Moore-Norman Technology Advisory Council Meeting Fall 2008

I was the only non-teacher/school admin person to show up for this AC. I really need to get some other people to show up next time.

I left 45 minutes before the meeting. The traffic was really bad. It took me 55 minutes to get down there.

Dinner was great - sandwiches, potato salad, soda, etc.

The meeting was in the classroom. Frederick talked about what he teaches the students and asked for input on new languages to expose them too. I think the only language I mentioned was Ruby/Rails. Should have mentioned Scala. Frederick didn't seem to know how the newer dynamically typed languages were taking off.

I also mentioned writing tests. The students really need to start off writing tests for their code. Even pair programming and doing TDD.

I volunteered to speak to the students about what it's like be a programmer, and whatever else we come up with. I'll probably talk about the importance of tests and what it's like to work at a big corporation as a programmer.

The swag was a tablet, pen, and a 4 port usb hub. Pretty nice.

Francis Tuttle Advisory Council Meeting

I attended another FT AC meeting yesterday. It was nice to see Kris Vanderwater and Marc Hill again. Brett Schuchert has the leader of the group since last year and he does a great job.

There was a lot of talk about TDD, BDD, Agile, XP, etc with great input from everone. We always come up with way too much for Marc to be able to teach in 9 months.

I'm thinking he needs to teach them the language (which he does with a self paced online course) and then get them into groups of 4 to work on a team project. Along the way, try to mention as many aspects of programming as he can, drilling down into some of the more important or popular pieces.

Some of the things mentioned that I have to google to learn about were: JQuery, json, google code, rdf & sparql. (from a different source - Bruce Cox keeps mentioning Woodstock when he talks about his java 2 course that is using jsf). A List Apart was mentioned as a great source (along with w3) for web type stuff.

Google Code looks really neat. I guess google has internships etc that use this...maybe? interesting. Les probably told me about it a long time ago.

Marc was wanting a site(s) where students could go watch videos that talk about things like TDD, XP, Agile, etc. The only site I thought of was The Server Side. Does anyone know of any others?


The swag this year was a FT clip with a magnet on it and a nice pen. The coffee, donuts, bagels, and fruit were great too.

NetBeans 6.1 - part 1 (of 1)

I started this a few weeks ago and never came back to it....

I installed NetBeans last night so I could play around with. If I ever do a presentation at the Okc Java Users Group, I thought it might be interesting to use NetBeans.

The install went pretty quick. The download was only 223mbs. I thought it would be twice that.

So I fired it up and figured out how to create a project (not bad). It has different types of projects that you can create and Swing was one of them. So I had it create a Swing app for me. I haven't looked at Swing in 6 years. That was using WSAD and their designer sucked.

It opened up the classes it created for the DesktopApplication, about window, and controller. I added a button on the panel with designer. This designer view really makes me think of VB or Powerbuilder. Just drag and drop and edit the different attributes in the Properties tab.

Editing the code is different enough from Rad(eclipse) that I am really struggling to figure out how to do stuff. Instead of Organizing Imports with ctrl-shift-O, it's Fix Imports ctrl-shift-I. The private methods in some classes are uneditable but can be changed by updating the properties.

I don't think I'll look into NetBeans anymore. And Paul Smith and I are going to talk about Collections at the December jug. What fun.