Planet Squeak

Torsten Bergmann: OmniBrowser in SeasideXUL

2008-05-09T12:11:00+00:00

Pavel continues his work on XUL for Seaside. He now has the OmniBrowser framework running...

The Weekly Squeak: Squeak Etoys - Students Build Their Own Games In Four Days

2008-05-09T10:15:02+00:00

The Software Architecture Group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut (who have produced a great online Seaside tutorial and associated book) have recently been involved in using Etoys in the classroom. They kindly sent us this report about the experience of two of their members when introducing Squeak and Etoys to high school students.

Pupils of the “Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Gymnasium” (high school) in Potsdam, Germany learned about Etoys and the basic principles of programming in a four-day workshop. Under the supervision of two student tutors of the Software Architecture Group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut (Robert Krahn and Michael Perscheid), the 14- to 16-year-old pupils have implemented their own ideas and games in very short time using Etoys. All of them had no or little prior experience with computers and programming.

On March 25, the workshop started with an introduction to the subject matter. The tutors introduced themselves and provided a first look at Squeak and Etoys. Afterwards, Robert and Michael presented brief tutorials in which the pupils participated. The first tutorial involved drawing a car and letting it drive along a road according to some small scripts. The second tutorial dealt with implementing the Lunar Lander game. For increased fun, the pupils were encouraged to be creative, resulting in a wide variety of car and rocket designs. In the course of implementing the car and lunar lander games, the pupils also faced the problems of adequately modelling physical phenomena, such as gravity, in which process they were guided by the tutors. At the end of the first day, all workshop participants had grown accustomed to the development environment and were well prepared for their own projects.

The second day started with a brief introduction to object orientation, which put the knowledge and experience gathered during the first day in a broader and theoretically founded context. Over the following two days, the pupils worked on their own Etoys projects. The tutors had given some hints as to what kinds of games could be implemented, but the pupils came up with ideas of their own as well. Many beautiful and creative results were produced. Robert and Michael were always available for individually attending to the pupils.

On the final day, participants were asked to present their projects in 10-minute short presentations. Michael gave a brief introduction to presentation techniques, so that the pupils were well prepared for this. Everyone proudly presented their achievements. Although none of the participants had prior knowledge in computer science, they achieved astounding results in short time. As a gift, all participants were given a CD containing all projects and the Etoys environment.

Michael Perscheid, Michael Haupt

The Weekly Squeak: Algernon: your personal assistant for Squeak

2008-05-07T13:02:49+00:00

A team of undergraduates at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have just released “Algernon”, a new keyboard-based launcher to help you navigate around your Squeak environment.

Algernon was developed by Erik Hinterbichler and Joey Hagedorn with their CS598 classmates, working with Professor Ralph Johnson of the Software Architecture Group at UIUC. The developers say that Algernon provides lightning quick access to categories, classes, morphs, and global variables in your image, and is inspired by tools such as Quicksilver and LaunchBar for Mac OS X. Like Quicksilver, it learns from your behaviours, and will prioritise options that you use most often. It is triggered by pressing Control-Space Shift-Return, though this can be changed by editing Algernon>>activationString.

Algernon can be downloaded from SqueakMap using the SqueakMap package loader or from Squeaksource using Monticello, and requires KeyBinder to be installed as a prerequisite.

[Edited in light of Erik's comments below.]

Summer of Squeak: Introduction to Squeak GTK project

2008-05-05T19:11:00+00:00

Here is a short description of the Squeak GTK.

This project aims to :

- provide a full support of the GTK+ library included GDK, GLib, Cairo.
- provide a full support of the WebKit library.
- Create a MVC framework
- Create a basic toolset (inspector, reflective management of widget, efficient class browser, transcript, ...) if time permitted

You can find the project at : SqueakGTK

There is a SqueakVM with the callback patch and the SqueakGTK plugin generated. But you can find all the files to patch the squeakVM and build the plugin by hand ;)

Gwenael Casaccio

Torsten Bergmann: Google Chart API for Seaside

2008-05-05T11:31:00+00:00

Seaside has more and more additional projects like SeaChart. The project now also includes examples for using the GoogleChart API. Click on the image for a few examples:

The Weekly Squeak: Seaside: your next web framework

2008-05-05T11:01:37+00:00

Randal L. Schwartz had a “standing-room only” audience at BarCampPortland for his presentation on why web developers should consider using the Seaside web application framework. BarCampPortland is described as an “unconference for the Portland [Oregon] tech community”, and aims to offer the attendees interesting topics, cool people and great networking opportunities.

Randal was offered a 45-minute slot, and took the opportunity to explain what makes Seaside such a powerful framework for professional web developers. His material, which incorporated feedback from colleagues on the Seaside mailing list, was very well received, and will form the basis for future presentations by Randal to raise the awareness of Seaside in the web development community.

Randal Schwartz: Seaside presentation at BarCampPortland a success!

2008-05-04T01:04:40+00:00

I had about 20 people in my room at BarCampPortland, which made it "standing room only" for the last few who showed up. The audience was attentive, and asked good questions. Monty Williams of GemStone was also along, and helped me with a few answ...

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Randal Schwartz: The Elevator Pitch for Seaside

2008-05-03T14:37:49+00:00

I'm at BarCampPortland this weekend, scheduled to introduce a whole new batch of folks to Seaside this afternoon. But as we were organizing the "unconference" last night, I found myself having to repeatedly describe Seaside and why I'm so excite...

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Randal Schwartz: Interviewed by Ronaldo M. Ferraz

2008-05-02T15:32:54+00:00

So, I'm apparently at the point where I'm getting interviewed about my progress with Smalltalk and Seaside. I met Ronaldo M. Ferraz at FISL a few weeks ago, and he asked if he could interview me. He sent me a list of questions by email, which I ...

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The Weekly Squeak: Squeak and the filesystem

2008-05-02T10:50:00+00:00

One of the stumbling blocks for experienced developers looking at Squeak for the first time is the concept of the “image”. Many developers, especially from the UNIX world are used to managing their source code and other resources with a host of file-based utilities, including editors, archivers and change-management tools.

The Squeak philosophy that everything happens within the image can make the transition to Squeak painful for such developers, but there are tools out there to help with the transition. Two such tools were discussed recently on the #squeak irc channel.

Johan Björk announced the release of SqueakFS, which allows you to browse and search all objects contained in your squeak image from your local file system. SqueakFS is currently read-only, but the developers are interested in adding editing capabilities. The file system functionality is provided by a socket client built on top of FusePython. This client translates file system paths into squeak objects and queries a server running in the squeak image for details on these objects. In order to do this, SqueakFS uses FusePython for file system support and is dependent on both FUSE and Python and will only work on UNIX systems. SqueakFS has been developed and tested on Linux 2.6 and MacOS Leopard running on Intel systems.

Brian Rice pointed to another recent project, Stave, which mounts sources on a webDAV share, and so provides an editable WebDAV interface to Squeak’s class system. With the use of a WebDAV filesystem or a webDAV-enabled editor, this enables a file-based view on Squeak. Stave is intended primarily for use with external editors, and hasn’t been tested with search tools.

Luca Bruno: Syx Manual

2008-05-02T08:56:00+00:00

Hello,
I report the post on the mailing list below:

Hello,
with the next release 0.1.7, once I get a working interpreter and updated all the parts of Syx,
I will move output of doxygen to doc/reference and start a texinfo manual in doc/manual.

My idea is to have this kind of manual:
1) What is Smalltalk
2) Why Smalltalk YX
3) Introduction to the language
4) Introduction the Syx environment
5) COMPLETE Class and methods documentation, EACH non private method will be documented with examples
and EACH class will have usage examples
6) Embedding
7) Advanced topics, internal documentation

I know it's not the time yet for Smalltalk YX to get such documentation but I think it will be
a nice boost for the project and also for the entire Smalltalk community.
Since I don't have such fantasy now I will start directly with all except the 5th topic.

Any hint will be appreciated.
Bye.

EDIT:
The Smalltalk reference will be created automatically from Smalltalk itself.

The Weekly Squeak: Using Smalltalk with Java: JavaConnect and JNIPort

2008-04-30T10:18:20+00:00

Torsten Bergmann has an interesting post which introduces JavaConnect, a project by Johan Brichau, a postdoctoral researcher at the Université catholique de Louvain. JavaConnect is a library (developed using Visualworks Smalltalk and released under the MIT licence) that allows a seamless interaction between Smalltalk and Java. Johan describes it as allowing a Smalltalk application to “access any Java object and send messages to it, just as if it were a Smalltalk object. Its implementation relies on a connection between the Smalltalk environment and a standard Java VM environment using Visualworks’ DLLCC and Java’s JNI. The Java application thus executes on a regular Java VM and the Smalltalk application executes on the regular Smalltalk VM.”

Joachim Geidel posted a comment giving a detailed comparison of JavaConnect to JNIPort, a similar tool developed by Chris Uppal for Dolphin Smalltalk, and ported by to VisualWorks by Joachim, a consultant for blueCarat Consulting GmbH. JNIPort (available under a bespoke, liberal licence) invokes a Java VM using the Invocation Interface functions of the Java Native Interface (JNI). It can automatically generate wrapper classes for Java classes.

Joachim and Johan developed the two projects in parallel, and have discussed whether they could merge in the future, although there are a number of differences in the designs at present. In particular, Joachim believes that JNIPort as currently implemented could be more readily ported to Squeak.

Torsten Bergmann: JavaConnect := Java asSmalltalkValue

2008-04-29T07:33:00+00:00

Nice project: JavaConnect is a Visualworks Smalltalk library that allows a seamless interaction between Smalltalk and Java. A Smalltalk application can access any Java object and send messages to it, just as if it were a Smalltalk object.

Read more at the JavaConnect project page:

Would be interesting to know how this relates to Joachim Geidels JNIPort project.

The Weekly Squeak: New Dabble DB Demo Debuts

2008-04-28T12:44:46+00:00

Avi Bryant writes at the Dabble DB blog that the team has produced a new 8-minute demo of their product in action. This new video replaces their 2006 video which was linked to so frequently that it still shows up as #4 in the google results for “the demo“.

Dabble DB is a tool to help you create, manage, interpret and present data via your browser. Written in Squeak using the Seaside web application framework, it has received glowing reviews since its launch in 2005.

Torsten Bergmann: Smalltalk Evening in Munich

2008-04-28T09:06:00+00:00

Today we have our next Smalltalk Evening here in Munich. Its hosted at:

Systementwicklung und Verkehrsinformatik GmbH
Nymphenburger Straße 14/Sandstr. 26

Please use the side entry Sandstr. 26 (5th floor), we start at 7.30pm

Two main topics:
- VW-Software at Gevas
- Squeak

Maybe we find the time to talk about Seaside too.

Randal Schwartz: Subverting Perl People into Smalltalk Hackers

2008-04-27T14:36:06+00:00

After FISL, I spent a week in Rio to kick back and visit my friends of the Rio Perl Users Group (commonly known as "Rio.pm"). I offered to give a talk in exchange for hanging out for a meal, and they asked me what I would want to talk about. Of c...

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The Weekly Squeak: Using Squeak in Education

2008-04-26T17:32:35+00:00

Hilaire Fernandes is writing a series of blog posts intended to introduce Squeak to teachers and to developers of educational software. The articles—available in both English and French—are intended to be a gentle introduction to Squeak’s features, and to highlight the ways in which it can be used in education. In each post Hilaire introduces a new topic, and explains its relevance to educational users.

In writing this series of posts, Hilaire is able to draw on many years involvement in developing Free software in education (including Dr Geo II for the OLPC XO), and working with education professionals to incorporate such software into the school curriculum.

The first post gives Squeak’s background and introduces Morphic - English, Français.

The second post is an overview of how images work - English, Français.

The Weekly Squeak: Squeak Project in Google Summer of Code 2008

2008-04-25T11:23:06+00:00

The Google Summer of Code team have announced that the Squeak Project is one of 175 Free and Open Source projects that have been accepted into their programme for 2008.

This year’s submission was explicitly under the “Squeak Project” title, to allow for projects from the wider community developing based on the Squeak environment.

The current list of projects with assigned students consists of:

Safarà: an Extensible Code Editor for Squeak by Luigi Panzeri, mentored by Lukas Renggli
Squeak IRC bot framework by Francois Stephany, mentored by Ken Causey
Squeak GTK Support by Gwenaël Casaccio, mentored by Stéphane Ducasse
freeCAD: 3D CAD with Motion Simulation Port to Croquet by Phua Khai Fong, mentored by Aik-Siong Koh
OpenNARS port to Squeak using Seaside by Cédrick Beler, mentored by Klaus D. Witzel

Congratulations to Giovanni Corriga and colleagues on the SoC mailing list who put the Squeak Project submission together, and best wishes to the students and mentors for a productive and enjoyable experience. We’re all looking forward to seeing your work!

Stephan Wessels: <br>I should have known better <br>

2008-04-24T00:33:49+00:00

April 23, 2008.

This is a very personal story.

I was in the hospital recently. And I wasn't visiting someone. It was about me. And I was there twice. First it was a trip to the Emergency Room. Then, a few days later, I was "admitted" into the hospital for treatment. I stayed for 3 days that second time. The earlier ER visit was about 6 hours long.

So what happened? The simple answer is that had a Gastro-Intestinal (GI) bleed. I lost between 4 and 5 pints of blood over a period of around 5 to 6 days. Details in a moment.

Looking back, I recognize I made a couple mistakes and I now realize how lucky I am.

On that pervious Saturday morning I awoke very early. It was around 4:30 AM. My stomach hurt. This was nothing new. There's been a lot of stress and worry about job stability and financial outlook. The company had been bought and there was a lot of open discussion about outsourcing all the IT staff; with rumors of layoffs of perhaps as many as 80% coming some this year. So the pain was understandable and familiar. I had been treated for stomach ulcers around 30 years ago, so I knew what they felt like.

I wandered into the kitchen, grabbed the bottle of chilled Mylanta from the refridgerator and swallowed a few gulps. I stayed up for around an hour, surfing the web and reading news sites.

Melissa, my wife, was up by around 5:30 AM that morning. That's our usual time, even on Saturdays. I still didn't feel comfortable and decided maybe I'd feel better if I spent a few minutes in the bathroom. I told her I wasn't feeling too good.

So there I was in the bathroom just sitting patiently. That was when it happened. Just before I stood up, I noticed my skin was clamy. When I stood up I nearly fainted. The room was spinning around and I was feeling very weak.

So I walked carefully, but quickly, over to the bed and laid down. By this time my wife came back into the bedroom to see how I was feeling. My breathing was really odd, I seemed to have short breaths. And I was drenched in perspiration.

We have nicknames for each other. I call her "Wif", she calls me "Hubster".

I remember saying, "Wif, something's wrong." Now this is very unusual. I'm generally the healthy one. Sure I get colds and the flu, but never anything serious. And for me to tell her that something was wrong was also a sign of something serious since I never did that sort of thing.

Melissa, remembering how her father had died from a heart-attack 12 years ago, was concerned that I might be having a heart attack. My symptoms were not exactly like a heart attack, but something was not right. She immediately called the doctor's emergency line and spoke to him about my symptoms. They agreed I should be checked at the Emergency Room in the hospital.

So she drove me over.

The hospital was efficient. They took my vitals and put me on an EKG machine.

Truth is I don't remember a lot about that morning because of my overall feeling of tiredness.

They also took a blood sample. I think they do this as an additional check to see if you had a heart attack.

My blood pressure was a lot lower than normal for me. But it was within normal range. And the tests showed I did not have a heart attack.

The hospital also did chest x-rays as part of their standard procedure.

The diagnosis was "Vasovagal Episode". Here's a summary of the information they provided which describes the symptoms.

There was a fall in blood pressure due to an interaction of the nervous system and the circulatory system. This results in an abnormally slow pulse, faintness, low blood pressure and other abnormal sensations. Vasovagal symptoms are brought on by emotional distress, pain, dehydration, bleeding or medication.

They did not find any serious problem. That's reasonable since there were no other symptoms to go on. And the possible pain contribution should also not be ignored. I'd been diagnosed with Adhesive Capsulitis (Frozen Shoulder) a few weeks earlier. This had been causing me a lot of pain and made sleeping soundly difficult. My right shoulder/arm constantly ached and if I rolled over and put pressure on it I could feel a lot more pain. And I'd just come off of a week of doing on-call Production support for my work, carrying a pager. It had been a fairly quiet week with only a one early morning (2:30) pages to deal with. But it's easy to see how this all fell into place. I was stressed, not rested, dehydrated and dealing with continual shoulder pain.

So they sent me home after lots of test and about 6 hours time in total. I was instructed to drink a lot of water and to rest.

Getting rest later that weekend was easy. I was really tired. And Melissa and I were both relieved that my heart seemed to be in fine shape.

I slept most of the day. That evening I had to go to the bathroom again. This part is a "poop story," so sorry if that's offensive. There were two problems I experienced.

The stools were very dark and soft, almost sticky. Like tar and black like coal. And the water had blood in it. Dark plum-red blood, and what seemed like a lot of it. I looked and became alarmed. I really got scared. You're not supposed to see blood and certainly not that much.

And I made two dumb choices. I did one of those "guy things" and decided to go to bed and hoped it would go away. I worried, but I ignored it.

I also didn't want to go back to the Emergency Room, so I didn't tell my wife. That was the second dumb choice.

I woke up again that evening around 12:30 AM and Melissa was still awake. She asked me how I was feeling. She could tell I didn't feel right and was understandably concerned from earlier that day. I couldn't bring myself to tell her about the blood in my stool water. It was embarrassing and I also didn't want to alarm her and make her worry even more.

But I was concerned enough that we agreed we would set the alarm for 2:30 AM to wake me and check how I was feeling. When the time came I was still feeling exhausted but not worse. So we went back to sleep for the night.

On the following Sunday morning I had another episode where my stools were tar-like and I was still discharging a lot of blood. Again, I didn't share the part about those symptoms. However, we did agree that I would call-in sick for work Monday and that I would call the doctor's office and get in as soon as possible that day for a follow-up visit from the Emergency Room activity that Saturday.

That morning, around 11:00 AM I was able to get an appointment with my doctor. He reviewed my verbal account of what happened on Saturday and also reviewed the report from the hospital with me.

I told him about the blood in the stool. He asked about the color of the stool and blood. Since it was a very black stool, he said that meant I probably had a stomach ulcer. So he prescribed Previcid and ordered a blood test.

I went back home and went to bed. I told Melissa about the blood. She was very upset with me for keeping this a secret from her. She was right. We talked about it a bit and I promised, and meant it, that I would never do that again.

The following Tuesday morning I called-in sick again because I was still feeling really exhausted. We were also hoping to get the lab results from the blood test on Monday, even as soon as that Monday evening. But had to wait till Tuesday morning.

We had another appointment with the doctor at around 1:30 that afternoon. We reviewed the blood test and learned that my hemoglobin count was way down. He said it was likely that my ulcer had gotten close to an artery and was dumping blood into my stomach.

After some discussion over our options, with the advice of the doctor, we agreed I would check-in to a hospital that afternoon. The goal was to get an Endoscopy procedure performed quickly to ascertain where I was bleeding and how it should be addressed.

The Endoscopy procedure, in addition to allowing the doctors to see carefully all around my upper-GI, also has the ability to heat, or cauterize, any open wounds.

I was admitted to the hospital within the hour.

Melissa likes to tell the story about how I was in such denial about needing hospital care. Now, I don't have as clear a memory of all this since I was by this time feeling both exhausted and very distracted.

The room was actually very nice. It had a private bed, shower room, and a sleeper-couch for a guest. Apparently, upon arriving in my hospital room, I decided to stay seated, still dressed in my street clothes, on the couch. I wouldn't put on the hospital gown nor sit on the bed. That status hadn't changed until the nurse came in and asked me to get dressed and get into the bed.

After changing clothes and getting into the hospital bed, according to my wife, I went into "geek mode". I started rambling endlessly about how the hospital bed must have a strain-guage in it so they could easily measure my weight while lying in bed. And apparently I rambled on and on about how strain-guages work (I used to be a mechanical engineer about 30 years ago). And then I rambled about my observations about the sensors and other equipment that was visually evident from the hospital bed.

According to her, I was behaving as if in complete denial that I had been checked into a hospital. I could not mentally accept that I was in serious trouble.

The nurses started an IV on me right away to get my fluids level up and to give me some nutrients. I was not permitted to eat real food for several hours in preparation for the endoscopy procedure that was scheduled to happen that evening.

Little did I realize that my encounter with needles had only just begun.

After I was checked-in, Melissa had to take off to put other things in order while we would both be at the hospital. She intended to stay in the room with me as much as possible. We had already agreed that she would spend the night in the room on the pull-out-bed of the couch.

She had already arranged to have Nicholas, our son, stay with a friend for the next few days and so she went home to transport him over. She also brought our Macintosh laptop computers so we could both have things to do besides watch television. I'm happy to report I never turned the television on. The hospital provides Wireless Internet access, and that was cool.

She also wanted to go home and pack up some clothes for the evening and eat her dinner too.

When Melissa returned later that evening, she found a way to make her arrival dramatic. By accident.

Now, she's not mechanically inclined. And from what I could see from my hospital bed, it looked like pulling the sleeper-bed out from the couch would take a little care. Within moments of her arrival, since it was past 10:00 PM, she started to pull out the bed.

Now if you can imagine it, the mechanism was like an elaborate scissors with many moving parts. And you had to do it only a certain way. Well she started to pull it up and out and the major section of it was sitting high in the air, like a triangle. It didn't look right to me. I remember saying, "Wif, that doesn't look right." And she got kinda stuck mid-way in motion. Something got jammed up or out of order.

And then the entire assembly dropped down hard to the floor. It made a very loud crashing sound. A heavy thud.

Two nurses came running in the door, panic written on their faces. They dashed over to where she was, lying on the floor, with the pull-out bed in a somewhat proper shape.

After everyone realized that no one was hurt, we all took a moment to laugh. I'm sure it was also embarrassing for Melissa.

The funny part was that the next day, when the nurses came into the room after she had left. They instructed me to please have a nurse come into the room and setup the spare bed next time she arrives. I guess they didn't want a repeat performance.

The worst part about the whole hospital experience was needles. Actually, there were several worst parts. But right now, the needles experience stands out.

From the moment I arrived in the Emergency Room on that Saturday, I was getting jabbed with needles. They needed a blood sample. So they sent in a technician who did it. Now I've been stuck by needles enough times now that I know what to expect. But that guy. He was quick but man, did it hurt. I yelled "Ow!" when he did it. It's supposed to pinch. Not hurt.

By the time I was back on Tuesday and admitted to my hospital room, they put me on an IV right away. And of course that required inserting a tiny tube into a vein. That wasn't as bad. The nurse who did it was skilled.

But there were lots of other times. For example, they needed to draw blood samples on a regular basis because they were monitoring my hemoglobin levels. This was more than once a day. And it was getting harder and harder for them to get a sample because my overall blood volume was so low. The poked around my arms inside the elbow, on both arms. The poked around the fore-arms. And the hands too. There's a lot of potential vein sites on the top of the hand. The problem was that sometimes they would get a tube in there but then the flow would collapse and have to start anew. Or one time I remember when they were giving me the 2 blood transfusions, the original site had blocked up and could no longer be used so they switched arms. The nurse had a heck of a time locating a vein that worked for her. I remember I was sweating from the pain she was causing while moving the needle around trying to get a line started. She tried three times before asking another nurse to come in and try.

There were 2 very nice needle punctures that happened. One, which happened at 4:00 AM one morning, was done by a nurse with a Russian accent. I don't know if I knew her name. She went into my left hand. It was so gentle I didn't even notice. I thanked her for that.

Another one was when a technician came in to draw a blood sample and I was telling him how good a job the nurse from early that morning had been. He commented, "Well, we can't have a woman doing a better job than me." and proceeded to do an excellent and gentle pinch.

Some of the time the problem was because my body was not co-operating. Sometimes I think it was the skill of the person.

I was on Morphine for pain for a few times on one of the days, and during that time I don't remember needle pokes. I also slept a lot. Although I'm pretty sure I was awakened for every blood drawing. One thing for sure, you don't really get much rest in a hospital. It seemed like I was awakened about every four hours for something they needed to check or do.

Before the 2 units of whole blood were given to me, I had apparently been showing real signs of anemia. My wife said I looked gray as death. She told me days later how scared she was when looking at me. I admit when I looked at my feet they looked a kind of green-gray color. One of the doctors explained easy ways you can check color is by looking at the hands and eyes.

On the hand, if you look at your palms, you can see all those lines that are sometimes used by fortune tellers and such. The lines should have a slight pink color to them. On my hands they were blanched.

The other easy one, which you cannot do yourself without a mirror, is to look under your eyelid. The doctor showed my wife if you pulled back the lower eye lid flap and looked underneath you should see red. They told me mine were parchment white.

I also learned that the hemoglobin count tests could yield inaccurate numbers because of the drop in my overall blood volume. The lowest test score we got was 8.3, which is pretty low. I should be around 14 to 15. But we also know that when the blood volume was low the count was actually probably lower than the test indicated. This was one of the contributing factors to why they decided to give me 2 whole units in a blood transfusion. From what a doctor explained to me, they avoid this step if at all possible.

It was explained that there's always risk with donated blood. You just don't know about the donator's life-style nor what diseases they may be carrying. It was explained to me that even though blood is carefully screened today, some of the tests we run now we're not known about only 10 years ago and who knows what we don't know to test for today?

But the blood transfusions were wonderful in results. By the time the second one completed I had most of my color back. And a lot of my mental energy was back. I still got winded if I went for a walk, and I got tired if I worked on anything mental for more than an hour, but I was a lot better. I was told it would take about 6 weeks for me to feel right again.

After the last blood transfusion, which each took 3 hours, I had a final meal at the hospital. The food there is pretty good. And I was hungry.

I was also fortunate that my friends Blaine and his wife Michelle dropped by to visit. They hung out with us while I finished my meal and when the nurses came in to disconnect me from all the equipment.

I had to be pushed in a wheel chair to meet the car when leaving but I was so grateful to be going home.

When I was home and back in my own bed I began to reflect on what had happened. This led me to a train of thought about an experience from when I was in my early 20's.

Back then, I was working as a Mechanical Draftsman in an Engineering Department. My mentor was a person also named Steve. He had a kidney disease and was required to undergo dialysis twice a week. Well, the time had come where he was due to have a kidney replacement. Now as I understood it, they had to give him some kind of medication during the procedure that would thin his blood. The problem was he also had a bleeding stomach ulcer. So he had to go into the hospital to have the ulcer repaired first.

He died during the procedure on his ulcer. Now this was 30 years ago. I don't really know a lot about what his conditions were but I truly believe this: The medicines and medical practices today have improved so much. I'm thankful that I didn't turn out like he did.

After spending 4 days at home I was ready to attempt re-entry into the work place. Truth is I get really anxious without having something mental to do. So I went back for 2 half days.

The first half day was exciting. I was so thrilled to be back at work. And many people were glad to see me back. But by the end of the second half-day I and was so exhausted I slept for 15 hours. I ended up staying home the next day and sleeping except for getting up to eat meals.

I went back to work again but promised to only do a half-day again and then rest up for the weekend since that was a Friday.

When I started again the following Monday I did whole days of work. Now I've been working 3 full days straight. And today was the first day I drove myself to and from work. Prior to this, Melissa had been driving me.

The work experience has been interesting. I found myself telling people that they were talking too fast for me to follow what they were saying. Anyone who has ever worked with me will see the humor and irony in that. And I seemed to get "winded" easily when I walked around. I also notice that my comprehension skills drop off by mid-afternoon. I avoid trying to understand or code anything requiring deep concentration during that time.

I'm drinking a lot of water every day. I'm doing about 3.5 liters of water a day. And I'm taking Iron pills twice a day and taking medication to heal my stomach.

Because of the need for me to build up red blood cells, I'm eating a lot of spinach salads and broccoli. And I'm having steak for dinner most nights. That's a neat perk.

So what did I learn?

One thing is that I promised my wife to never withhold medical related information again. I should not have done that and understand better why.

Another is that I'm grateful to be alive and recovering.

I also learned that I need to pay attention to what my body is telling me. When my stomach first started to bother me weeks before all this happened, I should have taken that seriously and seen the doctor right away.

I also have a renewed respect for modern pharmacology and the practice of medicine today.

Luca Bruno: Time for Debian

2008-04-22T18:55:00+00:00

Hello,
I switched to Debian lately and i think it will become my preferred distribution.
I started with Slackware, then an LFS and then Gentoo. I never found them definitive for me.

I used Slackware by compiling sources most of all, then i didn't see any reason to continue using it.

The LFS came since my new PC as a test, and as long I could maintain it I had no problems and had fun with it.

I then installed Gentoo when i got my first DSL. But the updates are slow for lack of testing, I'm on an amd64. I tried to contribute someway but for the time I've been using it I never seen a open and innovative development (not in the sense that it wasn't friendly). And also, I've seen many developers leaving the project.

In other words, I "almost" used always source-based distribution. All the time I tried other binary-based distribution also to change my way of linux-life, like OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Foresight, and so on but no one satisfied me.

Then i wanted to try Debian, hoping it was different than Ubuntu. And in fact it is!
What I like of Debian is it's very high QA, how new users deal with bugs, how stable it is, how the BTS work, how the packaging works (eventough there are lots of useful tools I still don't know), the rapid updates, the security.

The thing I dislike from other distribution is that they release new stable versions but that are not so stable at first. For example i had troubles with the package manager with both Ubuntu and Foresight. Boot problems with Ubuntu, several crashes with Foresight, and so on.

But, I don't want to say Debian is now my preferred distro (I'm still afraid of binaries), but this is the good way and hopefully the last choice. Go Debian!

The Weekly Squeak: “An Introduction to Seaside” now published

2008-04-21T12:59:22+00:00

Michael Perscheid announced in the Seaside mailing list the publication of a new Seaside book An Introduction to Seaside. He says that:

“This book explains the major concepts of Seaside in a clear and intuitive style. A working example of a ToDo List application is developed to illustrate the framework’s important concepts that build upon each other in an orderly progression. Besides the notions of users, tasks, components, forms and deployment, additional topics such as persistence, Ajax and Magritte are also discussed.”

The book is based on the online tutorial developed at the Hasso-Plattner Institut, and the content has been revised and expanded for this edition.

The 212-page book can be previewed and ordered at online publisher lulu.com for about €20/£14/$25.

Congratulations to all involved at the HPI Software Architecture Group for producing this great introduction to Seaside. They are: David Tibbe, Michael Perscheid, Martin Beck, Stefan Berger, Jeff Eastman, Michael Haupt, Robert Hirschfeld and Peter Osburg.

The Weekly Squeak: Video of Newspeak lecture now available

2008-04-19T19:46:48+00:00

The video has now been posted of Gilad Bracha’s talk on Newspeak that we mentioned last month. Newspeak is a new dynamic language being developed at Cadence, and is descended from Smalltalk and Self, with influences from E, Scala and Scheme, exploring ideas around combinatorial parsing, strict message-passing, reflectivity, capability-based security and actor-style concurrency.

Newspeak is being developed on top of Squeak, and the presentation makes a number of direct comparisons with Squeak, especially when discussing UI matters such as the Newspeak widget framework, application framework and Class Browser, and how they’ve improved on Squeak’s access to the operating system with a new FFI framework.

The roadmap for the future development of Newspeak is also laid out, including a discussion of when/whether the code will be published.

(If you’re having trouble viewing the video, see this thread for help).

[Edit - Gilad Bracha has a fascinating blog that records his ongoing development of Newspeak.]

Randal Schwartz: Smalltalk at FISL: now and forever!

2008-04-19T18:07:21+00:00

I gave my Seaside intro talk earlier today at FISL 9.0 (pictures being uploaded to my flickr account already). The talk was well-attended (about 200 or so in the audience), including some Rails folks. I was surprised though when I asked how many...

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Torsten Bergmann: Seaside and SVG

2008-04-18T15:13:00+00:00

The SVG project for Seaside is moving forward. It now also includes an example for rendering charts and a Mondrian graph. Meanwhile also the Mootools for Seaside got ported from VW to Squeak.

Here is a screenshot (click to enlarge):

Torsten Bergmann: Krestianstvo

2008-04-18T14:55:00+00:00

"Krestianstvo" - a framework to design Tweak UI's for Croquet applications in plain XML and CSS files. It includes one example of using XUL in Croquet. The project is hosted on Squeaksource.

Randal Schwartz: Mentioned Seaside on "The Future And You"

2008-04-16T15:44:33+00:00

I was interviewed by noted futurist Stephen Euin Cobb for his podcast, The Future And You. If you skip ahead to about the fifty-five minute mark, you'll hear me rave about Seaside and describe my recent activities. I also rant about why Muni Wifi...

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The Weekly Squeak: Waveplace in the US Virgin Islands

2008-04-16T12:44:38+00:00

Hi everyone,

We’ve just posted two new videos from the St John Waveplace pilot, which concluded three weeks ago. The first shows mentoring during the pilot. The second shows students presenting their Etoys storybooks.

1) Scenes from the St John pilot (4 minutes)

http://waveplace.com/locations/usvi/movie.jsp?id=45

2) The St John Storybook Awards (8 minutes)

http://waveplace.com/locations/usvi/movie.jsp?id=44

We will be posting the actual storybooks to our website soon so you can see them for yourself.

In other news, the Haiti pilot will resume next week, since things have calmed down in Port-Au-Prince. The kids and teachers are well.

As always, if you’d like to hear more from us, please subscribe to our newsletter or donate money on our website to help with our courseware and pilots.

Take care,

Tim

–

Timothy Falconer

Waveplace Foundation

http://waveplace.com

610-797-3100

Torsten Bergmann: Diff Tools for Squeak

2008-04-16T10:53:00+00:00

Gary Chambers announced new Diff Tools for Squeak as part of the UI Enhancement packages.

Looks promising:

and with different fonts and different look:

Torsten Bergmann: Arrrggghhhh .....

2008-04-15T14:08:00+00:00

Arrghhh!!! Try this:

Smalltalk

Transcript show: (50.0 - 7.23) asString

returns 42.77

C/C++

#include 

int main(int argc, char ** argv) {
    double a = 50.0 - 7.23;
    printf("%lf", a);
}

returns 42.770000

Java

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        double a = 50.0 - 7.23;
        System.out.println(a);
    }
}

returns 42.769999999999996

Luca Bruno: Smalltalk YX toward a new interpreter

2008-04-15T09:51:00+00:00

Hello,
Smalltalk YX is currently working on refactoring a part of the interpreter, relative to contexts and stack management.
The current version uses one stack per process but always create contexts for each method or block entered.
The new branch, called newinterp, won't create those contexts anymore but they will be created only on-demand (e.g. thisContext). This means both less resources and garbage collector usage, and a possible speedup.

More informations on the mailing list here.