Summmary of lispvan November 2005 meeting: AllegroCache and Dabble
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Wow, the Vancouver Lisp Users Group meeting for November went really well! Here are some of the highlights:
- We had record turnout with 15 people coming to the meeting.
- The new venue at Think! cafe was ideal. Not only did we have access to a video projector, the venue was relatively quiet, had good food and beer, was open till 11pm, and is relatively central yet close to UBC as well. Thanks to Avi Bryant for suggesting Think!
- We were able to capture both my presentation and Avi/Andrew's presentation and produce decent-quality movies from them (in the past, we've had problems with background noise making the movies unusable).
- We had wireless Internet connectivity.
- Neither demo had any technical problems.
The overall theme for the meeting was "Data Innovations". We had two presentations at the meeting:
- I gave a presentation and demo of AllegroCache, Franz's new object persistence product titled "Innovations in Persistence". Many thanks to Jans Aasman of Franz for permission to use some Franz materials & code and to do the demo with beta versions of Allegro CL 8.0 and AllegroCache.
- Avi Bryant and Andrew Catton gave a demo of Dabble, their new Smalltalk-based product for managing and sharing information online.
As I mentioned, we were able to make movies of both presentations. I am making available the movies in a couple of different formats:
- AllegroCache presentation/demo:
- Big version: This movie is about 125MB in size and is the presentation exactly as saved.
- Small version: This is the same as #1 but compressed to about 54MB. The quality is pretty comparable to #1, so you won't be missing much if you download the compressed presentation.
- Dabble demo:
- Big version: This movie is about 113MB in size and is the presentation exactly as saved.
- Small version: This is the same as #1 but compressed to about 38MB and with some edits made to the content.
As I mentioned earlier, we had record turnout with 15 people attending. Along with a lot of the usual "regulars" (including me, Drew Crampsie, Kevin Griffin, Pietro Campesato, Dean Giberson, Avi Bryant, Graydon Hoare, Andrew Catton, James Wright), we had the following new attendees:
- Ed Symanzik: Manages the High Performance Computing Center at Michigan State University and was in Seattle for the Supercomputer Conference. He made the 3 hour trip up to Vancouver just to attend our meeting and then drove down again that same night!
- Coby Beck: Coby's another "familiar face" from comp.lang.lisp and I was pleased to meet him in person after reading his posts for such a long time. I had never realized that he lived in Vancouver! He's been spending a bit of time over the past year doing stuff related to global warming.
- Dan Gast: Works primarily in PHP at the moment but is learning Lisp.
- Travis Hildebrandt: Works as an application systems administrator at Navarik and is learning Lisp.
Update-2005-11-21a: Some people using Linux movie players have indicated that they have had trouble viewing the compressed movies. The movies were compressed using the H.264 codec. Recent versions of Quicktime on Win32 and Mac OS X should be able to view the compressed movies; however, I'm not sure what you would need to use to view them under Linux. For the time being, the safest option is to just download the uncompressed movies. If anyone is successful in playing the compressed movies under Linux, could they please let me know and I'll update this page with the information.
Update-2005-11-21b: Chris Double indicated that he has been able to play the compressed movies under x86 Linux using mplayer and the latest win32 codecs.
Update-2005-11-21c: Paul Hayes emailed me with some further info on running the compressed movies under Linux:
"I had no problem playing acache.mov with recent versions of xine and mplayer. It's important that the players are built with their local versions of ffmpeg and libfaad whenever they offer a choice because there've been problems with the external ffmpeg/libfaad libraries playing some files containing AAC (ffplay from ffmpeg using libfaad wouldn't play your movie for me)."
