Doc Searls relates the story of an individual who, after joining the ACLU, started receiving lots (and lots) of junk mail from them. This is similar to what happened to me after I donated money to a political party (never mind which one). As in Doc Searls story, I've been buried in mail solicitations from the party - at this point, I'm thinking they have spent more money soliciting from me than I donated in the first place....
Blaine Buxton reminds us of some old treasures in books about software - Peopleware and Psychology of Programming. Another one that still rings true - because too many people have yet to learn the lessons, I guess - is Fred Brooks' classic The Mythical Man Month.
I made a modification to BottomFeeder yesterday - I had the current sort selection follow changes in feed selection. The VW widget doesn't do that by default (even though, IMHO, it should). With help from our GUI toolkit guy on the ST IRC Channel, I added that support. However - not well. The state of the sort selection was being improperly tracked, and that led to surprising results. I've fixed it now - changing fields will result in the same sort as you had on the former feed.
The Register reports a correlation between Sobig and DDOS attacks on Anti-Spam sites:
Earlier this week two anti-spam services, Monkeys.com and the Compu.Net "block list", announced their closure due to DDoS attacks, and other attempts by spammers to make their operation as difficult as possible. Their closure follows an earlier decision to discontinue the popular if controversial SPEWS block list (which was run by Osirusoft.com) for similar reasons (see postings to news.admin.net-abuse.email for more info).
Linford tells The Reg that Spamhaus has been under constant "extremely heavy" DDoS attack since early July. He believes the attack against his site and others originates from Windows machines infected with the Sobig worm, controlled by spammers over IRC networks.
Looks like semi-open war is breaking out on this front - and available bandwidth is going to end up being the collateral damage.
Loosely Coupled refers to a recent post by Sean McGrath on software development - Sean's point is that we can learn a lot about simplicity by looking at Http:
What would a simplified software interface look like? Well, by analogy with the hardware world, it would be one that just supported the basic receive and transmit functions. A real world example? For 'receive' substitute 'GET', for 'transmit' substitute 'POST'. In other words, HTTP.
Now, as Loosely Coupled says, this is oversimplyfying some - it takes a fair bit of elbow grease to create all that simplicity :) However, the point isn't so much for the service implementor as for the service user. Look at blogs for an example - Everyone talks about SOAP, but what do the tools and blogs support? XML-RPC. Why? Simplicity - implementing XML-RPC yourself is simple; implementing SOAP generally isn't - even if you have a toolkit.
So what does this answer? It explains why so many Java developers use JSP, but so few use EJB. It explains why consultants favor SOAP, and line developers like XML-RPC. It explains the growth in simple http based services as opposed to complex SOAP based ones. Anyway, have a look at the post.
If you won't stop browsing until they pry the mouse from your cold, dead fingers - then visit this site for instructions....
I updated the blog server awhile back so that - when a blogger hadn't posted in a few days - the server would scan back to their last post. The trouble is, I didn't think that carefully about the code, and I only tested it against blogs that had posts - not against a new (empty) blog. Well, this evening I went about setting up a new blog, and boom - that caused problems. The server just kept scanning back infinitely, since I hadn't considered that case. Well, now I've handled that, since I added a new blogger.
Oh, I'll post details on the new blog once the first post goes up
Via Scoble comes a link to Weblogsinc - a company who's purpose is building b2b oriented blogs. I thought there was a business opportunity here somewhere :)
Lambda the Ultimate notices the online pdfs for the Smalltalk Report. I think we are gradually replacing the kind of content that the old ST Report had with the Smalltalk Community Blogs
Tim Bray has a new Mac - this seems to be a mini-trend in the technical end of the blogsphere (maybe elsewhere, I don't know). Are Mac sales picking up? I know a number of people who have recently bought Macs, and all of them tell me I should as well. Hmmm
The Smalltalk Community Blogs site continues to grow. Travis Griggs has started blogging, and David Buck will be coming online shortly. Welcome!
Scoble points to some suggestions for Windows Update. There's one I vehemently disagree with: making critical updates mandatory. Or worse, as rumor has it, make the updates a requirement of the license. The updates aren't tested well enough for that. Let me give an example:
Is it any wonder that I tend to hit Remind me later on updates? My experience with them is decidedly negative. Now, I know that updates can be hard - I've screwed up BottomFeeder updates via insufficient testing. On the other hand, MS is a big company with lots of testing staff; Bf is a small effort by 2 people, with occasional help from others. Windows Update needs to work a lot better before most people will feel comfortable with it.
Then you need to go read Avi's post - it explains the concept in a nutshell.
Simon Phipps notices that Windows is a monoculture. Apparently he's without a sense of irony - since Sun's vision is also one of a monoculture - one where every application runs on the (frozen in 1996) JVM, and dynamic languages have no place whatsoever.
This site was unavailable for a period of time overnight, due to a power outage in Cincinnati. Things are up and back to normal now though; sorry for the inconvenience.
Chris Double shares a comparison between a Java struts and a Smalltalk Seaside weblog implementation. If you like lots (and lots) of code, pick the Java one :)
The FTP server is not working at the moment; I'm trying to get ahold of the admin. For NC downloaders, that means you should use the http service instead of the ftp service for the time being.
David Buck points out how Smalltalk tools enhance your productivity - and in the process, implicitly shows why Java/C# (et. al.) developers and Smalltalk developers talk right past each other when the subject of debugging comes up - Smalltalkers are talking about a much different tool.
The FTP service has been restored - so if you were trying to download Cincom Smalltalk NC, you should be able to use FTP again
The feeds (from this blog and from the ones in userblogs now have embedded comment support. You won't see them for anything cached in BottomFeeder unless you regenerate the feed.
Now that I have a bunch of other bloggers on the site, I'm starting to get requests from them for api access to the blog server. That brings up the ugly truth of the matter - this server sort of grew haphazardly, and the api has been mostly implicit. Well, I spent most of today starting to address that issue - and in the process cleaned up some inefficiencies. I haven't deployed the new code yet; I still want to test it out some more before I do that.
I got a request for supporting file urls this evening, and added support for it. This is only in the dev stream - it will show up in 3.2 when that is released. This should be useful for tracking local changes that can be published as RSS...
Ted Leung explains the concept of software monoculture far better than I did the other day.
The Yankees have 100 victories and the AL East pennant, and - so far - the Giants (football) seem to remember how to play the game. Somehow, the Red Sox managed not to succomb to their typical fall swoon (yet) - but then again, they have a series against Oakland (and then likely the Yankees, unless they manage to lose to Minnesota). Over in the NL, the Cubs managed to make it to the playoffs. Now, imagine for a minute - if both the Sox and the Cubs advanced to the series, one of them would have to win. Since that would mean the end of life as we know it, it can't happen.....
I love the fact that advocating Java in a vociferous way is pegged as normal - but being a Smalltalk (or Lisp, etc) advocate gets you labeled as a nut case:
James Robertson, smalltalk nut case and long-time Java detractor in c.l.j.a. (then again, I noticed most smalltalk nutjobs are Java detractors - it must come with the territory)....
Question the status quo, and there's just no end to how much you'll be called nuts. Interesting side point - most of the posters in c.j.l.a. who come at things from a Smalltalk viewpoint have used Java and other statically typed languages; while most of the Java folks arguing back haven't used any dynamic language.
Terry Raymond pointed me to this article on a "back to basics" movement in development:
The spark behind this growing trend comes down to control - enterprises tout IDEs as the development tool du jour, with supporters arguing that programmers will get more done if they can do all their work inside a single environment. But many programmers (especially experienced ones) prefer a markedly different approach, using code editors and pluggable modules, modes, or other extendibility features to pick and choose just the tools they need. They don't enjoy being shoved into a single development environment, and contend that IDEs are resource-intensive, slow, and have many more features than are really needed to get the job done.
Maybe that's because the IDE's are huge, bloated, and slow? Have a look at the footprint (both on disk and, more importantly, in RAM) of Eclipse, JDeveloper, etc - they are huge. I only have 256 MB of RAM on my two development systems - so that pretty much rules out any of the mainline Java tools. On the other hand, a baseline VW system starts up using 12 MB of RAM, and my standard development system, with all my tools loaded, uses 17. Heck, a dev image with all of BottomFeeder loaded - and a bunch of test artifacts lying around in workspaces - runs 24 MB. There's more:
"The editors in most IDEs don't have nearly enough features and they make manipulating code difficult," says Chris Rathman, a consultant and software developer. "For example, I need to be able to work with several hundred files in a single session and I must have the ability to do global search and replaces. Oh, and it has to be fast."
Hmm - that sort of refactoring in VW using the Refactoring Browser is nearly instantaneous - even on old, slow hardware like my PII 400. Maybe if the tools had a consistent meta environment, and didn't live on huge directtory trees of source code... The other intereresting thing is the need for editing features. Using Smalltalk, I'm simply never editing large bodies of text (other than SSP pages for the web - for which I often use an html editor). If the source for a method is so large that I think I need a power editor, then I made a mistake. Most methods should be short, and do one job - and by short, I mean - in Smalltalk terms - 7 to 10 lines. Consider the productivity loss from a language that, by its nature, pushes you towards long methods.
I also love this oft cited theory:
When it comes to expanding developer skill levels or teaching new programmers, there is some debate about whether code editors or IDEs are the right way to go. An IDE's extra features can act as a set of training wheels for new developers, depending on how much knowledge they bring to the table at the start. However, many of those who adhere to the code editing philosophy believe that junior programmers have an easier time learning the fundamentals of a programming language using a code editor because the new developer is not saddled with learning the bells and whistles of an IDE.
I guess some people just like creating mountains of text so that they can feel powerful about the whole thing. This is all part of the He-Man school of code construction, where the more text you create, and the harder it all is, the better.
I posted on the code bloat of a Java/Struts weblog implementation (vs. a Smalltalk/Seaside version last week. Now Chris Double points us to an in-depth comparison by Bill Clementson. This comparison explains, in a nutshell, why Smalltalk is so much more productive than Java - the sheer difference in code volume. Simple writing all that extra code is going to take longer.
Don Park is pulling for the Red Sox in the playoffs, partly because of their underdog status. Maybe they'll win - anything can happen - but they have a huge monkey on their back. The monkey is the 84 years of failure to win the big one - often with amazing flameouts (Think Bill Buckner). This weighs down in the players heads after awhile. If you think it doesn't, you haven't played competitive sports. As a high school kid, I ran track and cross country. There was a local high school that always seemed to win - and the mere fact that they won so much was an extra weight on the shoulders of every other team. It meant that we got more keyed up than we should have before every meet with them. It meant that we applied too much thought to the problem. It meant that, ultimately, in the back of our minds, there was always a question. That's where the Red Sox live, in that particular ring of hell. It's kind of fitting in a way that they now have Byung-Hyun Kim - he has that same monkey on his back due to the way the Yankees have played against him (not to mention his less than stellar year this year). He's going to go into any series with the Yankees feeling a need to prove himself - and that's just extra pressure. The Red Sox as a team feel that pressure, and it's going to take a lot on their part to overcome it. They might; anything can happen in a short series. I wouldn't count on it though.
Along the lines of this post, a reader submits this example:
Problem: I have a list of objects. I want to create another list containing the 'id' property of those objects.
Solutions:
Ruby
list.map { |i| i.id }Java
List ids = new ArrayList(); for (Iterator i = list.iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) { ids.add(new Long(((Thingy)i.next()).getId())); } Java w/ 1.5-style Generics and For Loop
List ids = new ArrayList(); for (Thingy x :list) { ids.add(new Long(x.getId())); }And the Smalltalk for that:
list collect: [[:each | each id]I think that all speaks for itself...
Yes, it certainly does. Just in sheer time at the keyboard, Java loses...
Some people using VW 7.x have reported freezes or crashes of VW on Linux distros with newer revs of glibc - particularly on RedHat 8 and RedHat 9. We've had a look at the problem, and believe that we have a bug in VW. Here's how to deal with this at present:
Some new linux systems install multiple libc.so.6 libraries, typically in /lib, /lib/i686, and /lib/tls. The difference between the libraries is the version of the kernel they assume to be running. Each library states this assumption in an ELF section named .note.ABI-tag that can be viewed using
#> objdump -s -j .note.ABI-tag <ELF file>The last 3 32-bit unsigned ints in this tag contain the kernel version, or "operating system ABI", required by the library. This was done as part of the new Native Posix Threads implementation. One big difference is that newer kernels have an api that defines the 'errno' global in thread-local storage instead of as a traditional global variable.
UnixSystemSupport has a #libraryDirectories attribute that includes '/lib', '/usr/shlib', and '/usr/lib'. On Martin's system, the loader resolves the engine's symbols in /lib/tls/libc-2.3.2.so and /lib/tls/libm-2.3.2.so. However, because the paths are hard-coded in the attributes of UnixSystemSupport, this causes VW to open /lib/libc-2.3.2.so when it tries to find the function pointers needed by the OSTimeZone package. Additionally, this second libc-2.3.2.so is loaded in RTLD_GLOBAL mode by primitive 330.
I discovered that I could eliminate the system freeze in two different ways:
- set LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5 in the environment before running vw
This causes the loader to resolve the engine against the libc in /lib. Since the UnixSystemSupport methods search for the same library there is only one glibc library loaded.
- empty the #libraryDirectories attribute on UnixSystemSupport and add 'libc.so.6' to the head of the #libraryFiles list.
This causes dlopen() to be called on the name "libc.so.6" which uses the platform's library search path. This ensures that the libc.so.6 that gets loaded is the same library as the loader used when it loaded the engine.
That's part of the text - with work-arounds you can apply in your image - for the internal bug report on this issue. Let us know if you have problems with this!
CNET News reports that Sun is restating their Q4 from a $12M profit to a $1B loss, and that they expect hefty losses in Q1 (just ended). Hmmm. That explains the recent round of layoffs at Sun, that's for sure.
Bill Kearney complains about spam getting into blog comment chains. That's precisely the reason I offer no email interface into my blog. We all know that spam is overflowing, so offering an email interface to a blog is (at least at present) an invitation for trouble. It shouldn't be that way, but it is.
Doc Searls thinks these principles for the internet make sense. Apparently, he's never considered the tragedy of the commons. When no one owns it and no one takes care of it, it rots. We can dislike that all we want, but it's the way things are. In fact, spam is one of the logical consequences of this.
In response to this post, where I said that a Cubs/Red Sox series was simply not possible, I got this in email:
No, if they both get to the Series, it would end in a 3-3 tie. Game 7 would never be played. The planet Earth would explode. Babe Ruth and that stupid Goat would fight it out instead. My money's on the Babe
Heh
Not that it really gets that cold here (DC area), but we didn't have what I consider to be a normal hot summer - and fall came in like a light switch at the beginning of September. Now, it looks like frost this week - with luck, snow won't be too far behind :)
If you follow the BottomFeeder dev builds, you'll see some changed behavior in the latest build. In the past, updated items came in as new, and you saw them (and the previous versions). Now, you'll see just the updated version in most cases. Also, I've placed the comments inline with the main feeds (my blog and the userblogs feeds) - so anytime a new inline comment comes in, an item will show as updated. Updated items will appear out of date sequence - they'll pop to the top of the list. I'm still experimenting with this, so the final behavior may end up different. Comments appreciated.
Scoble mentions that the public school near him doesn't have a computer lab. That's not the issue he makes it out to be. You want to be scared by what goes on in schools? Go quiz 3rd and 4th graders on their times tables, and see how many of them don't know them. Then look into whether your school allows kids to use calculators. My advice - don't worry about the computers - they aren't that relevant. Whether the math teachers actually impart knowledge, on the other hand, is critical. We've had to do all the drilling on basic math facts ourselves, because the schools don't.
Another way to realize this - go to a local shop where there are high school age kids around. Se how well they deal with math when the registers fail. Then ask yourself how relevant computers in the classroom are
In looking through my server logs, I see a lot of daily requests for the RSS files - from a very wide variety of newsreaders. However, there have been no requests at all (at least not yet) for the atom feeds. There are atom feeds for all the blogs hosted here. Now admittedly, other than this blog, I don't really advertise the atom feeds. On the other hand, I haven't had any requests either. At least from my viewpoint, atom - as a syndication format - has dribbled off into irrelevance. RSS, for all its warts, is the format that is actually in use - and that's unlikely to change.
Jeremy Allaire has something simpler than SOAP - built on RSS and XML-RPC. It's worth a read!
I fixed the server the other day so that all the main feeds had embedded comments - what I forgot was that the extant feeds, unless they got regenerated (via new content) still had the errors in them. My feed got updated, but the others, until they got new content, weren't getting updated. That's been fixed, and the feeds now have the embedded comments where they belong.
I posted a comment on Atom the other day, and Gordon made a few comments. I've made changes to BottomFeeder to handle Atom feeds; there was a bug related to changes from 0.1 to 0.2 that I had missed. I fixed all the server side validation issues as well. However, that leaves my question about relevance hanging. Here's the problem, as I see it. There are tons of RSS feeds out there - I see vitually no Atom feeds. I'm sure they exist, but I'm not finding them. Heck, look at the feeds page on Sam Ruby's site - no Atom links listed. There's another issue as well - there are scads of RSS modules, many of them very useful (embedded comments and the commentAPI in particular). Can you use these modules in Atom? I don't know, maybe you can - but the point is, it's not clear (at least to me).
On the posting side, the invention of a new authentication mechanism just seems wrong to me. HTTP has an authentication mechanism, it should be used. As to people not controlling sites - well heck, then how do they add support for this new mechanism on the server side? The site controller has to add it. If they can do that, they can darn well turn on authentication. To my mind, inventing a new authentication mechanism is just silly. Use what's there and move on.
Cincom has been publishing a newsletter called Expert Access for some time now. I've created an RSS feed for it here.
I recently (in 3.1) got Http authentication working in BottomFeeder. I didn't have to do anything out of the oridinary - all the support I need was already in the NetClients package, which has been part of the VW distribution for a few years now. So how do you add such support? Well, let's say you issue an Http request:
request := self fillRequestHeaders. client := HttpClient new. response := client executeRequest: request. response isUnauthorized ifTrue: [authInfo := self promptForAuthorization].
Now, once you have that authorization information, what do you do? Well, you create the request again, this time with the authorization information in it, then re-issue the request. Something like this:
request username: authInfo username password: authInfo password. response := client executeRequest: request.
That should do it. Now, of course, you'll want to catch exceptions, and handle other cases (movement of a page, various error responses, etc.). To get an idea of how to do that sort of thing, load the package Http-Access from the Public Store. The package handles authentication, moved pages, and mod-gzip automatically. I use it in BottomFeeder and my blog posting tools - it's getting real world use.
The @Stake firing of Dan Geer has been widely reported by now, but I've just been loiking at the ComputerWorld story in print. This thing is uglier than I thought:
The day after the report's release, co-author Dan Geer was fired from his job as chief technology officer at Cambridge, Mass.-based @stake Inc., a security company that derives a hefty percentage of its income from Microsoft. Moreover, the firing was made retroactive to Sept. 23 so that @stake could further distance itself from Geer and the report, sources close to the situation said.
An @stake official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed that Geer was fired and said that as a corporate officer he should have known that Microsoft was a client of the company. "It's not a matter of the content of the report; it's a matter of ethics and respect for clients," the official said.
Hear that sucking sound? It's the sound of @Stake's management team kissing up to Microsoft. The funny thing is, the firing makes Microsoft look bad as well - I think I'd stop doing business with a partner that made me look that bad. I'm sure there were some interesting conversations in Redmond over this, and I bet that the firing made MS officials far, far angrier than the report - the report could be spun - the firing is very, very hard to spin. Regardless of the reality of the situation, lots of people are going to assume that MS played the heavy on this.
There's a new episode of Angel, and two baseball playoff games on tonight. Thank goodness for the ReplayTV.
The A's Red Sox game that just ended was a hell of a game. I think everyone watching and playing was surprised by the bases loaded bunt by the catcher to end the game. Shades of Major League!
SCO takes on SCO, and says that the GPL won't stand up. There's definitely going to be some precedents coming out of this case; it's hold on to your hats time:
"The GPL has never faced a full legal test, and SCO believes that it will not stand up in court. We are confident that SCO will win the legal battle that IBM has now started over the GPL."
Watch what happens when a static typing advocate takes on David Buck in discussing the issues of type safety - look here and here.
Overheard in the Smalltalk IRC channel:
Definition of a blogger: a Blogger is someone who writes emails to himself
Heh. About the size of it....
I haven't posted since early afternoon - I was watching the Red Sox take their customary October swan dive - and then the Yankees came on at 8. Pettite pitched a heck of a game - if the Yankees let him go at the end of this year, they are completely bonkers. Looks like the folks hoping for a Cubs/Sox series won't be getting their wish :)
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