Smalltalk Inspect interviews tim Rowledge about Squeak and the Raspberry Pi (and lots more)

Smalltalk Inspect is alive and kicking, we just took a creative break for the new year…

But to finally kick off 2013, we want to start a little firework: a 2 hour interview with tim Rowledge about lots of interesting things around Smalltalk in the past, present and future. The highlight and climax here sure is tim’s work on the Squeak VM on RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi. If you wonder what this little machine might be good for, stop  and listen!

You can download this episode from here, or even better, subscribe to our podcast on iTunes. If you like what you hear and would like to learn more, you can always download more great stuff from our Smalltalk Inspect site.

Smalltalk Inspect interviews Stéphane Ducasse on Pharo

We’ve got another sweet episode of Smalltalk inspect over on our podcast page. To start 2013 off we chose to talk to Stéphane Ducasse about Pharo Smalltalk and its almost finished 2.0 release as well as the newly formed Pharo Consortium and Pharo Association, two organizations with one simple goal: accelerate and stabilize Pharo’s progress.

So head over to our podcast page or iTunes or any other podcast portal and hear all about what’s new in the Pharoverse.

Want to organize the next ESUG conference in your city? Here’s some guidance from a pro..

In our latest episode 22 of Smalltalk inspect, our Smalltalk related podcast, we interviewed Johan Brichau about his experiences with organizing this year’s ESUG conference in Ghent, Belgium.

The intent of this interview was to find out what exactly it means to organize such an event, how much effort to put into it and when to start with it. And Johan pretty much answered all our questions. It seems setting up an ESUG conference, while admittedly being quite some work (and some nervousity is involved too), is not as bad as it might sound, because the ESUG board is extremely helpful and does all the hard work of setting up a schedule and stuff.

So we could hopefully lower the barrier for people interested in hosting the next (or the one after the next) ESUG conference at their place.

Talking to Johan would sure be only half an experience without talking about yesplan, a Seaside application that he, together with some colleagues, developed in VMware Gemstone/S for cultural institutions. So this episode is also interesting for you if you’d like to learn more about Seaside deployment, load balancing and what kind of platform to run a Seaside application on.

Since this article is in english, you can probably guess that the episode is also in english.

Smalltalk Inspect interviews Seth Berman from Instantiations

We’ve just release episode 21 of our Smalltalk Inspect podcast. This time we talk to Seth Berman about his work at Instantiations on VA Smalltalk:

 First, we lift one of the best kept secrets of the JWARS project before he tells us a bit about some of the projects Seth has worked on before joining the VA Smalltalk engineering team at Instantiations. We chat a little about how different it is to work on a development tool than it was working on a “normal” project, and whether and how providing support to developers changes life as a developer.

BTW: This episode is in english

Smalltalk Inspect Episode 20 zum Thema Smalltalk auf Android ist jetzt verfügbar

Ich hatte es ja vor ein paar Tagen nicht geschafft, die Füsse still zu halten, und deshalb schon alles verraten. Deshalb hier nur der Weckruf, dass unsere Episode 20 von Smalltalk Inspect nun endlich verfügbar ist!

Wie nicht anders zu erwarten ist die Folge wieder etwas länger als 45 Minuten geworden, aber dafür auch sehr spannend. Das ganze findet sich wie immer hier – oder bei iTunes .

Smalltalk Inspect 18: Smalltalking hardware

We’ve just released episode 18 of Smalltalk Inspect. It is once again an english-spoken episode and this time we interviewed Jecel Assumpcao Jr. about the SiliconSqueak Project. SiliconSqueak is a project aimed at building a mini-computer (think Raspberry Pi) that natively runs Smalltalk Bytecodes on multiple cores in parallel.

I am not a hardware guy, but this interview was very interesting and inspiring for me, and I guess it’s going to be for you as well. If you’d like to listen to it, please follow this link to the Smalltalk Inspect web site, where you can also download and listen to all the other 17 great episodes of our podcast.

Feel free to send us comments and ideas for new episodes, either here on this blog or on the Smalltalk Inspect web site. And, of course, feel free to tell all your friends and colleagues about Smalltalk Inspect

My first Impressions of Apple’s Podcasts App

Apple released a new App for listening to Podcasts and managing subscriptions on the iPhone or iOS. It seems they figured iTunes (or Music, as it is called on the iOS machines) is a bit overloaded, so they started splitting it into several apps.

I must say I am not really impressed.

First of all, the application is really damn slow. At least on my old 3GS it takes literally seconds to see any reaction to a click/tap. I am subscribed to roughly a dozen podcasts, and I currently have 98 episodes that wait for listening. I’d say that is light useage, not hardcore podcast hunting.

When I play an episode, I often want to know how long the rest of the episode takes. Should I get off the car and go to work or just wait the remaing 5 minutes? The app doesn’t show this information, while teh Music App does. I miss that. [Update:]I found out a day later or two that it does in fact show a timeline, but you must move the Podcast label towards the top of the screen. Once I found that, I still must say it is too small to read and a bit hidden.[/Update]

I find the flipping between your media library and the catalog okay, but strange. The surfing for podcasts in the style of tuning an ancient radio (In German this is called “Topsender”, I guess it is calle “stations” in the english version) feels strange to me, and when I am not connected to a WiFi network it is really laggy, due to the loading times of all the icons.

All in all, while many bloggers out there get carried away by the nice visual design of the application and the reminiscents to an old Braun Tape machine, I must say in this particular case it seems Apple put design over usability. At least for my taste. I find myself using the Music App more for listening to Podcast episodes.

[Update]I’ve given up on using the Podcasts app and listen to my podcast episodes using the good old Music App. Podcasts is much too slow. Sometimes You wait for 8 or 10 seconds before it reacts to any user interaction. Sometimes I’m not sure if I hit the buttons right, so I press again. Guess what happens once the App wakes up again… it handles all my input, so it starts playing, pauses again and so on… So for me, Podcasts is a big disappointment. And it sure is not a reason to buy a newer iPhone [/Update]

Smalltalk Inspect 17: Igor Stasenko on FFI, Alien and NativeBoost

We’ve just released Episode 17 of our Smalltalk Inspect Podcast. It’s an interview with Igor Stasenko about calling code outside the Smalltalk VM. We cover Primitives, the Foreign Function Interface, Alien and NativeBoost, Igor’s latest pet project (or one of them).

So if you ever wondered how the FFI, Alien and the Gog VM relate to each other or are looking for some hints for downloading, installing and working with FFI or NativeBoost, this Podcast episode is probably your favorite starting point.

Don’t shy away if the intro is spoken in german, beginning with the second sentence the podcast is completely spoken in english (well, you know, the kind of english you can expect from Germans and an Ukrainian ).

Smalltalk Inspect Episode 16: Udo Schneider und Smalltalk aus dem Untergrund

Vor lauter Urlaub und anschliessender Aufholjagd mit allem währenddessen liegen Gebliebenen ist mir völlig durch die Lappen gegangen, auf unsere Episode 16 hinzuweisen.

Dabei haben wir ein extrem interessantes Gespräch mit Udo Schneider geführt. Neben diesem, jenem und anderem ging es vor allem auch um ein von ihm gestartetes Projekt für eine Administrationsoberfläche für ein Sicherheits-Appliance. Anstatt irgend jemanden zu fragen, nutzte er einfach Squeak bzw. Pharao und Seaside, um einen Prototypen zu erstellen. Dieser war dann so überzeugend, dass nun eben eine Smalltalk-Anwendung auf dem Gerät läuft.

Wie immer ist diese Episode hörenswert für jeden, der sich immer wieder mal fragt, wie man eigentlich Smalltalk in der eigenen Firma platzieren könnte. Hier gibt’s dazu die passenden Anregungen…

Smalltalk Inspect Fest: Präsentationen willkommen!

Noch sind es vier Tage bis zum Smalltalk Inspect Fest 2012 am 21.04. in Frankfurt, für das man sich  bitte auf unserer Doodle-Seite anmelden sollte.

Inzwischen haben wir einen Sponsor für einen Beamer gefunden, sodass jedem Demonstrationswütigen alle Tore offen stehen. Wir lassen uns einfach mal überraschen!

Zudem bietet das Hotel laut Webseite gratis-WLAN an und Marten bringt einen WLAN-Accesspoint mit, sodass wir uns auch privat vernetzen können. Einem Smalltalk-Hackabend steht also auch nichts im Wege! Einige übernachten im Hotel, es kann also notfalls auch beim (oder bis zum) Frühstück noch fertig gepackaged, released und online gestellt werden, wenn das nächste Killer-Framework entstehen sollte

Hach, das klingt alles sehr spannend, und so ganz im Sinne von Smalltalk Inspect: Agilität aus allen Poren…