Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

The Western States Infomration Network (WSIN) is using blogs to share information. WSIN shares crime information across several western states and their associated law enforcement agencies. Until recently, they shared this information via email and normal web pages. The difficulty was simple:

• There was lots of duplicate email
• Getting something on a website was a chore

Enter blogs - they found a way to allow any authorized user to quickly push information to their servers, in a way that any authorized user could easily check. I wonder if they use RSS internally? This is a very cool use of blog software, IMHO

Michael Lucas-Smith has noticed that the ECMA implementation in VW can directly access Smalltalk object now. What does that mean? Well, it means that you can add scripting to your Smalltalk application

• In a scripting language that lots and lots of non-Smalltalkers understand
• That exposes as much of the power of your domain model as you want

And all in a way that doesn't require you to create the scripting implementation. Very, very cool! Check it out in the public store

Scoble rhapsodizes about handwriting recognition on the Tablet PC. Yes, this is cool, and yes, it will have a lot of utility - within some market niches. For most people using a computer - who have access to a keyboard all the time (I am writing this in the O'Hare airport, for instance) - it's pretty much a yawner. I don't really touch type, and I still type way, way faster than I write. By a lot. To me, this all still falls into the nice to have, but not a reason to buy bucket.

Ed Foster details an inexplicable message Network Solutions just sent to all (or most) of their customers:

The last time we saw Network Solutions/VeriSign harassing its customers this way, a spokesperson described the message as a "friendly reminder." But those were e-mail messages designed to get customers to log into their online account managers. What's different about this latest snail mail is that it only provides a toll free phone number as a means of contacting NetSol to update your supposedly invalid account information. No wonder callers encountered long hold times.

So let me get this straight - they send out a vaguely worded, but threatening sounding mail, requiring customers to call a toll free number to respond. Since the mail sounds odd, many customers call to find out what's up - and encounter long wait times, further enraging them. Now that's how to make customers happy

Bossavit points to the all to common game of blockhead in development. Run in fear when you see it!

This blog entry discusses making an application look more like standard applications on a platform - like Windows or Mac - where that matters. While the discussion is on Swing and Java, it's relevant to VisualWorks developers as well.

As part of the Java settlement with Sun, MS is dropping support for a number of products as of December 15 of this year (2003):

The products targeted for phase-out are those that embed Microsoft's Java Virtual Machine technology.

Other products on the Dec. 15 phase-out list include: Office XP Developer and Office 2000 Developer editions; Office 2000 Premium Service Release 1; BackOffice Server 2000; Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA) 2000; Internet Explorer 5.5; and Visual Studio 6 Microsoft Developer Edition.

Wow

Here are some interesting thoughts on why internal blogs are less successful than public ones at Microsoft - and quite possibly elsewhere.

Jeremy Zawodny says that RSS is "good enough":

Remember when you first starting seeing URLs appear on billboards and at the end of movie trailers? So do I. It's going to be like that. One day we're just going to look around and realize that RSS is popping up all over the place. And a couple years later, we'll all wonder how we ever got along without it.

Forget Atom/Pie/Echo/whatever. It will be RSS. RSS may not be perfect, but it's good enough. That train left the station quite a while ago.

Atom may well work for a posting API (although, with the number of "angels on the head of a pin" arguments that take place on the Atom list, I have my doubts about that) - but as a syndication format, it's just not going to happen.

The Register reports that the Segway could be the birth of the robot as foot soldier. Give them red eyes and cue Hollywood....

Watch this not work. As much as we want to limit spam, legal remedies aren't going to work for a global internet - a spammer using a server in Asia, who resides outside the US. Sending email through that server is not under the jurisdiction of the US in any way shape or form. It's time to face up to the reality that free email is the problem....

Interested in tracking news (not necessarily software development news) in your aggregator? Via Dave Winer comes news of new feeds from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

• From Page Feed
• Daily (local) news Feed

Dare Obasanjo talks about why source code access is useful for a subset of end users. BottomFeeder has made sources available since the first release - check the public Store

Jeremy Zawodny has an interesting scenario laid out:

One day Bob has a great idea in the restroom and rushes back to his desk (after flushing and washing his hands, of course) to jot some notes on his weblog before he can pitch the idea to the board of directors. However, what Bob doesn't realize (or even understand, really) is that MovableType had TrackBack auto-discovery enabled. As part of that blog entry, he links to a post on Scott's Feedster blog (like I did just now). MovableType happily sends Scott's blog a TrackBack ping with the title and an brief excerpt of the entry (like mine did just now).

Bottom line - if you adopt internal blogging, make sure you understand the way it's configured.

I added support for news headline feeds (dynamic searches) awhile back in BottomFeeder - now today, I just learned that Yahoo News supports search feeds. So, I've extended the news feed support, allowing you to select either the headline service or Yahoo for topics of interest. The latest development stream supports this now.

Scott Johnson relays a story on a mysterious Outlook problem:

I just got a call from a good friend who is running Outlook 2000 on Windows 2000 and their PST file has just, plain, **poof** disappeared. Very odd. I confirmed that the file wasn't there but I'm looking for options / answers. Anyone have any thoughts? And, no, the person's company doesn't backup individual machines. Madness I say, just madness.

I'm wondering if the PST file hit 2 gigabytes and just vanished. I know that PST files automatically corrupt at 2 gigabytes but I didn't think they disappeared.

Wow. If I lost my Eudora files I'd have huge, huge problems

Scoble links to an MS top ten challenges for 2004 site. It's clear to me that on security, they still don't get it:

Significant progress has been made in 2003 and the company has made a strong commitment to improve the security situation in 2004. "Microsoft knows exactly what it needs to do to improve the security of its products. The main challenge is one of discipline"enforcing a consistent set of patch technologies and procedures across traditionally independent product groups," said Michael Cherry, Lead Analyst, Operating Systems at Directions on Microsoft

Microsoft clearly has no idea. The biggest problems are far simpler. Enable the damn firewall by default. Ship Outlook (etc) with all the scripting stuff off by default. Stop trying to have mondo fixes - do the simplest things first.

Windley reports that the Utah legislature now has an official news feed. If voters in Utah start using that, it'll help create a much better informed electorate. This is e-government at work.

The Telegraph (UK) is supporting RSS now. I got this from Stephen Cohen, via Dave Winer. They have a really wide categorization of feeds.

We are pleased to announce Smalltalk Solutions 2004. This year's event will be in Seattle, Washington, May 3-5. For exhibitor information, contact Joy Murray. If you are interested in submitting a proposal for the technical program, contact Alan Knight. Get your reservations made! Participation information may be found here

This scenario.

heh

From the VW Wiki:

It's always going to be hard for something new to get a look in. There is, of course, the economic reason that, for example, C/C++ guys are two a penny but Eiffel and Smalltalk guys aren't.

This is one of the most misleading abuses of statistics around. Just because the probability that you hit a C++ programmer if you throw a rock into a crowd is very high, does not mean that the probability that he can replace _your_ C++ programmer is any higher than finding a replacement Eiffel or Smalltalk programmer. Because you have to weed through tons of idiots who only _claim_ they know C++, the effort required to find a real replacement may be significantly lower for Eiffel or Smalltalk. Besides, if you can find a good programmer, chances are very good that he will be able to learn any programming language you use reasonably well in the time it would take to find a good C++ programmer. And learning from the sources of the previous programmer is a lot easier than learning the language from scratch in a general, application-independent way.

I have actually witnessed this. A company I worked for got a new manager level that was completely superfluous, so the new manager had to prove to herself that she had a real job, and spent a lot of time arguing against using languages that were not mainstream, and basically made it hard to use anything but Java, and many good people quit. Then a Java man got seriously ill. She was unable to replace him in the 5 months he was away. The other Java men could not do his work. To her amazement, choice of language mattered less than the other skills the programmers had. The conclusion from this story that this manager actually arrived at was that it was bad to have skilled programmers -- she alone should make the design decisions and programmers would simply implement them. She could now return to her policy of using only mainstream languages and hire only unskilled programmers who lied about knowing a language. As far as I know, nothing interesting has happened at that company for a long time.

This is actually just common sense. Unfortunately, it's all too uncommon in this industry.

Miguel Icaza talks about scripting support (Python, in this case) on .NET. The question isn't scripting languages; it's dynamic languages, and certain specific things:

• DNU (doesNotUnderstand) - very, very useful for Proxying
• #perform type behavior
• changing classes and/or other objects at runtime (#become: and friends)

Generally, it's not whether a language is a 'scripting' language - it's how dynamic a language is. For instance, #Smalltalk (an implementation for .NET) - does not support the last item on the list above.

The formal announcement:

Sorry for the delay, we know you have been waiting to hear

Smalltalk Solutions 2004 is Coming Soon!

We've been to the East Coast.
We've been to the Midwest.
And we've even been to Canada...
So this year lets head out west! We're going to Seattle!

What:	Smalltalk Solutions 2004 Conference
Where:	Crowne Plaza Seattle
When:	May 3-5, 2004

To participate in the technical conference, go to the participation page or contact Alan Knight

To become an exhibitor or a sponsor, contact Joy Murray

For more details make sure to visit our website

See you all in Seattle!!

If you are interested in the ongoing development of Cincom Smalltalk, point your browser here for details. We are just wrapping up our planning meetings, and that's a brief snapshot of what's coming.

If the last post wasn't enough information on what's up with CST, check out the proposal from our documentation team

No matter how much Schadenfreude this gives me, this CNET Report on the ongoing DDOS attacks on SCO aren't a good thing. It doesn't make thos who oppose SCO look reasonable in anyone's eyes...

After each release of Cincom Smalltalk, we have a set of planning meetings. I just spent a week in Santa Clara, with the entire Smalltalk engineering team. These meetings are compressed; we have a lot to talk about, and - relatively speaking, at least - very little time to talk. Our development staff is very widely spread out - we have staff in Santa Clara (office), Cincinnati (office), Oregon, southern California, Ontario, Illinois, New Hampshire, Germany, Pennsylvania, France, Japan, and India. I'm located in Maryland. What that all means is that our planning meetings are really the only chance to get the entire team in one room all at once. Sure, individual product area teams get together from time to time - but this is different.

We try to go over the just completed development cycle - so that we can see what mistakes we made, and how we can improve in the future. In my role as Product Manager, I lay out the product priorities going forward, and engineering, in turn, tells me what kind of progress towards those goals I can expect (based on existing work in progress, resources, difficulty, etc.). We also plan out the delivery schedule for the next release.

That all keeps us going for many hours over the course of 3 days. It's always a useful exercise, even if many of us come out of the process a little bit frazzled. The good thing is, we have the holiday season coming up, and many of us on the Smalltalk team have lots of days of vacation built up - so we have plenty of time to relax, refresh, and get re-invigorated for the next round of work coming up.

Doc Searls has everything you ever wanted to know about radio propagation.

Ward Cunningham joins Microsoft.

Brad Abrams points out an interesting issue with the managed/unmanaged divide in .NET:

The GC does an amazing job of managing managed memory. We really work hard to make sure pages stay hot, and the memory is cached where you need it. But the reality of the world is that for many folks it is not just managed memory they have to deal with. Often you have to deal with memory allocated by legacy APIs in an unmanaged heap which the GC does not directly manage or external non-memory resources. We added a couple of neat features to the CLR in Whidbey to help address these issues

Interesting problem.

Greg Reinacker (NewsGator author) has an interesting discussion on his site - should an aggregator download full content (even if the feed does not contain full content) for offline viewing? That's an interesting question. It would be simple to support such a thing in BottomFeeder, but - as Greg and others bring up on his site - that's going against the wishes of the content provider and starting to act more "robot" like. I think if I added that to BottomFeeder, I'd have to make sure that I respected robots.txt when doing so. It's an interesting crossing point for aggregators. Thoughts?

Dave Winer talks about the "tempest in a teapot" issue of markup in titles - it has been one of the primary complaints of the Atom crowd. I've continually failed to see why this gets so much heat from the Atom crowd. As Dave says, the RSS spec on this is silent on markup in titles - but the fact is, the spec talks about markup in description - which leaves it fairly clear that markup in titles is discouraged. This is hardly an issue worth baking a new spec on anyway. All RSS really needs is a best practices document to stand alongside the spec....

Remember all those arcade games you played as a kid? Well, be prepared to feel very, very old when you read what the PS2 set thinks of those games

Blaine Buxton doesn't think much of this idea, and neither do I - licensing software engineers:

We can't even agree on what best practices are, much less enforce them. This industry is more akin to a craft than an engineering discipline anyway....

Via Dave Winer - an online discounter, where searches for their various catalog items are accessible in dynamic feeds. This is exactly the sort of use case that non-geeks are going to be looking for.

If you have been downloading the 7.2 based dev stream updates to BottomFeeder, then you've likely noticed a few feeds that suddenly started updating again after a hiatus. I have been working on the part of the feed processor that deals with RDF - and a few of the updates went out with insufficient testing. It is the dev stream though, so you can expect some of that. Part of the distraction was from Cryptonomicon - a very engaging, but also very long, novel. I'm looking forward to reading Quicksilver, his latest book. I'm hoping it has a better ending than Cryptonomicon; it seemed to just thump to an ending after a lot of interesting action.

William Grosso covers the bases on both ideas pretty well.

Through the magic of ReplayTV, I just finished watching the two day miniseries Battlestar Galactica. I watched, but was never entralled by, the original series (and don't even ask about that last season - bleah). This was much better. Interestingly enough, the effects were not really the best part of the show - the characters actually had some depth. It's clearly trying for a prime time series slot, and I think it would be worth it. Other than SG-1, there's just not that much good sci-fi on tv right now (and no, Enterprise doesn't count as good sci-fi).

Thornton May at Computerworld has a weird idea:

Herein lies the disconnect. McNealy and his senior team are spooky smart and have thought hard and long about how our industry works. The top of the house at Sun has architected a plausible, affordable and practical alternative path to the Microsoft hegemony.

Unfortunately, this message isn't the one being delivered by the Sun sales force, which is perceived by most IT leaders as being little more than coin-operated box sellers. Sun's sales force is the least influential and respected of all the major vendors.

This is just too amusing. So Sun's sales guys are selling the wrong stuff, and it's because they lack vision? Let me explain something very, very simple about sales reps - they sell based on their compensation plans - i.e., they try to sell what will best reward them. Who sets those rewards? Why, that would be senior management - you know, those guys that Thornton May seems to think are Spooky Smart. So smart, in fact, that they have set up the sales compensation plans so as to prevent the sales of the things they claim to want to sell. Do I know this for a fact? No, I haven't seen the Sun comp plans. However, I have worked with direct sales staff for years, and I know how they operate. If Sun's reps aren't selling something - across the board - then it's an artifact of their compensation plans

I think Thornton May needs to go find a different set of adjectives to describe Sun's management.

Dave Thomas is using RSS to track his to do list:

My most recent experiment was with the simple ToDo system in Apple's iCal application. I ended up with lots of ToDo's in there, but unless I left the iCal window open all the time, I kept forgetting them. I just didn't look at them often enough.

So, I spent the last 15 minutes writing a quick hack: a Ruby CGI that takes the ICalendar format .ics files that iCal produces, extracts the VTODO items, and reformats them as an RSS feed. I then subscribed to this list inside my aggregator, NetNewsWire. So far, I like the result: my ToDo items are just another list in my aggregator

That's a great idea. Unfortunately, I don't keep my to do's electronically, so I can't just parse them to RSS...

Ed Foster points out that MS - like many other vendors - is forbidding benchmarks as part of their standard contracts:

Is it possible Microsoft has something to hide about the performance of its server and developer products? It's hard to escape that conclusion when you see how many of its license agreements now contain language forbidding customers of those products from disclosing benchmark results.

The Cincom Smalltalk team is always happy to see customers run and publicize benchmarks, even when they don't look good. We don't pretend that we can run our software under all the types of use cases that our customers do; the only way we can improve is if we know where the problems are.

The MS clauses are worse than most; take a look at this:

Note that Microsoft's censorship clause doesn't just say you can't publish benchmarks " it says you can't disclose them at all, presumably to anyone, without written permission from Redmond. That leads to all sorts of interesting hypothetical questions. Suppose, for example, your boss asks you to run some performance tests on Exchange Server 2003 to see if your company should deploy it. Can you disclose the results to her without bringing Microsoft police knocking at your door?

So what are MS and the other vendors afraid of?

ComputerWorld has an article on CMM and outsourcing. They have some interesting thoughts on the mismatch between organization types:

"CMM is a great discipline, and it is a great designation to have," says Bart Perkins, a Computerworld columnist and managing partner at Louisville, Ky. based Leverage Partners Inc., which helps CIOs manage IT suppliers. "But the reality is that if an outsourcer is at Level 5 and the client is at Level 1 or 2, the client doesn't have the internal discipline to take advantage of the Level 5 provider's standardized routines."

Defining system or project requirements is a prime example. "With CMM, the entire requirements process is very rigidly defined. A Level 5 requirements document is very detailed and explicit and has metrics associated with it," Perkins explains. "But a company at a CMM Level 0 or 1 could have their requirements on the back of an envelope and no metrics. The Level 1 companies are lucky if they write out two pages."

The upshot, says Perkins, is that touting a CMM Level 5 rating to a Level 1 buyer "comes down to touting a feature that's of little value. It's like a car salesman in Alaska touting a car's great air conditioning. It may be great, but you can't take advantage of it."

Heh. I seem to recall that only a few years ago, the completely specified, over the wall to IT and back again later methodology of development waqs being denigrated. So it's a good thing if we can get software that doesn't meet our actual requirements, so long as it comes in cheaper? Organizations that don't flesh out a detailed requirements document with metrics aren't necessarily broken - it may be that they are being honest with themselves about how much they know ahead of time. What this tells me is that CMM 5 done overseas is just BFUD, only with less communication with actual users. That's good how, exactly?

Larkware News talks about Log parser, a useful sounding tool:

Q. What is Log Parser?
A. It's a command-line tool from Microsoft that lets you run SQL queries against almost any sort of Windows log file, and get the results out to an array of destinations, from SQL tables to CSV files.

If it works as advertised, that sounds like a useful tool to add to the bag.

Dare Obasanjo explains - unofficially - some of the rationales for censoring benchmarks:

I'm not sure what the official line is on these contracts but I've come to realize why the practice is popular among software vendors. A lot of the time people who perform benchmarks are familiar with one or two of the products they are testing and know how to tune those for optimal performance but not the others which leads to skewed results. I know that at least on the XML team at Microsoft we don't block people from publishing benchmarks if they come to us, we just ensure that their tests are apples-to-apples comparisons and not unfairly skewed to favor the other product(s) being tested.

Yeah, I understand that theory. I'd rather be open, and meet bad speech with more speech though. Regardless of your reasons, having a license that forbids benchmarks without prior approval is going to come across as hiding something

Ryan Lowe makes some good points about outsourcing, and how to deal with it.

I've been working on something experimental for BottomFeeder. I've got code for eliminating the feed list folder completely - at startup, and feedlists would be folded into the subscribed folder, and from that point forward, any feedlists added would come in as folders and feeds. No more artificial separation between feeds and feedlists, it all just becomes one seamless whole.

Now, I haven't versioned this into the public store yet, nor have I deployed it yet. What I'm wondering is, how useful is this? I rarely use feedlists, so I'm not the best judge of this. Any Bf feedlist users want to chime in?