6 posts tagged “floss weekly”

Interviewed on Linux Outlaws and The Command Line podcasts

Oct 31, 2009
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I was recently interviewed on both The Linux Outlaws and The Command Line podcasts. While the interviews are general coverage of my life so far, I did manage to sneak a bit of Smalltalk and Seaside content into both of them. I especially made it clear that I've been hacking Smalltalk since 1982, long before Perl was even around.

The Linux Outlaws interview came about because a group of us open-source podcasters were talking about "bumper trading", where we make up 30-second promos for our show, and then send it to others in exchange for playing their bumper on our show. I don't play other people's bumpers on FLOSS Weekly, but I said that in exchange for interviewing me on someone's show, I'd be sure to mention that show on the following show of mine. I've heard that because of my mention of Outlaws on FLOSS, they had to upgrade to the next hosting plan for the rapid increase in downloads. Good work, guys!

The Command LIne show is one of the best produced shows I've heard. The host reads from a fully prepared script, and the resulting show has detailed show notes and chapters and well-produced musical stingers to identify each portion of the show. It's definitely on my "must listen" list, even if I must skip forward to different parts (easy, thanks to chapter marks) if I'm in a hurry.

Sneaking some Squeak Smalltalk into FLOSS Weekly

Oct 25, 2008
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I keep mentioning Squeak Smalltalk as I'm chatting with Leo Laporte while taping my well received podcast FLOSS Weekly. It's actually quite fun. He keeps bringing it up as something he's learning, and I think it's giving a big visibility to Squeak and to Smalltalk in general. There's even talk of creating a special Learning Squeak series that would be shown on Leo's live webcast network. Check it out!

FLOSS Weekly - GNUstep

Oct 11, 2008
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We interviewed two of the developers from the GNUstep project this week on FLOSS Weekly (episode 44). After seeing that I can write an Objective C program that runs natively on OSX, but could relatively easily be ported to Windows and nearly anything that runs X11, I'm inspired to go finish learning Objective C and the Cocoa framework and start hacking some real code.

The Smalltalk connection? Objective C is very Smalltalk-like, from what I recall of it. I can certainly stomach that a lot better than I can C++.

Update: Yes, we're going to interview the guys from the Étoilé project in a couple of months as well.

Dan Ingalls interviewed on FLOSS Weekly

May 23, 2008
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In yet another overlap of my interests, Dan Ingalls (co-inventor of Smalltalk and co-creator of Squeak and the Lively Kernel) agreed to be interviewed for my FLOSS "Weekly" show, and the show is now available. Check it out... great interview (thanks Dan!).

Reviving the IRTC in Smalltalk

Mar 26, 2008
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One of my fond memories of years past was reviewing the frequent submissions to the Internet Ray Tracing Competition (IRTC), being consistently stunned at how Dave Buck's povray could be used to generate some remarkable photorealistic images, even back in the early days when 10 Mhz was a fast machine.

When I interviewed Dave for a recent FLOSS Weekly, I discovered that the IRTC had fallen into limbo, and was saddened by that. But apparently, my wish to have it revive was enough of a nudge for Dave to look in to it, and a few weeks later he announced that the IRTC was going to be revived. Even better, the new website would be written in Seaside, and that I had volunteered to help him with it. (No, he didn't ambush me... we had discussed this in email the previous day.)

Last night, Dave and I started chatting for the first time about the project. I managed to download the latest VisualWorks NC version, and get it up and running, and got connected to Dave's repo. Within 20 minutes of wandering through the code to understand what had been written so far, I found a common Seaside misunderstanding (calling #renderContentOn: a subcomponent rather than #render:), and pointed it out to Dave, so the relationship has already been useful. We also talked about the need for class comments, especially since WAComponent's comment is where I learned about the #render: mistake.

What I find exciting about this is that I have a solid project to get VW experience in, and since we'll be using Glorp, I also get to learn Glorp with a practical project. I believe the code will be dual licensed (both MIT and LGPL), so this will also be a great example for others to use of a reasonably interesting and complex Seaside application.

Thanks to Dave for letting me apprentice with him (including the patience to explain VW to me, one crazy step at a time), and have the opportunity to contribute to a visible project!

FLOSS Weekly episode 23: Yahoo User Interface library

Jan 4, 2008
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OK, so it's not strictly smalltalk, but bear with me for a second.

My FLOSS "Weekly" interview with Nate Koechley of Yahoo just hit the feed. We chat about the Yahoo User Interface library, allowing rich interactions that are supported across all A-list browsers. Check out out to learn about why I'm pretty excited about using YUI for web development.

The Smalltalk tie-in is that I'm creating a Seaside library for Squeak that integrates YUI, much like Scriptaculous is also integrated. This will bring a comprehensive and ever expanding set of interactions for all browsers to Seaside! Cool!