Dr. Vanessa Freudenberg

I just returned from a nice productive visit to California, where I brought back my very own $100-laptop. Got the camera working in Etoys (see picture on the right, showing Yoshiki and me) with just a few patches to Diego 's code. We also went to visit Keith Packard and Carl Worth of Cairo fame in Portland. Had a nice chat about Twin and then hacked away on a Pepsi version of image compositing operators. A very interesting meeting it was, with the old folks (Alan Kay, Jim Gettys) and the younger ones all sharing their thoughts. And back to OLPC, read this nice essay titled Free Laptops: Creating, Producing and Sharing a Revolution .

Just found a nice video on youtube about the $100 laptop at NECC 06 , including a cameo of our very own Kim Rose (at 3:21) while the speaker is mentioning "creativity" - very apt, I'd say.

Andreas Raab wrote a nice primer on profiling in Squeak. MessageTally might be the single most undervalued Squeak performance tool - a mandatory read for every serious developer.

Lately I work on Squeak integration in the One Laptop Per Child ( OLPC ) project, perhaps better known as the "$100 laptop". The whole etoys group came over to OLPC's office in Cambridge. Squeak looks surprisingly well on the display prototype, and also etoys are reasonably fast. Ian Piumarta took some nice pictures , which might very well be the first photos of the actual display in the wild.

Get it at opencroquet.org !

A very nice post about the Magic of Smalltalk .

Only six days left to the Smalltalk Party in Brussels ! I'll be there, and more interesting people , too. You should come, too!

Steve is posting screen clips of progress in Sophie (a.k.a. the Future of the Book), which is developed in Squeak with a Tweak UI. It's looking nicer and nicer every week.

The first-ever elections are held in the Squeak community. Candidates have to be nominated by February 17, same deadline for getting certified at SqP if you want to vote.

Ted Shab posted a job offer to the ECOOP list. Part of it was this: We are currently building a [...] testbed for user-experience exploration in Squeak (Smalltalk) (really). The resulting framework will be used by the various NASA centers [...] to build distributed, multi-mission systems for planning and executing a variety of NASA missions, including robotic (e.g. Mars rovers & deep- space probes) and manned (e.g. the new Moon/Mars exploration effort, including the Crew Exploration Vehicle currently being designed). Andreas Raab commented : FWIW, this project uses Croquet and Tweak. If you ever wanted to work with a bunch of really sharp guys this is definitely a place to consider. Sounds cool :)