Squeak-dev July 2009

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sisters, 8 and 4, win programming contest with squeak
by Avi Bryant 22 Jul '09

22 Jul '09

Did anyone else see this? http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_405695… Avi

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Squeak VM questions
by Miguel Enrique Cobá Martinez 22 Jul '09

22 Jul '09

Hi folks, I want to know the status of VM in squeak. I have read the squeakvm.org pages and even the info it is detailed, it is not clear enough for me. I know that there are two types of vm builds (mainly) for i386 (32bits) and x86_64 (64 bits) and that each of these vm can, when configured before exporting C source code from VMMaker, interpret 32 or 64 bit images. Also, from the documentation, the 64 bit images are mostly of academic interest. The 32 bit images are the main kind of images, the ones we (almost) all use. And this 32 bit images can be interpreted with 32 or 64 bits built squeakvms. On the other site, are the addons that different brilliant people are contribuiting to the vm source code in order to have more capabilities in the image. This functionality includes: closures jit Now, I have an amd64 Debian GNU/Linux Lenny install and it is all 64 bit (x86_64) and Jose Luis Redrejo has made an excellent work on building a 64bit squeakvm capable of interpret 32 bit images like the squeak and pharo ones. But this squeak vm hasn't support for closures (my main need) so, I can't run pharo and the new squeak from Andreas on my amd64 machine in a native way. I run this images on a 32 bit KVM virtual machine and so far I am really impressed but I would like to have a native 64 bit squeakvm with closure support. The questions are: ¿Who are building squeak vm for the different architechtures? I can see that the different squeak vm are hosted on different places (smalltalk consulting, squeakvm.org, etc) and with different names nomenclatures. This is sometimes confusing, mainly for new users (and for old users too). ¿Can all the vm be hosted on a single place and with a single name format? ¿What means the version 3.10 for vm? I barely understand that it is related to the image that generated, but, if a squeak vm is to be used for squeak and pharo, for example, shouldn't have a more neutral version number? ¿What about the new vm implementations, like cog, exupery, stackvm, etc? ¿Are the sharing the same source code on squeakvm.org or are independent and incompatible implementations? ¿Are plans to build and make available 64 bit versions of the vm for the new users with recent equipment (almost all end user PC and laptops sold are 64 bit)? Finally I don't have to pressure anyone, because I understand that this is done on a free time basis, but I think that this will greatly reduce the barrier to squeak/pharo and smalltalk in general. Thanks for all the excelent work done. Miguel Cobá

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Iliad 0.6 is out!
by Nicolas Petton 22 Jul '09

22 Jul '09

Hi, I am happy to announce the first public release of the Iliad web framework (http://iliad.bioskop.fr). Iliad features: * standalone stateful widgets * nice urls with a simple routing system * simple API * easy to setup and deploy (no complicated configuration step) * javascript layer to update widgets using AJAX. If javascript is not enabled, the behaviour remains the same by making normal requests. You can download it from the svn repository: svn co http://bioskop.fr/svn/gst/iliad/tags/0.6.0 A Squeak/Pharo port is available at http://www.squeaksource.com/Iliad Installation instructions can be found at: http://iliad.bioskop.fr/wiki/iliad/Installation_guide for both GNU Smalltalk and Squeak. Some blog entries related to Iliad: http://smalltalk.gnu.org/tags/iliad I would like to thank Stefan Schmiedl, Joachim Jaeckel and Paolo Bonzini for their help. Nicolas Petton

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OSProcess DLL for Windows VM
by Jon Hylands 21 Jul '09

21 Jul '09

Hi everyone, One of the things they want BrainBot to be able to do right off the bat is talk using the Microsoft speech SDK (using a specific commercial voice). I have a nice little command line utility, so I can run something like this: say.exe Hello there, my name is BrainBot I need to be able to call this from Squeak, which means I need OSProcess. I don't have the DLL, and right now I don't have any way of building it either (I'm running on a fairly tight deadline, and need to get this running in the next day or two). Does anyone have a recent version of that DLL? Or is there a simpler way to launch a command line utility? Do I need a new VM as well? Thanks, Jon -------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Hylands Jon(a)huv.com http://www.huv.com/jon Project: Micro Raptor (Small Biped Velociraptor Robot) http://www.huv.com/blog

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MoS: starting on a new image
by K. K. Subramaniam 21 Jul '09

21 Jul '09

Hi, This Q is for MoS (Masters of Squeak) :-). Given a morphic image that has been extensively modified, which symbol would you start inspecting to learn more about the essentials in the image? Smalltalk? SmalltalkImage? Subbu

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Network address lookup with multiple adapters
by Jon Hylands 21 Jul '09

21 Jul '09

Hi everyone, So, hooked up to my robot are two separate networks - one is the wifi connection to the router (192.168.1.115), and the other is to a gigabit ethernet camera using the ethernet port on the mini-itx (169.254.1.11). When I run ipconfig (under XP) I get this: Windows IP Configuration Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Autoconfiguration IP Address. . . : 169.254.1.11 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.0.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : Ethernet adapter Wireless Network Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : phub.net.cable.rogers.com IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.115 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1 If I don't have the camera plugged in, when I evaluate: NetNameResolver localAddressString it returns: '192.168.1.115' However, once I plug in the camera and it gets an IP address assigned, #localAddressString returns '169.254.1.11'. Is there a way to apecify the adapter name, or get all the network addresses? Thanks, Jon -------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Hylands Jon(a)huv.com http://www.huv.com/jon Project: Micro Raptor (Small Biped Velociraptor Robot) http://www.huv.com/blog

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Nebraska Connectivity
by Gary Dunn 20 Jul '09

20 Jul '09

I have been reading about Nebraska Server and comparing it to activity sharing in Sugar. The contexts I am planning for are A) students learning Squeak on everyday laptops in a small classroom with WiFi, and B) home schoolers working at home connected to the Internet. Assume for now A and B are the same group. >From what I have read, Nebraska will work for A but is not well suited to B. Sugar's activity sharing will work in both situations, except it expects to find a school server (or at least a Jabber server). Regardless, Sugar's activity sharing takes place outside of EToys and we will not be using Sugar. Does anyone have any experience using Nebraska across the Internet? As a group? Person to person? -- Gary Dunn, Honolulu osp(a)aloha.com http://openslate.net/ http://e9erust.blogspot.com/ Sent from a Newton 2100 via Mail V

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Re: Squeak-dev Digest, Vol 79, Issue 56
by Ralph Boland 20 Jul '09

20 Jul '09

>> I have been looking at MethodDictionary. >> It seems to have very little to do with Methods. >> It seems to me that a better design would have been >> to have a class VarDictionary which does not use >> Associations (similar to MethodDictionary). >> MethodDictionary would inherit from VarDictionary >> and add the couple of additional methods it needs. >> VarDictionary would then be available for others to use. >> >> Better still would be to have MethodDictionary not >> be a variable class at all but simply use an additional >> variable "values". Again MethodDictionary should >> really inherit from a class that provides this service. >> I would use this service in my own code. >> > This will increase a method lookup times & lengthen the path for > accessing the methods by VM. > Don't forget, that MethodDictionary having such special format only > because to satisfy VM. > >> Ralph Boland >> >> > Igor Stasenko AKA sig. Makes sense. Perhaps the MethodDictionary class comment could spell this out more clearly. Currently it says: I am just like a normal Dictionary, except that I am implemented differently. Each Class has an instances (should be instance) of MethodDictionary to hold the correspondence between selectors (names of methods) and methods themselves. In a normal Dictionary, the instance variable 'array' holds an array of Associations. Since there are thousands of methods in the system, these Associations waste space. Each MethodDictionary is a variable object, with the list of keys (selector Symbols) in the variable part of the instance. The variable 'array' holds the values, which are CompiledMethods.

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Fwd: need tests for DataStream
by Cyrille Delaunay 20 Jul '09

20 Jul '09

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Cyrille Delaunay <cy.delaunay(a)gmail.com> Date: 2009/7/20 Subject: need tests for DataStream To: pharo-project <Pharo-project(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr> Hi, I wrote a new version of DataStream ( and its subclasses : ReferenceStream and SmartRefStream) in Nile and I would like to write tests for those classes. I would be very interested by anyone that has already write some tests for that.

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Re: [squeak-dev] Re: Squeak vision
by osp＠aloha.com 20 Jul '09

20 Jul '09

> At Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:14:43 HST, > osp(a)aloha.com wrote: > > > > > Bert Freudenberg a $BqD(Brit : > > > > > > >> The first step in this direction could be a fast bytecode package > > > >> loader, without the need to compile Smalltalk code. > > > > > > > > > > > > Indeed. Perhaps you remember the discussions we had about ImageSegments > > > > that loaded classes complete with CompiledMethods? Which is way way > > > > faster than compiling code, and could not only be used to load squeak > > > > apps on top of a fixed image like for Dr Geo on Etoys, but could also > > > > lead to blazingly fast updates, or to very efficient field patches of > > > > deployed software. Maybe bringing this idea up in a separate thread here > > > > on squeak-dev would get some developer intrigued - I for one do find > > > > this a fascinating project. > > > > > > I have the felling (unobjective) such feature could make life easier to > > > third party Etoys developer and eventually attract more of them to Etoys. > > > > > > Hilaire > > > > > > > Closed-sourse EToys would violate the concept of the user having access to > > everything in the system, a cornerstone of Alan Kay's vision. > > Well, it would violate the concept if it is closed source. > > > "User" does not refer strictly to the person using the computer at > > that moment. A teacher setting up and running an EToy session > > qualifies as the "user," and as such should have access to complete > > source and the right to modify it as they see fit. > > They do. > > > Educational software as product should not be treated as a for-profit > > market. All educational software and content should be open-source. The > > bulk of this work should be pro bono. What renumeration there is should > > come from grants. The educational system should benefit from free learning > > materials in the same manner we have benefited from Squeak. > > I'd think that not all educational software and content should be > open-source. But Etoys is. So, what is your point? Maybe it is just me, but "a fast bytecode package loader, without the need to compile Smalltalk code" combined with "such feature could make life easier to third party Etoys developer and eventually attract more of them to Etoys" sounds like an endorsement of closed-source commercial EToys. If commercial success is not the attraction, what is? Faster initial load time? Reduced file transfer size? Perhaps I assumed too much. My point is that commercial software, and commercial textbooks, drive up the cost of education. The success of the open-source software movement serves as a model for how we ought to be producing educational materials. I see Squeak at the foundation of that solution. Gary Dunn Open Slate Project

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