Industry Misinterpretations

Industry Misinterpretations 142: Travels with Smalltalk

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:22:31 EDT

This week Michael and I talked to fellow Cincomer Les Kooyman about some of the internationalization work that's been happening during the current release cycle. Specifically:

CLDR
Unicode VM work

Les has been involved in the CLDR (locale) work, so that's where we focused, but the VM work - largely a matter of switching APIs on Windows - came up quite a bit as well. We went back and forth between what's being done and how, and what it all means for application developers. To listen now, click here.

If you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or visit us on Facebook or Ning - you can vote for the Podcast Alley, and subscribe on iTunes. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!

Industry Misinterpretations 141: In the Clouds

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 09:28:48 EDT

This week we spoke to Ernest Micklei, who has been involved in a number of fascinating Smalltalk projects recently:

Cloudfork - an interface to AWS, including support for S3, EC2, SimpleDB, and SQS
Glare - an interface to the Adobe Flex/Air framework

You can read more about the work that he and Jan Van Sandt have been doing on this (and other stuff) at their blogs - Jan Van Sandt's here, and Ernest's here. There's a lot of great stuff there, including examples to help get you started with the two libraries I mentioned above. I've done a few screencasts based on the examples in the blogs; you can check those out here.

To listen now, click here

Industry Misinterpretations 140: Objective Seas

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:01:51 EDT

This week Michael and I talked about the new interface to Objective-C (mostly for the Mac) that's going into the next release (in August) in preview mode. It's not fully releasable as supported yet because the work on it is still ongoing; that's just not enough time to get it in there.

In talking about the new Objective-C connection, we got into platform interfacing, and noted that things are looking up on that front in the next release:

ObjectStudio is already Vista-certified, and will be getting Windows 7 certification when that OS is released
You'll have the ability to integrate ActiveX components into VW Windows in the next release
On the Mac, the Objective-C connection will allow for the same kind of embedding

The difference between the two is that on Windows, there's support directly in the GUI builder; on the Mac, it'll take some manual work. However, things are looking good! To listen now, click here.

Technorati Tags: objective c, smalltalk, platform integration

Industry Misinterpretations 139: Adding Velocity

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 16:15:43 EDT

This week we spoke to Jason Rogers, a long time Ruby on Rails developer who's been poking at Smalltalk for years, and recently participated in the Web Velocity beta program (interested in that? drop me a line). We covered a lot of ground in the talk, including some of the issues that Jason has had with the beta - we're all about transparency around here :)

The big win for Seaside over things like Rails, according to Jason, is the debugger. It's just so easy to work with it in Seaside and (and thus Web Velocity) - and so much harder in Rails. Anyway, listen for yourself and make up your own mind - grab the audio here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside, ruby, web velocity, ruby on rails

Industry Misinterpretations 138: Who Killed What

Sun, 31 May 2009 18:16:43 EDT

This week Michael and I discussed Bob Martin's RailsConf talk - which I commented on here. We ranged across that and a few related topics, largely dismissing Bob's talk. To listen now, click here.

Technorati Tags:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, ruby, bob martin, railsconf

Industry Misinterpretations 137: Kicking the Tires

Sun, 24 May 2009 10:21:47 EDT

This week we spoke to a long time "tire kicker" of Smalltalk, Sean McGinty. He's been looking at Smalltalk on and off for over a decade, so we thought it might be useful to find out:

Why he keeps coming back to Smalltalk
What prevents him from moving past tire kicking to real usage

That led to a discussion of the pros and cons of Smalltalk, what things we (as a community) could do better, and what things we do pretty well already. To listen now, click here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, im, tire kicker

Industry Misinterpretations 136: Yes We Can

Sun, 17 May 2009 19:39:03 EDT

Here's Georg Heeg, of his eponymous company, at the Minneapolis one day Smalltalk event on April 29, 2009. Georg spoke as the STIC director, borrowing President Obama's "Yes We Can" slogan and using it in the context of Smalltalk development. The talk was well received, and highly entertaining - I'll have video available next week. You can grab Georg's slides here; download the audio here.

You can see our photo gallery from the event here

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, minneapolis

Industry Misinterpretations 135: Dynamic Returns

Sun, 10 May 2009 10:56:00 EDT

Here's another talk from our one day event in Minneapolis on April 29: Randal Schwartz' "Dynamic Returns" presentation. It's all about why dynamic languages are good, and exposes a number of myths about the supposed strengths of static languages in comparison. You can grab the slides here, and check Randal's blog for more info.. I'll be posting the video of his talk on Monday, and you'll be able to see the slides in that as well. To listen now, click here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, dynamic languages, minneapolis

Industry Misinterpretations 134: Better, Faster, Cheaper

Sun, 03 May 2009 10:04:04 EDT

This week's podcast is from Arden Thomas' "Better, Faster, Cheaper" talk at our recent (April 29) one day event in Minneapolis. You can get Arden's slides here; he spoke about how Smalltalk can help you attain your goals with less wasted time, effort, and money. To listen now, click here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, efficiency, minneapolis

Industry Misinterpretations 133: Smalltalk and FPGAs

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 22:57:07 EDT

This week Michael and I spoke to Jecel Mattos de Assumpcao. We spoke to him as part of the Squeak boarda few weeks ago, but this week we talked to him about his background in Smalltalk, and some of the interesting work he's done with custom hardware and Smalltalk implementations. It was a wide ranging talk, and a lot of fun. To listen now, click here.

Technorati Tags: fpga, smalltalk

Industry Misinterpretations 132: Code Management

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 13:02:41 EDT

Today's podcast with Dave Buck is a chat with Cincom's code management team - Sam Shuster and David Caster. They now manage the progress of all aspects of code management in Cincom Smalltalk - parcels, packages, and bundles, and Smalltalk Archives.

There's a bit of missing audio from the beginning, due to a brain cramp on my part - I didn't start the recording properly. I filled in what was missed myself, which was basically a background question on where Store came from. To listen now, click here.

Technorati Tags: source code control, code management, store, smalltalk

Industry Misintrepretations 131: Talking to the Squeak Board

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 23:01:16 EDT

This week we spoke to three of the members of the newly elected Squeak Board: Randal Schwartz, Jecel Assumpcao Jr, and Craig Latta. We talked about the election, what the board does, and where Squeak is headed. To listen now, click here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, squeak, squeak board

Industry Misinterpretations 130: Directed Panic

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 11:28:58 EDT

This week we spoke to Alan Knight, our own engineering manager for the Smalltalk product suite here at Cincom. We mostly talked about the process of "herding the cats", and how the process of moving from developer to manager has been for Alan. To listen now, click here.

Industry Misinterpretations 129: Smalltalk in Small Places

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:19:40 EST

This week we spoke to John McIntosh, who's been around Smalltalk in general and Squeak in particular, for quite awhile now. We talked about his VM work, but soent most of the show on his current project: a port of Squeak to the iPhone, in the context of Pier as an iPhone application. That application is in beta right now - listen for more details! To listen now, click here.

Industry Misinterpretations 128: The Engineering Side Roadmap

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:34:43 EST

On March 9th, Alan Knight, our engineering manager for Smalltalk, gave a talk at the Ottawa (Canada) Smalltalk User's Group. He presented the roadmap for the product suite from the engineering side of things. I released the video for the talk earlier; this is the audio-only version. I've cleaned up the audio quite a bit - it came out pretty well. You can listen to it here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, roadmap

Industry Misinterpretations 127: Modeling and Mapping

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 19:08:02 EST

This week we spoke to fellow Cincomer Dirk Verleysen, who's been working on the Modeling and Mapping tools in ObjectStudio. These tools had been allowed to stagnate in older versions of the product, and is now being brought up to date. In the podcast, we find out from Dirk what kind of progress has been made on the project, and what the roadmap going forward looks like. To hear it now, click here.

Industry Misinterpretations 126: Seaside and Web Velocity

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:41:13 EST

Here's the audio-only for the talk I gave in Cincinnati last week - it's shorter than the video, as I cut down some of the later Q&A. It was a fun presentation, and a good time was had by all - there were lots of good questions. Thanks again to Mark Windholtz! To listen, click here.

Code City - Audio

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 23:34:58 EST

Here's the audio-only for the Code City talk from ESUG that I posted earlier. You can get the slides here.

Industry Misinterpretations 125: Seaside 2.9

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 12:30:54 EST

This morning we spoke to Julian Fitzell about Seaside 2.9 - in many respects, this podcast is an update to Julian's ESUG 2008 talk. We spoke about the changes in Seaside 2.9 - especially the partial continuations work. To keep up with what's happening in Seaside, it's probably a good idea to subscribe to Julian's blog. To listen to the podcast now, click here.

Julian recommended the following links for more information:

Seaside history/background
Seaside 2.9 development
Partial Continuations in Seaside 2.9
Seaside 2.9 Exception Handling

Industry Misinterpretations 124: Security in Smalltalk

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 12:11:52 EST

This week we spoke to Martin Kobetic, one of Michael's fellow developers on Cincom's Smalltalk team. We mostly talked about the security libraries (encryption, etc) in the product, although we spent a bit of time on Opentalk and grid computing as well. To listen, click here.

There are some audio artifacts in Martin's portion of the audio that I just couldn't filter out. I apologize for that; it sounds a bit like crackling on a phone line.