August 2009 - Pharo-dev - lists.pharo.org

[Pharo-project] [OT] ESUG videos?
by Esteban Lorenzano Sept. 2, 2009

Sept. 2, 2009

Hi, Sorry for the Off-Topic, but couldn't go to ESUG, and I'm eager to watch almost every presentation on it... Will it be possible? Cheers, Esteban

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[Pharo-project] Startup/shutdown
by Schwab,Wilhelm K Sept. 1, 2009

Sept. 1, 2009

Andy, Hopefully this is the promised code. Getting this across town and through the layers of MS software has been interesting, to put it mildly. Bill

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[Pharo-project] [ANN] Smalltalks 2009 - Third Smalltalk Conference of Argentina
by Andres Valloud Sept. 1, 2009

Sept. 1, 2009

Argentina's third Smalltalk conference, Smalltalks 2009, will be held from November 19th through November 21rd at the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales (FCEyN), Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). All those connected with Smalltalk, be it faculty, students, researchers, developers or entrepreneurs, are invited to participate, free of cost, as presenters and members of the audience. The organization committee will announce the registration website shortly. The conference's goal is to gather both the Argentine and International Smalltalk community to get connected sharing our work and experience with regards to Smalltalk or related topics. Smalltalks 2009 presentations will be divided between the "Industry and Development" and "Research and Education" categories. In addition, the event will host a Smalltalk programming contest. As in other editions, well known personalities from the international community will attend the conference. The "Research and Education" category is the best match for research and education work done with Smalltalk in universities and public or private entities. The "Industry and Development" category is suitable for presentations related to Smalltalk software developed by companies or individuals, both public and private. A list of suggested presentation topics, not exclusive, is below: * Development tools. * Development with prototypes. * Model driven development. * Agile practices (XP, TDD, etc). * Web application development. * Metamodeling / metaprogramming. * New frameworks or models. * Materials for education. * Embedded systems and robotics. * SOA and web services. * Experience reports, both development and research. * Commercial systems. * Automation and best testing practices. * Interoperability with other technologies. * Best design and architecture practices. Interested presenters should keep in mind the following deadline schedule. 1. You must present a summary of the proposed presentation no later than Monday, October 19th, 2009. The summary must fit on a single page, and must include a description, objective, and category of the work to be shown. The submission procedure will be announced shortly. 2. The conference's program committee will select the event's presentations from the proposals submitted according to the above procedure by Monday, October 26th. The proposals including dynamic examples as opposed to just static presentations will be given priority. 3. The conference schedule will be published in the conference's website on Wednesday, October 28th. 4. The conference's works and presentations will be published in the conference's website after the conference. Those interested in the coding contest can become familiarized with it at the smalltalks-2009-coding-contest Google group: smalltalks-2009-coding-contest(a)googlegroups.com The contest's goal is to have a good time solving a problem in Smalltalk, and win a prize while at it. We are working hard to ensure everyone can participate, and we will show examples and prototypes that can be improved by the participants. For directions to FCEyN, you can go to the computer science department's web site: http://dc.uba.ar Feel free to share this invitation with those who might be interested. If you have any questions, send us an email at fundacion (dot) smalltalk (at) gmail (dot) com See you at the conference! Smalltalks 2009 Organization Committee.

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[Pharo-project] Don't ask me how to reproduce this one :)
by Schwab,Wilhelm K Sept. 1, 2009

Sept. 1, 2009

Hello all, I periodically see a degradation of anti-aliased fonts, and have no idea what causes it. Given my recent adventures in to startup/shutdown, I suppose it could be due to a problem there?? It seems to be triggered by saving the image w/o quitting. This recent occurance was different in that I started noting that the text in browsers looked different to me, perhaps just that the method name was not bold?? Something was not quite right, but the text still looked to be rendered well. Shortly thereafter, the full breakdown happened with everything rendered in an ugly font. It seems safe to save the image in this state, and exiting and re-loading the image fixes is. Any ideas? Bill

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Re: [Pharo-project] Complex Solutions
by Ken Dickey Aug. 31, 2009

Aug. 31, 2009

I have updated PharoInbox with a newer slice: SLICE-basic-Complex-KenDickey.3 Float hyperbolic trig methods no longer return Complex answers. Renamed: #angle -> #argument, #magnitude -># modulus. Added more unit tests. Thanks again for suggestions, -KenD

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Re: [Pharo-project] Mac carbon VM 4.2.1Beta1U posted
by Henrik Johansen Aug. 31, 2009

Aug. 31, 2009

Hi Juan & all! Having used StrikeFonts v6 for some while now, I have some more feedback: - . are really hard to read on a 1920x1200 17inch display... I'm not sure if it's the size of the glyph in it self, but it really could at least use some more space up front, usually I can't distinguish it from the preceding character. - It does not play well with the displayMultiString:on: from: to: at: kern: baselineY: - method used for WideStrings in general, ASCII characters are then rendered as black blocks. Thing is, MultiDisplayScanner which is used in Pharo for TextEditors (well, most of them anyways, I haven't checked all) uses non-ascii characters as a stopCondition, thus any sequence in the string from:to: will always either be valid ASCII, or all unicode (for which ? is rendered correctly). So a possible solution is to check if first character is ascii, if so it's safe to use the standard method (which renders it correctly). Yet, it feels quite hackish to rely on the scanner dividing string into runs of ascii and non-ascii characters, (much faster though, as if the original method is used, a run of ascii-characters that happens to be part of a WideString, will be rendered one character at a time). It is however, a hack which will be quickly discovered if the pre- conditions change :) Would you be able to find some time to look into what it'd take to make the glyph-by-glyph rendering in misplayMultiString: work with the new StrikeFonts? To the others: - Would such a hack be acceptible for the moment? + Speeds up font rendering of strings with non-ascii characters (both FreeType and StrikeFonts) + Makes StrikeFonts v6 usable without further modifications - Is a hack dependent on the Scanner implementation. + Is easy to detect if preconditions change (basically, font rendering will fail :P) The alternate which is not Scanner dependent, is iterating each character in the run instead of just checking first. It's slower, and StrikeFonts will still fail to render if displayMultiString: goes unfixed. Not to mention, if a Scanner is made that does not make sure runs are either ASCII or from an extended charset, the slow method of rendering a glyph at a time will be used anyways... Cheers, Henry P.S: To the "We have FT fonts! Why care about StrikeFonts?"- replies. Yes, I know that. But: - Rendering is (no offense) slow. - Juans StrikeFonts code is good quality code of how it should be done. Increasing the ratio of such code compared to that which makes you go "Uuuuhh... " is one of the main reasons I got interested in Pharo, to make the Smalltalk experience for those determined on an OS- licensed smalltalk comparable to that I have working in VW on a daily basis.

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[Pharo-project] Complex Solutions
by Ken Dickey Aug. 31, 2009

Aug. 31, 2009

>From: "Schwab,Wilhelm K" <bschwab(a)anest.ufl.edu> ... >I have not been over all of it, but I have found that Real>>arcCosH and > #arcTanH can answer a Complex. I would rather not have to say it, but I do > not get the sense that you have taken our concerns seriously. We want the > errors from Float when the domains are violated. A mere #asComplex can be > dividing line that puts the programmer in conrol. Thanks. I had not caught these. >On this next minor point I can be talked out of it, but I would much prefer > #cosh etc. to #cosH; it's easier to type and matches all conventional > notation that I have seen. I am trying to follow camelCase as I understand it. One rubric from user interfaces is that things which are distinct should *look* distinct. I personally perfer cosH to cosh because I know it is not a typo. That I really mean cosH not cos. Let me know the proper thing to do here. >Number>>angle should probably be called #argument, though I would argue that > it should not exist as it is another example of implicit (however benign) > coercion to complex numbers. I am trying to follow conventions here for other languages which support Complex data types [primarily Common Lisp and, Scheme]. An angle in radians is what is returned. Wny not call the function returning an angle to be #angle ? Again, let me know the proper thing to do in Smalltalk. >Complex>>angle looks like it will answer zero for a value of zero?? AFAIK, > there should be no direction for a zero vector. In a way, it is splitting > hairs because exact comparisons of floats are dubious, but it probably > should raise an error for zero. I am following ANSI X3J13 (they had a formal vote which declared the angle of zero to be zero). Let me know of a better refrerence. [The problem with standards is that there are so many to chose from ;^]. >Object Arts has long looked down on #as* and #is* methods. With my bias > toward their views confessed, #isComplex and #isNumberOrComplex realy > should not exist, and even if they do, what are they doing in Object? > #isNumberOrComplex raises concerns that there is too much blending of > Complex into floats. According to my recollection of _Squeak by Example_, #isFoo is a standard ideom for a class #Foo. #isNumberOrComplex is used to make double dispatch work in #=, now that Complex instances answer false to isNumber. Do you have a better solution here? #isNumberOrComplex was added to Object to make the test relatively cheap (#= is used a lot, yes?). If Complex does not interoperate, at least to some extent, with Floats how would it be useful for anything? Smalltalk without polymorphism ??? Better solutions? >There are various uses of Taylor series corrections and some things that are > computed directly in terms of exponentials. My hunch is that robust > scientific libraries will (hopefully) do these things well, and most of the > transcendental functions, especially over complex numbers, should come from > them when possible and reasonable. The results will likely be faster and > probably more accurate than what we can do in Smalltalk. I agree that a better global solution for numbers is desired. This is an attempt for a small tweak to simply fix the problems I outlined. These problems exist in the current code base. Thank you again for taking the time to look at this, -KenD

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[Pharo-project] [ANN] new Core #10428
by Marcus Denker Aug. 31, 2009

Aug. 31, 2009

A pre-built core #10428 is available: http://gforge.inria.fr/frs/download.php/22978/PharoCore-1.0-10428-BETA.zip -- Marcus Denker - http://marcusdenker.de PLEIAD Lab - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile

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[Pharo-project] Package naming Scheme
by Torsten Bergmann Aug. 31, 2009

Aug. 31, 2009

Currently pharo packages are named differently: - either "MyPackage" and "Tests-MyPackage" for the tests - or "MyPackage" and "MyPackage-Tests" for the tests - or something completely different like "GraphicsTests-Text" First one is used more often but not very good when using the "alphabetize" functionality in the context menu of the standard browser ;) Since the package naming scheme also affects - the monticello repo layouts - removal/shrink scripts (see ScriptLoader>>cleanupForProduction) - and method category names for extensions we should agree on at least one to use. Were the pros and cons of the different naming schemes already discussed? If so is there any docu around? I remember Lukas suggested to use the one from Seaside... Thx Torsten -- Neu: GMX Doppel-FLAT mit Internet-Flatrate + Telefon-Flatrate fÃ¼r nur 19,99 Euro/mtl.!* http://portal.gmx.net/de/go/dsl02

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[Pharo-project] Pharo beta one-click somewhere?
by Janko MivÅ¡ek Aug. 31, 2009

Aug. 31, 2009

Hi guys, Is there any Pharo one-click around to adopt? Hopefully based on latest beta... Thanks Janko -- Janko MivÅ¡ek AIDA/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server http://www.aidaweb.si

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