Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

People are ignoring Gartner:

"Gartner Group recommend that companies delay deployment of critical Linux applications, determine "whether Unix or Windows will provide functions equivalent to those of Linux deployments", and take a "go-slow" approach to Linux in high-value or mission-critical production systems."

(Quoted on Slashdot and in The Register.)

As it turns out, as far as their internet presence goes, big companies are doing the exact opposite; over 100 enterprise sites run by probably the very same Fortune 1000 and global near equivalent companies that recieved the SCO letter have switched to Linux since May, including Schwab.com.

About on a par with the rest of Gartner's advice

Charles Miller has issues with clothes shopping. My wife would say that's me - I've gone from my Mom buying my clothes to my wife buying them in one easy step ;)

Ted Leung posted about VM's the other day, and Patrick Logan raised some interesting questions. This all piqued my interest, so I asked:

One question I'd have about the stuff Patrick points to - does it allow for updating installed software on the fly? It doesn't sound like it does, and to me, at least, that's a full stop. On my site, I'm doing live server updates all the time - it's just the way I work.

Ted responded today with some details on a Scheme project, and some information on what people can do with mod lisp. Looks like we need a mod-smalltalk module.

Spotted in ComputerWorld:

"Patterns, which originated in the Java World, are bleeding into the .NET world." says Daniel Meznick of New Technology Inc.

Quick, someone buy him the GOF book!

I'm waiting to pick my sister up at a Florida Airport (Lauderdale) - and there's open Wireless access here. Very cool. I used the access to upload a new dev parcel for BottomFeeder - deleting an item now just flags it as deleted and causes it to not show - it can then be restored until such time as it naturally ages off the system (based on your purge settings). Next up - allowing items to be set persistent.

CNet spots the soap opera that is the RSS vs. Atom fight. Here's something I found interesting:

"Dave Winer has on a number of occasions pointed out namespaces and said that they break interoperability," said Ruby, the RSS alternative advocate, who is a senior technical staff member at IBM in Raleigh, N.C., and a director of the Apache Software Foundation. "His RSS spec points to a list of namespaces, and it's extremely selective. It includes certain ones and not others. It's extremely confusing. I don't know anyone who knows what is and is not acceptable."

Wow - no one knows what's acceptable, and yet there are scads and scads of RSS feeds, and more readers than you can shake a stick at. For something that is so terribly confusing, it seems that somehow, people interested in the technology have managed to get past the personality problems of a few people who can't seem to get along. This has very little to do with technology, and an awful lot to do with a bunch of overwrought individuals who can't seem to "just get along".

Don't think so - just have a look at this:

The alternative - still in search of a name after being known variously as "Atom," "Echo" and "Pie"--would closely follow RSS technically but have different specifications. Ruby and other proponents say it would most likely wind up under the auspices of a standards organization, probably the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

The degree to which the proposed alternative mirrors the fundamental structure of RSS is an indication of how much the debate has become a referendum on Winer's ownership of the format, rather than on the technology itself. While Winer relinquished his CEO duties at UserLand last summer, he retains his seat on its board of directors and remains the principal shareholder.

The new format looks an awful lot like the old format, but with all the tag names changed for fun. Heck, adding support for this nascent format in BottomFeeder didn't require any new domain objects - every single "Atom" artifact mapped straight over to an existing RSS artifact. To make matters more interesting, "Atom" adds a "capability" that is just plain stupid - mime encoded binary data sitting in the feed. Just what I want - downloading the same large dataset over and over again until it ages off.

The problem with Atom is that it's trying to do too much - the group backing it is getting into classic over-engineering mode, and trying to solve too many problems at once. What we need is a new, cleaner API for managing blogs (posting, editing, etc.). What we are going to end up with is one more format that needs supporting. The simple question you have to ask yourself is, if you have an RSS feed now, what value add do you get by switching to Atom? Probably none. The most likely result will be a need to keep pumping RSS, and support for the new format. Yay

Syndic8 pegs the sweet spot for RSS - replacing email newsletters with RSS feeds. The prevaleence of spam causes two problems for traditional email digests:

• Many spam filters block newsletters, because they "look like spam" to the filtering software - so that subscribers lose thee content they wanted in the first place
• Even when newsletters get through, the torrent of spam coming downstream makes it easier for the letter to be ignored or deleted

Enter an RSS feed and an aggregator - people who want the content subscribe and get updates as they happen, sans spam. Watch the switchover start to happen

Via Clarence Westberg - get job postings delivered to your news aggregator

I fixed a bunch of small but annoying issues with BottomFeeder:

• Added a 'subject' input field to the dialog that pops for 'email it!' on non-windows platforms
• In the bug mail dialog, added an option to cc yourself
• Fixed an error message issue in the Auto-Discovery dialog
• Mail settings entered into the mail dialogs will persist into settings now. I had not updated this when I changed the settings tool over

That should address some of the things I've been gettting bug reports on

The Wiki being used to track changes to the Atom spec is using RSS to track changes. Here's the feed.

Maybe the Mac is an easier platform. All I know is, if you come at OS X expecting Unix you get a lot of near hits and a lot of misses. I was getting BottomFeeder set up for my Dad on his OS X machine - it took me awhile to figure out the way application directories are normally structured. Then I ran into a font problem. Finally, it took me awhile to figure out how to get an external browser launched. I'm sure this would all be simple for someone that actually knew the Mac, but that wasn't me. Today's lesson - every platform is difficult if you haven't worked on it.

From Boing Boing (by way of Matt Croyden comes news that the FCC will offer public WiFi access in and around their building. That's nifty, but I think I'd rather hang out at Starbucks and get a Mocha with my BottomFeeder surfing...

Starting with the introduction of the PDP into the base product, a new tool has been available to VisualWorks developers - the Process Monitor. There was a goodie version available in previous releases of VW, but it's now available as a menu pick straight from the launcher.

When you first fire it up (last item on the Debug menu of the launcher), you'll see a list of user processes. Right off, you'll notice that any open workspaces are running in their own process - this is an aspect of the MPUI (multi-process UI) that was introduced in VW 7.1. The bottom line on that is that there is no longer a singular (distinguished) UI process - so a process spawned from a workspace during experimental development won't hose down the whole UI.

Pull down the View menu in the process monitor - there are three options:

• Show all
• Show User (meaning, all ST processes launched via your actions)
• Show System (housekeeping stuff)

Switch to the system view - you'll see the idle loop process, the Low Space process, and a bunch of other things. You'll note that these processes are mostly at very high priorities - and that most of them are blocked most of the time. This explains how your system can become unresponsive if you get into a thrashing GC loop - the Low Space process is running at a priority of 91! If you get stuck in that, it's very hard to break out. If you see that happening, you might want to look at my memory management posts [here and here and here).

Now go back to the user view, and pull down the Process menu. Everything will be grayed out - because you haven't selected anything. So go ahead - select a workspace process and pull the menu again. You'll now see that only the proceed menu pick is disabled - because the process you have selected is, in fact, running. Go ahead an select Debug - bam, you get a debugger on that process. Go look at the process monitor - you'll see that the state is now suspended. Go ahead and hit the run button in the debugger, and notice that the state changes back.

This is very useful stuff. Say you have a background process in an application you are testing - and you suspect that the process is having a problem. Previously, it was fairly difficult to get into that process and figure out what was happening - now it's simple. Just select the process in the monitor, and either debug it or terminate it (depending on whatt your needs are). This can still be hard if your process becomes CPU bound and is running at a high priority, but it's a highly useful feature - I've made extensive use of it in BottomFeeder development.

Another nice thing you can do is use the dump option. That will dump the current execution stack for the selected process to a file. With a little work on your part, you could easily include this capability in an end user application as a diagnostic tool. The View option does almost the same thing, but dumps to a window instead of to a file.

The last thing to look at is the sample time - by default, every 2 seconds the monitor looks at the current state of running processes. You can increase or decrease the frequency.

All in all, the process monitor is a very useful tool - if you haven't been using it, make sure that you take a look

IT World has a fascinating article on the cost of saving disk space versus making application installation/maintenance easier. Their base point - with disk space so easily and cheaply available, we are worrying about the wrong things with shared libraries, etc.:

It seems to me that IT professionals spend an inordinate amount of time debugging problems that can be traced back to an anachronism in the way applications are built. The anachronism is the notion that disk space is more expensive than the person-hour cost of the poor customer installing the application. That used to be the case but is not the case any more.

...

In a world where a gigabyte of disk space costs less than a cup of coffee, why do developers regularly spend hours of expensive time (drinking multiple cups of coffee) in order to sort out problems that only exist because of a misplaced desire to save a gigabyte of disk space?

This is interesting. I hadn't given it a lot of thought, but there's something to this. I'll have to ponder this before I come to a conclusion, but it certainly made me think...

Derek has a cunning plan for SCO. Heh

I spent a large part of the day adding features to BottomFeeder. First off, Rich Demers made the new delete option to the html pane. I merged that in with the bug mail work I had been doing earlier. Then I added an option to persist items. If you mark an item as persistent, it won't be truncated (assuming you have that option set) off when you save your feeds. This is only in the dev stream so far, so bear in mind that it's work in progress...

Apparently, fans are upset over the new Battlestar Galactica miniseries coming to Sci Fi channel. Here's a clue folks - the original series was pretty lame

The GPL hasn't really been tested in the US, and now there's a report stating that the GPL is unenforceable under German or EU law:

IDGNS: Your study has raised some eyebrows in the open source community. Why so?

Spindler: Regarding such legal principles as liability and warranty, the GPL clauses have absolutely no legal validity. Under the license, developers and distributors of open software are not liable for any problems with their products. The GPL avoids any wording that could imply liability. Such a license is simply unenforceable under German, or even European Union law for that matter.

IDGNS: Your study points to potential risks facing a number of groups involved in the open source value chain: developers, software companies and users. So, really, just about everyone who comes into contact with open source software in one way or other should be careful, right?

Spindler: Not everyone -- for instance, users who don't modify the software or distribute it. However, in the software developer community, liability is an unresolved issue. Consider developers working on a program from different countries. The legal question is: What sort of company is this? Is each participant liable or the group as a whole? Or consider a project in which one developer starts writing code and then hands over that code to another who continues writing and hands over to yet another. In this successive approach to code writing, is the author responsible only for the code he or she wrote or for all code in the final software product? The answer may differ in each jurisdiction.

It's interesting, and there's more to read. Well worth reading and considering.

BitWorking has a good example of how the proposed Atom syndication format can be extended. The question I have is, how is this different from how RSS is used now?. Sure, Dave Winer doesn't like namespaces for some bizarre reason. The fact is, no one cares, and people are using namespaced extensions in RSS today. I am so not seeing the point of all this....

If you have firewall/proxy issues getting to the public store repository, then have a look here for some solutions.

Inc. columnist blames PowerPoint for - well, just about everything. It all depends on how and why you want to use it. This guy just goes off the deep end....

I've been adding more 'markup' support to the blog, in order to make my posting life simpler. Now I've got the following:

• Any line that starts with an * will be part of a bullet list
• Any line that starts with a # will be part of a numbered list
• Any line that starts with || will be a table, with || separating columns.

This is similar to (although not as extensive as) the markup support used by WikiWorks, the VW Wiki implementation. In any event, it makes it easier for me to add things like lists and tables to my posts, without having to punch out the full set of html tags...

I have access to OS X this week, since I'm in Florida at my Parent's house. I finally managed to get the Mac to spin up the default browser - Alan Knight told me about the 'open' command. So now, on OS X, the default browser will be used whenever you request an external browser. With that out of the way, I'm off to this site to play some Puerto Rico

I stumbled across this article in comp.lang.smalltalk. Here's the fun part:

The extends keyword is evil; maybe not at the Charles Manson level, but bad enough that it should be shunned whenever possible. The Gang of Four Design Patterns book discusses at length replacing implementation inheritance (extends) with interface inheritance (implements).

Good designers write most of their code in terms of interfaces, not concrete base classes. This article describes why designers have such odd habits, and also introduces a few interface-based programming basics.

Interfaces versus classes I once attended a Java user group meeting where James Gosling (Java's inventor) was the featured speaker. During the memorable Q&A session, someone asked him: "If you could do Java over again, what would you change?" "I'd leave out classes," he replied. After the laughter died down, he explained that the real problem wasn't classes per se, but rather implementation inheritance (the extends relationship). Interface inheritance (the implements relationship) is preferable. You should avoid implementation inheritance whenever possible

Hmm. Yes, you should avoid deep inheritance hierarchies. But Inheritance is a tool, not a problem. Maybe the problem is that Gosling and Holub aren't bright enough to know how to use it appropriately? Or maybe the locking they see in this comes from the combination with static typing.... Hard to tell, but clues are few and far between in this article. As often happens, Dave Buck has the best response to this silly article:

The first few examples given in this article actually point to difficulties with static typing, not inheritance. Smalltalk is immune to these since it uses dynamic typing.

The "fragile base problem" (for the benefit of people who didn't read the article) is that subclasses require knowledge of how the superclasses are implemented. If the superclass changes, changes may be needed in the subclasses to compensate.

Subclassing does allow a tighter coupling between classes than normal which makes it more fragile. Good design style is to reduce subclassing by using delegation instead. Good design style is also to avoid deep class hierarchies. I wouldn't say that subclassing is evil, though. It's like saying that lots of people are killed in car crashes every year, so we should avoid cars. Often, the alternatives are worse than the problem.

Sam Gentile likes his new Mac. I've spent a few days working on one (tweaking BottomFeeder to properly spawn a browser) at my parent's house. One thing I'll say - don't come at OS X expecting it to be just like any other Unix environment. You do have Unix, but you also have the Mac environment. I'm not yet sold on it being particularly easier than Windows - at tthis point, I think whatever you are used to is easiest. However, I am intrigued. Maybe I'll consider one next time I'm in the market....

Go read Joel first, and then really think about it. Can you afford the loss of expertise that will come with the relocation?

The Yankees just got Jeff Nelson back in a waiver wire deal. Why Seattle let him go baffles me, and why the Red Sox let him go by baffles me - but I'm certainly pleased to see him back in pinstripes. The combination of Nelson and Rivera in the bullpen is a real killer. Now the Yanks are ready for the end of season run and the playoffs!

Don Park reminds us where blogging sits in the grand scheme of things. That probably makes every blogosphere flame fest a real "tempest in a teapot" kind of thing. In any event, it's a useful piece of grounding information:

Most people on this planet knows nothing about blogging. I doubt if more than 5% of Internet users know what blogging is. Stepping back even further, Internet users are only a small portions of the world population. If the world population was a pancake, Internet users are the top crust and bloggers are just a small tip of it.

Good article here on Javablogs today:

Do you know how to use a hammer? A screwdriver? A saw? Almost certainly you do. Does that mean you can build a house? Well maybe, but unless you have previous experience at building houses, I don't think I'd want to live in the one you built. Knowing how to use the tools is not the same skill as being able to build a house.

So why is it that so many people seem to think that knowing how to use a profiling tool means you know how to tune an application? For sure, having a profiler as opposed to not having one makes tuning much easier, just like having a hammer as opposed to not having one makes building a house much easier. But the tool increases your productivity, it doesn't enable the ability. You don't suddenly have the ability to build a house because you know how to use a hammer; you don't suddenly have the ability to tune an application because you know how to use a profiler.

That's a very good point. Another thing I see a lot of is assumptions - you get to a site where there's a performance problem, and the customers tell you (with complete assuredness) what's too slow. I find that 9 times out of 10, they haven't even run the profiler - they've just made a guess about the problem. However, the author of that article is correct - while profiling is useful, just using the profiler won't tell you everything. Sometimes you have to tune the memory configuration, and that only shows indirectly via profiling. There are plenty of other similar cases - and they vary by application/language/environment/platform.

IBM smacks SCO back:

In a 45-page document filed late Wednesday, IBM argues that because SCO distributed a version of Linux under the open-source General Public License (GPL), it can't claim that Linux software is proprietary. IBM also argues that SCO software violates four IBM patents and that the company interfered with IBM's business by saying it had terminated IBM's right to ship a Unix product, AIX.

IBM is seeking unspecified monetary damages and an injunction stopping SCO from shipping its software. The counterclaims came as part of Big Blue's answer to SCO's amended suit and were filed in the same federal district court in Utah.

That sound you heard was the other shoe dropping

This gets it about right. heh.

BottomFeeder now supports the 0.2 spec of the proposed Atom syndication format. I also changed the blog output - I now support RSS 2.0 for the main feed, RSS 2.0 for the comment feed, Atom 0.2 for the main feed, and Atom 0.2 for the comment feed. The Atom spec is still under development and still somewhat in flux, so the latter two links are likely to change as time goes by. I'm holding off implementing the Atom API until I'm sure the flux is reduced - it's not a lot of work, but I don't really feel like jumping around that much yet either.

This article talks about managing the deployment of Java apps with the JRE, but it seems timely to as Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk. Why? We are in the process of developing a simpler runtime deployment system for VisualWorks, and a lot of the issues in the aforementioned article - while written in the context of Java deployment - raise some good questions for any runtime deployment system. I'm going to have to keep a lot of the questions raised here in mind.

Here's an interesting article on light pollution. I've been noticing this ever since I moved from a NY State suburb - with virtually no street lights, and thus no light pollution - to the Baltimore-Washington corridor (bathed in light 24x7). Back when I lived in NY, I could see lots of stars, and identify constellations. I noticed how bad things were in my area 2 years ago when my daughter was supposed to go out and look at stars - no identifiable constellations, and few enough that I almost thought I could count them! The article raises some interesting environmental and health concerns - and has some practical suggestions as well. Well worth a read.

Matt Croyden gets his vacation rained on. I got the same stuff here in Melbourne Beach, but I did manage to get in 18 holes this morning before it started. I'm hoping for clearer weather tomorrow; we are supposed to head over to Universal for the day.

I spent the entire day at Universal Studios - Islands of Adventure - with my daughter, her cousins, and her grandparents. The kids had a blast, and ran like heck all day (then crashed as soon as we stopped). Now I'm in a hotel in Palm Beach, because I have an early flight tomorrow. I'll catch up on what I missed on the flights (and during the absurdly long layover in Charlotte) - now it's crash time for me as well....

YB Normal comments on the Atom syndication format. He's got lots of critiques and suggestions. His two main gripes are on the <link> element (especially the madatory nature eof it) and the lack of OCS style aggregation support. Something occurred to me while reading this critique - Atom more or less assumes a weblog, while RSS does not. Given that, I expect that Atom won't easily gain traction - it's narrowed its focus too much. Go read the critique - it's worth a few minutes if you care about the syndicated content world.

Via Sean McGrath comes this tidbit from Patrick Logan:

"A language designed to give programmers what they want may initially succeed but create pernicious problems as it catches on. However, a language designed to give programmers what they really need may never catch fire at all."

The Java/Smalltalk divide in two sentences....

Scoble talks about the utility of Tablet PC's. His points boil down to:

• You can draw a picture on a Tablet
• You can use it standing up
• You can use it to read E-Books in bed

I don't know. For the first, I'd rather use a whiteboard or paper. For the second, some users need this, but I'm not one of them. For the third, I prefer an honest to goodness paper book - it's easier to deal with in so many ways. I'm sure Tablet PC's will have success in the same places that small devices currently get a lot of use - emergency vehicles, utility people, nurses and doctors - they just aren't great devices for business users, IMHO. I'd much rather have a notebook. And as to having celebrities sign - again, ink and paper are way, way more durable for that.

Sax.Net points out that the IBM defense against SCO will make or break the GPL. This may be the legal test of the GPL license that many people have been waiting for - on all sides of the issue.

I spent a pretty relaxing week in Florida - my daughter got to visit with her cousins at their grandparent's house. We spent time at the beach and the pool, and the kids had a blast. We stayed too long at Universal yesterday - the return flight from Palm Beach was at 6 am. We didn't get to the airport hotel until 1:30 last night, so we just blew the flight off. That meant standby - but it went ok. We got to the airport at 10, and had no trouble getting on the 11:15 flight - we upgraded to first class even. Charlotte looked more crowded, and the next flight after the 2 pm was already delayed by almost two hours - with T-Storms in the forecast, that didn't bode well. Fortunately for us, there were flight delays in the system already, and a bunch of people trying to get on the flight weren't going to get to the sirport in time. I blew two more upgrade coupons to make our chances better - that got us on with no trouble at all - as I write this, there are still open seats in first class, and we half way to BWI.

So in the end, blowing off our flight just cost us 4 hours - which is sleep time we really, really needed. Now it's back to the grind - and I don't mean work, exactly - the drainage project we started last week is still only half done, so there's lots and lots of trench to dig, pipe to lay, and dirt to haul off. Probably a good 3-4 days worth, in fact...

McKinsey says that product development is in a rut:

The changes currently required in product development resemble the lean manufacturing techniques that have transformed mass-production lines. Besides optimizing the efficiency of each station on the factory floor, lean procedures create a flexible, efficient work flow that's intended to meet customer demand just in time. To minimize waste and inventory and to optimize the efficiency of the line, parts are fed into the process as they are needed.

By contrast, the current approach to developing new products resembles the traditional mass-production line: Companies follow a fixed sequence of steps, moving from market research to product concept, design specification, prototype testing and so on. Like a production line, this process can be improved significantly by ensuring a continual flow of work. To achieve the next step, change in performance, companies must improve the efficiency of the entire process, from generating ideas to launching products.

Interesting article - the whole article can probably be boiled down to the bullet points put forth by the Agile Alliance, IMHO. However, McKinsey has a lot more influence than the Agile Alliance does; they should run with this stuff.

Java handhelds are less secure than desktops, according to Shlomo Touboul:

Given the relatively limited hardware capabilities of these small devices, he says, "when they put Java into the handset, they took out most of the security in the JVM [Java virtual machine]." While that may be little more than a self-serving observation from the San Jose-based data security firm, it's worth considering as companies begin distributing Java phones and PDAs to mobile workers. It's also worth pondering by the network providers that may become a legal target of those who lose precious data due to lax security. Touboul argues that less technically sophisticated handheld users have vastly different expectations of the providers that offer "air-time services" and the devices that consume them. He says that PC makers "are considered blameless" if a virus destroys a disk drive. Not so for handsets. "When it comes to air time, I expect my providers to protect [the device]," he concludes. Needless to say, Finjan promises an answer with its Vital Security for Cellular product, in beta now at an unnamed network operator. It should hit the market in the fourth quarter.

Probably less Java specific than niche specific, and I am unsure about his conclusions - but it's an interesting issue.

Ari Kaplan has some very bad ideas for IT departments with regards to stopping file sharing:

• Implement programs to detect and block p3p programs
  Translation: Don't even think about trying any new technologies that could improve document handling. In particular, shut down NetMeeting
• Perform random keyword searches of files that are stored throughout the network for illicit materials
  Translation: Destroy all trust relationships in your company, and ensure that no one stores anything useful on corporate systems
• Scan networks to determine how many computers use P2P programs, how many files have been transferred and how much space those files have consumed.
  Translation: Make sure that all your developers start blocking the port scanning software originating out of IT
• Limit the amount of hard drive space or the number of CD-RW drives available to employees
  Translation: Cripple your staff's ability to keep historical data in an easily accessible location. Make sure that your developers cannot actually do any development
• Launch an aggressive educational program to alert employees to the company policy on file sharing.
  Translation: Propagandize your employees by spreading enough FUD around that they disbelieve everything you say

Better yet, recommend these steps to your competition

Ted Leung tells us how he uses an aggregator, and how the ones he uses fall short:

I don't blog nearly everything that I read, but I do remember that I read about something. FeedDemon doesn't have a capability to search the feeds that it keeps on disk (it also limits how many items it will keep). I want to be able to search the stuff that I read (or saw go by). In order to do that I need the content on my disk to do the search. I know about Feedster. Every time I've tried to use feedster to do this, it either took to long for me to find it, or I didn't find it at all. So I want all the content in the feed.

BottomFeeder has a lot of that functionality, but not really all combined the way Ted wants. For instance, Bf can search its internal store, and save as much as you want it to (you can now mark individual items as permanent). Bf can be set to auto-follow feeds that are links only, but:

• It can't be set to follow excerpts only (good question - how would a tool know that we have an excerpt only?)
• Even when it does auto-follow a link, the fetched data is not stored - it's transient

It looks like some of Ted's issues could be fixed on the aggregator side, but the full content desire really has to be met by the provider. Either way though, he provides some good food for thought

Ted isn't the only one who's got ideas on how to improve the aggregator experience. I've been getting email and IRC prods to add more and better support for interactive responses to posts:

• Improve the comment API support, and make it seem more like an email response
• Integrate the blog posting tool I use more fully - i.e., add a blog this! option
• Add a discuss this! option that takes you off to an IRC channel or newsgroup. The question here is, which one?

These are all good ideas, and things I intend to get to as time goes by.

Via Ted Leung I see that there's some thought to responding to spam by issuing what amounts to a DOS attack on the urls embedded in a spam:

As I mentioned in Will Filters Kill Spam?, following all the urls in a spam would have an amusing side-effect. If popular email clients did this in order to filter spam, the spammer's servers would take a serious pounding. The more I think about this, the better an idea it seems. This isn't just amusing; it would be hard to imagine a more perfectly targeted counterattack on spammers.

So I'd like to suggest an additional feature to those working on spam filters: a "punish" mode which, if turned on, would retrieve whatever's at the end of every url in a suspected spam n times, where n could be set by the user.

There's one catch - how many ISP's are going to see your response as a hostile net attack - and get you in hot water over it? The motivation for this is fine, and I have no problem whatsoever with pounding the servers of the spam supporters - but your ISP may well not be so understanding

The RIM Blackberry is hanging by a thread after a court found in favor of NTP, who is suing them for infringement. The ruling prvents RIM from selling anything associated with the Blackberry, but then stays the injunction pending an appeal. How would you like to be a Blackberry user right about now? Even if RIM wins this case in the end, this ruling is likely a death blow - users are going to evaluate the risks, and likely flee.

England passes 100 degree mark for the first time ever. I can't even imagine how miserable the London undergound must be in this kind of heat - it's not as if they normally need air conditioning over there. Meanwhile, the US east coast is doing its best imitation of UK weather - rain, rain - and more rain after that. We started digging some drainage trenches a week ago, and the job was interrupted by my Florida trip. The sod that we dug up and put on my driveway is not only still alive - it grew

Rich was busy the last few days with BottomFeeder mods, and I've been puttering here and there the last few days - I just merged the two streams this morning, and published - if you are on the dev stream for the upgrade tool, you'll see the new version as an option. I've added 'Blog This' as an option for items - it will spawn the blog tool plugin if it's present. That tool needs some testing against the Blogger and MetaWebLog API; I only really use it with my private API. I'll also be adding the Atom API over the next few days, which ought to open things up some as well. There are a fair number of tweaks to menu and toolbar arrangements as well...

Spotted this in Y. B. Normal's weblog:

The sad reality is that as CPUs are getting faster, main memory and disks lag behind. By a long shot. So, if each application you have installed duplicates all the libraries it depends on, it will take longer to install, longer to load, and (because modern CPUs totally rely on their cache to keep their maximum pace) longer to execute. The assumption that we should stop optimizing for size, popular as it is among dynamic languages supporters, is plain wrong. Actually, it's getting to be farther from the truth as CPUs keep getting faster, but memories and disks don't.

This was in response to Sean McGrath's post. Exactly which statically bound languages of late have been optimizing for size? C#? Java? What planet is this from?

Spotted in Critical Section - the guy who may well be Canada's next PM has a blog. And unlike the Dean for President blog, it looks like Paul Martin does his own content (Dean's seems to mostly be added by media people on his campaign). Looks like blogging is getting to be another major communications channel - here's Martin's explanation for his writing:

But I've discovered its something I enjoy. For a couple of reasons. First, it's an opportunity to express my thoughts publicly without having to go through all the durm and strang that is a major speech or even a media scrum (another word that sounds like something that crawled out of a swamp - and with good reason).

While getting corporate marketing statements out is less work, it's still a lot more effort than blogging. Very interesting, IMHO. Wonder if he'll keep it up if he gets in office?