On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at a small improvement to Transcript APIs that makes using the Transcript a lot easier for simple tasks.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

So I'm driving to work yesterday morning and I see a lot of gas stations with prices of $3.719 per gallon and I think "I've got a half tank, no rush, prices might go down." Then, I'm driving home yesterday and almost all the stations are now showing prices of $3.959 per gallon and I realize "buy gas even when you think the price sucks if you need to, there seems to be only one direction prices move anymore."

Doh! What took me so long?

Technorati Tags: economy, gas, prices, oil

Found a disturbing but neat presentation in my blog scan this morning, over on Development in a Blink is a longish (67 slide) presentation of a bunch of facts that (if true) are both inspiring and intimidating. It's like one of those "remember when" massively forwarded emails we all sometimes get, but with more intriguing "shift" in it :)

Technorati Tags: general, information, humor, factoids

Smalltalk Solutions 2008 is coming up fast - the schedule of events is here, and registration is here. There are a ton of great talks, like this one from Michael Rueger:

Sophie is an all purpose tool for dealing with media. It will allow users to easily create books that can contain any sort of media on hand ­ text, image,s sounds, videos, animations. Sophie does for media what a physical book does for text and images: with Sophie, authors can create multimedia books. You might think of it as a wrapper for anything digital.

Sophie is built using Squeak, integrating both OpenSource components like Cairo and freetype as well as platform native technologies like Quicktime.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, smalltalk solutions

James Robertson asks a leading question about Store Bundles in VisualWorks. It's an interesting question, and I hope James will forgive me, but I think it's a bit off the mark. It's like asking me if I use the bathroom in that used house I bought a year or two ago. Duh, of course, I use it. But that doesn't mean that I bought the house for its bathroom, or that I like the bathroom. That given a chance I wouldn't gladly have what my neighbor has a for a commode at his place. There are (in my opinion) more telling questions to ask about the Bundle construct found in VisualWorks. Questions like these:

• Do you use Bundles primarily to get the code browser to group packages logically together?
• Do you use Bundles primarily to give you a mechanism of "versioning a set of packages together."
• Do you use Bundles primarily as a way to make loading a group of associated packages easier?
• Have you used Envy? If so, do you consider a Bundle an adequate replacement for an Envy Config map (open or realeased)?
• Have you used Team/V? If so, do you consider a Bundle an adequate replacement for Clusters?
• Do you take advantage of the fact that Bundles can have the same names as Packages? Do you take advantage of the behavior that the default prerequisite type (#any) will give preference to a bundle over a package, when it encounters two by the same name?
• Do you take advantage of the fact that when you put a Package in a Bundle, it will suppress things like post load actions?
• Do you feel that Bundle "load order lists" (having to get the contents of the packages right, and the packages in the right order) brings a level of organization to your code that you were lacking before?
• As you consider your peers in other technologies (Ruby, Python, Debian, C, .Net, etc.) do you find analogs for a system that uses something like both Bundles and Packages?
• When you teach a college grad, or that friend who's been listening to you tell him about VisualWorks for all these years, do you brag about Bundles to him, and show him all the cool things you can do with them?
• If you use Bundles, but are not enamored with them, how much pain are you willing to go through to get to a better place?
• Do you consider the presence of Bundles something that helps close the deal between a VisualWorks implementation and a competing technology (or another Smalltalk flavor)?

The last is my favorite.

I use Bundles, it's part of the legacy of the VisualWorks system. So I work within those constraints. But asking me whether I use them, doesn't really tell much about them.

Women without men are helpless

Women: without, men are helpless

I've added a list of all the Karyotype bands to the contest documents (see this post for the full list).  I've also put the information on this web page.  The list is easier to use than the diagram for some purposes.

On May 21st, Arden Thomas, product manager for Cincom Smalltalk will be proving us with a presentation on Web Velocity , a Seaside based framework for the rapid development of web based apps.

See our web site for further details:

www.nycsmalltalk.org

Ruby has the SymbolValue 'controversy', just like Smalltalk.

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.