Sad news. Most of the Smalltalk community knows all about Doug through stories shared by Alan. Some of you have been lucky enough to have met him. Much of what we know about computers was invented by some really terrific minds. Today we lost one of the best. It is amazing how far technology has progressed in such a short time. We are lucky to live in a time that still has so many of the great inventors still alive. It’s an amazing time to be standing the the shoulders of giants. Alan Kay reminds us that all of the present is not made up of all of the past. Only part of what was done back then survived and is in use today. Some of our history is better than our present. We should all take a moment and remember that past.
I couldn’t help but notice that Doug has three controls. The Mouse the keyboard and what? A function menu? A view selector? Just what is that left hand doing? I know I’ve tried to explain ctrl-c to people and even today many people have no idea that keyboard shortcuts exist. Just a thought.
http://gigaom.com/2013/07/03/doug-engelbart-american-inventor-computing-legend-passes-away/
Squeakfest 2013 in Uruguay
23 May, 2013
It’s that time again. Time to pack up the kids and join us at SqueakFest 2013. Don’t forget to bring your XO computer!
If you can’t make it please consider a donation to help cover travel costs: Donate
For more information see: Squeakfest 2013
From Rita:
There will be a Squeakfest again in Uruguay at June, 7th – 9th, this time in Atlantida. Etoys will cover the major part of the event, but there will also be workshops in Python, turtle art and robotics. After all, Uruguay is the country with XO-laptops in every elementary school and teachers are using the software which comes with Sugar.
http://squeakfest2013.weebly.com/
From our education team, Randall Caton and myself are going to present Etoys workshops. This year, I’ll introduce Kedama. I’m looking forward to an inspiring event!
If you want to help or know someone who would like to, I created a crowdfunding page to collect money to help to cover our travel cost. Please share as you like!
http://crowdfundedu.com/fundraiser/educators-to-squeakfest
Greetings,
Rita
ESUG Awards for innovative software
18 June, 2008
Noury Bouraqadi wants to remind all Smalltalkers that the deadline for entries in the ESUG Innovation Technology Awards is in two weeks time. The Innovation Technology Awards, to be awarded at the 16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference in Amsterdam, are intended to make public part of the innovative software built using Smalltalk. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, €500, €300 and €200 during an awards ceremony at the conference.
The winners will be selected based on criteria of creativity, stability, performance, successful use, and impact for the community. No constraints are put on the software except that it should be Smalltalk-based or Smalltalk-related; all flavours of Smalltalk are accepted.
The awards were founded by Nouri in 2004, and details of past winners can be found on his web-site.
German Squeak Association Meeting: Demos
22 May, 2008
The German Squeak Association (Squeak e. V.) had its annual meeting on May 17. For the second time, the meeting was hosted by the Software Architecture Group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam. Before the official part, attendees of the meeting were given the opportunity to demonstrate their Squeak projects.
First, Tobias Pape and Arian Treffer, students of HPI, demonstrated SwaLint, a source code checker for Squeak. SwaLint is intended as a successor to SmallLint and, thanks to its flexible plug-in architecture, supports running SmallLint checks seamlessly. SwaLint can be configured in great detail: thresholds for all kinds of values can be set, and output can be filtered. Users can easily implement their own plug-ins for the tool.
Next, Michael Haupt (HPI) gave a brief demonstration of SqueakFS, which was implemented by Johan Björk and Eskil Andréen from Stockholm University, Sweden. SqueakFS makes the contents of a running Squeak image available as part of the file system. Currently, it is limited to read-only access, but the image can already be viewed from three perspectives: all classes as a flat collection, assorted by category, and by class hierarchy.
Robert Krahn presented SqueakSVN, which is an ongoing development effort in the Software Architecture Group at HPI. The purpose of SqueakSVN is to make Subversion version control available to Squeak developers; it is able to import Monticello projects. SqueakSVN will be released in June.
Martin Beck is currently working on his MSc thesis in the HPI Software Architecture Group. His work is dedicated to implementing NXTalk, a Smalltalk virtual machine for the Lego Mindstorms NXT platform. Development of NXTalk application takes place in a Squeak image, and assembled NXTalk images are transferred to the NXT for execution by the dedicated NXTalk VM. In the current state, simple images can be assembled and run: Martin demonstrated a program that can be used to steer a simple NXT bestowed with two motors.
The popular introduction to the Seaside web application framework that was produced at HPI was briefly presented by David Tibbe, one of its co-authors.
Robert Krahn had another appearance presenting the collection of games for the XO laptop developed by HPI students. All of the games are available for download as project or SAR files.
Finally, Carl Friedrich Bolz (Düsseldorf University), Adrian Kuhn (University of Bern), and Toon Verwaest (University of Bern) presented SPy, their ongoing effort to implement the Squeak VM in Python using the sophisticated PyPy tool chain. SPy is currently lacking GUI and other I/O support, but is able to load images and run the tinyBenchmarks. Right after the Squeak association meeting, a PyPy development sprint in Berlin will, amongst others, bring new improvements.
After the official part of the association meeting, special guest Dan Ingalls gave a demonstration of Lively, his current project at Sun Labs. It looks and feels, admittedly, a bit like Squeak in disguise, but in Dan’s opinion, there is nothing bad about building the “same” system several times if it’s cool. That is certainly true for Lively.
The Year of Smalltalk
2 April, 2008
Randal L. Schwartz just announced that he will be giving a 3 hour tour of Seaside at OSCON 2008. We are very proud to have Randal on the Squeak Foundation Board. We are looking forward to more of his “Year of Smalltalk“.
[Edit: corrected spelling]
16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference *Call for Contributions*
14 February, 2008
———————————————————————
16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference – Call for Contributions
August 25-29, 2008 – Amsterdam, the Netherlands
http://www.esug.org/conferences/2008/
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For the past 16 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.
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 – There will be a Smalltalk camp the 23-24th of august
* Developers Forum
* Technology Forum
Developers Forum : International Smalltalk Developers Conference
——————
This 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 languages
Submissions due on 1st June 2008
Notification of acceptance on 15 of June 2008 More information at http://www.esug.org/conferences/2008
How to sumbit?
——————
Pay attention: the places are limited so do not wait till the last minute to apply. Prospective presenters should submit a request to esug-info@esug.org
following the template below. Please use this template since the email will be automatically processed!
Subject: [ESUG 2008 Developers] + your name
First Name:
Last Name:
Email where you can always be reached:
Title:
Abstract:
Bio:
Any presentation not respecting this form will be discarded automatically
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.
More information at http://www.esug.org/conferences/2008
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 at
http://www.esug.org/conferences/2008
Esug Student Volunteers Program
We hope to see you there and have fun together.
XO in the US Virgin Islands
12 February, 2008
Great video of the Waveplace XO Laptop Day.
Immersive Education Summit Ad-Hoc Meeting
3 February, 2008
Well I couldn’t resist. Aaron E. Walsh sent out an invitation to the Squeak – Croquet communities for an ad-hoc Immersive Education Meeting. The Boston Digital Summit held in January covered the Education Grid, this meeting was a chance to review this information for those that were not able to make it to the summit.
Second Life was quite an experience. I had to sign up and go through some training, figure out how to get to Sun’s virtual auditorium and sit down. It was quite amusing to see some people show up on stage and not know how to sit down either, so I didn’t feel so bad. Maybe I should have spent more time in the training.
Aaron, reviewed the details of the Education Grid. The Grid is an education content virtual repository focused on interoperability, standards, and quality educational content. The goal is to provide standards that allow content to be developed to operate in different virtual worlds. These standards must be open source to ensure that content can be made freely available.
Content is just a piece of the puzzle in education. Educators also need tools to be able to evaluate the progress of students. There are a number of general tools that should be developed and made available in a consistent way for each offering. Aaron mentioned, “While it is possible to record everything that happens in a virtual world there is no way an educator could watch everything a student did in an activity that might take 2 hours.” Tools that allow educators to evaluate raw data, to assess progress and to track grades, and to create content are essential.
Quality content will be assured by having a Peer Review of offerings before the become part of the grid. The peers will be selected from the community and people with special expertise will be sought to make sure that the education goals are met, the content is accurate, standards are followed, and licensing is compatible to be a part of the grid.
Licensing and interoperability were the major concerns once Aaron opened the floor to questions. Ownership of the content was also discussed. Aaron mentioned that a not-for-profit organization would own the grid, but that the grid would be virtual and would be hosted by multiple organizations. I’m not sure there was a full answer about the ownership of the content. I would have suggested that copyright stay with the author or developing organization, and that the grid would receive unlimited rights to distribute the content, much in the same way were are trying to organize the Squeak community.
Well I ran out of time but Aaron did a very nice job of wrapping it up just a few minutes over. Thank you! The concept is really a terrific idea. I hope that our communities will join together and support developing freely available virtual world educational materials. Aaron mentioned that other meetings will be held in Croquet, I look forward to that. I hope to see you there. Hopefully that meeting will be just as well attended as the SL meeting.
Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) 2008 – Call For Papers
25 January, 2008
Call For Papers
*** Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) 2008 ***
July 8, 2008 (Tuesday)
Co-located with ECOOP 2008, Paphos, Cyprus
Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN
http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/dls/dls08/
——————————-
IMPORTANT DATES
——————————-
Submission deadline: April 25, 2008 (hard deadline) Author notification: May 23, 2008 Camera-ready copy due: June 6, 2008 DLS 2008: July 8, 2008
——————————-
ABOUT DLS
——————————-
The Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) at ECOOP 2008 in Paphos, Cyprus, is a forum for discussion of dynamic languages, their implementation and application. While mature dynamic languages including Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, Self, Prolog, and APL continue to grow and inspire new converts, a new generation of dynamic scripting languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, Tcl, and JavaScript are successful in a wide range of applications.
DLS provides a place for researchers and practitioners to come together and share their knowledge, experience, and ideas for future research and development.
DLS 2008 invites high quality papers reporting original research, innovative contributions or experience related to dynamic languages, their implementation and application. Accepted Papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.
——————————-
TOPICS OF INTEREST
——————————-
Areas of interest include but are not limited to:
– Innovative language features and implementation techniques
– Development and platform support, tools
– Interesting applications
– Domain-oriented programming
– Very late binding, dynamic composition, and runtime adaptation
– Reflection and meta-programming
– Software evolution
– Language symbiosis and multi-paradigm languages
– Dynamic optimization
– Hardware support
– Experience reports and case studies
– Educational approaches and perspectives
– Object-oriented, aspect-oriented, and context-oriented programming
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SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
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We invite original contributions that neither have been published previously nor are under review by other refereed events or publications. Research papers should describe work that advances the current state of the art. Experience papers should be of broad interest and should describe insights gained from substantive practical applications. The program committee will evaluate each contributed paper based on its relevance, significance, clarity, and originality.
Papers are to be submitted electronically at http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/dls/dls08/ in PDF format. Submissions must not exceed 12 pages and need to use the ACM format, templates for which can be found at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.
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PROCEEDINGS
——————————-
Accepted Papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.
——————————-
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
——————————-
Chair: Johan Brichau (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
Joe Armstrong (Ericsson AB, Sweden) Pierre Cointe (École des Mines de Nantes, France)William R. Cook (University of Texas at Austin, USA) Pascal Costanza (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) Wolfgang De Meuter (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) Maja D’Hondt (IMEC, Belgium) Robert Hirschfeld (Hasso-Plattner Institüt, Germany) Roberto Ierusalimschy (PUC-Rio, Brazil) Andy Kellens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) Michele Lanza (University of Lugano, Switzerland) Michael Leuschel (University of Düsseldorf, Germany) Oscar Nierstrasz (University of Berne, Switzerland) Kent Pitman (PTC, USA) Lynne Shaw (CheckFree Investment Services, USA) David Ungar (Sun Microsystems, USA) Peter Van Roy (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) Martin von Löwis (Hasso-Plattner Institüt, Germany) Daniel Weinreb (ITA Software, USA)
Brought to you by ESUG!
23 January, 2008
The European Smalltalk Users Group – ESUG has generously agreed to support international smalltalk presentations.
From Prof. Stéphane DUCASSE :
Hi all
as announced at Lugano ESUG is putting in place new action to promote the use of smalltalk http://www.esug.org/promotionactions/publicationpromotion/
PublicationPromotion
ESUG offers 150 Euros for each international conference paper whose concepts involves an implementation in Smalltalk
Rules
• After notification of acceptance, one of the authors sends to the ESUG board the article, a CV, and a brief explanation of how Smalltalk was used
• In case the ESUG board decides to support the promotion, the author has to send to ESUG after the camera-ready deadline a PDF of the article, where ESUG is referenced in the acknowledgment section, including a link to esug.org
• During the presentation at the conference, the author must mention ESUG support
• After the presentation at the conference the author sends to ESUG a PDF version of the slides, where there is a visible reference to ESUG (e.g. theESUG Logo). ESUG will put the slides on the ESUG website
• The author can then trigger the payment by sending an e-Mail to the ESUG board
• A maximum of 3 supported articles per year per institution is allowed
Prof. Stéphane DUCASSE [ | ]
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr
Open Source Smalltalks: http://www.squeak.org, http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/smalltalk.html
Free books for Universities at http://www.esug.org/sponsoring/promotionProgram.html
Online Free Books at http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html
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