When I’m not busy coding in various dialects of C for Fog Creek, I enjoy coding in Squeak Smalltalk as a hobby, and I try to stay active in the community when I can. Unfortunately, lately, I’ve been slacking rather spectacularly, and perhaps because of that I missed that Göran had assembled a nice tutorial on how to build a Squeak VM for Linux/Unix. The tutorial should get you a fresh-built VM in a couple of minutes, and a custom-built one not too long after that. Do note that, if you’re on OS...

After a semester of virtually no coding, I’m preparing to return to New York to do more work for Fog Creek on Fog Creek Copilot. This will be the first time in my career that I’m returning to a code base that I haven’t seen in a bit over a year. In some ways, this is very exciting. Knowing that something I put so much time and effort into has proven to be truly useful to a large number of people is extraordinarily gratifying, and getting a fresh chance to fix all the little things that I ran out...

So, today I spent roughly two hours hacking the MySQL driver for Squeak to add the DESCRIBE command and adding MySQL support to ROE. ROE is an awesome package that lets you write queries directly in relational algebra in your Smalltalk code. It generates all of the SQL to actually execute the query and delays execution until as late as possible. The effect is very nice. I’m currently working on a tutorial for how to use ROE in Seaside, and as part of that, I thought it’d be nice to add MySQL...

Sometimes, you’re confronted with someone who so stubbornly refuses to understand what you’re saying that you just want to cry. Let’s ignore for the moment that a lot of the hype around Rails is…well, hype. Even with that in mind, contrast the tutorial video for Rails with the tutorial video for Trails, a JSP-based framework that aims to do the same thing. Even if you completely ignore issues like scaffolding, the difference between these two videos makes me downright sad. For example: Methods...