Squeak Board minutes - 11/19/12

Members attending: Bert Freudenberg, Colin Putney, Chris Muller, Randal
Schwartz, Chris Cunnington, Craig Latta

- Squeak4.4 is going to be released soon

- The election process is being reviewed to secure an election manager
so Göran doesn't have to do it forever

- David T. Lewis set up automatic building of 64-bit images [1], and Ian
Piumarta provides a Linux VM to run these images [2]. The Board explored
what could be done with such an image. The main thing it allows is
having larger object memories. One idea was a system that would log all
message sends and state changes, so we could have an omniscient debugger
(e.g., a person could play back everything that happened in the previous
half hour). This relates to Gilad Bracha's blog post "Debug Mode Is The
Only Mode" [3]. One thing necessary for a wider adoption of 64-bit
images would be providing VMs for Windows and Mac, and making some
remaining plugins work with 64-bits.

- Craig Latta is about to release the first modules for the Naiad module
system for Spoon: Chronos and Quoth. Craig has a process of
"spoonifying" an application written in regular code. Chronos is Alan
Lovejoy's date/time library [4] and Quoth is Craig's own musical
live-coding system [5].

- Tim Rowledge is waiting to receive in the mail a Raspberry Pi with
which he aims to provide a current RiscOS platform for Squeak. Being the
original ARM maintainer of the Squeak VM, he intends to adapt his
existing RiscOS code for the Raspbery Pi.

- Colin Putney  is in the process of reviewing and releasing a new
revision of Filesystem [6]

- Chris C. has developed a prototype of a new squeak.org homepage. It's
latest version can be found at [7]. It is an Altitude website. There are
questions about the site on two fronts: how it looks; and, how stable it
is. There has been doubt about how the site should look. Opinions about
its design, logo, layout, CSS, etc. are welcome. Herbert Konig is
helping to harden it with the Selenium testing suite. [8] [9] The most
recent image has been up for +200 hours without a problem. Colin has
added changes to Altitude, which will be deployed soon.

[1]
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2012-November/166422.html

[2] http://squeakvm.org/unix/

[3] http://gbracha.blogspot.ca/

[4] http://chronos-st.blogspot.com/

[5] http://netjam.org/quoth/

[6] http://wiresong.ca/filesystem/

[7] http://box3.squeak.org:8624

[8] http://seleniumhq.org/

[9] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/selenium-ide/

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Chris Cunnington <[hidden email]> wrote:

- Chris C. has developed a prototype of a new squeak.org homepage. It's latest version can be found at [7]. It is an Altitude website. There are questions about the site on two fronts: how it looks; and, how stable it is. There has been doubt about how the site should look. Opinions about its design, logo, layout, CSS, etc. are welcome. Herbert Konig is helping to harden it with the Selenium testing suite. [8] [9] The most recent image has been up for +200 hours without a problem. Colin has added changes to Altitude, which will be deployed soon.

I would suggest using Twitter's Bootstrap framework, it's easy to adopt and the defaults look reasonably pleasant even when a programmer puts the site together.

Cheers,

Rado

http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

A good tip. Thanks.

Chris

Yes, indeed.

And in particular I suggest to go for a fluid layout, so that it looks
fine on smaller screens

http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/examples/fluid.html

With Firefox 15.0 for example you have a new menu option
   Web developer / Responsive web design
where you can easily choose different screen sizes and have a look how
the site renders for various screen sizes.

This does not use much time in terms of Smalltalk as it is all CSS. It
will give us a modern web site.

In any case, Chris,  thank you very much for going for an Altitude web
site. It is good to have a test site. We were well served by Aida in
the past but giving the new framework a chance is fine as well.

---Hannes


On 11/20/12, Chris Cunnington <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 20-11-2012, at 5:12 AM, Chris Cunnington <[hidden email]> wrote:
> - Tim Rowledge is waiting to receive in the mail a Raspberry Pi with which he aims to provide a current RiscOS platform for Squeak. Being the original ARM maintainer of the Squeak VM, he intends to adapt his existing RiscOS code for the Raspbery Pi.


Still waiting; good old snailmail is living up to its name.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Try not to let implementation details sneak into design documents.

On 2012-11-20 12:39 PM, H. Hirzel wrote:
Fluid sounds good to me. And responsive... yea, I think I should look
into that too.

Thanks,
Chris

On 20-11-2012, at 11:44 AM, Chris Cunnington <[hidden email]> wrote:

And chocolatey.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
In the long run, every program becomes rococco, and then rubble.

>>>>> "H" == H Hirzel <[hidden email]> writes:

H> http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/examples/fluid.html

Yes, Bootstrap rocks.  I'm using it on all current projects.

--
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<[hidden email]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See http://methodsandmessages.posterous.com/ for Smalltalk discussion

If the case is, as the web site states, "There aren't any applications bundled with this release," then there ought to be a mention of how to add applications. Even if this statement is omitted I think it would be useful to newcomers to show them our version of the app store. The current site lists some things under "features" because in the past these were bundled. Granted, some good old stuff is rather broken, but if a newbie did want to try out one of these apps we need to make it simple to learn how and easy to do.

+1