Recent diary entries

Recent diary entries:

8 Apr 2008 GazzaGuru (Journeyer)

"Diff Tools" has now been made available via SqueakSource/Monticello in the UI Enhancements project. Check the swiki page for details.

12 Mar 2008 GermanArduino (Master)

Being that free time is more and more rare to have, I decided to post almost only on my main blog http://germanarduino.blogspot.com trying my best effort to write an understandable English, to share Squeak things with the Squeak community.

3 Mar 2008 willembryce (Master)

London Smalltalk Meeting this Saturday

The meeting is this Saturday. There's a good list of people attending, if you'd like to attend please add your name to the wiki page so building security will know to let you in.

If there's anything you'd like to present, please feel free to add your name to the list.

The wiki page is here.

Discussion and our monthly meetings are organised on the UK Smalltalk mailing list here.

3 Mar 2008 mikevdg (Journeyer)

Yes, I'm still working on Namespaces. I'm heading up to a new release which will include the work I've done on Packages as well.

Some documentation, which I'll touch up a bit before the release, is available at http://gulik.pbwiki.com/Namespaces.

The Packages work has a lot of potential. I'm going to separate source code from binary code; the Package will be binary and the PackageVersion will contain the source code. Packages have a unique UUID each, and dependencies between packages use these. Combined with the fact that multiple versions of the same package can be loaded into Squeak at the same time, it should - in theory - ensure that any code will always run using exactly the same dependencies that it was orginally installed with.

After this work, I'll be looking at making a Kernel and Collections package so I can start refactoring it! I'll be making the Squeak Kernel completely namespaced. I'll remove a lot of junk out of it, and add Dominion support so that runaway processes cannot crash the image (yay!).

28 Feb 2008 dmoreira (Apprentice)

If you see a proxy to nil, don't be afraid, is only GLORP

Yesterday discover a strange thing in GLORP. when you have a one to many relationship, and the mapping is wrong (such as a wrong field name), GLORP replace this property for a proxy to nil. Is very inconvenient, because if you use a message like addIfNoPresent a exception happen.

But, don't scare you. this happen only the Join is incorrect.

Check yours relationship's and be happy.

17 Jan 2008 dfaught (Journeyer)

Wow, it's been a long time since I blogged here. Been working on Croquet projects including: Procedural Textures and some Skeletal Animation Examples Lately, it's been movies which sadly were not made with Croquet, although Croquet is the subject matter.

9 Jan 2008 cnantais (Apprentice)

Needing to move up from simply persisting data in the Squeak image, I am moving up to the Magma object database.

2 Jan 2008 dz0004455 (Apprentice)

i am working on a program with a framework, and modules that will plug into it, and i need to know how to send a class name around. for example: i have a method in one class, that servers as a module, that will "Procces Commands" sent to the framework. I have another class that is suposed to manage the commands and getting them to the right place.

ManCommands-the command managing class

Framework-the framework that manages input/output

BasicModule1-a module that will eventually be used to run other "modules"

how do i get the framework to tell ManCommands to send the command sent to the framework to the ProccessCommand method it BasicModule1>

12 Jul 2007 sc0tty (Apprentice)

Serge Stinckwich just published my interview, part of a serie of interviews of french smalltalkers... You can give it a read (in french)

As I posted on my blog, if you want an english translation, please drop me a note, or comment on my blog.

Cheers,

Yann

7 Jun 2007 JohnMcIntosh (Master)

I pushed out the new os-x browser plugins on squeakland.org, they silently lurk on the download page now. The Sophie edit logic rewrite is continuing, a new internal build was pushed out today. The Sophie Project received an XO laptop earlier in the week, alas I've not personally had a chance to play with it yet, lurks at another Sophie team members house at the moment. Oh and the Sophie Reader application went out as an internal build for comment. So lots going on, like an IRC chanel sophie-dev, just a bit hidden from public view at the moment. (mind links etc lurk on the Sophie project mailing list).

4 Mar 2007 edoneel (Journeyer)

I got a first pass at my Ballon 3D Terrain plotting program working.

Change set for 3.6 at earthSwarms.4.cs

More info at EarthSwarms

22 Feb 2007 gokr (Master)

Hehe, funny, Maya is now 3 and a half years old, so it was a while since I edited this diary. :)

The election is coming up soon (Squeak board) and that will be very interesting to see how it unfolds.

14 Feb 2007 joelkruissink (Apprentice)

Squeak as as programming language may have the potential to be its own operating environment--operating system.

embedding the language in hardware prince-ops on multiicore chips tightly couples execution of a program in native mode.

as it now, Squeak is a creature of the host it runs on. the host is procedural the language is object. the original implementations of smalltalk at parc did not appear to hzve a an operating system host. was smalltlk actually its own os?

jk

28 Jan 2007 hylander (Master)

I've started on a new Squeak-based project in the last few months, and things are coming along well.

I'm building a biped robot using a Bioloid kit, in the form of a small velociraptor robot. I have a blog where I regularily post progress reports, and a project page on a community wiki that I set up.

The brain of this robot runs in Squeak on my laptop, and I have big plans for it. Read the blog/project page for more details...

22 Jan 2007 Adrin (Apprentice)

The GUI project moves forward. Here is the first description of implementation. It looks very simply now, but lot of brain time was spent.

6 Jan 2007 efc (Journeyer)

My BitBlt is now working reasonably well. It passes tests for basic operations for rules 3 and 25 with the default color depth conversions from all depths.

It needs a couple of specially optimized paths for noSource (constant color) and simple straight copies.

Still can't run an image (for very long).

2 Jan 2007 schcats (Apprentice)

Well...recently, I have a very small flash-card like program for creating small adding/subtracting programs for my 5 yo daughter. However, and this is a *big* however, I'm having more than a little trouble packaging it for use by wee ones.

I've viewed much of the relevant posts, documentation, etc on the Squeak swiki...but it seems much if it is badly out of date. For instance: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/786 refers to Ned Konz's lockdown package. This package seems to have been largely incorporated in (at least) images 3.8 and 3.9 but even there, the Preferences disableProgrammerFacilities is still a little broken.

If anyone should read this entry, I would be most appreciative of tips/tricks on simplifying the UI (removing halos, etc).

12 Dec 2006 tapple (Journeyer)

It is December, and school is out for the month. I will be working on the Swiki a lot this month. I did not get very much done during November, because I had several end-of-semester projects to occupy my time. What is planned for December?

After that, I may complete, merge, or remove all the incomplete tutorials on the swiki. I am not sure yet. Anyway, it should be a productive month!

25 Nov 2006 noha (Journeyer)

23 Nov 2006 Jecel (Master)

Yesterday, I mentioned a plan to incrementally develop a Squeak machine starting with a simple RISC processor. Step 3 would be the addition of a technology similar to ARM's Jazelle, which I am calling "BC Mode". This would speed up the interpreter allowing the compiler to be used just for the most critical code.

What was missing was that step 2 only mentioned the very similar "PIC Mode" technology for type feedback with no details, but this would involve not only adding a special PIC Cache (or enhancing the instruction cache to include this extra functionality) but also at least one instruction. In the case of RISC42 the COPR instruction makes additions like this trivial.

While this is being done it would be a good idea to consider other instructions that might improve the compiled code. A TADD instruction which checks the operands for SmallInteger tags and does all the ugly untagging/tagging in a single clock would be nice, for example. It could save the result and skip the next instruction in the case where everything worked out - this would be simpler for the compiler to handle than a trap.

22 Nov 2006 gonzaR (Apprentice)

currently developing another genetic implementation for the travelers problem.

18 Sep 2006 iakovz (Journeyer)

I'v updated squeak_*.qpr and uploaded a README

Here is a link

squeakvm-3.7-7-x86-public.qpr

7 Sep 2006 T (Apprentice)

Recent work include consultancy for GE, (GE money Bank) and full corporate identity, website and other material for Analyse Danmark (former Instant-Answer, now in co-operation with Cubizz)

Links
http://www.analysedanmark.dk
http://www.ge.com
http://www.gemoneybank.dk
http://www.cubizz.com

24 Aug 2006 Lethalman (Journeyer)

With the latest MC version 68, SqueakGtk got lots of improvements:
A new screenshot is available at http://squeakgtk.pbwiki.com/ScreenShots.
Please help me... if anyone is interested contact me: lethalman88 at gmail dot com.

Bye ;)

9 Aug 2006 gera (Journeyer)

New release available: SqueakNOS-08-Aug-2006.iso

This release was reorganized for a clearer distribution and to be in synch with the article "SqueakNOS: Building, changing, booting and installing.".

It also has Lance and Realtek8139 network cards initialization by default, as well as TCP/IP stack initialization, except for setting up the IP address, which should be done from the Workspace.

16 Jun 2006 hilaire (Journeyer)

First public release of DrGeo II

Dr. Geo II is an interactive geometry framework. It allows you to interactively construct geometric figures then to manipulate dynamicaly these figures. It is released under the LGPL licence.

It can be installed from Monticello from http://www.squeaksource.com/DrGeoII.html

Once installed, to open a new interactive geometric drawing, execute 'DrGApp new'.

Free point (on the plane or on curve) and value objects are Etoys powered.

11 Jun 2006 p2gilbert (Apprentice)

I have now managed to get the image on the iPOD working with Seaside and so have a portable development environment that I can take with me wherever I go. Still got a long way to go to understand this, I understand for instance how things work in a web framework or CMS, like Drupal or Django. Ive done some Python programming (and VB, VB.NET, VBScript etc) so can see how that all hangs together. But with Seaside, I can get the image up and running, I can get to the administrative stuff, I can run the demo, but HOW do you possibly get from there to a production environment? Do you run just one image? More than one? How does the user get allocated to one or the other - or am I missing something quite fundamental and it doesnt work like that?

14 Apr 2006 Chronos (Journeyer)

How fast is Chronos relative to Squeak's "out of the box" date/time classes? My blog post The Timing of Time: Chronos Benchmarks presents some data that address that question.

24 Feb 2006 Johansyd (Apprentice)

Hi! I joined the squeak community today. I hope to work in multilingual projects. I am particerly interested in contributing to a Norwegian or European project witch could help make squeak world wide. If you like this idea and want to comment or discusse it, send me a mail!

johan.sydseter@hiof.no

So long!

23 Feb 2006 gcorriga (Journeyer)

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:

  1. Steward Teams - a new improvement in Squeak's development process
  2. Network and File teams merged into I/O team
  3. A status report on the PortAudio port
  4. An image with all changes from 3.0 to 3.9
  5. Interesting discussion on select/case constructs
  6. (Laconic) News from the Sophie project
  7. A Seaside demo image
  8. Comparing different Squeak HTTP servers
  9. Squeak Foundation Board election announced
  10. Goran Krampe won't be running for the SqF Board
  11. A tutorial in Spanish on how to create a Christmas Morph
  12. Two nice articles on Blocks and Associations by Ron Teitelbaum
  13. A refactored version of Scamper, now on SqueakMap
  14. ACM's Classic Books in Computer Science
  15. New version of AudioVideoLib available
  16. Chris Muller releases KryptOn 1.0, Magma 1.1
  17. New releases of Pier and Magritte on SqueakMap
  18. 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.

14 Feb 2006 frenchPadreyfuss (Journeyer)

Simulation of memory and processor to let kids learn how computers are working.
Kids have to

  • program the virtual computer with a simplified assemblor language.
  • See the compilation process and execute programs step by step.
    All this written using E-toys.
    This is done in French but can be tranlated if people are interested.
    See:

    The page : processor and memory

    The project with a test program in it as example: test program CESIL

    • 13 Feb 2006 JulienBourdon (Journeyer)

    I finally managed to retrieve my password after two years of inactivity. What happened to me during these years? I got my BSc from the Universiy of Caen, france and I,m currently studying a MSc at the University of Sheffield.

    I hope to be able to add a semantic layer to Smallwiki when I'll be free...

    29 Jan 2006 mrm (Journeyer)

    I finally opened a Squeak People account today, as I'm getting back into Squeak development after several years away.

    I haven't spent those years away from Smalltalk -- I'm a developer for GemStone and spend most of my time there in VisualWorks, GemStone Smalltalk, and VisualAge.

    I have two reasons for getting back to Squeak now. The first is that I'm contributing some Squeak development to the CalCars project (http://calcars.org) -- we're putting Squeak into the controller of modified hybrid cars.

    The second is that I'm preparing a one-hour presentation for Smalltalk Solutions / Linux World / Network World in Toronto in April. My talk is titled "Real-World Uses of Smalltalk" but might be better titled "What do People Actually Do With Smalltalk, Anyway?".

    In my talk I will mention as many different kinds of uses of as many different flavors of Smalltalk as I can, and give selected demonstrations, including my Virtual Juggling Squeak application. I also plan to use Squeak as the delivery vehicle for the visual part of the talk.

    -Martin McClure

    10 Jan 2006 msh (Journeyer)

    Parsing WebStats with Squeak

    Over the past month I've become obsessed with usage reports for web sites: Analog, awstats, et al. I was not completely satisfied with what I was getting from the existing packages, so I decided to roll my own. You can see what I'm doing by filing in http://www.revejo.org/msh/changesets/msh-webstat.1.cs. An example of how to use the classes defined there is included in the changeset preamble. And for good measure, it's included here as well. 

    | a f1 f2 f3 r2 r3|
r3 _ AccessLogBaseReporter new.
r2 _ AccessLogBaseReporter new.
f3 _ AccessLogFilter new.
f2 _ AccessLogFilter new.
f1 _ AccessLogFilter new.
a _ AccessLogReport new.
r3 id: 'successful'.
r2 id: 'all'.
f2 addDestination: r2.
f2 addFilter: [ :i | true ].
f2 source: f1.
f3 addDestination: r3.
f3 addFilter: [ :e | ( e result ) = 200 ].
f3 source: f1.
f1 addDestination: f2.
f1 addDestination: f3.
f1 addFilter: [ :i | true ].
f1 source: a.
a
	stream: ( AccessLogStream with: (FileStream oldFileNamed: '/Users/mhamrick/Documents/Sites/Cryptonomicon.Net/access-log' ) );
	filter: f1.
( a report ) printOn: Transcript.
Transcript flush.

    Essentially what you do is you create a chain or tree of objects. The trunk of the tree is an instance of the AccessLogReport class. You pass it a 'filter' and a 'stream'. The stream should be an instance of AccessLogStream (as demonstrated above.) The filter is an object that responds to the filtering and reporting protocol.

    In the example above, the f1 is a simple "connector" filter. The only thing it does is receive events from its inputs and pass them on to its outputs. In this case, the outputs are two other filters: f2 and f3. f2 is a filter that simply passes all it's results to the reporter r2. f3 is a filter that passes events whose result was 200 (as opposed to 404 or 403) to the reporter r3.

    Both r2 and r3 are "base reporters" meaning they track total hits, unique ips, and total bandwidth.

    It's kinda rough right now, but I hope to make it a little more interesting over the next couple of weeks.

    17 Dec 2005 Craig (Master)

    Spoon 1a12 or later is available:

    http://netjam.org/spoon/releases/current

    3 Dec 2005 cdegroot (Master)

    This is the last diary entry here - from now on I'll be blogging on my website

    22 Nov 2005 xradionut (Apprentice)

    Having some time off from work I decided to plunge into working thru the various Squeak books that are sitting in the queue by the desk-side. Currently I'm halfway thru "Squeak: A Quick Trip to ObjectLand" and have been skimming "Squeak: Object-Oriented Design with MultiMedia Applications". Also tried some of the tricks I found on the Squeak swiki. I've spent several hours just browsing the classes.

    My overall goal is to build my knowledge of programming and learn some OO principles in a nice environment. Most of the programming I do for my job is procedural scripting, even if I use Python or Ruby.

    26 Oct 2005 simon (Journeyer)

    oopsla/time (from joyfulsystems.blogspot.com)

    I'm still here.. thanks for the recent patches and bug reports, which I'll get to asap (my way of forwarding patches to the repo seems to have broken..)

    OOPSLA/Wikisym was terrific. I met a lot of interesting people, including Ward C who gave a great talk about the anti-spam steward tools at WikiWikiWeb, and got energised and stimulated.

    I didn't do any demo or speaking about Zwiki; I had my hands full just figuring out what to do and where to go in this huge conference. In fact I didn't really get to hang out a lot at wikisym, because in truth I was more interested in the all-day squeak croquet workshop which was on the other side of the campus.

    One high point: together with Lex Spoon and Adam and Alex (who work on Klein, which is Self implemented in itself), I was there when David Smith and Andreas Raab fixed the bug that allowed them to run the real TeaTime for the first time. Hurrah! At this conference I got a big boost for continued squeak and croquet work; it's really exciting stuff. I also bought philikon's zope 3 book and got a big boost there too.

    Since, I have been experimenting with a new "one focus per day" discipline. Today was to be the day for zwiki and squeak. But as so often happens, my client's project seems to just eat time; the days I've spent have not produced enough progress that I feel ok leaving it for even a day.

    I think this heavily ttw-customized, rdbms-integrated, multi-product plone 2.0 site just exceeds my available brain space at this point. If this were the only focus I could still handle it, but it's just the current priority among many. I've got to simplify this thing and get out of this mess so I can feel productive again. Also, I need a pair programmer. I put out the call last night.

    18 Oct 2005 KenCausey (Journeyer)

    I mentioned something about an Announcements list, created it, then forgot to say anything further about it. Well, better late than never.

    If you have any announcements related to Squeak please send them to announcements@lists.squeakfoundation.org.

    And if you have even the vaguest of interest in Squeak you will want to signup at

    http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/announcements.

    This list is moderated and traffic should be very light.

    15 May 2005 rowledge (Master)

    Cool. We just had a Black Bear swimming in our pond. Not every day you see that, even out here.

    The performance issues with the 64b VM seems have been solved now; the use of inline static functions works ok but isn't optimised quite as well as 'real' code. Making macros available for platforms with such problems restored benchmark figures and other fixes done in the process of finding the problem have made small improvements over that.

    5 Apr 2005 maf (Apprentice)

    A small squeak...

    Well, I've got a new server (actually, it's a "vServer", a UML-like linux). For now, squeak runs fine on it, serving a SmallWiki at http://archer.kicks-ass.org:8080/, but this one's (on top of Squeak3.8) needs 20MB of ram for it self. With a softlimit of 80MB of ram and a hard limit of 100MB, there's not much to experiment with - which reminds me of the various 'Small' squeak approaches which are on their way, but had not stepped the stage yet... Well, there's a QuiteSmall-Image, but it's 3.7 based and doesn't contain a number of hard-to-track-down methods and fixes you'll need for SmallWiki and stuff. Well, I'd like to see spoon progressing, but afaic, first it's not there yet and second, it depends on flow, which in turn, seems to be a replacement for the whole collection and (network-) streaming library (which would make it hard to adapt the rest to it - correct me if I'm wrong). And even if I try to use what I've learned of CompiledMethods, it would be quite a lot of work to build something which seeds a 'core' image with needed Behavior.

    Maybe I should contribute a small amount of vServers to the people to build up a need for ram-saving squeak images ;)

    6 Feb 2005 ragnar (Journeyer)

    Well, since I finally managed to remember the password: That's all for now :)

    16 Jan 2005 FrankShearar (Journeyer)

    I'm having lots of fun with my Image Map Editor (http://kilana.unibe.ch:8888/ImageMap).

    It's the first time I've got to grips with Morphic (as I think I said in a previous diary entry that was one of the two main points).

    And finally I'm at a stage where I can actually do something useful. I've been able to add entries and such for a while now, but now it's all starting to look like a nearly-finished product.

    The biggest bug I currently have is that once you finish adding an entry, you get a FillInTheBlankMorph to enter the target to which the region points. All well and good. But if you click "Accept" the PasteUpMorph (ultimate parent of all the widgets other than the SystemWindow itself) catches the click and sends #clicked to the ImageMapEditor. This means that your first click disappears, and only the second click accepts the FITBM.

    Other than that, if you drag around the FITBM the PasteUpMorph (with #behaveLikeHolder: true) sucks in the FITBM. Not what I wanted. I may be able to fix that by adding the image to the PUM with a Layout, though.

    12 Jan 2005 karl (Apprentice)

    I finally got a new computer. This time I got a Dell and it seems to run quite fast :-) It's at least 20 times faster than my old mac. I'm getting used to WindowsXP and things are starting to settle down.

    10 Jan 2005 mue (Apprentice)

    As you can read here in the Tideland Wiki I'm a fan of ODBMS and their simpleness. But very often potential users are unsure about ODBMS or want to keep their knowledge about RDBMS in general and their system in special.

    So I made my thoughts about a combination of an ODBMS like interface to the user/developer and almost any RBMDS as the storrage backend. I've called this the Smalltalk Object Sink (SOS) and you can read about it here. Any feedback, ideas, thoughts and whishes are welcome.

    Currently I'm allready implementing this - right now a transaction analyzer. So the SOS will soon move from concept to project/product state and I'll release the sources.

    12 Dec 2004 FrankCag (Journeyer)

    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.

    3 Dec 2004 humasect (Apprentice)

    Testing. Getting more involved with Squeak development, and will require its complete spectrum of services for a project which is kept in secret. It is also a strategy; showing Squeak a little differently... actually, not differently at all. Different from what it is, which is actually the same as everything /but/ Squeak. So, mainstream slash popular use.

    18 Oct 2004 AndreasRaab (Master)

    Jasmine is out. Yeah! I'm so glad it is and I'm even more glad to see the reactions of people. In our discussion on the day of the release the question was brought up whether anyone would notice but, oh boy, they did. As far as I can tell we have been on the front pages of slashdot, osnews, opengl.org, and (here in Germany) both Golem, and Heise.

    What surprised me most is that apparently a lot more people grasped it this time than before (in the Croquet alpha drop a year ago). It went as far as people complaining about the (admittedly short) Heise article and claiming that the writer of the article (who actually knows what he's talking about and run the article by me, e.g., it was semi-officially approved) didn't know what he was talking about. After reading Julien's blog entry I even went so far as to read the Slashdot articles (something I hardly ever do since most of the time the signal-to-noise ratio is just unbelievably bad ;-)

    By the way, this time being slash-dotted didn't hurt us one bit. The universities were able to set up bit-torrent to solve the inevitable download problem and the web-site itself withstood the (about two orders of magnitude) larger number of requests. Check out Julien's story on being slash-dotted.

    25 Sep 2004 bkv (Journeyer)

    After several months' absence, playing with Squeak again. I'm really excited to see avi's Unstable Squeak project, and to see the number of fixes and enhancements in the 3.8-alpha unstable updates stream. Plus Diegos' new look for Squeak 3.8 is just plain fun.

    I've got a good feeling about all this.

    27 Aug 2004 DiegoGomezDeck (Master)

    I finnaly got caught by the blog-wave :-/

    If you can read Spanish, feel free to visite my blog http://diegogomezdeck.blogia.com/

    Enjoy it!

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