A Suitably Innocuous Blog

I've been trying out more social networking software lately. Even though I'm usually within easy access of an internet connected computer, I don't quite have the Twitter/Facebook habit down yet. Since the Charlie Rose interview of Marc Andeerson reminded me of Ning, I logged back in and checked out some local groups. I was already on the Smalltalkers group but had never joined any other Ning groups.

Since Marc kept going on about how easy it is to start Ning groups, and how they don' thave to be big, I decided to create a group for past and present Cincomers. This is to help Cincomers get in touch or back in touch, do job networking, or whatever.

The group is public right now. If people join or want to join but want the group to be private, I'm open to that.

The group has no official affiliation with Cincom, I'll probably get a disclaimer up sometime soon.

Technorati Tags: Cincom, social networks, ning, Cincomers

There's a new blogger on this server, Rick Stephens' CDS Technology Blog. Rich is an architect in Cincom's Eloquence group, or Cincom Document Solutions (CDS).

I don't know Rick personally, but I know and respect others on his team. I've put his blog in my feeds and look forward to learning more about Eloquence and the documentation automation world.

Technorati Tags: cincom, eloquence, cds, document-automation

The Mac OS X VM still isn't good enough to run on my G4 based system. It may never be, there was a bad architectural decision made early on that it the VM team is working hard to correct, but the G4 is aging fast enough that I don't really expect a lot of resources to be put on it. I still hope to get a MacBook Pro this year, but wedding first.

Anyway, I'm done with my poking around at PowerShell over on Windows and wanted to get back to VW and see how it looks these days. The X11 VM runs quite acceptably on my iBook, and once I get past the "yick" factor of a Motif L&F, I can see a lot of improvements in base VW since I last took a serious look in 2005 before my diversion into .NET work.

I can see that the Cincom Smalltalk team has been doing good work. The base image looks leaner and attention has clearly been paid to package organization. I'm able to find things relatively quickly and will spend some evenings and weekends over the next couple of months poking around and seeing how quickly I can remember how to do some things.

I still don't like the installer and it's default package choices are silly, IMO. I'd also like to see several pre-baked images, one for fat client development, one for headless server development, one for Seaside development, etc, as starting points for people to work from.

There's a minor nickname bug in TypeLess I want to hunt down and fix, and I want to look at BottomFeeder and see how possible it would be to get its use of directories to match the "user data doesn't go in program directories" approach that both Microsoft and Apple want. I'd also look at OS in VW, but I'd have to do that on a Windows system. Once I get that MacBook with Parallels ...

Tags: programming, Smalltalk

If may turn the tables on Kent Beck ...

I've noticed that I am relying on Spotlight more and more on my Mac. It's replaced the note/filer software I was using, StickyBrain from Chronos. I listened to a few podcasts about programming for Spotlight and there are plenty of documents on its use from Apple (1, 2). Spotlight on my Mac achieves that which I haven't seen yet from Microsoft or Google on my Windows machines--fast and painless indexing with fast and painless retrieval.

So what's my point?

Smalltalkers live in the image. We swim in a sea of co-equal objects. I'm not saying that Spotlight and other search and indexing tools to come are going to make life outside the image as empowered as life inside the image, but what they are doing is leaving behind what is in the image.

Jim made light of Dare's use of grep, and yes Dare was "missing the environment". Meanwhile Michael is shining light on the image and bringing "searchlight" functionality to Smalltalk. But, there's a divide between the image and the rest of your information.

I don't know if there's a way to bridge this divide, but until someone does there'll be the mental equivalent of 32-to-16 bit thunking (or maybe thudding) going on as we try to see all our data.

Tags: apple, Smalltalk, software, spotlight, search

Any Squeakers want to point me in the right direction here?

Doug Edmonds was working through an old sample post of mine comparing Squeak and VW file access and found that the final example snippet didn't work for him using Squeak 3.9 on Windows XP. I've updated that post with a "fix" but I think Squeak's FileDirectory class is behaving badly.

On any system I'm used to, "." or "dot" is the current directory. If I want to access the current directory, I pass dot as a directory name to library code and I expect to get back the current working directory.

Doug reports that "FileDirectory on: '.'" gets a debugger and an Error: 'Fully qualified path expected'. When I try that same code out in Squeak 3.9 on Leopard, the code doesn't find the file I expected it to. When I debugged through the code, I saw that on my Mac Squeak is prefixing dot with a slash--ie, "." becomes "/.".

I'm convinced that's wrong, but could be talked out of it. Still, it seems bad behavior for this fundamental an access to have changed since June of 2006.

Tags: programming, Smalltalk

I keep hearing that VW on the Mac is better lately, so I downloaded the latest in development build of Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks and installed it on my iBook G4 (1.2 GHz PPC, 1.25 GB ram).

I have to admit it, the experience is better. The UI Painter was usable and while I wouldn't try to use the code highlighting support, the Refactoring Browser wasn't annoyingly slow. It still flickers too much, but I suspect that between the tools team and the VM team things will get even better.

I'm not going to try to do much with VW on the Mac. I use REALbasic for my recreational programming on the Mac, and am currently working through a book on AppleScript, but VW felt usable on this platform. For recreational Smalltalk work, I want to get into ObjectStudio 8 over on Windows.

Oh, there are a couple of visual problems with VW. One is that the gel buttons are blurred and ugly. I gather this is a known problem but I don't know enough about display graphics to bother to follow the technical issues there. The other is that there is no visible sizing grip on the lower right corner of windows.

Update: I forgot to mention that VW insists on using the control key instead of the command key. Wrong-o on a Mac.

Tags: CST, Mac, programming, smalltalk, visualworks

Object Arts | Future development of Dolphin discontinued.:

It is with great regret and more than a touch of sadness that I have to announce that Blair and I have made the decision to stop selling and developing Dolphin Smalltalk. We will continue to distribute the free version of Dolphin X6 indefinitely but, as from today, we will not be selling the Professional version. Some limited support will remain in place for existing users of X6 but there will not be a future major release of Dolphin for .net (or Mac or Linux).

I only tinkered briefly with Dolphin, but it looked to be a great system. Commercial success is often independent of technical excellence (Oracle, anyone?).

See the Object Arts announcement for full details. Good luck to Andy and Blair in their future endeavors.

Tags: Smalltalk, software

The VW engineering team has made some great strides with the Mac OS X VM. There's plenty of work still to do, but on my iBook the experience is greatly improved. I can actually stand to use the Refactoring Browser now, network access to Store feels faster, and the file browser practically flies.

In some quick testing after my most recent install, my only complaint is with TypeLess (Michael, are you reading?). For some reason I do not understand, it wants to access kernel32.dll, a Windows file.

Tags: Apple, OS X, programming, Smalltalk, software, VisualWorks

I'm only playing around a little, but I'm checking out ObjectStudio 8, the ObjectStudio class library and tools using VisualWorks as its virtual machine host.

Cool. After I close the VW launcher, it looks pretty much like the ObjectStudio environment I worked with a few years ago. The transition from OS for everything, but slipping into the VW browser and debugger environments is a bit jarring at first, but I've got the rest of the standard ObjectStudio tools at my fingertips.

I'm poking around with the OLE stuff right now, everything I'm trying seems to work. I know this is only in beta, but since I work for Cincom I can get at some of the good stuff early :)

I don't know that I'll have much to blog about re this, but I just wanted to note that it's looking quite good.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, ObjectStudio, CST, programming

Today in the conference rooms near my cube I spotted Travis, Jim, Suzanne, Sherry, Pete, Andreas, Mark, Georg, Eduard, and probably a few others. That's the Smalltalk contingent, in town for OS 8 planning meetings. Travis was in for HR stuff and a quick visit before he heads out to see Vassili and get tasked with tool work.

Noisy!

And all but one of the out of towners on my team are in as well.

Noisier!

But it is good to see everyone.

I'm in head down coding mode, so I'm not in on any of the meetings with my group, but I have said "hi" to just about everyone. Jim did stop by to mention a change triggered by OS8 work that will let him do something new in BottomFeeder.

Tags: Cincom

I finished my introductory class today and I've been letting the experience settle in my brain. All in all, I see Cincom Socrates as a valuable tool for certain classes of problems. One difficulty some people in the class had to cope with was their tendency to approach it as a general purpose programming environment. When you do that, you think things are missing, and in looking for what you think is missing, you fail to see the rich feature set available for the problems Socrates tries to solve.

In the second day of the class, I noticed people beginning to get past the "this isn't VisualStudio/Eclipse" mode of thinking, and I began to hear "oh cool" and "ahhhhh" comments from my classmates.

This class was geared towards manufacturing and configuration applications, and Socrates offers the ability to do that off the shelf. The three areas touted as best fits were:

• Guided selling, wherein customer requirements are evaluated and recommendations are made.
• Configuration of products, services, or documents.
• Customer service scripting/monitoring/workflow.

Once I got used to the editors conventions and learned how the system expects to be used, I found it quite intuitive and easy to use. I particularly liked the graphical programming (tree based) available for some types of rules or constraints, and the ability to map out a UI flow in a self-documenting flowchart.

I don't have a current need for Socrates in the work I'm doing, but I'm glad I have it in my tool kit.

Technorati Tags: CincomSocrates, Socrates, Cincom, programming

I'm taking a basic Introduction to Socrates class this week, hence the blog silence. I did some tutorials way back when, but I didn't cover the full product. I like attending our classes on any product for two reasons:

• I get to learn how we think the product should be used
• I get to watch customers learn the product and see their reactions and learn from their questions

I often find that watching other people learn teaches me as much as head down studying because it exposes me to other perspectives. We all tend to approach tools from whatever need we have, and my needs as a commercial software developer are different from those of an MIS shop for an insurance company or heavy equipment manufacturer.

This helps keep my mind open, does anyone have any other techniques to share?

Technorati Tags: Cincom, CincomSocrates, Socrates, learning, software