Squeak-dev November 2001

squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

174 participants
374 discussions

RE: [OT] GEM, Blitter, and Atari ST (was: RE: Debian and SqueakLrevisited again)
by George Bosworth 01 Nov '01

01 Nov '01

And there were discussions in late '84 about putting a Smalltalk VM into the unused silcon space on a BLITTER chip being made by Commodore for a machine that never saw the light of day. -----Original Message----- From: Alan Kay [mailto:Alan.Kay@squeakland.org] Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 12:55 PM To: squeak-dev(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: Re: [OT] GEM, Blitter, and Atari ST (was: RE: Debian and SqueakLrevisited again) I will admit to being the "Chief Scientist" of Atari during a turbulent few years from '81 through early '84. The machine now known as the AMIGA was orginally funded by Atari during this time through R&D (however, I had very little to do with the design which was done by an spinoff group). It was an attempt to do some of the things you could do with an Alto + some of the things people had learned to do with games HW. There were some funny stories connected with this machine during the Atari collapse in 1984. The designers managed to get the rights to the machine (they were a semiautonomous entity somewhat separate from Atari). Jack Tremiel (not a nice guy) bought Atari on the assumption that he was getting the AMIGA. As the legend goes, you could hear his scream of rage in Antarctica when he found out that the AMIGA was gone. Cheers, Alan At 9:14 AM -0500 11/1/01, Stephen Pair wrote: >Chris Reuter wrote: >> GEM was released under the GPL when Caldera >> bought Digital Research. The Watcom C compiler is due to be >> released as open-source software as well, although the >> current maintainers are still trying to remove >> third-party-licensed code. > >Now that's a blast from the past. The Atari ST (running GEM) was the >computer on which I learned GUIs and event driven C programming (with >the Mark Williams C compiler) when I was a kid. I recently got an Atari >ST emulator running on my laptop and noticed something curious...there >was a menu option on the desktop called "Blitter" which IIRC sped up the >graphics display. I wonder if anyone here knows if this has any >relationship to BitBlt? > >- Stephen --

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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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RE: [celeste] moving from Communicator to Celeste....
by Joerg Beekmann 01 Nov '01

01 Nov '01

> Now of course if we had machines able to use the file system we designed > at Interval, indexable by content and tags etc, this would all be much > simpler. Sigh. the WebDAV extesions to http gives you a distributed file system with tags, locking, searching (via DAV searching and locating), access control, and versioning. www.webdav.org. Implementions are still mostly focused on the basic spec. Joerg

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Pushing Pixels (was Game Programming)
by Eric Scharff 01 Nov '01

01 Nov '01

How fast is "fast enough"? I agree that pixel pushing ~= good gaming. But how much pixel pushing could be done in Squeak? I decided to play with graphics and wrote a simple benchmark - roll the screen: | w h r copyTop scrollUp | Display restoreAfter: [ w _ Display width. h _ Display height. r _ Display boundingBox. copyTop _ BitBlt destForm: Display sourceForm: Display halftoneForm: nil combinationRule: 3 destOrigin: 0@(h-10) sourceOrigin: 0@0 extent: w@10 clipRect: r. scrollUp _ BitBlt destForm: Display sourceForm: Display halftoneForm: nil combinationRule: 3 destOrigin: 0@0 sourceOrigin: 0@10 extent: w@(h-10) clipRect: r. h // 10 - 1 timesRepeat: [ copyTop copyBits. scrollUp copyBits.]] OK, its silly, but I like watching it. :) This takes around 1.5 seconds in 16 bit color at 800x600 on my G3/233. Speed seems to vary considerably. It runs very well on my B&W G3, but really terribly on just a somewhat slower machine (PowerMac 8500). For kicks, I wrote the same code in C on the Mac (using the presumably-accelerated Toolbox CopyBits() function). It runs perhaps 4 times faster, which is nice, but certainly not an order of magnitude. Is there a way to do this faster? Is it fast enough? -Eric

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[ENH] WhatIsUnimplemented
by Joshua Gargus 01 Nov '01

01 Nov '01

from preamble: "Change Set: WhatIsUnimplemented Date: 1 November 2001 Author: Joshua Gargus The #notYetImplemented popup now tells you what is not implemented."!

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RE: [celeste] moving from Communicator to Celeste....
by G.J.Tielemans＠dinkel.utwente.nl 01 Nov '01

01 Nov '01

Just building an integrated webbrowser with minimal overhead can be fun, but I was wondering if it was not more effectieve to try to communicate with not bedaubed tools from the outside world. For example I did visit w3c amaya editor for the MathML (I support the education on a technical university) There I saw that with this tool it also is possible to make annotations when you visit a website and ALSO share these annotations with others. If you could realise a link from Squeak to this tool, broading the functionality of that share concept...) -----Original Message----- From: Alan Kay [mailto:Alan.Kay@squeakland.org] Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 3:02 AM To: squeak-dev(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: Re: [celeste] moving from Communicator to Celeste.... I think the heart of Eudora qualifies as a minimal workable email client. I would love to see Celeste taken to that level, including a nicer UI (though Eudora could also be better in this regard). It would be nice to have a global "Celeste & other comm flap", etc. Cheers, Alan ----- At 5:32 PM -0600 10/31/01, Jimmie Houchin wrote: >John Hinsley 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 >> > >I too, would like to switch from Communicator to Celeste. > >I use Communicator on WinME (at work, no choice :( ) and at home on >Debian Sid with Mozilla 0.95. I tried Ximian's Evolution but just >didn't/haven't really liked it. > >I have 10s to 100+ mailboxes hierarchically organized. >I have close to 600mb and 90,000 messages in mail. > >I would love for Celeste to be able to handle that. > >It seems to me (maybe incorrectly) that Celeste would need to do >similarly to other clients in that the mail file needs to be broken >up into multiple files, generally according to the mailbox scheme >set up by the user. > >In Communicator each mailbox has it's own file and index. I believe >Eudora is similar. > >I asked my wife the other day what it would take to get her away >from Eudora. She's open to such a move but it would have to be >reasonably feature equivalent and user friendly. She and my children >are currently on Macs. > >It would be nice if Celeste had UI choices (skins, chromes, faces, >whatever). One of which was similar to the other email clients so >that a migration path could be made from Communicator, Outlook, >Eudora, etc to Celeste. After migrating and becoming comfortable >with Celeste/Squeak then they could possibly if they choose move to >a potentially different and more powerful UI. > >Being able to import or use standard mbox format mailboxes would be >great. I frequently join mailing lists which have either >downloadable archives or archives available from the mail server. It >would be nice for Celeste to handle that. > >For example this mailing list is archived (back to July 01) at: >http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/ > >I look forward to using Celeste and hopefully contributing to it's >advancement once I become more Squeak proficient. > >Jimmie Houchin --

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Re: Plugins in MacOSX
by Eric Scharff 01 Nov '01

01 Nov '01

I'm not absolutely sure this works. cc and the tools that use it (ProjectBuilder) make Mach-style binaries, not the old CFM-style ones. I think that external plug-ins in Squeak require CFM-style shared libraries. I've built Carbon plug-ins in CodeWarrior without any problem, but I'm not sure how to do it with cc/ProjectBuilder. Carbon and OS X support a Plug-In API that I think could be used in Squeak. I also think it gets around this problem because building a Squeak plugin would be like building a framework using ProjectBuilder. For now, if you can, build Carbon plugins using MPW or CodeWarrior. -Eric

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RE: [OT] GEM, Blitter, and Atari ST (was: RE: Debian and SqueakL revisited again)
by Jarvis, Robert P. (Contingent) 01 Nov '01

01 Nov '01

If I remember correctly the Blitter was a special-purpose chip in the ST which did bit-blits in hardware. Bob Jarvis Compuware @ Timken > -----Original Message----- > From: Stephen Pair [mailto:spair@advantive.com] > Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 9:15 AM > To: squeak-dev(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org > Subject: [OT] GEM, Blitter, and Atari ST (was: RE: Debian and SqueakL > revisited again) > > > Chris Reuter wrote: > > GEM was released under the GPL when Caldera > > bought Digital Research. The Watcom C compiler is due to be > > released as open-source software as well, although the > > current maintainers are still trying to remove > > third-party-licensed code. > > Now that's a blast from the past. The Atari ST (running GEM) was the > computer on which I learned GUIs and event driven C programming (with > the Mark Williams C compiler) when I was a kid. I recently > got an Atari > ST emulator running on my laptop and noticed something curious...there > was a menu option on the desktop called "Blitter" which IIRC > sped up the > graphics display. I wonder if anyone here knows if this has any > relationship to BitBlt? > > - Stephen > > >

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