Scam recursion

Today I received the following email:

> Dear friend,
>
> I am Mr. Steve Howard,i represent BROWNMIJ IMPORT AND EXPORT COMPANY PLC
> based in UK. My company markets and exports Polymeric Polyol and other
> products for world trade.
>
> We are searching for reliable representatives who can help us establish a
> medium of getting to our customers in Europe America and Africa as well as
> making payments through you as our payment officer. It is upon this note
> that we seek your assistance to stand as our representative in your
> country.
>
> Note that, as our representative, you will receive 10% of whatever
> amount you clear for the company and the balance will be paid into an
> account that we will avail to you. Please, to facilitate the conclusion
> of this transaction if accepted, do send me promptly by email the
> following:
>
>
> (1)Your full names,
> (2)Age and Sex
> (3)Contact address and, Phone/fax numbers.
>
> Thank you for your time as i await your prompt response.
>
>
> Very Respectfully,
> Mr. Steve Howard
> DIRECTOR OF MARKETING
> BROWNMIJ COMPANY PLC
> Tel : +447031948114


Hopefully they will stop trying to give me money when they read my answer:

Dear Mr. Howard,

unfortunately I have to decline your offer since I dont think
it is worth the effort. I earn more money in my daily job -
which is sending stupid emails to other people and making them
believe they could esily get rich. I typically use free mail
accounts to send these messages around telling people that
I represent a company searching for reliable representatives.
Unfortunately my job get's harder these days since it is not
a new idea and most people dont want to get rich - typically
they send me an answer that they do the same job as I do and
have to decline my offer...

Very Respectfully,
Mr. John Massmailer
DIRECTOR OF MARKETING
STUPID COMPANY INC.
Tel : +440815

Tweak Roadmap

Found the roadmap for the next
steps in the Tweak system from Andreas.

Fractal Terrain

There is also a new fractal generator in the Croquet image available. It is used for terrain generation. Read more here.

CITRIS Collaborative Gallery Software

The CITRIS Corporative Gallery Software now has a project homepage, an online forum, a download page and a bug tracker.

You can download the software here. It is based on the Croquet project which is written in the Squeak Smalltalk dialect. Click on the image for a preview.

Tweak for Squeak

The project page for the Tweak UI framework for Croquet and Squeak provides a new look, some additional infos and a ready to use image. Have a look at: http://tweak.impara.de/.

Preliminary Program for ESUG 2005 available

The preliminary program for ESUG 2005 is available at
http://www.esug.org

Dolphin Smalltalk V6.0 Beta

Object-Arts is moving Dolphin Smalltalk 6.0 into beta. To have a look for yourself just click on link to see a Flash movie.

BotsInc.

Stêphane Ducasse wrote a new book on programming in Squeak.

With BotsInc you will learn how to program robots in an interactive environment. It's fun - but it is not a toy, it teaches you 100% real programming in Smalltalk. The project is built on top of the rich open-source multimedia Squeak environment that you can also discover.

Visit the projects website http://smallwiki.unibe.ch/botsinc/, have a look at the gallery and the screenshots or download the environment.

Squeak and Croquet

Marcus Denker's presentation about Squeak and Croquet from the 21st Chaos Communication Congress is available online.

You can download the PDF paper (79k), the slides (1MB), the demo image and the presentations audio in MP3 format.

ImageGestation

Alejandro F. Reimondo has released some code for building
a Squeak image using "ImageGestation".

See http://alereimondo.no-ip.org/ImageGestation for more information.

Smalltalk in the large

Nice - I've found some infos on the "RUT-K" project on the Cincom blog. It's the train scheduling system for the German railway built with VisualWorks Smalltalk and Oracle. I worked in the project as a Smalltalk consultant and developer for 2 years and helped to bring it in shape. You can read more about it in the ESUG2004 Report.

It's another example of a successfull large software project realized in Smalltalk. Smalltalk drastically reduced the complexity. The picture shows a typical construction window. The upper graphic pane shows the trains path and the lower graphic pane is used to find conflicts with other trains. Click on the image to enlarge.

Arstechnica: A history of the GUI

Found this picture on a the clientjava.com page. It shows an early Smalltalk UI from an Alto system, click on the image to enlarge.

Smalltalk

Nice picture from Lukas Renggli's website. Click on the image to enlarge.

Scratch - a new programmable toolkit for kids

is a new programmable toolkit that enables kids to create their own games, animated stories, and interactive art. Scratch is build using the Squeak Smalltalk dialect. Click on the image to enlarge or visit the Scratch project page.

wxMorphic Update v0.04alpha

Steven Swerling has announced an update (v0.04alpha) to wxMorphic for Squeak. It implements Doug Ways suggestion of SystemWindows popping up in their own OS window and includes an additional launcher window. Click on the screenshot to enlarge or visit the project page to download.

Teaching Behavior

I cleaned up some old VisualWorks code I had from Ernest Micklei and published it to the Cincom Public Repository. Watch out for a "Teachable" package.
It's another nice example how powerfull Smalltalk really is. It's an implementation of a Teachable class who's instances can be teached to respond to messages. It's usefull for creating mocks who should behave like other objects (for instance inside of a test case) without actually implementing a real mock class. Here is an example how it can be used:

|teachable|
teachable := Teachable new.
teachable
    whenSend: #help return: 'ok';
    whenSend: #doit evaluate: [1 inspect];
    acceptSend: #noDebugger;
    whenSend: #negate: evaluate: [:num num negated].

After teaching the object we can use it as if it had a normal implementation in a class:

teachable help. "this will return the string 'ok'"
teachable doit. "this will open the inspector on the SmallInteger 1"
teachable noDebugger. "this will accept the send of #noDebugger and return the teachable"
teachable negate: 120 "this will return -120"

A Squeak version of the code can be found here.

WxMorphic v.0.01alpha

Steven Swerling has announced WxMorphic v.0.01alpha. You can get the code from his website.

Traits beta 2.1

Adrian Lienhard has announced a new version of Traits (beta 2.1) for Squeak. You can download it from SqueakMap. There is also a predefined image (12.5 MB).

OBJ Importer for Croquet

There is an OBJ importer available for Croquet. Read more here and here or download it from SqueakMap.

   

To Traits Or Not To Traits

There is a discussion on the Squeak mailing list about language extensions to Smalltalk for Squeak. Especially about including Traits into the standard image. Click here to get some infos on it. You can also download a prototype.