Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Greg Reinacker points out a simple way to keep up with what people are saying about your product - subscribe to a Feedster search feed on your product! BottomFeeder has supported Feedster for quite some time now - I subscribe to a search feed on Bf so that I can see what is being said about it.

At the moment, this only captures a small part of the commentary on a product (probably more for a news aggregator, but that's a passing thing). Over time, as more and more analysts and industry authors start providing syndicated content, that'll change. This looks like it could be the start of a route around/beyond the (rather expensive) analyst firms - with the advantage of giving you actual feedback from real users who aren't being actively solicited for their opinions...

Sean McGrath quotes Anders Hejlsberg on distributed development and OO:

The problem with that type of programming OO is: it works great in a single process; it works quite well across processes; it works fairly well in a small intranet; but then it completely sucks thereafter.

...Whereas, we know precious little about how to scale CORBA systems in a geo-scalable fashion. We just don't. There's just no knowledge about it, and I've never heard of anyone being particularly successful doing it.

I'll agree that you can't treat distributed objects "just like" any other objects - doing so will cause problems. That doesn't mean that OO is inappropriate though. I've got a number of customers with nice CORBA based systems - Enron, and now the various successor firms, have a very nice distributed system, in both VisualWorks Smalltalk and java. Having received numerous emails from the developers - and seen the system - I know that it can be done. I also know that it's far easier in Smalltalk - these guys tried it both ways.

Anders' problem is that he's committed to doing distributed systems in a statically typed system, and statically typed systems make it very, very hard to do proxies in a reasonable way. Smalltalk just shines there (I'm sure that Lisp, Python, or Ruby would as well, I just haven't tried). Anders simply has a hammer, and he's stumbled across something that clearly isn't a nail. Thus far, it's apparently baffled him

Heh - http://www.itworld.com/nl/ebiz_ent/12162003/. I'll be putting on my flame retardant suit over here :)

I saw a question on runtime deployment and parcel loading this morning in my email; I posted on this

Dave Winer points to the RSS Winterfest - it's a conference on RSS/syndication, which looks like it will be conducted over the net. Fascinating - I can attend without ever leaving my office. The speakers look interesting as well.

More news from Dave Winer on RSS analytics:

The Clarkbot is a "Perl script written by Rick Heller. It searches the Feedster RSS search engine for references to "Wesley Clark" To be picked up by the Clarkbot, a blog must generate an RSS Feed, and that feed must be listed with Feedster."

Ignore the political stuff, and focus on what this means from a marketing standpoint. Here we have a campaign - and it could as easily be a sales campaign as a political one - aggregating commentary on itself. Why is that useful? Well, that should be obvious. In the past, it was hard to tell what people thought of a campaign without expensive help - polltakers (politics) or analysts (industry). Here's a new method - see what people are writing, and focus further efforts based partially on that feedback.

It's not definitive - but it is one more piece of information, and it's a piece you aren't getting now. Search feeds in feedster are one simple way to get this data - using a bot to scour the net for it is another. The future of analytics is unfolding here

Joi Ito talks about "blogger's block":

I've had blogger's block lately. As more people read my blog, I realize that I am writing for larger and larger audience. Just about every time I post something, I get thoughtful comments and email from a variety of perspectives. I realize that post early/post often is probably the best policy for blogging, but the rigor in which entries are discussed and the increasing percentage of people who I meet who have read my blog cause me to try to blog about things which interesting yet not something where I'm not likely to have to spend a lot of time defending myself. The fact is, I'm becoming more and more conservative about what I blog.

I know my audience is much smaller than Joi's, but I know what he's talking about - sometimes, it seems that there's too much information, and it's very hard to express anything coherent about it. On the other hand, there are days when it all just flows easily. I do think my writing is getting better; blogging has given me the opportunity to write on a regular basis. Like anything else, you simply get better with practice. For that matter, my typing is improving as well. I still don't really touch type, but it's getting closer

On the other hand, I worry a lot less about this:

he problem with many blogs is that the audience includes so many different communities of people that it collapses the facets of one's identity and requires you to choose a rather shallow facet which becomes your public identity. For instance, I know that people in the US State Department, friends from my Chicago DJ days, my employees, my family, thoughtful conservatives from Texas, cypherpunk friends, foreign intelligence officers, Japanese business associates and close friends all read my blog occasionally. In real life, I present a very different facet of my identity to these different communities, but on my blog I have to imagine how all of them will react as a craft these entries.

Ultimately, I write about things that interest me. Sometimes, other people are interested as well, and they comment - either here, on their own blog, or in email. I can't really try to write for anyone else; either what I write is interesting enough to read or it isn't. I can't really make that call. I'm not really worried about a public/private persona thing either - I purposely limit the topics I post on here. I don't engage in conversations about (electoral) politics, for instance. Why? I do this primarily to promote Smalltalk, and to comment on topics of interest (to me) in the IT sector. This is all about focus; if I started spouting my political philosophy (such as it is), I'd likely offend a number of people who would otherwise visit for news on Smalltalk. It's enough that I generate the occasional tempest in a teapot over static/dynamic typing issues.

Writing a blog is just like any other kind of writing - you have to decide what topic or topics you want to cover, and in what depth. Cover too wide a range, and you may not have enough focus to attract readers. Cover too narrow a range and you may only summon a tiny niche. It's not an easy thing, and I can't say that I really planned any of this out at the beginning. I started this blog as an experiment, and I've been very happy with how it's turned out. Ymmv.

Now the fun begins - SCO is finally telling us what they say is infringed:

Certain copyrighted application binary interfaces ( 1CABI Code 1D) have been copied verbatim from our copyrighted UNIX code base and contributed to Linux for distribution under the General Public License ( 1CGPL 1D) without proper authorization and without copyright attribution. While some application programming interfaces ( 1CAPI Code 1D) have been made available over the years through POSIX and other open standards, the UNIX ABI Code has only been made available under copyright restrictions.

Now, we get to see what's real and what isn't...

Think you have a bad project? Not compared to this guy you don't. He's got to migrate a bunch of legacy C code to Cobol....

Sriram Krishnan desperately needs to look at Smalltalk. Here's where he says we need to go:

Today, the Longhorn PDC build uses up close to 500mb of memory. If you had told this to somebody in the 60's or 70's, they would have been stunned. One thing is for sure...the programming language of the future will let us forget about the hardware underneath.

Hmm. We were abstracted away from the hardware a long, long time ago over here. The Java guys are late entrants to that game, and MS, with their .NET environment, is just starting to get in. Trouble is, Java and .NET still have static types, forcing you to consider essentially irrelevant details. Oddly enough, he's talking about functional languages in his post; someone hand him a Lisp environment :)

Two weeks ago, I was clearing snow from my driveway. Tomorrow, I'm off to play golf. The winter weather here in Maryland is just.... bizarre.

Michael Lucas-Smith has written a useful utility for detecting a "too deep" stack flow in a VW application.

Another Java developer using (or missing) warmed over C ideas. So much for doing OO...

Matt Croydon reports that you can use ssh from your phone to your PC - PuTTY for Symbian. Now, imagine using vi to edit your config files from your cell phone screen....

Cook Computing has turned off comments due to the flood of coment spam he's gotten. I've yet to receive any comment spam, and I haven't done a thing to stop it - but I'm not running one of the popular blog servers either. So far, security through obscurity has worked out....

The Anomolistic blog has a nice summary of the first President of the US - no, not Washington - the first President under the Articles of Confederation, the constitution used by the US from 1781 - 1787. There are a lot of good details that most people don't know - the period from 1781 - 1787 is very glossed over in most history classes.

Bob Westergaard notes that hibernation mode on a laptop is just like a Smalltalk snapshot. Which is why it's amusing to have a developer tell you that images are a bad thing while they snap their laptop shut...

Daniel Steinberg is upset at a comment that responded to this piece on customer/developer interaction:

It is the job of the product manager, business development manager, and marketing manager to make it their business to know what the market wants and to get customer feedback.

If your product does not meet the needs of your market or is not satisfying your customer, you need to point the finger at the Marketing department first. If their research and PRD clearly articulated the market and customer needs, then they are off the hook. Then you have to find out why the development team didn't follow the PRD.

That's the definition of a product company, and it doesn't fully apply to in-house development. On the other hand, if the developers never see a customer, they aren't going to connect that well with the marketplace - take it from a Product Manager - there's no way that marketing, PM, and sales can convey all that meaning down to the developers without some losses in translation. Developers need to have opinions as well, and it's best if they are formed at least in part by interacting with customers.

In looking over my work on BottomFeeder over the last year, I'm curious about something - what do developers using other languages do about limitations in their base libraries? No base library - not the one in VisualWorks, not the Java libs, not the .NET stuff - is ever without warts, limitations, and bugs. In VisualWorks, I have a number of possible ways to deal with that:

• I can create my own replacement for a library component
• I can override/extend/fix the component with problems

Let me explain what I mean. I use the base VW XML Parser to create documents from RSS feeds, and then use some XML to Object code that Dave Murphy created (and I've extended over time) to create domain objects. The XML parser, as shipped, will throw exceptions on invalid documents. Regardless of how you think XML ought to be, when an end user wants to see content, the fact that the feed is "broken" doesn't matter a whole lot - the software should deal with the problems as best it can. In VW, I can modify the base system libraries (and version my modifications separately) to suit my needs - so instead of bailing on bad documents, the parser instead moseys along. I guess my question is, how do you deal with that in languages where changing the base libraries is not a possibility? And bear in mind, my XML library thing is simply an example - I've done the same thing here and there with other parts of the system.

Do other developers create their own replacement libraries? How do Java and C# developers deal with system libraries that don't suit their needs? I'm curious.

From Fark:

Affleck's character was supposed to be a New York Mets fan, but the 31-year-old actor said he persuaded director John Woo to change the team to the Red Sox.

Still, it could have been worse.

"I would rather say the lines, 'I worship you, Satan,' than say my favorite baseball team is the New York Yankees," he told reporters recently, according to AP Radio.

I have a few words for Affleck:

• Bill Buckner
• Mookie Wilson
• Pedro Martinez, 7th inning, 2003, game 7, ALCS

Heh

Ted Neward points out some of the reasons why there are performance issues with many EJB applications - it has to do with developers following the rules laid out in the spec in all cases. Ted states that you hav eto know when to vary from the rules, and has this to say on the subject:

To truly criticize the EJB Specification without understanding why they made up those crazy, arcane rules is where the real crime comes in. The architect in Bob's story is committing an evil sin, to be sure, but so are you if you just take away the idea that you never want to use EJB. EJB solves one problem very very well--that of handling distributed transactional processing--in a fashion that's intended to be a very scalable model IF you play by their rules. And let's look at what those rules ultimately leave you with: a collection of objects that don't look like objects at all, but instead look more like a bunch of procedures collected together into lexical scopes (in the case of stateless session beans) or loosely-related objects (in the case of stateful session beans). MDBs fall into the lexical scope scenario, and entities were just a bad idea to begin with, so I'm not even going to consider them. (They should have been something hidden away within the implementation of the session or message bean, rather than something that could be seen outside of the container itself. Much like JDO accessed through a Connector, in fact.)

Basically, the problem comes in when you try to use EJB as distributed object technology. Funny that you might try that with an allegedly OO language :) This ties in with the comments by Anders Hejlsberg I stumbled across the other day - the ones where he states that OO and distribution are at odds with each other. Having looked at the way we do Opentalk in VisualWorks, I don't think that's true. What might well be the case is that OO and static languages attempting to do distributed objects are at odds with each other...

Scoble is on about Tablet PCs again - and does point out a few lucrative markets for them - hospitals and (large) restaurants. In those spaces, walk around devices likely could be quite big - altough I have some doubts about PC sized devices. I rather suspect that the sweet spot is for much smaller machines that can easily be carried by busy staffers. If you spend hours on your feet, you'll want to stuff the computer in a pocket. Touchpad PDA, yes. Full size, tablet, no. His last idea strikes me as funny though:

Then, take them for a walk down University Ave. Hand them the Tablet PC. Point out that the entire downtown area is a WiFi hotspot. What good is all that wireless unless you can use a computer while standing up? Now, think about all the workers who work while standing up. The teachers. The lawyers. The journalists. The newsbabes on TV.

Personally, I have less than no interest in walking and computing. I want to sit, where I can type, probably with a coffee. Walking around with a full sized screen that won't fit in my pocket sounds awful. I travel with a notebook regularly, and I want no part of that. I suspect that most business travelers are similar; a tablet (so long as it has a keyboard) is a nice to have, not a need to have. WiFi access and a keyboard that doesn't kill the hands and wrists are far, far higher up on the watchlist. I'm going to spend a truly trivial amount of time scribbling anything through a pen (or finger) interface; I'm going to spend scads of time typing. Which means a bad keyboard (hello Dell Latititude) is the thing to watch out for.

Yes, there are plenty of interesting uses for tablets. But in many of the places Scoble thinks will flock to them, I don't see it.

There's a Multi-Methods implementation in the Public Store. Looks like it was just posted yesterday; check it out - bundle name is MultiMethods. Complete with tests

From my daughter:

Martin Fowler wonders why anemic domain models are so common:

The basic symptom of an Anemic Domain Model is that at first blush it looks like the real thing. There are objects, many named after the nouns in the domain space, and these objects are connected with the rich relationships and structure that true domain models have. The catch comes when you look at the behavior, and you realize that there is very little behavior on these objects. Indeed often these models come with design rules that say that you are not to put any domain logic in the the domain objects. Instead there are a set of service objects which capture all the domain logic. These services live on top of the domain model and use the domain model for data.

Here's the 2 cent answer - most C++ programmers went from C to C++ without ever learning objects. Thus, most C++ objects were glorified structs. Later, most of the Java developers came from the ranks of these warmed over C developers - and again, they didn't pause to learn OO. What you have now is a bunch of Java (and C#) developers who think that anemic objects are objects. There's not a lot you can do about this; these folks don't know what they don't know...

The C2 feed has been repaired. It's been down for awhile; the format of the page on C2 changed, and I hadn't noticed....

The 7.2 based BottomFeeder development stream now supports Atom 0.3. The only real change I had to make was in the handling of the now (needlessly complex) link elements. I think I agree with Dare Obsanjo on this - there's really no value add to Atom format that I can see - it's just another format for us aggregator authors to support, and yet one more choice for end users to have to weed their way through. Meanwhile, some people are ramming that choice down your throat. Here's what Dare has to say:

The fundamental conceit of the ATOM effort is that they think writing specifications is easy. Many of its proponents deride RSS for being ambiguous and not well defined yet they are producing a more complex specification with more significant ambiguities in it than I've seen in RSS. I actually have a mental list of significant issues with ATOM that I haven't even posted yet, the ones I mentioned above were just from glancing at the aforementioned feeds. My day job involves reading or writing specs all day. Most of the specs I read either were produced by the W3C or by folks within Microsoft. Every one of them contains contradictions, ambiguities and lack crucial information for determining in edge cases. Some are better than others but they all are never well-defined enough. Every spec has errata.

The ATOM people seem to think that if a simple spec like RSS can have ambiguities they can fix it with a more complex spec, which anyone who actually does this stuff for a living will tell you just leads to more complex ambiguities to deal with not less.

Higher levels of complexity does not lead to less ambiguity; it leads to more. Why? Well, think of any board games or card games you know - which ones generate rule arguments - the ones with long lists of rules that attempt to cover all possible situations, or the 1-2 page rulebooks that tell you what you need to know? This is why RSS, with it's supposed problems - has few actual problems in the wild. Meanwhile, watch atom feeds that crop up to vary wildly, as different template authors interpret the complex rul structure in subtly different ways. Bah, humbug.

Clarence Westberg thinks that the Web Services game may be bringing the value of Javs down:

"Microsoft couldn't have executed a better divide-and-conquer war plan than the one that's being handed to it on a silver platter." David Berlind writes that in a future dominated by vendor-independent web services standards, the divisive Sun-dominated Java world is a ball and chain around IBM, keeping it from otherwise competing with unencumbered Microsoft. [Source: ZDNet]

His main point is that the spread of web services brings to phones what the spread of web apps was supposed to do on pc's - make the resident OS less important, and the remote one more so. This may play out better on phones than it does on PC's:

For instance, "As cell phones and PDAs become commodities, the value of device-resident software (such as operating systems, games, and other programs that run within the devices) will approach zero. Few people will pay more for a Java-based phone than for one that isn't. But the value of extra-cost and remotely hosted services for those devices will continue to increase. These services include mobile e-commerce (m-commerce), instant messaging (IM), location-based services (LBS) such as advertising-driven restaurant finders, and many others."

If that's the case, then time to market will start to matter more - and anything that allows you to build web services aware applications quickly will be useful. We (Cincom Smalltalk) have already started supporting smaller devices - and we've got good web services support. This may well be an opportunity for non-Java and non-MS solutions to get looked at

Slashdot reports that the dedicated hacker can redirect the OnStar service to publically available (read, free) services with some effort.

Websites and message boards are rife with step-by-step instructions to personalize OnStar's navigational and communications components. When a driver requests directions from OnStar his GPS data is routed over an analog cellular network to OnStar computers and the directions are read back to the driver on the same network. The price for this service is around $400 each year. Those who tap into their OnStar systems pay no such fees."

Imagine explaining this to grandpa :)

So now Beagle 2 is incommunicado. I guess the Martians don't want us to send robots :)

ISerializable links to the Dropload site - sounds like a highly useful service:

Dropload is a place for you to drop your files off and have them picked up by someone else at a later time. Recipients you specify are sent an email with instructions on how to download the file. Files are removed from the system after 48 hours, regardless if they have been picked up or not. Recipients can be anyone with an email address

There have been so many times I could have used such a thing...

At our recent planning meetings, we talked a fair bit about documentation (both written and online) for Cincom Smalltalk. Here's a link to our current thinking on documentation; please send comments to me

Slashdot reports that a researcher found post civil war era Smallpox scabs used in live vaccinations. I guess you never know what you'll turn up in old books...

FTP access to Cincom Smalltalk is down at the moment; our IT staff is taking advantage of the Christmas/New Years break to upgrade the corporate firewall. As they configure it, various services will be intermittantly unavailable; FTP is off at the moment. Expect things to be back to normal after the turn of the year. Http access is still working.

What to get for the dead guy who had everything: A glow grave. No need to let death stop your internet access....

Steven Den Beste has written a fascinating article on intelligence - the nature of it, and how it's modified (in people) by certain technological advances. It's a hard article to summarize; there's a lot there. I'd just recommend that you read the whole thing.

Scoble thinks he knows why Smart Displays failed - he says it's cost of the display units. Partially, but that's not the major reason - the major reason was client OS licenses. Consider a presumed home user of this:

• Server in the closet
• 4 Smart Displays

Not only do you need to lay out $1K per display, you need to lay out for multiple revs of XP, or figure out how to set up Terminal Services (or Citrix). What you really want is something like X11 (technically speaking). I suppose the biggest issue is Microsoft's business model - their model really, really wants you to buy more clients, and a terminal type usage pattern just doesn't fit that.

Taegan Goddard (political blog) quotes Dave Winer, who linked to this Scotsman piece. Dave is crossing a lot of boundaries with his blog, and understands something that a lot of the folks over in the Atom crew don't - a good message that can be easily consumed is better than a "perfect" message carried by a "perfect" format...

Windley points out that the Clark Campaign is embracing open source. Meanwhile, Dave Winer isn't too pleased by this:

Wouldn't it be great if Dean and Clark went after Viacom, ClearChannel and Time-Warner, instead of the tiny companies that make blogging and social networking tools.

I find myself hoping they get their asses kicked, hard. I don't expect much of Bush, but I doubt seriously that he would undermine the mostly American software industry by competing with it with free software. Makes the Dems' pitch about exporting American high-tech jobs to India fairly hollow (NH is a high-tech state, so it has been an issue).

There's some self interest in that, as Userland was originally Dave's company. This is all part of the general push/pull between open source efforts and commercial software. Clearly, a political campaign doesn't want to spend money on technology; like a movie, a campaign is a short-lived business, and it doesn't need to spend money on ancillary things. On the other hand, I can see where companies can get upset over this; we face open source alternatives to Cincom Smalltalk all the time.

Where I part company from Dave on this one is simple - companies like Userland (et. al.) should have considered approaching the various campaigns with free usage in exchange for publicity deals. There wasn't going to be license money from any campaign - but there could easily have been free PR. That in turn could have meant license revenue from others who saw the product being promoted that way. This wasn't a failed business opportunity; it was a missed marketing opportunity

Ok, maybe I'm just naive. There are topics I avoid on this blog - but I can't say that I agonize over the content. Sam Gentile is in a different place:

Which brings me back to the meaning of the blog. The problem with getting very popular in blogland is that there becomes less and less you can say. Every word has to be evaluated on what it might say to people, say to clients of mine, how will it affect relationships, is it meaty enough, and on and on. You end up virtually agonizing over every post and then there are so many things you can't blog on.

I don't know. I guess I can understand the worry, but hey - I write what I write, and it's what I feel like writing. If other people are interested, that's great - but I'm not so worried about this from a popularity contest standpoint. Now admittedly, I'm not an independent consultant - Sam is, and that does impact his choices in ways that don't (at this point, at least) impact me. If people disagree with me - and they do - there are comments and email. I guess I just have to be me :)

People who didn't already know the LoTR plot