We recently discovered that we would very sporadically get a segmentation fault when running the whole test suite of the VAST Platform (VA Smalltalk) on Linux. During our initial investigation, we realized this was not something new, but that the problem had existed for many years. It happens only on Linux (not Windows), and with … More Segfaults: GDB Scripts to the Rescue
Delegating tasks from high-level languages like the VAST Platform (VA Smalltalk) to languages like C, C++, Rust via some kind of FFI (Foreign Function Interface) is becoming more and more common. Ideally, you would like to have everything implemented in your preferred high-level language, but I believe in using the appropriate tool for each problem. … More “DLL Hell”: Tips & Tricks to Avoid it in VAST
Over the past few months, I’ve been troubleshooting hard problems that have appeared when running the VAST Platform (VA Smalltalk) on Windows. Some of the problems were indeed bugs (like sockets leaking under a particular scenario) and some were just Windows or customer issues. Regardless of where the problem was, I learned much about certain … More Troubleshooting Applications Running on Windows
A while ago, I did some experiments with Amazon AWS and EC2 instances. Back then, they weren’t very different from a VPS except that you were charged based on the usage and the servers were easier to grow or shrink. But… much has changed since then and AWS now offers many services and features. One … More Deploying VASmalltalk on Amazon AWS ARM servers
Some time ago I blogged about a fantastic project Gerardo Richarte and I were doing with an 18-bell tower located in Argentina. Back then, I showed some details of the architecture, code, and how I mocked-up “El Carrillon” with a homemade LED piano so I could test it at home. Later on, I wrote another … More “El Carrillon” project featured in the RaspberryPi magazine MagPi
Some time ago I blogged about a fantastic project Gerardo Richarte and I were doing with an 18-bell tower located in Argentina. Back then, I showed some details of the architecture, code, and how I mocked-up “El Carrillon” with a homemade LED piano so I could test it at home. In this post, you will … More El Carrillon: playing MIDI songs on an 18-bell tower with a Raspberry Pi and Smalltalk
If you are a programmer, I am sure you have found yourself many many times “debugging” a system by writing strings to the console / stdout / file. Those messages were usually something like “passed here!”, “false branch”, “now about to enter loop” and maybe even some “fuc..” or “WTF” too. If you were “lucky” … More It’s 2019: stop reading text and start debugging!
On all my previous posts (like this one) you can see VASmalltalk running on any Raspberry Pi, on Rock64 and even on Nvidia Jetson TX2: In addition, you can also see previous posts where I show how to use TensorFlow from Smalltalk to recognize objects in images. Last week, at ESUG 2019, I demoed a … More Getting Started with Nvidia Jetson Nano, TensorFlow and Smalltalk
In a previous post we saw basic object recognition in images using Google’s TensorFlow library from Smalltalk. This post will walk you step by step through the process of using a pre-trained model to detect objects in an image. It may also catch your attention that we are doing this from VASmalltalk rather than Python. … More Object Detection with TensorFlow and Smalltalk
In this post, I will be showing a simple example of object recognition in images using the TensorFlow library from Smalltalk. Doing Machine Learning without Python? With Smalltalk? Seriously? Whenever you start entering the world of AI and Machine Learning you will notice immediately that Python has been widely accepted as the “default” programming language … More Recognizing objects in images with TensorFlow and Smalltalk
Mariano Martinez Peck 