The author of this blog, James Robertson, passed away in April 2014. This blog is being maintained by David Buck (david@simberon.com).
Today's screencast walks how you can easily invoke another Smalltalk image from within your running image.
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Technorati Tags: image invocation
Torsten Bergmann reports that EToys has made the jump from the virtual to the physical - allowing you to work with robots outside the screen
Here's an interesting side effect of the recent tragedy in Chile - the day just got shorter:
The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second)," Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. "The axis about which the Earth"s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).
So if you're a little too tired at your next meeting...
Technorati Tags: earthquake
We're in London today, and we'll be in Paris on Thursday - you can register for the event, or just come to the Mercure Paris Terminus Nord - our event will run from 9 AM to 1 PM (local time), but we'll be there with breakfast out by 8 AM. We have a full program for you - come on out!
Today's screencast walks through adding Regular Expression library support to Smalltalk.
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Technorati Tags: regex, regular expressions
It's official: HBO has given a green light to a 10-episode series based on George R.R. Martin's fantasy series Game of Thrones and released the first image from the show
The big question though: will book five ever appear?
Truly a pile of awesome (via David Meerman Scott)
In a completely boneheaded move, the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) announced that they want to set up a system to charge people who tweet any part of song lyric.
Why yes, 140 characters promoting music is just bad. I'd ask if the music industry could get stupider, but I'm kind of afraid to find out...
Ahead of tomorrow's event here in Paris, we had some time for "speed sightseeing" today: Here are a few photos:
Had it not been so bone crushingly cold (winds), I'd likely stlll be out there :)
Today's screencast is a brief overview of the steps involved in setting up a Cincom Smalltalk based blog server using Silt, a web toolkit based application server that has been in production for over 7 years.
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Today's event in Paris is going well except for one small thing - it's 37 (f) outside, and there's no heat in the room we are in. Thank goodness for the heat emissions from the laptops :)
Technorati Tags: paris
I guess you could lose an iPhone or Touch the same way - cheap wifi finders can be used to track down an active device - PCWorld reports:
A statement by the mobile security software vendor highlighted a recent warning from a security specialist at University of Technology, in Jamaica. He said that it appeared crooks running a lottery scam on the island were using stolen laptops to do so. They tracked down the often out-of-sight computers using Wi-Fi radio detectors.
And the cost for such trackers is $50 or less, so it's not like there's a high bar to entry. Sobering...
We've had a good event so far (Georg is finishing his talk as I write this) - here are a few snapshots from the day - but first, if you want to hear our wrapup from the event, we'll be on ustream at 7:30 AM EST talking about it. The pics:
Arden Presents
Suz introduces Arden
Georg Presents
Group during Coffee Break
Doing my presentation
Travel day tomorrow - walk to the train station, 40 minutes to CDG, hop to London, take a plane from there to NY, then wait a few hours, fly to Baltimore. Then get a cab. So it truly will be a day of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles :)
Today's screencast looks at a small package of convenience methods I've used to deal with various network interfaces.
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Technorati Tags: convenience
PC World is now reporting that Steam is coming to OS X:
it seems the rumors are true and Steam will in fact see an OS X release.
Which means that the mac will stop being a second tier gaming platform. One less reason to require a Windows machine, it sounds like :)
The network announced today that it has ordered a 10th season of the young Superman series.
The entire Kandor thread makes no sense, Luthor is out of focus, and by now, the name "Superman" would never get used - "The Blur" would be what happened. The writers don't know when to stop...
So not only is Viacom yanking "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" from Hulu, it's also threatening to sue anyone who posts clips:
"Yes, we intend to do so," PR rep Tony Fox told THR. "My feeling is if (websites) are making money on our copyrighted content, then that is a problem."
Right.... because a couple of minutes of either show is likely to discourage viewing. By that logic, they should stop running ads, since they're only likely to discourage viewing, too. Morons.
I agree with Alain Reynaud that seventeen years is way, way too long a time period for a software patent, but I think seven years (his proposed interval) is also too long:
The problem, you see, is their length. Seventeen years of monopoly is an eternity in Internet time. Instead, software patents should only be valid for seven years.
Seven Years ago we didn't have Twitter or Facebook - which means that a patent (like the newsfeed one Facebook wants) would still be around (if granted today) in 2016 - still an eternity in internet terms.
No, I have a more radical notion: no software patents, period. Let competition take care of the problem. Big companies won't "rull the roost" under such a system; as happens right now, they'll still mostly go the M&A route to innovate. What would disappear is patent trolls.
Technorati Tags: patents
Word from Apple is out -- so get your credit cards ready. The iPad will be launching on Saturday April 3rd (and on the shelves, er... display tables at Apple retail stores), but you'll be able to plunk down cold, hard cash for it in just a week. Pre-orders will begin on March 12th for the US version (non-3G) for that April street date, with the 3G version coming in late April
I suspect we'll be in that pre-order queue - my wife has expressed a pretty keen interest in this device :)
The Squeak/Pharo Community is getting ready for Google's Summer of Code:
Mariano Martinez Peck will administrate the joint application supported by Janko Mivšek. They need to supply Google with information about ESUG as a mentoring organisation and a list of ideas/projects, each with a description and a nominated mentor. If their submission get selected by Google they will be told how many projects Google will sponsor — the mentor receives $500 and the student who volunteers to work on the projects will receive $4500.
The deadline to get projects included is March 12; follow the link for full details.
Technorati Tags: google, summer of code, open source
I've got a short post on the topic over on my Cincom blog.
You have to recognize what era you live in - and as much as it might be nice to hearken back to some presumed "golden age", it's just not coming back. Where am I going with this? To Mike Taylor's lament about the mundaneness of modern software development:
Today, I mostly paste libraries together. So do you, most likely, if you work in software. Doesn't that seem anticlimactic? We did all those courses on LR grammars and concurrent software and referentially transparent functional languages. We messed about with Prolog, Lisp and APL. We studied invariants and formal preconditions and operating system theory. Now how much of that do we use? A huge part of my job these days seems to be impedence-matching between big opaque chunks of library software that sort of do most of what my program is meant to achieve, but don't quite work right together so I have to, I don't know, translate USMARC records into Dublin Core or something. Is that programming? Really?
I rather suspect that as cars moved from being mostly mechanical to being highly dependent on software the same kind of lament went up amongst car enthusiasts. There's really no going back though; just as I have no real interest in gapping my own spark plugs, I have no real interest in writing my own version of malloc(). Even if I did, outside of being a harmless hobby, who the heck (outside of a handful of OS developers) would pay me to do it?
The world turns, and life moves on. The time for building every little library by hand is gone, and it's not coming back. Personally, I'm happy about that; I just never got a thrill out of low level grunt work :)
Having said that, I can tell you where that level of creation is still going on: game development.
This week's podcast is an interview we did with Dale Henrichs of Gemstone about the Metacello project - a configuration management add on for Monticello (version control for Squeak and Pharo). We'd like to thank Dale for taking the time to talk to us - it was a lot of fun!
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.
To listen immediately, use the player below:
If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Effortless for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!
If you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or visit us on Facebook or Ning - you can vote for the Podcast Alley, and subscribe on iTunes. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!
Technorati Tags: monticello, metacello, version control
The commits to Squeak trunk (the new community development model) are now also visible in Twitter:
Technorati Tags: squeak, social media, twitter
Sometimes an act of stupidity wanders all the way over to just plain idiotic - a woman's father dies, so she's in the process of cleaning various estate things up, and gets to disconnecting the phone service. She goes so far as to send a copy of the death certificate to Verizon, and gets this reaction:
It seems Lacy did not have her father's PIN (personal identification number) to access the account. So the representative refused to help her.
...
"Well, there's nothing else I can do for you," the representative said before laughing and hanging up the phone.
This is what you get when you've elevated process above everything else. Fear of making a mistake leads to acts of mindless stupidity instead.
Today's screencast looks at setting up a SQLLite database as a personal Store repository. It's quick, easy, and probably the fastest way to get started with Store as your version control system.
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Technorati Tags: sqllite, store, version control
We've wrapped up the current round of Cincom Smalltalk events - if we schedule more, it'll be announced over on my Cincom Blog. In the meantime, you can check out our video wrapups from 4 of the 5 events (I neglected to hit the "record" button in London) on uStream - I've embedded the player below. I'll have video for the talks themselves up in the next few days - I have initial processing, editing, and post production ahead of me on that - and some of the steps are all about "hurry up and wait" :)
Live Video streaming by Ustream
Technorati Tags: cincom, cincom smalltalk, events
So much for "I need a PC for Games":
Eager gamers have no doubt already seen the teasers, but Valve has now finally confirmed that its Steam game distribution service and Source engine will at long last be headed to the Mac. According to Valve, the company's current line-up of games (including the Half-Life and Left 4 Dead series) will be available to Mac users in April, while Portal 2 will represent the company's first simultaneous release for PC and Mac later this year.
This is awesome news. While I've come to prefer the XBox and Wii for games, I can't take those on the road :)
Ever wanted to experience 1993 (at least the web part) again? Well, if you have a modern Linux distro, you can:
Github user Alan Dipert has posted the source code for NCSA Mosaic 2.7 on the code-hosting website. You can download it and run it on any modern Linux installation. It seems to run on Ubuntu just fine, though PNG support is a little wonky. The good news is that the folks on Github are actively submitting patches.
You'll have to ignore Google (or any modern search engine) to get the real feel, but there it is. It's hard to explain why those of us who were in that first wave of online users were so excited, given images like this:
Just seeing that "S" image brings back memories :)
Technorati Tags: history
Apparently, I've been living in the future since 1993: That's when I started woking out of my home office, using the net to stay in contact with the rest of the company. Back then it was dialup and email (pretty much only email) - now it's irc, various IM systems, and social networks. Either way though, I've been in the "virtual office" for a long time. Video chat one on one is now feasible (along with screen sharing) with tools like skype and iChat; I suspect that having multiple people on a video call will start being feasible without the expensive hookups soon.
What made me think about this? Dvorak writing about what print publishers should have done (and should still do):
With a single layer of editorial control, establish a virtual office environment with telecommuting, teleconferencing, and a VPN ring for the employees who can work from anywhere in the world.
That pretty much applies to anyone who's not doing collective manual labor, I think. More and more, work is going to get distributed. Management theory will have to do a lot of catching up.
Tudor Girba is working on a Moose book:
This book offers an overview of the Moose platform for software and data analysis. More specifically it covers version 4.0.
Since I don't run Windows every day - and i sometimes go a weeks between runs of my Windows 7 VM - the updates tend to pile up. I was about to look at doing some more VW/COM screencasts, when I discovered that 370 MB of updates had piled up. There goes the next little while :)
Today's screencast takes a look at the Registry package, a contributed piece that makes it easier to work with the Windows registry from Smalltalk .
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
This is one of the funny things about the way patent infringement suits tend to go - you can aim it as well as you want, but you may get results you didn't expect. Consider Apple's auits against HTC, based on their multi-touch work. They seem to be aiming at Google, which could end up empowering... Microsoft:
Even before the lawsuit, handset makers were having second thoughts about Google, which with the Nexus One had become a direct competitor. Now their faith in Android as the easiest and cheapest way to counter the iPhone has been shaken, says Reiner. The unintended consequence, he suggests, is to send them into the arms of Microsoft (MSFT) and Win7 Mobile.
"Our checks," writes Reiner, "indicate that Microsoft has been quick to sniff out this burgeoning opportunity and has begun to aggressively promote the strength of its own IP portfolio, as well as its willingness to join battle with customers that come under IP attack."
I had been thinking that Microsoft was out of the handset running, but this Apple campaign could actually give them new life. Whether that's better for them than just trying to, you know, actually compete better, is an open question.
Hey look - Mr. "I collected a huge payoff for my great success at driving Sun into the ground" Schwartz has a new blog. Looks like he's trying to explain himself. What I'd like to know is this: does he still think that "give it all away for free, and then somehow make it up in volume" is a good business plan?
If so, he's got a great future with the underpants gnomes.
According to one analyst firm, the rumors of a looming iPad shortage are just that: rumors:
Apple is on track to build 5 million iPads in the first half of 2010, according to FBR Capital chip analyst Craig Berger. "We believe various news articles and competitor notes calling for a build delay were just false alarms," he writes. The company, of course, has now set an April 3 launch for Wi-Fi versions of the iPad, with 3G versions to ship toward the end of April.
I guess we'll find out soon enough; pre-orders start this week.
I find this announcement fascinating - a mashup of MS Outlook and Google Docs, using the APIs from both products:
Effective today, Mainsoft is offering full-featured access to Google Docs documents directly from within Microsoft Outlook. Their belief is that e-mail and document collaboration sites need to work together seamlessly — so end users can be more productive. They're also planning to give away software that offers full-featured access to SharePoint document libraries, within Microsoft Outlook. So to reiterate — full use of Google docs within Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint — tools enterprise users are used to, with the significant benefits that the cloud brings.
The Mainsoft product is called Harmony and will be a free product and has been built using SharePoint Web Services interfaces and Google Docs open APIs, giving full-featured access to Google Docs or SharePoint documents from an Outlook sidebar.
I'd love to know what Microsoft thinks of that. On the one hand, it doesn't displace Outlook. On the other hand, if an outfit that wants to go with Google Docs finds that they pretty much only use Outlook from the Office Suite, that could cause some heartburn.
Not having used Google Docs, I can't really say anything about whether they would actually serve as a replacement for Word and Excel. I've been happy enough with Apple's iWork, so I haven't seen any reason to wander over that way.
Technorati Tags: MS Office, Google Docs
