Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

I get Jonathan Schwartz' complaint about the default use of Windows by so many organizations - both public and private. On the other hand, I can deal with Word docs on my Mac without a problem, and my Mac also handles Windows Media player files just fine. Interestingly enough, my Mac is a better citizen on my local LAN (from a Windows file sharing perspective) than the other machines are; one of my wife's machines sometimes just disappears from the LAN without losing connectivity otherwise. Go figure.

I suppose I should get to the ironic part - Schwartz is out advocating for the ODF format. Meanwhile, Corel just backed away from ODF in WordPerfect (reported by ComputerWorld this week). If Microsoft wants to really put egg on the face of the ODF backers, they'll ship support for the format in Office 12. Now that would be amusing.

I have to take this announcement from Microsoft - that they will not be supporting EFI bootup with Vista, and will instead rely on the creaky old BIOS - as something of a good sign.

Why? Well, stop and think about it for a moment - it means that Microsoft actually considers Apple to be a viable competitor. The only reason for them to make dual boot a pain is to keep Apple software off of systems that have Windows. They realize that dual booting into Linux is irrelevant - Linux on the desktop is a non-starter. Apple though? Clearly, they think that might be a problem.

Via Instapundit, I found this interesting story on the crossover between video games and military action:

But there's another reason, not often talked about, for the success of CROWS. The guys operating these systems grew up playing video games. They developed skills in operating systems (video games) very similar to the CROWS controls. This was important, because viewing the world around the vehicle via a vidcam is not as enlightening (although a lot safer) than having your head and chest exposed to the elements, and any firepower the enemy sends your way. But experienced video gamers are skilled at whipping that screen view around, and picking up any signs of danger.

So maybe all that time on things like "Call of Duty" aren't just entertainment - I can see my daughter's retort to get off the GameCube already: "But dad, I'm doing this for the good of the country!"

I spent the day bogged down in a syncronization exercise. Steve Kelly has been making updates to the Silt server, and we were trying to create a unified version that would load the same on 7.1 and 7.4. The issue? I extended the DES class, and between those two versions it migrated between namespaces. This made life difficult. For now, I'm back to maintaining parallel versions. However, the server will be moving to 7.4 soon, and I'll be able to kill off the older version.

The good news is, I'm off to play Civ IV and Caylus this evening!

Oh my. I haven't watched the finales of Atlantis or BSG yet, but I just got through the season finales of SG-1. I won't give any real spoilers, but for you Star Trek fans - it reminded me a lot of "Wolf-359". My thought at this point? Where the heck do they go from here?

I find this whole mess around voting machines (in Maryland, where I live, and elsewhere) just fascinating. The Maryland state legislature just voted to ditch the touchscreen machines (they just went in over the last 2 elections) because they couldn't produce a paper trail:

The state House of Delegates this week voted 137-0 to approve a bill prohibiting election officials from using AccuVote-TSx touch-screen systems in 2006 primary and general elections.

The legislation calls for the state to lease paper-based optical-scan systems for this year's votes. State Delegate Anne Healey estimated the leasing cost at $12.5 million to $16 million for the two elections.

The whole voting machine mess goes back to the 2000 presidential election, which - like the 1876 election, was disputed. In the aftermath of that, laws were passed in an attempt to apply a technical fix. This ended up looking a lot like the sort of management fad that blows through IT shops from time to time. You know the sort: "Everyone else is using Java, we have to!", or "XML is the best thing ever, we should use it everywhere!"

So here in Maryland, the state grabbed the touchscreenn machines in 2002, thinking that here was the technical fix for any potential problem. Well, not so much. The machines were different from the old optical scan system we used to use - better in some ways, worse in others (a lot like those management fads). Which takes us to the present - like the IT shop that decides to drop everything and start using (insert fad here), the state finally looked at the level of complaints (no paper trail) and the amount of money spent (a lot).

And where are? Right back where we were in 2000, with Optical Scan machines. In the technology industry, we call this kind of thing "management by magazine". This episode shows that the transmission method might be different (warring press releases from political advocates), but the end results look a lot alike - trying to fix a supposed problem by applying a "new technology" - without doing an actual evaluation of the costs/benefits - usually ends up failing. Badly.

Time for my weekly look at the logs: BottomFeeder downloads went at a rate of 261 a day last week, a nice little pickup from the prior couple of weeks:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	706
Sources	328
Update	234
Linux x86	140
Mac X	123
Mac 8/9	75
CE ARM	55
HPUX	35
Windows98/ME	35
AIX	29
Linux Sparc	26
Solaris	26
Linux PPC	6
SGI	5
ADUX	3
Source Script	3
CE x86	1

Next up, the HTML pages accesses, by tool:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	52%
Internet Explorer	24.9%
MSN Bot	11.4%
Everest/Vulcan	4.3%
Megite	3.4%
Google Bot	2%
BottomFeeder	1%
Other	1%

Looks mostly the same as always, except for that MSN bot. That's a lot of crawling, IMHO. Off to the RSS tool accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	24%
BottomFeeder	16.2%
Net News Wire	9.1%
BlogLines	8.6%
Other	7.3%
Safari RSS	5.4%
MSN Bot	3.3%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.2%
Internet Explorer	2.8%
RSS Bandit	2.6%
Planet Smalltalk	2%
Feed Reader	1.9%
Magpie	1.5%
BlogSearch	1.4%
NewsGator	1.3%
Java	1.3%
SharpReader	1.1%
JetBrains	1%
Liferea	1%
FeedFlow	1%
NewsOutlook	1%
News Fire	1%
Feed Demon	1%
Attensa	1%

Looks about like always there.

I had to decide whether this belonged under 'security' or 'stupidity' - I decided that the latter was far more descriptive. There's a report out on a fairly serious loss of data by Citibank (and a bunch of other banks) - someone hacked into a system and stole a bunch of card data - including the PIN numbers - for a set of debit cards. The stupidity is in this quote:

"This is the worst hack ever," Litan maintained. "It's significant because not only is it a really wide-spread breach, but it affects debit cards, which everyone thought were immune to these kinds of things."

Unlike credit cards, debit cards offer an additional level of security: the password-like Personal Identification Number, or PIN.

"That's the irony, the PIN was supposed to make debit cards secure," Litan said. "Up until this breach, everyone thought ATMS and PINs could never be compromised."

Who exactly is "everyone"? The dumber flacks in the PR department? And to cap it off, here's her non-solution solution:

"Security is tight at the ATM, but point-of-sale is a whole other story," said Litan. "Look at your [debit card] account on a regular basis, and don't use a PIN-based debit card at point-of-sale," she recommended. "I never do."

Yeah, I'd much rather carry my checkbook with me everywhere, like it was 1978 all over again. Another thing - a regular credit card at the POS won't be any safer from a fraud standpoint - if the stores aren't careful with the data, then it doesn't much matter.

It's still all about Dave!

Every so often, someone asks me why Cincom Smalltalk doesn't use native (platform) threads - the assumption being that lightweight (i.e., managed by Smalltalk) level threads just can't cut it. Someone should tell Microsoft, because they have SQL Server using the same kind of model that Cincom Smalltalk uses:

Ken Henderson profiles the User Mode Scheduler (UMS) in SQL Server 2000 that requires developers to write code that runs efficiently, and yields often enough in the appropriate places. UMS provides more control and allows the server to scale better than it could with the Windows scheduler.

Read that last sentence a few times :) Then have a look a little further down in the article:

An important difference -- in fact, probably the most important difference—between the Windows scheduler and the SQL Server UMS is that the Windows scheduler is a preemptive scheduler, while UMS implements a cooperative model.

Just like what we do in Cincom Smalltalk. Read the article, and then look at the Smalltalk process model we use in CST. You'll see a lot of similarities.

tech.memeorandum has taken notice of DabbleDB, in a story linked from TechCrunch. DabbleDB is Avi's latest venture.

Sounds to me like James Gosling hears footsteps, and he's getting nervous:

"There have been a number of language coming up lately," noted James Gosling today at Sun's World Wide Education & Research Conference in New York City when asked if Java was in any kind of danger from the newcomers. "PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems," he continued, "but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems."

I'm sure he knows that due to the vast well of experience he has with Ruby, PHP (etc). Apparently, in Gosling's world, Ruby is only used for web pages. Sure James - and Java is only used for applets. How often do they let him out of his lab? His cluelessness abounds:

PHP (for example) is able to make things simpler because it's 100% aimed at web pages, Gosling explained. Whereas with Java, he said, "We have a balancing act: we need the simplicity but we also need power."

Hmm - I see that the phrase "best tool for the job" isn't part of his lexicon. Simplicity? In Java? Yeah, how about that implementation of generics, hmm?

David Heinemeier Hansson has related thoughts.

We watched the finale of BSG and Stargate Stargate Atlantis last night. After watching Atlantis, it seemed to me that the story lines of SG-1 and Atlantis are going to have to merge for awhile - the way they ended left me with little doubt of that. Maybe Rodney will finally get his chance to one-up Carter? Assuming he and Ronon can get out of the bind they are in, that is.

BSG ended with a bang. The writers set it all up a couple weeks back with Six and Eight surviving the cafe bombing on Caprica - we saw how that would play out and it really does reset the series. I have to say, I have no idea how they get out of this one. On SG-1, there was definitely time travel foreshadowing, which provides an out. BSG doesn't play those tricks, so I'm left just wondering. I'm not displeased with their direction - but I sure hope that they haven't painted themselves into a corner.

Ayende Rahien spotten my post on cooperative scheduling, and had a comment:

Cooperative threads relies on programmers' disipline to yield often enough to make sure that other threads are not starved. I can see several cases for doing this in SQL Server, since this can ensure that you'll not be pre-empted before you finished. I would guess that this is a good way to reduce locks in certain situation, since in this scenario you know that you will not be interrupted until you are ready. Windows 3.1 and Mac OS before X proved that this just doesn't work in the general case. A single ruoge application can take hold on the whole system.

Well, in Cincom Smalltalk, this model gives you predictability - you know exactly what a thread is going to do. The issue with runaway threads rarely comes up for a simple reason - most processes end up pausing for I/O (user input, db access, file access, sockets - what have you). That wait for I/O state is what prevents a problem from arising. Sure, if you create a CPU bound process, you can hose a system - I even blogged about that kind of issue here, in terms of a CPU bound process taking up too much time in this blog server.

What it looks like the SQL Server team spotted is something common to an awful lot of applications - CPU hogging is fairly rare, while processes getting into an I/O wait state are pretty common. As to worrying about thread management - I've worked with a lot of customer code, and I've dealt with application level threading extensively in Silt and BottomFeeder. With the exception of a few expensive operations in the Silt server, I've not had to devote a lot of thought to the problem. And even there, the problem had already been solved for me, by some Smalltalk library developer a long time ago.

Gosling's outburst is continuing to demonstrate an "out of ammunition" posture at Sun. I spotted this retort to Gosling tonight:

Here’s a good measure of performance. A certain sorting algorithm that determines the most active conversations. 100ms in Java, but a painfully slow 500ms in Ruby (5x). Once you add database query and networking, the difference between the languages is about 10%. 10% is not a big difference.

About the size of it. Compared to dynamic languages, Java is a huge pile of premature optimization.

Via Brad Wilson, I see that Ryan Tomasko ripped Gosling a new one over his clue free ramblings - about which Ryan said:

Minds changed. Respectful debate, honesty, passion, and working systems created an environment that not even the most die-hard enterprise architect could ignore, no matter how buried in Java design patterns. Those who placed technical excellence and pragmaticism above religious attachment and vendor cronyism were easily convinced of the benefits that broadening their definition of acceptable technologies could bring.

The people who are still unconvinced are those that just don’t care or are too lazy to spend a small amount of time researching and validating the arguments, which brings us back nicely to James Gosling’s recent statements.

There's a lot more as well, and it's all worth reading.

Update: More piling on here, at Developer Journals:

It really does seem that we're beginning to emerge from the 10 year long Java nuclear winter, when excellent dynamic languages such as Objective-C or Smalltalk were kicked out of the mainstream.

...

In contrast what underwhelms me about the design of Java is how it feels like it was done by someone who never really programmed in Smalltalk or Objective-C, and so they just left out any sort of introspection, left out meta-classes, left out dynamic method redirection via #doesNotUnderstand, and left out open classes that you could add methods to via categories. It was obviously designed by someone who had tried C++, found it over-complicated and designed a simpler alternative with a runtime derived from the Pascal p-code interpreter.

Read it all.

Cees has a brief report up on the Smalltalk party that took place in Brussels over the weekend. Apparently, they are planning more of these in various European locales over the next few months.

Murphee points out some of the difficult issues that Sun faces with JSR 292 - adding dynamic language support to the JVM. The upshot is, it won't be a small change:

Reading the overview of JSR 292 brings up another interesting planned feature: updating class structures at runtime. It‘s already possible to use HotSwap to update the contents of method bodies of loaded classes, but structural change of the class definition is impossible (causing the dreaded debugger dialog “Hot code replace failed”). One annoying restriction here is the it‘s not even possible to change method signatures or just add/remove methods from a class.

As he points out later, it's simple to do that kind of update in Ruby, and I've pointed out that I do exactly that kind of live update to the server code running this blog. Heck, I did that again over the weekend. I think the people responsible for the JVM are going to end up re-inventing everything we already did in Smalltalk, Lisp, and Ruby if they decide to take on 292. If they are true to past form though, it will involve a lot of really "interesting" syntax changes :)

There are only 4 days left for early registration discounts for Smalltalk Solutions 2006 - advance registration discounts last until April 17. You'll want the early discounts - full registration pays for all sessions, including tutorials - like the "Using AJAX from Seaside" tutorial with Andrew Catton and Avi Bryant:

Why shouldn't your web apps be as dynamic as your language? This tutorial is for intermediate to advanced Seaside users who want to use client-side Javascript to add a richer user experience to their web applications. Learn how to add autocompletion, drag and drop, visual effects and instant feedback using Seaside's AJAX object model, usually without writing any Javascript code by hand.

See you in Toronto!

If you follow the Public Store, you're about to see a change in the RSS Feed. Back when I first started publishing that, the feed generator didn't produce a GUID for the items. Most aggregators simulate one under those circumstances, but the information that most of them use (often the link) wasn't going to work out so well here - the link for each item in this case is the same.

So, I've gone ahead and added a GUID. The downside is, on the first round of updates, you'll see a bunch of "new" items that aren't actually new - but it should behave better over time.

Here's one of the downsides of outsourced hosting that I'm not sure is solveable - if the thing being hosted is critical to your business, who cares about it more: you, or the hosting company? If there's a problem, who will be more highly motivated to fix it? That seems to be the sentiment behind this story from CNet:

In a meeting here with reporters on Friday, Gianforte said reliability and cost issues mean the company isn't interested in managed hosting services, including the $1-per-processor-per-hour Sun Grid.

He tried turning over his servers to a managed hosting company seven years ago, he said, and the move was a "miserable failure" that has since been reversed. Managed hosting companies want control over computers, but RightNow needs to be the boss in order to keep its equipment running around the clock. "We need control to get that kind of reliability," Gianforte said. Nothing has changed in the last seven years to change his mind, he added.

There's also the cost thing:

It doesn't make financial sense, either, Gianforte said. Running his own data center, including engineers and other staff, costs 6 percent of revenue, and he expects that to drop to 4 percent in the next two to three years. One of his top competitors, SAP, pays IBM much more than that to host its software-as-a-service offering, he said.

That certainly sets a target for any outsourcer who wants to get business, now doesn't it?

I found this "I want to be alone" website to be truly amusing. I especially like the IMolatr :)

Apple is one of a number of companies that are going to get a crash course in globalization shortly - it looks like France is going to try and force them to open the iTunes store up:

It would no longer be illegal to crack digital rights management -- the codes that protect music, films and other content -- if it is to enable to the conversion from one format to another, said Christian Vanneste, Rapporteur, a senior parliamentarian who helps guide law in France.

"It will force some proprietary systems to be opened up ... You have to be able to download content and play it on any device," Vanneste told Reuters in a telephone interview on Monday.

Some people seem to think that Apple will shut down the store in France, but that's going to be hard to do - France, like the rest of the Continent (outside the UK) uses the Euro. If you use an ISP based across the border, what are they going to do? I suspect that they'll have to let it happen.

This reminds me of "daytime running lights" on cars. A few years back, Canada mandated that. Manufacturers started shipping cars that did that automatically, so that drivers wouldn't have to remember to turn them on manually. Given the easy border crossings, and the commonality between the US and Canadian car markets, most cars in the US now follow the Canadian convention, even without the matching law.

Bottom line, companies operating globally have to pay ever closer attention to the legal environment everywhere they operate.

From LWNW / STS 2006 comes this call for Student Volunteers:

We offer students of colleges and universities the opportunity to volunteer at the show. This entails assisting speakers in their session room and a variety of other duties photocopying handouts that sort of thing. In the time in between the specific job duty they are free to attend any seminar they choose. Or they can request that they volunteer in the specific seminar rooms that have the sessions they want to hear.

Please send an email to desiree@plumcom.ca and request a student application. We need at least 40-50 students.

See you in Toronto!

I've read plenty of criticisms of Microsoft's employee review system, but this one caught my eye:

Microsoft employees are growing more and more disillusioned with stagnating salaries and an increasingly contentious review system that they say is unfair, according to a recent report in WashTech News. That's led to more defections by senior engineers and growing dissatisfaction among rank-and-file workers, the report said.

Until I got to the next paragraph:

The publication is affiliated with the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, a labor union affiliated with the AFL-CIO that has tried to organize Microsoft workers in the past. At issue is the company's performance review system, according to the report. Microsoft employs some 38,000 workers in the U.S. alone.

Now, never mind what you think of Microsoft, or this union, or unions in general. Just consider the concept of a "news story" that uses a source that was unsuccessful in its attempt to deal with the subject of the story. Nah, there wouldn't be a conflict of interest there, hmm?

Maybe CNN should just cut out the middleman and host press releases from advocates - employers, unions, political parties. That way I wouldn't have to go all the way to the second paragraph in order to evaluate the usefulness of a story.

I had not heard about this suit before, but it looks like Microsoft's decision to settle - leaving Sony to sight the battle against a patent for game controllers with feedback - is going to bite Sony:

Sony's struggle with Immersion dates back to 2002, when Immersion came after Sony and its DualShock vibration feedback system for controllers. Immersion also pursued Microsoft and its controllers, but Microsoft settled with the company and entered into a licensing agreement, leaving Sony to fend for itself. In September of 2004, Sony lost a jury trial and was ordered to pay US$82 million in damages for infringing on Immersion's patents. Half a year later in March of 2005, Sony lost an appeal and damages were revised to nearly $91 million.

Worse, it looks an awful lot like Sony tried to buy off the guy who filed the patent:

In this latest round, Sony argued that Immersion was holding back evidence and requested that the original verdict be tossed out. They argued that inventions of Craig Thorner—once a consultant for Immersion—were not fully and properly disclosed. Sony argued that the full body Thorner's work on haptic feedback reveals weaknesses in Immersion's patent claims, and that such weaknesses are grounds for a new trial.

US District Judge Claudia Wilken has sided with Immersion. The problem is Mr. Thorner. While Thorner did once work for Immersion, he has also received a $150,000 payment from Sony for royalties and a purchase option on another patent. Although the money in question appears to be technically unrelated to Thorner's testimony, Wilken wrote that Thorner's testimony was suspect and that it was quite possible that he viewed his testimony as a favor to Sony. Since Thorner's testimony serves as the basis for Sony's new attack on Immersion's patents, Wilken's ruling effectively puts this line of appeal to rest.

Regardless of the merits of the patent, I doubt the court will take that payment lightly. I think Microsoft just got another leg up in the console space.

I'm not normally a fan of class action suits - the biggest winners are always the lawyers - but I'll make an exception for the RIAA. I'm all in favor of giving them a taste of the rectal probe:

Like a shark smelling blood in the water, the latest round of investigations has attracted the lawyers. Prominent California attorney William Lerach has now launched a class action suit against the labels on behalf of consumers who have allegedly been overcharged for music. This in itself is not particularly surprising given the ongoing federal investigation into the same topic, but the lawsuit does contain some interesting tidbits. For instance, the suit claims that the music labels fought tooth and nail against the arrival of online music stores, and that they did so by launching their own poorly-conceived (on purpose) online ventures.

Vassili starts talking about Splash:

To answer some of the questions I expect.

When will it be ready? For some definition of "ready", expect a preview in the release this fall. No promises as to the level of functionality of the preview--but much more than what you see above!

Yes, I will post it in the open repository. But, only when it gets to the point of actually being at least somewhat usable and useful. I don't want to spend time on publishing to two places until then.

It will not be a multiple-window setup like the current UIPainter.

Stay tuned to Vassili's blog for more information

I'd say that putting the spotlight on bad DRM helps - witness this statement from Sony on the analog "hole", with respect to Blu-Ray DVD:

In an important aside, Don Eklund, SPHE's senior vice president for advanced technologies, said that Sony's initial Blu-ray discs — and all of its Blu-ray titles for the forseeable future — will be free of the "Image Constraint Token" that's built into the Blu-ray and HD DVD standards. This controversial digital flag instructs the player to down-res the video signal from its analog component-video outputs to a standard-definition image to prevent high-resolution recordings — but at the same time prevents viewing of HDTV images on any TV or device not equipped with a copyright-protected HDMI digital input. That would eliminate any gain in image quality for HDTV early-adopters who bought displays prior to two or three years ago, when DVI and HDMI digital inputs were introduced.

It's hardly all good - the very next paragraph says this:

Eklund noted that Sony's key piracy concern isn't with analog HDTV signals but with the digital HDTV signal coming off the disc, which both Blu-ray and HD DVD are protecting with the robust Advanced Access Content System (AACS) endorsed by the Hollywood studios. If analog copying does become a problem down the road, the policy could change, he said — but for now, "we have no plan to implement the Image Constraint Token. All of Sony's titles will come out of the analog output at full definition." He added that other studios still have the discretion to activate the token for all or individual titles.

My take on this? The DRM nightmare they got themselves into with the rootkit CD's has constrained them a bit - but only a bit.

If you are arriving on Saturday or Sunday for Smalltalk Solutions 2006, and would like to meet up with other Smalltalkers before the conference, then hit this wiki page.

Scoble and Winer need to get over themselves:

Anyway, I totally understand why Dave would want to walk away. I’m staring at hundreds of emails and just don’t want to deal with my inbox right now. I’m gonna take the rest of the day off and hang out at SXSW. My sessions are over and now I just have to catch up with the email. I totally understand why Dave wants to take off from his blog. The pressure is just incredible to do more, more, more.

Who made me a gatekeeper? I don’t want that job.

Sheesh, what pressure? I write here because I feel like it. I don't feel pressure to write - I see things of interest to me and comment on them. I toss up Smalltalk advocacy, with examples. It's nice that I've built a decent sized traffic stream, but it's not what motivates me.

If writing is no longer fun, then hey - stop. In the meantime, don't take it too seriously. None of us are Edward Gibbons writing about the fall of the Roman Empire - it's just not that serious. Some people need to step back, take a breath, and just have fun with it.

Ten is a good number lings to a Reg Developer story that demonstrates something - it demonstrates that patent offices in Europe can be every bit as stupid as those here in the US. Here's Sun getting a patent for changing the byte code set for Java:

The Patent Office has concluded that Sun Microsystems can patent an invention for a reduced set of Java Bytecode instructions the form of instructions that a Java Virtual Machine will follow to execute a Java program.

Yeah, there's something no one ever thought of before - changing the byte code to be more efficient. At least the ruling patent official is really up to speed on modern developments:

"In this case, I do not consider that the invention lies in excluded subject matter as such, i.e. a computer program," he said. "The invention was almost certainly made at a much earlier stage in the creative process, before any computer program had been written (or flowcharts generated) with a view to implementing the invention."

Flow Charts? What year is it again?

Well, this was unexpected. I uninstalled the IE7 beta the other day, since it was unstable (and did not work with our internal websites). So I restored to IE6, and then noticed two oddball things:

1. Outlook Express was gone
2. Microsoft Paint was gone

The first one I didn't care about so much, since I use Eudora. I use Paint for some tasks though, and it was just gone. I can't restore it either - trying to do so prompts for the XP service pack 2 CD (yeah, like those exist), which I don't have. The big question: How the heck did uninstalling IE 7 beta kill Paint? What the heck is up with that?

Gablarski criticizes all of us who laughed at this patent, saying that it doesn't cover what we think it does. He highlights this section:

A host computer, containing processes for creating rich-media applications, is accessed from a remote user computer system via an Internet connection. User account information and rich-media component specifications are uploaded over the Internet for a specific user account. Rich-media applications are created, deleted, or modified in a user account, with rich-media components added to, modified in, or deleted from the rich-media application based on information contained in a user request. After creation, the rich-media application is viewed or saved on the host computer system, or downloaded to the user computer system over the Internet.

And says this:

Now read that very carefully. People are apparently reading the first sentence and stopping. This isn’t a list of “or”s here, the patent covers a piece of technology that incorporates ALL these things, not one or the other. This patent covers an application that is specifically designed to CREATE and manage multiple RIAs under a user account and either host them for the user or make them available for download. That’s the patent. Make more sense? It makes me wonder if people are really that stupid or if they’re just not reading everything.

Hmm. You mean like cookies interacting with a server to determine access and so on? Gee, that's never been done before either. So yeah, your AJAX application is fine, just so long as there's no user associated state involved. I stand by my original criticism.

Patrick Logan calls BS on some of the wilder claims made about SOA in the industry. He quotes the latest IEEE Software magazine (PDF):

In contrast to standard distribution middleware such as CORBA or Java RMI, an SOA implements processes as first-class entities.

Had I read that, I'd have the same bewildered reaction Patrick has:

This is on page 58 of the March/April IEEE Software magazine. I wonder if the editors have any more sense of how wrong this is than the authors?

First of all, SOA has no formal definition. Secondly, in any common use of the term SOA, there is nothing resembling a process, let alone a first-class process.

This is what happens when you let the marketing staff get ahold of a few buzzwords :)

CNet has a report up on the changing face of voting machinery in the US. I'd say this is another expedition into "management by magazine" land, searching for the elusive silver bullet fix. Consider:

As a result, almost 82 million registered voters will have seen voting systems changes over the past six years. The number of counties using hand-counted paper ballots this November will be only about half as many as in 2000.

Hand counting may not be sophisticated, but - with decent monitoring, I'd guess that it's pretty darn reliable. Instead, we have a plethora of whiz bang touch screens with no paper ballots at all in many places now. The response to the 2000 election looks a lot like the 1995-1996 introduction of Java to me - endless bouts of "all the cool shops are doing this" silliness, with no thought as to what might be the best business solution.

I suppose I should be encouraged - the software industry is no dumber than anything else :)

I've posted a new development build of BottomFeeder - it has a few bug fixes, and moves to the latest release of Software With Style's components. The build scripts for that are not up to date yet - there have been a few changes. So, if you intend to build from sources, you'll have to hang on.

Stupid in this case meaning my code :) I was looking at the bug list for BottomFeeder on SourceForge yesterday, and found a bug I should have dealt with a long while back:

(url here) is an example of a feed that doesn't have dates attatched to items.

I cannot sort items within a sub-folder by date if the folder includes such a feed.

Well, that seemed like something that shouldn't happen. I thought I was assigning default timestamps to items without them, but it turns out I wasn't. Why, I'm not sure; I guess it hadn't come up before. In any case, it was a simple fix. After getting an Item object from a feed, I have post processing code to clean up problems. That code does things like:

• Insert default titles
• Add the current time as the point of last update
• If there's no link, and the GUID looks like an URL, consider it the link as well

And now, it goes ahead and slaps a timestamp on items that are missing them. Most of this only applies to RSS; the Atom spec mandates behavior in these areas, so it's less of a problem.

Battlestar Galactica truly is the best show on TV - it's one of the few things on the air that inspires thoughtful conversation - like this. I'm not going to quote any of it, because I think it stands best as a whole.

There seems to be a rule in this neighborhood - if it's trash day or recycling day, the wind has to be gusting strongly enough to blow the cans and bags down the street. I just went out to rescue my trash can after it got emptied - and watched the wind blowing the neighbor's cans and lids down the street. Two of the three cans in this picture are from a house two doors down, and have landed there. Since I took the shot, one of them has jumped into the middle of the street:

I figured I ought to secure my own trashcan, so I took it back to the side of the house and weighted it down with a spare paving block - that's the gray thing sitting partly in the trashcan:

That's pretty much the only way to be sure around here :) A few weeks ago the can just disappeared - it came back a few days later. When people find trashcans they don't recognize, they drop them by the shared mailbox, figuring someone will claim them. There is some good news in all this - the weather has been just warm enough for the bulbs to sprout - spring flowers:

When it gets just a little warmer, it'll be time to get my grill tuned up. Mmmm, grilling....

It's time to register for Smalltalk Solutions 2006 - early bird registration ends this Friday - Advance registration goes through April 17. The Advance registration is still a discount from on-site, but not as much of one. Contact Suzanne Fortman for the Smalltalk Solutions discount code, which will give you an even bigger break.

See you in Toronto!

Well, it's less than an hour since I looked out my window at the trashcans blowing away - and away they've gone. Here's the same view across the street now:

All that's left is a forlorn trash can lid. The cans went down the street - you may not be able to pick them out here, but they are at the intersection at the end of this shot:

Thanks to Michael, the coding contest for this year's show is a go. The early details:

The 2nd annual Coding contest is on Phase One begins April 7th Interested parties should register with Michael Lucas-Smith before April 7th More details to come Prizes are: iPod video iPod nano iPod shuffle

See you in Toronto!

Looks like Rogers Cadenhead has found the dark side of Dave Winer - in the form of a "cease and desist" letter sent from an attorney Winer has retained. This is how Dave treats his erstwhile friends; it's not hard to figure out why fewer and fewer people can work with him. With respect to this "oh, it's hard to be Dave" post, Winer needs to buy a mirror. Every time he wonders why people dislike him, he can go have a look in it.

Oh, and to be extra clear - I take back every disdainful thing I ever said about Atom. The people involved in that effort knew about Dave, and I didn't. The whole thing makes a heck of a lot more sense now.

Gemstone is one of our most important partners in the Cincom Smalltalk business - and there's a nice description of why you would want to use their software here.

The Smalltalk Industry Council Announces the Second Annual Smalltalk Solutions Coding Competition

March 16, 2006 - The Smalltalk Industry Council (STIC) is pleased to announce the second annual Smalltalk Solutions Smalltalk Coding Competition.

The Smalltalk Solutions Technical Conference being held in Toronto will serve as the home for the coding competition finale. Smalltalk Solutions is the premier forum for bringing together Smalltalk users, developers, vendors, and enthusiasts.

Coding contest prizes include:

1. iPod Video
2. iPod Nano
3. iPod Shuffle

Each of the finalists will also receive an individual membership to the STIC.

The Smalltalk Solutions Coding Competition is broken into two phases of competition. The first phase begins on Friday, April7th at 9:00 am EST and ends on Sunday, April 9th at midnight EST. Registration is open and all participants must register for the competition by sending an email to Michael Lucas-Smith at by April 6, 2006. All coding must be done in Smalltalk, any dialect of Smalltalk.

The Second and final phase of the competition will take place the evening of Tuesday, April 25th onsite at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, home of LinuxWorld and Network World Smalltalk Solutions 2006.

Prize winners will be announced during the trade show on Wednesday, April 26, 2006.

Contact:
Suzanne Fortman
Smalltalk Industry Council
sfortman@cincom.com

Or

Michael Lucas-Smith
Software with Style
Michael.lucas-smith@softwarewithstyle.com

Sony's release dates for the PS3 are starting to look like the planning for Longhorn (remember when it was being called that?). Yesterday, Sony pulled together a press conference to announce that the PS3 would launch in November:

Sony will delay the release of its much-awaited PlayStation 3 gaming console until November from its planned spring debut because more work is needed on its next-generation DVD technology, the company said on March 15, the Associated Press reported.

Translation: We tried to shove too many next generation things into this console at once, and we are really hoping that the prices will drop on some of the. Like, say, the DVD player. And this sounds discouraging:

Kutaragi said Sony is still trying to finalize the copyright protection technology and other standards for the Blu-ray DVD disc, the format for PlayStation 3, and next-generation video for the company's electronics gadgets in the works.

I wonder if they can screw the pooch as badly as they did with music CD's?

I've been away from the blog most of the day writing a draft article. I've been asked to write up my experience creating the blog server, so I've been trying to piece that back together from memory and older versions of the code all morning. I have the sheer excitement of a dentist appointment coming up too - fun stuff there.

IMHO, any records Barry Bonds sets should have huge asterisks next to them - it's very odd to have your home run production go up as you age. The good news: Selig has finally realized that this might be a problem.

ON top of everything else, DRM sucks down additional battery power:

When it comes to the Creative Zen Vision:M's 14-hour claim, CNET got about 16 hours of playback time with MP3s from a full charge, which was a nice surprise. However, when they tried playing WMA 10 DRM crippled subscription tracks on it, they only got just over 12 hours; a loss of almost 4 hours (~25%) of playback time due to the battery-hungry DRM. CNET found similar results with other players with WMA DRM drastically reducing battery life by up to around 20%. Apple's FairPlay DRM seems to have less of an effect with battery life being reduced by around 8% when compared with MP3 playback.

The upshot:

When it comes to maximising battery life in a portable MP3 player, this is a clear sign that one should avoid playing DRM protected music if at all possible and also another good reason to get the music converted into a more battery-friendly format. While 2 to 4 hours may not seem a lot to some people, this can be the difference between listening to music to the end of a lengthy journey or getting left in silence a couple of hours before the journey is complete.

That's the RIAA for you, insisting on technology that drives you to find ways around it. That piracy they see? Like Dave Winer, they need a mirror to ponder the answer.

In today's blogosphere blow up, we have Rogers Cadenhead, Dave Winer - and a bunch of reactions - ranging all over the map. The one that kind of made me think was Scoble's post, and some of the comments in it. It's not the actual controversy that caught my attention though - rather, it's the reaction to it. Let me pull a comment from Nick Bradbury's post - the idea was expressed to some extent by by a lot of people, and by a number of commenters (on various blogs:

These public fights and taking-sides thing is starting to creep me out...

Here's the thing: Life is about taking sides, so buckle up and get used to it. If you have kids, do you maintain a constant state of non-judegementalism? If so, please warn me now, so that I never end up in the same room with them. When you see something wrong, you can criticize it, in the hopes of improving things - or, like all too many people, stay silent and offer tacit support for the bad behavior. Why is Winer such a consistent jerk? Because he has enablers all over the web, ready to step in and say "but really, he's not so bad...". That's what Scoble's post is doing - offering tacit support for Dave's consistent - and continuing - bad behavior.

Non-judgementalism isn't some kind of higher plane of existence - it's acceptance of all things, good or bad. The only thing that gets you is more bad, piled high, with an extra topping of obnoxiousness thrown in. We've all seen children acting out, and wondered to ourselves "what's wrong with the parents? Can't they control that child?" Well, we have the same thing here in the blogosphere. Too many people have bowed down and worshipped at the house of Dave for too long, and he acts just as you would expect: badly.

Update: Shelly Powers doesn't pull any punches, and calls this one the way it is. There are a lot of people who are staying quiet about Winer's bad behavior, and Shelly names names. It's past time for Dave's enablers to stage an intervention.

Update 2: As to the various people who plead that they can't take sides - go read Rogers' post. Then read Dave's response. Now, at that point, you might shrug your shoulders, figure it's a he said/he said thing, and leave it alone. However - cast your mind back to this post from the RSS-Public mailing list:

And with that, I am banging the gavel and ending this experiment of Rogers's.

Tomorrow I will talk individualy with all the corporate members of the "board" and ask them to resign.

Rogers may then wish to propose a new structure, one that is consistent with the "come back to earth" message.

They may wish to join with him, or they may not.

If anyone else decides to join up with him on the terms of the old "advisory board" I will talk with each of them individually, until they see that it serves no purpose.

This process will go on until Rogers gets the idea that it isn't go to work.

I may at some time send him a bill for all of my time that he is wasting. [ed: emphasis added]

Good night and good luck to all of you.

Dave

Well. After that, Dave went and pressured the VC's behind a few of the people on the board, and got those folks to drop off. As Rogers said in his post, there's no one Dave can pressure to get Rogers to back off, so instead, he tossed what amounts to a SLAPP suit at him. Boy, that sure paints all the people who won't call BS on Dave with glory, doesn't it? Heck, I went back and re-read Scoble's post - and what a mass of ill thought out FUD it is. For example:

So, what does my philosophy tell me to do? Protect the inventor. Protect the guy who brought us SOAP, XML-RPC, RSS, OPML, podcasting, and a few other things here and there. Against the angry mob. Why? Cause if I don’t, then maybe some new inventor will say “this space sucks, I’m gonna go somewhere that they appreciate inventors.”

And if that happens I’ll lose. We’ll all lose.

Sheesh, what a mass of crap. Dave hardly needs protection. He's the one tossing a lawsuit, as a thinly veiled way to get Rogers to give up the RSS Board. If Rogers decides to let that go (and I'd hardly blame him for doing so), then you watch - this suit will disappear. What I'd like to see is some of the supposedly leading luminaries of the blogosphere - Scoble amongst them - step up and grow a spine.

BlogCritics is still flogging the rumor that Google is buying Sun. If it's true, I will certainly have a lower regard for Google's business acumen - such a deal makes no sense to me (unless you are Sun management, desperate to parachute out). The newest piece of the rumor? The NYT Dealbook is floating it:

Talk of an imminent sale of Sun Microsystems to Google has been swirling around trading floors and Silicon Valley for more than a week. Shares of Sun, which has a partnership with Google to develop and distribute each other’s technology, spiked up about 4 percent last week as a result of the rumors. The speculation got even more legs after Google purchased Writely, a maker of a Web-based word processor that some people viewed as a product to be added to Sun’s StarOffice suite, which Google may help distribute. It’s also convenient that Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, is the former chief technology officer of Sun.

BlogCritics says this about it:

The prices of Sun and Google are moving further and further apart, too, as the market is realising what may be truth in the rumour: at close of trading yesterday, Sun was up and Google was down again, a rare phenomenon by any standards.

I don't know, you think that might be a collective "WTF???" from the market, aimed at Google?

Winer is certainly a piece of work. In a post that talks about the mapping choices made by Microsoft in their feed API, he says this:

Dave Johnson experiments with the Microsoft Feeds API, and finds they've made some unusual choices, which may not be good for interop. The solution of course is to parse the XML yourself, and it's definitely not too late for the community to provide the equivalent of the Microsoft toolkit, if perhaps the community can discuss such a thing without flaming out.

Without flaming out? Now why do you suppose that happens? You might wander over to the RSS Public mailing list, where people were discussing exactly this kind of issue. The whole thing flamed out alright - as soon as Dave showed up and spewed venom all over the forum. Why did Microsoft make the choices they made? Because in the absence of a tight spec, that's the sort of thing that happens. They made their best guesses, just like I and every other aggregator developer did. If there were a tight spec, that wouldn't happen as much. Can we get that? No, we can't, and here are Dave's *cough* words of wisdom *cough* on that subject:

It's not that I want it to remain ambiguous, it *has* to remain ambiguous, because the roadmap says so.

It takes the decision out of everyone's hands, no one can change the spec, because the SPEC SAYS IT CAN'T BE CHANGED.

So he spouts that, and then - today - acts stunned that developers working with RSS might come up with different interpretations of the spec, since it is - in his words - ambiguous. He's not only a mean spirited, bitter man - he's an incompetent, mean spirited, bitter man.

Stefan Tilkov:

I used to be a strong believer in static typing back when I was doing C++ programming. (That was actually something I did for a really long time — I was, in fact, somewhat religiously convinced there was a multitude of conceptual advantages C++ had over Smalltalk. Blame it on my youth.) Nowadays, the only advantage of static typing I still concede is the better support for IDEs and code completion, which you arguably would not need if you didn’t start with a verbose, unmanageable and ungrowable language in the first place.

Cincom Smalltalk has optional code completion support, btw.

Tim Bray has some good thoughts up on WS*, REST, and other related topics. This is all in the way of what you might call a concurring opinion (with a few differences) to this post by Darryl Plummer. Good stuff, I think, and well worth reading.

Wow, I stumbled on this today, after a tip from Boris. Apparently, it's Dave's world, and the rest of us just live in it. Sheesh, retire already, and stop the ongoing damage. Maybe I should start a counter, you know: Day Infinity, Winer still spreading venom...

I get a good amount of feedback on BottomFeeder, and Rich would like the same kind of thing for the documentation he's provided. On the sidebar, I've added links to four posts he put up asking for feedback - basically, Rich would like to know where the doc has been helpful, and where (if anywhere) there are gaps to be filled. The posts:

• BottomFeeder Tutorial Questions
• BottomFeeder Quick Start Guide Questions
• BottomFeeder User's Guide Questions
• BottomFeeder Technology Guide Questions

Thanks!

It looks like I need some help with MySQL. I'm looking at some code that uses MySQL as a back end, and I need a working ODBC connection to it. I've got MySQL 5.0 (from the MySQL Website) installed on Windows. I used the installer, and had it install everything. I then grabbed an ODBC Driver from here.

So now, I try installing a driver, and when I use the "test connection" option in the ODBC console, I get this:

[MySQL][ODBC 3.51 Driver] Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client

Trouble is, that looks like the most up to date client. I'm sure I've misconfigured something; anyone have a tip? Thanks in advance.

Update: Found the solution on this MySQL help page.

Via Alan Lovejoy comes this bizarre story:

Talk about a wild night near Seguin. A cow came flying out of its trailer, sent DPS and police scrambling, and left two police cars going up in flames.

After a long absence from the blogosphere, it looks like Steve Waring is posting again. Welcome back!

It looks like Dell has learned from the "Dell Hell" incident, and is monitoring blogs for mentions of the company's products. However, it looks like they might be being a trifle too pro-active - this guy had nice things to say about their monitor, and got a message that started with:

Thank you for contacting Dell about your issue. I'm glad to be of assistance. I sense you are not getting optimal performance from your system. I want to help you get it working quickly so you can enjoy your computer.

I think they need to put real people, instead of automated systems, in charge of that monitoring :)

Today is your last chance for early registration for Smalltalk Solutions 2006! You'll want to register early, so you can attend sessions like Randy Coulman's talk on FIT:

Many agile software development teams have struggled with how to write automated acceptance (or customer) tests for their software. Ward Cunningham's Fit (Framework for Integrated Tests) was introduced as a solution to this problem. In Fit, customers and testers write tests in the form of tables, which are interpreted by special purpose "fixture" code that calls into the system under test. This seminar introduces acceptance testing using Fit, FitNesse, and FitLibrary in Smalltalk and includes information for the customers and testers who specify the acceptance test tables, and the developers who implement the fixture code.

See you in Toronto!