Today I testified before the Assembly Budget Subcommittee No. 1 on Health and Human Services in regard to their plan to cut roughly a $1 billion of regional center services to people with developmental disabilities. Some of you may know me already. My wife, Azlina, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly just a month ago. Perhaps the saddest part of my personal tragedy is that my son Azrai, diagnosed with Autism three years ago, lost his mother, his best friend and a tireless advocate for him to receive all the educational and developmental services he needs to live a more-or-less normal life. As Melissa Mendoza wrote yesterday, there is tremendous cost involved in attaining services for a

A short introduction. I’m Steve Holmes, and I am a Software Developer working for Macer Media and The Sacramento Press who was kind enough to indulge my request to write a memorial of my wife Azlina so that I and others who knew her might take a step in the grieving process. On Thursday December 30th in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, my wife Azlina and our unborn son, Asyref (“Ash”), died suddenly from complications with her pregnancy. Azlina and I met in 1996 while we were still in college. I at UCDavis and she at Sacramento State. We met at a typical college party where she was classy enough to snub my clumsy flirting attempts. Lucky for me persistence paid off and days later she agreed to a

Sacramento is home to a flourishing development community and tonight's presentation at the The Sacramento Groovy User's by Ed Gibbs will be discussing the latest Behavior Driven Development tool, Spock.  This is a workshop open to the public and meant for technologists interested in the latest inovations for building quality software. Ed's description: Spock: The Search for an Intelligent Spec Spock (http://code.google.com/p/spock/) is a Groovy based Behavior Driven Development (BDD) library. Never heard of BDD? Still writing unit tests in JUnit 3? Come learn what literate tests are about. This talk includes a number of demos and hands on labs requiring minimal setup. You can even try

The Sacramento Groovy Users (SacGRU) is a professional association of software developers.  The group discusses the Groovy programming language and all it's frameworks, libraries and technologies.  Founded in December of 2008, the group meets the 1st Thursday of every month.  Please see the group's website at http://sacgru.com for details such as meeting time and place. Tonight the group will be meeting at The Sacramento Press (yes this Sacramento Press) on the corner of 5th and H Street in downtown Sacramento at 6:30.  The presentation will be "An Introduction to the Grails Framework".