On Tue, 7 May 2002, Jim Benson wrote:

> Karl Ramberg wrote:
> > Are there any reports witten about the SqueakEnd for the rest of us?
> 
> 
> > Doug Way wrote:
> > Well, John McIntosh wasn't there to give his usual in-depth report, so I'm
> afraid there won't be a good hour-by-hour synopsis available. :-)
> 
> I write:
> 
> I missed Johns writeup also. I am I going to find out what was *really*
> going on there?

Indeed, it's all like a dream, a glimpse of some otherworldly paradise...

> I'll tell you what I got out of the weekend.

Me too, inspired by My Hero(tm)...JIM!

I have nothing much to add to Jim's description of Alan's talk --  it
really is a wild ride. Personally, it was the first time I sorta
"got" eToys and tile scripting, though I'm still unclear how to use them
for things other than car demos.

[snip]
> Squeak on your own. The one thing that made those talks interesting though
> was that the initial implementors of those ideas in Squeak gave the talks.
> By "reading between the lines" you could pick up a whole lot more than what
> was presented, and made it more than worth the time.


Indeed, that was enormously fun. It also made clear to me an extra sort of
"documentation gap". This insight hit me during John Maloney's talk on
sound and music processing in Squeak (which was a blast, btw). John was
using all those interesting little SoundPlaying, Analyzing, and Recording
morphs that I had poked at over the years but, apparently, had never
*grasped*. Sometimes, this was due to a lack of understanding of sound
(the sonograms show you a whole lot about the shape of the sound wave, but
if you don't have an interpretive framework, well, eh), but some of it was
just not knowing the tools. For example, John constructed a few little
sampled instruments using his voice or tapping on a cup or the
like. *Very* cool! See, it's hard to convey how much fun that seemed.

> Also, Bijan gave a talk
> on the game of life, and it was interesting because this was his first
> attempt at an Active Essay. I thought he did a good job.

Thanks Jim! I'll note that my attendence at some of the prior talks
was...less...than it could have been due to the imperatives of
late-binding, or rather, late-night-binding of ideas to my talk
:) However, speaking as a procrast^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpresenter, I will say that
Squeak did let me down. 3.2 has a good feel to it (thus far). I did
encounter some bugs (e.g., the #patchsDo: one) and inflexibilities
(oy! PianoPlayerMorph hateBijanGutsWith: #gusto) *but* the over all
experience was on of fairly free exploration of both the ideas and the
bits of Squeak. More on this as I hone up the essay.

> Oh, and we ate a lot.

Yay Mark! Food was good and abundant.
[snip]

> One thing out of the ordinary was Dan Ingalls talk on the new modules
> system. It sounded to me like most of the architecture has been pretty well
> layed out, but that there is still quite a bit of work ahead before it can
> really be pushed out the door.

Yes, and a key bit for me was realizing that Modules are more like
Packages in other Smalltalks than, say, MODULES in ML. Which isn't bad at
all, it's just different than my mistaken impression and actually *helps*
me feel more in control of them.

[snip]
> Saturday night was demo night, and some interesting things were presented by
> the Squeak developers.

Jim is, of course, to demure and modest to mention his own demo, of the
Zurgle stuff, which was just plain amazing. He had worked up a
useable work and look alike PowerPoint clone. That alone was worth
seeing. One main theme (there were several) was 'When morphic came to
squeak from self, we lost *animation*. I want to add some of that back
in'. And he sure did. The Zurgle interface was very "alive" and
occasionally MacOSXy (and often XPy, of course).

Doug Way demoed the wisker browser which reminded me how cool it is. I had
used it for a month or so a ways back but never upgraded it to my current
image. Now it's first job on the list when i get back.

[snip]

Both from the presentations and some of the stuff encountered prepping for
my project, I'm getting really into Wonderlands. The current intro level
tutorials are nice, but there really needs to be a "next
steps" one. Ahem. Perhaps I'll get around to it :)

Personally, I had a great time, even if there was a bit of difficulty
convincing the GA grad students that I *in fact* existed.

Oh, Steve Wessels did fix a few bugs in his IRC client which is now my IRC
client of Choice. Very nice. (It was good to meet him, too.)

Craig tried, and failed, to get an InterpreterSimulator going for
me...is anyone running this on a regular basis or can point to a known
good version? I'd really like to just *see* this.

Craig also showed me some other cool stuff on his hard drive ("So, Craig,
I'm *booored*, what *else* have you got to show me"), including a totally
amusing use of the Avatar stuff (you mouse around "affective space" to
change the expressions of the avatar), and, of course, Flow.

There's more, and I'll spew it as it occurs to me :)

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.