Original by Ronald Jeffries, translation by Aleksi Niemela and Dave Thomas. www.rubycentral.com/articles/pink/index.html

(Source: Avi Bryant) I came across Avi Bryant's blog. Tons of interesting stuff, especially about Seaside. http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/avi/blogView

 Ich habe mal ein erstes deutsches 3.7g zusammengestellt:

 http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker/Squeak3.7gDeutsch.zip

 Das ist einfach das letzte 3.7g Full Image + deutsche uebersetzungen.
 Die englischen Fenster habe ich geloescht, die engl. Demo-Projekte sind
 aber noch drin.

 Was wir brauchen ist

 -> Eine deutscher Willkommen-text
 -> ein paar deutsche Demo Projekte
 -> am besten ein deutsches tutorial...

 Bi den Einfuehrungs-texten sollten wir uns nicht an den englischen orientieren,
 die sind naemlich eher sinnlos, denke ich.

Smalltalk is very well thought out, extremely well engineered, very flexible, and generally gives quite good performance in a multitude of situations. It’s very adaptable to many different situations, and has lots of tricks up it’s sleeve. Driving it is a bit of a paradigm shift from driving your average plane, it has some new fancy controls, but once you get the hang of it, it can be totally amazing and really fun. Even if you don’t totally know what you’re doing you can still get yourself out of a jam. Given that you’ve got a good pilot you can launch off to a quick start and really do some very heavy and impressive damage in a very short time. It also tends to perform quite impressively if you’ve got a few of them around, and easier to coordinate an army of them.

Java is pretty difficult to drive, and once you get it going in a certain direction it’s pretty hard to get it going somewhere else. It has a few turbo buttons on it so that if you really know when and where to use it, it can fly pretty well. You can surely get it going really fast if you fly it high enough and then point it straight into the ground. It’s generally not very flexible and often a real pain to deal with, but overall once you’ve got a flightplan fixed in stone you can fly it reasonably well and run it reasonably efficiently. If you are meticulous in your planning and implementation, it can really deliver the goods. If you make some mistakes, things can go very wrong that may become almost impossible to correct. Don’t count on any big changes, quick maneuvers, or any sort of fancy tricks that just might save the day, and leave yourself a good bit of time for planning and implementation before you expect to be able to deliver the goods. If you come accross any surprise attacks or come up against an Apache hellicopter, you could be doomed.

This situation provides much of the motivation for our architecture, ERP5, which offers several advantages for business. All ERP5 tools are open source, so are free and have openly available source code that a business can change to suit its processes. ERP5 incorporates, from scratch, advanced concepts such as object-oriented databases, a content management system, synchronization, variations, workflows, and a method to model and implement business processes. ERP5 is also a Web site where researchers can share innovation on management techniques and their implementation through software.

In 2001, two companies initiated the ERP5 project: Nexedi, a Zope service provider in France (Zope is a well-known open-source application server), and Coramy, a European apparel manufacturer. They aimed to develop a set of ERP software components for small and medium-sized companies. In addition to source code, the project also produced educational material and a clearly defined theoretical model. To fit the needs of smaller companies, they also designed ERP5 for distribution across distant sites with slow and unreliable Internet connections.

link

Source: _why, yaml.freepan.org) YAML is extremely simple to learn. The basics are extraordinarily simple. You may even find that you have unintentionally used YAML syntax when building lists or simple file formats.

It also helps if you have experience with any agile language (such as Ruby, Python, Perl or PHP). YAML was designed to suit these languages well and borrows a few basic ideas from them.

And look at the clock before you start. Jot the time down and we'll see how fast you are. [http://yaml.freepan.org/index.cgi?YamlInFiveMinutes]

The Springz library allows you to attach two objects together (in 2D space) with a spring, and simulate how they pull/push each other.

Boring when used between two objects, it becomes interesting when you attach thousands of springs with different strenghts and distances between hundreds of nodes, and let the simulation determine the best configuration of those nodes. (I wrote this library specifically to create a social network diagram from a large amount of data. I had written it first in Javascript + SVG, and it was working, but too slowly: 3 hours to render the first frame, and 12+ hours for each frame after that.)

Despite the very visual nature of this application, this library doesn't know jack about graphics; it just knows how to push/pull theoretical objects around in theoretical 2D space. Making this visible to the user is up to you. (My application reads in XML data and then outputs a few frames of SVG pre-rendered animation.)

The documentation for the Springz class lists the key features at the top of it. You can read this laboriously-written documentation, and download the file itself, from: here (click on Springz.rb under the Files listing).

If you happen to have the Adobe SVG plugin (freely avail for Win/Mac/Linux/Solaris) installed, you can see the JS version of this library in action at -- click the green rectangle to start the simulation, and then drag objects around and/or click the orange button to scatter them about.

I’m still waiting for some more, so check back periodically to see updates.

Significant functionality was added:

• Credit Management & Dunning
• Improved Discount Management
• Payment-Invoice Allocation improvements (incl. Auto Match)
• Ship/Receive in multiple UOMs
• Service Level Agreements
• GL Distribution
• Prepayment Order Improvements
• Financial Report writer improvements

Technical Improvements:

• Support of Oracle 10g
• Improved Database Connection management
• Performance improvements

Significant reduction of open bugs.

The PSP chipset comprises a number of components: the CPU, a media processor, a 3D graphics engine, a security processor and a power manager. The PSP’s MIPS R4000-based CPU will run at up to 333MHz, Sony chip designer Masanobu Okabe revealed at the Hot Chips conference in Stanford University, California. Its frontside bus runs at up to 166MHz, with both frequencies controlled by processor load. It contains a vector processing engine. link

matz called his talk: "How Ruby sucks".

 > PPS:
 > I remember working for a company, where it took the make utility3/4 of
 > an hour to figure out *what* to compile, and the compilers a day to
 > compile- it was a C++ project b.t.w. which was canceled and replaced by
 > a Smalltalk program after they spent 50man-years on a non-working
 > program - so much for non-toy languages !

Yeah and I just spent 3 days in an inhouse J2EE workshop held by one of our chief architects. We spent most of our time fighting with the tools. Changed setting over and over. The goal of the workshop was to demonstrate how to insert a row into an oracle table. At the end of the 2 days the table was still empty. Another non-toy language.

I have written two small apps (apx 5000 LOC) one in squak and one in stx. It was a dream. Got up in the morning and fixed two or three bugs before breakfast. You can only do this with a real cool environment.

So hats off to Nucleus Research for firing a salvo at SAP for causing customers to shell out millions on software with little more than added worker productivity in return. link