Dan Ingalls was at JSConf in Scottsdale, Arizona in April demoing Lively Kernel. There is a video of his presentation from the event available at:
http://blip.tv/jsconf/jsconf2012-daniel-henry-holmes-ingalls-jr-6106503
Lively Kernel has been evolving for some years now and it will be interesting to see the applications built with it in the near future.
With a transition looming from 32-bit to 64-bit, the VM-dev mailing list had a discussion about what the new object format should be. One of the issues was whether the new object format should have an immutability bit. A wide range of opinions appeared and at times the debate became somewhat heated. It is an interesting discussion for anybody interested in the design and construction of virtual machines.
What’s the best way to make a website with Smalltalk? Aida! Join the creator of the Aida web development framework in the Web Team mailing list two weeks from now for an online workshop between the 18th and 22nd. If you have never tried Aida before or are a power user and need tips on how to take your application to the next level, Janko Mivsek will be on hand to help you get started.
The Squeak evolution as a body of code allows anybody to submit a change to the Inbox. Only those who are core developers can move that code into the Trunk to become part of the next release. Owing to their outstanding contributions, the Squeak Oversight Board has invited four people to become core developers: Frank Shearar, Tim Felgentreff, Sean DeNigris, and Tobias Pape. Congratulations!
The BeagleBone is a single-board computer from Texas Instruments for creating hardware projects similar to Arduino. David Graham has installed Squeak on the BeagleBone and then connected to the running image with VNC. This is likely the easiest way to begin to make a working robot with Squeak. This project is similar to Physical Etoys, the ESUG Innovation Awards winner of 2010. Optimus Prime, beware!
The latest versionof the software found around the world in the One Laptop Per Child computer — Etoys — is now available from the Squeakland website. In Etoys 5 you’ll find new features such as single-stepping a script, attached watchers, a graph paper tool, and ScratchConnect, a way to connect Etoys and Scratch.
Squeakfest 2012 in Uruguay and Argentina is coming up soon: 17 to 23 May in Montevideo and Buenos Aires. Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in introductory workshops, develop content for various curricular areas, learn about project development, educational robotics and other topics related to Squeak Etoys and the One Laptop Per Child project.
How many calls have you missed since 2009? For Childline, a child-crisis-hotline service in South Africa, that number has been zero. Squeak Oversight Board member Chris Muller developed a GIS module to provide real-time regional call routing for 4Dst’s “Awareness Engine” product. Explore the presentation he made at this year’s Smalltalk Industry Council convention. Squeak Smalltalk — good in a crisis.
Physical Etoys 2.0 has been released with lots of new features:
1. First of all, it’s based on Etoys 5.0 so it incorporates all the
bug-fixes and new features from the Etoys release.
2. It focuses on the two main hardware platforms: Arduino and
Lego Mindstorms Nxt.
3. An Argentinian version of Arduino is now supported called DuinoBot.
More information available at http://tecnodacta.com.ar/gira/projects/physical-etoys/.
The Weekly Squeak 