squeakland October 2005

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19 participants
38 discussions

The Weekly Squeak No.6: September 25th - October 1st
by Giovanni Corriga 09 Oct '05

09 Oct '05

Dear squeakers, Hello, and welcome back to the The Weekly Squeak, a weekly report on what's going on in the world of Squeak. This is the second time in a row that The Weekly Squeak is late, so it looks like a change of scheduling is in order. Starting from now, I'll try to publish this newszine on Sunday. So, don't miss the next Sunday issue, which will sport the second installment of SqueakViews! In this issue you'll find: 1. Squeak Videos on Google, Redux 2. Limited senders and implementors browsing 3. Next Croquet release based on Squeak 3.8 4. New Squeak 3.9a releases 5. Mailing list server downtime 6. Quoth: a dynamic interactive fiction system 7. A first integration of RoelTyper in Squeak 8. Missing methods in Complex 9. Japanese Squeak 10. Favicons in SmallWiki 1 11. Keymapping discussion 12. Upcoming Squeak Chats You'll find the complete report at http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5740 . The past issues archive can be found at http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5751 .

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More advanced file browser?
by Wendell III 09 Oct '05

09 Oct '05

Hi all, I was just watching the Extremadura Squeak video, and noticed that everyone was using the Gnome file browsers to add their images to Squeak. This got me thinking about more self-contained functionality, and made me curious to know if anyone was working on a more "visual" file browser, or even support for common network filesystems for Squeak itself? I realize that the idea of files goes against the Smalltalk philosophy, but since we do unfortunately live in a world of files, it probably makes sense? Thanks all, -Wendell

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bug? help with 'referencePosition' and 'turnToward:' of an embedded object
by Nicholas Bennett 09 Oct '05

09 Oct '05

all, I was trying to build a little model of the solar system with eToys, but there is a snag... The basic scheme is as follows paint Sun, Earth, and Moon. Also paint 'spokes' one end will be in the Sun's center and the other represents the Earth's 'orbital position'. Embed the earth in the EarthSpoke (at one end). Set the EarthSpoke rotation center at the 'other end'. Simple 'turnBy:' scripts will now make Earth rotate about its axis and 'orbit' Sun. Analogous steps can be done for Moon & Earth - and you get a neat little hierarchy of containment and they all orbit and spin happily enough. Then I thought; 'why not add a shadow object to hide the half of Earth that should be in shadow?' I thought I could embed the shadow in the Earth object so it would move with Earth as it orbited and use 'EarthShadow turnToward: Sun' to ensure it orients correctly. This does not work - but it seems like it should - right? I simplified the construction to trouble shoot. - Just Earth, EarthShadow, Sun. - Embed EarthShadow in Earth. - Make 'script1' as EarthShadow turnToward: Sun - set it ticking - you can drag Earth around and the shadow will track the sun just fine - as soon as you turn the earth the shadow stops tracking so the insertion of the TransformationMorph 'breaks things' Seems 'Player::turnToward: target' is based on: self setHeading: (self costume referencePosition bearingToPoint: target costume referencePosition) A little debugging makes me think that the 'local to global' transformation is not really taking into account the ownership chain of the objects. I cannot see any comments re what 'referencePosition' is supposed to mean, the code is consistent with either 'global (but broken?) or 'local to owner'. Seems to me either referencePosition is supposed to return global co-ordinates and is 'broken' (at least for objects embedded into transformed objects) or turnToward needs to worry 'more' about the global->local co-ord issue. Does anyone have any thoughts about what the intentions of the code base is? how one could/should fix this behaviour? regards, nicholas

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Smalltalk Videos?
by Wendell III 06 Oct '05

06 Oct '05

Hi everyone, I was wondering: are there any "video tutorials" for Smalltalk/Squeak anywhere, visually walking a user through some of the techniques and procedures? Thanks! -Wendell

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Re: [Squeakland] Fwd: misc: elementNumber, obj id
by Scott Wallace 06 Oct '05

06 Oct '05

Hi, Randy. Yes, the elementNumber of an object in a container will change as the order of objects in the container changes, and the order depends on the order in which the objects were added to the container... and when you "pick up" an object and then drop it back into a container, that counts as being freshly added to the container, so the last object "touched" will be the one with the largest elementNumber. So, in short, you can't count on elementNumber to stay the same unless you're not "touching" the objects. So what to do instead? I'd recommend that you maintain your *own* "idNumber" variable in the objects in question, and give each of the objects its own unique value for an idNumber... and use *those* in your reckonings instead of "elementNumber." Since this is a variable that you have created and assigned values to yourself, its value is not going to change unless you proactively change it, so you should be able to use it to distinguish reliably among siblings. Cheers, -- Scott PS: If the above isn't clear, please send a concrete example and we can work it through together. >>From: "Randy Heiland" <heiland(a)indiana.edu> >>To: <squeakland(a)squeakland.org> >>Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 11:16:28 -0500 >> >>Can someone tell me a bit more about this tile in the miscellaneous >>category? Its balloon help says "my index in my container". I'm simply >>experimenting with some siblings in a playfield, seeing if I can have >>sibling-dependent behavior based on each sibling's identifier/elementNumber. >>It seems that whenever I grab one of the siblings and move it, its >>elementNumber changes. I'd like some fixed identifier assoc'd with each >>sibling. >> >>--Randy

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Cranky laptop & Squeak?
by Matthew Soar 05 Oct '05

05 Oct '05

Greetings three chunks 1) with an idea of making between 1 and 100 Million of these machines, presumably Squeak will run on the Linux OS, could a native version be written as well? 2) some links associated with the now gone Cybiko which has many of the requirements of the $100 project. 3) Windows98SE in 8MB - Linux is free, and robust etc,, however W98 has been arround for along time, is likaly to be suported and can be reduced to a tiny size,..... Matthew 1) --- The $100 laptop is being developed by One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OLPC is based on “constructivist” theories of learning pioneered by Seymour Papert and later Alan Kay, as well as the principles expressed in Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital. The founding corporate members are Google, News Corp, AMD, Red Hat, and BrightStar. All three individuals and five companies are active participants in OLPC. The $100 Laptop will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop, which initially is achieved via flat LCD screen, in later generation products electronic paper will be used (for example E-ink developed at the MIT Media Lab). In addition, the laptop will be rugged, use innovative power (including a hand crank), be WiFi- and VoIP-enabled, and have 4 USB ports. Its current specifications are: 500 MHz, 1 GiB of flash memory (no hard drive), SVGA 7" diagonal display, 128 MiB of DRAM. The cost of materials and assembly for each laptop is estimated to be approximately $100. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%24100_laptop images of the design. --------------------- http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/40/Laptop09052.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cd/Laptop09053.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6d/Laptop0905.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/13/Laptop09055.jpg project web site http://laptop.media.mit.edu/ September 28, 2005 Move over Microsoft, Dell. The $100 PC cometh. From MIT. http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1935&tag=nl.e589 $100 Laptop Effort Gains Momentum 09.29.05 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1865071,00.asp 2) ------------------------------------------------------ somthing simalar has been made befor; Cybiko is a hand held computer designed for teenagers (although available and suitable for all ages, including adults). It has over 430 "official" freeware games and applications. The CPU is an Hitachi H8S/2323 at 18 MHz and it also has an Atmel AT90S2313 co-processor at 4 MHz to provide some support. It came with 512 KB ROM flash memory and 1.5 MB RAM. It came with an add-on slot in the back, but the only hadware released was an MP3 player. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko http://www.geocities.com/cybikonation/pictures.html and... Inventor Plans New Computing Platform for Students By Jack M. Germain TechNewsWorld 02/12/05 1:30 AM PT The new PDA will be more of a wireless communicating device than a computer. It will have a built-in peer-to-peer network that will not require the Internet for users to stay connected. However, it will also have full Internet browsing capabilities. Mark Menarik, CEO of Chicago-based TanCher, said the device will focus on maximizing the wireless capabilities for the educational market http://www.technewsworld.com/story/40471.html http://www.tancher.com/ 3) -------------------------------------------------------- Windows98SE in 8MB!! ---------------------- The screenshot below is real. There is no disk compression, ramdrives or imaging utiltities involved here. Using our EOS software we performed an embedded installation of Windows98SE to a small 500MB hard disk. After booting to the explorer GUI our starting point was in fact a 17MB installation. All extraneous files were resolved and removed, leaving the smallest, leanest Windows98SE ever. It boots in seconds, is wonderfully fast and stable as a rock. Mind you it doesnt do a whole lot, though as you can see we still have the Explorer GUI and command environments fully functional. Serial ports, parallel ports, floppy, mouse etc - all present and accounted for! Now if you think this is silly-small...you should see what happens when you use Microsoft's Drivespace compression with a 3x compression factor. No I am not kidding. Windows98SE on a 4MB Disk-on-Chip anyone? The screenshot would look the same, since the compression is transparent the OS would be reporting 8MB still - just the physical storage is halved. Works great though! EOS Embedded Windows98SE has some huge advantages over Windows CE on an ix86 PC platform. A plethora of hardware devices are available with all the driver development done tried and tested. Standard software development tools abound and a wealth of off-the-shelf software are available. http://www.embeddingwindows.com/8mb_windows98.html -----------------------------------------------------------

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The Weekly Squeak No.5: September 19th - September 25th
by Giovanni Corriga 02 Oct '05

02 Oct '05

Dear squeakers, Hello, and welcome back to the The Weekly Squeak, a weekly report on what's going on in the world of Squeak. Sorry for being late... to make amend, we are proud to introduce you to SqueakViews, a series of interviews with the Squeak Developers. In this first installment, Giovanni Giorgi has a quick chat with Stéphane Ducasse. In this issue you'll find: 1. Loading vs. Merging in Monticello 2. How VMMaker works 3. HashTables 4. BabyUML overview posted 5. Ottawa Smalltalk Users Group meeting 6. Smalltalk Job Offer in France 7. 64-bit OSProcessPlugin, XDisplayControlPlugin, AioPlugin on SM 8. A Sourdough Image 9. A directory with Companies using Smalltalk 10. New Magma release 11. NetJam, Quoth and Spoon 12. Ken Causey joins the Coordinators 13. How to do things in an MC update stream world 14. Squeak Planets 15. SqueakLight status 16. ACM's Classic Books in Computer Science 17. Charsets support in SmallWiki 1 18. Upcoming Squeak Chats 19. SqueakViews: an interview with Stéphane Ducasse You'll find the complete report at http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5740 . The past issues archive can be found at http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5751 .

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New to Squeak - problems I'm having
by Mark Engelberg 01 Oct '05

01 Oct '05

OK, last night I was surfing the web and discovered Squeak. I installed the Squeak plug-in (on Windows XP Professional, in Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7), so that I could begin looking at the various tutorials. Here are some of the problems I've already encountered: First, when clicking on the supplies tab at the bottom of the screen, two rows of icons pop up. The bottom row is about two-thirds off the screen, making the icons difficult to recognize. Second, when viewing several of the tutorials, many weird characters seemed to be substituted for ordinary characters. For example, the dash character "-" was replaced by a capital N with a bar over it. Third, whenever a window of text was formatted in a narrow column with something to the right of it, the right edge of the text (about one letter's worth) was cut off. Fourth, in all of the tutorials containing a mixture of icons and text, the icons were not located in the space allocated for them by the text. They were always shifted a bit. Furthermore, if you tried to drag them into the space allocated by the text, the icon wouldn't quite fit (as if the text were a bit too small, or the icon a bit too big). Anyway, I like everything I've read so far about the promising features of this language for kids, but these user interface issues made a poor first impression. Can anyone tell me what's going wrong and how to fix it? Thanks, Mark Engelberg

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squeakland October 2005