Magritte for VASt

Over the past month or so I have been doing some work for National Spaarfonds, including porting Magritte to VA Smalltalk. They are generously offering this work back to the community and I am happy to announce that I have just uploaded the first version of the VASt Magritte port to VAStGoodies.

You'll want to start with the VASt 8.0.1 [128] developer preview image and then load the configuration map from VAStGoodies. There are currently four failing tests: three caused (I think) by method inlining and one by differences in error handling behaviour. I haven't yet determined what (if anything) can be done about these.

A version of Pier ported to Seaside 3.0 and VASt won't be far behind but I have some more cleanup to do first in order to make sure it loads into a clean image.

Vienna or bust

I've been wanting to visit Vienna at least since my arrival in Germany last year —particularly after trying to learn the Viennese Waltz in my ballroom dancing class—but could never convince anyone to come along. Thanks largely to an invitation from Bernhard Pieber, I finally made the trip.
And I've been busy: as well as trying to take in Viennese culture and some of the sights, I also presented an introduction to Seaside at mobilkom austria and had the chance to meet some local Smalltalk and Seaside developers over dinner and beer. It seems to take the arrival of a foreigner to prompt the locals to get together (no surprise: the same is true in my home town!).
Vienna is much as I imagined: a real "European" city with beautiful old architecture everywhere you look. A visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum would have been worth it just to see the building itself, but I was also struck by a couple of sculptures and by several paintings by Pieter Bruegel and Lucas I. van Valckenborch. It's interesting that I liked both artists since it turns out that van Valckenborch studied under Bruegel and Bruegel's Tower of Babel, which was displayed in the museum, was the model for van Valckenborch's version, which hangs in the Louvre.

First thing one morning, I walked to the Spanish Riding School to watch the exercises of the Lipizzaner Stallions. I thought Lipizzans were all grays but apparently that is simply the dominant and selected gene and it is tradition to keep at least one bay at the school at all times. The horses and their riders are impressively controlled and the Winter Riding School itself is astounding too: is there anywhere else in the world where you can ride a horse on a bed of sawdust, surrounded by two levels of marble balconies and lit by enormous chandeliers?

We saw a big band concert at a local jazz club and got standing-room tickets to a sold-out orchestral performance with Lang Lang (郎朗) on the piano and Zubin Mehta conducting. I would have gladly paid the extra for a seat if one was available, but these €6 standing tickets are a wonderful idea to make the symphony more accessible. The only disappointment was the sound in the concert hall, which seemed somewhat flat, probably due to our location under the balcony.

Schloss Schönbrunn (the former imperial palace) is also worth a visit. The expansive gardens are enjoyed in the mornings by walkers and runners and, despite the tourist hoards, the Gloriette perched on its hilltop behind the palace, creates a striking image. The palace museum was interesting too: among other things, I discovered that Marie Antoinette was Austrian (she, like most of her 10 sisters, were married to foreign royalty for political reasons).

Like I said, I've been busy.

Seaside 3.0a5

The fifth alpha release of Seaside 3.0 is out. Check out the release announcement. It's looking like Cincom, Instantiations, and GemStone will all include this version in their next upcoming releases; Pharo users can use the Seaside Builder to generate a load script. Squeak users will probably have success using the Builder as well, but we are looking for one or more people to actively test and maintain a Squeak port. Get in touch if you're interested.

We're expecting this to be the final alpha release, so now is the time to actually send in any bug reports you've been sitting on.

Languages - the other kind

A few days ago, Adriaan and I checked out Inglourious Basterds. It wasn't really what I was expecting (what was I expecting?) but it was well done overall and I enjoyed it. Christoph Waltz was the highlight for me: the cunning Col. Hans Landa was just plain interesting to watch. The movie kept me engaged right up until he finds the shoe (I'll leave it at that so as not to give anything away), at which point things seemed to go steeply downhill and the movie stopped feeling like it was going anywhere. It never really recovered.

The most rewarding part for me, though, was watching a movie with three spoken languages and understanding just about all of it. I was particularly keen to see the movie in the Netherlands where the absence of dubbing and my inability to read the subtitles left me free to take it in without distraction. Anyone know any other German/French/English movies that are worth seeing?

Seaside at Amsterdam.rb

I'm just back from the monthly meeting of the Amsterdam Ruby User Group at De Bekeerde Suster in Amsterdam. The cheeseburger was delicious, though I was slightly offended when the guy who brought the food said, "Let me guess... you want ketchup?". It's not like I'd even said a word; how could he have decided I was north american? :)

We talked about their plans for the RubyEnRails conference coming up on October 30 and shared some of our experiences from ESUG conferences. There was quite a bit of discussion around how to encourage programmers to give lightning talks. I also took a few minutes to give an overview of Seaside. Everyone there was quite interested in Smalltalk and the level of awareness was already quite high. We had some interesting discussions of the language's history as well as its benefits and limitations. In the end that made up a good part of the evening.

Thanks for the warm welcome.

In Bruges

I spent this weekend in Belgium. Arriving in Bruges after dark, I was greeted by the clip-clop of horse-drawn carts on cobbled streets (what an amazing sound!) and narrow lanes lined with medieval stone and brick buildings. The whole scene is gently lit by street lights that manage to avoid casting the gloomy sodium-light shadows found most places. Bruges by night is one of the most beautiful and romantic cities I have seen.
Incidentally, apparently I'm one of the few people left in the world who hasn't seen the movie In Bruges (oh it's recent... no wonder I didn't see it: I was in China), since it's all anybody talks about whenever Bruges comes up in conversation.
I had already decided to go for a run on Saturday when I looked at the online event listings and found there was an organized run happening and not much else that interested me. So, after a pleasant boat tour around the canals, I took my advice from last week one level further and saw the area around Bruges while running a 15km race.
For dinner, I found an excellent restaurant called De Vlaamsche Pot (The Flemish Pot), which serves local regional cuisine. The two-storey restaurant is cleverly laid out throughout a restored period house, complete with huge wooden beams in the ceilings. It is charmingly decorated and it successfully creates the atmosphere of somebody's dining room without any of the rooms feeling cramped at all. On top of that, the service was excellent in any language you can think of and the food was terrific. I filled up on delicious Flemish beef stew and didn't have room to even consider dessert.
The city's charm is tempered slightly during the day by the hoards of ambling tourists but not enough to put a damper on the weekend. It would be nice to do some day trips in the area some day: I'd love to see the fields of poppies and maybe check out Ypres and its Menin Gate, a painting of which struck me while in Canberra a number of years ago. It's always good to save something for the next visit.
Belgium brings my number of visited countries for the past three weeks to six and it looks like I'll hit at least seven before making it back to Canada... whew.

Smalltalk on AppEngine

Torsten posted a link to the announcement of GwtSmalltalk, which compiles to JavaScript and runs on top Google Web Toolkit and, thus, AppEngine. This is interesting coming only weeks after Avi's announcement of Clamato... there's clearly some interest around combining Smalltalk and JavaScript at the moment.

You can try out a demo. Hint, to create new instances you need to use:

Kernel instanceOf: