Squeak-dev April 2001

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165 participants
614 discussions

Re: Squeak for 3-year-olds
by Steve Wart 30 Apr '01

30 Apr '01

"Lex Spoon" <lex(a)cc.gatech.edu> wrote: > > Have you tried "gearing down" the stearing wheel: dividing the amount in > the "turn by" command by 3 (or so) ? It makes it much easier. :) > Haven't played with that much, although I was thinking I might modify it to make the car's heading the same as the wheel's heading (not as much like a real steering wheel, but easier to manage from a top-down perspective). I should have done this first, actually. We played around a lot with the sound recorder. The kids love the reverb on the recorder. Everytime they hear their voices echoing back at them they shout even louder into the mike. It was a total hoot - managed to get some goodies to send to the grandparents but could only externalize as a .wav file. Be nice to have .mp3, but oh well. Anyhow, we modified the script to get the kids voices to shout out whenever the cars crashed into each other. I wasted more time trying to get them to steer into each other than I did actually writing the scripts. Got stung by some weirdness (okay, only weird if you're not a Smalltalker :) when I renamed 'Car' to 'Yellow Car' (mnu #Car). Allowing spaces in names is a pain, but it would be nice to have a clean way of supporting them (possibly one could make spaces translate into something else -- given the assignment operator, underscores are probably not a good choice :) [Question: is allowing non-breaking spaces as part of valid identifiers an option? If someone is editing a name and they hit the space bar it could just drop one of those in]. Having two controls would be good. I loaded up the SpaceWar EToy from Bob's SuperSwiki, but it's not as fun when you're playing by yourself. I am intrigued by "Telemorphic" (saw the menu, have only a vague idea what it is, but it sounds great), but I want to use Squeak for doing stuff with my kids right now. I think that computers can be quite isolating and conventional PCs are hard to integrate into a social environment (prolly also true for pair programming). Rather than multi-user network capabilities, I'm starting to think that maybe I should try and get some external game controllers to hook up to the USB. Anyone know what it would take to get Squeak to work with these? It would be cool to click on a joystick morph and tell it, "you are connected to this controller now". A major point of frustration (moreso for my 2-year-old than for the 3-year-old -- it's amazing the difference in dexterity even though people often think they're twins) is dealing with the keyboard and the left/right/middle mouse button thing. I want to trash both devices. A single-button mouse would be better. Maybe a G4 iMac with OSX for the kitchen (when they come out). Must keep the kiddies away from Windows as long as possible :) So my son is now at the point where if he sees me reading mail in Celeste, he will pull himself up (push me out of the way), navigate into the Games world and start playing with the toothpaste game. The lesson for me is that two years ago, when I first started using Squeak I thought that the "non-standard" UI was a terrible weakness. I was wrong, and I have been proven wrong in an utterly convincing way (by a 3-year-old who has absolutely no use for the marketing rhetoric of the computer industry :). > Overall, thanks for sharing your experiences -- I've found them an > interesting read! Thanks. I appreciate the encouragement. Cheers, Steve

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RE: Squeak for 3-year-olds
by Raab, Andreas 30 Apr '01

30 Apr '01

Steve, > A major point of frustration (moreso for my 2-year-old than for the > 3-year-old -- it's amazing the difference in dexterity even though > people often think they're twins) is dealing with the keyboard and the > left/right/middle mouse button thing. I want to trash both devices. A > single-button mouse would be better. Maybe a G4 iMac with OSX for the > kitchen (when they come out). Must keep the kiddies away from > Windows as long as possible :) Gee - you're not telling me you're running Squeak in a window, do you?! ;-) Try going to full screen and then you'll have it all for yourself. WRT single button mouse - I agree. Actually there's a VM preference that makes all the buttons look the same (in other words, your k-button mouse behaves like a 1-button mouse) but it got broken at some point in the past and I'm just about to fix it. Cheers, - Andreas

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Re: Squeak for 3-year-olds
by Lex Spoon 30 Apr '01

30 Apr '01

Steve Wart <thecows(a)home.com> wrote: > Had an interesting session with my son today. Played around in the > scripting world for over an hour - I think that's the longest he's ever > sat still at the computer. > > He loves the car, but steering is pretty hopeless (I can't get the hang > of it either :). He liked it when I changed the colors. Usually he wants > to do things himself, but I think he realized changing colors was too > finicky for him. The color picker is pretty though. It would be nice to > see more like this. Have you tried "gearing down" the stearing wheel: dividing the amount in the "turn by" command by 3 (or so) ? It makes it much easier. :) Overall, thanks for sharing your experiences -- I've found them an interesting read! -Lex

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Re: [ANN] Date and Time Refactoring
by Lex Spoon 29 Apr '01

29 Apr '01

Brent Pinkney <Brent.Pinkney(a)reuters.com> wrote: > Attached is a zip archive with my refactoring of the Date and Time hierarchy. > Based on pior bitter experience, I am trying to make this dull (but important) > aspect of software more elegant. > > There is an HTML explanation in the zip file, but for short I am hoping to > leverage the internal iterator metaphor to eliminate errors at the iteration > boundaries and prmote terse code. > Brent, have you looked at the DateAndTime code in Richard Harmon's ANSIfication package for Squeak? Does your work go well in combination with his, or are they competitors, or what? -Lex

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Re: Comments on Smalltalk block closure designs, part 1
by Stephan Rudlof 29 Apr '01

29 Apr '01

Dan Ingalls wrote: > > >My intent wasn't to convince you by my design, but to get insights, where are > >the possible problems with my design. > >And now I've gotten much more, namely a raw draft of a more consequent design > >by a very experienced man (thanks to Allen). > > Go, Stephan! > > - Dan But in which direction (see also my other posts)? Since this is a very ambitious task (at least for me ;-) , but I like such things) resulting in much work, I don't want to work for the trash can here. Another question: IMO Allen's design is made in the spirit of having a good jitter available. I fear that for the case of not having one the creation of activation records for each block activation (onto the heap) may be a serious performance problem. OK, they may be recycled by holding the last created ones in some list (like for MethodContexts), but at least the logic costs something. Since there is no official Jitter release so far (at least for Linux) this could be a problem. In addition Jitter implementations come after a normal port of Squeak for new platforms. Comments? Greetings, Stephan -- Stephan Rudlof (sr(a)evolgo.de) "Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, 'Today I will be brilliant.'" -- Kirk, "The Ultimate Computer", stardate 4731.3

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Re: vm won't run, mac.
by John M McIntosh 29 Apr '01

29 Apr '01

At 3:02 PM -0400 4/28/01, jack wrote: >hi, > >i posted here a while back and had no success with the tips people gave >me, so i am trying again. Morning all. I traded a few notes with Jack about this in the last 24 hours. Beyond finding out he has an icelandic keyboard on the powerbook, Jack discovered that if he changed the default minimum size in the Get Info for memory size from 1000K to a much larger number then Squeak WILL run! Now I suspect but he's not confirmed yet is that he doesn't have a lot of memory around (VM or real) or it's very fragmented, and the macintosh OS will look at the minimum size and slot him into a 1000K. Now the problem is that 1000K IS enough memory to start the VM startup code running. BUT it runs out of memory when it attempts to read the first 4 bytes of the image to figure out if the 6502 magic number is there. A few statements later it would of course attempt to allocate the chunk of memory for oldspace/newspace and fail with an out of memory error, so the error he is getting is related to memory but bogus. So in the next revision I'll change the minimum value to a larger number say 1500K which should startup the VM and get you to the point of failure for out of memory. Of course if you have lots of memory around then the finder just gives you 20MB, which is why others couldn't recreate the problem. Note for carbon users using the special Carbonized macintosh VM. The memory allocation pattern is very different. The carbon VM running under OS-9 will allocate memory upto the memory partition. Then backoff the allocation based on how much memory is free, then reallocate based on needs. So if you allocate say 40MB then you might find only 17.4MB is actually used. The carbon application under OS-X will allocate a 1GB footprint, then back off, so you will find greater than 1GB mapped for VM storage, but say 17.5MB in use as the working set size. It will grow based on need but if you exceed the number of pages that can be stored in real memory then you get to discover how fast your paging device is. It won't crash, but it becomes very glacial in behavior. Lastly Hint. One needs access and a pointer to the V3.sources file. It's not obvious from the FTP site that a new user needs this too. Jack's last comment to me was he gets the error that the sources file can't be found. -- -- =========================================================================== John M. McIntosh <johnmci(a)smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659 Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com ===========================================================================

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Mouse buttons 2/3 switched on linux (squeak 3.0)
by fvdelius＠t-online.de 29 Apr '01

29 Apr '01

Hi Squeakers! I'm using Squeak3.0pre2-x86linux with a three button mouse (actually it's a wheel mouse). I realized that the "yellow" (middle) and "blue" (right) mouse buttons are switched: the middle button brings up the context menu and the right button the window manipulation icons. Is there a way to configure the "right" setting without changing my X11-setup? What's the behaviour with a 3-button mouse on windows? Thanks for your support! -Felix

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[GOODIE] MarkedUpTextActions
by Bijan Parsia 29 Apr '01

29 Apr '01

from preamble: "Change Set: MarkedUpTextActions Date: 29 April 2001 Author: Bijan Parsia Not really done, but kinda fun. This goodie adds a command to the cmd-6 formatting menu (is there a better name for this), 'render HTML'. If you select a bit of HTML in a normal text pane (e.g., a workspace) and select this command, it will replace your HTML with text rendered as Scamper would render it. Handy for adding URLs, images, or lists to your documents. Haven't hacked it into GeeMail yet (which is what prompted it in the first place. As you can tell, I hope to add other markup types (Latex, Swiki, etc.). I *think* it stores the markup with the rendered text, but I'm not sure ;) There's a host of issues about keeping that synched. Ideally, I'd like if one could render Squeak text to HTML, LaTeX, what have you. E.g. publish your GeeMail docs to the web. Yadda yadda. Gotta run. Have fun."! Here's a thought. Sometimes I have things like this which are just hacked together to a working state, good enough to share, but not really what I'd want to go into the main distribution. It might help the volunteers if we also added [TBI] (to be included) and [JFF] (just for fun) tags (or the like) to help the sorting process. Cheers, Bijan Parsia

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RE: Mouse buttons 2/3 switched on linux (squeak 3.0)
by Raab, Andreas 29 Apr '01

29 Apr '01

> What's the behaviour with a 3-button mouse on windows? Variable. The default is to have the right mouse button bring up the context and the middle button (if any) bring up the window menu. But you can change this in the VM preferences so that the meaning of right and middle mouse button changes. Cheers, - Andreas

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[ENH] ResetDebuggerContext-nk
by ned＠bike-nomad.com 29 Apr '01

29 Apr '01

Henrik wrote: > There is only one thing I miss. The restart command starts executing the > current method from the beginning even if you've gone halfway thru it. I > just wish one had the option of restarting with the debugger, so one could > debug into a message that one has passed over by accident. Does this do what you want? from preamble:

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