Squeak-dev July 2001

squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

168 participants
308 discussions

Latest info on JITter performance
by Eric Arseneau 14 Aug '01

14 Aug '01

Can anyone point me to information, or provide information, on the performance gains achieved by doing the dynamic translation with Squeak ? I would like to know some basics on the technique and how much performance was actually gained by doing it. Tx,

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[BUG] minor MPEG bug under Linux?
by John Hinsley 11 Aug '01

11 Aug '01

Normally I run Squeak from a little icon in Kde. Kde just executes "squeak -memory 60mk" (about as much as I can manage in Kde without squeezing everything else to death). Now, doing it this way, opening up the MPEGPlayer Morph and pointing it at AlienSong.mpg (which everyone seems to use as a test) brings up the debuger: error: a primitive has failed. Running squeak from the command line, I can run the mpeg, but find, on inspecting the Xterm: john@molehole:~ > squeak ioLoadModule(./Mpeg3Plugin.so): ./Mpeg3Plugin.so: undefined symbol: mpeg3_total_astreams /dev/dsp: No such device /dev/dsp: No such device /dev/dsp: No such device /dev/dsp: No such device /dev/dsp: No such device /dev/dsp: No such device Any ideas? I don't know what either error message means (I've always had the dev/dsp error and it seems not to affect anything). And it seems that Squeak needs to spit out the error message in order to be able to run the mpeg. -- Just a thought: this might have been responsible for my not being able to get mpegs to run when I "hand bodged" the mpeg plugin. BTW, I don't have a sound card fitted (or rather, I do, but it's one of those really nasty cheap ones that Linux doesn't recognise). Cheers John -- ****************************************************************************** Marx: "Why do Anarchists only drink herbal tea?" Proudhon: "Because all proper tea is theft." ******************************************************************************

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Newbie Squeak on Mac
by Glenn S. Fisher 04 Aug '01

04 Aug '01

I'm only about 30 days into using Squeak so I'm not up to speed on all the known issues with the tool. I'm working on a Mac and noticing a strange and annoying behavior. When I move another active application window in front of the Squeak window, the Squeak window remains active, sort of. Mouse movements and clicks pass through the active application window to the Squeak window and cause menus to open, items to be selected, etc. This doesn't happen if I remember to collapse the Squeak window, so there is a work around. It's just a little annoying. I like the tool though. I'm in the streaming media business. I'm investigating using it to develop a player. I found the MP3 stuff. Has anyone done anything with the Ogg Vorbis codec in Squeak? I'd hate to waste time re inventing the wheel, so to speak. -- Glenn S. Fisher CTO Websound, Inc. 802.254.3800 ext.202 gfisher(a)websound.com

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[ENH] Better Debugging (third round)
by Hans-Martin Mosner 04 Aug '01

04 Aug '01

Some more debugger fixes: 1. Support for stepping into blocks (thanks to Henrik Gedenryd) 2. A NonBooleanReceiver exception 3. Balloon help for the debugger buttons 4. A problem with handling exceptions in the debugger was fixed (when you stepped into the exception handling code, and then did a step which executed the #signal method, it would open a separate notifier) Cheers, Hans-Martin

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RE: [OT] Interactive Fiction is an Oxymoron
by G.J.Tielemans＠dinkel.utwente.nl 03 Aug '01

03 Aug '01

>Ger: Who is here talking about interactive story-telling? ..The first meaning of fiction in my old Oxford (1980 $5.95)is: fiction= a product of imagination. (I place a good simulation or a good TextAdventure under this definition and even prefer a combination of these; like independent Characters moving in a story-maze.) ..The second meaning: fiction= an invented story. Even inside this second meaning you could wonder when a story is created: - When someone invents the scheme of the story? - When a good storyteller tunes this story to his estimation of his public? - Or when you - as listener with your own background - "read" between the story-lines? Interactiv Fiction is the dream that you could bring this even a step closer to the receiver... -----Original Message----- From: Andrew C. Greenberg [mailto:werdna@mucow.com] Sent: maandag 30 juli 2001 17:40 To: squeak-dev(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: [OT] Interactive Fiction is an Oxymoron Sorry, but the recent thread used a term that just makes me boil over. It is, in my view, the quest for "interactive fiction" that has held back gaming now for decades. The reason for this is simple. Interaction is an anathema to excellent storytelling. A storyteller, at least per the Poetics, is concerned above all things, with timing. The tempo of a story is everything. The manner and velocity with which the characters are introduced and developed is essential to obtaining the necessary suspension of disbelief -- the tempo of building conflicts ultimately yielding a climax or climaxes drives the reader to continue, and the effectiveness of the denoument to finish, explain and justify the story are all measured along a timescale -- and the tempo between these elements is essential. >Ger: designing the tempo of a video on a stroyboard is very very difficult for our students, A threaded storyline (Oops.. with LOOPS??) should be suddenly easy because the tool can do it easily?. > Ger: yes and no.. The RIGHT Tempo is everything (most games have boring difficult=long puzzles on to many places... it invites children to cheat. As designer you can anticipate on that. My Youngest daughter cheats in ThemeHospital and then the speaker-system of the hospital shouts it loud over the corridors... She really hates it every time she does cheat, but not enough to turn off the sound...) > Ger: You can also create the feeling that the player thinks he is so close to the solution that it would be a pitty to stop after all his efforts, hours later he still thinks the same. Or the puzzle should look misleading simple: like that simple looking rubic-cube puzzle: give it three turns from the correct position and then ask someone to solve it: he knows that you gave it only three turns... It is the nature of a simulation, or interactive game, to permit the user control over his environment. Should he enjoy prowling around an arena for hours, so be it. If he wants to wander aimlessly through a jungle or search the interstices of irrelevant subject matter to the game -- again, so be it. The more detail, the more interesting the scenario -- but the far less effective the story. As an extreme example, while a simulation can sustain dead ends to make a game work, no story can survive that. >Ger: What about a good detective-story from Agatha Christie. Every time she makes you think that the wrong person did it, until he dies also (MY favroite as child: Ten little ...) On the other hand, if you have no dead ends at all, players feel a grave loss of challenge. (Enter the love-hate relationship between gamers, game designers and their game "cheats," walkthoughs and "cheat books.") This inherent conflict, the war between storytelling and interaction is, to me, the locus where all games (including my own efforts in this regard) have failed. >Ger: I think that you can broaden here your criticism to lots of Hypertext-dreams that did not work.. Of course, some merging of interaction and storytelling is possible without one destroying the other, but the more of one formulation is added, the more the other suffers. The trick, of course, is to recognize that interactive fiction is an oxymoron. To design the game well, first realistically design it as either a simulation-with-a-bit-o-story, or a story-with-a-bit-o-simulation. Then use smoke-and-mirrors, plain old theatre tricks plus new tech tricks, to make the game SEEM more storytelling, or more interactive, than it really is. >Ger: You have more hints to create better IF? >Ger: when desktop-tools came up everyone thought he could do quality printing on the fly, isn't this the same with these tools? Don't we underestimate the creative work of heavy teams working at the creation of a new game: Didn't even Disney to easily think that they could compete with the real game-industry while they where good in movies, cartoons and theme-parks and heaving some of the best fiction-realizers in house? Why do game-companies rise and fall? (like Infocom, to stay with the subject.)

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Window Frames Part III
by Jim Benson 02 Aug '01

02 Aug '01

Here's some more window frame code. This is just some simple mockups with three different window types; a browser, a file list and a workspace. It's at: http://people.we.mediaone.net/trade/Zurgle/Mock.htm You can file in the code and play with the window and their resizing bits. This is just an exploration of what the window resizing interactions might look like. Take a look, see what you think. Note that I just gathered threw some buttons together , and this isn't serious attempt at getting a frame look just right. However, I'm at a point where it would be nice to hear some suggestions as to what a 'stock' frame might look like. I need to come up with a 'default theme'. One area I'm pretty confused about is what the menu icon should look like and how to interact with it. As it stands now, the current menu doesn't seem to interact in a very natural way. My initial feeling is that it needs to be more of a pulldown menu, rather than just popping up over the menu icon. This is just experimental code. Use it in a throw away image. I'm not really looking for any bug reports yet, but if something glaring comes up feel free to mention it. Next up, refactoring SystemWindow to refactor the frame elements into another class. Jim

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[OT] How We Discuss Things
by Dan Shafer 02 Aug '01

02 Aug '01

As someone who has been involved in the online world longer than I care to admit and as someone who has been deeply involved in online community for the past several years, I am intrigued by the fact that the Squeak community -- with one of the richest and most powerful environments on the planet presumably at everyone's disposal -- still feels most comfortable discussing our mutual interest in the relatively inefficient halls of a mailing list. I don't subscribe to the list by email any longer (though I spent the past year doing so) because I found it too cluttered an experience, regardless of whether I used the digest or dealt with individual emails. Following threads was very difficult at best and filtering out topics in which I was not interested proved all but impossible. Dealing with the list in quasi-discussion mode via the Yahoo! interface is a tiny bit more satisfying, but only a tiny bit. It seems to me that if we moved from the older mailing list model to a true discussion board or Swiki model for all of our discussions, we'd all be enriched and our experience would be both more effective and more efficient. But I never hear anyone suggest this, which indicates perhaps I am alone in my feeling that this is such an archaic and relatively inefficient way of dealing with such material. If Swiki isn't the right tool -- and I see some drawbacks to it that are addressed in every good discussion board tool I know about -- then perhaps a real discussion board tool is? There is a way to experiment with this. I have access to a licensed Web Crossing discussion site where we could legally and easily reflect the mailing list in discussion topics and allow people to particpiate directly on the disussion board or via email or even mix those modes. I'd be willing to set up the site and open it to people who are interested in trying that mode of communication. It wouldn't disrupt the list any, but since it's not my list I don't think I should do this without some sort of agreement from at least some other list members. Or perhaps we can write (or someone has written) a discussion board product in Squeak? Thoughts? ===== ------- Dan Shafer, Author and Community Consultant ^. .^ | Commentator on Community, Web Building, Nanotech ='= | Sr. Co-Editor, Online Community Report | Author, NanoTech, MegaQuake: Business Implications of Squeak| Nanotechnology (Spring 2002), Wiley, ISBN 047120045X ------- http://www.gui.com (major update Spring 2001) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo! Messenger http://phonecard.yahoo.com/

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Squeakland press
by Alexander Lazarevic 01 Aug '01

01 Aug '01

Squeak and squeakland got mentioned in the recent issue (16/2001 p.64) of the well-known german computer magazine CT. In the category Web-tips under the headline "Multimedia easy to use" the author mentions some of squeaks capabilities (games, music, 3D, animation, various aspects of science) and the possibility to send projects directly via the internet to another user. The article implies that squeak still belongs to Disney and that Disney uses squeak for animation. It would be interesting to see if the weblog of the squeakland webserver shows an increase of german visitors for this weekend. :) Alex PS: Squeakland also got mentioned by CT in June (http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/em-16.06.01-005/)

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Mouse cursor disappearing?
by Vince Mazo 01 Aug '01

01 Aug '01

Hello, I' ve already posted a message about this problem, but I got no answers. Maybe I'll get luckier this time... When I drop one of my Morphs on another one,I open a FillInTheBlank but unfortunately my mouse cursor disappears.How can I correct that and make it remain visible? Thanks in advance... Vince

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Squeak instead of Servlets
by Gary McGovern 01 Aug '01

01 Aug '01

Hello, I'm enquiring as to whether anyone has done any work running Squeak rather than a servlet (or even JSPs) on a servlet engine with Apache and DB or if not, can anyone give me some relevant info such as different methods to achieve the same end. There's a few things I'd like to do in that vein and servlets is the only way I know how (not knowing perl or php) but I'd be more interested in using Squeak if possible. I should also mention that I'll be using a free host with apache. Thanks! Gary

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