Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Bob Congdon asks a few questions about the impact Eclipse is having on the market for development tools:

Eclipse is a terrific Java IDE. Its plugin architecture is superb. And it's free. Apparently that "free" part is having some negative consequences. According to The Register, Borland is dumping their Java and Windows IDE business to focus on the software delivery lifecycle. Why? Borland has been badly hit by the rise of "free" software tools, notably the open source Eclipse Foundation . Another article from The Register asks can IntelliJ IDEA can survive the Eclipse onslaught? IntelliJ IDEA originated a lot of Java refactoring features. Now they're available for free in Eclipse. That's great for developers. But what about tools vendors? One of the goals of Eclipse is to provide a platform for vendors to add their own value. But is it a good thing when Eclipse provides these same features for free and, as a result, forces vendors like Borland (and possibly Jetbrains, the developer of IntelliJ) to abandon the tools market?

Well, the interesting thing about Eclipse - to me - is the funding. It's an IBM project for all intents and purposes, and the net effect it's having is to drive Java development tools from the market. An interesting side note on that - I had a call with an analyst grouyp recently, and they told me that the overall vendor revenues for tool sales was up (and growing) - excluding the Java segment of that space, which was down, and sinking.

The amusing part for me is watching the way people react to all this. Microsoft gives away internet explorer, having the unsurprising effect of hurting Netscape - bad. IBM gives away Eclipse, having the unsurprising effect of hurting Java tool vendors - no problem. Apparently, you can inoculate yourself from charges of predation by open sourcing the software in question.

EGM interviewed Bill Gates about the upcoming Nintendo Revolution:

In the discussion with EGM, Gates expressed his doubts over whether or not Nintendo was taking the right steps with its audience. Gates concern however, is not dumbfounded. Because of the unique controller, the Revolution will tend to require somewhat unique games that are designed to be enjoyed using a different method of control and interaction. What this means for developers who were planning to bring games across platforms is yet unknown.

From the interview, Gates said:

"Sometimes that makes them incredibly right and sometimes that makes them incredibly wrong. They're certainly making a different bet in terms of how much they're putting into the graphics this time. I do think there is a question as to whether they can get outside the young age bracket at all. That's been tough for them."

Well, there's a parallel query they might ask Sony and Microsoft. Nintendo has been profitable with their consoles for years now (even though their market penetration is smaller than Sony's and MS'). How long can those two continue to attack the same demographic while losing money on every console sold?

Via Doc Searls, I see that BellSouth is making some headway in the "Tony Soprano" approach to network access:

BellSouth's new business model, a slightly more polite form of the kind of extortion practiced by Tony Soprano, is starting to pay off. The company says it is in negotiations with several Web sites willing to pay extra fees to BellSouth for more bandwidth than it provides to other sites.

BellSouth says that it shouldn't have to bear the cost of providing bandwidth for big sites like Google. Instead, the sites should pay for them. But BellSouth ignores an inconvenient fact --- it doesn't bear those costs; its customers do. So BellSouth gets to double-dip.

If BellSouth is finding that network access costs more, they need to up their subscription charges - not silently screw over their customer base by making the net worse.

Ralph Poole has some complaints about Microsoft:

I am sick of Channel 9, Robert Scoble, and the self-congratulatory Microsoft bloggers who mask their lack of solutions with betas and “naked conversations”. Yes, I do think that Microsoft needs to connect with its customers, but vacuous conversations among the "A" listers does not yield products that have value. How hard is it to create a portal in which people can keep up with their RSS feeds? How hard is it to create a browser that has tabs, is secure, and performs well? How hard is it to create a webmail platform that connects to Outlook? Does it take a visionary like Ray Ozzie to see that the read/write web is evolving quickly before everyone’s eyes? Why aren’t Microsoft’s customers even more demanding than they are? Is it because we are so satisfied with the applications that have evolved over the years that we are willing to wait for Vista and the next version of Office?

Well, it's harder to do any of those things when you've spent the last decade building up cross dependencies between all of your products. Why do you think Vista is late, and has nothing (other than a gift to the DRM lovers) new in it? Because they are working in a huge ball of mud that is hard to push in any direction.

This is why, unlike a lot of people, I wasn't worried about MS bundling everything under the sun. I knew that eventually, they'd hit this brick wall.

Planet Squeak has some news on the Smalltalk front: A new (Spanish Language) book on Squeak, by Diego Gomez Deck.

Here's an excellent post on development and tool choices - don't take the stupid no for an answer when the subject of Smalltalk comes up. The post in question is about Lisp, but the same answer applies:

As if a programmer can't think for himself. When you don't have any additional budget at all and you think Delphi would fit the current problem, then you are out of luck. You have to pay for Delphi. Same goes for some other tools. So you have to find another way to solve your problems.

There's a strictly Java only policy at the shop you are working? Don't waste your time thinking about how cool it could be to quickly code something in Ruby.

But when the only reason holding you back using Common Lisp is the doubt if other programmers could pick up when you leave, or support you in maintaining the code …

He explained his thinking in a prior post:

Every now and then I read a Usenet posting or blog entry about the somewhat frightening question from management: "Will someone else be able to work on your Common Lisp code?"

Then most people explain why they had to say "no".

You all know the reasons why they think they have to give this answer. But are the reasons really valid?

I don't think so. It is the job of a programmer to work with different tools. Programming languages are such tools, among others. It is expected that a Java programmer can learn the Eclipse IDE within a few days even if he was a long time user of Netbeans. A programmer has to use many tools he wouldn't choose by himself. Do you think most of them really like writing their e-mails at work with Outlook? :-)

If the other developers can't pick up the language used to write an application in, then I'd say that you hired the wrong developers. Unless you work for a vendor, shops that work exclusively in one language are very, very rare. Heck, our staff, in developing the Smalltalk products, has to work in C, C++, and C# (VM, browser plugins, .NET interop). They also need to do minimal work in Java (SOAP/CORBA/etc interop).

Sam Gentile (quoting Andy Hunt, co-author of "Programming Ruby") on Ruby:

When people ask me what attracts me to Ruby, I have two answers:

First, more than any other language I’ve used, it stays out of your way . You don’t have to spend any effort “satisfying the compiler” as you would in C++, or even Java. These languages have an awful lot of noise and verbosity. You get used to it of course, but it’s pretty wearing over time.

Second, I can type in an absurd amount of code in Ruby and have it work the first time. Not 2-3 passes resolving any syntax issues, not 4-5 passes tracking down a bug or two. It just works. Ruby’s not perfect, by any means, it’s got dark corners to the language just like every other language. But it has a lot fewer of them. For the great majority of projects, the great majority of the time, it just works."

I'd say exactly the same thing about Smalltalk, and the syntax is more lightweight: 5 reserved words, 2 operators. Try it yourself!

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I'm speaking at Smalltalk Solutions 2006 - I'll be going over the various issues I've had with this blog server, and how I've addressed them. See you there!

I'd guess that SGI's woes are not good news for intel and their rapidly fading hopes for the iTanium:

SGI issued its most ominous regulatory filing to date, warning that a bad 2006 could force the former high-flyer into bankruptcy.

In order to improve its business, SGI will consider measures ranging from axing or selling off product lines to pursuing "a strategic partner or acquirer." The hardware maker will basically look at anything and everything to remain a going concern.

SGI has been one of the last backers of the chip - that looks to be ending.

Looks like HBO wants to make us all watch their content live. I don't think they realize that what this actually means - a drop in the raw number of people watching their content, period. From Ars Technica, HBO's new filing with the FCC asks for:

By way of refresher, the analog hole legislation breaks broadcast content into four “Technical Content Protection Responses,” each with increasingly stringent restrictions. At the bottom is No Technical Protection Applied, meaning that the programming would be treated like every other transmission today. From there we move to Copy One Generation Content and Copy Unlimited No Redistribution Content which would allow limited recording and copying. HBO’s proposal would put its programming into the category of Copy Prohibited Content, which makes copying and recording of any kind verboten.

See, here's the problem. As PVR's spread, people find that they want to watch more and more of their content through them. We now have 4 different devices recording content from TV. We've used HBO On-Demand to catch up on shows we like on HBO, but we usually run them through the ReplayTV. Why? Because the on-screen controls HBO offers are horrid, and hard to use. The replay offers a better experience, so we use that.

People who have PVR's now are not likely to drop back to live TV. Other than sports, I watch almost everything through one of our PVRs. If HBO gets their wish, I'll simply stop watching HBO content, because I can't be bothered to watch it when it's convenient for them. I doubt I'll be the only one, either.

Here's how to kick up adoption:

But we're still missing the crucial piece to convince the corporate world to ramp up the work-from-home option. I think I've come up with it: technologies to erase the last vestiges of stigma around working from home:

The work channel: A new, high-def Web and satellite channel showing people working 24/7 at their PCs, in cubes, in conference rooms, at companies like yours. Bolted onto the new Windows Vista (or Mac OS X) desktops, this uncloseable window would be your constant reminder that everyone else is hard at work -- and you should be, too.

National grooming ID system: Much like the emergency broadcast system, this nationwide, mandatory-participation remote sensor and dashboard network would allow your co-workers and managers to know your personal grooming status at all times during work hours. Showered? Teeth brushed? Good job shaving, or half-hearted?

Home-office noise cancellation appliance: This industrial-strength, software-upgradeable device would selectively cancel out distracting noise from leaf blowers, screaming kids, Coldplay, whatever. (Actually, the Coldplay feature could have broader applications, in my opinion.)

Web-based alimentation management system: Much like TiVo's home media option, this would be controlled remotely by your spouse or manager -- hopefully not the same person. Basically, it's a huge remote locking system for key distractions like the refrigerator and pantry, tied into a wide-area sensor network to monitor stealth end runs to the local convenience store, and it would work in concert with ceiling-mounted chocolate and pistachio or cashew nut detectors, much like today's smoke alarms.

So that's it. Let me know your thoughts. Gotta run, I hear a dog barking. I mean, I'm getting called into a meeting.

Heh.

Peter Williams addresses the threading issues raised by Tim Bray here - I commented on that awhile back, here. I like Peter's take:

The threading issue is the one that interests me the most. I think that Mr. Bray is right that hardware threading is quickly becoming an important issue. In the near future most machines will support significant levels of true, hardware level, concurrency. But I think the shared memory native threading model that Java has is completely untenable.

Even vm (green) threads, which are well understood and have nice uniform semantics are difficult to use correctly. Once you throw in the vagaries of native threads you have morass of complexity that is practically unbearable. Worst of all, the usefulness of most of the techniques we have to help manage software quality, like automated unit tests and continuous integration, are inversely proportional to the number of threads in the application.

The thing you want to consider is which resource is more expensive - the hardware or the people-ware. Computers and networking equipment are only getting cheaper. People, on the other hand, are not having an easier time grokking multi-threaded code as time goes by. Which problem is easier to solve? Running more processes on the multiple CPUs/cores present, or getting people to accurately and safely thread applications within a single memory space?

The most important thing to keep in mind here is that, in the long run, it is always better (read: cheaper) to use extra computing resources to make problems more tractable for the humans in the system. For example, we have garbage collectors because it is cheaper to buy a slightly more powerful computer than to have you developer waste time managing their own memory. I am not sure what the best solution to highly concurrent hardware is but I am quite positive it is not Java style threading. My gut tells me that none of the approaches I know for apparent concurrency are going to work well for a highly concurrent application on highly concurrent hardware. If that is the case we will see something new and different as soon as the cool hardware gets into circulation.

That kind of work is one of my higher level priorities for Smalltalk as we move into the future. Java's "answer" is a complete non-answer, as far as I'm concerned.

Heh. "What about the Children" finds its way into the Little League set:

The Lowell Spinners say if Little League and other youth leagues agree to change the name of their Yankees teams to the Spinners, they'll pay for the new uniforms.

The Spinners are a Class A affiliate of the Red Sox, archrival of the Yankees.

Spinners' general manager Tim Bawmann says children in New England are often devastated when they are assigned to be on a team called the Yankees.

I don't know. I think I'd be devastated to have to play under the name "Spinners" :)

Dave Zatz has a commenter who thinks that HBO's request for copy never doesn't matter, because it's for video on demand:

Don’t suppose you guys actually read this through… it’s asking that SVOD services be set as “Copy Never”. It’s not asking that normal broadcast TV be marked this way. Because VOD is Video on Demand, there’s no reason to record it to your DVR, you simply order it from the VOD screens. The reason for this is because HBO, and the cable provider can get metrics on activity as well as charge for certain events over and over. Currently with Comcast, when you pay for HBO as a premium channel for normal broadcast, you also get HBO VOD free.

Hey Andrew - either you haven't actually used Comcast's on demand feature, or you really, really like shoddy services. As I said earlier today:

We've used HBO On-Demand to catch up on shows we like on HBO, but we usually run them through the ReplayTV. Why? Because the on-screen controls HBO offers are horrid, and hard to use. The replay offers a better experience, so we use that.

But hey, apparently you're just fine using shoddy services instead of nice ones you already own, because... well, I don't know why. There are plenty of reasons to record VOD to a PVR - the primary one being the crap controls offered.

In all the hype about Vista, just once I'd like to see Scoble address PVP-OPM - how does that do anything other than screw me over? Instead, I see this:

So, when I introduced Windows Vista, I didn’t bring a script. I didn’t check with the marketing department on the “talking points” that I should cover. What did I do? I invited Chris Pirillo to come and have a conversation with me about Windows Vista. At the end I had several requests for betas, and lots of compliments.

It's nice that people seem to like it. I'd really like to hear some justification for the nastier side of it though.

Scoble busts Slashdot (and others) who reported that Vista won't run on anything but really high end hardware:

I use Vista on a machine (a Toshiba Tablet M205) that can’t display Glass and Vista runs just fine, thank you very much! Geez, what do we have to do to get some accuracy in reporting here?

I was tempted to post on that, but thought it sounded "out there".

End of the week log time - let's have a look at the BottomFeeder downloads - up from last week, at 248 per day:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	618
Sources	314
Update	271
Linux x86	135
Mac X	111
Mac 8/9	100
CE ARM	68
Solaris	33
HPUX	22
Windows98/ME	19
Linux Sparc	18
AIX	11
Linux PPC	7
CE x86	5
SGI	4
Source Script	3
ADUX	1

Heh. I still have people downloading that ancient (3.2 based) Alpha build. On to the HTML blog page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	44.2%
Internet Explorer	30.1%
Everest/Vulcan	9.8%
Google Bot	6.6%
MSN Bot	4.5%
Other	2.7%
Nutch	1.1%
BottomFeeder	1%

I've carved some of the bigger pieces of "other" out. Looks like there's a new crawler out there that isn't that well behaved. On to the RSS tool usage:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	23.8%
BottomFeeder	17.5%
BlogLines	8.7%
Net News Wire	8.6%
Safari RSS	5%
Google Feed Fetcher	4.7%
Other	4.2%
Everest/Vulcan	4%
Internet Explorer	3.4%
SharpReader	2.5%
RSS Bandit	2.4%
Planet Smalltalk	2%
BlogSearch	1.5%
NewsGator	1.5%
NewsOutlook	1.5%
Magpie	1.4%
MSN Bot	1.2%
JetBrains	1.2%
Feed Reader	1.1%
Liferea	1%
News Fire	1%
Feed Demon	1%
Google Bot	1%
Java	1%

Between BlogLines and Google's Feed fetcher, it looks like the amount of aggregation going to online readers is rising. It will be interesting to see what happens when IE 7 and its integrated RSS reader goes into widespread use.

Rogers Cadenhead points out the downside of user scripts in a network application - they can run amok and actually cost people money:

A Radio UserLand user on Comcast in Monterey, Calif., is apparently a big fan of Cole. His copy of Radio keeps requesting that 5.5-megabyte podcast over and over, as frequently as every 10 seconds. In the last week alone, he's consumed 12.13 gigabytes of my server's bandwidth by downloading the file 2,365 times.

I don't know why this is happening -- it could be a bug in Radio UserLand or a UserTalk script run amok, either by accident or by design. The fact that it's coming from a fixed IP address suggests it's not malicious.

Never mind the tool in question - it doesn't really matter...

Doc Searls got a comment on his take that there aren't any "gatekeepers" in the blogosphere:

...to be told that a page sitting out on the end of the Long Tail is somehow equal to that sort of megaphone, because everybody could *in theory* read it. They won't, and to say otherwise starts to become downright cruel.

To which Doc responded:

I have this idea that the blogosphere is the one place in the world - or perhaps an entirely new world, or a part of a new world, created on the Net - where there is no need for class, for caste, for gates or keepers of anything.

I have a simpler answer: Life isn't fair. Some people have more traffic than others, and - like any other medium - first movers got something of an advantage. There's really nothing that can be done about it.

Well, looks like the calendar finally remembered what season it was - we got a significant snowfall last night. The most amusing aspect of it was the weather guy on channel 2 (Baltimore), Norm Lewis. He had initially said that this was going to be a non-event, leaving us with 2 inches of slushy snow. Then last night, he was trying to hang on to the tatters of that prediction, by saying we'd see the "low side" of 6" - 10" - this when everyone else was saying 8" - 12". Anyway, here's a picture I grabbed last night:

Not a great picture, but that's the quality of my camera phone. Now the results, as of 11:30 this morning, when the snow had long since stopped:

The roads are clear - it's been well above freezing for days before this storm. So there's just driveway clearance and sledding to look forward to.

Bryce Kampjes has announced a new UK based Smalltalk group. Check here for more information, and to join the mailing list.

One of my larger appetites over the last few years has been history - I've been reading a large variety of books, and those books have been concerned with a many different periods and countries. I've read about World War I, World War II, the middle ages - and I've always been fascinated by the US Civil War.

Recently, I've focused on something that has more relevance to current events - the history of the Islamic world, and the Crusades. I haven't studied this topic in any depth, so I would hardly call myself more than passingly informed at this point. To get some feeling for the Crusades, I read "The Crusades: A History" (second edition), by Jonathan Riley-Smith. I'll have to read other sources to get a wider view - this one is an overview of Crusading within the Catholic church, starting with the First Crusade in 1097, and ending with the fall of Malta (and the Hospitaller Knights) to Napolean in 1798. It's a broad view, and the sections on the active missions to the Middle East jump around a lot. As well, following the various noble family lineages gets to be very hard - there were parts of the book I had a lot of trouble getting through.

Still, it was a good introduction, and I intend to look for more source material; I'd be interested in any recommendations. After that, I was interested in learning more about the history and ideology of Islam - I've heard good things about Bernard Lewis, so I picked up two short books:

• "The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror"
• "What Went Wrong: Westernm Impact and Middle Eastern Response"

I've gotten about halfway into that first one, and yes, I do intend to seek out other sources. I still read plenty of "trashy" action novels, mostly while flying. I've found that I like learning about history more though; I'm enjoying Grant's Memoirs right now, for instance. One thing I found interesting there - he consistently referred to the Union forces as the National Army, rather than using the terms Federal or Union. Interesting, but I have no way of knowing whether it was peculiar to him, or to the time he wrote the book (the mid 1880's). I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in the US Civil War.

James Governor has noticed the same thing that many of us have - Blogger is the cesspool of the blogosphere, providing a huge number of the splogs that are out there. Yes, servives like Feedster could do a better job of filtering; but they wouldn't have to if Google just did some basic gatekeeping:

So far my evidence is just a quick snapshot, rather than something I have measured. But suffice to say of the spam blogs crudding up technorati for me, Blogger was the source of more than 50% of the total. Some myspace, one Wordpress.  

Maybe its just me, but to my mind causing pain at registration, and growing the splogosphere faster than anybody else, just ain't right. So Adwords is open to clickfraud, and now Blogger is emerging as the spam bloggers friend... Come on Google you can surely do better. Why not put some of those geniuses to work solving existing customer problems rather than inventing the future behind the GoogleWall?

Mark Baker quotes Patrick Logan from the service-oriented architecture list:

I ran a short experiment with some folks recently testing interoperability among various WS-* toolkits. What a pain. Very little time was available for actual business value. Then we replaced those WS-* toolkits with simple HTTP clients and servers. After a relatively short amount of time learning the specific APIs we were very soon spending nearly all of our time on business value. We paused periodically to examine what we'd lost by moving from WS-* to pure HTTP. We've yet to identify one thing of importance to us.

Heh. We've been here before - with the OMG and CORBA. Interop problems, confusing specs - the whole nine yards.

Bob Congdon has a post up on the difficulties of cleaning up external resources in Java if exceptions get thrown while they are in use. He points to a C# feature that ensures that such resources will be finalized, the using statement:

using (TextWriter tw = File.CreateText("log.txt")) {
      tw.WriteLine("Foo");      
      // Other stuff  
} 

Apparently, the compiler expands that. In Smalltalk, we don't need a language feature for that - we have the #ensure: method. It looks like this:

stream := 'someFile' asFilename writeStream.
[stream nextPutAll: 'Foo'.
"other code here"]
     ensure: [stream ifNotNil: [stream close]].

#ensure takes a block (closure) as an argument, and will execute regardless - if there are exceptions inside the block it's sent to or not. It's a very clean way to make sure that necessary code runs, when you aren't particularly concerned with the exact nature of any exceptions that pop up.

We got over a foot of the white stuff on Saturday/Sunday, and we went out to enjoy it. Today, schools were closed, so my daughter and a friend went back to the local hill - I went with them, because I really like sledding. I remembered to take a few pictures today - here's one of my daughter partly buried - she and her friend wanted to make it look like a sledding accident:

Here's another one of the same thing, while I was at the top of the hill:

Then I took two shots of the girls heading down the hill on the toboggan:

Here's a funny picture - the trees are budding, and snow has piled up using the buds as "baskets":

Chris Pirillo thinks that partial feeds protect against spam usage of your content:

Heh. Yeah. That's what happens when you give 'em full RSS feeds, dude. Can't have it both ways, and I think you're finally seeing the frustration that many of us realized well over a year ago. I told you that full RSS feeds are idealistic, and that partial feeds are the easiest way to protect yourself from scraping and whatnot.

Umm, not so much. Scraping HTML is trivial - For sites I really want to read, but can't be bothered to visit in a browser, I create a local (file) feed. Then I add that to BottomFeeder. If you think the spammers aren't already doing that, you aren't thinking hard enough :)

Via Tim Bray I ran across David Sifry's latest post on the state of the blogosphere. The most interesting take away is what Tim highlighted - the "magic middle":

The Magic Middle is the 155,000 or so weblogs that have garnered between 20 and 1,000 inbound links. It is a realm of topical authority and significant posting and conversation within the blogosphere.

That's a much larger group of people commenting on things than you could find 15 years ago via traditional media outlets. Instead of the handful of voices on talk radio or in small publications, we now have this large (and growing) set of communities. That's a big change, IMHO.

We are in the process of getting ObjectStudio 8 ready for early access - if having a look at that (and getting us feedback) is of interest to you, then send me email. I intend to push out a screencast on this later eventually, but in the meantime, here are a few screenshots. First, ObjectStudio running inside VW - click through for a larger image:

Now for the cool stuff - I loaded the OLE support into ObjectStudio, using the ObjectStudio tools, and then loaded a demonstration - hat tip to Mark Grinnell (our lead OST engineer). Here's what the ObjectStudio launcher looks like after loading those - a little unfamiliar to VW users:

Now, launching the IE demo - that pops up a window with the IE HTML control embedded in it. Again, you can click through for a larger image:

Now, that's running inside the ObjectStudio image, which itself is running inside VisualWorks. Which means that - once this is ready (and I need to emphasize that we at early alpha levels right now) - you'll be able to make use of this as either an ObjectStudio or a VisualWorks developer. Very cool stuff. Here's the ObjectStudio code, seen in the Refactoring Browser (again, click through for a larger image):

Mark Baker is right - BPEL wasn't really built for the web, and I seriously doubt that it'll be a player in the future. It reeks of all the same things that were wrong with the plethora of CORBA services back in the day - overly complex gunk that no one wants to figure out.

Looks like the marketing department at Fox is very, very slow on the uptake. After seeing Sony take damage from their CD rootkit fiasco, it's been reported that they are shipping DVD's with similar copy-protection schemes:

The Settec Alpha-DISC copy protection system used on the DVD contains user-mode rootkit-like features to hide itself. The system will hide it's own process, but does not appear to hide any files or registry entries. This makes the feature a bit less dangerous, as anti-virus products will still be able to scan all files on the disk. However, as we note in our article on rootkits, it's not that uncommon for real malware to only hide their processes.

Our message to software companies producing any software (not just copy protection products) is clear. You should always avoid hiding anything from the user, especially the administrator. It rarely serves the needs of the user, and in many cases it's very easy to create a security vulnerability this way.

What is it that people say about doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result?

I think this headline at ComputerWorld says it all:

India Aims to Tame Soaring IT Wages

Apparently, companies are starting to look elsewhere for cost savings. Give those spots 6-24 months, then: rinse, repeat.

As always, the best answer is to hire the best employees you can.

So first Oracle bought InnoDB. That wouldn't be big news except for the bind it puts MySQL in: InnoDB is the engine they use. Commercial users of MySQL now have a potential issue in their hands. It may never become a real one, but buying InnoDB was certainly a cheap way to give MySQL heartburn. To top that off, they just bought SleepyCat - which some had considered a possible replacement for InnoDB in MySQL. So much for that idea.

Recently, there have been rumors floating that Oracle is looking to buy JBoss. That would cap off an interesting set of buys, and would also get rid of a relatively small but troublesome corner for Oracle. Phil Windley explains what Oracle has done succinctly:

MySQL, InnoDB, and Sleepycat are all "open source" but they aren't "free." MySQL made a strategic blunder by not buying InnoDB to begin with. If they were, there'd be no company to buy. Take Linux as a counter example. Do you think that Microsoft would have bought Linux long ago and put the threat to their own OS to bed if they could? Sure, but fortunately there's nothing to buy. Oracle has effectively cornered MySQL by buying the storage engine they use. Moreover, they accomplished it much more cheaply than they could by buying MySQL outright.

Well, there may be "nothing" to buy on the Linux side, but I suspect that a purchase of RedHat and SuSe would change the playing field quite a bit. I would be astonished if Microsoft hadn't tried approaching one or both of them at some point.

Update: Apparently, they tried to buy MySQL as well.

Bob Congdon illustrates what I've been somewhat worried about:

Cable companies aren't exactly beloved by most people. Cable service is expensive and sometimes flaky or troublesome. It's pretty easy to find people who don't like Comcast . That said, our recent experience with Comcast was pretty good. We added HD and DVR services to digital cable. The DVR is nice — it stores up to 80 hours of standard broadcasts or 20 hours of HD content. We've never owned a TiVo so I can't compare the two services but with Comcast DVR there's a single box and single remote for both cable and DVR. Not sure if it's Comcastic or not but we're pretty happy.

The thing is, the Comcast DVR blows. I guess it seems ok if you have nothing to compare it to (and, to be fair, it does have some nice things that ReplayTV doesn't - HD recording and the ability to browse future recordings easily). However, those nice things are outweighed by some of the really stupid things:

• No skip. Yes, it has fast forward, but it would be very nice if it could just jump 30 seconds
• No ability to jump to minute X of a show. Instead, you have to forward/reverse.
• The second problem is more irritating due to this: Say you are watching a show as it records. Now the show ends, and the DVR starts recording a new show. You are behind, due to a few pauses. Bam - it skips to the start of the new show. Because, you know, that's what you want. Have fun getting back to where you were.

I'm finding that I prefer to watch non-HD versions of things simply so that I don't have to put up with that stuff. The Comcast DVR doesn't have to suck - it's got three tuners and a few nice features. The tragedy is, the flaws outweigh all that.

Spotted in SCI FI Wire

Andreas Katsulas, the character actor known to SF fans as G'Kar on Babylon 5 and a familiar face from Star Trek and other SF&F TV shows, died Feb. 13 of lung cancer in Los Angeles

I really thought he did a great job as G'Kar in "Babylon 5".

This site explains it all, and a lot else besides. Go read it all, if you're a fan of sci-fi flicks.

Looks like Nintendo will be showing off the Revolution at the E3 show in May. Which likely means that a late 2006 rollout is on schedule.

Blogging Roller quotes Ed Burnette:

If you really want to ensure true freedom of your code, put it under the control of a Foundation like Apache or Eclipse. Foundations are not controlled by any one company so you can feel comfortable about being on a level playing field with your competitors.

Unless one company starts giving disproportionate sums to the foundation - and most foundations are not going to turn away money. You can see this in the political sphere - plenty of charitable foundations have entirely different political orientations from their (now deceased) founders, because they were "captured" by generous funding.

If you think that can't happen in the business world, you're simply naive.

The spread of blogging is making the job of PR people difficult and confusing. Witness this post from Ed Bott, which I found via Scoble - Bott has early access to Office 12, as a member of the tech press. He's restricted by the beta EULA from writing about it, and Scoble was trying to look into that. That's where the confusion started. Here's Bott explaining it:

• A coordinator of the Office 12 beta program dismissed the report as a “rumor” and said the confidentiality requirement of the EULA was still in effect.
• Scoble checked with his sources inside the Office team and said the official word was that press – including bloggers – are indeed allowed to write about Office 12 client apps.
• A few days later, Scoble backtracked: “It turns out that this isn’t quite the case,” he wrote. “There are different NDAs given to different groups. … If you’re an MVP, in the Technical Beta or on the TAP program you’ll need to comply with the EULA of Beta1, which maintains confidentiality except in cases where the information is already public.”
• The next day, I received an e-mail from a representative for the Office team confirming that technical beta testers can write about the client applications in Office 12 only if they’re among the group of press and reviewers recognized by Microsoft. “These folks (there are a few hundred of them) can blog all they want about client apps…”

That's enough to make your head spin, especially when there's been so much talk about various aspects of Office 12 (especially the new Ribbon UI).

What we're seeing is the old PR staff doing business as usual, and getting snared by the ground as it's shifting underneath them. I'm not sure where this is going to end up - it's (mostly) easy to identify a member of the press, and then control the level of conversation with them. It's a lot harder with bloggers popping up with unmoderated comments as that's all taking place.

A new model is trying to be born, and I don't think anyone knows what it's going to look like yet.

Tim Bray wants to utilize the resources at the client side to lessen the load on servers:

I suspect there’s a huge system-wide optimization waiting out there for us to grab, by pushing as much of the templating and page generation work out there onto the clients. In particular, when you’re personalizing a page, assign all the work you can to the personal computer sitting in front of the person in question. Yeah, that cool, responsive AJAXy stuff is nice but maybe it’s the icing on the cake; the real win is making the Web run faster. ongoing doesn’t do any sexy-UI stuff, but you know, the page content could be a lot more dynamic, and there’s no reason for it to run slower; or even to upgrade from the single fairly-basic Athlon that hosts it.

That's a good idea, but it has one downside: the compatibility issue. I dropped a simple javascript html editor into my comment page here, and Mac users got up in arms over it - because the editor doesn't work with Safari. That's the sort of issue that any push like this will hit, unfortunately.

The RIAA pulled its middle finger back out, and waved it at all of us again today. Here's what they said during the Grokster case last year:

"The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it's been on their website for some time now, that it's perfectly lawful to take a CD that you've purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod."

However, in a filing the just made, it's clear that they consider that to be inoperative:

"Nor does the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even routinely granted, necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization. In this regard, the statement attributed to counsel for copyright owners in the MGM v. Grokster case is simply a statement about authorization, not about fair use."

So using their standard operating procedure, if they write a restriction against copying in tiny print, and hide it under the CD inside the case, that's fair warning. What a bunch of utter tools. Oh - even making a backup against a disaster is verboten:

The same filing also had this to say: "Similarly, creating a back-up copy of a music CD is not a non-infringing use...."

I repeat: what a bunch of tools.

Gizmodo quotes a source claiming to have the Sony PS3 release date:

According to well-placed industry sources, PlayStation HUB will offer PlayStation 3 owners much the same services as Xbox Live, including chat, downloadable demos, independent games and online play. The service is also designed to support PSP online play as well as PS3.

We'll have to wait and see. The most anticipated part of this? What's the price tag going to be?

Alan Knight posted this on one of our mailing lists, and I thought it would be generally useful:

Yes, quite a lot of substantial things changed with Runtime Packager. See the release notes for some additional information. One of the significant and backward-incompatible changes, as Jim pointed out, is the change from using categories and namespaces as the organizing mechanisms to using packages and bundles. Most of the changes as to what did and did not get stripped would have made it strip less (e.g. allowing for pragmas and handling registries of classes). I don't know why it would strip productFromInteger:, and I haven't seen that behaviour.

The biggest problem with a simple, linear bootstrap chain is that the system does not start up in a simple, linear fashion. The most notable branching points in a basic image are between runtime and development usage, and between headless and headfull operation. I'm not sure where to draw the distinction is between something that allows clients to hook in their interests at a proper position and a confusing network of implicitly linked events, triggers, and pragma dependencies. In comparison to to the traditional mechanism, which could be described as a linear bootstrap chain with a place to hook interests, it proved to be too hard-coded and not flexible enough, not to have enough registration points, and the registration mechanism led to ordering dependencies on exactly when particular interests were registered. The Subsystem mechanism, and the SystemEventInterests have allowed for considerably greater flexibility, and there are a number of things implemented as a result that would have been quite difficult to do as ObjectMemory dependents.

I'm not sure if you were wishing for a tool that would show the ordering dependencies or complaining that one is necessary, but there is one. See Tools-StartupOrderingTool, which adds a tab in the RB code view when a Subsystem class is selected.

To disable the command-line options that we thought you might want to disable for security reasons, See Settings->System->Loading, or the class side of ImageConfigurationSystem.

Dynamically pausing parts of the system during runtime is something that has been part of the system since the beginning, and is fairly widely used. The mechanism on Subsystem merely makes it possible to do this for Subsystems without making them be dependents of ObjectMemory.

I suspect the increase in footprint from 7.3 to 7.4 is more likely due to the more conservative approach to stripping when confronted with difficulty to correctly trace constructs such as pragmas and class registries than to links between subsystems, but it's possible that that is a factor. I also note that by default the system will start by including all Subsystems in the image, and they would have to be explicitly excluded. You might be interested in looking at base.im as a basis for stripping, rather than a full development image, or at unloading development-time only functionality before stripping.

Improving and automating deployment procedures is one of our priorities, and the changes in Subsystems is part of that, as are the changes to Runtime Packager. We think the basic Subsystems code is stable, although adapting other parts of the system to use those mechanisms such as was done for Runtime Packager in 7.4 is still ongoing. Runtime Packager is likely to have more changes, and also to have less emphasis as the primary deployment mechanism, particularly with respect to stripping a development image.

The Off Switch is apparently too hard for Dave:

Firefox started misbehaving, so I thought -- let's go download a fresh install. Guess what's waiting for me: no choice but to install the Google Toolbar. Remember what they said about their hack, if you don't like it, don't install it. Well, there it is. Where's the choice now. Back then I couldn't get anyone to listen. Letting Google modify our content to add links to their sites was a very bad idea then, now maybe others get that too? Now that they're doing it for the Chinese censors. Why do you guys trust Google so much . They're a corporation; they'll do whatever they have to do to make money, do you think the integrity of your writing is even the smallest little issue for them? I don't.

This has nothing to do with trust - it has to do with user options. For those slow on the uptake, there's an "options" button right on the Google toolbar. Not to mention that right clicking in the toolbar area allows you to turn the Google toolbar off. Not to mention that the Google toolbar can be uninstalled from the extension menu as well.

But hey - who wants to let a few facts get in the way of a pointless rant?

I'm working on getting a dev build of BottomFeeder on VW 7.4 out. I've got it working, but some of the extras that I've come to rely on - the process monitor and inspectors - are still being stripped out. That's a consequence of the changes I spoke of in my previous post on RTP - and I'm still adjusting to that change. I should have a dev build by tomorrow, unless I get sidetracked.

Cees de Groot announces a Smalltalk event in Brussels:

A bit of a short notice, mainly because we hade to shove this in between today and StS , but please mark 11th March 2006 in your diary if you’re a Smalltalker within reasonable travel distance of Brussels.

The VUB Programming Technology Lab will host this day of informal chat, presentations (Bryce will rehearse his StS Exupery presentation), and hopefully drinks&dinner afterwards.

Coen de Roover, our contact and thus Official Party Host (thanks Coen!), has setup a Swiki at http://prog.vub.ac.be:8080/SmalltalkParty/ - if you plan to attend, just add your name to the list.

It's time to register for Smalltalk Solutions 2006. The site is accepting registrations now, and it's coming up sooner than you think: April 24- 26. Register now, so you can attend talk like this one:

Efficient Smalltalk (Travis Griggs)

Smalltalk is slow. Everyone knows it. So why try?” Not! In this tutorial Travis will dispel these myths, and along the way he will provide insight and patterns that will show you when and how to improve performance in Smalltalk programs. Looking for efficient Smalltalk this is the program to see.

See you there!

Morgan McLintic notes that Steve Rubel has moved to Edelman, and the most interesting part to me is the disposition of his blog:

He keeps his excellent MicroPersuasion blog following a buyout deal with his previous agency, which had a branded practice of the same name. Richard Edelman is pumped about the appointment too - as well he should be.

The blog was a valuable piece of "real estate", and it had to be bought out. I expect we'll see more of this sort of thing as time goes by.

Tune your browser here for a collection of sci-fi audio from the golden days. Hat tip Tim from Adventa Control Technologies

Slashdot posts a link to Dvorak speculating that Apple may ditch OS X and go Windows. The irony? Following the link to Dvorak yielded this (click for larger image):