Who says that the text terminal is dead? Is this the text terminal brought into the 21st century, or Lisp dragged back to the 20th?

I love this article. Lawrence is 60 and can perhaps afford to be sanguine, but I am glad he is warning the rest of us.

Some quotable quotes here: "while we laugh at the guy who expected that his computer could be hooked up to his boom box to use the cd, he's actually just a bit ahead of us. Yes, ahead, not behind. In the future, he probably could get his computer to talk the boom box into transferring data from its cd." "When I was a teenager, I had a friend who made extra money testing and changing vacuum tubes in TV's and radios. Try earning money that way today- there is actually a very small market for that kind of thing, and there are still people who sell tubes and the like, but that market is pretty small. In the dumbed down computers of the future, there may still be a few antique machines kicking around here and there, but that isn't going to support very many of us." This is largely true and happening all the time. A programmer can use Python or Smalltalk without needing to know C (or Fortran or assembler.) A child can program in Morphic tiles (Etoys and Scratch)! We don't need to know the difference between a serial cable and a printer cable, or how to install a driver' it is all USB (or Bluetooth!) There are some gurus that program USB, but perhaps only a few hundred of them, and the rest of us just use it.

Etoys has become a great branch of Squeak (it branched from 3.8, but in the course of its development for OLPC, it has gained some nice fonts and a nice toolbar, among other things.) It behaves in a slightly more mainstream way, in that Etoys users no longer save the Etoys images, just save the project file (which is referred to in help as "Keep a current project"). The Squeak image itself restarts pristine and untouched each time it is restarted. \n\nSqueakers and developers who want to save their whole image (window positions, preferences, the lot, in classic Smalltalk style) will want the save command in the World menu. Bert Freudenberg explains where the World menu is hidden.

An old-fashioned language war, 2009 style. Visual Basic even gets a mention as "Lisp-like" (for its debugging.)

Is this 'coherence' or subtextual programming a close cousin of Kenny Tilton's Cells?

Inspiring radical vision for open source to win in the long term.

Making money - billions of dollars of it - with open specification hardware and open source software

The "Naggum Markup Language" - a tidy way of expressing XML element trees with attributes.

So what is the best way to set up NoScript to avoid XSS attacks from Facebook users?

"It is still a good idea to run Firefox and NoScript to help protect yourself from all kinds of Javascript attacks." Not more of this?!

Interesting clippings from the slides: "What can we do with it? * Write applications. Melodie uses lots of Smalltalk, first pure-Smalltalk app committed to svn in January. * Write scripts. Corner activation and gesture app uses Smalltalk for scripting. * Modify existing apps... " "We can inspect classes in a code browser, see method names, and write replacements in any running application. In a perfect Free Software system, any user can make any changes. "

My comment above might imply that Smalltalk is not modern. The truth is far from it, as Smalltalk is still pushing the boundaries of technology and user interfaces, from Croquet and Qwaq, to Alice, Sophie, Scratch and Etoys.

(I fixed Friday's broken link to the PDF.) From what I read so far, this seems to be another attempt at a fully introspecitve integrated and customisable personal computer with a graphical desktop. In other words, it is Dynabook Smalltalk and Lisp workstations all over again, but quite likely with some interesting modern twists.

The designer of Ruby renamed his language "MatzLisp"

This is a short tutorial approach to an old but little-noticed saw.

Blog from a recent convert to Clojure

Some old, some from the 2000s, some still happening too often.

Certain kinds of deployment are much more efficiently achieved with virtual servers. This article is a simple and almost hands-on introduction to the way a Sun Cloud deployment can be scripted or have another automated front end for deployment.

I don't think this will get you past the iPhone app store, but it should make it easier for non-Cocoa coders who want access to the accelerometer, geolocation and other on board functions that aren't available to pure web apps.

For now, Linux builds of the chromium open source browser won't work on Intel and AMD processors from the early/mid 2000s (including my desktop PC :( )