Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Had a nice trip around Sydney today - went down to the harbor and met some friends - took a ferry across to Watson's Bay. We had lunch at Doyle's, which overlooks the water. That was quite nice, but the clouds started to role in and it got cold as we sat there. It wasn't bad for walking though, so we went up the hill to Sydney Harbour National Park, which is a nice place with a great view of the harbor outlet - you've got the rocks below, and the Pacific as far as the eye can see. I still don't have a digital camera, so photos will have to wait. If you want an idea of where I went, have a look here - the guy who wrote that has some nice shots of the area. I didn't go to any of the beaches (it's winter here now, and today was no beach day :) ). It was a nice day out, and I had a pleasant drive back with the local Cincom rep and his wife - who took me on a guided tour of various parts of Sydney. A bit chilly by the end of the day, but it was all very nice. Now I just have to find dinner...

Blaine Buxton finds Paul Graham off on a good rant about languages:

"I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Java were created for other people to use.

If you think you're designing something for idiots, odds are you're not designing something good, even for idiots."

Heh - a bit strong - but he's got a point.

Today's weather wasn't quite so good, but I headed downtown anyway. I got to Darling Harbor about 10, and walked down to the Maritime Museum. That was a long, cold walk - it was on the opposite side of the harbor from where I started, and the wind was really whipping around. The museum was quite nice - there's nice US/Australia friendship display at the front - it was put up back in the late 80's for the bicentennial of the founding of the first British colony here. The museum has a lot of other interesting displays as well - lots of information on the harbor, on the history of the 19th century whaling industry, and on the development of the harbor area through time. I spent a couple of enjoyable hours there before going back out to brave the elements.

It was a cold walk in search of lunch - I wasn't about to pick one of the carry out places that expect you to eat at an outside table! I stumbled on a place called "The Meat and Wine Co." - and it was a nice place, with an interesting menu. I selected a nice grilled chicken dish and a glass of wine - they warned me about the hot sauce before I tried it, and they weren't kidding! It was a good, filling lunch. They had an interesting frozen berry mousse concoction for dessert - it was quite good, although I think my wife would like it better than I did - she loves tart desserts.

After lunch I decided to duck into the IMAX theater and catch "Ghosts of the Abyss" - a nice little gem of a movie that documents Cameron's filming of the Titanic. It was something else in IMAX 3D - well worth seeing. The footage of the 1st class dining room windows alone was worth the price of admission - highly recommended.

After the movie, I had to figure out what to do with the rest of the afternoon. I headed over to the Sydney Tower, but the ticket agent convinced me that it was better to wait until dark - the cloud cover would make for a dull view during the day. She whisked out a map and gave me some quick advice. Off I went to Hyde Park, a nice little park in downtown Sydney. At one end is the Anzac Memorial, built after the first world war. The entrances were blocked, with no reason given. It's a very somber building - reminded me of a lot of the Civil War memorials I've seen in the northeast and midwest US. I walked back up the park towards the fountain - the trees on either side of the path offer a very "Cathedral" type framing of the park - very nice effect. Midway down was a spire dedicated in 1857 by the (then) mayor of Sydney, but there was no further explanation. I'm kind of curious as to what it was built to commemorate!

I kep going down the street, passing the Convicts Barracks Museum. I was tempted, but by now it was nearly 4:00 pm, and I wanted to get into the Sydney Museum. It's small (which is good, I only left myself 45 minutes to see it!) - but quite interesting. It has a nice section on the history of the city, including a mockup of the way the city looked in the 1840's. There was a section on the (apparently famous) Red Cedars of Australia, and a lot on the early history of the city. It didn't take long to go through, but it was worth seeing.

I headed out around 5 - couldn't cut back through the Botanical Gardens (they were closing at dark). So I headed back to the Tower, since the sun had set and it was getting dark. Sydney Tower is a lot like the Tower in Toronto, or the one in Tokyo - offers quite a spectacular view of the city all the same. I bought a couple of things to take home, and headed back to the train station. A few minutes on city rail, and I was back at the hotel in Chatswood. It was a nice day (if cold from the wind). I probably don't have any more tourist time this trip - next week is going to be busy with talks and customer visits. I should definitely come back here when it's summer locally.

I'll be off for a day trip to Melbourne tomorrow - I'll be speaking to the Melbourne Smalltalk Users Group and doing other visits in the city - I have no idea whether I'll have network access during the day. This will be the first time that I'll have been out of Sydney - I didn't leave the city at all my last trip (in 2000).

Danny Ayers is talking about getting a unified whole out of RSS/RDF, RSS 0.x/2.x, and Atom. To my mind, he's looking at this at the wrong level - the XML level:

I was just wondering how best to munge data from RSS x.x, RSS 1.0 and Atom. Sure, transforming everything into RSS 1.0 + the odd new term might work, but seems a little messy, strained. There are (potential) equivalences that could be specified properly between DC, RSS 1.0 and Atom/OWL), but that still seems a little limited. That's ignoring the RSS x.x stuff. But it just occurred to me that if a fresh ontology was created, it would be possible to have things like:

rss:title rdfs:subPropertyOf gosl:title
rss2:title rdfs:subPropertyOf gosl:title
atom:title rdfs:subPropertyOf gosl:title
dc:title rdfs:subPropertyOf gosl:title

This is the wrong place to work for that. What you want is to get a set of domain objects - you can work with those in a unified fashion. At the XML level, it's going to be a complete nightmare...

I spoke to the Smalltalk User Group here in Melbourne today - I gave this talk on developments in Cincom Smalltalk, and this talk on Blogs and RSS.

Tim Bray wonders why more people haven't commented on this piece by Jonathan Schwartz, where he states that the commoditization of software is good for Sun. There's a reason that piece didn't get much commentary - watching a clueless Sun Exec whistle past the graveyard just isn't that interesting...

I'm back from my trip - we had a good meeting with the local Smalltalk users group. Good conversation, lots of good questions about both the product and about my blogging talk. It was again made clear to me that blogging and aggregators are still very much in the early adopter mode. Tomorrow we have another full day of meetings, including the Sydney Smalltalk users group in the evening - meeting up with the With Style guys before that. Should be a good day.

Ed Foster reports a user's experience with Cingular mobile service:

"I have had Verizon for ten years, but I needed phones that would roam in Europe, and decided to go to Cingular," the reader wrote. "After telling the folks at Cingular that I needed the phones for trips being made in the next two months, and being told 'no problem,' I shelled out some $600 for four high-end quad mode phones from Motorola. I confirmed with Cingular and Best Buy (where I bought the phones) before signing that the phones would work when I showed up in Europe, no additional activation charge or notification was required."

The reader then gave one of the phones to his teenage daughter to take to Sweden. "The phone didn't work there," the reader wrote. "I called Cingular to be told that they won't activate the phones until I have established a one year history with them. (I am 50 years old and I have excellent credit.) I told them when I bought the phones I was told that my credit history made this unnecessary. Nope (not sorry, 'nope'), not true. No exceptions. Don't even ask."

I almost switched to Cingular for this trip to Australia (and a trip I'll be making to Europe later this year). It was laziness that stopped me, but it seems just as well - a one year waiting period???. That's just a sick joke. This is exactly the sort of word of mouth story that loses more customers than a company ever realizes...

This post in the N=1 blog makes an excellent point about internationalized software:

Now the polite version had the following message when the person did not get the correct answer: "We are sorry that the clues were not very helpful for you. Please try the next game." I can see why some people might think they're being manipulated with such a message. In English, it almost sounds condescending - but of course this was in Chinese, so probably the impact of the message was different.

Which is an important point in itself: there are differences between various cultures, so don't expect that something that works for China would automatically work for North America, and vice-versa.

It's about more that just making message catalogs for different languages - you really have to have someone from the target region helping out. There's another way to deal with this, and I've seen it done with the picture management software that came with our Sony camera. Instead of translating messages, this application had none. Instead, it sports a large number of totally inscrutable icons on buttons. That's definitely not the way to go...

Thanks to Denis Johnson, I have some pictures of the daytrip we took to Watson bay on Saturday. Here's a shot of Circular Quay, where we we departed on the ferry for Watson Bay:

Here's a shot of the Sydney Harbor Bridge from the ferry. I didn't get a chance to try the bridge walk this trip, which is something I'd like to try out.

Finally, proof that I was in Watson's Bay - a shot Denis took from there. If you look at the Sydney skyline in the background, you can just make out the Sydney Tower. Note the classic VisualWave sweatshirt!

We (myself and the WithStyle guys - Michael Lucas-Smith and Rowan Bunning) spoke to the Sydney Smalltalk and Ruby user groups this evening. I gave a brief update on the products, and then spoke about BottomFeeder. That was well received - lots of good questions and feedback. Again though - the penetration of syndication is less than everyone seems to think.

Next, Michael and Rowan gave a talk on WithStyle. Rowan gave some background on the work they are doing rich interactivity of desktop apps in the model of web apps. Lots of cool stuff with Rich UI interaction va the use of the With Style engine. Michael is going to do a demo - I'd suggest a quick visit to their website to join their developer program.

Good question from Bruce Badger - some would say that JavaScript "solves" this problem - what say you? Rowan's answer is that JavaScript and the browsers really haven't lived up to that promise. I'd add that lots of people - and firewalls - turn it off. Back to Michael - "We are going to break out of the browser" - we need rich internet applications (ed: like, say, BottomFeeder). They plan to support:

• CSS with XML
• Pollock integratin (with CSS styling!)
• XForms
• Advanced Widgets
• Skinning with CSS

Why CSS - have a look at CSS Zen garden. Now he's off to do a demo. But wait - we're in one - his presentation is in WithStyle. Showed us the example browser, and now he's showing the WYSIWYG XML editor. This is very cool - you can edit the content w/o having to muck around with the XML itself - and it's smart enough to have an open back end (i.e., you can save to arbitrary CMS systems).

Lots of cool things integrated - CSS2 and CSS3 (almost there). ECMAScript integration with Smee from David Pennel. They've got an HTML Window (which I have to integrate into Bf...). Now he's going to show us how to build a presentation app. It's a fairly simple matter of a few methods, or a few files. This demonstrates the integration of XML Events and of Smalltalk scripting - it's a very cool integration.

They are now doing nightly builds and a developer program - you can sign up, get on the mailing list and grab the builds.

Questions: How do you deal with the onset of Avalon and its (someday) ubiquity? Answer - trying to be a rich client solution, not a web browser specific answer.

We have some customer visits in and around Sydney today, and then it's off to Canberra tomorrow. Should be an interesting day; then Friday I'm off for home again. It's been a good trip so far.

Tim Bray wants better we authoring tools:

The state of Web authoring tools is kind of like the state of what we used to call 1CWord Processing 1D twenty years ago when I was getting into this business. If everyone 19s going to write for the Web (and it looks a lot of people are going to) we need the Web equivalents of Word Perfect and Wordstar and Xywrite and Microsoft Word, and we need them right now.

Well heck, I saw those last night at the Sydney Smalltalk Users Group meeting. If you want WYWISWG XML authoring tools for the web, look no futher than Software With Style.

In a customer visit this morning, I ran across two things that seem to come up a lot:

• Memory tuning (Knowing when/how to muck with ObjectMemory space sizes, and wen/how to tune MemoryPolicy)
• The existence of the double buffering window manager policy in VW 7.x.

The latter is often a simple solution to flicker problems in an application; the former involves appropriate tuning to an application's memory profile so that the GC sub-system isn't doing unnecessary work. In this area, I'd strongly suggest having a look at the appropriate pages of the VW Application Developer's Guide - it's well documented.

Dare Obasanjo's has noticed something pretty odd in the W3C Compatibility mode docs for XPath 2.0:

The list below contains all known areas, within the scope of this specification, where an XPath 2.0 processor running with compatibility mode set to true will produce different results from an XPath 1.0 processor evaluating the same expression, assuming that the expression was valid in XPath 1.0, and that the nodes in the source document have no type annotations other than xdt:untypedAny and xdt:untypedAtomic.

My reaction is pretty much what his was - huh, what? Compatible isn't compatible, or something. Bizarre...

Sean Malloy shows us how to sell Smalltalk to your boss:

I setup a server, and while test clients were connected to it and sending/receiving messages, I started changing the request handler methods which determined the responses to messages. Simply changing some of the outputs while the test app was connecting to the server. At first it wasn't really apparent to him what was going on. Not until I showed the same task being accomplished in C#. Each rebuild we got to watch the test client start throwing exceptions about failed connections, mean while any change to the code required rebuilding the app. So I wasn't able to change the results of requests on the fly. Trust me when I say if I had been trying to show off C# as the better option, it would have been a pretty bad demo. That was about the time he had a "Holy S***" moment. It was pretty cool.

Heh - I've seen that moment too - it's always great when you get the dynamic nature of Smalltalk across in a visible fashion.

I'll be speaking at the ANU tomorrow at 4 (in Canberra). Then sometime around 7, I'll be speaking at the Canberra LUG (Linux Users Group). Should be a good time.

In the Star Trek universe, there's never too many bad ideas:

Rick Berman, executive producer of UPN's Star Trek: Enterprise, revealed to SCI FI Wire several spoilers for the upcoming fourth season, including the possible casting of original Star Trek star William Shatner (Capt. Kirk) in a familiar role.

Ooh, like we haven't seen this idea before. Over-acting is already a problem in Enterprise :) But wait, there's more!

• T'Pol (Jolene Blalock) may find herself getting married in episode three, Blalock said in an interview.
• The long-standing Temporal Cold War arc will be resolved in the first two episodes.

Will this involve removing the stick from T'Pol's butt? And Berman finally noticed that the temporal cold war idea sucked? Here's a thought - send Berman away on a long term research project and find better writers!

Well look at this - Scoble points to the fact that MS is hiring into the IE team, and that there's an IE blog. So is it possible that IE might support CSS properly?

Dave points to some pretty anti-social behavior on the part of IIS6:

In a comment on a late post yesterday, Scott Fraer points to a Microsoft article that explains: "When you start Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, IIS binds to all IP addresses on the server, not just the IP addresses that are assigned to Web sites."

That's just... wrong

It's been a great trip, but I'm ready to head home. My wife and daughter miss me, and I miss them. The With Style guys have been great, and I was able to present to some great groups. The ANU presentation this afternoon went very well - and afterwards, a lot of the folks there were brainstorming about how to make use of RSS and blogs for project management. The Linux group had a few different concerns, but we still had a very good session with lots of good questions. I had a great time, and I'm looking forward to coming back!

I've had a few people ask me for my subscription list - here it is. If you grab this, you'll want to delete the Smalltalk-CST folder - the urls for those feeds are internal to Cincom, and you won't be able to get to them :)

Ted Neward has a post up talking about the pitfalls of O/R mapping - now right off, I have seen plenty of Smalltalk projects go down the road to hell trying to build their own O/R frameworks - so it's possible to fall off the cliff. Smalltalk is certainly no silver bullet here. On the other hand, I've also seen many projects succeed quite well here. I think Ted overstates the problem:

Both major software vendors and project teams (building their own O-R layer) fall into the same trap. With object-relational technologies, products begin by flirting with simple mappings: single class to single table, building simple Proxies that do some Lazy Loading, and so on. "Advisers" are sent in to the various project teams that use the initial O-R layer, but before long, those "advisers" are engaging in front-line coding, wrestling with ways to bring object inheritance to the relational database. By the time of the big demo, despite there being numerous hints that people within the project team are concerned, project management openly welcomes the technology, praising productivity gains and citing all sorts of statistics about how wonderful things are going, including "lines of code" saved, how we were writing far more useful code than bugs. Behind the scenes, however, project management is furious at the problems and workarounds that have arisen, and frantically try every avenue they can find to find a way out: consultants, more developers, massive code reviews, propping up the existing infrastructure by throwing more resources at it, even supporting then toppling different vendors' products as a means of solving the problem. Nothing offers the solution the team needs, though: success, a future migration path, or at the very least, a way out preserving the existing investment. Numerous "surprises" (such as the N+1 query problem thanks to lazy-loading proxies or massive bandwidth consumption thanks to eager-loading policies) make the situation more critical. Finally, under new management (who promise to fix the situation and then begin by immediately looking to use the technology in other projects), the team seizes on a pretext, ship the code and hand it off to system administrators to deploy, and bring the developers home to a different project. Not a year later, the project is cancelled and pulled from the servers, the project's defeat complete in all but name.

There have been two really nice O/R frameworks done in Smalltalk (that I know of - there may well be more) - TopLink and GLORP. GLORP is an active project, and getting quite nice early reviews from people taking it up. Sure, projects can fall over dead in the attempt to build a "perfect" O/R layer - but projects can far, far more easily fail by scatter shotting SQL throughout the code base. What is Ted actually advocating here? Does he have a proposed solution, or is it just carping? Inquiring minds want to know :)

The MS guys are rediscovering yet another old Smalltalk idea - treating an object as if it were an array. Take a look at #instVarAt: and #instVarAtPut: in class Object (never mind that doing this sort of thing is typically a very, very bad idea):

http://www.csharphelp.com/archives/archive140.html

C# introduces a new concept known as Indexers which are used for treating an object as an array. The indexers are usually known as smart arrays in C# community. Defining a C# indexer is much like defining properties. We can say that an indexer is a member that enables an object to be indexed in the same way as an array.

   this [argument list]
 {
  get
  {
   // Get codes goes here
  }
  set
  {
   // Set codes goes here
  }
 }

Of course, the beauty of this is that C# had to add new syntax to do this, while the equivalent Smalltalk functionality is just another set of methods. So the C# guy has to memorize yet another set of reserved words, while the Smalltalker simply looks at the library. Sometimes I'm amazed at how Java and C# are examples of Smalltalk being re-invented - but with a crufty, inelegant syntax....

Jonathan Schwartz still thinks that commoditization is helping Sun - apparently, he's not noticed the buckets of money Java shovels at IBM - even as Sun continues to lose money (yes, they made money last quarter. Remove the MS payoff and the numbers are still brutal though). Here's more fantasy thinking:

At Sun, as I said, it's tough to compete against a social movement, especially one in which we all believe. But compete against a single company, Red Hat? Finally. Now that Sun's Solaris operating system runs on Intel, AMD and Sparc systems, our customers have immense choice. We can deliver our products at a lower price point, we can deliver more and better features, more innovation, legendary security (the national security kind), and far better customer support and responsiveness - maybe not for a developer looking for real-time patches (yet), but certainly for the enterprise looking for an accountable vendor.

So if you're running Red Hat, and feeling frustrated by their support, exorbitant pricing, or weak security, it's time to look at Solaris, on any of the more than 200 hardware platforms we support. From HP, Dell, IBM and, of course, Sun (and a host of others). The migration is a very easy one. So is the free download.

Yeah, keep whistling past the graveyard Jonathan. I have a tip for you: Redhat isn't the competition - Dell (lower cost) and IBM (Service and software delivery) are. Dell's costs are scads lower - which is why they sell so much hardware. IBM has a software suite that actually sells at a profit (while Sun doesn't). What's enabled that? Well, commoditization of hardware (making a Sparc purchase mostly insane), and commoditization of software (which Sun has done to itself with Java). No one wants the Sun hardware anymore - I see shops walking Sun out and Linux in every day.

It's worse than that though - Sun simply isn't structured to make money on the commodity sales end, and it's showing. Then we see this kind of thing:

And if you're looking for an open source Solaris, stay tuned there, too. Remember, it's in our roots.

Update: Seems I spoke too soon below - this ComputerWorld story has details.

That's too funny - watching Schwartz make public comments about open sourcing Solaris, while McNealy immediately makes negative comments about the idea. So is this good cop/bad cop, or is Schwartz just publically dissing McNealy? It's hard to tell from here.

This is interesting - a .NET (C#) developer looking at what it would take to add an attribute to an object at runtime:

I wanted to be able to add properties on the fly.  I've changed the idea a bit to look them up on the fly versus adding them.  Using psuedo-code:

// expandable object
MyObject o = new MyObject();

// add the property
o.AddProperty("FirstName", "Justin");

I'm not using these properties in code anywhere.  I'm actually feeding the object to a template system (the C# port of StringTemplate in this case).  Now StringTemplate supports reading properties in the templates like so...

$p.FirstName$

But unfortunately the MyObject type doesn't have a FirstName property.  And StringTemplate uses the Type to do reflection.  Anyway, during my research of IExpando (much like IDispatchEx), I noticed the interface IReflect.  Looking at the docs for it, it contains all the most common methods that people use on Type when performing reflection (GetProperty, GetMethod, etc.).  So if I change StringTemplate to use IReflect vs. the Type class, then I could implement IReflect myself.  Of course, there are problems with this; mainly the fact that PropertyInfo is an abstract class (MemberInfo, the parent class, is also abstract).  So I would have to write implementations of those.

Hm...this seems like more effort than its worth.  Maybe I should just do something like this...

$p.Attributes.FirstName

Attributes would be an IDictionary.  Then I can extend StringTemplate to look at the object.  If it is IDictionary, then use the property name as the key.  The former definitely has more of a "coolness" factor, but the latter would take like 15 minutes.

Heh. As opposed to the following in Smalltalk:

myObject class addInstVarName: 'firstName'. This is one of those telling differences between Smalltalk and languages like Java and C# - it's not that you can't accomplish the same things - it's that you don't bother because of all the work involved. Smalltalk makes the simple things simple, and the hard things possible. Languages like C# and Java make the simple things possible, and the hard things painful...

It's a long way from Sydney back to Maryland. Unlike my outbound flight, there wasn't a lot of excitement this time. The trans-pacific flight went off fine. I plowed through three of the books I brought with me - the book on the siege of Petersberg ("The Last Citadel", 1864-1865, US Civil War) was very good. The author used a lot of primary source materials - after action reports by commanders, individual soldier's recollections and letters, and some of the archival material from "The Commitee on the Conduct of the War" (a Congressional commitee that examined the war effort during and after the war). If you are a Civil War buff, this is a great book.

Anyway, things went fine to LAX. Then I had to go back through security - and I had a small contretemps with one of the rent-a-cops at the entrance to the security line. It seems that my travel back was too big (and yes, it's bigger than the size specified - it's a garment bag). However, no one else with outsize bags was being hassled - the rent-a-cop had some bogus ideas about how the other bags could be folded. After a little back and forth I did an end run - I went to the other security line, where they had sane people working. With that out of the way, I had 3 exciting hours to spend in LAX.

As it happens, I paid my way into the USAirways club last year, and my membership is still valid. That got me into the united lounge, which was certainly nicer than the main concourse. This is when I found out that the "powers that be" at LAX have signed up the world's most ineffectual WiFi vendor - some bozo firm called Boingo. When you spawn a browser and the site uses T-Mobile, or Wayport (or any of a number of other services), you get an HTML form to login to. Simple, no fuss, no muss. Not these morons. No, first you register. Then you download a Windows client (I guess you are just SOL if you have a Mac, or Linux). That client allows you to access the WiFi. To top it off, it was up and down the whole time I was there. That still wasn't the dumbest part though. First, you have to register. Ok, you get a browser page - hit the link to the "Try it Now!" page. You get a list of one option - $21.95 per month for a year.

Well, that's useless, so I went to dialup. However, it turns out that they do have "pay as you go - it's just well hidden. You have to follow a link labelled "Change the Promotional Code", delete the code from the input field, and then submit - at which point you get a pay as you go option. Who's the blazing idiot who came up with that? Someone who's driving theory was "yes, I want fewer customers now?" At least I was able to get news updates and mail.

So now I'm back home, exhausted (I've had two Fridays this week). I'll sleep well tonight, and with luck, won't have any jet lag. We'll see...

The Yankees slap the Red Sox down again

Sometimes it's just carelessness. Have a look at this Computerworld story - an email address book with bad entries caused lots of county government mail to be cc'd off to Sweden:

The investigation was launched after Computerworld notified the county on July 6 that Robert Carlesten, managing director of Internet company Ord&Bild AB in Karlstad, Sweden, had produced dozens of e-mails that he said had been arriving at his Internet.ac domain regularly for the past two years. Carlesten said he responded to the senders of the e-mails on multiple occasions to inform them of the problem but never received a reply.

...

According to Whittington, the glitch stemmed from the county's Internet naming structure, which includes ".ac" for the auditor controller's office. "Now we need to research who has the bad address book that has this address," he said.

Whittington said his office was never directly informed about the problem by Carlesten and noted that any county employees who may have received e-mail responses from Carlesten never brought the matter to his attention.

This apparently went on for over 2 years. Makes me wonder how many security breaches that are blamed on MS (etc.) are really just careless mistakes like this...

This article has an interesting interview with John Loicano, Sun's exec VP in charge of software. Here's an interesting point:

Question: Solaris is going open-source. Why not Java?
Answer: We see ourselves as being the stewards of Java. Compatibility is a key issue.

fascinating....

I just love the hullabaloo around e-voting. Take this:

Part of the problem arises from the complexity of e-voting systems. The code that makes up these systems is so large that there's no efficient way for election officials to ensure that it's free of malware or to completely debug it, according to testimony Johns Hopkins University professor Avi Rubin gave before the U.S. Election Assistance Commission this spring

Complexity? Seriously, how complex should a system like this be? It's an automated multiple choice list. If the people writing such systems made them complex, then find better developers. Seriously, this doesn't even begin to be a complex domain problem. As to security, that's mostly an issue of separating the systems from public (net) access, and verifying that only authorized staff has back end access. In other words, problems we know how to solve. Then there's this:

If you thought pregnant chads in the 2000 election were bad, wait until you see what a determined hacker could do to the democratic process this fall. That is, of course, if we're lucky enough to detect the attack.

What, this columnist has never heard of ballot box stuffing? I'll refer her back to the history of Tammany Hall in New York - this sort of system is no more (but also no less) secure than any other system out there.

I ran across this problem in BottomFeeder awhile ago, and had exactly the same problems that Dare had:

I stumbled across a feed that used the same link for each item from a given day; the Cafe con Leche RSS feed . This meant that RSS Bandit couldn't differentiate between items posted on the same day. This was particularly important when tracking what items a user has read or whether an item has already been downloaded or not. I should have pinged the owner of the feed to point this problem out but instead I decided to code around this issue by using the combination of the link and title elements for uniquely identifying items. This actually turned out to be worse.

Yes, I've had that problem, and it's one of the reasons that differentiating items in RSS is non-trivial. There are blogs out there that don't include GUIDS or links - yes, odd as that sounds, I've seen it. If someone can create weird XML, they will create weird XML...