Smalltalk with James Robertson

One of the pleasant surprises here at StS 11 was running into Dorin Sandu and finding out about a little project he's been working on. He's been creating an interface between Smaltalk and Lucene, and he's been using BottomFeeder as a testbed for that.

As I did things, the search facilities in Bf are a pretty simple linear search through the item space. Dorin has replaced that with Lucene. To help with that, I really only needed to do a couple of things:

• Change the item GUIDs to the link if the link is there (nearly always the case now)
• Report a few new events when feeds add items or delete them

It should be fun to see what comes of that :)

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I've just pushed out a new release of BottomFeeder, now hosted here on this server. There's not a ton of changes since the last release; it's mostly a few cleanups, changes to the urls for doc, and the addition of a menu item that gets you to the license for the app.

Questions? Drop me an email

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As you've probably noticed, I haven't managed a release of BottomFeeder for awhile. At first, it was because I was going to ship out a 7.7 based release, then 7.7.1 came out, and then I got laid off from Cincom - so through a long chain of events, it just never happened. So...

Today I was showing my build script for Bf to some folks here at my new job - they have been using RTP manually, and I thought that a script might make things easier. In doing that, I polished my script up a bit (catching some parcel dialogs I had been ignoring), and then I was just poking around the new runtime. One of the other things that had held up a release was what I thought was a new bug, but it turns out it was simply a mistake I made when porting up to 7.7.1.

If you look in class FontPolicy, there's a method: bestFont:allowance: - it will take a font request and hand you back the best match. At the very bottom of that method is this:

	best == nil ifFalse: [^best].
	^noFontBlock 
		ifNil: [self class noMatchingFontSignal raiseRequestWith: requestedFont]
		ifNotNil: [noFontBlock value: requestedFont]

At some point, I removed my override fix for that - doh. So, when I get back to my home office I'll get that dealt with, do a new build, and then look at the whole rehosting problem I mentioned yesterday. The good news is, I think I'm ready to roll it out :)

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Since I'm no longer at Cincom, the location I've been using to host BottomFeeder is no longer accessible to me. So... I'll be relocating the files to this server. That will have to wait until the weekend (or possibly the Christmas break) - the bandwidth I have in the hotel here in Dallas is just barely usable, and I have nice, reliably fast connectivity at home.

The bad news is, I can't do anything about the update requests for existing downloads (unless I can get someone at Cincom to redirect those Http requests - I'll look into that).

In any event, look for an announcement on that within the next couple of weeks.

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Two days ago, I posted a new BottomFeeder development build; turns out my build scripts had some issues, and not everything that was posted was correct. So - I just ran through the whole process again, fixed the scripts, and bam - I have a clean build. I should be able to release this as 4.7 soon.

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I've just pushed up a new BottomFeeder build - this one is based on VisualWorks 7.7.1 - since that's just about released, and I never got a 7.7 based release out, it's time to move up to the latest.

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I've been mentioning the next release of BottomFeeder for awhile; you might be wondering where it is. The current build is based on VW 7.6, and 7.7 has been out for awhile - but 7.7.1 is coming out this summer. So rather than release it on a soon to be passed release of VW, I've decided to hold back. When 7.7.1 ships, I'll ship Bf. Other than one issue I'm tracking, things are ready for release.

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I've posted a new development build of BottomFeeder - check it out, and let me know if you hit any roadblocks. I'm hoping to do a release of 4.7 shortly.

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I've pushed up another VW 7.7 build of BottomFeeder - I've been running it myself for a couple of weeks now, so I feel pretty good about it. Give it a try, and let me know about any issues.

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I've been remiss in getting BottomFeeder updated (as I wrote about earlier today) - so this morning and afternoon I've been taking a real run at it. In the 7.6 based build, there were interesting rendering issues on the OS X platform - text would just disappear from the browser window. That had something to do with the VM, I think, since it's gone in the 7.7 build (and there certainly haven't been any changes to the WithStyle component).

Additionally, things just feel more responsive. Now, starting in the last release, there was some kind of odd save bug - Bf saves the position of the window on save, and that wasn't happening on the save before exiting - instead, the file holding that information was getting truncated. I've been looking at that issue today, and discovered exactly the sort of things you expect to find in old code - stuff that makes you ask yourself "Did I really write this crap?"

Here's what I mean. In the UI, there's a method called #saveAll, that invokes the save behavior that occurs after every update (assuming that setting is toggled on). However, the save on exit was using a different code path. Why, I have no idea, but I vaguely recall having various issues with proper termination a few years ago. be that as it may, I just changed the code to all use the same exit path, and now, it seems to be working properly.

Since I've been playing a lot of "Dragon Age: Origins " lately, I'm tempted to say "Thank the Maker" :) Either way, I think I'm closing in on a stable build.

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