Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Right after Matsui hit the go ahead single, I had to head to the office. So I missed the scoring in the 9th. Yanks win!

There are problems with the Cincom network right now - apparently, there are some virus infected systems inside the firewall, and they are flooding the network with packets - which is why access to the site is spotty right now. It will likely stay that way until business hours in Cincinnati.

This afternoon I visited Tokyo University and was shown a pretty nifty application. Starting in 1990, they started building an application that aids in the design of - and simulation of - seagoing vessels. That was a pretty interesting application - it uses JUN for display, and is used by ship building companies here. Then they showed me another application that uses the same framework - but aids in the design of satellites. Very interesting stuff - it's always cool to see the things our customers are doing with the product.

After the visit, the office staff took me out to a very nice dinner - restaurant called Luke at the top of a downtown tower. The food just kept coming, and it was all good. The steak in particular was just amazing. I can't thank the folks here enough for the kindness they've shown me. It was too bad that it was raining - the view of Tokyo from the restaurant patio was excellent - but would have been far better in clear weather. Even so, the food was good, the conversation better, and the customer visits have been very good. I'm looking forward to the magazine interview tomorrow - and then it's back on the plane for the long, long flight home.

I'm off to a magazine interview, and this afternoon, I'll be trying to see some of Tokyo before I leave tomorrow morning. I'll have some posts on the day this evening.

Update - The interview was with Solution IT, a local monthly IT journal in Tokyo. The interview went very well - lots of good questions, and an enjoyable conversation. They were interested in product direction, interoperability between VW and OS, and my thoughts on XP devlopment in VW. All in all, it was a good time

Some people really, really wanted to go:

CHICAGO, Illinois (Reuters) -- A Toledo, Ohio, man who bid $60,300 bought the last two seats on this week's final flight of the Concorde.

just plug this into your next argument

Going to OOPSLA? Then checkout Camp Smalltalk at OOPSLA - This came via the Camp ST mailing list from Ralph Johnson:

It appears that OOPSLA is going to provide tables and chairs, but will let us bring power strips and the like. We are going to be in a hallway on the second floor of the Anaheim Convention Center past registration. I'll bring my projector and they are going to provide a screen for us. I doubt that they will have signage, since they just figured this out this past week, but perhaps I'll be surprised. I'll make sure that the student volunteers at the information booth know where we are, since we won't be in the program. I'll try to find out the exact location Sunday morning and get things set up.

Ted Leung has some interesting observations on Eclipse and software communities.

I'm packed and ready to leave (after a night's sleep, that is). It was a great trip - got a lot done, met a lot of users, and hookd up with the local Cincom staff (a great bunch!). Kuroda took me around a few parts of Tokyo today - the district where they sell electronics is amazing - as is the one selling cookware. Then we visited an old temple - I got some pictures of that, I'll post them when they get developed. Then it was off to the Ginza area for dinner. Shabu Shabu beef is interesting - you get served a big plate of raw, thinly sliced beef. There are condiments at the table, and a bowl of boiling water in front of you. In goes the meat, then out again in seconds - mix with the condiments and eat. Very good, and I managed it all with chopsticks (not one of my skills). I bought a few knick knacks to take back home - and I'm looking forward to my next visit here.

I've flown a lot of non-American carriers now - nearly always on long haul flights. I'm going to start avoiding them. Why? Well, here I am - long flight from Tokyo to Chicago on JAL - and there's no power at the seat. How flipping stupid is that? It's a long flight, and it would be nice to be able to use my laptop for more than a little while. until the foreign carriers grab a cluestick, I'm going to go out of my way to fly US carriers.

In a piece on the Windows iPod, Dare Obasanjo says somthing I've been thinking about converged devices for awhile now:

I guess I'm about the reveal myself as being a Luddite but I have no problem with the B & W iPod interface nor am I interested in taking pictures or playing videos on my music player. This annoying convergence of features has not interested me in my cell phone (which happen to have lost useful features over time like password protected address books for frivolous shit like games, web browsing and taking pictures) and I definitely don't want it in my music player especially if it keeps the price high instead of allowing it to drop to a more reasonable amount so I can pick up a few as Xmas gifts.

That's pretty much how I feel about it as well. I don't really want a mini device with a finger cramping keyboard replacing my laptop, and I don't really want a phone/mini pc combo that doesn't fit in my pocket either. I'm more than happy to carry multiple devices, thank you very much....

The senate passes a 'do not email'http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5095408.html?tag=nefd_top ] anti-spam bill. I'm not sure which will happen first:

• Hackers gettiing into the email registry for fun and profit
• Rapidly changing consumer email addresses making the list worthless

I'm sure this will be as popular as the 'do not call' list. I'm also sure that it will be every bit as useless.

Avi Bryant pushes out a useful analogy for Continuation based web apps:

My argument is that this content or service view of the web doesn't scale up to the application level. It's like unix commands - it's nice that you can string together cat and sort and grep to do useful things, and that these provide services that anyone can take advantage of. But even though the loose coupling is great, you're going to have a real hard time writing emacs as a shell script. Or even pine. At a certain point, you need a richer model of state, of components, and of control flow. Building a complex application by stringing together a series of simple stateless parts, at the level of granularity we're talking about (essentially one user interaction per part), is madness.

Go read the whole thing. I'm not entirely certain that I completely agree (I'm more of the mind that HTML based apps suck), but he makes some very good points

Avi Bryant pushes out a useful analogy for Continuation based web apps:

My argument is that this content or service view of the web doesn't scale up to the application level. It's like unix commands - it's nice that you can string together cat and sort and grep to do useful things, and that these provide services that anyone can take advantage of. But even though the loose coupling is great, you're going to have a real hard time writing emacs as a shell script. Or even pine. At a certain point, you need a richer model of state, of components, and of control flow. Building a complex application by stringing together a series of simple stateless parts, at the level of granularity we're talking about (essentially one user interaction per part), is madness.

Go read the whole thing. I'm not entirely certain that I completely agree (I'm more of the mind that HTML based apps suck), but he makes some very good points

InfoWorld TechWatch has only half the story:

Microsoft apparently will keep either pretending that Java is nothing to worry about or will keep trying to get developers to drop it altogether.

Yep. And Sun will keep pretending that Linux isn't that important. Want to guess which blind spot will end up doing more damage?

CNET News reports that Amazon is now allowing full text search by book content - not just subject, author, and title. Wow...

Because it works:

About a third of people responded to a spam, seeking more information. And 7 percent actually bought a product or service.

I'm not home yet, but I am back in the US. Landed in Chicago a couple of hours ago - some food and coffee later, I was on the prowl for pay phones with Data Jacks. I actually found a few - but finding one with power nearby (grr - see this post for why that's a problem) was a real hassle. Finally found one, so I've got my mail, my news feeds updated, and my backed up posts up. Home soon now...

Cool Smalltalk advocacy from Blaine Buxton:

Smalltalk has always enjoyed a small tight community that I love dearly. I'm proud to be part of a smaller community. It sets you apart from the crowd. Being a Java developer is like being one of the millions. Does this mean I would still love Smalltalk if it got popular? My answer would be @#$%& YES! I choose my language on what I am most effective in and find wonderment in. I went back to Smalltalk again because I am more effective in it that Java. I never have to think about the language, only the problem at hand. In Java, I was always forced into thinking about the language with its many shackles to prevent you from hurting yourself. I like being free.

Scoble waxes lyrical over Longhorn again:

So, how would I look at Longhorn then? It's a rethink of the entire platform. Look at what Windows 95 did for the world. It caused a huge wave of new and innovative applications. The Longhorn wave is going to do the same thing.

Meanwhile, Word still sucks

See if you can fool the Gender Genie - I certainly couldn't.

For all the hype on Tablet PC's, my theory about how people prefer to interact with a PC seems to be mostly correct - keyboards rule over writing. Why? Even if you don't really touch type (I don't), you can get a lot more entered a lot more quickly via the keyboard. It seems that many people, like me, just don't like to write longhand if we don't have to. And the manufacturers are getting antsy:

With Tablets failing to attract many 'corridor warriors' and premium pricing making them highly uncompetitive in market awash with bargain notebooks, vendors continue to find making money an uphill battle. Under a million will be sold this year, less than five per cent of the global notebook market, with HP the leader.

If I have to write by hand, I prefer paper - yellow pads and notebooks. IMHO, a Tablet for writing is about as useless as it gets

The Yankees lost last night, and I didn't even see it - I got the news on my phone, which I checked at the movies. I just got back from Japan, and the wife wanted to see a movie - so off we went to see "Intolerable Cruelty". I had low hopes for this, as it had "chick flick" written all over it - but it was surprisingly good. I laughed a lot - the movie got my attention and held it. I'd definitely recommend the movie. Not as much fun as "Kill Bill", but it was a good flick.

Scoble quotes another developer who's gone gaga over Longhorn. What these guys need to do is get out more. Here's a few things they might want to answer:

• Are graphics still down in the kernel? If so, why? So that we can enjoy full crashes more often? This was right in NT 3.51, and has been wrong ever since. So do the right frelling thing
• Can I actually put a bullet point where I want it in Word yet?
• Does Word still produce html designed by morons?
• Is the window title area still wasting scads of screen space, as it does in XP?
• Is Log off/Shutdown still located under 'Start'? Do you have any idea how many users get thrown by that?
• Will every update that comes to the OS require a reboot? Get with the program and figure out what modules are,. for goodness sakes
• Will the disk defragger in Longhorn actually work, or - like the one in XP - will it spend hours looking at my disk and then give up, having done close to nothing?

I've actually been disappointed in every release of Windows since NT 3.51. Why? Because 3.51 was stable - it ran without crashing, and - at least as I recall - without rot. XP doesn't crash as often as NT 4 did, but it certainly rots after awhile - if I don't reboot after a few days, the whole system slows down. All 9x (and ME) did that, NT 4 did that, and XP does that. 3.51 didn't. As with Word, I suspect that the dev team got bored with a working system and started adding fluff because it was fun.

Here's a tip. I don't care about your new storage model. I don't care about your new API. I don't care about the new L&F. What I'd like to see is apps that aren't actively hostile (the entire Office Suite after Office 97) and an OS that is at least as stable as NT 3.51.

In response to Ziv's comment here:

I'm fully expecting to get Smalltalk - and more specifically, VW and OS - critiques from readers and users. If they aren't happy, I want to know why. As to "caring about performance" with regards to graphics in the kernel - I'll remember that next time I set up a web server; you just gave me another reason to make sure that I use Linux, Unix, or FreeBSD instead of Windows for any critical server task. If MS thinks that game performance is more relevant than uptime, there's very little else that I need to know. With respect to Word, go look for other complaints - I'm hardly the only one that has problems with bullets and numbering.

I pulled the Amazon feed builder from the dev build earlier today, but now it's back and upgraded - I though I had broken something, but it seems to have been a problem on Amazon's end. That's fixed, and you can now build RSS feeds for Amazon from Bf - for Books, CD's, and DVD's. It's all pretty cool, and it works nicely. Enjoy!

News flash - Toy dog fart sets off security alarms at airport. That's just too weird....

Charles Miller explains how Linux - RedHat specifically - can be as bad as Windows (possibly worse; I've had bad things happen as a result of Windows Update, but never had it result in a completely broken system... yet).

The Register explains security within the context of the average user. Talking to a professor who gets a lot of non-technical computer users in his classes, we see some revealing answers to what most technical folks think are simple questions:

"Do you update your anti-virus software regularly?" I'll ask them. Most look at me as though I'd just asked them if they refloozle their hossenblobbets with tinklewickets. A few will tentatively volunteer a timid, "I ... think so?" Some are willing to admit that they don't even have anti-virus software. At least they're sure.

"Do you run Windows Update regularly?" I'll ask next. Hmmm ... those hossenblobbets really do need refloozling. Some state that yes, they do run Windows Update, but they have no idea what it is doing to their computer, so they just agree to everything and assume it's all good. Most say they've never done it once, if they even know what it is.

"Do you have DSL or a cable modem at home?" is my next question. Ah, finally! A question they can all answer. They know the answer to this one! About half usually have some sort of broadband connection, and they are enthusiastic in their answers: "Yes, I do! You betcha! Love it!"

"Great!" I continue. "Do you have personal firewall software running on your computer? Do you have a router/firewall so your Windows machine isn't directly connected to the Internet? Did you remember to turn off file and printer sharing if your Windows machine is directly connected to the Internet?" A pause ... and we're right back to hossenblobbets and tinklewickets.

It's enough to make someone who cares about security throw up his hands in frustration and just give up.

Here's the great disconnect between most technical users and the people who just want to use computers as a tool. Most people look at a PC the same way they look at a piece of stereo equipment or the TV - they plug it in, and they want it to just work. If there's any user interaction at all, they want it on - at most - the level of interaction they have with a ReplayTV or VCR. You simply cannot expect average users to deal with firewalls, security updates, etc. I know I've posted before that having Windows Update on by default would drive me nuts - but I think it's probably the right answer (so long as it could be disabled manually - most people wouldn't bother).

It's worse than that though. For way too many years now, Windows has been shipping with the defaults set to wide open. Maybe that was excusable through Windows 95 - but by Win 98, ME, and 2000? And XP? This is why there are so many zombies out there sending spam and viruses - because these systems have been shipped in what amounts to a broken state, and the unsurprising has happened - they've been compromised. In most cases, the infections won't clear until those systems are junked and replaced with new systems (presuming that the security defaults for those new systems are reasonable).

Next time one of your non-tech friends asks for system advice, suggest a Mac. You'll be doing the entire world a favor.

Smalltalk Party in Berne, Switzerland:

SSUG is organizing a Smalltalk Party (successor of SqueaNic, SmallNic :). We invite all Smalltalkers to join this event to share their enthusiasm and knowledge about Squeak.

WHAT	SMALLTALK EVENT
WHERE	UNIVERSITY OF BERN - IAM Bern, Switzerland
WHEN	Saturday 8th of November 2003 -- 12pm until ...
CONTACT	email : bergel@iam.unibe.ch

Don Park complains about how large Blog Roller is. I just checked my blog package - it fits in one loadable parcel, drags in a few goodies and base components - and is a total of 83 classes. Maybe Don should look at Smalltalk if he wants to avoid bloat....

The next meeting of the Ottawa Carleton Smalltalk Users Group will be:

Video Screening:	Squeakers
Date	Nov 19, 2003
Time	7:00 pm

At this meeting, we will be showing the video called "Squeakers". This is an excellent documentary on Squeak and Alan Kay. Here's the description of the video:

Dr. Alan Kay, known as "the Father of the Personal Computer," has devoted his life to the subject of computers and early childhood education. Thirty years of computer innovation and a deep understanding of how children learn is behind his Squeak programming language - and the new math and science projects shown here with fourth to sixth graders.

A 44-minute Hi Def film of interest to parents, educators, and anyone concerned about how children learn, SQUEAKERS features Alan Kay, Jerome Bruner, Seymour Papert, and a special appearance by Quincy Jones.

Location Details

The meeting will be held in Room 5115, Herzberg Laboratories (building 13 on the map ). Pay-parking is available in Lot 1, 2, and parking meters can be found along University Drive. Free parking is available across Bronson Avenue opposite Lot 5.

Please RSVP to david@simberon.com if you plan to attend

Red Sox fire Grady Little. The owners say it wasn't because of the game 7 (ALCS) screw up, but - I'm sure that played a very large role in the decision.

David Buck likes what he sees from us so far in the DotNet Connect. It'll be preview (beta) for 7.2 - fully supported in 7.3

The marketing speak runneth over:

Here's my quick, two sentence definition of Indigo in order to give you an idea about the scope of this thing:

Indigo is the successor technology and the consolidation of DCOM, COM+, Enterprise Services, Remoting, ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX), WSE, and the Microsoft Message Queue. It provides services for building distributed systems all the way from simplistic cross-appdomain message passing and ORPC to cross-platform, cross-organization, vastly distributed, service-oriented architectures providing reliable, secure, transactional, scalable and fast, online or offline, synchronous and asynchronous XML messaging.

Hmm. I believe I've been hearing that "solves every problem known to mankind" thing since CORBA and COM came out. Let the marketing hype begin!

Gordon Mohr explains why one should never attribute to conspiracy what can be more easily explained by imcompetence or sloppiness....

SCO is making an effort to completely discredit the GPL. Looks like the test in court that some people have wanted for the GPL is increasingly likely to take place.

The CST Online Tutorials have changed urls a few times over the last couple of years - I've posted the link above in response to some questions about where they are. In response to a site redesign by Cincom marketing, it's likely that the Smalltalk pages will be moved again in the near future - the main page link will work - but it's probable that the internal links will be rearranged. To get to the online tutorials:

• start at the main page
• Select the Education link on the left bar
• Select Online Tutorials, which should show up under Education after you select it

Here's an interesting story on the variance in internet usage (men and women) in different regions of the world. The author has an interesting theory on how the 'market size' of language usage affects community building.

Peter de Jager has some interesting thoughts on how adaptations for scarcity (both human and technological) backfire when the norm switches from scarcity to abundance:

Anyone considering a new technology should at least ask the question: "What are the long term consequences if this advance reduces costs to zero, or increases access so that everyone with a desire to do so, can use the technology?" That might seem to be a giant 'societal' question of value only to economists and city planners, but it has applications closer to home.

I'll have to think about this one. He makes some interesting points.

ok, this was just bizarre. I had to run my daughter out to dance class - before I left, the mouse wheel wasn't working with BottomFeeder. I figured I must have somehow broken something, and decided to just leave it while I was out. 2 hours later, I get back. I get the login screen - keyboard doesn't work. Ok, maybe the USB cable is loose. No dice. Try the laptop's basic keyboard - still no response. Ok, this is now really weird. I can't login; fortunately, I can shutdown from the login screen. A reboot clears the problem. So my question is, what the heck was it? Do I have some virus/worm that got through my firewall? Did my machine overheat and stop something from working right? Did XP just have a senior moment? Is this some bad side effect from the last Windows Update? I have no idea....

Windley has some excellent advice for anyone looking to promote blogging within an organization. The primary one:

Don't do it if you're not prepared, as an organization, to speak the truth. Blogging promotes, but also requires to some extent, a culture of candor.

That's really, really important, IMHO - and it's one of the reasons that I'm totally unimpressed with the campaign blogs of the various presidential candidates - they are all nothing more than blow dry marketing exercises. Part of the appeal of blogs for readers is getting a much less filtered view of a person and/or an organization. If you can't handle opening up that way, then you probably shouldn't bother.

Peter Drayton writes about an interesting event at the MS PDC:

Larry O'Brien's Alternate Programming Languages BOF is happening later tonight. There was some scheduling confusion, in case anyone is wondering where/when: it's at 11pm tonight in room 406AB. Here's the BOF abstract:

C# is super and VB .NET is invaluable, but it's been argued that the greatest benefit of .NET is the level field it provides for programming languages both familiar and exotic. This session brings together language enthusiasts and implementers in a casual atmosphere to discuss and demonstrate both existing languages and works-in-progress. Does the runtime help or hinder particular programming types? Is anyone using alternate languages in production? And, is it possible for us to perform an impromptu interop-a-thon: F# -> Eiffel -> Haskell -> Python -> Fortran -> Smalltalk -> ... ?

If you're at the show, see if Smalltalk gets a mention.

I'm not sure I like the way that the new sblog is set up. In particular, have a look at the feed. That's a link that immediately issues a 302 to a relative url. I'm not sure that's a great idea; nevertheless, the fact that it wasn't working in BottomFeeder was a bug which I just fixed (in the dev stream). The problem was - I wasn't expecting relative urls in the redirect (which is a bug). That's fixed; you should be able to deal with SBlog feeds now (or any other feed that issues a 302 and redirects to a relative url)

Update: - as you'll see in the comments, the lack of links in the feed is an "out of time" issue, not something silly. So what I wrote below just makes me look bad. Oh well... removing foot from mouth...

I have another issue with the SBlog feeds though - there are no link items - either for the feed itself, or for the items. Now, I understand the whole idealogical position of "HREF Considered Harmful". That's all fine and good, but it clashes with the expected usage of the web and of blogs. Those feed elements really, really need links....

There are a few things to iron out before I can release 3.2 of BottomFeeder - but I've also started the transition to VW 7.2. That's going to be released in November, and it will require a new BottomFeeder runtime - so while I'm at it, I figured I'd clean up a few other issues. There are some packages I've decided to split out and make loadable at startup - mostly so that they can be more easily updated by end users. I've got the basics of that in order. I've also got most of the 3.2 issues ironed - the only possible worry is the new "new in tree" view, which I've gotten some reports of trouble on. I'll be looking at that and trying to reproduce.

So here's a post on LongHorn, replete with the now obligatory "It's better than Mac" yelling. In the middle of the post is something I found amusing, and kind of sad:

Speaking of Allchin, you've not lived until you've watched a group vice-president (Allchin owns Platforms, which means that he has ultimate responsibility for what goes into Windows - what you'd expect to be a fairly PHB role) go head to head with Don Box on the latter's preference for emacs (Allchin's apparently a vi man) and then write code live on stage in front of seven thousand geeks and a worldwide audience. Oh, and argue variable naming conventions too. Either a) the guy's been drilled to within an inch of his life or b) he's a quick re-learner (or, even more scary, c) he's more competent than about 50% of the dreck that wears the "Software Developer" badge)

So - to write code, neither of these people use MS tools (like, say - VS, or even an MS text editor)? They stood in front of an audience and made the implicit point that either Emacs or VI are better for code development than MS tools are. That, to me, is a marketing blunder of the first order. Wonder if anyone else picked up on it....

InfoWorld TechWatch has an interesting take on RSS - it's reached maturity with the tech crowd, while "corporate" still isn't using it much. I can attest to that - the Smalltalk engineering group here at Cincom uses RSS, blogs, and aggregators quite a bit - but our marketing group is still trying to wrap their heads around the idea. It's going to be catch up for awhile at that level, I think