Tuesday, January 27, 2009

In GemStone selectors >>true and >>false not allowed

Lesson of the evening ...

While moving Slaps (the Smalltalk LDAP library) to GemStone I found that while VisualWorks is quite happy if methods have the selector >>true or the selector >>false, GemStone is not. Darn.

Oh, well. Easily fixed.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Adding UDP sockets to Sport

I am looking at adding UDP socket support to Sport (the Smalltalk portability interface), specifically so I can run the Syslog library in Gemstone.

I have posted some initial proposals to comp.lang.smalltalk (cls), so if you are a Sport maintainer for a Smalltalk dialect or if you are just interested, please respond to my post there.

BTW, we use cls for Sport because cls is a forum for all Smalltalk dialects and Sport applies to all dialects. There you go.

Sunday, January 04, 2009

Popeye the Sailor copyright free 70 years after Elzie Segar's death - Times Online

Here's a rare thing. Something of value actually enters the public domain (in some parts of the world):

Popeye the Sailor copyright free 70 years after Elzie Segar's death - Times Online

... though I fear that Popeye will now be portrayed as a victim of 'weak' copyright protection legislation and used to encourage law makers to extend copyright terms yet again.

I hope, instead, that we see some excellent derivative Popeye works over the next year that show value in the economy, and that this strengthens the arguments for resisting copyright term extension, and perhaps even for shortening those terms to more useful levels for the wider economy.