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Smalltalks 2009

Squeak Weekly - Wed, 2009-09-23 14:39

Following on from their high-profile presence at ESUG this year, the Argentinian Smalltalk community are preparing to host their third annual domestic Smalltalk conference, Smalltalks 2009.

Running from 19th to 21st November in Buenos Aires, the conference’s goal is to “gather both the Argentine and International Smalltalk community to get connected sharing our work and experience with regards to Smalltalk or related topics”.

The conference will have two streams: “Research and Education” for research and education work done with Smalltalk in universities and public or private
entities; and “Industry and Development” for presentations related to Smalltalk software developed by companies or individuals, both public and private.

In addition, the event will host a Smalltalk programming contest.  As in previous years, well known personalities from the international community will attend the conference.

All those connected with Smalltalk, be it faculty, students, researchers, developers or entrepreneurs, are invited to participate, free of charge, as presenters and members of the audience.

In addition, early registrants get a great-looking T-shirt for free, so get your bookings in now!

Categories: Smalltalk

HeadlinerCreative : A Case Study

Drupal Community - Tue, 2009-09-22 11:50

Web designers have taken to blogging platforms as a foundation for their portfolio websites. It has always bothered me since, as a web designer, I believe in user-centered design. Blogging systems are not ideal for showcasing a portfolio, as it’s coming at the project from the perspective of “what’s easy to build and how can we fit what we want into it?”

I think a lot of designers feel overwhelmed by Drupal, because of all the capability and power it has. But Drupal is capable of not just managing newspapers and portals – Drupal can easily and efficiently handle small-time operations, as well.

I knew I needed to redesign my own website, www.headlinercreative.com, and I was determined to use Drupal. I approached the project like any client’s website, starting from the very beginning: figuring out the goals and purpose of the website, figuring out what content I wanted to display and the best way to display it. I wanted something that would be easy for me to use and update, and that would be intuitive for visitors to view my work and participate in blog discussions. I knew that whatever I came up with, Drupal would handle it superbly.

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What to Do About the H1B Program

Home Feed - Sun, 2009-09-20 08:17

Sept 17 2009: a work in progress

The Spirit of 1776

"If America so much as considers making a stocking or a horseshoe nail, she shall feel the full weight of British might." - Lord Chatham, 1766

As I see it, the major obstacle to ending the damage wrought on Americans by the H1B program is Americans themselves, especially the estimated 500,000 American techies who have been displaced. Frankly, I'm not sure why.

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Categories: BB.com Feeds

Drupal powered NowPublic.com acquired by the Clarity Digital Group

Drupal Community - Sat, 2009-09-19 17:21

As you may have seen in the news, NowPublic.com, the first venture backed start-up to use Drupal, was acquired by the Clarity Digital Group which owns and operates Examiner.com a quantified top 100 web property for local news and information. Over the next ~6 months we'll be migrating Examiner.com to the NowPublic Drupal based platform, creating one of the largest public Drupal installs on the planet!

While we at NowPublic have been blessed with a loyal, dedicated, and amazing team that continues to impress me on a daily basis, and fortunate enough to have great advisers, the unsung hero of this story that I want to publicly thank is everyone who has contributed to Drupal, and the Drupal community - without you all this would not have been possible. Drupal the software, and the Drupal community have been critical to the success of NowPublic.com from the very beginning.

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New Drupal Book: Drupal 6 Site Blueprints

Drupal Community - Fri, 2009-09-18 16:30

Packt Publishing is pleased to announce the release of a new Drupal book called Drupal 6 Site Blueprints authored by Timi Ogunjobi. This is a project-oriented book that provides readers with a starting foundation for 12 powerful Drupal Web site projects that can be tailored to their needs, including community functionality, blog networks, e-commerce stores, photo sharing, Google mashups, and so on..

Packt Publishing is also pleased to offer a 15% discount to any Drupal.org user. To purchase this book with this discount, simply purchase Drupal 6 Site Blueprints through Packt Publishing, and provide the code Dru6SBto. Also, keep in mind that Packt contributes a portion of every book sale right back to Drupal!

This book is aimed at Drupal users in the following categories:

  • Students seeking hands-on experience building useful PHP-based Web projects using a rapid development environment.
  • Hobbyists looking to build rich Web applications for personal and business use or for their clubs or society.
  • Business owners who would like to test the Drupal platform and to see if it meets their immediate and future business needs for a Web application.
  • Professionals who like to quickly present prototypes of new Web projects to their clients.

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New Development Model, two months on.

Squeak Weekly - Thu, 2009-09-17 15:51

It has been two months since the Squeak Oversight Board first put forward their “New Community Development Model”. At the time the proposal caused a lot of heated debate on the squeak-dev mailing list, with concerns being expressed that similar efforts in the past had had little lasting impact, and had caused great frustration for those pushing those earlier efforts.

The motives of the Board were to “get rid of as many hurdles as possible in the contribution process [and]  to enable the community at large to improve Squeak, the core of the system and its supporting libraries”.

So, two months down the line, how’s it doing?

If sheer volume is any criterion, it looks like a great success with over 500 packages uploaded as patches to 3.10.2 and over 40,000 downloads from the trunk (see bottom of the linked page for up to date statistics).

The results of all this activity are available to use and test in the daily updated image published at http://ftp.squeak.org/trunk/ (needs a recent VM). If you want to contribute, you can add new patches at http://source.squeak.org/inbox/, or ask one of the current developers for access to the developers repository at http://source.squeak.org/trunk.

If you just want to get an idea of what’s going on, check out the commit logs that are getting posted to the squeak-dev mailing list, and to the #squeak irc channel on freenode.

Categories: Smalltalk

Drupal 6.14 and 5.20 released

Drupal Community - Wed, 2009-09-16 14:45
Download Drupal 6.14
Download Drupal 5.20

Drupal 6.14 and 5.20, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. Both releases fix some other smaller issues as well.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

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Drupal 7 code freeze

Drupal Community - Tue, 2009-09-15 16:12

After some 82 weeks of development beginning in February 2008, no one should be caught by surprise that we are in a code freeze for a release of Drupal 7, the next and best release of Drupal yet. However, as we all know, some of the best patches always happen at the last minute, and there are always last-minute patches that must happen. As part of my State of Drupal presentation at DrupalCon Paris last week, I talked about the Drupal 7 code freeze. Since not all of us could be in Paris, I wanted to share the relevant slides (PDF, 85 KB) in this post.

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The Lynchpin in the H1B Process - Labor Condition Applications ( LCA )

Home Feed - Mon, 2009-09-14 09:38

Sept 14 2009:

In some ways, the heavy attention paid to H1B visas misses the most critical element in the process of replacing expensive Americans with cheap foreign workers, that is the Labor Condition Application.

What are LCAs ?

A very good summary of FAQs about Labor Condition Applications at visalaw.com.

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Categories: BB.com Feeds

Help build future DrupalCons

Drupal Community - Mon, 2009-09-14 03:27

The Drupal Association has taken the first steps in implementing its new events plan. In this first phase, we will be working to schedule DrupalCons two years in advance, and we have established regional groups to manage this process. We have committed to adding a third annual DrupalCon that will float between regions not currently served by the European and North American Cons.

The Regional Organizing Groups are open to any interested party in the community, and free to choose their own structure and governance. They will select cities, choose local teams, and create programs for future DrupalCons. Australian, European, North American and South American Groups are forming or have formed and can be found on http://groups.drupal.org.

We are making these changes because DrupalCons are growing just as the Drupal community is growing and we expect that growth to continue and accelerate. We have committed to making DrupalCon available to anyone who wants to attend them, and this means that we need to select appropriate venues and work hard to be efficient in order to keep the ticket price affordable. The Drupal Events Plan is a work in progress and is available online for your review.

We are committed to having DrupalCons that serve the entire community while maintaining the sense of community that has been the hallmark of DrupalCon. You can become involved by joining the Drupal Association, taking part in a regional group and in your local Drupal group.

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FAQS about the H1B Program

Home Feed - Sun, 2009-09-13 07:21

Sept 14 2009: created

Oct 2 2009: See latest H1B news on Digg

What is the H1B Program ?

A good, no-nonsense description of the often-bewildering H1B program at Wisegeek, with some small clarifications and edits. Note that the description is cast from the H1B employer perspective.

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Categories: BB.com Feeds

Drupalcon Paris 2009 Feedback Survey

Drupal Community - Fri, 2009-09-11 12:31


DrupalCon Paris 2009 is over and we want to have your feedback, whether you attended the event or couldn't make it this time around.

You are the ones, that can help us make DrupalCon your conference, by simply filling out this survey.
We have lots of questions for you and you have the answers to them!

This is for you, so help make future DrupalCons, including DrupalCon San Francisco 2010, April 18-20th, even better!

ESUG 2009 wrap up – Best Ever?

Squeak Weekly - Tue, 2009-09-08 11:58

All the participants should now have safely returned home after a hugely successful ESUG conference. Participants from around the world (including an Argentinian football team) shrugged off the economic climate to spend a week in Brest and share their experiences and aspirations with fellow Smalltalkers.

Highlights included:

Check out the photos for a flavour of the conference: Adriaan, Hernan, James, Yuri. and many more.

Comments on the web have been very positive too:

  • “ESUG was a blast, totally.”
  • “Definitely the best Smalltalk conference I’ve ever been to.”
  • “a great conference”
  • “a pleasure to attend every year”
  • “fascinating, inspiring and enjoyable”
  • “it’s been intense”

With reviews like that, next year’s conference in Barcelona is bound to be a sell-out, so remember to book early!

(Photo from Yuri’s collection)

Categories: Smalltalk

ESUG 2009 kicks off, VAST goes free, Technology Awards break records

Squeak Weekly - Tue, 2009-09-01 04:11

ESUG 2009 has got off to a successful start, with a packed programme of events lined up for the next few days.

After an introduction from Stefan Ducasse for ESUG and local organisers Alain Plantec and Loic Lagadec, Georg Heeg looked at Smalltalk’s history and future direction and James Foster ran through news from the Gemstone world, including brief discussions of Metacello and Scaffolding.

After lunch there were a series of shorter presentations including the “academic strand” of the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies.

In the evening, Instantiations sponsored the reception event in the evening, and took the opportunity to announce free editions of Visual Age Smalltalk for academic and open source usage, which was very well received!

Attendees also had the opportunity to see the entries for the ESUG 2009 Innovation Technology Awards. A record-breaking 21 applications were entered this year, and the results of the voting will be announced at the conference social event on Thursday.

(Photo from Adrian van Os’ site)

Categories: Smalltalk

Magma goes HA!

Squeak Weekly - Sat, 2009-08-29 06:04

Chris Muller announced release 42 of Magma to the Squeak-dev mailing list. Magma is a multi-user object database for Squeak and Pharo images and which provides transparent access to a large-scale shared persistent object model. Magma release 42 brings unprecedented scale and availability of persistent domain models to Squeak users.  In particular, a single logical repository can now be served from multiple servers simultaneously, each hosting their own physical copy which are kept constantly up to date automatically.

There’s lots more information, introductory material and documentation at the Magma homepage.

Categories: Smalltalk

The American Society of Media Photographers

Drupal Community - Fri, 2009-08-28 07:28

In early 2009, The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) embarked on a website redevelopment project with Context, a web development firm based just outside of Philadelphia.

With over 7,000 members and an expansive website consisting of hundreds of pages ranging from informational tutorials to event registration to their national "Find a Photographer" service, the ASMP had quite a project in front of them, and were looking for guidance in determining which system would be able to meet their requirements.

After reviewing the ASMP's 11 page request-for-proposal and the wonderfully clean and organized designs provided by Chicago's Grillo Group, Context decided that Drupal was the only CMS that would make the project practical.

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DrupalCon Paris: seven days to go

Drupal Community - Mon, 2009-08-24 13:44

Just a week to go, and we are busy, frenetically working on the last details to get you the coolest, most fun, most informative Drupal Conference ever. We cannot but express our regrets to those who will not be able to join us: know that we have worked hard to get you as much video coverage as possible, so you can still follow the conference.

As you all may know, organizing an event of this stature is no easy deal and we are fully expecting to still meet bumps on the road in the next seven days but.. we know that with your support we'll be able to surmount anything. God willing, this time Wi-fi will work :)

So, some additional information about how well this is going:

  • There will be over 850 people in attendance from all over the world.
  • We have a line up of 82 sessions lead by members of the Drupal community, not counting the dozens of BoF sessions.
  • We have 42 sponsors (6 Platinum, 2 Gold, 12 Silver, and 22 Bronze) representing Drupal service providers and corporate users including major national and international software and media companies with familiar sponsors like MTV and Microsoft.
  • There are still two opportunities left for your company to be a sponsor (Gold and Silver), you will not be on the printed materials but, we will get you the exposure both at the venue and online, remember: benefits from the sponsorship go to furthering the Drupal community if interested, hurry and use the contact form on the conference website.
  • We have a great job fair lined up with the top Drupal service providers hiring from the best and the brightest developers and business persons the community has to offer.
  • We have added DrupalCampParis4 to the first day of Drupalcon! Please sign up online on the Barcamp website.
  • Lastly, we have sold 25 of the 30 remaining late registration tickets. There are only 5 tickets left! If you are interested in attending Drupalcon Paris and need a ticket, please purchase one today before they are all sold out.

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Squeakfest a roaring success

Squeak Weekly - Wed, 2009-08-19 14:27

The US Squeakfest finished last week, following on from the previous Brazilian event, and it was a great success. Perhaps the best way to give a flavour of the excitement of the events and the enthusiasm of the attendees is to quote Timothy Falconer’s report:

As I write this, I’m flying home from Squeakfest USA.  Sitting here, staring at my laptop, I’m completely unable to find appropriate words to describe the magic and friendship of the last few weeks.  So many passionate talks, so many stirring examples, so many last minute details and surprises.

I’m tired.  That much is clear.  Blame it on three conferences in four weeks and roughly fifteen thousand miles of travel in between.  Were it not for my many Squeaker traveling companions, I’d have curled up to hibernate long ago.  Truly the best part of the last month has been the company I’ve kept: Rita, Yoshiki, Marta, Kim, Scott, Alex, Bert, Ted, Bill, Randy, both Kathleens, Avigail, and Milan. Sharing the adventure with people of such talent and humor has truly been an embarrassment of riches.

As for the presentations, workshops, and hallway talks, there’s just too much to say.  With dozens of sessions between the two Squeakfests, my mind’s a blur with memories of enthusiasm and insight, along with strengthened motivation to support and expand our vibrant Etoys community.

Rather than summarize my recollections, I’ll instead point you to the video on the Squeakland website http://squeakland.org/resources/audioVisual/#cat865 (scroll down to Squeakfest Brasil and Squeakfest USA).

We managed to capture nearly all of Squeakfest USA on our live webcast feed, though we lost the first half of the presentation from South Korea.  Also, the final roundtable wasn’t posted at the request of one of the participants. My apologies for the audio problems on the first morning.  If you start at the beginning, know that the sound does get better.  Also, if the video screen is at times too hard to read, the blame rests with the web stream, which reduced quality to improve bandwidth.  We will be posting better video from both events in the future, particularly of the children’s workshop, so stay tuned.

I’d like to give a special thanks to Rita Freudenberg, our education director, who earned the “most traveled” award for her trips from Germany to both Brazil and Los Angeles.  When you total her air distance, she flew more than 40,000 kilometers (25,000 miles), which means she effectively circled the globe for Squeakland in the last month.  Her insight, passion, and hard work in the last eight months were instrumental in both Squeakfests.  As with her husband Bert, her continuing efforts on behalf of the Etoys community are unparalleled.  Also a big thanks to Marta, Bruno, Kim, and Kathryn for tending to the many details of both conferences.  Your hard work really showed.   Most of all, I’d like to thank everyone at Viewpoints Research Institute for their time and talent in the last year.  Your guidance has greatly helped Squeakland Foundation as we take and carry the Etoys torch into the future. Wow! What more is there to say? Let’s hope that ESUG 2009 proves to be as inspiring!
Categories: Smalltalk

SportBusiness.com relaunch

Drupal Community - Tue, 2009-08-18 11:56

SportBusiness Group is the world's leading supplier of information, media and B2B marketing services to the sports industry and, with its network of partners and agents, assists companies from all over the globe in achieving their business goals.

The latest incarnation (site version 11, 3rd Drupal version) of the Sportbusiness.com website has finally brought us into the world of Drupal 6. We initially moved the site over to Drupal almost 3 years ago (back in the Drupal 4.7 days) after months of data conversion from a proprietry Oracle-based CMS. We've never looked back. The upgrade to Drupal 6 has just finished; the site has been redesigned and several major changes have been implemented.

Getting up to 10,000 page impressions a day certainly doesn't make this a high-traffic site by comparison to some of the other sites we have at Electric Word plc (parent company to SportBusiness), but the visitors to the site demand equally high levels of quality and content. This was something we had to maintain from previous releases.

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Origo - Distributed Software Development

Drupal Community - Tue, 2009-08-18 10:16

Origo is an open, modular and extensible software development, management and distribution platform. Aimed at software developers, Origo provides a set of services for combining, integrating and facilitating the development process over a network. Origo provides services like source control management, issue tracking, statistics, release hosting, wiki, blog and features for communicating and networking with other developers. An extensive API can be used to integrate Origo into other applications and development processes.

Origo was conceived as a research project of the Software Engineering chair at ETH Zürich, and has resulted in several theses. Recently ownership was transferred into an ETH spinoff, Oriact.

Released in August 2007, the platform as of August 2009 hosts 3,000 projects with over 6,500 developers worldwide.

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