Fall seems to be the time for fun and adventure for the Virtual Family! Two new nannies were on the job (Kathy and Rhian), barely able to exert any influence on Sis or Junior, let alone anyone else in the family, when yet another e-mail arrived. Plans were made, CD's were cut (well, the Virtual Family had to travel somehow, right?), manuals were printed (every family has its quirks that need explaining!), and airplane reservations were made. The Virtual Family was flying from
to    
That news had the new nannies' heads spinning let me tell you!!! 

The nannies arrived in Saskatoon on September 24th and were warmly welcomed by the folks at the University of Saskatchewan.  The first task the next morning was get the Virtual Family settled in on some 30 computers in the lab.  It was hard work, installing the Family individually on each computer...the nannies were in the lab all morning!  Unfortunately, the
network didn't allow Virtual Family to do the things it needs to do to make it run (load pictures, load sound)! 
We had 2 workshops to do that day.  In the first workshop, we used Maria's laptop to show the girls what Virtual Family was all about while Kathy was working like crazy getting things to work on their computers!  The girls seemed to enjoy it nevertheless. 

Between the first and second workshop, the nannies created a policy file (think of it as a note you'd give to the teacher to get you out of class if you're ill) that told Java's SecurityManager   that Virtual Family was not a malicious program that would destroy anything on the computers.  They also had to some quick reprogramming of one of the VF files.  Okay, so the tutorial STILL didn't work by the time the second group came in, but at least the rest of Virtual Family worked and they and Maria were able to give a workshop, using UltraEdit (a text editor) to open up the code files and do some real programming. 

Now imagine you're a server.  And 30 of your computers want to compile something, at the same time, on the same hard drive.  What do you do?  Answer all of their requests r...e...a...l...l...y s...l...o...w...l...y.   The most gratifying part of the whole workshop was to go through all of that trouble, all of that typing, the slow compilation process, the slow re-running of Virtual Family, and finally seeing the looks on the faces of the girls when they could see that they actually made a change in the program!

Somebody said to us afterwards, "but all we did was cut and paste and change a few things.  Is that really programming?"  But of course!  Programmers don't always have to start from scratch!

By the way, at some point we hope you've seen our technical support page.  A lot of it came from all the things we learned in Saskatoon!