Opening, Alan Knight of Cincom and Allen Davis of STIC
More than 140 people pre-registered for the conference and some more registered on-site. This is down on last year but good in the current economic circumstances and given the SARS cloud hanging over Toronto (I know some people cancelled for that reason and suspect there were others). Alan thanked the attendees for braving the dangers of Toronto. As someone who believes we're all far too risk-conscious these days, I will remark (pointedly to any who stayed home for that reason; of course, many stayed away for other reasons) that I found crossing the road in Toronto far more cause for concern than SARS, given Ontario's interesting 'cars can turn right against a red light' rule (at least with 'priorite a droite' in France, it is the driver who practices it who assumes the position of greatest risk).
Allen thanked the conference sponsors and Joy Murray (STIC), Andrew Ignatow, Alan Knight and Jim Robertson (Cincom), Jason Jones (whysmalltalk), Ginny Ghezzo (IBM), Monty Williams and others I could not type fast enough to record; my apologies to whoever I missed.
Exhibitors
The Cincom stand raffled a GPS (I think it was; I didn't win it :-/) and were handling out VW7.1 and OS CDs, etc.
The Smalltalk world is (too :-/) small, still it was a coincidence when I met Lisa Almarode who works for GemStone and is married to Jay, whom I last met at Lake Windermere in 1990 when he presented on GemStone and we ran an OODB BOF together. Alas, I gather from her that while she is keeping the Almarode name in Smalltalk, Jay, though still regretting Smalltalk, now works in Java and does not expect to have the opportunity to return. At least GemStone has fully returned from its former ParcPlace-like state of two-three years back under Brokat. As with VW, you can't keep a good product down; strange that some managements tried.
Totally Objects and I have agreed to restart the UK Smalltalk users group. Expect to see some web pages shortly, gradually developing into a site with useful UK-relevant Smalltalk information: talks, users, resources, etc. David Pennington glanced at a map to plan his trip to Toronto. Accustomed to British distances, he thought Connecticut looked quite close enough for Toronto to be a short drive from an airport there. Some 500+ miles and six+ hours later he arrived, vowing always to check a map's scale in future.
Silvermark's Test Mentor addresses widgets by name if they are named or by generated name if it can, but by path from enclosing subcanvas or window if duplicate names make this necessary. It would doubtless be possible to make it always use the logical path approach (i.e. as precursor to revising the generated widget-addressing test code to be logical feature invocations, so less brittle).
Reiling provides utilities for GemStone DBAs: self-restarting daemons, etc
Previous Topic
