Monthly Archives: July 2005

Tonight’s meeting – OpenSkills

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Bruce is one of my favorite presenters. He has that witty British thing going and no matter how boring the presentation may be he is always fun to watch. Not that he was boring this time, the presentation was brilliant we had a lovely time.

Bruce’s OpenSkills related presentations are interesting because of the various open source technologies used which are combined with Smalltalk and often leveraged from Smalltalk. On this occassion , the OpenPGP stuff and it use to support a trust network was very interesting. Also of interest to me was his use of Glorp since we intend to use it to provide a pluggable rdms backend to our product.

After the meeting we went to the bar which is now apparently becoming part of our custom. I’m glad we started to do this since it allows us to interact in a way one can’t during a presentation. We had two guests i.e. newcomers , Matt and Jerome. Good meeting you all, hope to see you next time. Any questions you know where to ask. BTW, next time would be September since we take August off. The fall season should be a good one. I potentially have more presentations than available time slots , a good thing since that means that we should have material available for first Q 2006.

Garage Band

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This is a great time to be an aspiring musician. Check out Garage Band. They keep making their services better and better. I have been a member ever since my composition teacher joined. If you like Jazz piano search for Jon Raney , son of the legendary Jazz guitarist Jimmy Raney. Unfortunately, you won’t find me there yet :)

Collaborating with StORE

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It had been probably about 1.5 years since I last tried to use Postgres on Windows as a backend for StORE, the source code versioning environment for VisualWorks. It was not happening at all. At that time I decided to use the Interbase/Firebird backend because it was a multi-user solution which was stable and that was a step up from what I had been using at the time namely Access. Why is a multi-user backend necessary? Well, because it one wants to collaborate with somebody there is no to setup some centralized repository somewhere you can do it peer to peer which sure beats passing parcels around. However the Interbase/Firebird solution was not quite perfect. So now I have decided to move on to using Postgres on Windows as my StORE backend the reasons being:

  • Good security which means that participants do not have to be confined to the same local network
  • Very easy install on Windows
  • the admin tools are good, making it easy to setup users and multiple databases
  • Postgres works with Glorp and thereofore with the Glorp Store replicator
  • I want to start working with something that uses Glorp since we plan to use it in the near future
  • Finally, this is the setup that many of the Cincom Smalltalkers seem to be using i.e. from my talks at SS 2005

Murphy and the Matrix

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Everything that possibly could go wrong went wrong. Did I drop the ball, did I slack off? Let’s start at the very beginning. About three years ago or so I went to OOPSLA , I’m confused as to whether it was in Tampa or Minneapolis. All I remember, is that STIC had a fairly decent size booth with a gigantic overhead sign and right across from the Microsoft booth. There I setup a camp in one corner and demoed something I called OpentalkMatrix. OpentalkMatrix is something akin to LimeWire or Kazaa but yet different. Like LimeWire and Kazaa it allows users to discover components on a p2p network but it has extended support for VisualWorks code parcels. Anyhow, let’s leave the details for later just suffice to say that the demo worked. I would later go on to demo OpentalkMatrix at NYC Smalltalk and yet again it worked. At home I have a 4 node network including a node on a wireless leg and it works here fine. Prior to the conference , I even tried this out on the network at the office and that worked too. Finally, a couple days before my slot at Smalltalk Solutions I met with one of the principal Cincom Smalltalk engineers in charge of Opentalk development and our dry run went well as well. Of course, the logistics at the demo were slightly different. I did not count with the original presenter running over into my time slot :) I did not count on my notebook not being able to connect properly to the projector i.e. something that I have done many, many times at NYC Smalltalk, I did not count on a second wireless network in the area. Did not count on having to use TightVNC in quite the way I did. I knew that a live demo was a daring undertaking but I thought I had taken enough spins around the block. Overall, I am pissed and mostly because I do now think that I did slack off. I did not deliver. I did not take the time to control my environment. Anyhow, the only way I will be able to redeem myself is to demo OpentalkMatrix at a global scale i.e. let the Internet be my stage but before I can do that for one we will have to fix one minor issue with Opentalk. More on that later :) .

4th of July in NYC

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Every year we make an excuse, oh the rowdy crowds and this and that, but for some reason this year we dragged ourselves out and got on the subway and in 30 minutes got to our spot. The spot was in Long Island City right across the river from 34th street. New York is such a great city and we just don’t take enough advantage of it . The fireworks were spectacular, beautiful. We will be making this a tradition. One of the coolest things about watching the fireworks in NYC is that within my immediate radar there were couples, and families of just about every possible race, ethnic background, all enjoying for 30 minutes the tremendous spectacle Macy’s puts out for the 4th. Supposedly, 1000 shells per second were launched. These fireworks were the second largest in NYC history second to the millenium celebrations. Here are some shots, I did not take them , I figured somebody would.

OpenSkills Membership Management System

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Bruce Badger , a long time friend of NYC Smalltalk , will again be gracing us this year with a presentation on another support system for his OpenSkills organization. Last year the presentation involved Gemstone , a Smalltalk based oodms/app server as well as the use of Squid, and a Smalltalk based wiki.. This year the presentation involves using GLORP ( the reincarnation of TopLink) and the generation and management of PGP keys among other things. Bruce always presents the week after Smalltalk Solutions since that is when he makes his pilgrimage from the land down under up to the States. So invariably, we will also be discussing Smalltalk Solutions which I hope will not include my mishap but more on that later.

If you are in the NYC area please join us. More information can be found at the NYC Smalltalk wiki.