Squeak on the Nokia 770 (touches on old iamges, Morphic, SM, wxWidgets, and more!)

Hola everyone!

First... Hi! I'm back! I've not been on the list for a year or two, lots
of stuff going on. Things have died back some, so I'm going to be getting
back into Squeak finally! I am going to start by helping out with this new
documentation initiative, working on Morphic tutorials.

Now for Squeak on the 770...

As someone else pointed out, I have a Nokia 770 now. It's an awesome
little device, with one major flaw: a 220 MHz CPU. Now, I've used Squeak
on PDAs with similar CPUs- 206 MHz StrongARMs in a PDA like the iPAQ
3650/3150.  Morphic was usable under Squeak 2.8 and to a lesser extent
3.0.  When I was using PDAs that slow, 3.2+ was never really tried,
because it was a lot harder to shrink those images to a small enough size.
The iPAQ I used then had 16 MB of RAM, so I was dealing with images of 6
MB or smaller.  A lot of folks seem to be surprised that I wasn't using
MVC back then- I've always used Morphic on my PDAs.  I usually sacrificed
some features in newer images to use an older Squeak with Morphic.  Squeak
2.8 is very fast, capable and useful- not perfect, but it isn't something
that belongs only in a museum of computer archeology.

However, Squeak has gotten a lot slower in recent versions.  I personally
haven't used an image newer than 3.4 or 3.6 on any WinCE or Linux-based
PDA, but if Squeak got slower between 3.4/3.6 and 3.9g, then I imagine it
is way too slow. When I say "Squeak is slow" in this context I mean the
way Morphic feels as a user, not that the results of 0 tinyBenchmarks has
been getting slower over time. This includes actions like the time it
takes for a window to redraw it self after you've resized it and gone
mouseUp; the framerate at which Morphs are redrawn when being dragged; the
time it takes for a menu to pop up; the time it takes for a button to
register and pushed.

As a result, a project I am planning on persuing is getting
wxWidgets/Squeak to work on the 770. I'd really like to see this happen.
I personally don't mind Morphic one bit- I prefer it in a lot of ways to a
"regular" GUI toolkit.  But, it may get us the UI speed we need. Then
again, it may not. I'm not sure how feasible this is, but I'll find out
when I have the development environment I need.

Until wxWidgets/Squeak is ported to the 770, or until something miraculous
happens with Morphic or the VM, I plan on running older versions of Squeak
on any PDA, just as a matter of neccesity. I'm undecided what version-
it'll depend on what kind of performance I get on the 770.  Until
recently, I was using 3.4, mainly because it could access SqueakMap.
However, SM no longer works on anything older than 3.8, so I will
certainly move back to at least 3.2, possible 2.8 considering the slowness
of the Nokia 770's CPU.

Like someone else mentioned, some basic work has been done and it does run
on the 770. See: http://tech.inhelsinki.nl/2006-08-29/ However, I have no
copy of Squeak for the 770 right now- the person did the work hasn't
shared a binary yet, though he said he'd send me one eventually.  I'd
compile it myself, but I've no Linux/x86 machine for running the 770 SDK.

One thing I need is access to a Linux machine via SSH for hosting the gcc
cross-compiler for the Nokia 770.  If possible, an x86 machine would be
preferable. I have a PPC OS X machine at home, but that's it.  If anyone
would be willing to hook me up with access to a machine with the requisite
software installed, that would be really awesome! Please email me if you
can help.

Well... I plan on being active on the list again, so I doubt this is the
last you'll see of me. If you'd like to discuss Squeak, please stop by the
Squeak IRC channel- #squeak on irc.freenode.net.  Contrary to the ideas
some people have of IRC/chat, we have some very productive conversations
there, in addition to being a place where Squeakers interact socially.

Regards,
Aaron
(celebrating his triumphant return to the squeak-dev list... :D )

[hidden email] || rev in #squeak on irc.freenode.net
   "Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must
         raise themselves to Liberty." -- Emma Goldman

Aaron

between 3.8 and 3.9 the morphic speeds up. So could you check if this  
has
an impact on your analysis. And we are interested in the Nokia 770.

Stef


On 5 oct. 06, at 01:19, Aaron Reichow wrote:

Hi Aaron,

Welcome back! I am wondering, have you looked at Tweak as an
alternative to wxWidgets on the 770? I know virtually nothing
about the relative speed of Tweak compared to Morphic or
wxWindows on machines with "limited" resources, so this may
well be an ignorant question, but I am curious.

Ron

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email]
[mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of
Aaron Reichow
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2006 7:20 PM
To: squeak-dev mailling list
Subject: Squeak on the Nokia 770 (touches on old iamges, Morphic,
SM,wxWidgets, and more!)

Hola everyone!

First... Hi! I'm back! I've not been on the list for a year or two, lots
of stuff going on. Things have died back some, so I'm going to be
getting
back into Squeak finally! I am going to start by helping out with this
new
documentation initiative, working on Morphic tutorials.

Now for Squeak on the 770...

As someone else pointed out, I have a Nokia 770 now. It's an awesome
little device, with one major flaw: a 220 MHz CPU. Now, I've used Squeak
on PDAs with similar CPUs- 206 MHz StrongARMs in a PDA like the iPAQ
3650/3150.  Morphic was usable under Squeak 2.8 and to a lesser extent
3.0.  When I was using PDAs that slow, 3.2+ was never really tried,
because it was a lot harder to shrink those images to a small enough
size.
The iPAQ I used then had 16 MB of RAM, so I was dealing with images of 6
MB or smaller.  A lot of folks seem to be surprised that I wasn't using
MVC back then- I've always used Morphic on my PDAs.  I usually
sacrificed
some features in newer images to use an older Squeak with Morphic.
Squeak
2.8 is very fast, capable and useful- not perfect, but it isn't
something
that belongs only in a museum of computer archeology.

However, Squeak has gotten a lot slower in recent versions.  I
personally
haven't used an image newer than 3.4 or 3.6 on any WinCE or Linux-based
PDA, but if Squeak got slower between 3.4/3.6 and 3.9g, then I imagine
it
is way too slow. When I say "Squeak is slow" in this context I mean the
way Morphic feels as a user, not that the results of 0 tinyBenchmarks
has
been getting slower over time. This includes actions like the time it
takes for a window to redraw it self after you've resized it and gone
mouseUp; the framerate at which Morphs are redrawn when being dragged;
the
time it takes for a menu to pop up; the time it takes for a button to
register and pushed.

As a result, a project I am planning on persuing is getting
wxWidgets/Squeak to work on the 770. I'd really like to see this happen.
I personally don't mind Morphic one bit- I prefer it in a lot of ways to
a
"regular" GUI toolkit.  But, it may get us the UI speed we need. Then
again, it may not. I'm not sure how feasible this is, but I'll find out
when I have the development environment I need.

Until wxWidgets/Squeak is ported to the 770, or until something
miraculous
happens with Morphic or the VM, I plan on running older versions of
Squeak
on any PDA, just as a matter of neccesity. I'm undecided what version-
it'll depend on what kind of performance I get on the 770.  Until
recently, I was using 3.4, mainly because it could access SqueakMap.
However, SM no longer works on anything older than 3.8, so I will
certainly move back to at least 3.2, possible 2.8 considering the
slowness
of the Nokia 770's CPU.

Like someone else mentioned, some basic work has been done and it does
run
on the 770. See: http://tech.inhelsinki.nl/2006-08-29/ However, I have
no
copy of Squeak for the 770 right now- the person did the work hasn't
shared a binary yet, though he said he'd send me one eventually.  I'd
compile it myself, but I've no Linux/x86 machine for running the 770
SDK.

One thing I need is access to a Linux machine via SSH for hosting the
gcc
cross-compiler for the Nokia 770.  If possible, an x86 machine would be
preferable. I have a PPC OS X machine at home, but that's it.  If anyone
would be willing to hook me up with access to a machine with the
requisite
software installed, that would be really awesome! Please email me if you
can help.

Well... I plan on being active on the list again, so I doubt this is the
last you'll see of me. If you'd like to discuss Squeak, please stop by
the
Squeak IRC channel- #squeak on irc.freenode.net.  Contrary to the ideas
some people have of IRC/chat, we have some very productive conversations
there, in addition to being a place where Squeakers interact socially.

Regards,
Aaron
(celebrating his triumphant return to the squeak-dev list... :D )

[hidden email] || rev in #squeak on irc.freenode.net
   "Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must
         raise themselves to Liberty." -- Emma Goldman

IMHO the performance of the 770 is not very well at all and so Squeak  
itself is sometimes a little bit slow.

Starting the VM with the latest image 3.9 #7061 takes about 10 - 15  
seconds. My 770 has 64 MB built in and a 2 GB media card. The image,  
changeset, and source files located on the media card, and the vm is  
located in the built in memory.

The VM was build with Onne's patch (http://tech.inhelsinki.nl/ 
2006-08-29/).
works fine:
- starting squeak with shell command
- pen support
- hardware-keys: cursor up/down/left/right, cr (enter) and escape
- network (WiFi and Bluetooth modem) but must be connected before the  
vm is launched.

don't work / is missing:
- Squeak launcher with file (image) chooser which will integrate  
itself in the Hildon UI.
- audio in/out support
- some hardware keys: menu, home, fullscreen, zoom in/out
- built-in virtual keyboard support

Starting the VM with a shrinked 3.4 #5170 image (1.5 MB image, 21 kB  
changeset, 13 MB source file) but MVC only starts in less the 1/2  
second and responds very good.

@Stef: Are there any special benchmark you are interested in? If yes,  
please send me the code an I will run it for you.

Actually I don't know how to act with a pen only (no 3 button mouse)  
and with no virtual keyboard yet - can anyone give me a hint?

Gerald.


On 05.10.2006, at 08:52, stephane ducasse wrote:

> Aaron
>
> between 3.8 and 3.9 the morphic speeds up. So could you check if  
> this has
> an impact on your analysis. And we are interested in the Nokia 770.
>
> Stef
>
>

Gerald Leeb puso en su mail :
I do not have a Nokia 770, but a shrinked Squeak .
It's based on 3.7 , but could load code from 3.9.
And I ready to help with any problem.

If you wish try, here the url , thanks to Klaus.

 
ftp://[hidden email]:21/pub/SqueakLight/SqueakLight.406.zip



       
       
               
__________________________________________________
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Hi gerard

I just wanted to know what was the general feel and if 3.9 was usable.

I do not see my emails again.....:( and my mailing-list setup are  
correct.

Stef

On 5 oct. 06, at 14:17, Gerald Leeb wrote:

On 05.10.2006, at 17:45, stephane ducasse wrote:

> Hi gerard
>
> I just wanted to know what was the general feel and if 3.9 was usable.
>
> I do not see my emails again.....:( and my mailing-list setup are  
> correct.

Gmail does filter for duplicates... so when you read via Gmail (pop  
or on the
web) you will never see your own posts...

    Mracus

On 5-Oct-06, at 5:17 AM, Gerald Leeb wrote:

> IMHO the performance of the 770 is not very well at all and so  
> Squeak itself is sometimes a little bit slow.

Well we have to remember that the cpu in the nokia is running at  
about 200-ish MHz, has a whole 32Kb (or thereabouts) cache, no  
floating point hardware and a 32 bit fairly slow memory bus. If  
you're lucky it will run Squeak at about 5% the performance of a  
typical modern desktop machine. Graphics will tend to be relatively  
worse since the memory bandwidth really bites you.

Nonetheless, actual raw Smalltalk performance is pretty good and the  
UI slowness is down to far too much code running to do the job. If  
you try an older image that has a functional MVC system you might  
well find the apparent UI performance very reasonable. On my very  
old, similarly powered Acorn RPC any morphic menu takes a couple of  
seconds to appear. In MVC, menus are perceptually instant.

Mind you, even on my current dual core 2GHz G5 PowerMac morphic and  
tweak menus sometimes seem to take forever. I take that as a hint  
that some work is needed in the graphics/UI classes.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- She's a screensaver:  Looks good, but useless.

Actually the Nokia 770 is a really nice device and the display is  
awesome :)

Hey Ron-

On Thu, 5 Oct 2006, Welch, Ronald P (CSC) (US SSA) wrote:

> Welcome back! I am wondering, have you looked at Tweak as an
> alternative to wxWidgets on the 770? I know virtually nothing
> about the relative speed of Tweak compared to Morphic or
> wxWindows on machines with "limited" resources, so this may
> well be an ignorant question, but I am curious.

Tweak is impossibly slow on all the PDAs on which I've tried it.  And by
that, I don't mean (like with newer Morphic on a slower PDA) you have a
couple second wait between a stylus tap and a menu popping up- in an
example like that, we are talking about 30 seconds between tap and menu.
I let the Tweak team know this when I tested it, but for the life of me I
can't remember or find their response.  I've not tested Tweak on any sort
of Linux-based PDA, so this covers only WinCE-based PDAs (WinCE 3.0,
Pocket PC 2k/2k2, Windows Mobile 2003-5.0).

I'll check it again when I get Squeak going on the 770 and let you know.

Using Tweak was a thought of mine as well, but for now it doesn't jive.

> Ron

Regards,
Aaron

[hidden email] || rev in #squeak on irc.freenode.net
   "Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must
         raise themselves to Liberty." -- Emma Goldman

On Thu, 5 Oct 2006, Gerald Leeb wrote:

> @Stef: Are there any special benchmark you are interested in? If yes,
> please send me the code an I will run it for you.

Could you start by running 0 tinyBenchmarks? That would be helpful.

> Actually I don't know how to act with a pen only (no 3 button mouse)
> and with no virtual keyboard yet - can anyone give me a hint?

As a longtime Squeak PDA user, I've interacted with Squeak in 3 ways:

1. Using the OS's input methods (virtual keyboard, HWR, etc),

2. Using a virtual keyboard for Squeak that I wrote, or

3. Using an updated and modified CharRecog.  CharRecog is a really neat
character recognition engine that, if memory serves me, Alan himself wrote
for Squeak.  Unlike Grafiti, you have to train it, it doesn't come with
any built-in set of gestures.  To use it, I used to define one of the
hardware buttons on the PDA I was using as the hotkey to start it within
the text field. I think there is an alt key command that will start it as
well, but I don't remember what it is. I also added an item to the
scrollbar menu to start it.  I've written a fair amount of code and text
with this- once you get it trained up enough, it is pretty useful, and it
is very responsive.


Regards,
Aaron

did you try Genie on it. Because I remember that nathanael optimized  
Genie.

Stef

On 5 oct. 06, at 23:04, Aaron Reichow wrote:

And, of course, there is the Genie recognizer that Nathaniel wrote,
which is a much more comprehensive recognizer with many useful tools
that both Nathaniel and then Ned Konz added.

Cheers,

Alan

------------

At 02:04 PM 10/5/2006, Aaron Reichow wrote:

Stef-

On Thu, 5 Oct 2006, stephane ducasse wrote:

> did you try Genie on it. Because I remember that nathanael optimized
> Genie.

When I was working on Dynapad, I had begun to do some work with Genie.
However, a lot of my work was intitially focused on CharRecog. Basically,
I had gotten it to a point where it was useful enough for me that Genie
wasn't a priority. Genie is really cool, really powerful, way more
extensible, and can do a million things more than CharRecog. However, it
is also slow (on PDA hardware) and IMHO it is confusing to figure out what
to do with it, how to configure it, etc.  If the platform were a PC/Mac
tablet, then Genie it would be, and the work would be worth it- Genie
would let us do a lot more than enter text- with enough energy put into
it, it could become a complete gesture control system for a PDA.  Genie is
where I will begin to focus my efforts when I have a PDA-type device with
enough power, but until then I will be sticking with some other solutions.
Genie isn't that bad on a fast enough high-end PDA, but even on a Zaurus
C760 (400 MHz PXA255) or a Dell Axim X51v (624 MHz XScale), I found Genie
frustrating at times in 'real world' use compared to Genie.

For those who want to use Genie for a PDA-type system, I would suggest
getting a computer like the OQO or the Sony VAIO UX-series for something
very close to the size of PocketPC PDAs or, if you'd like something with a
larger screen, a UMPC or a Sony U-series.  Me, personally, I'd kill for
any of those computers, especially the smaller ones (anything but a UMPC).
However, I don't have the kind of cash required- most PDAs are only
$200-400 USD, which is still a lot of money, don't get me wrong- but it is
a lot cheaper than the $1500-2500 required to get one of those x86
handhelds listed above.  Then again, I'm always open to donations if folks
would like me to refocus my efforts on higher-end hardware. :)

Or, at the very least, a Linux-based Zaurus- anything past a C750 would be
good. The PXA255 @ 400 MHz or above is important.  Or, something
similarily spec'd for WinCE, but on CE preferably something with a CPU
speed of 520 or 624 MHz. CE machines are slower than the C750+ Zaurus
models.  I think this is due to a better memory bus in the Zaurus models
specifically, as those same CE machines running Linux benchmark similarily
as they did under CE. The upper end of the PDAs available aren't too bad
for genie, but the Nokia 770 is too slow.

To check out an image with Genie and a set of gestures for text
recognition see:

ftp://ftp.squeak.org/3.0/unix-linux/iPaq/TinySqueak.image.gz
ftp://ftp.squeak.org/3.0/unix-linux/iPaq/TinySqueak.changes.gz

It was created by Kevin Fisher and it is based on Squeak 3.1a.

> Stef

Regards,
Aaron

[hidden email] || rev in #squeak on irc.freenode.net
   "Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must
         raise themselves to Liberty." -- Emma Goldman

Just to piggyback on Alan's comment...

1. See my other rambling post, in reply to Stef.

2. Genie, unlike a lot of other newer Squeak technologies, does indeed run
on older Squeaks- at least 3.1a, probably 3.0, but probably nothing before
that.  It can do a ton more than CharRecog- but CharRecog is a single
long method that is deadly simple and just as elegant. But a serious
Squeak PDA project- like my ressurected Dynapad [1]- will be based on
Genie and not CharRecog or something similar.

[1] Dynapad resurection is waiting 'til I have hardware decent enough to
run newer Squeaks without wanting to pull my hair out. :P

Regards,
Aaron

[hidden email] || rev in #squeak on irc.freenode.net
   "Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must
         raise themselves to Liberty." -- Emma Goldman

On Thu, 5 Oct 2006, Alan Kay wrote:

Hi. How do you use OS's input methods (Windows [WM5?] virtual keyboard)?
I have problems with OS input methods on my WM5 PDA device. There is no
way to show windows keyboard (main squeak window is completely over
whole windows PDA desktop).

Thanks, pf


> On Thu, 5 Oct 2006, Gerald Leeb wrote:

> As a longtime Squeak PDA user, I've interacted with Squeak in 3 ways:
>
> 1. Using the OS's input methods (virtual keyboard, HWR, etc),
>
> 2. Using a virtual keyboard for Squeak that I wrote, or
>
> ...

On 10/5/06, Aaron Reichow <[hidden email]> wrote:
> One thing I need is access to a Linux machine via SSH for hosting the gcc
> cross-compiler for the Nokia 770.  If possible, an x86 machine would be
> preferable.

No problem - I can get you an account on one of my machines, but did
you consider downloading a VMware image? The player is free, there are
Linux images floating around on da Net, and VMware is fast enough for
development...

Aaron Reichow schrieb:

>
> One thing I need is access to a Linux machine via SSH for hosting the gcc
> cross-compiler for the Nokia 770.  If possible, an x86 machine would be
> preferable. I have a PPC OS X machine at home, but that's it.  If anyone
> would be willing to hook me up with access to a machine with the requisite
> software installed, that would be really awesome! Please email me if you
> can help.
>

Hello Aaron,
if you still need an SSH access to a Linux machine I can and would help.
I have a ready to use virtual machine with debian 3.1 running on an
internet server. If you need access, let me know.

Regards,
Franz Josef Konrad

Thank you!

You can download the vm-binaries for the Nokia 770 from my homepage:  
http://g-24.net/squeak/770.html


0 tinyBenchmarks returns on my 770:
13114754 bytecodes/sec; 493975 sends/sec

have fun
Gerald.

I understand money wise :)
And thanks for your report this is really interesting and worht  
experience.
in the Genie implementation you used did you check if the primitives  
was there?

Stef

On 6 oct. 06, at 05:38, Aaron Reichow wrote: