TechCrunch asks an excellent question - where the heck is the iPad app for Facebook? The iPhone app looks kind of stale for that matter - maybe they can't find anyone to replace the guy who famously declared that he wasn't doing that work anymore (which should have led to his immediate termination, IMHO, but that's another story).
On the jobs page for the relatively new Seattle Facebook office, one of the openings is for “Software Engineer, Desktop Software”. Desktop software. Desktop. Before the damn iPad. Hey Facebook, 1986 called, they want their strategic vision back.
Apparently, this is the start of some big team. I think TechCruch is right - they lost their calendar, and think they are living through a re-imagined "Back to the Future", set in the 80's....
In the annals of stupid, this is pretty high up - a Senate committee wants to break the internet:
The legislation will allow the DOJ to target the "worst of the worst" foreign websites dedicated to digital piracy or selling counterfeit goods, said Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and lead sponsor of the bill. Intellectual property theft is "unacceptable," Leahy, chairman of the committee, said in a statement.
This is great - the practical impact would be to have a set of alternate DNS servers pop up. Instead of the mostly unitary net we have now, we'll have chaos. That seems to be what Congress does best though...
Today's Smalltalk 4 You shows you another way to get immediate access to the debugger in VA Smalltalk - the little "Debug THis" window that appears in the lower right corner of the screen when you start up the development environment. If you prefer a written walkthrough to video, then skip down to 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:
Today we'll look at another route into the debugger in VA Smalltalk, which can be useful when trying to grab the foreground process. To show that off, we'll again create a Smalltalk process in the workspace, and then grab it with the debugger. Here's the code to kick off a simple process:
Now, when you started up VA, you may not have noticed the tiny little window in the lower right hand corner. It has one button, and gives you immediate access to the Debugger:
If you click that, instead of an empty debugger (which we saw in the last tutorial), you'll get the foreground process:
Now you can follow the same steps to debugging/terminating the errant process, via the Debug Other menu pick:
Need more help? There's a screencast for other topics like this which you may want to watch. Questions? Try the "Chat with James" Google gadget over in the sidebar.
Looks like it's one of those travel days. First, I finally had to deal with one of the new scanners. I opted out, of course - if TSA wants to run security theater, the only protest I can lodge is to waste their time. With that out of the way, I got onto an earlier flight headed to DCA instead of BWI (good news, since I forgot about my bifurcated flights this week and parked down near DCA).
That's pretty much when the good news ended though; now we have about 90 minutes of ground hold, due to T-Storms between here and DC. Joy :)
Today's Javascript 4 You. Today we look at using JQuery to encode urls - something you need to do for many of the optional function arguments. 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.
As announced in an earlier blog-post, i implemented a RemoteRunner for the jtalk-server (based on the jtalk-project). It's very simple: if you implement a Method runRemote in your class, e.g. RemoteTest, then by executing:
RemoteRunner new runClass: RemoteTest
will execute the Smalltalk-Code implemented in the runRemote-Method on the server. The example prints out the date and time of the server.
BOSS is one of the more useful pieces of VisualWorks, so I'm interested to see that the Pharo project is acquiring a modern equivalent. Via Torsten:
Fuel - a new project to implement binary object serialization for Pharo is part of the ESUG SummerTalk. It's work in progress but already usable, there is a ConfigurationOfFuel metacello config to easily load it.
The existence of a Metacello configuration is key - it makes it very, very easy to load (and thus much easier to contribute to the project). Good stuff!
This afternoon I had to export part of a tree of objects from one UI to a smaller one (to allow for end user editing of those objects). This all backs to a database, so I didn't want the AspectAdaptors (this is VisualWorks) I was hooking up to make changes to the actual domain objects; I wanted copies. Using #copy and #postCopy is pretty straightforward, but I wanted to check to make sure that I was doing it correctly
As part of our development toolset, we have some mods that add a little "inspect it" button to every window. That's highly useful, and got me most of where I wanted to go. The last step was simply using base functionality of VW that a lot of people probably aren't aware of - you can drag objects from an inspector and drop them on a workspace, creating a workspace variable that points to that object. Doing that from each piece of the UI, I was then able to run a simple #== check on the objects, and verify that my copy operation was working correctly. Kind of a cool thing to be able to do, that drag/drop between tools.
Today's Smalltalk 4 You shows you how easy it is to grab an arbitrary VA Smalltalk process and load it into the debugger. This can be useful a few different ways - exploring the system, or killing a runaway process that you didn't keep a variable reference to. If you prefer a written walkthrough to video, then skip down to 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:
Today we'll look at debugging arbitrary processes in VA Smalltalk, which is easy using the debugger. To show that off, we'll create a Smalltalk process in the workspace, and then grab it with the debugger. Here's the code to kick off a simple process:
And here's a look at the Transcript, which shows that the process is, in fact, running:
Going back to the launcher menu, select Tools, go all the way to the bottom, and open the debugger:
You haven't opened the debugger on a specific process, so it's empty. That's something we'll fix in a moment. Under the Processes menu, select the first option, Debug Other:
What you'll see now is a small window with a list of processes in it. These are Smalltalk processes, controlled by the VA Smalltalk environment:
You can select any of them and start debugging them in the debugger, including main system processes. This is a great way to see how things work in any Smalltalk environment, but here we've selected the process we forked off above. One of the other things you can do with this feature is select a process so that you can terminate it - useful if you've forked one off, and haven't maintained any direct access to it. Here's the process in question in the debugger:
Now that you've grabbed the process in the debugger, it's easy to kill it. Simply go back to the Processes menu, and select Terminate:
In this example, we held a reference to the process in the workspace, so we can inspect it (as seen below). If you didn't, simply repeat this process, and you'll see that the list of processes is one smaller:
Looking below, you can see in the inspector that the process is dead. That solves the problem of grabbing an arbitrary process we don't want or need any longer and killing it:
Need more help? There's a screencast for other topics like this which you may want to watch. Questions? Try the "Chat with James" Google gadget over in the sidebar.
No hail, but the sky got dark very fast, and we are getting a lot of lightning and wind right now. North of here, TV is reporting really nasty hail:
... And TV weather is telling me that rotation is headed straight at Arlington. This week has had way too much excitement for me...
Update: Well, that was exciting. Tornado warning here a few minutes ago, hotel sent someone door to door. Danger seems to have passed for the most part, but - there's another line of cells west of here. So it looks like it's not over yet.
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.
Nothing gets your attention like a midday trip to the emergency room. I've had a slight bit of chest pain (left side) for a few days now, and this morning it started to really hurt - my boss took me down to the nearest emergency room, and then waited the process out with me. They strapped me in, took some blood, ran a few tests - and apparently, I managed (no clue how) to strain a muscle in that spot (exacerbated last night, it looks like, when I helped a woman with a back problem put her bag in the overhead bin).
Alls well that ends well - my ekg, blood pressure, and pulse checked out fine, and the blood work didn't show anything ominous.
There was one upside - I managed to miss a meeting that would almost certainly have been dull :)
Apple has told patent troll Lodsys to take their claims elsewhere. The only troubling bit left is the fact that Apple - in a completely understandable cost/benefits decision process - paid Lodsys off in the first place. Ideally, Lodsys' "innovation" would have been deep sixed.
Today's Smalltalk 4 You shows you how to get started with Squeak and SQLlite - perhaps the simplest database that you could possibly set up. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To give full credit where it's due, I found all the necessary instructions on the Smalltalk Impressions blog. 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.
Welcome to episode 29 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, and David Buck. Yes, the sequence number is off - for some reason I lost count last week, and skipped 29. So out of order, here it is.
I spoke to Stef Ducasse this week, about where the Pharo project is headed, and especially about his ideas for a consortium around Pharo. It's an idea similar to what has grown up around the Apache and Eclipse projects - but you can hear Stef explain it himself in the podcast. I'd like to thank Stef for his patience with this episode - we botched a recording attempt with him a few weeks ago, and he was kind enough to come back and do it again.
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!
Welcome to episode 29 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, and David Buck. yes, the sequence number is off - for some reason I lost count last week, and skipped 29. So out of order, here it is.
I spoke to Stef Ducasse this week, about where the Pharo project is headed, and especially about his ideas for a consortium around Pharo. It's an idea similar to what has grown up around the Apache and Eclipse projects - but you can hear Stef explain it himself in the podcast. I'd like to thank Stef for his patience with this episode - we botched a recording attempt with him a few weeks ago, and he was kind enough to come back and do it again.
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!
The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Monday, May 23rd.
Tim Mackinnon has recently started looking at JTalk - and how it translates Smalltalk to JavaScript as well as providing the familiar Smalltalk browsers in your web page. It's still a new project, but how does this approach compare to staying native? Come and join us for some interesting smalltalk on this topic.
In addition to this, Niall Ross will briefly update us on the upcoming ESUG conference 2011, in Edimburgh. Don't forget that the early registration is now open!
We'll meet in our usual venue - the Counting House, close to Bank Station, from 18:30 onwards.