Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

I'm back up - apparently, I'm in one of those "sleep fine the first night, stay awake the second" swings. I cheerfully await sleep tonight, I guess. In the meantime, the hostage crisis here still has the area cordoned off. There are police and medical units camped out here at the hotel, and they have that "up all night" hangdog look going - one of the medical guys was trying to sleep on the sofa.

There's still a way in and out of the hotel though - I checked with the front desk, and we can get in and out near the restaurant. Which means a train ride to and from the airport, looks like. I don't have any real news about the hostage thing, other than the nearly 12 hour duration of it - not a good sign, IMHO. I thought the early release of children sounded good, but now it doesn't look so good. Then again, I'm in a cocoon here, so what do I know?

I'll try to pick up some news on my way to and from the airport, and see if any of this hits the media in the meantime.

I got a few more details talking to the police this morning. There were originally four hostages - two children, aged 3 and 8, and two adult women. The hostage taker is an ex-boyfriend of one of the women, and she's apparently had trouble with him before. Now, he's holding the two of them in their apartment with a grenade. The police have the whole area - about a 2 block square - cordoned off. I heard a few snippets about it on the radio this morning, while taking a cab back to the hotel, so the media finally has it.

So, no sign of end to the standoff - the police look pretty settled in. I'll be heading up to the conference - there's supposed to be a guided tour of the city this afternoon. I don't know how that will be impacted by the standoff - I'll post more details as I get them.

Seems that better information on things is out this morning. Apparently, the guy behind this is an escaped prisoner - more properly, he was on some kind of leave, and went AWOL. He's holding two women in a bar - his wife (possibly ex-wife) and some woman who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (apparently, a bar, not an apartment). There were two children let go last night, so that was accurate - and they are his children. No progress on getting the final hostage out though, so things are still buttoned down. I don't know if I'll have more for awhile - I'm off to the conference, and I don't know if I'll have time or info to post. I'll update this tonight when I get back.

There's a comment from Dirk up this thread, and he informs me that there are two people trapped in a nearby apartment who can't leave due to the cordon. That's probably part of the initial confusion on the number and location of the hostage taking.

The situation is still unresolved. I managed to get better info from local media - here's what I know now:

• This whole thing started at 7 pm or so last night. The hostage taker was out of jail on a 1 day furlough, and went to a bar/cafe - probably in search of his ex-wife. He found his ex mother in law and ex sister in law instead, who had his kids with them
• There was some kind of ugly argument at the bar, and the police were called. A police woman showed up, and the perpetrator took out his gun and shot her - fortunately a slight wound to the arm
• That's when things went to hell - she called for backup, and he grabbed his hostages - the two women and the kids. At some point, the kids were let go
• I don't know whether he has a grenade - that was reported, but I had not heard of the gun earlier. Multiple policemen have told me he has a grenade
• Ironically, this guy was in jail for taking his family hostage!
• Apparently, the police are no longer releasing news updates of any kind - the perp has been monitoring news reports, and gotten angry about things he thought were wrong. So... no press conferences, etc.

That's what I know now. I'll have to see what new info - if any - turns up tomorrow. The only thing I have left is pure speculation, but here goes - I have a very bad feeling about this. The longer this goes on, the more likely it is (IMHO) that this guy will convince himself that "it's too late to go quietly". At that point, either the police use snipers to take him out, or he ends the whole thing violently himself. Again, that's pure speculation on my part - above this paragraph is stuff I'm reporting based on actual sourcing.

On a more pleasant note, we had a nice walking tour of Brussels today. I started out heading to the airport (by train - my car is stuck in the garage due to this hostage situation). Picked up the wife and daughter, had a cab run us back here. We then went up to VUB to meet up with everyone.

We headed out on the tour after lunch - we had a nice, very funny guide. I'll have some pictures to post tomorrow or the next day - I'm too tired to play with the camera just now. Anyway - things ended at a brewery (only one running in Brussels), and that tour was kind of fun - although the warm air in one room triggered my jet lag and sent me to sleep.

Back at the Uni for the banquet and awards - the prizes went as follows:

1. RoelTyper
2. SqueakSource
3. Intensional Views

There was a funny "10 things I hate about Smalltalk" speech at the banquet - things like "I hate how productive it is - think about job security!", but delivered in a humorous way. All in all, a good day.

Joel Spolsky says:

As I worked through the screens that would be needed to allow either party to initiate the process, I realized that Aardvark would be just as useful, and radically simpler, if the helper was required to start the whole process. Making this change in the spec took an hour or two. If we had made this change in code, it would have added weeks to the schedule. I can’t tell you how strongly I believe in Big Design Up Front, which the proponents of Extreme Programming consider anathema. I have consistently saved time and made better products by using BDUF and I’m proud to use it, no matter what the XP fanatics claim. They’re just wrong on this point and I can’t be any clearer than that.

Well - I have to admit - as with exceptions, when Joel misses the point, he doesn't miss by a little. Look at his assertion - "If we had to make the change in code..."

Well. This assumes two things:

1. You got the spec right before you got started, because - according to Joel - once you start, it's just too hard to change the code
2. You won't get into analysis paralysis due to fears about (1)

BDUF assumes that the spec can be made perfect, after which the coding will just be automatic. Well - if that's the case, why does he care about getting "the best" developers? Clearly, they have very little work to do in the bizarro universe where Joel lives - after design, they just code to the spec.

The reality is, specs are never complete - new requirements always arrive, and the first cut of a spec can't possibly catch them all. The whole point of agile is to accept this reality and move on. Joel wants to pretend otherwise, which makes him... foolish.

I suspect that Joel's developers have gotten into the habit of nodding their heads politely at Joel, and then rolling their eyes as he turns around. He's gone past the technical world into the "used to be technical and think I still am" project manager role. People like that are a real pain to work for, because you end up having to put up a false front - "sure, we'll do it just like you say, Joel" - followed by doing it the right way. Joel is a good product marketer - that's where he ought to spend his time. The technical side? He needs to stop making it obvious that he has no clue what he's talking about.

The hostage crisis ended last night - apparently, the police rushed the place around 3:30 am. Must not have been too loud - I didn't hear anything. In any case, the word is that they caught him, and the hostages came out unharmed. So it was a long, nervous wait for the police and the two women's families, but it all ended far better than I had feared it would

Unlike last time, it looks like this page actually is planning an RSS 3. Oof.

Blaine points to an interesting story on BEA - apparently, they want to be able to support scripting (read: dynamic) languages on top of their servers:

"The goal is to meet the developers where they are living, and clearly there has been an explosion of new ways of building applications," said Roth. "Java and J2EE (programming models) are still important but innovations in programming can't be denied."

It's raining out, so it's a great time to be inside and hear about the new buzz terms as they hit Smalltalk. Andy Berry is going to cover what SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is.and what the business benefits and risks are. In particular, he'll cover how it interacts with Smalltalk.

What is "architecture"? Let's pretend that you won the lottery and ask a builder to build you a new house... Heh - Andy has a picture of what you have in mind, and a picture of what the builder actually produced (I lived this one when we had our house built - we didn't get the cathedral ceilings at all where we wanted them...). Like Andy says, the builder always has a rationalization at hand to explain why things went the way they did.

So... consider a city, where you end up with lots of buildings. You want it to all mesh. Now, apply that to IT - you have apps for Sales, Billing, Q/A (etc) - they probably are all silos. They should all tie together (eg - a Sales Enquiry should be able to "turn into" an Invoice w/o any hard work). The bottom line - a suite of applications that work together this way will save money.

An IT architecture must tell us how to link things together. Has to consider both the business itself and the world around it. At this point, imagine a circle ("The World") with boxes for your customers, your suppliers, your company, and your enablers. That's what your architecture has to tie together.

"A Service Oriented Architecture is a way of including everyone - Customers, Suppliers and Enablers - as partners in your IT system" So, an SOA is an architecture designed around services. What's a service? posit a taxi driver, who you call to take you from point A to B - the taxi driver has provided a service. Side note - how the driver gets paid is an interesting point all by itself.

Services:

• Business Oriented - don't tell the taxi driver how to drive
• Asynchronous - I make a request, and it later happens
• Normally, you get what you ask for

Returning to IT - Always ask yourself - can I imagine myself doing this? If so, it could probably be made into a service. A service to submit an invoice is high enough level to call a service. Where does this fit - design/architecture level, or code level? Is SOA:

• The most important development in the last ten years?
• An interesting development that your company should monitor?
• Just a messaging application?

Andy falls into camp two above - start thinking about it, and see how you could/should use it. Consider doing an internal project before trying to go outside the company's walls. So Andy asks us: Can you think of three business oriented services that would allow parts of your company to work more effectively together?

Implementation:

• Do it yourself
• Us a supplier like IBM, Iona (et. al.)
• If you do that, make sure you get monitoring

One option is to use what's called as ESB (Enterprise Service Buss). InfoWorld just did a wrap up on those, iirc - I think I threw rocks at it :) The basic idea is that you wrapper your applications in a messaging layer. What goes on the "bus" - messages - typically, Web Services messages.

At the implementation level, a web service is a service delivered by XML encoded messages. Andy is referring us to "The Semantic Web" by Berners-Lee. This is where you end up intersecting with the "Web 2.0" folks - including the RDF crew.

So what are the benefits? You automate (as much as possible) your communications flow with your suppliers. A simple example of this sort of thing is how we (Cincom Smalltalk) handle "goodie" submissions from authors. They register with us, and then have access to an FTP site. Our normal build process pulls the latest from there - thus eliminating the need for reminder emails. The upshot here is to end up with an architecture rather than a set of isolated silos. You should end up automating out a bunch of things with customers and suppliers.

The risks? At this point, you'll be an early adopter - meaning that you'll inclur extra costs, and be off the wrong way if the buzz ship moves along. How can you mitigate that? Andy's suggestion is that Smalltalk helps here, by dint of its flexibility - and it's supported in Smalltalk (VW and VA, for sure). More:

• Don't bet the business - start small
• Ensure access to mentors that have done this before
• Choose a product before you start implementing.

At the end of this, you want an architecture, not just another "cool" use of buzzword bingo technology. Start small, get buy-in from the right people in your organization, and try to pick an obvious starting point to prototype.

Back to that taxi driver and payment - we just hand him money. Translated to IT, what we really want is "pay as you go" services that are metered. Yes, it sounds utopian - but it's probably a level of outsourcing that will work.

Suzanne Fortman is talking about Smalltalk promotion in the community at large, and specifically at Cincom. No slides - this is a general introduction on her part to this community. I blogged about her StS talk here.

Ed Foster spotlights the difficulty people have with AOL and cancellation. This reminds me of the Dell thing from last week. This kind of "death grip on the customer" approach is the kind of thing that generates a lot of bad PR. As with Dell, it used to be something you could hide - there would be an occasional press story, but nothing much that spread. Now? Now you have the searchable web. Like Dell, it looks like AOL is going to have to learn this lesson the hard way.

Troy sent me a link to this piece in AdRants - which puts a nice exclamation point on my earlier post about AOL:

Jarvis explains to Dell and to any marketer wondering about this whole blog thing why they should pay attention to blogs and how they should join the conversation about their company rather than attempt to control it with anachronistic, uninformed marketing logic. All marketing directors should read what Jeff has to say, pay very close attention to it and act accordingly. Lest, one day, you'll wake up and quietly, all your customers will have left your store.

It's after lunch, and Mark Johnson is up to talk about VA Smalltalk. I blogged both talks on this at StS. The difference here is that Mark is a marketing guy, not a technical guy - so the tone of this talk should be somewhat different than at StS. On to his agenda:

• Who Instantiations is
• Relationship with IBM
• Roadmap information

Mark has been at Instantiations since 1999, in Marketing and Business Development roles. His charter at Instantiations is to promote Instantiations tools - Smalltalk and otherwise. For those who don't know, Instantiations is a small (25 staff) company in Oregon. They were re-founded in 1997, they mostly partner with IBM, working with Rational, Eclipse, WebSphere.

They've been selling a bunch of VA add-ons for ever since Instantiations was re-founded out of the wreckage of ObjectShare. Late last year, Instantiations started working with IBM at the Raleigh lab to provide 2nd and 3rd level support for IBM. More recently, Instantiations was able to announce and offer VA Smalltalk. They are an Advanced IBM Business Partner. They have been a VisualAge Smalltalk Solution Team Member, member of STIC, and also associated with similar programs for Rational tools, WebSphere, etc.

Now we see the slide that IBM showed at StS - the "either run or walk to Java" slide. Even the maintain Smalltalk slide calls that a "Staged Transformation". Mark is pointing out that Instantiations is taking over marketing and support, so that there's no need to migrate - the choices IBM are laying out are to migrate now, or go to Instantiations.

VA Smalltalk 7 (Instantiations Product):

• Lengthens viable life of VAST applications
• 100% compatible with VA
• Includes VA Assist, WidgetKit/Controls, GF/ST
• Modernized product
• Fully Supported (by Instantiations)
• Roadmap for the future (out 2 years)
• Instantiations is 100% committed to product development

The roadmap:

• VA 7: Summer delivery (late August, early September) - VA 6.0.3 with the additional components listed above
• VA 7.5 (Next year)
  • ANSI support
  • More modernization
  • Integrate RB
  • Newer Windows Widgets
  • More WS* stuff
  • All additional migration stuff

• VA 8 - follow link above

They plan to evolve their own pre-existing tools as well, and integrate them more fully into VAST. Small note - GF/ST will remain a "goodie" (i.e., unsupported). By contract with IBM, they have to include the migration assistance tools from Synchrony Systems. The release was delayed somewhat by the slowness of the 6.0.3 release from IBM. Still on track for Windows GA version shortly (within a week), with Linux, AIX, and Solaris by end of August. Looks like you can contact Mark for a copy of the slides.

Mainframe stuff is still at IBM - Academic licenses are not free. hmmm.

I spoke at ESUG today, after Mark's talk. Here's a picture Suzanne snapped while I was talking:

The talk went pretty well - I had a good crowd, and they seemed interested. After that, Suzanne and I spoke to a few people and headed out. She's on her way back to California, I'm taking a short break here in Brussels. I'll be posting some pictures we took on the tour yesterday in a few minutes.

We took a walking tour of Brussels yesterday as part of ESUG. It was a nice tour - my wife shot a few pictures while we walked, and I thought I'd post a few of them. The area around Grand Place in Brussels is just beautiful - have a look at this view from the courtyard:

Here's another shot of the same place, different part - we would have more, but a huge stage set up in the middle for a festival blocked some site lines:

Next, there's a marvelous covered street near Grand Place. It's about 8.5 meters wide, and covered with a glass ceiling - shops on the ground floors, apartments above. They sounded small (about 100 sq meters in general), but it would be a fun place to live, I'm sure:

Here's another view, near the end of that street - look at the artwork:

Last, a nice fountain in a courtyard - there were matching fountains, this is a shot of one. It's in a nice little courtyard, small and cozy:

We have ways of downgrading your machine: better not try to use Outlook 2003 on a machine with more than 1 GB of RAM - MS can't count that high:

Still no luck there, though. I had to do a Google search to find the relevant page on MSN. There I find the "cause" of my tribulations (emphasis mine): If you are using Outlook 2003, and have more than 1GB of RAM available on your machine, you may encounter problems with Outlook. This is a known issue in Outlook, and a fix for this will be available shortly from the Outlook team. To avoid this problem, you can remove memory so that your computer has 1GB or less of RAM, or you can disable memory above 1GB.

Shades of "640k is enough for anyone" :)

Seems Scoble ran into Steve Jobs:

Then I follow him outside and introduce myself. "Hi I'm Robert Scoble and I work at Microsoft and it's an honor meeting you." By then Dave and Dean walk up. "I'd like to introduce you to Dean Hachamovitch, he runs the Internet Explorer team and this is Dave Winer."

He then said something like "cool, nice to meet you. It's nice to see that you're copying our stuff." Ouch. But then Dean invites him to see the rest of Internet Explorer and Windows Vista and says we have a few innovations to show him. Steve graciously hands over his email address and invites us over.

Too bad I wasn't around - I'd have given Jobs crap for copying all of our stuff...

Via BitWorking comes this post from Kottke, where he's ragging on Technorati. Come to think of it, there are searches I've tried on Technorati that almost never work - ones for links to my blog, for instance. I always get a "the database is busy" error. In any event, I spoke about this yesterday at ESUG - I have 41 search feeds set up in BottomFeeder now, cutting across products and terms that I care about. I suspect that the folks at Technorati are clued in enough to notice Kottke's post (I would hope they are, given the field they are in!).

Phil Ringnalda is not amused over the advertising he finds at xml.com:

O'Reilly's XML.com, a site I used to take very seriously, because of all the scary-smart people who write there? Brought to you by hotel spam, mortgage refinancing spam, and one of those "directories" that only exists to feed off confused searchers by sending them right back around through Google's AdSense division when they arrive from a Google search.

How horribly low have we sunk, that I'm not willing to link to O'Reilly sites without a rel="nofollow", because they are a bunch of low-life search engine spammers? X-bloody-ML.com, something that I won't touch without a nofollow condom? This just sucks.

The ads in question are low key, text only ads - nn the other hand, they are spam crap that will show up in search results because of this, so maybe I should be as upset as Phil. In any event - if you are targeting developers (and O'Reilly most certainly is) - then this sort of advertising is pretty much guaranteed to generate negative linking.

I have some more pics from the walking tour - these were all taken by my daughter. The first shot is of a remnant of the 12th century city wall, now inside the Radisson. It's actually reconstructed; the old wall was moved during the building of the hotel:

Here's a picture of the cathedral near Grand Place:

Here's a shot of the Covered Street I mentioned yesterday::

And finally, a picture from the brewery we went into at the end of the tour. This shot is of some hops - they use hops that age for a year:

Slashdot reports that 186,000 miles/sec is no longer the speed limit:

"With off-the-shelf components, scientists have managed to speed up light beyond the 'universal' constant of c, or roughly 300 million meters/sec. This, and the previous ability to slow light down could shake up the telecom world, according to the story at Science Blog."

Follow this link for the details.

Well, here's a pack of morons at work - a group of bozos wants to import large animals (including predators) into North America. Yeah, that's how I want to explore a natural park - looking around to make sure I'm not becoming prey:

"Obviously, gaining public acceptance is going to be a huge issue, especially when you talk about reintroducing predators," said lead author Josh Donlan, of Cornell University. "There are going to have to be some major attitude shifts. That includes realising predation is a natural role, and that people are going to have to take precautions."

I have an idea - why don't we introduce the predators in his neighborhood. Let him explain to local parents that they will have to "take precautions".

We drove over to Antwerp this afternoon, and after a nice lunch hopped on the local tourist bus and made our way to the Fine Arts museum. It's a lovely museum - abstract art downstairs (not my favorite - IMHO, if a 2 year old could duplicate it by accident, it's not art) - but the works by Rubens and other masters upstairs were well worth the trip. Here's a front view of the museum - my daughter took all these shots:

Victoria took a lot of shots in the museum, but it seems that a bunch were blurred. Not enought light/resolution, and we couldn't use a flash. Her camera is only 2 megapixels. Here are three of the best shots:

Via Blaine Buxton comes a link to an interesting debate between Kent Beck and Alan Cooper - on the merits (or lack thereof) of XP. Here's a good point made by Alan Cooper:

I think XP has some really deep, deep tacit assumptions going on, and I think the deepest tacit assumption is that we have a significant organizational problem, but we can't fix the organization. Essentially, the crap rolls downhill and ends up rolling right into the programmer's lap. When the product or the program turns out to be unsatisfactory, the fingers point to the programmer. XP is very well-intentioned; it's the software-development community beginning to say, "Hey, this is not only unfair to us, but it's not productive as a discipline and we can do a lot better." I applaud that sentiment and I agree with that sentiment, but then XP says, "OK, so, I can't change the organizational failings, so, I'm going to build my own internal defenses." I suppose this is probably better than nothing, but I'm interested in changing the way organizations are constructed. I believe that in order to create quality software, you have to change the organization. We can change the organization, and it strikes me that the assumption underlying XP is that the organization's structure is a given.

The problem is, you can't always fix the corporate structure and its infirmities - and yet, you still have to get something done. The reality - which Kent is bypassing in that first part of his answer - is that we aren't all consultants, and we can't all quit. He also makes a good point about customer-centric design (central to XP) here:

It's my experience that neither users nor customers can articulate what it is they want, nor can they evaluate it when they see it.

Neither the people who buy software nor the people who use it have the capability of visualizing something as complex as the behavior of software. They also don't have the ability to analyze what appropriate behavior is.

There's a lot of truth in that. XP/Agile are an answer, not the answer. I still don't think much of BDUF, but Cooper makes some really good points here.

Kevin Cheng (author of the Ok/Cancel strip) would like to syndicate his strip via RSS, but needs the ad revenues from his site:

Kevin Cheng, the artist who draws OK/Cancel is here at Barcamp. Very cool. He's talking about doing RSS for his comic.

He's scared by RSS because he needs people to visit his Web site in order to serve ads that would make money for him. I suggested he consider doing product placements on his comic

Scoble's suggestion might be the best one - I read Kevin via RSS now - I scrape his site via a BottomFeeder script.

More pictures from our day trip, these are from my wife. First shot is of an old castle on the Scheldt, used as a defensive measure back in the post medieval period:

Next, a few of the art works. Again, quality is a bit uncertain - we are still learning about the various settings on the camera, especially for non-flash shots indoors:

We took a brief tour of the military museum in Brussels, and then headed out to Waterloo on a tour bus. We got a lot of good information on the way there, and then had some time to view the Panorama Museum and the main monument, a Lion on a hill which marks the spot where a Dutch Duke was wounded during the battle.

The Panorama museum is kind of cool - panorama paintings were very popular during the early 19th century, and they have one of the few surviving examples put up in panorama there. Here's a shot of part of that panorama:

Next, I have a shot of the Lion atop the monument mound. That mound is interesting - apparently, local women built the thing by digging dirt from one side of a sunken road and carrying it up to build the hill. It's impressive - the thing is massive, and holds a 28 ton lion statue at the top:

Here's a shot of me at the top of the mound - my daughter took this, as well as the rest of the shots here:

Here's a shot looking up the steps towards the monument, with me coming down. Those are very steep steps - and narrow as well. If you have a fear of heights, you probably won't like climbing this:

Here's a view from the top, looking down at a small camp of reenactors in French period gear:

The last shot is of the reenactors at ground level:

This is something that bugs me here in Brussels, and it's bugged me in parts of England as well - would it be too hard to actually mark the roads with visible signs? No, the tiny blue signs on buildings that you can't see from a car don't count. In most US cities, the signs are large and easy to read. I can still get lost, but it takes more effort :)

Notwithstanding my mini-rant over street signs, we are having a great time here. The food at the restaurants has been fantastic, and we enjoyed our tour today. We plan to take a tour of Brugges and Ghent tomorrow - it's an all day thing, but I should have pictures galore when I get back. We are still open on Tuesday - anyone have any last minute suggestions for a good way to spend a day in or around Brussels, Belgium?

Ed Foster reports that HP doesn't get it either. With the connected web, this kind of customer disservice story spreads - and worse, ends up showing up in searches. You can save pennies by outsourcing and handing out zero empowerment scripts - but you'll end up costing yourself new sales by the bucket.

Is the new HP going to be any easier for customers to deal with than the old HP was? One bad sign is a recent story relayed to me by a reader that sounds a lot like stories we heard in the Carly era. You may be able to get the service you deserve if you're willing to fight, but only by going over the heads of those who are supposed to be helping you.

Bill Clementson announced a talk by Avi Bryant to a Lisp group:

For our next meeting of "lispvan", Avi Bryant, the author of the Seaside continuation-based web application framework (which is written in Smalltalk), will be giving us a presentation describing his web application framework. Since Drew Crampsie gave the presentation last month covering his lisp-on-lines package (which is built on top of Marco Baringer's UCW, a CL continuation-based web application framework), this meeting will give us the opportunity to compare/contrast the approaches taken in each of the frameworks. If you're interested in alternative approaches to web application development, it should be an interesting meeting! Here's the "official" meeting notice:

Topic: Seaside - a Smalltalk continuation-based web application framework

Presenter: Avi Bryant

Date: Thursday, August 25, 2005

Time: 7pm - 10pm (or whenever)

Venue: Tobys Pub and Grill (see map)

Summary: Avi Bryant, the author of the Seaside continuation-based web application framework (which is written in Smalltalk), will be giving us a presentation describing his application framework.

We traveled to Ghent and Bruges today, as part of a tour. Both were beautiful towns, and we spent far too little time in them. Bruges got more time from the tour though. In any case - here are some pics, some from my wife, some from my daughter. First up: A Rubens in the Cathedral in Ghent:

Next, I have a shot of the bell tower in Ghent:

And a shot of Saint Elisabeth - a sculpture outside the church:

In Bruges, there's a massive square - actually two of them. This is a shot of part of the larger one. It's much nicer than the one here in Brussels:

We took a 30 minute boat ride on the canals in Bruges - here's a picture from there:

And finally, in Bruges - the only Michaelangelo sculpture outside Italy, in the Cathedral:

Jonathan Schwartz throws the DRM question back at the movie industry, and detects a double standard. It's a great commentary, but have a look at these excerpts - the media exec asks him about "digital watermarks" being required, and Jonathan responds:

Rather than provide a response in the room, I turned a question back to him. First, the network you're supposing will deliver a movie to a theater or a camera to a file server is the same network I'm presuming will run throughout your datacenter. On the internet, it's tough to distinguish a feature length movie from a data warehouse application (bits is bits) - so would your datacenter folks support the tech industry certifying content behind your firewalls with a digital watermark? In running business systems?

...

After a few days, I got a response. He'd spoken with their CIO, who dismissed the relevance of my proposal to manage all digital assets under the same scheme. "You'd have to start by proving I've stolen something."

Kind of illustrates the whole problem. Schwartz gets this right, and I hope he presses this with all the media execs he talks to. Now if Microsoft and Apple would do the same...

Today's Dilbert is just about perfect :)

After a long PR pounding, Dell finally discovers that customers matter:

Dell Computers, which came under fire this summer from blogger Jeff Jarvis, says it has new procedures for dealing with the blogosphere. The company’s public relations department monitors blogs, looking for commentaries and complaints and, starting about a month ago, began forwarding complaints with personally identifiable information to the customer service department so that representatives can contact dissatisfied consumers directly, said Dell spokeswoman Jennifer Davis. The move appears to have been triggered by a series of “Dell Hell” posts penned by Jarvis about his problems with a Dell computer. Jarvis first wrote about the topic in June, and continued posting updates through the summer.

“Obviously, Mr. Jarvis’ experience could’ve been handled better,” Davis said.

And it only took them this long to notice :)

We took our last day in Belgium in the car, trying to see some local castles. I'd still like to see Ypres, but we ran out of time this trip. Anyhow - we drove north out of the city to Bouchout castle and the associated national park (the grounds). There's a beautiful castle there, along with gardens and a greenhouse. The latter was being rehabbed, so we only saw some of it. Here's a shot of Bouchout castle, taken by my daughter:

Here's another shot, from the back:

We also walked the grounds, which are quite nice - very peaceful. Also uncrowded, which was a big switch from the crowded downtown area we are staying in. Here's a shot from inside the greenhouse, of some semi-tropical plants:

This next one is fascinating - lilypads that look like little boats. These things are huge for lilypads - if you could get a frog to use a paddle, he'd be all set:

That was our trip there - we passed through more of the greenhouse though. Sadly, Bouchout Castle is only open for events - conferences, seminars, etc. Now wouldn't that be a great place for an ESUG or Cam Smalltalk?

From Bouchout castle, we drove to Beersel. With our poor grasp of French and the previously mentioned Belgian aversion to signs (never mind the absolutely insane drivers :) ), we had some trouble getting there. We arrive just before 5, and the castle was still open - the groundskeeper didn't charge us for entry either. Here's a picture of the front - this castle is very old, the main part dating from the 13th century, with the towers being extended in the 16th:

Here's the interior - note the stage? They put on concerts there. Must be an interesting place for them. The bridge leading in is pretty wobbly. The moat was mostly gone, but that's a restoration thing - they should have it all back together in 3-5 years. Anyway, the interior:

My daughter and I walked up the towers - you can go about halfway up. We also walked all along the guard wall. It's decayed a fair bit, but this was definitely a cool castle.

We visited this castle - in Brussels itself - quite by accident. We got turned around driving in Brussesls (have I mentioned the sign issue?), and ran across a castle in the middle of a small park. There was an open parking spot, so we scooted in. There's a small museum there, but it was closed - we had used up that part of the day elsewhere. Here's the history behind the castle:

And here's a view of the castle from a few steps back:

We are headed home tomorrow morning - we've had a great time, and wished we'd allocated more. On our way back from an excellent dinner at a Spanish Restaurant, my wife took a few nice shots of the area at night - the hotel is in a bustling area, very loud at night (especially on weekends) - lots of bars, restaurants, and clubs. Here's a shot that will give you an idea:

There's a lot going on. Lots of good food though - I'll need to get back into my exercise regime at home! Here's a beautiful shot of the tower at Grand Place, lit up at night:

I'm winging my way home tomorrow - I'll be back at my desk on Thursday

Mike Stall explains the complexity of the VS suite:

Visual Studio is over 43 million lines of code, there are over 30 teams working on different pieces, with roughly 700 developers checking-in code to 11 different virtual build labs that are then integrated on a rotating schedule producing over 100 different builds of the product daily. In addition we have interdependencies with SQL and MSDN.

No need to wonder why it's late - that many developers is a solid sign of an ongoing death march, complete with the attendant tight coupling to other systems that they don't fully control. That's got to be a complete horror show to have to work on...

Now here's an article I can really get behind - Kevin Barnes draws a rough categorization of development languages - between "freedom" languages (Smalltalk, Ruby, Python, et. al.) and "Safety" languages (Java, C#, et. al.). He's made some very good points, and also makes it clear that his (and my) side of this argument does involve a few tradeoffs. First off, take a look at his definitions:

What, pray tell, is a “freedom language”? Freedom languages are those languages that put the individual programmer at the center of their philosophical world. They work hard to remove any language constructs that reduce programmer freedom, and add the most powerful constructs available. Many are post-modern languages and most tend to be syntactically dense.

The other kind of language is the “safety language.” Safety languages think first about the creation of contracts between modules, objects and functions. They focus on teams rather than individuals. They remove language features that are confusing or frequently misused so that there are fewer opportunities to make mistakes and so there can be clear separation of concerns and maximum verifiability. These languages are full of barriers and check-points and well-defined paths and they tend to be syntactically verbose.

With that out of the way, we get to something I've always found irritating - the presumption by "safety" advocates that the (so called) scripting languages are just toys:

The advocates to safety languages tend to deride freedom languages as “scripting” languages or “fringe” languages. They are only fit for hacking out small projects and putting together demos and whatnot. They focus on static-type-safety as one of the most fundamentally critical elements for ensuring program completeness. They may also talk about execution efficiency (memory, speed, etc). They tend to view freedom languages as improper for a larger team of programmers with mixed skill sets. The heart of their arguments is basically that these languages are not “safe” for large projects.

Kevin makes some great points about this, and I'm not going to try to quote his entire article - you should just read it and see what you think. I do like this, from near the end of the piece:

There is one other strange quality to the safety languages. They all look the same. The safety ideal has manifested itself in even the simplest elements of syntax. The providers of safety languages want constructs and syntax that will be comfortable to people who write code in other “major” languages. They want companies to be safe from an inadequately small developer pool. Many languages that started out looking different (Basic or Pascal) have over time morphed to take on the look and feel of the other safety languages. It’s very easy for someone familiar with C++ to read C# or Java or VB or Delphi. They have a lot harder time figuring out Ruby or Smalltalk or Python. Think I’m exaggerating?

Kevin points out that this presumed familiarity is less valuable than you think - stepping into any large project, the idioms and strategies (i.e., the design) used by the developers will matter more than the language selection in terms of getting up to speed. In any case - as I said - read the whole thing. I agree with almost everything Kevin's said here, including his caveats.

Bitwise magazine plugs Smalltalk (Dolphin, to be specific) in this article - I like this part:

In some respects, all those modern OOP programming languages (C++, Java, C#, Delphi et al) still haven’t yet caught up with the innovations made by Smalltalk over quarter of a century ago. Some of them (such as C++ and Delphi for Win32) are hybrid procedural/OOP languages. And even ‘pure’ OOP languages such as Java and C# are still not quite as pure as Smalltalk. Besides, Smalltalk has a few neat tricks (the ability to select and execute any arbitrary piece of code is one of my favourites) that those copycat languages lack.

“I invented the term 'object-oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind" :: Alan Kay

I don't think he had C# or Java in mind either :)

We thought we were in for a hellish trip - just as we boarded, they told us that air traffic control systems in London had crashed, and we were looking at a three hour ground hold. Hmm - fortunately, that cleared in 45 minutes, and they made all but 20 minutes of that up in the air. That still left us with a 5+ hour layover - but good fortune again, we were able to get our bags switched to DCA, and put on standby - worst case - we get out for DCA at 6 instead of out for BWI at 8:15.

Unfortunately, WiFi here is really spotty - I had it last week down by K19 (weakly), but there's nothing here by K4. Sigh....

Missed that flight - waiting for the 6:00pm. And sitting on the floor outside the Admirals club, grabbing the tmoble hotspot :)

ARmageddon reports that Gartner now wants to charge customers extra for reprint rights to the utterly valueless "magic quadrant" diagrams. The tragedy is, there are probably plenty of people willing to pay for that.

As predicted, the Borg is executing its plan to squeeze more revenue from vendors (see links below). We have now received several confirmations from the AR community that Gartner now asks vendors to purchase reprint rights as a condition to quote Magic Quadrants in their press or marketing rights.

Dave has put together an intro article on Smalltalk, specifically oriented at people who know Java and/or C# - and would like to add Smalltalk to their arsenal. Check the article out here.

Redhill consulting points to an interesting reaction from the Java-ites:

RoR is quickly becoming the Godwin's Law of Java language related discussions: "As an online Java discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Ruby or RoR approaches 1 (i.e. certainty)." -- Marc Stock

There's this too, from the same place (comparing to Godwin's law):

Any programming language and Smalltalk

That's it, define contrary opinions out of existence :)

Matthew Morgan asks a question about various languages (he mentions Smalltalk, Lisp, and Scheme, among others):

So, these languages are often more elegant and concise than their mainstream counterparts, but they also require more mental effort to decode (especially when reading other people’s code). I suspect this is the kernel of truth behind the idea that these languages are only for Smart People. But even Smart People would be better served by a language that didn’t require that extra effort. Is it possible to escape the dichotomy of expressiveness versus readability?

He gives an example - I don't know Scheme, so I can't comment on its veracity. However, in Smalltalk, I can't think of anything that makes the language harder to decode - quite the opposite, actually.

Stephanne Ducasse just pointed me to Planet Squeak, an aggregation of blogs related to Squeak, Tweak, and Croquet related blogs. Check it out - the sources for the site are all listed with their individual feeds as well. Here's the feed.

Lesscode thinks that Java has reached a point of no return (in terms of complexity), and that Ruby on Rails is poised to eat its lunch for web development. It does look like dynamic languages are getting another look.

SD Times has an article on Agile Development vs. Build process - their contention is that build tools lag behind methodologies and the IDEs:

“Teams that want to be more agile are headed for a train wreck if they have long build times; they’ll need to find ways to build all or part of the software more frequently to get the kind of continuous feedback that helps agile teams move quickly,” said Clark, who hasn’t used BuildForge. “But I don’t see that as a tool problem as much as it’s a build process problem. That is, I don’t think tools will help as much as getting someone on the team to optimize the build process will.”

Optimization may be easier said than done. New languages and libraries ooze increasing amounts of code while the 20-year-old Make-based infrastructure lags behind advanced IDEs. Worse, ongoing coding projects create deeply recursive and dependency-laden groups of Makefiles that only a conjurer can untangle.

While Smalltalk doesn't suffer from the complexity of "Make" (et. al.), builds can get to be complicated - we had a number of conversations about this at ESUG last week. When I posted my build process for BottomFeeder recently, the first comment I saw was "it's too complicated". This is an area that the entire industry - including my end of it - needs to improve.