I started reading Peter Gabriel's "Practice of Software" last night after watching "Mononoke no Hime" on DVD. The book was interesting; I was expecting another Go4 Design Patterns book but it turned out to be a collection of articles for "The Journal of Object-Oriented Programming".

I found the book while searching for a Delphi 5 guidebook and impulsively added it to my stack. Why are guidebooks so bloody thick and heavy? Good thing these are just library books. <Insert ad for supporting your local library>

I am waiting for my copy of Delphi (standard) to arrive. My Pascal skills are rusty but I don't think I'm going to have much of a problem.

I poked around in the internals of Squeak 2.8 (a Smalltalk/80 variant) and finally managed to figure out how to open a window under the MVC (Model-View-Controller) system. I have not looked at the Morphic libraries yet but I am surprised at the lack of UIE (user interface elements) under MVC; is this what inspired the Macintosh and Windows user graphical interfaces? As far as I can tell, there are no radio buttons, drop down lists, combo boxes and other elements that I'm become accustomed to. Perhaps I should try hacking some of these UIE but the Squeak team is abandoning MVC and moving to Morphic. Should I even bother with MVC at all?

I simply love the Squeak code browsers. Are there any code browsers out that that are similar for Java, C and C++?

Does anyone believe in Literate Programming at all?

P.S. Mononoke no Hime is excellent!