When I started my own company about a year ago I ended up buying an ASUS G73JW gaming laptop - I took a deliberate decision to focus on raw power for decent money and totally ignoring portability. Generally it has served me well, although it does tend to make a lot of fan noise, at least under Ubuntu. It might work smoother in Windows, but I seldom boot into Windows.

Needless to say though it is a real ton of bricks (8.8 lbs = 4 kg) and including the truly fat power supply it simply weared my back down during 2011. I have been carrying this beast in a backpack every day - and my body eventually said “enough dammit!”. :)

These days I am, as usual, torn between several interesting technical projects.

Amber

The new Smalltalk called Amber (by Nicolas Petton) that compiles to javascript is pretty awesome and there are tons of interesting things one can do with it. My contributions so far include the beginning of a package model, a faster simpler chunk format exporter/importer, a command line compiler, a Makefile system so that Amber can be built fully from the command line and a bunch of examples running on top of Nodejs and webOS, and a few other odds and ends.

This day started with some stress, Nicolas and I whipped up the last details of our co-presentation on Jtalk (Nicolas decided to skip Iliad) - and my Eris demo suddenly got b0rken. But I managed to fix it and our presentation was very well received - it was great fun!

Nicolas managed to do quite a few “on the fly” demonstrations of various Jtalk snippets etc, and running the slides in Jtalk was of course a killer thing. I explained how jtalkc is being run on top of Node.js and quickly proceeded into showing the TrivialServer demo in Node.is - when Apache benchmark showed 1800 requests/second there was a spontaneous applause. :)

Now we can relax and talk to all people about Jtalk - and now in fact the web panel starts with Nicolas on the panel. Unfortunately the panel discussion didn’t play out that well, it needs some entertainment and also at least one or two that disagree :)

Later tonight and tomorrow we will probably keep on hacking Jtalk like mad. So much fun stuff to play with! We intend to “finish” the first stab at so called “speculative inviting” that we started earlier this week, and try to do some profiling on it to verify the gains. Using the Compiler is actually a good candidate for a reasonable benchmark.

The evening ended with the usual pubs and hacking and chatting about cool things people are doing.

Suddenly it is Wednesday and we are already on day three at ESUG - a superb software developer conference focused on Smalltalk. Time flies. Yesterday I mainly hacked together with Nicolas Petton on Jtalk, really fun, unfortunately I missed a few interesting presentations, like Fuel and Bifrost etc.

This day starts with Stéphane presenting “Humane assessment”. Mmm, got distracted by my Touchpad, but Stéphane is showing some cool visualizations right now, clearly useful for large systems and organisations that need understand their own “huge legacy software”. Hehe, the browsers shows visual queues on “bad designs” like marking methods as “BrainMethod” or marking a class as “God Class” - that is indeed very slick!

All in all it looks like a very useful tool - I should probably try it out on some codebase. In fact, this tool is a really good “added value” tool that can be offered to customers when helping them. I have at least one client that really could make some good use of a tool like this.

Next up before coffee is Arden Thomas from Cincom (hehe, that was funny, the Touchpad wanted to correct “Cincom” to “Condom”…) presenting what is new in their products / ObjectStudio and VisualWorks. These are really mature and amazing Smalltalk tools, but of course they also costs money, money, money. But VisualWorks is accessible in a non commercial full version, which is quite nice if it fits your needs. Cincom is also quite active in a bunch of open source Smalltalk projects like for example GLORP (think “Hibernate” for all you non-Smalltalkers) and Seaside (the most outstanding web framework in the world).

After running around flaunting the Touchpad :) - I came slightly late to Igor Stasenko’s presentation on NativeBoost. I have worked with Igor and he has this refreshing “fearlessness” so diving into assembler is not a problem for him. So NativeBoost is an extension to the Squeak VM (and the new Cog VM) that enables dynamic machine code generation - and execution - directly from Smalltalk using just Smalltalk. So it includes a DSL for writing assembler (a port of AsmJit) and mechanisms to access memory etc etc. The machine code needs to be relocation agnostic since it is actually stored directly in a Smalltalk object (the method) and will be moving around due to the garbage collector moving things around. Another interesting issue is that if the machine code calls into the VM in order to create a Smalltalk object, it will need to be aware of the fact that this can trigger GCs and move things around - but this is just the same for building VM plugins. Of course, Igor’s stuff is very impressive and you can make very fast code using it.

The day then ended with the social event and announcing the winners of the awards and a nice dinner followed up with some beer and endless “Why doesn’t everyone use Smalltalk?” discussions - as is customary.

Over and out, Goran “typing this in on my Touchpad using the bluetooth keyboard”

Sooo…. I actually managed to order a HP Touchpad 32Gb here in Edinburgh to be picked up at Comet within 48 hours. I ordered when it was still a whopping 429£, but when I went to pick it up I got it at the UK discount price of 115, and I will get the VAT back too.

The first hours were frustrating because I was in the ESUG conference and we only had a WiFi with a so called “captive portal” with a login form - and the first time you power up a Touchpad it wants to hook up to a Palm Profile, and does not want to do that using a WiFi with a captive portal.

The Montague pub to the rescue later that evening, an open wifi. I am currently writing this post using the Bluetooth keyboard (so nice) while the TP is snugly positioned on the Touchstone inductive charger. Both these are great accessories. I have also managed to do Skype with my wife, really easy and worked well, hook up the calendar to Google with perfect sync, and in fact it synched over all my contacts etc from my Palm Profile for my Palm Pre 2 - just works!

I have done the OTA 3.0.2 update (in the pub while eating) and I have installed a bunch of apps, like the one I am typing in know - for WordPress. I have also activated the included 50Gb free cloud space included from box.net - brilliant.

Email app is running fine, Facebook app is very good, tons of other little nifty things - I am a happy camper! Is it just as “smooth as silk” as the iPad? No, but it excels in other areas like true multitasking, a real Linux beneath (bonus for me as a developer), synergy, full flash, 50Gb cloudspace for life included, really good virtual keyboard (multiple sizes even) etc etc. Sure, slightly thicker and slightly heavier - but…. BUT…. It cost me around 85£ with 32Gb RAM. That argument is a killer.

Day after tomorrow I will be demonstrating apps written in Jtalk running on it - yiha!