[LRUG] Topic for Next meeting

[Benjohn Barnes]

On 24 May 2006, at 14:06, Robert McKinnon wrote:

>
> If we stick to the second Monday of the month for the next meeting,  
> the
> date is 12 June. Benj, are you able to make that day? If so, shoot  
> me a
> little summary & bio and I'll get Wendy to put that up on the LRUG
> meeting page (http://skillsmatter.com/london-ruby-ug).

Okay:

Me -

I'm Benjohn Barnes, and I've been a programmer since I was about 8.  
I'm 30 now. I started on the BBC in BASIC, then added in assembly. My  
major interests have been computer graphics. I'm also very interested  
in how people can describe computer systems though, and in various  
other fields of computer science.

I learnt c++ (and many "exotic" languages at university, now sadly,  
mostly forgotten, but I hope the thinking isn't) at university, and  
used that almost exclusively for the next 10 years. I consider myself  
pretty good.

I started learning Ruby about 8 months ago. Having looked at plenty  
of other c++ alternatives (Lua, Python, Squeak, Scheme, F-Script,  
Objective c) something about it really gripped me, or perhaps almost  
everything about it really gripped me, particularly the instal on my  
Mac iBook.

I'm currently using Ruby to drive QC tests for a Digital TV company  
called NDS. I'm interested in using Ruby for computer graphics, and  
many other things that I hope to get round to one day!

Talk -

I propose to build a _very_ simple "talker". Really nothing more than  
a socket that accepts connections that are sent to everyone  
connected. Hell - disconnection may well not get covered! I'll use  
Ruby's TCPServer and TCPSocket classes for this. I'm going to built a  
very simple manager for these objects. I'll cover adding  
functionality to them by "extend"ing them with an event handler. I'll  
make use of IRB, and demo ideas in that while building up a script  
for the code. I'm imagining that it'll take half an hour. I'm hoping  
to show off how easy this stuff is in Ruby.

Cheers,
	Benjohn