NYC Smalltalk Blog

Happy Holidays to all.

Please join us at our next meeting on Wed, January 21st, 2009 where Arden Thomas Cincom Smalltalk’s product manager will be presenting. For more info check out our site: www.nycsmalltalk.org.

Also if anybody is interested in helping out with presentations related to Smalltalk and other technologies that can be leveraged from Smalltalk please send me an email here: presentations@nycsmalltalk.org.

thanks

-Charles

Please join us this upcoming Wednesday, Feb 6th , for an interesting presentation on a new Seaside based framework which leverages Gemstone to provide for transparent persistence services to Seaside.

James Forester of Gemstone will be presenting.

Please visit our site for directions.

GLASS: Transparent Persistence for Seaside
 
While the Seaside framework elegantly addresses HTML generation and application flow-of-control issues, it still leaves challenges for the developer--including persistence, multi-user coordination, and scaling. With typical solutions (including object-relational mapping, external files, and multiple images) the "pure objects" experience of Smalltalk is compromised. In this presentation we will demonstrate GLASS (GemStone, Linux, Apache, Seaside, and Smalltalk), a stack (analogous to LAMP) that provides a robust environment for deploying sophisticated, dynamic web applications that can scale.
 
GLASS runs on GemStone/S 64 Bit, a Smalltalk application server and database, whose Web Edition is available for free--even for commercial use. Copies of the software will be available at the meeting.
 
James Foster is QA Lead on the Smalltalk Engineering Team at GemStone Systems, Inc.
 

The next NYC Smalltalk presentation will be held Wednesday Nov. 7th.

I, Charles A. Monteiro will be discussing issues I encountered as well as techniques/strategies in our quest to have an Oracle centric direct sql VW application speak to a Postgres backend without having to change application layer code.

The presentation starts at 7pm  but there’s an open house at 6:30 where people meet and freely discuss anything sort of Smalltalk related.

After the presentation many of us go to a local pub/bar and continue the discussions over some beer.

Our presentations are opened  to the public. Bring a friend if you have one.

For directions go to: www.nycsmalltalk.org , keep in mind that the web site is in the process of being converted back to a wiki and therefore may not be up to date, although you can certainly trust the directions .

Arden Thomas which is the new SE for Cincom Smalltalk will be presenting on January 31st , 2007.

Directions and time can be found on our web site.

Abstract:

I  will discuss our new product roadmap, which has been changing and evolving more recently.  I would also like to get feedback from the group on their product needs, and even do some group "thinking out loud" or brainstorming, about future directions for Smalltalk IDE's, and ways to improve our product.

Bio:

Arden Thomas got started with Smalltalk in 1986, looking for better ways to do software development (he found it). He is currently a senior field application engineer for Cincom working to help Cincom's Smalltalk customers, and to help move Smalltalk forward.  Prior to this he worked for ParcPlace as a trainer, sales engineer, and consultant, and then moved into a senior development position at Forest Investment management, doing extensive software development in VisualWorks Smalltalk.

See you all there and as always we will get together for some drinks right around the corner at the La Vigna restaurant at the New Yorker at 34th and 8th.
 

Mark Pirogovsky, a frequent visitor to NYC Smalltalk , will provide us with a presentation on his experiences building shrink wrapped Smalltalk applications. He has actually worked on three large shrink wrapped ST apps.

He will specifically be using his current application as an example.

Check out: http://www.aggflow.com

For bio and background checkout:

http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/VisualWorks/Mark+Pirogovsky
http://profiles.yahoo.com/mpirogovsky

Date:

Wednesday , October 18th, 2006

6:30 pm Open house

7:00 pm - Presentation

Directions:

Take A,C,E to 34th street Penn Station. For that matter any train stopping at 34th street would suffice such as N,R,2,3. The New Yorker Hotel is at the corner of 34th and 8th, see the star on the map above. Walk to the corner of 34th and 9th. Meeting is held at: 440 W. 9th Ave, Fl 8. Meetings run from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm .

The first half hour is an open house where individuals new to Smalltalk can ask any question regarding Smalltalk of any of our seasoned Smalltalkers. After the presentation we go around the corner to the New Yorker Hotel and have a couple of beers and talk more Smalltalk and other related tangets that come up.

 See you ALL there.

-Charles

I think of our seasons here at NYC Smalltalk to run from September to June. July and August have proven to difficult to meet and we do take a break in December though sometimes our schedules get pushed so that we still end up presenting during the first week of December.

We had a great 2005 – 2006  season, we had everything from Sunit testing to a Ruby/Smalltalk presentation. We also met 9 times i.e. we had a full schedule and not once did I have to present  We had good vendor support, and support from individuals like Carl Gundel that made the trip from Boston to present.

A rundown of this past season can checked out here:

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/ocit/blogView?searchCategory=community

This season should be as interesting. We have two new presenters right off the gates. Andres Valloud who will present on his experiences in winning the Smalltalk coding contest at Smalltalk Solutions 2006 and Mark Pirogovsky who will be presenting a demo of a engineering application written in Smalltalk. More details soon on those. We also may have an old friend to NYC Smalltalk come and visit us again, that being Eric Clayberg of Instantiations whom I cornered at Smalltalk Solutions this past April in Toronto. We have a decent number of VAST developers and customers that would like to hear the skinny on Instantiations effectively taking over the VAST line. Synchrony Systems also expressed interest in presenting. I also tried to recruit a known Squeaker, this guy lives in Boston so its do-able as Carl has proven but sure its a  hike. He kind of said , “I’ll call you” and so I wait.  Eric lives in Boston as well but he is a vendor so I have less pity. We shall see.  Back to Squeak, I sort of feel bad that we under represent Squeak here. I welcome any Squeaker that wants to present to let me know.

Recently, an old Smalltaker friend of mine that had surely moved to the dark side dropped me a note remarking that it was good to see me still involved with Smalltalk and NYC Smalltalk. Well, I personally certainly have had my stints with Java but luckily really never stopped working with Smalltalk and I am happily fully employed in Smalltalk for a decent while. As far as the group well it has been around certainly since at least 94 and we have never stopped meeting. Sure some years were leaner than others but things are looking pretty good for Smalltalk from where I see it. VisualWorks for one is soooo much better, awesome really. The VW community is the most active I have ever seen it. Cincom is doing well. Squeakers are working on all sorts of nifty things.

What was particularly nice this past season was to see so many new faces to the group. Maybe this year we can get to see some of the old, old faces we have not seen in a while.

To keep abreast of our schedule folks can subscribe to our newsfeed. I will also post to comp.lang.smalltalk and to the VWNC list. Finally, we have a Yahoo group registering there also provides the advantage of having access to presentations that been made available to us by the presenters.

Here’s our newfeed:

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/ocit-rss.xml

Joining our Yahoo groups happens here:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nycsmalltalk/

Our next presentation is in September, date to be announced most probably the 13th and full details of Andres presentation will be made as soon as I can confirm the availability of the venue.

See you all soon.

-Charles

Okay, NYC Smalltalkers can go to:

http://wiki.nycsmalltalk.org for details on whatever the current meeting is.

For now this is being forwarded to http://www.nycsmalltalk.org

but the idea is that hopefully we will have a wiki backup so that I can update it from any where I may be.

Anyhow, June 7th we have the Smalltalk Ruby presentation. In July we plan to have Andres Valloud this year’s winner of the Smalltalk coding contest at the Smalltalk Solutions conference give a presentation on the strategy that won him the iPod.

-Charles

In my last post I griped about my dynamic dns problems. Recap: I used to run the NYC Smalltalk wiki from my home on my VAIO notebook running CentOS Linux until it seems the greedy facist cable company apparently shut me down. I really don’t think it was just me

Anywho , a gentlemen and a colleague assisted by providing me with access to a shell account from where I could run nmap on my box in order to figure what was really up. Have not had the cycles to do this yet but I will and thanks.

What have I done?

• I changed my web site hosting provider and went with a cheaper package that allowed me to do more, a lot more. I’ll blog about these guys later. I’m quite happy with them and quite disgusted with my previous fat cat provider.
• The more is that we now have http://www.nycsmalltalk.org  – a static web site, which I have not yet updated but will and probably will for a while be posting the up coming meeting announcements on.

While making the move I found some interesting and nostalgic items packed in boxes such as:

• http://www.ocit.com/nycst

A site that my wife had built in Flash for us. From the art work you all can tell how old it is. Looking at it just makes me sad.

Anyhow, I will have a wiki back up someday but chances are that I will take the time now to port to WikiWorksSSP i.e. an extended WikiWorks framework based on VisualWorks SSP technology which includes a reasonable security mechanism and move away from SmallWiki. The main reason is that there has not been any continued development of SmallWiki on VisualWorks but rather they moved to Squeak.

-Charles

I thought it would be an interesting idea to have a presentation where we compared Smalltalk to one of our dynamic language cousins. Of these next kin it seemed to me that from the most popular languages that Ruby was the closest. So I approached the NYC Ruby chairperson, Patrick May. We met at the cafe at the New Yorker Hotel , right around from Suite LLC where we hold our meetings and for a couple hours we chatted but mostly went through the VisualWorks IDE. I brought a copy of VW 7.4 NC which I let him have. Patrick apparently has been a fan of Smalltalk but did not know quite where to start.

I wonder, has anybody written a “making the transition” type of tutorial i.e. that which understands that most new comers to Smalltalk will be used to file based environments and just unfamiliar with the “live” image concept that Smalltalk presents.

But I digress, details for our May presentation:

Date: June 7th, 2006

Location: 440 W. 9th Avenue, between 34th and 35th ,  8th Fl

Time: 6:30 to approx 8:30

The presentation actually starts at 7pm , but there is an open house from 6:30 – 7pm.

Abstract:

Patrick May will give an introduction to the Ruby language, highlighting similarities and
differences from Smalltalk.  He will also speak on the viability of Ruby in various
real-world scenarios

Bio:

Patrick May is a programmer, organiser, and artist.  May is Director of Technology at
Rhizome.org, a new media arts community.  Since 2002, he has been developing ruby-web,
 a ruby environment optimised for the web.  He has presented ruby-web at the 2002 and
2004 Ruby Conferences.
 
.

Perhaps some of you have noticed that NYC Smalltalk Wiki is not operational. Well, perhaps you all out there have not noticed but some of our regulars have. It seems that my ISP has shut all of my ports down. Probably not just me. It probably is now “policy”. This SUCKS !!!

BTW, I have a residential broadband account. It has sustained our wiki for at least 2 years. Are they all starting to do this? So the small people like me can’t run wikis from home. Forget about any independent P2P collaboration. P2P networks will definitely need to rely on super peers which means at the very least folks on business cable/dsl. But wait, some cable providers will give you a business cable account and they will very generously open 2 ports. What a joke.

I wonder what the motivation is. Are they trying to control spam/viruses better? Are the small fries of the world actually really impacting their bandwidth? Is this a money making squeeze to get us all to upgrade to business cable.

Maybe I’m screwing up. My newer NetGear router may be screwing up.

I used Shields UP from www.grc.com to check out my port “stealthness” or not. Unfortunately, Shield Up will only test a range of 64 ports at a time and I have to edit the port forwarding tables on the router as well to be able to test. Needless to say I only tested a couple ranges. I don’t know of a tool that will scan the entire port range. Even if there is such a tool, I obviously would need to connect a box directly to the cable modem. I think. I don’t believe there is a setting in my router to just allow all traffic through. Of course not. Through to where? Traffic has to go somewhere.  Well, there is the “DMZ” option but I already tried that with one of my boxes.

All of this is such a hazzle and aggravation especially since it makes me so angry that I have to take time away from playing my guitar to handle this BS.

Action items:

1. Need at the very least a backup static site for NYC Smalltalk.
2. A link from the site to a url that would access the NYC Smalltalk blogs “Community” category, if possible.
3. Spend just a tiny little more time on testing what the issue really is.
4. Decide to bite the bullet and upgrade to a business cable setup that would allow me total access to my box. In other words just buy myself out of this hazzle.