Bill Clementson's Blog

Summmary of lispvan August 2005 meeting

Friday, August 26, 2005

For our August meeting, Avi Bryant, the author of the Seaside continuation-based web application framework (which is written in Smalltalk), gave us a presentation describing his web application framework. Avi had just gotten back from a year in the Netherlands, so it was really nice of him to agree to talk to us on such short notice - thanks Avi!!

I indicated in a previous post that we would be trying out a new format for this meeting and that (instead of using a VGA projector and screen) we would be using VNC to network a number of laptops together. It worked really well. Avi was able to sit at the table with his beer and give his presentation while we could watch the presentation and demo on several laptops scattered around the table. I also made a movie out of the presentation so others can see/hear what Avi presented to the group. However, this was my first go at making a movie and there are definitely areas for improvement! I do hope to do a better job in the future. You can download it from here. However, before you do, there are a couple of caveats:

1. The movie is BIG. It is about 214MB in size. Any advice that people can provide on reducing the size of movies made with SnapZ Pro on Mac OS X would be greatly appreciated by me (and by Drew as well since the tech coop is hosting this movie!). I'm a real newbie at this movie-making stuff and I've got a lot to learn!
2. Although I did a sound test before starting to capture the presentation (honest! I really did!), the sound is very faint. The first 7 minutes are extremely faint and you will have to crank up the volume. After that, I adjusted the input volume and it's a bit louder (although not ideal). Also, the audio gets a bit out-of-sync with the video. I'm not sure why this happened. My laptop's battery ran out after I started syncing up the sound and I had to restart the sync process after I got home, so that may have had something to do with it. I'll have to do some tests to see what went wrong with the sound so that future movies are better quality.

• Avi Bryant: Who along with being the speaker and a keen Smalltalk developer, is also interested in different languages and technology. He indicated that he will be coming to future meetings as well, so he must have liked the beer! ;-)
• Ken Dickey: Ken drove up from Washington to attend the meeting. A lot of CL enthusiasts will remember Ken's article "Extremely Successful Software" that recounts his experiences with Extreme Programming and CL while doing a development project at Memetrics in Australia. He's also written a number of Scheme articles for magazines (see here and here). He had a bunch of interesting stories about his time at Apple (1992-99), Dylan on the Newton, an object system that he's writing in Scheme, and other things. We hope to twist his arm a bit and get him to come back to give a presentation at an upcoming lispvan meeting!
• Graydon Hoare: Graydon works for Red Hat and is probably best known for the work he has done on Monotone and Gnu Classpath. We're hoping to have an upcoming SCM meeting where Graydon, Kaz Kylheku (who wrote Meta-CVS in CL), Avi Bryant (who wrote his own SCM utilities for Smalltalk) and a few other SCM enthusiasts can have a discussion about SCM approaches, pros and cons.