What I did with Rev last night

[Jeff Reynolds]

Not a personal story, but a pararallel. about 8 years ago the  
Monterey Bay Aqarium plowed about $1 million into revamping their  
auditorium where some of my exhibits run. New mega projection system,  
HD non compressed video server, huge amx control system, the works. I  
was also updating my exhibit system (then written in metacard, now  
rev) and also making my system work with all these new systems. now  
instead of talking directly with all the equipment i had to to talk  
through the amx system, i was at the mercy of the rest of the system  
to make my system work. they had a really great amx programmer  
working on things and was on the speaker phone with the HD server  
programmer there as they were getting this first gen HD server to  
work with the amx control system and banging their heads into a big  
wall on something. i finally late in the evening asked (these guys  
were C programmers, way more programming under their belts than i)  
what the hang up was and got a long list of problems, and they were  
now thinking if they wrote a little program to take commands in from  
the serial port and then spit them out to the dos shell they would  
control the HD video server. there was talk of how to engineer this  
beast and what it would require.

i walked away and came back 5 minutes later with little metacard app  
that did just that, read the serial port and spit that out to the dos  
shell. Poped it on the HD server and it started working like a charm.  
jaws hit the floor. in the time it took them to just start listing  
what they would have to do to create the app it was done and running  
with metacard! I get a grin every time i go back to work on things  
there when i see the same little mc app is still running there and  
working great.

it was one of the most satisfying moments for me for such little  
work! Not usually easy to get the C guys to give the hypertalk much  
respect! I have been amazed at what i have been able to do with  
hypertalk in such a rapid and flexible manner over the years. makes  
rabbits pop out of hats!

cheers,

jeff

On Jul 4, 2007, at 7:20 PM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com  
wrote:

> It is so satisfying to be able to write whatever I need. Anyone else
> done little personal stacks with Rev lately?