As a long time Squeak/Pharo (Smalltalk) developer I have accumulated a set of packages that I have written or co-written and that have been published open source for others to use. Since quite a few years SqueakSource has been the natural hosting place, but it has reached the end of the road and it’s high time to move on.

When I bought my Lenovo X220 - which I have been extremely pleased with to date - I chose an Intel 320 160Gb SSD disk with it, in retrospect a BAD MISTAKE. No idea why I didn’t find the warnings plastered all over the net at the time, and the problem was even acknowledged by Intel as early as july 2011. The disk has been working fine since april when I got it, until the last day of 2012…

In a customer project right now I need to be able to work and evolve code fast, with a relatively complex model. And by fast I mean that I want to cut away as much as possible of the efforts related to persistence. Generally this is what OODBs excel at.

In the Squeak world we have GemStone (commercial), GOODS and Magma as “full fledged” OODBs. Last century :) I worked with GemStone (both Gemstone/S and /J) and its a great product - but I want something lightweight and open source. And simple. And hackable. And new. :)

I also used Magma in the Gjallar project, and while I respect it highly - this time I want to try something with an “externally supported backend”. I also had a mixed performance experience, but this was “pre Cog” and Magma has also surely evolved lots since then, and I am not sure we did everything the way we should have either.

SandstoneDB could also be interesting to look more closely at, but since I have been working with Nicolas Petton on improving Phriak (Riak interface for Pharo) it was natural to take a look at one of his “under the radar” projects - Oak, an “OODBish” solution on top of Riak. At this point I have been doing much more than looking, in fact I am hacking on it! And oh, yeah, of course there are lots more persistence options available too.

So… I kinda got tired of Wordpress. A bit too much for me, I want something more lightweight that “just works”. I also stumbled over some blog that had just moved over to Octopress and made it sound like “da shit” for coders. So be it! And so far so good.

In short I did an XML export from inside Wordpress admin, created an account on Disqus, added the disqus plugin for Wordpress, exported over all comments, then “git cloned” Octopress onto my laptop, used exitwp (from github) to migrate my XML file from Wordpress, used rsync deploy over to my server and adjusted config in Octopress to use disqus (and thus pick up all old comments).

Yeah, that’s about it. :)

Recently there were a range of threads on the pharo-dev mailinglist discussing the textual format to use for Smalltalk source code metadata. The discussion veered off from the specific use case but basically four different formats were discussed and compared, of which one I am the author. And oh, sorry for the formatting of this article - I need to change theme on this blog for better readability.