Smalltalk at EDC
Igor Dmytryk
The core trading platform used by the Treasury group at Export Development Canada is written in Smalltalk. The system has been under constant development for over 10 years. The talk will demo the system and cover aspects of our development methodology, testing and future plans. RSVP required.

Location: Meet at main lobby of EDC
151 O'Connor, Ottawa
Wednesday, Feb 10th, 2010 at 6:00pm

RSVP is mandatory for this event so Igor can make arrangements with security

Please RSVP to david@simberon.com if you plan to attend.

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I have some time opening up in March and since Simberon hasn't held an Intro to VisualWorks course in a while, I thought I'd check to see if there's enough interest to hold one. If you have enough people at one site who want to take a course (or any of the other courses we offer), I could also deliver an on-site course.

Email me at david@simberon.com if you're interested.

Reporting in Smalltalk

David Buck

Over the years, there have been several attempts to build a reporting framework in Smalltalk. It's difficult, though, to build a framework that has the power to produce the kind of reports expected in modern systems. David will talk about various approaches he's used in the past along with his current favorite of using Apace FOP.

The Code Factory
246 Queen Street, Ottawa
Wednesday, Jan 13th, 2010 at 6:00pm 
 

Please note that there will be a $5 charge per person which goes directly to The Code Factory for the use of the room.

Please RSVP to david@simberon.com if you plan to attend.

Visit http://smalltalk.ottawa.on.ca for more details about the group.

Is it just me or are the spammers getting stupider? I get a lot of spam myself because I keep my e-mail address visible without obfuscating tricks. As a business owner, I do want people to be able to contact me easily. Making it hard for them isn't good business.

Sometimes when I get a spam e-mail, I have to look at it carefully to determine that it's really spam. Are the hyperlinks pointing to a strange domain? Is this really coming from the organization that claims to be sending it? Are they asking for information that they shouldn't be asking for over e-mail? Are there attachments that look dangerous?

Today, I received a spam e-mail that purported to be from Facebook claiming that all users need to update their account agreements. A few things signalled alarms on this e-mail. First, I don't think that Facebook would send me an e-mail address with a sex shop e-mail address in the "Reply-To" field. Second, the e-mail wasn't asking me to visit a web site. Instead, the instructions were:

Please unzip the attached file and run "agreement.exe" by double-clicking it.

My virus checker suppressed the attachment so I never even saw it.

Are spammers getting lazy or are they explicitly trying to target people who aren't savvy to these tricks?

I developed the web site for the Internet Ray Tracing Competition (IRTC) in Seaside and made it operational several months ago.  Check out http://www.irtc.org.  I'm finding that lately I don't have much time to make changes to the site and need some volunteers familiar with Smalltalk and Seaside to help out.  The site is running in VisualWorks NC.

If anyone is interested and able to help out, please contact me at david@simberon.com.

The next meeting of the Ottawa Carleton Smalltalk Users Group will be on November 10th, 2009.

Xtreams
Martin Kobetic

The traditional Smalltalk-80 streams have served us well for decades now. They are reasonably simple and reliable (for the most part). However, over time we have also accumulated a lot of practical experience in a wide range of circumstances. We know a lot about where they work well and where not so much. Xtreams is an experiment (at this point) to see if we can distill that experience into something that will be a worthy successor. We are fairly enthusiastic about the current state of Xtreams. The implementation is still fairly small and straightforward while already providing some exciting improvements and addressing a lot of the perceived shortcomings of the traditional streams in general and in their VisualWorks incarnation in particular. This talk will be a brief introduction to the present state of Xtreams, demonstrating some of the design choices and capabilities. I also hope to try some hands-on experiments together with whatever problems people might be interested in and see what kind of solutions we can come up with.

The Code Factory
246 Queen Street, Ottawa
Tuesday, Nov 10th, 2009 at 6:00pm

Please note that there will be a $5 charge per person which goes directly to The Code Factory for the use of the room.

The next OCSTUG meeting will take place Tuesday, October 13th:

Smalltalk Superpowers Workshop

Smalltalk allows you to do things that are inconceivable in the mainstream languages used today. This workshop is a show and tell where everyone will show the superpowers they have in Smalltalk. Come show us how you can accomplish extraordinary things in this extraordinary language. All Smalltalk dialects are welcome.

The Code Factory
246 Queen Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 6:00pm
 

Please RSVP to david@simberon.com if you plan to attend.

Please note that there will be a $5 charge per person which goes directly to The Code Factory for the use of the room.

The Ottawa Carleton Smalltalk Users Group has wrapped up its elections for a new president. I would like to congratulate Alan Knight on the win. I will continue to support Alan and the rest of the group and I hope all the members of the OCSTUG will do the same. Congratulations, Alan. We should have an interesting year coming up.