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[Pharo-project] [ANN] WatchIt
by HernÃ¡n Morales Durand Jan. 12, 2009

Jan. 12, 2009

Dear all, You can use again the "Watch It" debugging functionality written by Ned Konz back in 2002. This is the description: "This adds a 'watch it' choice to the context menus in text editors. This will take the selection, make a BlockContext out of it, and give you a Morph that will display the value of that block every half second. It can be used, for instance, from the Debugger to display an instance variable as your program runs." Test 1: Paint and select "watch it" from the menu: World currentHand cursorPoint Test 2: "debug it" the following lines, once inside the debugger, paint the "collection", select "watch it" and voilÃ ! | collection | collection := #(1 2 3 4) asOrderedCollection. collection add: 88. collection add: 99. collection Tested under: -Squeak3.9 -Squeak3.10.2 -Pharo0.1Core-10201 Cheers HernÃ¡n

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[Pharo-project] [ANN] 10204: fixing inbox and more tests
by StÃ©phane Ducasse Jan. 11, 2009

Jan. 11, 2009

Hi I published a fix for the inbox empty mcz behavior and more collectionTests. I will have a look soon at Mike's changes, but we have a deadline for thursday. Stef

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[Pharo-project] Fun with Smalltalk in high school
by Hilaire Fernandes Jan. 11, 2009

Jan. 11, 2009

Yes, I forgot, it is Pharo related! Now, I want in the future to redesign the DrGeo UI to take advantage of Polymorph. Computer are good for dynamic stuff, I love to mix interactive geometry and analytic calculus. With DrGeoII it is becoming so much fun. I would have love to play with that at high school. See this post, in French only, but a comment at the end of the article propose a Google translation http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire/index.php?post/script-drgeo Hilaire

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Re: [Pharo-project] Fwd: [Newbies] squeak locks up on windows / help me debug it...
by Bill Schwab Jan. 10, 2009

Jan. 10, 2009

Cam, If I am reading this correctly, you are the newbie looking for a stable Smalltalk. If you are new to the language, please stick with it for a while; it is worth the time to learn it. You mentioned some things that might suggest you have experience with Smalltalk in general and are simply looking for a new dialect - I could be accused of that also. As Chris pointed out, Pharo is not yet intended as a stable release. 3D is not really a priority for the project - part of me wishes it were, though I quickly realize that I need a platform for other work first. Robust process synchronization, ANSI assignment (giving me back the ugly but widely used underscore), Seaside, SSL and a good user interface framework come to mind as the real essentials. I cannot personally vouch for the stability of Squeak. I have watched it for years, and occasionally used it for real work, usually for small tasks for which it had the necessary pieces waiting to be brought together. One such project was 3D visualization of stacking boxes on carts - the trick was to buy the right cart, and Alice was helpful. I do a lot of CAD these days (in my other life, I design and build medical gizmos), so if faced with a similar problem now, I might simply fire up QCad. Still, the experience showed me that Squeak 3.6 to perhaps 3.8 was able to do a fair amount of translating, rotating and render without crashing too much. It did occasionally quit though. For years I too read the Squeak was rock solid. A time or two, somebody would run into something somewhat scary and patch it. I am cautiously optimistic, but plan to take it one step at a time. My interest in Pharo is to find a path off of Windows, which (mincing words here) I consider to be a flaming piece of junk in the early phases of melting down into an abyss from which not even quantum tunnelling will allow escape. I would greatly enjoy being wrong, but I cannot take that chance. I have not reached the point of switching, but I get closer with each new frustration from Windows and each update of Pharo. I have been studying alternatives to Windows for a long time, and my interest in choosing one is steadily increasing. That brings me to a question: is your trouble with Pharo and B3D, or is it more about Vista? I have my gripes with even XP doing screwy things. Many times, I have caught Explorer incorrectly/partially rendering selection states and having opening scroll bars set such that extant list items are not reachable until the window is resized - genuine high school kid mistakes, and this is in commercial software. Ok, maybe the fault is with device drivers or in our IT department's work in deploying the software. One thing I can say for certain: I do not own these bugs, because none of my software runs on the offending machines, and I do not have administrative privileges on them. Back to your problem, one possible scenario is the B3D crashed (I have seen it happen), and that Vista dragged it out into a slow spiral?? I doubt you will ever get excuses and propaganda from Pharo users and developers, but you will find a mission of creating a clean system into which other code can be loaded. We are not trying to re-develop every Squeak package ever written. We will hopefully have a list of packages known to work well, and will hopefully expand that list over time. I started having problems with recent Pharo images freezing (immediately from load), and discovered that I was using a very old VM on one machine; grabbing a recent VM fixed it. You might try that. I would also suggest that you test both Croquet on your Vista machine (that should hopefully get the latest 3D efforts) and also try to find an XP or 2k machine to test your code. My sincere evaluation is that Windows is slowly collapsing before our eyes. An older system might do a better job of allowing you to isolate the problem. And yes, it could be the very alpha-ish Pharo. Bill Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. University of Florida Department of Anesthesiology PO Box 100254 Gainesville, FL 32610-0254 Email: bschwab(a)anest.ufl.edu Tel: (352) 273-6785 FAX: (352) 392-7029 >>> cunningham.cb(a)gmail.com 01/10/09 3:41 AM >>> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Chris Cunningham <cunningham.cb(a)gmail.com> Date: Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 12:41 AM Subject: Re: [Newbies] squeak locks up on windows / help me debug it... To: "A friendly place to get answers to even the most basic questions about Squeak." <beginners(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org> It is worth noting that Pharo is currently under heavy development. The Pharo team is busy ripping out parts of Squeak they don't want in the base image and adding other parts that they do want. From all reports it is very nice to work in, but it is not a stable release at this point. If you want to keep working with it, be prepared to submit bug reports to that list if you encounter issue like this one. Otherwise, pick up the squeak 3.10, 3.9, or 3.8 to try out the tutorials until Pharo is more stable/released if you don't want to be that involved in the development (or early beta/alpha? testing) of it. On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 4:39 PM, Cameron Sanders < csanders.personal(a)functional-analyst.com> wrote: > I thought the Pharo base image (3.10 with a few fonts & Balloon3d added) > running on Windows was looking pretty stable (compared to other images). > But after an hour of editing code on a Vista machine --an hour since the > last saveâSqueak has abandoned me. It is unresponsive. Trying both control > and alt in combination with '.', 'l' (lower case L), 'c', does nothing > apparently useful. > > > > The process stack reported by Vista shows it to be incurring page-faults > like mad. [OK, that has subsided while I typed this email.] My machine has 4 > GB of RAM, I am running two instances of internet-explorer, and I have > turned off the Windows search-indexing service. I know Vista has a > guess-the-next-program pre-loader that could be a little overzealous in > displacing programs from RAMâ¦ but stillâ¦ it seems like this 101MB program > shouldn't generate any page faults when the other two leading memory pigs > are using less than double that much virtual memory. Vista's Resource > Monitor claims I am using only 43% of physical memory. The page-fault count > for Squeak.exe doubled while I typed this message. > > > > When I click the Squeak icon on the window frame of the running copy (upper > left on Windows), I do see the menu for VM Preferences. It shows me the menu > and allows me to invoke actions. It will allow me to toggle the "Show output > console" on and off. The output console shows me changes to memory (as I > have that option checked). I can use my mouse wheel to scroll this console. > Control-'.' and Control-c (and lower case L) in this console do not change > anything. > > > > After mucking around in the console area, I am now getting "WARNING: event > buffer overflow" just moving my mouse around in squeak. After turning the > console off, the pointer is now invisible except when you click. It appears > that the overall squeak window is repainting itself properly. > > > > -- Help me debug it > > > > I have an interest in building a commercial application in Squeak. The FAQs > says squeak is stable. Given the active community of developers (including > The Great Ones), I imagine that it is stable, and that I am just doing > something dumbâ¦ repeatedly. However, for Squeak to be adopted more broadly, > it can't go zombie on users, even when the user does something dumb. That's > an absolute. > > > > What is the longest uptime a squeak image has ever endured (while doing > something useful)? Which version was that and on what platform? > > > > So I am willing to work to help make squeak more robust, but as a complete > newbie with it, I need much guidance. So right now, with this hung-up image, > what should I do? Should I attach to it with gdb? And if so, then what? [If > the internal process control is working, I won't be able to make heads or > tales out of it from gdb, right?] Or can I launch another squeak and send > it a signal in some way [is it listening?]? What is most useful in this > case? > > > > [Is there a way in Windows/Vista to signal an app so as to force a core > dump?] > > > > Thanks in advance, > > Cam > > PS: I want to emphasize that I do not care about the code lost in this > particular instance (it was tutorial code), instead I am looking for a > stable free development environmentâ¦ and I'm willing to help make one. > > > > > > __________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus signature > database 3755 (20090109) __________ > > The message was checked by ESET Smart Security. > > http://www.eset.com > > _______________________________________________ > Beginners mailing list > Beginners(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org > http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners > >

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[Pharo-project] Completion in Pharo?
by Alexandre Bergel Jan. 10, 2009

Jan. 10, 2009

Dear List, Before we have the Mac menu, Cmd-Q was completing a symbol being written. Is there a new mapping for this? Alexandre -- _,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;: Alexandre Bergel http://www.bergel.eu ^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;.

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[Pharo-project] Fwd: [Newbies] squeak locks up on windows / help me debug it...
by Chris Cunningham Jan. 10, 2009

Jan. 10, 2009

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Chris Cunningham <cunningham.cb(a)gmail.com> Date: Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 12:41 AM Subject: Re: [Newbies] squeak locks up on windows / help me debug it... To: "A friendly place to get answers to even the most basic questions about Squeak." <beginners(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org> It is worth noting that Pharo is currently under heavy development. The Pharo team is busy ripping out parts of Squeak they don't want in the base image and adding other parts that they do want. From all reports it is very nice to work in, but it is not a stable release at this point. If you want to keep working with it, be prepared to submit bug reports to that list if you encounter issue like this one. Otherwise, pick up the squeak 3.10, 3.9, or 3.8 to try out the tutorials until Pharo is more stable/released if you don't want to be that involved in the development (or early beta/alpha? testing) of it. On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 4:39 PM, Cameron Sanders < csanders.personal(a)functional-analyst.com> wrote: > I thought the Pharo base image (3.10 with a few fonts & Balloon3d added) > running on Windows was looking pretty stable (compared to other images). > But after an hour of editing code on a Vista machine --an hour since the > last saveâSqueak has abandoned me. It is unresponsive. Trying both control > and alt in combination with '.', 'l' (lower case L), 'c', does nothing > apparently useful. > > > > The process stack reported by Vista shows it to be incurring page-faults > like mad. [OK, that has subsided while I typed this email.] My machine has 4 > GB of RAM, I am running two instances of internet-explorer, and I have > turned off the Windows search-indexing service. I know Vista has a > guess-the-next-program pre-loader that could be a little overzealous in > displacing programs from RAMâ¦ but stillâ¦ it seems like this 101MB program > shouldn't generate any page faults when the other two leading memory pigs > are using less than double that much virtual memory. Vista's Resource > Monitor claims I am using only 43% of physical memory. The page-fault count > for Squeak.exe doubled while I typed this message. > > > > When I click the Squeak icon on the window frame of the running copy (upper > left on Windows), I do see the menu for VM Preferences. It shows me the menu > and allows me to invoke actions. It will allow me to toggle the "Show output > console" on and off. The output console shows me changes to memory (as I > have that option checked). I can use my mouse wheel to scroll this console. > Control-'.' and Control-c (and lower case L) in this console do not change > anything. > > > > After mucking around in the console area, I am now getting "WARNING: event > buffer overflow" just moving my mouse around in squeak. After turning the > console off, the pointer is now invisible except when you click. It appears > that the overall squeak window is repainting itself properly. > > > > -- Help me debug it > > > > I have an interest in building a commercial application in Squeak. The FAQs > says squeak is stable. Given the active community of developers (including > The Great Ones), I imagine that it is stable, and that I am just doing > something dumbâ¦ repeatedly. However, for Squeak to be adopted more broadly, > it can't go zombie on users, even when the user does something dumb. That's > an absolute. > > > > What is the longest uptime a squeak image has ever endured (while doing > something useful)? Which version was that and on what platform? > > > > So I am willing to work to help make squeak more robust, but as a complete > newbie with it, I need much guidance. So right now, with this hung-up image, > what should I do? Should I attach to it with gdb? And if so, then what? [If > the internal process control is working, I won't be able to make heads or > tales out of it from gdb, right?] Or can I launch another squeak and send > it a signal in some way [is it listening?]? What is most useful in this > case? > > > > [Is there a way in Windows/Vista to signal an app so as to force a core > dump?] > > > > Thanks in advance, > > Cam > > PS: I want to emphasize that I do not care about the code lost in this > particular instance (it was tutorial code), instead I am looking for a > stable free development environmentâ¦ and I'm willing to help make one. > > > > > > __________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus signature > database 3755 (20090109) __________ > > The message was checked by ESET Smart Security. > > http://www.eset.com > > _______________________________________________ > Beginners mailing list > Beginners(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org > http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners > >

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Re: [Pharo-project] Check if you launch Pharo without display
by Bill Schwab Jan. 10, 2009

Jan. 10, 2009

FWIW, Dolphin has an interesting approach to this kind problem. As the image loads, it creates a session manager. There is a hierarchy of such classes for GUI and headless systems. GUI session managers take care of creating and showing the app's main window. I asked a similar question not long ago, and Andreas consisely explained that Squeak just runs, and it picks up where it left off after an image save. I'm genuinely uncertain which is better, but Dolphin seems to have some advantages as a result of the formalism. Bill Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. University of Florida Department of Anesthesiology PO Box 100254 Gainesville, FL 32610-0254 Email: bschwab(a)anest.ufl.edu Tel: (352) 273-6785 FAX: (352) 392-7029 >>> stephane.ducasse(a)inria.fr 1/9/2009 3:43 PM >>> Yes but gwenael needs to know when the image is headless from the image if it was launched as headless. stef On Jan 9, 2009, at 9:40 PM, Brian Brown wrote: > Well, there is the -headless switch you can pass to the VM on startup. > > > hth, > > - Brian > > On Jan 8, 2009, at 9:17 AM, Gwenael Casaccio wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> I'm working on saphir (a scripting engine for Pharo) and >> I would like to know is there is a standard way to know if you >> launch Pharo without a display >> >> Gwenael >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Pharo-project mailing list >> Pharo-project(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr >> http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project > > Brian Brown > CTO > AbleLink Technologies, Inc. > http://www.ablelinktech.com > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Pharo-project mailing list > Pharo-project(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr > http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project > _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list Pharo-project(a)lists.gforge.inria.fr http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project

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[Pharo-project] Check if you launch Pharo without display
by Gwenael Casaccio Jan. 9, 2009

Jan. 9, 2009

Hi, I'm working on saphir (a scripting engine for Pharo) and I would like to know is there is a standard way to know if you launch Pharo without a display Gwenael

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[Pharo-project] Platform class
by Michael Rueger Jan. 9, 2009

Jan. 9, 2009

Hi all, in Tweak there is a hierarchy of CPlatform classes (CPlatformWindows etc) that provide a central place to add platform specific requests and avoid having the current platform detection code all over the system So instead of coding ExternalClipboard>>interfaceClass with all the gory details of platform detection you could just write Platform current externalClipboardClass We also used this in Sophie in connection with the FileLocations and URI package, supporting things like Platform current tempDirectoryURI Platform current userDirectoryURI etc What do people think about introducing something similar (category System-Platform) in Pharo? Michael

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[Pharo-project] GUI editor, etc.
by Bill Schwab Jan. 9, 2009

Jan. 9, 2009

Hello all, There was some recent mention of GUI frameworks and/or an editor. For fear of losing the idea, I will just throw this out now while I am thinking of it. I submit that one needs both a drag/drop graphical tool, and a programmatic capability. The graphical approach works well for many/most uses. Programmatic construction is very helpful for creating views to match RDB schemas, etc. Magritte might be of help in both scenarios, especially the programmatic side. We might get a lot out of simply "telling Magritte about Polymorph." So far at least, we seem to be using code, not data structures, to assemble views. That would make the graphical tool something that should work like I _think_ WindowBuilder does/did. My recollection is that it executed code to construct objects and then had the modified objects write code to recreate themselves. I fear we need to be careful about looking at the code to see how it works. Perhaps a little controversial, Tweak strikes me (please feel free to disagree/correct as appropriate) as using compiler/language changes to do things that can be (and so far, I would argue should be) accomplished by composition of objects with the language as-is. What Tweak shows as events in code browsers, I would prefer to see listed in a graphical tool editor. I'm pretty sure I recall WindowBuilder doing a nice job of that too. The toothpicks holding my eyes open are about to snap. Bill Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. University of Florida Department of Anesthesiology PO Box 100254 Gainesville, FL 32610-0254 Email: bschwab(a)anest.ufl.edu Tel: (352) 273-6785 FAX: (352) 392-7029

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