[clug] CLUG meeting 22 July 2004

[David Price]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 10:54:38AM +1000, Steven Hanley wrote:
> Currently there are no talks scheduled, any volunteers?

James Robertson should still be talking.  I mentioned this previously,
but it was a fair while ago.  Details are repeated below.  Michael
Lucas-Smith may also be talking about some software he's been writing
recently.

Abstract
--------

This session will discuss blogs, blogging, and some of the associated
technology (RSS in particular). The focus of the talk will be whether
blogs are something of relevance - for project managers, marketing
staff, or developers. I expect an interactive session with many
questions, as well as an interactive introduction to what a blog is.
I'll be taking the tack that blogs are, in fact, useful and worth
investigating. I have my own blog -
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView - and I also sponsor
other blogs on our site - http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs

A quick check of the InfoWorld site, the O'Reilly site, Microsoft or
Sun will demonstrate that many of the industry analysts and
evangelists have started blogging - what this talk will explore is
whether anyone in the audience should be.

The talk will reference BottomFeeder - an open source RSS/Atom news
aggregator. Other technical issues covered will include

* Development issues (dealing with RSS, character encoding issues)
* Deployment issues (building a deployable and installable
  application)
* Cross platform issues (Unicode, character sets, libraries, look and
  feel)
* On the fly updating of a deployed application


Bio
---

James Robertson Cincom Systems, Inc.  I started my career as a
teacher, spending almost three years at that. I moved on to software
development with the US government, and shortly thereafter moved into
consulting work with Booz-Allen and Hamilton. After three years of
various sorts of work there, I discovered Smalltalk. I soon joined
ParcPlace, first as a trainer/consultant, and then as a sales
engineer. I stayed with the Smalltalk team through various convulsions
of the company and ended up at Cincom when VisualWorks was acquired in
1999. I have since become the Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk,
which consists of VisualWorks and ObjectStudio (another Smalltalk
dialect).