I found that someone has a working use for java.net.SocketImplFactory, that is adding SOCKS support to Java sockets. The code is here.

I thought I'd mention this just for the sake of completeness

I just committed unix-domain sockets (AF_UNIX) for GNU Smalltalk.

GNU Smalltalk's socket library is more or less based on the java.net library, but java.net does not have AF_UNIX sockets! Okay, they are not portable to Windows, but you'd expect someone to have written an extension library for that. But no, there is none. Why?

It turns out that there are two problems.

Peter Norvig's blog showed an example of a toy spell checker in Python, which Michael Davies converted to Smalltalk. This problem is interesting and Michael's solution is actually quite idiomatic.

I'll show a couple more tricks that can help decrease the number of lines.

Travis Griggs has been having fun with Cairo and, thanks to the contribution of Tony Garnock-Jones, so am I...

The Cairo and libsdl bindings (Cairo is drawing on a libsdl surface) is not yet in the FSF repository. I'm planning to put up a new git repository with my experiments as soon as possible!

The next release of GNU Smalltalk will include support for Seaside. This blog post is a short tutorial, which will show how to make your first Seaside component.

To follow this tutorial you need GNU Smalltalk 3.0a (which will be available from ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/smalltalk/smalltalk-3.0a.tar.gz later today) or a later version.

One of the new features in 3.0a and later is the ability to run an image in the background and control it from the shell. For example, you can try these commands:

$ gst-remote --daemon
$ gst-remote --eval '100 factorial'
$ gst-remote --kill