<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Hi Gerald, I wish you and everyone in our community a great 2024! (inline) On 12/30/2023 12:03 PM, Gerald Klix via Cuis-dev wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:702919b6-c8e2-3fd8-bfbb-4a5c358fb9b4@klix.ch" type="cite"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> <div class="moz-cite-prefix">Hi Juan, sorry for the long delay, I caught a rather nasty cold. First and most important: Thank your for your work! </div> </blockquote> You're most welcome! <blockquote cite="mid:702919b6-c8e2-3fd8-bfbb-4a5c358fb9b4@klix.ch" type="cite"> <div class="moz-cite-prefix"> Second and less important: Haver's image saving problems are gone with Cuis Version 6.2 and 6.3. There are some minor issues like <ul> <li>a different order of menu items in the preference menu (trivial to fix)</li> <li>font loading, the <tt>TrueTypeFonts</tt> directory is not found in my setup (easy to fix) </li> </ul> For the remainder, please see my inline comments. Best Regards, Gerald </div> </blockquote> Yeah. As usual, some minor bumps may happen. Of course, keep reporting serious trouble or annoyances! <blockquote cite="mid:702919b6-c8e2-3fd8-bfbb-4a5c358fb9b4@klix.ch" type="cite"> <div class="moz-cite-prefix"> ... </div> IC, to describe the situation in German: „Einen Tod muß man sterben.“, meaning you have to choose one evil. I can only think of one – rather nifty – improvement: Add two preference menu options like: 'Save preferences globally' This one selects the currently implemented behavior. 'Save preferences only in image' This one implements the old behavior. Both will be persisted in <tt>UsersPrefs.txt</tt>. The later serves as a flag, that means: Ignore every other setting in <tt>UserPrefs.txt</tt> and stick to the settings that are already persistent in the image. </blockquote> I did something very much like that. Thanks for the suggestion! Check the updated Preferences menu. <blockquote cite="mid:702919b6-c8e2-3fd8-bfbb-4a5c358fb9b4@klix.ch" type="cite">.... <blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:65858148.9040904@cuis.st"> It also means to try to give a platform agnostic experience. For instance, right now, I'm doing a kind of introductory curse to CS for my daughters and a few friends (teenagers and young adults). I prepared a bunch of thumbdrives with this very Cuis setup. They bring a mix of Windows, Intel and ARM Mac, and Linux laptops. This works on all of them without needing to waste their attention on irrelevant technicalities. I like that, and I think it reflects the kind of experience most novices will have. </blockquote> Nice, I tried such a thing for two of my daughters individually and two of my sons. I failed miserably. I hope you are better at teaching, than I am! </blockquote> I'm don't think I'm much at a teacher, but I'm trying! I'm calling this "Computadoras y Números" (Computers and Numbers). I'm trying to help them develop some algorithm thinking, and understand how computers deal with numbers and how we can get them to compute useful stuff. Even though we are using Cuis, I didn't even bother to explain Smalltalk syntax, just jumping into "the stuff". For the first session, I wanted them to compute the square root of an integer number. We talked for some minutes about what does that mean, and how that could be computed. Then I let them try it, and help them as they move along. The next exercise was to use the trick that adding consecutive odd numbers yield perfect squares, and compare both methods. It went OK, but it was a bit too hard for them. For the second session I wanted to play with real numbers, so we tried two ways of computing Pi. The first one was to "draw" a circle on a grid, and take the number of points in the grid that lie inside the circle (using the x^2+y^2 <= r formula), divide that by the total number of points. And do that for increasingly larger grids, to improve the approximation. This one is interesting because it only uses integers. But it is slow. Then we tried another method, that is the perimeter of an inscribed polygon of increasing number of sides. This later one can be done without trigonometry, but it requires sqrt() to normalize the vertexes, hence Float. These are way more complicated things that what we did before, so I went slower, and explained my solution on my computer as I guided them on writing their own. So I didn't push them too much and they didn't get frustrated. I guess the ability to write the solution completely on their own requires a bit more time and practice, and my objective is to engage them, not scare them. They still could really understand what we were doing, and appreciate the kind of thinking involved. It was a lot of what Alan calls "hard fun". I'm looking forward for our next session! <blockquote cite="mid:702919b6-c8e2-3fd8-bfbb-4a5c358fb9b4@klix.ch" type="cite">... Suppose you want to write a maintenance application for images – something I am contemplating for years – a straight forward solution is to use directories in the filesystem to structure a given set of tuples of image and change files. The current solution forces the maintenance application to copy (or symlink) <tt>UnicodeData.txt</tt> and the file with the compressed sources. How about an 'image (related) data directory', that contains all that stuff? There should be command line options similar to those implemented for the <tt>userBaseDirectory</tt>. The TrueTypeFonts directory seems to be already relative to the <tt>userBaseDirectory</tt>, which is, IHMO, is the best solution. </blockquote> We could use a preference for the directory containing sources and UnicodeData.txt. Or we could store them in the #vmPath. Or just keep them in the same directory as the image. I really don't see much of a problem. Cheers, <pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">-- Juan Vuletich cuis.st github.com/jvuletich researchgate.net/profile/Juan-Vuletich independent.academia.edu/JuanVuletich patents.justia.com/inventor/juan-manuel-vuletich linkedin.com/in/juan-vuletich-75611b3 twitter.com/JuanVuletich</pre> </body> </html>