
While the Early Registration for the 2008 ESUG Conference in Amsterdam runs till July 15th, the special deal on accommodation ends July 11th.
Get your discounts now!
Scribbles for the bored
Well, the gauntlet is down (BTW - desktop power integration. Cool!). The use case Ted talks about is actually quite interesting - we were at UDS last month, waiting on a SVN server that was apparently so slow we could have walked to it and copied stuff onto harddisk more quickly. (Really. No kidding). bzr was idling and blocked on network IO the whole time... kudos for the plugin Ted!
For my response, may I present a new index format, (branch url) 70% smaller than bzr's current default, equally fast at most workloads, up to 20 times faster at others. I started this this week, and John jumped in in overlapping time periods, but I think it counts!
Note that the perfromance wins are a component improvement - other things we haven't addressed yet can make the index improvements less visible. But several early adopters have told me that they see a 25-30% reduction in 'time bzr log > /dev/null' or other commands.
To install:
bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~lifeless/+junk/bzr-index2 ~/.bazaar/plugins/index2
bzr branch https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jameinel/+junk/pybloom ~/.bazaar/plugins/pybloom
To use:
cd <repository you want to experiment on>
bzr upgrade --btree-plain
(or --btree-rich-root for bzr-svn users).
A version of this will be going to trunk soon, and it will be able to upgrade from any repository that you have that uses the plugin as long as you keep the plugin installed.

A set of posts to the squeak mailing lists has given more details about the 16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference organised by the European Smalltalk Users’ Group, to be held 25-29 August 2008 at CWI in Amsterdam.
Programme Details
Mathieu van Echtelt writes that the programme features more than 40 presentations on, among others, the following subjects:
Programming Language Platforms
Web Frameworks
Model Driven Engineering:
Additionally, the winners of the ABN Amro sponsored Innovation Awards will be presented.
Booking Accommodation
Noury Bouraqadi notes that discount hotel rates for conference attendees are available until 11 July.
Seaside Sprint
Lukas Renggli has announced that the core Seaside dev team will be holding the first official Seaside Sprint, starting after the conference closes at 14:00 on 29 August, and finishing when the last participant collapses over their smoking keyboard. He invites anyone interested in working on Seaside or related code to participate. The venue details will be announced once agreed.
Camp Smalltalk
As usual, the weekend preceding the conference will be used to host Camp Smalltalk, an opportunity to work with colleagues on a number of exciting projects. See the Camp Smalltalk page for more information.

Lukas Renggli has announced a Seaside Sprint after the end of ESUG 2008:
The Seaside Sprint is intentionally planned outside Camp Smalltalk, because we want to be able to define the exact goals at the beginning of the Sprint where everybody is present. We would be happy if people from the commercial vendors could join the effort, so that we can push the release of Seaside 2.9 together. People proposing their own Seaside related projects or being interested joining the development team are very welcome as well.
Sounds like some good stuff will come out of that.
Qubits and Branes Share Surprising Features from PhysOrg.com
What do black holes and entangled particles have in common? Until about a year ago, physicists thought that the two entities existed in completely separate worlds. Then, in 2007, physicist Michael Duff from Imperial College London demonstrated a correlation between the entanglement of three qubits and the entropy of a black hole. In the past year, several studies have demonstrated even more connections.
[Continued]
The Seaside core team is happy to announce the first official Seaside Sprint held in Amsterdam. The Sprint starts right after the last ESUG presentation and is basically open ended:
The Seaside Sprint is intentionally planned outside Camp Smalltalk, because we want to be able to define the exact goals at the beginning of the Sprint where everybody is present. We would be happy if people from the commercial vendors could join the effort, so that we can push the release of Seaside 2.9 together. People proposing their own Seaside related projects or being interested joining the development team are very welcome as well.
The place where the Sprint is held has not been determined yet, but we are trying to get something organized where we can comfortably work. It is supposed to be fun, but be prepared to work hard ;-)
See you in Amsterdam!
As I just wrote on the Seaside mailing list, when someone suggested posting a job elsewhere:
It's been very helpful to the Perl community to get one place for all serious Perl jobs: jobs.perl.org. Because then all the smart people look there, and all the clueful employers post there, and it's also free. And the stats at http://jobs.perl.org/about/stats show that Perl is far from dead.
I'm trying to do the same thing for Smalltalk. Please support me in that. Don't point at other places. Get them to post at http://smalltalkjobs.dabbledb.com. It will be good for all of us overall. Truly.
The DabbleDB interface has many RSS feeds for particular areas, and can be pulled out and searched in detail. It's also all in Smalltalk, which is a good demo.
I mentioned the Smalltalk room on FriendFeed yesterday, but I didn't mention the fact that it merges together a bunch of feeds from various sources - my blog, other people's blogs, and the public repository feed - so you can find out what's happening across the Smalltalk world in one place (new feeds can be added to it easily).
If you want to follow that in your reader, just add this feed.
main()
{
1 Penn State: http://www.cincom.com/common/success-stories/profiles/pennuniversitydetail.html JPM: http://www.cincom.com/common/success-stories/profiles/jpmorgan.html They use hundreds and hundreds of Smalltalk images for derivatives calculations.
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at the ExtraEmphasis package - which adds some nice text capabilities (plus a nice debugger enhancement)
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