I'd like to thank David Buck and Bob Nemec for the opportunity to present BottomFeeder in Ottawa and Toronto (respectively). The talks went well, and we had a great set of conversations afterwards - both at the presentations and in the post meeting get-togethers. There are some great folks in Ottawa and Toronto, and I'm already looking forward to my next visit.
Blaine Buxton says just give it a shot:
Isn't it time to deal with complexity with a simple and powerful language? Read this article and realize Smalltalk could be used to fix the "complexity" problem by dealing with it instead of masking it with more complexity. IT systems are complex. You need a language that can deal with it: Smalltalk. If you want rising IT costs and complexity, do what everyone else is doing. Why not try something new, yet has had lots of time to mature
The worst that can happen? You'll decide on something else. Grab the download and have a look
Go look at the fun Ted Neward is having with Sun over copyright issues. This is hardly Sun specific; it's more of an environmental issue in the business arena at present...
Avi notes that the Continuation based web app meme is spreading - the name is changing as it goes, but the idea is getting around.
Jason Jones has the hotel Info for StS 2005. It's going to be a great conference!
Lileks has a funny bleat up today - scroll down to his screen shots from "The Asphalt Jungle" - this one in particular. As he says, go ahead - just hang that stage light anywhere! Heh.
Smalltalk Solutions is the premier forum for bringing together Smalltalk users, developers, and enthusiasts. This year's conference will take place June 27-29 in fun-filled Orlando at the Wyndham Orlando Resort
We are currently accepting proposals for all varieties of talks involving Smalltalk technology and other areas of interest to Smalltalkers. We need your participation to help maintain the high technical level of the conference! See http://www.smalltalksolutions.com/participate2005.htm for more information.
The Conference will conveniently take place entirely within the Wyndham Orlando Resort:
Smalltalk Solutions 2005 has a great rate of $109 USD plus applicable taxes. Please call early (407-351-2420) and mention Smalltalk Solutions 2005 when making your reservations for the discount rate.
Wyndham Orlando Resort is a tropical paradise in the heart of the world's most popular vacation destination. Lush gardens and romantic lagoons make it easy to forget that this elegant resort is located on bustling International Drive. Florida's most thrilling theme parks - Walt Disney World®, Universal Studios® Florida and Sea World® Adventure Park - and the Orange County Convention Center are only minutes away.
Relax in a secluded, old Floridian-style villa. The hotel guest rooms are full of delightful touches like pillowtop mattresses and in-room movies. Suites with bunk beds and play areas just for kids are perfect for families.
Outside, enjoy a host of pleasures like Gatorville Bar & Grill and three gorgeous pools. Jog along a tropical garden path or visit our health club. Or find a treasure in one of the great shops that are just steps away. When the sun goes down, dine in the casual elegance of our Augustine's Grille. Then revel in Orlando's hottest nightspots on International Drive.
Wyndham hotels has an exciting program full of great benefits for their guests. The program is called Wyndham by Request and by joining you receive a room personalized to your specifications including:
Smalltalk Solutions is a Smalltalk Industry Council Event. The Smalltalk Industry Council (STIC) is a nonprofit trade association whose goal is to promote the awareness of and increase demand for Smalltalk.
Blaine makes the case for Smalltalk as a scripting language:
We all know that scripting is helpful for kicking off systems, moving files around, querying the state of a running application, and etc. This is available off the shelf for every Smalltalk dialect that I know of. The cool thing about scripting in Smalltalk is that since you have a powerful environment around you, you can write your script in a workspace. Now, if your script gets too big, you can start moving it to classes and refactoring. You can also move scripts to external files and load them in a runtime. Why do you configuration files when you can have runnable code that does it for you? Let the objects do the talking! Scripting is also great in running systems. If you run Smalltalk in headless mode, you can have scripts that query the state of the system while it's running! This can be very powerful and DANGEROUS! But, wait a minute, we have access to the compiled code and we can actually query the compiled code to make sure it doesn't do anything nasty. The bounds are limitless and once you start thingking about them, you wonder why am I writing unix bash scripts and then, you might be wondering, why not have the power of a compiled language, but the expressive power of an interpreted one? Smalltalk is all that and a whole lot more.
Beyond that, it's not hard to make VisualWorks (part of Cincom Smalltalk) act as a "real" scripting tool. You can set up an image that will read from stdin, expect to find a script (Smalltalk in file-out format) - load it, run, and exit. It's not perfect in that role yet - but it's one of the things we are working on at Cincom.
Another batch of comment spam materialized overnight - I've dispatched it all, and added some code to the server that ought to get rid of most of it. It's not the best or smartest filter ever, but it I'm hopeful. We'll see how it goes. In the meantime, I'm off to a birthday party for a friend's daughter - I'll be offline most of the day.
ComputerWorld lists a bunch of reasons for corporations to worry about what their bloggers are writing. Interesting stuff, and definitely worth looking at. Bear in mind that free speech only gives you the right to express an opinion - it doesn't protect you from libel, nor does it guarantee you access to a soapbox...
Frank Hayes makes a contrarian point about outsourcing:
With the dot-coms, we didn't know whether a Web-based business model would work at all -- or if it did, what kinds of businesses it would support. We didn't know how fast business could shift to the Web, or whether dot-coms really could transform retailing. All we knew was that bits cost less than bricks, so we figured everything else must cost less on the Internet, too.
A scrap of data, an untried business model and a lot of faith: That was the dot-com way, and we all chased it.
And offshoring? We know offshore programmers get paid less -- they're the bits-cheaper-than-bricks part of the scheme.
But we don't know what kinds of corporate IT projects can be effectively offshored. Or what happens to quality levels as offshoring volume ramps up. Or whether outsourcing will leave us with the flexibility and agility to adjust to rapidly changing business conditions, take advantage of new market opportunities and quickly respond to new user needs.
Great points, and it echos something I've said - the practice of tossing requirements over the wall to IT and getting a system back later never worked that well when the IT guys were local. What makes anyone think it will work well when they are 12 hours away (in timezone terms)? Something to consider...
The New York STUG is meeting soon:
NYC Smalltalk will be meeting on November 16th where we will check out Microlingua - a new Smalltalk dialect being developed to work in resource constrained environments.
Visit our wiki for more detais
Our meetings are open to the general public. Invite a friend.
Ever wondered how far the IP wars were going to go in the software world? We may have some idea with this eweek story:
Blunk pointed out that Microsoft is claiming some form of IP rights over "a total of 130 protocols which Microsoft is offering for license."
"Many of the listed protocols are IETF RFC request for comment documents, including but not limited to the core TCP/IP v4 and TCP/IP v6 protocol specifications," he said in his note.
Some of the RFC protocols that Microsoft asserts that it may have IP rights over, such as the TCP/IP protocols and the DNS (Domain Name System), form the very bedrock of the Internet's network infrastructure.
"Microsoft does not specify how this list of protocols was derived and to what extent they have investigated their possible rights holdings over these protocols," Blunk said. "The list appears to be a near but not completely exhaustive list of public protocols implemented in Microsoft products.
The thinking in the article is that MS is simply fishing for license acceptance in hopes of being able to exploit them later. Either way, this is a disturbing trend. I wonder if Jonathan Schwartz still likes IP law as much...
Ironically, Jim Rapoza takes a shot at subscription pricing in a magazine that is supported by.... subscription pricing. Irony aside, he makes the end user case for perpetual licensing, and denigrates vendor motivations:
That's because most of these vendors really, really want these types of licenses to take off. They want to be freed from the constant revision cycle and the fears that customers won't upgrade to the latest versions. They want the constant, reliable revenue streams that subscriptions and utility licenses can provide.
I get complaints about Cincom's subscription pricing for Smalltalk, and the rationales given are like those Rapoza brings forward - they boil down to a suspicion that Cincom is simply trying to extort the last possible dollar from customers. Here's what's actually going on - we are trying (and succeeding) to create a sustainable business. Most companies aren't selling thousands and thousands of units every month (or year, even). Getting people to upgrade - even to a compelling new release - is not always easy (inertia plays a big role here). Why does a vendor need a steady, reliable stream of revenue? Well, it depends - do you want the vendor to be able to pay their engineers (and other assorted costs) on an ongoing basis or not?
It's really that simple when you get right down to it. The cost of continuing development is mostly one of personnel, not hardware. The blunt truth is - and you can see this in the demise of so many development tools over the last decade - the simpler "pay once" plans don't tend to cover costs. The only way for them to do so is for the vendor to sell (literally) thousands of new development seats each year.
Peter Coffee has an interesting article on the silently escalating war in the wireless space:
The threats to system function are diverse. Cornfield Electronics' TV-B-Gone is a digital shotgun, spewing out remote control power-switching codes from the same database that's built into any off-the-shelf universal remote control. Within a minute of activation, it will usually hit the infrared pulse code (or codes) to turn off any nearby TV unit. If you happen to have other devices in the area that use one of those codes, either by choice or by accident, then welcome to the world of collateral damage.
Things are only going to get weirder from there...
The IndiaTimes is almost too easy to spoof today:
Mahindra British Telecom (MBT) said the software almost completely automates the process of converting legacy applications written in languages such as Cobol, Pascal, Delphi and Smalltalk to modern languages such as C, C++ and Java.
C++ is a "modern" language? Oh, and another thing - they say they have tools that do automated conversions? Check your wallet before talking to these clowns...
Via Doc Searls I see that mark Cuban got fined for this post - and he asks his readers about it here. Now, take a look at the post he got fined for - it's no different from what any number of sports writers might push out for the hometown sports section. Makes me think of this post that I made over the weekend...
The current issue of CMO has a small piece on RSS - and immediately spots the key marketing angle:
Well, does the idea of millions of eager eyes with lots of spare time (and maybe some spare cash) viewing your ever-updated online information sound appealing? "RSS subscriptions allow the customer to get information when it becomes available, not when they think to ask for it," says Harold Check, a noted RSS expert and former managing editor of Yahoo. "It not only fulfills the basic contract between company and customer ( We want you to know what we have to offer), but it entirely sidesteps the very negative experience of a customer asking for information and not getting it."
The key is that it allows people to get information as it becomes available, and leaves all the decisions about contacting a vendor in the consumer's hands. It's clear to me that these marketing mavens don't really get it though:
Feeds dedicated to individual companies - even the likes of Microsoft and Oracle - don't rank in the top 50 most popular sites (at least according to recent totals from RSS consolidator Syndic8.com). And after the top 10 or so, the number of viewers drops off fast. So using RSS in conjunction with your own site to push new products probably isn't going to work. Worse, feed readers generally list simple headlines and summaries of stories. If your site depends on banner ads, for instance, a serious RSS effort might ultimately undermine any efforts to get more people viewing it. (Getting your product mentioned on one of the more popular RSS-feeding blogs or Web hangouts, such as Slashdot, however, will pretty much guarantee a flurry of visits to your site.)
Hmm - they might ask Scoble about how Channel 9 has been working out for MS. If you produce compelling content for people, they'll come and read it. If all you produce is the same old brochure-ware site, then you'll starve. There's no "magic" here - it's all about content. Ironically enough, the same issue has an article on blogs and how they can help raise visibility...
TechWeb has an interesting article on the looming complexity issue in software development:
In the new IDC report, released Thursday, Picardi projects that software revenue will rise at an annual rate of 6.9 percent through 2008, when it will reach $189 billion in sales.
"Issues of complexity, security, and software quality, as well as a myriad of changing macroeconomic factors, all pose continuing challenges to industry growth," Picardi said, calling the complexity issue the real villain holding back software sales from returning to double-digit pre-recession growth rates. He foresees the complexity crisis continuing for five to ten years.
Seems to me that J2EE is one of the problems here.... Smalltalk, anyone?
Now that the X-Prize has been won, it looks like the next step has been defined - the Space Prize:
Anyone who wants to follow in the shoes of Burt Rutan and win the next big space prize will have to build a spacecraft capable of taking a crew of no fewer than five people to an altitude of 400 kilometers and complete two orbits of the Earth at that altitude. Then they have to repeat that accomplishment within 60 days.
While the first flight must demonstrate only the ability to carry five crew members, the winner will have to take at least five people up on the second flight.
And one more thing. They have to do it by Jan. 10, 2010.
Now that should be fun to watch!
I had a brain cramp trying to add a new feature to the blog earlier, and didn't notice it right off - I was watching "Enterprise". In hindsight, I should have been watching the blog - it would have been far more entertaining. In any case, things are back to normal now.
I guess Steven Culp wasn't empowered enough playing Major Hayes on Enterprise - he's moved up to being an emasculated husband on Desperate Housewives. And heck, the plotlines make more sense!
Mark Cuban throws some well deserved rocks at the RIAA. It's really too bad that they are too stupid to listen. Their motto seems to be "when in doubt, sue!"
Ed Foster points to where DRM is taking us - and I don't think that this road was ever paved with good intentions:
My new microwave won't work because it objects to the brand of refrigerator I have in the kitchen. And the aspirin bottle has detected a rival brand in the medicine chest and therefore can't be opened. And my mattresses tag-removal alarm system is ...
Well, OK, maybe things haven't gotten quite that bad yet, but it's certainly the direction that software Digital Rights Management schemes are taking us. Most distressing is the trend by game software publishers to use DRM that refuses to let the game play if software it doesn't like is detected on the user's system.
"They really have gone too far this time," one reader recently wrote. "Check out the links in this Slashdot discussion. Sims 2 checks your computer and will not run 'when active CD Emulation software is detected by the copy protection on the game CD.' That means Electronic Arts wants us to remove perfectly legal programs like Nero and Clone CD that are often pre-installed by the PC manufacturer! This can't be legal."
That's what I call user hostile behavior - it's worse than the bad old days of copy protection schemes.
Game releases are getting to be more and more like movie releases - Scoble has a number of posts up that illustrate that. Not completely alike though - a blockbuster movie would never be released this early in November (it would be held for the Thanksgiving/Christmas season). That makes me wonder - game releases seem to happen when they are ready. New TV shows are no longer released only in the fall. When will movies cross beyond blockbuster season?
I had a problem restarting the blog server last night - I took it down in order to load in from scratch a new memory policy, and got bitten by an initialization issue I had created for myself. In the blog server, I initialize a particular blog this way:
BlogServer from: 'someInitializationFile.ini'
from: settingsFile | inst | inst := self basicNew. inst settingsFile: settingsFile. inst initialize. self default at: inst appkey put: inst. ^inst
That looks simple enough - create the new blog instance, initialize it, and then stuff it in the dictionary I use for later lookup. Well, as it happens, the #initialize method ended up invoking code (while initializing a cache) that did this:
server := BlogSaver named: 'blogNameHere'
named: appkey ^self default at: appkey ifAbsentPut: [self new].
That's where I trapped myself. The way #at:ifAbsentPut: works, the #new would get fired before the server object would get into the dictionary. #new would then go back through these actions.... and loop. How did I get into that mess? Well, by not testing the startup sequence on my test server. The server image had been running for quite awhile, and I had not tested the startup - even though I had added a fair bit of new code since the last time I restarted it. Lesson learned here - make sure to test the startup sequence before recycling the server.
David Brooks (registration required) has an interesting article on the ongoing decentralization of American life. He's addressing some of the political import of that, but I'm interested in the event itself - I live in one of these exurban areas that he talks about:
In my book I tried to describe the culture in these places - the office parks, the big-box malls, the travel teams and the immigrant enclaves. But when it came to marketing the book, I failed in two important ways.
I couldn't figure out how to tell the people in exurbia that I had written a book about them. Here I was writing about places like Loudoun County, Va., and Polk County, Fla., but my book tour took me to places like downtown Philadelphia, downtown Seattle and the Upper West Side. The places I was writing about are so new, and civic life is as yet so spare, there are few lecture series or big libraries to host author talks. The normal publishing infrastructure is missing.
I was about to give a reading in Berkeley when I asked a few of the bookstore employees if they sold many copies of Rick Warren's book, "The Purpose-Driven Life." They weren't familiar with the book, even though it has sold millions and millions of copies. I realized there are two conversations in this country. I was in the establishment conversation, but somehow I needed to get into the Rick Warren conversation and I could never find a way.
Columbia, Maryland is one of decentralized, exurban areas he's talking about. There are 100,000 people living here - but there's no actual city government (the Rouse company manages the various villages in Columbia, but our government is county level). There's a "downtown" in Columbia, but it's a mall and a handful of office buildings - surrounded by residential housing.
Most people living here live in single family homes with a yard - typically about 1/5th an acre or so. This kind of town is denigrated by urban dwellers as "having no culture", but there are reasons people choose to live here rather than in one of the nearby cities (Baltimore or Washington):
We almost never go into Washington or Baltimore - last time we hit DC was when relatives came and we toured with them. I can't recall the last time I went into Baltimore - it simply doesn't exist as a destination for me.
A lot of this is self reinforcing, I think. I grew up in an outer suburb of New York City - IBM country in Dutchess County, New York. Other than school field trips (and later, Yankee games) - I never went into New York. I never really felt like I was missing anything, either. There are lots of people my age who have the same sort of life experience - grew up in the suburbs, moved into one later on. We never experienced city life, and really don't have any notion that we are missing anything. I've visited lots of cities in my work life, and there are plenty of them I like - Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto - but I have less than no interest in living in that kind of environment.
This has all sorts of implications for marketing and politics - the suburbs aren't all like Levittown (and realistically, I wonder if they ever were)...
There's one very good thing that building the blog server and BottomFeeder have accomplished for me - they've taught me a bunch of things about the product that I promote. I've been working with Smalltalk for a long time - since 1992. Until I pushed these two projects out though, I had never built anything "real" - I'd done consulting work, taught classes, built demos - but never anything that was intended to be really used. I run Bf on my desktop all the time now, and I use TypeLess (the plugin IRC client) to communicate with the community. I use the blog posting tool to post here
There's a difference between hacking around with a product (which is what I had always done before) and actually working with a product - which is what I do now. It's given me a lot better insight into the issues our customers face:
It's made me a better PM by taking me far more directly into the worldview of our customers. It's a place that more product managers ought to travel to.
At the end of this week, I'll be heading off to EuroQuest - a nifty board gaming convention that's held north of here. I've succeeded in my attempts to turn my daughter into a gamer - she is attending this convention with me on her birthday - her choice. We're looking forward to the Puerto Rico tournament, which is being held on Friday and Saturday. Should be a fun con!
Patrick Logan points to this comment by Jon Udell from awhile back:
"When you think about it," Hugunin said, "why would the CLR be worse for dynamic languages than the JVM, given that Microsoft had the second mover advantage?" And in fact, while he had to do plenty of extra work to support dynamic features that the CLR doesn't natively offer, he notes that the massive engineering resources invested in the CLR make it highly optimized along a number of axes. So, for example, the CLR's function call overhead is apparently less than the native-code CPython's function call overhead, and this is one of the reasons why IronPython benchmarks well against CPython.
As Patrick says, I don't think that's the appropriate benchmark to use here...
Jonathan Schwartz has a post up explaining how they (Sun) are going to monetize the rapidly expanding Java phone business (and the Java Desktop thing that he hopes will grow) - the back office servers that drive it all:
What's making the net work behind all those connected cell phones, set top boxes, automobiles, airplanes, medical devices, PCs and game machines (I could go on)? The very secure network infrastructure at the core of Sun's business. Who demands infrastructure of that scale? The network operators (the world's communications companies - satellite, wireline, mobile, you name it), and the leading services run through those networks (financial services being the most obvious, along with entertainment, media, and every other web service the world's contemplating for internet deployment, in-house or otherwise).
How big is that infrastructure market? Huge. And it isn't shrinking. We do billions of dollars in business with those companies, serving the very consumers described above - and our bet is they'll continue to grow. If you're going to bet on the value of the network, who better to partner with - rather than compete against - than the network operators and service providers.
That's not a bad idea, except for one thing - it's no longer 1997. Back in the late 90's, this idea worked pretty well, because there were only a handful of choices for scalable back office servers - Sun, IBM, HP. MS wasn't serious in that space yet, and Linux wasn't mature enough. Consequently, during the dot com boom, Sun sold scads of servers
Things have changed since then. MS now has credible server offerings. Linux is mature - and there are large outfits (IBM, for instance) backing the Linux play. Sun is not the low cost provider in servers - which is a problem for this strategy. To be fair, I don't know what I'd do in their position - but I don't think I'd be loudly touting a dot com era strategy as the route to salvation...
Don Park notes that the Atom folks are ready to declare victory and go home - after accomplishing very, very little. Dare Obasanjo made the appropriate points in the Atom mailing list:
That latter point is what convinces me that this was a huge waste of time - in BottomFeeder, I have a set of parsing code for the various feed formats, and that's the only place in my application that is cognizant of Atom - the object model elsewhere neither knows nor cares.
Apparently, disliking Dave Winer isn't enough to drive a syndication format...
The other day, I pointed to a startup error in the blog server. Well, it turns out that I had another bug that I only just noticed this morning. At startup, the server reads in the NC download registrations that have been made and sets up an internal cache to check against. Well, I had commented out some code that had been giving me trouble... and in the process, did not end up setting the cache up properly. Again, this is a failure to test problem on my part. So if you've had issues with NC downloads over the past few days, go ahead and try it now - should be fixed.
There's some good news on the NC download front coming up as well. With the 7.3 release, we'll have the installer network enabled (this already works for our vw-dev community). What does that mean? It means you'll be able to grab a small (less than 10 MB) download, and have the installer grab the components you need over the network. Should make for a much nicer install experience.
Another sign of the fetish over code generation. Does anyone else wonder why there's such a huge need for code generation over in the .NET and Java universes? Might it have something to do with overly complex systems?
Travis Griggs points out that it's often what you know that isn't so that's a real problem.
I get lots of questions about Pollock. There's a great place to learn all about it - Sam Shuster's blog. Sam is the lead developer for Pollock, and has been posting real examples of how to work with it.
Travis Griggs and Colin Putney have posted some information on how they automate builds using VisualWorks. This is good information - and something that we intend to make easier as we push out a Smalltalk Runtime system over the next few releases.
Now that's a fascinating use of RSS. Scoble points to this blog, which lists some interesting aspects of Halo2 - including this:
Additionally, are you ready for this? To the right here is a "GameViewer" with a view of each game, including perspectives on exactly where Robert kicked my ass in this specific game instance.
If that's not all? How about an RSS Feed of all my Halo 2 games?
Drink that in my friends. I wonder if there's some OLAP in there. I'd be fascinated to see the database schema.
That's kind of neat, I must admit...
Brad Abrams visited a University recently, and some of the student feedback he got was amazing:
WashU uses Java as its primary teaching language. The thing that surprised me was that none of the people I interviewed really liked Java. Their #1 complaint was that it is just too slow. Usually when I pushed on this I either got generalization (it has to be slow because it has a GC) but some pointed out real issues such as startup time, small device or even throughput problems. One notable quote was: "I want to use C++ because Java is a toy language". A lot of this push back struck me because *some* of the same criticism of Java can be applied to CLR based languages such as C# or VB.NET - I certainly hope an informed developer would not call C# or VB.NET "toy languages". Frankly I would not even call Java a toy language.
This sounds like a visit to the he-man productivity haters club. C++ is a "real" language, and things like Java (or CLR based languages, or Smalltalk, etc) are toys? LOL
Microsoft might have publicized their new search engine a little too soon; when I tried it out just now, it was slow, and came back with this:
This site is temporarily unavailable, please check back soon
Update: Sriram Krishnan is equally unimpressed
I bet Jonathan Schwartz isn't too happy with this ComputerWorld editorial. Sounds like the move from Unix to Linux is getting more and more widespread...
ComputerWorld has a long article on the morale situation in IT. Here's something that made me sit up and take notice:
Underlying workers' complaints about layoffs and burnout is a kind of mourning for what IT used to be - a well-paid profession made up of hands-on problem solvers who were respected for their abilities.
Today, in contrast, "if you want to be someone who is a doer, you pretty much have to be a contract worker," says the database expert. "You can no longer be an employee because they're hiring employees to manage and supervise the process, not to do the process. Management views the doers as a commodity."
Oh, really. When exactly was IT made up of problem solvers who helped out the user community? I've been an end user (from the perspective of IT) in all but one of my software jobs - and I don't recall any point where IT was viewed as positively as the above implies. The author of this article really, really needs to go back and read Dilbert from the early 90's forward.
Here's the thing that many (not all) IT departments completely forget - they are plumbers - they keep the water flowing, but they don't actually execute on the business plan. Yes, they have a critical role in helping the business users succeed - but it's an enabling role. Way, way too many IT staffers forget that - and they refer to users a Lusers.
You know the primary reason that outsourcing has gotten so popular? Because the track record of IT departments stinks. Outsourced IT may not have a better track record (personally, I suspect that it will end up being worse) - but it's seen as cheaper. Look at it from the business users side - if service is going to be awful, and if projects are going to fail ugly - why not at least pay less for the priviledge? IT departments have a lot of introspection to do, and the woe is me thing isn't helping them...
Update: On a related note, Frank Hayes notes that large projects tend to fail. Now, quick - what kinds of projects does IT love to embrace, and what kinds of projects tend to get outsourced? Hmm...
I've placed the US flag in the menu to the right in honor of Veteran's Day here in the US. My grandfather (mother's side) was a veteran of WWI - Veteran's day is today in remembrance of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Coincidentally, I just started reading "Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918, World War I and Its Violent Climax", a book that covers the final endgame of that war. So here's a tip of the hat to my daughter's namesake, Victor Anderson - a man I never knew, but whom I've learned an awful lot about from my mother.
Dave Winer inadvertently explains why text is usually better:
I think we'll be lucky to get even limited metadata, and transcripts are completely out of reach. I'm not going to spend the time or money to produce them for my podcasts. And even if I could easily and economically produce a transcript, I wouldn't. Adam tried to excerpt my last podcast and found it impossible. I wasn't surprised. It was a sequence of thoughts, each building on the previous. Try to pull one out of context and it doesn't work. If I had to respond to people who had skimmed my podcast (by reading the transcript) I would stop doing it.
Text is easier to deal with in so many way. There's a place for audio, but not as a replacement...
We are on track for the next release of Cincom Smalltalk. Take a look at the information page here, and at the roadmap over here. We expect to ship before the end of the month - ObjectStudio 7.0 and VisualWorks 7.3
It turns out that the repercussions from this went one step beyond what I thought; the master feed wasn't being updated the last two days. It's back online now
I've made a new modification to the Wiki Server in order to try and stop the flood of wiki spam that's been coming in. There's a potential downside; it's possible that a valid page edit could fail. If that happens to you, please send me email. I'm archiving off the (presumed to be bad) content, so I can always recover edits that get rejected. Let's see how well it works...
You'll have to read Doc Searls post on the contortions the music industry is going through to believe it. The position they ended up in can't be comfortable, and I'm not entirely certain that it's a physical possibility...
Now here's a pathetic tale of idiot management. Mandatory overtime (in the form of long days and 6-7 day work weeks). Having been a union member (back when I was a school teacher), I'm not a big fan of unions. On the other hand, this is exactly the sort of abuse that unions tend to stop. I tend to think of unions as a necessary evil - there's no need for one with a decent employer - but there are plenty of situations (like the linked one) that positively cry out for one. The tragedy is that unions tend to overstay their welcome and become as stupid as the bad management they were created to fight against...
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