Update (2011-06-30 09:21 EST): Our initial review of Cincom-provided “Windows Goodies 7.9 – 1″ suggests that a resolution is, indeed, valid and functional, so this bounty has been revoked. I hope to try this again some day, it would have been a fun experiment.

Update (2011-06-29 12:12 EST): James Savidge advises that a proposed fix is being integrated into the most current build of VisualWorks this week and will be available to customers shortly. As a result, this bounty is currently on hold pending our review of the update.

Original Post,

A little while back I’d reported an issue with RequestingPrinter (part of Windows Goodies) to VWNC mailing list,

“all of the below code was tested in clean visual.im in 7.8 and 7.7.1;
just paste into the workspace and work away”
Parcel loadParcelByName: 'Windows Goodies'
"if you execute the below, select a printer and proceed,
7.8 will experience primitive failure in 1201, but successfully
return a print job in 7.7.1"
"the below will also fail with exact same error when running 7.7.1
image on a 7.8 VM, so it appears to be a VM issue in 7.8"
RequestingPrinter startPrintJobNamed: 'test'

I’d later received a response from Alan Knight suggesting that,

The problem with that is that Windows Goodies explicitly assembles a host printer handle, which is an opaque VM structure, out of the Windows handles that it gets back. The structure of that opaque handle changed in 7.8 (primarily because of changes made to accomodate 64-bit Windows), so the assumptions that that goodie makes are longer valid. We’re in the process of investigating how to make that work.

Now, we have a few options to consider if we want to continue moving to VisualWorks 7.8 (and we do),

1. Assume that folks at Cincom are actively working on this issue and wait for a resolution
2. Dedicate an internal resource to fixing it and push other projects back
3. Assign a bounty to this and let someone from the community hack at it

I’m not a big fan of the first two, so we’d like to give the third option a try.

DeepCove Labs will pay an equivalent of CAD $400 (four hundred Canadian dollars) to whomever delivers an updated version of Windows Goodies with RequestingPrinter that works in VisualWorks 7.8 and, of course, we’ll contribute that version back to VisualWorks for others to make use of.

Frankly, I’d never posted a bounty like this before, thus, exact logistics aren’t clear to me, so if you have any questions and/or comments, please don’t hesitate to comment and I’ll do my best to address them.

The following snippet uses a weekly extract of Mozilla’s CA bundle (link) to populate the registry instead, which should be sufficient for most folks simply wanting to make HTTPS requests without fiddling with registries or #proceed’ing SSLBadCertificate exceptions.

| pem bundle |
pem := (HttpClient get: 'http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem') contents.
bundle := CertificateFileReader new readFrom: pem readStream.
X509Registry trustedCertificates addAll: bundle.

cache := Dictionary new.
rs := ('fwrules.20101110.raw.txt' asFilename withEncoding: #utf8)
		readStream lineEndTransparent.
ws := ('fwrules.20101110.resolved.txt' asFilename withEncoding: #utf8)
		writeStream lineEndTransparent.
['(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.'
  , '(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.'
    , '(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.'
      , '(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)' asRegex
        copyStream: rs
        to: ws
        translatingMatchesUsing:
                [:str |
                cache
                        at: str
        		ifAbsentPut:
                                [| ip |
                                ip := IPSocketAddress stringToBytes: str.
                                IPSocketAddress hostNameByAddress: ip]]]
        ensure:
                [rs close.
                ws close].

$hmacsha = New-Object System.Security.Cryptography.HMACSHA1
$hmacsha.key = [Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes("secret")
$signature = $hmacsha.ComputeHash([Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes("string"))
[string]::join("", ($signature | % {([int]$_).toString('x2')}))


If you look closely at the snippet itself, you’ll notice it assumes your strings are ASCII-encoded, so you may need to adjust it slightly in some cases.

By the way, the answer is ee8ac90d2d72885a4247f86addea4c3c29a4cba4.

Update (August 4th, 2010): The position has been filled and we’ll be sure to let you know when we’re ready to consider more folks to join us!

We are pleased to announce that DeepCove Labs are looking for another full-time developer to join our agile team of long time Smalltalk fans. Our primary focus is evolving and maintaining mature industry leading international payment processing platform that we have built from the ground up over the past 10 years as well as developing new and exciting products for financial services industry.

Ideal candidate is someone who has experience with Smalltalk, Seaside and SQL. They must be enthusiastic, motivated and as excited about using cutting edge technology to solve business problems as we are. Good task management and time management skills are a big plus as we work as equal peers and share roles every day of the week. We are not XP fanatics, but some things are second nature to us,

• keeping things simple
• plenty of unit tests
• no code ownership
• frequent integration
• lots of refactoring
• frequent releases
• no overtime
• our customer shares the same address

Our primary requirements are as follows,

• at least five years general software development experience
• several years experience developing with dynamic languages (Smalltalk, Ruby, Python, Lisp)
• one year recent Smalltalk experience
• experience developing applications of at least moderate complexity
• demonstrated experience working directly with users

Experience with any of the following would be a major plus,

• web application development (REST, Seaside and JavaScript)
• agile test driven development
• SQL (or, more specifically, Microsoft SQL Server)
• financial services
• deployment of large scale applications

Our primary office is located in the heart of Vancouver (Canada), steps away from the Pacific Ocean, beautiful parks, shopping and entertainment district and all major transit connections. We also have an office in Shannon (Ireland) if you prefer to reside in Europe. All employees receive excellent health/dental benefits package and few other perks.

We like to think we are an open, flexible and friendly place to work, so please drop us an email with your resume if you are interested.

The small team size comes with a bunch of advantages: They’re self-contained, can work swiftly and quietly, don’t have the presence of conventional military troops, and are able to operate without a big infrastructure.

Big can be powerful. But even the Army realizes small can be a great way to get things done too.

Yup, sounds about right.

I don’t use it myself a whole lot (@bpopov) and all I was trying to do is see whether or not Fusepoint’s Vancouver data center was affected by the most recent power outage… Sigh.

Your private key is intended to remain on the server. While we try to make this process as secure as possible (such as by using SSL to encrypt the key when it is sent to the server), for complete security we recommend that you manually convert the certificate on your server using the OpenSSL commands below.

If you see the above, you can just scroll down and copy-paste provided examples to run on your own machine, very useful.