Sunday, April 15, 2012

Smalltalk history - draft 2

Ok, here's another draft of my diagram of Smalltalk History

Smalltalk history

As part of a new Introduction to Smalltalk course I'm developing to be delivered as an online course, I've put together a brief history of Smalltalk. I think it's important to know where the different dialects of Smalltalk came from.  I'll likely release this video for free.

Part of the video is the following diagram of the companies involved in the major Smalltalk dialects we see today.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

GemKit for VisualWorks 7.8 available

I have GemKit for VisualWorks 7.8 available.  I'd like to get feedback from existing GemKit users to make sure it works for them.  GemKit itself seems to work fine for me.  I haven't upgraded the release management tools to the new version of Store since it seems more like Store improvements than core GemKit functionality.

You can download GemKit, some documentation on how to set it up and use it and two video tutorials from this location:
simberon.com/downloads/GemKitVW78_small.zip

If you have any feedback, you can send it to me at david@simberon.com.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Space Wars Game

I've had a request to publish the space wars game.  You can download the parcel here.  I'll upload it to the Cincom Public Store repository as soon as I can.

Friday, January 6, 2012

GemStone 6.1.5 Time Bomb

Ok, let's see a show of hands - how many people have GemStone projects running on 6.1.5?  Ok, of those, how many encountered a mysterious crash yesterday?

It seems that RcQueue uses a timestamp for its records.  That timestamp is the number of seconds since January 1, 1995.  It's constrained to be a small integer.  Yesterday, it overflowed to a large integer, violated the constraint, and brought our production server to its knees.

Fortunately, there's a fix in GemStone 6.6 - it now records timestamps since January 1, 2005.  There, that fixes the problems.  Everybody set your watches for January 5, 2022.