Squeak-dev October 2001

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191 participants
600 discussions

Re: [celeste] moving from Communicator to Celeste....
by danielv＠netvision.net.il 02 Nov '01

02 Nov '01

Cool, I don't know of anyone with quite that much mail in Celeste! I think you can probably live happily in Celeste, and I'm sure you'll get plenty of help if you need it (on the list or off it), but you should know you might need to get your elbows dirty to get good performance. I've used Celeste with 130MB very happily, and I think some people have somewhat more. What might be too slow for your comfort is the operation of saving and loading the index, which is dependent on how many messages you have. However, this is only done when you open/close Celeste, so that's not too bad. Another thing is that the in memory index, well, takes up memory... As Lex said, we have plans to overhaul the Celeste indexes, which are somewhat stuck, but maybe they'll be unstuck if that gives you trouble. About the conversion - Nope, we don't have a Communicator format mail reader/importer. However, it's pretty easy to write them - that's how I converted from MH, for example - I wrote the class MHMainInboxFile (all two methods of it). Your milage might vary - but a Communicator filter would probably be useful to other people too. Then you put your class in MailBD>>importMailFrom:intoCategory: instead of MailInboxFile, and voila. Anther question - Do you have a deep mail category tree? Celeste has a flat list. You'll have to think what you want to do with that. Daniel John Hinsley <jhinsley(a)telinco.co.uk> wrote: > I'd like to switch from Communicator to Celeste. I don't have any > problems with multiple ISPs and such. > > The problem I do have is simply the huge amount (well, hugeness is > relative, currently nudging half a gig and all in standard Netscape 4.7* > on *nix format) of stuff I have to transfer over. It can't be as simple > as copying all the child directories over, or can it? > > Ideas, advice and cries of "don't do it!" welcome. > > Cheers > > John > -- > If you don't care about your data, like file systems which automagically > destroy themselves and have money to burn on 3rd party tools to keep > your > system staggering on, Microsoft (tm) have the Operating System for you.

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Re: Debian and SqueakL revisited again...(was Re: Debian source package)
by goran.hultgren＠bluefish.se 02 Nov '01

02 Nov '01

John Hinsley <jhinsley(a)telinco.co.uk> wrote: [SNIP] > > Oops, didn't know that. Ok, so we are basically not going into Debian > > then. > > Bummer. > > Indeed, especially as Debian looks to become much more widely used now > that the diskpacks are being sold (for cost, of course!) in more > countries. I see it working like this: newbie buys RedHat, gains feet > and confidence, and at some point either has to spend ages on line (with > possible ASP nonesense) buy a new commercial distribution, or go Debian. > I'm thinking of it myself! Yep, that seems to be the case. I started out a long time ago with Slackware, moved to RedHat and then Mandrake to finally arrive, where most all seasoned Linuxers seem to end up, at Debian. Being noncommercial Debian has a few nice aspects - it won't go out of business :-), it won't ship bad stuff because of falling stock prices, and I can always (like in the Squeak community) easily get in contact with the responsible person. And the package system is the best I have ever seen. The reason why I think Debian is important to Squeak is that there are plenty of really good programmers running Debian. And if we could attract a few of those to Squeak... Andrew Greenberg wrote: > From a legal and policy point of view, I'm sure we could get approval to > a modified Squeak-L, to the extent it embodied the corresponding > portions and concessions of the APSL language. There may be a political > issue, however, as Alan has seemed in the past VERY reticent to reopen > the matter with Apple legal. ... and Stephen Pair wrote: > If possible, the license issue should be addressed...not because there > are any real > technical issues with SqueakL, but because many people seem to have > problems with it > because it is not blessed as an "open source" license (for a few > technical reasons). > > I think the requirement for a new license (if any) should be that it > stick as closely > as possible to the current SqueakL, and that it be blessed by > www.opensource.org. Well, SqueakL is probably already OpenSource (I guess) so I am not sure you really need to change it in order to get it blessed as that. People that only care for stuff being OpenSource and that actually do know what it means - are probably quite satisfied as is. But a stamp from Eric Raymond is always good. :-) But being stamped as OpenSource doesn't make it "DFSG free" which means it still won't go into Debian. From what I have read on the net APSL1.2 is not "DFSG free" either - there have been quite a lot of discussion on the clauses regarding "making modifications publicly available" etc. Debian has a rather high standard for software being free and I admire them for that distinction. Linux is spreading all over the world, especially in poor countries and, for example, the clause no 6 in SqueakL regarding "Export Law Assurances" might of course in an international view be a problem. The two practical problems that I have sofar seen discussed with SqueakL regards compatibility with GPL/LGPL and inclusion in Debian. If I remember correctly (and I didn't find it on the Swiki) GPL nor LGPL code can be brought into the base image but you can build a Squeak app and release it as GPL or LGPL. Is that right? Most people probably care about the last part I guess. Andrew Greenberg also wrote: > There was, for a few versions (somewhere between 2.4 and 2.7), a message > that clearly stated that contributions and changes were, unless > expressly stated otherwise, made under Squeak-L. I don't think it is in > the present version, but it ought to be placed back, as a matter of good > legal hygiene. Yes I second this. And perhaps we could complement the upcoming repository/modules system with some license mechanisms - easy way of stamping a license on a module and also easily have a list available describing what licenses play together etc. regards, Göran

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RE: Lots of concurrency
by Ken Kahn 02 Nov '01

02 Nov '01

David Chase wrote: > I don't know if this has much relevance to Squeak, but in my > experience programmers, and I think people in general, are much > happier thinking sequentially. The sort of bugs that occur with > unstructured parallelism are just too Martian for most people to > contemplate. On the other hand, if every method is "synchronized" > (to use the Java phrase), it is generally too expensive, and also > not enough (to refer back to someone else's transaction example -- > books must balance). > Whether people are "happier thinking sequentially" is a very important question. [As an aside, people clearly don't think sequentially - the brain has huge amounts of internal parallelism. And I think it is just an illusion that this parallelism is only at a low level (e.g. neurons). Read Minsky's Society Theory of Mind ( http://www.media.mit.edu/people/minsky/ ) for example.] Thinking sequentially about problems that are inherently concurrent is suboptimal. Here's an excerpt from "MultiLogo: A Study of Children and Concurrent Programming" ( http://el.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/Papers/mres/MultiLogo/MultiLogo.html ) where a fourth-grade girl (F) who had programmed Logo for a year was asked to "program" a situation in which she had to sweep the floor and her brother had to set the table for dinner: F: I'm going to tell him to start setting the table, which he won't do. Anyway, he starts on the table, then I go back and start sweeping. M: So you're going to ask him to set the table, and then you're going to start sweeping. F: But when I tell him to do it, he only does one plate. But there are five people that he has to set places for and he only sets one plate. Because he has to repeat this thing. And I have to repeat. I only make one stroke with my broom. But we have to repeat it forever. But there is no way both of us... I think her problem is that her model of programming is sequential as a result of her year of Logo programming. And the world isn't sequential. Think of sports teams. Think of traffic. Think of the internal concurrency in walking. In games. Think about bank account transfers. The Incredible Machine. Cooking. An orchestra. And so on. "Unstructured parallelism" is fine UNLESS the concurrent activities can interfere with each other. That's why I'm not excited about taking sequential languages and adding threads or the like. You need to redesign from scratch to deal well with concurrency. There's been a lot of discussion here of transactions. I agree that programming transactions using locks is just "too Martian". [Maybe that's why the ToonTalk help character is Marty the Martian ;-)] Here's how I would program them in ToonTalk. I'd program a bank account robot to respond to a message to give exclusive attention. The message contains a nest where subsequent messages will arrive. (And probably a bird that is given an acknowledgement that the message was processed.) The robot takes the nest where messages normally arrive and stores it somewhere in its box and puts the incoming nest where that nest was. In case you want to back out of an aborted transaction the robot should have copied its box and stored it as well. Now when the sender of the message has exclusive control over this bank account. All of its messages go to the nest it sent and messages from anyone else go to the stored nest. To end exclusive control a message is sent releasing it and a robot handles it by throwing away the copy of the old state and the nest and puts the original nest back where it was. (And any messages that were sent in the meanwhile are still on top and are now processed). This isn't very complicated - I bet a typical 10-year old familar with ToonTalk can master this. As with any code, bugs are possible. The most serious one being to forget to end exclusive control when you are done. > > I also think that truly asynchronous communication is a dubious > idea. The worst parts of Java (the deprecated bits) are more > or less asynchronous (Thread.stop,suspend,resume). We ended > up (in our Java system) hiding almost all asynchrony; threads > yield at well-defined points, garbage collection occurs at > well-defined points, etc, all enforced by the compiler/VM (in > the safe language, there are no infinite loops, period). > and in "Little Deadlocks and the Three Bears" by Jecel Mattos de Assumpcao Jr. ( http://www.lsi.usp.br/~jecel/stories/deadlocks.html ) he defines asynchronous: "asynchronous - the synchronous messages used in CSP couple the communication of information with the communication of events. With asynchronous messages the two are separated (communication of event is then done with semaphores and similar structures) allowing great flexibility in system design. This also means there are great opportunities for mistakes, so understanding and debugging asynchronous systems is not a trivial task. " These problems with asynchronous messages don't match my experience. Maybe these problems are completely a consequence of mixing asynchrony and sequential programming. > I am afraid that I am perhaps focusing on this at too low a > level for this crowd, but the subject of the thread is "lots > of concurrency", and I am not sure what that is really intended > to mean. Normally, I think it implies performance. > To me concurrency means simultaneous activities (and if just running on a single processor then at least conceptually simultaneous). Parallelism (running on multiple CPUs under your control) and distributed programming (running on communicating computers typically controlled by different parties) are special cases. Simultaneous activities are a good idea when there is a conceptual match, when there are CPUs going idle, or when it is inherent (e.g. distributed computing). Best, -ken kahn ( www.toontalk.com )

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Re: [OT] Interview about C#
by danielv＠netvision.net.il 01 Nov '01

01 Nov '01

Hi guys. Bert, it didn't sound to me like Justin was attacking John, just ranting. Which, as you say, is very close to the "noise" side of the scale, but not really malevolent. Justin, if your ISP doesn't give you service, switch. Even if you don't, stop using their email address - get a forwarding account elsewhere. That way you're not advertising them, and you're not tying yourself to them by giving people your address there. This way you can switch later on. Refering back to the ([OT]) topic, by way of conjecture - I don't think MS views Smalltalk anything like the way they view Java. Java is a large competitor platform, that's pretty consolidated around industry standards they're excluded from controlling. Smalltalk is a bunch of small, independent players of different kinds, none religiously adherent to any specific competing strategy. Smalltalk has always adapted - by encapsulating (Squeak, VW) or by tying in (Digitalk, Smallscript). MS loves (to have - no sentiments implied) adapters. Smallscript is a showcase for how a Smalltalk adaptation helps MS - by using the .Net class library, Smallscript is yet another way to for people to tie themselves into MS control. What Sarkela refers to is something that is pretty control-neutral, and otherwise positive - MS is making it's VMs pretty language agnostic. Yes, Smalltalk will feel at home on that VM, and so does Mercury, a Logic/Functional language, and quite a bunch of other research platforms that MS has paid to port to it, and which appear to have affected the VM spec. This might make it more likely people will be using applications written in something other than a syntactic variant of Java/C#, which is good. I say control neutral becuase that ties in only whoever does the adaptations over their VM, not the users of the language. Maybe weak-control would be better. Daniel P.S. - not that I would ever bring such a trojan horse into my home, of course, but it's good to be aware how exactly they're tightening their vice on most of the industry. Bert Freudenberg <bert(a)isg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de> wrote: > On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, Justin Walsh wrote: > > > Hi Sarkela, > > No offence but, [...] > > Justin, > > that was pretty rude. You're on this list for a very short time, you don't > know who John Sarkela is, so why do you attack him in such a way? > > I don't think this list is the place for such unfounded rants (which have > even less to do with Squeak or Smalltalk than the philosophical quarreling > flooding in here lately). > > -- Bert > > PS: No, I'm no MS advocate, I think they're evil, too. But it's way better > to do something about it: I for my part try to help Squeak run on a > Free OS. There's a lot to do, still - you just might want to join us.

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RE: Game Programming in Squeak
by Bruce ONeel 01 Nov '01

01 Nov '01

Along these lines there was a fairly funny post on comp.lang.c a few years ago between someone who KNEW that it was impossible to write DOOM in ANSI Standard C because ANSI C was way way way to slow. He got a response from some one named dmr(a)research.att.com who was complaining that it had absorbed all of the leisure time in his lab and yes it built with their ansi c compilers. This went back and forth for a while until someone pointed out that dmr might know something about C, being the author of one of the main books about C. "Andreas Raab" <Andreas.Raab(a)gmx.de> wrote: > Jon, > > > As anyone who has done any serious 3D game development realizes, > > Squeak will probably never be fast enough to do a "modern" > > first-person shooter. > > I'm sure that if you start from that point you'll have plenty of ways to > prove it ;-) Ah ... do you remember the days when people "knew" that you > can't possibly write an operating system in a high-level language like C?! > ;-) > > Sorry couldn't resist, > - Andreas

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Access vs. Media
by Mark Guzdial 01 Nov '01

01 Nov '01

A few of the academic educational technology research groups in the U.S. have been shifting their focus to Palms from desktop or even WinCE devices. Their argument is interesting: It's about access of two kinds. - ACCESS BY STUDENTS: Many people believe that we're never going to see much impact of computers at the level of 10 kids per computer (at best!) that we have today. Palms are cheap enough that one can outfit a whole class with them using current budgets. - ACCESS TO STUDENTS: What's more, students react to them differently than desktop computers. My former Ph.D. advisor, Elliot Soloway, says that kids in urban school districts don't even talk about the Palms like computers -- instead, it's more like a Walkman or an MP3 player. It's a media device that happens to have more interactivity to it. I'm making an argument that a cheap, handheld device is a grand idea, but the Palm is too cheap -- we simply don't want to give up all the forms of media that we have even if we step up to an iPaq or WinCE class device. I have some questions for y'all about this: TECHNICALLY: - I've been claiming that all forms of Squeak media (e.g., 3-D, Alice, MPEG, Flash, text-to-speech) run on WinCE and iPaq devices, but I realized that I haven't actually seen those all run on a handheld device. Can anyone verify that these Squeak media run on the handheld devices? - Is it still the case that Squeak can't be ported to Palms? EDUCATIONALLY: - This group cares about these kinds of issues. What do you think? I'm arguing that more diverse media is worth an decrement in accessibility that's found in the Palm. Do you buy that? Or is it just a matter of time before the Palm's cost-performance ratio shifts and we can get the media we want without surrendering the Palm's cost, ubiquity, and accessibility? Thanks for advice and comments, Mark -------------------------- Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies. Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/ (404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial(a)cc.gatech.edu http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html

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[BUG] TestRunner doesn't work as documented
by Ned Konz 01 Nov '01

01 Nov '01

I'm using a recent image. According to the class docs, TestRunner runTests and TestRunner runTests: '* test*' should both work. However, both result in walkbacks. The first problem is that the Morph itself doesn't get opened, so you get a walkback because the Morph stuff hasn't been initialized. This can be fixed in runTests and runTests: by making them call open, and making TestRunner class>>open return a TestRunner, not a SystemWindow. Then runTests: is broken further because it calls some methods that don't exist (classPatternFrom: and selectorPatternFrom:). In fact, there are several messages called in TestRunner that aren't implemented: TestRunner>>openAsMorph calls TestRunner>>open TestRunner>>runTests: calls classPattern:, selectorPattern:, classPatternFrom: and selectorPatternFrom: TestRunner>>showResultDefects calls TestRunner>>result TestRunner>>showResultSummary calls TestRunner>>failureMessage -- Ned Konz currently: Stanwood, WA email: ned(a)bike-nomad.com homepage: http://bike-nomad.com

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OOPSLA 2001 trip report
by John M McIntosh 01 Nov '01

01 Nov '01

A bit late, and a bit brief but it's been sleepless here in Tampa. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com/html/OOPSLA2001d1.html

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[OT] Interview about C#
by Tim Rowledge 31 Oct '01

31 Oct '01

Might interest a few of you:- http://windows.oreilly.com/news/hejlsberg_0800.html tim -- Tim Rowledge, tim(a)sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim Useful random insult:- Suffers from Clue Deficit Disorder.

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Re: 2 Squeak questions
by danielv＠netvision.net.il 31 Oct '01

31 Oct '01

Put bring up the halos on a morph, press the debug halo (gray wrench), and inspect morph. Look at the fullBounds, now drag the morph around. Try to inspect anything you don't understand - you might still not understand how it works, but you'll know quite a bit about it. For example, try to inspect (alt-i / cmd-i)- World findDeeplyA: TextMorph This lets you get examples for the different morph subclasses, and where they're used. And if one isn't used, that's also information. Have fun. Daniel Dennis Damico <dennis_damico612(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > --0-517543564-1004448273=:24677 > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > > > Hi all, > > I'm new to Squeak and Smalltalk. As a new user I can attest to the difficulties of using Squeak without good documentation. There are some excellent tutorials, but they only go so far. And when one attempts to step beyond the tutorial material there are inevitable difficulties. What is needed is more detailed reference material on the objects in the Squeak system. > > As a small step toward a solution here are two (mega) questions on areas that I found difficult or confusing. If there are enough responses I'll summarize in a form suitable for posting somewhere. > > > > Question 1: What text morphs are available? > > There are tons of text-related objects: AcceptableCleanTextMorph, AlansTextPlusMorph, PluggableTextMorph, Text, TextMorph, TextComponent, TextFieldMorph, TextContainer... Then there's the string set: String, StringMorph, UpdatingStringMorph, StringHolder... > > What is the purpose of each? What are their various strengths/weaknesses? Which are recommended? > > > > Question 2: How do coordinate systems work? > > In which direction do coordinates increase? Are there exceptions? Are coordinates global to the screen or local to a window or morph? How do you convert between coordinate systems? What is a TransformMorph? > > > > thanks > > > > --------------------------------- > Do You Yahoo!? > Make a great connection at Yahoo! Personals. > --0-517543564-1004448273=:24677 > Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii > > > Hi all, > I'm new to Squeak and Smalltalk. As a new user I can attest to the difficulties of using Squeak without good documentation. There are some excellent tutorials, but they only go so far. And when one attempts to step beyond the tutorial material there are inevitable difficulties. What is needed is more detailed reference material on the objects in the Squeak system. > As a small step toward a solution here are two (mega) questions on areas that I found difficult or confusing. If there are enough responses I'll summarize in a form suitable for posting somewhere. >   > Question 1: What text morphs are available? > There are tons of text-related objects: AcceptableCleanTextMorph, AlansTextPlusMorph, PluggableTextMorph, Text, TextMorph, TextComponent, TextFieldMorph, TextContainer... Then there's the string set: String, StringMorph, UpdatingStringMorph, StringHolder... > What is the purpose of each? What are their various strengths/weaknesses? Which are recommended? >   > Question 2: How do coordinate systems work? > In which direction do coordinates increase? Are there exceptions? Are coordinates global to the screen or local to a window or morph? How do you convert between coordinate systems? What is a TransformMorph? >   > thanks <hr size=1>Do You Yahoo!? > Make a great connection at <a > href="http://rd.yahoo.com/mktg/mail/txt/tagline/?http://personals.yahoo.com" target="_blank">Yahoo! Personals</a>. > --0-517543564-1004448273=:24677--

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