I just read and liked this article about Dan Ingalls which included tidbits about his contributions to computing and Smalltalk:
http://www.itwire.com/it-people-news/people/43878-smalltalk-developer-looks-back-over-40-years
Tag: Smalltalk
Switched From Squeak To Pharo
Over the last few weeks I switched goodstart.com and w6talent.com from Squeak to Pharo.
I made the switch because I like the cleaner look of Pharo and the general direction – to make a clean, lean, Smalltalk development environment. Also, I am working on another project to produce investment banking tombstones at tombstonecreator.com so I needed better font support and the Pharo font support is nice.
I had to make a few minor changes to my apps and to the HttpSsp framework for Smalltalk Server Pages but it was all very minor and easy to do.
So far I’m happy with my switch.
New VPS
A few weeks ago I switched VPS providers from Fluid Hosting to VPS Land. I made the move for several reasons:
- I wanted to switch from Squeak to Pharo but the new vm needed CentOS 5 or I needed to build the vm myself (which I did not want to do) so
- I wanted to upgrade from CentOS4 to CentOS 5
- I wanted more memory/disk so I could run X windows and vncserver
- I wanted to save money if I could
- My existing VPS provider could not help me upgrade without me having to go through nearly all the same pain as a switch to a different VPS
So I moved and managed to:
- Get 50% more memory
- Run X with vncserver
- Run CentOS5
- Switch from Squeak to Pharo
- Save $300 per year
- Move everything for all of my sites over to the new server in a week with very few hiccups
My old VPS provider had pretty good support. My new provider (VPS Land) so far has had pretty good support as well. I hope they keep it up and that I don’t need much support going forward!
Squeak vs. Pharo
I’m trying to figure out which Squeak flavor I should be using for my sites and for application development – Squeak or Pharo. I’ve been using Squeak but more and more of my Smalltalk friends are telling me to use Pharo. I don’t follow the Squeak list or the Pharo list so I’m not sure which one will be better for me.
Can everyone please post a response with the pros and cons of both Pharo and Squeak? Thanks for the help!
Squeak / Smalltalk / Smalltalk Server Pages
I’m almost done building another application with Squeak / Smalltalk / Smalltalk Server Pages. The application is nearly done and will be available in another couple weeks and up on the new site (domain already purchased). I wish I had a preview up to show people.
That will make 3 applications or sites running Smalltalk Server Pages in Squeak:
- W6Talent.com – a site that allows creative agencies to book talent from multiple reputable talent agencies
- GoodStart.com – a site about the Smalltalk programming language
- The new site / application .. coming soon
Restaurants.com Rip Off
My wife recently bought a coupon at restaurants.com and when she was done clicked on some ad. As it turns out restaurants.com gave our credit card info to mvq-shopessplus.com who started charging us a monthly subscription (shown as SHOPESSPLUS on our cc bill). She did NOT give them our cc number or agree to any subscription. She was NOT told that restaurants.com was going to share our cc info with some other company so they can rip us off or that restaurants.com gets a kickback from SHOPESSPLUS for giving away our credit card information. How can this be legal?!?! I called and got the charges refunded and complained like mad. Stay away from restaurants.com and watch your cc bills for these subscriptions that you didn’t sign up for. I just saw something about this type of fraud on the nightly news a week ago. We are pretty computer savvy so if they got us they can probably get most people.
Smalltalk Site CleanUp
My Smalltalk site should remain spam free from now on. I added CAPTCHA images on every form submission and all submissions require my approval as well. That goes for:
Take that spammers!
Does Your Company Use Smalltalk?
The list of companies that use Smalltalk already includes about 300
companies. If your company uses Smalltalk, please add it here:
http://www.goodstart.com/who-uses-smalltalk.ssp
If you are currently programming in Smalltalk you can take the salary survey too:
Converted Site To Smalltalk
I just converted my GoodStart.com Smalltalk information website from static files and php scripts to Squeak with Comanche and Smalltalk Server Pages. Now the site is hosted on a VPS and has real objects for things like the job board or the list of companies that use Smalltalk. The only real visible changes to the site so far are:
- Salary Survey has all results available and sorted by year
- Who Uses Smalltalk page is now searchable and sorted by date
- All user supplied data is approved/denied before being posted on the site
- Links should sort properly now
- Many dead links were removed
Please contribute to the site by:
- posting any Smalltalk jobs you know about
- posting any company that you know is using Smalltalk
- adding links to useful Smalltalk websites
Thanks,
Monty
Load Balancing Squeak
This week I tried to follow the tips that Ramon gave out on his blog to load balance Squeak images behind Apache:
http://onsmalltalk.com/scaling-seaside-more-advanced-load-balancing-and-publishing
I had some problems getting it to work. I tried everything I could think of and then finally contacted Ramon. We chatted and in a few minutes I had everything working great. I didn’t understand that his image launcher script should stay up once Apache launches it. Once I got that.. everything fell into place.
Now I am using his scheme at:
Thanks Ramon for your blog post and your help! As you can see his blog OnSmalltalk is now on my blog roll (list of links on my blog).
Monty Kamath 