Squeak-dev August 2007

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132 participants
163 discussions

Swazoo-devel mailing list rescued from spam
by Janko Mivšek 20 Aug '07

20 Aug '07

Dear Smalltalkers, Swazoo-devel mailing list was full of spam since last year and I can imagine that for many of you it was useless. But now I managed to configure a list so that only members can post on it and also cleaned-up an archive. But on calendar view of archive in the monthly numbers spam posts are still present. Just don't open months from august 2006 to jul 2007. So, Swazoo-devel archive (since 2000) is here: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=swazoo-devel And you can subscribe here: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/swazoo-devel then you can post to address swazoo-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net Best regards Janko Mivšek maintainer of Swazoo

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Another interesting timing/process bug
by Andreas Raab 19 Aug '07

19 Aug '07

Hi - Not sure how many people use it but BlockContext>>valueWithin:onTimeout: doesn't deal correctly with non-local returns which can have "interesting" effects to say the least. For those of you using it, I recommend applying the following fix immediately: http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=6628 This is in particular interesting if you call valueWithin:onTimeout: repeatedly as illustrated in the tests accompanying the above fix. Cheers, - Andreas

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Very bad about Squeak in blogosfere
by Janko Mivšek 19 Aug '07

19 Aug '07

From Anonymous on http://factor-language.blogspot.com/2007/08/smalltalk-is-dying.html: "Anyone who says Squeak is production ready has never used Squeak in production. Recently quite a prominent member of the Squeak community seriously considered moving to Java because he could not get uptimes bigger than a two days. It turned out Delays and Semaphores (!!!) were broken all time along. There are dozens of issues like this. One example is that the settings of the GC are tuned for memory sizes of about 1 MB. Don't even get me started about the 1 GB and 120 MB memory issues which tend to crash the image. Or the bugs in ClassBuilder, InterpreterSimulator, Decompiler, .... You need to have several Squeak images per CPU because there is a limit to the amount of punishment a single Squeak image can take. Squeak itself is heavily forked (Squeak, Croquet, Sophie, SqueakLand, SmallLand, ... ). All the code in the image in unmaintained. There are teams but most of the time they don't even integrate submitted fixes for bugs. Development of these packages has stopped. The same situation for the VM. The only VM that is maintened is the Mac VM. The Windows VM will only get new builds if the maintainer needs some fixes for himself. The Unix VM is unmainted. The maintainer of the main VM code publically stated he will do shit unless someone pays him. Squeak is fully of ugly shit code that has just been hacked in for abandoned experiments. That http server Seaside uses on Squeak? Unmaintained and has bugs with HTTP 1.1. That really is just a small list of issues Squeak has." -- Janko Mivšek AIDA/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server http://www.aidaweb.si

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Re: Mod operator?
by Bert Freudenberg 18 Aug '07

18 Aug '07

(moved from beginners list) On Aug 14, 2007, at 0:51 , Michael van der Gulik wrote: > Matthew Fulmer wrote: >> On Sat, Aug 11, 2007 at 11:05:54AM -0400, John Almberg wrote: >> >>> Sorry for this simple question, but I can't seem to find the >>> mod operator. >>> As in, "what's the remainder after doing division?" >>> Thanks: John >>> >> >> For such questions, it is best to use the method finder: >> - Open method finder (world menu -> open -> method finder) >> - enter a mod expression ( such as 7 . 3 . 1 ) and hit enter >> - method finder gives several answers. Two of them are what you >> are looking for >> > ****WOW****!! That's just magic! > > I can't believe that I'm still finding more incredible features in > Squeak after spending a couple of years immersed in it. Indeed. And because many are unaware of these features they get broken regularly. I think the list of "safe" selectors to try wasn't updated in ages, although there were many additions to the base system that could be found using the method finder. - Bert -

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[Packages] Split-Join in development universe etc
by Keith Hodges 18 Aug '07

18 Aug '07

I added Split-Join as a package in the development universe. This is a small set of functionality, much discussed on the list, which has not yet gained the notoriety required to make it into 3.10. Making this an item that can be named as a dependant, should other packages make use of it this has the benefit of recording its usefulness. It also means that I/you can write packages so that we can be sure it is loaded when needed. I proposed enabling Universes to run arbitrary, or Installer based scripts, but this is considered somewhat cavalier. So undaunted, and no less barbaric I have used a PackageInfo-#preamble to load this script! This has the disadvantage of being hard to maintain and it is working invisible magic behind the scenes , whereas the script option would have been visible and manageable. To use this you will need a PackageInfo-Base which supports preamble scripts etc. I am not sure if the Monticello in 3.10 can support this fully (it should do but I haven't tested it). So in addition I have also uploaded Monticello1.5 ;-) to the package universe, in some areas it has been a radical makeover of 1.0 This should now be ready to use in 3.10 now that I have reinstated traits support. recent work includes - fixed monticello configurations - fixed preambles/postscripts - fixed browsing of configurations - wired up load/merge/browse buttons for configurations - real version numbering 1.2.3b etc - out of order loading - doesnt loose methods from packages so easily as 1.0 - support for traits reinstated - (untested diffs support not expected to work) The monticello in 3.10 is unique among monticello versions in that I find it impossible to work around so as to get it to load monticello 1.5, so there is a Monticello15-bootstrap package which loads it in from source the first time. (Another task which a script would have been helpful for) A warning though, there is one significant show stopper bug to catch, which I havent had time to track down in the past 3 months. When given a package in which classes change their instVars significantly (i.e in ways that 1.0 could not handle at all) the class can get corrupted and that package needs recompiling. We have found this is needed occassionally (i.e.it is usually signalled by the image crashing) In spite of this I think that Monticello1.5 is nearly ready to be used in 3.10. I tried using the old one for a few hours and got very frustrated with loosing class extensions. enjoy Keith

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[ANN] Swazoo web server 2.0 released
by Janko Mivšek 17 Aug '07

17 Aug '07

Dear Smalltalkers, Swazoo 2.0 is here, on Squeak and VisualWorks simultaneously while Dolphin and Smalltalk/X ports are already on the way. What's new in 2.0 since 1.0? - input streaming for uploading large files - output streaming (chunking) for sending large files,support for Comet - improved request framework - Sport portability layer introduced for easier porting - improved exception handling - reorganization of packages - extensive SUnit tests, all pass Download and installation instructions are on Swazoo's website http://www.swazoo.org, where you can find also short description of streaming at http://www.swazoo.org/streaming.html where a short benchmark of throughput is also present. A few words about it: Swazoo (Smalltalk Web Application Zoo) is an open source, vendor agnostic, dialect neutral Smalltalk HTTP server with resource and web request resolution framework, a fruit of a first Camp Smalltalk 2000 in San Diego. Its main features are: * virtual site support * clean web request resolution framework * static web serving * input streaming of HTTP requests (for large file uploads) * output streaming (chunking) for responding large files and for Comet I hope that you will find Swazoo useful and therefore help us achieve its main goal: to become a web server of choice for all dialects of Smalltalk. Best regards Janko Mivšek maintainer of Swazoo http://www.swazoo.org

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"The Weekly Juan" update
by Juan Vuletich 17 Aug '07

17 Aug '07

Hi Folks, I did a redesign of my site. You can take a look at www.jvuletich.org . As always, any comment is welcome. Juan Vuletich

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Re: OT: Dolphin smalltalk giving up
by Bill Schwab 17 Aug '07

17 Aug '07

Some of us are already here. I cannot speak for the others, but I have long viewed Squeak as one possible escape plan from Windows, and to a lesser extent from disappearance of Dolphin. To be blunt, I am still worried in that order, though that would change over time if Dolphin indeed becomes unsupported. >From a developer's perspective, it is a tough transition. I can work in Squeak, but it is a bitter pill compared to Dolphin. From an end-user's perspective, I fear that Squeak out of the box would cause mutiny. As I have always said, the GUI feel the problem. I deal with busy users in sometimes dire circumstances. They cannot be expected to remember whether they have previously opened a dialog (modality can be a good thing). I think I would be able to design and build around some of the limitations. Tweak scares me a bit. The capability is fine (even great), but I have reservations about dragging the compiler into it. I would much rather see a higher level GUI editor that uses a time-aware variant of a traditional event system for routing. While I am no big fan of native widgets, I would probably opt for something like wxSqueak to force the point. ANSI compatibility, or at least friendliness would be a barrier. My favourite example is the behaviour of #next, #next:, which "silently" answer nil or truncate. I think these basic reading methods should raise an error on end of stream, with truncating variants (#nextOrNil, #nextAvailable:) allowing one to be more relaxed. I do a lot of parsing that needs to be right, and "want my bad news early" vs. having something blow up later with no clear indication of what went wrong, or worse yet, after incorrect results have been obtained. I could move to my own selectors, but I worry about "reverting" and not getting the behaviour I expect. Underscores. I have a lot of code that uses them. Sorry. I talk to databases that use them in field name, and field names make good choices for selectors. Lots of class names too, again thanks to external sources. I am glad to see that Andreas fixed some critical threading bugs. I am somewhat surprised that it took so long for them to surface. How does one square that with the popularity of Swikis and other server uses of Squeak? I would have thought they would stress the VM enough to show such bugs, but they apparently did not, or worse yet, the community largely ignored the problems??? Insights would be appreciated. I am not sure how to copy with the loss(??) of Dolphin's overlapped threads. For those not familiar with them, Dolphin provides a way to mark external functions to be called on a separate OS thread such that only the calling Smalltalk Process is blocked. With a really good SSL Socket implementation, I should be able to wean from them. By really good, I mean that the image cannot hang when a network wire is pulled or a machine or DNS entry does not exist. The calling process should block, but not the entire image. Another thing that scares me a bit is printing. I simply have not investigated it in Squeak, but will need to do so. That's one Dolphin user's perspective. Bill Igor Stasenko wrote: Hopefully, some people will join a squeak community. On 11/08/07, Chris Kassopulo <ckasso@...> wrote: > http://www.object-arts.com/content/blog/2007Aug10.html Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. University of Florida Department of Anesthesiology PO Box 100254 Gainesville, FL 32610-0254 Email: bschwab(a)anest.ufl.edu Tel: (352) 846-1285 FAX: (352) 392-7029

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Re: [ANN] Smagick
by Kevin Driedger 17 Aug '07

17 Aug '07

I got a few more dependencies loaded only to get DNU on #waitForCommand: It seems that WindowsProcess needs some more work. I've tried simplifying and just getting an external process launched ( ExternalWindowsOSProcess command: 'c:/WINDOWS/system32/notepad.exe' ) and even that doesn't work.... Alas it's time for bed. ]{evin Kevin Driedger wrote: I've tried it on Windows and stepped through the code a bit and it seems that you are assuming that the names of the binaries will be without extensions but on Windows they add .exe to the end. I'll see if I can change that. ]{evin stefan.reichhart(a)gmx.ch wrote: Hi, Thanks (to all) for the nice feedbacks ! request by Damien: "Smagick 0.1" is now available as Package Universe ;) interfacing: Right now the "IO" between "Smagick" and "Image Magic" via "OSProcess" is done using "OSProcessIO". That is an intermediate layer that composes the commands for a model (=Smagick) and returns the parsed output (if there is any) and the process of an external application (=Image Magick) back to it. "OSProcessIO" is using a file- pipe for this ... yet very primitive. I know that "Smagick" works well on Unix, Linux and MacOSX - tested and heavily used. I don't know whether it runs on Windows. Maybe someone can try it ? - I don't use Windows anymore ... Cheers, Stef On Aug 7, 2007, at 3:54 PM, Lex Spoon wrote: >> "Smagick" is a small high level interface to control "Image Magick" >> from within a Smalltalk environment, eg. Squeak. The purpose of this >> package is to provide high performance image manipulations without >> the need to know all the low level details of image processing. > > Neat!! > > There is a ton of stuff available on our machines outside of Squeak. > There are several ways to access such things, and Smagick's approach > is to use OSProcess. > > Can you comment on how the interfacing works? Does Image Magick have > a mode that lets you talk to it over a pipe, or does it have a rich > set of command-line options that Smagick can use, or what? > > Also, does anyone have an idea if Smagick works in Windows, possibly > with Cygwin? How about OS/X ? > > > Lex > -- ]{evin ])riedger 1473 Brule Ave., Ottawa, ON http://extremedesigners.ca

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Re: [ANN] Smagick
by Kevin Driedger 17 Aug '07

17 Aug '07

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