Aug 29th, 2007	The 2000's

March 2000. Did you miss Camp Smalltalk 2000? Well I didn't, for more information come look at our SqueakEnd'00 and Camp Smalltalk 2000 report. If you didn't see me there, then perhaps I'll see you all at OOSPLA 2000, or perhaps before that at Summer Camp Smalltalk 2000 on the east side of North America or in Europe.

For some part of April and all of May, Mr McIntosh was hard at work for Squeak Central working on the macintosh Open Transport plugin for Squeak. Some references to the interesting things about this plugin are documented here. The objective was to make the best performing socket plugin using Apple's high performance Open Transport logic and lay a foundation for others to follow

Is it July? Where did June go. June was spent porting Craig Latta's Correspondents/Flow work to the Disney Socket Primitives and the current exception handlers. This brings a marvious streaming package to Squeak that allows you to create streams on sockets, MIDI, and serial devices. If you don't care for the existing Socket support in Squeak, then check these changesets out!

Will I be at the next Camp Smalltalk? YES!. Will I write another story? Maybe, but I really want to code some software this time

For Sept and October - MPEG that all I can say, see the OOPSLA 2000 (Camp Smalltalk report)

Mind I must admit in the later part of October a spent a few days writting a plugin to access the TIFF lib which is a library that lets you read or write TIFF files.

In Dec I had time to visit Silicon Valley and buy some camera equipment, fiddle with a Nikon film scanner, and learn some things about Photoshop 6.0. Oh and somewhere here some thoughts on MPEG tuning, plugin loading and Internet Radio. Post Christmas it seems quite a few Squeakers got film scanners, so maybe some TIFF applications are brewing.

The Year 2001

In Jan 2001, I made my yearly visit to MacWorld 2001. A fantastic place at which I took a few pictures like this one, (with a 20mm lens really really close) can you guess what it is? The mood was upbeat, Apple is fine (In April Apple blows away Wall street with earnings), iMovies are great, Ti powerbooks rule, and the new iBooks sell like hotcakes.

Feb, and March passed in a blur, there were 12 different builds done for Squeak in order to get the next Squeak Book out. Did you notice Squeak for the macintosh now supports Naviagation services, aliases, and has internal threading for better event handling. Some work also took place to build a Carbon version of Squeak and I've now got it running on Mac OS-X. Oh and in late March we took a two week vacation to Kauai HI. The more observant of you might note the Waimea Squeak Build, versus the Boston Snow storm build. Yet another story: Seems a client of mine invited me down to enjoy two days trapped in a hotel in Boston during the great NE snow storm of 2001.

In April I will be talking about Garbage Collection at Smalltalk Solutions 2001, and writing again for Camp Smalltalk at Smalltalk Solutions 2001.

The week after Smalltalk Solutions I managed to get slash/dotted via this article. Great fun watching the web logs spin by for a day or two. Great exposure for the community. One thing not really covered in the feedback was the fact that Smalltalk Solutions was driven by business needs and the user community. Not some deep pocketed Vendor, as pointed out DELL canceled their conference because of the economic situation this year. So hats off to my fellow Smalltalkers in making the Conference a great success and I hope I'll be back next year. My wife didn't understand what slash/dotting means, but my teenage son did, he quickly spread the word at school that Dad was way cool.

May 2001. Somewhere in May I managed to visit Silicon valley, it was interesting, never pass up an option to visit Fry's, only in Silicon valley is where you can find temples built to the worship of High Tech. However shopping aside, I did manage to make some progress on VMMaker for Squeak with Tim, yes Tim has a VERY nice place in the mountains, poor internet connectity tho. Thus at the end of May I announced that the macintosh source was rebuilt using VMMaker, a first for this decade. Much of my other time in May was taken up looking at Open/GL on the macintosh and making it work correctly in Squeak when you run it in a microsoft browser. This work also overflowed into June, which shared time taken to review source code documentation in Stable Squeak and discussions with David about exactly how many bits does SmallInteger use. Oh and a few days of tuning against a very popular VW application that runs with 900MB images, and *had* just a wee little GC issue, (sporadic response times).

In the summer of 2001, I attended ESUG for the first time and spoke on GC issues. I also took advantage of this business trip to spend 8 weeks in Europe. Followed by a trip to OOPSLA in Tampa which because of 9/11 was very lightly attended.

2002

In the winter of 2001/2002 I restructured the support code for the macintosh Squeak Virtual Machine. This work consisted of transposing a monolithic file which was created and modified by various people over a 10 year timeframe into a dozen files to add additional macintosh enhancements to Squeak. As part of this change I migrated the official build environment to Apple's Project Builder with full Carbon support to make Squeak a true OS-X application. This included adding support for file which have a size greater than 2GB and I successfully lobbied the Squeak VM maintainers to make this a platform wide solution along with supporting the VMMaker author in migrating the maintainers to the VMMaker build process. Additional changes also included support for macintosh file names greater than 31 characters and Carbon aware alias resolving. I also studied how GCC 2.95 produces PowerPC assembler code and with some changes to Slang altered the C code generator to produce a PPC VM that runs 30% faster than previous generations by taking advantage of compiler optimization side effects.

2003

Studied the GC algorithms in Squeak and make code changes to improve performance of the mark phase by as much as 40%. This improved some benchmark times by as much as 10% overall. Worked on adding proper serial port support for os-x and more integration of the unix source tree into the os-x version of the VM.

I also worked a number of issues with VisualWorks GC tuning, the most interesting and major one was with the German National Railway.

2004

In the winter of 2003/2004 I worked on a GemStone to Oracle conversion project in Atlanta then in Denver as the company changed location. Then I spoke on GC issues at Smalltalk Solution 2004 in Seattle.

In the summer of 2004 I started work on Sophie, an E-Book authoring,reader, server system which is funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, administrered by the Annenberg center for Communications at USC.

In the fall I attended ESUG in Europe.

2005

Early in the window I revised the Squeak GC logic to collect statistics and added the ability to do active tuning of how the GC logic reacts to problem situations. Later in the Summer I altered the Squeak VM to use Quartz drawing versus copying bytes to Quickdraw ports, this is pre-work for the mac-intel conversion project.

Hard at work with Sophie. I did attend ESUG in Europe again, and spoke on GC issues at Smalltalk Solutions 2005 in Orlando.

2006

In the early part of 2006 I undertook more rewriting of the Squeak Mac Carbon VM to address issues with MacIntel support, this required the tombstoning of the OS-9 code base because much of the code base was obsolete in the os-x 10.4 XCode tree.

Since the summer of 2004 I have been working with the Sophie team on the next generation of electronic books via a grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation Sophie will be distributed under the new BSD license as an open source project and is based on Squeak and Tweak, and via plugins and FFI logic extends Squeak with quicktime support, expanded clipboard support, hypenation, spelling, mac services, and mac menus. In the fall of 2006 we entered beta testing.

2007

More Sophie work, beta versions flow and in August of 2007 we release RC6 which seems a fine product, plus we start work on the One LapTop Per Child project's eBook authoring and reader tool (Sophie for OLPC)

This concludes my talk, did you find it valuable? Let me know.

PS Looking for the 90s, or the 80s?