for details.Occurs July 28 - Aug 2, 2003.lv For those of us unable to be present, I hope someone takes on the recorder role and lets us know what is going on. - RS: Yes, please...DKF I'll pop on some notes on as I make them...CF I put an overview of the conference at Tcl'2003.MR I've posted some photos at http://www.markroseman.com/tcl/conf2003.htmlAK: My conference travelog now at AK at the Tenth Annual Tcl/Tk Conference.AK: And my photos are at http://purl.org/net/akupries/conf/tcl2003/tcl2003.htmlMC Tue 29 July: The hotel apparently had a T1 from January through sometime in June of this year, when it was removed. The hotel has DSL, but the ISP is AOL. Currently we're using Burrow (written in Tcl, naturally) running on the Windows desktop of one of the hotel employees to tunnel out over port 80 to an HTTP proxy and irc (for the Tcler's chat) and SSH (currently to a Linux box I have, and to a machine stevel has--more mappings available upon request, and with an SSH connection you should be able to route just about anything over it, under *nix at least). We also have port 25 going to an outbound SMTP server for those that need that.At the conference, configure your browser to use 192.168.1.100 port 80 as a proxy.Update: as of Tuesday evening there are now two aggregated idal-up modems providing bandwidth and the proxy isn't needed.
MC Wed 30 July: Each of the tutorials has been progressively more attended. I attended Ken Jones's Tk tutorial and his thread extension tutorial, along with Clif Flynt's C extension tutorial, and stevel's MetaKit and OOMK tutorial. All were excellent. This evening about 20 of us went to a local pizza place, "The Cottage Inn", for dinner. The food was great, and the conversation good. The Poll: Argument Expansion Syntax naturally came up in conversation...AK: Six of us got lost and ended up at "The Brown Jug" instead. They there ok too. And yes, argument expansion was one of the topics too.
[AP] It would be nice if there were actual video recordings, of the conference, for sale.lv I would find it surprising if there were, as that tends to be a pricey conference feature and this year the goal was to keep prices to a minimum.CF I videotaped several sessions on Friday and Satdy, limited by breaking the video camera, and not getting things arranged promptly. Given too much time I have this vision for "Tcl/Tk: The Movie". We also did audio recordings of most sessions. I don't know the quality of any of these (yet).Mac Cody: Any possibiliy that the audio recordings could be digitized, converted to MP3s, and posted for those who could not attend?AK: The Linux.au folks used Speex instead of MP3's. This is a codec geared towards speech encoding and lives under the Ogg umbrella.CF 8/4: I scanned one of the audio tapes yesterday, and it appears that the recordings are good enough to digitize. I think Gramofile is the best digitizer for this, but it seems best supported on debian, so I'm building a debian system to do the conversions. I'm trying to think of a painless way to merge the digitized audio and powerpoint/gif/html slides (a snack application, perhaps) to distribute.Mac Cody: In the head-long rush to use the latest Linux audio-gadget, please try to ascribe to the KISS philosophy. I don't want to spend as much time setting up my Linux box to listen to the audio files as actually listening to the audio files! This is why I suggested MP3 format. It is probably the most usable format for the greatest number of platforms without too much fuss to access. I can also burn a CD-R with MP3 files and listen to them on my Rio Volt player while I commute to work. :) As I think about it, it would also be "a good thing" to have access to the presentation slides to view while listening to the audio files. Are they going to be made available?sheila 8/6: KIS is good, but the app he chooses to encode the tapes with won't affect which app you must choose to listen to them with, right? If he encodes them in ogg format (and there are ogg players for many platforms), someone could convert them to mp3 as well for people who have trouble finding an ogg client (it would be cool if my rio could play oggs, but it can't).Mac Cody: Well, I've never heard of Speex until CF mentioned it above. I try to keep up on what apps are out there for Linux, but there is so much happening now-a-days that it is becoming difficult. That, in itself, is actually an exciting thing to say about Linux!
MR Sat 2 Aug: A big theme at this conference was the sad state of Tk, having fallen behind most everything else in terms of a decent look&feel, lack of modern widgets, etc. Larry McVoy kicked that discussion off in his keynote and helped to reinforce it throughout the rest of the conference. Larry came away a bit happier, realizing that people have found ways to work around their problems (e.g. Brian Griffin's work), but he and everyone else recognized how important it is to take this whole thing a lot further, and have things work right by default. It's been a long time since the traditional one-line "Hello World" in Tk actually did the right thing (IMHO).There was some general agreement about working out both a longer term roadmap for serious updating of Tk, which might well include many non-backwards compatible changes (so for Tcl/Tk 9 timeframe), as well as other shorter term steps along the way. Better defaults, bringing in more widgets into the core distribution, making it easier to contribute, etc. were all things that came out of the discussion. I hope we can keep some momentum behind this. Larry's offered to kick in some money and other resources, so I hope we can leverage that to help move things forward and bring some new energy into Tk.DKF Mon 4 Aug: Just pointing out that there was a consensus among the TCT members who were there that Tk does need work and that answering the points Larry raised was a good way forward. And that we could easily create an experimental branch to do this sort of work (perhaps using BitKeeper for the revision control software, since that will interoperate with CVS) and then fold that stuff back into mainline Tk as-and-when the formal parts of the process are done. Getting a TIP through is much easier when there is concrete, in-style code already to play with.What Larry asked for (and I think these are good ideas):
- a tabbed notebook widget
- a table widget
- a tree widget
- a properties dialog
- a default L&F on Windows that was more like Windows (with Win2k being a perfectly acceptable target)
for the work going on relating to this Tk emphasis. Apparently there is also http://noucorp.com/mailman/listinfo/tk-nextgen .See also Tcl'2003.
