Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Bob Congdon points out that Coke cans do, in fact, have value!

PR Opinions unearths the unseemly practice of paid advocates - the kind that you don't hear about as having been paid:

Appearing on a local TV show in Austin Texas to review toys for kids, Oppenheim promoted a number of different products including a  personalized photo album from Eastman Kodak.

The only problem was that Mr. Oppenheim was paid by Kodak.

On a subsequent appearance on NBC's Today show, he once again promoted Kodak's product - though Kodak says it didn't pay for that particular mention.  That was obviously Oppenheim's favor to Kodak. And they weren't alone.  Of the fifteen products he plugged on NBC, nine were former clients and eight had paid for plugs on local television.

The Oppenheim episode has opened up a big can of worms.  It appears that there's a booming industry for TV talking heads promoting products for cash with no disclosure before, during or after their segment.

Infomercials are better than that - at least they don't hide the pitch. It's only a matter of time before this happens in the blogosphere (more likely, before it gets reported as happening). There have been bloggers paid for political mentions (from both sides of the spectrum) - I'd guess that there are bloggers getting paid for product mentions as well. Easy enough to do, actually - a blogger with a passion for something (photography, say) gets offered money to slip in mentions of a particular brand/model. I don't see any obvious way for general readers to find out, either.

Jonathan Schwartz hasn't gotten the memo yet - "the network is the computer" was the pitch about 8 years ago. Here he is again though, flogging network computers:

Display over IP. DOIP ("Do IP") is to the PC industry, what VOIP (voice over IP, simplistically, using the internet to make phone calls) is to the telecommunications industry. Phone calls are near to free at this point, and the business model is undergoing radical change. It's inevitable that pervasive and sufficient bandwidth will allow most of what happens on a client to migrate to the network. Why upgrade your PC if you can rely on plentiful bandwidth to have someone centrally deliver it as a service? You don't upgrade your TV set, BBC and News Corp do it for you every evening with fresh content. And you don't buy a new TV to watch it. The same should apply to your PC. DOIP is to a PC as XMRadio is to a CD player.

Sure it is. You come down here and deal with the "DNS? What's DNS?" service that Comcast is becoming known for. A couple weeks of that will wash this bad idea clear out of your head.

And I don't upgrade my TV set? Good gosh, which part of HDTV haven't you heard about? To get improved content, I have to upgrade both my TV (done) and my cable box (not yet) - and my ReplayTV as well. The most irritating part of his post is the way he's trying to wrap a pure marketing ploy (please, buy useless network PC's so that I can sell a ton of expensive Sparc boxes to datacenters) in environmental clothing. Sheesh.

There's a small bug fix out for the 3.9 release of BottomFeeder available. As it happens, the http code was making an incorrect assumption about getting encoding information from XML documents. It was assuming that every header with encoding information would wrap the encoding in double quotes (as HTTP attributes normally are). A quick perusal of the specs shows that this is a bad assumption - the encoding can be wrapped in single quotes. The latest update for the NetResources library addresses this. The symptom? There are some feeds that weren't being read at all, and others that were being badly decoded (i.e., you would see occasional odd characters).

For those observing Passover (or like me, married to someone who does) - the Jib-Jab treatment of Matzah is a must-see. Yes Virginia, there certainly is such a thing as too much matzah :)

Today's update looks at Software Components in Smalltalk. Register today!

Programming with Software Components: From Globals to URIs, Classes to Interfaces

presentation

Staehli, Richard: Simula Research Laboratory

Monday 4 pm to 4:45 pm

Abstract: Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) promises to simplify the construction of high-quality applications through composition of off-the shelf components. This is arguably a fulfillment of the original promise of object-oriented programming; that objects may encapsulate arbitrary implementations.

Surprisingly, the Smalltalk community lags behind the industry in advancing CBSE technology. The idea of composing a computing system from components that may encapsulate heterogeneous programming language and runtime environment is at odds with Smalltalk's single image heritage. Further, todays component technology, such as CCM, force a programmer to choose when to use heavyweight components and when to use lightweight local class instances.

Our investigation into a Quality-of-Service (QoS) -aware component architecture suggests a way to improve Smalltalk programming by separating concerns of functional composition from concerns of component implementation. In this presentation I show how Smalltalk source code may be made more robust by replacing a global reference to an implementation class with a Universal Reference Identifier (URI) for a component interface type. This allows the implementation of this component to be determined at compile time, deployment time, or even upgraded dynamically at runtime without violating the semantics of the source code.

Bio: Richard Staehli has worked the past three years architecting and prototyping a Quality-of-Service (QoS) -aware component architecture in Smalltalk for Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo, Norway. He received a Ph.D. in 1996 from The Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology and has since worked on video data types for Informix Software, on a CORBA application server for Oracle Corporation and as a senior technical consultant for the interactive web services firm AGENCY.COM .

See you in Orlando!

Here's a headline you don't see every day:

Exploding Toads Baffle Experts

Some folks from Quallaby are putting together a STUG in Boston - check it out, as they meet tonight - Colin Putney put out an announcement:

The Smalltalk group at Quallaby (where I work) is organizing a get-together of Smalltalk folks in a couple of weeks. I'd like to invite all Squeakers to the first meeting of the Boston Area Smalltalk Users' Group. There's no agenda; the first meeting will be to gauge interest, get to know each other and plan further activities.

BASTUG Inaugural Meeting:

Monday, April 25, 2005, 7:30 pm.

Not Your Average Joe's (coffee shop)

1727 Massachusetts Ave, Lexington, MA

If you're in the neighbourhood, drop by and say hello. Feel free to contact me off-list if you need more information.

Lileks has a fun bleat up today - the part that really struck me was his experiences with a couple of vendors (Best Buy and Marshall Fields, but it could be any large corp.). The trouble he ran into is common to companies where individual employees have no stake in the results - the Dilbert problem of "the pay's the same no matter what I do". Here's the punchline:

Lesson: from Best Buy to Marshall Field’s, it’s the same problem. One day a company is responsive, quick, savvy. Then one day it’s one percent bigger than it was before, and something happens. They’re the IRS. They’re the Pentagon. They’re an organization slowly ground into ruin by a thick busy level of managers, some of whom are in charge of extracting point-of-sale contact info, others who are going to make their bones on a store-wide phone-system overall. Elephants playing patty-cake.

When the people you deal with have no idea why they are asking the questions they ask, it ends up being a problem. Something to consider at acquisition time, I think.

Slashdot points to what you have to call Extreme Gaming:

"Wired reports about four skydivers who decided to give the Nintendo DS wireless capabilities a try while they were freefalling. 'The four sky divers proved that an ad hoc network set up using the wireless functions of a Nintendo DS works perfectly at distances of nearly 400 feet while falling 120 miles an hour,' states the article."

Scoble stopped patting himself on the back over the anti-discrimination imbrogolio long enough to ask an interesting question:

That gets me back to something else I've been thinking about. How do you rate search engine quality?

But, it is pretty interesting that all three engines have as a #1 result something I wrote on Saturday (although you'll see MSN biases against blogs). I remember the days back in 1996 when I tried for more than a year to get Yahoo to list a site of mine, and even Altavista used to take more than a month to list new information.

He's right about the engines picking stuff up faster, that's for sure. There's been some level of pressure on Google (et. al.) at the bleeding edge from blog specific engines (Feedster, blogdigger, etc.). That's helped push them towards getting new stuff up faster.

I'm still kind of amazed at how few refs I see to msn searches on this server though. My referer lists are full of Google, and always have a few Yahoo requests. There's almost never an MSN request though. Very few of my readers are using MS' search engine, that's for sure. As to why that is, I suspect that it's related to the high usage of Mozilla I see. Firefox comes with a Google search field right in the toolbar, which means that I rarely bother with any other search engine. My guess is that most other Firefox users follow the same usage patterns.

It's amusingly ironic, seeing MS beaten at its own embedding game that way.

I should have mentioned that yesterday was Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand. When I visited Australia last year, I visited the war memorial in Sydney (which, sadly, was sealed up - apparently, antiwar protesters kept defacing it. Utter lack of respect, IMHO). I also visited the huge memorial in Canberra, which looks a lot like the mall in Washington (DC) - only with red sand rather than the reflecting pool. So a day late, I'll give a tip of the hat to the memory of all the brave Aussies and New Zealanders who fought and died for their countries.

Scoble notes the progress towards making PC's "dull" (in the sense that TVs are dull - that they "just work"):

Scott Koon is bored by all the stuff he saw come out of Winhec yesterday. Or, more accurately, he's ambivilent. I can understand that. Sometimes computers seem as exciting as cable TV, electricity, or water.

Well, we aren't there yet. Sadly, we aren't even close. When I visited LA recently, I spent a decent amount of time securing my wife's cousin's PC. I'm on the hook to visit one of her co-workers, so that I can do the same there. The trouble is, most people want to treat a PC the way they treat a TV. That's just not feasible yet. You need anti-virus protection, you need a working firewall (in addition to the NAT protection offered by a router), and you need anti-spam software. My wife was commenting the other day that she couldn't get email while my daughter was present.

Is all of this MS' fault? No, it's not - but they bear a fair bit of the blame for having whistled past the graveyard on security for years. We're going to be paying the price for that decision for years, as we wait for Windows 98/ME to die off.

Update: Gordon Weakliem reminded me that LiveJournal does support digest auth for feeds - there are details on this page. So just ignore my wild eyed ranting about LiveJournal below :)

Yesterday, I had someone ask me if it would be possible to support the private feeds LiveJournal uses. He set up a feed that had password protection so I could test - that's when I started the slow slide into "standards? what standards?" hell. First up - LiveJournal. Could they use Http Auth or Digest Auth for their private feeds? Nope, that would be entirely too simple. Perusing their forms, it looks like they use their bozo equivalent of Digest Auth, but only if you pass through their form and retrieve a cookie. Retrieving the cookie would "just work" if they used Auth, but nooo - they have to be special.

So off I went, to add support for that. Strike two came around the corner shortly thereafter. I couldn't read their cookies, because they use a non-standard format for them. Great - seems the New York Times does the same thing with their cookies, so maybe there's a common content management system out there with bad ideas. One AR later, and a discussion with the VW developer who works with this stuff and I had a fix.

So now, a full day later, I can actually start looking at actually supporting LiveJournal. It's things like this that make me laugh at the "Atom will solve everything" crowd. A new spec won't change the fact that people make mistakes and refuse to follow standards...

Dvorak has been "out standing in his field" for awhile now, but this latest column has an item I just can't pass up:

Power plugs on airlines. Has anyone but me noticed that most of the airlines that have power plugs fitted into the aircraft have stopped using them? A couple of years ago, they were all active, although none of us had the little connectors. Now that we have the connectors, the airlines have shut down most of the outlets. In the past year, I have not been on an airplane that has had these systems running. What happened? Were they blowing up? Catching on fire? This was a DC system, so people couldn't have been electrocuting each other. I have yet to get an explanation for this, except for typical airline apathy.

Hmm - I've flown multiple airlines with power over the last year or two, and I can only recall two things - the power being left off by accident (i.e., the pilot not turning it on, and having that corrected by talking to a flight attendant), and having a faulty power outlet at my seat (only seen that once). And yet here's Dvorak, claiming that no flight he's been on has had working power. Hmm. I suspect a wee bit of exaggeration there. He must live on a different planet...

Sci Fi Wire reports that the brain freeze affecting Star Trek's writers shows no sign of abating:

Star Trek: Enterprise producers Brannon Braga and Rick Berman told SCI FI Wire that they understood the recent disparaging comments made by cast members about the final episode, but stood by their execution of the series finale. "You have to remember, under normal circumstances, most people probably would have thought this was a very cool episode because it has a great concept driving it," Braga said in a conference call with reporters. "But when it's the final episode of a series, emotions are running very high."

Yes, this last season has been much better. In fact, had they had stories like this the rest of the time, the series wouldn't be ending. Having said that, it's kind of a hot tip when your cast is willing to be publically quoted bad mouthing the finale. And well they should - the finale involves Frakes and Sirtis (Next Gen) watching the Federation ceremony via the Holodeck. The Holodeck? Good gosh, that's the place the writers went when they had no ideas left! Berman was facing the end of Trek on TV for the first time in over a decade, and the best he could come up with is a Holodeck episode?

If Paramount wants to revive this franchise, they need to retire Berman. Send him off to wherever George Lucas has been for the last few years, so that they can have bad sci-fi ideas together, and leave the rest of us alone.

It's time for my weekly log scan again. I've gathered up the XML stats, the BottomFeeder download stats, and the general HTTP access stats to see what's what. Here's what's happened since the last look on the 19th (roughly 7 days, given the cutoffs):

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	633
HPUX	491
Mac 8/9	412
Sources	341
Linux x86	232
Mac X	217
CE ARM	130
Windows98/ME	76
Update	58
Linux Sparc	22
Solaris	16
Linux PPC	8
AIX	7
SGI	5
Source Script	4
ADUX	3
CE x86	0

The totals? Add it up and we get 2655, or nearly 380 per day in that time span. Not bad - although I have no clue why there are so many HPUX downloads. That's got to be some kind of anomaly :) The Mac 8/9 rates still outpace OS X by nearly a factor of 2, so rumors of that rev of Mac OS' death are greatly exaggerated. Next up: A look at what tools are looking at the RSS and Atom feeds:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
BottomFeeder	21.8%
Mozilla	19.6%
Net News Wire	16.4%
Other	13.4%
NewsGator	4.6%
BlogLines	4.3%
SharpReader	4.3%
Internet Explorer	4.1%
Planet Smalltalk	2.3%
Feed Demon	1.9%
RSS Bandit	1.3%
JetBrains	1%
Liferea	1%
Shrook	1%
Magpie	1%
PubSub	1%
Feed Reader	1%

The stats here look mostly the same as they have the last few times I've checked, which is no big surprise. Unless I get some big up or down spike in readership, these percentages aren't likely to shift a lot. last up - the HTTP accesses to the site:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	54.4%
Internet Explorer	33%
Other	10.6%
Opera	1%
BottomFeeder	1%

Those are a bit higher for the straight browsers than they were last time. Otherwise, Mozilla based browsers continue to dominate over IE (which is why I figure I get so few MSN searches in my referers).

Here's an interesting interview with Al Ries, author of "The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR." Cincom's Steve Kayser asked him a few good questions about advertising and PR - I liked this summation of things:

Steve: So when it comes down to bottom-line ROI?

Al: No-brainer. The largest advertised brand in America spent $780 million on advertising last year. Do you know the name of the largest advertised brand? It's not McDonald's, Budweiser or Coca-Cola.

The largest advertised brand in America last year, would you believe, was Chevrolet. Now let me ask you a question, what's a Chevrolet? If I told you I would meet you out front in my Chevrolet, would you be able to recognize my car?

What's a Chevrolet? A large, small, cheap, expensive car … or truck. But you already knew that. $780 million and there probably isn't one thing stuck in your mind that you can connect with Chevrolet. What a waste.

His point is the large scale advertising is often a symptom of trouble (think about companies that went into bankruptcy recently), or a sign that a company hasn't got any good brand recognition - and advertising isn't going to solve that problem. A good ad campaign can complement good PR, but it can't salvage bad or non-existant PR. You need something to build on, first.

Read the whole thing - there's more good stuff there.

In a Red Couch interview, Jonathan Schwartz put his finger on how blogs change the nature of interaction between journalists and the rest of us:

We asked him what blogging’s role will be in this new Era.

“It’s kerosene on the fire. The Participation Age has been on the Net since email. Moving from there to blogging is like moving from carrier pigeon to phone. The emergence of blogs means we have passed beyond early crude tools and it results in fundamental changes on how everything relates. While a journalist is writing about my blog, I’m blogging about his journalism. This is change,” he told us.

In a very real sense, blogs are the new "letters to the editor" - only the editor has no choice as to whether it gets printed. There's still no guarantee that you'll get more than trivial readership, but it's a far, far better chance than you had with the letter.

Register for StS 2005 today - it's coming up fast! Here's today's spotlighted talk:

A Smalltalk-based system for dynamic multi-context information processing experience report

van Os, Adriaan and Westerhof, Eugene: LEI - Wageningen UR

Monday 4:45 pm to 5:30 pm

Abstract: In spite of the dynamic character of information need, software systems should preferably be stable. Software changes are expensive and are a risk to system stability. This is why we want to separate the software engineering process from the information systems development activities. For this purpose LEI developed a Smalltalk-based system for model-based system specification and workflow management. System behavior is dynamically generated from data specifications, constraints, computation models and workflow specifications. In our presentation we will explain the construction of the system and the main principles it is based on. We will demonstrate how context-independence of the data model has been achieved and how the workflow engine schedules the workload.

Bio: Adriaan van Os

• Working with Smalltalk, mainly VisualWorks, at Soops since 1995.
• Main architect/developer of the presented system.
• Involved in some CampSmalltalk projects.

Eugene Westerhof

Developer of several subsystems of the presented system.

See you in Orlando!

I've added tentative Atom 1.0 support into the dev stream of updates in BottomFeeder 3.9. I'm not going to promote it to the non-dev stream until one of two things happens:

• The format starts getting used "in the wild" (which happened with 0.3)
• The format gets stamped final

In the meantime, the dev stream only support should be considered tentative - and I'd appreciate any bug reports from people who see it (Atom 1.0) being used.

James Governor points to what could be the beginning of actual watchdogging between analysts and journalists. About time, I'd say :)

BusinessWeek's new blog has gone after Laura DiDio, Yankee's Get The Facts lead. Laura has long been a target of Linux lovers, for her uncompromising defence of the proprietary. But BusinessWeek writer Steve Hamm aims to expose limitations in Yankee's research approach. It will be interesting to see if a story appears in the print edition; it has to be likely. If you want to contact me for the article Steve i would be more than happy to contribute. I tend to pretty vocal on the subject of industry analyst ethics, and RedMonk is doing the best we can to do the right thing.

By now I'm sure you've seen the IBM announcement on VisualAge Smalltalk, and the Instantiations announcement as well - the latter being a future roadmap for VA from Instantiations. We've been aware of the coming end of life for VA (at IBM) for awhile now, and have been talking to partners about providing a roadmap for interested developers. We don't have anything specific to announce that way today - but we will shortly. Expect to hear something concrete by the time of Smalltalk Solutions 2005 in Orlando.

What should you take from these announcements? First off, you should take a fresh look at Cincom Smalltalk - it's cross platform (including multiple Linux platforms and Windows CE). It's binary portable. It's a full software stack, supporting modern standards like WS*. It includes two premier Smalltalk environments - VisualWorks and ObjectStudio. Cincom is fully committed to Smalltalk - we have the largest staff of developers of any Smalltalk vendor, and have been doing more forward development than any vendor. If you want a stable, secure platform that is under active development by many of the leading luminaries in the Smalltalk world, then you should download our product and have a look.

How do you know that we are committed to our product? We are profitable (both Cincom as a whole, and the Smalltalk business inside it). We are also eating our own dogfood - the main Smalltalk site is a VW ssp driven site, as is this blog server. The various services provided on this server (surveys, downloads, the Wiki) are all Smalltalk powered. We believe in our product enough to use it.

As I said above, we'll have more to say on this shortly - in the meantime, you'll be happy to know that a move to Cincom Smalltalk won't include any so-called "modernization" materials advising you to migrate to less powerful and more expensive technologies. Questions? Feel free to comment, or send email to Suzanne Fortman (our Smalltalk marketing manager), or me.

Doc reports that Neville Hobson is seeing his RSS feeds "hijacked" from a hotel. I suspect that what's happening is that Neville's network usage has expired, and all http requests are being redirected. I've had that happen before.

Yep, I just browsed his post. Look at the url that his feeds got redirected to: "http://soln-sr965.solutionip.com/register/"

I've definitely seen that before. What he got bitten by is a bad implementation of redirect by the hotel's ISP. The redirects should be temporary, but I bet they are all permanent. FeedDemon, like BottomFeeder, sees a permanent redirect on a feed and silently adjusts the properties for the feed in question. Very nasty - at hotels that have network service that I need to resubscribe to daily, I always take BottomFeeder offline when I go to sleep. Time for Neville to look for backups...

Wired has a story on the journalism curriculum at NYU, where the profs are asking some questions:

For as far back as anyone can remember, New York University has used introductory courses to drill students on the basics: "ledes," "nut grafs," the "inverted pyramid" and the "five Ws" ­- who, what, where, when, why (and No. 6: how). But at a time when the vast majority of our students who enter the job market will never work for a newspaper, does it make sense to stick with tradition?

Why would the basics change just because of a move to the web? Do the pixels make things that much different? Here's the reason for the question:

Could it be beneficial to jettison "objectivity" and "balance" in favor of transparent bias, much like bloggers (and online columnists) do? Would it be wise to encourage our students to exchange fact-based narrative for edgy commentary and digital trash talk? And if we were to banish the inverted pyramid to the scrapheap of history, what could we replace it with?

Yep, that's all we bloggers are - a bunch of trash talking opportunists. Has this guy ever heard of the editorial page? Most blogging is a combination of editorial comment and "letters to the editor". Do newspapers that offer an editorial opinion jettison objectivity elsewhere (well, that's another argument. The point is, there's no requirement that they do so).

There's plenty of room on the net for objective reporting and for opinion dispersal. The only thing that's really changed is the ability to hide/ignore errors of fact. Before the rise of blogs, fact checkers had to send a letter to the paper and hope it would get published. Now they can link to the story and have Google push their commentary up. Wired gets this right at the end of the article:

But when all is said and done, I still expect that each student will know how to craft a hard news lede on a tight deadline. Because whether we're talking today or 10 years ago, it's not the medium, it's the reporter.

Exactly so.

Jason Jones points out that advocacy matters - look at this CNN story describing the kid who led the fight against the bogus Loonatic characters. Bravo!

Here's an article in CIO Insight on guidelines for blogging in a corporate environment - sounds like a good set of tips to me. The most important one (from Sun's guidelines, apparently):

The worst thing that can happen is that a Sun sales pro is in a meeting with a hot prospect, and someone on the customer's side pulls out a printout of your blog and says "This person at Sun says that product sucks." Using your weblog to trash or embarrass the company, our customers, or your co-workers, is not only dangerous but stupid.

This is one of the reasons I wonder about some of Scoble's posts. Plenty of people call him "courageous" for standing up to management at MS - but there's a huge downside as well. The old adage about honey and vinegar applies here.

If you are looking to upgrade an old VW 2.5.x system to VW 7.3, there are two things you should do:

• Download VWNC (7.3) and have a look
• Peruse the change information here

Jon Udell relays an interesting end user interaction with IT story, and draws this conclusion:

We can draw various conclusions from this little parable. Here's the one I want to stress today. Calling people "users" is pernicious. It distances and dehumanizes. We should probably remove that word from the IT vocabulary.

Read the short post to get the full context - he's absolutely correct too.

Even Darth Vader has a blog :)

Dave Winer thinks we can somehow reject ads in RSS "as an industry". Righhhhht. Advertisers will soon figure out something critically different about RSS (as opposed to stock website) ads - if they annoy us too much, we can simply unsubscribe. Problem solved, no fuss, no muss.

Off and on, in between other things that have come up today, I've added support for del.icio.us to BottomFeeder. In this case, support means that you can post a set of tags for an item to del.icio.us, or change your mind and delete them. There are other aspects of the API that I haven't added; I'll have to think about those (not from a hard to do standpoint, more from a "how does it fit in Bf" standpoint). I should have an update available for the dev stream shortly

Today's update looks at the work on Pollock - register today so you can hear about it first hand.

Onward to Pollock

presentation Bykov, Vassili: Cincom Systems

Monday 4 pm to 5:30 pm

Abstract: Pollock is the new VisualWorks widget framework. This presentation is based on demos showcasing its strong points and the influence it will have on future VisualWorks tool development. Bio: Vassili Bykov is the VisualWorks Tools project lead, and a VisualWorks user since version 1.0. After joining Cincom in July 2000 he has been responsible for modernizing the look and feel of VisualWorks environment. His interests range from information and graphic design to programming language implementation, and he searches for balance between them in his current position. In the past, Vassili was an object technology instructor with The Object People and a member of TOPLink/Smalltalk development team.

See you in Orlando!

RealTechNews reports that the crawl lines, stock sidebars, weather sidebars (etc) that have become prevalent on news channels are overloading viewers:

From Kansas State University: “We discovered that when you have all of this stuff on the screen, people tend to remember about 10 percent fewer facts than when you don’t have it on the screen,” (journalism/mass comm. professor Tom) Grimes said. “Everything you see on the screen — the crawls, the anchor person, sports scores, weather forecast — are conflicting bits of information that don’t hang together semantically. They make it more difficult to attend to what is the central message.”

I don't know though. I find the crawl line useful myself. The rest of it is often distracting, I'll admit. Looks like they did actual research, so my thoughts probably fall into the anecdotal area.

I've finally gotten around to all the ancillary work that's involved in packaging up a separate blog posting client. I'm down to two things now:

• Editing the HTML files
• Uploading the builds

I've got it built, and it should all be ready to go sometime this afternoon. Stay tuned.

CNet reports that Sun may use a bunch of it's extra cash ($7.5 B) to buy itself out and go private. The supposed plan would be to sell off assets and then go public again with a leaner, meaner profile. It's unclear to me why they don't just sell off the assets now, but maybe there's a bunch of legal stuff that makes it all easier as a privately held firm - I'm not a lawyer :) Anyway, here's the salient bits:

CEO Scott McNealy has explored a plan to take Sun private with private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, a report in Business Week published on Friday said. One of the magazine's stock columnist cited a hedge manager close to McNealy as the source.

The rationale behind the leverage buy-out would be to shrink the size of Sun by selling assets, invest in its stronger product areas, and then go public again, according to the report. The company's substantial cash holding of $7.5 billion makes such a plan feasible.

It'll be fun to watch how this plays out, if the report is accurate

While I don't always agree with Jerry Brown (current mayor of Oakland), I like his style. He's got a blog, and is engaging in a real give and take with people. He's allowing comments, and has an RSS feed as well. I hope more politicians step up like this

I've made the BottomFeeder blog poster available as a standalone application. Go here for information, and here to download the application. It's supported on all the same platforms as BottomFeeder - and it's a fully WYSIWYG posting tool. The only posting API of note that it doesn't support is Atom, and I'll get to that fairly soon.

Spotted in Sci Fi Wire

Rick Berman, executive-producer of Star Trek: Enterprise, told SCI FI Wire that he believes the decline in ratings that led to the series' cancellation was the result of an oversaturation of the franchise.

Here's a tip Rick: It's shoddy creative control over the series that's a problem. Evidenced by the fact that the very last episode is a Holodeck episode! You want the real problem? Get a mirror...

If you have tried downloading the blog poster for Mac OS X, you actually got BottomFeeder. You can blame my editing skills for that - I built my build script from the same one I use for Bf, and I didn't make a required change. I've just posted the proper build, and you can grab it here.

Vassili suggested that I give the poster a name now that it's standalone - he also came up with a good one. Go check out the new Bottom Line site.

Misbehaving passes on a report about girls and careers in technology:

Jacquelynne Eccles, a University of Michigan psychologist, says that girls steer away from careers in math, science and engineering because they view them as solitary pursuits: "In order to increase the number of women in science, we also need to make young women more interested in these fields, and that means making them aware that science is a social endeavor that involves working with and helping people."

The bigger question is why they view those fields that way. In this regard, I don't think pop culture helps a lot. Take almost any tv show or movie that portrays software developers - how common is the unwashed, unkempt, thick black glasses look? I see this with my daughter - her mom and I are both in software, and her perceptions of developers are more colored by pop culture portrayals than by her own home.

My wife had a good take on the "missing" Georgia woman:

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - A Georgia bride-to-be who vanished days before her wedding turned up in New Mexico, claiming at first that she had been abducted, then admitting she had gotten cold feet and "needed some time alone," police said Saturday. ADVERTISEMENT Jennifer Wilbanks, 32, was in police custody more than 1,420 miles from her home on what was supposed to be her wedding day. "It turns out that Miss Wilbanks basically felt the pressure of this large wedding and could not handle it," said Randy Belcher, the police chief in Duluth, Ga., the Atlanta suburb where Wilbanks lives with her fiance. He said there would be no criminal charges

My wife's comment? Call your mom!

There's been a stability issue with the Windows and Linux based versions of BottomFeeder over the last two releases if you have libtidy enabled (the default). I just figured out the problem, and have a fix for it uploaded. The problem? In using libtidy, you have to allocate buffers. Here's the problem in the version I just fixed:

tdoc := self tidyCreate. 
output := TidyBuffer new. 
errbuf := TidyBuffer new.

See the problem? #new creates objects in Smalltalk memory. That means that the buffers can be moved in memory. At the end of the method in question, those buffers are freed. Usually, that worked fine. The problem is, if they got moved during GC before the end of the method call, then bad things (like a crash) happen on the attempt to free the pointers. So, we have to do it this way:

tdoc := self tidyCreate. 
output := TidyBuffer newInFixed. 
errbuf := TidyBuffer newInFixed.

That ensures that the buffers get created in fixed (i.e., non-movable) memory. That solves the problem of the occasional crash, and makes for a stable BottomFeeder. Check for updates, and grab the libtidy one.

Go read FoldedSpace for everything that was right about episodes IV and V (Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back), and for everything that's gone horribly, horribly wrong since. The Star Trek reference at the top of the post is spot on - the two franchises suffer from the same problem: the intellectual exhaustion of the "powers that be" behind them.

Here's an example of what happens when process rules over common sense - you end up with a nonsensical situation, like sending penguins through a metal detector:

Two traveling penguins from Seaworld in San Antonio went through regular airport screening at Denver International Airport recently. Here, Pat and Penny are removed from their carry-on case so they can walk through the metal detector. (Pat is the good looking one)

In that example, we see airport security staff putting two penguins through the detector. One wonders where they might have been hiding something. The folly of this particular example isn't what I'm after though. Consider software development - how many completely absurd processes do you follow because they matter to some other part of the organization? The interface with the IT department is a common point of absurdity - an engineering group always needs non-standard systems for development, testing (etc). IT quite frequently has a set of standards, and is completely unwilling to bend from them. In many cases, it's not even their fault - often times, the CEO has told the CIO to "hold the line" on costs, and clamping down on non-standard requests seems like a reasonable way to do that.

What's the upshot? The upshot is that higher management often has to resolve disputes that they have no real need to even be aware of (how many CEO's really want to get into the arcana of engineering system requirements? How many even have the technical qualifications to do anything more than pick sides?).

I see this in schools too - rather than allow teachers and administrative staff to exercise judgement, a set of ironclad policies has been imposed from on high. Presumably, this has been done to limit legal exposure. The end result is, if you send your child to school with a cough drop (or, in the case of a teenage daughter, with a Motrin) - the consequences are either a long suspension or outright expulsion.

The bottom line is, when process and rules become more important than the actual job at hand, you have a real problem. Look at how you do things at work - if there are procedures you follow that you can't understand - and that make no sense - you've stepped into the process zone.

Spotted in Slashdot

"Star Trek Producers have finally agreed that Star Trek fans are oversaturated with the show, and are planning to provide a break. This does not mean they wont bring something new to the screen; they will just wait a few years. They are convinced the ratings dropped due to the show competing against other Trek re-runs."

Couldn't possibly have to do with the fact that Rick Berman wouldn't know a clue if it bit him on the head. Nope, not possibly. Trek would do just fine if Paramount fired Berman and found a producer who could, you know, produce...

I finally got around to watching last week's episode of "24" last night. I'm not sure why we still watch the show - the pacing is good, but the plotlines are more absurd than the ones on "Alias" - and that's saying something. It became clear just how ridiculous the plot was when I had a mini-epiphany after watching "Revelation" and "24" back to back - so long as you could make (one extremely large) leap of faith, the plot of Revelation sort of held together. In fact, it held together better than the plot of "24", because that required so many leaps of faith that I ended up needing dramamine.

This dinner in NYC tomorrow night sounds like fun, but my relative proximity to NY makes it impossible for me to go. Why is that? Well, I'm heading up to NYC on Tuesday for the one day business blog event on Tuesday - and I can't really justify a hotel stay in NY, or the extra train ride. Maybe one of these things will happen in the DC area eventually.

I ran across this article in SD Times yesterday - it outlines the different approaches taken by MS with .NET, and Sun with Java. Sadly, they both follow the "more complexity is better" development paradigm. Here's an example of what I mean:

Among the most talked-about new language features is generics, which Holub said lets developers write code before knowing the program’s variable types. “It’s [otherwise] very difficult to do some kinds of generic programming in the sense of a data structure. Because if you don’t know the types, that makes the code nasty, more error-prone and harder to deal with. Generics allow you to give the compiler what it needs to effectively customize the way a class is used for a particular typing system.”

Talking about data structures, O’Brien explained, is like talking about lists. “For instance, a list of cats versus a list of dogs. With generics, you’re able to make sure that a list of cats, once you’ve created it, will prevent you from putting a dog in.” And that simplifies programming, added Holub, “because when you pull something out of [the list], you know as a fact that it’s a cat, and you don’t have to worry about putting in any manual tests you would otherwise need.”

There's the widely voiced fear of the declarative typing crowd - you might accidentally put the wrong thing in a collection, and then boom - all heck will break loose. Now seriously - how often does that happen? Let's see - I've been writing Smalltalk code for over a decade now, and in the last three years I've released three applications - BottomFeeder, Silt, and Bottom Line. You want to know how many times I've ever seen the "wrong thing in a collection" problem in my code?

Never

That's right folks, never. But just look at the exquisite complexity added to C# and Java to make sure that this can't possibly happen to you! It's like putting seat belts on a bus. I've been doing what Holub refers to as generic programming for a long time now, and trust me - it's not "nasty" if you use Smalltalk. It's "nasty" if the tools you use insist on handing you a straightjacket, and then explain how it's all better because you can't hurt yourself that way.

Sure, it just takes a whole lot longer to get anything done.

One of the worst things you can do in software development is assume things. You see it a lot - developers assume that they know why software is slow, so they don't profile. They assume they know what the problem is, so they don't test. They assume they know what the requirements are, so they don't ask.

I fell into that trap on the bug side over the last 3 releases of BottomFeeder. Starting with version 3.7, I integrated Software With Style's XHTML viewer (and more recently, their editor) in the application. The viewer doesn't handle general HTML - it really wants XML (which means XHTML for general web content). Now, most stuff out there just isn't XHTML. In fact, a lot of the stuff out there is really bad, because browsers have been built to be lenient. What to do?

Well, the first thing we did was use the parser in Twoflower. That worked ok, but - as it happens (and I knew this, having used Twoflower for all the previous releases of BottomFeeder), it doesn't handle every possible breakage in HTML. There was plenty of content that the Tf parser wasn't cleaning up well enough to view. So, we looked at LibTidy - an existing C library that cleans up HTML quite nicely.

Michael built a Smalltalk wrapper for it - Windows and x86 Linux - and I started shipping it with BottomFeeder. That's where I got into trouble. It's been years (over a decade now) since I worked regularly in C. All of the knowledge I once had has rusted away, and I'm now very reluctant to delve down to the level. So, when we got occasional crashes in BottomFeeder, I made an assumption - I decided to add an option to the application that allowed the user to toggle libtidy on/off, and chalked the error up to general C level instability.

Well. As you can see from this post, the problem was much, much simpler, and involved a stupid mistake in the Smalltalk wrapper code - one that popped out at me as soon as I sat down and looked seriously at the code. So by making an assumption - rather than actually looking at the code - I cost myself 2 releases of a less stable application. That's the kind of problem that you can buy yourself by not actually looking.

Register now for StS 2005 so you won't miss talks like this one:

Opentalk at Large

experience report

Lutomski, Len and Kobetic, Martin: Cincom Systems

Tuesday 8:30 am to 9:15 am

Abstract: The presentation will discuss some of the less common capabilities of the Opentalk framework and their applications. We will demonstrate how multicast can simplify a standard unicast solution, we will explore a simple grid computing framework and how it can be applied to multi-image testing, and more. The goal is to inspire the audience to experiment with Opentalk beyond the basic remote messaging techniques that dominate main-stream application development.

Bio: Martin Kobetic is a senior developer of the VW Protocol and Distribution Group. Len Lutomski is the manager of the VW Protocol and Distribution Group.

See you in Orlando!

I'm getting periodic service drops (Comcast broadband service). I know that Comcast was having major problems a few weeks ago, so here's my question - is anyone else seeing short service breaks (I'm getting them daily). Or do I need to get a new cable modem?

ISerializable points to this post by Clemens Vasters, which adds some reality to the funhouse that is SOA discussions. Here's the simple description of SOA:

It's CORBA, but on port 80 with angle brackets.

Ameliorated, maybe. Here's an interesting post decrying the death of trackback (and comments, etc):

Originally there was no weblog spam and yet conversation and discussion still existed. If an individual posted something and another individual wanted to respond to it, they simply wrote a post on their own site linking to the original. This environment was entirely free of spam. It was completely clean. I can't help thinking that maybe we need to start thinking in terms of approaches like that - where there is no automated functionality that could be robotically exploited. Or perhaps we should be looking in other directions - how can we abstract out the kind of social networks that lie behind Flickr to structures that we could overlay across the internet as a whole. A question I think we should be asking is how could we build services that let you decide precisely which groups of people should be able to see, link to, 'trackback' or comment on the work you do in a decentralised, disaggregated way?

That approach has problems too. The way you figure out that someone has linked to you is via referers. If you spend 5 seconds looking at that list, you'll see that it's been spam bombed, just like everything else - whether you make the list public or not (referer spamming is so cheap a trick that the perps don't bother checking their work; what's the point?).

I make my referers public, and I have to add keywords to my blacklist daily. I have to spend more time dealing with referer spam than I do with comment/trackback spam - Silt handles that for me pretty well at this point.

The net-net of this is, I don't think there's a final answer to this. Just ongoing drudgery.

A plethora of semi-amusing quizzes.

if you tried to get to the blog in the last hour or so, it was down - as were the other services on this server. We had a slight issue to deal with on the back end, but it's all better now.