SUMMARY: first technical PPPM meeting

[Tim Chambers]

Attendees: Tim Chambers, Bob Gattis, Don Johnson
Location: Panda Express

Don asked us for help solving a memory problem he's having. He uses a system
called Information Architecture (IA) to organize documents. It uses a
structural DTD in XML to describe document structure. The IA also handles
document content. The system converts the XML documents to HTML for access
from a web browser.

It works alright up to about 10,000 documents. But the process runs out of
memory (4Gb) on a collection of 25,000 documents.

Don brought his laptop and demonstrated the system to us. It's released
under the GPL. He said he'd send it to me for our PPPM Web site. He gave me
permission to nag him to get it done. (Don, this is your first nag. :-)

# # #

You all might not realize it, but we haven't had a "technical" PPPM meeting
before today. You might say that Eric Raymond's talk (jointly sponsored by
the PPPM and Pikes Peak Linux Users Group) counts, but he didn't talk about
Perl.

So I'd like to take this opportunity to encourage all members to send me
ideas for future meetings.

FYI, I talked with Rob Nagler of bivio.net (Boulder), who is on our list.
Bivio has a Perl-based Web technology you can check out for yourself at
www.bivio.net. He's also currently finishing up work on a new book. (Care to
share any details, Rob? I don't want to announce anything specific without
your consent.) He and I agreed to touch base again in the fall. I bring this
up because I consider Rob's book and Bivio's technology to be fodder for
future PPPM meetings, too.

<>< Tim