Squeak People diary for ragnar

6 Feb 2005

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 23:53:25 -0700

Well, since I finally managed to remember the password:

I'm thinking in setting up a web page and some squeak code in which you could toggle the "I'm-using-this" bit of a package, and the web page would get updated with that information. One of the things you see on the mailing list is people saying "they don't know if anyone uses X, but..", and then someone pops up saying they do. Communication could be improved.
This sounds verra similar to the network announced coding activity thing its been floating around my mind for ages now. I saw subethaedit some days ago and it certainly looks like a tool with a very good potential.
Lots of healthy (and a bit stingy) discussion on the mailing list lately. Good.
Avi helped me fix the last issue I had with my little Seaside toy.. so that made it possible to now have someone learning squeak/seaside half-time, and we're going to polish the web app and see if we can start using it internally.

That's all for now :)

13 Nov 2004

Sat, 13 Nov 2004 14:35:17 -0700

It's been long time since my last diary update and it still feels as it was last month.. life is busy around here. On the squeak side... I got too disgusted on the gtk thing a few months ago and left it to dry in the sun in case someone wants to pick it up.. it's nice, tho, to see that the Wx thing from Rob Gayvert is still going on. I have a couple of ideas for things to do with squeak whenever we manage to get a standard looking widget set. Notice I say a standard looking, because more and more I like the idea of having non-native widgets in the image.

19 Aug 2004

Thu, 19 Aug 2004 18:46:44 -0700

Had some time today and needed a rest, so I had a look back at the gtk code and pounded on it a bit. I easily got it to a point where it handled multiple argument callbacks in squeak such as:

e _ self newEntry text: 'a Label'.
e callbackFor: 'move-cursor' add: (GtkCallback newWithTarget: self selector: #testEntryAction:arg2:arg3:).

and required minimal effort to add new fuctions (effort involves editing one line)

Then I happily I thought it'd be a nice idea to make a little class browser to see what else was needed.. and stumbled upon gtk_list_store_new. This little ugly beast is varadic, which I obviously have no way to handle.

The alternative is gtk_list_store_newv, taking a pointer to an array of arguments instead, which is only a bit better than the varadic fuction. I say this because unfortunately I have no way to handle it with the current C/perl glue code "design" (In order to fish the values out of squeak I need to know their types, and in this case I need the types of value in a value)

Next to check is wether there are newv functions like this, and if (heh:) they take different kind of parameters. if not I could make some sort of special case.. or let squeak pass the type along with each argument in the array.

This is what I get for not knowing the gtk API. It always pays off to think and study the enemy in advance, even for quick hacks.

22 Jun 2004

Tue, 22 Jun 2004 00:30:18 -0700

A cow-orker thought the mouse that roared was really a cat.. and now that I think of it, it does look like a cat. Is it a mouse, or is it a cat? I'd like a cat, I'm a cat person. We get lots of cats on the green zone near the office.

Lots of animals, huh? :)

21 May 2004

Fri, 21 May 2004 16:34:36 -0700

I came back from sick leave after 3 weeks (1 of holidays) and when I started picking everything up I found that my little GOODS+Seaside+SOAP+Perl experiment was failing miserabily, with GOODS segfaulting. After some tests I managed to corner the bug to something related to GCC (3.3.x).. now everything works nicely again :)

German was trying the LDAP thingie on Active Directory and it was freezing. Turns out AD uses long concrete form for lengths even when it's not necessary (happily wasting 4 bytes for each element in a packet) and I wasn't adding the length of the length of the length (a byte).

24 Mar 2004

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 01:06:49 -0700

After talking with German and Goran on IRC about the lack of widgets we all know about, I must admit I got carried a bit on to GTK land and almost put together some proof of concept thingie that does other funny thingies with GTK thingies from squeak. But anyway, thats not the interesting part for me.. it is that I wasn't hopelessly lost while thinking in the plugin part! Wow! :)

Last weekend Goran and Cees had a nice idea on bringing some "collaborative awareness" onto OmniBrowser, which I'm fiddling with whenever I have some time (and don't get sidetracked by GTK;). Basically the concept consists in being able see when other people are browsing or changing classes or methods; other interesting stuff could come later tied to this, such as IMing.

On the LDAP front I'm putting it to rest for a bit until the need for it pops up, I use it, and see the real world bugs in it and the required improvements in the API.

9 Mar 2004

Tue, 09 Mar 2004 20:40:16 -0700

Been busy, very busy lately, and quite out of office too, which means less chances to do stuff with squeak. But nonetheless these days have been amusing.. it was really cool to hop briefly into irc and know what people there were doing, how, and why (throwing squeak into squeaksource). Anyway, obSqueakContent: ;)

doHanoi: aDiscNumber from: aFromPile to: aToPile using: aUsingPile
	(aDiscNumber > 0) ifTrue: [ 
		self doHanoi: aDiscNumber - 1 from: aFromPile to: aUsingPile using: aToPile.
		Transcript show: 'Moving ', (aFromPile asString), ' to ', (aToPile asString); cr.
		self doHanoi: aDiscNumber - 1 from: aUsingPile to: aToPile using: aFromPile ]

28 Feb 2004

Sat, 28 Feb 2004 00:44:06 -0700

After about 15 days, LDAPlayer 5-32 is in a mostly usable shape. I'm missing a couple of stuff from the RFC (and niceties like following references) but I think I will be moving it from bleeding edge to alpha sometime soon; probabily when I feel comfortable with the todos in LDAPWorker. My last weeks commute took 7h instead of the usual 3h due to bad weather and awful quantities of snow.. if this week happens again, I bet I can get a 6-xx with a good LDAPWorker soon enough. Nice to have something interesting to do while stuck on the road :)

16 Feb 2004

Mon, 16 Feb 2004 03:14:50 -0700

I finally published a initial public version of the LDAP Plugin, coinciding with the birthday of my brother.. I must sound pretty monothematic, always going on and on about the same subject, but thats what I'm doing right now :) It's coming along nicely, and I expect to get it into public consumption state sometime soon.

I'm pretty undecieded on what to do after. The "boring business" morphic widget implementation or skinning could be interesting.. but I'd rather prefer something that'd play along with seaside, and that I could put to some use (either practical or as "selling" value) in the near future.

An idea would be a better ganglia (a distributed monitoring system) but right now I have no idea on what could be considered better. Perhaps integrate it with something similar to mon (used to monitor services) "Server type" ideas are very welcome, if anyone wants to help inspiring me :)

13 Feb 2004

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 00:52:33 -0700

It's been a bit from last post, and I made a little writeup on how the plugin thingie ended up.

I've been putting time into writing a fully squeak LDAP client, and its going very well.. the worst part was figuring out the BER decoder, which is already done (at least for what the LDAP RFC spec requires). I plan to put out a version (with rough edges, thats for sure) soon, probabily once all basic functionality is there and works in controlled conditions, and then start prettying it up and making it ready for public consumption.

Now to think of a more interesting name than Squeak LDAP Plugin ;)