Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Spotted in ION RSS

I'm also becoming increasingly impressed with Newsgator. Their recent acquisition of popular RSS Aggregator FeedDemon was a further step in their plan to be a major RSS services company, particularly on the Microsoft platform.

There is the small matter of integration here - something I have a little experience with, having lived through the PPS/Digitalk mess. NewsGator is built on the .NET platform, and integrates with Outlook. FeedDemon is standalone, and is built in Delphi. Ok, you explain to me the technology integration path there :)

It's Friday, so it must be time to examine the server logs. Here's the week of BottomFeeder downloads:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	688
Mac 8/9	400
HPUX	350
Sources	234
Mac X	214
Linux x86	196
CE ARM	101
Update	45
Windows98/ME	40
Solaris	16
Linux Sparc	14
AIX	12
Linux PPC	7
SGI	5
Source Script	3
ADUX	2

That's about 332 per day, which is in the same range it's been for awhile now. More source accesses this week though - not sure why that would be, since I haven't pushed a new release. Let's see what's up with HTTP accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	50.1%
Internet Explorer	34.8%
Other	13.1%
BottomFeeder	1%
Opera	1%

Well, Mozilla access seems to be rising, that's for sure. Based on reporting I see on other tech blogs, I'd say that MS' browser share amongst the "thought leaders" is in serious trouble. Let's see what the tool mix looks like for RSS accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	24.1%
Other	23.4%
BottomFeeder	18.3%
Net News Wire	12.6%
BlogLines	3.5%
NewsGator	3.5%
SharpReader	3.5%
Internet Explorer	1.9%
Planet Smalltalk	1.9%
Feed Demon	1.5%
Liferea	1.5%
Feed Reader	1.2%
RSS Bandit	1.1%
JetBrains	1%
Shrook	1%

Looks like it's time to take a walk through the "other" data and break it down more. The rest of the data is pretty similar to the last few weeks. I'll have a look at search engine accesses tomorrow.

Larkware news gets to the heart of the matter on the "big announcement"

I worry about the smaller file sizes business, too. Are smaller file sizes really all that relevant in these days of rapidly-expanding bandwidth and disk storage? When was the last time you ran out of disk space because of the size of your Word documents and Excel spreadsheets? (Now, the size of your Visual Studio install, that's another story). It looks to me like the smaller size comes at a cost: "The smaller file sizes are enabled by a combination of industry-standard ZIP compressed files technology that automatically compresses each component within the file as well as the reduced overhead of an XML format." So, you don't actually have a pure XML file to work with; you have a zip file containing a batch of XML stuff. This raises the bar in terms of the tools you need to actually interoperate with the new formats. It's not going to be as simple as just plugging them into the same XML tool stack you use for any other XML file format.

Yes, sticking a bunch of XML docs into a zip file doesn't exactly make it a simple matter to "just plug in your existing XML tools". What we've actually got here is one sticky tarball (existing Office format) replaced by a new sticky tarball - the big difference being the word "Open" slapped in front of it for marketing purposes. LarkWare examined the license and came away thinking it was pretty opaque - you should read that yourself (IANAL). This riff is good too:

So what's the bottom line? Well, XML is nice, sure, but honestly, most users will never care. I don't care if you save my document in XML, Braille, cuneiform, or chicken scratchings, so long as you can get it back when I ask for it. Some tool vendors, who can puzzle through the license and handle the legalities, will find their jobs marginally easier. Microsoft will have an additional flag to wave at confused legislators the next time open-source advocates argue for a switch to non-proprietary software ("Look, even the name says we're already open!"). All in all, I see this as a nice PR move, and an interesting technical achievement, but not of any particular significance to most users of Office.

This is 90% PR, and maybe 10% meat. It worked, too - they sure got a lot of undeserved attention out of a nothing-burger announcement. Now maybe if they had announced that they were supporting the Oasis Office Document standard...

Here's one of the things that makes Smalltalk more productive that the mainstream systems - the ease of exploratory development. Sure, Eclipse has workspaces, and similar things exist in other tools - but it's a pale reflection of what you can do in Smalltalk. Remember this post from awhile back, where I talked about categorized searches in BottomFeeder? Well, here's the workspace I mucked around with in the running application:

You can click the image for a bigger view. I developed that code mostly in the running application, not in my development image. Why is that relevant? Because I was interested in that kind of answer, so I started scripting it - and once I had something that looked reasonable, I went back to the development environment - witness the code in a browser:

Concept to completion - pretty quick, since the code was virtually the same (there was refactoring in order to slot it into the update loop process and the framework). That's not the big thing though - the big thing is that the idea came to me while browsing through my feed data, and I was able to act on it in the runtime with the actual feed data. I didn't have to import the feed data into the development environment first - I was able to just noodle around in the runtime.

That's something that you can't really do with applications built on top of the mainstream technologies - .NET and Java. They aren't set up for it. With Smalltalk, it's just a byproduct of working in the system.

The Register rounds up some even more negative commentary on the deal:

"If Sun management called the HP/Compaq merger the collision of two garbage trucks, what is a Sun/Storage Tech combination?" Merrill Lynch's star analyst Steve Milunovich asked himself in a research note published today. "We're neutral to slightly negative on the acquisition. Sun used $3.1 billion of its $7.5 billion in cash for a deal that doesn't seem to accelerate revenue growth given that tape is a mature market."

The Register is willing to cut Sun some slack over this deal, but it looks puzzling to me

Next week we are having planning meetings for Cincom Smalltalk - if you have suggestions for us, now's the time to send them to me.

There's been some buzz in this direction, but now CNET is reporting that Apple will be switching from the PowerPC chip to intel. Hmmm - I'm skeptical, given that they didn't cross the hump from the 680x0 transition that long ago. Then again, it sure would make their hardware cheaper. I guess I'll be watching for this on Monday:

update Apple Computer plans to announce Monday that it's scrapping its partnership with IBM and switching its computers to Intel's microprocessors, CNET News.com has learned. Apple has used IBM's PowerPC processors since 1994, but will begin a phased transition to Intel's chips, sources familiar with the situation said.

Apple plans to move lower-end computers such as the Mac Mini to Intel chips in mid-2006 and higher-end models such as the Power Mac in mid-2007, sources said.

Update: Scoble seems to have some sources on this:

Make no mistake. This is a real story and I've gotten confirmation from people who know. I can't say more, though, cause I don't want Apple to sue me to find out my sources.

Read the rest - his speculations are pretty good questions

There's been a bunch of speculation as to what Apple's moves in the processor space will be, and what they mean - now that CNET has reported that they are making an intel based move. Of course, if they wanted to stay "out there" they could announce that they are adopting the itanium. If that happens, I can guarantee that you'll hear shrieks of pain from our VM engineers :)

In any case, there's the requisite Slashdot story, and this batch of speculation from Russell Beattie (and I'm sure that there's tons more that I'm missing). Some of the speculation is just nuts - witness Russell Beattie's maunderings:

Here's my bet: it'll be OSX Server that runs on x86 only. Everyone's hoping for x86 lappys or just a version of Tiger that'll run on everything, but I don't think it's going to happen. Or, here's another idea: Tiger Express. A version of Tiger which will run on your Wintel box and show you how nice it is on the other side... Maybe even an Ubuntu-style "live CD" that people can pop in and use on their Windows boxes without having to install a thing?

None of that makes much sense, IMHO. The original story gives a timeline for adoption - low end stuff in 2006, everything else by 2007. That makes sense, I think - if they could get access to cheaper hardware components, the price of their low end systems could drop (or stay constant as they beefed them up). The thing that's held me from buying a Mac is price/performance - visits to CompUSA and BestBuy consistently show that I can get an x86 box for $500 to $1000 less, but get twice the RAM and twice the HD. I'm sure I'm not the only one who notices that, and Apple's financial folks have to have picked up on it as well.

We'll certainly find out Monday - at which point all this speculation could be so much mush. The CNET story only mentions x86 chips in passing, and intel is desperate to find a meaningful partner for the itanium. I can definitely imagine Apple taking that route, although doing so wouldn't really help them in the price area much.

Here's a funny send up of the song "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia :)

Register now for StS 2005 so you can attend talks like this one on Unit Testing strategies:

Unit Testing Seaside Components

presentation

Shaffer, C. David: Westminster College

Tuesday 2:45 pm to 3:30 pm

Abstract: I will present the freely available SeasideTesting framework and a small representative set of tests. SeasideTesting is a framework that extends SUnit to simplify developing and running tests of Seaside web components. This framework is unique in that it is designed specifically to allow both testing the rendered HTML result and direct access to the component instances. The advantages and some challenges that come with this capability will be discussed.

Bio: I am an assistant professor of Computer Science at Westminster College in Western Pennsylvania USA. In that capacity I teach all levels of undergraduate Computer Science. I am also sole proprietor of Shaffer Consulting and have been developing software in Smalltalk, Java, Python, C, C++ for more than 15 years. Recently I developed payroll and retirement management software and business to business web applications. I have several years experience with Java/JSP and also develop web applications using Python.

See you in Orlando!

I have an update to the search engine access report I put up last week - here's a chart (click on it for a larger version) of referrals to the various blogs here from search engines. I've added data for the AltaVista engine this time around:

There's a definite downward trend going on with respect to search engines. My daily traffic has been the same or slightly up over that time interval, but it looks like fewer people are finding the blogs via net searches. Not sure what that means at this point.

Last night our daughter was of at a sleepover, so we headed off to meet friends at "The Three Nines" - a typical enough "drink until you drop" kind of place. While the ambiance isn't much, the food is good, the drinks are cheap - and the staff are quick to note when your glass is empty or your plate is pushed to the side. All in all, it's a good location for a trvia game. Which is not to say that we did well :)

A week ago, we managed to come in second, barely missing first. Last night, we were completely clueless - for far too many of the questions, we just had no idea. We came in dead last, with only a handful of correct answers. Still, it was an enjoyable enough evening, a good night out with friends. We had been going to a game that the same guy was running at a local establishment, "The Luna C Grille". That ended pretty badly - the service there was just awful, the food mediocre (but expensive).

The Columbia game had been at another local bar, but things got ugly there between the guy who runs the game and a few drunken regulars. The management of that place inexplicably decided that having 70 people in once a week was less relevant than the desires of about a dozen regulars. Who knows - maybe they do spend as much as the larger crowd if they come in every night.

Back to the game at the "Luna C" - the first week there were 7 teams, around 50 people total. That's a big crowd for this place - it's not usually that full. The service was just awful. The waiters spent a lot of time ignoring us, and looking annoyed when they did have to deal with us. This performance was repeated the next couple of weeks. It wasn't just us, either - fewer teams started showing up (one team was banned by the management when they became incensed enough with the lack of service that they just walked out). By the time Glenn (the guy who runs the game) called the game off at that location, only one team had not announced that they wouldn't come back.

This place is a mystery. My daughter is fond of a couple of the dishes there, and it's convenient to our house - so we've gone in a few times. The service has never been good. The place is trying to be an upscale restaurant, but - they are behind a Giant supermarket and the windows look out on the local gym. Scenic, it's not. Even if that's what they're going for, being rude to paying customers gets you one thing and one thing only - bad word of mouth. They now have that in a pretty big way, having irritated a whole bunch of locals who play in this game.

If you live in the Columbia, MD area, or are passing through - here's a tip. Avoid the Luna C Grille. You can pay a lot less for mediocre food and bad service.

In a political post on one of the blogs I read, I saw a great summation of the problem that many companies get themselves into - certainly this is what befell ParcPlace back in the 90's, and I think it's what's wrong at Sun now:

When American corporations have lost their way and can't figure out how to improve their market position, a common "solution" is to merge with another similarly befuddled company. This allows both companies to "grow," and permits executives to put off hard decisions for years amid talk of "synergy" and restructuring.

Look at the telecom sector - I think there's a reason that BellSouth has been successful. They haven't had to deal with the kinds of internecine warfare that crops up after a merger. Instead, they've been able to concentrate on their core business. I can tell you from experience - when entities of roughly equal size merge, there's no synergy - there's infighting.

Register today for Smalltalk Solutions - look at this keynote on domain driven design that Eric Evans is giving:

Domain-Driven Design Purch

Tuesday 2 pm to 5:30 pm

Abstract: Large information systems need a domain model. Development teams know this, yet they often end up with little more than data schemas which do not deliver on the productivity promises for object design. This tutorial delves into how a team, developers and domain experts together, can engage in progressively deeper exploration of their problem domain while making that understanding tangible as a practical software design. This model is not just a diagram or an analysis artifact. It provides the very foundation of the design, the driving force of analysis, even the basis of the language spoken on the project.

The tutorial will focus on three topics:

• The conscious use of language on the project to refine and communicate models and strengthen the connection with the implementation.
• A subtly different style of refactoring aimed at deepening model insight, in addition to making technical improvements to the code.
• A brief look at strategic design, which is crucial to larger projects. These are the decisions where design and politics often intersect.

The tutorial will include group reading and discussion of selected patterns from the book "Domain-Driven Design," Addison-Wesley 2003, and reenactments of domain modeling scenarios.

Bio: Eric Evans is a specialist in domain modeling and design in large business systems. Since the early 1990s, he has worked on many projects developing large business systems with objects and has been deeply involved in applying modeling and Agile processes on real projects. Out of this range of experiences emerged the synthesis of principles and techniques shared in the book "Domain-Driven Design," Addison-Wesley 2004. Eric now leads "Domain Language", a consulting group which coaches and trains teams to make their development more productive through effective application of domain modeling and design.

See you in Orlando!

I keep hearing cheerleading on how big podcasting is getting, but I'm sure not seeing it in my subscriptions. In RSS, podcasts would be announced via enclosures. The draft Atom 1.0 spec has support for the same kind of thing (and heck - BottomFeeder already supports it :) ).

But let's take a look at my feeds and items. Here's a small script I ran against my 291 subscriptions:

| allEnclosures allAudioOrVideo |
rejectBlock := [:matchString :url | ('*', matchString, '*') match: url].
allEnclosures := RSS.Enclosure allInstances.
allAudioOrVideo := allEnclosures collect: [:each | each url].
allAudioOrVideo := allAudioOrVideo reject: [:each |
	(rejectBlock value: '.png' value: each) | 
	(rejectBlock value: '.jpg' value: each) | 
	(rejectBlock value: '.gif' value: each)].
^allAudioOrVideo

So what did that give me? A collection of 14 video and audio enclosures. At the very least, the feeds I subscribe to don't advertise podcasts as enclosures very often. Heck, Dave Winer, who's a huge proponent of the genre, almost never uses Enclosures - he just slaps a link to podcasts he's done straight into his items. So are people finding podcasts the same way they find other web content - just by stumbling on it? Is it simply the case that most blog client tools don't support Enclosure definitions? BottomLine does, although that support is specific to the Silt server (I can't see a general way of supporting client side enclosure definition in any of the APIs out there).

Oh, and another small aside here - see that Smalltalk script up there? That was run from a workspace in the runtime. Smalltalk is just cool that way.

I picked my daughter up from a sleep over this morning (these should be called stay up all night overs, for truth in advertising purposes :) ) Anyhow - as we walked home, she made a point of telling me how hard it had been to fall asleep after getting such a good night's sleep Friday, and how she wasn't really tired. I sent her up to change, and found her fast asleep a few minutes later, after I wondered why things were so quiet. Not tired my foot :)

Jonathan Schwartz tries to see if any of the warm glow that Apple emits might reflect his way:

So I'd like to personally invite you to adopt Solaris 10 as the underpinning of the next generation Mac. We both respect Unix, both respect innovation*, and both clearly see volume opportunities in extending choice to developers. We'd love to work together.

Sure, as if Apple would spend tons of cash to attach itself to a boat anchor like Sun. How's that StorageTek acquisition going for you Jonathan?

I was initially enthusiastic about the nofollow idea from Google, but I quickly lost that and became extremely skeptical. Now there's a good summary post by IOError on what the outcome of all this has been - and it's not been the problem for spammers that some people initially thought it would be:

As we've seen, rel="nofollow" is Google's way of having bloggers effectively delist themselves from search engines under the guise of protecting them from comment spam. If you want your site to have more Google juice, and who doesn't, people have to link to you without rel="nofollow". It's that simple. Nofollow hurts the entire blogosphere, and if carried to its extreme, will result in most blogs being relegated to obscurity as they drop out of the top 100 search engine results.

Pretty much the size of it. The spammers don't care - so long as there's a link to follow, PagRank is just so much fluff to them. What this has done is de-emphasize blogs in Google's ranking scheme, which is something they've apparently wanted to do. Better yet (from their perspective), most of the bloggers cheerfully followed along.

In a story about the rumored Apple move to intel, Wired manages to guzzle some koolaid:

What's new this time is a fast, transparent, universal emulator from Transitive, a Silicon Valley startup.

Transitive's QuickTransit allows any software to run on any hardware with no performance hit, or so the company claims. The technology automatically kicks in when necessary, and supports high-end 3D graphics. It was developed by Alasdair Rawsthorne.

Umm, yeah - I've got some software right here that manages my perpetual motion machine - it works great, and better yet, I can now get it to run on any hardware with no performance hit thanks to this.

If Apple has licensed QuickTransit for an Intel-powered Mac, all current applications should just work, no user or developer intervention required.

I love it when you hear the phrase "should just work, no intervention required". It's time to grip your wallet tightly when you hear that. Here's the thing - there is no painless platform move. If Apple is going to a new chipset, there are going to be porting costs, period. Now, the author might have a point as to why Apple is interested (intel's new DRM technology). But the whole "pain free" migration? If you wanted that, you should have been using Smalltalk - where the move between platforms truly is seamless - and BottomFeeder is an example of that.

Wired reports some good news on the Mars Rover Opportunity - NASA has gotten it out of the sand trap it had gotten stuck in. It took them a month, but it's done.

There was a nasty settings bug in the Enclosure handling plugin for BottomFeeder - I've posted an update that solves the problem. Just check for updates and load the plugin.

Jonathan Schwartz explains how $1Bn in cash is actually better than $4Bn in cash:

Let's start with basics. Pat Martin and team have done a fantastic job turning StorageTek around. They're profitable, and cash flow positive. On a non-GAAP basis, combined with Sun, we believe the deal will be accretive (additive) to earnings within the first year. Making money is a good thing. (Sun employees will recognize that as Priority 1.)

On a cash basis, here's an even simpler calculus for non-accountants - although the deal takes $4.1 billion to complete, STK has $1 billion in cash - meaning it takes $3 billion net to acquire the company. On $3 billion in cash, Sun generates around $100M in interest income. Using the cash instead to own STK swaps our interest income for STK's net income and cash flow. Which both exceed, obviously, our $100M in interest income. The shareholders are better off.

On top of this, we get the benefit of a common corporate infrastructure, increased purchasing power with suppliers, increased coverage - opportunties that represent upside to the above figure. And that's before we get to new revenue opportunities.

I think he went to the Abraham Beame institute for Advanced Finance - Bill Lyons was the other well known graduate of that school. Remember this post I made over the weekend - now read the last paragraph above. I've seen the results of "common corporate infrastructure", and it's not pretty. Then he touts the acquisition of sales staff:

With this transaction, Sun and STK combine to create one of the largest dedicated storage sales and service forces in the world - and combining our product roadmaps makes us a supplier of the broadest product line in the industry. (And unlike other notable industry combinations, there is near zero product overlap or redundancy - so customers can be assured of a seamless transition and roadmap continuity.) With healthcare information privacy, Sarbanes-Oxley, new FDA regs, securities compliance - anyone want to bet against the growth of archival storage or information lifecycle management? We'll be 3,000 folks stronger in going after the opportunity (which, at last count, measures about $65 billion annually) - and not just with tape, but with the combined organization and roadmap.

All I can say to that is LOL. When PPS and Digitalk merged, the first people who bailed were the sales folks. Why? They knew that there was going to be a period of uncertainty during which commissions were going to be harder to come by. There are always other opportunities for good sales people - the best ones at StorageTek are either out the door already, or interviewing. What Sun is going to end up with the low performers.

This is an amazing post by Schwartz, actually. Sun has been hearing a crescendo of "WTF??" reactions from all over, so they have to explain what passes for strategic thinking there with an immediate post from the COO. There is an interesting side point here - the fact that they posted this to a blog rather than (or in addition to) a standard press release is interesting.

If you like Lileks, then you simply can't miss today's bleat. A small sample:

And don't miss the Vision Statement. The slogan, "Pizza with a conscience," suggests that ordinary pizza is sociopathic, or at least has no opinion on factory farms and doesn’t care that the cheese cultures were kept in small smelly pens all their lives, or that the green peppers were doused with pesticides to make them robust and tasty. If your corporate pizza had a conscience, man, you would hear the ingredients weeping as you opened the box. Which is such a buzz killer. Eat me! Chew hard! I cannot bear this burden any longer - would that I crisped up in the oven and ended my life as a black wisp of smoke, evaporating like the cry of a baby seal in the cold arctic air. Yes, that’s what I want. I want the pizza shop’s slogan to be something like "Sausage so fresh the screams of the pig still bounce off the slaughterhouse wall!" Really I do.

Heh - it's worth reading in full

Ted Leung points to the press release. To answer Ted's query about clones, turn to the News.com story:

After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that."

However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac."

Let the attempts to build an OS X capable wintel machine begin :)

Cincom CEO Tom Nies was interviewed by the Wall Street Transcript recently - note the highlighting of Cincom Smalltalk:

TWST: We'd like to begin, if you will, with a brief historical sketch of Cincom Systems, and a picture of things as they are now.

Mr. Nies: Cincom is one of the founders of the software industry. We were organized in 1968. Our foundations were laid in the areas of database management and applications development technologies. In 1980 or so, we began to provide applications systems with manufacturing and financial applications as well. Then, in the mid 1980s, we began to offer text and text-management and text-content systems. During the latter half of the 1980's decade, we also provided Network Management Systems, and today offer CRM, Call Center, and Configuration Management systems. In the applications development technology area, we provide Smalltalk offerings, which are major object-oriented technologies. We're now the world's leading Smalltalk provider as well. In the past three years, we've expanded our offerings beyond software. We now provide outsourcing services for application development, application hosting, call centers, and business process outsourcing.

Get Smalltalk from the source - download Cincom Smalltalk NC now.

I got to experience one of the true joys of summer travel on the east coast today - thunderstorms. It was hot today - temps went past 90 with pretty high humidity. On the east coast, that means one thing - late day T-Storms.

So of course I arranged my flight to Cincinnati for 7:50 pm. I arrived at DCA to find flights backed up like crazy - the 5:40 departure to dayton hadn't left yet (it never did - they put some of those passengers on our flight). We boarded around 8, and then just sat until 9, as a rather nasty storm rolled by. Then they re-opened the door, and put on a few refugees from the earlier flight.

Maybe next time I'll have the sense to fly earlier in the day :)

David Buck illustrates the richness of the Smalltalk libraries - and the comparitive paucity of the C# and Java ones. Throw the "final" wrench into the mix and you get productivity loss.

Suppose, though, that Smalltalk could know (maybe by type inference or by declarations) the types of the variables and it implemented a kind of Intellisense similar to that in Visual Studio. What you'd find is that the list of available methods is about 10 times larger than those in C#. This highlights the fact that the C# libraries are really quite sparse.

Read his whole post - the table he posted is quite revealing.

I'll be in a planning meeting with engineering all day today (and tomorrow), so I won't be posting much. We should have a productive meeting, and I'll push out any useful details that I can

Interestingly enough, with the way we package Cincom Smalltalk we don't get a really good idea of what people are using. What do I mean by that? I mean that we ship both ObjectStudio and VisualWorks, with all their various components. So at our end, we would really like to know:

• Are you using ObjectStudio, VisualWorks, VSE? Which ones do you have in development/production
• For the Cincom Smalltalk product(s) that you use, which components are you making use of? Which ones do you plan to make use of?
• What platforms (OS/hardware) are you developing on? What about deployment?

This kind of information would help us a lot. Please send me feedback on this, either in comments or email.

Register for Smalltalk Solutions now, and find out what Cincom and our partner Georg Heeg have been up to with ObjectStudio:

Integration of Smalltalk Systems – E.g. ObjectStudio inside VisualWorks

presentation

Heeg, Georg: Georg Heeg Objektorientierte Systems

Tuesday 4 pm to 4:45 pm

See you in Orlando!

Our first day of the planning meeting is done, and, as usual, we haggled and argued over priorities and the relative importance of various aspects of the product. No, I'm not about to spill any "dirty laundry" we discussed :) We have another day of this tomorrow, at which point we should be ok for another half year. In the meantime, let me know what you think we should be up to.

Have a look at BitWise, which got a plug over on the astares blog. They have a story on Squeak this month, and they will be covering Dolphin 6 and Cincom Smalltalk in upcoming editions. Bookmark that site!

Via ION RSS:

"Just received an update that IBM's CIO's office is testing out RSS for internal communications. At this moment we have 3 feeds up and running on the IBM intranet. [...] The intranet is the first source IBM'ers turn to when they are looking for information and contains our profile, our contact details, personalised data according to profession etc... With these 3 RSS feeds we're certainly going in the right direction."

There's your business value right there - automated information flow instead of haphazard emails. Does it work for everything? Of course not. Is it well suited to a large amount of internal communication? You bet.

Register today for Smalltalk Solutions so you can find out about the wxSqueak project:

Introduction to wxSqueak

presentation

Gayvert, Rob: Independent Consultant

Tuesday 4:45 pm to 5:30 pm

Abstract: wxSqueak is an open-source project which blends Squeak with the wxWidgets cross-platform GUI library. This presentation will start with the project goals and the main features of wxWidgets that are used in wxSqueak. Some of the more interesting technical challenges will be discussed, with particular focus on callback mechanisms. The current capabilities of wxSqueak will be demonstrated, and a roadmap for future development will be presented.

Bio: Rob Gayvert is an independent consultant, and has been working with Smalltalk since 1989.

See you in Orlando!

Wired News reports that United is adding WiFi - I have hated flying United, but with WiFi in the mix? Hmmm. If I can just get past the intense dislike....

United Airlines gets FAA approval for wireless internet access during domestic flights, but the FCC still has to OK it. Some international carriers already provide the service -- for a fee of course.

Dare Obasanjo points to an MS response to a Sun benchmarking test (XML parsing). However, I didn't see the common XML file that these tests should have been using - I saw a description of the XML, but no sample. So.... what am I missing? Without common test data, this is all meaningless. Is there a link to the XML test data that I'm missing here?

After a hard day of meetings, a little fun is required - here's a picture of a few of us out at PF Chang's last night:

From the left, that's Georg Heeg, Suzanne Fortman, and Eliot Miranda

I have some more photos - these are higher quality, as they came from a real digital camera

Starting on the left, that's Eliot Miranda, then Ron Weeks (ATG engineering manager), Vassili Bykov, Sherry Michael, Sam Shuster, and Kuroda-San. On the right side, we have MaryAnn Nelson (sales), Alan Knight, me (mostly hidden behind Alan), Andreas Hiltner, Helge Nowak, Bruce Boyer, and Claude Poole (Smalltalk engineering manager). Here's another shot:

You can't tell who that is in front of Eliot, but that's Georg Heeg. Sam's in the back there, making a loud point :)

Ted Leung points to some useful resources for learning about the ValueModel pattern - including a reference in a book you may already have on your shelf.

We had a good set of meetings, and I now have a full plate of things that need to be done - I don't have anything specific to discuss, since we didn't change directions at all - have a look at our roadmap for where we are headed (and note that I plan to update that doc)

Steve Rubel reports that some people are yearning for some kind of "more authentic" ecology of podcasting - this is inspired by the news that Rush Limbaugh is now podcasting (although, I should note that it's a for pay service - you have to pay to access to the podcasts):

Dave Winer and Steve Gillmor have coined a new phrase - media hackers. I like it. Dave envisions a future where the biggest podcaster is not Rush Limbaugh, but media-hacker stars that have yet to come to the forefront.

Well, I have serious doubts about that happening (at least in large numbers). There's a reason that I go out of my way to listen to James Lileks, for instance - he spends time on his podcasts. Go over here and give on them a listen - you'll find an eclectic mix of pop culture references, Sci Fi riffs, and a variety of interesting (and often quite odd) music. There's only a new one once every few weeks, and part of that is likely due to the effort he's putting in.

Add to that something else - Lileks has a "radio voice" - he comes across very well. I've tried to listen to Winer's casts - they ramble, he moves away from the microphone (making it hard to hear him), and he's "all over the map" in terms of topics. In other words, there's no focus. It takes time to listen to an audio broadcast, whether it comes over the air or over the wire. If the speaker isn't focused and interesting, what's the point? Ultimately, if you expect to gain listeners, it's going to take actual effort. Rambling about whatever comes to mind just isn't going to cut it - for the same reason that it won't cut it in an editorial page writer.

I have two more meeting pictures - Suzanne had a real digital camera (as opposed to my camera phone), and had me snap a shot of her, Eliot, and Georg:

Here's a lower quality one of Sherry Michael and Sam Shuster:

That's what I have from the meetings - there should be a bunch of pics coming from Smalltalk Solutions though - along with my blogging of the events.

I blogged about Satellite Forces last winter, and now we have a press release on our progress together:

OTTAWA, ON - Cincom Systems, Inc., a global leader in business process application development, announced today that they intend to pursue a partnership with Satellite Forces International (SFI), a leading developer of business management applications.

You can register for the StS 2005 tutorials now:

• Seaside tutorial
• Web Services tutorial
• Domain Driven Design tutorial
• Smalltalk Garbage Collectors

See you in Orlando!

I get news like this:

Kim Delaney, Beau Bridges and David Cubitt will reprise their roles from NBC's hit SF miniseries 10.5 in 10.5: Apocalypse, a sequel that began filming in Montreal last week.

The whole plot was an improbability drive :)

Here's a story proving that bad copyright ideas aren't solely a US problem - look at what the Europeans are pondering:

European recording companies are pushing to extend terms of copyright to nearly 100 years to be more in line with U.S. law.

So the idea is to prove equivalent levels of idiocy?

If you want up to the minute info on the ESUG conference, then you should subscribe to this feed.

When I first created this blog server (back in 2002), the basic server structure differed a fair bit. I've been evolving the code (mostly without having to restart the server) over time, and I'm about to make another such change - to the storage mechanism. The running implementation now dumps every blog item into one directory (per blog). So, every post I've ever made sits in a file somewhere in the same directory (one file per day). At some point, that's going to be a problem in terms of the file system. So, I've made a small change - underneath the basic storage directory are per-year directories, and each post just drops into that directory. The cool thing is, that change required only three small method changes - I'd refactored the storage code awhile back, so it was simple.

Harder is the fact of the existing server, it's caches, etc. Once I made the simple code change, I had to get the server updated - files relocated and caches updated. Moving the files was easy, because they are named based on date: a file named vw_blog13-5-5.blg is from the 13th of May, 2005. Quick work to rearrange all of that. Then there's the caches - for quick lookup, there are a few caches that needed updating - for instance, the category cache:

blogs := (BlogSaver default keys) asOrderedCollection.
blogs do: [:each |
	| blog |
	blog := BlogSaver named: each.
	blog cache setupSearchCategoryCache].

Another short script of the same sort for the keyword cache, and it's done. I'll convert the server to this new structure sometime this weekend, and the cool part is, no one should notice the change.

If you live on the gulf coast or in Florida, here's a feed you should subscribe to - the National Hurricane Center. The stock website is here. At present, they have good info on Tropical Storm Arlene (scroll down); last year, I kept track of all the storms that crossed Florida via that feed. My parents live in Melbourne Beach, FL, so these things are of interest to me.

Richard Mansfield has been scarred by the "C" language family. In this article, he tries to explain why OOP is bad. What he mainly explains is something very simple - he's only been exposed to OOP done wrong, and drawn bad conclusions from this:

To the extent that OOP is involved in components such as text boxes (not much, really), it's very successful. GUI components are great time-savers, and they work well. But don't confuse them with OOP itself. Few people attempt to modify the methods of components. You may change a text box's font size, but you don't change how a text box changes its font size.

What he's doing here is arguing against a concept that predates OO - encapsualtion. I was confused by this trashing of basic programming concepts until I read the short bio at the end of the piece:

Richard Mansfield has written 32 computer books since 1982, including bestsellers 'Machine Language for Beginners' (COMPUTE! Books) and 'The Second Book of Machine Language' (COMPUTE! Books). From 1981 through 1987, he was editor of COMPUTE! Magazine and from 1987 to 1991 he was editorial director and partner at Signal Research.

It looks to me like Richard started out in assembly, and his exposure to OOP has been through the marvelous examples provided by C++, Java, and C#. In those languages, you get OO as the supposed main play, but it's surrounded with stupidity like primitive data types, "final" class definitions, etc, etc - it's no wonder he's come away with so many bad ideas:

For a while it was a success, but things took a turn. In those early days, computer memory was scarce and processors were slow. Processor-intensive programs such as games and CAD had to be written in low-level languages just to compete in the marketplace. To conserve memory and increase execution speed, such programs were written in assembly language and then C, which conformed to the computer's inner structure rather than to the programmer's natural language. For example, people think of addition as 2 + 2, but a computer stack might work faster if its programming looks like this: 2 2 +. Programmers describe it as little Ashley's first birthday party: the computer starts counting from zero, so to the machine it's her zeroth birthday party.

When fast execution and memory conservation were more essential than clarity, zero-based indices, reverse-polish notation, and all kinds of bizarre punctuation and diction rose up into programming languages from the deep structure of the computer hardware itself. Some people don't care about the man-centuries of unnecessary debugging these inefficiencies have caused. I do. Efficiency is the goal of OOP, but the result is too often the opposite.

He then goes on to argue that data and functionality need to be separate - that this somehow increases the odds that your code will be flexible:

I find that leaving the data in a database and the data processing in the application simplifies my programming. Leaving data separate from processing certainly makes program maintenance easier, particularly when the overall structure of the data changes, as is so often the case in businesses (the most successful of which continually adapt to changing conditions). OOP asks you to build a hierarchical structure and thereafter try to adapt protean reality to that structure.

Encapsulation, too, is a noble goal in theory: you've reached the Platonic ideal for a particular programming job, so you seal it off from any further modification. And to be honest, constructing a class often is fun. It's like building a factory that will endlessly turn out robots that efficiently do their jobs, if you get all the details right. You get to play mad scientist, which can be challenging and stimulating. The catch is that in the real world programming jobs rarely are perfect, nor class details flawless.

This is where I think he runs off the rails. Inheritance is one aspect of OOP, but it's not the end-all, be-all. In fact, most of us recognize that deep inheritance trees lead to obfuscation more than they lead to elegance. But never mind that - what I want to know is this: If I have a set of functions over here, and the database over there - as opposed to a set of objects over here, and the database over there - how is the former easier to update than the latter? If the form of the data changes, guess what? The functions (or methods) need to adapt. Richard seems to think that a rigid separation somehow makes this easier - either he's smoking something, or he's never worked on a non-trivial system. I spent years working in C, and I also spent a fair bit of time in Basic (and other similar languages). Believe me, Smalltalk makes it far, far easier to deal with code migration issues than anything else I've ever worked with.

Mansfield has discovered that the Emperor has no clothes, and he thinks the Emperor is OOP. What he hasn't figured out - most likely through lack of exposure - is that C++, Java, and C# do not define OOP. In fact, they are all fairly ugly hacks pretending to be OO, while preserving the nasty familiarity of C style syntax. If he wants to blame someone, he can look at the supposed giants: Stroustrup, Gosling, and Hejlberg - who have managed to inflict a few megatons worth of damage to the software development field during their careers.

My wife spotted this headline in a local newspaper - I don't think I need to add much commentary:

You have to see it to believe it:

The "cursed'' 1919 contract that shipped Babe Ruth from Boston to the Bronx sold at auction Friday for a staggering $996,000, delighting its new owner -- a die-hard Yankees fan -- and a hunger-relief group designated to receive a financial windfall from the sale.

All I can say is, whoa....

Over the last few years of development work on BottomFeeder, the application has changed in one very important way - what started out as a monolithic, big ball of code has become a set of reusable components that have been plugged together. That's not true in all cases; the RSS parsing is still too tightly coupled to the application - a looser coupling could make for a fully reusable Smalltalk library for dealing with RSS and Atom. However, that's the exception here. The application now includes, between core components and plugins, 30 pieces that can be updated in a (mostly) independent fashion. Of course, updates to one sometimes require new APIs available in another, but you get the idea.

So what's there? Let me walk through the list:

• SpellChecker - a pluggable spell checking module. It depends on the presence of the ASpell shared libraries, which are readily available for Linux and Windows, and can (in theory at least) be compiled for other platforms
• GIF Support - a library for reading GIF format
• WinGDIPlus - a Windows specific library that uses native libraries to convert various image formats into something that Smalltalk can use
• EpiWin32Folder - a Windows specific library that enables use of the directory selection dialog (as opposed to the file selection one)
• Emote-Support - used mostly by TypeLess, it provides a set of emoticons, enabling auto-replacement of ASCII-art
• ExtraEmphasis - a library that simplifies various VW font usage scenarios
• ExtraActivity - a library that makes it easier to animate Visual Components. Used mostly bu WithStyle
• Weaklings - adds a simple "Weak" mechanism for instance variable slots in an object
• VRCommonDialogs - a cross platform set of common dialogs
• Http-Overrides - this is really part of the NetResources library. It separates out the overrides required by that library, so that changes needed after a new VW release are easier to track down
• NetResources - a basic library for wrapping the VW net clients libraries with a highter level API
• NetResourcesHTTP - a high level API for HTTP access that simplifies access, and adds support for things like caching, digest auth, and more
• PatchFileDelivery - a general settings driven library for delivering application level updates (parcels) via HTTP. Supports download and save, and download and load immediately
• Browsing-Assist - a library that supports spawning a web browser on an URL across platforms. On Windows and Mac, this "just works", and has APIs for spawning new or reusing. On other platforms, the browser must be specified
• OSTimeZone - a cross platform library for setting the time in VW to match the PC clock
• XmlRpcClient - a library for making XML RPC calls and handling the responses
• XML Configuration Files - a library for storing configuration information (or serializing objects) in an XML format.
• BottomFeeder - the basic BottomFeeder application itself
• Twoflower - the Twoflower Http parser, used by WithStyle if LibTidy is not present or fails
• WSBundle - The Software With Style code base
• LibTidy - a library that wraps the C based LibTidy. This library takes arbitrary HTML and cleans it up, returning valid XHTML.
• Win32TaskbarSupport - makes VW Windows and menus cognizant of bounds, including the taskbar - prevents menus from disappearing behind the taskbar
• Windows TrayIcons - a Windows specific library with a simple API - allows you to drop an application into the tray
• IRC-BottomFeeder-Typeless - the Typeless IRC plugin to BottomFeeder
• Blog-Tools - the Blog posting plugin, which supports Blogger API, MetaWebLogAPI, and the MT API. Also available Standalone, as BottomLine
• WinMineGame - Minesweeper
• GoldenMonkey - a game
• Steroids - Asteroids game
• Xonix - the old Xonix arcade game
• EnclosureHandler - manager for downloading/saving enclosures automatically

That list has grown over time - I started out with three components that could be updated at runtime! I should also point out that an awful lot of those components were written by other people - in particular, Software With Style is responsible for the excellent NetResources and WithStyle components - without which, BottomFeeder would be a lot less nice.