Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

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So I upgraded to XP Pro today. It went fairly well. I decided to share a printer on the home network, and to go back to using the Linux printer as the default. Thus began my descent into XP weirdness

1. Ran the wizard for configuring a small/home office
2. That completed, and succeeded in disabling my network. After it was done, my network card had a nice big red X over it on the control panel, and there was some new 'bridge' icon there
3. Deleted the 'bridge' thingie, whatever it was
4. Rebooted
5. Now, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, I can share my printer and see the other share devices available on the LAN. Huzzah

I suspect that this is not the scenario the MS marketing folks had in mind in their product plans. It's likely I did something "wrong" here, but - the way I got to a successful configuration was mystifying, to say the least...

Scott Ambler will be giving a keynote address at this year's Smalltalk Solutions Show. Here's the official announcement:

The Smalltalk Industry Council has been very busy planning this years Smalltalk Solutions Conference in beautiful Toronto. The conference will be held July 13-16 at the Crowne Plaza Toronto Centre hotel. The Conference will conveniently take place entirely within this hotel and conference attendees will receive a discount rate with the hotel. Please call early and mention Smalltalk Solutions 2003 when making your reservations for the discount rate. Hotel information and pricing can be found here: http://www.smalltalksolutions.com/hotel/hotel.htm STIC is now accepting registrations for the conference. Please go to the Smalltalk Solutions website http://www.smalltalksolutions.com/registration/reginfo.htm for further information. Remember, STIC members receive a $75.00 US Dollar discount for the conference so join STIC today by visiting the council web site at http://www.stic.org

I got an interesting bug report today for BottomFeeder. It turns out that this feed from Dive into Mark wouldn't parse. I took a look - and he has a version tag of PI!!!! Ok, that's odd. Maybe it's related to this post, as kind of a perverse test to see how many aggregators pass. The 2.7 released failed this test, but a quick patch - which should auto-load on startup - fixes that. I find this kind of thing anti-social. It's one thing to have a bad feed because of a tool problem (bug) or bad HTML (human error). But to have an actively bad feed? Seems a bit over the top to me...

And didn't actually go badly, once I gave up on the upgrade idea and went for a clean install. I's still re-installing software - including the Oracle client software (why is it 600 MB if it's just the client?). Even my VPN software works!

See this blog entry - Sam has some nice things to say about S#. Ironically, it's the next post after an item on COM interoperability issues

If you use BottomFeeder on a non-Windows platform, you may have noticed a problem - on loading a new plugin, a couple of exceptions get thrown, and the plugin did not actually load. I tested on Windows, and did not hit this problem - apparently, packaging the application as a single executable masked it. What happened was, the application has the compiler available so that patches and plugins can be loaded dynamically. However, when loading a plugin that adds new classes, the system tries to log the changes - to the (now non-existant) change file!. Since this is Smalltalk, I just released a patch - it simply prevents the logging of changes, and the plugin stuff works fine on Linux now.

So I'm trying to upgrade my PC to XP Pro from ME. Apparently, I had a few registry entries to Outlook - which I had long, long ago deleted. The installer was confused by this mismatch, and barfed. Then the PC reboots, and I accidentally okayed a boot from CD. That was ok, because the XP Pro installer had an error in the startup script. I'm feeling better about my BottomFeeder slip ups now....

A few days ago, I posted on burnout - I had received an interesting email from a development manager casting about for alternatives to C++ after a recent death march. Today, Reflective Surface weighs in with some commentary:

The obvious options to solve the problem in the programmers' side, which is trying to change the corporate culture, is an inglorious effort that will certainly result in more frustration and stress, and has few chances to succeed. With respect to the companies themselves, the corporate inertia that denies every possibility of finding effective solutions is proportional to the size of the company multiplied by its Dilbert coefficient. So, I fear to say that there's no simple solution. Ironically, the market itself is responsible to blinding companies to the losses that result from continuing in that suicidal path. Companies that go under when programmers finally get so fed up with mismanagement that they leave are pretty common. The case Robertson cites in which the company realized its mistakes and started searching for solutions is exceedingly rare. So, I believe programmers must find their own defense mechanisms to avoid getting burned out. After all, I'm just stating the obvious when I say that there's not point in wearing yourself out because others are failing to realize their errors.

I love that Dilbert coefficient reference. Sometimes, I wonder if the primary goal of many IT organizations is simply churn - everyone chants there's no silver bullet, and yet - as soon as a big technology vendor releases something new (Java, .NET) - everyone scurries off to see what it is.

This morning, I posted this, expressing my frustration that people don't seem to consider Smalltalk when they are casting about for alternatives. Gordon Weakliem makes some excellent points:

But I think that it's hard to underestimate Paul Graham's role as evangelist. His various articles touting Lisp make a compelling case for using interactive environments and against the C/C++/Java/C# lineage, and his "Plan for Spam" shows Lisp neatly solving real problems. Smalltalk's strongest advocate (in my opinion) is Kent Beck, who's been more interested in processes; while his XP and Unit Testing work mentions Smalltalk, he hasn't made Smalltalk the cornerstone, concentrating on demonstrating applicability in any environment.

I think Gordon's on to something here. It's ultimately all about marketing, and evangelists are part of that, whether they work for a vendor - or more usefully, if they don't.

These news items can't be good for Sun:

Pixar Animation Studios, which brought the world Monsters Inc. and Toy Story, is switching from Sun Microsystems to Intel, as the melodrama in the server market heats up. The Emeryville, Calif. based film studio is replacing servers from Sun in its render farm--a bank of servers that fuses artists' images into finished film frames--with eight new blade servers from Rackspace. In all, the blade system contains 1,024 Intel 2.8GHz Xeon processors, and it runs the open-source Linux operating system. Pixar installed the Rackspace system over the previous six months and will use it to develop its next film, The Incredibles, which will likely hit theaters in 2004. ... Last July, for instance, Industrial Light and Magic replaced RISC-based computers running Unix on artist workstations from SGI, choosing instead Dell desktops containing Intel chips and Linux software. ILM also installed a rendering farm running AMD's Athlon processors. Other Intel-Linux installations took place at DreamWorks and Sony Pictures' Imageworks.

Ouch. Meanwhile, this story I linked to got slashdotted - not my link, but the main story. Double Ouch. Excuse me while I enjoy some Schadenfreude....

I posted a patch for the new 2.7 release, and it works fine to address 2.7 issues. Unfortunately, it introduces problems in previous Bf releases. If you are running an older release, do one of two things:

1. Upgrade to 2.7
2. Edit the btfSettings.ini file (2.6) and change the patch file setting to look at file patchDefinitions.xml instead of patches.xml. That will allow the older version to start without errors.

This was due to bugs that shipped in 2.6, for which I apologize.

You just want to scream. This post is more evidence that developers are starting to see that Java and C# may not be the end all and be all of existence. If Lisp gets a thought, why not Smalltalk?

If you downloaded 2.7 earlier after my announcement, get it again in about 2 hours - I uploaded from the wrong directory. Sorry, my bad....

Visit the BottomFeeder Home Page and grab the latest release. There are a lot of bug fixes and improvements. OCS Feedlists are much better supported - Dave Murphy improved the OCS feedlist handling, and Rich Demers has provided a Users Guide for BottomFeeder and for Twoflower. The UI has been enhanced greatly with a toolbar - and there is plugin support as well. BottomFeeder now supports a simple API for adding additional applications at runtime - either ones already installed by the user, or ones available from the website - see the Plugins menu item for details.

I spotted this item over at Dewayne Mikkelson's blog. Fascinating stuff on the ability of nature to cope with the oddest things thrown at it:

Contrary to expectations, urban landscapes are some of the most interesting ecologies. The variety of landscapes and microclimates (roads, parks, gardens, rail, canals, industries), the intense flow of exotic materials for commerce and gardening, and continual disturbance, all contribute towards many opportunities for nature. Due to such variety, cities are often more biologically diverse than the surrounding countryside. Nature is astoundingly creative, and keen to exploit subtle convoluted chance.

Here's one of the examples:

... tropical fauna and flora occurs in certain canals where water used to cool machinery is discharged. Thermal pollution of the River Don by the steel industry has enabled wild figs to colonize its banks

Interesting stuff. Go read the whole thing, and check out the source he cites

I posted this yesterday, and today I just stumbled on this, which purports to be an internal to Sun memo on Java:

This document details the difficulties that keep our Solaris Java implementation from being practical for the development of common software applications. It represents a consensus of several senior engineers within Sun Microsystems. We believe that our Java implementation is inappropriate for a large number of categories of software application. We do not believe these flaws are inherent in the Java platform but that they relate to difficulties in our Solaris implementation. We all agree that the Java language offers many advantages over the alternatives. We would generally prefer to deploy our applications in Java but the implementation provided for Solaris is inadequate to the task of producing supportable and reliable products. Our experience in filing bugs against Java has been to see them rapidly closed as "will not fix". 22 percent of accepted non-duplicate bugs against base Java are closed in this way as opposed to 7 percent for C++. Key examples include:

4246106 Large virtual memory consumption of JVM
4374713 Anonymous inner classes have incompatible serialization
4380663 Multiple bottlenecks in the JVM
4407856 RMI secure transport provider doesn't timeout SSL sessions
4460368 For jdk1.4, JTable.setCellSelectionEnabled() does not work
4460382 For Jdk1.4, the table editors for JTable do not work.
4433962 JDK1.3 HotSpot JVM crashes Sun Management Center Console
4463644 Calculation of JTable's height is different for jdk1.2 and jdk1.4
4475676 [[under jdk1.3.1, new JFrame launch causes jumping]

In personal conversations with Java engineers and managers, it appears that Solaris is not a priority and the resource issues are not viewed as serious. Attempts to discuss this have not been productive and the message we hear routinely from Java engineering is that new features are key and improvements to the foundation are secondary. This is mentioned only to make it clear that other avenues for change have been explored but without success. Here we seek to briefly present the problem and recommend a solution.

Go read the whole thing. If it's real, it's a fairly devastating indictment...

Have been getting very intense. Last week, Buffy had me on the edge of my seat - Joss Whedon had me gussing wrong the whole episode. I would have enjoyed Angel a whole lot more if the complete idiots at my local WB station weren't bouncing the broadcast day and time to broadcast boring college hoops. Meanwhile, 24 was as tense as ever last week.

Now if only Firefly hadn't been cancelled..... I mean really, Enterprise is so lame in comparison....

I've been working on memory settings for the application server (the one that runs this blog and other ST apps here). I've also been in the guts of BottomFeeder and some of the plugins for it. It was also a snow day and a Friday....

So now I'm watching Farscape, and am feeling lazy...

This is priceless:

Tag Soup RDF lets you create statements that the document/author made, that you or anyone else has made. The lies can be categorized and pruned to your or anyone elses whim. I really hope no one or at least very few, will ever have to manually produce RDF/XML. If you're a programmer use a library, if you're not use an application. If you want to write it yourself it's just like code or English - if it doesn't parse it can't be understood. Responses:

1. "Don't worry your little head about it, we'll build you programs to hide this horrific syntax from you." I've heard that before. Actually, I've heard a lot of it. Categorize under "engineers will save us".
2. Your RSS feed does not validate as RSS. Your feed (RSS 0.91, no less) is auto-generated by Blogger Pro, a closed source tool which you can't customize. Categorize under "tools will save us".
3. While we're on the subject of validation, your HTML doesn't validate either. Some of these errors are under your control (unescaped ampersands in links), others not (invalid HTML in the Blogspot-inserted banner ad). Lucky for you, my browser has been specially designed to work around errors like this and parse and display the rest of your page as best it can.
4. I tried to contact you privately, but neither your site nor your RSS feed contain any sort of machine-readable contact information. No doubt in an attempt to cut down on abuse by spammers. Categorize under "metadata will save us".
5. Your site does link to a web-based contact form, which is broken. I give up.

Ouch. I hope I'm never a target of Mark's. Go see his post for all the links.

You have to admit it's a funny item:

AN INSIDER AT Sun Microsystems says there's frantic discussion inside the company about big problems with the Java platform that, he claimed, "prevent general acceptance of Java for production software within Sun". He said: "It strikes me as hypocritical for Sun to blame Microsoft for any failure of the Java platform when Sun's own engineers find developing common software applications in Java impractical".

One of the problems, he claimed, is that while Java has a lot of benefits compared to C and C , its implementation on Solaris makes it difficult to deliver reliable applications.

I'm not sure the website here is the most reliable source, but I did get a chuckle out of this.

If you grab the latest DEV version of BottomFeeder, you'll see a number of bug fixes around feedlists. You'll also see that a new plugin is available from the Plugins menu. Kudos to Anthony Lander for contributing!

Anthony Lander has started working on an IM client for VW. So far he supports MSN IM, and I'm sure more will come. Check out the Pongo package in the public store

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that .NET is going to be ok for Smalltalk on balance. Have a look at this post from Ted Neward:

The point is that Java has a cocept of 100% pure Java, .NET libraries on the otherhand, it's not mentioned the degree of native code. For example JDBC has a concept of type 4 drivers, meaning 100% Java, is there a 100% CLR concept?

It's that last point that I want to highlight--no, there is no concept of "100% pure CLR", because the CLR embraces the "impure" as part of its reach. Can I build a "100% pure C#" application? Absolutely. But does Microsoft offer that as a marketing promotion? No; they think it's silly, because integration with the unmanaged world is a goal of the CLI, just as NOT integrating with the unmanaged world is a goal of Java. To treat the CLI in any other way is like claiming .NET is better than Java because it integrates with unmanaged code better--which it does, because that's a goal of the whole platform, just it's NOT a goal of Java's. Compare apples to apples, or your entire reasoning and conclusions are wrong.

Hat tip to Alan Knight for pointing me to this. I'd rather play the One OS, many languages game any day, compared to the One Language, many OS game. Since there isn't likely to be only one OS anytime soon (Linux, anyone?), it's a far safer field for Smalltalk to live in.

Decide for yourself:

Opera's techies downloaded the page using wget, in three different formats, identifying as Opera 7, MSIE and Netscape 7.01. The files sent to each browser are different, which is not necessarily suspicious, and the one sent to Opera7 has less content and is bigger than the one sent to IE. But that is not necessarily suspicious either.

Where it does get suspicious is when you look at the style sheets MSN sends to the browsers. The culprit, says Opera, is a 30 pixel value set on the margin property in the Opera style sheet. This instructs Opera to move list elements 30 pixels to the left of the parent, which means content moves off the side of its container, which means it looks like Opera is broken.

Opera tried to test whether or not this was deliberate by changing identification to the non-existent browser Oprah. This returns the IE style sheet, which works perfectly well in Opera. In Opera's view MSN is therefore looking specifically for "Opera" in the User-Agent string and sending it a broken style sheet. That, of course, could still be a mistake, as it's perfectly logical to send IE as the default if the browser can't be identified. But as there was no need for MSN to design an Opera-specific style sheet in the first place, one wonders...

Sounds kind of slimy to me. Go grab the whole story

For those of you tracking dev builds, I've posted a new one. There was a bug in saving feedlists related to BOSS, and there was a bug in decoding OCS files, due to a change in their format. I fixed the former, and Dave fixed the latter.

Spotted this in comp.lang.smalltalk:

For those who have been following the articles and presentations I've been giving on ElastoLab, I've finally released the 3.0 version. In this version, the physics code has been completely re-written in Smalltalk. I did this because I had to fix some tough bugs in the physics and implement a new algorithm to handle multiple particle collisions with barriers. It was much easier implementing this in Smalltalk than in C . The performance in Smalltalk seems to be reasonable, so it wasn't worth keeping it in C .

Along with this release, Simberon will be holding a contest to win one of three Microsoft X-Boxes. The best three scenes submitted before the March 31st deadline win an X-Box. See the web site for details.

ElastoLab is a physics playground for kids age 9 and up that lets them play in a world with gravity, springs, elastics, and more. A simple scripting mechanism allows you to create simple games and interesting simulations.

ElastoLab is written in VisualWorks Smalltalk.

For more information, see Simberon's web site at http://www.simberon.com.

I can vouch for the coolness of ElastoLab - and not just for 9 and up - my nephew (who was 5 at the time) - was utterly fascinated by this!

I guess I'll have to bookmark this page and check for changes to OCS more often. I was going to try and track down a feedlist bug when I found that I couldn't actually load feedlists from Syndic8 any longer.

Dave actually fixed the problem, and I can now go back to trying to reproduce the reported bug....

Here's a useful tip on using Apache without setting up any relays:

First, make sure that you build apache with proxy enabled (./configure --enable-proxy, for example). Then, add the following to your httpd.conf file. Modify the host name and URLs appropriately. Be sure to restart apache if you didn't already. Now, configure a TinyHttpServer (not an IPWebListener!) on the appropriate port (8008, in my example) and start it up. You should be able to reach your configure site by hitting apache with /configure/ as a path (note that the trailing slash is required).

When it's time to deploy you can look at further restricting who can access the /configure/ site as well as mapping urls like /shopping to /shopping/ (to avoid the problem of forgetting the trailing slash). mod-rewrite is good for this...

Read the whole thing

I got a bug report from our Doc guy, Richer Demers this morning. It was related to Twoflower - printing was failing. Since Twoflower is embedded in BottomFeeder, I decided to have a look.

Two things needed to be done:

1. Take account of what platform Bf starts on, and set the printing options accordingly at startip
2. Make sure that Twoflower uses the appropriate printer object based on the platform

The code had been (inadvertantly) Windows specific, but no longer. While I was in there, I added printer support to BottomFeeder - you can now print the HTML Window from a toolbar button or menu pick. The output could stand some cleanup, but it works.

See this comment thread over on Sam Ruby's blog. He's getting spam, and installing spam filters to guard against that.

way, way too much work for me....

Spotted in an email:

Having seen a great degree of programmer burn-out on 1.0, we have analysed the reasons for the same, and have concluded that the technology employed (Visual C ) was one of the major factors. We then started looking for alternatives. Cincom Smalltalk is one of the candidates that we are evaluating. My technical team is trying to implement a reference application using all the candidate technologies, for comparisons and metrics.

Come on in, the waters fine over here!

I read Sam Gentile's Web log on a regular basis, and usually enjoy his point of view. So I was really happy to see this post on his blog:

My work lately led me quite naturally to the seminal book, Generative Programming: Methods, Tools, and Applications. I read most of the book yesterday in one sitting (yikes!) and although I found much of it tough going, I want to share one key insight I got. I have always had a lot of trouble understanding the Smalltalk argument as put forth on places like Wiki when I used to be there and indeed the real advantage of late binding languages. I always viewed the safety of static type checking as a given. Well, in Chapter 6 on Generic Programming, in the area of Overloading and Parametric versus Subtype Polymorphism, is the example that lays it bare before my eyes and makes me see it.

Go read the whole thing to see his example. It's always nice to see people understand where the Smalltalk crowd is coming from!

I finally addressed a nasty problem in BottomFeeder. Some feeds - like Joel on Software's feed - use relative urls in the feed.

Now, IMHO, relative urls in a feed are a bug. However, as an aggregator provider, I get to grit my teeth and deal with bugs like this. So I dove into Twoflower code, and found that it had API's for this issue, and we just were not using the right one when setting up the HTML widget.

This would have been easier to deal with if the code we have for dealing with selection changes in the item list wasn't such an un-refactored mess. I haven't fixed that yet, but at least the mess now works. A new dev build is up, and feeds using relative urls should have working links and images now.

I did some more tweaking here and there, and posted a new DEV Build.

I added a few more tags to my RSS Feed as well - each item now has a GUID. The GUID happens to be the timesatmp (in seconds format), which works quite nicely as a unique identifier. For comments, I slap the entry and comment timestamps together, with a colon between them. There are some back end things this simplifies for me....

Here's an interesting story in the Register on Spam filters:

Designed to stop spam, the app has gone censorware-crazy, with MPs complaining that the system is 'stifling political debate'.

Paul Tyler, Lib Dem MP, told the BBC that the email filter is "now blocking parts of the Sexual Offences Bill being sent to parliamentary e-mail addresses. It also blocked a Liberal Democrat consultation paper on Censorship."

There's irony at work there. I don't yet trust spam filters. At my end, it's still easier to just delete them. Better filtering that tossed suspected Spam into a "spam" folder for my perusal would be nice, but this story demostrates the current limits on fully automating that process.....

I've certainly opened a can of worms by adding plugin capability to BottomFeeder. How so? There are two ways:

1. Plugins have to conform to whatever idiosyncracies that Bf has. The TypeLess plugin is a good example - it had to be modified to deal with some extensions added by the Aragon goodies. The Aragon goodies are used by Twoflower, which is the HTML presentation tool used by BottomFeeder.
2. There's now the whole possible issue of an API. Before I added this capability, BottomFeeder was cheerfully "API Free"

The second point came up in conversation with the guy doing the BottomFeeder User's Guide, Rich Demers. He pointed out in an email that having a plugin API would be more useful if BottomFeeder itself had one. So I suppose one will have to be surfaced over the next few releases.

One thing is for sure - any software that is being used is never a still object - there are always changes.

Things may not always go your way. Sun has invested enormous sums of cash on the various MS suits, with this one being the most critical to them, based on their reactions:

Microsoft received a reprieve on Monday from a court order requiring the company to ship Sun Microsystems' Java software.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted Microsoft a stay of a Jan. 21 decision from U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz in Baltimore, who gave the company 120 days to begin including Sun's latest Java runtime environment in every copy of Windows and Internet Explorer.

Earlier in the day, Microsoft had said that it would comply with Motz's order by beginning to ship an updated version of Windows XP Service Pack 1 that includes a more current Java Runtime Environment from Sun.

....

In a statement sent to reporters, Sun's vice president of legal affairs Lee Patch said: "We regret the 4th Circuit Court's decision. The preliminary injunctions granted by the district court will benefit consumers and the Java community's developers, enterprises and system vendors."

This is what happens when you bet the ranch on lawyers instead of on business plans - you put your fate in someone else's hands - never a great idea, IMHO. Now imagine how much better off Sun might be had they thrown that money into product development, marketing - anything remotely useful.

I'm catching up on my feeds after a busy day of patching web apps, when I stumble on this entry on Matt Croyden's blog:

Rob Fahrni:

Charles Cook: "After writing a lot of C#, returning to C make me realize how unproductive C is." - This has been my experience as well. I'm looking forward to the day when I can spend most of my time implementing code in C#.

So just take the next step guys, start using Smalltalk, and be amazed that you ever got anything done over there in C-Land. It's progress though - at least the C language folks are slowly getting to see the benefits of a VM and Garbage Collection. Using Java or C# (peas in a pod, really) instead of Smalltalk is like using dull hand tools instead of power tools....

This is so true. It's painful to go back to C after coding for awhile in C#. It's just so easy to do so many things. I'll be spending a good bit of time in C# this semester, and for that, I am quite happy.

Courtesy of Travis Griggs on the IRC Channel:

"So for many, many months I was using my OpenBSD machine thinking "Man oh man this looks like Windows. It even has a Start menu." Everything worked exactly as a Windows machine except for pokey games and the slight lags I'd notice once in a while"

"My dream was shattered when I realized I was just VNC'd to my Windows machine."

Time to step away from the keyboard...

Hat tip to Alan Knight for spotting the Smalltalk reference in this NYT Article:

Microsoft's Web services technology is tailored for Windows. But the .Net technology is trying to appeal to a wide range of programmers by letting them write in many different computer languages, including Cobol, C++, Perl, Smalltalk, Java and C#, which is Microsoft's answer to Java. By contrast, the middleware of the non-Microsoft camp runs on any operating system, but it is geared toward Java programmers

There's the difference for Smalltalkers in a nutshell, btw. Have a look at the whole article - always good to get a Smalltalk ref in widely respected media.

I've been pondering the shuttle loss. All the media outlets are talking about how long the program will be shut down, and how it will affect the ISS.

That got me thinking about a school trip I chaperoned recently - my daughter's class visited a local History of Flight museum. Back in the early days of flight, there was a ton of experimentation in airplanes. There were a lot of accidents as well, but things iterated towards stable designs pretty quickly. I can't help thinking that if space exploration more closely resembled early aviation - commercial instead of governmental, and lots of experimentation instead of huge monolithic programs, things would be further along.

If incremental design and development works in software, and worked for early aviation, why not for space?

So a few hours ago, I notice that the IRC Plugin to BottomFeeder was having an odd problem - trying to pop up a private chat was causing exceptions. This was not happening if I loaded just TypeLess into an image. Somewhere, there was a protocol override

After some wandering through code, I found a truly ugly override in the Aragon Goodies - look at the code for #selectionIndex in MultiSelectionInList - which should answer a Set.

	| s |
	^(s := selectionIndexHolder value) isEmpty ifTrue: [[0] ifFalse: [[s detect: [[:i | true]].

this was the cause of my problem. The expected result for that method is a Set - and this returns an Integer! Aragin should have created a new method and used it instead of breaking all client code that relies on this. At this point, regardless of anything else I've ever said, I did want method level namespaces. I was able to work around it, by doing a check in the TypeLess code for the presence of Aragon. Speaking of ugly though, in looking at MultiSelectionInList, I found this Aragon extension:

initialize

	| ldm context |
	self listHolder: List new asValue.
	ldm := Smalltalk at: #LensDataManager ifAbsent: [[^self selectionIndexHolder: Set new asValue].

	context := thisContext.
	[[context sender notNil and: [[(context receiver isKindOf: ApplicationModel) not]]
		whileTrue: [[context := context sender].

	(context receiver isKindOf: ldm)
		ifTrue: [[self selectionIndexHolder: ((PluggableAdaptor on: Set new asValue)
					getBlock: [[:m | m value]
					putBlock: [[:m :v | (v isKindOf: Collection)
							ifTrue: [[m value: v]
							ifFalse: [[m value: (Set with: v)]]
					updateBlock: [[:m :a :p | "a == #value"
						false])]
		ifFalse: [[self selectionIndexHolder: Set new asValue].

Ack! I know what's going on there, but I don't have to like it.... In any case, an updated IRC plugin parcel is on the site.