WordPress.com (the free service that hosts The Weekly Squeak) has recently done some adjustments to its blogs’ RSS feeds. This adjustment led to the discovery of a bug in the Universal Feed Parser used by some desktop and web aggregators (such as Planet Squeak). The bug has been promptly fixed, but if you’re still experiencing problems we suggest switching to the Weekly Squeak’s Atom feeds (Entries feed, Comments feed) until your service is upgraded to the newest version of the feed parser.
Author: gcorriga
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More eye-candy coming soon to your Squeak desktop
Gary Chambers recently announced the imminent release of an add-on package for Morphic that brings more eye-candy to your Squeak desktop.
This package offers TrueType font support (via the FreeType Plus package), desktop theming and a whole collection of standard widgets.
While waiting with impatience for the release of the package, you can look at the screenshots here and here.
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New Seaside website
Phlippe Marshall wrote to the Seaside mailing list:
After too many delays the new Seaside homepage has finally gone online. Since we switched hosts it might take a moment until the DNS update propagates to you. The first thing you’ll notice is the updated look for which we no longer have to excuse. We cleaned up the content and added a lot of new stuff. Among others you’ll find interactive examples, feed aggregation Monticello commit logs and the answers to often asked questions like ‘What is the best Swiss cheese?’. Under the hood we made a lot of technology upgrades. We finally run on Seaside (2.8) and the Pier CMS with several plug-ins, we are also hosted at Seaside-Hosting. The only way to eat more dog food would be running on SqueakNOS.
The page is not yet fully finished (and probably never will be) but we feel we’re at the point where it’s significantly better than the old one. So if you have suggestions for improvements or want to help get in contact with us.
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A Squeak 3.9 development tutorial
Steve Wessels has recently published a complete development example for Squeak 3.9. In this tutorial, he guides the reader towards the creation of a simple solitaire-style game.
From the Introduction:
An activity I enjoy is writing simple games in Squeak. I also enjoy sharing this powerful development environment with interested developers. This is one of the reasons I write these tutorials.
For this development example I’d like to try something different and take the student through the process of writing a game in Squeak. Proceed linearly through the example. The development process described here will be very specific to the way I work. Consequently, you will see how I encourage organization of files and other processes as part of Squeak development. In a very real way, Smalltalk development is a personal expression.
While not geared towards complete begginers, Steve’s tutorial is good learning material for beginning/intermediate Squeak users.
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Squeak at the Salón de la Educación 2007
Antonio Moreno just let us know of this Youtube video featuring a demonstration of Squeak use in education. The demo, taken at the Salón de la Educación 2007, shows Randall Caton explaining to teachers, students and politicians how he uses Squeak with his students as part of the Nasa Connect program.
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Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth talks about Croquet
Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has been recently interviewed by the Economist magazine. Amongst the many topics covered in the interview, Shuttleworth also talked about Croquet and how Canonical (Shuttleworth’s company) uses it for planning and building Ubuntu:
One area where he sees this happening is in real-time collaboration. E-mail is widely used as a collaborative tool, but has severe limitations. When a team, such as a group of software developers, wants to work together on something in real time, something more elaborate is needed. Mr Shuttleworth points to an open-source platform called Croquet, an immersive environment that is similar in many ways to Second Life, a popular online virtual world. “You can see your collaborators’ avatars looking at a spreadsheet in a virtual room,” he says. “People change things in different colours—newer stuff glows. We’ve started to use this for planning and building Ubuntu.”
Canonical, which is based in London where Mr Shuttleworth now lives, cannot afford to pay for all its programmers to come to planning meetings for new versions of the software, which are held every six months. Rather than demote some participants to a “second class” of virtual participation, he would prefer to have everyone participate virtually.
You may find the whole interview here.
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Squeak in North Carolina Schools
The University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) has published the following press release:
Wilmington, N.C. – While demand for Information Technology (IT) professionals is projected to increase over the next five years, a dwindling number of American students are choosing to specialize in IT fields. Now, a grant-funded partnership between the University of North Carolina Wilmington and the New Hanover, Pender and Brunswick County schools is addressing that issue by infusing IT skills into the curriculum in grades 7-12.
[…]
The three-year-long project will work directly with about 75 educators who teach the Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) curricula and 150 of their students in grades 7-12. Teachers and students will learn to use “Squeak” software to create virtual models that simulate actual science and math-related experiments. For example, students could create a computer model to study the transmission of a disease, an activity that could be too dangerous to study in a physical laboratory.
“It may be difficult to study the spread of a virus for real in middle school,” said Gene Tagliarini, associate professor of computer science and grant coordinator. “But you can simulate an epidemic using the Squeak tool, which can create models to study things as abstract as balancing equations or as concrete as building a bridge.”
[…]
You can read the complete press release on the UNCW website.
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A new home for the Weekly Squeak
The News Team is proud to announce that, as of today, the Weekly Squeak news blog has a new home at http://news.squeak.org.
The blog will still be hosted by WordPress.com, but its main address will be the squeak.org one. The old address, https://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com, will still work and will redirect the viewes and the RSS feed subscribers to the new address.
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A report from Squeak’s booth @ Smalltalk Solutions 2007
William Hartford writes:
Fellow Squeakers,
As most of you know, due to the fantastic work of Chris Cunnington, Squeak was able to acquire a booth at Smalltalk Solutions this year. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to volunteer to work the booth for the two days of the convention. We had a fabulous location and got a tremendous amount of traffic. The Smalltalk community, while small, is one of the most intelligent, kind, supportive, and fun communities I have ever been involved in. I would like to thank all Smalltalk Solution attendees for there kind words, Squeak cheerleading, and help with answering questions when the crowds got large.
Bert Freudenberg was kind enough to lend us a OLPC laptop. This was the major draw of non-Smalltalkers to our booth. Many of the people knew nothing of Smalltalk but had heard of the OPLC project. The etoys demo was beautiful and if gave us a real opportunity to explain a little about Squeak, Smalltalk, and etoys.
Tim Rowledge generously sent me 45 silver and 5 gold badges. We were able to sell 27 silver badges raising $324 Canadian for the Squeak Foundation. The badges are beautiful and if you have not yet had the opportunity to buy one I recommend that you do. If you are in the Toronto area come out to the Beach Outings Club and I will have some on hand.
I could not of dreamed how well it went. The booth was fantastic, the people were kind, and the interest in Squeak exceeded my expectations.
Thanks for all the support,
Will Harford -
ESUG 2007 Call for Contributions
ESUG Conference 2007 Call for Contributions
15th International Smalltalk Joint Conference – Call for Contributions
August 25 – 31, 2007 – Lugano, Switzerland
http://www.esug.org/conferences/2007
For the past 14 years, the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG) has organised the International Smalltalk Conference, a lively forum on cutting edge software technologies that attract people from both academia and industry for a whole week. The attendees are both engineers using Smalltalk in business and students and teachers using Smalltalk both for research and didactic purposes.
As every year, this year’s edition of the largest European Smalltalk event will include the regular Smalltalk developers conference with renowned invited speakers, a Smalltalk camp that proves fruitful for interactions and discussions. Besides, this year will be held the 4th edition of the Innovation Technology Awards where prizes will be awarded to authors of best pieces of Smalltalk-related projects. Last, but not least the event includes as usual a research conference which was renamed this year into “International Conference on Dynamic Languages”. This reflects the widening of the scope of this conference to enable cross-fertilization with research conducted using other dynamic languages.
You can support the ESUG conference in many different ways:
* Sponsor the conference. New sponsoring packages are described at http://www.esug.org/supportesug/becomeasponsor/
* Submit a talk, a software or a paper to one of the events. See below.
* Attend the conference. We’d like to beat the previous record of attendance (116 people at Köthen, Germany in 2004)!
* Students can get free registration and hosting if they enroll into the the Student Volunteers program. See below.The conference features the following events:
* Camp Smalltalk
* Developers Forum
* Research Forum
* Technology ForumCamp Smalltalk
Camp Smalltalk is a free forum where smalltalk developers can join forces on projects.
Developers Forum : International Smalltalk Developers ConferenceThis year we are looking for YOUR experience on using Smalltalk. The list of topics includes, but is not limited to the following:
* XP practices
* Development tools
* Experience reports
* Model driven development
* Web development
* Team management
* Meta-Modeling
* Security
* New libraries & frameworks
* Educational material
* Embedded systems and robotics
* SOA and Web services
* Interaction with other programming languagesSubmissions are due on 30th of May 2007.
Notification of acceptance on 15 of June 2007.
More information here.
Research Forum : International Conference on Dynamic Languages
Smalltalk is one of the oldest object-oriented languages, but its conception and programming environment can still be considered as a design pearl and as a beacon in the realm of programming languages and programming environments. The bulk of its modern contenders are still lacking many of the features that Smalltalkers find both mundane and essential. Nevertheless, as software engineering practices and new application fields evolve, Smalltalk should keep up. This concerns the language, its implementation technology, its programming tools as well as the software development culture it supports. The research forum invites scientific articles that report on original research conducted in and/or for Smalltalk. The list of topics includes, but is not limited to the following:* Aspects, Aspect languages and Applications
* Ambient Intelligence, Ubiquitous & Pervasive Computing
* Embedded Systems
* Compilation Technology, Optimization, Virtual Machines
* Formalizations
* Language Engineering, Extensions
* Model Driven Engineering
* Programming in the Large, Design, Architectures, Components
* Development Environments
* Program Analysis
* Reflection and Metaprogramming
* Testing
* Agile Techniques
* Web Services & Internet ApplicationsMore information can be found here.
Technology Forum
We are proud to announce the 4th Innovation Technology Awards. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, 500 Euros, 300 Euros and 200 Euros during an awards ceremony at the conference. Developers of any Smalltalk-based software are welcome to compete.Student Volunteer Program
If you are a student wanting to attend ESUG, have you considered being a student volunteer? Student volunteers help keep the conference running smoothly; in return, they have free accommodations, while still having most of the time to enjoy the conference.More information is available here.
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