Video: Codebreakers – BBC
Continuing the discussion of Open Source and the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC), here is a terrific article: Breaking Barriers. Thank you Diego Gomez Deck for pointing it out. Squeak even has a mention in conjunction with the Extramadura Project on page 77 (adobe doc page 88). (more…)
Ramon Leon shows How to Build a Blog in 15 Minutes with Seaside in this screencast. Everything is filmed straight from squeak and the web browser. No cuts , and (unfortunately) no audio. He starts from scratch and finishes with a blog tool that shows entries and comments. Magritte is used to make the input forms of posts and comments, and for checking things like that a post’s title is not empty, and that the title of a new post is not yet used by a previous post.
About 10 minutes into the show you see how an error is fixed in the living application. From the web page, he brings up the debugger in Squeak and notices that the post’s list of comments is not yet initialized. So he fixes that and just reloads the web page.
There are more videos about Seaside at Seaside Videos.
Thank you Matthias for the post.
The lesson here is watch which key you press! Dale Henrichs from Gemstone accidentally posted his GemStone code to the Seaside Repository. It looks like we can expect Seaside to work with Gemstone coming soon.
In Dales own words: We’ll make an announcement to this list when all of the pieces are in place (including information about downloading non-commerce/trial versions). Our target date for having everything ready is Smalltalk Solutions 2007. If things continue to go smoothly, we are likely to be ready sooner.
Remember you heard it here first! Ok well you heard it first on the seaside list, but you heard it here second!
This video is a year old but it shows a very nice overview of using squeak in the class room. Enjoy!
It’s that time again! Time to pick our SqueakFoundation Leaders. Can you believe a year has gone by already. There have been some significant achievements in the last year. The most notable change is the progress that has been made to change our license. The community has been working hard to identify the authors of Squeak. With the help of Alan Kay talking to Steve Jobs we finally have an open source license to start from. Viewpoints has an OS version and hopefully soon, so will we.
The foundation itself was off to a very rocky start. It appeared to many that the board was not functioning properly. There was very little communication from the board. No indication of what issues were being considered or what progress was being made. Things seemed to change once, what must have been, arguments on the board bubbled over onto Squeak-dev. After that point it appeared that Craig began to organize an agenda, and a report back to the community. This concept which many had suggested and I’m sure was eventually supported by the entire board was a major advancement. I would strongly urge whoever is running the next board to continue with this framework.
As Daniel has pointed out I was disappointed with last years elections. It seems to me that there is a lot that needs to be done to help this community. There were a number of goals set out in the original board that were not addressed either during the election or afterwards. Much of what should be done is still left to do.
What I’d like to propose is that we build up a list of questions that we will submit to every candidate. Those questions and responses will be published on the Weekly Squeak. This way we can infer a policy statement from those that are running.
The other major drawback that I saw from the last election is that the positions taken by the candidates were not supported or rejected by the highly respected members of our community. There was no debate about who should lead, who supports who, and why. For many in this community it would be very beneficial for some leaders to step up and support candidates, foundation goals and positions.
The community in general is polite and nobody wants to support one friend over another friend. That is understandable, but by not taking a stand one way or the other we leave a vacuum. Debate and supporting your candidates is very important to this community. We should have a vigorous but civil debate, for only that level of participation will make this community stronger.
Your comments are welcome, your participation is crucial, the direction of our community is in your hands. Please participate in the discussion and please VOTE!
ODBMSJournal did a nice interview with Chris Muller about Magma. Magma is an object database writtne entirely in Smalltalk. Chris discusses smalltalk in general and IDE’s both closed and open source. He also discusses aspects of Magma including commiting and setup, queries, standard SQL support for reporting tools through ODBC, reporting, Morphic persistence, performance optimizations and his expierences in developing Magma.
Thank you Steve Moffitt for pointing out the interview.
Check out Scratch!
Scratch is a new programming language that lets you create your own animations, games, and interactive art. Scratch will be available for public release later this year.
The Scratch project has released the first beta version for public download. Scratch is based on Squeak, although there is apparently no way to reach through to the Smalltalk / Squeak core of it.To learn more, have a look at
http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/llk/scratch/about.htmland at the Getting started Guide
Scratch is being developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Lab, in collaboration with KIDS research group at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies.
Thanks Matthias for submitting this article!
The following was origanally posted to the beginners list. If you have questions the beginners list is a good place to go for help. You can find the beginners list here.
Learning Smalltalk is definitely and experience. There is a major “Ah-ha!” moment prerequisite. It is really amazing to see people hit that “Ah-ha!”.
Some people do it quickly but most take some time. I’ve seen it come after even a years worth of practical hands on programming, so don’t get frustrated if it doesn’t come right away.
The best I can do to help you is to give you some hints on how to get there yourself. (more…)
Many of you are following the latest developments in VM technology. The Strongtalk VM was release as open source by SUN. There is some discussion about using the Strongtalk VM for Ruby. Will Ruby be the first language to benefit from Strongtalk’s Type Feedback optimizations? Will the VM developers in the Smalltalk community step up to help Strongtalk? While a path is being forged it would be nice if we could steer it back towards support for Squeak. Please join the discussion at: http://groups.google.com/group/strongtalk-general
The Weekly Squeak 