I just had an experience that fuels my session manager fire. �I loaded Pharo, and it was totally unresponsive. �Why? �I can't be absolutely certain, but here's my story: last night, I had an open connection to a system visible only with a vpn. �With the vpn not in use, either Pharo (or more likely ODBC) went nuts because it could not find the server, and I finally killed the process, started the vpn, and all was well on the next startup. �IMHO, hanging like that is one of the worst things software can do, and I think we can do a lot to fix it with a few simple changes.

Linux ODBC is probably partly to blame, but it should not have been invoked so early in statup. �Someone recently argued against lazy connections, but this would not have happened if they were part of the design. �The image would have become helpless once I did something that triggered database activity, but that is where overlapped calls enter the picture. �Even without the, at least I would have been able to use the image. �Note that if I had taken the offending image to another machine, it could have been useless - not good.

Bill


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