Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Better Bad News has a hilarious take on splogs. They don't call it that - they're aiming wider :)

Joi Ito has an early look at an AC Nielson study on online shopping around the world - and demonstrates that it differs around the world:

The US is way behind Europe in the amount of online shopping (ranking 11 worldwide), perhaps because mall shopping is so much easier than shopping in a European city. This encourages Europeans to shop online.

I've been surprised by how hard it is to buy things in Europe after 5 pm, that's for sure. Everything closes early - it's not at all like the US, where I expect to be able to get milk (or anything else) at midnight or later. I guess this study shows that it has an impact on how people shop online.

Anyway, interesting stuff.

Ryan brings up the Wikipedia quality issue that's been buzzing around lately, and runs smack into the real problem - after noting, via Dave Winer, that everyone has an equal voice on the Wiki, we get to this as the solution:

Identify people who have expertise or knowledge on certain subjects

That's harder than you might think - and it all depends on the subject. I find that Wikipedia is pretty good on historical subjects (at least older ones), and that's because any controversy that may have existed on the subject has passed. For instance - look up Julius Caesar - the history reveals that there have been a number of reversions lately, but the general information looks pretty good - the damage on that page is the garden variety "I'm excited by curse words" sort of damage.

Now have a look at something more recent, and more contentious - the 2000 US Presidential election. Go browse the blogosphere if you think that there's anything resembling consensus on how that went down. I can't see there being a fully objective view of something as controversial as that election for a long time - it wasn't until deep into the 20th century that the 1876 election was viewed with any objectivity, for instance.

So back to the expertise question - how does a "real" encyclopedia deal with this problem any better than Wikipedia does? Take any controversial topic for which varying interpretations exist (i.e., nearly any historical event that happened within the last 100 years) - where do you find experts who have "unassailable knowledge" of some event? The bottom line is, you don't. Let's take a subject I've read a fair bit about recently - WWI. It's long enough ago now that some level of objectivity is creeping in - but it's still colored by subsequent events (WWII, the Cold War) - enough to generate controversy. What's definitive?

• The Guns of August
• The Illusion of Victory
• Paris 1919
• The Myth of the Great War
• The Pity of War

And that's just five books I've read on the subject - five books with very different discussions of how (and why) the war was fought. Let's take the encyclopedia up now - how does the entry on WWI address the war? How does it explain the hows and whys? I'll tell you how - it uses the (then current) academic consensus. Is that "correct" in any abstract sense? Who knows? It might be - or it might not be. The reality is, even WWI is still too controversial for there to be a reliable "consensus" view. Which means that the entry - whether it's in printed copy or bits - is just going to be some compromise view.

Exactly how does that differ for Wikipedia and any other work? It doesn't. The reality is, having "anyone" be able to edit doesn't mean that "everyone" will. Most people don't care deeply about any particular subject - the ones with an interest (and, of course, the vandals) will be the ones who show up. With the printed encyclopedia, anyone who's views fall outside the current academic consensus will just get cut out immediately. With Wikipedia, they have a chance to get their take peer reviewed and commented on.

Which leads me to the opposite view from Winer, and Ryan, and most other people - I'll take the Wikipedia approach over the standard. It's far more likely to allow a larger set of views fight it out.

You would think that an outfit as large as Google would do a trademark search before rolling out a service:

A trademark dispute has forced Google to re-brand its Gmail web mail service in the UK. Existing users get to retain their Gmail address (at least for now) but from Wednesday onwards new UK users will be given a Googlemail email address instead.

UK-based financial services firm Independent International Investment Research (IIIR) said its subsidiary ProNet Analytics has been using the Gmail name for a web-mail application since the middle of 2002, two years before Google began offering Gmail accounts to consumers. The email service offered by ProNet, by contrast, is used mainly by investors in currency derivatives.

I suspect that the problem here is a US-Centric one - I bet they looked in the US, saw no problems, and went ahead with a world-wide rollout. This is going to be a big problem for companies over the next little while.

There's been a lot of hype recently about Sun and Google coming up with a web based replacement for Office. I've been quietly skeptical about this one for awhile, but this article says everything I wanted to say about it.

The bottom line - the network isn't reliable enough for day to day applications. Heck, that's why I use POP access to gmail - I don't want to have to rely on network connectivity to look at mail. I take planes and trains often enough that being completely cut off from my mail for hours would be a real problem. I don't use web based aggregators for the same reason - I like having offline access (and Comcast makes sure that I have regular, short term offline experiences even while I'm in my office).

The last thing I want is a graphical VT-100 - and I don't need people explaining that reduced functionality and the danger of a complete loss of service is progress, either.

Travis has been posting from OOPSLA

Jon Udell posted on something I saw, but mostly skipped over a couple of days ago - this "LifeHacker" story in the New York Times. Truth be told, since the Times put the TimesSelect thing in place, I've paid a lot less attention to them - I assumed this story was behind that, and moved along (yet another way that the Times has marginalized themselves, but I digress).

Anyway - the heart of the story is this snippet here:

Lots of people complain that office multitasking drives them nuts. But Mark is a scientist of "human-computer interactions" who studies how high-tech devices affect our behavior, so she was able to do more than complain: she set out to measure precisely how nuts we've all become. Beginning in 2004, she persuaded two West Coast high-tech firms to let her study their cubicle dwellers as they surfed the chaos of modern office life. One of her grad students, Victor Gonzalez, sat looking over the shoulder of various employees all day long, for a total of more than 1,000 hours. He noted how many times the employees were interrupted and how long each employee was able to work on any individual task.

When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, "far worse than I could ever have imagined." Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

That's not going to be a productive way to work, regardless of your profession. Jon is hoping for tool support to fix this, but I think that's fundamentally the wrong way to go - and online "status" pages that let other people know how busy you are aren't going to cut it either - people will just blow right past that, deciding that their stuff is more important - how many phone numbers do you run through when you get voice mail for someone on a given line? Do you just stop there? I din't think so :)

Now, I work out of a home office, so the problem of people walking up to me goes away. That leaves the phone (land line and mobile), email, news aggregator, and IM. All of these are easy to ignore, if I want to. The only real way to solve this problem is personal fortitude. You want to focus on a task? Fine - close the door, mount a "do not disturb" sign, and get to work. Technology isn't going to save you here.

This seems a little harsh, but boy, was it funny. Via ArcterJournal.

Jeff Jarvis commented on the splogs this weekend (like everyone else), but there are a couple of interesting comments if you scroll down - have a look at what Steven DenBeste said:

Ultimately there isn’t any permanent solution to this kind of thing. Any system which permits anyone to create readable material on anyone else’s system will be abused by spammers.

The only real solution is to assume that a certain percentage of people out there are hostile, and to design accordingly. Automatic trackback, for instance, was always a terrible idea because it assumed universal good faith.

And then below that, this:

By the way, has it occurred to you that it is economically to Google’s advantage to let the current situation persist? As long as Google can keep its own search results clean, then the spam blogs will make everyone else’s search engines useless and thus drive traffic to Google.

Why would Google want to change the situation? Certainly it would be both illegal and immoral for Google to actively work to pollute the search results of its competitors, but I don’t think that benign neglect of spammer abuse of Blogspot is actionable, and it serves the same purpose. Certainly if that’s what Google is thinking, then it’s slimy. But not illegal, and not actionable. And it’s difficult to see why Google would want to expend any significant effort to try to fix the situation.

Certainly food for thought. Also, make sure to walk through to Elliot's post on splog prevalence on BlogSpot - apparently, it's nearly a third (I'd really love to see historical tracking on that!). Kind of blows a hole in Evan Williams' breezy 1% nonsense...

I suppose the Lisp folks see the same thing, just a bit slower. The evolution of development languages is clearly in the direction of what Smalltalk is, with the great mass of developers being dragged kicking and screaming, begging not to have C syntax taken away from them. Consider the progress:

• With Smalltalk gaining popularity in the late 80's, we had the abortion that is C++ introduced, which at least brought (some) OO concepts out to the masses
• Java came along, which mainstreamed VMs and garbage collection. That was progress, but decent reflection was left out, and the C style was kept
• Ruby and Python are starting to gain ground (especially the former now, with Ruby on Rails). The syntax is still Cish (at least to my eyes), but we've got closures and decent reflection. Not the power or environment that Smalltalk has, but closer

From the perspective of a Smalltalker, it looks like a grudging acceptance that we were right all along, but the foot dragging and wailing can still be heard. Kind of like a toddler being put to bed...

Spotted in SCI FI Wire

David Hasselhoff told Australia's Rove Live TV show that he's acquired the film rights to his old Knight Rider TV series and still plans to turn it into a feature film, according to the Moviehole.net Web site.

Spam hasn't been a huge problem on the CST blogs - for one thing, we have obscurity (my own server) on our side, and, for another, the various blocking schemes I've put in place seem to work pretty well. Even so, it's useful to be able to delete multiple comments at once - so that's a feature of the web admin stuff now. If you login, and go to the post editing page, you can select a post, see all the comments, and select which ones (if any) to delete.

One of the things I bring up here is why overriding base library behavior is often useful - I thought it might be a good idea to give an example of that, and show how you manage it in VisualWorks.

Here's a a view of the Browser, with a method overridden:

I've shrunken the image for space reasons, but in the top right you'll see that the method is red. That indicates that I've overriden a method owned by a different package (WithStyle, in this case) in the posting tool's package. The override is this snippet of code I added:

	(value isNil or: [value isEmpty])
		ifTrue: [value := ParagraphEditor currentSelection].

In the method above, "value" holds a string that will be the default choice in a dialog box that is popped up for data entry. In this case, it's popped up when the user wants to insert an image into the post. I figured it would be nice if the tool remembered the last image that got uploaded, and made that the default choice. As it happened, the WS method was usually leaving that choice blank (thus, requiring me to type it all in).

I spoke to Michael, and he told me that better pluggability there would be a good thing. In the meantime though, I'm stuck - unless I override. So I did that, and you see the way the browser displays it - in a way that is easy to pick out. I can also version this override off separate from the WS code (thus, not perturbing their codebase). Later, after they've addressed this, I simply remove the override (a menu pick in the browser) and adjust my code to deal with their pluggability.

Simple, and it gets the job done - and in the interim - unlike the situation with Java, or C# - I don't have to either wait for the vendor, or write an entire replacement library/wrapper to get around the limitation. Two lines added to an override, and I'm done.

Of course, some people "don't trust developers", so they are happy wearing the chains the vendors hand them...

Gosh forbid I should be able to execute a search and find a book that I might want to buy - no, publishers and authors seem to like the current system, where finding a reference requires a trip to the library (which most people won't make). Has it occurred to these fools that better searching will lead to more sales? Or do they take the same stupid pills that the RIAA and MPAA are on?

Via Scoble, I see that the awful idea that is the Office 12 Ribbon is already spreading. Great - I really wanted more wasted screen space everywhere. The Office 12 team that came up with the Ribbon really, really needs to be flogged.

Better yet, they can come to Columbia, and join the local highway department. Those guys are filled with bad usability ideas for the roads, so the Office 12 folks will fit right in.

PR Differently is pretty sure that his prediction about the demise of large parts of print media is coming along. I'm not about to argue the other side of that one :)

Jonathan Schwartz makes the point that rewrites done just for the sake of a new language/toolkit don't make sense - something the entire industry collectively forgot about a decade ago:

Before I receive 2,000 email critiques, you should know my roots are in desktop software. So lest you think I'm coming at this from the perspective of a knuckle dragging big iron computer guy, that's not me.

As a software guy, here's a simple (though often irritating) rule behind user oriented software: The language in which a product is written has nothing to do with the value it conveys.Coming from the company that produced Java technology, that probably sounds a little odd. But it's a simple truth, especially when it comes to users: if the app's no good, it's no good, even if it's implemented in Java. Or PHP. Or Rails.

...

Because rewriting an app simply to use a new toolkit isn't creating value for consumers. Creating an application or service that delivers unique value is what captures users. And the internet gave some developers a tremendous opportunity to deliver unique value - by radically simplifying basic networking, enabling connectivity and community on a truly global scale.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Dare says that "Web 2.0" is meaningless hype, and quotes Joel Spolsky, who has a good post out on the same topic. Here's Dare's summary:

I feel the same way. I am interested in discussions on the Web as a platform and even folksonomies (not tagging) but the marketplace of ideas has been polluted by all this "Web 2.0" garbage. Once again, I've flipped the bozo bit on Web 2.0. Like Joel, you won't see any use of the term on my blog or in items I link to from now on.

I think they are both dead on target with this. There's a lot of buzzword bingo going on, and it looks like people are starting to spend money stupidly again.

Steve Rubelis down on Flock (something I haven't seen), but that's not really the point of this post. Here's the snippet from Steve that I want to look at:

Last night I tried out Flock, a new Mozilla-based browser that's getting a ton of buzz. The press is chiming in here too. Originally just a handful of people were invited to try Flock, which is in developer preview. Unfortunately, Flock installers quickly spread around town and the company released it out to everyone to try.

That last bit is important - Flock installers quickly spread around town. The error made by the Flock people is in the assumption that you can make a limited release available on the web. If you have something that well read people are going to look at - and comment on - then it will stop being a limited release within a few minutes. Which might be a problem, depending on whether your stuff was really ready for general release.

Bottom line - there's pretty much no such thing as a limited release anymore.

So is this report from Boing Boing some limited ISP problem, a large spam surge, a viral attack of some sort, what? I haven't seen any slowdown myself, so it's rather abstract to me at this point.

Every so often, I make a mistake in the deployment of code from my test server to the production server (the Smalltalk image that runs this and the other blogs here). In those cases, I go back to the methods I updated and look to see what's different. Now, I'd rather not take the server down for this kind of thing, so instead I do something like this and load the patched method into the system:

[self codeThatMightBeWrongHere]
     on: MessageNotUnderstood
     do: [:ex | Transcript show: ex errorString; cr].

Then I do something with the server that will exercise the modified code, and watch the Transcript (scrolling to a file) to see what happens. Once I figure that out, I restore the original code, do more testing on the test server, and deploy the needed fix. All without taking the server down. It's one of the cooler aspects of having a full development system available as your deployed server.

I wouldn't have thought it was possible, but I think I've spotted a well of stupidity that's actually deeper than the one Darl McBride lives in:

Charlotte, N.C.-based Scientigo owns two patents (No. 5,842,213 and No. 6,393,426) covering the transfer of "data in neutral forms." These patents, one of which was applied for in 1997, are infringed upon by the data-formatting standard XML, Scientigo executives assert.

Scientigo intends to "monetize" this intellectual property, Scientigo CEO Doyal Bryant said this week.

And I thought the boys from Eolas were ambitious.

Time for my weekly look at the logs - the BottomFeeder downloads dropped back from the stratospheric levels they reached last week, to a still respectable 403 per day:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
HPUX	672
Windows	637
Mac 8/9	399
Sources	308
Mac X	216
Linux x86	182
Update	175
CE ARM	122
Windows98/ME	29
Linux Sparc	28
Solaris	20
AIX	16
Linux PPC	7
SGI	6
ADUX	3
Source Script	3

Those HP download numbers are a source of constant amazement to me. Off to the html page accesses, where it looks like IE is staging a comeback:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	45.8%
Mozilla	39.9%
Other	7.7%
MSN Bot	2.3%
Google Bot	2.3%
Java	2%

I guess the uptick in readership is driving me more toward the average browser usage, which is still heavily IE. On to the RSS pages:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	27%
BottomFeeder	12.7%
Other	12.6%
Net News Wire	10.3%
BlogSearch	4.8%
Safari RSS	4.4%
Planet Smalltalk	3.5%
NewsGator	3.2%
Magpie	2.8%
RSSReader	2.5%
Internet Explorer	2.4%
SharpReader	2.3%
BlogLines	2.1%
Feed Reader	1.5%
Feed Demon	1.5%
RSS Bandit	1.2%
Liferea	1.2%
Google Bot	1%
Jakarta	1%
JetBrains	1%
News Fire	1%

Looks like the RSS aware portion of the audience is still very Mozilla and Mac centric - with the rest of my audience spread across a very diverse range of tools. On the other hand, if you look at the tools owned by NewsGator now, they have 15% of my audience.

Adam Connor brings up the most common reaction I see when a non-mainstream language is proposed:

They do care about price (including long-term maintenance), but there are a lot of other considerations. A brilliant Lisp programmer may produce a more effective, maintainable solution 1, but what if he leaves? Hiring Lisp programmers might be tricky, and thus entails risk. Moreover, most businesses would rather hire a strong business analyst with so-so programming skills than a brilliant programmer with so-so business skills. The reason is simple: the business analyst will produce a pedestrian solution to the right problem, whereas the brilliant programmer will produce an elegant solution to the wrong problem. Or so the thinking goes; of course, the ideal is to get someone who is strong at everything, but they are scarce and priced commensurately.

Seems that learning a new language is a nearly impassable hurdle, at least in the minds of a lot of the industry.

ComputerWorld has a story that runs counter to the conventional wisdom - internally developed software is becoming more common?

Packaged software is getting whacked ...

... by a shift inside IT to develop apps internally. That's the conclusion drawn by Ken Berryman, a consultant at McKinsey & Co. who also spoke at SoftSummit 2005. According to Berryman, New York-based McKinsey in 1998 estimated that 31% of business applications were internally developed. By 2003, that percentage had jumped to 42%, while packaged apps fell from 32% of the mix to 28%, he says. Berryman says he

expects the trend to continue because there is now "a much more standard software stack" for IT, including everything from middleware to network protocols. Plus, he says, development tools are improving.

I wonder if this is a "real" jump, or a Sarbanes-Oxley induced jump?

I just love this ComputerWorld story on "object based storage" - talking about the idea like it's a new one. Maybe the author of this piece should visit Gemstone or Objectivity. Sheesh:

Serving as a sort of boot camp for scattered data, object-based storage techniques thrive in organizations that need heavy doses of discipline both to appease hovering regulators and strengthen internal data retention and retrieval methods.

Here's how it works: Object-based archiving technology corrals disparate data files - documents, images, video clips or audio files - into content "objects" tagged with metadata to make the information searchable regardless of location. Also called content-aware or content-addressable storage, the technology is still in its infancy but is often hailed as a fast and easy way to pool and manage large data sets.

Back to the future!

I love this InfoWorld article for the sheer lack of self awareness involved. Writing from the "trenches" of IT, we get:

If there's a happy ending, this is it: The evil empire of bureaucracy never realizes that IT is awesomely adept at subverting authority. We attend teleconferences from our desk, where we multitask. We fill out the innumerable forms "they" insist they need by copying and pasting from other documents. We swiftly learn what they consider the right answer and give it back to them as quickly as we can, so we can get back to work.

In short, instead of confronting the enemy head on, we move into guerrilla-warfare mode. Long live the rebel forces!

Sorry to burst your bubble, but for too many of us, the "they" you speak of is IT, and the "rebel forces" are the rest of the organization desperately trying to get work done in the face of mindless IT "standards" that get rammed down our throats.

Or a Halloween party, at least. My wife and daughter always go to town for this holiday - here's a small shot of what they put me up to:

Spotted in digg NASA has a very sharp picture of the Sun available - check it out.

The web is a marvelous thing - sometimes it even immortalizes the otherwise irrelevant typo. Witness "Instant Massaging"

I've been reading "Red Star Rogue" - a history of a Soviet sub that apparently tried to launch a nuclear warhead at Pearl Harbor in 1968. It's an amazing book - I'll have to look for other information on this incident after I finish it. The context of the times is interesting as well - as this rogue strike was being attempted, you also had the Pueblo incident and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. In other words, lots of bad things happening all at once. Kind of amazing to me to consider just how close things got to global war when I hadn't even reached the age of 7...

Inessential hits on one of the ugly truths about free software (which is separate from open source) - if a given niche in software goes free, you end up with 80% solutions:

There are some email clients I personally like—Mailsmith and mutt, in particular—but I’m not the first person or the last to say that there is no Ultimate Email Client for OS X. Justin is right in that nobody can afford to create it. Even if you made Pretty Much the Greatest Email Client Ever, it would be hard to compete against Mail.app and gmail and so on. Email clients are like air: people don’t want to pay for something so basic. (Okay, some rare people will.) What’s frustrating is the sense that, by the year 2005, we shouldhave a great email client. It’s not like it’s new technology. It could be done. The problem is the economics.

Bug Bash asks what we think of a couple of MS marketing campaigns - the dinosaur campaign is one I don't think much of at all:

The Office “dinosaur”campaign. I can tell you that in the hallways of a certain Large Northwest Software Company, this campaign is the topic of many lively impromptu debates, to the point where one of my favorite conversation starters there is “so, are you pro-dinosaur or anti-dinosaur?” Me, I’m pro-dinosaur. I like the campaign. It’s attention-grabbing. It also does a good job of using humor to balance what amounts to a rather bold challenge to the target audience (i.e. to upgrade to the latest version of Office or risk obsolescence). The dinosaur campaign seems to inspire a “love it or hate it” reaction, however, so I’d love to hear what others think about it.

Here's my reaction - any campaign that insults the target customers is a mistake. This campaign does that in spades.

It's hard to tell whether the search engines have done anything concrete against splogs, or whether the wave has passed temporarily. I say that because of what I see with referer spam - it's quiet for awhile, and then all of a sudden there's a wave of new crap (which is why the referer list for the CST blogs is no longer public). Anyway, I posted on the raw amount of splog content sitting in my aggregator awhile back (here), and I figured it might be interesting to have another look. So, I ran my test script again, using a cutoff date of October 22 - to see what's been coming up since then:

Feed Title	Total Items	BlogSpot Items	Splog Percentage
IceRocket: Smalltalk	80	3	4
PubSub: Smalltalk	30	14	47
IceRocket: Cincom	17	4	24
Feedster Smalltalk	55	7	13

PubSub is still getting hit pretty hard (mind you, my script understates the damage - I'm looking only at Blogspot splogs here - eyeballing notes a few others). Seems like the other engines are addressing this problem a lot better, but again - you have to keep that leading caveat in mind.

Wired News reports that some companies are blocking blogs at the firewall:

Robert Mason (not his real name) would love to spend a few minutes during lunch catching up on blog posts from around the web, but his company doesn't allow it. The financial institution where Mason works as a vice president has security filters set up to block access to -- among other things -- any website that contains the phrase "blog" in the URL.

What's more, says Mason, such practices are becoming prevalent in corporate America, particularly in financial services. Mason sits on a roundtable privacy group of 20 of the country's largest banks. "My best understanding is that my company's anti-blog stance is the industry norm," he says.

If that's not a sign of mainstream arrival, I don't know what is :)

In VisualWorks, the Web Toolkit makes it pretty easy to create ASP/JSP style applications, complete with support for servlets. The way you get a servlet invoked is the same whether you use Smalltalk or anything else; you simply name the servlet appropriately at the client side, in the web page.

Take this blog, for example - there's a login page for the site bloggers to use if they want to post from the web form or use the online admin tools - here's the snippet from the SSP (Smalltalk Server Page):

<form action="servlet/LoginServlet" method="post" name="blogLoginForm">

Looks pretty normal, doesn't it? That's the point - you don't have to do anything special from the client side to support the web toolkit. You can even use JSP tags - I have no experience with that, but there are examples that ship with the product. How do things look on the server? This form is very basic - two fields, one for username, one for password. Here's the servlet definition:

Smalltalk.Blog defineClass: #LoginServlet
	superclass: #{Blog.AbstractServlet}
	indexedType: #none
	private: false
	instanceVariableNames: ''
	classInstanceVariableNames: ''
	imports: ''
	category: 'Blog'

AbstractServlet is a simple subclass of SingleThreadModelServlet, with some code specific to the needs of the blog server. There are two servlet classes in VW - the one I just mentioned, and HttpServlet. What's the difference? HttpServlet passes the request and response as arguments into the API methods, while SingleThreadModelServlet passes them in as instance variables - i.e., it maintains them as state information. Which one is right depends on your usage.

The entry point for a post servlet is going to be #doPost: or #doPost:response: - the latter for the stateless model. Here's how that looks in the LoginServlet:

doPost
	| model userOrNil |
	model := BlogUser new.
	model appkey: self appkey.
	model getInputFrom: request parameters.
	userOrNil := model validate.
	userOrNil notNil 
		ifTrue: [self session initialize.
				self session at: 'currentUser' put: userOrNil.
				self determineDestinationFor: userOrNil]
		ifFalse: [self redirectTo: (self handler linkNamed: 'blogLogin')]

Basically, I grab the input, ask it to validate (which checks the input against the valid users of this blog), and then determine where login should take them. In general, there are two types of users - people who can post, and people who can post and have admin rights. The method #determineDestinationFor: redirects valid users to the appropriate page, based on their access rights.

And that's pretty much it - the heart of this servlet is that one method, with the supporting code being simple lookup stuff. The bottom line - getting a Smalltalk servlet working is pretty easy - and, since it's Smalltalk, you can debug the code during test. In fact, when I was refining the MetaWebLog API servlet, I did just that - one of the bloggers on the site tested a client against my test server, and I had breakpoints in to see what I was being sent (and more importantly, what I was expected to send back). The fact that the servlet was just another Smalltalk object - rather than a file artifact that would have to be loaded, flushed, and reloaded repeatedly - made the whole things a lot easier to deal with.

There's a reason they say "measure twice, cut once" - when you do it the other way, you get this:

It's hard to see, but if you look above the TV mount, you'll see three holes - Those are ffrom my first crack, before I realized that the TV wouldn't fit in that space. Dohhh

My parents live in Melbourne beach, FL (the barrier island side), so I called them up this morning. They downplayed the storm's effect in their area, but then they sent a couple of pictures - the winds there were stronger than they had thought while they were locked inside. They didn't lose power (otherwise, I wouldn't have these pictures :) ) - but there was some slight damage. Here's a shot of the community pool, which now has less fence than it did yesterday:

And here's a shot of the Indian River side, looking at a pier that took some damage:

Dare thinks that this is the reason publishers (and some authors) are worried about Google's plan to scan books and make them searchable:

So what does this have to do with Google Print? Well, I personally don't buy computer books anymore thanks to the Web and search engines. The last book I bought was Beginning RSS and Atom Programmingand that's only because I wrote one of the forewards.

The trouble is, looking up technical information isn't like reading a book for pleasure or research purposes. Sure, I could haul my laptop up to the bedroom - but it's a whole lot less trouble to have a real book - and the book doesn't need power. The point is, I don't see a lot of people deciding to read the 7th "Harry Potter" book online. Looking for a bit of technical information isn't at all like trying to follow a plot line.

Looks like politics isn't the only place we find "Fake, but Accurate" as an argument - some of the most well respected people in the analyst game have done the same thing - Tom Peters, for instance:

Confession number three: This is pretty small beer, but for what it's worth, okay, I confess: We faked the data. A lot of people suggested it at the time. The big question was, How did you end up viewing these companies as "excellent" companies? A little while later, when a bunch of the "excellent" companies started to have some down years, that also became a huge accusation: If these companies are so excellent, Peters, then why are they doing so badly now? Which I'd say pretty much misses the point.

Umm, no Tom, it is the point. If the data is inaccurate, then you have a set of anecdotal evidence and assumptions. But go ahead, do some hand waving - like this:

Start by using common sense, by trusting your instincts, and by soliciting the views of "strange" (that is, nonconventional) people. You can always worry about proving the facts later.

Shorter Peters: "Just make crap up, and then prove by assertion."

Joe Winchester expounds on the Smalltalk roots (idea-wise) of Eclipse, and then steps in it:

The Eclipse roll call, not only in terms of the core team that Mike has created around him, but in terms of its comitters and participants is like a who's who of the old Smalltalk rearguard. At Eclipsecon 2005 it's amazing how many of the speakers, the companies exhibiting products, are the same ones who were part of the Smalltalk community, but also amazing how it is bigger and better than Smalltalk ever was.

Oh? Can you modify the tools as they are running? And before you say that's absurd, what if I want to - on an ad-hoc basis - modify the tools in some way? Heck, using Smalltalk, I can do that to a running application - I've done that, as demonstrated here. With a tool like Eclipse? Sure, if you want to make the change in some limited (i.e., in one of the exposed APIs) way, and then either restart or start a new instance. Rinse, Repeat.

Heck, I have this level of "muckability" in my application server - the one that runs this blog. How do you think I modify it? I sure don't take it down and restart it. Eclipse is in no way, shape, or form "better" than a Smalltalk image. At best, it's a pale reflection, showing what a bunch of Smalltalk literate developers can do with a lower wattage language.

Ed Burnette has thoughts on this here.

Well, the Google Web Accelerator is back. Some people are completely panicked (again), and others are in full "tut, tut" mode. I don't know. I was kind of ambivalent about this 5 months ago, but now? I think I'm still kind of ambivalent. I see Bill de hÓra's point about how assumptions are what a lot of the web is built on - but at the same time, I see where the 37 Signals guys are coming from too. Still - Bill's more right - these kinds of bots aren't going away, and this is hardly going to be the last such thing running around on the web.

"Surface" hasn't just jumped the shark - it's killed the shark, and is currently dancing on its grave. I'm not sure I've seen such concentrated stupidity before, unless Lucas or Berman have been involved.

Oh gosh, and following the links for this post I ran across worse news - someone has given Berman money for another Star Trek movie. Clearly, the universe is out of balance.

Joel has a concise explanation of what the splog storm is about - it's all about gaming Google AdSense in order to scam money from them. Thus the scraping of real content - it makes it harder for Google to tell that the links are total crap. This is Google's problem to solve now - and, as Doc points out, the splogs aren't limited to BlogSpot.

The posting tool now has support for Technorati tag addition - if you grab the latest update, you'll see a new option under the "Post" menu. Once you post, the tags are part of the body of the post, and will need to be edited as such. It's basic, but it's a start.

Slashdot reports that laptop screens (and thus, laptops) are getting bigger:

With so many DVDs featuring letterboxed or wide-screen versions of films, consumers' fascination with larger screen sizes is changing the size and shape of the laptop industry, stated an IDC report issued on Monday. The wide-screen format, found in only 39.2 percent of laptops expected to ship this year, will become dominant in mid- to late 2006.

I feel like a voice in the wilderness on this, but I don't think handhelds are going to overtake laptops anytime soon. For one thing, typing with your thumbs gets old fast, and it leads to injury (carpal tunnel, anyone)? The closer you get to a full size keyboard, the better off you are.

Second, video - Yes, I know video on the new iPod is kind of neat. However, I'm not at all sure that I want to watch more than a snippet of video on that size screen. The small form factor works perfectly for audio. I'm not at all sure that it works well for much else.

Winer thinks we should wait for publishers to tell us about their books, and not index them as Google wants to:

The likely reason they insist on opt-out instead of giving an inch and letting it be opt-in -- very few publishers would opt-in, and at least some would forget to opt-out.

To use the example he brings up - iTunes - had Apple let the RIAA folks do this one, then we would still be waiting for a service, and paying $5 a song when it finally rolled out with DRM that would make the Apple system look like an OSS playground. There's also this, from Wired - not all authors are on board with the publishers on this one:

Google's plan to scan library book collections and make them searchable may be drawing ire from publishers and authors' advocates, but some obscure and first-time writers are lining up on the search engine's side of the dispute -- arguing that the benefits of inclusion in the online database outweigh the drawbacks.

"A cover does sell a book to a certain extent, but once you're intrigued by a cover you want to dig deeper," said Meghann Marco, whose first book, Field Guide to the Apocalypse, was published in May.

Some authors think that - wait for it - making their books easier to find will help sales. What a shocker! Winer's hatred of "bigCorps" (unless they have big checks) is blinding him here.

Here's the thing - Google already indexes copyrighted works - everything we write on the web is copyrighted, so far as I know (IANAL). Google crawls that stuff (as do the other search engines) and indexes it all, making content easier to find. What they propose to do here is the same thing, but with books that tend not to exist in an easily searchable form. Ultimately, if it all works out, it'll be easier to find books I might be interested in, and easier to buy them as well. Should we require opt-in for indexing of the web, too? The way it works now is opt-out via robots.txt. Does Winer propose that we reverse that? If not, why not? By Winer's *cough* argument *cough*, our rights are being violated as we speak....

Google Web Accelerator is not making David Heinemeir Hansson happy.

Someone explain the difference to Chris Pirillo

Is it okay to be scared now? There's a new Google app that's set to be unleashed soon. Google Base? "Google Base is Google's database into which you can add all types of content. We'll host your content and make it searchable online for free." This is either really good, or really bad - depending on how you look at it. As a Google shareholder, I'm sure this is good news (now your company is worth more than God). But my spidey senses are tingling. The very thing we feared Microsoft would try to do with the Internet, Google is doing. Do you understand what's happening - truly?

We're potentially giving the Internet to Google, people. With great power comes great responsibility. I just hope that someone does not set us up the bomb.

Sheesh. GWA is the end of the web as we know it, and GoogleBase is going to turn us all into robots. In other news, Chicken Little is out there.

Here's something you don't see every day: surfing at a NYC beach:

The feed at Planet Smalltalk has been broken for the last few days; it's fixed now (at least, it loaded into BottomFeeder just fine). The Feed Validator reports an encoding mix-up, but that's small stuff in the grand scheme of things.

I'm in the process of uploading a new Development build for BottomFeeder - this would be a full build, under the dev links on the download page.

I'll update this post when it's ready. The reason for the build? I've updated (in dev) the main BottomFeeder components, and the WS (xhtml display) component, and having those load in at startup can be slow.

Update: The dev build is up now.

Here's a great post on the dangers that can arise from the common "devil's advocate" approach:

Tom Kelley--general manager of IDEO--believes that "devil's advocate may be the biggest innovation killer in America today." We've all been in a meeting where a passionate idea is put forth but someone plays devil's advocate and drains the life out of the room. Invoking "the awesome protective power" lets the devil's advocate be incredibly negative and slash your idea to shreds, all while appearing not only innocent but reasoned, balanced, intelligent... all attributes loaded with business "goodness".

Read the whole thing - it's good. The important take-away is to remember that criticism isn't enough - you need to have an explanation of why something else (maybe the status quo) is better.

By "We" I mean those of us that work in the technology sector. The problem? Drowning in jargon that means different things to different people. Look at what police (and fire, etc) are doing about the problem:

It's time to say over-and-out to 10-4. The Department of Homeland Security recently mandated that police, fire, and other first-responder groups no longer signal everything they do in an emergency with a speedy 10-code - as in, say, 10-76, meaning "on our way." Why kill the jargon? It turns out that the codes have different meanings from place to place. What's more, some agencies have added 11- and 12-code systems, and others have dropped the whole numeric thing altogether. When multiple agencies responded to major disasters, people could barely understand each other. So, over the next year, as fire and police stations around the country begin adopting the new protocol for management of wide-scale emergencies, their drills will include an amazingly interoperable radio communication system: plain English.

Ponder that the next time you read one of those TLA ridden documents expounding on the benefits of SOA using an ESB...

Martin Fowler has a nice roundup on this year's OOPSLA. I especially liked the quotes from various people he included at the bottom of the post. I especially like the quote from Don Roberts:

Static types give me the same feeling of safety as the announcement that my seat cushion can be used as a flotation device.

Closed events are a bad thing, unless I get invited

Based on the comment below, I was referring to this item:

Next Tues, Nov 1, Microsoft is briefing press and analysts on a new strategy. The two presenters are Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie. Thanks for the invite, I'll be there

Not the podcasting conference. It's easy to confuse them on Winer's blog, because he wouldn't know what a post title was if it beat him about the head and shoulders...

We have an old ReplayTV 4040 unit - well out of warranty, and - sadly - well out of decent condition. For the last little while, the device has been rebooting on a regular basis, often multiple times during a recording. So - we went out and looked for a replacement hard drive. We found a vendor who sells drives with the OS pre-installed, so we bought a larger drive than the one we had. It all looks good - it booted up, and we are now setting up the recording options. It was all pretty easy - just like the instructions here.

Can you pass an 8th grade math test?

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct! Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?