Topic: Computing

A friend of mine is having a less optimal experience with Linux, and I realized I could jot down my experience for the last few years.

It starts off with Cincom, Arden Thomas presenting their roadmap. He had a slide mentioning Jules Verne and I must ask him if he is aware of the influence from the books of Jules Verne - as Dan has explained, the ballon and the island in the classic Smalltalk logo comes from the Mysterious Island book.

Day three blurred a bit for me - lots of mingling and hacking intermixed with some nice presentations, but I missed quite a lot, I admit, like the presentation on new native UI stuff in VisualWorks and the tODE stuff from Dale Henrichs.

Another day in IAE Universite Savoie Mont-Blanc in Annecy.

Here we go! Time for a week of Smalltalking fun in IAE Universite Savoie Mont-Blanc in Annecy.

I am sitting in a gate on an airport waiting to go to ESUG so I felt I should finally get this article out the door. In a presentation earlier this year I asked what has happened in the programming language area since year 2000? Not much I felt and I couldn’t really name any interesting new language when thinking about it. But then I decided to look more closely and I can conclude I was at least partly wrong :)

15-18 years ago my passion was in OODBs. As a Smalltalker GemStone was one of the most fascinating to work with, but as we all know OODBs never got really popular, despite their fantastic qualities. But the new NoSQL databases in many respects offer OODB-ish characteristics, although they of course also bring a whole new menu to the table.

Recently when I automated a development process I looked deeper at managing virtual environments and ended up using two really nice tools complementing VirtualBox in a slick way - Vagrant and Veewee. A lot of us use VirtualBox of course, but getting a new Ubuntu box up is still a bit of blablablabla… What if it could be done all from the command line and easily automated?

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.

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.