I never would have thought that I’ll have to program in Smalltalk one day. I know Java and PHP quite well and compared to them Smalltalk — or specifically Squeak in my case — is awesome and very weird at the same time.

Okay, I just have to write a little wrapper layer, still I have to deal with sockets programming, implementing a Singleton, and a bit exception handling. Pretty basic if you’re an experienced Smalltalk programmer, but quite a challenge if you’re not.

I’ve learned some interesting things about the language and its development environment and I thought I share it with you. This isn’t a complete Smalltalk roundup, just some notes. Feel free to add stuff in the comments and check out www.squeak.org.

Squeak and Smalltalk is definitely worth a look, it’s actually an easy but powerful first-contact programming language, so don’t be frightened by my technical gibberish below.

This post isn’t about super-secret ssh sorcery, but a collection of frequently used and easily forgotten ssh tricks. Mostly a reminder for myself.

Sometimes you need access to filesystems that are not natively supported by your operating system. For example when you need to access an weirdly formatted external drive.

To integrate support for a new filesystem, you normally need special binary drivers that are loaded into your kernel. This usually involves a reboot and some security issues, as the filesystem driver runs with the same privileges as the kernel itself.

But wait. FUSE is a convenient alternative to kernel-based filesystem drivers. FUSE stands for “Filesystem in Userspace” and makes installing, using, and developing filesystems really easy.

Woopra is a website analysis service that allows webmasters to monitor various statistics, and track and interact with individual users in real-time. This article covers how the Woopra client can be installed on some unsupported plattforms.

While installing the server side installation is easy as pie and done by inserting some lines of HTML in the site template, installing the Woopra client can be tricky. At least on Linux or OS X boxes.

Every current television show is available on BitTorrent and most of the .torrent's are syndicated via RSS-feeds. TVShows was a great application that hid all the RSS stuff and allowed easy show subscription with some mouse clicks.

Regrettably it doesn't function any longer, as it is blocked by its feeder websitebut I don't know exactly why. For some people -- like me -- it stopped working, for others it's still working fine. .

I wrote an easy tutorial that describes how to restore that functionality with some freely available tools. This article is written for users of OS X Leopard, but it should apply to Linux as well. Read it over at TorrentFreak.com.

PS: In the past this tutorial was hosted here and as a slightly modified version over at TorrentFreak. I think it's a good idea to remove the tutorial from here and just point to torrentfreak.com, so that additional comments, questions and tips pool up in a single place.