let your light shine" as a literal and symbolic expression during the worship to our King. Overall it was a success for the whole opening worship experience but when the congregation erupted into loud applause at the end I knew they enjoyed the experience too. I hope we have some of it captured on video.

We'll post the latest alpha CrowdSync source up on Github shortly.

5th Generation Arena ChMS Website

nairdo — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:57:00 GMT

Today marks the launch of our 5th Arena ChMS powered website. This time around it was more of a cosmetic face-lift, and as far as the switch-over was concerned, we used all the tricks we learned last time to make the change very smooth (more on that below). The bulk of the switch took 8 seconds (scripted), about 1 hour of minor manual tweaks by Jason Offutt and I, followed by roughly 4 hours of additional fine tuning by Jason Ake.

A few lessons were learned during the 4th generation site (aka Hasselhoff) which were largely based on feedback we received from the congregation and staff. Gone is the campus selection integration that was initially prevalent after the initial launch in the summer 2010. Now the only place a person needs to think about which campus they care about is when they're exploring the calendar, giving online (since one of our campuses has a different giving system - ugh), and when they simply want information about our different campuses. It mostly turns out that people don't like campus separation/segregation.

Although the new site is based on the "Elegance" theme, props go to Jason Ake (our new web designer) and our graphic artists, Jeremy Wagner and Mitch Eiler, for their many cool elements and tweaks. Most of the cool code changes including the newly tweaked event calendar, our Facebook login integration, and Vimeo video wall come from Jason Offutt, who's continually pushing me to learn the latest techniques and libraries. To that end, this time around we used a little Mustache.js, Backbone.js, and as we discussed at RefreshCache 2011, we wrote some of our JavaScript in CoffeeScript. Our promotion slider (seen here) is still based on our Promotions via XSLT module but this time around our XSLT spits-out Awkward-Showcase jQuery library goodness to handle the transitions and widgety-thumbnaily UI. The recent blog entries that are pulled into the the home page is using a slightly customized (I added caching) version of Arena's standard XML File Transformation module (which I just posted to the shared repo here). Lastly, we also used the Promotion via XSLT module on a standalone page to "feed" our Arena based promotions into our "Welcome" Facebook page as seen here:

Overall these changes took our code team between 2-4 weeks of execution time while all the rest of the project work took Jason Ake between 2-3 months of planning and execution.

Now, about the planning, staging and cut-over...

First of all we decided to ease our pain by creating four new Arena templates which would roughly match our previous four (home page, child page, single column page, and wide page). In addition to that, whenever possible, we used identical "area" (placeholder) names inside the templates. These two steps alone simplify the cut-over tremendously since our cutover SQL script now basically only has to change (for example) pages that use template 65 and update them to use template 77, etc. I highly recommend you use this same technique when upgrading/updating your website from generation to generation.

Once the templates were created/beta we also immediately added them to our production Arena install so that we could get their final templateID (for use later when writing the cut-over script). At that point in the process it's also a good idea to add any new pages that you're going to want in the new website and just set the "Display in Nav" to false. On the day of the cut-over your script can surgically flip that bit to make it show up. At about t-minus 2 weeks we copied our production Arena database and Arena website folders into a new test instance for testing the cut-over scripts. We added an alias to our internal DNS and set up IIS to serve the test site up as http://testweb/ for general staff User Acceptance Testing.

Now that this website is behind us, next up will be creating a personal, personalized space on the site and the modules needed for people to access all of "their" stuff (profile, prayer requests, small groups, contribution statements, event registrations, customized news/promotions, etc.).

Rock ChMS, An Open Source Church Management System and CMS Framework

nairdo — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 20:11:00 GMT

I've joined forces with an initially small team of developers and artists to form the Spark Development Network (www.sparkdevelopmentnetwork.org) and we are creating a new, open source Church Management System (ChMS) called Rock ChMS. You can read the press release if you wish.

This may come as no surprise to some of you after hearing me last year at RefreshCache (www.refreshcache.com) and previous rants on why open source is the best option. Last week I reviewed my "State of the Union" presentation from last October. Reading that now, you might think that Rock ChMS was already underway; however our group had not even had a single discussion about anything remotely related. Over the years several groups tried to apply pressure to our vendors to release open source versions of their product and I think we waited as long as we could, but in the spirit of RefreshCache, decided to just make it happen on our own.

Although everyone at Spark Development Network will have slightly different reasons, basically we wanted to collaborate on a framework that was free for the Christian Church and para-church community, that's beautiful, easy and simple to use, easy to administrate, open source and easy to develop against for the church developer community. For those who want to eventually run their church on Rock ChMS, should they ever encounter a mission critical bug, their developer can jump in and fix it without having to wait for an official patch.

Rock ChMS is only a pre-alpha seed at the moment, but the source is now open and publicly available on Github: https://github.com/SparkDevNetwork/Rock-ChMS. This was done so that others could collaborate and get involved from the earliest days of the project. Rock ChMS is going to be a full featured Church Management System built on top of a custom CMS application framework, so you may find it's similar to other CMS frameworks you've used in the past. It's an ASP.NET 4.0 Entity Framework application written in C#, so if you’re serious about wanting to help The Church, then git on over to GitHub and fork the repo. When you're ready, submit a pull request and we'll take a look at your work. If you're interested in knowing more or want to get involved in other ways, sign up on our Stay in Touch page.

Grouping Arena Module Settings

nairdo — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 23:26:00 GMT

Something I've been meaning to have added to the Arena Custom Module Developer (ACMD) guide is this little known feature that was introduced at some point in the past few years. It's a way to group your custom module's settings as seen here:

The effect is subtle, but when you have 20 or so settings like we have in our check-in module it starts to become really necessary (of course we haven't yet added groupings, but we will in the next release).

To create these groupings (aka categories) all you need to do is include the System.ComponentModel in your using section:

using System.ComponentModel;

... and then define a Category attribute with a grouping name argument for each module setting as seen in this example:

// Styling Group
[TextSetting( "Search Button Image Path", "Relative path ...", false ), Category( "Styling" )]
public string SearchImagePathSetting { get { return Setting( "SearchImagePath", "", false ); } }

[TextSetting( "Search Button CSS Class", "CSS classname...", false ), Category( "Styling" )]
public string SearchButtonCSSClassSetting { get { return Setting( "SearchButtonCSSClass", "", false ); } }

[TextSetting( "TextBox CSS Class", "CSS classname ...", false ), Category( "Styling" )]
public string TextBoxCSSClassSetting { get { return Setting( "TextBoxCSSClass", "", false ); } }

// No group defined -- these go into a "General Settings" section automatically
[NumericSetting( "Return Results Page Size", "The number of ...", false )]
public string ReturnResultsPageSizeSetting { get { return Setting( "ReturnResultsPageSize", "10", false ); } }

VBS Check-in Process Improvement

nairdo — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 00:15:00 GMT

This year we had a little more than 1750+ kids use the automated check-in system for VBS across three of our campuses.

Looking at this graph which shows the number of check-ins per minute, you can see check-in does not ramp up as sharply as we would want on Monday (red).

(click for larger image)

By Tuesday (blue) after some adjustments were made and parents knew the routine a bit better, check-in ramps up quicker to about 50-60 kids per minute and 28 minutes later the lines were gone and the majority of kids were checked in.

It's OK, but not great. Ideally, you'd like to check in 1500+ kids per minute and have check in last one minute. Not realistic or necessary since not all parents arrive exactly on time. Perhaps 150 kids per minute is a goal. Then check-in only lasts 10 minutes. What will it take to reach that goal?

With some analysis, we found that it takes about 15-18 seconds per parent to check in their kids. It turns out, much of the time it takes for someone to check in using our system involves punching in the phone number (see this video). That's something I already knew, and it's one of the reasons why I wanted to keep barcode scanners at all our campuses. (a battle I lost -- for now). If a parent uses a barcode they shave 6-12 seconds off that time (depending on how slowly a person normally types in their phone number) and they can check in their kids in about 4-6 seconds.

So if we don't start using barcode scanners again, I think the only thing we'll be able to to is drop in more, cheap, iPad kiosks... unless we start letting people check in using their mobile phone when they arrive on campus...

Eddy Currents Can Trap You

nairdo — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 13:48:00 GMT

Our current church management system has been falling behind. The Visual Studio precompiled website solution we get with the SDK still targets the .NET Framework 3.5 and this morning I ran into my biggest issue to date:

I can't use the NuGet.Core library in my new module until our current vendor either updates the solution to target the .40 framework or I figure out a way to get around this hurdle. I don't think I can safely just change the build target on the solution since it's precompiled... hmm.

Once I figure that out, I'll move onto the other problem. The system is still using jQuery 1.3 (circ. 2009). Yes, jQuery 1.4 was released at the beginning of 2010, 1.5 at the beginning of 2011, and 1.6 was just released last month. I'm beginning to understand why President Roosevelt uttered the words "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Any suggestions?

Custom IE Error Page (DNSERROR.HTM)

nairdo — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 22:22:00 GMT

When you use a web based kiosk for your attendant-less check-in system, you should think about what's going to happen if your network fails you -- especially if you're using the 3G network. This is what you'll see if the kiosk cannot reach the server:

That page is especially problematic if you don't have a keyboard because there is no way to refresh/reload the page if the network starts working again.

Luckily you can customize this content... it's just a pain to do it but I'll show you how. Here's what our page now looks like:

The button is a nice feature because it's basically just going to load our check-in system page again. Without that, in the past someone would have to reboot the whole system (pressing F5 on an stashed-away emergency keyboard would have also worked). It's also worth noting that since you can use javascript in there, you should even be able to do something more sophisticated such as automatically retry every few seconds, etc.

Here's how we did it:

Download a Resource editor such as Resource Hacker. I read that it is possible to edit .mui files using VisualStudio, but after about a half hour of fail, I found Resource Hacker and it did it quite easily.
Grab a copy of your kiosk's ieframe.dll.mui file (found under C:\Windows\system32\en-US\) and stow it away for backup purposes.
Use Resource Hacker and edit the ieframe.dll.mui file. Navigate down into the "23" folder (aka HTML folder) and select the DNSERROR.HTM item like so:
Make your changes. It's just HTML, so you know what to do...
Press the "Compile Script" button.
Save the file and quit.
Copy the file over to your kiosk's C:\Windows\system32\en-US\ folder. If you're unable to, because the file is in use or similar, just rename the live file (oddly Windows let's you do that) and then copy the file down to that folder.
Start IE and kill your network to see the result.

Is this a hack? Of course, but it works. We're using an old version of IE, so you're mileage may vary. I'd consider switching to Chrome for our kiosks (since you can start chrome in -kiosk mode too) but I can't seem to find any information on how to customize its equivalent error page. Let me know if you've found another way.

Patchy Philosophy and the Bug Free Software

nairdo — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 03:17:00 GMT

[note: This is an especially 'angry coder' post -- so I encourage the the faint of heart reader to simply skip this article.]

Although I hate to admit it, I know there is no such thing as bug free software releases. With testing and a solid QA process in place, you most definitely can drive software defects in new releases toward zero. However, the more complex the software is, the less likely it will come close to zero. Some have argued from a business perspective it's not cost effective to even try to reach zero bugs. Personally, I think it's your obligation to do your best to find and kill bugs before your customers do -- if you want to keep your customers and your business.

What to do? Shall we developers simply pretend bugs don't exist and keep on creating new releases? Certainly not. Patches to the rescue.

When you haven't yet proven that you can release software with little to no defects, you are obligated to follow the patch principle. Your customers are counting on it. The idea is simple. After you release a new version of your software (major or minor release -- any version that introduces new or changed functionality) you promise to quickly and frequently release patches for the bugs that are reported by your customers. You must not wait until the next release because guess what...there will be more bugs in that release too. (To think that 'the next release will not contain bugs' is to misunderstand developers and software development.) You should not wait and batch them up either and you should not endlessly test the patches for weeks or even days. You create and release them -- quickly -- as your customers are broken until they've applied that patch. They are at your mercy. It's up to you to establish a solid, reliable patch process your customers can count on.

So, as we move into the future, I intend on pushing this same philosophy with the two open-source software projects that I'm involved with. Both of these new management systems (Grassroots and ****) will not suffer from the patchy philosophy syndrome.

Remote, Mobile, 3G, Check-in

nairdo — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:11:00 GMT

When we launched our Queen Creek campus at the Queen Creek High School, we decided not to rely on the local network there. Having learned our network reliability lessons when we ran a test church at Campo Verde High School the year before, we instead decided to put some trust into the 3G cellular network. So far it's been pretty solid.

Built not for looks but for quick setup, tear-down, and storage, this 'kiosk on a cart' solution was somewhat based on Daniel's "network in a box" configuration and our custom check-in Arena module. The cart includes a self contained network using a used Cisco 800 series router with a 3G card that creates a VPN tunnel to our main campus. If IT and Networking are your gig, you can read all the details about those parts over on Derek's blog.

If you're wondering if it's fast or even usable... check out this video of me doing check-in of some test children during a live, normal weekend.

Every time I see the labels print out with this setup, I'm amazed. The browser on the kiosk is talking over the 3G VPN network, to our web server which is then sending a local print job to a printer called QC1 (or QC2), which in turn is defined to talk to the printer's print-server on a particular static IP back over the 3G VPN network. Back and fourth over the 3G network without a hitch.

One more important thing to note. Notice how fast we can punch in a phone number? Unless you're using iPads or some other non-mouse/keyboard device, you might need to change your registry's DoubleClickSpeed setting. We've set ours to 50. That setting defines how clicks are interpreted by the OS, so if the number is too high the OS won't interpret two very fast clicks (screen touches) as two single clicks.

Mind Storm

nairdo — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 14:02:00 GMT

Here are a few of the things swirling around in my head that make it hard to sleep...

thinking about new friends I met in North Africa that live in tents (refugees) and have lost everything due to the revolution
having so much side work I have to turn customers away
emails I haven't responded to
still top-secret and not secret side projects such as Grassroots
the need to do more RefreshCache 2011 prep work
thinking about how to keep up with news, software tech, tweets, feeds, and friends
trying to figure out when we can upgrade our Arena to a newer version
potential security holes
bugs
bed bugs (not that I have any -- just knowing that they exist somewhere out there)
Quantative Easing 3
thinking about and publishing a list of things that are keeping me awake at night
recursion

Ok, they say if you just write things down that you'll feel better and can get back to work. We'll see if that works.

I'm Defeated: Community Communications

nairdo — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 18:20:00 GMT

I admit defeat. I can't keep up with all the community posts in the Arena community forums anymore. Actually, I would have to say it started at some point during 2010. I just would not admit it until today. I guess this might also mean the.Community has become a pretty successful tool for certain things ArenaChMS!

Anyhow as a result, I'm finally changing my forum's subscriptions -- unsubscribing from about 90% of them. I just need to keep the most essential ones... and I'm lucky I went in there. I also just discovered several new forums for the community developers, namely the Developer Alerts forum. Perhaps that forum will be used to announce when a Arena deprecates a method from their class library API...

Using Firebug in IE

nairdo — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:39:00 GMT

If you're developing complex modules for your Arena website, you'll probably need a tool such as Firebug (a plugin for Firefox) to test how your CSS changes will effect layout in the browser. Once you've used Firebug you'll have a hard time trying to manage without it.

That's great for Firefox, but what about IE? With Firebug Lite you can also have much of Firebug's great functionality inside IE too -- you just need to add a script reference into the "head" section of your webpage...

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://getfirebug.com/firebug-lite.js"></script>

If you use our custom Inject Javascript Arena module, you can have that (or any other javascript reference) put directly into the head of the HTML with a few simple module settings:

And if you add it to your site's Arena template and only allow admins view permission to that module, it will have absolutely no impact to anyone else. Enjoy.

** You also need to add this "bookmarklet" (Launch Firebug Lite) to your your Favorites in IE which is used to start Firebug Lite.

Jason Offutt == JSON Data

nairdo — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 15:40:00 GMT

My good friend and co-worker, Jason Offutt, recently started blogging over at JsonData.tumblr.com. (Yes, not only is he a developer and an artist, he's also a great writer!) In our spare time, Jason and I have been working on a couple of open source projects. One of them, his baby, is an MVC web application for allowing organizations to start giving campaigns w/sponsors and the other is still very young and undisclosed. The topic of open source is a frequent discussion among the guys involved in these projects and Jason just wrote a great article about open source development in the .NET world --- which is something many non-MS developers may not realize is happening.

As I mentioned at RefreshCache, it's a shame when can't utilize the tools and experience we've gained during our regular job when we continue the work of our ministry in the off hours; whether we're helping build a website for an orphanage in Nepal or writing software for a parachurch ministry. We love Arena ChMS as application development framework, but it's not open source and we just can't use it for our other projects.

We can't control the choices of our vendors, but we can control our own actions. This is part of the reason why Jason and I are involved in these other two projects. I'll be posting more about all this early next year. Happy Thanksgiving!

Silence: the moral dilemma on hiding a Facebook friend

nairdo — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 02:31:00 GMT

Yesterday I used the "hide" <friend> feature on Facebook and I'm torn over it.

For me, the Facebook trend had become something I dreaded because of a particular person I know who doesn't seem to have a day job other than to FB troll every day - all day. You know the type of person I'm talking about. Not the regular person who occasionally drops an agenda-based-topic into their socially acceptable narcissistic stream of consciousness. I'm talking about the super activist whose only job is to dredge up nonsense, pre-spun statistics, so-called facts and bogus "news" which they feel is going to influence the overwhelmingly silent majority of Americans. In order to see what my other friends were up to, I'd have to wade through 6-12 other daily, inflammatory, repulsing posts from you-know-who, and after a year or so of doing this Facebook simply sickened me.

The act of FB hiding is something I've been struggling with internally for months now. Most the people I've talked with say, 'yeah, it's fine to silence your friend, and you need to do it.' But I can't help but feel: what's the point in calling someone a friend if you can't stomach what they have to say. Hiding seems like a cop out - a lie to yourself.

Coincidentally, my pastor said today, 'to outright reject every detail of what someone says without measuring its truthfulness is foolish and you'll be seen as an idiot.' While this applies to to all parties in a debate, what if only one side is being intellectually honest and reasonable? I suppose it's only reasonable to end that debate and walk away from the unhealthy conversation.

I'm going to try it for a while and see how it goes. At least with hiding there is still some ability to participate in each others discussions, but I will definitely be mulling my decision over and may just pull the plug on the 'friendship'.

I knew something like this could happen. It's one of the reasons why I've always been overly thoughtful about who I accept friend requests from. I don't generally think of my FB friends as simply co-workers or acquaintances. I consider them real friends (someone I could call on for help) and I want to keep it that way.

[Note: In yet another coincidence, shortly after writing this post, Facebook announced a new version of "Groups" which could be the answer to the problem I've just described -- provided the trolls take their constant activism to their activist groups.]

Simple Deploy Tool

nairdo — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:25:00 GMT

Even before the full release of our newly rebuilt website, it seemed like we were constantly deploying daily/hourly updates from our sprints to several of servers (UAT, Staging, etc.)... so much so that, being a Lazy programmer, I stopped what I was doing one night and wrote quick WinForms app I call Simple Deploy.

Now I can quickly deploy a set of files again-and-again to a set of servers with a simple button click -- not that I endorse having to do this -- but now I can be lazy. If I need to exclude a server, I just unclick the server's checkbox before pressing Deploy.

I'm not sure yet, but I'm considering adding this into the RefreshCache swag bag if others think it's useful.

The Arena Community Developer Board

nairdo — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 15:37:00 GMT

In February 2007 the guys at Arena ChMS established what was loosely called the Community Developer Board (or CDB). This little known group was comprised of the Arena team (Jeff M, Steve, Mark, Alfred, etc), Jon and David from CCV, and Phil and myself from Central. Since that time a few more churches were invited to the team (Joel & Daniel: High Desert Church, Jeremy Hoff: Shepherd of the Hills, Tom Powers: Southeast Christian Church) but our charter has been roughly the same as summarized here:

The CDB’s role is to foster and grow structured development for the Arena community. To achieve this, the CDB should, among other things, create and maintain documentation that illustrates how to properly design, develop and package Arena modules for use by the community. Additionally it should ... fulfill other needs that are essential to more efficient module development.

A few of the things the board has done:

help establish the.Community site
establish the original wiki which later moved to the official wiki
establish the namespace/naming standards
create the Arena Custom Module Developer guide (ACMD)
establish the monthly and yearly Arena Developer Roundtables
establish the module export/import feature (and applying constant pressure to make it more complete)
establish our original shared source repository on CVS Dude
establish the "My Portal" framework enabling developers to write personalization modules
establish consistency on various things like using the MS Ajax CDN

Although we haven't always agreed on things, we've made good progress in areas where there was consensus. (Establishing the RefreshCache tribe has been instrumental in relieving pressure in areas where we have not agreed -- more below.)

With the arrival of Mike Gold at Arena and onto the CDB, he's been reshaping how things are done at Arena and as result the CDB will be undergoing a reboot or reinvention. Regardless of the direction the CDB takes, the RefreshCache team will continue to grow in importance. On that team Arena has no responsibility -- which means they are not on the hook for anything. This has been a real blessing for everyone. Having that kind of clarity has freed up the community to take responsibility and ownership for things that they feel are critical or important (our Manifesto).

For the most part, everyone who attended last year's event is part of the RefreshCache team. Over the past year this team has:

established and manage the #ArenaChMS IRC channel (Brian Slezak)
established the Arena Sample Server - a place where developers can setup their custom modules and try out other live modules in action
established our Redmine project server - the new repository (replacing CSV Dude) for hosting your code, issue tracking, wiki, etc. more... (Daniel Hazelbaker)
created an amazing Arena module installer (Jon Edmiston, David Turner)
really beta tested each major release of Arena before its available to everyone (Austin Spooner)
created the Arena Sandbox - a place where developers can test installing their modules in a clean sandbox environment (Daniel Hazelbaker)
taught developers essential tips and tricks for developing Arena modules (David Turner, Jeff Schinella, Jason Offutt)
shared vital ideas and concepts about ChMS (Jon Edmiston)

We're only about about 3 months away from RefreshCache 101010 so it's not too late to get involved on this team by signing up to attend the free event. As you can see on our Speakers page, this year we're planning on having the guys from Integrum (creators of Gangplank) stop by and chat with us about stuff they think is important. There are a few other surprises we're hoping to unload on everyone there too but it's too soon to spill the details.

Lastly, I'm serious about this: if anyone else is out there and can't attend RefreshCache because of cost please let me know. You can stay at my house (last year we had a few people at my place -- it was great!) or I'll help find independent sponsors to help with travel costs, etc.

101010 A Developers Conference: RefreshCache

nairdo — Sun, 09 May 2010 01:28:00 GMT

Last year we decided to take a little more ownership of our destiny so we created "RefreshCache," the free two day event for church developer teams that use the Arena ChMS platform. We're doing it again, but this year we're breaking the ice with pre-event social and hack-night on the evening of 10/10/10. (We did not initially realize it was a binary day.)

We only made one announcement on the Arena community developer forum and we already have 19 registered attendees with two (and possibly three) of the top ten largest Christian churches in America attending. If you're looking to get plugged into the core of the Arena community developer team, the RefreshCache (RC) team is it.

We haven't locked everything down yet, but to give you an idea of what kinds of things we cover, check out last year's schedule or one of these other blog posts. Also as an added bonus, this year we're providing all registrants with early releases of a bunch of modules created by RefreshCache founding members. These modules include:

Arena <-> Planning Center Online (PCO) integration. Created by Jon and David over at CCV. Currently being tested by Austin at NCBC.
TinyMCE based Advanced HTML Editor. Created by Jason O at Central.
CuFon Font Replacer. Use the CuFon font rendering engine instead of boring Arial, Verdana, etc on your website. Assembled by me.
Promotions via XSLT. It can use a custom XSLT (for layout), inject style sheet, apply image effects, randomize, and cache. (The 'promotions' module to end all other promotion modules.
and a few others...

I really hope you don't miss it -- register now.

Ignore This Book At Your Own Peril

nairdo — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 18:09:00 GMT

"Ignore this book at your own peril." -- Seth Godin said that about the book Rework by the founders of 37signals. Before I even finished it, I went and ordered two copies for some friends. Everyone will benefit from reading the book, but anyone who's writing software, is running a business, wants to start their own business, is a product manager, or is managing projects, really should stop whatever they are doing and take 2-4 hours to read this book.

I've read a bunch of books on various topics over the past several years -- and while many of them are really good, I usually don't talk them up too much. This book is 99% meat and no fluff.

I experienced so many of the things Jason and David write about but one in particular stands out to me. Meetings are toxic. Not all meetings, but most. When I worked at a very large Fortune 100 company, I remember getting pulled into meetings with hundreds (400-800) of others. If you take the average salary and compute the cost of this 800-1600 man hour meeting, you're in the $20,000-$50,000 range. As my old boss, Frank Dooris, used to say, "How many pagers does a sales guy have to sell to make up for that?"

I could say so much more about this book. It describes much of what inspired us to start our own developer conference for the Arena ChMS community developers. We're giving this book to all attendees of this year's RefreshCache conference. I hope you or your developers can come. We all end up hurting if you don't make it to the event, but ultimately you'll be missing out the most.

Arena Loves Twitter Too

nairdo — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:26:00 GMT

Have I mentioned how much I love Arena? Here's why - because it can do almost anything you need it to. Let me illustrate with a small example. I recently heard someone say 'oh, Arena can't do that yet' on the topic of integrating twitter with our website. Not true. There's no need to wait for a future of release of Arena. You can easily add your favorite tweets to an Arena powered website using the XML File Transformation module.

Here's how to do it in three simple steps.

1) Publish an XSLT file that transforms a Twitter RSS feed to suit your website's layout, look and feel. I've included mine below which you can reuse or modify as you see fit.

2) Add the XML File Transformation module to a page.

3) Configure the module's settings appropriately. For example, I'm using "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/47123579.rss" for the XML File Path and "~/xslt/Custom/Cccev/twitter.xslt" for the XSLT File Path setting. (That XML File Path is the RSS feed for our @RefreshCache tweets.)

Ok, I'm definitely no XSLT expert -- in fact I'm an absolute bumbling n00b in this area. Regardless, I was able to cobble something together that works. Notice in lines 9-60 I'm falling back to my language of choice (C#) for date processing mostly because the JavaScript date parser does not like the RSS pubDate string format. Yes, lines 63-75 are me embedding a style block directly inline. (I know, shame on me.) Line 78 is where I restrict the number of tweets displayed to only 5. Lastly, lines 77-86 are the main HTML layout for the tweets. Again, you can download mine and modify it as you please.

   1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>   2:  <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"   3:         xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt"   4:         xmlns:cs="urn:cs"   5:         xmlns:js="urn:custom-javascript"   6:         exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl js"    7:  >   8:     9: <msxsl:script language="c#" implements-prefix="cs">  10:  <![CDATA[         11:     public static string UXDate( string pubDate )  12:     {  13:         DateTime d = DateTime.Parse( pubDate );  14:         DateTime now = DateTime.Now;  15:         TimeSpan timeSince = now - d;  16:           17:         double inSeconds = timeSince.TotalSeconds;  18:         double inMinutes = timeSince.TotalMinutes;  19:         double inHours = timeSince.TotalHours;  20:         double inDays = timeSince.TotalDays;  21:         double inMonths = inDays / 30;  22:         double inYears = inDays / 365;  23:    24:         if(Math.Round(inSeconds) == 1){  25:             return "1 second ago";  26:         }  27:         else if(inMinutes < 1.0){  28:             return Math.Floor(inSeconds) + " seconds ago";  29:         }  30:         else if(Math.Floor(inMinutes) == 1){  31:             return "1 minute ago";  32:         }  33:         else if(inHours < 1.0){  34:             return Math.Floor(inMinutes) + " minutes ago";  35:         }  36:         else if(Math.Floor(inHours) == 1){  37:             return "about an hour ago";  38:         }  39:         else if(inDays < 1.0){  40:             return Math.Floor(inHours) + " hours ago";  41:         }  42:         else if(Math.Floor(inDays) == 1){  43:             return "1 day ago";  44:         }  45:         else if(inMonths < 3 ){  46:             return Math.Floor(inDays) + " days ago";  47:         }  48:         else if(inMonths <= 12 ){  49:             return Math.Floor(inMonths) + " months ago ";  50:         }  51:         else if(Math.Floor(inYears) <= 1){  52:             return "1 year ago";  53:         }  54:         else  55:         {  56:             return Math.Floor(inYears) + " years ago";  57:         }  58:     }  59:  ]]>  60: </msxsl:script>  61:    62:   <xsl:template match="rss/channel">  63:       <style>  64:        #tweets a {  65:         text-decoration: none;  66:         color: #444;  67:        }  68:          69:        #tweets span {  70:         font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;  71:         font-size: 9px;  72:         color: #888;  73:         font-style: italic;  74:        }  75:       </style>  76:    77:         <div id="tweets" style="padding-left:5px;font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; width: 500px;">  78:         <xsl:for-each select="item[position() &lt;= 5]">  79:             <p>  80:               <a href="{link}">  81:                   <xsl:value-of select="substring-after(title,': ')" />  82:               </a>  83:               <br/><span><xsl:value-of select="cs:UXDate(pubDate)" /></span>  84:             </p>  85:         </xsl:for-each>  86:         </div>  87:     </xsl:template>  88: </xsl:stylesheet>

An "expert" may cringe at what I've done in there, but I really don't care. I mostly care about the end result.

In case you're wondering, the XSLT transforms this sort of thing:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" version="2.0" xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss">
  <channel>
    <title>Twitter / refreshcache</title>
    <link>http://twitter.com/refreshcache</link>
    <atom:link type="application/rss+xml" href="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/47123579.rss" rel="self"/>
    <description>Twitter updates from Refresh Cache / refreshcache.</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <ttl>40</ttl>
  <item>
    <title>refreshcache: #ArenaChMS comm devs - planning is underway for RefreshCache 2010!  Submit your topics and discussion ideas now http://digs.by/1KpL</title>
    <description>refreshcache: #ArenaChMS comm devs - planning is underway for RefreshCache 2010!  Submit your topics and discussion ideas now http://digs.by/1KpL</description>
    <pubDate>Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:57:37 +0000</pubDate>
    <guid>http://twitter.com/refreshcache/statuses/8600862288</guid>
    <link>http://twitter.com/refreshcache/statuses/8600862288</link>
  </item>
.
.
.

...into this. Here's a close up of the final product.

RefreshCache 09: Summary

nairdo — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 11:47:00 GMT

Wow, what a week**. Based on the feedback we heard or saw (Josh, tweets), some blog posts we read (Joel, Brian), as well as Jason and my own observations, we can now say RefreshCache was a total success!

While each person had their favorite part, I think we're all in agreement when I say we came together because of our passion for using software technology to grow the Kingdom of God. Each of us wants to make a difference for the kingdom and we want to use our skills to create software. Ultimately RefreshCache was a seed; a realization that we are not limited by the speed of a vendor (as is the case with most other ChMS systems) and a kick start to working together as a community throughout the whole year.

For me, it was an honor to be able to rub shoulders with the guys that attended. Here were some of my highlights and favorite moments:

Getting to hang out with Daniel Hazelbaker from HDC and chat about check-in, subversion, CodePlex, branching, etc. You should see the Arena WS API he created!
Having time to work in Visual Studio with Austin Spooner from NCBC. Austin is Mr. Answer Man when it comes to Arena modules.
Having time to talk about open source and Typo3 with Brian Slezak from COR. We're lucky to have someone with Brian's experience on our team.
Getting owned by David Turner in a few rounds of Halo ODST and learning about the Voracity Solutions package installer. This guy is skilled with Visual Studio and the Rocket Launcher.
Getting to see the work of Tom Powers, Josh Martin, and Maxim Strelsov from Southeast Christian. These guys are pretty new to Arena but they're already creating great stuff. I can't wait to see what they tackle next.
Talking with Joel Lingenfelter from HDC about coffee and all things ChMS. He has to be the most gifted CFO I've ever met!
Chatting with Michael Speers and Eric Byrd from Shadow Mountain. Thanks to their questions, they spurred on a mini "check out the features right under your nose" session.
Getting to hear from Central's own Jason Offutt on JSON, SOA, and jQuery. Jason's an engineer and an artist!
Listening to CCV's Jeff Schinella on Semantic Web, CSS and XSLT. We all need to put his lesson into action.
Hearing Jon's closing presentation on "Life After Features" some of which is touched on in his blog. and David's blog on eRA. Jon is a visionary and always seems to be 2 steps ahead of everyone.

For you Arena community developers who missed this year's event, you need to join us on IRC channel #ArenaChMS if you want to plug into this group of guys. Like I said at R.C., we are all going to see the rediscovery of Internet Relay Chat once the Google Wave hits -- albeit in a newer, easier to use form.

To correct the record, I'd say that Mark Miller was the actual inspiration for RefreshCache. Mark is a creative cinematographer/director genius and due to unforeseen events he had to bow out from the planning of RefreshCache early this summer. Hopefully we'll have someone of his caliber to kick next year's RefreshCache into the event-execution stratosphere. Also thanks to Mark we have the only clear picture at RefreshCache (showing a handful of people).

Lastly, I just want to publically thank Kim Musgrave, Liz (my wife) and especially Jason Offutt who picked up the tasks when we lost Mark Miller, because without him RefreshCache 09 would not have happened.

** For anyone that though I was kidding, I crashed at 7pm on Thursday night and slept for 13 hours.

SSRS, SQL 2005 and Parameterized TOP

nairdo — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:47:00 GMT

I was writing a query for Reporting Services (SSRS) and I really wanted to use a parameter to allow the user to choose how many of the "top" results should be retrieved/shown. With SQL Server 2005, the TOP expression is now parameterized however attempting to use it in an SSRS dataset like this:

SELECT TOP ( @topN ) p.person_id, p.first_name,p.last_name
FROM core_person p WITH(NOLOCK)
ORDER BY p.last_name

only gave me this error:

Rats! It should have worked. My @topN parameter is properly defined as a Report Parameter of type Integer with a default value of 20.

Looking around I found a lot of complicated ways around the issue some of them involving creating dynamic statements and such like this one (link). Way too complicated for me and I hate dynamic SQL -- I just say NO.

It turns out with a little creative oob thinking you can just trick SSRS by declaring another variable in your dataset and then setting it to the value of your Report Parameter like this:

DECLARE @NewTop int
SET @NewTop = @topN

SELECT TOP ( @NewTop ) p.person_id, p.first_name, p.last_name
FROM core_person p WITH(NOLOCK)
ORDER BY p.last_name

Problem solved.

RefreshCache 2009

nairdo — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:24:00 GMT

Well it's less than a week away -- our first 100% community organized, managed and executed developer gathering for Arena called RefreshCache. I originally envisioned this get together as a very small group of guys (6-8) but we decided to open it up to other Arena community developers. Invitations were sent out about a month ago and we are now double what I was originally expecting.

Arena is unique, and although I've always known it, something changed this past spring when we collaborated with Joel and Daniel of High Desert Church to create a check-in system that works for both of our churches exactly the way we both needed it to work. Something happened when we broke away and moved our code to CodePlex. I think I realized that we are limited only by our fear and actions, and not by any one vendor.

This small group of developers who are gathering together next Monday and Tuesday in a desert town of Arizona are a unique group of developers who share the same goal: to collaborate and combine our development efforts in order to increase the fruit of our labor (my first public blog post). This has been a great journey so far, but the best days are still to come.

Online Arena ChMS Demo

nairdo — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:55:00 GMT

In case you did not hear via twitter (@ourarena or #ArenaChMS) or the Arena blog, Chris Rivers will be giving a 10,000 foot demonstration of Arena ChMS. If you have never seen Arena in action and are considering a switch from your current Church Management System (ChMS) I would definitely encourage you to sign up for the Sept 16th demo next week.

The demo won't even scratch the surface of all the features and possibilities Arena has, but it's definitely a good starting point.

The Voracity Solutions 'Installer'

nairdo — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:50:00 GMT

If you haven't checked out Voracity Solutions you should do it now. You already know the guys at Voracity Solutions as Jon Edmiston and David Turner the original creators of what has become Arena ChMS. Among various long term plans and projects, they've started cooking up custom modules and solutions for Arena.

A few weeks ago I got an early glimpse of an Arena module installer/control panel they worked on, but now they have a public demo in their latest blog post. (I'd recommend subscribing to their blog to get the latest tidbits and news.) Although such a mechanism was discussed some time ago, Jon and David finally had a serious need to make it happen.

It's called the Voracity Installer and it has the potential to make installing your custom Arena modules a snap (literally a one click operation). I say potentially because they’re wondering if other Arena community developers are interested in using it – so if you are interested, let them know by dropping your comment/reply on that post. If they publish their package file specification we'll almost certainly adopt it for use in all our module packages.