Squeak smalltalk adventure

Subject matter

2009-07-24T20:23:00.000-07:00

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On writing. It can be seen that articles are found everywhere, on most websites; anywhere that the written word can be placed. One letter, a singular subject matter, can be expounded and made to balloon into numerous words to present that singular starting thesis and morph into a fully-articulated article. They can take many forms and be rambling, and the World Wide Web seems to be especially abundant with them. I would accept that the Internet is principally powered by articles.

Destination Marketing blogs A thousand words Applications Simple thought Singular topic Concept By people Specific Original idea Lexicon Balloon

The most common end point of many articles would have to be SEO blogs and article directories. Of course, there are other types of content, like pictures and mp3 and software like word processors, and such. Articles are attractive to people and search engines. Which is to admit that they are consciously written with this specific audience in mind. The concept of writing for people is no rocket science. What is not so easy to see is the reason for writing articles for search engines which is another essay altogether. Articles are mainly written by people but they may also be written or written by people and re-written by a machine. Article wizards they call them. A picture may paint a thousand words, We still need words to describe it. A website would have a number of articles in it.
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Rudely Aborted

2008-10-08T02:47:00.000-07:00

My little Squeak Smalltalk featuring Seaside adventure last year was unceremoniously aborted last year when I could not raise enough funds to keep my website going. It was fun and I learned a lot of things about making a website and making it run. I went to Cagayan de Oro City several times trying to drum up some support for it but to no avail. I thought it was a nice proof of concept but there were no takers.

I did find out that putting up a website is nothing without promotions. This was one of the aspects of websites that I had not really anticipated. One has to promote one's website and that is no mean feat. I started doing web promotions and the results were very encouraging. I stayed in Cebu City for a while but I knew that I would have to make my little experiment be situated in Cagayan de Oro City.

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Making money

2008-04-20T18:11:00.000-07:00

I am looking forward to remaking my old website which I made using Squeak/Seaside/Magma. This time I will be trying Pier/Magritte. I have been reading up this creation by Lukas Renggli and I hope to start something soon. Whiling my time away from the serious stuff, I stumbled upon mylot.com which totally engrossed me. I joined the discussions and started a few of my own. They say you can make money doing that. Well, if it's true then it is a fun way to make money. I have this to say, I had fun posting about things important to me. They report that I have earned a few cents for my activity. Cool!

Mylot is one way of making money while having fun posting on things you care about.

f-stop, fab, fable, fabric, fabrication, fabulous, facade, face-card, face-lift, face, facet, facetious, facial, facile, facility, facing, fact, faction, factoid, factor, factorial, factoring, factory, factual, faculty, fad, fade, faded, fag, fail, failure, fain, faint, fair, fairbanks, fairfield, fairness, fairway, fairy, fairyland, faith-healing, faith, faithful, fake, fuhrer

Anyway, here's Cagayan de Oro City with another one: Cagayan de Oro City. My Cebu City site has made pr1, surprise, surprise. Dumaguete is still in the boondocks as far as Google goes but Dumaguete has made some headway. Jai Alexander rocks!

There is always: Ching's Way and Ching's Web along with Ching's Best and Ching's Illusion. Way to go, Ching!

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Smalltalk on Ubuntu

2008-03-07T08:57:00.000-08:00

I installed VirtualBox on my Windows PC and installed a Virtual Machine running Ubuntu desktop. The installation of VirtualBox, the creation of the Virtual Machine went without a hitch and so did the installation of Ubuntu Desktop. There is also a download of Ubuntu Server and I wondered about the difference between the two. It turns out that Server is the distro which has LAMP pre-installed which means that you do not have to apt-get install the three tools. Desktop is the version which has the GUI which makes the download somewhat bigger.

I proceeded to install Squeak Smalltalk which also went without a hitch. The only problem was, the repository only had Squeak 3.8 and not the 3.9 that I had used on my windows machine. I shall have to install Squeak 3.9 on a separate directory which involves untarring the download.

Check these out: Ching's Way, Ching's Web, Ching's Best, Ching's Illusion

Memory leak

2007-12-03T19:50:00.000-08:00

The problem of space I tried to solve by buying more memory. When I had bought the memory, it still persisted and I was getting pissed off with myself. I wrote the mailing list and quickly got a diagnosis. It was a memory leak after all. Trying to find a memory leak and plugging it is not so easy. There are a number of reasons why memory leaks. This involves variables that keep on existing even when everything else goes to sleep. Someone suggested looking at global variables but this was not so helpful to me as I never create globals. Very clearly the problem involved something other than global variables. Another point was a recursive method which never ends. I took a look at that but nothing of the sort existed on my code.

qatar, quack, quad, quadrant, quadriceps, quadruple, quail, quaint, quake, quaker, qualification, qualified, quality, quanta, quantity, quantum, quarantine, quark, quarrel, quarry, quarter, quarterback, quarterfinal, quarterly, quartet, quartz, quasar, quash , quasi, quay, quebec, queen, queens, queensland, queer, quell, query, quest, question, questionable, quetta, queue, quezoncity, quiche, quick

I had been using Magma for my persistent objects and I remembered a discussion about sessions lying about un-destroyed. In the back of my mind, I had thought that this might be a source of problem. I just did not realize how quickly it could become a problem. I wrote the Magma mailing list and quickly got a reply from Chris Muller about how to clean up sessions that were left lying around. MagmaSession cleanUp and my problem disappeared.

Our favorites are: Ching's World, Green Tea, Dumaguete, Cebu City, Cagayan de Oro City, Papoy, Moira Trinity Cagayan de Oro, Dumaguete, Cebu are all in the Philippines in the world of Ching.

The Problem of Space

2007-11-04T16:52:00.000-08:00

I have been having a bit of a problem regarding space. It all started when Squeak complained that "space is low". I did not think too much about it except for the inconvenience of having to look for more memory. I did try to get some virtual memory but that didn't work. I guess windows does not really use virtual memory the way it is supposed to, that is, use the hard disk as virtual memory. So I got me another gigabyte of RAM which was fine for a very short bit until I got the same message again. So I got another gigabyte of RAM and the problem turned to one of a different type of RAM was needed. There are four slots on my motherboard which are two sets of RAMS of different speeds. So I had to go and replace the third RAM with another type as specified on the motherboard.

Come into these sites: Squeak Smalltalk Adventure, The Ordinary Life, Politics: Divine Right of Kings and Presidents, Creation, Life, Consciousness.

And it doesn't work. I am thinking that maybe the two slots have to be filled which means that I have to try putting another ram card into the empty slot and see if that will work. The original RAM is DDR2-533 and I have 2 of those. The 2 other slots require DDR-400. This is wierd. It would have been funny if it were not such a pain in the ass.

Our favorites are: Ching's World, Green Tea, Dumaguete, Cebu City, Cagayan de Oro City, Papoy, Moira Trinity Cagayan de Oro, Dumaguete, Cebu are all in the Philippines in the world of Ching.

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Seaside and Ching's World

2007-08-17T21:36:00.000-07:00

Ching's World runs on Seaside on Squeak. I do not profess to know Smalltalk but I do dabble a little bit in Squeak Smalltalk. Just simple stuff, baby steps. There is no great ambition to create a "killer app", just something to get going like a website. Ching's World owes everything to Squeak and Seaside and all things Smalltalk.

Everyone does uploads and downloads without even thinking about it. I sit and ponder, how is it to be done? I do not know but wrapping my head on these questions brings the answer inevitably to the fore with the help of those who have come before. David Shaffer is to be thanked for his tutourial as well as his personal help in illuminating some obscure (to the uninitiated such as myself) problems.

Like I always say, I am ignorant only once, until I learn how to do it and unless, I hit my head on something hard and unlearn the lesson learned. Bravo! Ching's World. Take your baby steps and grow.

Squeak roars!!!

2007-07-22T02:01:00.000-07:00

I don't really know how to program in an object-oriented way. I like to do quick and dirty stuff with very little forethought associated with it. Organizing is good and nice but it takes too much time and makes no guarantees that thte end result will work in the real world. Maybe I am just lazy. Maybe I am just not smart enough. Maybe I am too shallow and judge the value of a thing on obvious, easily seen results.

That is how I am when it comes to programming. If I get something to work then I work some more to make the code small. And I know enough that today's new version is not going to stay forever. Someone is surely going to come along and make a better mousetrap rendering your spanking new one old and dated in a few months. This was how I learned to trust only those very basic methods to stay the same for they are not sexy nor glamorous and get no notice from the systems developers who are out to outsmart, outsexy, outglamorize the competition.

Check out chings-world. It is simple and runs on Squeak.Based on the Philippine setting, it has very modest goals.

Client server, Object oriented programming

2006-08-12T04:22:00.000-07:00

While it was really convenient to use Clipper for simple programming jobs such as Inventory and Accounting programs using only personal computers to keep track of a store's daily transactions, there arose a need to integrate various services and functions using personal computers. Networking became a necessity and not merely a luxury which only large companies can afford to have. There were some small networking companies which offered simple peer-to-peer networking but the acknowledged king of the hill was Novell Netware.

I had the good forture to try Novell and it was an experience to make one re-think one's position in the computing world. I had gotten comfortable programming simple tasks on a stand-alone computer with its own hard disk to store data in. Now, clients were asking if it was possible to have several people access the same data source at the same time. While no programmer would ever say it could not be done, one needed experience and a lot of research to convert a simple stand-alone program to something where multiple users could use it.

The Big Guns of the computing world led by IBM and Microsoft started to bring their message to the masses and the buzzword was "client server". The costs of putting together an application using the client/server software offered by the Big Boys were quite prohibitive and small independent programmers had to resort to various ad-hoc solutions to mimic ths capabilities of the large-scale software solutions.

Various smaller companies selling dBase-like products transitioned into a kind of client-server architecture where back-end databases were independent of the front end tools. Added to this mix was the adoption of these companies of object-oriented principles pioneered by the Smalltalk team of Xerox. That Microsoft finally had a graphical user interface that worked fast enough to satisfy users also served to fuel the desire to be "Windows-based", whatever that meant to people who wanted something snappy and new-fangled.

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Clipper from Nantucket

2006-07-21T03:13:00.000-07:00

Very soon after Ashton-Tate released their very popular dBase III system, a slew of other software were offered to the market which offered the same database files and the same programming interface. dBFast was one of the fastest ones and had a very innovative system where it used the IO services of the operating system allowing it to have a very small footprint. One could create an execitable program with a file size of only 10KB. It was blazingly fast which I liked very much. The only problem I found with it was that it could not return a value the way C does. Having a value returned was a convenient way to structure a program.

Foxbase also introduced a similar product which claimed to be faster than dBase III. The way they did it was to compile the source code into an intermediate bytecode file which is then run by the compiler. This is much faster than the dBase III system which is purely interpreted. Foxbase which eventually evolved into FoxPro also allowed the creation of user-defined functions but it was limited in the fact that it could not return values. It also meant that the compiled bytecodes needed the services of the interpreter to run the semi-compiled program.

What I, and I'm sure a number of dBase programmers wished for was a compiler that could create free-standing executable files. Nantucket Software must have heard our prayers because they released a compiler that produced EXE files. The early edition had certain quirks which were quickly corrected. With the Norton Editor, the Plinker and dBase III for creating DBF files, one could create an executable file with database capabilities. Clipper was quite fast and pretty soon had a number of libraries that extended its functionality. It was not uncommon to find programmers struggling with programs that went over the 1MB limit imposed by the Intel PC architecture. Well to be truthful, the struggle was really about getting more memory as it seemed kind of a badge of achievement to write an application that boasted a 2MB footprint. Microsoft very quickly, as did other third-party vendors, rolled out software drivers that allowed programs to use extended memories.

I learned very quickly that Clipper tended to grow so fast and added many features that tended to make old libraries incompatible with the new releases. It was therefore prudent not to chase the new releases if one wanted not to multiply the problems of updating old files. My solution was to choose the very basic libraries and stayed away from the new-fangled extended libraries. Those facilities that kept changing and were largely black boxes like Tbrowse, I stayed away from. I wrote my own file browser and a few other things that enabled me to keep my executable file to under 300 KB. Clipper had everything that I wanted at the time and allowed me to structure my programs so efficiently I could bring out a whole new program in a matter of days instead of the many months that other dBase programmers needed to finish an accounting application.

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Meditation promotes peace of mind.

dBase II was a handly tool.

2006-06-24T08:04:00.000-07:00

dBase II was a lot of fun and allowed me to use files like I never did with BASIC. There were all kinds of cool stuff which I had to manually program in Basic like, sorting and indexing but which I could do with just one keyword: sort or if I wanted to index a file: index on. Although I could do lots of things with dBase II, it was still the backwoods when it came to creating reports. All I could do was to use ASCII characters as separators which was very tedious to do. dBaseIII changed all that when it came out with cool formatting stuff. One could draw boxes and I got crazy with it for a while. When programming, I used a very handy but difficult editor which came with MS-DOS, edlin. The one good thing about it was that it came bundled with MS-DOS and was quite easy to use. I was quite happy with it until a friend of mine introced me to the Norton Editor which was way more cool than edlin. With the Norton Editor I could have two editing windows where I could copy and paste code. The Norton Editor was also small so I could just keep it in one diskette with the other tools that I used to write programs.

They say "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed is king". I suppose that is true in more ways than one. Since I knew a little more about programming, I could make a little money by giving lessons which I did for a while and I used BASIC to introduce beginners to the joys of computer programming. On one class where I trained personnel from a local bank, after several lectures on the basics of computer programming like variables and operations, I asked them to write a small program to indicate if they had grasped the concepts of BASIC computer programming as it related to their work. Most of them were using Visicalc to do their worksheets and it was a great boost from manual computation using paper columnar worksheets.

No one had the inclination to do anything that involved thinking outside their usual day to day work so I was kind of placed in an embarassing situation of not having taught them anything after several sessions. At this time, computers were not really welcome in the work place because of the notion that they would render people obsolete so, there is a strong need to show that personal computers were great tools for personal productivity. This is easier said than done and many people in the workplace had a secret fear of these new intelligent interlopers. I therefore had to come up with something that would demonstrate the helpfulness of personal computers and also to bolster my status as someone who knew what he was talking about.

Asking one participant to point out the one thing that he could do with his Visicalc but which was somehow also tedious and he said he found it tedious and time-consuming to make amortization tables for loan applicants. Here was an opportunity for me to make converts of skeptics and I asked for the details regarding this task. He gave me the different interacting components like

Principal amount
Term of the loan
Interest rate
Dates: starting and maturity
Type of payment (monthly/semi-monthly/quarterly etc)

Dashing off a small program using dBase II with the participants looking on while I explained the process as I created the small tool for making amortization tables, we concluded the session with murmurs of approval for this wonderful thing called computer programming. This little exercise helped to bring their perception of me as a Tech Guru a couple of notches higher which was not too bad.

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dBase II was all the rage

2006-06-09T11:25:00.000-07:00

One thing became abundantly clear to me: files were important if one were to have anything become persistent. Basic commands Put and Get allows you to store and retrieve the information that you want to retain. I used it a little bit with my program that stored the results of the Jai Alai games which I tried to present in this way and that with the hope that it would eventually show me some kind of pattern that I can follow. While it was all very fine I still needed a way of easily storing more complicated data where I could do cross-referencing and indexing.

A friend had told me about a hot new product called dBase II so I lost no time in looking for materials about it. I also found out that there was a short course being offered in the University so I enrolled in it. Unluckily for me, no one else enrolled in the course so I was informed that the course would be cancelled due to lack of interested students. This was a big blow to my plans to become proficient in this terrific language so I proposed to the teacher to let me take the course on my own. All he had to give me was a book and a computer. I told him he did not have to give any lectures. I will just learn on my own.

So there I was with a sparkling brand new Dimension Personal Computer with the Z-80 microprocessor powering it and using the advanced CP/M operating system. It had built-in 5 1/4 floppy disk drives so I could save my work. Having access to the tutorial manual only while I was in school was a big inconvenience for me. I thought it would be far better if I had my own manual so I arranged to buy my own book so I could study while at home. This really boosted my learning by leaps and bounds and I have used this system since. I reasoned that books were better than teachers because one could go fast or slow depending on one's pace and still be able to go back and forward with ease. A teacher might spend too much time on something and gloss over another.

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Post Basic

2006-05-29T05:53:00.000-07:00

After another month of "Advanced" Basic where I learned about Bubble Sort and files, how to create, open, write to them, erase and close them I was feeling pretty good with myself. I was on my way to becoming Computer Savvy. The usual way to get more experienced was to write Inventory or Payroll programs and this was supposed to really get your hands dirty. The very popular Accounting program Peachtree was written in Basic and it looked really formidable so I decided I was going to do my own thing and write a program that was to give me a handle on the Numbers Game based on the Jai Alai Special LLave. Ten players sporting the numbers one through ten were going to play every night and the numbers of the top three finishers would determine who would win. Many people have gotten addicted to this game and reportedly a lot of money is to be won if one could just figure the right combinations.

I thought this would be a worthy project that would also have the added benefit that if I was able to make a program that could point me in the right direction of which numbers would be most likely to come out in the winning combination I would also be able to win some money. I had no idea how I was going to do this program but the prospect of a machine that could predict outcomes of number games was pretty exciting indeed.

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A love affair with smalltalk

2006-05-23T03:14:00.000-07:00

Before the Internet was an integral part of daily life and the word Website was still unheard of, I had my first-hand experience with Computer Programming using the Basic interpreter that came with the Apple II personal computer at the training school that I enrolled in. It was a one-month crash course that introduced the fundamentals of the computer and the Basic language itelf. I learned about Variables from my teacher who treated me like an unworthy acolyte while he laborioously explained the difference between a String Variable and a Numeric Variable as though they were the most wonderful nuggets of wisdom and he a High Priest who was full of it and overflowing with a generosity to share these secret doctrines. I especially noticed how he would display his knowledge and showcase his genius when it was a young female student he was tutoring. So involved would his explanations be and so confused his listener.

This was my first brush with the Black Art of Computer Programming which sounded to me like an esoteric, forbidden knowledge whose fruit could only be savored by select Cognoscenti. Who would not fail to be intimidated when confronted by Kilobytes of Floppy Disk space and dynamic Random Access Memories? Not to mention static RAMs and CPUs with blazing megahertz? Add to that mix the ever-mysterious database files which constantly faced cross-linking and corruption and you have the beginnings of TechnoPhobia. Which was not really a bad thing once you got over the fear of the jargon and deciphered the mumbo-jumbo to mean very specific terms. Then it would be your turn to play Tech Guru.