The April 5th. open Ada-DK meeting was, as usual I’m tempted to say, a fun experience.
We had Jacob Sparre, Kim Rostgaard Christensen, Ulrik Hørlyk Hjort and me talking Ada and software in general an entire evening. And we did get around a lot of subjects:
- Private protected types
- Persistent objects
- Memory mapped files
- Lego Mindstorms (Kim had brought a big box!)
- zlib done in Ada as a possible Ada-DK community project
- How to set up a teaching environment, focused on Ada, for young programmers
- Random thoughts about interesting Ada projects that could help boost her popularity
As I said: Good wholesome fun. If I had the time, I’d do these meetings once every week!
A few days before the meeting, I’d mentioned a problem I had with a private protected type to Jacob, and he advised me to wrap it in a record, and sure enough that solution worked a charm. But after having given the whole problem some more thought, Jacob became convinced that I’d probably stumbled on a bug in GNAT. We should’ve setup some test-code at this meeting, but it never happened. So that specific task is still open. I’m thinking we should start with that at the next meeting.
Yesterday I finally got my new smartphone, so after having had a $50 crap Nokia phone for years and years, I’m finally part of the hip crowd – at least in the phone department. It’s a Nexus S, and so far it appears to be a pretty decent piece of equipment. What I’m getting at with this tale of my smartphone investment, is that I might shoot some pictures/videos at the next meeting, you know, to spread the joy. There’s nothing like pictures/videos of geeks talking tech. It is some of the most popular content on the internet. Isn’t it?
All in all this open Ada-DK meeting was just as great an experience as all the other meetings. I’ve really come to appreciate my fellow Ada-DK members – they truly are a great bunch of guys.
