dave astels

In followup to my earlier post, I have to report that Settlers of Catan is a smash hit at our house.

We’ve had standard 3 & 4 player games, and Nancy found rules for a 2 player variation which plays as well as the multiplayer version.

We’re looking forward to playing ‘Settlers’ a great deal over the summer.

The first modern Smalltalk (according to Alan Kay) was Smalltalk-76… as in 1976. That’s 30 years ago. This is what Steve Jobs & crew saw in ‘79 on their famous visit to PARC.

There is lots of activity in the Smalltalk world at the moment.

The Smalltalk Industry Council is alive and well.

With Smalltalk Solutions being held in Toronto again, there’s some local buzz. Here’s one article in itbusiness.ca.

This article in eWeek on Cincom Smalltalk.

Instantiations has picked up IBM’s VisualAge Smalltalk and are actively developing and promoting it.

Ambrai is well underway with an OS X native Smalltalk system, which looks very promising.

Dr. Dobbs as this article on SeaSide, a web app framework by Avi Bryant et.al.

So, why the fuss about Ruby? Why don’t we just use Smalltalk.. It’s everything Ruby is, and so much more. This train of thought keeps surfacing for me.. maybe it’s time to really follow it through. Sure… I’ll keep using Ruby for knocking out scripts, utilities, and small applications. It’s good for that. But I hope to use Smalltalk for more & more over time.

After reading James Robertson’s blog about these new-fangled board games, and most recently Martin Fowler, I decided to have a go. After talking to Martin about it, I picked up a copy of Settlers of Catan today (interestingly the manufacturer of the English version, Mayfair Games, is a short drive from my hotel in Skokie IL). I expect/hope to play a few games over the weekend.

So far I’m impressed. The materials and construction look great… wooden pieces (including dice) and nice heavy board tiles.

FYI: I just updated my resume: resume.pdf

If you are in need of my services, send me an email: dastels at daveastels dot com

Guess where I was yesterday.  The Mothership (and yes… I got the tShirt)I actually spent the afternoon walking from my hotel (at rt 85 & E El Camino) to Apple and on to Hobee’s on Stevens Creek Blvd. Nice walk, beautiful day, cool Apple swag.

My first OO language was Smalltalk. I learned about OO from Smalltalk. Since then I’ve been fortunate enough to spend many years working professionally in Smalltalk, but lately it’s been C++, Java, and C#. I’ve been using Ruby a lot recently as well.. but I always feel drawn back to Smalltalk. I’ve made an effort to get back to using it at times.

I’ve been using Smalltalk with a vengeance lately. My first undertaking is a port of rSpec for VisualWorks Smalltalk 7.4. A version for Squeak will follow soon afterwards, that being followed by a version for Ambrai Smalltalk.

Tom White’s Blog: Literate Programming with jMock:

Posted by tomwhite on May 11, 2006 at 11:10 AM

“We’ve been using jMock at our company for some time now. We’ve found it great for test driven development and isolating our unit tests from the rest of the system more effectively. One aspect of jMock that stands out for me is its idea of constraints. In fact, we’ve found this idea so useful that we always use the org.jmock.MockObjectTestCase base class rather than junit.framework.TestCase, even when we aren’t mocking anything out. This seems to have registered with the jMock development team, as they are planning to extract the constraints into a separate project, codenamed Hamcrest (it’s an anagram of “matchers”).”

(Via Steve Freeman.)

Nancy just found this site to help you get sexual sin out of your life. You know what they say about truth being stranger than fiction.

They even have software to monitor & report you internet usage.. to a person of your choice.. wife, boss.. whoever. But what do they do about DVD players?

Hmm… there’s probably a business opportunity there… sneaking people their porn fix.

Dr. Dobb’s | Smalltalk: Requiem or Resurgence? | May 6, 2006:

Jeremy Chan

The grandaddy of the object-oriented world, Smalltalk has fascinated developers since it appeared on the programming scene.
Jeremy Chan is a Principal Consultant at the Jonah Group and a Technical Architect with over 10 years of experience in object-oriented software engineering.

The August 1978 issue of BYTE magazine had a language feature that included a small picture of the ‘Land Of Small Talk’, perched on a tower amid Fortran Ocean, to the south of Pascal’s Triangle, North of Lisp Jungle, and East of the Basic Sea. The following text, associated with a description of the language, uncannily describes the state of Smalltalk both past and present.”

…

At the recent Smalltalk Solutions Conference, Georg Heeg organized a talk around what he termed “The Smalltalk Paradox”, as enumerated in the quotation above. Nostalgic as always for the full-force return of Smalltalk to the fore of modern object-oriented software development, I listened attentively.

Go read the whole article… it’s nicely done.

In the “it’s a small world” category, I hired/supervised Jeremy on one of his work terms when he was at Carleton University. What langauge were we using? Smalltalk, of course.

We went to see Alice Cooper in concert tonight.. all of us: Nancy & I and our sons Thomas & Jason.

The opening band was Helix. They sucked in the 80s and are worse now. The guitarist, Rainer Wiechmann, and the bassist, Jeff Fountain, seemed at ease and on top of their game… but the rest of the band should have stayed in the last century. They got a lackluster response from the audience… which stayed seated for the duration.

When Alice Cooper hit the stage it was a completely different story. The audience (at least on the floor where we were) were on their feet before the opening chords had faded… and remained standing for the rest of the show. It was awesome. The music was perfect, and he was as much a showman as ever.

This was my Jason’s (my son) first real rock concert. I think he started off in fine style