Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

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 :)

From Smalltalk.org:

Planet Smalltalk Blog Headlines Now Live
Smalltalk.org and Planet.Smalltalk.org are pleased to provide Smalltalk Related Blog Headlines on Smalltalk.org. Thanks to the efforts of Coen De Roover of Planet.Smalltalk.org we were able to quickly add this functionality. Enjoy.

Smalltalk.org is actively seeking projects that can be deployed for the Smalltalk community's benefit. If you have an idea for a project please contact us.

On the political side of the blogsphere, there's been a lot of "post game" talk about the Eason Jordan mess. Thus far, it looks to me like just about everyone commenting on this thing is missing the point. Doc Searls points to a post that calls the resignation a "right wing hit job". Anil Dash approached the root of the problem, and then backed away - to wit:

In this sense, Eason Jordan got fired for blogging. Except, of course, he's not a blogger. And nobody's ever been fired for blogging. But his words getting taken out of context and resulting in his resignation from his position put him in an untenable, unemployable position, at least to those who choose a false clarity over the nuance and understanding any of us would extend to the people we care about.

And further down:

And about Eason Jordan: More myopic blogger triumphalism. Dear political bloggers, most people, even in the blogosphere, have never heard of the whole kerfuffle, let alone the one surrounding Jeff Gannon. This is inside-baseball cliquishness at its worst. I'm not saying these guys didn't screw up, I'm saying that you didn't win. It won't temper we liberals who control the media to be more moderate, and it won't keep the White House from trying to spin the media. Net effect? Lots of negatives, few positives.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you're hurting us. You're hurting all weblogs.

There are so many things missed here that it's funny. Was Jordan taken out of context? It's impossible to know, because the people who have the audio and video won't release it. Think back to when you were a kid, and you played a game of "telephone" - this is a game where you get 20 or 30 kids into a circle, and the first one tells a 1 or 2 sentence story to the next kid in line. The fun part is seeing what the story looks like by the time it gets all the way back to the first kid.

What we have here is a first class PR disaster for CNN - which was exacerbated by a purposeful lack of information. Step back from the politics of this for a minute, because I don't think any of that's the real story here - how would you react to this story if we changed it over to the IT industry, swapped in someone from MS, IBM, or Sun (pick your favorite large company there), and changed the statement to some partially closed speech at an event? We had that recently with Gates' "communist" statement about Open Source. Take a look here at Red Herring reporting on this - he immediately released a statement attempting to clarify his remarks. He continued to have people in the trade press disagree with him (witness Red Herring), but he also defused the PR problem with more speech. That's what Jordan didn't do. MS and Gates realized that they had to get out in front of the issue and clarify - Jordan and CNN though they should hunker down and "weather the storm".

The difference is that - without politics involved, we can see the PR issue far more clearly. Go back to Jordan now - he made a controversial statement, was apparently called on it in the room, and immediately started back-pedaling from it. When people started asking questions, he (and his employer, and the Davos people who had the tapes) stonewalled. What happened next followed a very familiar pattern - the stonewalling made Jordan (and by extension, his employer) look bad, and fed the idea that he must have said something truly awful. Instead of getting out in front of the issue the way Gates did, he tried to hide behind the "it was taken out of context" standby.

Jordan didn't lose his job because of politics - he lost it because his statements embarrassed his employer, and they decided that they didn't want to take any more PR damage. Sure, the politics of the various people asking questions entered into it, but that's mostly irrelevant. When you have a bad PR problem, what you need is more transparency. In this case, Jordan and CNN opted for less, and they took damage as a result. What CNN needs to do is recognize this mess for what it is - atrociously bad PR. If they continue to view it as nothing but politics, then we'll see the same kind of thing happening there again in the not too distant future.

Well, I feel stupid now. Last night, we had a light blow in the kitchen. After that, none of the lights in the kitchen would go on. First thought - check the circuit panel. I checked, it looked fine - nothing looked tripped. My wife checked, it apparently looked fine to her. We expected some nasty short or something, so I called an electrician this morning. He went down to check the panel, and sure enough - a circuit was flipped. We must have needed more light or something. Either way, I'm out $86 due to my own inability to spot a flipped breaker. Dohh!

I'm happy to see Microsoft promoting the concept of least priviledge (i.e., not running as local admin). The part I find amusing is how long it took them to get there - Unix has worked that way for decades. The trouble is, MS at first thought that it would too complicated to throw that at end users. The result - years of "glued on" security that peels off all too easily.

Firefox has succeeded - it's pressured Microsoft into updating IE. This is good news all around, because with MS finally moving, the Firefox team will have an actual competitor to compare themselves to

I've finally gotten around to creating some tools for automating the management of the blog server. This afternoon I knocked out a web interface for creating a new blog, and finished up the interface for disabling existing blogs. Other than the tedium of creating the SSP pages, it was all pretty easy - the only place that gave me a small hitch was the resetting of server state. Here's what I was doing at first:

VisualWave.WebSite clearSites.
VisualWave.WebSite allSites.

The problem is, I was doing that in the #doPost method of a servlet, and on the page I was redirecting to there was an expectation of finding a session variable called 'currentUser'. In its absence, the page redirected over to the login page. This confused me for a few minutes, until the obvious dawned on me - clearing all the sites also cleared all existing session state - so of course there were no session variables left! As it happens, the WebToolkit has a very straightforward API, so I went and looked at class WebSite. What I wanted to do was programmaticall add a site, or remove a site (depending on which management page is in use. Here's all I had to do:

Adding a site:

site := VisualWave.WebSite
               new: siteName
               fromFile: self siteFile
               in: VisualWave.WebSite siteConfiguration.
VisualWave.WebSite addSite: site.

Removing a site:

VisualWave.WebSite removeSiteNamed: siteName.

That's it - it's pretty easy to create a small set of site specific tools with the api provided (other than that SSP creation :) ).

Blaine Buxton points to new leadership for Squeak's direction. Check it out

Slashdot reports that SHA-1 has been broken:

"From Bruce Schneier's weblog: 'SHA-1 has been broken. Not a reduced-round version. Not a simplified version. The real thing. The research team of Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu (mostly from Shandong University in China) have been quietly circulating a paper announcing their results...'" Note, though, that Scheier also writes "The paper isn't generally available yet. At this point I can't tell if the attack is real, but the paper looks good and this is a reputable research team."

I'm no crypto expert, but the experts seem to be impressed...

I'm off to Montreal in the morning - going up to see a customer's application. I'm sure I'll have more to say when I get there. In the meantime, I better remember to bring my heavy coat and gloves - it's still winter up there :)

It wouldn't be a complete trip without a nice delay - I've got an extra hour in the lovel Philadelphia airport, where I get to enjoy the $9.99 per day WiFi. Fortunately, no one is expecting me there until this afternoon. I've got another post on outsourcing lined up - there are a couple of howlers in ComputerWorld that I feel a need to abuse :)

One of the outcomes of the rising tide of spam is the gradual loss of the commons - something Phil Ringnalda pointed out in a post this morning. Think about it - a few years ago, email was useful and (mostly) dependable. Now it's neither. For one thing, not all the spam gets caught by filters - there's some mess to clean up each day. Worse are the false positives. How much mail are you losing to spam filters? It's actually impossible to tell, because there are so many levels:

• Filtering done by the ISP/corporate IT - if something gets tossed before it gets to your mailbox, you simply never see it.
• With local filtering, the false positives at least get into a junk folder. But how often do we actually check that?

Think about that - someone sends you an email asking for comments on some issue. 7 years ago you got the email and responded (or not, but at least you saw the mail). Now? If you don't respond, the sender has no idea what happened - are you ignoring them, or did you simply never see the email? The spammers have completely destroyed email. I only know of one place where email still works - in closed systems, like the security agencies (NSA, CIA, etc). Ironically, the people who are cut off from the net are getting better service because of that.

Now turn to blogs - a relatively new phenomenon whereby anyone can express their opinions and get instant feedback - either via comments, trackbacks from other blogs, or referer lists. At least, that's how it used to work. Now, you have to have some kind of comment protection system or face an onslaught of links from poker and porn sites. Depending on which system you use, comments may well become more difficult to enter, deterring some level of honest feedback. With others, it's simpler just to turn comments (and trackbacks) off rather than deal with the daily headache of managing the ones that got through. That kills a goodly proportion of the value proposition behind blogs - the interchange of ideas. Again, the spammers have destroyed the commons.

That leaves us with referers. For any kind of post you put up, a referer list is a valuable thing. It gives you a window into how people are finding your content - and gives you an opportunity to locate other people who are saying things you might be interested in. That was before referer spam took off. It's trivial to create - all you need to do is use a script that queries for a page and provides a spam url in the referer field. A real reference points back to content that actually references you; spam creates bogus links for you to follow. What this does is force the site owner to build filtering rules for referer reporting (even if it's not public) - you don't want to have to wade through a ton of sites that don't actually reference you. For instance - during the Presidential primaries last fall, I got bogus refereral links from the campaign sites of every single Democratic contender. if you read this blog, you realize that I never get into national/international politics - it was just more commons destruction

I don't know how to fix this. Spam is too easy and too cheap to create - much easier and cheaper than the various counter-measures we take. We've been trying to get rid of email spam for years now, and it's not really working out. Sure, there are tools - but there are also costs. I don't see a happy shiny future coming - just an endless battle against the ethically challenged.

I see that ComputerWorld has a new article on outsourcing this week - Mark Gottfredson wants us to believe that even "core" business functionality should probably be outsourced. Let's take a walk through his notions:

You say that sourcing, which was always tactical, needs to become a core strategic function. Why now? The reason it's so important now is that there is a confluence of events that makes it possible for you to literally be able to redefine your business in terms of whether you do things or have them done by someone else or more cheaply somewhere else. A population 10 times the size of the U.S. has come on stream in the last few years, and they have an average wage advantage of 85% to 95% versus us.

Also, a technological revolution has made it possible to do many things that used to be done manually over the Internet or a telecom pipe as quickly and cheaply around world as next door. Finally, there's a trend where things that used to be functions of companies are becoming industries, and whole companies are focusing on functions.

There are a couple of problems here. First off, the price advantage in India is sliding. There's been a tech boom there for a few years now, and salaries are rising. I've seen US based (never mind near-shoring to Canada) consultants willing to do work for $20/hour. The price differential is there, but it's not as attractive as it used to be. Because the tech market in India is so strong, turnover is a huge problem. Turnover is never a good thing for a project.

His second point is theoretically true, but runs into a few problems. I'm the Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk, and we have staff distributed across North America, with a few people (and critical partners) in Europe. We have regular conference calls so that the various development teams can stay in touch - and we also make use of things like IM, Skype, and IRC. It's difficult to schedule a meeting when we need people from Europe and people from California. Why? Well, at 9 am in Santa Clara, it's 6 pm in Germany. Either someone has to get up early (CA), or someone has to work late (Germany). As I write this, it's 2:50 in the afternoon here (I'm in Montreal at the moment, but it's the same time in my office in Maryland or Corp. HQ in Cincinnati - and only 3 hours earlier in California). In Mumbai, it's 1:20 AM. So at 9AM my time, it would be 7:30 PM there. You see the problem? Sure, we can communicate just fine using all sorts of whizzy stuff on the net - so long as someone is willing to do it during non-business hours. That works fine if you have a project that requires minimal communication. I hate to break this news to Mr. Gottfredson, but software isn't one of those projects.

We know how well throwing requirements over the wall to a local (but uncommunicative) IT group works (not well at all). We know what the failure rates for such projects are (high). So.... how will tossing it 10 1/2 hours away make it better? Unless your plan is to fail less expensively. If you want a software development task to have a decent shot at success, you're going to need good, solid, regular communication between the developers and the people who will take delivery. This is one of the reasons that agile methodologies exist, btw - as a reaction to disconnected failures.

There are other issues as well - further down, Gottfredson praises the idea of pushing customer care off:

The traditional view has been to think about what's core and what's noncore and consider outsourcing the noncore. That's not a particularly useful framework anymore. Think of customer service and the call center: What could be more strategic than your interface with customers? Yet those customer-interface skills are not particularly proprietary across industries. The way you respond to customers is common for any number of companies. So even though it's strategic, many times other people can do the job better and more cheaply than you're doing it.

Here's the thing - people who work for you actually care about the product or service that you provide. When customers call, they have an attachment to the product that makes it easier to provide good service. When the call center is a bunch of low rent staffers (whether overseas or not) reading from a script, it's very, very clear that they don't care. For instance - here's a saga I had with a Sony TV repair a year ago. You know what the upshot of that experience was? I now own a GameCube instead of a PlayStation2. There's Gottfredson, claiming that others can provide this service cheaper and better. No they can't. In fact, they won't even try.. The contracted support people are sitting in a call center, manning a phone bank. They get calls for multiple products, and pick up the appropriate script off the computer based on which line rings. Do they know anything about the product you are calling about? Probably not. Are they empowered to help you in any way? Probably not. Can they ask someone down the hall "hey, is this a known problem"? Heck no, they don't actually know anyone at the source company. All they can do is read a script. If your problem matches the script, great. If not, you start down the road to hell.

Here's the problem - we all know that it's easier to keep an existing customer than it is to grow a new one. We also know that a torqued off customer will regale his friends with the epic tale of bad service from Company X over and over again. In the age of Google and blogs, we now know that these rants will be searchable. For instance - I just did a Google Search for "Sony Customer Service", and the second result on the list is this one. There's one other such link on the first page. When I'm looking to buy a new piece of expensive hardware, I now execute such searches - because I want to find out whether or not I'll be able to get help if I run into a problem. Sure, it's cheaper to send support to a call center off in the boonies. What people like Gottfredson fail to realize is that there are matching costs. Dell noticed this; they moved their corporate support back inside.

Any kind of customer facing activity is potentially hazardous to send elsewhere. It really depends on whether you are selling something that is a low cost commodity (in which case, you probably need to outsource in order to keep costs down), or whether you are selling something that is expensive. If the customer paid a lot, the customer is also going to expect good support. If you provide bad support, it's going to cost you. Glib business experts like Gottfredson see only the cost savings - they never even consider the possible soft costs that will bite back.

Well, I've got to hand it to the NHL. Salon is reporting that the season is cancelled. This is really, really stupid. The NHL doesn't rake in nearly as much money as the NFL, the NBA, or the MLB - they can ill afford to go dark for a whole season. And yet there they are, doing it. It took baseball years to recover from the lost 1994 season, and baseball started with a far larger fan base. The owners and players deserve each other...

I found a way to justify my coffee habit - it's lowering my risk of liver cancer :)

I figure that it's a bad sign when you get up in the morning and discover that your hotel has no hot water. Hey, it's only February in Montreal - who wants hot water? Having survived that, I'm off to find coffee before meeting with a local customer.

I had a fascinating meeting with a customer today - Satellite Forces Canada. I'm heading off to the airport shortly, but will have some details later. I'll write some thoughts up on the plane, and post later. They have some truly cool technology that I don't think you could do easily in the currently faddish systems out there.

I met with a very interesting customer today - RubrIQ. They are based in Ottawa, Canada - the meeting was in Cincom's Montreal office. They drove over from Ottawa, I came up from Maryland yesterday. I met with David Long, who's the visionary (and a co-owner there) and John Couch, one of their customer support and all around networking guys.

These guys have a very interesting system they call Atlantis. It's built in VisualWorks, and exists roughly in the domain specific modeling area. Here's what they do - they capture the business process requirements for an application area. Their tools allow you to model it graphically, showing as much or as little detail as you want. The underpinnings of this system is a Finite State Machine - which means that the applications generated by Atlantis are always in a known state. If your requirements are wrong that might be the wrong state, but it's definitely known.

What they've done is work with a few people in business areas they are targeting - I won't go into too many details there, since we are under NDA. Suffice to say, they capture the full business process for a given problem, and they can push a full application out the back end. They believe in their own sales pitch - their internal systems (accounting, sales management, and software lifecycle) have all been built with this tool.

Before I saw what they do, I really would not have believed it was possible - given a set of business processes, they can capture them and generate a working application. In the markets they are going after, they can deliver a working product in a week - which is pretty darn impressive. I won't say that this is a silver bullet for all business areas; it's not. However, for the targets they are going after (and a few others they plan to go after) - Atlantis is simply untouchable.

I mentioned that I didn't think that a tool like Atlantis could be built in the faddish languages - like C# or Java, for instance. In a theoretical sense, that's not correct. In a practical sense, it is - while you could build this in one of those systems, it would require a larger team and a much larger up front investment in time. They make use of the dynamism of Smalltalk - and of the meta model behind Smaltalk - in ways that would be hard to deal with elsewhere.

This is an outfit that you're certain to hear more about as time goes by. John and his team have done a very, very impressive job.

If the lawyers can't blame D&D, or movies, or TV... they'll try to blame videogame. Which part of "Personal responsibility" is unclear to this bozo?

I think we can file this in the "couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys" folder - The Register is reporting that SCO is likely to be delisted from NASDAQ. It's a fitting punishment for all of the value they've destroyed (their own) and attempted to destroy.

It seems to depend. If Microsoft created the SmartTag, it falls with an enormous thud. On the other hand, as Dare Obasanjo points out, it lands quietly if Google created it. I really like this summary line by Dare:

Personally, I can't wait to see how much cognitive dissonance  this causes the Slashdot crowd.

Heh. He's got that right.

Apparently, there's still a Boston Red Sox related curse out there. The last time the Sox won a World Series (before this year) was 1918. The following Stanley Cup (1919) was cancelled (the influenza outbreak). So this year, the Sox won the Series. And sure enough, the Stanley Cup has been cancelled.

I've finally gotten serious about providing some tools for the blog software I've been working on for the last couple of years. The latest version in the public store has some GUI (not web) tools for bootstrapping and managing blogs and users. I haven't fully tested them yet, so there could be problems. There's also a few layout issues - I slapped them together quickly, and have not gone back and adjusted them so that a window resize won't make them look wonky. At some point, I'm really going to have to go through and create a message catalog and pull all the strings as well. Having added all of those caveats, it's progress. Grab the latest rev of CST-Blog from the repository and have a look. I'll be updating this page once I do some more testing.

If you are running BottomFeeder on OS X 10.2.x and having stability problems, try following the steps outlined by james Savidge, who walks through setting up Bf to use the X11 VM. I'm planning on packaging this to make it easier, but there it is. Thanks James!

Some of the letter writers here have way too much free time on their hands. For that matter, the "Free Stanley" folks need to find a hobby as well...

It seems that the folks at Warner Brothers are out to damage a brand:

he old look of the cartoon character Bugs Bunny is saying "That's all folks!" to the generations who grew up with him. Bugs, the Road Runner and other Looney Tunes cartoon characters are getting a new look and even new names.

The "reimagined" Bugs Bunny is going to be renamed "Buzz" and star in a new series called "Loonatics." The series will be set in the future and will feature a tough-talking rabbit with laser eyes and who is a martial arts expert. Even Daffy Duck will get a techno-update with built-in sonar.

So... exactly how is this an "updated" set of characters instead of a brand new set of characters? Look Warner, you have a successful, well known set of characters here. Remember how well the Animaniacs did a few years ago? Now ask yourself, were those "re-imagined" characters, or new ones?

I mean - I ask you - which image below is Bugs Bunny? Bah

The Smalltalk Industry Council Announces the First Annual Smalltalk Solutions Coding Contest

Cary, North Carolina - February 18, 2005: The Smalltalk Industry Council is pleased to announce the first annual 2005 Smalltalk Solutions Smalltalk Coding Contest. The Smalltalk Solutions Technical Conference being held in Orlando June 27-29, 2005 will serve as the home for the coding competition finale. Smalltalk Solutions is the premier forum for bringing together Smalltalk users, developers, vendors, and enthusiasts.

Coding contest prizes include:

• 1st Place - $1,000 USD to be used towards a future Camp Smalltalk attendance
• 2nd Place - iPod
• 3rd Place- iPod shuffle

Each of the finalists will also receive a Smalltalk Solutions 2005 conference registration valued at $670 USD as well as a complimentary individual membership to the STIC. This does not include travel, lodging meals, tutorials, or any other fees associated with the conference attendance. The Smalltalk Solutions Coding Competition is broken into two phases of competition. The first phase begins on Monday, May 16 at 9 a.m. EST and ends on Wednesday, May 18 at 9 a.m. EST running for 48 consecutive hours. Registration will begin March 1 and participants must register for the competition online at www.stic.org by May 13 at 6 p.m. EST. Confirmed registrants will receive the requirements for the first phase online. All coding must be done in Smalltalk. Conference registration is not required to participate in the first phase of the competition.

One representative from each of the four board member companies consisting of Cincom Systems, GemStone, IBM, and Knowledge Systems Corporation will judge the first phase of the competition. Each submission will be submitted to the judges as blind submissions and a total of three (3) winners will be selected to compete onsite at Smalltalk Solutions 2005 in Orlando, Florida. The winners of the first phase will be announced on June 1, 2005 on the Smalltalk Industry Council web site. The second and final phase of the competition will take place on Sunday, June 26, 2005 from 6 p.m. to10 p.m. onsite at the Wyndham Orlando during Smalltalk Solutions pre-registration. The details of the second phase of the competition will not be released to the finalists until the competition begins. Prize winners will be announced during the keynote general session on Wednesday, June 29, 2005.

Contact:
Jason Jones
Smalltalk Industry Council
1143 Executive Circle
Suite G
Cary, NC 27511
Phone: 919-789-8549
http://www.stic.org
http://www.smalltalksolutions.com
jsj@ksc.com

iPod and iPod shuffle are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.

Which D&D class are you? Here's what they told me:

You scored as Bard. It is said that music has a special magic, and the bard proves that saying true. Wandering across the land, gathering lore, telling stories, working magic with his music, and living on the gratitude of his audience: such is the life of a bard.