February meeting writeup
Mark, Suzanne, Ricky, Simon, Matt, Alexander, Hakim, and Carl met at the Phil Pub for drinks and a lively discussion on the LJUG project and other miscellaneous topics.
Projects
Projects proposed included:
- Utility bill tool - Mark
to calculate the real costs of your gas/electric/phone etc.
- J2ME spreadsheet - Hakim
a pre-existing but stalled project...
- Spreadsheet synchronization - Alexander
between desktops and phones, via some XML web-service transport
- Enterprise Resource Planning - Mark
SAP, here we come!
- Tool to help develop software to the ZSpecification standard - Ricky
- Local weather tool - Simon
Scope for web-service; UI tailored to desktop or phone as appropriate.
The Spreadsheet Synchronization project appealed to most as a project that involves work on various platforms, server end development, XML transformation. This will involve some hard thinking about how to resolve conflicts in editing (in brainstorm, I particularly liked the idea that conflict resolution could be done by arbitrary criteria, for example the seniority of the person making the edit!)
But this is a complex project, and we'll need to spend quite a bit more time specifying it. A late proposal came in from Carl to do a simple task that we seem to need some help with, namely:
getting the drinks in at LJUG meetings
Some use-cases for this very important tool will include:
- Allows addition/deletion/maintenance of new user
- Allows addition/deletion/maintenance of each users drink order
- Stores history of drinks orders per user.
(Controversial)
- Allows easy query of "last round ordered"
- There should be a way for the pub to enter categorised menu items for
selection, possibly including pictures and special offers.
- Maybe it should be possible to attribute each order to a named group,
like the JUG, so over time groups that always meet in a particular pub
could get a rebate.
- The waitress should be able to set the order to a new state, so that
addition/deletion isn't possible after she has started to prepare the
delivery.
The tool will allow us to make orders (hopefully for the next meeting!) by web-service, ideally even by SMS. The XML transport (which is also the working name for the project) will be callsed
FreeAsInBeerML.
Also discussed...
- Macromedia actionscript from a designer's perspective.
- Java for SAP
- Why the living dead need SMS alerts about factory production.
- ZSpecification formal methods for specifying zero-error development projects.
- Q: How to do triangulation with a mobile phone to find where another phone is (or where you are!) (A: Some mobile operators are experimenting with this, but it is probably a payable service, and there isn't a consistent standard)
- Would you trust Mark to work from home?
- The sad state of decline of Britain's public dental care.
- Translating Crazywarp.
- Speed cameras; monitoring speed across distances rather than at a specific point; and using Java to break the speed limit.
- The utopia that is now.
- Who buys from spammers?
- How to sell your legal notice from Microsoft on EBAY.
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
- Laundering drug money.
- Managing edit conflicts
- Collaborative ascii art and collaborative spreadsheets?
- Problem: phones connecting to servers, phones connecting as servers.
(Phone OpCo as massive firewall: you can't get from the outside in to your specific phone).
- Usabilitiy and website design. (See Joel's book)
- Adapting
Carl's OTASlang to J2ME
- C# vs Java
- Some positive comments about Visual Studio and .Net as developer environments.
- Why .Net/JVM may not be best environments for running dynamic languages.
See Dan Sugalski's blog. (But what about Jython?)
- James Strachlan and Groovy. (Great, but buggy?)
- $Perl{syntax}, and why those @sigils can make your $code cleaner
- CVS and Subversion, some positive comments about MS SourceSafe (and some surprise thereat)
- Dynamically changing schemas at runtime. Refactoring schemas.
- Real life stories of software development.
Posted by osfameron at
08:08 AM
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