Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Last year, I spent a fair bit of money on a 51" Sony TV (stupid me, buying it right after the Super Bowl). It was very nice, and I've spent many happy hours watching DVD's on it. Lately, we've noticed that the colors are off - it's been flashing a lot of green. Well, this takes me back to the warranty information - yes, less than a year old, should be covered. Thus began another saga of "offshore and clueless support staff" lotto.

Day one

I call Best Buy, where I bought it. This, at least, was efficient. No extended warranty, I have to call Sony. Off the phone quickly, look up the Sony phone numbers, and call. After way too long navigating an automated system who's "options had just changed" (do any options ever stay static? For any automated system?) I get a real person. This is where the trouble starts

I explain the problem, give the tv's serial number and model number. He asks for the purchase date, I give him that. He tells me that I should get a call or email back within a few days with information. I grab his call center ID so that I have some evidence of the call.

Day 2, three days later

I call support again, wandering through the automated system again. Finally I get a person. After re-explaining the problem in depth, I'm told that I have to haul the 51" tv off to a service center. I explain that

• I paid a large amount of money for this TV
• If I move it, there's a really good chance I'll do additional harm
• I don't have a truck, so hauling it will cost me a truck rental (2 actually, for the round trip)

This gets me nowehere, as this guy is clearly just following a script. I ask for a superviser. His response to this is interesting - he marks my case critical and says I'll get a response in 24 hours by phone or email. I grab his call center ID as the call ends

Day 3, next day

I get a call from Andy at Sony. He actually sounds like he wants to solve my problem - after I start explaining that I don't think I should haul my tv to a service center, he tells me there's no need - this tv qualifies for in-home service. Remembering that I have someone helpful, I don't explode. He gives me the names and phone numbers for 3 local service centers which will be able to help me out, so long as I have a receipt to show them. Having that, I thank him - but I also point out that the call centers I got did not even hint at the possibility of in-home service. He tells me that he'll follow up on that, and the call ends.

I immediately call the first place on the list - and they tell me that no, they only service TV's sold by them directly, and that they will be calling Sony to remind them of this. Gritting my teeth now, I call the second place on the list. Finally - a place that wants to help. They take the purchase date, model number and serial number - and tell me oh, that's a known problem - we'll order parts, and call back with a service date. I thank them, thinking - known problem??

With a car, a known problem gets me a recall. I would be much more disposed towards another Sony purchase if I'd been notified of this known problem. I'd also be more disposed to buy Sony again if the call centers I'd gotten had had accurate information - instead of lots of go away so we can close this call information

And there's the problem, I'd warrant - Sony sent their call centers offshore to save money - the first two I spoke to had those hard to place accents typical of the genre. These call centers likely have some incentive to close cases quickly - probably as part of their basic contract. Now here comes the kicker - do those policies and contracts lead to better service for the customer? No, not at all. I went through the same exact crap with ReplayTV last year. The problem with outsourcing support is not that the function goes overseas - it's that the function goes to an outside vendor who's incentives are all set by the contract you sign with them - and not by actual care or concern about the actual problems of the customer. This becomes abundantly clear whenever you have to be the end consumer of outsourced support - you have to push up at least one (sometimes two) levels before you can get anything that resembles support. Sometimes, as with Sony above - you don't even get accurate data. What you do get is an attempted brush off, as quickly as possible.

I'm going to start asking more support questions when I buy higher end products. I'll happily pay extra if support is provided by the same company that sells the product. Why? Because the employees will have a stake in the customer's problem. I understand outsourced phone support from a business perspective - it looks like it saves money. The question to ask is, just how many future customers are you ticking off and losing that way? Sony, take note - you'll be last in line next time I look into an audio-visual component.

Ted Leung points out one of the reasons MS keeps winning - they understand marketing, and they glom onto new directions in marketing very, very quickly:

Sara Williams of Microsoft announced the Microsoft is doing a Planet MSDN. Of course, theirs is called blogs.msdn.com, which makes total sense. They are using the weblogs.asp.net infrastructure, and I have to give a lot of credit, because these folks were among the earliest to aggregate blogs for a development community. Maybe they'll fix their infrastructure to do 304 and Gzip.

This led me to think about other commercial development communities, which led immediately to Java. So of course, there is java.blogs, which has been out for a while. weblogs.asp.net is to javablogs.com as blogs.msdn.com is to part of java.net. And indeed java.net is aggregating bloggers. Unfortunately, the blogging activity at java.net is very, very low. If I was a Java engineer, I would be begging my management to let me put some content up on java.net. Among the early adopters, Sun looks distinctly unclueful on this.

I have some sympathy for Sun on this - I've put together a Smalltalk blogging community, and there's no way to force content - all you can do is get interesting people blogging, and hope that the content comes along. On the other hand, Microsoft has done that - they have a very large community of bloggers, both internal and external. They have people like Scoble cheerleading both internally and externally, they have lots of their product managers and project leads blogging - and they've got a growing community of users blogging, mostly about MS stuff (take a look at Sam Gentile's excellent blog, for example). Now go back and look at Sun - as Ted says, it looks pathetic

The Smalltalk community's efforts are as big as I can manage on my own - I created the blog server for this site, I'm writing BottomFeeder - it's fulltime work. With that said, anyone that wants a Smalltalk oriented blog should contact me. I can get you set up quickly, and I'm on the lookout for more community bloggers.

Dave Winer points to a developing RSS Module for "The Sims". There's a use case I wouldn't have guessed in advance.

Danny Ayers shows us how the Atom effort is stuck on how many angels fit on the head of a pin type discussions. These guys need to realize that "good enough" solutions beat "perfect" every day of the week....

Don't like the way VisualWorks formats things in the browser? Try this:

FormatterConfigurationTool open

I've been meaning to comment on this piece from Dare Obasanjo for awhile. In the meantime, go read it.

I just found out that the SciFi channel has a news feed. The cool thing is how I found it - the Feedster "feed of the day" feed. Keeping up with the doings of the SciFi channel should be easier now.

This CNN article is kind of sad:

The Walt Disney Co. is expected to close a feature-animation studio in Orlando, Fla., on Monday, jeopardizing the jobs of nearly 260 animators, the Orlando Sentinel reported Saturday.

There's plenty of good animation happening outside of Disney these days -- it's just kind of a surprise to me that Disney couldn't keep up...

I'm just about to release the 3.3 release of BottomFeeder. This release is based on VW 7.2, so upgrading will require replacing the base image and VM (non windows) or base executable (Windows). Your saved files will all be handled just fine by the upgrade; there's been no change to the formats. What's new?

• Upgraded BottomFeeder to the VisualWorks 7.2 runtime. Users must download the new runtime.
• Initial Startup time has been greatly speeded up
• A complete overhaul of the posting tool. Thanks to Michael Lucas-Smith for all of his work and suggestions!
• How many items to cache can be set on a per-feed level now
• Feeds can be set to auto-browse individually, as opposed to the global setting
• Fixed a number of bugs and limitations in the feed auto-discovery module
• Improved the update tool
• Added two new feed builders - one for the Headline news service, one for the Yahoo news service
• On Windows, we now have better support for Unicode character display
• Added Support for Atom 0.3 syndication format
• Added support for the wfw comments module - Bf now follows per item comment feeds, inlining the comments (as per the includedComments support)
• Improved the Http package's handling of cookies
• Added a 'Flag for followup' property to items. Items may be marked as being flagged, and all flagged items can be viewed as a group
• Some minor UI layout tweaks in the main UI

There's a number of other "under the hood" changes that won't be immediately noticeable, but will result in a better application. We are working to get the doc updated, and expect to have 3.3 out shortly. Stay tuned!

I guess we have to support Windows 98 for a long while yet - with days until the announced end of life, MS just back-pedaled - it's supported through June 30, 2006 now. DOS lives....

I agree with this post - anonymous content is valuable. There's a long history of anonymous content in the US; Benjamin Franklin published anonymous screeds after the Constitution was ratified. If a person thinks it's safer/better/easier to publish anonymously, then who am I to argue? Heck, I host an anonymous blogger here.

The Queen Mary 2 sails - looking for all the world like a 1920's or 1930's era luxury liner.

Smalltalkers, get your browsers revved up:

ESUG Innovation Technology Awards
The European Smalltalk Users Group (ESUG) is proud to announce its first Innovation Technology Awards. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, 500 Euros, 300 Euros and 200 Euros during an awards ceremony at the next ESUG conference (6-10 september 2004, Köthen, Germany). Developpers of any Smalltalk-based software are welcome to compete.

Eligibility

• Any Smalltalker can apply (students, companies, ...)
• The presented piece of code/software should be written in Smalltalk or directly support Smalltalk (e.g. Smalltalk VM)
• All Smalltalk dialects are accepted
• The applicant should own the copyright/copyleft of presented code or at least be the official representative of the copyright/copyleft owner
• The presented software should be recent. It should have been finished after the 1st january 2002.
• The software should be free for non commercial use.

How to apply?
Applicants should provide :

• a short paper (in PDF format) up to 3 A4 pages in 12pt font with :
• keywords for the entry, and
• Smalltalk platforms it runs on, and
• whether it is a free or shareware, or a professional piece of software,
• names and affiliation of developers, and
• description of their software, and
• one or more screenshots of their software, if possible, and
• a runnable demo (available for download or on a CD).
• Descriptions and demo location should be sent to bouraqadi@ensm-douai.fr

Evaluation

• Winners will be selected by votes of the conference attendees.
• Pieces of software will be downloadable from the ESUG website 2 weeks before the conference to give people the chance to evaluate it.
• Every applicant can give a 10min talk/demo during the conference.
• Then, conference attendees do vote.

A vote consists in providing a sorted list of 3 prefered pieces of software. Voters should provide such a list based on their preception of software's:

• Innovation and Creativity
• Stability and Performance
• Successfull use

Winners are softwares which ranks top the most often.

Dates

• Applications (see requirements) should be sent by july 1st
• Notification of eligibility will be sent by july 31st
• Demos, votes and the Awards Ceremony will take place during the ESUG Conference, 6-10 september 2004, Köthen, Germany.

I'm curious about the "finish date" - January 2002?

Charles Miller is tired of stupidity. With regards to the silly "theory" that the moon landings were faked:

So after going through the usual gang of of objections 14the stars and shadows, and so on 14and extracting grudging admissions that the chance of a conspiracy that big and with that many people involved staying secret so long is incredibly low, we ended up back at the same old place. It's just my opinion that it never happened. Opinions can't be false, right?

People believe they have some right, some moral imperative to hold any stupid opinion they want. I'm sure in the USA, it's even Constitutionally protected. You have the God-given right to hold any damn opinion you want, even if it runs counter to every single fact you've encountered.

Where's my God-given right not to be subjected to stupidity?

I'm with him on this :)

The authors of Feed Demon and of NetNewsWire say that they will reject malformed xml out of hand:

NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons recently announced that NetNewsWire's future support for Atom will require Atom feeds to be well-formed. Some people aren't too happy about this, claiming that he's applying a double standard that will make Atom appear less useful than RSS.

So, I'll add to the stink by stating that my plan is the same as Brent's. FeedDemon will also support Atom, but if an Atom feed isn't well-formed XML, FeedDemon will display an error rather than try to parse it. In fairness I have to consider this decision open to input from my customers, but I want to explain why I believe this is important.

I'm already off the reservation with BottomFeeder. It doesn't handle anything thrown at it, but it does ignore as many problems as it can. I use the standard VisualWorks XML Parser, but I do intercept and ignore a bunch of the error conditions. Why? Because it's an end user tool, and many of the end users are never going to report the problem as malformed xml - not to me, and not to the author of the bad feed. What they'll actually do is hunt around for a replacement aggregator that will handle the bad feed. That's the reality of it, and all the hand waving in the world isn't going to change it.

I'm not about to use a different set of code to deal with Atom than I do with RSS either - especially since Atom is the same blasted thing, with slightly different tag names.

CNN is reporting on steak gone wrong:

SEATTLE, Washington (Reuters) -- The city that spawned America's obsession with strong, dark coffee is giving locals a popular new coffee-flavored steak, even while the mad cow scare that started in Washington state is putting some people off beef.

Rippe's, a local waterfront steak and seafood restaurant, began serving filet mignon steaks dusted with Starbucks Corp.'s dark espresso blend a few weeks ago and now has a runaway hit on its hands.

Blaine Buxton hears the sound of lost productivity, and doesn't fall for it again.

And this is why I don't miss Java: Joy Of Java. While you're at it, read the rest of the blog for a lot of fun reads. This guy knows what he's talking about and is very entertaining to read. But, I remember pain like this when I was doing Java. I tell ya I don't miss the 10 minute start-up time of a Tomcat servlet so I could find out in less than 2 seconds that I had to restart it because I found my problem. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. It's nice not to have to restart the web server everytime you want to debug new code (yeah, I know about hot swap, but it only works on simple method changes....). Lots of languages can keep their web services up and running while you're programming in them though (think scripting, lisp, smalltalk, etc)...

That sound you hear? It's the rest of us busy being productive while you restart your services....

It seems that MS gets it on blogging. In a post describing a meeting with various bloggers at MS, and with a marketing manager, Chris Sells relates this story:

And then Adam Sohn from marketing talked about the need to police ourselves, describing some of the downsides in regards to blowing some group's launch plans or unconstructively criticizing another group. He preached caution when approaching the line between what was good for the customer and what was good for Microsoft. After listening to what I began to interpret as a message of self-censorship, I asked Adam a warm up, "Isn't it true that a lot of the stuff close to the 'line' is what our customers find most valuable?" He agreed that it was. And then I asked Adam my real question, "So, when we get close to that line, do we err on the side of our customer or ourselves?"

Now, you have to remember that I've been a contributing member of the Windows development community for a lot of years. I've seen how aggressive Microsoft is in everything it does to always be on top. So when I asked on what side of the line I should come down, I fully expected to be told to keep the shareholders in mind.

I think there's a simple reason that MS understands how and why blogging works - above all else, MS is a marketing machine. They are all about getting the message out to customers and prospects. They seem to have realized that blogging is (or can be) another marketing channel. Sure, a less controlled, more chaotic one - but a channel for information nevertheless. Additionally, they seem to have figured out that a lot of developers and IT managers are tired of the perfectly processed messages they get fed every day from vendor marketing machines. Blogging allows them to get that same message out, but in a more authentic voice.

This is the point where you should be asking yourself how many bloggers your company has...

Charles Miller writes on a topic I've touched on more than once, and makes a lot of sense in the process. Go read the whole thing.

Dare Obasanjo talks about products that are so good that communities organize around them and advocate - without the help of the vendor's marketing department:

The interesting thing is that I find myself to be one of these people. Whenever I start talking to someone who doesn't have a TiVo about owning one the conversation eventually a sales pitch. I've found that talking to people about the iPod to be the same way. Halfway through the conversation there's the frustration that washes over me because I can't seem to find the words to truly express to the person I'm talking to about how much the iPod or TiVo would change that aspect of their lives.

To some extent, the Smalltalk community is like that - but that isn't enough. At least in the IT world, you need some level of backup from the vendor(s) in order to convince your management...

The Register explains (snicker) spam oddities...

There's a mailing list for Squeak Smalltalkers in China: squeak-cn@lists.squeakfoundation.org. They list Liang Peng as an additional contact point. Go Smalltalk!

I'll be speaking to the NY STUG in New York City on January 28th:

James Robertson, lead developer for the BottomFeeder project and whom has an uncanny resemblance to the Cincom Smalltalk Product mananger, will be demonstrating BottomFeeder and discussing technical issues such as the use of Web services, http based communications and so forth. BottomFeeder is an open source RSS viewer which provides for viewing of BLOGS. BottomFeeder is built using VisualWorks Smalltalk.

Details:

Date	Jan 28th, 2004
Location	Suite LLC offices
Address	440 9th Avenue, 8th Floor
Time	6:30pm to 7:00pm -- Open house
Time	7:00 to 8:30 pm -- BottomFeeder presentation.

Directions:

Take E or C train to 34th (Penn Station) walk to corner of 34th and 8th. Walk up one block to 9th. RSVP is requested. Please send mail to: charles@ocit.com with subject line of: NYC Smalltalk Jan 28, 2004. Our meetings are opened to the general public. Invite a friend !

To join our mailing list simply send mail to charles@ocit.com. Joining our list will give members access to all of the presentations and articles maintained on our site.

Any questions send mail to charles@ocit.com

See you there!

This is the look of momentum - Ted Neward - author of a forthcoming book called "Effective Java" - is going to be the editor of a community site called TheServerSide.Net.

Dave Winer says that users care about things like feed quality:

Greg Reinacker says his aggregator will continue to accept bad feeds. This may make his competitors look like idealistic dreamers for thinking it would serve users' interests if they spend more time designing and coding new features and less time working around bugs in content. With all due respect, I think Greg is wrong about users. They do care about quality.

That all depends on the user in question. Technical users - like, say, the ones involved in this discussion - care. Non-technical users might well care, but not in the way you might think. I think of my neighbors, in sales and teaching. They use computers, but are not the least bit technical. Last year, after they got a PC back from their vendor support, it couldn't print. They had no idea how to fix the problem. Likewise, if they start using an aggregator, and it throws some error message at them for a feed, they won't have any idea what it means, nor will they care. They may stop using the feed; the may try another aggregator; they may get turned off on the whole notion of news aggregators. Rest assured, notifying the producer of the bad content will not be something they would do.

Now, consider - are most software users like us, or like my neighbors? I think the answer is clear, unless you aren't thinking very hard. This explains why non-technical users like Windows and Mac, and don't really like Linux - because it's too hard. End users want software that works like their TiVo or their ReplayTV. Minimal setup, easy to interact with, and - outside of absolutely critical errors - doesn't bother them with trivia. To an end user, having a non-compliant character in a feed item is trivia. Ask yourself this - would you want your stereo to inform you explicitly everytime it comes across a flaw on the CD you are trying to play? or do you want it to compensate and move on?

So what if Nicole Ritchie were a developer?. Heh

This accident happened maybe 15 miles from where I live. Sounds like a tanker trailer carrying gas fell off an overpass, onto I 95, and then blew up when a truck on 95 plowed into it at highway speeds. Video footage from the scene showed the highway had melted. Matt Croyden has a picture on his site

We've got another community blogger here - Sean Malloy. Subscribe to his feed here. Sean's just learning VisualWorks, and I look forward to hearing about what's easy and what's hard from the perspective of a new Smalltalker.

Mark Pilgrim explains in complete detail why insisting that clients reject invalid xml out of hand is a bad idea. The best part is, as I write this, he has four perfect examples:

Norman Walsh (invalid XML), Danny Ayers (invalid XML), Brent Simmons (invalid XML), Nick Bradbury (invalid XML), and Joe Gregorio (invalid XML claiming to be HTML) have all denounced me as a heretic for pointing out that, perhaps, rejecting invalid XML on the client side is a bad idea. The reason I know that they have denounced me is that I read what they had to say, and the reason I was able to read what they had to say is that my browser is very forgiving of all their various XML wellformedness and validity errors.

All of those folks have been extremely insistent that aggregators should reject bad content out of hand. All of those folks have invalid feeds on that basis right now. The lot of them need to read the rest of Mark's post; they should consider what he has to say carefully. Here's how I checked the validity myself:

I used this code to check whether a feed was valid xml - it just grabs the source xml, and tries to parse it - without handling any errors

source := 'http://inessential.com/xml/rss.xml'.
parser := XMLParser new.
parser validate: false.
doc := (HttpClient new get: source) contents.
^parser parse: doc

I used this snippet of BottomFeeder code to make sure that the invalid xml was getting handled:

doc := Constructor  
	documentFromURL: 'http://bitworking.org/index.rss' 
	forceUpdate: true 
	useMaskedAgent: false.
cls := Constructor determineClassToHandle: doc.
target := cls objectForData.
feed := cls 
	processDocument: doc
	from: 'http://bitworking.org/index.rss' 
	into: target.

In each case, the simple parse fails with an error, while the BottomFeeder framework deals with the error and produces the content I want to see.

Joe Hewitt hasn't been paying attention to development trends much:

What I'd prefer instead is if I could purchase the features of these apps on a more granular level, and plug them into my workspace for working with photos. I want Photoshop for its drawing tools and filters, Picasa for it's slideshow, AOL for sharing and publishing, and ACDSee for thumbnail browsing. I'm tired of dealing with Picasa's bizarre UI for selecting photos, AOL's weird way of retouching them, Photoshop's image browser which knows nothing about my Picasa collection, and ACDSee's awkward zooming and panning tools.

MS has tried that (more than once) - DDE, COM, now .NET. All make that idea (some more, some less) possible. Sun tried it in Java - Beans (client) and EJB (server). Heck, it was tried long before that (Lisp machines, Smalltalk machines, Lisp systems, Smalltalk systems). The problem is, it's not really feasible - it's non-trivial technically speaking (having multiple components from multiple sources that don't communicate beforehand be able to snap together and agree on basic domain issues), and the economics is even harder. If I'm going to write a component for one part of that, I need a whole application to test it with - and I may as well sell the whole application. The only place this has really taken off is at the UI widget level. At the business component level, I have doubts whether it ever will

"24" seems incapable of discarding old characters - the show has moved the ball three years out (I still wonder about last season's cliffhanger) - and still, old characters pop up. Can't the writers think of something new? Now I see that Joss Whedon plans on bringing back more of them on Angel. At least with Joss, there's a chance of threads being tied up, but still - move the ball forward!

I do some pre-processing of incoming feed items in BottomFeeder, for a variety of reasons. Unfortunately, there was a bug in my pre-processing code that hosed off pre tags - making code snippets appear very badly. I just fixed that, and pushed out an update - both for the upcoming 3.3 dev version, and for the existing 3.2 release. That should make posts with pre tags appear properly.

So it's not enough that SCO is torqueing off their customers, and not enough that they can't respond to the judge's demands in their case; now they have to send out referer spam? Good gosh, just how stupid can this outfit get?

The mafia comes to "The Sims Online":

Alphaville's a tough town, the sort of place where even the street-smart are rarely safe and newcomers are often eaten alive. You can call the cops, but they usually don't arrive in time. That's why so many Alphaville residents seek justice by hiring guys like Jeremy Chase. He runs a band of thugs who'll gladly deal out ugly punishments for the right price. Chase, a 26-year-old resident of Sacramento, runs the Sim Mafia

Art imitates life...

Randy says that tools that handle bad feeds (like, say, his earlier today) are broken, and tools that reject bad feeds are good. In other news, war is peace, white is black, dead is alive....

The comments feeds for the community blogs have actually been broken for about a week - I made a change, putting the descriptions into a CDATA block - and forget to modify the generator appropriately for comments. It's fixed now, and all should be well again.

Ted Leung reports that Planet Apache is on the air. There's an RSS feed as well. Anyone working with Apache on a regular basis should subscribe...

This post sums up the issue quite well:

So, what's all this have to do with the controversy over the handling of badly formed XML? A simple observation: people will write forgiving XML parsers because they can.

Via the PoMo blog, I came across this interesting article on advertising. It's an interesting take down on the lies that the advertising community has been telling itself for years:

Did Nielsen ever offer more than a gross proxy for the real television audience? No, but that was okay, as long as that stand-in was big and growing (and the one with the most buying power). Were media planners ever blind to the implications of magazines inflating circulation numbers with cheap subscription drives? Even in the days of the two-martini lunch, everyone knew that the value of the impression had to decline. It's just that nobody much cared to do anything about it. Certainly, nobody from the agencies would; and even advertisers blithely ignored it because there was no alternative to TV other than print. Those four-color spreads were so beautiful.

I've often wondered about the actual value of print ads. Sure, you can target an audience by picking the right magazine (or program, or even website). But can you get them to pay attention to the ads? I know that I blip over the ads, and pretty much always have. The dirty secret about TiVo and ReplayTV is how little they've changed things. Sure, they allow us to flit right past commercials - but how many of us actually paid attention anyway? Pre-DVR, there was the fridge, the newspaper, the magazine, the person next to us on the couch. How many people actually watched the ads? Heck, how many were ever convinced by them?

Take cars - Do we actually buy them based on ads, or based on some level of individual research (even if it's only a brief look into Consumer Reports?) This actually points to a partial answer to the problem - content. You can get people to pay attention to marketing (advertising) if the content is useful and interesting. If all you have is glossy ads with pictures, I don't think you'll get very far. If, on the other hand, you have content that explains what your product or service actually does, and why it would be useful - then you've got something. Now, I'm not going to state that the creation of meaningful and rich content is simple - it's not. I do think that it's more valuable than the concept ad you pay mega-bucks to a high priced advertising firms for though.

An example in the software world - have you seen those absolutely stupid IBM Linux ads running on TV? Sure, they look good - but do they actually tell me anything? There's a confused looking kid sitting in a chair, with a bunch of adults periodically talking to him. Is there any point at which I'm told what problems are solved? Heck, is there any point at which I'm told what products or services are being talked about? Contrast that with the old Chaplin PC ads from the early 80's - they were cute, and interesting - and also showed us what kinds of problems a PC was likely to solve. What do these new Linux ads tell me? Absolutely nothing. The only winner is the advertising agency - and I'm sure that all the folks there behind the ad are patting themselves on the back over how terribly clever they are. Meanwhile, those of us actually watching the ad have no idea what it means, or what product/service we should inquire about. That's the kind of advertising that will be on the way out. Content is becoming king, and high concept art isn't content - at least not in any marketing sense

This looks interesting - a webcast conference, where many of the 'attendees' are joining remotely. I've registered, and intend to listen in. It will be interesting to see whether this kind of thing works or not.

NASA has moved the Rover off the landing gear - and they have some nify pictures:

The Rover looking back at its tracks:

The Rover looks ahead

There's more at the Mars main page

Well, we now know that MS engineers know that OS X is Unix. The trouble is, they seem to have used a really old Unix reference manual when they built Word for OS X - Arcterex noticed that Word on OS X enforces a 31 character limit on filenames - and I just got verification on that from another OS X user, Alan Knight. Amazing, simply amazing....

Spotted in Sean McGrath says that Java (the language) is going to subside, with the JVM itself being targeted:

Groovy adds more grist to the dynamic typing mill. Java the language is on its way to becoming the assembler of the 21st century.

• Its there for a reason and does its job well.
• It can be programmed directly if push comes to shove
• Day-to-day work targeting the JVM is best done in something more productive.

It's really a pity that the JVM sucks so hard for dynamic languages - this would be a great way for Sun to add value over .NET, if they actually had a clue

Blogging Roller links to a very interesting paper on blogging and markets. The thing is, this paper has value whether you buy into blogs or not; some of the main thrusts are valuable insights in any case:

There are certain issues to be stressed here. First, it is obvious that unless the weblog is unique, it 19s not going to work. Weblogs are an attempt to break free from the dehumanised, standardised, conformant with corporate guidelines on how to address an audience PR speak. This is why they work and Macromedia 19s Tom Hale gets it when he says 1Creaders should perceive the weblogs as the thoughts of community managers instead of corporate shills 1D. No doubt. But then he says that they wouldn 19t have been true blogs if they had put them on Macromedia.com. Why? Is it OK for employees to speak with a real voice but it 19s not OK for companies to do so? Primarily, it 19s a matter of mindset. Organisations have been stuck with rigid frameworks for way too long. It 19s only because of these mind frames that companies are compelled to traffic their voice to press conferences, press releases, investors and shareholders reports. Channelling one company 19s voice into routes more dialectic than traditional corporate outlets has been frowned upon as a mere illusion. But there is no illusion here. It all depends on your definition of a company and corporate (or marketing) communications.

This is perhaps the biggest issue that many organizations face - no one wants to read another breezy press release, and few believe the claims anyway. Even if you have useful information to convey. Think about restaurants - what claims do you put more value on:

• The ones from an ad?
• The ones from a restaurant reviewer in the newspaper?
• The ones from people you actually know who ate there?

I'd guess you put weight on those from the bottom up - and that points out the issue with most corporate websites - the information is top down, and that's the least persuasive form of information for an awful lot of people. The nice thing about a weblog is that it puts a face and a voice on the corporation, which puts it at the level of the reviewer (at least) - and possibly at the personal level eventually. That can only be helpful - look at the reviews at Amazon, for instance - sure, there are bogus ones there. But I look at them when I cruise Amazon for books on "counterfactuals" (like this one by Harry Turtledove, for instance). I don't always go with the reviews, but they do help me out - and I put more weight on them than I do in the publisher's blurb. Likewise, the thoughts of your lead developers and project managers - and the commentary provided back from actual users - are going to be given more weight than the product announcement.

In any case, I recommend the article. There's a lot there, and I don't agree with all of it - but it's a thought provoking read

Sean Malloy links to this wiki page, which offers tips for Smalltalkers coming from a C style language. There are some other useful links there:

• Smalltalk for Java Programmers
• Syntactic differences
• Smalltalk for the Java programmer

Some good resources there...

US Senators are starting to syndicate content - here's hoping we see more of this sort of thing.

Via Scoble comes word that PR News Wire is offering a feed. The march of RSS into the world of marketing is continuing.

The Register reports that a couple of bozos have patented a naming convention:

The Net's two biggest registrars of domain names are being sued for infringing an email and domain name patent granted last month.

The lawsuit, filed yesterday in California, claims Network Solutions and Register.com are liable for selling, specifically, .name domains. It claims undisclosed monetary damages and an injunction against the sale of any more domains.

US patent 6,671,714 - "Method, apparatus and business system for online communications with online and offline recipients" - is owned by Frank Weyer and Troy Javaher, both of Beverly Hills in California, was filed in November 1999 and approved on 30 December 2003.

What's next? Patenting surnames?

Joi Ito goes on and on and on about the 'power law' of web (and blog) linking - the power law being, more or less, that the earlier you get in, the more linkage you get:

I think we are going to see an explosion in work designed to alter the construction and effects of this inevitable inequality (viz Sifry's experiments on moving recent blogs up the Technorati list) and I am optimistic about this change, as I believe the concentration of real thought and energy on what is actually possible, as opposed to cycles wasted on utopian declations, will be tremendously productive.So I'm glad Clay is willing to consider what we might do about the fact that the most influential blogs are by people in positions of privilege

It's all about content. Post interesting stuff that people want to read, and you get noticed. Post boring stuff no one cares about, and you don't get linked. It's really that simple. The 'top bloggers' may have had a first mover advantage, but they only stay at the top by being interesting. The main limiting factor I see in coming into contact with new stuff is the sheer volume limitation - for me, there's only so much stuff I can track, even using an aggregator. On the other hand, I have dropped stuff that has gotten stale, and added stuff that looked interesting as time has gone by. Meanwhile, Joi is worrying about how Technorati lists stuff. That is so not the problem. You want readers? Be interesting....