Toronto JUG is the biggest user group in Toronto which was created base on one particular computer language. We have more than 1000 members and have more than 100 members attend monthly meeting. Toronto JUG was formed in 1996 and have a very good domain from 1998 – jug.org. But we lost it at the end of 2007.

Just got a updating email from Mr. Steve Rosenberg, the president of Toronto JUG.

In his email, he said:

The jug.org domain expired, and the notice was sent to a Quest sysadmin who is no longer with the company. So we’ve lost the jug.org domain (somebody snatched it up very quickly!).

So from now on Toronto JUG will start using new domain: http://www.torontojug.org/

Not too bad, maybe even better.

Anyway, the lesson for me is:

Make sure use a reliable email address when register a domain name. Gmail could be a good choice.

Upcoming event:

• Toronto JUG February 2008 Meeting

Task-Focused Programming with Eclipse Mylyn

Current IDEs overload us with tens of thousands of artifacts that make up an enterprise application, and as a result we spend a lot of time searching, scrolling, and navigating through the code. Eclipse Mylyn focuses the IDE to show only the information relevant to the current task. This makes the work with large systems much easier and also helps with switching from one task to another. Mylyn monitors developer’s activity to identify information relevant to the current task, and uses this task context to focus the Eclipse UI on the interesting information and hide the uninteresting. This improves productivity by reducing searching and scrolling, and makes navigation really simple. By making task context explicit, Mylyn facilitates reusing past efforts, and sharing expertise. Task management facilities also provide integration with issue tracking repositories, such as Bugzilla, Trac, JIRA and several others bringing all required information right into the IDE.

Presented by Eugene Kuleshov

Eugene Kuleshov is a software developer with over 15 years of industry experience. Eugene is a committer on Eclipse Mylyn project and an active contributor to several other open source projects, including ASM, Maven and Eclipse. He blogs about various software-related topics at http://jroller.com/page/eu/

Couple of things need to remember about Facebook groups:

1. You have to choose a network which your group belongs to
2. After you click “Finish and View”, you couldn’t change network anymore
3. Only the people are in the same network can join your group

So, here’s one things make sure you do it right at the very beginning:

1. Set Global as the network of your group.

But, if I already created a group and want to change its network, what can I do?

The answer from Facebook is very simple: recreate it.

Today we created a new group for ToRCHI:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7729954398

And the next monthly meeting will be the “Tour of IBM’s Innovation Centre“, make sure add it to your events.

I just came back from TorCHI monthly meeting, it was a great event again. Really appreciate the great efforts came from the managers of TorCHI and Leonardo Ruppenthal who is the awesome speaker tonight. Too bad I forgot bring my camera. I will catch up next time for sure.

Leonardo Ruppenthal is a senior user experience consultant at Bell Web Solution. He talked about what they are doing in Bell to help users easily access videos. And he inspired a great discussion on the status and predictions of user generated contents and old school TV channels.

About TorCHI:

Toronto Region’s special interest group on Computer-Human Interaction (ToRCHI) is a local chapter of the ACM’s special interest group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI). This chapter has members in Toronto, Guelph, Waterloo, Peterborough, and other nearby locations in Ontario. We are psychologists, designers, human factors engineers, computer scientists and computer users who meet to discuss and exchange ideas about human computer interaction and user interface design. We meet at 7:00pm in the second or third week of every month at various locations. The format of our meetings usually consists of refreshment time, presentations by invited guest speakers or discussion groups, followed by question periods, and open discussions.

Anyone who is in Toronto and interested in UX and CHI could/should join this. Next meeting is February 27. It is a tour at IBM’s Global Services lab. Should be cool!

And the ToRCHI Facebook is on: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2323294704