Squeak People diary for FrankCag

12 Dec 2004

Sun, 12 Dec 2004 20:14:27 -0700

I'm just realizing it's coming up to a year now that I've been semi-active in the day-to-day workings of Squeak and the Squeak community. I started with 3.6 this time last year and now we're up to 3.9. Been keeping IRCe afloat, done a few fixes here and there, played around with some personnel Squeak stuff... Not as much as I had hoped to get accomplished a year ago, but it could be worst.

At this time last year I was on a very old windoz PC. Using morphic was OK but just barely. Now finally we've gone totally MAC and OS X. What a relief! A powerbook G4 and a new IMac G5 with the big screen. Never going back again. Its great to have a really nice GUI sitting on top of Unix. Nice to get back to my Unix roots, might just start coding in C again!

One thing I have felt in the past few weeks (months?) is a change in the Squeak community environment. It's not something I can put my finger on but I definitely sense a shift in the wind. Hopefully we can stay together and continue moving Squeak forward and not splinter off into a dozen different fiefdoms.

Enough for now, time for a beer and a little stick throwing with the dog, peace.

21 Mar 2004

Sun, 21 Mar 2004 05:47:38 -0700

Well I am re-entering the land of Macintosh. Just got a Powerbook G4. It is really a very nice machine. Haven't felt this way about a computer in a long time. Mac OS X 10.3.3, 1.25 Ghz G4, 1 Gb ram and the display, It will be tough not just spending all my time watching DVD's.

It was really great sucking over Squeak, installing it and bringing it up. it didn't drop a note. Even installed the new combined IRC/Enhanced IRC package (which by the way I am now maintaining) brought it up and got on to IRC.

The speed up over my old box (a windoz PC that has seen far to many upgrades) was amazing. Now all i need is a real internet connnection (none of this 56k dialup crap) and watch out.

3 Mar 2004

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 19:45:47 -0700

Well of course I found problems right away. When I tried to download the project into a fresh image from SqueakMap it failed to load.

I had downloaded to SqueakMap the last Monticello change file! Of course this only had the changes from the last version (ala SCCS), not the whole thing. Do I fell sheepish!

I dropped back to downloading a CS of the quotes project and will try to figure out how to get Monticello to spit out a complete version.

2 Mar 2004

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 18:52:45 -0700

Cretaed and released my first project, Quotes. It displays quotes and their authors in a random sequence. The program fist was on my web page in Java then DHTML and now in Smalltalk/Squeak.

It was an interesting learning experience, putting all the different elements together. I now have a fair handle on Morphic and some knowledge of Monticello (enough to get packages in and out, I'm sure there is more to it).

13 Feb 2004

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 23:10:02 -0700

Getting use to Squeaks interface and the Smalltalk stuff is coming back. Finally figured out changesets and what they're good for (absolutly nuthing, say it again, huh!) (sorry 'bout that, got carried away).

Away I've always found the best way to get to know a system is to dive in and fix bugs. So that's what I'm up to. Got a temporary fix for the Largelist/EnnhancedIRC conflict. Made clockMorph show 24 hour time if you want and fixed a bug in TextPropertiesMorph. am now looking at a bug in AlignmentMorph.

9 Feb 2004

Mon, 09 Feb 2004 18:54:14 -0700

Last week I submitted my first bug fix. It was for a bug in changing the emphasis in a StringMorph>>changeEmphasis. Unfortunetly I subbmited it in the wrong format and before I could re-submit it correctly it was picked up and corrected by Stephane Ducasse.

Over the weekend I submitted an enhancement for clockMorph to allow it to display it's time in 24 hour time. Not a big change but it wa the first time I created a changeset, filing out, etc. I also found a bunch of squeak documentation on minnow that, while I was aware it was there, I never really explored it in depth.

I'm still working on the conflict between the Enhanrced IRC package and the LargeLists chhanges. Played around with pluggableTextMorph's to get a better idea how they're suppose to work so I can hopefully get a better idea as to what is broke.