. .

skyrimAAC

Thu'umcast Episode 2: Don't Kill Your Follower (AAC)

November 14, 2011 23:44:21.346

Thu'umcast

Welcome to episode 2 of "Thu'umcast" - a podcast where Michael Lucas-Smith, Scott Dirk, Austin healy, Makahlua and I document our trials and tribulations in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Today we talk about some of the quests we've been doing - centered loosely around the mage college quests out of Winterhold. A lot of other things came up, including the number of dragons we've slain, the skill/perk system, and some of the weirder random encounters we've had.

If you liked our work on That Podcast, you'll probably like this. We intend to stay with the same idea - a gameplay podcast. If you don't want spoilers, don't listen - we are going to be talking about how we play the game, and what we ran across as we played.

You can subscribe in iTunes (or any podcatcher) using this feed, or this one for the AAC edition. We'll add the iTunes specific links as soon as they are available. In the meantime, join the Facebook Group and follow us on Twitter. If you play on Steam, join the Steam Group. Like the music? Pay Sbeast a visit, we thank him for letting us use it!

Links to all episodes and other information can be found on the Thu'umcast page

.

If you want to download the podcast directly, we've provided it in three formats:

Got feedback? Tweet us!. Enjoy the podcast, and we'll see you in Skyrim!

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Thu'umcast Episode 2: Don't Kill Your Follower

November 14, 2011 23:43:38.836

Thu'umcast

Welcome to episode 2 of "Thu'umcast" - a podcast where Michael Lucas-Smith, Scott Dirk, Austin healy, Makahlua and I document our trials and tribulations in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Today we talk about some of the quests we've been doing - centered loosely around the mage college quests out of Winterhold. A lot of other things came up, including the number of dragons we've slain, the skill/perk system, and some of the weirder random encounters we've had.

If you liked our work on That Podcast, you'll probably like this. We intend to stay with the same idea - a gameplay podcast. If you don't want spoilers, don't listen - we are going to be talking about how we play the game, and what we ran across as we played.

You can subscribe in iTunes (or any podcatcher) using this feed, or this one for the AAC edition. We'll add the iTunes specific links as soon as they are available. In the meantime, join the Facebook Group and follow us on Twitter. If you play on Steam, join the Steam Group. Like the music? Pay Sbeast a visit, we thank him for letting us use it!

Links to all episodes and other information can be found on the Thu'umcast page

.

If you want to download the podcast directly, we've provided it in three formats:

Got feedback? Tweet us!. Enjoy the podcast, and we'll see you in Skyrim!

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Pharo 1.3 Ships

November 14, 2011 20:52:27.601

Spotted in Planet Squeak

We are proud to announce the release of 1.3 of Pharo. This new release is the result of active development from the community and it is composed of:
  • Cleaning architectural dependencies
  • More cleanups directed by applying code critics on the system
  • Support for server and headless images. Pharo niw has a support for stdin, stdout and stderr.
  • More robust and better startup/shutdown
  • Improved look and feel
  • Better widgets
  • Improved tools
  • Weak Announcements
  • Stratified Proxy
  • More class comments
  • Network improvements based on Zinc

Follow the link for more details.

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ST 4U 158: Getting Started with GLORP in VA

November 13, 2011 22:24:53.619

Today's Smalltalk 4 You starts making use of Glorp against Oracle with a simple query - about as simple a query as you can make, as it happens. 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:

First Glorp Use.

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 get started with using Glorp in VA Smalltalk with Oracle. We've already set up basic connectivity; today we'll have a look at one of the classes (DatabaseAccessor) that you'll end up using in VA Smalltalk.

To start doing queries, you need to login and get things set up:


"login"
login := Login new.
	database: OracleODBCPlatform new;
	username: username;
	password: password;
	connectString: 'orcl11g';
	yourself.

"login and logout"
accessor := DatabaseAccessor forLogin: login.


Next, use the basic API, #basicExecuteSQLString:


"simple query using basic database facilities"
result := accessor basicExecuteSQLString: 'select 1 + 1 from dual'.
result next first.

That uses basic Oracle facilities to do the simple math problem. The more important thing from our perspective is the API: #basicExecuteSQLString:. We'll be using this, and other facilities of DatabaseAccessor over the next few screencasts. Once you execute and inspect that, you should see this:

Basic Query

Finally, logout:


"logout"
accessor logout.

Next time we'll start taking a real look at creating database descriptors, so that we can start interacting with tables using GLORP.

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.

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IM 54: DALI at ESUG 2011 (AAC)

November 13, 2011 19:22:17.343

Welcome to episode 54 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson and David Buck.

This week we have another ESUG 2011 session - Johan Brichnau's talk on a dynamic abstraction layer for web apps. From his abstract:

Multiuser web applications often need to manage concurrent (and potentially conflicting) operations on shared data. The parallel processing of web requests and the disconnected client-side view on that shared data raise ample opportunities for users to make conflicting changes. When such conflicts arise, we may or we may not need to inform the user of the conflict. To this end, database transaction mechanisms are a performant and proven technology for detecting and managing conflicting changes. When each user's web session maintains its isolated view on the database and operations are wrapped in transactions, we are able to prevent, detect and handle all such conflicts. At the same time, however, such applications easily become dependent on a particular database's technical abilities. Even when only considering the object-oriented databases GOODS, Magma and Gemstone, the differences in how database views and transactions work are vast. For example, Magma supports nested transactions while GOODS does not. An even more important difference is that when using Magma and GOODS, we can maintain a separate database view per web session and rely on the transaction mechanism to handle all conflicts. In Gemstone's GLASS integration of Seaside, however, incoming requests always share the same database view. This means only parallel execution conflicts are trapped by the transaction mechanism. With DALi, a database abstraction layer, we build Seaside-based web applications that are database independent and rely on database transactions to manage inter-user application-level conflicts as well as parallel execution conflicts directly. DALi is currently implemented for Pharo Smalltalk (with GOODS, Magma or image-based backends) and GemStone GLASS.

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!

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IM 54: DALI at ESUG 2011

November 13, 2011 19:21:41.513

Welcome to episode 54 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson and David Buck.

This week we have another ESUG 2011 session - Johan Brichnau's talk on a dynamic abstraction layer for web apps. From his abstract:

Multiuser web applications often need to manage concurrent (and potentially conflicting) operations on shared data. The parallel processing of web requests and the disconnected client-side view on that shared data raise ample opportunities for users to make conflicting changes. When such conflicts arise, we may or we may not need to inform the user of the conflict. To this end, database transaction mechanisms are a performant and proven technology for detecting and managing conflicting changes. When each user's web session maintains its isolated view on the database and operations are wrapped in transactions, we are able to prevent, detect and handle all such conflicts. At the same time, however, such applications easily become dependent on a particular database's technical abilities. Even when only considering the object-oriented databases GOODS, Magma and Gemstone, the differences in how database views and transactions work are vast. For example, Magma supports nested transactions while GOODS does not. An even more important difference is that when using Magma and GOODS, we can maintain a separate database view per web session and rely on the transaction mechanism to handle all conflicts. In Gemstone's GLASS integration of Seaside, however, incoming requests always share the same database view. This means only parallel execution conflicts are trapped by the transaction mechanism. With DALi, a database abstraction layer, we build Seaside-based web applications that are database independent and rely on database transactions to manage inter-user application-level conflicts as well as parallel execution conflicts directly. DALi is currently implemented for Pharo Smalltalk (with GOODS, Magma or image-based backends) and GemStone GLASS.

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!

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Thu'umcast Errata

November 12, 2011 14:12:00.425

The iTunes feed may show episode 1 as being absurdly long; it's not. The actual duration is just over 36 minutes; when I posted the show, I managed to paste the file size (in bytes) into the show length field in my tool, and iTunes took that as a seconds count. I've since repaired the feed, but there's no telling when iTunes will notice. Sorry about that!

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skyrimAAC

Thu'umcast Episode 1: Hand Me That Golden Claw

November 11, 2011 23:40:30.923

Thu'umcast

Welcome to episode 1 of "Thu'umcast" - a podcast where Michael Lucas-Smith, Scott Dirk, Austin healy, Makahlua and I document our trials and tribulations in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Today we talk about our launch day impressions - what we've done, where we've gone, and some of the glitches we've run into. So far, we like it a lot - the world is wide open, there's a lot to do, and - ost importantly - there are a lot of ways to get things done. Everyone got at least as far as Riverwood, and most of the crew got a lot further along than that.

If you liked our work on That Podcast, you'll probably like this. We intend to stay with the same idea - a gameplay podcast. If you don't want spoilers, don't listen - we are going to be talking about how we play the game, and what we ran across as we played.

You can subscribe in iTunes (or any podcatcher) using this feed, or this one for the AAC edition. We'll add the iTunes specific links as soon as they are available. In the meantime, join the Facebook Group and follow us on Twitter. If you play on Steam, join the Steam Group. Like the music? Pay Sbeast a visit, we thank him for letting us use it!

Links to all episodes and other information can be found on the Thu'umcast page

.

If you want to download the podcast directly, we've provided it in three formats:

Got feedback? Tweet us!. Enjoy the podcast, and we'll see you in Skyrim!

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skyrim

Thu'umcast Episode 1: Hand Me That Golden Claw

November 11, 2011 23:39:55.673

Thu'umcast

Welcome to episode 1 of "Thu'umcast" - a podcast where Michael Lucas-Smith, Scott Dirk, Austin healy, Makahlua and I document our trials and tribulations in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Today we talk about our launch day impressions - what we've done, where we've gone, and some of the glitches we've run into. So far, we like it a lot - the world is wide open, there's a lot to do, and - ost importantly - there are a lot of ways to get things done. Everyone got at least as far as Riverwood, and most of the crew got a lot further along than that.

If you liked our work on That Podcast, you'll probably like this. We intend to stay with the same idea - a gameplay podcast. If you don't want spoilers, don't listen - we are going to be talking about how we play the game, and what we ran across as we played.

You can subscribe in iTunes (or any podcatcher) using this feed, or this one for the AAC edition. We'll add the iTunes specific links as soon as they are available. In the meantime, join the Facebook Group and follow us on Twitter. If you play on Steam, join the Steam Group. Like the music? Pay Sbeast a visit, we thank him for letting us use it!

Links to all episodes and other information can be found on the Thu'umcast page

.

If you want to download the podcast directly, we've provided it in three formats:

Got feedback? Tweet us!. Enjoy the podcast, and we'll see you in Skyrim!

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Enclosures:
[thuum1.mp3 ( Size: 13144074 )]

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ST 4U 157: Loading GLorpDBX into Pharo

November 11, 2011 7:09:45.755

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at loading GlorpDBX into Pharo - along with a small proble you hit (as of the time I recorded this, anywaY) when doing so. 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:

Glorp

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:

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smalltalk

Cincom Changes Release Strategies

November 10, 2011 15:31:42.628

Spotted in [|] Less is More

We heard our customers:  This fall you will see service-pack maintenance releases for our Cincom Smalltalk products.  This release is a true maintenance update as requested by Cincom Smalltalk customers. In future release cycles we plan to have one major release annually along with service-pack online releases at regular intervals.  The service-pack releases will have refinements, fixes and updates to the major releases. 

I think that's a good idea - and it also fits in well with how most of the rest of the industry operates. If the service packs are easy to add updates, it'll make projects like the one I'm on now much easier to keep in synch with Cincom releases.

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js4u

JS 4U 106: JQuery detach()

November 10, 2011 8:40:52.792

Javascript 4 U

Today's Javascript 4 You looks at the detach() function in JQuery. 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:

detach()

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:

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STIC 2011 Calls for Student Volunteers

November 10, 2011 7:25:43.535

Want a free ride in return for a bit of work?

The Smalltalk Industry Council is currently seeking student volunteers to help keep the 2012 Smalltalk Industry Conference running smoothly. In return, these volunteers will receive free accommodations, no conference fees and time to enjoy the majority of the conference. For those interested, past duties have included handling registration as people arrive at the conference, staffing coffee machines, running the microphone during question and answer periods, assisting with collecting presentation slides for STIC right after the presentation is given, assisting with photos or audio when needed, directing attendees to social events or the next exciting session, being present at an information desk to answer questions and generally being helpful. Student volunteering makes the conference better, takes a fairly small amount of time and doesn’t significantly interfere with enjoying or learning from the conference.

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Smalltalks 2011 Pharo Slides

November 9, 2011 15:31:09.194

Spotted in Planet Squeak

The slides from the Pharo presentation at Smalltalks 2011 are now available online:

-- Download PDF
-- SlideShare: slideshare.net/MarcusDenker/pharo-one-year-later

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ST 4U 156: Setting up GLORP for Oracle in VA Smalltalk

November 9, 2011 12:23:38.110

Today's Smalltalk 4 You sets up connectivity for Oracle and GLORP on Windows for VA Smalltalk. There are few tricky parts to this, including the use of the correct ODBC definition. 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:

Loading GLORP.

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 set up connectivity to Oracle (using ODBC) so that we can use Glorp against Oracle from VA Smalltalk. The Oracle support in VA for GLORP uses ODBC, so that's why we are doing this. To get started, bring up the ODBC configuration tool, and set up access to your database (installing Oracle is beyond the scope of this tutorial). Make sure you use the Oracle drive, not the Microsoft one - the MS one does not play well with VA Smalltalk:

Oracle GLORP

Once you have that, you can connect to your database as follows:


login := Login new.
	database: OracleODBCPlatform new;
	username: username;
	password: password;
	connectString: 'orcl11g';
	yourself.

Make sure you use the proper connect string, which was set up when you configured Oracle. Next, login:


"login and logout"
accessor := DatabaseAccessor froLogin: login.
accessor login.

accessor logout.

If you specified a password, it'll login for you; otherwise, you'll get prompted.

Next time we'll start taking a real look at creating database descriptors, so that we can start interacting with tables using GLORP.

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.

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My Old Enemy, the Oracle Installer

November 8, 2011 19:05:36.205

I remember the hell of the Oracle installer years ago, when I was installing Oracle 8 under Linux. Surely, I though, 11g has to be better under Windows?

Well... not so much. First, it complains about misisng files as you get about 3/4 done. With modal dialogs that have a "continue" option. Awesome, that. Then, it fails to install your database (if you asked it to), claiming that it's missing a default template. remind me what business Oracle claims to be in again?

You can install a db manually, of course - getting prompted with a slew of questions that you probably don't care about unless you're an honest to goodness DBA. Why they don't have an option for "take a all the defaults and just go" is beyond me.

On the other hand, unlike the Linux installer of yore, it doesn't crash multiple times on install... I guess that's progress.

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JS 4U 105: Gauging Browser Support

November 8, 2011 10:26:28.127

Javascript 4 U

Today's Javascript 4 You looks at the support() function - which lets you gauge the level of JQuery support a browser has. For more details on that, check the API page. 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:

support()

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:

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ST 4U 155: Loading GLORP Support in VA

November 7, 2011 10:03:29.584

Today's Smalltalk 4 You gets started with GLORP for VA Smalltalk. 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:

Loading GLORP.

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 get started with GLORP for VA Smalltalk - for our examples, we'll be using the ODBC support and PostgreSQL, but it's going to be the same for any other database (such as DB2) at this level. To start with, let's load the support in from ENVY. Open up the load/unload features tool from the launcher:

GLORP

Just hit "Ok", and let it spin - you'll have GLORP support loaded shortly.

Next time we'll start taking a real look at GLORP itself.

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.

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Learn Squeak

November 7, 2011 9:56:58.000

HPI has started a new series of Squeak screencasts - check it out.

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posted by James Robertson

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games

Subscribe to Thu'umcast in iTunes

November 7, 2011 8:23:43.602

Thu'umcast

Our iTunes feed has been approved

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posted by James Robertson

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