Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

John Dvorak reads the Riot Act to the European Publishers Council. You remember those folks - I commented on their witless theories here. Balsemão deserves a lot of ridicule over this.

Martin has posted a lot of details on what's been done with X.509 and ASN.1 in Cincom Smalltalk, Winter 2005 Edition. Check it out.

I can't follow the link from Digg, but it sounds like artists are starting to get annoyed with Sony - likely because of damage to their sales. There was a piece on this in the NYT a week or so ago (sadly, the Times has now tossed it behind a pay wall) - if the entire DRM idea gets tarred by Sony's missteps, all the better. In the end, the artists are the ones who take the biggest hit when people stop buying CD's from a specific label.

Bobby Woolf falls into a common trap - he assumes that most people need massive scaling for their projects:

The article talks about tasks that don't require much business logic. Google just displays search results, e-mail, and map images. Yahoo is the poster child for portals, aggregating existing info and integrating it on the glass. They both use read-only data that can be highly replicated; users can configure the display. Those tasks require minimal programming logic, so PHP scripting and a simple SQL database be all you need (plus a Web server and OS). Even then, huge sites like Google and Yahoo must be doing much more than just using PHP.

But a lot of sites need more than scripting. Do your users need to: Find airline tickets? Trade stocks? Does your implementation need to: Integrate with EISs? Enforce security? Coordinate multiple users updating the same data concurrently? Good luck with PHP scripts. You're gonna need J2EE or .NET for that. I can tell you that this is what WebSphere (WAS) customers are doing.

The dirty secret of the software industry is that most people are, in fact, building fairly simple applications. Most users of things like WebSphere are using it simply as a JSP container - and that's a pretty complex (and expensive) container. Especially when you could build the same thing in Smalltalk in half the time, and for a fraction of the expense. Not to mention that you wouldn't need the army of consultants that WebSphere seems to require.

He goes on to analogize the current debate to the early 90's Smalltalk vs. PowerBuilder debates, and says this:

So LAMP may well work if you want open-source everything and just want to display (and CRUD?) your database. But for full-blown applications hosted on the Web, LAMP won't cut it. AJAX is a cool display technology (see Ajax and Java), but it's only a display; you still need a server behind it running something (LAMP, Java, .NET, etc.). .NET is on the same level as J2EE, and c# is very Java-like, so then that comparison is the old Microsoft-only vs. semi-open-standards and write once, run everywhere argument.

I'd bet good money that the scaling issues faced by Google, eBay, and Amazon are far beyond anything that most web developers will ever need. Funny that they didn't buy into the J2EE/WebSphere camp then; however did they manage it? According to Bobby, it's because they have simple applications. I'd disagree - I'd say it's because they made a rational choice to avoid the absurd levels of complexity in J2EE.

Hat tip to James Governor

There hasn't been a lot of reporting on New Orleans of late, but a post by Dave Winer got me thinking about the city - it's going to come back, but it won't ever be what it was. Have a look at the history of Galveston, TX, before and after the 1900 storm.

Before the storm, Galveston was an up and coming commercial center, with lots of the nascent oil business going there. Afterwards, that all went to Houston. I expect a similar thing to happen to New Orleans, including the port itself - lots of business that went elsewhere (and found that it could get by elsewhere) simply won't come back. Like Galveston in 1900, the risks will look too high, and - if a full rebuild is necessary - business owners will look to mitigate their risks.

Galveston didn't disappear, of course, and neither will New Orleans. However, Galveston is no longer a commercial center - it's a tourist location. New Orleans is likely looking at the same fate.

Travis points out that - when you look at the implementation details - Smalltalk I/O can be as fast as C.

The music industry isn't pleased with what Apple is doing with the iTunes store - BusinessWeek lets them have a soapbox:

Not necessarily. As has been true since the start, iPod owners mostly fill up their players from their own CD collections or swipe tunes from file-sharing sites. Now legal downloads may be losing their luster. According to Nielsen SoundScan, average weekly download sales as of Nov. 27 fell 0.44% vs. the third quarter. Says independent media analyst Richard Greenfield: "We're not seeing the kind of dramatic growth we should given the surge in sales of iPods and other MP3 players."

Which brings us to a grand irony: Apple, which launched the digital music revolution, may now be holding it back. Critics say Apple's proprietary technology and its refusal to offer more ways to buy or to stray from its rigid 99 cents a song model is dampening legal sales of digital tunes. "The villain in the story is the iPod," says Chris Gorog, CEO of Napster Inc. (NAPS ), which sells both subscriptions and downloads. "You have this device consumers love, but they're being restricted from buying anything other than downloads from Apple. People are bored with that."

Umm, yeah - we'd much rather buy from bozo outfits that install rootkits on our machines. People are "bored" with the Apple store? Well heck Chris - that sounds like a heck of a business opportunity to me. How about you try *gasp* competing with Apple instead of whining about their business model? Hmm - I decided I'd take a walk over to the Napster store and have a look around - pricing information on their subscription service seems to be pretty well hidden. I wandered by the FAQ, and came across this:

What happens to the music I downloaded to my PC if I cancel my Membership?

If you cancel your Membership, the music you downloaded from Napster will no longer be playable at the end of your current billing period. You can still use Napster Light to play and organize all of the music you own without a membership fee. Access Napster Light with same user name and password. With Napster Light, you can also sample 30-second clips and buy songs for 99¢ and albums from $6.95. If you decide to resume your Napster Membership, your Napster music library will be restored and your downloaded music will be playable again.

And they have the gall (later in the page) to call what Apple does lock in. I can burn CD's off of iTunes to my heart's content. If it's stuff I bought, they don't bring across anything but basic track info, but they don't render my collection worthless either. I'm not sure how this restriction plugs into Napster Lite, where you can buy songs one at a time for 99c. But the main membership - info on which I did find in the FAQ - costs $14.95 per month. Hey Chris - I'm bored with that. Looking over at iTunes, I notice that Apple just charges me 99c a song, and doesn't turn my music off if I decide I like another service better.

Which one of these do you think was set up with the help of our *cough* friends *cough at the RIAA, and which one wasn't?

Some actual facts pop out:

The scientific magazine "Nature" has compared 42 articles in both the encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Experts in their field were given the task to check for factual errors. To the surprise of nature, both encyclopedias were containing similar amounts of errors.

Will the relentless Wikipedia critics get a clue, or decide that this isn't worth noticing?

Bob reports that Cincom Smalltalk, Winter 2005 Edition, is ready for release. It's in the Cincom release machinery now; I'll report back with expected shipping dates when I have them. As well, once that happens, the NC download will flip to the latest stuff.

Lispian explains why the one true language theory of software development doesn't work.

I tried to make sense of this post from Gillmor, but it was too many non-sentences jumbled together, with the word "Attention" tossed in a few times to prevent me from nodding off. I may be no fan of Office - and I still think that the Ribbon in Office 12 is an utter atrocity - but if this article is what passes for opposing ideas, then the Redmondites have nothing to worry about.

Scott Adams makes some good points about making things free:

Recently I offered my book, God’s Debris, for free on the Internet, under the theory that the people who like it might be inspired to buy the sequel in hard copy. 170,000 people downloaded it in two weeks. Many of them presumably e-mailed it to other people who e-mailed it to yet other people. I’m guessing half a million people read it in the past month. It’s a love-it-or-hate-it kind of book, so let’s say 250,000 people loved it. That seems about right based on the reviews on Amazon.

His idea was to charge for the follow on book, as kind of an experiment - the results?

I don’t know the exact number, but it appears to be less than a thousand. An alarming number of readers were confused about this whole process and wrote to ask if they could also have the sequel for free.

This is an obvious problem (although it seems to go right past the deep thinkers at Sun, who seem to think that revenues will just flood in if they make everything free). There are a few different reactions to the challenge posed by free competition. On the one hand, you see reactions like the ones from Sun - and I think they'll run into the same issue that Scott Adams did.

The other common reaction is the one pursued by the RIAA - rage against the technology that enables free downloads, and try to be like the little dutch boy, fingers in every dike breach. Almost no one takes the approach that Jobs was smart enough to see at Apple - come up with a reasonable price and download system that encourages people to do things legally without trying to take them to the cleaners.

The Apple approach leads to growth and happy consumers - the RIAA approach leads to stupid stuff like the lawsuits they are using (which alienates customers and prospects), and self defeating DRM approaches (Sony). Funny, then, that Apple is the odd man out in the music business. I guess inertia is a more powerful force than success. Let's see if Microsoft is paying attention - will they stay with PVP-OVM, and end up stunned by angry users?

Andy Bower (Object-Arts, makers of Dolphin Smalltalk) has some thoughts on being a Smalltalker - here's his summarization of Java:

We started building Dolphin in 1995 and, when Java floated in on the Internet bubble later that year, our disappointment was palpable. It wasn't just that Java was getting very big, very fast and was obviously going to make it harder to sell Dolphin to the masses. It was more that, really, the designers had just missed the point. Or at the very least they had missed an opportunity. Yes, they had a virtual machine and garbage collection, which was more than C++ ever did but what about all that other stuff they could have taken from Smalltalk? What about dynamic typing? What about keyword selectors to aid readability? What about proper Reflection? What about "Everything is an object"? Heck, you couldn't even add two Integers together. It was very sad.

And .NET? Recall that Dolphin is a Windows specific Smalltalk, so .NET was potentially a good thing for them. Except:

With the advent of .NET, I must admit we thought it was all going to change. Here was a virtual machine that was designed to run multiple languages using a common "object" model. Okay, it only ran on Windows but, hey, so does Dolphin so we weren't too unhappy. But where was all that good stuff again? Yes it's all marginally better than it was with Java but, really, writing a performant Smalltalk on top of the current CLR is just impractical.

We saw the same thing here at Cincom. We seriously considered hosting ObjectStudio on top of .NET (and in 2003, Microsoft called me a few times to gauge our interest). The problems are as Andy says - it's just not possible to build a performant Smalltalk on .NET. The JVM is even worse that way. There's reason to be cheerful though:

The great thing from our point of view is that, if you like Ruby you are pretty well sure to like Smalltalk so, hopefully, we're about to get a new influx of dynamic, everything is an object, programmers and that can only be a good thing for Dolphin and for computer science. It's taken 25 years but we're nearly back there.

Yep. After a ten year road to nowhere, the industry might be rediscovering actual progress.

Looks like Sony has a lot of ground to make up on the PS3 - if this report from Merrill Lynch is correct:

According to a report from Merrill Lynch, published in Japanese magazine Toyo Keizai, Sony is set to lose over US $1 billion on the Playstation 3 in the year following its launch. The report indicates that Sony may be willing to sell the console at less than the production cost - said to be around 54,000 yen (almost US $500) - in an effort to gain a significant share of the market.

That's a huge pile of cash to burn through - they better hope that the negative halo they gained from the DRM mess doesn't bleed over into this space.

TypeLess has been a plugin for BottomFeeder for a long time now - but at some point in the last 3 months, a change in some of the XML code broke the way settings got written out. The way this manifested was in a failure to load settings from disk - so you could run TypeLess once, and then it would fail if you saved settings and tried again. Here's the fix if you have seen that:

1. Delete the file Typeless.xml in the BottomFeeder directory
2. Grab the Typeless update via the upgrade tool in BottomFeeder
3. Open TL, and save settings.

After that, it should all work right. Sorry about that.

Hey look - these clowns at Visto who are suing Microsoft think they invented TCP/IP and various mail protocols:

Visto has been at the forefront of developing mobile communications solutions for nearly ten years. Company co-founder Daniel Méndez and others developed the system to allow consumers to securely receive their email and other sensitive data via mobile phones or other mobile devices while traveling. Méndez and Visto went on to patent the system that drives email from personal or business servers to mobile devices like cell phones and allows users to access sensitive data and email stored behind highly secure corporate firewalls.

So if I have Cincom Smalltalk installed on a "Smart Phone", and I use IMAP to access a mail server, am I infringing their patents? Their CEO, Brian Bogosian apparently thinks so. I guess I'll have to watch which devices I use to collect email with in the future. Sheesh, what a maroon.

Steve Kelly weighs in on a little brouhaha in the DSM world - his CEO, Juha-Pekka Tolvanen posted a quote from Grady Booch, at an industry panel. Grady responded, both in comments and on his own blog, that he'd been misquoted.

It might have stayed there, except Steve dug up a number of other people at the event who have Booch saying what Juha said he said. Now, Steve is an straight shooter - he's not one to run wild with an accusation - so I'm inclined to follow him on this one.

Ebiquity has taken a look at the ping-o-sphere - specifically, at the pings that hit servers like weblogs.com. The results are not terribly surprising - around 3/4ths of all pings are bogus:

In the next step we used our work on splog detection to detect splogs (and hence spings) among the english blogs. Our detection mechanism is close to 90% accurate. As shown in the charts below pings from blogs average around 8K per hour and those from splogs average around 25K. [ed: follow the link for the charts]

Clearly almost 3 out of 4 pings are spings! Going back further to the source of these spings, we observed that more than 50% of claimed blogs pinging weblogs.com are splogs.

Ouch. That means that any of the services that rely on pings are going to end up using (or, are already using) the same kinds of techniques that email clients and servers use to identify spam. Of course, with that, we get false positives (i.e., good messages getting junked).

So that got me thinking about the piece Doc Searls did awhile back on the net, the carriers, and who charges what. Specifically, I came back to this:

There's nothing wrong with being in the bandwidth business, of course. But some of these big boys want to go farther with it. They don't see themselves as a public utility selling a pure base-level service, such as water or electricity (which is what they are, by the way, in respect to the Net). They see themselves as a source of many additional value-adds, inside the pipes. They see opportunities to sell solutions to industries that rely on the Net--especially their natural partner, the content industry.

They see a problem with freeloaders. On the tall end of the power curve, those 'loaders are AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other large sources of the container cargo we call "content". Out on the long tail, the freeloaders are you and me. The big 'loaders have been getting a free ride for too long and are going to need to pay. The Information Highway isn't the freaking interstate. It's a system of private roads that needs to start charging tolls. As for the small 'loaders, it hardly matters that they're a boundless source of invention, innovation, vitality and new business. To the carriers, we're all still just "consumers". And we always will be.

Well, the spammers are also freeloaders. A large part of the problem is the simple fact that - unlike sending physical junk mail - the cost for sending junk email, or setting up splogs (or sending out pings from them) is pretty much zero. Now, I'm not saying that the carriers are "the good guys" - far from it. But one of the complexities that Doc didn't really touch on is why the public - and a fair amount of the technically literate public - might be willing to go along with their vision. Net users are inundated by junk mail, web searches are clogged by bozo results, and real (and reported) virus/worm attacks are perceived to be rampant.

If the carriers get the things Doc is afraid of, these things will be a large part of the reason.

Troy blogged about the Technorati support for RSS tag feeds - it turns out that you can add support for that directly to BottomFeeder via the search building wizard. Under the Search menu, hit "Search Feed Builder". Then, click on the "Define Builder" button. You can fill in that dialog box like this:

Then, just go back to the search wizard itself, select Technorati from the drop down menu, and enter the tag you want to search for. Don't worry about spaces; the tool encodes that stuff for you.

The Yankees are interested in Garciaparra? Why? Here's what ESPN has to say:

Garciaparra is believed to be deciding among four finalists -- the Yankees, Dodgers, Indians and Astros. Tellem has not been willing to identify those teams but said Garciaparra viewed all of his finalists as "attractive options," and is "weighing them all carefully."

There have been indications over the last 24 hours, however, that the Yankees and Indians have grown less optimistic about their chances of signing Garciaparra. The Indians are believed to be concerned that Garciaparra won't prefer a job as an every-day right fielder. And the Yankees apparently believe that Garciaparra would prefer to play first base in Los Angeles over a job as a first baseman-DH in New York, in part because he owns two homes in southern California.

Good gosh, the Yankees need pitching, not another first baseman with stone hands.

Troy reported a crashing issue with BottomFeeder on the OS X platform - I was able to reproduce it on my mini, and I'm in the bowels of the application debugging it. I'm not sure what it is yet, but I'm on the trail. At this point, if you see this problem, please let me know

Update: The new files are uploaded. Just grab the new Mac files

I found and fixed the Mac issue. I'm going to push new builds for that platform, but in the meantime, here's the fix:

• Start BottomFeeder
• Don't select anything in the tree view
• On the toolbar, select the third icon from the left, and download LibTidy
• Restart BottomFeeder, and it should work fine

My apologies for this - if you would rather download an entire new build, I'm doing that now, and will update this post when I have it

Cees noticed that MS has finally realized that the graphics engine doesn't belong in the kernel:

Well, well, well. After 15 years, the original NT group is being proven right: Microsoft is moving the graphics out of the kernel again, reversing a decision that lots and lots of people frowned upon when they moved graphics into the kernel between NT 3.51 and NT4. Back then, most people concluded that it was the major reason that NT4 wasn’t just as rock-solid as NT3, and it seems that they’ve finally gotten the message.

I wonder how many kernel hacks ought to be removed now that they aren't trying to speed up Doom anymore...

We are going to have a slight hiccup in the winter release - we found that we have to re-package, due to a small installer problem - a "typical" install could lead to confusing results (especially in the non-commercial release). So, we are doing a re-package, and should have that all ready early next week. However, Cincom takes a holiday during the week after Christmas, so that will push the official release out until after the new year.

LtU has a post up on access to archived PDFs of the Smalltalk Report:

For 1996 there's a link to each of the pdf files and there's a pdf index for the earlier issues 1991-1995 afaict we must play with the URL to reach the pdf file, so '91 issue 1 SMAL0101.PDF and '92 issue 3 will be SMAL0203.PDF

BottomFeeder release issues. CST Winter Release issues. My Christmas shopping is barely started, and I still have to get a tree. And, my daughter has a girl scout party in a few minutes.

I think I need an extra week in this month.

I've been meaning to comment on this story all week, but I've been like Barliman Butterbur - one thing drives out another. From CNet:

Eleven years and billions of dollars later, Itanium serves instead as a cautionary tale of how complex, long-term development plans can go drastically wrong in a fast-moving industry.

Despite years of marketing and product partnerships, Itanium remains a relative rarity among servers. In the third quarter of this year, 7,845 Itanium servers were sold, according to research by Gartner. That compares with 62,776 machines with Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc, 31,648 with IBM's Power, and 9,147 with HP's PA-RISC.

I'm not convinced that HP will stay with the chip either. Everything I've read about this chip says that intel allowed a technical idea to run ahead of market research, and they paid the price for it. Read the story - it's a good overview of the problem.

Just follow the steps outlined by Marketing Sherpa, and you too can have a corporate blog with all the identity of Borg. I mean, have a look at what they suggest:

Before you get in a room with stakeholders to discuss the blogging issue, you must understand what you hope to gain from blogging -- because the direction of that discussion will depend upon your answer.

This falls under their "Set Goals for Blogging" theory. I started this blog back in 2002. Did I have goals? Heck, at the time, I wasn't really sure what I was doing. I started because I thought it might be cool to build a blog server using the Cincom Smalltalk Web Toolkit - I even made it multi-user at first. That stopped, and I eventually invited a community here.

And setting a direction? heck, I don't have one - I post on things that interest me, as they come up. I don't have even a vague plan for what I'll post - it's all ad-hoc and driven by events. I read a lot of content, and a lot of what I read is from RSS searches for keywords of interest to me and my area of business. Step one should be "read what other people are saying about you".

I rather suspect that a "goal oriented" blog would get really dull, really fast - just like the political blogs that stay "on message" get really dull. If you want to sound like a corporate version of one of the "talking points" folks that show up on the political talk shows every night, follow their advice. Just don't be surprised when you end up with something that no one but the trolls cares about. Here's the kicker on that:

In other words, the company's communications strategy should be mirrored throughout the company's blogs -- but they can show more of a person's or company's personality.

Here's a tip: If this is what you think, then don't even bother. Your "blogs" will be the same kind of puffery as the press releases you already have.

The only useful thing in the entire piece is the idea about a blogging policy - letting people know what corporate considers out of bounds on an official (i.e., hosted on corporate servers) blog would be useful - that way, no one will be confused about what the boundaries are. But - those boundaries should err on the loose end.

Hat tip to Scoble.

Tim Marman points out that the customer is in control:

My "relationship" with Engadget really illustrates this well.  I used to read Gizmodo but switched over when Engadget first offered full-text feeds. Gizmodo has since added full-text feeds, but it was too late: at this point I consider myself a loyal Engadget reader.  It's one of the few sites I will read when I don't have my aggregator.  Even when I do, I still visit the site a lot to leave comments.  I also link to them a lot, and while I may not have Scoble's 18,000 readers, I send some traffic your way - that should at least help make up for the "lost" visits from me, right? ( Oh, and unlike Robert, it's not that I actively refuse to link to sites with partial-text feeds - it's just hard to link when I've already unsubscribed and won't see your content ).

It's really very simple: RSS lets the customer control the conversation.  In exchange for that control, we will gladly reward you with our loyalty - and we'll be happy doing it. But if you're going to do this, you can't do it half-assed - don't give us partial feeds!

I'm not as hardline on partial content as Tim or Scoble are, but that's not the point - the point is, customers have a lot more power in the conversation than they used to. Marketing departments are figuring this out very, very slowly.

Looks like reality finally caught up with the hype - the public UDDI registries run by IBM, SAP, and Microsoft are being shutdown. Wow, who would have guessed that a system like the CORBA registry - but using XML and HTTP instead of binary mechanisms - would also fail to reach widespread usage? It's almost like we've seen this movie before.

The last time I downloaded Eclipse, about a year ago, it was slow, but easy enough to install. I figured I'd have another look, since the Java fans who read this blog keep telling me how wonderful it is.

Well, it may well be wonderful. I have no idea though, because I can't get it to run. I downloaded it from eclipse.org easily enough - but then the app told me that it needed JDK 1.4.1, and all I had was JDK 1.3.1. That's where the real fun started

First check - follow the links from the Eclipse sit to the Sun download page - there's JDK 1.4.2. No 1.4.1 in sight. I figured that ought to be close enough, so I grabbed it. That's when I found the marvelous installer that Sun has. Now, I know that the Cincom Smalltalk installer has not always been perfect - but this one did some basic stuff wrong. No cancel button, and it reported progress for awhile, and then just stopped - leaving me wondering whether it was still running. Finally, it finished - and then it asked me to reboot. What's up with that?

Ok, back from the reboot - and Eclipse still tells me I only have 1.3.1 installed. Look at CLASSPATH in a DOS shell - nope, that points to the new stuff. Installed Programs? Nope - no sign of anything with a 1.3.x version anywhere there. Joy. Off to the registry - nope, nothing there.

In desperation, I go into the directory and try starting the file called "startup" instead of the one called "eclipse". Fascinating - that works. But it opens up without any sign that it sees the JDK, so I expect I'm not seeing it the way I'm supposed to. Clearly, I'm missing something here. I have no idea how to even evaluate this thing.

Doc tries to explain Howard Stern:

Even though I didn't catch much of the final show, I did think of a way to explain the complex ironies of Howard's humor to those who can't see it through politically corrective glasses: When Howard seems to be making fun of Wendy the Retard , he's having fun with her; and when he seems to be having fun with Daniel Carver the racist , he's making fun of him.

I've never found Stern to be funny. Back when he was married, he was somewhat amusing in a 7th grade bathroom sort of way - mostly from the "his wife lets him do what?" kind of perspective. After the marriage ended, so did that question.

I can hear 7th grade level locker room humor anywhere though, and I don't feel a particular need to seek it out. Another thing - if you have to explain something as simple as what Doc tries to explain above - it's not, in fact, simple. I've watched Stern on TV, and I've listened to him on the radio. It's not at all clear that he's anything other than a misanthropic fool to me, and I don't think I'm particularly humor impaired, or a fan of PC notions. Stern is the classic shock jock, and his shtick has ratcheded up the shock meter over the years as people have gotten used to one shocking set of humor after another.

I've seen real comedians, and while they don't necessarily eschew cursing, they can be funny in almost any context without having to reach back to 7th grade. George Carlin comes to mind. Or the late Richard Pryor.

You should compare the way Six Apart dealt with a crisis (yesterday's Typepad outage) with the way most companies deal with one. Unlike, say, Sony (lots of denial and stupidity, finally followed by a grudging admittance of something, but not quite wrongdoing), Six Apart got right out in front of the outage and was extremely transparent about it. Now, I don't want to compare the actual problems - they were nothing alike. I'm talking about the responses.

If you look through the postings around the sphere yesterday, you'll notice that there wasn't much (if any - I didn't see any) outrage, and people seemed to be happy with how Six Apart was treating them. Just have a look here - Anil Dash gave a candid interview on the issue on the day it happened. Not weeks later, like too many companies out there.

I may not use their software (I wrote my own server), but I like the way they do business.

Time for my weekly look at the logs. BottomFeeder downloads stayed in their zone, at 355 per day. The breakdown:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
HPUX	580
Windows	476
Mac 8/9	410
Sources	392
Mac X	199
Linux x86	126
Update	79
CE ARM	71
Windows98/ME	37
Linux Sparc	31
AIX	21
Solaris	19
Linux PPC	14
SGI	13
Source Script	7
ADUX	6
CE x86	1

Those HP numbers always amaze me - who knew there were so many HP users interested in an aggregator? Off to the HTML blog page report:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	50.6%
Internet Explorer	31.2%
Other	6.9%
MSN Bot	4.7%
Google Bot	3.6%
Java	1%
Opera	1%
BottomFeeder	1%

Either my audience switches between IE and Mozilla a lot, or a fair proportion of my audience is variable. There's just not a lot of consistency between the IE and Mozilla numbers, week to week. Finally, the RSS tool distribution:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	24.3%
Other	15.7%
Net News Wire	8.9%
BottomFeeder	8.7%
Liferea	5.2%
Safari RSS	5.1%
Java	4.2%
Internet Explorer	4%
BlogSearch	2.9%
Magpie	2.4%
SharpReader	2.3%
Planet Smalltalk	2.1%
NewsGator	2%
RSSReader	2%
Feed Reader	1.3%
RSS Bandit	1.3%
Feed Demon	1.2%
JetBrains	1.2%
BlogLines	1.2%
MSN Bot	1%
Python	1%
News Fire	1%
Google Bot	1%

Still a lot of tool diversity there.

I'm not sure that Orlowski would know what a fact was if it started stalking him. In an all too predictable hit piece on the accuracy of Wikipedia, he has a lot of fun at Jimmy Wales' expense. I guess he didn't see this piece on the overall accuracy of Wikipedia versus Britannica.

The reality is, Wikipedia's issues with accuracy has far more to do with the controversies on topical issues than it has to do with anyting else. I think I mentioned that awhile back.

Dare has a post up on a cross-protocol, browser based IM client (Meebo), and the liklihood that they'll be acquired. That raised a question in my mind though - and it's not meant to be a nasty question - I'm honestly curious. What do MS, Yahoo, and AOL get out of their IM clients? I mostly use AIM, but that has to do with which network most of the people I deal with are on. I don't use AOL for anything else, and I haven't paid them for anything, ever. At one point I used MSN as a backup for dialup access, but I gave that up eons ago too, as I started traveling less, and hotels started having broadband access.

So honest question - what actual benefit are these guys seeing from their IM networks?

It looks like Sony's DRM mistake may be causing blowback where the labels really, really don't want it - with the artists:

The battle between artists and Sony BMG over the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) copy protection on audio CDs just got even more interesting as some more artists have decided to act. This time it is My Morning Jacket, who's album "Z" is copy protected. They are doing their very own recall of the CDs and get this... they are burning unrestricted copies of the CDs themselves and sending them out to fans. Oh I wonder how Sony BMG feels about that.

Let the fun and games begin!

I think it's clear, based on some of the comments here, that some of the people reading this blog don't get what I was after in that post - and don't get my take on Intellisense, either. Let me start with the Eclipse post. I am honestly curious - I haven't looked at the product in awhile, so I downloaded it. I keep getting what looks like a nonsensical error about a JDK revision that - so far as I can tell - isn't installed on my machine. I'm assuming that I'm supposed to start Eclipse via the 'eclipse.exe' file in the main directory, not via the 'startup' JAR file. Sure, I was snarky in that post - but if you read this blog and you haven't come to expect that, well, I'm not sure you get me yet :)

As to Intellisense - I've seen what the Dolphin guys are doing (which is the same thing as a couple of optional add ons to VW do, for that matter). I've also seen how it works in Eclipse, and in VisualStudio. Personally, I just don't find the feature helpful, but I do know that people differ on this. Here's the thing about Smalltalk though - I stated here that sure - a static language like Java (or C#) will be able to give you more precise information for that kind of feature. What I also said is that, IMHO, the benefit that comes from that is far, far lower than the overall loss of flexibility that those typing schemes also give you.

As other people have said about Smalltalk, it's clay in a developers hands. In contrast, Java and C# are more like balsa wood. Sure, you can build useful things from balsa wood - but it's a brittle material, and you can easily snap things off. Clay is more malleable. It's not a perfect analogy by any means, but it drives at the point I'm trying to make. I understand the benefits that static typing gives at a tool level. It's just that the cost is, in my opinion, far too high.

Maybe my reboot requirement from the first time I tried the game was something else, because I've played a few times since then without any problems. At first, I disliked the UI (relative to Civ 3), but it's grown on me. I also managed to get in a couple of network games with Michael - timezone issues prevented taking the games to completion, but I was ahead in one, and he had me in the second.

So ultimately, I think I'm now happy with the game.

With some help from the IRC Channel - I got pointed here - I was able to get Eclipse running. Seems I had to specify the VM path - there's likely something going on with my search path.

So, there it was - not showing any of the system code. I followed some advice from this thread, and Eclipse promptly crashed with a fairly useless error message. Now, even given my previous post (the chirpy one about Civ 4), it's entirely possible that Civ 4 left my machine in a weird state. On the other hand, VW and BottomFeeder are operating fine, and the sometimes shaky Eudora hasn't crashed.

So my evaluation is still nebulous. Of course, this is Windows, and experience has taught me that "works on my machine and not yours" is common enough. I don't have a new enough Linux box to contemplate running Eclipse (It's a PII 400 - although, I should point out that VW runs just fine there :) ). Anyway, I'm still looking.

It's an unnatural act in December:

Football that matters in December in the Meadowlands. Even better - Looks like Washington wins this week over Dallas. The Giants play the Skins next week, but then they play the hapless Raiders the last week of season. All they need to win the division is one win.

Yes, this is Scoble talking about an MS product:

The other night Chris Pirillo recorded a podcast in his house with a bunch of geeks talking about Xbox 360. It’ll give you some sense of what we’re experiencing tonight. I can’t believe the quality. Sorry, Maryam, we’re going to buy an HD screen in 2006. I’ll go more into debt for one. It’s just so freaking cool.

But, the lines outside retail outlets with XBox 360 consoles aren't hype, anymore than the fascination with the Apple Nano is. I think Microsoft might well have a small tornado on their hands here.

Read this from Philip Greenspun and you'll understand:

We did three sightseeing/photo flights over New Orleans.  The first was with Vincent, who oriented me to the area.  The second was with Ernie, who pointed out some additional sights and breaches in levees.  For the third flight, we removed the left door of the R22 and left it with the FBO.  Tony flew from the right seat while I took photos out the open left side of the helicopter.  Flying above the city, you realize what a tough challenge rebuilding is going to be.  Some of the high ground neighborhoods are more or less back to normal, with the exception of blue tarps covering damaged roofs.  The low-ground neighborhoods, however, whether formerly rich or poor, are deserted.  It looks as though a 1970s-style neutron bomb was detonated leaving the buildings and cars, but killing all the people.  No homeowner in one of those neighborhoods is going to be able to rebuild without taking on a tremendous risk.  What if the other people in his neighborhood decide not to rebuild?  He will have spent $200,000+ on a new house in a dangerous abandoned area.

There are two levels of risk involved here. One is the risk the putative homeowner is willing to put up with, based on the level of abandonment. The other is even harder to get around - the level of risk a mortgage lender is willing to deal with in order to fund rebuilding in what's now recognized as flood plain. Sure, it's always been flood plain - but potential lenders have had that fact put in front of them now. Between those two things, I expect that large parts of New Orleans will simply never get rebuilt, regardless of what kinds of aid packages go into the project.

If you ever wondered about where driving habits (as in, which side of the road) come from, here's a background page. Interesting how much influence Napolean had over the process in Europe, especially in the case of Austria.

Another thing that I should mention in the context of this post - and the comment trail after it. On this blog, I do an awful lot of "thinking in public" - I tend to post my first impressions, not after long cogitation on an idea. Which means, my initial take on an idea does not always represent the sum total of my thinking on a subject - and a mostly dismissive reaction doesn't mean that I'm not discussing the idea with our engineers.

Having said that, bear in mind that our engineering team is engaged in a pretty darn big project - we are building a system that is as large and comprehensive as J2EE or .NET, with a fraction of the engineers that Sun and Microsoft have. Sure, Smalltalk is marvelously productive, which is why we are able to stay in the game - but we do have resource limits, and - as such - a large part of what I do is prioritization.

I've tossed out a new Survey on our website - it's short, with a few questions about your tool desires. Let us know what you think, and send me email if you have comments that go beyond the survey.

Bjarne Stroustrup on language usage:

One reason often quoted for learning Smalltalk is that it is ``pure'' and thus force people to think and program ``object oriented.'' I will not go into the discussion about ``purity'' beyond mentioning that I think that a general purpose programming language ought to and can support more than one programming style (``paradigm'').

The point here is that styles that are appropriate and well supported in Smalltalk are not necessarily appropriate for C++. In particular, a slavish following of Smalltalk style in C++ leads to inefficient, ugly, and hard to maintain C++ programs. The reason is that good C++ requires design that takes advantage of C++'s static type system rather than fights it. Smalltalk support a dynamic type system (only) and that view translated into C++ leads to extensive unsafe and ugly casting.

The reverse is true as well, of course. Once you get past a high level view of your system, design will get to be language specific - you'll approach the same task differently in C++, Smalltalk, Java (et. al.). Which language to use depends on a best fit analysis - clearly, I'm of the opinion that Smalltalk is a better fit for most application level tasks. But the larger point is what Bjarne said.

Rogers' exploration of the editing practices of Jim Wales makes the same point I made awhile back - topical content is going to oscillate for a long while - especially when the content is covering something on which people disagree. Biography pieces on living people definitely fall into that bucket :)

Ebert on movies in 2005:

How in the world can anyone think it was a bad year for the movies when so many were wonderful, a few were great, a handful were inspiring, and there were scenes so risky you feared the tightrope might break? If none of the year's 10 best had been made, I could name another 10 and no one would wonder at the choices. There were a lot of movies to admire in 2005.

News on box office attendance numbers in 2005:

A box-office jolt from the magic kingdoms of Kong, Narnia and Hogwarts will close Hollywood's year with some holiday cheer, though not enough to offset the biggest decline in movie attendance in 20 years.

What Ebert isn't seeing is that lots of the "critically acclaimed" movies are movies that don't get much box office. I think the movie industry - and Ebert - might be able to learn something from a thing Sam Goldwyn supposedly said: "If I want to send a message, I call Western Union".

And please, enough with "risky" movies and "edgy" scenes. More acting, more story lines, less commentary. And whatever you do, keep George Lucas away from the script.

Via Rob Fahrni - which hero are you? Looks like I'm:

You scored as Captain Jack Sparrow . Roguish,quick-witted, and incredibly lucky, Jack Sparrow is a pirate who sometimes ends up being a hero, against his better judgement. Captain Jack looks out for #1, but he can be counted on (usually) to do the right thing. He has an incredibly persuasive tongue, a mind that borders on genius or insanity, and an incredible talent for getting into trouble and getting out of it. Maybe its brains, maybe its genius, or maybe its just plain luck. Or maybe a mixture of all three. Captain Jack Sparrow 67% The Amazing Spider-Man 63% Neo, the "One" 58% William Wallace 58% Maximus 54% Batman, the Dark Knight 54% Lara Croft 50% James Bond, Agent 007 50% Indiana Jones 46% The Terminator 25% El Zorro 25% Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0 created with QuizFarm.com

Theater owners are solving the wrong problem - they want to jam cell phones:

With flat panel prices in free-fall and sizes approaching those anaemic megaplex screens, it’s no wonder the National Association of Theater Owners is in a panic about the decline in consumers willing to slap down a near-sawbuck to watch a flick. What to do? Well, it looks like cellphone jamming is the new baby jeebus in an industry attempt to lure your azz back into their buttery seats. See, NATO (er, yeah) has announced plans to petition the FCC for permission to jam cell phone signals within theatres to “block rude behaviour”

Would actually making the audience aware of a rule (silent/vibrate/off) - and enforcing it wit expulsion if need be - be just too hard? I don't typically have to worry about emergency calls during a movie, but some people (doctors, for instance) might not have that luxury.

Maybe theater owners should ask Hollywood to create a better product instead.

For all of you who still enjoy 7th grade humor, I give you... the ship.

Scoble asks a developer:

He says he’s walking away from Microsoft’s Web development tools. He’s going to Ruby on Rails and won’t be back until we get the magic back. Well, that’s what we’re working hard on and why we’re doing the Mix06 event.

One question, though. Have you checked out the latest ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2005? If so, what about it turns you to Rails?

To get that, he's going to have to wade into the dynamic language/static language debate :)

Here's a shady action on the part of an ISP:

Shaw cable has, this year, begun to roll out traffic-shaping technology on their network using technology from Ellacoya, and reportedy by this Wall Street Journal article. It seems they started using this service in early 2005 in the greater Vancouver area, probably because Shaw's network is most overloaded in that market. There have been reports that they are rolling it out to Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Winnipeg. Check out the reports, there's a lot of talk.

Ellacoya's technology works by "deep packet inspection" which is a type of firewall that's super-intelligent. That is, it doesn't just know about IP and TCP or UDP ports, it can also look inside the packet and see if it's FTP, HTTP, Bittorrent, kazaa, and etc. Therefore, it's not affcted by port numbers. This technology, while impressive, is not perfect. It can mis-identify packets, and requires constant upgrades to keep track of all potential types of data traversing the internet, of which there are many, and the possibility to create a new one today exists.

The issue here isn't that the ISP is doing this; it's that they are doing it quietly, leaving customers to figure out why their service is affected. The downside is, people tend to have fewer options with local ISP's than with other vendors - leaving them fewer options to effectively punish the provider.

A caveat - there are reports that this is exaggerated, but it's still worth watching.

So Troy is testing out the mt api support that I built into the Silt server. For an idea as to what kind of fun this is, have a look at the results for a Google search on "mt API". Good luck finding anything useful - I had to dig into the Google cache for SixApart docs.

Anyway, in response to getCategoryList() I was sending back an array of structs, as requested - but I was letting the code fall through to the same API in metaweblog API. The difference is that the meta API sends back a number of key/value pairs in the dictionary, while MT only expects two - category id and name (and a third, isPrimary, for specific posts). Silly me - I thought extra dictionary entries would be ignored.

Not in the tool that Troy was testing though. So, I've got that fixed and uploading to the production server. Now to find out where my next misconception comes from.

Generally, I love working out of my home office - it would take a lot to get me back to the commuting/office style of things. However, it's not all peaches and cream - I'm constantly reminded of this Dilbert Strip, which I taped to my door - all the frames are the same, and Dilbert is talking to Ratbert and Dogbert:

CAPTION: What the Work-At-Home Person Says

DILBERT: Don't disturb me unless the house is on fire.





PANEL TWO



CAPTION: What the Rest of the Family Hears

DILBERT: I am your servant. My specialty is killing spiders.





PANEL THREE



CAPTION: What the spiders hear

DILBERT: The house is full of wounded flies.

I thought of that when I read this WSJ piece on the travails of the work at home person. I don't have trouble with my company - Cincom is actually pretty good about that, partly because we have so many work at home staffers. However, it took me a few years to convince my wife and daughter that I was, in fact, working in my office. Which is why that Dilbert strip ended up on the door :)

Here's James Gosling explaining why Java isn't a "scripting" language"

The biggest was concerns about performance and the inevitability of scale. I can't remember how often I've had experiences where someone has proudly shown me some system they've put together using the scripting-language-du-jour: things like an Adobe Illustrator clone written entirely in PostScript; a satellite groundstation diagnostic system written as TECO macros; a BASIC compiler written as Emacs macros; fourier transform algorithms in PostScript... This list is endless. They always ended with "this is so cool, but I'd like it to be as fast as {C,Assembler,whatever}". People get into scripting to quickly build small quick things, but they often grow far beyond where the initial concept started.

Another was about testing, reliability and maintainability. One of the common properties of scripting languages is brevity. This tends to lead to omitting declarations, weak typing and ignoring errors. Generally a great thing if you're quickly putting something together; not so great if you want checks and balances that crosscheck correctness.

It's telling that he lumps all scripting/dynamic languages together as weakly typed (casting in Java, anyone?). Makes me wonder if he's even looked at Smalltalk or Ruby - since both are strongly, but dynamically, typed. In Smalltalk, you can't get a type error - you'll get a well understood exception.

Then there's his assumption of slowness - not all dynamic languages are interpreted. Lisp, for instance, has implementations with type inferencing and all the speed of optimized C. Most Smalltalk implementations use a JIT, and are plenty fast (although, doing arithmetic tests is not an area Smalltalk shines at). Ruby is interpreted, but there's at least one project - YARV - out to create a JIT.

The fun part is, Gosling caught a lot of crap for that post, and mostly backed off, retreating into the "chains are good for you" position:

One of the slogans that was brought up in the commentary to my previous blog entry was "freedom vs. safety". Once upon a time I used to believe that: it has certainly been conventional wisdom for years. But a lot of the time, the truth is actually that safety is freedom (eg. a good safety harness and rope give you the freedom to climb a mountain).

When I'm writing a function and declare a parameter to be an Image, I am free to trust that it is an Image. I'm free to trust that no one's array access has smashed my data structure. Examples abound.

Ahh yes, argument by assertion. "Examples abound", so he needn't give any. I've made this point many times - the kind of error that type checking catches is extremely rare - it's come up a handful of times for me over the last 13 years of Smalltalk development. The kind of type checking that Java requires comes at a high cost - it catches errors that almost never come up, and adds in expensive rigidity (generics are simply the latest attempt by the Java guys to muck their way past the casting issue).

Which reminds me - casting is a lie to your compiler, and walks right past this vaunted type safety. So if the "safety"offered by Java style typing is so phenomenal, then why do you allow casting at all? Wouldn't you be even more safe and more free without it?

If you don't trust my word on this debate, have a look at this piece, which goes through things at Amazon. Good read, and a lot of good points. Also way too long for me to hack out snippets and comment. Read the whole thing, and ponder.

Dave apparently missed the memo on Wikipedia versus "real" encyclopedias. As I've said before, the main areas of contention are going to hit topical pages - biographies of living people and items on events where many of the protagonists are still alive.

I fail to see how any encyclopedia is going to do well in those areas - unless you play "my facts win, because I'm me".

Firefly is at an end:

''In the end, it was what it was: a tough sell,'' says Whedon, adding that it appears the Firefly saga has reached its conclusion. He has no regrets -- and he's moving on.

Sad news for me - I loved that show, and liked the movie quite a bit. It's simple though; not enough people liked it.

Seems that Bruce Eckel is unhappy over all the attention that Ruby (specifically, Ruby on Rails) is getting - so he wrote up a counter to Bruce Tate's "Beyond Java". I don't think he's unfair to Tate's book, although I must admit that I have more sympathy for Tate's argument. In any case, Eckel recycles the "Humane Interface" discussion from awhile back, and - like most of the Java enthusiasts - misses the point:

Martin's argument is that Java's List interface requires you to say aList.get(aList.size -1) to get the last element, and this seemed silly to him. Which it is, if you have unified all sequence containers (that is, list containers) into a single type, as Ruby and Python do. Java, however, follows the C++ STL approach of providing different types based on the efficiency of various operations. The Java libraries do not unify to a single list type because of efficiency issues, so you have to decide if you are going to be fetching the last element from a list a lot, and if you are you use a LinkedList, which does have a getLast() method -- a fact which was completely left out of Martin's original discussion, and the ensuing firefight (other than some ignored comments).

What he misses is the pragmatic approach that Ruby and Smalltalk take. Convenience protocol is no bad thing, and - given decent tools (like Smalltalk has), lots of methods in a class aren't a problem. At least in Smalltalk, most of the convenience protocol landed in the Collection classes based on many, many years of usage - and Ruby was, to a large extent, modeled on Smalltalk. The big problem in a language like Java is that you can't just add a new method to an existing class - instead, you get an explosion of "helper" classes wrapping them. I suppose that's a pragmatic approach given Java's design, but I wouldn't call it an instance of good design.

Eckel approaches all that with the thought that developers should know up front that they'll need a given method, and then pick the right class. Umm, yeah - I always have full information when I get started. I guess in his world, he never runs into that "oh, crap" moment when you realize that some object is missing protocol that would make life simpler. Elliotte Harold, who weighed in on this extensively, never really got that point either.

Anyway, David Heinemeier Hansson (the Rails guy) had some thoughts on Eckel's response to Tate:

I'm losing track of the ill-conceived comparisons, but I do know what's astoundingly clear: Bruce Eckel doesn't like Ruby, he doesn't like the attention its getting, and he doesn't like people such as Bruce Tate fueling that attention. No beef, that's cool. But why not just say it like that?

You could even have presented yourself as the polar opposite to the so-called hyper-enthusiasts: A hyper-detractor! The label comes complete with a cape, an evil smirk, and long tirades about how the other side is no match for your master plan.

David does get a bit too snarky over Eckel's changed opinion on Python - it is possible to change your mind over time. Writing extensively on the web simply makes it possible for people to find your old opinions more easily and imply it's some kind of hypocrisy.

Hat Tip to Tim Bray.

The Yankees have a center fielder - Johnny Damon. Now, it'll be interesting to see how he looks with shorter hair and no beard :) Seriously though - he should make for a great leadoff hitter.

I tried running Eclipse again this morning - I had previously added the JDK I installed so that I could browse Java sources - now it crashes on startup. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong here, but it's more trouble than it's worth. I downloaded IntelliJ to take a look at that.

First off, they have an actual installer - and when you get it installed, and create a package, it asks you which JDK you want to use. Right off, this was better than Eclipse - it worked. So anyway, I added a new project to work on, and it went ahead and indexed the JDK for me, so that browsing would be possible. That's where I hit a point I'm not following.

There are a bunch of ancillary Java libraries with sources (network, security, plugin, etc) - but the runtime - rt.jar - shows up as an unbrowseable thing. Again, I'm sure I'm missing something here, but I have no idea how to just browse the base Java libraries.

Ok, just to get a feel for the tool I go down the tree to a package that has source - ldapsec.jar. I open the tree to StartTlsResponseImpl, and select it. Nothing. Ok, I have to double click to get source. Why that is, I have no idea - seems like a bad idea to me on the usability front.

Well, on to the project I created. I select my project - and have a "what now?" moment. Yes, I know that people downloading CST NC have the same issue, which is why we have the WalkThru document. So, off to the help, and it tells me what to do - I create a new file in the project (analogous to creating a new class in a CST package, mostly). Now, a fair bit of my problem here is my burned in expectations as a Smalltalker - I really don't think about source files, and I know that this is not a problem for most developers - so this is an issue on my end, not the tool's. I do notice that there are a bunch of XML files already associated with my project - gosh knows what those are, but I'll leave those alone. So I created a simple program:

class HelloWorldApp {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello World!"); //Display the string.
    }
}

Hit "Build", and got a compiler error. Hmm. I suppose it's significant that the tool tells me that it can't resolve "String" - likely means I've got some configuration thing wrong. I have no idea what that might be though, so I can't really get into any of IntelliJ's refactoring - I have to figure out how to get it properly set up first.

Well, I'm really starting to wonder about the raves that Eclipse gets. They don't include a Windows installer (heck, even I include one for BottomFeeder) - IntelliJ and NetBeans both do. I'd suggest they run off to find NSIS and have a look at that - it's simple, and it's free. Doing so would probably get rid of the problems I had.

So anyway, after a brief look at IntelliJ, I'm grabbing NetBeans. First set of points over Eclipse - they ship an installer for Windows. Heck, it's smarter than the IntelliJ installer - rather than trusting me to find a JDK, it searched for a suitable one at install time. Which limits the number of setup mistakes I could make.

Well, that was shortlived. On trying to run, it tells me that it can't find java.exe in a tiny dialog box. I think I've found the source of the odd Eclipse issue, and of many of these other ones - my path has a 1.3.1 JRE in it, which was installed by Oracle's client. So it looks like I need to muck with the OS level path. Joy.

Well, it seems that my configuration is confusing the tools. The 1.3.1 install that Eclipse was moaning about was from an installation of Oracle Tools (something I did over a year ago) - it seems that Oracle buries a JRE in there. So, I grabbed the latest 1.5 from Sun and installed that. It complained about installing files as it got close to finishing (apparently, I should have quit Firefox before starting). The upshot? I ended up with a corrupt set of files. So, I blew those away and have started installing the 1.5 files again.

Meanwhile, NetBeans seems to be fixated on an older rev that I blew away, and won't start or uninstall. That's lovely - highly friendly, that. IntelliJ collapsed after I uninstalled the version of the JDK I told it I had - it's idea of informing me there's a problem is a modal dialog with one button that pops up over and over again. Not impressed with that either. So, I think I'll have to just delete NetBeans and IntelliJ, and start the installs over.

All this just to look at tools that supposedly have great features I need to borrow from :)

Update: Ok, I removed all the old JRE and JDK stuff from the system, grabbed the 1.5 stuff from JavaSoft, installed, and dutifully rebooted Windows. Then I unzipped the Eclipse files again, and tried that. No dice - as it's trying to set up a workspace, it tosses an exception - java.lang.ExceptionInitializerError. Even better, eclipse is still running, as is the JVM it started. I couldn't delete the offending directory until I killed both. Restarting eclipse led to the same error.

I don't think "simple" describes what I'm seeing. There are words that do describe it, but they aren't family friendly...

In the comments here, I have a number of people telling me to uninstall Oracle stuff and move on from there. Well, here's the thing - I actually use the Oracle tools (my Smalltalk source code repository is an Oracle DB on my Linux box). So, suggestions that I start yanking software I actually need out will not be taken seriously.

In contrast, let me explain something - I have VW 2.5, 2.5.1, 2.5.2, 3.1, 7.1, 7.2.1, 7.3, 7.3.1, and 7.4 all installed on this system. None of them interfere with any of the others. And yet, I'm being told that to get Java to work I have to yank out an installation that is (or should be) unrelated to what I'm doing?

Please. If Java is that brittle, then I'm simply too busy to be bothered. Maybe I'll try installing some of this stuff on my Mac after I upgrade the memory (256 is all it has at present, and that's not going to be enough with the heft of these tools).

Here's a fun time waster I got via a link on the Smalltalk IRC channel - try to keep that red block from hitting anything. The best I managed was just over 18 seconds - see how you do.

Sony's legal problems continue to get worse:

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott expanded his lawsuit against Sony BMG Music Entertainment on Wednesday, alleging that a second form of anti-piracy technology used by the label violates the state’s spyware and deceptive trade practices laws.

Abbott sued Sony BMG in November, saying the world’s second-largest music label surreptitiously included spyware on millions of CDs through technology known as XCP. That technology, included on 52 Sony BMG titles, could leave computers vulnerable to hackers, he said.

The new allegations involve an unrelated CD copy-protection technology known as MediaMax, which was loaded on 27 Sony BMG titles, including Alicia Keys’ “Unplugged” and Cassidy’s “I’m a Hustla.”

This is getting to be a hugely expensive headache for Sony - and, if the criminal charges go forward, it could get worse than just expensive. The RIAA and the various labels are going to have to re-think their positions.

Jonas Bonér has some interesting thoughts on Java and language innovation over the last decade. I know that many people I speak to have mentioned that the last decade of OOPSLA has been a do-over - same old ideas, recast in Java. Anyway, it's a mostly thoughtful piece, with some honest questions. The one glaring flaw is the idea that AspectJ represents innovation. It's a compile time hack attempting to mimic Lisp MOP. Which goes to my comment: nearly all the useful ideas to date have come through Lisp and Smalltalk - and everything else has been poorly implemented (and in too many cases, poorly thought out) "improvements" to them.

I just ran across the first prediction page for next year (well, at least the first one I've seen). The first item is highly amusing:

Mozilla will release an upgrade to Thunderbird that interfaces to gmail through an API, and has full support of labels, archiving, etc

Hmm. I hate to break it to you, but that happened, a long while back. Gmail is available via pop and smtp already (which is how I use it). Eudora interfaces to it just fine, and I have to assume Thuderbird does as well. The rest seem reasonable, although number 14 is, well, amusing. And 16? Delusional at best :)