Squeak-dev January 2005

squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

134 participants
235 discussions

REMINDER: Harvesting Party Friday January 7th 08:00 GMT
by Ken Causey 06 Jan '05

06 Jan '05

Just a reminder that the next Harvesting Party will take place between 08:00 (8 AM) and 12:00 (Noon) GMT Friday January 7th, 2005. As usual we will meet in #squeak on irc.freenode.net. More information about the #squeak IRC channel can be found at http://people.squeakfoundation.org/article/7.html Information about the Harvesting Party idea can be found at http://people.squeakfoundation.org/article/29.html If you have the time please attend and work toward the future of Squeak. The next seven parties are scheduled for 12:00 (12:00 PM) GMT Tuesday January 11, 2005 16:00 (04:00 PM) GMT Saturday January 15, 2005 20:00 (08:00 PM) GMT Wednesday January 19, 2005 00:00 (12:00 AM) GMT Monday January 24, 2005 04:00 (04:00 AM) GMT Friday January 28, 2005 08:00 (08:00 AM) GMT Tuesday February 01, 2005 12:00 (12:00 PM) GMT Saturday February 05, 2005

1 0

Cuteness
by wynand＠realtimerodeo.net 05 Jan '05

05 Jan '05

I don't know if this question has been posed before - I didn't have the time to search the archives for this, since I'm at a cyber cafe. When I first read about Squeak, I was mildly put off, since I thought it was an environment for kids. Now that I'm more farmiliar with it, it seems pretty robust - certainly enough so to serve as an environment for developing hardcore applications. So, I was wondering, why is Squeak being marketed (inasmuch as one can use the verb "to market" for an open source project) almost only as an educational tool? Another question - is anyone still working on building a JIT component? I'm quite keen to do so, but I lack the experience and so I'll first have to do a lot of reading before I can start. Realistically it'll take me more than a year. --Wynand

6 8

Newbie point of view regarding Squeak
by Hilaire Fernandes 05 Jan '05

05 Jan '05

Hello, Regarding the recent loong thread related to the future of Squeak and suggested road map, I would like to give some points of view as a newbie to Squeak and Smallktalk in general. An outsider may have complete different point of view worth reading. Mark Guzdial was wondering what may be the expectation of newcomers to Squeak. As a new comer, I can jump there. Probably the expectation of new comers just depends on how is presented Squeak to them. To me it has alway been presented as a multimédia tools with advanced programming concepts. So I just expect that Squeak has good and stable features in that field. If I discover that such features just disapear or too easily become obselete I will quit and spend my time to learn some other environment. I have to admit, that I was really worried when I read that a super-mega-inovative stuff named T**k will soon replace Morph. I was just spending time learning it... As a newbie appearing to be a math teacher, I was interested by the quote of the www.squeak.org: 'If you are a student, parent, or teacher, please jump over to our newly redesigned SqueakLand.org website, and download some great educational projects.' However as a French speaking person I was surprise to see that I18n was poorly or/and not clearly in place in Squeak. I later discovered that people were working on that, but not on maintstream, but aside and in an isolated way. Eventually with the help of others I volunteer to help in localisation in French but with the strange feeling that it was just hugly hacks (comparing to the way i18n and l10n is professionnaly conducted in other project of the free software community). So to sum up, as a newbie I fell that 'Squeak in education' does not make big-enought sense as long as I18n is not a top concern in Squeak, at least in non-english speaking countries. As a newbie appearing to programming, I am very interested and excited by the programming capabilities of Squeak. When I start with a fresh image, I always install Shout or Montecillo alike tools because it gaves me more interesting functionnalities in programming. Also as a newbie I will explore the tools as the Refactoring Browser and Sunit test as these tools open interesting programming concept. (ie after all one of the reason I did want to look closer in Squeak). Mark Guzdial made some other interesting remarks regarding the complexity in Squeak and his difficulty to understand new stuff/development-tools going into Squeak. I agree with him, that as a newbie when I look at the categories class, it looks very impressive. However I do not agree about hit engeneer-position. I fell that only the engeneers can help Squeak to evolve and to bring us new development functionnalities, which in turn will help producing more interesting user application in Squeak. I don't think that the multimedia developers - which I am - can do that. There are some other point of vew or feedback I would like to share, but at a meta-development level or the organisational level of the Squeak development. - When a new comer hit the Squeak reference page of Squeak it gets to http://www.squeak.org. Do we need to comment about its quality? After a few click it will get to http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak it looks a bit better, much better, not because the information is well organised (it is a nightmare) but only because there is a lot of valuable information to find. So to say the true, the first contact with Squeak through the web is not very good. Until now, the only professional looking web site I found was in German http://www.squeak.de, the one from Small-land is also quite nice, but the German one is much better structured. (hints: 'Provide guidance in the User Interface, in particular newbie need that') - It looks like Squeak is an orphaned project. Where are the leaders? Where are the founding fathers? Beside demonstrating how the UI was invented by themseleves can they help the Squeak community to be organised? - Only one devel. list covers the different *core* aspect of Squeak. Squeak is like a whole system to itself covering VM, compiler, library, UI, multimedia. I cannot image that the linux-kernel+GCC+libc+Xwindow+Gnome could have been developped with only one developper mailing list. At some point it really shows that Squeak developpement is poorly organised in the community. - why there isn't sub development groups (with clearly identified leaders) covering some of the core points of Squeak: VM, class-core, i18n, GUI, multimedia, E-Toy, code cleaning, documentation, etc. Each sub-groups will work on its own space area (mailing list, etc) following a roadmap defined in common, throught a Squeak foundation. An additional group, the "release team", would help in coordinating transveral communication and in sighting the development group to follow the release schedule. All these points are not new and not from me. For example the Gnome community is following something like that. Look at http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/ and the link at the right Oh, a few last words, again related to technical aspect of Squeak and newbie. A simple mandatory rule to follow when adding new classes to the core of Squeak will be that only well documented class can get in. I can assure you that newbie will thanks you. Hilaire

10 16

[Q]Source and Changes file questions
by Karsten Wolf 05 Jan '05

05 Jan '05

Hi folks, every now and then I am hitting the 32MB barrier of the changes file. I know, this can be handled by compressing it. What's lost is the complete method version history. IIRC the current limits are: 32MB Source file 32MB Changes file The SourceFileV3 is currently 13.8MB. That leaves nearly 18MB or more than 1/4 of our total capacity unused. Questions: - Will the parameters be changed for V4? - If not: is there any way to compress the changes file by just removing the doits? - Can the sourcefile be "compressed" up to it's limit (like having the full version history of base squeak)? - Any other ideas? karsten

1 0

[ENH] AutoIndentPreference-mikki
by mikki＠ida.liu.se 05 Jan '05

05 Jan '05

from preamble: "Change Set: AutoIndentPreference-mikki Date: 3 January 2005 Author: Mikael Kindborg This change set contains code for a preference so that you can choose if you want return to auto-indent in the text editor. Autoindent is on as default. To turn it off, go to the preferences panel and the browing section, and check the autoIndent option." "This code adds a preference for auto-indenting." Preferences addPreference: #autoIndent categories: #(browsing) default: true balloonHelp: 'This preference makes return auto-indent in the text editor.' projectLocal: false changeInformee: nil changeSelector: nil.!

2 1

Why ProtoObject>>becomeForward: is not implemented
by Yar Hwee Boon 05 Jan '05

05 Jan '05

Is there any reason why ProtoObject>>becomeForward: is not implemented? -- Regards HweeBoon MotionObj

1 0

[ENH] MorphInAScrollPane-fbs
by frank.shearar＠rnid.org.uk 05 Jan '05

05 Jan '05

from preamble: "Change Set: MorphInAScrollPane-fbs Date: 5 January 2005 Author: Frank Shearar Since the Swiki documentation says that you should use ScrollPane in preference to TwoWayScrollPane, this changeset introduces Morph>>inAScrollPane. #inAScrollPane does exactly what #inATwoWayScrollPane does, only with the word 'TwoWayScrollPane' scratched out and 'ScrollPane' written in in crayon."!

1 0

[BUG][Balloon] BalloonCanvas not rendering text
by Michael Latta 05 Jan '05

05 Jan '05

Text is not being rendered for any BalloonCanvas with a transformation. When I place a StringMorph inside a TransformationMorph subclass that uses a balloon canvas it does not render. When I look at the code involved the following two methods stand out. BalloonCanvas>>drawString:from:to:in:font:color: BalloonCanvas>>paragraph:bounds:color: Both call ifNoTransformWithIn: and only attempt to render if it returns true. I imagine this is an issue with the use of bitmap fonts, it should be possible to scale true type fonts. It would be nice however to at least make an attempt to locate a suitable font. The current code results in just blank space. Michael

1 2

MPEG4IP and Squeak
by Yoshiki Ohshima 04 Jan '05

04 Jan '05

Hello, I have been doing some experiment with MPEG4IP (http://www.mpeg4ip.net/). MPEG4IP comes with bunch of related codec (both encoder and decoder... duh) and a higher level "player" program called mp4player with which you can view the movie and audio read from disk and send through the network. I hacked the player software so that it writes the decoded audio and video data in buffers, instead of dumping it to the SDL audio and video library. The buffers are actually Squeak's SoundBuffer and Bitmap; you can use the data in Squeak. I haven't tested it well, but it should work with RTP or HTTP streamed video. Only non-standard library it uses is the multi-thread library of SDL, so it should be reasonably portable among major platforms. I modified (or I think I modified) it so that it can handle multiple concurrent content streams at once. It is vital to make up a possible application like multi-person video conferencing system. I haven't gone as far as I wanted to, though. The limitations are: * The timing and sync is not working very nicely. (Especially, the order of video frames is often wrong.) * The handling of concurrent/multiple streams is not tested well. * Encoder part hasn't been worked at all. * etc., etc. The problem I had is the debugging a multi-threaded, realtime program written in C++. The program depends on the libraries that are about one million lines of C++ code in total, so this was logistically cumbersome to look at. The reason I hacked mp4player was to avoid reimplementing different stream protocols like RTP and the architecture of pluggable codec plugins. But with hindsight, I could have done a better job if I just use the codecs as Squeak plugins and write the software layers above them in Squeak... Anyway, for those who might be interested in it, I put the code on the web at: http://www.is.titech.ac.jp/~ohshima/squeak/MPEG4IP/ First try the Windows version of binary "squeak_gui_test.exe" in http://www.is.titech.ac.jp/~ohshima/squeak/MPEG4IP/mpeg4ip-squeak-dll-05010… Start the program, and type a .mp4 file name (you can find bunch at http://www.archive.org/movies/movies.php) in the box, and press the "Start" and "Display" button in this order. It should show the video data on screen and write the sound data to a file. Then, to compile the program, get mpeg4ip-1.2 source from the MPEG4IP sourceforge site, and apply the patch in http://www.is.titech.ac.jp/~ohshima/squeak/MPEG4IP/mpeg4ip-squeak-050103.ta… and open the player60.sln from Visual Studio. Build them in the "Release" configuration and you'll get the dlls and executable. To do stuff from Squeak, get http://www.is.titech.ac.jp/~ohshima/squeak/MPEG4IP/MPEG4IPClientPlugin-0501… and file in the .st file into a recent Squeak image and evaluate: m _ MPEG4IPClientMorph new openInWorld. m startClientOn: 'air64.mp4'. I need to focus on the other stuff, but if somebody move forward from here, or take "the other path" I mentioned, it would be really great. Thank you! -- Yoshiki

1 0

squeaksource currently doesn't work
by Ruben Bakker 04 Jan '05

04 Jan '05

I tried to access squeaksource over the web for a couple of times, but I got the following error: Bad Gateway The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. Apache/2.0.47 (Win32) Server at www.squeaksource.com Port 80 Ruben

3 2

Jump to page: