What has happened to Dolphin Harbour?

Steve Waring seems to have dissapeared off the face of the internet since
about September of last year (Children? Job? Illness?)

Anyways, the Dolphin community sources/links are extremely fragile at best.
I'm _still_ finding new Dolphin sites where pac files have been published.
Dolphin Harbour seems to be one example of something done right, but it has
stagnated!

The OA wiki is locked down, so what should be the mother source of
information is stagnate aswell. Which leaves the news groups as really the
only place where there is a flow of information about Dolphin. I hate news
groups!

Andy, are you guys looking at re-addressing this problem? I guess some would
look at it as Marketing. Perhaps a few of the OA team members should get
some sort of blog going (and keep them going) as a way to drum up some sort
of information flow from within. Having Blair do a daily snippet or
something could be good. Or even yourself, or anyone.

There are are so many broken links into the OA site too. I don't really care
about it, but plain old 404 messages just look like shit. Someone should
spend 2 hours and write some sort of intelligent 404 handler for your site
"Sorry the page is gone, but the content it contained is found
[link]here[/link]". 404 errors from within Dolphin look _really_ bad, (And
thats going to be happening on the evaluation version!)

Has anyone else got anything like Dolphin Harbour going?

The Smalltalk community in general is hard to traverse. There is so many
broken links, and so much dead content. Someone needs to clean it up. People
interested in Smalltalk may not even last long enough to find a version of
Smalltalk worth using like Dolphin for example.

"Yeah I tried GNU Smalltalk. No idea what the fuss is about..."

Sean Malloy wrote:

> The OA wiki is locked down, so what should be the mother source of
> information is stagnate aswell. Which leaves the news groups as really the
> only place where there is a flow of information about Dolphin. I hate news
> groups!

That's unfortunate, because this NG is *the* place for the dissemination of
information and the exchange of ideas.  It works very well too (IMO) -- much
better than some "discussion forum" software on some website somewhere.

I find the wretched "forums" are excruciating to use. There are a couple that I
have to read since they are the only source of information that I need, but I
use them *very* reluctantly.   If the Dolphin community ever moved to one of
those then it could say bye-bye to me (this may be considered an advantage of
such a move of course)

Wikis are all very well as a place to *record* information, but I've rarely
come across anything as lame for the *exchange* of ideas.  Using a wiki to hold
a conversation is silly.  Even using it to "grow" a knowledge base seems to
work rather badly because no-one (naturally) wants to delete anything that
anyone else has written, so you end up with a base paragraph followed by a
bunch of riders added by other people, rather than providing the reader with a
coherent and up-to-date view of the matter in hand.


> Anyways, the Dolphin community sources/links are extremely fragile at
> best. I'm _still_ finding new Dolphin sites where pac files have been
> published. Dolphin Harbour seems to be one example of something done
> right, but it has stagnated!

I very much agree about the risks and problems of a community who's "static"
content is structured as a collection of independent websites.  But what are
the alternatives, and can you get the people (like me) who construct such
things to "buy into" a centralised repository ?   I'm not saying you can't, but
there'd have to be a considerable advantage *to me* before I'd want to cede
control over my public software to another entity.  E.g. there's no way that
I'd use SorceForge for my stuff.

It's definitely something to think more about, though.  If I had a more
constructive proposal then I'd make it.


> The Smalltalk community in general is hard to traverse. There is so many
> broken links, and so much dead content. Someone needs to clean it up.

That's the nature of the Web.  If you'll forgive me getting gnomic, it only
lives because it can die.  If you want to lock stuff down, and keep it all
packaged nicely, then you'll risk massive stagnation if people find that
contributing to a centrally-managed resource is more effort (e.g. changes to
their working practises) than it's worth.

    -- chris

Chris,

> That's unfortunate, because this NG is *the* place for the dissemination
of
> information and the exchange of ideas.  It works very well too (IMO) --
much
> better than some "discussion forum" software on some website somewhere.
>
> I find the wretched "forums" are excruciating to use. There are a couple
that I
> have to read since they are the only source of information that I need,
but I
> use them *very* reluctantly.   If the Dolphin community ever moved to one
of
> those then it could say bye-bye to me (this may be considered an advantage
of
> such a move of course)

Its just a pity about all the rubbish that gets spammed into the NG. Go
Britney.

> I very much agree about the risks and problems of a community who's
"static"
> content is structured as a collection of independent websites.  But what
are
> the alternatives, and can you get the people (like me) who construct such
> things to "buy into" a centralised repository ?   I'm not saying you
can't, but
> there'd have to be a considerable advantage *to me* before I'd want to
cede
> control over my public software to another entity.  E.g. there's no way
that
> I'd use SorceForge for my stuff.
>
> It's definitely something to think more about, though.  If I had a more
> constructive proposal then I'd make it.

What about something like SqueakMap for Dolphin? Part of the problwm is
finding shared code. There is a lot of it in the newsgroup that is posted,
and there are .pac files floating around, but nowhere that can act as a
portal to all of it. Dolphin Harbour seems to be on the right track, but its
been quiet for some time.

Don't think of it as handing away control of your software. Keep your own
site for that. My gripe is with the location of examples. Its hard for a
newcomer to get into dolphin. I know the pool of developers who can publish
stuff for free isn't as great as in the Microsoft camp, but the only real
place to get answers to "HOw do I do" type questions, is the news group. I
haven't found anywhere which has a lot of snippets... Theres this great
addin for Visual Studio, I can't remember the name of it, but it connects
you to some web service, and people can publish and download snippets of
code.. Something like that could prove useful. Might be a nice undertaking
for me to try as a first real application......

> > The Smalltalk community in general is hard to traverse. There is so many
> > broken links, and so much dead content. Someone needs to clean it up.
>
> That's the nature of the Web.  If you'll forgive me getting gnomic, it
only
> lives because it can die.  If you want to lock stuff down, and keep it all
> packaged nicely, then you'll risk massive stagnation if people find that
> contributing to a centrally-managed resource is more effort (e.g. changes
to
> their working practises) than it's worth.

I'm generalising, but my point is there is that from the outside, there is
very little new stuff happening. I know this is not the case, but on the
surface, it seems that things have stopped.

I'm not really making a point... I guess I'm just starting to get a bit
frustrated because after having spent a good amount of time playing in
Dolphin over the last week, I had to go back to work and started up Visual
Studio and felt like quitting my job! =\

"Sean Malloy" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:%PZic.7888$[hidden email]...
> Anyways, the Dolphin community sources/links are extremely fragile at
best.
> I'm _still_ finding new Dolphin sites where pac files have been published.
> Dolphin Harbour seems to be one example of something done right, but it
has
> stagnated!

I remember being very impressed by Dolphin Harbor.  However I was not really
sure exactly what it was.  It looked like they were mostly oriented towards
Dolphin Internet technologies.  I wasn't sure if non Internet goodies would
fit there.

> The OA wiki is locked down, so what should be the mother source of
> information is stagnate aswell. Which leaves the news groups as really the
> only place where there is a flow of information about Dolphin. I hate news
> groups!

I never really got into the whole wiki thing, though I did recently try to
add an ADO DB example without success.  I really like this newsgroup, and I
much prefer it to some kind of web board.  If you are into the web board
thing then I suppose you could use Google
http://groups.google.com/groups?group=comp.lang.smalltalk.dolphin .  I use
Google for all my Dolphin newsgroup searches.  I see very little spam in
this group.  I use the free Usenet server here http://individual.net/ to
read and post.

> Andy, are you guys looking at re-addressing this problem? I guess some
would
> look at it as Marketing. Perhaps a few of the OA team members should get
> some sort of blog going (and keep them going) as a way to drum up some
sort
> of information flow from within. Having Blair do a daily snippet or
> something could be good. Or even yourself, or anyone.

I think OA does a _much_ better job of interfacing with the Smalltalk
developer community than some Smalltalk vendors.  I suppose if one does not
find the newsgroup that may miss out on a lot.  I think the sense of
community in this newsgroup is one of the greatest strengths of Dolphin.
Some vendor's Smalltalk newsgroups feel very lonely.  I have seen an
increase in new people posting latly, so I think Dolphin is getting more
exposure.

> There are are so many broken links into the OA site too. I don't really
care
> about it, but plain old 404 messages just look like shit. Someone should
> spend 2 hours and write some sort of intelligent 404 handler for your site
> "Sorry the page is gone, but the content it contained is found
> [link]here[/link]". 404 errors from within Dolphin look _really_ bad, (And
> thats going to be happening on the evaluation version!)

If you are talking about the help links from Dolphin going to broken pages
then I think that really should be fixed, either in the distribution, or on
the web.  In general I think OA has a very nice web site.

> Has anyone else got anything like Dolphin Harbour going?

Well, there is the Dolphin web ring here
http://l.webring.com/hub?ring=dolphinsmalltalk .  If you do a bit of
googling you will find other sites.  Here is a nice list of links
http://mypage.bluewin.ch/a.fischer/dolphinResource.html , perhaps a bit old
though.  I am not aware of anything quite like Dolphin Harbor.  It takes a
lot of work to maintain a good living website.  It is difficult for me to
even keep my little goodie site current.

Chris

> I remember being very impressed by Dolphin Harbor.  However I was not
really
> sure exactly what it was.  It looked like they were mostly oriented
towards
> Dolphin Internet technologies.  I wasn't sure if non Internet goodies
would
> fit there.

I think DH should be more of a allpackages welcome site. There needs to be
ONE site, which can either link to all other code, or keep a local copy of
it (with auth permissions). Fuck it, there isn't an up to date one. I'm
starting one.

> I never really got into the whole wiki thing, though I did recently try to
> add an ADO DB example without success.  I really like this newsgroup, and
I
> much prefer it to some kind of web board.  If you are into the web board
> thing then I suppose you could use Google
> http://groups.google.com/groups?group=comp.lang.smalltalk.dolphin .  I use
> Google for all my Dolphin newsgroup searches.  I see very little spam in
> this group.  I use the free Usenet server here http://individual.net/ to
> read and post.

I don't care for wikis either, my point is only that the OA wiki is locked
down, and hasn't been updated for some time... Most news servers purge
messages after 30/X days. I only just discovere dthe totallyobjects.com news
server (which is also free), so I've started using that instead. It keeps
all of the posts, rtather than my ISP news server purging, which kind of
sucks. Threads start to go weird, people responding to non-existent
messages. Couple non-existent purged messages, with the legion of posts
about nude survivor pics, porn, and penis enlargment, and it can be painful
to find the new posts... example a:
news://news.totallyobjects.com/comp.lang.smallytalk.advocacy.

> I think OA does a _much_ better job of interfacing with the Smalltalk
> developer community than some Smalltalk vendors.  I suppose if one does
not
> find the newsgroup that may miss out on a lot.  I think the sense of
> community in this newsgroup is one of the greatest strengths of Dolphin.
> Some vendor's Smalltalk newsgroups feel very lonely.  I have seen an
> increase in new people posting latly, so I think Dolphin is getting more
> exposure.

Hey I am not having a go at the way the OA team help with requests, they're
quick to respond, and do it for free I might add. Hell, Andy even refunded
me my purchase of the basic edition for the pro edition, which he didn't
have to do. I'm just saying on the whole the news groups present a re-active
interaction. You ask a question, you get an answer (most of the time more
than one). I'm saying perhaps some Dolphin developers should be more
pro-active, and publish information, whether someone has asked or not. Know
what I mean?

> If you are talking about the help links from Dolphin going to broken pages
> then I think that really should be fixed, either in the distribution, or
on
> the web.  In general I think OA has a very nice web site.

Yes, if anyone at my company were evaluating Dolphin as a windows
development environment, and the first click to the help (and every click
there after) resulted in 404 errors, you would get the impression that
either a) the product is dead/dying, or b) that the product, like the help,
is full of bugs and problems (when it isn't!). Software is just like
cooking. Its all about presentation: "Who cares if its good if it doesn't
look good?" - I suggest to Andy, that they set up a generic page for all of
those help 404 pages which some how tries to handle the requests in a smart
way, and forward the browser request to information related to the context
of the request... The 404 error is just terrible... Admittedly, I don't see
the 404 error anymore, I installed the Dolphin 4 education centre, which
changes links to go to the HTML Help version.

> Well, there is the Dolphin web ring here
> http://l.webring.com/hub?ring=dolphinsmalltalk .  If you do a bit of
> googling you will find other sites.  Here is a nice list of links
> http://mypage.bluewin.ch/a.fischer/dolphinResource.html , perhaps a bit
old
> though.  I am not aware of anything quite like Dolphin Harbor.  It takes a
> lot of work to maintain a good living website.  It is difficult for me to
> even keep my little goodie site current.

yeah, I know it is difficult maintaining a site, and keeping it fresh. It is
hard work. DH has suffered the same fate as most other sites. Real life gets
in the way (I guess?)

Web rings be damned! :)

Sean

"Sean Malloy" <[hidden email]> wrote in message news:<[hidden email]>...

==snipped==

Have you tried the link to DSDN at the end of Louis Sumberg's page at
http://www.mindspring.com/~lsumberg/Dolphin/index.htm ?

==snipped==


HweeBoon

Sean Malloy wrote:

You seem to be raising three separate specific issues.

1) The state of the Dolphin help/website.
2) The absence of a browseable collection of "how-to"s, or "snippets".
3) The absence of a clear way to find existing resources.

Regarding (1), I have no comment.  That's up to OA.

Regarding (2):

> You ask a question, you get an answer
> (most of the time more than one). I'm saying perhaps some Dolphin
> developers should be more pro-active, and publish information, whether
> someone has asked or not. Know what I mean?

As a regular poster, and a poster of snippets at that, I'll explain why I,
personally, would have no interest in contributing to such a collection.  Not
that I'm saying the idea is bad, only that I wouldn't bother adding to it.

For me, this newsgroup is primarily about discussion.  I read it because it is
/interesting/, not because I have some selfless drive to "help newbies and
promote the Dolphin cause". (I'm quite happy to do either of those things, but
they're not the reason I'm here).

Most often, if I post an answer to a question, or a snippet of code, it because
I found the question interesting.  The typical case is that I /didn't/ know how
to do <whatever>.  So I read the question, and become interested in finding out
the answer.  Often I have an idea of how to do it, but want to check see if my
idea is right, so I test it.  Sometimes I have a less precise idea of where to
start, so I have to do some research.  Sometimes I have /no/ idea where to
start and have to do a lot of research.  (Or, of course, I may have no idea how
to do it, and no interest in finding out either -- as if often the case for
COM/ActiveX-type questions).

If I've "solved" the question (or if I have a partial solution, and no one has
posted a fuller solution), then I may as well post it.  Why not ?  It's not as
if I have any fear of pontificating ;-)

The other part of this, is that I get to compare my "solution" with other
people's.  They can (and do) correct, expand, or question what I've posted.
Even if they don't do so directly, then it's always interesting to compare, and
learn from, other people's approaches (which are often very different from
mine).

There are other occasions when I'll try to post answers to questions (that I
already do know an answer to), but that tends to be when I think the answer
itself is interesting and worth discussing.

So, for me, the idea of adding to a published collection of snippets and
how-tos holds little appeal.  Other people, of course, will have different
opinions on this.

Incidentally, and independently, another reason I'd be disinclined to
contribute to the collection is that there is already a very large collection
of examples in the form of the source code to the system (and in any third
party stuff you add).  That is /intended/ to be browsed and learned from.  I
don't know how much you are in the habit of looking for examples and insight in
the system code, but if you are not, then you are missing probably the single
most valuable resource there is.  I've suggested to Andy before that this point
should be made clearly in very first introductory material that a new user ever
sees.

And don't forget that Ian maintains an archive of this NG.  And -- for more
recent posts -- there's also Google.

Regarding point (3) ("the absence of a clear way to find existing resources" in
case you've forgotten by now ;-)

I think this is something that is well worth thinking more about.

One way would be to have a communal "links" page somewhere central.  But that
means "somewhere on the OA site", by definition.  There used to be a "links"
page as part of the wiki, but I gather that that is now frozen (I haven't
checked).  Unfortunately, even when we could edit that page of links, very few
people did.  I suppose website creators were bashful about adding links to
their own sites to it (I know I had to *force* myself to add mine -- it would
have been much, much, easier just to let it lie).  Also there's the usual
problem of people being unwilling to change (as opposed to add to) the stuff on
a wiki page.

Another alternative is a links page that /isn't/ part of the OA site.  But we
already have such pages, and they (as you have obviously found) aren't enough.
One problem is that maintaining them is chore.  Another is that the newbie has
to /find/ them, and that's no easier than finding any other resource.

So, in the absence of further data, it appears that a centralised links list
won't work.  So how about a de-centalised one ?

The web-ring is a decentralised approach, but it doesn't seem to work too well.
I know I haven't bother to get my website on the rign, so maybe I'm part of the
problem myself.  Anyway, I didn't find the ring too appealing for some reason.
Possibly because they tend to collect dead links.  Possibly because I didn't
fancy adding javascript to my site.  Possibly because I didn't like the central
web-ring site.  Possibly because I'd prefer (as a user of a web-ring) to see
some indication of what a site has /before/ I follow the link.  I dunno.  Does
anyone think it's worth having a drive to get the web-ring healthy again ?

Or, another decentralised approach.  Someone (I'd be willing to do it myself,
if there's enough call for it, and buy-in -- in advance) would maintain "links"
list.  That list would be posted to this NG about once a month.  We, as a
community, would be responsible for helping keep the list up to date.  Several
(ideally most) of the third party web-site owners would undertake to mirror the
*current* list somewhere on their website (that's what I mean by buy-in), so
the list should be in the form of /simple/ HTML so as to make it easy for
website owners to paste into their pages.  The list should also have a "last
checked and updated at" date featured prominently somewhere -- a stale list is
of little use.

I don't know, but maybe it would be possible to create a rough index of the
packages that are available and distribute that in the same way.  I suspect
that would be going too far, and betoo difficult to maintain.  Thoughts anyone
?

Lastly, you mentioned the squeakmap in another post.  I'm not sure how that
works, but it /looks/ as if it is a centralised list of packages, plus a
feature to download them and install them directly into your image.   There are
security issues with that (I /don't/ like the idea of executing random
third-party code before I've seen it -- and loading a package into an image
does just that).  Those issues could probably be avoided by making it
browseable, perhaps using Rosetta instead of .pac files.  Again, it seems to me
that the centralised nature of the map means that it would /have/ to be hosted
(and probably lead) by OA.  Also it'd be a big project[*], and would have
considerable impact on people who contributed content.

    -- chris

[*] and it would probably use so much third-party code (e.g. Steve Waring's
HTTP stuff) that just installing it would give a pretty complete index of
what's available ;-)

Small follow-up.  I wrote:

> The web-ring is a decentralised approach, but it doesn't seem to work too
> well.

Actually, I just gone and looked at the web-ring for the first time in ages and
it's much better than I remember.

Considering signing up.

    -- chris

"Chris Uppal" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:[hidden email]...
...
> Or, another decentralised approach.  Someone (I'd be willing to do it
myself,
> if there's enough call for it, and buy-in -- in advance) would maintain
"links"
> list.  That list would be posted to this NG about once a month.  We, as a
> community, would be responsible for helping keep the list up to date.
Several
> (ideally most) of the third party web-site owners would undertake to
mirror the
> *current* list somewhere on their website (that's what I mean by buy-in),
so
> the list should be in the form of /simple/ HTML so as to make it easy for
> website owners to paste into their pages.  The list should also have a
"last
> checked and updated at" date featured prominently somewhere -- a stale
list is
> of little use.
>
> I don't know, but maybe it would be possible to create a rough index of
the
> packages that are available and distribute that in the same way.  I
suspect
> that would be going too far, and betoo difficult to maintain.  Thoughts
anyone
> ?
...

I really like the idea of a list of Dolphin related links.  I also like the
idea of a list of packages, however I understand the difficulty involved in
maintaining it.  There are so many different sites with different offerings
it may not be obvious to a newbie exactly what is out there.  A list with
good descriptions would be great.  I don't think broken links are horrible
in a package list, though maybe they could be kept separate.  Sometimes it
is useful to know what _was_ out there, even if the links to it are broken
(someone may be able to dig it up again).

Chris

Hi,

> Steve Waring seems to have dissapeared off the face of the internet since
> about September of last year (Children? Job? Illness?)

Still here, but busy coding away!
 
Dolphinharbor will get an update in the next couple of weeks, as Louis
Sumberg has some updates and bugfixes for the Win Shell packages which
I will be uploading.

Dolphinharbor is really just a machine and internet connection that
Jerry Bell has kindly made available. While the public face (port 80)
has not been updated for a while, we have been experimenting with
various other types of web apps on other ports.

If anybody has a web application they want to run on Dolphinharbor,
for example something like Squeakmap, email myself or Jerry and we can
get it up and running.

Steve

> Dolphinharbor will get an update in the next couple of weeks, as Louis
> Sumberg has some updates and bugfixes for the Win Shell packages which
> I will be uploading.

Great to hear!