November 2018 - Pharo-users

Re: [Pharo-users] My Keynote at the Salta Conference
by Offray Vladimir Luna CÃ¡rdenas Nov. 25, 2018

Nov. 25, 2018

Hi, Thanks for your positive and critical comments, as usual Ben. Richard I think that is important to listen to a community when reaching to it (I remember a talk we had where I suggested an approach closer to anthropology instead of marketing). Many of us value your contributions, despite of approaching them in a critical way. For example, I think that promotion is important, but popularity is not, and the later is not a proper measure of the effectivity of the former. As a Latin American (that means people born and rise Latino America, not Latinos living in United States) for me is really alien the North American people (that means people living in the North region of the American continent that goes from Alaska to Patagonia and beyond) is kind of obsessed with popularity, competition, winning and losing, at least for what popular media depicts (even seems that loser is kind of a big insult over there). I don't think that winning a competition is the best way of making a younger become part of collaborative open community. Also, in an interconnected world, I feel more inclined to volunteer my time helping a young person from the Global South to become part of the Pharo/Smalltalk community that to volunteer my time for a pretty localized competence in a particular place of the Global North. That being said, I think that little money can help a lot (specially in the Global South) and I like the idea of making young people interested in the offerings that Smalltalk has. The average FLOSS project has a media of one developer [1], so even winning one more after the competition is a big win. But I would try to volunteer my time in something that brings the gap between Pharo communities and young people and between the Global North and the Global South, specifically in my Pharo powered project, Grafoscopio. [1] https://mako.cc/writing/hill-when_free_software_isnt_better.html So I'm glad that you are open to suggestions. Here come mine about how this could be done, but this may also become something totally different of your actual proposal, but, hopefully, also more global, interesting, long lasting and a middle point between your promotional efforts and the activities of this community. # The Smalltalk Global Campfire Is an immersive inclusive global experience where new people (regardless of age, ethnicity or gender) can participate in a Smalltalk powered project and get mentorship from community members and start a long lasting relationship with a powerful technology, Smalltalk, and the friendly communities around it. ## How it will work Seasoned global Smalltalkers will propose a "tent", which is a set of related campfire projects (one or many) directed towards newbies, related with programming and coding, but also connected them with other activities which recognize that people comes from different backgrounds, have different interests and that an inclusive tech community is more than code[2]. The projects will allow newbies to learn coding, but also to express and connect it with wider concerns (documentation, civic tech, entrepreneurship, gaming, learning, etc). [2] https://morethancode.cc/about/ Interested campers will find the different tents where they can join and the tent leader will prepare a set of (increasingly complex?) activities for the members of the tent. Campers will work in the activities on a weekly basis and setup and open source code repository for working together. Coordination language for the Global Campfire will be English for tent leaders, but campers can use native language for communication between them and for some activities (local documentation, translations) as we don't want to impose a unique language to become part of a community and we recognize active Smalltalkers from around the world that can help local communities, made them stronger and better connected. ## Tent medals Becoming part of a open collaborative community is mostly about being able to help each other and how you and the community create value for each other. So while this is not a competition, we recognize that small money can be an important incentive to keep communities dynamic. At the end of the Campfire the community will provide with Member Badges and Tent Medals which recognize the work done by all the participants and also will give a small money incentive for the tent that made the best work, so the tent can decide how to spend it better. The evaluation will be done for each Tent leader, and also two external judges. The Tent Medals will be: * 1 Gold Medal: XXX Dollars. * 1 Silver Medal: XYZ Dollars. * 1 Bronze Medal: ABC Dollars. ## Closing I really don't know about the details here: How do we assign the prices? There is any better place that the one referred at [2] to showcase the important of going beyond code in tech communities? What is the proper duration for the Campfire? This is just a draft, but I think that this is something I would like to volunteer for and serves better the need for new people in our community, and can be also addressed from our local context and particular projects while connecting more the global community. On 21/11/18 10:23, Ben Coman via Pharo-users wrote:

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how do I send the 2 messsages to the function
by Roelof Wobben Nov. 25, 2018

Nov. 25, 2018

Hello, I have made this function : calculateNewFloor: aFloor index: index Â Â Â "comment stating purpose of message" Â Â |action floor | Â Â action:= SantaAction getActionFor: aFloor. floor := action doMovementFor: aFloor now I want to send a message to this functionÂ : findBasement: input2 Â Â Â "solution to part1 of this challenge" Â Â Â Â input2 withIndexDo: [ :element :index | |action| action:= SantaFloorAction getActionFor: element. floor := action calculateNewFloor: floor ..Â ]. Â Â Â Â ^ counter but how do I get the second argument in this Roelof

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Questions about NewValueHolder and Model
by dorellang Nov. 25, 2018

Nov. 25, 2018

Hi everyone! I was trying to find out how to propagate changes through widgets in the Spec UI framework, and so far it seems to me that using NewValueHolder objects is the most proper way right now. Am I wrong? However I have some questions regarding this class: (BTW I am using a Pharo 7 image) First, you may notice that NewValueHolder extends the Model class, whose class comment simply says "Provides optimized model support". The first thing I thought coming from a non-Smalltalk background was like "What is that supposed to mean?". Then I tried to make sense of it, but you know, this has been hard because Model has a lot of methods that aren't too related IMHO. For instance let's take all the methods under the 'stepping' and 'stepping-window' protocols ...what are they intended to do? After doing some research I think they are some kind of mechanism from the Morphic framework to setup actions that will be performed periodically, probably for supporting animations or something, but what does this have to do with being a Model anyway? All of this has been pretty confusing, but I think I've understood it better after reading this post about Smalltalk MVC: http://peter.michaux.ca/articles/smalltalk-mvc-translated-to-javascript . I know this may be a bit obvious for veteran Smalltalkers, but now it has become clearer to me that this Model class is the M of the MVC framework that was used in ye olden days to build Smalltalk UIs. Which is weird because as far as I know MVC doesn't exist in Pharo. So I asked myself: "Shouldn't this be killed? Why is it kept? (at least it should be cleaned up I think)". And after searching the references and senders of the methods I think it mostly comes down to Morphs. Is it feasible to clean this up? I think all of this should be explicitely documented at least, you know, all this Model API. Currently it's too implicit, not friendly for newcomers and too mixed up with random Morphic stuff (which should be dying soon anyway). Some other thing that bothers me it's that that most of the methods in Model are defined in Object too. I understand that that was made in the original MVC to have the ability to use anything as a Model, but I don't think that's necessarily the best option. It would be cleaner perhaps to have an asModel message which creates a ProxyModel object which implements all the Model API methods and then proxies the rest to the underlying instance; or maybe a more pragmatic approach would be like moving all these Model methods in object to an extension protocol; or ...hey, it's 2018! Today we have traits, we could create a Trait with all those methods and then just let the current Model class use it. That's are my thoughts about the Model class. Now I'm not an expert, so they should be taken with a grain of salt ;) Coming back to the NewValueHolder, other two issues came to my mind: - What's the deal with the old ValueHolder class? Apparently it's not used anywhere. I think it should be removed, and NewValueHolder should be renamed to ValueHolder. - Some messages of NewValueHolder are also in the Model class in the 'announcing' protocol... What's the point of this polymorphism? This is not like the classical Model API at all, which uses the dependents and updating protocols. All these methods under the 'announcing' protocol use a totally unrelated way of propagating changes. This breaks SRP, shouldn't we have instead like a NewModel class which uses this new Announcement-based mechanism for propagating changes and don't conflate the two things? - In the same fashion, I don't think there isn't any good reason for having the NewValueHolder as a Model subclass; at least the Model that implements the behavior from the old MVC framework. For the record in my image I've done 'Object subclass: #NewValueHolder (...)', copied all the announcing methods to NewValueHolder and added an announcer instance variable and it's going fine so far, but that might be because all Objects can be used as models in the MVC sense. Anyway, after some use 'Object classVariableNamed: #DependentsFields' still prints "#DependentsFields->a WeakIdentityKeyDictionary()" :P I think that's it, or maybe I forgot something I don't know haha -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

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Re: [Pharo-users] Windows 10 double-click issue + solution
by PBKResearch Nov. 25, 2018

Nov. 25, 2018

John Many thanks for the tip. I have always found double click very erratic on Windows 7 and now on W10. It would eventually work, but was critically dependent on getting the right timing for the click interval. Pushing the pointer towards 'slow' on the mouse settings has improved things a lot. Peter Kenny From: Pharo-users <pharo-users-bounces(a)lists.pharo.org> On Behalf Of John Kimber via Pharo-users Sent: 24 November 2018 23:06 To: pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org Cc: John Kimber <jk4aiest(a)yahoo.com> Subject: [Pharo-users] Windows 10 double-click issue + solution

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Windows 10 double-click issue + solution
by John Kimber Nov. 24, 2018

Nov. 24, 2018

Given the "What FP can learn..." demo, I decided to take another look at Pharo. Needless to say, I'm pleasantly suprised by the progress. The Launcher, in particular is impressive. Soon ran into an issue. On my pc under Windows 10, double-clicks would rarely select a word. Searched the Web, found some links but no real solution. Tried the following.... Under Mouse Properties>Activites: There's a setting for Double-click speed. Choosing the "Slow" value got double-clicks for Pharo working on my PC. HTH, john https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38700587/double-click-highlight-selecti… http://forum.world.st/Pharo-6-Mac-OS-X-mouse-doubleclick-issues-to-highligh… https://www.reddit.com/r/smalltalk/comments/9z3fmf/how_to_promote_pharosmal… -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

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Re: [Pharo-users] My Keynote at the Salta Conference
by Ben Coman Nov. 24, 2018

Nov. 24, 2018

On Thu, 22 Nov 2018 at 01:32, Todd Blanchard via Pharo-users < pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> wrote: > OK, sorry. I missed that. > > Now I've read it. And it requires a customized VM that can count bytecodes > executed against a budget and terminate execution if the budget is exceeded. > > For the developer it requires an awareness of the relationship between > bytecodes and source code. I, personally, have virtually no idea what that > relationship is. I used Smalltalk as a high level language and try not to > worry about how expensive things are until it actually matters. I think > that is most developers. > > So I'm not really a fan of this contest approach. The implementation is > certainly beyond my skills. I have been dabbling with Squeak since its > release and only recently trying to get into Pharo "in anger" because I > have a couple projects I personally want to realize. I'm finding the > entire thing to be really fast moving and hard to get my head around and > the VM is pretty much still impenetrable to me after a couple months trying > to build one. > It was a real nice feeling when I first managed to build the VM. Buzz me on Discord next week and I can help you out with this. So I'm definitely not your guy and the number of people who are on top of > the VM enough to pull this off is likely on the order of ten. > If its okay to execute entries on a StackInterpreter VM, then I've dabbled enough that I may know "just enough" to achieve this. The added complexity of the Cog JIT would put it beyond my skills since the interpreter loop is cycled for every bytecode. In concept, add an instance variable to Process and increment that at the start of every interpreter loop. Can someone comment on the validity of that concept? cheers -ben

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split on space or -
by Roelof Wobben Nov. 24, 2018

Nov. 24, 2018

Hello, For a acronym maker challenge on exercism.io I have to make acronyms. But I see I have to split the parts on space and when it's a word with a - then I have to split on that, Any hint how I can do that ? Roelof

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Re: [Pharo-users] VPS difficulties
by horrido Nov. 24, 2018

Nov. 24, 2018

This works! Everything is copacetic. On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 at 04:02, horrido <horrido.hobbies@> wrote: > Okay, I've resolved everything. First, the reason why I'm getting the > 'pthread_setschedparam failed' error when I run Pharo under Debian is > because it must be run as 'root'! Don't ask me why, but that's the reason > why Pharo can't set thread priorities. (This wasn't an issue under Ubuntu > Server â go figure.) > > Second, I am now using Pharo's own SHA256 class. It's probably not as > secure > (because it doesn't use a salt value) and not as quick to execute (not > being > C code), but for my purpose, it doesn't really matter. > > So I can use DigitalOcean or OVH to run my web server in a VPS. > Good to hear. But you shouldn't need to run Pharo as root, just be root to create this config file.... cat <<END | sudo tee /etc/security/limits.d/pharo.conf * hard rtprio 2 * soft rtprio 2 END cheers -ben </quote> -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

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How to attach a repository
by Nicolai Hess Nov. 24, 2018

Nov. 24, 2018

How can I "attach a repository" to project pharo? In a fresh pharo 7 image I get this message on clicking the "history" button on a method in calypse: [image: grafik.png] btw, the "atttached" has three t's :) And wouldn't it be better, to show an error dialog instead of a debugger stacktrace, if we try to show the history without an repository. nicolai

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About the IoT Hackathon last Friday
by Sven Van Caekenberghe Nov. 24, 2018

Nov. 24, 2018

Last Friday we went to the IoT Hackathon in KÃ¶ln and it was a great experience. Thank you Norbert, Christian, Markus and the whole ZweiDenker team for their generous hospitality: the accommodations where great (beautiful office), the food and drinks super tasty, everybody friendly and welcoming. Thank you Allex (Oliviera, Inria/RMOD) for running the workshop and for being so patient, friendly and tireless in helping everyone with all aspects of getting experiments up and running. I knew about PharoThings [1] and TelePharo [2] before, but actually using it in practice to experience connecting software and hardware felt a bit like magic. Thank you Denis (Kudriashov) and Inria/RMOD for developing these packages. Sven [1] https://github.com/pharo-iot/PharoThings [2] https://github.com/pharo-ide/TelePharo

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