Squeak-dev August 2006

squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

151 participants
220 discussions

caps lock introduces funny menu behaviour
by Keith Hodges 25 Sep '06

25 Sep '06

Is this a known problem? When caps lock is on, all pop up menus refuse to accept selections. When I click on "No" a second green "Red on Green "No" appears next to the first, and neither accept the click, leaving me stuck. I am running 3.8-6665 and vm 3.9-7 #1 Fri May 12 11:30:30 CEST 2006 gcc 3.3.5 Squeak3.9alpha of 4 July 2005 [latest update: #7021] Linux altair.dcs.elf.stuba.sk 2.6.8-2-686-smp #1 SMP Tue Aug 16 12:08:30 UTC 2005 i686 GNU/Linux default plugin location: /usr/lib/squeak/3.9-7/*.so Keith ___________________________________________________________ All new Yahoo! Mail "The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use." - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html

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2D and 3D Function Graphing?
by Rich Warren 22 Sep '06

22 Sep '06

Are there any packages that handle 3d function graphing (like a graphing calculator). I saw a sample here: http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/3231, but he didn't say how the graphs were made. Is there an easy way to do this in Balloon? I also saw KGraph, but it won't install. Function Plotters (http://mate.dm.uba.ar/~caniglia/Andres/ fplot23.zip) also looks good, but it dies after trying to send messages to nil when I try to load it. Thanks, -Rich-

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[ANN] AutomaticMethodCategorizer 1.4
by Diego Fernandez 16 Sep '06

16 Sep '06

This version adds a hook to categorize uncategorized methods on save. Still not very tested (that means, that I only used it on the standard browsers of 3.9-7021). To install the method save hook evaluate: AutomaticMethodCategorizerInstaller install

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About using squeak to script...
by stéphane ducasse 15 Sep '06

15 Sep '06

Hi I would like to use I would like to pass a file as argument, I know that this is possible and I should read the manual. ;) any hints is welcome. What I do not know is how can I print on stdoutput? Should I create a primitive (argh) for that? Would be neat to have that per default (may be this is the time for me to learn something new writing a primitive) Stef

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Info on Smalltalk DSLs or Metaprogramming...
by Rich Warren 14 Sep '06

14 Sep '06

Hi, I've seen several online articles about writing Domain Specific Languages in Ruby. All the articles mention that the idea of DSLs comes largely from Lisp and Smalltalk. I've found descriptions on writing DSLs in Lisp--but I can't seem to find any good references for Smalltalk. Does anyone have any helpful pointers? If I'm going to follow the Ruby model, then I need to be able to execute arbitrary strings as code (which Compiler evaluate: and related functions seems to handle). I also need to be able to add new methods to classes/ instances at runtime--which I haven't found. Any help would be greatly appreciated. -Rich-

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Some camparisons between squeak versions.
by Peace Jerome 12 Sep '06

12 Sep '06

Hi All, I've started to get curious about how squeak is changing as it's growing. So I genned up some things to look at and then ran them In three different "releases" of squeak. I am poking around to increase my understanding so if you know of better things to look at please chime in. The big one is compiled method. My current interpretation of that is that it tells me how many total class>>methods there are in squeak. I thought that method dictionary would be one per class but there seem to be more than two for each class. So I've reguessed that each class has two method dictionaries. I am just puzzled by the extra. Method context grew the most between 3.8 . Now I wonder what accounts for that? The gatherer: {CompiledMethod . MethodDictionary . MethodContext . Class } collect: [ :class | class printString , ' ' , class allSubInstances size printString , String cr ] And the results: Sq7054 #('CompiledMethod 44834 ' 'MethodDictionary 4108 ' 'MethodContext 4170 ' 'Class 2037 ') sq6665 (3.8) #('CompiledMethod 47792 ' 'MethodDictionary 3612 ' 'MethodContext 1352 ' 'Class 1668 ') Sq5976 (3.7) #('CompiledMethod 41206 ' 'MethodDictionary 3140 ' 'MethodContext 874 ' 'Class 1546 ') __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

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The success of Grants
by Ron Teitelbaum 06 Sep '06

06 Sep '06

Hello all, I received a reply from Ton Roosendaal who runs the Blender Foundation. He shared his experiences with grants, and said I could share his thoughts with you. I agree with Ton that if we are going to fund projects that a professional atmosphere, proper administration and management, will help to achieve better results. We might consider funding research projects administered by a University, or managed by a company. Ron Teitelbaum From: Ton Roosendaal Hi, From Blender Foundation experience: We've participated twice in the Google Summer of Code, grants for students to work for two months on a coding project. Results of this is very mixed; it mostly depends on the professional attitude of a student. A downside of this approach is that it divides volunteers/hobbiests a bit... students get paid for what others do for free. That's why it is perceived like a lottery; some people just got the luck to be granted. We've also hired a couple of times active volunteers to do servicing (website, development support). In almost all cases, the contributions they did while getting paid was less (quantitive as well as in quality) than what they did for free. In 2004, a student of the Amsterdam University graduated on a research on this topic, the results of a survey she did in the Blender community is summarized here: http://download.blender.org/documentation/bc2004/Martine_Aalbers/ results-summary.pdf I've asked her to also look at how financial rewards would work in our projects. Her conclusion was that this has the danger of diminishing motivation. In scientific research on other communities, this is called "crowding out". Her entire paper is unfortunately only available in Dutch: http://download.blender.org/documentation/bc2004/Martine_Aalbers/ MartineAalbers.pdf As an alternative, I then decided to experiment with another approach. This became the "Orange Open Movie" project, which has resulted in the 3D animation short "Elephants Dream". The target was to establish a temporal but highly professional studio in Amsterdam, and invite key members of the community to come over to work for half a year on realizing a movie short. That project worked out great in all aspects. It helped Blender development, it helped our 'brand', it increased commitment from the active volunteers as well as from professionals. This leads to a separation of two groups of contributors to Blender; - volunteers: people who contribute to Blender without getting paid. - professionals: people who contribute to Blender as part of their daytime job. It's important to realize that 'volunteers' still can be highly professional in their contributions. For example a 3D developer working for company XXX can contribute to Blender in his spare time still. This seperation is not about quality of work, but about differencing ways for how to support contributors. My current conclusion is that - when money gets involved - it's important to participate in an existing professional environment, or to create one yourself (like we did for studio Orange), or to help people to setup a business to become 'professional'. We didn't give out large grants yet, but if we will do I would look at sponsoring companies/organizations to hire Blender developers/artists for projects. For volunteers, what works quite well is more incidental support: - sponsored hardware (we got boards from ATI and Nvidia for example) - small grants for creating documentation (or helping creating books) - organize events, and give volunteers expenses coverage, free access, drinks/dinners - art/movie festivals with prizes -Ton-

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newProcess debugging help
by Ron Teitelbaum 06 Sep '06

06 Sep '06

Hello all, Is there a way to know that a method is being simulated in a debugger? I would like to have two different paths thisContext isDebugging ifTrue: [aBlock value] ifFalse: [aBlock newProcess]. so that I can debug the new process without having to change the code and remove the threading. Or is there a better way to step through code that is executing in a different thread? It would be nice if when the debugger hit a new thread it would simply open up a new debugger on that thread, then you could keep stepping through either debugger. Thanks, Ron Teitelbaum

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bugs on mantis: who assigns them ?
by Dan Corneanu 05 Sep '06

05 Sep '06

Hi, how do bugs on mantis get assigned to someone? Who is responsible for this?

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[ANN] Rome
by Bert Freudenberg 02 Sep '06

02 Sep '06

Rome is a 2D rendering framework made available by VPRI under MIT license: http://www.squeaksource.com/Rome.html The primary backend for Rome is a plugin using Cairo (http://cairographics.org), additionally there is a reference implementation completely in Smalltalk, and one using the Balloon2D engine. Rome is currently used in the TinLizzie and Sophie projects. - Bert -

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