Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

and he's coming up empty when it comes to MS software.

The Planet Smalltalk site moved - and they are finding lots of new Smalltalk blogs! Here's the rss feed

One thing I should point out about using BottomFeeder on Linux (or Unix) - there's no way (that I know of) to specify a "default" browser. On Windows or Macintosh, Bf will - if you spawn a browse request - sent that request to the default browser. On Linux or Unix, the default browser is WithStyle, the browser we use in the html pane. Now, WithStyle is a good tool for basic browsing, but it's not a full browser replacement by any stretch (nor is it intended to be). Here's what you do:

• Open System Settings
• Go to the Browsing tab
• In the input field, specify a browser (or a script that launches one)

After that, browse requests (unless you specify Bf as the destination) will go to the external browser.

Update: as it happens, there was a bug. Grab the latest update for the browsing component (named Browsing-Assist in the update tool), and it should be resolved.

Doc Searls points to Dale Wolf's screed on the death of traditional marketing. It's nice to see Cincom getting some presence in the blogsphere.

Sci Fi Wire has some interesting news on casting in the two SG series:

Bridges will join SG-1 as Gen. Hank Landry, the new head of Stargate Command, when Jack O'Neill (Richard Dean Anderson) is promoted to oversee Homeworld Security. Bridges will have a regular role on SG-1 and will also appear in a few episodes of Atlantis.

Oscar winner Gossett joins the cast of SG-1 in a recurring role as a Jaffa leader who vies with Teal'c (Christopher Judge) for political control of the new Jaffa nation.

Pileggi, best known to SF fans for his recurring X-Files role as assistant FBI director Walter Skinner, takes on a recurring role in Atlantis as a hard-nosed colonel who butts heads with Dr. Weir (Torri Higginson) and Maj. Sheppard (Joe Flanigan).

Production on both Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis is set to begin in March for summer premieres on SCI FI.

It will be interesting to see how well SG-1 does with the effective loss of two main characters - O'Neill and Hammond. I'll have to see how well Beau Bridges fills that gap; I have qualms. As to Atlantic - I'm curious as to how we get a colonel in the cast - I thought that Major Sheppard was the ranking military guy - either the story is wrong on the wire, or they are about to do something wonky...

I'm off on a quick trip to corporate - we hired a new marketing person for the Smalltalk group, and we have a set of "getting started" stuff to talk about. many of you will already be familiar with her - Suzanne Fortman. I'm trying to convince her to set up a blog here, so with any luck, you'll be hearing more from her.

Chris Petrill makes a good point about some of the more bizarre numbering schemes used by open source projects (Firefox, anyone?)

Please, if you release software to the public and consider it usable and reasonably stable, do not number it some absurd 0.3.1, or whatever. If you release it to the public, it's a 1.0 release to start with. From Charles Miller:

Too many Open Source projects treat Version 1.0 as some kind of Holy Grail that can only be reached when the project is perfect. I find that highly annoying, because it makes it really, really difficult to tell a sketchy alpha from production code that is just still in pre-1.0 because the author wants it to do everything.

Nothing is ever "feature complete." Nothing is ever "bug free." Don't pretend you'll ever finish the project, and certainly not without people actually using it, if that's your goal. If it's not your goal, don't release it.

I've learned a lot about this through doing BottomFeeder. The temptation to muck with the version numbers for reasons that have nothing to do with the code are just amazing...

Dale Wolf says that traditional marketing is dead. Well, have a look at Phil Ringnalda's reaction to an announcement by the news owners of Bloglines:

Feed on Feeds is rough as a cob, it keeps triggering what I think is a Firefox frames bug and setting the feedlist frame's source to about:blank, the autodiscovery is far too simpleminded, taking the first application/rss+xml it finds, ignoring Atom and not offering a preview when there are multiple feeds to be found, there's some extra escaping going on in titles, so I read mnot’s Web log and some seriously twisted post titles from AKMA, the HTML (lack of) security is frightening, not being able to read or even subscribe to a feed when it's in a temporary not-well-formed state is a pain, and you know what? None of that matters, for three simple reasons: freedoms 1 through 3. I can fix the things that bother me, where I could never fix Bloglines; I can tell you how to fix them, or fix them for you; I can give Steve my fixes to put in a future version, or if worst comes to worst and we disagree about what it should do too completely, I can come up with a new name and head off in another direction.

Bloglines did many nice things for me, and I sincerely wish Mark all the best with Ask Jeeves, but it's time for me to see what I can do for Feed on Feeds, rather than wait for the monetization hammer to come down on Bloglines.

A culture used to being able to blip past with TiVo and ReplayTV is not sitting still anymore.

CNET and Reuters confirm the buy - via Morgan McLintic.

Gordon Weakliem hits on a number of things I thought I'd comment on. To wit:

That's exactly the problem with comments: you lose control of your content. It's just not worth it to spend any amount of time composing a comment when you're losing control over whether or not the comment even will be published. It's like sending a letter to the editor: they get thousands a day, yet maybe a dozen get published daily. Why bother expending all that effort? It's amazing the practice has survived. On the other hand, when you post to your own weblog, you own the content, and nobody can take away the fact that you've had your say.

It's actually an open question as to who owns the content (depending on who you host with, and whether it's a corporate blog or not). Information Week has an entire article on this:

The trend is forcing IT, human resources, and legal departments to come up to speed quickly. The issue of who owns the copyrights to Weblogs, in particular, seems to have caught some people off guard. Mark Potts, chief technology officer for Hewlett-Packard's management software business, says that he would be surprised if his Weblog, which is hosted on HP's Web site, was copyrighted by his employer. "That's an interesting question," he says.

But, after checking the company's policy, an HP spokeswoman discovered that the rights to Potts' content belong to the company and not the CTO. "HP owns the copyright for anything written by an HP employee published on an HP Web site, including blog entries," the spokeswoman says via E-mail.

So interestingly enough, you may not own the content. Information Week points out that Microsoft is not being clear about ownership on the new Spaces system - and I'd be curious to know what anyone's actual rights are with hosted solutions like BlogSpot (etc). It's just not clear at the moment. Having stirred a can of worms there, let me go on to Gordon's next comment:

One other trend that really bothers me is the current fad of using CAPTCHA in comments, and in particular, the fact that these systems almost never have any sense of identity to them. That is, once I've passed the CAPTCHA test, I have to pass it every time I visit the site. That's a serious disincentive to post a comment, particularly when some of these weblog operators generate CAPTCHAs with pretty extreme distortions.For my part, I disable comments on posts older than a certain threshold. These sort of protections are never applied to Comment API implementations (realistically, how could they be?). One really has to wonder when we'll see widespread spamming via the Comment API; probably around the time that CAPTCHA and comment expiration become widespread enough to cause some real pain for the spammers.

Hmm - I have no idea why Gordon thinks that the CommentAPI should be wide open while the rest of the system gets locked down. In this server, comments all pass through the same check/save system, whether they come from the CommentAPI or from the web form. Are other systems really so broken that the same isn't true? Makes me wonder...

I'm in meetings at corporate today - and it's a dash from one to the next until late this afternoon. The good news is, we are getting started on the marketing and business plan for the next year. The bad news is, I have to attend all those meetings...

Stephanne Ducasse has some announcements from Esug:

Call for contributions for the
13th International Smalltalk Conference
Saturday 13 august to saturday 20 august
Brussels
http://www.esug.org

For 13 years, the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG) has organized the International Smalltalk conference that aims at being a live forum on the cutting edge of software technologies. ESUG attracts people from both academia and industry for an entire week af activities. Every year about half of attendies are engineers using Smalltalk in business while the rest of attendies are students and teachers using Smalltalk for both their research and courses.

Like every year, this year's edition of the event will include the regular technical program with high quality invited speakers. As well, we'll have a research track with an excellent program committee, a business day about Smalltalk's successfull use in the market place, and a technology awards program where prizes will be distributed to the authors of the best pieces of Smalltalk related software.

THIS YEAR we are looking for YOUR EXPERIENCE Reports using smalltalk so please come to tell us more on your experience and projects

Here is a non exhaustive list of topics we are interested in:

• XP pratices
• Development tools
• Experience reports
• Model driven development
• Web development
• Team management
• Meta-Modeling
• Security
• New libraries
• new UI framework
• educational material
• Embedded systems

ESUG technical program

• Submissions due on 1st of May 2005
• Notification of acceptance on 15 of May 2005

ESUG Research Conference

• Paper of 25 pages max
• The best papers will be published in a special issue of Elsevier
• Computer Languages and Systems
• Submissions Deadline: 21st of May 2005,
• Notification of acceptance: 21st of June 2005,
• Final version: 31st of July 2005.

ESUG Education Conference Information

Smalltalk Business Conference

• Submissions due on 1st of May 2005
• Notifications on 21st of May 2005

Innovation Technology Awards

• 3 pages max describing the software + URL to download the software
• Submissions due on 30th of june
• Notifications of elegibility on 15th of july

Are you a student who wants to attend ESUG (the first European Conference on Smalltalk)? ESUG has again a student volunteer program so you can get the conference for free. Your duties will be low and you will have to help a bit the local organizers. ESUG will not pay the travel but the conference will be free and possibly the hosting will be also free depending on the number of students.

For Information on the student volunteer program click here

That's a lot of information on this year's ESUG conference - check it out - I'll see you there.

Sometimes, in all our efforts to "cover the bases" in a marketing effort, we miss the truly obvious. take this post from WonderBranding, for instance:

"I've done everything possible to create good relationships with my female clients," a doctor announced to me during a recent seminar, with just a hint of smugness.  "I've decorated my office with soothing colors and have a fountain in the waiting room to ease any nervousness.  There are a variety of magazines on the coffee table that appeal to different personalities... I even have a cappucino corner where patients can make themselves a beverage.  I've covered all the bases - there's nothing left."

I let his statement hang like Air Jordan for a few ticks of the clock, then asked him,

"How long do your patients have to wait in the waiting room before they're escorted in to see you?"

It was like hitting him with a two-by-four.  One of the most important aspects of the patient experience, yet he was so far inside the bottle he couldn't see it.  How much simpler it would have been to focus on the biggest complaint that most patients have these days - interminable waits without explanation - instead of interior decorating or refreshments.

This is a common problem - we think we've covered the bases, but - in fact - we've typically missed something important. The problem we create for ourselves is that we assume that we know what people want - but we don't bother to ask what people want. This is something that Doc Searls co-wrote an entire book about - The Cluetrain Manifesto. It's also something that Dale Wolf has been on about in his marketing blog.

The WonderBranding post covers a bunch of territory on addressing this - I'll summarize briefly: The key is to figure out what people don't like about your product/service and deal with that. This might be something specific to your product, or it might be something endemic to your industry - either way, you need to find a way to address that concern. The flip side of that is to figure out what it is that your loyal customers keep coming back for - figure that out and build on it.

Shelley Powers points out the logical end game to nofollow by analogy. She's not wrong...

My whirlwind day of meetings at corporate is over - now all that's left is the conference calls (did I mention how much we like conference calls?). I head home in the morning, and will get there early enough for morning coffee. Off to bed for now.

I stayed at the airport hotel in Dayton last night - a simple hotel, but they had free Wireless, so I'll likely stay there again. I left the notebook up overnight, figuring I'd have BottomFeeder grab updates overnight so that I could read them on the flight. Well - that was before Microsoft decided to "help" me.

I have Windows set to do auto-updates, which is (in theory) the best practice. When I got up this morning I looked at the notebook and had the wtf?? moment - I was no longer logged in. My first thought was "oh crap, what didn't the firewall stop?". Well, that wasn't it. My event logs looked a little suspicious - remote access system activated at 3:10 am, then nothing until I logged in at 6 - that was in the security section of the Windows Event log. Wandering through the application section, I noticed that Windows update had helpfully downloaded an update to the .NET framework, and that apparently required a reboot. I hadn't realized that Windows would reboot itself - must make server deployments fun if you forget to turn that feature off.

Panic averted, I headed over to the airport. It's probably a good thing I'm in good health and have a strong heart though - both look like requirements for running Windows. A little tray notice such as: "your machine has been rebooted after a software update" would have been helpful...

A Smalltalker familiar with dotNET (he's been involved in C# projects for the last 18 months or so) pointed me to this MSDN article - the second of a series on the presumed move from software craftsmanship to software factories. I'm not so sure that we'll get there anytime soon, at least not with Microsoft leading the way. Here's an interesting admission:

The first reason is the current economic model for commercially sustainable reuse. In the previous article, we discussed the Language Framework pattern, which describes the progression toward automation:

• After developing a number of systems in a given problem domain, we identify a set of reusable abstractions for that domain, and then we document a set of patterns for using those abstractions.
• We then develop a runtime, such as a framework or server, to codify the abstractions and patterns. This lets us build systems in the domain by instantiating, adapting, configuring, and assembling components defined by the runtime.
• We then define a language and build tools that support the language, such as editors, compilers and debuggers, to automate the assembly process. This helps us respond faster to changing requirements, since part of the implementation is generated, and can be easily changed.

The first two parts of this pattern are within reach for most organizations, but the third part is not. Developing language-based tools is currently quite expensive, and therefore makes economic sense only in broad horizontal domains, such as user interface construction and data access, where the necessary investments can be amortized over a large customer base. For this reason, commercial implementations of the Language Framework pattern are supplied almost exclusively by platform vendors.

Look at that last paragraph - Developing language-based tools. Here's a tip - these folks might want to talk to Steve Kelly at MetaCase. The tools that MS thinks are too hard for most of us are not, in fact, out of reach - unless you insist on using low productivity development platforms - like, say, the ones Microsoft (and Sun, and IBM) promote. Here:

We are now at a point in the evolution of the software industry where frameworks and tools must become more vertically focused, in order to realize further productivity gains. They must provide more value for smaller classes of problems. This breaks the current economic model because markets for vertically focused frameworks and tools are too small to support platform plays, and because the domain knowledge required to develop them is housed mainly in end user organizations that have not traditionally been software suppliers.

The premise is correct - the expertise does exist only in end user environments, and the generalized frameworks that MS is after are just too hard to build if you work in static environments. There's simply not enough flexibility in the CLR or the JVM to support that kind of work - static typing, the need to cast repeatedly to accomplish anything useful, and the continual larding of new language "features" simply makes those environments more and more complex - makiing it harder and harder to actually get anywhere.

Steve kelly demonstrated the MetaCase tools to me at the Cincom Smalltalk User's Conference last December - it's an amazing little system - it allows you to build domain specific languages (leveraging the expertise of the end organization). The key thing is, it's hard to build tools like the ones MetaCase have - at least, if you use straightjacketed environments. Smalltalk removes the artificial complexity from the tool building exercise, and lets us take that next step - the one MS wants to get to. They have the right ideas - model driven design and domain specific languages - but the wrong tools with which to implement those ideas. If you want to see those ideas in action, visit the guys at MetaCase

Later in that article I posted on earlier is this gem:

While CORBA attempted to use a similar strategy, its complexity required major investment by platform vendors, which limited its scope. The simplicity of XML-based protocols significantly lowers the barrier to implementation, ensuring their greater ubiquity. By encoding remote method invocation requests as XML, they avoid interoperability problems caused by platform specific remote procedure call encoding and argument marshalling. Also, by obtaining broad industry agreement on standards, they have designed platform interoperability in from the beginning.

Ok, let me pull out the 40 ton cluestick and explain something to the author - the various XML mechanisms for interop (SOAP, XML-RPC, etc) are no simpler than CORBA. I've worked with both, and - in fact - the current WS* developments look astoundingly like the process the OMG used in the 90's for CORBA. It's all the same stuff, this time using text instead of binary. You want to secret to XML's success? It's not simplicity - it's port 80. To get a CORBA service working between 2 entities, I have to get security personnel all around to agree to open specific ports. The XML protocols take a pass on that by using HTTP as their transport mechanism.

XML is not simpler, and anyone who tells you it is selling something.

The Register reports that Carly Fiorina is out at HP:

Carly Fiorina has left her post as chairman and chief executive of HP with immediate effect. Robert Wayman, HP's CFO, takes over as interim chief executive and will lead the search for Fiorina's replacement. He retains responsibility for finance.

Patricia Dunn, an HP director since 1998, becomes non-executive chairman of the firm.

In her valedictory statement, Fiorina said: "While I regret the board and I have differences about how to execute HP's strategy, I respect their decision. HP is a great company and I wish all the people of HP much success in the future."

The Register notes that it's an odd point for a CEO to bow out; they have some speculation though:

Fiorina's sudden departure follows rumours that HP's board of directors was unhappy with her patchy performance and was looking for ways to reduce her responsibilities. HP said on Monday that Sanford Litvack was leaving the board and would be replaced by Thomas Perkins who was an HP director between 2002 and 2004. He originally left because at 73 he was too old to sit on the board - HP policy says directors should not be over 70 years old.

fascinating. Update: Misbehaving has a few thoughts on this, from the "women and technology" POV

If you were trying to access any of the server functions earlier this morning - the blogs, the survey application, or the NC download application - you probably got an error or a timeout. Something went wonky after I went to bed last night, and I had to give the server a kick when I got up today. It's all back online now.

Mark Bernstein asks a good question - If spammers make money by spamming products nobody could conceivably want, wouldn't you suppose they could make even more money selling stuff that someone might want?. I think I have an answer to that. The broad middle of the market views spam as an annoyance at best - and downright obnoxious at worst. Most corporate entities don't want to be seen that way. Tells you something about the ones that don't mind right there...

STIC is pleased to announce that Niall Ross will be delivering a keynote address at Smalltalk Solutions this year:

Cary, North Carolina, Feb. 9, 2005 - 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. The Smalltalk Solutions 2005 Conference Board is pleased to announce one of this year's keynote speakers:

Niall Ross - The Value of Smalltalk

Abstract: "Some languages are better than others", is often said by experienced software engineers. It is as often disbelieved by IT managers who suspect that those technical differences their team gurus talk about don't really impact the business. Managers are not programmers. Managers care about rapid delivery, scalability and the ability to refocus their systems on new opportunities, not about dynamic typing, late binding, a fully-exposed meta-model, few reserved words and classes as first-class objects. Why should language features matter to them?

Niall uses detailed examples from real commercial systems to illustrate how certain features of Smalltalk feed directly into business values. His talk is an attempt to bridge a chasm of understanding and (more importantly) to give others the means to do so in their own workplaces. Language choice is a major driver of project success or failure, yet is much neglected and often influenced by irrational considerations. By showing ways in which particular features of Smalltalk impact particular business needs, Niall hopes to help people find the words that can bridge the gap.

Bio: Niall ended his undergraduate career with two intellectual interests: computing and the theory of relativity. A quick check of how much commercial work was available to relativity and gravitation theorists decided him to do academic research in that field and then seek a commercial job in computing, rather than the other way round. Niall started working commercially in IT in 1985. He was at first assigned to designing and implementing software engineering process improvements and only three years later did he begin significant writing and delivering of commercial software. This experience taught him that intelligent people can nevertheless form foolish ideas about software engineering if they have not worked at the coding coalface of real large commercial projects.

Learning from this, Niall spent the nineties working on software to manage complex, rapidly-changing telecoms networks. A side effect of this work was that it taught him much about how scale and rate of change affects software. Early in the nineties he discovered Smalltalk. The more he used it, the more he came to recognize its its power in this area. This perception was strengthened when he spent a year delivering a telecoms management system in Java.

At the end of the decade, Niall formed his own software company to offer consultancy in meta-data system design, in Smalltalk and in agile methods. He has since worked on a variety of meta-data-driven systems, mostly in the financial domain. He also leads an open-source project (http://customrefactor.sourceforge.net).

Niall has made many presentations at IT conferences over the past two decades. Presentations relevant to his Smalltalk Solutions 2005 talk include:

• Solving the XP Legacy Problem with (Extreme) Meta-Programming, Niall Ross and Andrew McQuiggin, Smalltalk Solutions, 22nd-24th April 2002, Cincinnati
• XP-rience: eXtreme Programming Experience, Niall Ross, 10th European Smalltalk Summer School, Essen, 25th August - 1st September 2001
• The Business Case for Adequate Reflection, Niall Ross, 8th European Smalltalk Summer School, Ghent, 30th August - 3rd September 1999

Those of us writing corporate blogs received another cautionary tale today:

Mark Jen, a blogger whose candid comments about life on the job at Google sparked controversy last month, has left the company.

"Mark is no longer an employee at Google," a Google representative said in response to an inquiry Tuesday. Efforts to reach Jen for comment were not immediately successful.

Jen's departure comes less than a month after he joined Google as part of a wave of new hires and began recording his impressions of his new employer, including criticisms, in his blog.

Update: Scoble adds some useful thoughts on the subject. Jeremy Zawodny has some details and observations

Patrick Logan points to more stuff in that MSDN article that I missed:

The file has been the central container of work in software development for over thirty years. All of a project's structure and logic is ultimately reduced down to files and directories. The tools that surround software development are built around this concept, too. This article explores the concept of file structure, and contrasts it with an emerging view of Model Driven Architecture... It seems clear that the file is a relic that has outlived its usefulness for software development... The modern development environment has not yet fully caught up to the object-oriented shift. All of the tools still rely on a file to be the container of source code. While some contain modeling capabilities as well, the models exist as different entities than the file and its code.

Or to quote someone: "Source code in files.... how quaint". In case MS is looking, the answer is over here. We knew that code in files had outlived their usefulness 3 decades ago :)

One of the interesting capabilities of VisualWorks is overriding. Now, this doesn't mean simply redoing a method in a subclass - no, it means something that is potentially more powerful - but also more dangerous. What you can do is redefine a method in an existing class in a loadable component - either a Store package or a Parcel. You have been able to do this since the beginning with Smalltalk - all overrides do is add some traceability to the process. let me give a small example:

For BottomFeeder, we use a network component called NetResources, a library built on top of the VisualWorks HTTP client support. We needed a higher level library to support things like mod-gzip that the client lib did not (yet) support. In any case, as part of the implementation, we overrode the definition of the class HttpClient. Here's the VW 7.2.1 definition:

Smalltalk.Net defineClass: #HttpClient
	superclass: #{Net.NetClient}
	indexedType: #none
	private: false
	instanceVariableNames: 'request proxyHost keepAlive connectionStream useProxyAuthorization '
	classInstanceVariableNames: ''
	imports: ''
	category: 'Net-HTTP-Support'

In contrast, here's the overridden definition we used in VW 7.2.1:

Smalltalk.Net defineClass: #HttpClient
	superclass: #{Net.NetClient}
	indexedType: #none
	private: false
	instanceVariableNames: 'request proxyHost keepAlive connectionStream useProxyAuthorization originalResponse '
	classInstanceVariableNames: ''
	imports: ''
	category: 'Net-HTTP-Support'

We added an instance variable in order to have better error handling. This was fine, and it all worked without any issues before we started the port to VW 7.3 (which went live in December - see here for details). Here's the 7.3 definition of that class:

Smalltalk.Net defineClass: #HttpClient
	superclass: #{Net.NetClient}
	indexedType: #none
	private: false
	instanceVariableNames: 'request proxyHost keepAlive useProxyAuthorization connection entityParsingOptions cookieAgent enableCookies protocol '
	classInstanceVariableNames: ''
	imports: ''
	category: 'Net-HTTP-Support'

As you can see, a number of new instance variables were defined (and the class now natively handles mod-gzip). We took out our mod-gzip handling, but we didn't immediately notice the more dangerous thing - our (obsolete) class definition did not have any of the new instance variables - and they are used in the code. Well, that led to some bizarre errors (in development). As it happens, VW will deal with undeclared references by creating a variable in the Undeclared dictionary. After running Bf in development a few times, I had a lot of state in Undeclared. The trouble is, when running threaded Http accesses, multiple clients ended up sharing things that they had no business sharing! Fixing up the definition solved that problem

The bottom line? Overrides are useful, but - with each migration to a new release you have to carefully examine your overrides to see if they are still congruent with the system. In our case, they weren't. It's useful to be able to patch problems in place, and it's also easy to trace - I always store system overrides into a separate package so that I know where to look. The key is - you have to actually look

Now this is good news for Sci Fi fans - Galactica has been picked up for a second season! Maybe some of these poor deluded folks will tune in and see what quality sci-fi looks like. A note to those of you who have been giving this a miss based on the campy 70's show - this is nothing like that one. The baseline premise is the same, but just about everything else is different. The cast is good - they really, really convey the nearly hopeless situation that humanity finds itself in. The Cylons make a lot more sense - they seem to be more cyborg than robots. The Galactica looks old and gritty, and they play into that. If you haven't looked, catch up with one of Sci-Fi channel's marathons!

The STIC has an RSS feed now

In reference to this thing I've spent all day on, there was an interesting report from a denizen of the Smalltalk IRC channel - apparently, a guy from MS was speaking on the topic in Switzerland today. I've replaced the guy's IRC handle with anonymous - if you really want to hear directly, visit the channel. Anyway - I report, you decipher:

[14:35] <anonymous> that microsoft presentation was so bad
[14:36] <anonymous> (how bad was it?)
[14:36] <anonymous> indescribably bad
[14:37] * anonymous is low on metaphors
[14:37] <anonymous 2> what presentation
[14:38] <anonymous> this guy http://blogs.msdn.com/jackgr/
[14:39] <anonymous> 50 minutes on "hey, look, a software productivity crisis"
[14:39] <anonymous> 10 minutes of Visual Studio screen shots
[14:39] <anonymous> 15 minutes of questions
[14:40] * anonymous was shut down by the moderator for flaming microsoft
[14:40] <anonymous> and I'm supposed to be one of the pro-MS guys
[14:40] <anonymous> so much for my rep :)
[14:40] <anonymous> hey he did say that MS was adding Smalltalk protocols to C#
[14:40] <anonymous> good god, whatever that means
[14:41] <anonymous> totally unprompted by any Smalltalk reference whatsoever
[14:41] <anonymous> 93% of the audience was saying "wtf?"
[14:41] <anonymous> the other 7 guys were cheering that he mentioned Smalltalk
(but still not knowing what the hell he was talking about)
[14:43] <anonymous> someone asked if any of this stuff worked with Unix or Linux
[14:43] <anonymous> he said that if we had Unix questions we should talk to SCO, and if we had Linux
questions we should get the community to implement it for us
[14:43] <anonymous> really shot his credibility to hell

I've been so busy making fun of this that I nearly missed something interesting - Alan Kay was interviewed recently. There's a lot of good stuff in there, but I particularly liked this observation:

Perhaps it was commercialization in the 1980s that killed off the next expected new thing. Our plan and our hope was that the next generation of kids would come along and do something better than Smalltalk around 1984 or so. We all thought that the next level of programming language would be much more strategic and even policy-oriented and would have much more knowledge about what it was trying to do. But a variety of different things conspired together, and that next generation actually didn't show up. One could actually argue 14as I sometimes do 14that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects.

You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the good ideas from the '60s and '70s, as computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were.

That's one of the reasons that the tagline here is Scene, not Herd. Go read the whole thing.

Priceless, from the Smalltalk IRC channel:

[15:51] <alan> ah, but it's not enough to to have a service oriented *architecture*. You need a service oriented *Lifecycle*
[15:51] <alan> or SOL, for short.
[15:51] <petrilli> I've been SOL for a long time
[15:51] <jarober> *cough*

Lambda the Ultimate points to an interesting post about the painful slog that is C# development

We've been using C# for a couple of years now, and are getting tired of the verbosity. Especially tired of copy/pasting and changing a couple of identifiers, and I imagine many other people are, too. After seeing some of the macro capabilities of Lisp, we got jealous. After some googling and browsing, I ran across Ned Batchelder's python-based code generation tool, Cog.

Cog lets you build ad-hoc code generators in python, in your source code files.

The fact that you have to find a tool (surprise! written in a dynamic language) to make C# development not suck should be a big, huge hint that perhaps you ought to follow the Python thing and see where it leads - you might end up in Python, or Ruby, or Smalltalk, or Lisp - regardless, you'll end up being productive.

Patrick Logan has takeoff advice for the software factory guys :)

If you follow this advice, you'll be sure not to get cancer. I make no guarantees over what other problems you may develop... Be safe, eat carrots

This is hilarious (at least if you've set up a blog). make sure you aren't drinking anything you don't want spewed on the screen :)

I currently have 49 invites - first come, first served. Send your requests to jarober@gmail.com

If you are interested in a fully localized for Japan version of Cincom Smalltalk, contact your local sales rep - the 7.3 version has been prepared by our Japanese office.

In case you were wondering where the term "dude" comes from...

Wired News reports that the origin of the Hope Diamond has been found - it comes from the "French Blue", part of the crown jewels in pre-revolutionary France:

The research helps confirm the Hope Diamond as originating with a 115-carat stone found in India in 1668. That stone was sold to King Louis XIV of France who had it cut into the 69-carat French Blue. The French Blue was stolen during the French Revolution.

Just over 20 years later, after the statute of limitations expired, a large blue diamond was quietly put up for sale in London, and eventually Henry Philip Hope purchased it.

Finally donated to the Smithsonian by jeweler Harry Winston, the now 45.52 carat stone is the world's largest blue diamond.

The research trail relied on old sketches and French research on the diamond itself in the 1700's.

Since I've been developing some decent sized systems - the blog server and BottomFeeder - I've noticed a distinct tendency towards conservatism on my part. Back when I was a sales engineer, I was always using the latest code from engineering, and demonstrating right out on the bleeding edge. Now I've got systems in deployment, and I lag the leading edge - in much the same way that our customers do. This has been an invaluable lesson to me in my role as product manager - when you have running software, you don't just jump out and upgrade.

For instance - the blog server running this is actually a VW 7.1 based server. I'm only getting around to updating it to VW 7.3 today. Why is that? Well, I've had plenty of other things to do, and the server (modulo bugs introduced by me) has been quite stable and scalable. There's some interest in our marketing group in getting up to speed on blogs now, so I thought I should create some actual deployment tools (don't ask how I deploy a new blog now :) ) - and update the posting tool for the limited use case that they will likely want. If I'm going to start writing tools, I want the latest version of the product - so update time it is.

BottomFeeder has been closer to the latest stuff, but it lags as well. The downloads are all 7.2.1 based - I've got a 7.3 development image, and we've just worked our way through the migration issues (see the override post from yesterday). The difference between the two? I've been more conservative with the server than with the client tool. As I said, the server has been stable and scalable, so I haven't seen a good reason to make changes. All by itself, that little lesson is valuable - I can hear those words from customers over and over again, but it's a lot more meaningful when I run smack into it myself.

Ultimately, I've determined that any product manager who wants to really get it should build something with his product. If you can deploy it in some way, that's even better. Believe you me, you'll learn things that you can't easily understand any other way.

Here's a nice commentary on what it takes to actually learn OO:

About an hour ago I finished David West's Object Thinking. It's a great book and a must read for anyone who thinks that he or she knows object oriented development. He saved me from the clutches of the formalists and structured programming. Of course, I still have to convert the guys at work but at least I'm aware of the dangers. I thought I was doing OOP alright but it turns out I was misled by the formalists. So now I'm into Smalltalk (Squeak) to teach myself real object oriented ways without the bounds of an object oriented programming language in disguise (Java, C#). It's pretty different but I like it and see that there's a whole new way to create software that the world is seemingly conveniently ignorant of.

Ed Foster is still on the case, looking for bad EULAs. With the help of his readers, he found some beauties, like this one:

After all, Microsoft and EULAs have always gone hand-in-hand. Developers in the Visual FoxPro community have been puzzling over some changes Microsoft made in the EULA for the new 9.0 release. In particular, they've been scratching their heads over this decidedly cryptic passage:

"The software is engineered to allow you to use it in certain ways. You must comply with these technical limitations. For more information about them, see the software documentation. You may not ... work around technical limitations in the software..."

I'm guessing that this doesn't leave the choice of what you can and can't work around to the end developer. Ed's guess is that this a vague attempt to prevent end use on Linux via emulation, but heck - with that wording, it could mean anything.

Sometimes, I really love this industry that I work in. Nothing beats this Hilton license for use of their hotel broadband though:

"You agree that HHC shall own all Information. By using the Service, you voluntarily, expressly and knowingly acknowledge and agree with all of the foregoing and further agree to each and all of the following: (I) such Information belongs to HHC and is not personal or private proprietary information; (ii) such Information, wherever collected, may be processed, used, reproduced, modified, adapted, translated, used to create derivative works, shared, published and distributed by HHC in its sole and absolute discretion in any media and manner irrevocably in perpetuity in any location throughout the universe..."

It's nice to see that they've anticipated Faster than Light travel already - what do they know that I don't? I've got a suggestion for them though - they can shorten that agreement down to one line: All your base belong to us

Hey look, here's a shocker - Gartner is mumbling nonsense again:

Analyst firm Gartner has said that companies should think carefully before migrating from the Internet Explorer browser to the open-source Firefox browser from Mozilla.

The Gartner report said Firefox's growth, so far, was "unsustainable" as many of the features that had made it popular were primarily aimed at individual users not businesses.

In the US, Firefox now has 5% of the market and is still rising, while Explorer's share is slipping.

I wonder if that explains why Firefox hits on this site have doubled in the last year - because technical business users can't find any useful features in the product? Here's a tip for the woolheads over there at Gartner - try leaving the office and actually seeing what's going on in the sectors you claim to follow. Yes, I know it's easier to collect checks from big companies and write reports that favor them. It's not actually "analysis" though. Heck, I could hire my daughter's 6th grade class to suck up a whole lot more cheaply...

It's starting to look like the term "beta" is being bent completely out of shape. Witness what Google has done with it over the last few years - services that are, for all intents and purposes "production" status, are still labeled beta.

Underscoring the trend, Google co-founder Larry Page on Wednesday told investors that the beta, or test, stage for its products would last as long as its engineers expected to make major changes to them--a process that has already taken years, in some cases.

"It's kind of an arbitrary thing," Page said. "We could take beta off all of our products tomorrow, and we wouldn't actually have accomplished anything...If it's on there for five years because we think we're going to make major changes for five years, that's fine. It's really a messaging and branding thing."

This is another instance of a perfectly good word being co-opted out of existence. If the word ever meant anything, it means less than that now.

I'll be delivering a talk on our Product Roadmap on February 23rd in NYC - follow this link for details

The Economist has noticed blogging, mostly due to the efforts of Scoble at Microsoft. What have they noticed? Well, this:

Mr Scoble seems to be worth his salary. He has become a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide, who read his blog religiously. Impressively, he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience. Bosses and PR people at other companies are taking note.

Regardless of what you think of MS or any of the various lawsuits of the past few years, you have to admit - their public image had taken a beating. What the Economist has noticed is that his PR efforts - unscripted and honest - have helped improve that situation. Think PR departments haven't noticed that? Well, go google "PR Blog". I got back 4 million plus hits.

The article notes many of the potential issues - they figure (and I agree) that some ugly lawsuits are inevitable. There have been plenty of people fired over blog content; suits are only a matter of time. Still, that's a nit. This is a new adjunct to traditional PR, and it's not going away.

I suppose this is encouraging in a "at least the damage is widespread" sort of way - India has some morons in the IT sector as well:

One of India's biggest offshoring players has launched software it promises will make programmers all but unnecessary in converting legacy applications to modern programming languages.

Mahindra British Telecom (MBT) said on Thursday it is putting the finishing touches on software that 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.

The Mumbai-based company is a joint venture between Indian technology group Mahindra & Mahindra and UK telco British Telecommunications. It has development centres in the UK and India and specialises in applications outsourcing and offshoring for the telecoms industry.

*Cough* modern? C, or C++? Which planet does this guy live on, and has it escaped the late 80's yet? Java? Here, let me show you a system that uses BlockClosures - can the bright boys at Mahindra show me what kind of unmaintainable crap that will generate? Sheesh. I suppose this indicates that the Indian software sector is maturing - they are now generating people incompetent enough to work here. Hat tip to Christopher Petrilli for spotting this silliness.

Now this animal is fascinating:

It takes a car driver about 650 milliseconds to hit the brake after seeing the traffic light ahead turn red. The star-nosed mole, operating in the Stygian darkness of its burrow, can detect the presence of a tasty tidbit, such as an insect larva or tiny worm, determine that it is edible and gulp it down in half that time.

"Most predators take times ranging from minutes to seconds to handle their prey," says Kenneth C. Catania, assistant professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt, who conducted the study. "The only things I've found that come even close are some species of fish," he says.

This odd looking creature is so fast that scientists are studying it to learn what the limits are on physical/brain responses.

One of the outflows of phishing attacks has been advice from banks (and other financial entities) that you should never click a link to a financial site in email - instead, you should enter it by hand. Well, that's a good idea in theory - but this Slashdot piece points out a problem there as well:

"Slate's Paul Boutin reports on the sordid history of the oldest scam on the Internet. For almost as long as the Web has existed, there's been a thriving economy of sites, services, and software vying to grab you as soon as your mistype a URL. Studies estimate that 10-20% of all hand-entered URLs are mistyped, adding up to at least 20 million wrong numbers per day, helping to enrich the likes of porn purveyors, ISP's, Paxfire, Microsoft and VeriSign."

10-20% is a huge number - and I fully expect a lot of those "close but wrong" urls to move from porn to something more dangerous over time. Ultimately, telling people to enter urls by hand is a partial solution at best.

Following on my post about development stupidity yesterday, one of the commenters pointed to this survey of global development practices (PDF). In a sidebar, the authors pointed to previous research that reached these conclusions:

• Spending more time and effort on customer specifications improved both development speed and productivity.
• Prototyping, better software engineers, smaller teams, and less code rework contributed to faster development.
• More time and effort spent on testing and integration negatively affected overall development time.

Their results suggested that early planning and customer specifications are crucial to productivity, whereas "doing it right the first time" is essential for reducing development time.

I nearly stopped reading the article right there - if they want to imply that testing is a bad thing, then they live in a very different reality than the rest of us. The summary point is worse though - doing it right the first time is essential? Well sure, and I love mom and apple pie too. The fact of the matter is, we know from long years in this industry that we don't usually get it right the first time. We have to be prepared to iterate towards the right answer. The authors actually make that point later on in the paper, so we shouldn't take the sidebar as being their conclusion. Here's what they say towards the end of the paper:

Importantly, when we captured the effect of all these practices in a model predicting performance, the presumed disadvantages that stem from not having a complete specification disappeared. That is, adopting practices associated with a more flexible process (that is, those geared to generating early feedback on product performance) appears to compensate for incomplete specifications. In a sense, these practices seem to provide an alternative mechanism for generating the type of information that a specification typically communicates. Our findings help explain why early software development research might have concluded that waterfall-style processes lead to improved performance; they might not have captured data on the use of other (more flexible) practices that were actually better performance predictors. And they also help us understand that in selecting a development model, we should be careful not to think that we can "cherry-pick" only those practices that look most appealing.

Exactly. Another thing I wonder about in this survey - it's dated 2003, and the data set is earlier than that. A lot of work in India is with maintenance of existing US/European projects, and that was even more true a few years ago. There may well be an apples/oranges comparison here when trying to place Indian development side by side with US and European results. They allude to that here:

It is important to remember as well that no Indian or Japanese company has yet to make any real global mark in widely recognized software innovation, long the province of US and a few European software firms. Code productivity taken in isolation might not be a good proxy for business performance, and it is probably less valuable than a defect measure for judging a development organization's performance.

That's a good point, and it gets back to the apples/oranges point I was making above. It's too early to draw any real strong conclusions from this data. I'm not sold on the notion of having overly detailed specifications up front, and my experience (thus far) with dealing with India is that they really, really want such specs. Then again, IT in the US wanted that kind of thing in the early days of development here - so it's likely that Indian development will "get over" that desire as they gain experience.

Silicon Valley Sleuth has some counterpoints to the Economist article on MS:

Anyone who claims to be at home in the blogosphere should know Scoble. His blog is a must read site and he is said to single-handedly have succeeded at changing the image of "Microsoft the bully" into "Microsoft the former bully with some nasty old habits".

But there is something severely wrong with this image: it isn't sincere. Scoble is a single instance of a single Microsoft employee writing a blog. He might be world famous inside the blogosphere but in the real world he is a nobody.

If Microsoft really wanted to make an impact, one of its highest ranking executives should start blogging. If Sun's COO Jonathan Schwartz can write a blog, so can Bill Gates. His words would outweigh anything Scoble says and give his company actual credibility.

He's got a point. As many times as I've made fun of Schwartz' comments, the fact is, he's out there communicating Sun's corporate vision. You can combine that with the commentary from line workers like Tim Bray and get something like a full picture of Sun from the outside. That's simply not the case with Microsoft - as much good as Scoble does (and I'm of the opinion that he's a huge help to MS) - it would help MS even more to get an executive level viewpoint "out there".

Now, at this point you could point out the obvious - as much good as I think I'm doing for Smalltalk and Cincom here, we don't have an executive blogging either, so who am I to throw stones? That's a fair point - but I can say that we have some tentative plans in that direction. I don't want to announce anything, because it's still under discussion here at Cincom. On the other hand, I've been spending a lot more time in the blog server code of late than I have been with the BottomFeeder code :) So stay tuned - there may be changes in that regard in the not too distant future.

Misbehaving points to a question from Richard Bartle:

Suppose a disgruntled programmer were to run some code that flipped the sex of every player character in EverQuest. Further suppose that this programmer did such a thorough job that it would take a week before all the characters could be flipped back. The players would complain, obviously, but would they actually play for that week? Would they learn anything from the experience?

I suspect that they'd keep playing, and I also suspect that they wouldn't learn much. Back in the day, I used to run a role playing game. During my early play (both as a player and as a DM), we had lots of characters changing sex - and we only had guys playing. It was one of those late adolescent "ooh, ooh, I get to play a pretty elfin girl" kind of things - i.e., it's not as if there was anything that vaguely resembled complex thinking going on. I think that Misbehaving would be all too familiar with the results of such an experiment.

Scoble thinks that MS needs TV ads. Yeah, right - like a lack of market awareness is Microsoft's problem. Here are a few tips:

• All that pseudo-AI code in Word that wants to "help" me by deciding how I want layout? Either rip it out or make it easy to turn all that crap off. Word sucks eggs. It's been getting steadily worse for 10 years now. The sad thing is, if you made Word for Windows 2.0 available again, I'd ditch what I have now in favor of it.
• Fix Internet Explorer, hopefully within my lifetime.
• Make copying files with Explorer as fast as XCopy. It's absurd that LAN file copying - using the obvious tools - sucks so bad

Forget ads. Fix your damn software.

I ran across Mark Jen's explanation of how things went down at Google. The first thing that struck me about it was the same thing that Scoble spotted - grammar. Here's the last paragraph from Jen's latest post:

thanks for reading! oh, and if you're looking for a talented technical project/product/program manager, i guess i'm on the market now. if you have a corporate blogging policy, i promise i'll follow it. i'll use proper capitalization in my specs too :)

I had a very, very hard time getting past his lack of capitalization. As a poet (e.e. cummings comes to mind) you can call this artistic expression. As a software professional, it comes across as uneducated. Seriously - Jen wouldn't get past the resume scan with me for that reason alone.

This is something that bugs me a lot, actually. I get email from a lot of people, including a few who clearly can't spell. That's a problem - because my first impression of an idea is lower if the presentation is weak. Poor spelling or grammar aren't things to be oddly proud of (I've seen a lot of that too). They are something that holds you back. My advice to Mark Jen - realize that the form of what you write is as important as the substance of what you write. If the form creates an initial negative reaction, then your substance never gets a real examination.

My sister took this sunrise shot on the way to the bus stop with her kids a few days ago; it's a nice shot:

Freeform Goodness reminds us of the progress we've made just in the area of personal music over the last couple of decades.

I'm seeing an uptick in two spam trends on sites I'm either interested in (the UIUC wiki) or sites I manage (this blog). Over on the wiki, I'm starting to see the spam become more clever - if you look at the home page's history, you'll note that the last "defacing" left the page visibly ok - but changed a bunch of the underlying links. I saw an inocuous looking addition here as well (look at the page history). This is a real pain in the neck to notice, because the pages are fine by cursory examination. Like a military arms race, each advance by one side (the spam filtering that uiuc added recently) gets immediately countered with a new tactic.

I've put almost a complete stop to comment spam on my blog; there have only been a handful of successful attempts over the last few months. Referer spam, on the other hand, is an ongoing battle. I'm adding to my keyword blacklist just about daily now; I downloaded the full list of supposed referers this morning, and it was astounding how many attempts there are. The new tactic there - seemingly inocuous urls that lead to bozo sites. The battle never ends.

It looks like Microsoft is getting burned by their own bundling strategy - as Firefox gains ground on IE, the earlier bundling strategy seems to have tied MS' hands in knots:

Officials for the Redmond, Wash., company said they will not upgrade the browser before the next release of Windows, dubbed Longhorn, which will only increase pressure from Firefox and further erode confidence due to security issues, sources said.

But because Microsoft has made the browser inextricably integrated with Windows, any upgrades will likely have to be delivered through a service pack update to the operating system, which is something Microsoft said probably won't happen. The company is looking at whether service packs might be viable, sources said.

This is just too rich. MS bundled IE so that they could kill Netscape off - and it worked. Figuring that they were done there, they've spent years ignoring IE (other than to tie it tightly into the OS). Now, Firefox comes along and creates a real challenge to MS - and their earlier bundling strategy pretty much prevents any kind of reasonable response. So when will Longorn come out?

"It has now been seven months since Firefox emerged as a real threat, and Microsoft has done nothing but issue ad hoc patches for individual holes," said Eric Raymond, an open-source software advocate and consultant in Malvern, Pa. "There will be no IE 7 until Longhorn, which isn't scheduled for general availability until 2006 and will probably slip further."

I don't think Longhorn will make it in 2006 either, and based on the various postings I see about IE, it sounds like the code base is a bewildering morass of hacks designed to deal with the issues of specific websites. I expect a decently working IE to stumble along at the same time that I expect a Word that doesn't suck to arrive.

I've started in on my rather large reading backlog - I'm into two books: "The Pity of War" by Niall Ferguson, and "Pox Americana". The first book looks at how WWI started - looking at the diplomatic maneuverings between Germany, the UK, France, and Russia in the two decades leading up to 1914. The latter book covers the Smallpox epidemics that struck North America during the 18th century. So far, I'm finding both of them to be very engaging reads - the Ferguson book in particular is challenging a lot of my preconceived notions on the origins and fighting of the war. I haven't read widely enough on ths topic yet to draw any conclusions, but it's interesting to read something with a variant take on things.

The Smallpox book is fascinating and terrifying all at the same time. I haven't gotten that far with it yet, but I've learned a few things I didn't know. Apparently, one of the reasons that Smallpox spread so rapidly in the native population was their genetic homogeneity - once the virus adapted to a given victim, it was ready to spread to any other native. It spread amongst unrelated natives as well as it spread amongst related Europeans. That's why it killed so many.

I'm not sure why I have such a fascination with such dark material, but there it is.

Tonight we wanted pizza, so I shuffled off to Bertuccis for it - I had to swing by Staples for some school supplies anyway - my daughter needed more critical notebook attachments. Somehow, I got through school with a looseleaf binder (1), paper, and a few pens. My daughter and her classmates show up looking like they are preparing to invade Russia with Napolean's army. It might be progress, but it sure looks like something else. So anyway... back to the pizza.

My wife likes Feta cheese and pepperoni, my daughter and I like plain (or, if they offer it, hot peppers). We all like extra tomato sauce. So I ordered 2 pies - one small, one regular - both extra sauce. This is where I (again) ran into the conundrum that Lileks explained so well a year or so ago:

I'm not looking for the perfect pizza, a circular Beatrice I can love unconditionally - just a good hot bubbly pizza with lots of sauce. That's all. A pizza that does not dole out the sauce as though it is a precious substance gathered by the dram at great expense by men in boats, far from home, following the herds of ocean-going tomatoes as they ply the world of wave and spume.

And further down:

It's not as if I'm asking them to arrange the pepperoni just so, and I send the pizza back if the pepperoni pieces overlap. All I want is extra sauce. Not extra wignlesput, or extra blompgretna, or any other extra noun that does not exist in the narrowly defined world of the pizza prep table. Extra sauce. See that sauce, there? In the pot? Put some on the crust. Now, concentrating hard on the word "extra," add some more.

HOW HARD CAN THIS BE?

My sentiments exactly. I swear, you say "extra sauce", and all they hear is "extra" - which translates to "extra cheese" in pizza parlor parlance, apparently. It seems that other than Lileks, my wife and I are the only two people in the western hemisphere who want extra sauce - how else to explain the stubborn lack of attention on the part of every place I order pizza from? I don't think "sauce" sounds a lot like "cheese", but hey, what do I know - I don't work in the pizza business. I'm going to start ordering the sauce on the side in a container - I wonder whether they'll just hand me bags of shredded mozzarella...

I'm constantly amazed at the "security problem? Perish the thought!" attitude that prevails across the entire IT sector. It seems that each individual person/business has to get slapped upside the head before awareness dawns. For the latest example, have a look at this PC World story on the security behind wireless car key systems and the ExxonMobil speedpass system:

ExxonMobile acknowledges the potential security problems with the Speedpass device. "Bottom line, we are aware of it," says Don Turk, a company spokesperson. Still, the company does not have any plans to change the internal Texas Instruments chip or upgrade their current security systems at this time, he says.

"There are additional security protections for our consumers in the Speedpass system," says Turk. Unlike a credit card, a Speedpass does not store consumer data, so thieves would not have access to personal information, he says.

ExxonMobil Speedpass also guarantees that consumers will not be held liable for any fraud committed against their accounts, Turk says.

According to Texas Instruments, consumers have little cause to be concerned. The company has made upgrades to the RFID chip that the Johns Hopkins researchers tested, says Gary Silcott, an RFID spokesperson for Texas Instruments.

"We're evolving beyond that product," he says. Additionally, Silcott says, "There's a much greater security threat and a much greater instance of fraud on magnetic-stripe credit cards."

Bah. Sounds like they'll have to have a serious incident before they wake up. It's not just them though; that's the way the entire industry thinks.

It's reading posts like this one that make the job worthwhile.

After my initial typo in this post, Peter William Lount added this commentary

More evidence (as if I needed it) that SOAP is the new CORBA - only shinier with angle brackets and port 80! - Mark Baker points to the ongoing interop woes. Gee, I seem to recall this kind of thing happening before...

Ryan Lowe takes me to the woodshed over my beta rant from a little while ago. He makes some good points about the larger public impact (i.e., just about none):

Labels like beta on software are completely meaningless to almost everyone but a very small minority of keyboard-wielding geeks. Unless you can be absolutely positive your audience is only other geeks who know how to use a test release, care should be taken with each release you put out.

Fair enough. My comeback on this is twofold:

• If beta is meaningless, why does Google keep every new thing they do in that state?
• Google's initial audience for their new stuff (GMail being a prime example) is the geek audience

Anyhow, Ryan makes some good points, and I don't really disagree with him that much on this.

I know why Orbitz would like to ban deep linking without their permission; they want to make sure you come through their site and see the ads, offers, etc. I also know that it's an exercise in futility. Linking is the nature of the web; there's no easy way to stop it. If they want to prevent such linking, they'll have to write their applications in such a way as to make it hard to do. Instead, I expect them to deploy lawyers. See slashdot for more on this. Here's my two cents back to Orbitz - the mere existence of this policy has convinced me to stay away from your service. Congratulations! You just lost a potential customer.

I'm finally getting around to building some site administration tools for the blog server. So far, I've done all the management ad-hoc, in a development Smalltalk image. That's worked ok, but I wanted something a whole lot simpler. Not to mention something that other Smalltalkers could pick up if they had any desire to try the system out themselves. So far I have some simple web forms that allow one click creation of new blogs, and a similar screen for turning blogs off. Once I get this stuff stable, I'll update the home page with the updated SSP files.

Looks like ObjectConnect just released a new version of Smalltalk MT

Well, I tried commenting on this item over on Gordon's blog, but it's giving me a 500 - probably related to the problem Gordon says he's having:

I got an IM from the admin at my hosting provider telling me there are about 30 concurrent mzscheme processes running and that it's consuming about 80% of the server's resources. Looks like the optimization problems I blogged about a while back have caught up to me. The general plan is to switch to a real storage mechanism, such as mysql, postgressql or dbm, instead of the filesystem, but I may try to hack in a temporary fix until I can get the time to do the right thing. In the meantime, I've done the really brutal fix and deleted the older half of the archives until I can get the performance under control.

Ok, I'm curious. I use the filesystem for storage on my blog as well, but I don't have problems like that. It may be because I only ever run one process - a single Smalltalk image - to manage all the blogs on the server. As well, I don't store html pages in the html directory system; all the "pages" in my archives are in binary object files (one per day). It's easy to route to the right file via the guid (which is a stringified timestamp). I use a cache for the keyword and category searches, which has helped a lot. I've thought about using a database, but thus far there's been no compelling reason to do so. Heck, even backups are simple - a tar gzip and I'm done :)

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