Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

I have no illusions about Verizon DSL - I've heard friends complaints, and read plenty of others. On the other hand, after the last couple of weeks of Comcast flakiness, I think some local competition would have to help. Last week's outage looked an awful lot like a large scale DNS attack (Comcast has not said anything to that effect). Things were flaky last night in exactly the same way, which started me thinking that the earlier outage may have been less harm and more foul. Now there's an outage just in my node. Sigh.

Sam Ruby gives a nice summary of them - especially useful for people who aren't that familiar with Smalltalk or Ruby.

The showstopper bug turned out to be a configuration issue. In early builds of 3.9, we had turned spell checking off. It should now work in the XML editor, so it got turned on again. That's when I started having bizarre crashes. I didn't put the two together until Michael gave me a hand with it this morning - I had never copied the various pieces of the spell check system to my 7.3 development directory, and that was the source of the problem. I bundle all of that with the builds, so it wouldn't have actually affected the runtime - but I never got that far.

So, the upshot is - candidate build time...

I just love this sort of story (from MSNBC) - a "what are the blogs saying" segment. I'd quote it, but it's a video segment. The upshot - it's the new "man in the street" segment, with MSNBC peddling the notion that the view from a handful of blogs (never mind the subject) is somehow meaningful. This is every bit as meaningful as Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segments. There are (quite literally) millions of blogs - would it be too hard for the mainstream media to accept the notion that it's impossible to distill that all down into a 5 minute "what the blogs are saying" segment? Looks like it's about as hard as getting pizza with extra sauce...

We've got one of our corporate marketing folks blogging on the site now - Dale Wolf is running the Simplicity blog. This blog will likely end up being multi-author, extending up into other parts of Cincom's management. Stay tuned - and subscribe here.

Even Scoble has cut back on the scope of his reading:

I've noticed something. I haven't been reading my feeds very regularly for the past couple of weeks. I feel more ignorant. But I'm happier. The neat thing is that my aggregator continues to gather weblog posts and whenever I have time, I can read a feed or two. But not putting the pressure on myself to read 1,300+ feeds every night sure is making life more enjoyable.

I always thought 1300 feeds sounded like too many - but I'm sure the amount you can read varies by person (and the level of other responsibilities). For me, I've noticed that I start to feel overloaded every time I get near 300 feeds. I've been holding at just under 270 for a few weeks now.

Doc and Dave Winer dislike the "It's a Small World" ride at Disney. I've always rather liked the ride - iirc, it originated at the Worlds Fair in New York City. My daughter loved the ride when she was little. It's no thrill ride (lol), but it's not horrible either. I think they complain way, way too much :)

Adam Connor asks a fair question about complexity in development languages:

Java’s generics don’t have anything like C++’s power — beyond hiding casts, I’m not sure I see much benefit at all — so they aren’t used this way. But Java abounds with other features that are used and abused: classloaders, reflection, dynamic proxies, aspect-oriented programming, and now annotations. Again, the core problem is that the language wasn’t really designed for this level of dynamic behavior, so features such as reflection or dynamic proxies are hard to read and understand. (That is not to say that Java isn’t an advance over C++, where such features are so hard that they simply wouldn’t be attempted.) Again, it’s obvious that more dynamic languages have existed for years, e.g., Smalltalk. Ruby seems like a new language in this vein.

Is every language fated to push at the complexity barrier until it falls over in a heap?

Until people stop trying to recreate dynamic features in rigid languages, yes. Watch Java and C# get more and more baroque over the next couple of years, as "power" gets added to each...

I've been reading "Krakatoa: The day the Earth Exploded" recently - it's a fascinating summary of the huge volcanic explosion of 1883. Apparently timely as well - take a look at these two stories of an eruptions on Sumatra - here and here. These things can be nasty - the Pinatubo eruption in 1991 cooled the planet for a few years, for instance.

Nothing in modern memory compares with the "year without a summer" - 1816. It was popularly known as "Eighteen hundred and froze to death". Here's some basic info from the Wikipedia page:

The unusual climate aberrations of 1816 had the greatest effect on the American northeast and northern Europe. Typically, the late spring and summer of the American Northeast are relatively stable: temperatures average about 20 25 °C (68 77 °F), and rarely fall below 5 °C (41 °F). Summer snow is an extreme rarity, though May flurries sometimes occur.

In May of 1816, however, frost killed off most of the crops that had been planted, and in June two large snowstorms resulted in many human deaths as well. In July and August, lake and river ice were observed as far south as Pennsylvania. Rapid, dramatic temperature swings were common, with temperatures sometimes reverting from normal or above-normal summer temperatures (as high as 35 °C, or 95 °F) to near-freezing within hours. Even though farmers south of New England did succeed in bringing some crops to maturity, maize (corn) and other grain prices rose dramatically. Oats, for example, rose from 12 cents a bushel the previous year to 92 cents a bushel.

All of that was caused by a large eruption in - you guessed it - Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies). It's too far back to know the cause for sure, but something very similar happened in 535, as recorded by Byzantine historians:

In the years 535 CE and 536 CE, several remarkable aberrations in world climate took place. The Byzantine historian Procopius recorded of 536 CE, "during this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness ... and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.". Tree ring analysis by dendrochronologist Mike Baillie, Queen's University, Belfast, shows abnormally little growth in Irish oak in 536 CE and another sharp drop in 542 CE, after a partial recovery. Similar patterns are recorded in tree rings from Sweden and Finland, in California's Sierra Nevada and in rings from Chilean Alerce trees.

If one of those volcanos in Indonesia goes in a similar fashion, we could have a very nasty couple of years in front of us. Let's just hope that they don't - The people of that region have suffered enough, and the modern world is less well prepared for that kind of disaster than the early 19th century world was, IMHO.

Matt Croyden notes that Comcast was having problems last night - DNS lookup was broken (again). It was fairly widespread (again) - I spoke to a friend in LA via IRC, and he was out as well. Either there's a sustained attack hitting Comcast, or they are doing something very, very wrong...

This note in cls may be of interest to VSE users:

After a flurry of activity on the Visual Smalltalk Enterprise mailing list, Kent Beck has agreed to open source Profile/V (a performance profiler for Visual Smalltalk) under the CPL 1.0 license.

Update: Dan Poon uploaded the code to our wiki.

If you updated BottomFeeder yesterday for a non-Windows platform, or via the baseapp-*.zip file, then you didn't get a few important files - my packaging script didn't include them. Just grab the appropriate baseapp-*.zip file now, and unzip it in the Bf directory. Let it replace everything (after quitting BottomFeeder), and restart. The missing stuff? A few icons, and the latest message catalog.

Dare Obasanjo points to yet another case of spammers abusing the commons - Blogspot has gone to spam heck, and the various tagging schemes (Technorati, de.icio.us) are being abused:

A very high percentage of the spam blogs that we process at PubSub.com also come from blogspot. We’ve got more serious “problems” in Japan and China, however, for the English language, blogspot is pretty much “spamspot.” It is, as always, disappointing to see people abuse a good and free service like that offered by Google/Blogspot in such a way.

And then there's:

All Blogspot blogs right now are included in every Feedster search by default. And now, due to the massive problems with spam on Blogspot, we're actually at the point of saying "Why don't we make searching Blogspot optional for all Feedster users". What's going on is that spammers have learned how to massively exploit Blogspot -- to the point where at times 90% of the blog traffic we get from Blogspot is spam. Now that's bad. Actually this spam issue just plain sucks. And its starting to ruin the user experience that people have with Feedster.

If Blogspot supported categories, Dare's right - things would be even worse. Here's a question I have - what's Microsoft doing to combat this with Spaces? I can see where combatting spam blogs would be pretty hard with a free service. IMHO, this falls back to a very old adage: You get what you pay for. If the service is free, you pay one way or another...

Here's today's spotlighted presentation:

Home grown relation database mapping and management system used with large real life Oracle 9i database application

presentation

Jamrich, Jozef: Prescient

Monday 9:15 am to 10 am

Abstract: This presentation will concentrate on the following.

• explanation of the basic design of the mapping and management system
• explanation of the performance issues experienced
• explanation of the solutions

The system is currently used in real life application with over 300 tables with as much as 900 mil record per row. The daily data feed includes files from Auto-Zone, Target,... with 100,000 rows and more of data to process.

Bio: Jozef Jamrich is a system architect at Prescient.

See you in Orlando!

We lovers of bad movies have a full plate coming from Sci Fi Channel. I mean, how can I go wrong with this:

Squid/Tentacles (working title), a creature feature starring a giant squid which attacks the crew of a treasure-hunting expedition.

Those funny guys at Gartner sent me a link to a survey they wanted me to take. I figured it couldn't hurt, so I clicked the link. Here's what I got in Firefox:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e10'  
 
[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] Too few parameters. Expected 1.  
 
/survey/Include/SurveyUtility_inc.asp, line 307
 

So I tried it in IE, and it worked fine. Even better - if I toggle a plugin setting so that Firefox reports itself as IE, it works fine in Firefox. So Gartner's inept web gnomes specifically look for the Agent String and die on non IE ones (with a stupid looking error message). Explain to me again why anyone takes their advice seriously?

Every so often I run across well meaning people that need to be slapped with a huge clueByFour. Here's an example from the "My Turn" column in Newsweek. The author is one of those parents worried about excessive candy intake:

Regardless of the example my wife and I attempt to set, we're working against a lot of variables. So why don't we just grin and bear it? Well, because we understand what's at stake. According to a sobering report that recently appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, the rapid increase in childhood obesity may cause today's children to have a lower life expectancy than I do—shocking in an age of so many advanced health-care techniques. It was only by explaining the risk of type 2 diabetes to my daughter that I was able to coerce her into eating her vegetables—at least for one night.

Looking at the picture in the story, I'd guess that the kid in question is between 8-10. Yeah, a deep explanation of Type II Diabetes is a great way to encourage eating of vegetables. I've never really had that problem with my daughter. Why? Well, we've made sure that fruits and vegetables are available at every meal, and - more importantly - we haven't gone into hysterics at the site of candy. The guy who wrote that piece sounds like the kind of self righteous a****** that everyone else in the neighborhood hates, because every encounter with him leads to a lecture on healthy living. Bah.

Set a good example, make good food available, and don't get all paranoid about candy - your kids will get the message just fine. Or you can do what this guy does, and have every meal turn into an epic battle.

The Register has the details. I'm not the only one who gets snarky when the subject is Sun :)

Water on the Moon? NASA thinks there may be some there, which would make moonbases a whole lot easier.

Some clever pranksters at MIT pulled a fast one on the WMSCI conference:

Jeremy Stribling said Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with "context-free grammar," charts and diagrams.

The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.

To their surprise, one of the papers -- "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for presentation.

Heh.

It seems that not all the B0rg occupants in Redmond are happy with their management - have a look at Mini-Microsoft. Mind you, find me any company and I'm sure that kind of commentary could be produced...

I've had a few people ask about building BottomFeeder from the sources. First off, go to the Software With Style and register for the development program. You need WithStyle to build. After that, grab the download instructions from the BottomFeeder site. That zip file contains a script that will do a build, along with all the files you need to do a build. During load, you'll get a message about a missing pre-requisite - WSBundle. You can ignore that. WSBundle is just my application packaging of WithStyle. I do that so that it can be updated like the other components.

Oh - and make sure you grab VisualWorks non-Commercial first, if you don't have it already. You'll need the 7.3 release. One other thing - WS registrations have been having problems of late - Michael is on it, and should have it all working (and the backlog addressed) this weekend.

In this week's screencast, I cover how I got BottomFeeder to deal with problematic XML data. When I first started writing Bf, other developers assumed that I had a tag soup parser - because they couldn't imagine how else I could do it. Partly, that's a blinders problem caused by the "final" declarations that litter the class libraries of Java and .NET - allegedly to help developers. Sure, they help - the same way a bullet hole helps ventilate things :)

Anyway - here's the compressed AVI file (187 MB), and here's the progressive WMV (27 MB). I went a little long this time.

IBM is having pains - it's not just Sun, according to the Register:

During a conference call yesterday to explain a 9 cent per share earnings miss, IBM confessed it would consider a "sizable restructuring" but declined to detail what form this reorganization would take. Sanford Bernstein's meticulous analyst Toni Sacconaghi has predicted the restructuring will likely result in between 5,000 and 10,000 staffers losing their jobs. If there are job cuts, they will probably be tied to IBM's mainframe business and particularly mainframe workers in Europe, according to pundits. IBM's mainframe business suffered a double-digit drop in sales during the first quarter, and weak economies in Europe and Japan were blamed for the overall revenue miss.

Then again, is this just one of those "must hit the quarterly numbers" things that panic public companies?

Here's today's daily update on Smalltalk Solutions 2005 - register today!

The VisualWorks VM Plugin Framework

presentation

Krishnamachari, Sudhakar: Cincom Systems

Monday 9:15 am to 10 am

Abstract: This VM Plugin framework is used to develop higher-performance C implementations of algorithms or code sections for use as primitives dynamically loaded into the virtual machine. The major part of the development effort is in working with Smalltalk coding to create all the methods that are finally exported as a C code file for compilation as a dll and relinking.

Bio: Sudhakar Krishnamachari is a Software Services Project Leader (Smalltalk), with Cincom Systems India Pvt. Ltd. He has worked with the Cincom Smalltalk Supports division prior to this for nearly a year. He has also worked with ACA-Europe a French CAD firm as a Manager (Specs and Testing) and handled development project team in C/C++ /VC++.

Born in 1967,in India, he is a graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee and a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was a practicing architect for nearly a decade, with experience in CAD, animation and development of office automation tools, prior to the shift into software development. He strives to contribute very actively to the spread of Smalltalk.

He has been working independently on the MySQL port of the VW as well as on development of a framework for multi-user group workflow based generic webapplication that can be supported on MySQL / Linux combination (as with any OS or DBMS VW supports). Also worked on software development related to architectural graphics in C/VC++ and on other related CAD/Graphics application developments.

See you in Orlando!

CNET has a report up on personal aviation - a personal helicopter:

Norris, who has developed high-end stereo speakers and an alarm that signals when a hip replacement might be in trouble, is one of the founders of AirScooter, a Henderson, Nev.-based company specializing in small, light flying vehicles. Some of its other planned products include an unmanned helicopter-like flying vehicle and a dimunitive "ready to fly" model that can be assembled in 15 minutes, the company says.

The AirScooter II, though, is designed for people. It weighs around 300 pounds and doesn't require a pilot's license, according to the company's Web site. The company is seeking regulatory approval but has said it expects to release the product this year

There's a QuickTime video here.

There's an interesting Smalltalk event taking place in Belgium April 25th:

Web application frameworks in Smalltalk and Common Lisp

Monday, 25th of April 2005, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

The VUB (Programming Technology Lab), ULB (deComp), Belgian Assocation for Dynamic Languages (BADL) and the Belgian Smalltalk User Group (BSUG) are very pleased to invite you to two presentations about web application frameworks based on Smalltalk and Common Lisp. The two presenters are the main authors of the respective frameworks and will show you first-hand overviews and illustrate examples from, and experiences with, real-world use scenarios. It will be especially interesting to see what advantages the use of non mainstream dynamic programming languages brings to the table in a domain that is specifically targeted by Java and .NET frameworks. We also expect a heated discussion about the merits of the use of continuations in Seaside and the lack thereof in the Fractal Framework. ;)

The schedule for this event, held on Monday 25th of April, is as follows:

• 15:00 - 16:00 Avi Bryant, Seaside
• 16:00 - 17:00 Marc Battyani, Fractal Framework
• 17:00 - 18:00 Open Podium Discussion

This event is rounded out with a little reception.

The venue for the event is the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Campus Etterbeek, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium. For a description of how to get there see http://www.vub.ac.be/english/campEt.html

The exact location is still to be determined and will be announced at the following website: http://prog.vub.ac.be/events/2005/BADL/WebApplicationFrameworks.html

Please make sure to register for the event at the website, so we can plan ahead. The number of places will be limited according to the exact location of the event, and will be announced at the website.

Below are the abstracts of the presentations and the biographies of the speakers.

Avi Bryant, Seaside

On the web, abstraction is a dirty word. The dominant paradigms and philosophies of web development -- CGI, Servlets, Server Pages, REST -- provide only a thin wrapper around the low-level details of HTTP, and encourage you to use the rough stones of the transport protocol as the direct building blocks of your application. Web developers by and large reject any further abstraction in the way that assembly hackers once rejected structured programming: it's too inflexible, uses too many resources, and above all, it doesn't let you see what's really going on. As a result, web applications suffer the same problems now that assembly language programs did years ago; they're fragile, verbose, difficult to maintain and ill-suited to reuse.

That's not to say that better abstractions aren't available. The Lisp and Scheme communities have been working on them for years. Paul Graham's ViaWeb pioneered the use of closures, not query parameters, to capture application state in each link. Christian Quiennec showed how to use first class continuations to invert the flow of control of HTTP and put the server back in the driver's seat. Macro packages like htmlgen bring HTML into the language itself, opening up much more than a template system can provide. Meanwhile, object-oriented packages like WebObjects have demonstrated how to decompose the web page into a tree of stateful, interacting objects, allowing a finer granularity of development.

Seaside combines these ideas and others with the rich development environment of Smalltalk to provide a stable, complete, and innovative web application platform. This talk will introduce Seaside, and will focus in particular on the ways in which these abstractions can be leveraged to enable reuse: how to use closures, continuations, and intelligent HTML generation to destroy the intra- and inter-page coupling that is holding web development back.

Marc Battyani, Fractal Framework

Web sites have evolved from static documents to simple applications (eCommerce) and now to complete applications. Today, frameworks like J2EE and .Net are used for writing these applications made of tens to hundreds of object classes. These huge frameworks suffer from the limitations of their programming languages. Other frameworks, based on continuations, are emerging but still have limitations for complex applications. The Framework presented here has been used in production since 2001 and shows how the unique qualities of Common Lisp can boost the productivity by more than an order of magnitude for writing web applications compared to J2EE/.Net. This framework automatically generates the presentation, modification, validation, storage and data integrity layers of all the object classes of an application. It provides session management, web controls and a unique way for collaborative work. Internally, it makes extensive use of the Meta Object Protocol, CLOS generic functions, lexical closures, and on the fly code generation and compilation.

The speakers

Avi Bryant is the co-founder of Smallthought Systems Inc. Much of his work centers around the use of Squeak Smalltalk as a platform for commercial software development. As an actively contributing member of the Squeak community, he maintains its standard version control system, as well as packages for web development and relational and object database access. As a consultant, he has helped companies develop Squeak-based products for the travel, theatre, and finance industries, higher education, and mobile devices. Avi is based in Vancouver, Canada but currently residing in The Netherlands.

Marc Battyani's professional activities involve electronics design and writing software. He is the founder of Fractal Concept and the author of several open-source libraries (mod_lisp, cl-pdf, cl-typesetting). He works on various domains ranging from medical or industrial systems and applications to network infrastructure management web applications for banks as well as 3D software for robotized testing equipment, 6D real time positioning systems for the industry and the military, smart environmental radio sensors, etc. All the application software is written in Common Lisp with Fractal Concept's web application framework. Marc has a MSc in electronics and a MSc in computer science. He lives near Fontainebleau in France.

Sounds like a great event.

I'll be offline most of tomorrow - heading up to NYC with my daughter's girl scout troop. They are seeing a play - "Mamma Mia". Long trip to take by bus - we head out at 7 am, and don't get back until 10:30. I should kill off some of my reading backlog, at least :)

This article is enough to make you think twice about using BlueTooth for any data that matters:

The gun, which is called the BlueSniper rifle, can scan and attack Bluetooth devices from more than a mile away. The first version of the gun showed up at Defcon 2004, a hacker/computer security convention held annually in Las Vegas. You can read about it in Tom's Hardware show coverage report here.

While the early version was held together with tie-straps and rubber bands, this newest version has a much more professional look. The team at Flexilis learned a lot from making their previous gun, and have made many improvements. The gun is now bigger, stronger and more durable and the antenna is almost twice a powerful as the older model. It also has a small computer which eliminates the need for lugging around a heavy laptop just to gather data.

How hard was it to make this gun? John Hering, from Flexilis, says, "The parts are easily available for a few hundred dollars and you can make this gun in a long afternoon." In fact, in this two-part article, we will show you how to build your very own Bluetooth sniper rifle. A complete parts list is provided and we will document each step of the manufacturing process. We'll also report on our test "shoot" of some famous high-rise buildings in downtown L.A., namely the US Bank / Library Tower and the AON Tower.

With how lucrative a field identity theft is, I expect the hackers to be out in force with this technology. I remember when cell phones first came out - just about any trip into New York City was an invitation to have your phone hacked. Things are going to get worse in Wireless tech before they better.

6 am on Saturday is just wrong :) Off to New York city.

Apparently, there's no end to the childish whining that Dave Winer (appropriately named!) is capable of. He thinks an invitation only dinner with an MS VP is un bloglike, somehow:

Microsoft's Jim Allchin had dinner with some bloggers in SF last night. It was set up by Scoble. Now, while it's true that Microsoft has embraced blogging to a greater extent than any other big corporation that I'm aware of, it's totally unbloglike to make a dinner invite-only, and keep it a secret until after it's happened.

Now, let's run a thought experiment - suppose Scoble had done it Winer's way, and just said "Dinner with Allchin" - everyone show up here! MS is a big company, and - as such - it has a vast array of suck ups and haters lying around. Somehow, I doubt that Scoble and Allchin would have been happy with an audience of "Microsoft is Evil" chanters, interspersed with sycophants. Like it or not, if you want to get useful feedback in that kind of forum, you have to limit the audience somehow.

We had a nice day in NYC. We took in "Mamma Mia", which was better than I expected. It's a funny play - who would have guessed that there would be a play - set in Greece - inspired by the 70's music of a Swedish band? That's funny all by itself :) We stopped by the huge Toys R Us store in Times Square afterwards (I think it's where FAO Schwartz used to be). It's a neat store - the Lego section has some fascinating sculptures. For instance - here's a picture of the Statue of Liberty, done in Legos:

And here's a shot Chewbacca in Legos:

And finally, here's a shot of a The Empire State Building, as legos:

Micro Persuasion points to an interesting new site - one that aggregates Red Sox news for the Boston Globe's readers. This is where aggregation is headed.

Slashdot has a story on a few fascinating statements from Ivan Seidenberg - CEO of Verizon. He managed to undo a fair amount of positive marketing in this interview, I think. In reference to municipal WiFi, he said:

The head of the country's largest phone company ridiculed San Francisco's interest in building a municipal Wi-Fi network that is designed to offer cheap or free Internet service throughout the city.

"That could be one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard,'' said Ivan Seidenberg, chief executive officer of Verizon Communications, during a meeting with Chronicle editors and writers on Friday. "It sounds like a good thing, but the trouble is someone will have to design it, someone will have to upgrade it, someone will have to maintain it and someone will have to run it."

Nothing he said is wrong, but he said it in a way that's sure to set people's teeth on edge. The old adage about honey and vinegar comes to mind. Rather than ridiculing localities over this, he ought to be sounding out municipalities quietly - pointing out the actual costs, and offering to manage this sort of thing for them. That's not the dumbest bit though - get a load of this:

Seidenberg, for instance, said people often complain about mobile phone service because they have unrealistic expectations about a wireless service working everywhere. Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon and Vodafone, is the state's largest mobile phone provider.

"Why in the world would you think your (cell) phone would work in your house?" he said. "The customer has come to expect so much. They want it to work in the elevator; they want it to work in the basement."

I wonder if Seidenberg has seen any of the ads Verizon runs - you know, the "Can you hear me now? Good!" ones. Gosh knows how people would have gotten the notion that the service is ubiquitous based on those ads. Or heck - maybe this "Verizon wireless for the home" ad tipped people off. I wouldn't want to be the poor marketing schlub who has to answer questions about this interview, that's for sure.

VodkaPundit points out another anomaly - the MSM claims to have it over bloggers because they have editors and fact checkers - while the pajama clad bloggers have neither of those things. Curious then that they still manage to get so many simple things wrong - like this story on a phantom seal hunt. So VodkaPundit asks:

But assuming that Reuters is accurate for a change, a question: what happened to the editors who approved it? Fact-checkers? You know, all those valuable tools (and I mean that in every sense of the word) who allegedly make Big Media "journalists" superior to us pajama types? Are they still on the payroll? And why weren't their names publicized along with that of the fired freelance reporter?

Those are good questions. The technology press (which I follow fairly closely) has the same set of issues, and don't even get me started on outfits like Gartner. There's a reason that trust in the media (pretty much all media) is so low - and it's not a matter of political bias (in either direction) - it's a basic matter of not making stuff up.

Michael analogizes debugging to a murder mystery:

Here's some advice from me. Whether you choose to apply it to debugging a coding problem, or just understanding general behaviour that a program is exhibiting, try doing the follow:

Assume the entire issue is like a murder mystery. First you need to establish a motive. You also need a means and you need opportunity.

When debugging, it is easy to guess at some components motive and jump straight to their guilt. For the ultra intuitive, this can often work out really well. But for everyone else, it leaves them stumped as to what went wrong when jailing the component does not stop the crime from repeating.

My summary: Don't guess. In my experience, developers (myself included) are notoriously bad at figuring out where problems lie - this is especially true when the subject is "why is it slow?" Walk through the code with a debugger, or - in the case of a performance issue - use the profiler.

That was my wife's comparison :) The question? How many F words in the HBO series Deadwood - cumulative so far, and per minute? Not exactly a game for the whole family...

Steinbrenner has no one to thank but himself for the performance of the Yankees so far this year. The pitching stinks, and it's because he keeps trading away young talent for old guys like Randy Johnson. Sure - Johnson is a great pitcher. He's also 40, and his knees are about to fall off. Time to do the hard work of developing pitchers...

Scoble asks where to send a newbie:

A friend of mine who is a pretty well known journalist and is asking for help in learning programming with the new Visual Studio Express Editions. Particularly with VB.NET. Wonders where the best resources are for novice programmers. Where should I send him?

Not the answer he wants, but if his friend wants to learn programming without all the complexity, he should look here or here.

Gordon Mohr notes that the NY Times (supposedly the flagship of the print media) doesn't quite get the whole attribution thing. This goes right along with yesterday's post.

Here's an interesting analysis of the Gartner takeover of the Meta Group.

Today's update looks at one of the Object/Relational mapping talks at StS - there are a number of talks on this topic this year - register now and see what it's about!

Home grown relation database mapping and management system used with large real life Oracle 9i database application

presentation

Jamrich, Jozef: Prescient

Monday 9:15 am to 10 am

Abstract: This presentation will concentrate on the following.

• explanation of the basic design of the mapping and management system
• explanation of the performance issues experienced
• explanation of the solutions

The system is currently used in real life application with over 300 tables with as much as 900 mil record per row. The daily data feed includes files from Auto-Zone, Target,... with 100,000 rows and more of data to process.

Bio: Jozef Jamrich is a system architect at Prescient.

See you in Orlando!

I just updated the Silt Server to support OPML blogrolls. The client tool for BottomFeeder has been updated to support this new API as well - if you grab the dev updates, you'll see a new menu option under the "Post" menu.

Adobe is buying Macromedia:

"By combining our powerful development, authoring and collaboration software — along with the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash — Adobe has the opportunity to bring this vision to life with an industry-defining technology platform," said Chizen in a statement.

In a hint that some products could be scrapped as a result of the merged, Chizen noted that "cost savings" are likely to be made at the company, though he added that the motivation for the deal was to continue to expand and grow business into new markets.

Color me dubious. These firms are too close in size to each other - there's going to be knife fighting galore in the hallways. Far from ending up as a threat to MS, or as a monopoly threat to consumers, this merger could create a window of opportunity. This kind of acquisition is always dicey; just look at the HP/Compaq mess...

ACM has an interesting article on complexity in Java and C++ - compared to the simplicity of Smalltalk. This is the main reason Smalltalk is more productive - you don't get bogged down in the confusion caused by the poor choices of the language designers. The author repeated the old canard about Smalltalk being "slow", but it's an otherwise good read.

There are some details on ObjectStudio 7.0.1 posted here. Similar details on VW 7.3.1 are coming shortly.

Derek reports that an Indian tribe may build a casino near Saugerties, NY. I'm interested because I grew up in nearby East Fishkill, NY - back when the entire area was an IBM town. That would sure be a change for that sleepy little town.

Scott Granneman is unclear on the concept here:

The key distinction for me is this: I don’t like it when large corporations make wide-ranging decisions for users that disadvantage those that the corporations choose not to favor. So, for instance, I like the Firefox Greasemonkey extension, but I don’t like AutoLink. Both change the contents of web pages in users’ caches, in radical ways (in fact, Greasemonkey is perhaps more radical than AutoLink). However, AutoLink only changes links in ways that Google approves and provides; Google in effect, then, becomes the gatekeeper for e-commerce and communication. For example, AutoLink automatically changes all ISBNs to point to Amazon.com, which sounds great, but what if you don’t use Amazon? What if you like Barnes & Noble? Or BookPool? Or even better, you wish to support your local independent bookstore’s web site? AutoLink provides no way to change this, which means that Google’s decisions about links are immutable, and the company now has strong influence over the purchasing decisions of millions of its users.

Which part of "Then don't install the stupid tool" is unclear here? Does it come pre-installed? No. Do you have to go out of your way to get it? Yes. Does it operate without your consent? No. What's hard about that? This "I don't like it when they do it, but it's ok when some other guy does it" thing is just... stupid. Gatekeeper? Only if you want them to be Scott. There's an easy way to prevent AutoLink from doing things you don't like: Don't install it, or uninstall it if you have it. I suppose that changing the channel during commercials is a major hurdle for Scott too.

I think Microsoft ended up in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation vis-a-vis VisualBasic. They had decided to put a lot of effort into .NET - and they also had a large VB developer community. Consider their options:

• Don't put VB on .NET, and instead move it forward independently.
• Put VB in .NET, and make whatever changes are required

They went for the latter strategy - and are currently getting buckets full of cold water over it. Larry O'Brien has another column on this in SD Times this week. However, consider the reaction had they taken the first path (as the large crowd of MVP's objecting to the second path says they should have). Instead of "keep VB", MS would be hearing cries of "You are aren't serious about VB - it's an orphan".

Once they decided to go down the .NET platform path, they were going to anger the existing VB community no matter what they did. This is a choice every vendor has to make when they decide to make a dramatic move. Look at VisualWorks - we are in the process of building Pollock as a replacement for the existing GUI system. There are a lot of customers out there with significant investments in the current system (both in terms of actual systems and in terms of years of problem solving knowledge). We don't have a real choice though - the current framework doesn't get us to where we need to go (native widgets). That doesn't make the transition any easier though, and that's what MS is hearing from its (much larger) customer base now.

There's an interesting (and not much commented on) thing at work here as well. Consider the MVP's - they are influential (and knowledgeable) people in the VB community. What does VB.NET do for them? Well, it reduces their current knowledge base in VB to ashes, for one thing. If I were an outside consultant - instead of the Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager - the switch to Pollock would make me a little nervous on those grounds alone - a lot of the knowledge I have on the current GUI system is going to become useless once Pollock comes in. Some of those MS MVP's have had the same fear about their current VB knowledge, I'm sure.

Via my referer list, I ran across this detailed critique of Java. I especially liked this:

This "inordinate amount of typing" means that the language is not higher level then C++ and from this standpoint might be "one step forward, two steps back". We can ignore Simson Garfinkle's claims that Java is unsuitable for "major desktop applications" and that "it's better to train programmers to write efficient code than to depend on new programming languages to do it for them". The former point is common knowledge and irrelevant to me (with the current 3Ghz computer you probably can write a major desktop apps in Java; but that's actually true for Python too). The latter point is obvious and beside the point: it's portability between similar architectures (for example Solaris, AIX, HPUX, Linux) that matters most in the current economic environment; also tremendous industry momentum behind Java and money that IBM and Sun are putting into it can eventually lead to breakthrough that might substantially improve the quality of the interpreter and/or on the fly compiler. But it is "inordinate amount of typing" that really hurts: the language is verbose to the level that you hate despite its advanced over C++ - like automatic memory allocation. OO libraries often became a Babylon tower that buries the naive developer before he realize the magnitude of the treat ;-). Everything is possible in Java and everything is too long. Likewise Java programs tend to be longer than in C++ and several times longer than in Python and other scripting languages.

Some of the critiques have been partially addressed (like generics) - but always with more layers of complexity. The evolution of Java (and MS' C#, for that matter) reminds me a lot of Winchester House...

This parody of the whole male/female A-lister thing is pretty funny. Some of the facial expressions the guy with the tie uses are close to Jim Carrey territory :)

This is interesting - as of 2006, Monday Night Football is moving to ESPN. That's not the only change though - NBC is getting Sunday night football (which was ESPN's gig) - and they've got an interesting deal with the NFL on the games:

NBC will devote its entire Sunday night prime-time lineup to the NFL. The Sunday night games will start at 8:15 p.m. eastern and include flexible scheduling for the final seven weeks of the season, details of which will be developed by the league.

That issue has become more pressing since parity caused by the salary cap has resulted in teams moving up and down the standings annually, leaving bad teams that were strong the previous season in prime time and good teams that were bad the past season off of it.

So the schedule for the second half of the year will be up in the air, pending the ratings needs of a sponsor. I'm sure that will make coaching staffs happy. Will they do a one time adjustment at mid-year, or week by week?

The log reports are easier to compile now - Pete hatch (the guy who manages the server this stuff runs on) has separated the RSS logs, the main logs, and the blog logs. That makes it easier to run the various scripts I use for counting. With that said, here's the latest set of reports - these go back to April 9th:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Mac 8/9	966
Windows	859
Mac X	617
HPUX	548
Sources	446
Linux x86	312
CE ARM	153
Update	139
Windows98/ME	80
Solaris	38
Linux Sparc	38
AIX	26
Linux PPC	19
Source Script	15
SGI	14
ADUX	7

The interesting thing here - to me - is the number of downloads for the older Mac platform. It's not the best platform for Bf right now, but it's certainly in demand. Next up is the RSS access statistics, by aggregator:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
BottomFeeder	22%
Mozilla	19%
Net News Wire	16%
Other	15.7%
SharpReader	4.6%
BlogLines	4.5%
NewsGator	4.4%
Internet Explorer	2.3%
Planet Smalltalk	2.3%
Feed Demon	2%
RSS Bandit	1.2%
Magpie	1%
Liferea	1%
JetBrains	1%
Shrook	1%
Feed Reader	1%
PubSub	1%

It looks like more people are accessing the site with the popular Windows tools - NewsGator accesses are up, for instance. Even so, the Mac stats conform to the BottomFeeder download patterns - there's strong interest in the Mac platform among my readers. Finally, the general HTML accesses for the site:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	46.5%
Internet Explorer	30.2%
Other	14.9%
BottomFeeder	2.7%
Net News Wire	2.2%
Java	1.5%
BlogLines	1%
Liferea	1%

That's interesting - a small (but significant) percentage of the web access is coming through aggregators rather than through browsers. That tells me that there are people out there "living" in their aggregator rather than in the browser. Interesting...

Dare Obasanjo posts a letter from Newsday which laments the supposed decline of journalism. Oh, please. When was the supposed golden age? The 60's, when journalists worked for a different set of large corporations? The 20's or 30's, which was the golden era of scandal sheets? Perhaps the "yellow journalism" period of the 1890's? Perhaps the earlier part of the 19th century, when papers loudly aligned themselves with one party or the other? I love the way people fall for this notion that the media has fallen from some former period of grace.

It's the same kind of a-historical view that thinks the anti-war protests of the 60's (or today, for that matter) are some new thing. There's a fantasy view of history, where everyone views the World War II era as being representative of all US history. People who think that ought to look at the history of dissent and reporting during other eras - the Civil War era, the time of the war with Mexico, 1812, WWI - pretty much anytime in US history other than WWII. The WWII era was the anomaly.

What Laurie Garret needs is a history book - it's pretty clear to me that she's got no actual knowledge of the subject.

The Yankees hammered the Rays, but this game is not a good sign:

Somewhere, maybe even George Steinbrenner was smiling. Alex Rodriguez, Tino Martinez and the Yankees answered their outspoken owner with a record-setting rout Monday night, scoring 13 runs in the second inning of a 19-8 victory over the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

If Steinbrenner has any sense, he's not smiling. 8 runs? Here's the bad news:

Tampa Bay fought back against Wright, who barely lasted long enough to earn the easy win. He was charged with eight runs and 11 hits in 5 1-3 innings.

It's a good thing they had a great second inning - because otherwise, this would have been a lot like the losses to the Orioles and Red Sox. Hitting isn't the problem here; pitching is.

Register today so you can come to the great talks we have lined up this year - and make a vacation out of it, since we'll be in sunny Orlando, FL:

Number Crunching Smalltalk

experience report

Poon, Dan: Romax Technology Ltd.

Monday 2 pm to 2:45 pm

Abstract: For over 10 years, Romax Technology Ltd. have pioneered the use of Smalltalk in Engineering Design and Analysis, a numerically intensive domain and traditionally the preserve of FORTRAN and more recently C and Matlab. Many vehicles on the roads today have benefited from Smalltalk analysis.

Smalltalk was initially used for product modelling and visualisation - its uses now includes number crunching where it performs along side FORTRAN.

Smalltalk's USP is that it is such a simple language that, when supported with pair programming between numerical analysts and Smalltalk coaches, it quickly becomes a lingua franca, enabling esoteric numerical algorithms and domain knowledge to be melded with production software skills.

Once captured in Smalltalk, a numerical model is much more malleable than its FORTRAN counterpart, meaning we can easy parameterise the model and apply optimisation techniques such as genetic algorithms.

We will also discuss the political implications of getting engineering analysts and computer scientists to work in pairs, the strong business case for doing so, and how our org chart has evolved with it.

Bio: 16 years of OO development experience from the early days of version 1.0 C++ to OODBMS. From the early attempts at OO methodologies to Agile. Worked within Telecommunications, Foreign Exchange Options Trading, and now Engineering Design Analysis.

See you in Orlando!

If you want to hear some funny audio bits, you can't go wrong at Lileks Bleatophony. His diner bits are longer, but they're pretty good. This is the guy who wrote this classic on pizza - the whys and wherefores of "why the heck can't I get extra sauce??" His books are funny too - Interior Desecrations and The Gallery of Regrettable Food. Here he is on pizza, for instance:

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.

Heh. Classic.

Sean points us to news that Dolphin 6 is getting closer - the Object Arts guys have a nice looking ScreenCast up on the new stuff. The IdeaSpace idea reminds me of the old Smalltalk idea of Projects (essectially, logical desktops) - but in a tabbed master window. I'm not sure what I think about that, but I really like the pin/unpin idea for the various parts of the browser.

After the announcement that the new Pope would use the name Benedict XVI, Rogers Cadenhead found himself in the news:

By the time Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany assumed his new papal moniker on Tuesday, it was already too late for the Vatican to buy the corresponding dot-com Web address.

That's because a St. Augustine, Fla. man, Rogers Cadenhead, registered the address BenedictXVI.com on April 1, hoping that would be the name of John Paul II's successor. To cover his bases, Cadenhead, 38, also registered ClementXV.com, InnocentXIV.com, LeoXIV.com, PaulVII.com, and PiusXIII.com.

Apparently, hits started piling in as soon as the name became known :)

There's been some grumbling about things at Microsoft - from people at (or recently at) Microsoft itself. Mini-Microsoft is interesting today, and Dare had a good piece up the other day as well. Sounds to me like all is not entirely well in the b0rg cube...

Update: James Governor has some interesting thoughts on all this, with a particular focus on how it might affect Scoble. I've often wondered about some of the bomb throwing Scoble does within MS. Back in the 90's, I spent a fair bit of time at ParcPlace-Digitalk and ObjectShare throwing bombs - some of them public (in USENET - the blogosphere didn't really exist then). One thing I learned was that bomb throwing - especially the public kind - almost never works. It puts your targets on the defensive, and makes it harder for your allies to join with you. You get a lot of private claps on the back, and very little public support.

Are there times I disagree with Cincom management? Sure there are. You won't see me trying to air the dirty laundry here though, because I don't think it would be productive. On your way out of a job, such behavior burns bridges. What do you think it does while you're still on the job?

Today's update brings us to Sam Shuster's Pollock presentation:

Pollock - Now and For The Future

presentation

Shuster, Samuel: Cincom Systems

Monday 2 pm to 3:30 pm

Abstract: In this presentation we will present new widget features that Pollock provides and show how E-Z it is for you to use them in your applications. We will also take a look at how to configure hot keys for your applications as well as presenting an overview of the major refactoring that took place at the start of 2005 to make Pollock even more flexible. The Pollock roadmap to final Production will be discussed as well as VisualWorks GUI plans for the future.

Bio: Samuel S. Shuster is the GUI Lead for VisualWorks. His pride and joy is the Pollock GUI Framework which is slated to replace the current VisualWorks GUI framework over the next few years. When he's not responding to the constant "When Will Pollock Be Done" questions, he sits in the corner of his livingroom, looking dazed.

See you in Orlando!

Rok Hrastnik has released a new report - The Business case for RSS. It's a useful summary of his previous work in this area. Here's the direct link to the report.

Anyone who's been paying attention knows that corporate blogging is on the rise. This article points to some stats on that - apparently 45% of the biggest 1000 firms either are blogging now, or plan to do so soon. This is where the miasma of corporate standards is going to run smack into the fresh voice of unhindered blogging.

Should companies be ok with having people say anything on a blog? No, they shouldn't - but on the other hand, there's such a thing as going too far - listen to this so called expert's opinion:

Experts on business blogs say the best safeguards against harmful posts are to institute proactive controls.

"Nothing should make it to the public eye without at least one other set of eyes on it, in any company," said Matthew Oliphant, co-founder of the corporate blogging consulting firm BusinessLogs. "The best way then to run your blog publishing is like any other publishing house: You have post writers and editors, as well as an editor in chief and a publisher. Writers write; editors edit the writing."

Yeah, there's a plan - just treat blog posts like press releases and watch the interest fly in :) For good or ill, you're going to have to use a lighter touch. First off, you should have a policy you can point employees at: Sun has a good one here, for instance. Rather than filter everything upfront, you're really going to have to make judgment calls based on policy. More simply, hire good people and have some trust in them - but make sure to make them aware of the boundaries.

Sci Fi Wire reports on something that always irritates me - pulling a series when there are episodes "in the can":

Fox has again pulled the plug on Tru Calling, taking the supernatural series off the air after the April 21 episode, meaning that viewers who were trying to catch up with the canceled series' last six episodes will miss the final one, TV Guide Online reported.

Look, I understand the whole ratings imperative. At the same time, this kind of thing ticks off a lot of the people that you would like to keep happy. Who am I talking about? People who own and use PVRs (and heck, even people who only have VCRs). Tru Calling has one episode left - so why not air it on a Sunday night at 3 AM? I won't stay up for that, but my ReplayTV will find it. Ditto a show like Firefly or WonderFalls - airing the remaining episodes during slots when no one is watching anyway does no harm to the bottom line, and will yield some amount of positive feelings.

Instead, networks go ahead and do stupid stuff like leaving the last handful of episodes hanging. What's the point?

Torre should worry about Johnson "springing back". Johnson is (or at least, was) a great pitcher - but his knees are about to fall off. The Yankees would be far better off with a shaky 23 year old than with a shaky 40 year old with bum knees. I fully expect Steinbrenner to not get that though, and go looking for another over the hill pitcher. Sigh.

I didn't point out that we have a new blogger on the site - Rowan Bunning of Software With Style. Rowan is the product manager for SwS, so subscribe to his feed for the best info on what's up with the SwS product suite.

Overheard in the Smalltalk IRC channel:

The users I know are so clueless, that if they were dipped in clue musk and dropped in the middle of a pack of horny clues, on clue prom night during clue happy hour, they still couldn't get a clue.

heh.

Update: No, this isn't what I think of users, either of Cincom Smalltalk or of BottomFeeder. I just find that set of words amusing.

Tim Bray has been looking at Blog clients - in particular, cross platform clients. He missed one - the client that ships with BottomFeeder. It's a WYSIWYG XHTML editor (which also allows you to flip over to plain tag mode if you actually like that sort of thing). It works with the MetaWebLog API, the Blogger API, and the MT API (as well the API to the Silt Server, a nice, portable, simple blog server).

There are some issues; the spell checker isn't really working right in the WYSIWYG mode yet, for instance. That'll get addressed soon though. I've tested the client against Blogger, and it works there - I've also tested other clients (like ecto and BlogJet) against my server using the MetaWebLog API, and the BottomFeeder client poster works the same way both those tools do - ditto the MT API.

What's it implemented in? Why, Smalltalk of course - Cincom Smalltalk, to be precise. I found some of Tim's assumptions a bit odd. Take this, for instance:

I don’t know of any other plausible clients that are Java and hence portable, so I think bloged is going to have legs, and is worth us funding some further development. Particularly when the Atom Publishing Protocol becomes ubiquitous. [ed: bloged being a Java client that Gosling and a few others at Sun have tossed together].

When Atom publishing format becomes ubiquitous? Here's the thing - Atom is going to be one format among many (as much as MetaWebLog API sucks). The problem for Atom format is that it's late to the game, and the other solutions - pathetic though they may be - actually work now. I'm sure I'll support Atom with my client eventually - but eventually could be awhile from now. Here's the big thing though - portable doesn't mean it has to be Java. We were doing binary portability in Smalltalk 15 years ago...