Recently I was asked by Joe Backansas, and Joe forgive me if I have slaughtered your name, if I would consider podcasting the NYC Smalltalk meetings. In his words that “would really be cool”. Then a few weeks later James Robertson , which you all know very well, inquired as well.

Well, I’m swamped but with regards to this, things were just falling in place. I recently purchased a new PC to do be able to handle professional level hard disk recording. My hard disk recording software Adobe Audition recently won an award at a Podcaster’s conference. I have been listening to a podcast on how to podcast using Adobe Audition and I certainly could use exercising my sound engineering chops.

So I will be giving this a shot.

In my music blog I talk about some of the obstacles involved and how I expect those will be conquered.

I will report back and hopefully have a podcast to share fairly soon. Our next NYC Smalltalk meeting is actually tonite.

-Charles

http://www.monteirosfusion.com

Give me more classes is what Andres Valloud says. He will shows us how more classes can in some cases equate to better Smalltalk performance.

Andres will be providing us with an encore presentation of his recent OOPSLA presentation.

The next meeting will be Wednesday November 29th, 2006. It will be the last for this year since we will be taking a break for the holidays.

Same place except its on the 11th Floor and our regular same time.

Directions:

Take A,C,E to 34th street Penn Station. For that matter any train stopping at 34th street would suffice such as N,R,2,3. The New Yorker Hotel is at the corner of 34th and 8th, see the star on the map above. Walk to the corner of 34th and 9th. Meeting is held at: 440 W. 9th Ave, Fl 11. Meetings run from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm .The first half hour is an open house where individuals new to Smalltalk can ask any question regarding Smalltalk of any of our seasoned Smalltalkers. After the presentation we go around the corner to the New Yorker Hotel and have a couple of beers and talk more Smalltalk and other related tangents that come up.

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The Presentation

The abstract:

This presentation shows how to substantially increase the performance
of Smalltalk programs by creating more classes to take advantage of
polymorphism. An improved implementation of the well-known message
match:, using this and other techniques, can run up to twice as fast
as the current inlined implementation VisualWorks Smalltalk includes.
In this particular case, creating more classes is shown to be so
powerful as to become preferable to heavy use of identity checks on
immediate objects by a margin of up to 20% on average. In addition,
non-inlined implementations compare quite well to the existing inlined
implementation of match:. While they can run faster in some cases,
their overall performance falls behind by no more than a factor of 2.

This is a quick summary of chapter 3 from my book currently being
written. It is due to be published in 2007.

The bio:

Andres has been programming since age 10, has been programming in
Smalltalk for the last 10 years, and has been an artist at it for the
last 5 years. He has received a check from Donald Knuth regarding The
Art of Computer Programming. He is currently writing a book on
Smalltalk. He won the Smalltalk Solutions 2006 Coding Contest, and
he was a presenter at OOPSLA 2006 as well. Presently, he works as a
consultant at JP Morgan.

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See you all there.

Charles

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MonteirosFusion