A story. A long story. Not responsible for reader boredom. Lately, I've been reading the Portland Pattern Repository, aka the Wiki Wiki Web (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki). A lot of Smalltalk programmers hang out there. I was interested in Smalltalk years ago, but never managed to do much with it. There's an open source Smalltalk implementation called Squeak (http://www.squeak.org/). Tonight I downloaded it and looked at the demos. The demos are fairly amazing. One of the demos is a MIDI sequencer and synth (yes, all written in Smalltalk). I played the sample song, the William Tell Overture, on my laptop (running Linux, of course) through the tinny laptop speakers. I thought, "I want to hear this through real speakers". My desktop machine has Serious Audio Output (not computer speakers, it's a 100 W/channel amp, studio monitor speakers, and a subwoofer). So I scp the squeak RPMs over to the desktop machine. Over wireless. Log in to the desktop machine. Over wireless. Install the RPMs. Then I'm thinking, "Why not try running Smalltalk on the desktop machine to a remote X display on my laptop? Over wireless?" I try it. It works, slowly. (Thanks to Franklin Hays for making me think of it.) So I go into my office and switch on the Serious Audio Output gear. Then I come back out and sit down next to Wife and Father-in-Law. "Wanna see something neat?" They're geeks, so they look. I open up the piano roll window. I press Play. The piano roll animates, and loud and impressive music comes out of the next room*. They're surprised. It takes nearly the whole overture to explain what it is and how it all works. Wife reaffirms that I will always be a geek. Wireless is cool. Smalltalk is cool. Serious Audio Output is cool. Linux is coolest. Thank you and good night. * Okay, it wasn't *that* impressive -- Squeak implements an FM synth, so it still had that "computer audio" sound. But it was loud. (-: -- K<bob> [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.jogger-egg.com/
