Squeak People diary for gcorriga

23 Feb 2006

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 19:28:44 -0700

The Weekly Squeak, Light Edition No.1: January 1st - January 7th

Hello, and welcome back to The Weekly Squeak, a weekly report on what's going on in the world of Squeak.

In this issue you'll find:

Steward Teams - a new improvement in Squeak's development process
Network and File teams merged into I/O team
A status report on the PortAudio port
An image with all changes from 3.0 to 3.9
Interesting discussion on select/case constructs
(Laconic) News from the Sophie project
A Seaside demo image
Comparing different Squeak HTTP servers
Squeak Foundation Board election announced
Goran Krampe won't be running for the SqF Board
A tutorial in Spanish on how to create a Christmas Morph
Two nice articles on Blocks and Associations by Ron Teitelbaum
A refactored version of Scamper, now on SqueakMap
ACM's Classic Books in Computer Science
New version of AudioVideoLib available
Chris Muller releases KryptOn 1.0, Magma 1.1
New releases of Pier and Magritte on SqueakMap
A report from the SqueakFoundation board

You'll find the complete report on the Squeak wiki.
The past issues may be found in the Archive.

3 Feb 2006

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 18:56:01 -0700

The Weekly Squeak, Light Edition No.19: December 25th - December 31st

Hello, and welcome back to The Weekly Squeak, a weekly report on what's going on in the world of Squeak.

We're back! Due to some personal problems of some member of the News Team (mostly of its team leader, who was and still is swamped in pre-graduation work), we had to suspend the pubblication of The Weekly Squeak. In the coming days, we'll try to recover with the pubblication of Light Editions of TWS. These light editions will contain pointers to interesting and useful messages which have been sent to the various Squeak-related mailing lists. If you'd like to volunteer some time to submit newsbits or article, please feel free to join us on news@lists.squeakfoundation.org .

In this issue you'll find:

The Squeak Foundation and the Squeak License
New release of the Chronos Date/Time library, now under MIT license
Binary Tree packages compared
Squeak video and webcam support
A SmallLint extension for expected failures
A recap on persistence strategies in Seaside applications
GestionImmo: a Pier based application
A library for POSIX file handling

You'll find the complete report on the Squeak wiki.
The past issues may be found in the Archive.

3 Feb 2006

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 18:54:22 -0700

The Weekly Squeak, Light Edition No.18: December 18th - December 24th

Hello, and welcome back to The Weekly Squeak, a weekly report on what's going on in the world of Squeak.

In this issue you'll find:

Goran Krampe On Socket vs OldSocket and on SocketStreams
Questions and Comments from a Squeak/Seaside Newbie
How to determine programmatically your operating system from Squeak
A holiday morph from Edgar J. De Cleene

You'll find the complete report on the Squeak wiki.
The past issues may be found in the Archive.

28 Dec 2005

Wed, 28 Dec 2005 16:04:26 -0700

The Weekly Squeak No.17: December 11th - December 17th

Hello, and welcome back to The Weekly Squeak, a weekly report on what's going on in the world of Squeak.

Another issue of The Weekly Squeak out of the door, and yet again we're slowly reducing the lateness in publication. We hope you'll enjoy this latest installment!

In this issue you'll find:

ShoreComponents for Seaside 2.6
Squeak 3.9a is on fire!
Some questions about Seaside's architecture
A hosting by the Seaside
An explanation of SqueakMap caching
SqueakSource Update 1.3
Live Seaside Tutorial
New versions of ODBC
Graphics in JavaScript
Internship Position &at Douai
A new Spoon-ful
Upcoming Squeak Chats

You'll find the complete report on the Squeak wiki.
The past issues may be found in the Archive.

26 Dec 2005

Mon, 26 Dec 2005 19:03:45 -0700

SqueakViews: an interview with Cees De Groot

Welcome back to SqueakViews, the column in which we interview the Squeak hackers and developers. In this installment, Giovanni Giorgi has met Cees De Groot, one of the most prolific Squeak hackers and a member of the Squeak Foundation board.

GG: First of all, please share a little about yourself and your background. Where are you from, your studies and your current job.
CDG: I live in the Netherlands, will turn Very Old[tm] next year, and the little bit of formal training that people tried to expose me to was at Nijenrode Business School - even though the IT department sucked, I learnt a lot about business and after dropping out I've been mostly an autodidact. I had various software development jobs in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and the UK and even help setting up some companies in the recent past - read the resume on my website for details if it really interests you :-).
Currently I am self-employed, doing both fixed-price projects and by-the-hour consulting gigs, mostly in some Smalltalk dialect.
GG: You are one of the most famous developer on Squeak. What are your primary working area at the time? What teams are you leading?
CDG: Well, famous is probably an overstatement. Vocal, yes, and by times even actually active. At the moment, I divide my time between Files where I am the team leader and v3.9 and Morphic where I help out. And now and then I come up with a little tool or proof-of-concept, which usually gets announced immediately on squeak-dev... Then of course there is the SqueakFoundation board, where I am a member and we're slowly finding out how to cooperate and how to make the community move forward. It turns out I learnt a lot about community building during my Jini Technical Oversight Committee involvement - I see a lot of history repeating...
GG: Can you do a small description of each of the projects you are working on (and your future plans too)?
CDG: At the moment, I am finishing a project called 'Digital Society of the Past' which resulted in Kolibri, a peer-to-peer system written in wxSqueak; also, I am preparing a new Squeak-based venture which is currently still a bit hush-hush. Kilauea is my main focus at the moment, because it directly forms the foundation for this new venture.
Kolibri is interesting because, to my best knowledge, it is the first project with a complete "I am a Windows application" user experience, from the installer to the (wxSqueak-based) interface. It is also interesting because it does some neat peer-to-peer stuff. The drawback is that it comes up in Dutch, I am planning to do something about that in the near future.
Kilauea is yet another effort to help Squeakers build web applications even faster. I think it differs from for example Mewa or Magritte in that it doesn't give the developer any choice: Kilauea persists in Magma, for example. If you want another persistence mechanism, or something different w.r.t. the web front-end, you're out of luck. This might seem inflexible, but it keeps the code base small and simple, and at the moment I am interested in that above anything else. The end goal is to have a new developer download a Kilauea image and have him have built his first fully-persistent, metadata-driven web application in, say, 5 or 10 minutes.
GG: What do you think of the last directions of the Squeak community? In my humble opinion, Squeak community is rapidly adapting and growing, and must support itself in much more organized way. What is your point of view?
CDG: The Squeak community is probably still 'recovering' from the end of Squeak Central as the leading institution - what we are getting better and better at is removing bottlenecks, so that as little as possible hinges on the effort of just one or two persons. Lots of stuff is happening at the moment, and all at the same time - a new way of maintaining images, a new organization structure "at the top", etcetera. We are happily making lots of mistakes, but so far there seems to be a lot of progress as well. That, and the interest that some high-profile projects like Seaside and Scratch are generating, make me feel quite confident about the future.
We are glad to have been 'adopted' by ESUG so we now have a legal entity to do stuff, but I see that as a temporary solution. The decision process is slow, and we're bound by ESUG's bylaws which of course were setup for different goals. Luckily, Ron Teitelbaum has gotten the interest of the people at the Software Freedom Law Center and they have indicated that they're ready to support us with various issues, ranging from crypto law compliance to formation of a legal entity around Squeak Foundation and licensing issues. We're currently dealing with the crypto stuff so that US-based developers can safely work on the Cryptography project, but if that turns out to work well, I am very much for asking these guys to help us with the other issues as well.
GG: About Squeak Community, tell us the state of your project SqueakPeople.
CDG: Half asleep :-). SqueakPeople currently runs the Advogato.org code, which is in C and stores everything in XML files for some reason. I have code that reads the XML files, but so far have been too lazy to write code that writes them back. If we have that, we can slowly move forward, replacing SqueakPeople's Advogato code with honest Smalltalk code bit by bit, but as long as writing data isn't possible, the project is stalled. The only alternative would be a big bang changeover, but that's an amount of work I'm not able to spend at the moment. So if someone feels like helping me here, you'll have my eternal gratitude :).
I am glad that SqP took off and is now one of the 'core' sites of the Squeak community. There is a lot of value in the web-of-trust, and other sites could profit from it as well (like the Squeak Swiki, where we could limit certain kinds of modification only to people who identify as, say, at least someone with the Apprentice level on Squeak People). So I hate it that we currently have this C code that I'd rather not touch, the sooner this moves to Squeak, the better.
GG: What are your plans for the future?
CDG: I'll be happy if I can continue contributing to Squeak and apply it in my work as well. At the moment, all my paid work is done in various Smalltalk dialects and I am very much planning to keep it that way.

26 Dec 2005

Mon, 26 Dec 2005 18:59:22 -0700

The Weekly Squeak No.16: December 4th - December 10th

Hello, and welcome back to The Weekly Squeak, a weekly report on what's going on in the world of Squeak.

We're fashionably late, but we're finally here with a brand new issue of The Weekly Squeak. This latest issue has a good number of news items, and also sports the latest installment of SqueakViews, in which Giovanni Giorgi meets our favourite Dutch hacker, Cees De Groot. Enjoy!

In this issue you'll find:

November Team Reports
Magma and Seaside integration support
Trouble with the mailing lists
A Pier sample application
A Magma server with web management console
ComSwiki 1.5 released
SqueakLight status update
Feedback from a Squeakland workshop
SqueakSource server image
A Squeak image repository
What does Squeak development look like?
A new test server
New SqueakSource repository for Magritte and Pier
Mantis vs. mailing list: the eternal struggle
Problems with the MediaView browser port
Upcoming Squeak Chats
SqueakViews: an interview with Cees De Groot

You'll find the complete report on the Squeak wiki.
The past issues may be found in the Archive.

20 Dec 2005

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 15:42:57 -0700

The Weekly Squeak No.15: November 27th - December 3rd

Hello, and welcome back to The Weekly Squeak, a weekly report on what's going on in the world of Squeak.

Real life has exacted its toll on the News Team members, keeping them from working on newszine. We're trying to recover, though: the next issue will actually be acceptably late (10 days! ;-P)

In this issue you'll find:

Persistence for lazy people
A forensic tool for dead images
Squeak Map changes and upgrades
Installing the latest HV
Some notes on Squeak's UI
Don't forget your updates
Singletons in Squeak
Stable Smallwiki1 source on Squeaksource
Upcoming Squeak Chats

You'll find the complete report on the Squeak wiki.
The past issues may be found in the Archive.

7 Dec 2005

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 12:06:18 -0700

The Weekly Squeak No.14: November 20th - November 26th

Hello, and welcome back to The Weekly Squeak, a weekly report on what's going on in the world of Squeak.

It seems like this past week has been a little slow on the news side. Could it be that the Squeak developer are working at making Squeak an even better system? Anyway, we are happy to provide you with a good mix of news from the various Squeak-related mailing lists.

In this issue you'll find:

Pier 1.0.0 alpha: now with access control
A German Squeakland success story
SoapCore 0.8 on SqueakMap
A report on the Bern Smalltalk Gathering
squeak-mentors.org
MCConfigurations quick howto
Squeakland and particle systems
SQLite3 FFI wrapper for Mac OS X
Squeak on an electronic paper display
Packaging media with Monticello
More work on the bootstrapped kernel image
Upcoming Squeak Chats

You'll find the complete report on the Squeak wiki.
The past issues may be found in the Archive.

1 Dec 2005

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 11:47:11 -0700

SqueakViews: an interview with Avi Bryant

Welcome back to SqueakViews, the column in which we interview the Squeak hackers and developers. In this installment, Giovanni Giorgi has met (by e-mail) Avi Bryant, creator of many useful Squeak tools and frameworks such as Monticello and Seaside.

GG: First of all, please share a little about yourself and your background. Where are you from, your studies and your current job.
AB: I grew up in Vancouver, Canada and did a degree in Computer Science there at the University of British Columbia. I'm recently back in Vancouver after spending a year in the Netherlands.
I work for a company called Smallthought that I founded with Andrew Catton. We do 100% of our development in Squeak and Seaside. We have some long term development projects that pay the bills, and we provide consulting, training and support to teams in North America and Europe that use Seaside.
We're also working on a commercial product; see http://dabbledb.com for more info.
GG: You are one of the most famous developer on Squeak, of the last two years. You have written Monticello and Seaside, and experimented a lot with Object Oriented Database like Goods, Magma, OmniBase. How do you ended up with Squeak? What way did take you the Squeak community ;) ?
AB: I first became interested in Squeak and Smalltalk in mid-2001. At the time, I was working with Objective-C and Ruby, both of which were heavily inspired by Smalltalk, and I was beginning to become very interested in the ideas around XP and agile development, which arguably came out of the Smalltalk world. So it was a fairly natural step to trace all of these interests back to their origin. However, although I played around with Squeak and Smalltalk/X for a while, it never stuck until I went to that year's OOPSLA to present a demo paper with Andrew. Our work was in the distressingly large category of OOPSLA papers that I sometimes describe as "dragging Java into the 1980s". The activity at Camp Smalltalk, and especially the Squeak BOF, seemed so vibrant and refreshing compared to all of that nonsense, that we both spent the next few days diving seriously into Squeak for the first time. Not long after that, Julian Fitzell and I were supposed to start working on a new web application, and I suggested that we do it in Squeak. So we did.
There were actually two occasions in the following months that almost made me go back to Ruby. The first was when I realized that I wanted to use continuations in Seaside - this was long before its first release. Ruby has a primitive for capturing continuations, and Squeak doesn't, and it looked like, despite Squeak's clear advantages in other areas, I was going to have to continue the work in Ruby to explore the idea. Luckily I was just naive enough to believe that it might be possible even without a primitive, at the image level, and Squeak was just flexible enough that I was right. So I got to keep working in Squeak.
Then, a few months later, Colin Putney (then at Whistler.com) approached me about doing some work with him; he knew me from the Ruby community and wanted to build a new Ruby web framework to use for all of their development. I was in a bit of a fix, because it was an interesting project, but I also knew I didn't have the energy to maintain frameworks in both Ruby and Squeak - and if I was getting paid to work in Ruby, the work in Squeak would have to get set aside. I finally managed to convince him that Squeak was a better choice, and that Whistler.com should use Seaside rather than building something new. Whistler.com doesn't use Smalltalk anymore, but luckily for us Colin's conversion was permanent - and by the end of that project, so was mine.
GG: Can you give us a small description of each of the project you areworking on (and your future plans too)?
AB: Most people probably know about Seaside and Monticello (and if you don't, google for them). So I thought I'd mention a few of the smaller and lesser-known packages I've worked on recently that people might find useful:

Collections-BTree: this is due for a rename, because it now has more in it than just a BTree implementation. It's a bunch of collection classes that are useful for building large indices of things. It's especially geared towards people using OODBs like GOODS, but I'm using it in the image too: the BTree class is great for when you need to select numeric keys by range, and TSTree makes a solid basis for full-text search. TreeSet has an interesting optimized #intersection: that lets you compare two collections without looking at every item of either. I'm also going to be rolling some code in here from Benjamin Pollack specifically aimed at indexing by date ranges, which lets you do quick queries of all the events that overlap with a specific week, for instance.
ROE: This is a model of the relational algebra in Smalltalk, which lets you lazily build up query expressions from first-class Smalltalk objects and then transparently generate SQL from them as needed. It's a totally different approach to accessing a relational database from Smalltalk than O/R frameworks like GLORP. I think it's pretty neat, but I've managed to entirely avoid RDBMS usage recently in my professional life so ROE has been neglected... which, on balance, is a good thing.
Scriptaculous: this is a Seaside package that integrates the "script.aculo.us" and "Prototype" Javascript libraries, which came out of Ruby on Rails. What's interesting about it is that those two JS libraries use a very consistent and very OO coding style, which makes it possible to model them fairly well on the Smalltalk side. So with Scriptaculous it's possible to do some pretty sophisticated Javascript coding in Seaside apps without having to do any string manipulation or write raw JS code... in some ways it's like ROE for Javascript, but nowhere near as far along.
Monticello 2: Colin and I have been working on a new incarnation of Monticello for a while now. He's doing almost all of the implementation work, but I'm having a lot of fun being involved in the design. The main technical difference is that ancestry is kept at method granularity rather than at package granularity. This makes some things much easier, like cherry picking changes, or sending around patches rather than full snapshots. It makes other things harder, like providing a simple UI or designing a networked repository. The basic model is largely done, but there's a lot of work on those last two items that needs doing; if anyone's interested in helping out, contact Colin or me.

GG: What do you think of Exupery project? It seems very promising and can eventually make Squeak faster then Visual Works (the leading technology on this side)?
AB: I've learned not to doubt Bryce. When he first announced the project, I was highly skeptical: here was some guy nobody had ever heard of before, claiming he was going to implement a native compiler from scratch entirely at the image level - it just felt like one of those extremely ambitious projects that was never going to go anywhere. Especially since it's not much use until it's mostly done; if it were me, I would get distracted partway through and move onto something else. But his focus has been unwavering and the progress has been extremely impressive. So now I'm really looking forward to version 1.0. And it's convenient that Apple is moving to the same architecture that Exupery targets: I figure I should have an x86 PowerBook at about the same time that Exupery becomes useful for development work.
GG: What do you think of the last directions of the Squeak community? What is point of view?
AB: My main concern is that all of the organizational churn, all of the discussion and experimentation around harvesting models and so on, is going to burn out people that would otherwise be off writing useful code. To take Göran as an example (I don't think he'd mind): take the total volume of email he's produced over the last year, and compare to the number of improvements that have been made to SqueakMap in that time. I have my own ideas about which is more useful to the community. But I've always had an anti-authoritarian streak and a dislike of what most people would call "being organized".
That said, when you have hackers off in their corners producing cool packages, you often do need someone to do the thankless work of integrating them all, and I think we're making some progress there. For example, Andreas produced the first version of ToolBuilder in a matter of days if not hours, but it takes a concerted community effort to actually integrate the work into the base image. That's happening, thanks to Cees and Brian Brown and others, and that's great. The work Stef, Marcus, Doug and Daniel are doing to work out package-friendly harvesting is also really important going forward. And in general I think the team model, splitting things off into smaller groups and dedicated mailing lists, has been a success, even if I've been somewhat remiss in my own leadership duties for the Packages team.
GG: We know you are one of the founder of the beta4.com web site, but it is pretty 'minimalist' (the home page has only an email address on it). What are you carry on there?
AB: Beta4 Productions is the name Julian and I used for a variety of work that we did together starting in 1998 or so: mostly software related in some way to the theatre industry. The word "Productions" was intentionally vague, since we wanted to leave the door open for hardware projects (we did some experimentation with lighting consoles) or theatre/film production (Julian's an experienced theatre technician and I've done some freelance camera and editing work) as well as software. Both of us have since moved on to other things, but still use that domain out of habit. So we're really phasing that site out, which explains its minimalism - not that there was ever much there, but there's now even less. At any rate, if you want to email me these days, avi@smallthought.com may reach me faster than avi@beta4.com. And SqueakSource has more recent versions of our code than beta4.com/mc does.
GG: What is you preferred license scheme? Free as LGPL or more protecting one?
AB: I don't get very political about these things. Most of my income comes from providing services, not licensing, so I tend to release stuff under very unrestrictive terms (eg, the MIT license). It's usually code I need to write for myself or my clients anyway, and if someone else can get some benefit from it too, great.
GG: What are your plans for the future?
AB: More of the same, hopefully; I'm having fun hacking Squeak and running a small business and living in beautiful coastal Canada... the longer I can keep that humming along, the better.

1 Dec 2005

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 11:42:07 -0700

The Weekly Squeak No.13: November 13th - November 19th

Hello, and welcome back to The Weekly Squeak, a weekly report on what's going on in the world of Squeak.

As soon as we have announced that the have reduced the Weekly Squeak gap, real life has caught up with us (well, just with the editor really). So, it is a great honour to us to present the 10-days late 13th issue. This is the first issue which adds the Seaside mailing list to its roster, and also sports an interview with Squeak hacker extraordinaire Avi Bryant. Enjoy!

In this issue you'll find:

Multiplatform sensor refactoring
New 3.9a images available
A Resource framework
Answers ain't just for newbies
Dabbledb vs WikiCalc
C5-06 Conference
SqueakNOS VMWare Package
Morphic Layout documentation
IMAP client for Squeak
Cees' Refractoring Browser
A poor man's VNC with Seaside
Despamming a Swiki
DoIt refurbished
The annual VM building experience
eCompletion in a workspace with Shout
A Smalltalk job offer
A Squeak post card
First release of Pier 1.0.0-alpha
Small-Land video on Google Video
Some tips on cross-dialect portability
Upcoming Squeak Chats
SqueakViews: an interview with Avi Bryant

You'll find the complete report on the Squeak wiki.
The past issues may be found in the Archive.