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original authors are busy documenting and implementing new and advanced features – this learning resource has become out of date with some of its examples.  So I thought I’d contribute back to help update it to the latest release.  Here is how…

Continue reading →

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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 which includes its own ODBC interface along with several other backends.  However all the ODBC connection examples I saw were for database servers with connection strings that were not of the “DSN” form that I think is required for Microsoft Access – so I ended up returning to ConfigurationOfODBC and resolving the issue above.

Yet I was most of the way through getting DBXTalk working, so I record my experience here for posterity.  It is the “hack” version since to resolve library dependencies I simply copied everything next to virtual machine executable.  I’ll look into resolving these more correctly later.  So I… 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 I sought assistance getting ODBC working on Pharo 1.3.  Credit goes to Mariano Peck and Eliot Mirranda for assistance troubleshooting, providing a slightly older configuration that worked, and then the latest VM build.  I am happy to report that ODBC appears to be working with the Pharo 1.3 image on MS Windows 7 using CogVM version 2522.

The purpose of this is that I have a UML design an application has stored in a Microsoft Access database.  I want to use Pharo to implement that design directly into Smalltalk classes since I could not find a common export/import format.  ConfigurationOfODBC looked promising so I followed instructions at http://www.pharocasts.com/2010/12/access-database-through-odbc.html, except that rather than using SQLLite I started with a blank Microsoft Access database.  This worked well on Pharo 1.2.1 but not out of the box Pharo 1.3.

Here is the method to get ODBC working and tested with Pharo 1.3. Continue reading →

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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 done via
[Start > Control Panel > Mouse > SetPoint Settings] as pictured below. Continue reading →

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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:

You are able to attach graphs to your comments in those articles.

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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 the tool flaps.  The “textual reference to dropped morph in  Workspaces” looked like an interesting feature that would likely to be quite useful in the future – so best to find out how it works right now… 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 of Morphic in Cuis.”

So lets check that out.  We should compare some other flavours of Smalltalk.  The code used to generated the graph data is the same  “V1″ code as used for morphic performance. The software versions tested here are:

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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 time with a simple page refresh.  The site is brand new, so there shouldn’t be any traffic.  So what gives? Continue reading →

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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 as the development platform.  Specifically I’ve selected Squeak with its Morphic graphics system, which seems to have a lot of useful “direct manipulation” functionality.  Now some validation of this choice would be useful and one place to start is performance testing.  Continue reading →

Posted in Morphic | Tagged , | 3 Comments