Squeak-dev June 2007

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120 participants
175 discussions

SqF feedback
by stéphane ducasse 21 Jul '07

21 Jul '07

Hi I'm reposting this email since I have the impression that the point was lost in its original thread. ... - Normally after election, politicians do not really listen anymore and I would like to do the inverse. I would really like to know what you expect or would like to see put in place. We have some ideas (bounty system, better process) and I will really listen what the new boarders want to do (I'm even eager to see that :)). We do not have the monopole of good ideas, so if you have some points that you would like to see happening please mention it. Stef

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Re: Q] Any AS 400 Squeak experience ?
by Davide Grandi 19 Jul '07

19 Jul '07

> On Sat, 23 Jun 2007 16:46:15 -0700, Edgar J. De Cleene > <edgardec2001(a)yahoo.com.ar> wrote: > > > El 6/23/07 3:24 PM, "Blake" <blake(a)kingdomrpg.com> escribió: > > > >> Not personally, but both of my parents. I might be able to > lure my dad > >> into a project, tho'. > > > > If have any details, as what VM, I appreciate > > Oh, I see. That's a long shot but I'll ask. Squeak on the AS/400 ? Very intriguing ! AFAIK there were only a Visualage Smalltalk edition (4.5) running on the PASE environment (an AIX-like hole drilled in OS/400 down to the MI, if my memory holds). Back in 2000-2001. You could run Squeak on a Linux "partition" of the OS/400, headless (unless you start also the X server) : you need a standard linux 64 distribution running on a Power kernel (Suse, Red hat, et al.). I run a Jxxx app. server 5 years ago and ran it exactly as I did on a pc-based environment. Running it on the OS/400 side could lead to some interesting integration with the OS/400 db (tables, schemas and other db "objects" are first class OS object). I wander if someone ran Squak on the other IBM "big Iron", the /390 aka zSeries (or in his software emulator Hercules). Let us know about the '400. Best regards, Davide -- Ing. Davide Grandi davide.grandi(a)mclink.it www.davidegrandi.net

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Using a keyboard with Squeak on the Nokia 770/N800
by Aaron Reichow 04 Jul '07

04 Jul '07

Hey all, Just a little note- I've had some luck using my bluetooth Keyboard with my Nokia N800 and Squeak. I mention this specifically because with a keyboard, the Nokia N800/770 makes a cool little laptop- I'm building a simple laptopish case out of cardboard and because teh Maemo platform the Nokias run on is a bit funky with regards to input- e.g. unlike on CE, you don't have access to the OS-level software keyboard, etc to input into Squeak, and as such we've relied on Genie or soft-keyboards inside Squeak to input text. Since the KB doesn't support the HID profile, you have to use a driver. Driver: http://fanoush.wz.cz/maemo/ Keyboard I'm using: http://www.freedominput.com/site/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=28 The keyboard I'm using, but which uses the standard HID profile, which is a better way of doing things in many ways: http://freedominput.com/site/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=34 What is great about the Freedom BT keyboards is that unlike every other foldable I've seen they have a number row. Makes a huge difference if you're coding- on the IrDA keyboard I had for the Zaurus I had to press two keymodifiers to get a lot of punctuation chars like [, etc. The keyboard has been working well, but no Alt- modifiers present or interpreted by the driver; Ctrl- and Shift- clicking work fine, and there is a key which seems to be mapped to escape which is handy for bringing up context menus. Not sure if regular HID-compliant keyboards (which just work on the Nokias) work in Squeak, but I don't see why they wouldn't. Just a little info for those wanting to make a novy-HandheldPC-cum- Dynabook out of a Nokia 770/N800. :) Regards, Aaron

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SmalltalkImage current
by Norbert Hartl 04 Jul '07

04 Jul '07

Hi, I read in a posting from Andreas that there are problems with the renaming from Smalltalkk to SmalltalkImage current. I discovered problems with it several times myself. That remembers me that I wanted to ask what were the reason to change it? It breaks a lot of code and reading this list it appears to me that nobody likes it :) So how came it has been renamed? Btw. how much smalltalk images I'm able to run. new is disabled. I don't get it. Any hint is appreciated. Norbert

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The land of the Mice, a bedtime story
by goran＠krampe.se 04 Jul '07

04 Jul '07

Let me tell you a story... I was around... when King Dan ruled the Land of the Mice, his court the "SqC" was strong and the stream was flowing smoothly. It was a glorious and joyous time and I were there to see sir PWS, sir Comanche and princess Swiki being born as children of Socket. The wizard Morphic was still young and agile at that time... Things were well, but not everyone were happy in the Land of the Mice - the population grew quickly and only the fortunate ones to enter the castle Image could have their fields fully prosper and not wither and die in the harsh outbacks of the Internet. During this era the (oh, so lonely) renegades of Stable Squeak rose and fell. A noteworthy effort and something to learn from, they were probably the first to wander outside of the monarchy trying to create something on their own. But they tried to do everything on their own and soon perished under lack of time. Together we are strong but in few numbers we do not weigh that much. I was around... at the Great Gathering (OOPSLA) when King Dan and his court withdrew from power and left the land in the hands of the Guides, a humble group that tried to guide, but did not manage to lead and capture the hearts and dedication of mice as the formidable King had been able to do before them. Only a few brave souls during this era kept the state apparatus working - wanderer Marcus and blacksmith Doug comes to mind, also being guides at the time and doing a fearful amount of work to keep our stream facilities working. Though clearly undecisive, this era was still to be remembered as a relatively good time - the time when a lot of new useful structures were erected by brave dedicated citizens, like for example monastery Monticello, the castle of SqueakSource and the holy library of SqueakMap. And the new popular plaza - SqP - where citizens could post their writings on walls for all to see. All in all, great accomplishments - but still, an undecisive era becoming more and more vague in direction and loosing momentum. I was around... to see the revolution that begun the short third era - the one year of benevolent dictatorship. A small group took a firmer charge of the land, by force - with the aim to create a new constitution. This was not looked upon as something good by all citizens. It was also the rebirth of Squeak.org and the acquisition of the electronical citadell - box2 - where all holy scrolls and resources were kept. During this year they started a process towards a democracy, strongly believing that this was the only way forward for the land of the mice - a stronger rule enabled by the display of trust from the citizens. This group had many names but promised *one* thing, and that was to step down after exactly one year. And when one year had passed this was also fulfilled and they were replaced with a group elected directly by the people! The land of the mice entered the fourth era - the era of The Board, a Democracy. During the second, third and fourth era, groups of fellow citizens moved off in different directions and created new communities throughout the land like the mysterious Croquet island, the infectious brotherhood of Seaside, the true temple of the Spoon, the state bureau of Mantis and lately even a modest but popular food court called SqueakDev, just to mention a few. The land of the mice is fertile with more citicens than ever, even though spread out in various parts of the continent. We are now in the second year of the fourth era. Are the citizens happy? Or is there confusion and paralysis spreading slowly across the land? Is the bureacracy and constitution working as we hoped or is it slowly eroding the hearts and souls of mice? ...is the magic gone? And if this is so.... what can we learn from history to do something about it? Can our land be yet again changed through a revolution? Would it be wise? Or is it just a lack of strong builders creating new castles and houses of wonder? Can the land sustain more than one castle? ...to change the land of mice... or to raise the sails and find new land across the sea? And with those words my friends, it is time for you to sleep on it. Good night. /Göran

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RE: Fishing for a CS Masters Thesis Topic
by J J 03 Jul '07

03 Jul '07

> Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 22:40:44 +0300> From: danielv(a)tx.technion.ac.il> To: squeak-dev(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org> Subject: Re: Fishing for a CS Masters Thesis Topic> > Under languages:Also under languages:What I would personally like to see worked on is having a better language to fill the systems programming roll. Right now everything converges on C/C++. There are higher level languages that are used to systems programming (e.g. Slang), but as far as I know they *all* convert to C. The GCC project has the ability to take an AST directly to convert to machine code, but this is also constrained by what C is capable of.What I would like to see is some other language used for this "portable assembler", but without the assumptions and limitations of C [1]. Instead of deciding that added complexity is the solution (e.g. C++) I would like to see a language that looked to simplicity. Personally, I was thinking of a Lisp language for this roll because Lisp is the only language I am aware of (a useful one anyway) that is actually *simpler* then Smalltalk. I think powerful Lisp macros would also make it possible to build abstractions on top of the very low level primitives so that you don't have to do thinks like do a function call setup unless you didn't like any of the available options.[1] Some of the limitations I was thinking of are things like the stack-based method of doing function calls and the inability to catch overflow, but I'm sure there are even more.Thanks,Jason _________________________________________________________________ Live Earth is coming. Learn more about the hottest summer event - only on MSN. http://liveearth.msn.com?source=msntaglineliveearthwlm

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Squeak to/from UTF-8 conversions
by Andreas Raab 01 Jul '07

01 Jul '07

Hi - I was working on a little improvement in UTF-8 conversion speed (so far it's about 150x faster for latin-1 text ;-) and for measuring the improvements was running a test that said: strings := String allSubInstances. 1 to: strings size do:[:i| original := strings at: i. utf8 := original squeakToUtf8. copy := utf8 utf8ToSqueak. original = copy ifFalse:[self error: 'Encoding problem']. ]. When I ran this test it failed on each and every WideString instance. Digging into it, it seems that all of the WideStrings in Squeak have a language tag that is being supplied implicitly by the current LanguageEnvironment. Questions: 1) From what it looks like right now there is no way to preserve that language tag through a UTF-8 conversion. Is this indeed the case or am I missing something? 2) Given that my language environment is being set to Latin-1, how should clients treat UTF-8 to provide the "proper" language tag? For example, I expected that a client be able to read and write UTF-8 text without implicitly providing that language tag. If that's the case, then how does one store these in common text files? (I could see how to do this for formatted text but not for "plain text files" without further attributation) 3) More generally asking, isn't the language tag here more of a "decorator" along the lines of text attributes? This would certainly model more closely the effect that I'm seeing here (some attributes are dropped by the squeak -> utf8 -> squeak conversion) *except* that I didn't expect any lossy conversion for strings (contrary to Text where dropping text attributes is obviously lossy). Thanks for any help, - Andreas

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(no subject)
by au miau 30 Jun '07

30 Jun '07

(I'll be happy if noone read that , I don't like what and how I wrote (but i didn't write anything I don't think) It is an answer to some messages I was supposed to answer long ago but I wanted to be sure in my answer... and that took a monstrous amount of time :-) As I don't plan anything smalltalk related in future it seems to be last time to write an answer... And maybe most important to say is :I deeply regret and feel no excuse for time of much more important people than me reading and answering my messages took) To be smart is like being a movie star, some people want to help You but more like to use You or just to touch You and tell You are their friend. So You don't learn realy much about ethic of commmunity You live in -fools learn the ways community treaths those who it doesn't recognise like its members . A community is free and open when it don't exclude too much people ...and don't have a long list of "disabilities",qualities, and characteristics that it "recognise" as allien ...And what french people contributed when it is known for what one will be excluded ("law") and for what can not be (i.e. "rights") i.e. "I think You fool" is not a good reason because "fool" is difficult to define and "I" is not the source of the law Looking back from now I think that Squeak community I quit ~5 years ago is as close to communism as I ever saw ,from malformed idea of progress -"language for children" (and some very brutal forms of that idea could be discovered in internet like "children to think much beter than adults now" -i just wonder if noone in smalltalk world knew an old story about king that decided old people don't contribute to his welth anymore and ordered all old people to be executed ...)- coresponding to "power to THE working class". It is not that idea for language understandable for children is bad or I don't like it. I was 3 year old when I understood programming. I could not read , write , play music or do "1+3" but I saw some diagrames (not idiotised block-schemes where arithmetic and choice rules) and i got it :You compose some rectangles and You program is ready .It was not my business who put what is in the rectangles I just knew that from few blocks one can build endless worlds. That idea about programming was known in 50-ies!!! And then Fortran-Algol-Pascal , Assembly-C and Gods-of-Cobol take the world ...So when I said to my father "You know I think I can do it" he was just shocked how iresponsible I am for what I say - he knew just too much to understand me... He knew fortran and that I can't do "4853+87437" => so he was right to think that I can't do FORTRAN programming ...I wasn't one of the first smalltalk kids just because I'm born in communist country ...and what it means is another story The point is that including one group of people should not exclude another. Then it comes the brainwashing - Scientific Communism and Object-Orientation.And I have one question on that if I understood it when I was 3 should I stay there and to be treathed as 8 years old idiot who can't do anything more than when was 3 ...forever? In old times von Neuman and Wiener was in titanic competition working in every field of math from logic to quantum physics and computing was just a part of new math they invented ..."I can't do cohomology , quantization , or even what von Neumann already did but don't worry I can object"- great philosophy ,isn't it? Did someone used word "algebra" , may I hear that story and just to leave Object Systems in Jean Baudrillard's books? ..... After reading maybe first of McLuhan's books I realy don't like him "Lights off!Shut it down!Culture worths nothing!" is realy not somethink I like to think on.My father never read Montesori and it was not a problem for him to teach me more than he could imagine love and fairness were enough The point is that ideas in smalltalk somehow become too easy .... too easy to fake And use for whatever purpose (and i think it is something people in communist countries in 1975--1985 experienced too) .... I wrote the stupide message like physicists do experiments to understood the laws of nature, I wanted to know how the community of free and open smalltalk act on stupidity and if that is reason for exclusion...and something even more fundamental "what is stupide" in that comunity(and if my idea for stupide have something common with ) ... I had two answers ... First was only one I hoped to not have . It was very very generous and in a way very stupid , becouse if The King answer personaly to every fool it would be busiest King in the world of most unsructured and lazy community... But I hoped He will think on that Second answer was for a message I send to foundation ML from Marcus Denker looks like this"What do You care if You knok at hte door and nobody opens or if someone opens just to tell You You are not invited to that party?" This is realy great answer.Why I should care if I'm not invited in smalltalk world , why to care what's going inside it and if he (miss)used his power by telling me that I'm not invited? Smalltalk is language that i miss from when i was 3 and I stupidely promised something to my father without knowing that this was our last conversation and there will be no way to take that promise back .But smalltalk come at too high prise for me to lost any pleasure of finding things out.(which I think is worse than unkept promise) I regret this message become so long and for most things I didn't planed to include but i did and for mistakes and completely broken grammar and for the fact it become collection of fragments difficult to reasemble and read (but reading and writing (of the same text) are completely unrelated things and reading is creative process so what You read is up to You) And my only excuse is I'll never write again (here) . ----------------------------------------------------------------- С бензин в кръвта! http://auto-motor-und-sport.bg/

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Fwd: [Squeak-ev] CHOOSE Talk: $100 Laptop
by Klaus D. Witzel 30 Jun '07

30 Jun '07

Hi Squeak-dev'ers, Marcus asked for forwarding the below. Come one, come all! /Klaus ------- Forwarded message ------- From: "Marcus Denker" <denker(a)iam.unibe.ch> To: "Squeak in Germany / Squeak in Deutschland" <squeak-ev(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org> Cc: Subject: [Squeak-ev] CHOOSE Talk: $100 Laptop Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2007 10:55:17 +0200 Hallo, Hier noch die offizielle Einladung zu Bert's Vortrag naechsten Freitag. Kann das jemand an die listen squeakland, die etoy-olpc liste und squeak-dev weiterleiten? ============================================================ The CHOOSE executive board is pleased to invite you to a presentation by Dr. Bert Freudenberg on 'One Etoy Per Child on the $100 Laptop'. This event is free for all SI-CHOOSE members, even the drinks after the talk! Non-CHOOSE members are also welcome, and are encouraged to fill out the membership application form (http://www.s-i.ch/) before attending the meeting. If you want to know more about CHOOSE and the events which CHOOSE organises, please visit www.choose.s-i.ch NOTE: registration for this event is required. Please fill out the registration form at the end of this e-mail. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ One Etoy Per Child on the $100 Laptop ========================== When: 06.07.2007, 17:15 Where: Institut fuer Wirtschaftsinformatik (IWI), Universitaet Bern, Engehaldenstrasse 8, 3012 Bern, Hoersaal 001 Travel instructions: http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/Resources/Maps/ Speaker ------- Dr. Bert Freudenberg Agenda ------ 1 hour Talk and Q/A Afterwards you are invited to a refreshment. Abstract ======== Most of the two billion children in developing countries have unsufficient access to education. The non-profit "One Laptop per Child" project is working on a learning machine, a cheap, networked computer with software to support "learning to learn" for every child. One of its software components is "Etoys", a tile-based authoring environment written on top of Squeak. The talk will present the OLPC project, its current state of development in general and the progress on Etoys in particular. Bio === Dr. Bert Freudenberg got a PhD from the University of Magdeburg (on non-photorealistic realtime rendering). He worked for impara GmbH in Magdeburg developing software for children. Currently he is a freelancing developer working for Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research Institute on porting the Squeak and Etoys environment to the 100 dollar laptop. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- REGISTRATION ------------ Please DO NOT reply to this e-mail! Fill in the form below and sent it to choose AT glue.ch. Thanks. I want to register for the following event: ___ Name: ______________________________________ Email: ______________________________________ Company: ______________________________________ Address: ______________________________________ ZIP/City:______________________________________ Please check: [ ] CHOOSE member [ ] JUGS member [ ] SI member [ ] Non-Member Marcus -- Marcus Denker -- denker(a)iam.unibe.ch http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker

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[Fwd: RE: Paying for projects]
by Ken Causey 30 Jun '07

30 Jun '07

Here is the first of Jason's (JJ's) projects opened for bidding. He accidentally sent it to me directly yesterday and once he realized that asked me to forward it to the list. So here it is. Ken P.S. Be sure to reply to the list of Jason "J J <azreal1977(a)hotmail.com>" directly, not me. -------- Forwarded Message -------- From: J J <azreal1977(a)hotmail.com> To: Ken Causey <ken(a)kencausey.com> Subject: RE: Paying for projects Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 21:10:19 +0000 Ok, since most of the responders want to do it this way, I will try it. After all, it does save me the time of going and making a list and I'm sure we're all sick of subscribing to new lists all the time. :) And if it does go bad I can still make it later on. So for my first project: I want undo on Change sets. I'm not talking about the change sorter, or any GUI. I want the relevant Change set classes to know how to undo a given set. Any GUI work will (maybe) be another project later. Now, the reason undo doesn't work now is because not everything that happens is recorded. If you make changes to methods it seems to work, but class changes basically just say "Class was changed" in the change sorter (and the undo explicitly says that these can't be undone). So what I am asking for here is that all this information be recorded in some way. If I make a change set, add some ivars and then say "undo" then I want the ivars to be taken out and the class put back as it was. Once we have this I don't think any special handling is needed for class renames, because the change set will have one class going away and a new one being created. If you reverse that then you are back where you were before the change. And don't worry about the case of when a change set is made after the one that gets the undo message. I want the undo to simply undo (i.e. revert to previous) all the changes in the set that receives the message. If that ends up blowing away 100 modifications to a method that happens to be in the receiving change set, fine. We'll worry about that later. Also, I know that object changes to the system don't get recorded, and I'm not worried about that. Think: things you would find in the smalltalk browser. Not: thinks you would find in the object inspector. I.e. the closest we get to static information, classes and methods (though if you think of something else, ask me :) I don't want any cheesy hacks here like trying some kind of hidden image save and then restore it on undo, or anything else. I want a clean solution. I suggest a modification to the format of the changes file. I remember a while back Time, I think it was, made some changes to the changes file format to remove some limitations they had. I would prefer to build on this change, or if you think best then make a whole new format. The only thing that will be required is that we can parse the old format still (at least enough to be able to convert it). Now both of these line items may be complex enough to warrant their own project each. At this point, I'm assuming not and I'm expecting the project to be $50 to $200 USD. If I'm way off here, please tell me why and how much you will do it for. You can also suggest a smaller subset of the request that you *would* do for this price range. Any part of the request is negotiable, but one of the parameters of who I pick will be the person who gets the closest to what I want at a price I think, or you convince me, is reasonable. So, just to be clear, success in this project looks like this: I apply the changes you give me (once we get started I will make a new project on Squeaksource to put your code so I can load it from MC). I go to the change sorter or some such method and create a new change set. I make some changes to methods and classes, renaming, etc. I save the image and shut down. I restart the image, get a reference to the change set somehow and send it an #undo message (or how ever it's done). I verify the image is just as it was before the changes were made. So, that is it. Let the bidding begin! :) Please send me personally your bids/negotiations, I don't want to spam everyone with that stuff. I will announce it as soon as I have picked someone and we will work out how we do this. We will probably use rentacoder unless you have a better suggest (just keep in mind I hate making new user ids and passwords :). Thanks, Jason

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