[ale] [ANNC] ALE CENTRAL MTG. for Thurs., May 20th, 2010

[Aaron Ruscetta]

Only two Shell programming days left until...

-- "Seat Belts and Air Bags for Bash" --
presented by Michael Potter of Replatform Technologies, LLC

The ALE Central Meeting for
Thursday, May 20th, at 7:30pm will be:

Synopsis:
-- This presentation will focus on the underutilized features of bash
that are critical to building production quality scripts. Demos will
show you how to turn on options and error trapping that expose
the hidden time bombs in the code.

Turning these features on should be considered a requirement,
much like turning on "strict" and "warnings" is considered a
requirement for Perl programs.

Also, as much of the bash syntax has become outdated, the
presentation will explain which syntax is best to use and which
syntax to avoid.

Knowledge of any of the common UNIX scripting languages
will be sufficient to understand the presentation and script
authors at all proficiency levels should find value in attending.
Although the presentation does not address differences between
Korn shell and bash, much of what will be discussed also
applies to Korn shell.

Bio:
-- Michael Potter has been working in IT since 1989, when he
switched from programming automotive embedded systems.

Since that time he has been involved in projects related
to moving mainframe applications to UNIX and Linux using
open-source technologies.  Projects have included
* a CICS emulator written in C,
* a source code control and configuration system,
* a DFSORT like set of utilities that work similar
 to sed/grep/sort tools on unix,
* a JCL to bash conversion scheme, and
* a scheme to add web service interface to
 mainframe applications.

Michael recently released his mainframe socket emulation
code as open source.  This code will allow socket code
originally written on the mainframe to be recompiled
and run on Linux.

Michael recently moved his mainframe rehosting business,
Replatform Technologies, LLC, from Chicago to Atlanta.
And just for fun you can check out his Atlanta Startup
Weekend project here:  <http://www.instantloop.com>

You can reach Michael at michael at potter.name
<http://www.replatformtech.com/>

=============
We will be meeting at our usual venue, Emory Law School,
Gambrel Hall, rm 1C. Meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm
Directions to Emory Law School can be found at:
<http://ale.org/?page_id=2>

As always, this announcement information is also posted
at  <http://ale.org>