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general

Set Up a Server and...

December 31, 2009 19:03:12.917

Watch the hack attempts. The logs show attempts at hacking php (sorry, not in use), and MySQL (sorry, not installed). It's not that I believe Smalltalk is unhackable, but it should be a lot harder just based on how many of the black hats are out there have any Smalltalk knowledge (I'm guessing that's a small number)

With that said, it's the end of 2009, and 2010 is 5 hours away - So Happy New Year to all!

posted by James Robertson

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general

Ten Years On....

December 31, 2009 13:35:32.509

And still no one has a name for the decade. "The Zeros" doesn't quite cut it - and it seems that my favorite, "The Aughts", never caught on. So during the teens, what the heck are we going to call the last decade?

posted by James Robertson

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books

A Song of Ice and Fire

December 31, 2009 12:59:40.356

My friend Mike gave me the first two books of George Martin's " A Game of Thrones" for my birthday last month, and I've found them very engrossing - book three should be on its way from Amazon now. It's a huge story, with more characters than you can shake a stick at, and - unlike the cardboard ones you'll find in your typical political thriller, these characters are fleshed out. Having said that, if you decide to read these books, don't get too atached to any particular character - a number of "he can't kill so and so, can he?" moments have come and gone already (bear in mind that I'm only in book 2!), and plenty of those characters have been killed off.

Heck, I like the books well enough that they are modifying the way I exercise. More than once, instead of heading out to jog, I've gotten on the stationary bike so that I can read a few chapters :) Highly recommended series - it's not your run of the mill "swords and sorcery" fare by any means.

Oh, and yes - I am looking forward to the HBO series :)

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

How to Clone a Smalltalk Class

December 31, 2009 12:09:33.216

Ever had a situation where you needed to "clone" a class? The typical procedure looks like this:

  • File out your class
  • Open your favorite editor up and do a copy/replace operation
  • File the new class in

Admittedly, you don't need to clone a class that often, but if you've had to, you probably thought someting like "why isn't there a better way?" Well, it turns out that there is:

If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?

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posted by James Robertson

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general

TV Inanity

December 31, 2009 10:48:35.093

My wife likes (or rather, liked) the show Eastwick, which not only met a cancellation, but did so in a very odd fashion:

So, in a turn of complete idiocy, ABC skipped an episode of Eastwick. A really important one where we were supposed to find out what happened to Jamie and Darryl. They skipped it, apparently, to cut down on the remaining episodes they had to air before winter hiatus is over. I, for one, am extremely upset about this and I hope that someone at ABC reads this and can feel my ire through the computer screen. Imagine me right now, I am glowering at you, execs.

You know, the most fanatical fans have DVRs. Would it hurt ABC (et. al.) to air shows like this at, say, 2 AM, when they aren't showing anything useful anyway, and at least let those fans with DVRs have closure?

posted by James Robertson

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weather

More Snow

December 31, 2009 10:28:23.293

This is hardly Snowmageddon, but we still have more snow that you usually see in December around here:

Snow Dec. 31

Snow Dec. 31

Now, off to borrow the snow blower...

posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Get Ready for VW 7.7 and OS 8.2 Non-Commercial

December 31, 2009 0:24:13.159

Cincom Smalltalk

Cincom will be posting the new non-commercial downloads soon - VW 7.7 and OS 8.2 - you'll want to pay attention my corporate blog for the latest updates on that. There was a bit of packaging left to do when the holiday season came in, so you'll have to wait for the new year. It should be worth it though - lots of good stuff in both products, as I mentioned here earlier.

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posted by James Robertson

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games

XBox Fun

December 30, 2009 23:50:50.304

I've spent a lot of time this week playing "Gears of War 2", after having gone through the "Modern Warfare 2" campaign twice (on different hardness levels). Gears of War is a longer game, and some of the segments require you to get something "just right" to get past - I was stuck flying the Reavers against Skorge for quite awhile before I moved on, for instance.

The big thing you need to adapt to as you change shooters is the minor controller variations - there's a fair bit of difference between MW2, Gears of War, and Halo, for things as simple as throwing/evading grenades. Speaking of Halo, I haven't gotten very far in Halo 3, but then again, that's probably related to all the time I've put into Gears of War 2 :)

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posted by James Robertson

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traffic

The Insanity of Traffic Calming

December 30, 2009 21:33:42.080

One of my pet peeves in the neighborhood I live in is traffic calming - which, as practiced in this part of Maryland, seems to equate to "drop random shapes we made with playdo into the street and see what happens". Consider these, on one of the two routes out of our neighborhood:

Traffic Calming

Traffic Calming

With that first one, see how the car parked in the street (and that happens a lot there) effectively blocks access in one direction? With the second, see how one end of the device has been chipped off? That was a snow plow 4 years ago. Every day, school buses have the devil's own time navigating these, and I have no idea what a Fire Truck would do.

In the hall of bad ideas, these are really bad. I have a hot tip for the rocket scientists who come up with this stupidity: Just Narrow the Whole Road! It'll slow down traffic, and cause fewer ancillary problems.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Getting this Server Running

December 30, 2009 19:02:41.898

Smalltalk

One thing that a few people have expressed interest in already is this: what did I need to do to get this server running Smalltalk? Well, the first step involved some basic investigation: where could I find affordable VPS hosting? After looking around, I settled on slicehost for that (click here to sign up) - they have decent rates, the reviews I found looked positive (at least one of the inexpensive alternatives, which will remain nameless, had horrid reviews).

Before I go further, I should explain why I had to look into VPS (Virtual Private Server) or a Dedicated root server. If you run typical web software, it fires off a new instance every time a request is made; Smalltalk isn't like that. You have your Smalltalk image running all the time, listening on a port. So if you pick a hosting service that charges for CPU time, you'll get hit on that.

Anyway, I asked around about domain registrars, and got referred to GoDaddy - that was simple, although boy oh boy - do they ever want to upsell you on things :) Once I got that and slicehost set up, I needed to set the DNS records up - this post walked me through that easily. With that out of the way, a few things remained:

  • Getting Smalltalk onto the slicehost server
  • Getting the specific packages for my blog server onto the slicehost server
  • Setting up the Apache configuration (installing Apache first)

The first two were simple: I used a combination of wget and scp to transfer files up to my server, and then copied them into the directories I wanted them in. I set up a non-root user to run the Smalltalk server, and gave that user ownership of the appropriate directories, so that I didn't need to operate as root. Then I edited my files for the new setup, and started the server on a specific port. At this point, my Smalltalk server wouldn't start, telling me that the file (VM) didn't exist. This seemed strange; then I realized that I had a 32 bit VM and a 64 bit server. So, off to install the 32 bit libs:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

A minute or so later, the VM started fine, and doing this (not the port I'm using, btw) worked:

http://www.myNewDomain.com:12345/blog/blogView

Now I wanted to get rid of the port number in that url. With some help from Steve Rees, I did the following two things:

set up symlinks for the necessary mod-proxy load files in:

  • /etc/apache2/mods-available in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
  • copied proxy.conf up out of the mods-available dir and into /etc/apache2
  • Edited that file:


 ProxyRequests On

        <Proxy *>
                AddDefaultCharset off
                Order deny,allow
                Deny from all
                Allow from .myNewDomain.com
        </Proxy>

Then, in httpd.conf (same directory), I added the following:


<Location /blog>
ProxyPass http://127.0.0.1:12345/blog
ProxyPassReverse http://127.0.0.1:12345/blog
</Location>

At which point, the base url, http://www.jarober.com/blog/blogView worked. And that was it - other than getting some files that I forgot to copy over the first time, it all worked fine.

So the bottom line? Getting a Smalltalk based server running on the net is pretty simple now, and not at all expensive. Over the next few years, I expect the price for VPS to drop even more, so it's only going to get easier. So if you're a Smalltalker and want to get your app running out on the net - just go do it :)

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posted by James Robertson

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general

Launching A New Site

December 30, 2009 17:38:08.471

I've decided to set up a new blog, outside of Cincom - it makes sense to me to start posting most of the non-Cincom related stuff here, with the Cincom blog concentrating mostly on Smalltalk. My plan for the short term is to link from the established blog over to this one, giving short summaries of what I'm writing about - thus letting my readers know what I'm up to.

Getting a Smalltalk server running here (slicehost) was pretty easy (other than the trouble I had with Apache, but that's my own limited expertise at play there). I got the basics working fast though - domain registration with GoDaddy, discount code from one of the many podcasts I listen to, slicehost account set up, stuff uploaded, and now it all seems to work. We'll see how it goes :)

posted by James Robertson

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