I've been tossing around the idea of developing advanced Smalltalk courses and was wondering what interest there may be in them. They could be delivered as open enrollment courses or on-site courses. Topics could include:

• XML reading and writing
• Namespaces and bindings
• Exceptions and error handling
• Detailed debugging techniques
• Regular expressions
• Performance profiling and improvement
• Processes and process synchronization
• Metaprogramming
• Sockets
• Garbage Collection and weak references
• Memory policy tuning
• C interfacing
• Developing proxy classes
• Net clients (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, etc)
• Building Domain Specific Languages in Smalltalk (Parser Generator and other compiler technologies)
• Creating your own pragmas
• GLORP
• Seaside

If you're interested in courses on these topics, drop me an e-mail at david@simberon.com.

This Sunday, my whole family will be participating in the Kanata Supercities Walk for Multiple Sclerosis.  My wife was diagnosed with MS in 1991.  She's been doing quite well with it over the years compared to other people we know.  She's still able to walk well and she's able to do most things she wants.  She occasionally has numbness or burning in her legs and arms, but she's otherwise quite mobile.  Others aren't so lucky.  A friend of hers is blind and needs a wheelchair.  Others have spent time in the hospital unable to move until they are given steroid treatments.

MS affects people in northern climates more frequently than those in tropical climates.  Scientists believe this is related to Vitamin D, but it's not conclusive yet.  The Ottawa MS Clinic is running a clinical trial that holds a lot of promise for MS.  In the people they've treated so far, it appears that the MS has been cured.  The catch is that the treatment requires a bone marrow transplant and is, therefore, quite dangerous.  One person in the trial died from complications of the treatment.  Hopefully, they'll discover a safer and less intrusive treatment soon.

If anyone would be interesting in sponsoring us in the walk, please drop me an e-mail at david@simberon.com.  You can also donate to the MS Society of Canada directly at http://www.mssociety.ca/en/events/scwalk/online-fundraising.htm#donate.

As I announced earlier, Simberon is running an Introduction to VisualWorks Smalltalk open enrollment course from May 12th to May 16th, 2008 in Santa Clara, CA. We can also deliver on-site courses if you have a number of people (4 or more) who want to take the course. We can deliver courses in VisualWorks or VASmalltalk.

We also offer the Experiencing Design Patterns course and the Refactoring Object Oriented Design course using Smalltalk as the programming language. These courses go into more detail on the topics I post in the Simberon Design Minute.

If you're interested in any of these courses as either on-site courses or open enrollment courses, e-mail info@simberon.com.

Are you curious about Smalltalk and wondering why everyone it talking about the development environment? If so, check out this video. It shows the development environment in action on a solitaire game written in Smalltalk. If you can't play Flash videos, try this AVI file.

Simberon will be offering an open enrollment course Introduction to VisualWorks Smalltalk course in Santa Clara, California. It's a 5 day course that will be running from May 12th to May 16th 2008. The course covers the Smalltalk language and basic libraries, version control, refactoring, and building user interfaces. To register visit Simberon's web site.

Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte talked to Ward Cunningham on FLOSS Weekly this week. I thought it was a very good conversation that talked about wikis, programming languages, dynamic and static languages, Smalltalk, Ruby, Perl, extreme programming and teaching programming to young people. It's well worth the listen and it's always good to hear from Ward who has had a dramatic effect on the modern programming world from design patterns to extreme programming.

I've had several requests to provide a page with all of the Simberon Design Minute episodes that I record for the Industry Misinterpretations podcast. I've started the Simberon Design Minute page at the Simberon web site. I'll get them posted as quickly as I can get them transcribed. Once I have a reasonable number of them there, I'll work with James to make them available on iTunes.

For over a year now, the Internet Ray Tracing Competition has been in hiatus. Over the past few weeks, I've been working with Chris Cason (the POVRay team leader) on a proposal to get it back online. It's now official - we'll be resurrecting the site. I've volunteered my time as has Randal Schwartz to write the software to drive the site in Seaside 2.8 using VisualWorks NC. It will be a chance for us to develop a public web site using Seaside and help the raytracing community at the same time.

I'll blog our progress here as we go.