Fusion ate my caret (^) or was it the Lion?

sometimes I encounter strange phenomena. I hove no idea if that’s only me, but I suspect so, because I couldn’t find anything of help on the web (maybe because searching for “fusion ^” is not a good idea).

So what’s happened? One of my machines runs lion and for VA Smalltalk related work I have to use Win XP on that device. For that I use vmware fusion 4. On that machine, I cannot enter the caret. It just is ignored. I do run the same version of vmware fusion, win XP and VA Smalltalk on a snow leopard Mac as well and there I have no problems at all. Pressing the ^ button simply works there.

I cannot tell you how annoying it is to try program in Smalltalk with no chance to enter a caret, because it is Smalltalk’s return statement I have to use the screen keaboard application for that and sometimes feel a bit like a clown when I do so.

So my options are:

• Hope for somebody with some insight out there to read this post and help me
• Contact vmware and hope they help me
• Look at alternatives to fusion (maybe virtualbox is not the worst idea here)
• buy me a windows box to run VA ST (didn’t lenovo just show a nice touchscreen machine that looks beautiful and may be a nice base for Windows 8?)
• hope for Instantiations to port VA ST to the Mac

I guess not all of them are equally likely to happen, nor is my sympathy for all of them equally unlimited. Maybe I’ll start with the first two, followed by the third and somewhere in the back of my head not forget about the last one

Dreams sometimes come true – this time it might be a pdf report generator in Smalltalk

just a few weeks ago, we interviewed Christian Haider on our SmalltalkInspect podcast (it’s in German), where, among a lot of other interesting stuff, we discussed how cool it would be if someone came up with a pdf report generator in top of his pdf4smalltalk framework.

And now consider this: Bob Nemec just wrote about his work on such a thing over on his blog. He’s working on a seaside-canvas – inspired renderer for reports on top of pdf4smalltalk. He’s preparing a talk about it for this year’s ESUG conference (to be held held in Gent, Belgium late August) [UPDATE: Bob points out in a comment that the conference he's going to speak about his work is going to be the Smalltalk Industry Conference 2012 which will be held in Biloxi, Mississippi USA on March 18-21] .

The best part, however, is this:

Still a lot of work to do, but I’m looking forward to showing it at the conference. And, if it’s good enough, it will be added to the VW public store (long term plans are to port to other Smalltalk dialects).

So it’s going to be open sourced!

It seems Bob has gotten quite some stuff working already (he’s talking abut it in the above-linked post): word wrap, tables – partly even with coslspan and rowspan properties, and I guess quite a little bit more.

Can’t wait to see it in action…