Author Archives: Ben Coman

Contributing to Pharo By Example

Posted on 2012/05/21 by Ben Coman

When I was learning Pharo Smalltalk, I found the Pharo By Example book a great help.  It was well written and available at a good price ;). However as Pharo advances at great speed and the original authors are busy … Continue reading →

Posted in Pharo | 4 Comments

Windows 7 Pharo DBXTalk – “my hack”

Posted on 2011/12/25 by Ben Coman

Having just got ConfigurationOfODBC working from Pharo Smalltalk, I had some trouble determining exactly how to get at the individual data items.  So I thought I’d check out DBXTalk for comparison.  DBXTalk is a lot more comprehensive solution leaveraging OpenDBX … Continue reading →

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Pharo 1.3 ODBC working on Windows 7

Posted on 2011/12/16 by Ben Coman

Wow. Eight months since my last post.  It is now apparent the impact over that time of my 60-70 hour work week onsite at a mine expansion. This post summarises the result of discussion on the pharo-project mailling list where … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

mouse buttons and menus

Posted on 2011/04/28 by Ben Coman

My mouse is a Logitech Wireless Nano Mouse M305.  The default function of the mousewheel (button 3) is Zoom.  To be most useful for Smalltalk, the mousewheel function needed to be configured as Middle Button.  For Windows 7 this was … Continue reading →

Posted in System | Leave a comment

performance testing spreadsheet

Posted on 2011/04/28 by Ben Coman

For anyone anyone so inclined to replicate the results, or update the results for subsequent releases of the Smalltalk systems, the linked spreadsheet Squeak Graphics Framework Performance Testing.ODF was used to generate the graphs in these articles: http://blog.openinworld.com/2011/03/morphic-performance/ http://blog.openinworld.com/2011/03/morphic-flavour-performance/ You … Continue reading →

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workspace referencing to existing morphs

Posted on 2011/04/27 by Ben Coman

Flipping through Andy Burnett’s blog Learning Smalltalk he discusses in Getting a handle on objects from the Flaps how to get programmatic reference to morphs that have been created by direct manipulation – for example by being dragged on-screen from … Continue reading →

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more morphic performance

Posted on 2011/03/18 by Ben Coman

Previously in morphic performance I benchmarked different actions in Squeak Smalltalk for creating, hiding, showing and deleting morphs in Squeak. On [squeak-dev] Herbert Konig wrote: “Juan Vuletich has done a great job at simplifying cleaning and speeding up his version … Continue reading →

Posted in Morphic | Tagged , , , , | 14 Comments

wordpress shared hosting performance

Posted on 2011/03/12 by Ben Coman

It’s the second week of running WordPress, so I’ve been trialing a few plugins…  Suddenly, about half the time I do anything I get “Apologies, but the page you requested could not be found.” The page loads fine the second … Continue reading →

Posted in Admin | Tagged , , , , , , | 9 Comments

morphic performance

Posted on 2011/03/03 by Ben Coman

For my postgrad dissertation I’ve decided to program an engineering design tool.  I’d like to focus more on the application domain rather than the programming minutiae.  Based purely on gut feel from a long-held but unproven belief, I’ve selected Smalltalk … Continue reading →

Posted in Morphic | Tagged , | 3 Comments