Planet Smalltalk

Desde hace mucho tiempo había querido escribir historias fantásticas. El género fantástico, junto con la ciencia ficción son mis favoritos. Cuando nació Tristán, supe que había llegado el momento. Escribiría para él  las historias que hasta entonces revoloteaban por mi cabeza. Ahora tienen una razón de ser. Son historias para mi hijo que crecerán conforme él [...]

I was recently working on a project called SPM (Squeak Project Manager).
It's an application to manage squeak projects, with:

• a Monticello repository accessible from the website
• a tracking system including a timeline, roadmap, milestones and tickets (or issues)
• a wiki
• news (or blog)
• an interface to Monticello, which allows you to browse the code online, with bookmarkable urls

Each user also has a personal page, with an editable todo, a list of all tickets assigned to him, and a list of the recent events in the timeline.

It's not finished yet, but we already use it for Scribo: scribo.bioskop.fr
SPM is based on Aida/Scribo, and will be released under MIT licence.

Stay tuned!

Last weekend I installed LaTeX and began to write my first book. It is a book about Seaside. I want to include, at least, the following topics: Seaside basics Advanced Seaside Ajax Announcements Persistance (GLORP,  Magma,  GemStone/S) Scalability (load balancing, static content caching) Deployment (big iron, VPS, Amazon EC2) Unit Testing Maintenance (monitoring, updating) Magritte (just a little) Data export (JSON/REXX) I am thinking of creating a full application, [...]

Today I updated the Debian GNU/Linux machines under my control in order to apply the fixes for DSA-1571 and DSA-1576. I had to regenerate several keys in the servers but now it appears to be all safe again. That was an error from a Debian package mantainer but, in spite of that, Debian remains my GNU/Linux distribution [...]

I have a unique talent it seems. I can “pick up” new technology at an exceptionally quick rate. This sounds useful, however it tends to get me into trouble because it quickly appears that I have some enormous depth in something I’m just beginning to sort out.

I’m not sure why this is. Perhaps it is the dearth of actual competent individuals in IT; perhaps it is that once you demonstrate some breadth of knowledge, it is assumed that you know everything to a certain level of competence. I don’t. I know something about nearly everything in the technology world, but there’s a much smaller set of areas where my knowledge is deep and extensive. This can be dangerous. While it lets me bridge a lot of gaps when working with clients, it sometimes leads project management people to make assumptions.

Take this morning for example. I’ve been asked to represent my team in a discussion about Active Directory with the client. Certainly, I know what directories are. In fact, I probably know directories (and meta-directories) better than 99% of the people working with Active Directory. That doesn’t, however, mean that I understand implementation issues with Active Directory in particular (I don’t), nor do I understand all the intricate and interwoven dependencies with Windows deployments (I don’t, and have no desire). My experience is in glueing together directories from dozens upon dozens of organizations into one organization-wide view. It’s not a trivial task, but it’s not the same task, and assuming that because I’ve done one that I can do the other? Dangerous.

I know it, but why is it so hard for others to understand the various skill sets inside even a specific technology/discipline? I can learn—that’s my talent—but even for me it takes some time, something we are sorely lacking in this project.

There was a discussion recently on standards where one poster said that they were big on alignment. Here's an exchange:

Hi__ jwen,

jhdn> Simple solution: set in your coding standards that ALL
jhdn> classnames MUST be a specific length, and also dictate specific
jhdn> lengths for all member variables, method names, etc. etc.

Hmmm_, I___ thnk that mght caus more prbs, mayb even a___ rvln from
the_ devs. Not_ to__ mntn that it__ lmts your cr8v ablt to__ use_ good
nams and bild a dict* that hlps bild betr apps.

Grgg

* I Just couldn't come up with a four letter substitution for
"vocabulary". :)

Classic. I laughed coffee through my nose. It hurt, but was well worth it. I'm glad I don't work somewhere they have standard on the size of my variables. I don't think I would be working there much longer.

新しいメーリングリストにもちょびちょびメールを書いています。がそれはともかく、Nicholasからの正式なアナウンスです。http://wiki.laptop.org/go/AnnounceFAQ Windowsとdual bootできるようにするということで、今までのコミュニティにはがっかりする人もたくさんいるでしょうね。ただ、あたかも世の終わりであるかのように受け止める人も多いですが、Windows上でも気にせずにフリーなソフトウェアを書いている人もいるし、すでにいろいろな教育用コンテンツもあるので ...

GUIフレームワークでの実験なぞをしています。使用しているのはまだSqueakです。 ズーム可能なインターフェイスをMorphic上で書こうとするのは初めてでもないのですが、いつも意味不明な壁に当たってめげていました。Morphicの持つ機能には頼らずに全部自分でやるという建前ではありますが、レンダリングをするところはやっぱり既存のBalloonCanvasなどを使ってしまうわけです。 今回はもう一度気合を入れなおして、じっくりと見直してみました。はまりポイントは 座標変換行列がisPureTran ...

I also agree that Ivan Kristic's recent blog, sic-transit-gloria-laptopi, is a must read, warts and all, for its passion and the challenging way in which it airs some important questions, such as:

Can constructionism scale?

As far as I know, there is no real study anywhere that demonstrates constructionism works at scale. There is no documented moderate-scale constructionist learning pilot that has been convincingly successful; when Nicholas points to "decades of work by Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, and Jean Piaget", he's talking about theory.

Is there any evidence that "free software does any better than proprietary software when it comes to aiding learning?"

This insight:

There are three key problems in one-to-one computer programs: choosing a suitable device, getting it to children, and using it to create sustainable learning and teaching experiences. They're listed in order of exponentially increasing difficulty

This assertion:

A Windows-compatible Sugar would bring its rich learning vision to potentially tens or hundreds of millions of children all over the world whose parents already own a Windows computer, be it laptop or desktop. To suggest this is a bad course of action because it’s philosophically impure is downright evil.

This proposal:

I’m trying to convince Walter not to start a Sugar Foundation, but an Open Learning Foundation. For those who still care about learning in this whole clusterfuck of conflicting agendas, the charge should be to start that organization, since OLPC doesn’t want to be it. Having a company that is device-agnostic and focuses entirely on the learning ecosystem, from deployment to content to Sugar, is not only what I think is sorely needed to really take the one-to-one computer efforts to the next level, but also an approach that has a good chance of making the organization doing the work self-sustaining at some point