mkdir with todays date

When I code, I constantly do backups of my work so I can revert when I screw up. Yes, I know you can use git, etc to do this, but for me its easier just to start my coding day by creating a directory with the format YYYYMMDD and copying my current stage there. I then update that periodically as I hit a stable stage, and when I make a mistake, I rollback by copying my last ‘commit’ from the backup directory.

The directory format YYYYMMDD is nice because it transitions from from broad to fine granularity, which is very useful for tab-completion.

Up until about 20 minutes ago, I would always manually type the date when creating the directory. For example, today, I would type mkdir 20120525.
Now, I let my shell do the work for me. The new command is mkdir $(date +%Y%m%d). I am not limited to mkdir, however. ctrl-p up modify the mkdir to cp and you get cd $(date +%Y%m%d) ….

Trello

I just discovered the Pharo team is using Trello.

I thought I would give it a try for my smalltalk projects.

https://trello.com/board/smalltalk/4fa4337e6aaab1d21e062aac

Still Here.

Since I have to compile Cog to Slackware 64, I am backing up even further to re-learn my c-skills. The last time I did C was on on Unix Sparc machines in college. Now, I am on AMD64 with GNU tools.

Honestly, although I have to back away from Smalltalk a bit, I am enjoying this.

To be more honest, I will be learning Assembler as well as I am interested in stuff like http://seaside.citilab.eu/scratch/arduino where Smalltalk interfaces with micro-controllers.

My thinking is that learning how to get the Smalltalk environment to interact with the GNU stack in more fundamental ways should be a lot of fun.

Ubunto squeak vs Slackware

My squeak images work fine with the install of squeak on Ubuntu, but not on Slackware–even after I installed the 32 bit compat libs. Since my Slackware install was not working, I wiped my computer, re-partitioned my drives and installed slackware on one partition and ubuntu on the other.

My thinking now, is to figure out how to compile the things I need without cmake (since cmake does not support the 64-bit port) on the Slackware partition and do my smalltalk coding on the Ubuntu partition.

Busy updating some other skills…

I am still here, but I am getting my flying chops back so I can CFI for a living and code things I want to.

Grokking Distro’s continued

I messed around with Coglinux’s shell script this morning to no avail.

One behavior that is constant is that un-compiled Squeak4.x and Cog all exit with a segmentation fault.

PhysicalEToys works and it runs an older VM.

I think I am going to step back even further and try to install VMMaker and try from step 1. After that, I will return to the compilation failure problems in cog.

Grokking and Building Smalltalk ‘Distros’

Since my compile of Cog is not working and is going to take some more work and understanding, I decided to strip things down to the bare minimum and work upwards.

One of the things that has been on my list of ‘todos’ for a while is understanding the layout of the various Smalltalk distrobutions–Pharo, Croquet, Squeak etc.

This morning, I am documenting everything I see and don’t understand in the directory structure of these applications. I just finished documenting the Pharo directory tree and am currently documenting the Squeak4.2-All-in-one.app structure and then I will probably do the Croquet and OpenCobalt trees just for completeness (gotta throw PhysicalEToys in there too, I guess (:)

A first lesson is that it seems a distribution is a platform for distributing on Mac, Dos and Linux concurrently–with a bulk of the files being geared towards the Mac.

For example, .plist files are Mac files as are .dylib files. Whether or not they are used by the other systems is something I will be investigating.

Furthermore, it seems that .dylib files co-respond to .bundles.

Anyway, that is the project, I will write when I know more.