Smalltalk with James Robertson

Eliot Miranda explains the hows and whys of writing a JIT for a language like Smalltalk.

Technorati Tags: jit, squeak, cog

Today's Smalltalk 4 You uses the morphic UI designer for Squeak to build a simple UI. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Looks like Google Charts for Seaside has been updated for VA Smalltalk:

Yuri Vrancken ported the SeasideGoogle Chart library to VASmalltalk and published it at vastgoodies this port worked with 8.0 Beta, but has never been updated since that time. I took the code and make it work for me under 8.03 remove some system changes (to make the loading process easier and therefore broke the original code and made it perhaps not compatible with the original Squeak version).

Technorati Tags: seaside, va smalltalk

Looks like the iTunes enabled post for the day will be delayed; the service I use to host the files seems to be having a problem. I can't really complain a whole lot; it's free after all :)

In the meantime, the daily screencast is up on YouTube

Technorati Tags: screencast, javascript

This is oddly fascinating - a 10 minute video that upgrades (progressively) from Windows 1.0 to Windows 7. Virtualization makes it all possible :)

Technorati Tags: upgrades

Today's Javascript 4 You. Today we take a further look at replacing DOM objects in Javascript. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. Join the Facebook Group to discuss the tutorials. You can view the archives here.

To watch now, click on the image below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: javascript, dom, tutorial

Ok, this is just silly. A French consulting firm wants to get rid of internal emails and "use social platforms" instead:

Another French consulting and services company, Atos Origin, has similar designs for a social media transformation: Chairman and CEO Thierry Breton wants to eliminate internal e-mail from the company within three years, replacing it with social platforms, he announced in February. "E-mail is on the way out as the best way to run a company and do business," he said.

Why? I understand that email can be overwhelming (I get well over a hundred emails to my gmail box per day, and that doesn't count the ones I get from work), but: email does serve a purpose, and it's slightly different than the way social media works. If nothing else, you can track emails centrally, which is necessary in some legal contexts.

An old phrase comes to mind: it's a poor workman who blames his tools....

Technorati Tags: email, social media

Finally, A Dance with Dragons has a publish date! It's coming out this summer: A Dance With Dragons will be published by Bantam on July 12, 2011. The manuscript is huge 14 the publisher estimates the hardcover edition will run more than 900 pages, putting it about the same length as the longest book in the series, A Storm of Swords. Schedule your summer vacation accordingly.

Technorati Tags: fantasy

Dale Henreichs has announced the availability of the latest GLASS beta - to get started, go here.

Technorati Tags: seaside, glass

Way back in 2002, I started writing the software that drives this blog - at the time, I was thinking of it as a promotional tool for Smalltalk. When I left Cincom and needed a new job, it became something more useful: a promotional tool for me. I publicized my situation, and that effort led to a job offer from the place I'm working now. This aspect brought up by Rob Conery also came up:

It’s ubiquitous. What a perfect interview topic: “I’d love to see how you handled asynchronous pings to Technorati and oh do you have a POP feature? Also did you use MetaWeblog or Wordpress?”

One of the things I got asked about was my technical chops - since I'd been working in software promotion, did I still have any useful skills from a development perspective? Well, the blog is a living, breathing example of the fact that I know at least a few things. The code is in the public repository, so it's easily accessible as well.

Having a public project like a blog turned out to be useful for me in multiple ways.

Technorati Tags: resume, blog

Joy of Tech pretty much nails it again :)

Today's Smalltalk 4 You continues with the morphic designer for Squeak - how do you reopen (for editing) a GUI you've already created? If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: morphic, squeak, designer

Looks like AT&T will finally lure me off of my unlimited data plan for the iPhone with the mobile hotspot. Being able to set one up on the fly is better than carrying one plan for the iPhone, and then pondering whether to use 3g on my iPad:

Thankfully, you can just revert to the standard, non-Wi-Fi hotspot data plan once the need is gone. An AT&T spokesperson confirmed to me that upgrading to include support for iOS 4.3 Wi-Fi hotspots is not an irreversible, long-term commitment. The spokesperson told me, "Customers can select and migrate between data plans without penalty or contract implications."

Technorati Tags: iPhone, iPad, wifi, 3g

It looks like the multi-decade trend towards bigger and bigger "box store" outlets is coming to an end. It's harder to have more inventory than an online entity like Amazon:

U.S. retailers of all stripes super-sized their stores over the past two decades after big-box chains demonstrated the benefits of being larger than the competition. But many outsized outlets now look like dinosaurs in an age when Amazon.com's offerings dwarf even the most bountiful in-store selection, and advances in supply-chain management let retailers replenish shelves quickly without keeping heaps of merchandise handy in the back of the stores.

For most stuff I'd find at a big box store, it's easier to go to my browser and order it. Unless I need something right now, it's hard for me to justify the slog out to the box and the inevitable waiting in line. That even goes for the big grocery stores - I get over half of my groceries via Peapod now. I'd be much happier with a new specialist store (perhaps a real butcher?) than I would be in a new super store. The WSJ article indicates that I'm hardly the only person thinking that way.

That begs this question: what happens to all of those strip malls that are filled with huge box stores?

Technorati Tags: big box, retail

As always, Eliot is full of implemetation details on the ins and outs of "marrying" an interpreter and a JIT inside the same VM.

Technorati Tags: jit, interpreter, cog

How can you tell that you really, really like a game? When you come up with yet another role playing rationale for a character, and start the umpteebth playthrough in search of the last few achievement points :) Dragon Age 2 can't come soon enough :)

James Ladd will be at the NYC STUG on March 17th to talk about Redline Smalltalk:

Redline Smalltalk is Smalltalk for the Java Virtual Machine, because nothing is as productive as Smalltalk and the app has to run on the Java Virtual Machine. Redline compiles from source code directly to bytecode and is compatible with Pharo syntax. While Smalltalk on the JVM has been tried before there are some significant innovations coming with Redline, which will be detailed.

Follow the link for full details.

Technorati Tags: redline, jvm

Welcome to episode 20 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, and David Buck. This week I have a presentation from ESUG 2010 - John O'Keefe talking about two things:

• VA Smalltalk
• The new, completely Smalltalk focused Instantiations

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.

To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.

If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Troublemaker for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!

If you have feedback, send it to jarober@gmail.com - or visit us on Facebook - you can subscribe in iTunes using this iTunes enabled feed.. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!

Technorati Tags: esug, smalltalk, va smalltalk, instantiations

Welcome to episode 20 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, and David Buck. This week I have a presentation from ESUG 2010 - John O'Keefe talking about two things:

• VA Smalltalk
• The new, completely Smalltalk focused Instantiations

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.

To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.

If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Troublemaker for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!

If you have feedback, send it to jarober@gmail.com - or visit us on Facebook - you can subscribe in iTunes using this iTunes enabled feed.. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, esug, instantiations, va smalltalk

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at VA Smalltalk - how do you load the various libraries that it ships with into the image? If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, va smalltalk, envy

The script came from Alan Kay's spouse, Bonnie MacBird. According to imdb:

Her script for Tron is loosely based on the work of her spouse Alan Kay (Dynabook, Smalltalk, Vivarium)

Well, you have to take the bad with the good, I guess :)

The growing adoption of Facebook Comments has set off the usual complaints about how one company is "taking over" the web, but Steve Cheney has posted a new level of stupid:

Face it, authenticity goes way down when people know their 700 friends, grandma, and 5 ex-girlfriends are tuning in each time they post something on the web.

Later he says that anonymous posting isn't really his point, so I have to wonder - has he heard of Google? Has he noticed what's happened to every prominent person who's tried to stay anonymous on the net? Exactly what authenticity is the web stealing?

Back pre-internet, if you tried the sort of "authentic" conversation that Cheney seems to want in different venues, word would eventually snake back to everyone else through the grapevine. The only thing that the net has done for that is to make the grapevine bigger and faster. I have to wonder whether Cheney understands the medium he's commenting on at all....

Technorati Tags: stupidity

Today's Javascript 4 You. Today we take a look at using timeouts in Javascript. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. Join the Facebook Group to discuss the tutorials. You can view the archives here.

To watch now, click on the image below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: javascript, timeouts

I've been continuing to work on build automation, because I've also been asked to refactor the package/bundle structure we use here (in order to create a cleaner separation between the various deliverables we produce out of the codebase). 

I've talked about the tools I've built for this before; what I did more recently was take the GUI focused tool I built and made it scriptable.  So instead of a few menu picks, listbox selections and button presses, it's now more like this:

BuildTool 
	generateFor: logicalName
	useSmartBundle: aBoolean 
	version: versionString 
	startWithImage: imageName

And that can be fired off via a batch file (this is Windows) - and that in turn could be automated via higher level tools - maybe I'll start investigating something like Hudson. It's coming together pretty nicely, and I can now kick off a complete build, starting from a base visual.im, and within 15 minutes have a development image and a runtime, ready to go.

Peter William Lount has been working on Zokutalk as a side project for quite awhile - here's a code example to give you an idea as to what he's been up to.  If nothing else, it's a stab at a file based syntax for a Smalltalk-like language.

Well, it looks like I'll get to play DA2 before I have more time with the XBox:

My connection speed in the hotel isn't speedy, but I should have the game when I get back from work tomorrow :)

Technorati Tags: da2

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at VA Smalltalk - how do you load Seaside support and get started with it? If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, va smalltalk, seaside

The ESUG board has made the call for contributions for the 2011 event in Edinburgh:

We are proud to invite submisssions to the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies which is held as part of the ESUG 2011 joint event at Edinburgh. The goals of the workshop is to create a forum around advances or experience in Smalltalk. We welcome contributions on all aspects, theoretical as well as practical, of Smalltalk related topics

Technorati Tags: esug11

I paused my DA2 download this morning, because it was proceeding way too slowly - at the rate it was going, it might have finished before I check out on Thursday.As it happens, I'm heading to my sister's house for dinner this evening, and my plan is to take advantage of their broadband to finish the job.  I'll be able to play the game on my flight home this week :)