Monthly Archives: August 2020

Crypto-Nacl

Hi all,

I wanted to let you know that I ported the Crypto-Nacl library from SmalltalkHub to GitHub here: https://github.com/objectguild/Crypto-Nacl

The original author is Tony Garnock-Jones, with contributions from Hernán Morales Durand. See the README for more details.

Libsodium has evolved a lot over time, which means that there is plenty of additional functionality that can be unlocked through this library. I don’t have a need for it at the moment, but that might change in the near future. My interest is in using the cryptographic features to enhance security of business applications.

Oh, and thanks to the Buenos Aires Smalltalk team (https://github.com/ba-st/) for inspiration on using GitHub Actions with smalltalkCI 🙂

Cheers,

Jonathan van Alteren

Founding Member | Object Guild B.V.
Sustainable Software for Purpose-Driven Organizations

[ann] Indie Web

Hi all,

Due to the confinement in the pandemic, our forms of telepresence become
more important and many suddenly got even more immersed into an
Oligopoly cyberspace (Zoom, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Amazon,
Microsoft, etc) with opaque algorithms that under extractive logic
commodify our privacy and communications, try to condition our attention
and habits, as well as to shape our current and future behavior. But
this is not the only way to inhabit cyberspace.

From the Grafoscopio community[1], we would like to invite you to a
series of workshops that we are doing to make visible other ways of
populating and building the web, aligned with the movements of
IndieWeb[1a], from what we have called “pocket infrastructures”. You can
find more information about these topics in [2] and in particular about
the workshops in [3] (in Spanish).

[1] https://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/en.html
[1a] https://indieweb.org/
[2] https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/indieweb/
[3]
https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/indieweb/doc/trunk/docs/es/index.html#talleres

The second workshop will be tomorrow, Saturday, Aug. 29 from 3:15 PM to
7:15PM CO (GMT – 5) — I will try to share the other workshops earlier,
but the site in [2] will be the consolidated memory of them, for those
who want to join us asynchronously.

We will see how IndieWeb sites help us to untangle and reweave that
other web and how this help us to reconnect in this stranger times.

Rethinking the infrastructure is also to rethink the ways in which it
enables and makes visible (or not) certain ways of being and acting.
Infrastructures are embodied discourses. So thank you in advance for
joining us in rethinking this in practice.

Of course, Pharo is behind scenes, as usual, powering this experience.
But with these IndieWeb workshops I think we have found a sweet spot
that puts coding in front with a practical introduction and motivation
beyond the kind of boring “Hello World”. Following a “local first”
approach, documentation will be in Spanish, but source code[5] and
interactive documentation will be in English to bridge our worlds :-),

[4] https://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/dumb-hello-world
[5] https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/brea/

See you on cyberspace,

Offray

Static SmalltalkHub

Hi all,
Since May, SmalltalkHub is in read-only mode, allowing people to get back their data and move it to another forge if needed.We had several unexpected downtimes with the deprecated version of Smalltalkub (different software stack due to server migration).

To enhance the user experience, we put the static version of Smalltalkhub «  SmalltalkHub archive » on-line as the official http://smalltalkhub.com service. It was already announced that it will be done in November but we decided to do it earlier because it improves the current state:

– faster and reliable downloads from smalltalkhub.com (mcz files are no longer stored in a Mongo DB but served as static files)

– Smalltalkhub archive still allows to list projects, search for a project, see packages, contributors, commits

– the deprecated version of smalltalkhub is still on-line until November at http://deprecated.smalltalkhub.com/.


So you have the best of the 2 versions.


Regards,The Pharo consortium team.

Pharo Master Class for Inria Academy @Inria Chile

Tuesday I will give a master class to 90 attendees. This master class is organized by Inria Chile and the Inria Academy.

I will do many interactive sessions but the slides to back-up and explain some sessions are available at http://rmod-pharo-mooc.lille.inria.fr/MasterClass/

S.

An object view on global usage: the case of Transcript

Hi guys
I wrote this https://thepharo.dev/2020/08/11/transcript-the-misunderstood-global/because I thought that I had to :).


See Chapter 8 for a longer version is available at https://github.com/SquareBracketAssociates/Booklet-PharoWithStyle/releases/download/continuous/WithStyleBook-wip.pdf

Feedback and PRs are welcome.

S (full of positive energy)

Grafoscopio ported to Pharo 8.x and Git

Hi,

Grafoscopio [1] has been ported to Pharo8.x and Git. Source code[2] and
documentation[3][3a] repositories reflect the change (at some point I
hope both could be integrated in Fossil, but meanwhile community hosted
Gitea and Fossil are working pretty fine).

[1] https://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/en.html
[2] https://code.tupale.co/Offray/Grafoscopio
[3] https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/grafoscopio/
[3a] https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/grafoscopio/doc/tip/readme.md.html

For the Grafoscopio 2.x series I hope to update several other things
including migration to Spec2 and improved usability.

Cheers,

Offray

ps: We are experiencing some issues with our Gitea instance today. That
should be solved soon or I hope to provide a non-oligopolistic
alternative in the future.

static.smalltalk.com

http://static.smalltalkhub.com/

is the static file server version of smalltalkhub.com. Smalltalkhub is suffering instability. So may be we will turn http://static.smalltalkhub.com/ sooner than planned.

[Ann] Updated Alpine Linux Pharo VM Docker image

Hi all,

I’ve updated the Docker image for pharo.cog.spur.minheadless VM
built on Alpine Linux. This version is built on Alpine Linux 3.12. 

Some links:

– https://hub.docker.com/r/pierceng/pharovm-alpine
– https://github.com/pharo-contributions/Docker-Alpine/tree/master/vm.build
– https://github.com/PierceNg/opensmalltalk-vm/tree/pierce_alpine_839a5ca

This version removes the following plugins. I’m still thinking about some
of the others, especially the GUI-related ones. The idea is of course to
have the smallest possible set of plugins. Comments welcome.

– Security
– Drop
– Croquet
– DSAPrims
– JoystickTablet
– MIDI
– Serial
– StarSqueak
– InternetConfig

The output Docker image contains the Pharo VM only and is not runnable by
itself. It is intended to be used as a base to build your own Docker image
containing your application-specific Pharo image. 

I’ll be building a similar Docker image for Pharo’s fork of the VM.

Pierce