Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Scoble asks a generally good question about the browser business:

Finally, I'm gonna ask a provocative business question of Opera (and other browser manufacturers): What's your business again? If all the browsers have the same underlying features, and they should only add things that are standards, what differentiation are you offering your customers and investors? Are you saying Firefox's developers can't propose anything new that'd push the Web forward? Hey, how about some linking technologies like Greasemonkey? Is Firefox not allowed to add anything like that that the W3C didn't propose and that the WaSP didn't approve of?

I'd take it a lot more seriously if IE didn't screw up my css fairly regularly - and if the IE team weren't already backing off of supporting css properly in IE7.

When IBM did this sort of thing, it was called FUD. In this case, I think it's just an MS marketing guy with no grasp of technology speaking out of his... well, just imagine the orifice he's using. In a CNET article discussing JavaScript and DHTML (now called AJAX, because we needed a new acronym), Charles Fitzgerald says:

The software giant, which pioneered several of the technologies developers are now re-evaluating, dismissed any threat to its plans for XAML. "It's a little depressing that developers are just now wrapping their heads around these things we shipped in the late 20th century," said Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's general manager for platform technologies. "But XAML is in a whole other class. This other stuff is very kludgy, very hard to debug. We've seen some pretty impressive hacks, but if you look at what XAML starts to solve, it's a major, major step up."

Yes, a UI description language is a real step up from something completely different. Maybe someone can get Fitzgerald an Apple and an Orange, and see what happens.

Since Steve Kelly decided to start using Silt, both Silt and the client posting tool have been improving a lot. Bugs that I had forgotten about (or simply not run into) got noticed, and then either fixed or pointed out. An extra pair of eyeballs - even one 6 timezones away - is simply invaluable

I'm of two minds on this article by eWeek's Scot Peterson. On the one hand, the kinds of security issues that face IT departments are awful - phishing attacks, spam, viruses, worms, etc. - it's a full time job just keeping up. On the other hand, this recommendation - while mostly valuable - has a huge downside:

Make systems that are locked down from the beginning and that restrict what users can do, where they can go and what they can download, or significantly cut the number of power users at your company. It will be hard for users to accept—IT administrators need to be jerks, meanies, hard-asses or whatever you want to call them. This may not be "new" thinking, but until technology can be made simple enough, then perhaps its uses need to be simplified.

There's a problem here - not with Scot's prescription, but with the all too common implementation by IT shops. In my experience, IT shops simply aren't that good at distinguishing classes of users - they like coming up with standards, and then enforcing them across the board. It can be nearly impossible to convince them that you really need a different set of access rules. This is a difficult problem - all the more so because it's not really a technical problem. It's an interaction issue between business units and IT.

Via Learning Seaside comes a pointer to a PDF presentation on Seaside - and I'm quoted on the first page :)

I guess we need to make it simple for Scoble and the IE team:

No, I'm not saying that. But, I am saying that what'll get more people to switch browsers in the future is things like having better security (that's why most Firefox users tell me they switched from IE to Firefox). Having better RSS support. Having better tagging support. Having better tabs support. And so on.

I'm not saying that standards don't matter. They do.

But what about Dave Winer's request for a better editor?

Or my request for better inking support? Or, or, or, or.

I'll spell it out - your CSS support sucks eggs. What does that mean? It means that pages that look normal in Firefox look like crap in IE - and it's not because Firefox is adapting for crap, it's because the IE team has apparently decided that CSS2 is "flawed". Well.

You know what? As far as I'm concerned, MetaWebLog API sucks, Atom is pointless, and SOAP is a huge duplication of CORBA on port 80. But you know what else? It doesn't matter what I think, because I have to support these things anyway. Whoever runs Product Management/Marketing for IE - it's time to fire their sorry butt, get someone new in there, and slap them around with a cluestick until they get it. I'm tired of paying the IE penalty for CSS, and so is everyone else.

Let me know if the IE team doesn't get it - I'll use smaller words next time.

It's time to take a look at the log files again. I've walked through the Apache logs for the period between March 6 and March 17, and filtered on the XML accesses - here's a look at the tools that are being used to access the various RSS/Atom feeds on the Cincom Smalltalk site:

I've omitted anything that fell under 1% - so the table above represents 83.7% of the accesses - just over 16% of the accesses to the feeds come from other tools. One thing I've noticed is that the Mozilla numbers keep going up - which tells me that more people are using Sage and similar things. While there are a few IE RSS plugins, not many people are hitting this site with them. Anyway, I'm going to start filing these log reports in their own category so that they're easy to find - I might even be able to spot trends that way :)

It looks like I'll need to upload the AVI file along with the WMV file each week - nearly 30% of the accesses to the screencast I pushed up earlier this week are for the compressed AVI file. Who knew?

If you've tried downloading the screencast in the (rather large) zipped AVI file, you might have gotten a server error. If so, try this link for the file. Sorry about that.

I've been making my way through "The Myth of the Great War : A New Military History of World War I", which goes through a military history of the great war. The details are fairly astounding - it looks like the Allies spent the entire war in a parallel universe, convinced that their huge casualties were not so bad, because Germany was getting worse. In fact, as Niall Ferguson detailed in "The Pity of War", nothing of the sort was happening - and by 1917, both the BEF and the French army had ceased to have significant offensive capabilities - they had been bled out by follies like the Somme campaign and Nivelle's 1916 disasters. It's not a matter of cowardice in any way shape or form - based on the accounts I'm reading, the French and the British soldiers (not to mention the Canadians and Australians) fought bravely - it wasn't their fault that they were being led by fools.

If you take a look at the other side of the ledger, Germany (and Austria-Hungary) had knocked Russia, Serbia, Rumania, and Italy out of the war prior to the entry of the US - had the US not come in, it looks to me like the Germans would have turned West with a vengeance (witness the nearly successful 1918 spring/summer offensive) and taken the UK and France out.

Of course, there are issues with Mosier's (the first book above) narrative - he ascribes too many faults to the Allied powers, and too much brilliance to the Central powers. Even given that, it's a worthwhile book - combined with Ferguson's book, it's given me a fresh look at the mostly forgotten conflict that the pre-WWII generation called The Great War. By all means, read the book yourself, and draw your own conclusions. The more I read about that war, the more I realize that it is the central tragedy of the 20th century. Yes, WWII resulted in many things that were a whole lot worse - but WWII was one of the things set in motion by the endgame of WWI. You can look at the 1919 settlement talks and trace down many of the current issues in the middle east and the Balkans. Some wars have results that you can look back on later and be somewhat happy about. There's really nothing about WWI that looks that way.

Patrick Logan says that Java and C# (et. al.) are not only dead ends, but doomed:

Not only did Lisp and Smalltalk languages and tools support evolution as well as backward compatibility, the culture and organization encouraged even drastic swings in features.

J/J and C/C do not have those benefits, neither technical nor organizational. They are ultimately doomed, so the word to the wise would seem obviously to get off those platforms ASAP. Invest in systems that have proven themselves already for decades.

You can get off the dead end here

If you are a Smalltalker - or interested in learning about Smalltalk - in the greater Washingtin DC area, then check out the new DC Metro Smalltalk page. We are investigating places to meet now.

Chris Petrilli may actually think less of IT industry analysts than I do. I wouldn't have thought such a thing was possible :)

"If you’re evaluating tools, and you don’t bother to install and test them, then you’re in paper comparisons and someone will always look better. Feature wars are pointless exercises. You can lead an analyst to water, but you can’t make him any less of a myopic moron. "

"Solve real-world problems in simple to use ways and you will have the best advertising in the world… word-of-mouth. I’ve already told over a dozen other groups about Trac, all of which have adopted it. None of which would have even looked at it were it not for a recommendation. "

I stand by the comment, because I think most “analysts” are little more than overpaid sock puppet shills.

Patrick Logan notes that Microsoft has hired a new VP with a suitable background :)

In the last few days, I've had two things that I took to calling "Heisenbugs" - one of the blogs here had a never-changing referer list, and the server, after having been restarted, stopped sending blog pings. These were weird bugs that I just couldn't understand - I kept querying the server, and things looked ok - but wouldn't work correctly.

What I discovered is that they both had (of course) logical explanations. For the referer problem, there was an old log file that was being read from - and sure enough, it had the "never changing" list of referers. After I cleaned that up, the problem went away.

The other one was stranger. On posts, I send blog pings to a variety of places - blog.gs, Technorati, etc. These had worked before, but they weren't working now - and the failure seemed inexplicable, a MessageNotUnderstood deep in the bowels of the Http library. The issue was simple, once I figured it out. There's a cached dictionary of header fields mapped to classes that handle them. What happened was this - when the server started, that cache got filled before all the code was loaded into the system - leaving it partially filled. The solution was simple - clear the cache, and force it to reload.

So I didn't have Heisenbugs - I had bugs I hadn't figured out yet.

This column by Allen Holub of SDTimes magazine has to be the best thing I've read about development in eons. He points out that software engineering isn't engineering, and that mathematics simply isn't that relevant to most developers. I couldn't agree with him more:

In fact, computer science is neither a science nor an engineering discipline. Science concerns itself with the formulation and proof of hypotheses. Programmers just don’t do that. Similarly, all engineering disciplines except software engineering concern themselves primarily with the mathematical analysis of structures, be they physical structures or electronic circuits. Programmers don’t do that, either.

Indeed, “software engineering” books don’t talk about engineering at all, at least not in the way that mechanical or electrical engineering books cover their subjects. Software engineering is about process, not structural analysis. The closest thing that software engineering has to real engineering is the study of design patterns, but even these are nebulous. There is no single “correct” structure for the realization of a design pattern. Even calling the creation of software “engineering” is a misnomer in my mind.

That's exactly right. Think about Unit tests, for instance. A structural engineer building a bridge doesn't need tests - what he needs is a blueprint and the materials. Armed with those, he can tell you whether the bridge will stay up or not. In software, the basic design tells us nothing of the kind. If it did, we wouldn't need tests. So given that, what is software development? Back to Allen:

So if programming isn’t science or engineering, what is it? It’s a liberal art. Modern programming bears more similarity to creative writing than to engineering or physics. The design process that you go through (or at least should go through) to create a program is almost identical to the process that you use to write a book: research, formulating a thesis (or problem definition), an orderly exposition of the thesis. These steps are central to both expository writing and object-oriented analysis and design.

In other words, it's not really a "hard" science at all - it's one of the soft, squishy ones, where the answers are subjective and we have to puzzle out the best answers from among many possible ones. Consider what we actually have in the popular languages in this light - we have primitive data types in Java (and in the CLR as well) - because someone decided that premature optimization of low level math stuff was important. Yes, I know that some people need that speed. But for the vast majority of developers on the vast majority of projects - you aren't one of those people. The problem for most of us is developer productivity and time to market - not how fast we can add up the numbers that show how many users of IE hit the web page today. Carrying on from that point:

We should really give up on the notion of math being the foundation of computer science, drop hard-core mathematics from the curriculum, and replace it with English composition (which teaches you how to write large, complex, documents like computer programs) and Latin (which teaches you how to analyze complex linguistic systems).

Bear in mind that logic—the one “mathematical” subject that is inarguably part of programming—is traditionally taught by the philosophy, not the math, department. As an added benefit, if programmers were trained as writers, they’d be able to write coherent documentation and put meaningful comments in their code.

The mathematics that is actually relevant—a bit of set theory and the like—is easily covered in a one-semester class on the order of the Math-for-English-Majors classes offered by most universities.

There are a lot of developers who will have a really hard time letting go of the idea that all inbound CS people should take a compiler class. Ask yourself though - how many people are doing that kind of work, and how many are creating what amounts to glorified reporting interfaces?

Dave Thomas (the OTI/ENVY guy, not Prag Dave) spoke at the AOSD conference. I have a lot of respect for Dave, but there's one thing being reported that I have to take exception to:

The later adopters have a long list of questions they just need to have answered. Often have very different skills and much less software engineering experience than any AOSD attendee can imagine. Want standards, customer references, case studies and insurance of major vendors/ISVs. Make sure you always operate with honesty, integrity, and modest claims. Dave : we actualy persuaded ourselves that people could program in Smalltalk - they can't! Gurus can, but the man on the street can't.

Oh? Well heck, they sure can't code in Java or C# then, because those are vastly more complicated. Or Fortran. or C++. Sheesh. People think Smalltalk is hard because it's different, not because it's actually hard.

Via Daver Winer comes news that the term "Podcast" is being trademarked - I found more on it over here. This post on the Trademark blog has the details - Apparently the shameless folks at Shae Spencer Management are the ones doing this - relying on the general cluelessness of the USPTO, I guess.

I've been meaning to pick up a book I just saw referenced on the Samizdata blog - "Armageddon - The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945". So far, the only thing stopping me is the really, really melancholy nature of the subject - I'm both interested and repelled. I'll get to that book eventually, but there's another WWI related tome I intend to pick up first - "Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World". I've been trying to get a handle on the first world war, and I really have to go through the post-armistice conference to get a fuller picture. Maybe I'll be able to turn my attentions to a different topic after that; at the moment, I'm kind of immersed...

One thing that I haven't made that clear about BottomFeeder is that it's been designed for extensibility via plugins - I've created a number myself - the Posting Tool and the Enclosure Handler. I've packaged TypeLess as a plugin, as well as a number of games that Steve Kelly fixed up for later releases of VisualWorks. I've also done some additional work on Bob Westergaard's scripting plugin. All of this stuff either ships with BottomFeeder, or is available for download via the update tool.

The plugin mechanism is pretty simple. There are a number of events that BottomFeeder reports that make it easy for applications to deal with things happening:

• #bfOnline - reported when the application goes online
• #bfOffline - reported when the application goes offline
• #bottomFeederStarting: - reported when BottomFeeder is starting. The RSSFeedViewer instance is sent as an argument
• #bottomFeederQuitting: - reported when BottomFeeder is quitting. This happens both in development and in deployment - the RssFeedViewer instance is sent as an argument
• #quitting - reported in deployment only, when BottomFeeder is quitting. BottomFeeder will not quit until all handlers have returned
• #addedFeedList: - reported when a feed list has been added. The FeedList is sent as an argument
• #addedFeed: - reported when a feed has been added. The Feed is sent as an argument
• #newItemsFor: - reported when there are new items in a feed. The Feed is sent as an argument
• #removeFeed: - reported when a feed is removed. The Feed url is sent as an argument
• #removeFeedList: - reported when a feedlist is removed. The Feedlist url is sent as an argument

The other thing you need to do is register your plugin with BottomFeeder. The way you do this is to add a small message to the #postLoad action of your plugin parcel (the plugin should be packaged as a parcel). That snippet looks like this:

#{RSS.RSSFeedViewer} ifDefinedDo: [:cls | 
	cls registerPluginClass: BlogTools.PostingTool 
	startupMessage: #openWith: 
	label: 'CST Blog Tool'].

That's the message send that's used by the Posting Tool to register itself. There are actually two forms of registration possible, depending on what your plugin is going to do:

• registerPluginClass: aClass startupMessage: aSymbol label: aString
• registerPluginClass: aClass startupMessage: aSymbol label: aString isForUI: aBoolean

You can send the second to specify that there's really no UI if necessary; the first will assume one and add an item to the 'plugins' menu. Finally, there's a way to unregister a plugin as well. This code should be put into the parcel preUnload: block:

unregisterPluginClass: aClass

With that, you can properly unhook the menu addition. That's pretty much it. You should probably be familiar with the codebase for BottomFeeder to work with this, but that's easy enough - it's all in the public store.

This guy got my (negative) interest in a couple of ways. First off - Smalltalk is hardly dead - our business is growing year on year - both from existing customers and new ones. Secondly, a .NET Passport required to add comments? Good gosh, why not require a signature in blood too?

I've just added two new features to the Silt server:

• Per category RSS feeds
• Potential per-item RSS feeds

The former are self explanatory - each category now has an associated feed - the XML links are in the sidebar. The per item feeds need a bit more explanation. As an anti-spam move, I started closing down comments to items that had aged out of the RSS feed - I figured they were effectively invisible (to me) once they left the feed, and I wouldn't see any spam that came in. I recently added a feature that allows bloggers to mark comments open for individual posts. So, any such post now has an associated per-item feed (there will be a feed link right on the page for such items).

There's a new dev build of BottomFeeder online as well - go to the download page, scroll down to dev builds, and grab it. I'm getting pretty close to a 3.9 release - Rich is working on documenting the Blog posting tool (now that it really works with the Blogger and MetaWebLog APIs properly).

It looks like Librarian Gorman isn't the only one upset that the little people have voices now - just look at Tina Brown moan:

We are in the Eggshell Era, in which everyone has to tiptoe around because there's a world of busybodies out there who are being paid to catch you out -- and a public that is slowly being trained to accept a culture of finks. We're always under surveillance; cameras watch us wherever we go; paparazzi make small fortunes snapping glamour goddesses picking their noses; everything is on tape, with transcripts available. No matter who you are, someone is ready and willing to rat you out. Even the rats themselves have to look over their shoulders, because some smaller rat is always waiting in the wings. Bloggers are the new Stasi. All the timidity this engenders, all this watching your mouth has started to feel positively un-American.

That's right - the media actually has to pay attention to facts, or they'll get caught out. Oh, the horror. Time to put on ashes and sackcloth for sure - it's just too hard! The condescension in that piece is amazing - she's not even trying to obscure how little she thinks of the great unwashed masses. Here's a tip Tina - if you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen. Unlike most of use bloggers, you get paid for the stuff you write - so spend some actual time on it.

Oh, here's a tip for you - I found a definition of the word "fact". It looks like you aren't really sure what a fact is, so I thought I'd help.

Doc Searls got blasted by Dave Winer today over a number of things, including podcasting:

Doc, how about looking at your words from our perspective. Talking to us through you ain't going to cut it. Your friends who want to earn the respect of the podcasters should explain in the medium, in their own voices, in their own words -- produce a podcast and tell us what the f*** they're doing, instead of leaving us guessing. Then you might see the hostility ease, because that's where it comes from.

Whereupon Doc says that he won't say a word about podcasting until he does one. Ok - this is a really stupid meme that ticks me off in more ways than I can count. What specifically, you ask - the one Winer leads with (but he's hardly the only one making this sort of argument) - summarized, it's: "You can't criticize/comment on that - you've never done it!"

That's a completely lame, stupid argument, and the people who make that sort of argument deserve to beaten with a cluestick. And yes, I've been guilty of the same lame argument with respect to Smalltalk, so I'll keep that in mind. There are tons of things that it's impractical to have first hand knowledge of - it's highly unlikely that I'll be writing for a newspaper anytime soon, or reporting on TV, or researching drugs, or fighting a war. Never mind the things I couldn't do even if I wanted to (give birth, say). In the constricted universe of the "no experience, no input" crowd, that means I don't get to have an opinion on any of those things.

Well heck - how do any of us get to have an opinion of any sort, then? No one can try everything - do we really want to limit debate (pick a topic, any topic) to those with direct experience? Bah.

You may have had trouble reading my feed the last few days, depending on the reader you use. I know that BlogLines wasn't getting updates at all. It turns out that I had an error in the Enclosures I was putting up. The issue - They were listed as having 'unknown' for a size, and that's not what was expected. All that has been fixed now; sorry about that

It's shaping up to be a busy summer. I'm heading to Smalltalk Solutions, of course - Orlando, June 27-29. I'm actually going down a lot earlier - my parents live down there, and my sister's kids will be visiting - it's a chance for my daughter to spend time with her cousins. July isn't too busy yet - but August could be packed. I'd like to go to the WBC convention - that runs August 2-7. I already have a vacation to DisneyWorld scheduled for the 7th-14th... and then I'm heading to ESUG, which runs from the 16th -20th in Brussels. Looks like I won't be seeing that much of the house this summer :)

"Pox Americana" is a very scary book, in its own way. What it covers is the Smallpox epidemic that spread through North America between 1775 and 1782. I've read about half; the first section covers the American Revolution- but from the perspective of the war as a disease spreader. Consider: American soldiers (British soldiers and their mercenaries tended to have immunity) were vulnerable to the disease, and were traveling over a much wider area than they ever had. The war caused civilian displacement as well - and both things spread the Pox. It looks like the native population took it hardest, and the author gives two reasons:

• Virtually no immunity in the population
• A population that was far more genetically homogeneous than the European immigrants

The latter problem seems to have been severe - the Pox spread between unrelated natives as easily as it did within a European family. Indian villages ended up having death rates of 50% and more.

It only gets worse in the part of the book covering what was then Spanish North America. Traveling missionaries and traders spread disease out of Mexico City and New Orleans, all the way up through the Pacific northwest. Evidence for the suffering there is fragmentary; there really aren't written records. From what little survives, it sounds like some areas ended up with as much as a 90% loss of population - particularly in the Spanish mining camps, where the natives were already being abused.

I'm in the middle of a section that covers the Canadian interior - disease spread there through the fur trading network that had spread. The British and French traded with the natives, who in turn often acted as middlemen to other tribes. It sounds like the Cree indians of the north suffered near annihilation.

This is scary stuff, and makes me realize how lucky we are that Smallpox has been eradicated. It also makes me worry about the potential for an avian flu pandemic - a bad enough virus with the kind of long incubation period that Smallpox had (up to 2 weeks) could wreak havoc on a tremendous scale.

Patrick Logan points out that any hopes I have for real support of dynamic languages on the CLR are probably misplaced. I know Sun won't do anything on the JVM; they seem to think that adding doodads to NetBeans is all that's needed - the JVM is frozen, and it looks like it's staying that way. The bottom line - look elsewhere for dynamic language support.

Well well, another "facts are bad, we want different facts" post. This is dumber than the nonsense I saw from Tina Brown yesterday, and I wasn't sure that was even possible. Shelley Powers has decided that some facts need to disappear down the memory hole:

So I’ll say this, directly and honestly, to Dave Sifry from Technorati: Dave, you are hurting us.

The Technorati Top 100 is too much like Google in that ‘noise’ becomes equated with ‘authority’. Rather than provide a method to expose new voices, your list becomes nothing more than a way for those on top to further cement their positions. More, it can be easily manipulated with just the release of a piece of software.

You have focused on comment spam and you see this as the most harm to this community, all the while providing the weapon that is truly tearing us apart. You are hurting us, Dave.

NZ Bear, you are hurting us. With your Ecosystem, you count links on the front page, which give precedence to blogroll links over links embedded within writings, and then classify people in a system equating mammals and amoeba. Your site serves as nothing more than a way for higher ranked people to feel good about themselves, and lower ranked to feel discouraged. There is no discovery inherent in your system — no way of encouraging new voices to be heard. So NZ, you are, also, hurting us.

Well gosh. We better stop measuring things - the measurements hurt. We better stop comparing things - comparisons hurt. The link counts and top 100 are what they are - deal with it and move on. Hiding those numbers won't change anything - they'll be the same whether they get published or not.

This is the kind of stupidity that argues against Advanced Placement classes, because it might damage someone's self esteem. Sheesh - you know what, if your blog isn't in the top 100, it's not a crisis. Mine isn't, and you don't see me whining about the unfairness of it all. You want to see more readers? Write compelling content. That's it! Write something people want to read. It's not as if women can't write - the book I'm reading right now is fascinating, and I note that the author is female. Not that I noticed before - I didn't actually care. What I care about is that it's well written, on a subject I'm interested in, and is teaching me something I didn't know.

This moaning into the wind about the unfairness of ranking is just idiotic. Sheesh, get over yourself already. Oh heck, I nearly forgot - she's claiming that the rankings are doing more damage than Comment Spam? Oh? I spend zero time fighting rankings in my blog server, but I have spent a fair bit of time on comment spam. On that basis alone, she has no clue what she's talking about. If she gets her way, maybe I'll start sending her my comment and email spam - after all, it's no trouble at all in her bizarro universe.

Dana VanDen Heuvel has something interesting up this morning - there's a faux blog called "NigelBlog" associated with the show "Crossing Jordan". It reads like a real blog, and there are comments for each item. The only thing missing is an RSS feed :)

Ralf Westphal has an interesting post up on the nature of software development. He asks a lot of good questions, ending with these:

If you doubt the immaturity of the software development trade, think a minute about the following:

• Why is deployment, i.e. handing the product to the customer, such a pain?
• Why do we still store the majority of code in text files which are hard to manipulate?
• Why do we still try to solve all those different problems with just a handful of different languages?
• Why do so many software projects fail (in comparison to building houses or producing movies)?

Read the whole thing - those final questions are fronted by some good writing.

I added per-category feeds late last week, but the presentation on the page was pretty sub-optimal. The XML links were pushed in with the categories, and it was all "bunched up" in there. There's already a syndication section of the page template - so I moved the syndication links down there. The sidebar is a lot longer now, but at least it's laid out nicely :)

I understand Tim Marman's point about copyrights - he's correct in saying that the medium doesn't change the law:

As a producer, I have the ability to define how others can use my content. If we want to encourage sites to syndicate their content, we have to ensure that they can prevent people from using content in ways they don't want to allow. This is at the heart of a lot of the Creative Commons licenses, including the Attribution-NonCommercial license I publish my content under.

This license basically says you can repurpose my content here as long as 1) you attribute the content to me and 2) don't use it for commercial purposes. In other words, I want to allow people like Scoble to post my content on his link blog, but I don't want someone taking my content and using it in a book.

That's fine. The trouble is, that horse left the barn a long, long time ago. Take Search Engines, for instance - they are clearly being used for commercial purposes. They reproduce partial (potentially full) content wrapped in a different site's advertising policy. Take news aggregators - if you include full content in your feed, you've ceded control over how that content will be used - maybe not from a de jure standpoint, but that's irrelevant - you've done so in a de facto fashion. Any consumer of your RSS feed might be using their aggregator for commercial purposes (I certainly use mine that way). Are they in violation when they display your content locally using a custom stylesheet? What if we have an aggregator that works like the free version of Eudora, where it throws ads at you?

This isn't really new territory we're in - copy machines crossed this line (with respect to books and magazines) a long time ago. Back when I worked in an office, in the days before the internet was visible to most people, the local admins routed a folder of interesting stuff around. Much of it consisted of magazine articles copied in full and passed around. That was almost certainly a copyright violation of some kind - should everyone in the office have been arrested? There's kind of an informal understanding with copy machines - we ignore "the small stuff". The difficulty here is that we haven't come to a shared understanding of what constitutes "the small stuff" on the web yet.

Panopticon sets out to explain why they had to break compatibility from VB to VB.NET - and in the process, explains one of the main problems with the CLR for us dynamic language folk: the CLR can host any language, so long as it contorts itself into a C# style shape.

Just a reminder to everyone that Smalltalk Solutions 2005 will be here before you know it.

For those of you who might not be familar with the conference, Smalltalk Solutions is the premier forum for bringing together Smalltalk users, developers, and enthusiasts.

When: June 27-29, 2005

Where: Beautiful, Sunny Orlando Conference

Hotel: Wyndham Orlando Resort: A tropical paradise in the heart of the world's most popular vacation destination

Help make this the best Smalltalk Solutions conference ever and sign up today at www.smalltalksolutions.com/registration2005.htm. Smalltalk Solutions is a Smalltalk Industry Council event.

In this week's screencast, I have a short demonstration of the configurability of a Smalltalk application. It's short - I'm heading to Cincinnati for meetings tomorrow, and I'm off to LA on Saturday. What's nifty is the live development in BottomFeeder - I show off some scripting and code addition into the browser that's part of Trippy (the VW inspector). Enjoy. Oh - and as I did last week, here's the compressed AVI file.

The crew at Quallaby would like to get a Boston Smalltalk user's group set up - if you are interested, let me know and I'll put you in touch with the right people.

Michael Hauser of BBN responds to this post - comments are now off for that post now, so - with his permission - here's his response. Sometimes, I really let my desire to let loose with a few ranting zingers get in the way of the point I'm trying to make :)

James,

I was recently made aware of your 3/14 blog posting about BetterBadNews. I am unable to post a comment on that posting, as you apparently have the comment feature enabled only for recent entries. So here is my comment:

I'm the technical implementor/consultant on BetterBadNews. While the site content often doesn't represent my position, I find it provocative, funny, and creative - attributes missing from the large majority of blogs in the 'sphere.

Before the March 5th entry was published, I registered my opinion that the needs of users trump the needs of publishers, and that the ability to annotate content and share that annotation can empower users, improve the quality of the conversation, and lead to greater freedom. This was a position that I didn't see being well represented in the online conversation. However, I do agree with those who have called for caution on this issue. While it's true in theory that the Google toolbar is opt in for users, in the sense that it must be explicitly installed, in actuality, much of the software installed on non-technical users' machines was installed not by the users themselves but by well-meaning friends or relatives. So the argument that only knowledgeable users would've installed Google toolbar, and would therefore know what it is and how to uninstall it, is quite specious. More importantly, autolinking sets a precedent that could be abused later by others (e.g., Microsoft, AOL, etc.) by, for example, building link alteration into the browser and making it less visible and more difficult to disable. By raising awareness of this danger, the community is helping to ensure that web annotation evolves in a direction that balances the rights of users, content publishers, and service providers. BetterBadNews chose to represent the opinions of those expressing concerns about autolinking, and that includes a broad range of people, some of whom are certainly as bright and clued in as you imply yourself to be.

To the extent that BetterBadNews confuses some of the technical details of this issue, BetterBadNews is reflecting both the complexity of the issue and the confusion in the distributed conversation in the blogosphere. That is a primary goal of BetterBadNews- to extend and reflect that conversation, including its confusion. Based on the feedback we're getting, many people get that that's what we're about.

Regarding the technical problems with our blog, thanks for your feedback. For me, it's one of many spare time projects and I haven't had time to work out all of the technical glitches yet. With respect to your specific complaints, there are technical issues with QuickTime/browser integration that may not be easy to solve. If you know how to implement a link that plays an embedded QuickTime movie without a page reload and without using an inline frame, please let me know. The obvious workaround is to put the text into the video itself - I have suggested this but I am not doing the video production and I was asked to put the "Click to Play" text below the movies in the interim. It is possible to embed the movie into an inline frame, using a link to dynamically load the frame, but this is more complicated and it's not clear that embedding movies in multiple inline frames in a page wouldn't create even worse cross-browser compatibility issues. I haven't had time to do the testing to find out.

Regarding the use of Firefox "instead of the great and powerful IE", we primarily use Firefox on Mac OS X, not IE Windows. The "turds" you refer to are difficult to eliminate across the various popular browsers. I just inserted CSS code to style the div surrounding the enclosure as position:relative, and that seems to have addressed this issue on Firefox-Windows, but some versions of IE apparently handle position:relative incorrectly, and this fix doesn't seem to solve the problem on Safari. If you can shed light on this issue, I welcome your input.

While your criticisms are valid from a usability standpoint, these misfeatures do not manipulate the user behind her back, disguising one thing as another, as some are concerned that follow-ons to Google autolinking could do. And as for "basic awareness" of the technology we're using, our blog is implemented on top of Zope, a sophisticated web application server, using COREblog with fairly extensive code mods by me to allow embedded video and support RSS2.0 enclosures. I'd say that shows more than basic awareness of the technology, though I certainly wouldn't claim to be an expert in all of the various technologies we're using. And it's not like your own blog doesn't suffer from any technical problems. In fact, just today you discovered and acknowledged an error in your feed. I'm sure that other technical problems could be identified if someone wanted to take the time to evaluate your blog thoroughly (e.g., I can see a text layout problem on your page as rendered by Firefox Mac as I write this), but to use such problems as evidence that you are clueless in an attempt to invalidate your opinions about technology issues would be either insincere or ignorant.

Sincerely,

Michael Hauser

The fact that Michael's response (see below) had to be emailed to me and then posted, instead of being put up as a comment is just more evidence of the damage that the spammers have wrought on all of us. Why are comments off on that post? Because I tend not to notice comments on posts once they fall out of the RSS feed, and I used to get spam in such posts. Sure, I could have comments emailed to me so that I could verify them - but I really don't need the extra email traffic. Just one more sign of the eroding commons...

Death Race 3000 is apparently in the works - a remake of the cult classic "Death Race 2000". Can it possibly be as campy as the original?

Via Patrick Logan comes this insight from Steve Loughran:

By adding all the functions of CORBA to SOAP, WS-* replicates the old world of distributed computing, only with underpinnings (HTTP, XML) not designed for that particular role.

That's pretty much the size of it. We now have CORBA all over again, even including all of the superfluous services that three people on the planet might need, someday, maybe.

I'm starting to think that federalizing security at airports was one of the stupidest things that could have been done. We've combined the efficiency of government services with the detail orientation that the MVA is so well known for. Take this morning - I arrive at the airport at 6 am for a 7 am departure. Sure, they say I should arrive 2 hours early - sorry, but they don't need to claim that much of my sleep time. First off, the line stretches from terminal D (this is BWI) all the way over to terminal E. Second, they send someone over to facilitate those of us with upcoming departures - they shepard a bunch of us forward. Rampant line cutting ensues, as everyone in the new line is convinced that they are the only ones in a hurry.

I take a look at the normal line - it's moving along at a nice clip. They've got three - no wait, 2 lanes open for the "accelerated" line - one of the TSA crews had to take a break. Here's the first thing that eally torqued me off. I realize that there are work rules, and I realize that the screeners ability to focus will drop if they stay on duty too long. But still - when the lines are backing up over at the local grocery, they add checkers and open new lines - they pull people from other jobs for a few minutes until the lines die down. Nope, not the TSA. Rules are rules by gosh, and if travelers miss their planes... well, they should have just arived earlier. Never mind that the normal line got people through faster after that - I watched the people who had been behind me scoot through.

Which leads to the insecurity thing. Consider: there's a huge build up of people in line, in a small area, in the zig-zagging rope pens. There are no security checks to get into the terminal itself, just to get to the gates. Just how much damage could a guy with a few hand grenades do while the helpful TSA agents take their mandatory break? What they've managed to do is replace one problem with another - and even that's making the assumption that the new security is better than the old (I'm not convinced).

And what's up with having to take my PC out of it's bag? Two things:

• X-Ray machines see through the canvas bag
• No one else - not Canada, not Europe, not Australia - demands that I remove my PC from the bag

This process alone slows the line down a ton, and it achieves absolutely nothing. All the business travelers have to fish in their bags, pull the PC out, put it in a container. Then we all slow down so that we can watch the things and make sure they don't get lifted. What do we end up with? A system that:

• Slows the entire screening line down
• Adds no additional security
• Makes it a whole lot easier for thieves to make off with a PC unnoticed

Travel just gets more and more annoying, and for no good reason whatsoever.

We've been meeting here in Cincinnati - the management team for Cincom Smalltalk, that is - to determine what our business direction will look like going forward. We've mostly been talking about possible partner relations (which is a very amorphous term in the way we are using it). Start looking for some noise from us in this direction over the next few months.

Patrick Logan points to a post by Ramon Leon:

With or without Seaside, Smalltalk needs to return to the mainstream. The current crop of mainstream languages, pretty much feel like handcuffs in comparison.

Based on the comments to this post and this post, I'd have to say that a lot of people like handcuffs...

I guess I needed some sleep. I had an amazing dinner last night with a partner, and got back to the hotel just before 11. I went straight to bed. I woke up once (who the heck set the thermostat to 76?) to set the temp down, but otherwise slept through to 9 am this morning. I tend to stay up too late watching TV at home to get that much sleep. Feels good!

Phillip Greenspun has a post up about his desire for widespread WiFi - I'm not sure that it would save fuel the way he thinks - if you examine his side trip thing, for instance, it would take a good amount of time to find the website and get the hours of operation - likely enough time that you would be past the exit (or already off and on the way down the road to the attraction).

That's not the biggest problem though. 802.11x isn't the same kind of protocol as digital cell (GSM, CDMA, etc) use - I've driven through neighborhoods with open wireless all the way down the street - at 30 mph (much less highway speeds) you can't acquire and keep a signal - by the time you get one, you've lost it - there's simply no handoff mechanism. IIRC, WiMax might sidestep that issue by making the coverage area wide enough - but it's not widely deployed yet.

Interestingly enough, the system that currently addresses that problem is one that Phillip addressed in his very next post - Verizon broadband services via the existing cell system. It's slow and expensive - I've read that it works all the way up and down the Amtrak NE corridor, and I figure it might be worthwhile for regular commuters on that route. For anyone else? Panera Bread or Starbucks are simpler answers.

I don't see anyone rolling out a single 802.11x system across the highway system anytime soon - too many nearby homes and businesses would poach off of it if it were free, and the installation costs would likely make the service expensive anyway (just look at the aforementioned Verizon system for an example).

I just love this binary XML thing. John Bobowicz brings up the topic in an article I ran across today:

Is this a memory lapse?

It seems we've forgotten what the notion of a Markup Language is all about. XML, like other markup languages such as HTML and WML, tag portions of text documents for one reason or another. HTML marks up text for formatting purposes and XML marks up text to make data embedded in a text document more machine readable.

All of these things are about making documents more useful. Formating documents, embedding data in documents, etc, is the purpose of markup languages.

The other thing we are forgetting is that binary formats are platform optimized. This optimization is a leading cause for incompatibility between dissimilar systems.

We've been down this road before, and it wasn't that long ago. I give you... CORBA. I guess the only good things about binary XML and WS* is that the people involved aren't doing greater harm somewhere else...

I'm back home for a few days - we had a productive couple of days in Cincinnati, and it looks like we have a lot of work to do in the next little while. There's some real interest in blogging back at corporate as well - there should be some increased activity from Cincom on that front in the near term future - stay tuned for that.

In other news, I figured out how to customize the editing toolbar in the Silt client poster (in the cab, no less - am I insane, or what?). I'll be pushing out a new version with toolbar options for bullet lists, numbered lists, and tables shortly. I've got to hand it to the Software With Style guys - they made that pretty simple.

I'll be off to LA in a few days - I'll be speaking at the new LA STUG, and taking my daughter to visit a cousin that lives out there/ Should be a pleasant excursion.

With all the gushing about Ajax of late, it's kind of nice to see Hani blasting it with both barrels. I haven't spent any time looking at XmlHttpRequest, so I can't really speak to his critique. But as usual, he lets loose with a full bodied rant :)

Eric explains some of the facts of life with respect to MSDN and the licensing of MS products:

Many companies and teams buy a single subscription and share it among all their developers.  This form of piracy is rampant.  Some folks probably even think it's legal.  It's not. We encounter this all the time when talking to people about our own products. 

User:  "Why should I buy Vault when SourceSafe is free?" 

SourceGear:  "Why do you think SourceSafe is free?"

User:  "Because it's on the MSDN discs."

If you have ten developers using Visual Studio, you're supposed to have ten subscriptions to MSDN Universal.  That's the way it works.

Well. If you look at their new pricing (just over $10k for "everything"), and realize that it's per developer, then it's clear that MS' products aren't as cheap as most people have assumed they are. Also note - the MS stuff is a subscription license - i.e., you pay each year. Which isn't so very different from what Cincom does, is it? Except.... consider - we only charge for deployment, not for development. Most vendors charge on both ends...

My post on the CLR has certainly generated a lot of comments. I think that I'll let that conversation keep going - I'm going to leave comments on for that post after the point when they would normally go off. The nifty thing is, that action will create an item specific feed that can be subscribed to - so I'll still be able to track it without having to remember to dig through the archives.

Wesner Moise seems to have a few issues with a few things in the CLR, particularly weak references. He then goes on to call Smalltalk a "language of the past":

I had a lot of radical ideas that I didn’t mention, mostly involving features from various academic languages that unlikely to come in the next few years. I firmly believe that the new advances in languages will borrow heavily from languages of the past such as Lisp and Smalltalk. Already, we have seen the advent of garbage collection, closures and iterators in C#. Languages will also become more declarative over time.  

Smalltalk is hardly a language of the past - look here, for instance, and download it. It's also amusing to see him describe things that Smalltalk and Lisp have supported for decades as "radical ideas". Maybe the radical idea would be to drop the language that doesn't support 3 decade old "radical" ideas and use one that already does...

And obtw - VisualWorks supports weak collections. Too "radical" for the CLr, I suppose...

The schedule for StS 2005 is online now. Check it out. As an aside, it's looking a little rough, and has a number of TBD items. Those are being ironed out as I post this

Well, I wasn't a huge fan of Point Pleasant, but it was ok. Off it goes though - March 17 was the end of the road for the show. The good news is, the last episodes of Tru Calling will appear in that timeslot. Via Sci-Fi Wire.

It looks like there will be some more noise from Cincom on the blog front soon - i.e., some more Cincom bloggers. I can't get into too much detail yet, but there's action afoot - and the Silt server is what's going to be used. This is pretty cool stuff, watching your own software get picked up and adopted :)