Dear Friends

With the greatest sorrow a heart can withstand, I regret to inform you that my beloved wife, Glenda Vigoreaux has passed into the arms of our loving God. Her courageous battle with anxiety and insomnia ended the morning of Tuesday, July 15, 2008.

Glenda is survived by her adoring husband Paul Hacker, mother Lydia Echevarria, sister Vanessa Vigoreaux, brother Luis Echevarria and a host of family and friends who also loved her dearly. At last she has the peace for which we've prayed, as she sings with a choir of angels.

Glenda has been honored in a ceremony attended only by immediate family. The final resting place for her cremated remains is yet to be determined. Memorial donations may be sent to St. John's Lutheran Church, 7205 North 51st Avenue, Glendale, Arizona 85301. Please forward this message as appropriate. My apologies to those I may have forgotten.

Each of us who met her are blessed to have encountered a loving soul, unique in the world. Her concern and respect for each individual were genuine. Glenda trusted that in giving of her many talents, she brought out the best in good people and was thereby enriched herself. She was an inspirational angel among us.

Please join my prayers celebrating her life and honoring her example as an extraordinary human being. Remember her as I will, full of life and love.

Good night sweet Angel. Te amo.

Paul A. Hacker

If you'd like to comment, please provide them instead in the previous entry. Let's regard it as a memorial roll for her from our community and others (lots of nice comments there already).

I'll have more on that in a moment, including more about her surprisingly storied past (entirely unrelated to training and speaking) that may be a surprise to some (it was for me).

But first I'd like to remember her as I knew her.

Glenda, the acclaimed trainer and speaker

Glenda was an Adobe Certified Master Instructor who had taught Adobe/Macromedia technologies starting in 1998, including ColdFusion, Dreamweaver, Captivate, Contribute, Acrobat Connect and Presenter. She was widely praised and received consistently high marks, working for Roundpeg in Arizona (since 2005) and who before that had been on her own as GVX Technology since 1996.

Glenda was an equally lauded and popular conference speaker, winning best speaker honors at Max 2004 and CFUnited 2005 (we tied that year). You can find a podcast of her 2006 talk on CF printing and Reporting as well as her CFUnited bio of that year. You can learn more of her professional history from her LinkedIn page. She was even a speaker on the ColdFusion Meetup in May 2005, when Steven Erat was hosting.

Suicide? Glenda?

The most tragic thing about the news is that her death has been ruled a suicide. I just can't fathom that. Besides the accolades above, anyone who knew her would say that she would seem one of the very last people in the world you could ever expect of being driven to that. In fact, if you look at the about page of her GVX site, you see that she had a clear passion for life, and for others.

Of course, I'd not talked to her in a couple of years, and naturally people's personal lives can often be masked by their public persona. Indeed there was much more to her background than many may have known (I didn't). I learned of her death today in an email from Steve Drucker (for which I'm so grateful). In it, he pointed to a news article (translated from Spanish).

The story reports that her husband found her with a gun at her side, with the "forensic and physical evidence...consistent with a self-inflicted shooting". I didn't know her husband, named there as Paul Hacker.

She came from a famed family, tragically notorious in Puerto Rico

But in that story (and with additional details found in sources mentioned later here), we learn that in fact Glenda came from a background of both notoriety and family tragedy. I never knew that hers was a celebrity family in Puerto Rico. Not only were her father and mother famous there as a TV producer and actress, respectively, but tragically, her father was brutally murdered and her mother convicted of it and jailed for 13 years. Apparently, all this was big news in Puerto Rico.

Indeed, the wikiepedia entry on her mother has even already been updated to reflect Glenda's death, and her death is listed as well in Wikipedia's 2008 deaths page with references to her notable family members, all this just 3 days later as I write. Again, clearly this was significant news to some people.

As further sad testament to the notoriety of all this, the news article above even says her house in Glendale and her family's in PR were both "full of paparazzi" (representing Puerto Rican press, I'd suppose).

I was almost tempted to doubt if we were talking about the same person, since these things all referred to her as Glendaly Vigoreaux Echevarría (the latter being her mother's famed last name). But then I found this memorial page which had that same "Glendaly" name but with happy pictures of her. Yep, that was the Glenda we knew.

A one-time TV star in Puerto Rico

The page goes on to offer still more about her family, their tragedy, and her life. It says that she herself had been a child TV star and later host, comedienne, and singer with her sister Vanesa on Puerto Rican TV shows.

That doesn't surprise me. She was certainly so full of life, which makes this all the more surprising.

R.I.P., Glenda

So today we remember the passing of a member of the CF community, a stellar trainer and speaker, mystified by the asserted cause of her death...while a segment of the celebrity gossip world instead regards it only as another tragedy for a notoriously troubled celebrity family. It just doesn't make sense.

She will be sorely missed.

his blog entry with a photo.

That's representin'! :-)

• CFUnited Europe in mid March
• cf.Objective() in early May
• WebManiacs in late May
• Scotch on the Rocks in early June
• CFUnited in mid June

What a blast, and of course it's an honor to be invited. I've not written much about them because, well, I don't know what I could add that hasn't been said by many other bloggers who attended each! :-)

Unfortunately, the schedule precluded me giving any thought to attending (or proposing to speak at) WebDU (spoke there last year) or SpringBR. And sadly I had to miss the Adobe Community Summit.

As if those events (and the commensurate travel) weren't enough of a draw on time, in the weeks since the first event in mid-March I've also:

• squeezed in teaching 6 classes
• written 2 tips columns and a feature article for 2 editions of the FAQU
• organized nearly a dozen ColdFusion Meetups
• attended an invitation-only Microsoft Tech Summit (for a couple dozen folks they picked from competing communities to talk and listen to)
• spent a week in Germany with the fine folks at Intergral (makers of FusionDebug, FusionReactor, FusionAnalytics, and with whom I also do some consulting)
• and provided my consulting services to many folks in what little time remained!

Fortunately, the nature of my consulting is different than most: I focus on helping people solve problems (rather than build or architect apps), so they generally need me only sporadically and for short spurts of time. We've been able to fit them in nicely in the time in between, but I've got some who've been patiently awaiting the end of what some called "the conference silly season".

I had also started my series on the tools/resource list, but after part 10 got just too bogged down. I plan to pick that up again very soon.

Just wanted to offer a bit of explanation on the relative quiet the past couple of months.

I have some other really exciting things planned and in the works which I'll be sharing in coming weeks and months. Some are new resources, some new services, and some new tools. All dedicated to helping the community. It's exciting times!

This is an example of an organization that really gets things right, not only about making their tool seem appealing but making it easy to evaluate it without having to first install it. So often, I look at various other products/projects that bury or hide key info to help me decide whether I want to bother considering it at all, let alone downloading or even installing it first. (So often, we're forced to download the product and either install it or at least read a readme. Some people just won't be bothered, so the site really can be key to winning customers.)

The Sava site does thing so well. I felt it was a real breath of fresh air, and I really hope others will consider adopting some of their approaches, which I'll talk about here.

First, I'll note that I have indeed added it to my list of CF-based CMS's. I think some would be surprised that this now makes 24 of them, at least per my listing (some free, some commercial).

What they get so right

Here are just some of the stellar features they employ on the site:

• an attractive site interface, with a real fresh look and feel (bright, colorful, easy on the eyes, lots of pictures of real, happy-looking people)
• a "quick tour" set of edited screenshots showing highlighted key features, in an easy to use slideshow interface
• a set of "overview" pages tied separately to marketing, IT, and design folks (see the left nav bar)
• high-level features page and separate list of all features
• Quick start tutorials
• their download page explains that they offer the tool in 2 forms. The "standard" flavor is simply the source code (like you'd expect for any project, though they note that it runs on either CF7 or Railo 2.0). The "express" flavor is a complete bundled edition that is easy to install onto a machine not running CF (or that is but you don't want to tinker with it). It runs on Railo Express which offers a totally self-contained environment to run a CFML app like Sava, with the Railo CFML Engine, Jetty Application Server and WebServer, and H2 Database. See the download page for links to those parts.
• Of course, they have all the other expected things: FAQs, forums (as well as paid support), and nice docs in the form of a user guide, developers guide, and component API.
• I mentioned the paid support page, and I'd say that and the services page are just another example of refreshing transparency: lots of other projects/companies kind of hide their services, as if they don't want to offend people that they're willing to take money to help users make the most of their tools. It seems a missed opportunity.
• They also offer a list of clients, to help you feel more comfortable knowing others have gone before you, and they have a blog, which is of course a great way to keep people updated on things.

Only close to perfection

I did find one curious slip in the otherwise well-oiled machine: The support page offered a link to a documentation page which seems almost incomplete. Fortunately, it offers the same link to the individual docs on the left nav bar as are found on the main support page, but it just seems curious that these docs are not mentioned individually in the body of this page. But more than that, the wording of the page (currently) just has an unfinished feel to it. I'll drop a note to the folks to bring that to their attention.

Great first impression, and a model

Other than that, though, it's clear that these folks have put a lot of effort into the site and wanting to make the tool appealing. (If it reflects the level of care they put into the tool itself, that certainly bodes well too, and I'm sure the site could lead some to feel that way, at least on the surface, so great way to make a good first impression.)

All this is just such a rarity in my experience, and I just find it so very refreshing. I wish them well, and hope these thoughts may help some others.

I'm not knocking any others in particular

Indeed, let me add that I don't say all this to embarass anyone in particular about their site. If you think I'm talking to you, that's just your conscience, not me. :-) I have no one in mind. And I'm not limiting my thoughts to only open source projects: there are just as many commercial product sites that drop this ball, too, which just blows my mind. I do realize that open source projects (especially if they have no paid support model) often feel constrained to "afford" the time to make such a nice site. Still, this is one open source project that just gets things so right.

Who else do you think "gets it right?"

I realize, too, that there are others that do things well. I mean no slight by not mentioning them, nor highlighting them earlier. In fact, feel free to list here in the comments any other sites you think get things right. I suspect one that some would think of immediately is ColdBox, and its site, both of which Luis Majano has clearly put a lot of effort into.

• 5 really powerful Online Image Editing Tools
• 6 Unique Web Communities That You Won't Forget
• 20 Apps That Should Be On Your Mobile
• 10 Free Microsoft Apps That Don't Suck
• 10 Google Services That Need To Be TERMINATED!
• 6 Free Vista Utilities to Tweak and Improve Performance

And they frequently do a list of "Cool Websites and Tips" (latest edition was #104.

They've also had some things of interest specifically to bloggers:

• 12 No-crap Tools to Make Your Blog Better
• 5 Must-have Plugins for Your Wordpress Blog
• Buy and Sell website text links with TNX.net

If you like the stuff, you can sign up via RSS or email.

But with care, it can work, as another video shows. The keys seem to be: don't use a frozen turkey, don't use too much oil, do it outside a safe distance from the house, oh, and maybe don't do it while drinking! :-)

Enjoy the holiday, everyone (and the peace on the lists for those outside the states).

Don't know if others have blogged about that (as I just mentioned, I'm in Europe this week and next, so not connected too often or too well while traveling).

It turns out that they've enabled the Google Site Search feature, which while not an internal search engine is at least much better than nothing at all. It found the things I was looking for, and though I've long used the Google site search feature to get around this there (and at other sites), many don't know how to use it, so it's certainly a step in the right direction.

I understand after talking with them that they are indeed looking to get the real CFML-based search to work again, and I may even help them with that now that I'm on my own. Anyway, in the meantime, enjoy.

I've been a Serious Magic customer for a couple of years, though I've never gotten around to using my VC license. :-) It's really interesting, allowing you to create compelling "tv-like" videos using green screen technology (to have your video appear within or atop an interesting background) and teleprompting to ease reading of scripts. (Since I've never given speeches or read on screen from scripts, I'll admit that's not suited me.)

But if you haven't seen what the tool can do, check out the product page which has a nice few-minute long embedded video (that starts within a few moments of viewing the page) in which the author has used the tool to demonstrate itself.

I wish I'd gotten around to using it, as now with the Adobe acquisition I expect to see a lot more use of the tool. "I coulda been a contender!" :-) Enjoy.

One will be a feature on using FusionDebug, and the other is another of my "tips" column. In the first issue (July), it was on the back page as something like "tips from a coldfusion developer". That wasn't too clever.

In this next issue, we've chosen to call it "Tipical Charlie". That's not a typo. (I've already had one person ask if it was, when they saw another site listing the upcoming issue articles.)

Where did I come up with the name? Well, some know that besides this blog, I have an older one, called tipicalcharlie.com. That one focuses on non-CF tips. Still, I thought it also a suitable title for the FAQU column. ]

On the tipicalcharlie site, I do explain where I got the idea for the name. HGTV fans may already recognize it.