Okay, NYC Smalltalkers can go to:

http://wiki.nycsmalltalk.org for details on whatever the current meeting is.

For now this is being forwarded to http://www.nycsmalltalk.org

but the idea is that hopefully we will have a wiki backup so that I can update it from any where I may be.

Anyhow, June 7th we have the Smalltalk Ruby presentation. In July we plan to have Andres Valloud this year’s winner of the Smalltalk coding contest at the Smalltalk Solutions conference give a presentation on the strategy that won him the iPod.

-Charles

In my last post I griped about my dynamic dns problems. Recap: I used to run the NYC Smalltalk wiki from my home on my VAIO notebook running CentOS Linux until it seems the greedy facist cable company apparently shut me down. I really don’t think it was just me

Anywho , a gentlemen and a colleague assisted by providing me with access to a shell account from where I could run nmap on my box in order to figure what was really up. Have not had the cycles to do this yet but I will and thanks.

What have I done?

• I changed my web site hosting provider and went with a cheaper package that allowed me to do more, a lot more. I’ll blog about these guys later. I’m quite happy with them and quite disgusted with my previous fat cat provider.
• The more is that we now have http://www.nycsmalltalk.org – a static web site, which I have not yet updated but will and probably will for a while be posting the up coming meeting announcements on.

While making the move I found some interesting and nostalgic items packed in boxes such as:

• http://www.ocit.com/nycst

A site that my wife had built in Flash for us. From the art work you all can tell how old it is. Looking at it just makes me sad.

Anyhow, I will have a wiki back up someday but chances are that I will take the time now to port to WikiWorksSSP i.e. an extended WikiWorks framework based on VisualWorks SSP technology which includes a reasonable security mechanism and move away from SmallWiki. The main reason is that there has not been any continued development of SmallWiki on VisualWorks but rather they moved to Squeak.

-Charles

I thought it would be an interesting idea to have a presentation where we compared Smalltalk to one of our dynamic language cousins. Of these next kin it seemed to me that from the most popular languages that Ruby was the closest. So I approached the NYC Ruby chairperson, Patrick May. We met at the cafe at the New Yorker Hotel , right around from Suite LLC where we hold our meetings and for a couple hours we chatted but mostly went through the VisualWorks IDE. I brought a copy of VW 7.4 NC which I let him have. Patrick apparently has been a fan of Smalltalk but did not know quite where to start.

I wonder, has anybody written a “making the transition” type of tutorial i.e. that which understands that most new comers to Smalltalk will be used to file based environments and just unfamiliar with the “live” image concept that Smalltalk presents.

But I digress, details for our May presentation:

Date: June 7th, 2006

Location: 440 W. 9th Avenue, between 34th and 35th , 8th Fl

Time: 6:30 to approx 8:30

The presentation actually starts at 7pm , but there is an open house from 6:30 – 7pm.

Abstract:

Patrick May will give an introduction to the Ruby language, highlighting similarities and
differences from Smalltalk. He will also speak on the viability of Ruby in various
real-world scenarios

Bio:

Patrick May is a programmer, organiser, and artist. May is Director of Technology at
Rhizome.org, a new media arts community. Since 2002, he has been developing ruby-web,
a ruby environment optimised for the web. He has presented ruby-web at the 2002 and
2004 Ruby Conferences.

.

Perhaps some of you have noticed that NYC Smalltalk Wiki is not operational. Well, perhaps you all out there have not noticed but some of our regulars have. It seems that my ISP has shut all of my ports down. Probably not just me. It probably is now “policy”. This SUCKS !!!

BTW, I have a residential broadband account. It has sustained our wiki for at least 2 years. Are they all starting to do this? So the small people like me can’t run wikis from home. Forget about any independent P2P collaboration. P2P networks will definitely need to rely on super peers which means at the very least folks on business cable/dsl. But wait, some cable providers will give you a business cable account and they will very generously open 2 ports. What a joke.

I wonder what the motivation is. Are they trying to control spam/viruses better? Are the small fries of the world actually really impacting their bandwidth? Is this a money making squeeze to get us all to upgrade to business cable.

Maybe I’m screwing up. My newer NetGear router may be screwing up.

I used Shields UP from www.grc.com to check out my port “stealthness” or not. Unfortunately, Shield Up will only test a range of 64 ports at a time and I have to edit the port forwarding tables on the router as well to be able to test. Needless to say I only tested a couple ranges. I don’t know of a tool that will scan the entire port range. Even if there is such a tool, I obviously would need to connect a box directly to the cable modem. I think. I don’t believe there is a setting in my router to just allow all traffic through. Of course not. Through to where? Traffic has to go somewhere. Well, there is the “DMZ” option but I already tried that with one of my boxes.

All of this is such a hazzle and aggravation especially since it makes me so angry that I have to take time away from playing my guitar to handle this BS.

Action items:

1. Need at the very least a backup static site for NYC Smalltalk.
2. A link from the site to a url that would access the NYC Smalltalk blogs “Community” category, if possible.
3. Spend just a tiny little more time on testing what the issue really is.
4. Decide to bite the bullet and upgrade to a business cable setup that would allow me total access to my box. In other words just buy myself out of this hazzle.