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Tonight I made a lump payment and what I hope will be the last on my student loans. That only took eight years.

Had a wonderful time at Joseph and Karan’s wedding. I’ll get the pictures up so those of us who used digital cameras can exchange snaps. Got home late last night, really late, six or seven hours late. The wildfires in Southern California threatened a FAA control center which was evacuated (rumor at the gate was that cars in the parking lot of the center were on fire). The plane for our departing flight arrived two hours late in Oakland- giving us hope- but there was no crew who could legally fly it. The pilots, I’m told, are limited to ten hours of flight and the available pilots were in Long Beach. But all the flights out of Long Beach were grounded due to smoke. You can imagine the crowd at the airport as people arrive for their 5:45pm to New York only to find that the 1:10pm still had not left and no one could not get anything but "indefinitely delayed". We were getting better news from the people with laptops and wireless handhelds than we did from the desk attendants. Investigations of other flights and carriers was fruitless. I guess hundreds of pissed off New Yorkers hanging around eating free snacks and drinking complimentary bottled water was too much and the gate security people brought up uniformed police to keep an eye on things. Unsurprisingly, nothing was going on except a lot of exasperated people slouching in vinyl chairs, leaning on walls and camping on floors chatting about what brought them to California and the police left after ten minutes. Finally, after sitting around the airport for six hours, our carrier got a fresh crew and we took off.

Last summer there was a used book sale in Poughkeepsie and among the other sub-$1 treasures was a copy of the Digitalk Smalltalk/V tutorial and programming handbook. The paperback shipped with the first widely available commercial Smalltalk for IBM PC and Macintosh in 1986. Smalltalk was the first object-oriented language I used so I popped the buck and thought I’d get around to looking through it to refresh my memory. It ended up on my bookshelf, unread.

Smalltalk, for the unintiatated, is the first pure object-oriented language and the first graphical integrated development environment (IDE). It was developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the late 1970’s. PARC later licensed Smalltalk-80 through PARCplace/Digitalk and then, when Xerox cut it loose, became the commercial entity Cincom. Fast forward to Squeak. Squeak is a free, liberally licensed (though maybe not strictly OpenSource or DFSG free), actively developed Smalltalk released by one of the original Smalltalk authors, Alan Kay. I’ve been aware of it for a while but have not had the inclination to play with it.

Last week I saw another reference to Squeak. It was Sunday and I was on-call, so sort of confined to the house, and I figured I would download the virtual machine (VM) and image to take a whack at Smalltalk again. You know what? It’s fun. It’s not what I do at work. It’s different and in lots of ways better than I remember. I’m having a good time. I bought a used copy of Chamond Liu’s Smalltalk, Objects and Design and, for nostalgia, one of Adele Goldberg’s Smalltalk 80: The Language (aka the purple book). I found EMACS key bindings for squeak. I’m digging into the class libraries and really liking it. Even if I don’t do a damn thing with it the exercise feels worthwhile and, I might add, it’s not work.

I borrowed from a colleague Jeff Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards. Working on user interface isn’t something I relish and standards compliance can be a dull topic but his writing is very entertaining- unusual for a technical book- and the examples are excellent and concise. I’m about two thirds through it and picking up a whole collection of good ideas and techniques.

Partial cutover from one blog to another. Redirected the main site link, the index and rss feed. I’ll get around to redirecting the individual entries sooner or later.