This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Sydney Trip
Feed Title: Michael Lucas-Smith
Feed URL: http://www.michaellucassmith.com/site.atom
Feed Description: Smalltalk and my misinterpretations of life
We had a good trip up to Sydney. On the way we saw over ten police cruisers on both sides of the highway. Amazing. I've never seen so many police patrolling in my life. This was just near the beginning of the trip - after we got away from the Canberra region the police disappeared entirely. The highways to get in to and across Sydney these days are brilliant but costly. We went through several toll booths traveling around.
We arrived at Cincom HQ at roughly the expected time - around 1pm. We then had a good meeting with Cincom's Managing Director and then went on to do some more formal business - more about that next week.
Then Bruce Badger (soon to be a blogger?) turned up and we had a good old chat about life the universe and smalltalk before an interviewer from builderau.com.au turned up. He was a nice guy and we got to chatting all about the smalltalk industry, where it's been, where it's come, where it's going. It turns out he used Smalltalk back at university. We impressed him by showing him a modern VisualWorks environment. Hopefully he'll write some articles. What I find amazing is tha tif you go to http://www.builderau.com - you end up at ZDNet. Is this a deliberate move on their part to quash builderau?
Then it was off in to Sydney itself to go to the James Squire Brewery - which strangely enough doesn't actually bew beer. They have all the equipment, but not the license. There the beers were $8! Ouch. No worries, we stuck it on our corporate card :)
The meeting was an amalgamation of Smalltalkers and the Ruby users group in Sydney. This is good because Ruby and Smalltalk share the same dynamicism concepts. The Ruby people caught on fast. James started with his presentation of where VisualWorks and ObjectStudio are at. Things are continuing to improve with no slowing down in sight.
After that, he launched in to his talk about blogs. Apparently I have a lot to be blamed for when it comes to the Cincom blogs, Bottom Feeder and other associated tools. I've made Jim's life hard by getting him to do something called "work". He seems afraid of this magical word - will have to look up its definition later.
Next it was us. I don't like much to blog about our own presentations. We discussed the web technologies in general then I launched in to some actual demonstrations of what WithStyle can do. The presentation itself was inside WithStyle. Then I showed browsing the web using an example web browser. Then I showed WYSIWYG XML editing using EzyXML, built off WithStyle. For the Ruby people, I showed how easy it is to hit the web in Smalltalk:
'http://www.slashdot.org' asURI asResource
After that I gave a demonstration showing how easy it is to make your own technology using WithStyle. I recreated the basics of a presentation program with a couple of classes and a couple of methods. I pulled together XML, XML-Events, Smalltalk and produced a working presentation engine.
The trip ended well too, many beers were had - Jim had several pink things instead of a real mans drink such as beer. James Robertson, Andrew McNeil, Paul Hargreaves (Managing Director of Cincom Australia) are heading to Canberra tomorrow. James is presenting at the ANU in the middle of the day, then again in the evening at the Canberra Linux Users Group. I received an email this morning from my friend David Price saying that the meeting will be packed full of presentations. Fingers crossed that I'll actually get to do my presentation (they're a disorganised lot)
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