Beginners November 2006

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Preference #menuTitleBorderWidth does nothing?
by Petr Fischer 14 Nov '06

14 Nov '06

Hi, has preference #menuTitleBorderWidth any effect? (It's used in color themes (ColorTheme) too) Thanks, pf

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More questions on beginner's lesson
by Dooright 13 Nov '06

13 Nov '06

Thanks for the fast help on my previous question to this list! I'm now at the bottom of the first page of the beginner's tutorial at http://www.dmu.com/squeak/sq1.html This last part seems to be a doozy! It apparently creates an OCX control, publishes the project to the web, pulls an off-site Squeak plug-in into your browser, then runs the project over the web. Not bad for a begining lesson! It does gloss over a LOT of details about how to set this all up, most notably about the structure and name of the web page that it asks you to to create, and some of the parameters. Has anybody worked this lesson thru? I can serve the &ltOBJECT as foo.html from my server, but the browser simply displays it as text. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Want to start your own business? Learn how on Yahoo! Small Business. http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/r-index

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The Weekly Squeak Summary No. 6: Nov 5 - Nov 11, 2006
by Michael Haupt 13 Nov '06

13 Nov '06

Dear Squeakers, welcome to the The Weekly Squeak Summary, a weekly report on what's going on in the world of Squeak based on the Weekly Squeak blog. There have only been two news items during last week, which I will briefly summarise. 1. Ah Ha!! - http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com/2006/11/07/ah-ha/ This article, originally a post on the Squeak beginners mailing list, gives an overview of the basic principles behind Smalltalk, and details how and why they are so useful. In particular, the principles mentioned are the syntactic pattern "object message", the fact that user code can go everywhere in the system, and the core features of polymorphism and inheritance. 2. Scratch! - http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com/2006/11/08/scratch/ An outcome of the work at the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is a programming language for interactive media design. A beta release is freely available, an official release has been announced for later this year. You can find this and much more on The Weekly Squeak blog, the newsblog dedicated to the world of Squeak: http://news.squeak.org/ Subscribe to the Weekly Squeak RSS feed: http://news.squeak.org/feed/ Happy squeaking, Michael

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Disappointed
by Jeff 12 Nov '06

12 Nov '06

I'm pretty disappointed with this list at the moment. My last post, "beginners questions" talked about how beginners often don't get their questions answered and pointed out that often when the experts see that an answer, ANY answer, was given they then assume the question was answered, so they don't offer anything more. Now I do appreciate Matthias's honest attempt to answer the question, so I don't want this to be misconstrued as an attack on him. But he obviously misread it. And, well, once people saw that the question of how to make a wonderland actor move in response to mouse clicks had been answered, I didn't get any more help. The question I asked was how to move a wonderland actor with the arrow keys, and I need to do that without the actor having the focus. Unfortunately, since it's been taking so many hours for the messages I've tried to send to get posted on here, (I think I had screwed up joining the list somehow, and redid it so hopefully that problem is solved), it took me a full day to get my question asked and now another full day to explain that the answer I got was to a different question. By the by, I've been spending about 10 hours a day for 5 days now trying to solve this problem. It's getting quite frustrating for me and making me want to give up on squeak. _______________________________________________ No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding. Make My Way your home on the Web - http://www.myway.com

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Help (and where to find it) ?
by lanas 11 Nov '06

11 Nov '06

Hi folks, Where is help ? After years of Linux use and work, I've developed an habit of always looking at the same place for help files, even for newly-installed packages. Be it the man page, be it the info page, be it the doc/ subdirectory of the source package. Now, how does this go with Squeak ? Case in point: Connectors. I've installed Connectors. Three new tabs were created. I browse the new classes looking for high-level 'howto' information on how I can use this package to make, for instance, UML diagrams. Nope. There's a ConnectorsDemo demo but it fails when I paste and execute the code in a Workspace (following what I recently read in the well-made Lalonde book 'Discovering Smalltalk'). So where do I look for an howto to use this package ? Is there a generalized approach to where to find such info in Squeak ? Cheers, Al

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Navigator tab, PUBLISH IT!
by Dooright 10 Nov '06

10 Nov '06

I'm trying to do the http://www.dmu.com/squeak/sq1.html Learning Squeak tutorial. How do I find the Navigator tab and/or the PUBLISH IT! command in Squeak 3.9? ____________________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Music Unlimited Access over 1 million songs. http://music.yahoo.com/unlimited

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Script question
by Andrew Burton 10 Nov '06

10 Nov '06

I'm trying to put together a small script that will move a Sketch when it's under the mouse. Right now the Sketch just sits there, mouse over or not. I don't think my conditional is setup right, but can't seem to find just how it should look. Here's the script as it looks: script1 (self isUnderMouse) ifTrue: [self forward: 5]. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks! -- Andrew Burton tuglyraisin(a)aol.com http://utilitarian.us - A Guide to Esoteric Technology in Paragon City http://jarodrussell.livejournal.com/ - Take a guess. ;)

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squeak and the jvm
by Michael Kohout 10 Nov '06

10 Nov '06

I suppose this is more of a pie in the sky type question, but with the changes coming to the Java virtual machine in version 7, where the jvm itself provides a more message oriented opcode, has any consideration gone into perhaps porting squeak to run on the jvm? I'm aware of talks2 but it seems as if development on that effort(based on the public releases/news) is at a standstill. thanks Mike Kohout

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Re: [Newbies] Beginners questions
by Jeff 08 Nov '06

08 Nov '06

I've noticed on the list my mailings don't seem to parse correctly. I don't know why that is, but I can't blame you for not being tempted to wade through them. I wouldn't be either. If anyone can tall me how to solve this, I'd appreciate it.Thanks,Jeff --- On Wed 11/08, lanas < lanas(a)securenet.net > wrote:From: lanas [mailto: lanas(a)securenet.net]To: beginners(a)lists.squeakfoundation.orgDate: Wed, 8 Nov 2006 07:27:57 -0500Subject: Re: [Newbies] Beginners questionsLe Lundi 6 Novembre 2006 18:09, Jeff a écrit� :> Hello group!I'm hoping that this beginners list is a good place for a> beginner to get answers to... well, beginner's questions. And so, with that> in mind, I'll ask a few questions. But first, experience has taught me that> I should be a little more clear in what I'm looking for as an answer.> Imagine a total newbie to computers asked a group of experts the question> "How do I run a program under windows?". One member of the group> decided to respond by handing him a 400 page technical manual on windows> and telling him that everything he wants to know is in there. Upon seeing> that the rest of the group decides that his question has been answered and> sees no need to offer additional assistance. This newbie's question wasn't> actually answered by the group, ultimately what they did was say "ask> the manual". The manual naturally can't hear him so it can't directly> respond to his question, he has to start searching it. After skimming a> bunch of pages and not seeing what he's looking for, (or anything he> understands), he looks in the index. It isn't there. He looks in the table> of contents to see a chapter called "Getting started with> windows". Thinking that looks like what he needs, he flips to it and> it starts out by telling him that the first thing he needs to do is install> windows. Ok, so he looks for this Windows disk. [snip]For what it's worth, your message appeared as a large chunck of dense text (worse than quoted above) without any paragraphs, filling the windows' text screen like a wall brick.I must be frank and I must say that it was not tempting to wade through and read it.This being said, no, I can't answer your question ;-)Cheers,Al_______________________________________________Beginners mailing listBeginners@lists.squeakfoundation.orghttp://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners _______________________________________________ No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding. Make My Way your home on the Web - http://www.myway.com

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RE: KeyPress On World of Squeak Wonderland (was: Disappointed)
by Jeff 08 Nov '06

08 Nov '06

Thanks Ron,There's some good info. in there. Unfortunately, scene doesn't have respondWith: to: method, but I might be able to find a workaround. One method I was trying to use in the past was to create a script from tiles, and have that script always ticking and just send the helicopter the command to move in response to the world's last keystroke. I couldn't get the script to find the helicopter at all, and have been having trouble with going from one workspace to another attempting to refer to the same thing, and also with the differences between tile scripts and workspace scripts, for some reason they don't act the same and I'm not sure why. Even when I tried creating a class MyWonderland with instance variables | wonder copter |, I couldn't figure out how to get a method to understand what 'copter' was and pass messages to it other than the one that created it. Also related, when I define jump as jumpup := wonder helicopter move:#up.I still don't know exactly how to make this method do this again. I've tried World jumpup. jumpup. wonder helicopter jumpup. but only jumpup loop. seems to work, and again only from the particular workspace I defined it in. I know all of this is related somehow. Anyone got a hint? --- On Wed 11/08, Ron Teitelbaum < Ron(a)USMedRec.com > wrote:From: Ron Teitelbaum [mailto: Ron(a)USMedRec.com]To: hombreviii(a)myway.com, beginners(a)lists.squeakfoundation.orgDate: Wed, 8 Nov 2006 11:07:48 -0500Subject: KeyPress On World of Squeak Wonderland (was: Disappointed)Hi Jeff, Welcome to the beginners list! I appreciate the fact that you aresticking with the problem. That in my opinion is the best way to learn. Ididn�t answer your question because I do not feel that I am an expert inWonderland. If the question was something like how can I map a key to sosome action that is pretty easy, IF that action is an isolated easily calledmethod. Something like: Utilities garbageCollectAndReport. This isa class method and there is no instance that needs to be sent to. If a key stroke needs to be captured and affecta running instance it is a bit more difficult to do but still very possible. Theissue here is that there is a complicated event loop that needs to be tappedinto but this would be very difficult to explain to someone with limited experience. The fact that you are using wonderland means that there is probably already ahook to do what you want so a complicated explanation of what I know willprobably only confuse the matter and make things more difficult for you. There are people on this list that havemuch more experience with Wonderland, but nobody that will answer your questionwithin hours. I would love to have Squeak be much more apleasant experience for you. My suggestion is that you start slower andwork on understanding basic concepts of Squeak. Do more tutorials; lookinto how some things work before trying to extend them. Also a comment, starting with theassumption that people are not going to help you is discouraging to people whomight. People are more likely to help people that work hard themselvesand will benefit from the help and will appreciate that help. I think youhave the work hard part down. You need to be a bit more appreciative ofthe effort and time that goes into helping you. Now to your question: Matthias was rightand he sent you to exactly the place you needed to go. I justloaded a 3.8 image and did the helicopter tutorial. I have to say it wasgreat fun! Wonderland is a very nice piece of code and I can see that itwould be fun to play with. The tutorial is fun but the concepts are noteasy and how the authors did what they did is very clever but also difficult especiallywhen you venture off the beaten path. You picked a hard place tostart! That by itself can be very frustrating. Here is your answer but the answer is notperfect. What I noticed is that the keys only have focus when the actoris under the mouse. There may be a way to make this work in the contextof a world but I couldn�t get it to work that way. The world doesnot appear to have a reactions collection, but there does seem to be a little hookin Scene that might have been intended to work that way. Again this is anadvanced concept. I also tried adding a reaction to the ground to make iteasier for this to work. The ground accepted the reaction but did not acton it. I added a reaction of [:event | self halt] but that did nothing somaybe background items like ground and sky don�t quite work or don�trespond to certain reactions the way other actors do. It makes sense thatWonderland might be written this way. If you added a right key press tomultiple objects how is it supposed to know which item the key press shouldcontrol. There could be a number of ways to fix this like adding an actorthat is a control stick or something, then placing the mouse over the controlstick would work the helicopter. (just a suggestion of where you might gofrom here) Ok so here is the code: helicopter addResponse: [:event | eventgetMorphicEvent keyString = '' ifTrue:[helicopter move: #left]. eventgetMorphicEvent keyString = '' ifTrue:[helicopter move: #right].] to: #keyPress I hope that helps, welcome to the list and Happy coding, Ron TeitelbaumPresident / Principal Software EngineerUS Medical Record SpecialistsRon(a)USMedRec.com face="Times New Roman">From:face=Tahoma>beginners-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org[mailto:beginners-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org] style='font-weight:bold'>On Behalf Of JeffSent: Wednesday, November 08, 200612:28 AMTo:beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.orgSubject: [Newbies] Disappointed I'm pretty disappointed with this list at the moment. My last post,"beginners questions" talked about how beginners often don't gettheir questions answered and pointed out that often when the experts see thatan answer, ANY answer, was given they then assume the question was answered, sothey don't offer anything more. Now I do appreciate Matthias's honest attemptto answer the question, so I don't want this to be misconstrued as an attack onhim. But he obviously misread it. And, well, once people saw that the questionof how to make a wonderland actor move in response to mouse clicks had beenanswered, I didn't get any more help. The question I asked was how to move awonderland actor with the arrow keys, and I need to do that without the actorhaving the focus. Unfortunately, since it's been taking so many hours for themessages I've tried to send to get posted on here, (I think I had screwed upjoining the list somehow, and redid it so hopefully that problem is solved), ittook me a full day to get my question asked and now another full day to explainthat the answer I got was to a different question. By the by, I've beenspending about 10 hours a day for 5 days now trying to solve this problem. It'sgetting quite frustrating for me and making me want to give up on squeak. border=0 width=23 height=23 id="_x0000_i1025"src="http://imgfarm.com/images/webmail/rt/i… _______________________________________________ No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding. Make My Way your home on the Web - http://www.myway.com

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Beginners November 2006