Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Via Scoble comes this link to a Business 2.0 story on corporate blogging:

So here's my prediction: Blogs will soon become a staple in the information diet of every serious businessperson, not because it's cool to read them, but because those who don't read them will fail. In short, blogs offer an accelerated and efficient approach to acquiring and understanding the kind of information all of us need to make business decisions.

Makes me wish this were the late 90's, when I could have tossed my blog server code at naive VC's and gotten showered with funding :)

Scoble assumes it's all or nothing - I posted on the Joel piece yesterday. Here's Scoble:

The argument still exists. Do you go for the better programmer productivity of .NET? Or do you go for the faster download speed of, say, Visual C or Borland's Delphi? (Nick Bradbury wrote FeedDemon in Delphi, for instance).

MS didn't have to have forced that choice on people. I use VisualWorks Smalltalk to build things like BottomFeeder. The download for Bf on Windows? A single executable, 7.2 MB. Smalltalk is a runtime based system, every bit as much as things like Java and C#. But guess what? I don't have to force the download of all the libraries on my users. Not to mention that I can provide them with on the fly updates over the web. And worse than that, I'm the Product Manager, not an engineer - what do I know that MS' top technical talent doesn't?

For starters, I know what technology to start with....

Dave Winer has been using PubSub to track references to himself - I tried using PubSub for Smalltalk and BottomFeeder references, and it was doing a much worse job than Feedster. I've got support in BottomFeeder for adding Feedster searches easily; I can't do that with PubSub because they have this whole email registration system. That discourages use, to my mind.

The spammers continue to try and use language to defeat bayesian filters - I just got one that used text from one of the "Wizard of Oz" books:

One Wizard is worth three Sorcerers

Ah, you shall prove that, said the Prince Then he again lay down and began to examine his electrical traveling machine

We Mangaboos have, at the present time, one of the most wonderful Sorcerers that ever was picked from a bush; but he sometimes makes mistakes

Bonus points to anyone who can identify which "Wizard of Oz" book that comes from!

Frank Hayes of ComputerWorld has a theory:

So why would SCO want to be sowing all that weirdness and confusion?

Could it be for the same reason that SCO has had such trouble coming up with convincing examples of copyright infringement? And credible evidence of IBM contract violations? And a viable defense against the lawsuit Red Hat filed against SCO last August?

After all the success SCO's management has had using legal threats to pump up the stock price from less than $1 per share to more than $20 late last year, could it be that SCO's executives -- or at least its lawyers -- figured out months ago that SCO hasn't got a case against Linux?

Could it be that they keep piling on the lawsuits and the rhetoric for fear that if they stop now, SCO's stock price will collapse and they'll be buried by shareholder lawsuits and an SEC investigation?

He lays out why their latest suit is so odd pretty well, I thought - although, not being a lawyer, what do I know? Either way, I like his summary. It seems very plausible to me

Someone else who should look at Smalltalk to simplify his cross platform needs....

We just got back from a show at Medieval Times - and it was pretty entertaining. The jousting and sword fighting were pretty well choreographed - and I don't care how long they practiced, the fighting that involved maces held some actual danger. The food was surprisingly good as well - very tasty soup and chicken. My daughter had a blast, especially after one of the knights threw her a banner he had pulled down during one of the jousting tournaments. All in all, it was a fun time, and I'd recommend an outing to anyone.

If you use BottomFeeder, and have your upgrades set to the dev stream, you'll notice a change to "slim mode" - instead of a cut down window, it's a Ticker style scrolling window with the titles of new items. Double clicking on an item will go to it in the main window; closing the ticker will re-open the main UI. If it turns out you don't like that never fear; there's a UI option in settings to go back to the older slim mode. This is something of an experiment; I'm using Ticker code provided by Michael Lucas-Smith, and I don't know what people will think of it. Comments and suggestions are welcome!

Syndic8 now supports Atom. Heck, BottomFeeder has supported it (both 0.2 and 0.3) for months now. This is creating a problem though - Atom was supposed to create a single, well specified format. But wait - Blogger is now pushing Atom Feeds. What we'll end up with is at least 3 (and probably more) variants of Atom, starting with 0.2. The end result will be every bit as confusing as RSS has been. I'm hardly the first person to notice this - Charles Miller commented on this a few days ago. The spec is still being argued over, and clients (Bf and other news readers), search tools (Feedster) and web based clients (Bloglines) are already supporting it. The unbaked 0.2 and 0.3 formats are now going to live forever - because no format ever dies on the net.

Here's a funny hack for the TiVo - Follow this link to see RSS feeds scrolling on a TV screen over the picture. So there's a TiVo based RSS client out there now :)

John Porcaro is talking about conversational marketing. It's not the only thing you need to do; the "traditional" stuff certainly has its place. What's important is offering not just information, but some option for feedback and questions. It's hardly the case that the typical website answers all your questions; what do you do to get answers? Email contact points are only useful if you actually receive an answer in a reasonable timeframe - there have been plenty of times that I've gotten answers very, very slowly. Here are the salient points from John's post:

• Post information on your company or product website that is: A) relevant, B) current, and C) written in a human voice. If there's a reason for customers to come to your site, they'll come.
• Offer a way to ask for and collect feedback.

That second point is the more important one. This blog helps me get feedback; I get the idea that the various MS bloggers are helping MS get feedback as well. It's a useful channel that lowers the barrier for customers and interested parties

There has been a text selection bug in the html pane of BottomFeeder for awhile now - but I just received a fix from Holger, who develops Twoflower (the html component in Bf). Some text selections may still look odd (seem to be missing characters in the selection itself) - but a copy will pick them all up now. Hit the update tool to grab the latest Twoflower - both for the dev stream and the normal production stream. Thanks Holger!

Diego Doval has a nice summary of his decision making process for deploying a server on Linux or Windows (or something else). In going through the whys and wherefores, he's provided a useful example of why one might go with Linux - and a particular Linux at that. Well worth reading.

Gordon Mohr sees a fox guarding the hen house:

If the Anti-Virus companies were really sneaky, they'd also sell spam-filtering solutions.

Then, their flood of spam-triggered spam would drive up demand for those products. And, because the spam-triggered spam is comparatively easy to filter, its volume pumps up the reportable "effectiveness-rate" of simpleminded spam-blocks.

Oh, wait, they are really sneaky!

He may be onto something there...

I'll be watching the game later - friend down in Virginia wants us all to see the game in HD, and that should be interesting to see. I don't really care about the outcome of this game; my team (the Giants) forgot how to play football this season - mostly, they seemed to be playing "give the ball to the other team and watch". The Yankees, they aren't....

Inspired by Dare's work, I'm adding the concept of search folders - synthetic feeds - to BottomFeeder. Look for it to show up in the dev stream soon.

The super bowl was actually a very good game this year. Most of the first half was a defensive struggle - and then bam - the last 5 minutes was an adrenaline rush. The second half picked up where the first half left off - and didn't let go until Carolina lost with 4 seconds to go. And that's without the celebrity breast at halftime :) Great game, I think the best Super Bowl I've ever watched. Now if I can muster the motivation to finish off search folders for Bf...

PCWorld reports that the DDOS attack on SCO has taken them off the air. Now, as much as I enjoy watching SCO take hits, this isn't the best way to do it. In fact, it's liable to create sympathy for SCO in legal circles that we really, really don't want.

I've got an initial implementation of Search Folders done for BottomFeeder. What is this? Well, the search tool allows for searches of content you have already downloaded by title, text, or category (or all three). What I've done is allowed these searches to be saved as a synthetic feed. A synthetic feed looks just like a normal feed in the tool, but is organized into it's own search folder, and is updated on demand from within the tool - a re-execution of the search in question. It turns out that this is a feature I like a lot, so here it is! To have a look, grab the dev stream update

Joi Ito has an interesting take on ADD and psychiatry in general today - thought provoking, worth reading:

Now I'm back to trying to figure out what parts of my personality I should change and what parts of my personality are actually features and not bugs.

A valuable question to ask, I think.

Sci Fi reports that there's a possibility of less suckage in Star Trek: Enterprise soon:

Cinescape Online is reporting a rumor that an overhaul may be in the works for UPN's lackluster Star Trek: Enterprise. Citing an anonymous source, the site reported that Paramount Television Productions president Garry Hart may make changes to the show's production staff after February sweeps, including the possible replacement of longtime executive producer Rick Berman.

There's been some improvement this year with a consistent story arc - maybe if they ditch Berman and find some actual writers things could really improve. What I'd really like to see is a long term decline in the "second story line" problem. The second story line on Trek this year is at least consistent, developing a relationship between Trip and T'Pol. In year's past, the secondary story lines often sucked the life clean out of a show (especially on DS9 and Voyager; gads).

Sci Fi Wire reports that "Indiana Jones: The Geriatric Years" is going to start shooting. Thrill to Indiana in the rest home!

These bozo parents have hit on the perfect way to make their child's life miserable:

HOLLAND, Michigan (AP) -- Tacking Jr. or II onto a boy's name is too common, a new father decided, so the self-described engineering geek took a software approach to naming his newborn son.

Jon Blake Cusack talked his wife, Jamie, into naming their son Jon Blake Cusack 2.0.

The reality is, kids with "oddball" names suffer at the hands of other kids - you can call it unfair all you want, but it's the way it is. This is the sort of bozo decision that this poor kid will suffer with for years....

Windley has some pointers to Transcripts of the RSS Winterfest talks.

CSC is working on killing morale:

Workers at CSC's San Diego Regional Center (SDRC) found out that there will be no holidays or sick days allowed through the end of the fiscal year, according to docs obtained by The Register. The is the second year in a row that employees have been forced to give up their vacation days to meet lofty productivity goals, and the practice has left a bad feeling in the workplace.

"Apparently, the SDRC have made a bad business forecast, and we loyal worker bees are supposed to rescue them by forgoing vacation," writes one disgruntled employee. "They basically want everyone to take 2 weeks vacation and our 9 holidays and never get sick. Many of us acrue 3 or 4 weeks vacation per year."

That has to be one of the most clueless things I've read about in a long while - and having worked at ParcPlace back in the day, that's saying a lot. Reminds me of a gig I did at American Airlines (years ago) when I worked for Booz-Allen. One day, the project lead on the Sabre side had a meeting with the project lead from our side, and said something like: "I work 12 hour days - your people should work 12 hour days". So we were told to:

• Work 12 hour shifts
• Only claim 8 hours a day for billing purposes

Morale stank on that job. We all pulled 12 hour days - but a lot of that time was spent doing crosswords, playing computer games, drinking coffee, and just hanging out. It baffles me as to what managers are thinking when they decide that they can get something for nothing from their staff - there's always a price - it just might be delayed or deferred...

Feedster is providing an online aggregation service for InfoWorld. That looks kind of cool...

Brian Marick writes about the interviewer/interviewee problem:

Dave Liebrech talks about people who are not business experts interviewing people who are. He uses investigative journalism as a model. What struck me most was this:

The interviewee *believes* the interviewer has a perspective different from their own, or has an incomplete understanding of some of the areas.

This brought something else to mind for me - accuracy and what we believe based on what gets reported to us - through any outlet. Think about the last time you say any technical topic being discussed by a reporter (possibly even in the trade press). If it's on TV, radio, or in a general newspaper, it's highly likely that there were many slip ups and factual errors (my friend Mike likes to point to Consumer World reviews in this regard). So when we read these things, we laugh about the inaccuracy - and then move on to reading about subjects we don't know as well without batting an eye.

What the interview thing raised for me is this - just how accurate is the rest of the stuff I read? If the tech journalists can be so far off base, what about about the political, economic (etc.) journalists? Just how much of what they report is being filtered not through bias (about which one can read tons of material) - but through sheer ignorance? It's probably a good idea to look at all journalism with a very, very jaundiced eye...

Via Doc Searls comes a link to James A C Joyce on why blogs are boring. This kind of strikes me the way complaints about bad TV or radio strike me - are people unaware of the "off" switch?

James Britt points to #Smalltalk - Don and John's work is starting to get noticed by the .NET crowd.

The Register tells us why the scourge of viruses won't end anytime soon:

Was the vector some l337 0-day 'sploit? Nope. Was it a complex multi-layer program leveraging several unpatched vulnerabilities? Nope. It was -- wait for it -- an executable attachment in an email. What genius! The author of Novarg (or MyDoom, or whatever you want to call it) really put his noodle to the test when he cooked this one up, huh?

So long as we have users that will open anything they get sent in email, we'll have this problem. Even better anti-virus systems won't help much here - the sorts of users that will open anything are highly unlikely to install (and keep updated) an anti-virus system. Sigh...

One of the things that recently got a lot better in BottomFeeder is character and font handling. I have to thank Alan Knight for most of the improvement - his work on Web Toolkit has given him a lot of experience dealing with encoding on the web. Here's how things work in Bf:

• Download the XML (RSS or Atom) page from the server
• Parse the XML into Objects
• Display the feed data to the user

The difficulty came right there at the beginning. The HttpClient in VisualWorks will use the correct encoding to get the content from an Http response object - assuming that the encoding has been set in the header. If it's not set, what it does is assume (as per the standards) that the content has been encoded as iso-8859-1. The trouble comes in when the content is sent without a content encoding header, and is encoded in something other than iso-8859-1 - you'll end up seeing a lot of bad characters in the resulting stream of data

Well, that's the standard way of dealing with this, and so - in some sense - "correct". The trouble is, end users couldn't care less about following standards if it means crappy looking text to read. The upshot is, I had to start playing some of the same games that I suspect browsers play - looking for other encoding information in the text. At the moment, Bf looks in two places:

• Once I have the content, I scan through looking for <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" tags. If I find one, I go ahead and grab the encoding set there as the proper one to use
• I look in the XML attributes for encoding information - things like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding=. Again, if I find that I grab the encoding information

Well, at this point we have a problem - the content has already been decoded as iso-8859-1, and, based on the new encoding information, we know that's wrong. What to do? Here's where Alan's tip saved the day. The following code snippet sets things right:

decode: text with: encoding

 	^[(text asByteArrayEncoding: 'iso-8859-1') asStringEncoding: (encoding asLowercase)]
		on: Error
		do: [:ex | text]

That undoes the iso-8859-1 encoding, and then decodes the text with the proper encoding information gleaned from the document. The results of this simple snippet of text have been really good - I'm seeing far fewer garbage characters in the text of the feeds I access. I still see some (especially in the Meerkat feeds), but I can't do a lot when there's no encoding information at all - iso-8859-1 is as good a guess as any in the complete absence of information.

This is the sort of thing any user-agent on the web is going to have to go through. For good or ill, encodings simply are not universally set in the http headers. Maybe they should be, but they aren't. I don't expect it to get better either - remote hosting services pretty much ensure that

Proving that politics invades every field, this development in the ongoing Atom/RSS imbrogolio takes the cake.

Via StronglyTyped, a nifty map of WiFi hotspots in North America

This story has some interesting things on food safety:

Cutting boards are another area of concern. Turns out that wooden boards are safer than plastic, because the cellulose in wood absorbs bacteria but won't release it. Plastic absorbs bacteria in a different way. "When a knife cuts into the plastic surface," said Professor Dean Cliver, of the University of California at Davis, " little cracks radiate out from the cut. The bacteria seem to get down into those knife cuts and they hang out. They go dormant. Drying will kill, say, 90% of them, but the rest could hang around for weeks."

Makes sense; that's why plastics that you send through the dishwasher often get dyed the color of things you wash - the plastic absorbs it all. This is the part that runs counter to lots of "conventional wisdom":

In one experiment performed by Professor Cliver, raw chicken juices were spread on samples of used wood and plastic cutting boards. Both boards were then washed in hot soapy water and dried, then knives were used to simulate cutting vegetebles for a salad. No bacteria appeared on the knives cut on wood, but there were plenty on the knives used on a plastic board.

We use glass, which I think obviates the whole issue. But I'm sure a lot of people use plastic thinking it's safer. Sometimes it's what you know that's not so that's most dangerous. Read the rest; fascinating story.

I might be able to make some progress on getting BottomFeeder packaged for the Mac this week. One of the engineers has gotten me VNC access to a Mac, and I should be able to get the packaging done - it doesn't look hard at all. I'll post again on this subject if/when I achieve something!

I've followed the packaging directions for OS X that come with VW (amazing what happens if you read the shipping documentation) - and I think I have a "proper" OS X packaging on the download pages now. I'd appreciate hearing about any issues this packaging has.

Lisp and Ruby users have a few words about J2EE as well:

J2EE applications tend to grow like cancer until all resources of the host have been consumed. At my day job we've written over one million lines of Java implementing a simple internet marketplace. We do use a code generator to do most of the grunt work, but only because we cannot create the necessary abstractions within J2EE. Using a code generator is like enumerating all the parts and assembly instructions for a house instead of just writing "home". Java has no meta.

The MS .NET crowd is in the same boat....

After a couple of suggestions from engineering, I went through my build again, and made sure that all the networking code that should be there is on the build. There were some Mac specific classes that I think may have been being stripped out of the build; in any case, I've got a new OS X build attempt posted. I've got it structured as an OS X application - something I can do without having a Mac. I'm in the process of getting access to an OS 9 machine (remotely) that should allow me to do a build for that platform as well. I'll gladly take any and all feedback on the latest OS X build I've posted.

I found this post via a Feedster search for BottomFeeder I use to see stuff I might otherwise miss. I noticed that there was a reported issue with the Atom support - and sure enough, it wasn't quite right. It turns out that the Blogger Atom feeds are set up slightly differently from the ones I tested against (off the Atom Wiki). This is what I love about early adoption of in-development specs - everyone goes their own way, and tool builders end up having to support all the variations. In any event, I just posted an update to the Atom support in the Dev stream for Bf; I may try to extract it for the normal update stream as well.

Ted Leung has some interesting comments on the dangers of promotions. Linking to a Fast Company article, he quotes:

Picasso wasn't interested in becoming a curator. Meryl Streep is an extraordinary actress, but that doesn't mean she wants to or would be any good at running a studio. Why does corporate America insist on taking your job away from you if you're good at it and serve it up as a promotion?

It's not quite that simple; there are, in fact, people who want to move up the chain. For the most part though, this fits - we all know plenty of former tech people in management positions - many of whom don't belong there. Heck, this makes me wonder if the huge failure rates in IT projects is related to this problem. The problem is twofold:

• Convincing corporate managers that they can keep us happy without promoting us
• Convincing ourselves of this same fact

The latter point may be the hardest - the reality is, even with increased pay, many people would consider years in the same position as being stuck.

Ben Hammersley points to a summary of RSS by Mark Pilgrim, which documents the existence of 9 different (and incompatible) versions of RSS. This is one of the prime reasons that news aggregator authors continue to get mail asking something like this:

Your aggregator - (insert name here) - has trouble with this feed: (insert http link here)

Now, Atom was going to make this all better, right? Maybe it would have, if people hadn't insisted on deploying it before it was ready. I count myself among the guilty here - I've got Atom 0.2 feeds on this blog. In the wild, there's Atom 0.2 and 0.3 - and since the specs aren't done, there's slight variations in implementations, as different sites see the spec differently. Blogger is mandating that users pick RSS or Atom (why they can't do both is a mystery), so their take on 0.3 is likely to be semi-definitive. What does this mean? Look for the variance to get worse, and then worse again...

Tongue slightly in cheek, Charles Miller explains why Java programmers have it so hard:

We're surrounded on all sides, you see. To C programmers, we're children who can't handle real complexity. To Smalltalkers and Lispers, we're misguided souls groping towards a better way, but trapped in the wicked grasp of Sun's marketing. To Perl and PHP nerds, we're too busy over-complicating things to ever get anything done. To Ruby and Python hackers, we're already dinosaurs. And to everyone, we're apparently the COBOL of the 21st Century.

Pretty much every other language has its niche. You can point at it and say that it's useful for this, or it pioneered that, or you'd use it in this circumstance. The only people who say anything like that about Java are, well, already Java programmers. C# programmers might look on Java as a slightly embarrassing parent, except we're the competition, and it's better to just not mention us at all.

Heh. I wouldn't say trapped in the grasp of Sun marketing; I'd say trapped in the grasp of a bad type system...

I've been pushing builds of Bf for OS X for 2 days now, and I think I finally have it - although confirmation from someone with an OS X box would be appreciated. There were a few issues with my packaging:

• One of the XML manifest files listed the wrong name for the VM - I fixed that
• The OS X VM expects an image called 'resource.im', and I was shipping 'bottomFeeder.im'. I changed that
• There's a known issue with some OS X networking setups that can cause a socket error when trying to get the host address. Since this happens at startup, it's kind of a problem. I've got a patch that works around that in the build

I'm hopeful that I've got this working; if so, I can move along to fighting with OS 9...

Update: As youcan see from the comment below, the OS X build works. It doesn't have the Bf splash screen (I have no idea how to provide an image in the right format without access to a Mac - help welcome!), but it installs and works fine as a double clickable app. I'd like to thank Holger Kleinsorgen and Ralf Propach for their help this morning, and Roger Whitney and Bruce Bolden for their email help.

Program chair Alan Knight has pushed out another call for participation:

Smalltalk Solutions 2004 is fast approaching, and we need your participation! Smalltalk Solutions is a premiere venue for Smalltalk professionals, regardless of dialect, to meet and exchange ideas. We are currently accepting proposals for all varieties of talks involving Smalltalk technology and including presentations of other areas of technology from a Smalltalk perspective.

This year's conference is taking place in Seattle, Washington, May 3-5 2004. Presentations may be in the form of:

• Technical Presentations
• Experience Reports
• Technology Demonstrations
• Half-day Tutorials

Presenters receive a free conference registration (one per presentation). Tutorial speakers will also receive a small stipend.

To submit a proposal, please go to http://www.smalltalksolutions.com/participate/participate.htm or email Alan Knight

Proposals should be received by February15, 2004.

get those cards and letters in!

Salon has an interesting article on a show I've seen only once, but found interesting - "Bands Reunited". It's an interesting article, and a great show - catch it sometime if you were listening to music during the 80's....

Amtrak to offer WiFi at their stations. Now, if we could get it on the trains running up and down the Northeast corridor....

Via Bob Congdon comes news that won't make the intel boys happy - MS is releasing a 64 bit preview of XP - for the AMD cpus. It's about time to stick a fork in the itanium...