Squeak-dev October 2008

squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

111 participants
144 discussions

Linux and ttyUSB0
by Jon Hylands 13 Jan '09

13 Jan '09

Hi everyone, On my current robotics project, I'm using a gumstix verdex to talk over a USB to serial converter chip (FT232) to a serial bus. My brother Dave made up a new kernel driver for the gumstix, and when I plug in the chip it registers itself as ttyUSB0. For work I've done previously on Squeak on the gumstix, I've used standard serial ports, which map to ttyS0, ttyS1, ttyS2, etc, which correspond to port 0, 1, and 2 when I open the Serial Port in Squeak. However, I have no idea which port number ttyUSB0 corresponds to... Anyone got any idea? Thanks, Jon -------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Hylands Jon(a)huv.com http://www.huv.com/jon Project: Micro Raptor (Small Biped Velociraptor Robot) http://www.huv.com/blog

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The state of Squeak I18n support: let's improve it
by Katerina Barone-Adesi 09 Dec '08

09 Dec '08

There has been a lot of excellent work done on Unicode in Squeak. Unfortunately, not all of it works 'out of the box'. I've started working on trying to figure out how to enable the basic operations (input, display, and copy/paste) for several languages. With the kind help of several Russian squeakers, I've managed to create relatively simple instructions on how to do so for Russian, which I've posted here: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5773 ; I've personally tested the 3.10 instructions under Linux. However, getting to this point involved days of experimentation, including quite a lot of image hangs. The reason I created the documentation was that, despite reading everything on squeak.org and the mailing list archives about Russian and Cyrillic support, I still couldn't get it working - it took combining the instructions of two people who had had similar experiences, and the patches of two others, to have everything work, although there are some problems with garbage characters with copy/paste sometimes. A side effect of these instructions is that various accented European characters (such as à, å, ò, ö, ĵ, ñ, ç, č, ć, š, đ, etc - everything I've tried) work. This cursory testing suggests that Italian/French/German/Spanish/Swedish/Esperanto/Slovenian/etc operations also work after following the Russian instructions; they do not work by default. Perhaps more interestingly, Thai and Greek also work; Arabic nearly does, but only displays in its 'general Unicode' form (rather than correctly changing what appears based on the position of each letter in the word: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet for a better description). I'm now going through the same process for Japanese. Installing 'Japanese Environment Installer' (JEI) from SqueakMap only gave me a working display of Japanese characters, without working input or copy/paste. Possibly interestingly, direct input while using a Japanese keymap (with no input method) to type kana works with the Russian patches, but not with the JEI patches. Nothing using extra input method software works anywhere in Squeak in any configuration I've tried. Deadkeys also don't work. I would like to request help from all Squeakers who can input, display, and copy/paste text in languages which have characters or writing systems that don't appear in the languages mentioned above, and especially of those who have everything working with Japanese. Any instructions on how you did it would be greatly appreciated. I intend to keep documenting the simplest ways to currently set things up, which will hopefully have the side effect of making a baseline set of patches to have things Just Work become clear. Any reports of errata in the documentation, platform differences, or bugs are also extremely welcome. Thank you; Katerina Barone-Adesi

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Botsinc free
by stephane ducasse 04 Dec '08

04 Dec '08

Hi all I'm happy to announce that my book BotsInc http://smallwiki.unibe.ch/botsinc will be free soon (in fact it is since 23 september). I would like to thank ESUG http://www.esug.org for supporting financially the buying of the book rights and giving the book to the kid world. A catalan version will be available really soon thanks to jordi delgado! (Yes the french were not the first this time... We were the first for the etoy book and squeak by example. :)) If you want to participate to a translation please contact me. I will be setting up soon an infrastructure to support any language translation. Stef ------------------------ Stéphane Ducasse USTL - LILF - CNRS UMR 8022 - INRIA stephane.ducasse(a)inria.fr http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr "if you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do different? ... especially if, by doing something different, today might not be your last day on earth" Calvin&Hobbes Tel 33 3 59 57 78 66 - Fax 33 3 59 57 78 50 40, avenue Halley, Parc Scientifique de la Haute Borne, Bât.A, Park Plaza, Villeneuve d'Ascq, FR-59650, France.

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Cleaning up lava code and unsent messages.
by Jerome Peace 02 Dec '08

02 Dec '08

Cleaning up lava code and unsent messages. Hi all, This was an after thought from my previous post. It deserved its own topic. Lava code is code left over from historical times which has no use in the current image and yet no one is willing to take responsiblity for removing it. For the record squeak has historically had about one sixth of its messages as unsent methods. Some of which is lava code others of which are examples, probes, utilities and tests. It would be nice to clean things up so there are no unsent messages. This could be done simply by creating a (pseudo-recursive) message #legitamatelyUnsentMethods (one method say for each class.) That sends for any legitimate examples, etc. Then anything that shows up as unsent would be illegitamate and removeable. >From time to time you would look at the implementors of the legitamatelyUnsentMethods to clean out what no longer belongs. a legitamatelyUnsentMethods method would be packagable if care were take that it mentions only the unsent methods of that package. My proposal is that package maintainers should take the responsibility for doing this in their own packages and the release team should reject any code that contains unsent messages. An Sunit test could be provided to check. I am also hoping to recruit those who would be willing to sort out the unsent messages in core packages and either write legitamatelyUnsentMethods methods for them or flag them as lava code for removal. It is a good way to gain an insight into a lot of squeak code while helping the community. If this task appeals to you please start it by planting a seed on mantis. Yours in service and curiosity, --Jeorme Peace ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs

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Using Mac OS vm from the command line
by Keith Hodges 17 Nov '08

17 Nov '08

I am using a symbolic link to squeak -> Squeak 3.8.18beta4U.app/Contents/MacOS/Squeak VM Opt It requires a full path the to image, it cannot open an image in the PWD is this expected behaviour? Keith

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[ANN] Pier 1.0.17
by Tudor Girba 11 Nov '08

11 Nov '08

Hi, Pier 1.0.17 is now available. You can download the one click Pier from the new webpage: http://www.piercms.com/download The release contains the core of Pier and several add-ons (like the blog). It features an improved site structure and a new stylesheet. The new www.piercms.com provides a documentation section and a blog that will grow in the near future. Feedback and comments are more than welcome. Cheers, Doru and Lukas

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[ANN] Euro 2008 Betting! 24 hours left!
by Göran Krampe 10 Nov '08

10 Nov '08

Hi folks! (This is a reminder - perhaps folks missed my previous post so this time I added "[ANN]" - almost noone from the Squeak community have joined up and previous years quite a lot of people did.) 2 years has passed and it is time to go crazy over soccer again! The european championship is about to start in exactly 24 hours and the little betting site I built 6 years ago (in Squeak3.9/HttpView2) is once again up and running! So drop by, place the bets and join up to see how it goes. No official prizes :) are set - but who knows. IMPORTANT: You got 24 hours to bet until the group play betting game closes! There are two other betting games though that are continuous so you can join later. http://em2008.krampe.se/eng regards, Göran PS. Will post a followup later on describing how we used the translation mechanism in Squeak to make the site in both english and swedish.

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Squeak Carbon OS-X VM 3.8.19beta1U ships
by John M McIntosh 09 Nov '08

09 Nov '08

This VM has a number of fundamental changes and can be found via ftp or my idisk at http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com/squeak.html (a) I have changed how image files are read. Users should verify the VM still will load and work with their current images on their current systems. I have tested with macintel on 10.5.x and powerpc on 10.4.x but have NOT tested on a 10.3.x powerpc system, if some 10.3.x user could do that it would be appreciated. (b) I no longer cwd (change working directory) at startup time to the VM directory, and I added a change so if the image name is for example Squeak.image we attempt to find that in the VM directory. This change *should* enable the ablility to launch a VM and image and startup file from a command line using relative file paths, versus having to give absolute paths. Users are welcome to test and confirm this feature works as expected with relative and absolute paths for the image and startup file. Memory allocation background: In the past we have read the image file into a pre-allocated chunk of memory allocated via mmap, now I have changed to a more complicated but faster method of reading which then allows us to someday depending on your VM to avoid re-swizzling pointers for an image that is launched on a unix, windows, or iPhone since all oops should start on the 500MB boundary. What happens is we mmap the image file with copy on write mmap into a segment of memory starting at a real address of 500MB (500*1024*1024), the next virtual memory page follow the size of the file then is anonymously mmap upto the maximum memory size choosen for the implmentation. In this case we allocate 512MB of memory which is a settable option in the info.plist. Because of mmap differences between operating systems, and versions of operating systems I cannot say if this will work on your favourite device, but it does seem to work on os-x 10.4 & 10.5 for powerpc and macintel, plus on iPhone 2.x. Post loading we check to see if the memory start location is the same as the memory start location when the image was saved. If not then we adjust all oops pointers by the difference in addresses. If the saved image was at the 500MB boundary then we do not need to walk all the oops to swizzle pointers, this saves some CPU cycle and becomes important on slow devices like the iPhone, or when we want to use Squeak as a scripting engine and expect really fast startup. -- = = = ======================================================================== John M. McIntosh <johnmci(a)smalltalkconsulting.com> Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com = = = ========================================================================

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Anyone have any processors in Smalltalk or a formal semantics?
by Eliot Miranda 09 Nov '08

09 Nov '08

Hi All, I wonder if anyone has any 32-bit processor implementations, either in Smalltalk or in some other, preferrably easy-to-parse, formal semantics. In implementing the new JIT VM I would like to continue developing in Smalltalk using VMMaker/Slang, but this implies having a processor simulation in Smalltalk to produce actual machine code for. Ideally this would be an x86 of some description (doesn't need to be bang up to date, 386 would be fine). I'd also welcome an ARM. TIA

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[ANN] Monticello 2.0.26
by Colin Putney 30 Oct '08

30 Oct '08

Hi folks, This version has some improvements to the file and directory repositories, including some work by Julian Fitzell to make the tests pass on Windows. (The repository code was fine under Windows, but the tests didn't work due to some differences between the way file streams are handled in Windows vs. Mac and Unix.) Also, there was a bug that prevented the directory repository from working well with Dropbox, per Avi's suggestion a few weeks ago. That's been fixed, and I've created a Dropbox repository for MC2. Send me email if you'd like to get access to it. Available at the usual place: http://www.wiresong.ca/static/releases/Monticello-current.zip Colin

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