will follow in a couple of days. Here's the daily text from Richard Gaskin. I'm running
off to track down the power supply that Frederic Rinaldi left plugged in at his
hotel room...photos later - Ciao]
ERC Journal, Day 0: Arrival
Wow. As soon as the plane breaks through the clouds in its descent to the Malta airport, the reason for Jim's affection for Malta is immediately clear to me. It is the quintessential Mediterranean island, sun-bleached stone and ancient cathedrals and all.
Jim greeted me at the airport and kindly offered an espresso while we waited for David Cragg's plane. In a wonderful experience to be repeated many times over the next 24 hours, I finally got to meet one of the most famous members of the Rev community.
It's almost always the case that the Revvers I finally meet in person bear little resemblance to how I imagine them from their posts to the list. David is no exception: for a guy who slugs it out so well with the dark dragons of FTP error code implementations as he does in libURL, I'd almost expect him to swagger more than a cowboy. But David is from Edinburgh, so he's merely well-mannered. :)
Back at the hotel we met up with Fr�d�ric Rinaldi, and the three of us took a cap to a restaurant with a good reputation just around the other side of St. George's Bay. The waiter was very personable, and we were glad we gambled on the Maltese Merlot -- even ordered a second bottle before the meal was done.
ERC Journal Day 1: Reception
Sunday, 14 November
The introductions were a wonderful surprise: we have people here from more than a dozen countries across three continents. But perhaps most surprising were the number of attendees -- maybe as many as five or six -- who were willing to come here with no previous Revolution experience: they had heard about it, and so wanted to learn more they made the effort to be here. Some of these people have some very interesting technical challenges they're hoping to solve, with a lot of interest in Rev's database connectivity. Fortunately Rev seems up to the task for all of them.
Kevin Miller's keynote was a great way to kick off the Conference. He outlined accomplishments of the last year, with the release of versions 2.2 and 2.5, and hinted at some future goodies coming down the road. While all of us were forbidden from sharing some of the specifics of his future plans for Run Rev, I can say this: For all those who had to listen to my whingeing about Bugzilla #624 during the Monterrey Rev Summit this last summer, it seems Kevin is taking an interested in better support for making drawing apps -- and a whole lot more.
After the keynote we enjoyed cocktails and talked, and I don't know if I can express just how delightful it was to finally meet folks like Graham Samual, Monte Brille, Klaus Major, and all the rest in person. Such wonderful discussion on everything from life in Malta to current projects and of course our favorite Bugzilla entries. ;) It was too bad many of us had jet lag -- the shuttle to return to the hotel came far too early, though at least for myself I can say the rest was needed.
ERC Journal Day 2:
Malte Brill started the day with a good overview of Rev basics for all the newcomers here, from buttons to players and the message path.
Once the basics were covered he showed us the more exotic stuff: his new multimedia library, which rocks. You may have seen it in revOnline, and on the preview page for the ERC. There's more to the library than I can cover here, but in brief it provides handy handlers for managing the movement of objects, but via script and constrained responses to mouse drags. Really nice stuff, and the demo stack for the library, like all of Malte's work, is very graphically pleasing. He covered the elliptical movement algorithms today, and we're all looking forward to his session tomorrow on path-based movement.
After a brief coffee break (one thing I like about Europe is that no one asks if you want decaf) Klaus Major began his session on algorithms. His was a very interesting approach, introducing algorithm design with the admonition that too often people solve problems by thinking about them in unnecessarily complex terms. The goal for his session was to craft a simple implementation of the classic Memory Game.
We've all played Memory, the game of matching tile images, but certainly for myself my familiarity with it as a user has me taking it for granted to the point that I'm rather cloudy in imagine how I would sort out building it. Thankfully Klaus is here to show the way.
The first of his session took place away from the computer, discussing the steps we might use if we were to build such a game in the physical world. Once we had sorted out the basic steps needed to build the game, Klaus went to the computer and created an implementation of Memory from scratch, with scalable functions that work well with, as he says, "any number of tiles from two to twenty thousand." Klaus' style uses friendly and clear names for handlers that make it easy to determine the handler's scope: the handler that responds to mouse clicks is named "hasBeenClicked", and it calls a routine to do check the result named "elChecko".
What could well have been sloppy, verbose code in my hands was delivered by Klaus in just a few lines, well-crafted because they take strong advantage of Revs' ability to let you focus on the human-logic side of things more than lower-level bit-counting.
After a brief break, Klaus dropped into a cabaret act: a monologue from "the engine", a sometimes petulant 14-year-old who notes wryly, "Scott Raney is my father, but my mother is unknown." When Mssr. N. Gene receives a message, he needs to find the proper recipient, checking in first with the irate Italian Mr. FronteScripte, and working his was back to two Dutchmen both named Grouppe but one with a tatoo'd checkmark for "bad behavior", at last completing the journey with an old German general named Heinrich Backscrippt who can't understand the message because of a mildly risque language translation issue.
_______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
