Squeak on Linux

pvaneynds Debian & Lisp blog: Unix squeak image

Certainly the Gentoo Portage version is very out-of-date now. I for one would appreciate an update.

No, please don't remind me

Greg Reinacker's Weblog - The Best of the Best: "A::A() : m_x(5) { }"

Lord, I had almost forgotten this dire syntax. And frankly I wish I hadn't been reminded. Must be more careful of the links I follow.......

Good game, good game

AMK's Journal: Carcassonne

Good game!!

Played "settlers of Catan" last weekend - another good game!!

A flurry of books on Lisp

For a supposedly dead language (ducks behind cover), Lips is gettng a fair number of new books:

• Practical Common Lisp: "Practical Common Lisp"
  
• "Successful Lisp
  

"Hackers and Painters" has some Lisp references too.

Talking of Paul Graham, an update to "On Lisp" would be great. "On Lisp" is a great example of going beyond an intro book - it really shows the power of the language by going beyond the simple cases. I'd like to see other books that go into GUI, database etc. at a more detailed level. Of course, a disadvantage of Lisp (and Smalltalk) is tha therre are many ways to skin those Cats, so a book of contributions covering the most popular alternatives would be great.

What about Smalltalk? There are some fairly recent Squeak books, but perhaps there will be more along in a while.

XML.com: WSDL 2: Just Say No: "To put it simply, these specifications are astoundingly bad."

Architecture Astronauts

Joel on Software - Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You: "Architecture Astronauts":
A recent example illustrates this. Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.

Ouch! no Xmas card for him !

Philip Greenspun's Weblog:World's most depressing country uses the most anti-depressants

Have no back to break, but have got hearts and minds

Scott iis rght:Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment

There will always be some hot heads taking pot shoys, but adopt policies to reduce them to an unsupported minority.

UML and SOA

James Governor makes some important points on SOA and UML:James Governor's MonkChips: BEA, SOA, UML

SOA is not about bits and bytes, or XML, or some other standard du jour. There is a big picture to it, and an integrating vision part as well.

Then lets generate the XML!.

Fix UML 2?

Good summary of UML vs. DSL:Why not base domain specific languages on UML?

Some of these can be fixed.

And there is a potential downside for DSL - what if I want to combine models based on different metamodels?

An interesting debate - hopefully this moves us to languages with greater expressive power than todys programming languages.

Did I Blog this before ?

The same malaise which keeps m from blogging much also means I have lost the ability (or will) to search. Anyway it's still great !!
smart stuff

IBM and Smalltalk

IBM & Smalltalk

Is IBM blowing their Smalltalk ship out of the water just when the tide is heading again for dynamic languages?

My interpretation of the newsgroup thread that is pointed to is "No"; sounds like a holding statement to me. Plenty of people reading between the lines and speculating though!

Great hackers revisited

This article reflects many of my opinions about Paul Grahams article:Great Hacker != Great Hire

I too enjoyed the essay, but I too rankled at some of the strictures (Obviously I am not a great hacker!)

I really don't understand the part about not wanting to work on customer stuff - ultimately that IS what matters. The number of jobs you can do without pesky users is severely limited - back to academia ?

Also, team work is just so important; are there pretty great hackers who are more productive than most, but aren't prima donnas ?

Hope this isn't true

BBC NEWS | UK | MoD denies US missiles set for UK

Not so much whether we have the missiles or not, but how the decision has been made scretly (if it has).

Closing the presses

I thought most of the world had come to realise that allowing states to close down presses is a bad idea, unless you want to undermine democracy. Here is the modern equivalent of shutting down the presses: Home Office in frame over FBI's London server seizures | The Register : " What does this action say about freedom of expression and freedom of the press?"

September - the month of evil

Much fun with the SenderID debacle at IETF with some great houmo[u]r:Evil of September 2004 :: OSDir.com :: Open Source, Linux News & Software: "users are just friends who haven't submitted a patch yet"

Good, fun article.

Tinderbox..... for the Mac

After reading Mark Bernsteins article I took a look at his:Eastgate Tinderbox: the tool for notes : "Tinderbox is a personal content management assistant. It stores your notes, ideas, and plans. It can help you organize and understand them. And Tinderbox helps you share ideas through Web journals and web logs."

Sounds really good but I don't have any Macs to try it on. Linux version some day ?

Oh darn

10 Tips on Writing the Living Web: A List Apart: "Write for a reason, and know why you write. Whether your daily updates concern your work life, your hobbies, or your innermost feelings, write passionately about things that matter."

But that takes time !!

A recommended article, even though I do find myself wincing every now and again - perhaps I shouldn't write at all :-(

Back from Paris

Had a great time, met some great people, learnt many "interesting" things, but tripled the length of my TODO list !!

Off to Paris

Daniel Barlow -- Diary: "Off to Paris tomorrow (work trip)." What a coincidence -so am I!