Beginners December 2011

beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org

27 participants
17 discussions

Re: [Newbies] Blender 3D
by Gary Dunn 14 Dec '11

14 Dec '11

Where is your school located? I have spent years struggling to get my education project to critical mass. Closest thing so far is OLPC but they focus on younger children in third world countries. My idea is to reach high school students to be self sufficient. They make their own slate computers and run the school network. These days I see too much corporate influence. Off the shelf tablets, commercial software. Little change -- improvement -- in teaching methods. Gary Dunn Open Slate Project http://openslate.org On Dec 14, 2011 4:58 AM, "David Corking" <lists(a)dcorking.com> wrote: Chuck Smith wrote: > We are starting a different school that runs by having the students > create w... This reminds me of the choice Victorian co-operators made to select education as one of the key Rochdale Principles. > We are using the advancement in energy to take it to the next level which > will bring us to an o... You are probably already aware that the Smalltalk community has been heavily involved in programming education, for example: Squeak Etoys Scratch and Build Your Own Blocks Alice (also built in Java) Bots Inc (http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/botsinc) Also, you may be interested in following these new UK-based communities: http://codingforkids.org/ http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/ Hope that helps, David _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners(a)lists.squeakfoundat...

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Re: Beginners Digest, Vol 68, Issue 3
by Overcomer Man 14 Dec '11

14 Dec '11

Blender 3D is a great project in my opinion. You should be able to cut the lines of code to 1/10th of C by using Smalltalk. From 1M that's 100K lines which with a programmer coding an average of 10 debugged lines per day would take 10K man-days or 460 man months. Let's say a class size of 20 could reduce that to 23 months or about 2 years. You could save more work by careful and elegant redesign of the core 3D objects and messages since elegant simplicity will help new people understand how to contribute faster. Therefore you'll have to teach moving to highly understandable object names instead of the usual amateur tagger philosophy where lots of open source software is developed using names that nobody except the developer understands - until the software gets popular and others have to learn it. ----------------- Koans for learning Smalltalk on the other hand strikes me as another waste of time and books like the entire "patterns" movement. IBM has or had a great little book for introducing people to Smalltalk using its Visual Age line. Even simpler, stick to Smalltalk itself. Have people start exploring the code for Dictionary until they completely master it - able to code it and use it. One could move from there to other key objects. My understanding of Dictionary once got me a job. ------------------ Language popularity is a matter of advertising. Nobody heard of Java until its creator advertised heavily claiming it was the best language of all, when to people who studied languages it was not as good as Smalltalk. Instead of advertising Smalltalk like that Adel Goldberg implemented a greedy pricing strategy which killed interest in ParcPlace Smalltalk creating many intellectual theives who stole Smalltalk's essentials to put objects in other lesser languages like C++, Java, etc.. The way out of that legacy in my opinion is projects like Blender 3D, maybe OpenOffice, and other killer applications in Squeak (or Cuis) which can potentially be so good people won't have a reason to stay with kludge languages. Kirk Fraser

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blender 3D
by chsmith＠xmission.com 14 Dec '11

14 Dec '11

Hi great squeakers, is it possible to create in squeak an app like Blender 3d or is it better to stay with blenders system. I would like to organize a school in Brazil where we will be teaching programing. I want to teach around creation of a software app on a large scale that is why I like blender 3D. Let me know all your thoughts. Chuck Smith

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networking in squeak
by Christopher Hogan 13 Dec '11

13 Dec '11

Hi, I have been trying to figure out how to do some basic networking functions from inside of squeak. I found the old Telnet application in a 3.8 image and I have it working in Trunk and am toying around with giving it a new UI. The other thing I need is ping. I saw some old treads about using commandshell but I haven't been able to get ping work. I am not sure I have everything I need loaded, I keep getting 'cannot access system to run ' ... messages. I am on a win7 (64 bit) box if that helps. I also found this old paper http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/archives/papers/Berg05a-CompLangESUG04-classboxe… It mentions having a socketICMP that might work for what I would like to do. I found classboxes on squeaksource and I managed to get some of it loaded into an old 3.8 image but I don't see the socketICMP anywhere. I checked a few other images from around the time the paper was published but I don't see it in any of them either. Does anyone know if that code is hiding out there anywhere or if I could get some pointers for what I might need to get loaded for commandshell to get ping to work I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks Chris (newbie squeaker)

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How do I load a MovieMorph from a .movie file?
by sst 13 Dec '11

13 Dec '11

Hi Everyone, I'm trying to improve the MovieMorph tutorial to update it to Squeak 4.2. I'm stuck on being able to load my .movie file into a new MovieMorph. This is the code I have used to create the .movie file from my 3 bitmaps (frame_001.bmp, ...): | frameCounter frameCount frame32Bitmap movieFile animationFrame | movieFile := FileStream newFileNamed: 'buddies.movie'. movieFile binary. animationFrame := Form extent: 100@100 depth: 32. #(22 100 100 32 3 100000) , (7 to: 32) do: [:i | movieFile nextInt32Put: i]. 1 to: 3 do: [ :i | frameCounter := i printString. frameCount := frameCounter padded: #left to: 3 with: $0. frame32Bitmap := Form fromFileNamed: 'frame_' , frameCount , '.bmp'. frame32Bitmap displayOn: animationFrame at: 0@0. "Convert down to 16 bits" animationFrame display; writeOnMovie: movieFile]. movieFile close. I stole it directly from the current Recipe (on the Squeak wiki) for creating a Squeak movie. It runs and creates the buddies.movie file from my bmp frame images. But I can't figure out how to load the .movie file into the MovieMorph. Does anyone know the way to do this? Or do I have to load each frame manually? I suspect the clue is in the Form>>writeOnMovie: method but haven't had any luck figuring it out. I know I have to load in the bits of the bitmap somehow ... I was expecting to be able to write something like this (I know, loadMovie: doesn't exist - it just seems like what one would expect to see): m := MovieMorph new. m loadMovie: (FileStream fileNamed: 'buddies.movie'). m openInWorld -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/How-do-I-load-a-MovieMorph-from-a-movie-file-tp418866… Sent from the Squeak - Beginners mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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Re: Deleting elements from a Collection while looping through it
by Jerome Peace 11 Dec '11

11 Dec '11

Jan Are your falling blocks unique? Is there a reason you are putting them into a Set instead of some other collection? One of the hidden features of Squeak/Smalltalk is that stack like collections exist. Because OrderedCollections have both a add/removeFirst and add/removeLast methods they can easily act like a stack or a queue. If you want to loop thru a queue of falling bricks just remove each brick and replace the still falling ones at the end. No? A Set would only be useful if you are mapping many of something onto one of the same something and you have a lot of different somethings. That doesn't sound like what you are doing. If you have a method called say #falling which when sent to a brick causes it to fall and return true or causes it to not fall and return false then a simple: bricks := (1 to: 100) collect: [:each | Brick new ]. bricks := bricks asOrderedCollection . "Optional" bricks := bricks select: #falling. the above is short for bricks := bricks select: [:each | each falling ] . would have each brick do its thing and store the list of still falling bricks in the variable. Yours in curiosity and service, Jerome Peace

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Deleting elements from a Collection while looping through it
by Jan Teske 10 Dec '11

10 Dec '11

Hey, I have a question concerning the behavior of Collections in Squeak. Recently I face a problem when trying to delete some elements from a set during a 'do:' message. Have a look at this sample method: doFallForAllIn: aSet aSet do: [:block | block fall ifFalse: [aSet remove: block]] It loops over a set of blocks and performs the fall message on each of them. If a block is not falling I don't want it to be in aSet after the function returned so I remove it from the set. Squeak doesn't seem to like that since some rather strange error now occures: If a block is removed from the set, the next block in the set will be left out from looping... sometimes. Nearly all the time it works as exspected, only sometimes a block is ignored. I couldn't find any pattern when this happens. So my question is: Has anyone an explanation for this? Does the error occure because the way I'm doing it is fundamentally wrong? Or am I just overlooking something and it is possible to remove blocks from a collection while looping over it? Thanks in advance!

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Beginners December 2011