Chicago Area Tcl Users Group

2006/11/08 Bryan Oakley: the third wednesday scheme will work for me only part of the time, unfortunately. I have a week on / week off custody schedule with my kids, and the weeks they are with me I can't get away in the evenings. I'll come the weeks I can, though.

2006/11/08 skm: How about the third Wednesday of every month as a general rule? How about alternating locations between the city and the burbs? good or bad idea?

Next week, I'm guessing I can show up, and maybe Bryan. Perhaps we'll have more people for December, though I'm sure attendence will be affected by the holidays. I'd really like it if someone other than me could help organize these things. I am not a charismatic meeting organizer, though I will start to investigate the possibility of hosting meetings at my place of work. It is conveniently located. I have to figure out hoops to jump through for security, though, so I can't promise anything right now.

2006/11/07 snichols: I wish I could make it, but I have a prior commitment.

2006/11/07 skm: Bryan Oakley, you have a deal! Now we just need to find a meeting room. I cannot wrestle up a room at my place in the space of one week, can you? (I'm still going to show up at Bean Addiction this Wednesday. It's a pleasant place.)

2006/11/06 skm: Does anyone have a talk handy? if not, is anyone interested in a purely social gathering of tclers? I work very conveniently near to Bean Addiction in Presidental Towers, which has free wifi and excellently prepared expresso. I propose we meet there. How about this Wednesday after work, where after work varies from 5:30 to 8:00, so give me feedback on that. If none of you show up, I'm likely to show up anyway. it's a relaxing place. We could copy the practice of the java user group -- they have meetings in the burbs and downtown.

As I said below, I'd like to hear about o-r frameworks for tcl. If none exist, I'm interested in writing one because I think this type of thing should really exist. So, I'd like to either hear about existing ones, or get tips on approaches I'd want to take if writing one. I'm going to do surveys of how other languages handle this, e.g. at work I use java and we use hibernate here, and of the members of the local python user group (chipy) pointed me to http://www.sqlalchemy.org/

as an example of this in python. There was a talk given at a tcl conference a while back Standard Interface: An Object to Relational Mapping Interface to Relational Databases [1] which could be a starting point.

Bryan Oakley cannot make this wednesday, Nov 8th, 2006. The following week would work for me. I'd be glad to give a talk about something at one of the meetings.

2006/10/25 skm: holy cow has it been a while. I've been insanely busy for the past year and haven't had any opportunity to run a user group. Are people still interested in having a Chicago tcl user group? I'd still like to have one, though maybe we should meet up with the Naperville population of tcl users.

I'd like to hear some talks on object-relational frameworks in tcl. If there are none, then I am interested in writing one, because I'd really like to see such a think exist in the tcl world.

Bryan Oakley, now a resident of a Chicago suburb, would gladly participate.

SEH 20061025 -- I'd be all for a Chicago/Naperville meetup, especially if we could get SRIV to show up with his bag of tricks.

MDD: Sounds good to me, though it would be a long trip from NJ for SRIV to make it.

SEH My bad, I thought he was local...

2005/04/25 skm: Update: Paul Z and I will be very busy for most of May, so we will be unable to plan a talk until after May. We haven't had a meeting in a while, and I don't want to let too much time slip by without one.

[bchristy] was the last meeting a year and a half ago? (info below dated sept '03)

snichols I'd be interested in attending a Chicago area meeting. When is the next one scheduled?

Upcoming Meetings

In the works...

Paul Zaremba will give a talk on monitoring build status with tcl and lava lamps

Links

ActiveState's User Groups page [2].

There is a low volume mailing list for the group. To subscribe, visit http://groups-beta.google.com/group/chitcl

Potential suggested topics for future TUG meetings

TclMagick
Using Boost.Build with starpacks
Automated testing
Automated GUI testing
Performance/load testing
Griffin
Security and tcl

Please add to the list.

Group Projects

Does anyone have ideas for a ChiTug tcl project? We have a Komodo license for ChiTug.

On the location of the meetings

I want to include as many people as possible in the Chicago area. Perhaps we can alternate locations -- Chicago, Suburbs, etc. Please post suggestions here.

MDD: Where do people live? I'm in Wheaton.

sheila: I live near Lawrence and Kimball.

Old Chi-TUG Meetings

The September 25 2003, 6:30 pm meeting

Clif Flynt gave a talk on BWidgets.

A copy of Clif Flynt's, Tcl: A Developer's Guide [3], and Brent Welch's, Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk (3rd Edition) [4], were given out as a door prizes.

Details on the Topic

MGS: Although I won't be able to attend (I live in San Francisco), I'm interested to know what Clif Flynt will be saying about the BWidget toolkit. Some sort of beginners' tutorial guide? New features? Future plans? Just curious.

Clif Flynt: The BWidgets talk is an Intro talk that describes what the package is, how to use the notebook, main window, menu descriptors, and a few other widgets. It runs about an hour. It's mostly a beginner's tutorial overview. This is an adaptation of a talk I gave at FOSDEM about using Tcl/Tk to put a GUI onto a non-GUI application with open and exec.

Directions Hey folks...here is the mVerify contact page which has a map and directions...http://www.mverify.com/Contact_contact.shtml

We will be meeting in a conference room, provided by Jim Hanlon, in the Apparal Center [5], just West of the Merchandise Mart. The street address is 350 North Orleans. Office is 950. The name on the door is Adexis. Doors open at 6PM. There will be signs on the door to make it easier to find.

To find the conference room, take the escalator to the 2nd floor elevator lobby, and go the 9th floor. Use the Main door at the West End of elevator lobby (at 6PM, turn toward the sunset). The only possible mistake is to enter the Holiday Inn, which shares the building and has separate elevators. So ignore the Holiday Inn environment, and take the up escalator. You do not need to sign in with hotel security since you are not going to the Holiday Inn.

Parking and CTA Information

CTA Blue, Orange and Brown lines are within 3 blocks; Metra commuter rail is 4-6 blocks, depending. If you're driving, on-street parking [6] is available near the East Bank Club ( 500 North Kingsbury St ) or the Blommer Chocolate factory ( 600 West Kinzie ) - those seem to be P9 and P45 on the map ref'd earlier in this sentence.

Public Transportation

CF: The South Shore Commuter line will drop folks at the Randolph St exit at 6:20 PM, and goes East again until after midnight. I believe it's a few blocks walk from Randolph to the Merchandise Mart.