Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

The news that Vista slipped again left me yawning, which is why I went all day before commenting on it. After reading the Mini-Microsoft take though, I looked again. Here's the basic info:

Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system has been beset with another delay. After clearly pinpointing the holiday season of 2006 for launch, the company has now revised their primary launch period to 2007.

Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division, told analysts that the target time has been bumped to January 2007 for all consumer versions of Windows. He also said that editions aimed at business users would be available as early as November through volume licensing programs.

Like I said, I yawned at that this morning. But here's Mini-Microsoft on the case:

I was upset at missing the back-to-school market. Now we're missing the holiday sales market. All of those laptops and PCs are going to have XP on it. What percentage will upgrade to Vista? Well, I guess that's the little dream that I need to give up on. Vista's deployment is going to come from people buying CPUs with the OS pre-installed, not dancing down the CompUSA aisle as they clutch that boxed version of Vista to their loving chest. So not only did we miss last year's opportunity, we're missing this year's opportunity, too. With the convergence of high-tech media, this holiday season would have been an explosive nodal point to get Vista out for a compounded effect.

It's certainly a big loss of sales at a crucial time of year, and most of the people buying PC's then won't get on Vista for a few years - not until they buy another PC down the road.

So think about that - they delayed by a few weeks into January, supposedly to lock down some security issues. Hmm. It's March now. You're telling me that they can see a 2-4 week delay that clearly right now? I don't think so. I won't be at all surprised if this small delay turns into 6-9 months, or even more.

Check out the Channel 9 thread.

The conference hotels for StS 2006 are filling up, and the room blocks are about to be released. Make sure you register (and ask about the Smalltalk Solutions STIC discount), and get a hotel set up. See in in Toronto!

Dave Winer noticed my post on personality and technology, and asks me:

Okay, so tell us about your personality James. ";->"

Well, I'll put it this way. I have yet to be responsible for the creation of a whole new format simply because other people couldn't work with me. Heck, come on over to the Smalltalk IRC channel and ask folks there what they think of me.

Workers at the Brooklyn Bridge uncovered a Cold War era fallout shelter, complete with intact civil defense crackers:

The estimated 352,000 Civil Defense All-Purpose Survival Crackers are apparently still intact, said Joseph Vaccaro, a supervisor at the city Transportation Department. The metal water drums, each labeled "reuse as a commode," did not fare as well, and they are now empty.

This kind of thing is cooler than a planned time capsule, because the items stuffed inside aren't "artificial".

In the development (4.2 build stream) build of BottomFeeder, I've just added support for a new feature - search feeds now support Newspaper mode. What does that mean? Well, a search feed is simply a pseudo-feed built from a search across all your subscriptions. So say you want to track commentary on the Vista delay - you open the search dialog:

Now, having defined it, I get a view like this:

Toggling properties to set newspaper mode on, I get:

Which gives me a "River of News" kind of view on the search term. You can set those up as regex searches as well - but you'll need the latest 4.2 based update

Well, this is good news. Gary Oldman is going to reprise his role as Sirius Black in the fifth Potter movie. I really liked his potrayal of the character - he got the "edge of madness" aspect of having been in Azkaban just about perfect, I thought.

I'll be speaking at the Syndicate Conference in Toronto in June - it's being held on Jun 14-15. I'll be talking about aggregation technology - news aggregators, RSS/Atom, etc - but from a PR/marketing perspective, rather than from an implementors viewpoint. That means I'll be talking about why PR/marketing/Product Managers need to care about the blogosphere, and how they can keep track of what's being said.

If you are in or near Ottawa, and would be interested in a quick look at Smalltalk, then head on over to Dave Buck's site, and drop him a line.

CINCINNATI, OH -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 03/22/06 -- Cincom Smalltalk customers will present at the upcoming Smalltalk Solutions Conference 2006 in Toronto, Canada, April 24-26, 2006.

Smalltalk Big Talk of the Town

eWeek magazine recently hailed Cincom Smalltalk(TM) as a pioneer and establisher of the "key ideas of object-oriented language design and implementation." Also, eWeek described Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks Version 7.4 as having "delivered a polished development experience in eWEEK Labs tests, with efficient packaging of finished applications for convenient deployment."

A few of the Cincom Smalltalk Customers presenting at Smalltalk Solutions include:

Experience Report: Building an Optical Food Sorter with Linux and Smalltalk
Travis Griggs, Key Technology -- Ever wonder how the food you eat gets sorted, the good from the bad and the ugly? This is an experience report describing how Key Technology's latest machines (and the people behind them) do just that using Linux, Smalltalk, and Test Driven Design.

Tutorial Efficient Smalltalk
Travis Griggs, Key Technology -- Smalltalk is slow. Everyone knows it. So why try? Not! In this tutorial, Travis Griggs 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. This is the program to see how efficient Smalltalk really is.

Development of a Platform and Domain Neutral -- EAI Framework
Tom Hawker, OOCL -- This seminar will examine the practical aspects of creating an EAI framework around Web Services, including creation of support facilities, new Gemstone-resident code, and solutions to maintaining data and platform neutrality for both client and server operations.

"We're proud to have Cincom Smalltalk customers share their experiences with others," said Suzanne Fortman, global marketing manager, Cincom Smalltalk.

Cincom is a proud sponsor of the Smalltalk Solutions Conference 2006 premiering at LinuxWorld and NetworkWorld in Toronto, Canada. Visit the Cincom Smalltalk booth 1133 in the exhibit hall and receive a copy of the non-commercial version of Cincom Smalltalk Winter Edition.

About Cincom Smalltalk

Cincom Smalltalk enables software developers to build applications quickly and efficiently, including scalable browser-based and client-server systems. Cincom Smalltalk delivers significant productivity over Java(TM), C#, C++, or Visual Basic®, allowing developers to bring their products to market significantly faster.

About Cincom

For nearly 40 years, Cincom has delivered innovative software and services that enable thousands of clients worldwide to simplify the management of complex business processes. We empower our clients to outperform their competition by providing ways to increase revenue, control cost, minimize risk and achieve rapid ROI.

Cincom serves clients on six continents including BMW, Citibank, Boeing, Northwestern Mutual, Federal Express, Ericsson, Penn State University, Milacron, Siemens, Rockwell Automation and Trane. For more information about Cincom's products and services, contact Cincom at 1-800-2CINCOM (USA only), send an e-mail to info@cincom.com or visit the company's website at www.cincom.com.

CINCOM, Cincom Smalltalk and VisualWorks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cincom Systems, Inc. All other trademarks belong to their respective companies.

© 2006 Cincom Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Media Contact:
Suzanne Fortman
Cincom Systems, Inc.
Marketing Manager
949-722-8928
Email Contact

David Buck has updated his Spider Solitaire game - and it's a plugin for BottomFeeder as well.

Fascinating. IBM is looking to monetize their investment in Eclipse:

IBM's decision to offer support for Eclipse reflects the open source environment's growing presence among businesses - 30 per cent of enterprises and 25 per cent or so of small and medium businesses (SMBs) use Eclipse, analyst Evans Data Corp (EDC) estimates.

But it will have an interesting challenge in tackling price objections. This week at EclipseCon in Santa Clara, California, EDC said it had found little appetite for paid support from Eclipse users. Just over 30 per cent expect support to be free while a third said if they would pay anything at all, it must be less than $100.

Well, it's going to be a tough row to hoe. IBM has trained people to expect things to be free, and now they have to live with those expectations. To Wit:

The sticking point seems to be the need to pay to support for a tooling environment that has the perception of being "free".

Well duh. Now they realize that.

I'm always happy to see nice comments about BottomFeeder.

I'll be on the road a lot over the next few days - I have to go to LA this morning, for a family event over the weekend. Then, I have to hop back on a plane to London on Sunday, in order to get to SPA 2006. The timezone changes alone should leave me baffled :/

Digg notes that Apple is calling France's proposed law - which open up the iTunes music store to arbitrary devices - is generating an intemperate response from Apple. They are calling it "State Sponsored Piracy". While I think Apple should be able to run their business any way they want (it's hardly the case that there are no alternatives), I don't think this response is going to help them make friends and influence people.

I always love full day travel - and I have a longer one to look forward to on Sunday - LA to London. Whoo boy. So we finally arrived at our hotel, after only one wrong turn. With luck, that will be the worst of it :)

Bob Congdon defends Gosling's rather clueless comments about non-Java, dynamic languages:

Language flame wars can be fun but this one seems a little over-the-top to me. Some of the commentary has been interesting but why be so defensive? Is it really that surprising that the creator of Java still prefers it over other languages? Is it really that surprising that the CTO of Sun Microsystems might say something dismissive about alternatives to the Java ecosystem? Gosling is a smart guy. He's not as clueless as some people seem to think. He's just doing his job.

Sure - but he mostly comes off as defensive. Not to mention woefully uninformed. In his response, he says this:

For now, I'll make the generalization that "scripting language" means one that is interpreted with dynamic runtime typing, and the other camp is languages that are compiled to machine code and have static runtime typing. This is a broad over-simplifying generalization, but it matches pretty well what goes on in common conversations.

Earth to Gosling: run on down to the Self research - right there at Sun. You might learn something. Yes, it's a huge over-simplification. Smalltalk, for instance, is mostly JITted (you know, like Java). There's no reason that Ruby or Python couldn't use a JIT, other than the simple fact that no one has done that (yet). He goes on to say:

Yes, people tend to forget about trade-offs (I think economists term this as opportunity cost). I think people should stop looking for the silver-bullet. Maybe a "cease-fire" in this flame war is figuring out ways of getting scripting languages and non-scripting languagues to work together.

That's nice of him, after spending most of the rest of the post trying to say that the domain for "scripting" languages is small. The reality is, most software really isn't that complex, and most of it doesn't need extreme scaling. Gosling's mistake is in thinking that most problems are complex, and that most problems need to scale to the moon.

In reference to the last post on this topic, there are a few things that back up Alan's comments in the thread. If dynamic languages can't scale, then an awful lot of people at Amazon, Google, and EBay are doing something very wrong. There's heavy use of "scripting" languages at all three of those, and - the last time I looked - their scaling needs are above and beyond the needs of almost every web project that falls into the so called "Enterprise" space.

In Gosling's follow up, he tries to wave away the "most time is spent in I/O argument", and well he should try to wave it off - because it invalidates most of the rest of what he says. The reality is, most web projects spend a lot of time grabbing results from the database, massaging them for display, grabbing results from the submission, and dropping them into the database. Being dramatically faster at floating point math doesn't mean anything for that kind of thing. For situations where it does, sure - pick the right tool for the job. The mistake Gosling and others make is of extension - since Java is faster for a few things like math, they think it should be used everywhere for consistency.

Heck, if that's his argument, he should just pick Fortran.

Learning Seaside has a neat post up on Seaside and Scriptaculous - and the best part is, Cincom's Michel Bany is porting Scriptaculous to VW. He's been maintaining the Seaside VW port for awhile now. Expect to see both in "contributed" in the summer release!

Via Rob Fahrni, I found this report on Windows Vista development:

Up to 60% of the code in the new consumer version of Microsoft new Vista operating system is set to be rewritten as the Company "scrambles" to fix internal problems a Microsoft insider has confirmed to SHN.

In an effort to meet a dealine of the 2007 CES show in Las Vegas Microsoft has pulled programmers from the highly succesful Xbox team to help resolve many problems associated with entertainment and media centre functionality inside the OS. The team are also working closely with engineers from the Intel Viiv team. and it is now expected that the next version of Viiv could be delayed to line up with the launch of the consumer version of Vista at the 2007 CES Show in Las Vegas.

Like Rob color me extremely skeptical. There is simply no way that they are going to "rewrite" 60% of the code and hit a 2007 release date. I suspect that the reporting was washed through a number of non-technical hands that did not understand what some technical guy said - like a long game of telephone.

Of course, if there's anything even vaguely accurate there, 2007 would be optimistic...

I spent the afternoon at the Getty Museum; I'm in LA for a family event over the weekend. It's a beautiful place, with phenomenal views of the surrounding area. Then there's the collection itself! I really enjoyed the dutch masters section - after my recent reading about the early 17th century in Europe, I got a much better feel for some of the points that the artists were trying to make. Here's a shot looking back at the entrance from the patio:

And here's a shot I took of the entrance to the French/German 18th century section. They have this arranged in the style of a noble of the era's rooms:

I'll have more pictures to post later - I have to run out to a family dinner.

Back from dinner (stuffed), and I have the rest of my pictures ready to go. First, a shot of central gardens from above:

Next, a shot of what looked like a Mission from the Getty:

Back inside, they have a really nice collection of medieval books - when you look at this one, bear in mind that it was all hand written!

Finally, a shot of the Getty Museum from below as we crawled along the 405 on the way back to the hotel. Except for this, it was a great day.

Techmemeorandum notes that Office is going to be late, just like Vista (pushed into 2007). This is why I thought that the anti-trust suits against Microsoft were a waste of time; the company has spent the last decade on a dubious over-coupling mission they call integration. The upshot is this - virtually every one of their mainstream products are now mutually dependent, in ways that make timely delivery difficult to achieve.

When IT shops end up in this place, they typically start over, placing the existing code into a maintenance mode. Microsoft's options are a lot more limited; they have an enormous customer base that is dependent on backwards compatibility. If they broke that for the sake of a more maintainable future codebase, they would simply be giving people a reason to seriously look at the Mac platform.

Apparently, it's all about Steve Gillmor:

Mike Arrington missed the Gillmor Gang taping today, even though he changed his travel arrangements to be there. I forgive him, because he's understandably starry-eyed by his lunch with Bill Gates at the Mix06 conference. But I don't forgive Robert Scoble for not inviting me, or Waggener Edstrom either.

Geez, the world will somehow manage to spin up tomorrow, even though Gillmor didn't get his lunch date with Gates. The rest of his post is even more grating than the opening. Someone needs to deliver a huge sign to Gillmor, that he can hang in his office: "It's not all about you"

I have the rest of the day in LA, and then it's on to London tomorrow morning. I'm going to hate myself for setting this trip up; who knows how conscious I'll be when I get to Gatwick (at 7:15 AM local time)? That's why I've decided to ditch the rental car idea and take the train. According to the SPA 2006 site, it's possible to take a train all the way to St. Neots, which will allow me to doze off on Monday without fear of the M5. That's always a good thing :)

I think the best way to address James McGovern's latest post is to translate it. So, let's hone in. He says:

Lot of folks have chimed in on a previous posting on Ruby and responded with passion and supplied their own perspectives but zero facts.

Translation: "Lots of people chimed in with words I didn't understand. Many of them brought up actual examples, and that's, like, so totally unfair"

Still another perspective is that I am a thought follower and defer my entire thought process to the wisdom provided by large consulting firms. Wrong! I simply acknowledged that this is a behavior whether right or wrong hapens in corporate America.

Translation: "I'm a thought leader, damnit. Do you see anyone else following me? And when I said that big consulting firms were all that mattered, people twisted my words by taking what I said literally. Fargin Bastages..."

I still cannot stop laughing about the postings regarding me being too enterprise. These are from folks who have obviously never met me or even engaged in an open conversation. I suspect their perspectives would change if they did so...

Translation: "How dare people take my words at their literal meaning!"

He then presents the world's most constricted set of rules defining what he actually meant to say - until tomorrow, after yet another person presents him with one of those fact things - something he's clearly never understood.

The sky is a different color where McGovern works.

I can tell that Gold status on American isn't what it used to be - I'm sitting in the middle seat here, and the only saving grace is the power port. We left Orange County at 8:45 am, and I have a full day of travel to look forward to - I arrive in London tomorrow morning. Then I'm hoping I can decipher the rail schedule well enough in what I'm sure will be a dazed state to get to St. Neots. Ahh, the joys of travel...

Looks like there's a new mailing list, set up by some of the European Squeakers. This one is intended to coordinate Smalltalk meetups and parties. Check it out here.

Tim Bray wrote a long column about analysts awhile back, and I finally have time to comment on it, seeing as how I'm stuck at 30,000 feet with a bunch of flagged items in BottomFeeder. Here's an anecdote Tim used to jump into the post:

The perception of corruption, whether it’s true or not, hasn’t gone away. Shortly after I joined Sun, I was trying to figure out why large parts of the industry seemed hell-bent on re-creating CORBA, only more complex and less efficient, under the WS-* banner. One senior technology strategist, not from Sun, told me “Obvious! It’s because IBM and Microsoft paid the analysts megabucks, megabucks I tell you , to go out and tell everyone that this was where the future was, and anyone who wasn’t going that way was dog meat.” Mind you, he’d had a few beers. But that’s not the only time I’ve heard that particular suggestion.

I have to agree with Tim's quoting of an old standby for this: "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity". Industry analysts aren't evil, and they aren't all on the take. I'm sure some are; there are bad apples in every field - and trade analysis is hardly immune. That's not the main problem though. The analysts are looking for the same thing that IT shops and vendors are looking for: The next big thing (tm). IT managers want to know what it is, because there's safety in numbers; if "everyone" is using a certain technology, then the thinking is that support will be easy to find, and it can't be too bad. Analysts want to be ahead of the curve, so they are scanning for that "big thing" - because once they find it, they have something to point to.

What that leads to isn't corruption, but herd behavior. Without consciously working at it, IT managers and analysts reinforce their own preconceived notions, and are prone to jumping on bandwagons. Witness the rise of OO as a buzzword, relational databases before that, and Java and WS* more recently. It's not that these were necessarily bad, even - they just became reinforcing memes that spread across the tech landscape. So what you end up with is a system that can easily be construed as corrupt - the big analysts are pushing the big technologies that the big vendors want to push. I think the actual behavior is more subtle than that, but - as Tim says - it's certainly a perception problem for the analyst firms:

It’s a problem for the analysts, and their customers, and for the industry, that there’s this elephant in the room. Because I totally believe that we need analysts. I know for a fact that there are those who read people like me and Don Box and Bob Sutor and use what we say about Java or messaging stacks or ODF as serious business input. But dammit, we’re vendors, our paychecks depend on selling you expensive stuff! At least with us, our hearts are on our sleeves and the conflict of interest is screamingly obvious.

It seems that in a rational world, there’d be a place for professional intermediaries; someone who has a non-tech business to run doesn’t really have time to drill down on whether crazies like me who are dissing WS-* are right or wrong. They should be able to outsource that research. (By the way, no analyst from a mainstream firm has ever raised the WS-* issue with me, which seems a little weird).

I think analysts are going to have to do what Tim suggested - they are going to have to disclose, using journalist style ethical standards, what vendors are paying them, and how much they are paying them. As Tim said, with us vendors the bias is obvious - don't come to me, for instance, if you are looking for an objective opinion about Java (or Smalltalk, for that matter). The analysts, on the other hand, are striving to be that objective voice. They need to make sure that the audience can make a judgement call based on all the inputs.

It's been a long set of travel, but I'm now at SPA 2006. The train from Gatwick was easy and pleasant - much simpler than driving, as I did last time. I'll be attending one of the afternoon sessions - haven't decided which one yet. Should be a good week - this is a small, fairly intimate conference.

Miguel de Icaza gives us a more accurate rendering of Digital Rights Management - via David Berlind of ZDNet:

This year, we get "CRAP", which stands for: "Content, Restriction, Annulment and Protection" a much better description for the euphemistical "DRM".

The afternoon session I decided to attend is Michael Feather's talk. With luck, the Capucchino will keep me awake during the talk :)

For purposes of this talk, "Legacy Code" = "Large existing codebases that lack any real tests" - i.e., the language of the codebase isn't relevant. Michael started with a desire to do XP 6 years ago, but he was transitioning from a dirty codebase - as opposed to the C3 project, where they mostly abandoned the legacy codebase and started over. So, what are the possible approaches?

• Pretend the existing code isn't there
• Use TDD to create new classes, make direct changes to the old ones, hope they are correct (tends to miss code coverage)
• We'd like to be more conservative - i.e., avoid going back to the existing code for changes
• Is that viable?

Heh. His first example is a "legacy" C++ HTML generator. Sadly, it doesn't look all that different from my original HTML generation approach for the Silt server. I've gotten smarter about that over time, but it's an example I can definitely identify with. The testing approach to use here is one of documentation - the idea is to have tests demonstrate what the code does. Michael calls these characterization tests.

When you have legacy code, try not to add inline code to it. Instead, write tested code in new classes and methods, and delegate to them (IMHO, this can lead to interesting maintenance problems itself - hard to understand code). The techniques for doing this are called Sprout Method and Sprout Class. Interesting sideline here - refactoring is harder in a C++ codebase, due to the lack of good tools.

So the question is, why is he advocating a conservative approach? There are no tests for the existing codebase, so making changes can introduce unintentional (and hard to find) errors. Most of the development in this case is about preserving existing behavior. Most applications are glued together - we only find this out when we test pieces in isolation (unit tests). Some examples of glue:

• Singletons
• Internal Instantiation (class creating a hard coded instance of another class)
• Concrete Dependency (when a class uses a concrete class, you'd better hope that class lets you know what is happening to it)

Tools matter a lot here - having the ability to safely extract methods and interfaces in the IDE help a lot. If not, then it's all manual (and harder). Breaking dependencies can get ugly. The Legacy Code Change Algorithm:

1. Identify Change Points
2. Identify Test Points
3. Break Dependencies
4. Write Tests
5. Refactor Change

What about testing expensive operations? i.e., you don't want to call the real method in test because it will take too long (computationally expensive, lots of db interaction, whetever). There are mock frameworks for various languages, and you can always use polymorphism for test purposes. The rationale here is that you want to replace behavior without changing the base method. Sounds to me like people using C++ are on the short end of the stick here :)

Breaking Dependencies:

• Extract an interface - safe for legacy code, but can take a little time. Mock interfaces stand in for real ones. The list of things to watch out for in C++ is long.
• Extract Implementor - like extract interface, but we push the code down instead of up

Up next - a test exercise using Java or C#. Heh - I translated the Java code to Smalltalk and then did the exercise - as fast as everyone else refactored :). Interesting discussion over interfaces (Java, C++, C# - all of this is implicit in Smalltalk). The whole exercise dealt with parameterizing constructors, and then went into parametrizing methods. All one and the same thing in Smalltalk. From how these exercises are going, it's very, very obvious that it's tons easier to restructure and refactor code in Smalltalk than in the languages being used here.

What about methods in classes that cannot be (easily) instantiated? Try making it a static (Class, in Smalltalk terms) method until the mess can be cleaned up. "Utility classes" - ones with all static (Class) methods are a problem as well. Bottom line, the methods aren't where they belong. Preserve signatures, but create the appropriate methods in the appropriate classes.

Ahh, templates. Saved by dynamic typing :)

Summary: Tests are the ultimate safety net, providing an "exoskeleton" for your code. Fascinating thing at the end: We have to develop languages and tools which make it easier to recover. Smalltalk is not a silver bullet - you can write bad code using any language or toolset. However, I claim that Smalltalk makes it easier to get yourself out of the corners you code yourself into.

I'm with Scoble on this one - Nicholas Carr seems to want corporate bloggers gone, replaced by the blow dried PR machines of yore:

Microsoft's Robert Scoble, who cowrote a book on corporate blogging called Naked Conversations, now seems intent on turning himself into a case study for why companies shouldn't blog. The posts on his company-sponsored blog, Scobleizer, have become increasingly shrill and antagonistic of late.

What Scoble brings to the table is an open voice. You want marketing? Go look at those stupid dinosaur ads. You want honest? You'll have to take the good with the bad. I don't always agree with Robert, but I give him a lot of credit for his openess.

First the "IT doesn't matter" thing, now this. It's almost as if Carr desperately wants attention or something.

Michael Feathers, Bruce Anderson, Jason Gorman, Dave Thomas (pragDave), John Daniels, James Dobson are on the panel. It's clearly not a completely serious effort :)

Web 2.0 - what is it, and where can I buy it?

Dave Thomas - a huge success in marketing, and he's not sure where you can buy it. Web 2.0 is all about making browsers suck less (AJAX, asynch updates, etc). There's no worse place for an application than a 3270 that also gets porn - are we putting more and more lipstick on a pig? He's saying that the browser should be dead, and we should be moving to smarter clients. For a lesson, look at how the next generation plays video games - why can't we produce applications that are as useful as that? We need a more immersive, useful environment.

Michael Feathers - Yes, the browser model is somewhat broken, but it's non-proprietary. It's lousy, but it works.

Audience question - what about Flash? Michael says yes, it's definitely part of Web 2.0. Jason says it's unclear what Web 2.0 even is. It feels like something I already have, but with a cooler name. Bruce - keeps thinking about Google Earth. A large part is that IT shops like the browser because of the low maintenance aspect of installation.

Audience followup - what about mashups? Browsers enable it, it looks cool, but how maintainable/scalable is it? Dave: XML should have been shot at birth. DJ's (music) are an example of mashups. HTTP's advantages: dynamic typing and port 80.

Automatic vs. Manual Tests: What do you recommend?

Jason - manual tests are run once as a sanity check, so that you know what's being done. Then move to automation.

John - don't do manual testing - automate it. You'll find that you won't need manual tests. James: what about more ad-hoc testing that still needs to be done? What about UI tests? John: Talking about system/acceptance testing more than unit testing. Michael: as many automated tests as possible is good. Manual testing is useful for "exploratory testing", when you are trying things out. James: User Interface testing, when we are talking about subjective judgements, cannot be automated.

Audience feedback - Manual testing is error prone and cannot be as predictable as automated testing. Dave: testing is a design/analytic tool as much - or more - than a bug finding tool. In this case, the question becomes meaningless. All the testing is manual, with some of it becoming automated over time as we move through development. Michael: Testing tells us about the design, and provides a frame for "holding it up". Michael: We've moved from BDUF to BTUF (Big Test Up Front). We've gone too far.

What are the best motivational techniques for developers?

Bruce - I like to see developers taken seriously. It's about being genuinely involved in the task at hand.

Jason - Need to be able to "put my stamp" on things. Being able to walk away and say "I was there".You lose motivation when you aren't taken seriously

John - I only hire developers who care about what they are doing. There are the 9 to 5 types, and the people who attend conferences like this. If you have the latter, and you give them the space to do what they are good at, then you'll get results.

Dave - No way to motivate, but tons of ways to de-motivate. It comes from a lack of respect.

Michael - Different people are motivated differently. A lot of self selection happens.

Bruce - At IBM, we get involved in large projects, where you might fear death marches. We find it's easy to attract people to the challenge.

Audience question - What about the tension between what product management wants/needs, and what developers want/need? Need more and better communication to bridge that gap. Feedback - it can be very demotivating to end up doing what you are sure is not the right thing.

Is Management the root of all evil?

John - I'm pretty sure it's no :)

Dave - Listening to managers is the root of all evil. You have a responsibility to say no if you think you are being told to do the wrong thing.

Jason - Money is the root of all evil. Managers are just the weed growing around the mony

Bruce - A good manager shields developers from the day to day "crap" that crops up.

Michael - Bruce just described good management. Too many organizations have people who cannot understand the ramifications of bad decisions.

John - it's about having a good relationship between managers and developers. It's about mutual respect toward common goals.

Audience question - Should managers come up from technical staff? Jospeh: would prefer someone who understand what's going on. We are in one of the few professions where we have managers who do not understand technology. Michael: Do leadership and management have to be the same? Dave: Some teams need a strong tech lead, some teams need a non-technical manager. It depends on the team. Michael: You want the soft skills, regardless.

I'm in Dilbert Hell. What do I do?

Consensus: Get another job, or if not possible, find a hobby.

All this talk about Second Life makes it sound a lot like Red Dwarf's Better than Life. I wonder...

Scoble on anti-smoking:

Hey, Chris Abraham, I'm an anti-smoking fascist. It's one thing I appreciate about California. Have you noticed that the housing prices have gone up continuously since smoking was banned there? Hmmm. Glad to hear Scotland is joining the fascist groups. When we got back from Europe EVERYTHING stank. Yuch.

Hmm. This is all good so long as the "nasty habit" being banned is something you don't like anyway. The trouble is, when the "it's not good for you" nannys get started, they don't know where to stop. Second hand smoke bothers me a whole lot less than the self righteous fanatics who want to "help" me.

Anyone remember the disaster that was the CORBA security serice, or the CORBA resource management service? Well, it looks like the WS* working groups want to revisit the chaos. Tim Bray surveys the damage.

Today's invited talk is on project retrospectives, and a retrospective on the book "Project Retrospectives" by the author, Norman Kerth. The idea: after a project (any sort), it's a good idea to sit back and discuss what lessons were learned from it.

It's not enough to just gather and identify "what went wrong" and point fingers - the idea is to have the retrospective become a post project ritual that focuses on learning, not blame. For purposes of the retrospective, assume that everyone did the best job that they could at the time with the skills/tools/resources available to them at the time. Example: The campfire discussion of the buffalo hunt in "Dances With Wolves". The upshot: No one person has a complete picture of what happened - you need the perspectives of all the participants, so you can see the things you missed.

Important - you want an "atmosphere of safety" in order to get honest (and complete) feedback. The key things to learn in a retrospective:

• What worked well?
• What have we learned?
• What would we do differently next time?
• What still puzzles us?
• What needs furher work?

The way corporate culture changes is by changing the stories they tell about themselves. Constant learning implies a continual change in the way work gets done. Many organizations simply don't want to change. Some teams do want change:

• Agile teams
• Software Process Groups
• Teams at Wits end
• Consulting firms
• Highly Dynamic firms by design
• Disaster Response teams

Retrospectices can also be useful after milestones are reached, or after a merger, or after a manager/lead has been replaced. in other words, after an important event.

Good question: What do you do about people who lie, or spend their time working to undermine someone else? The idea is to focus on the events that happened, not on the people themselves. Seems to me that this might require a highly focused facilitator with many teams.

Product Managers are, or can be:

• On site customers (what if you don't have any yet)
• Product owners (what does it mean to own a product)
• Product sponsors (what responsibility does a sponsor have)
• Product champions (who are you fighting against)

PM is the business process that actively manages the lifecycle of the product. It's neither R&D nor sales, but the intersection of them. "Responsible for everything and authority over nothing" [ed] - very true :). The PM role in a software firm is different from the role of a PM for a "physical" product.

Focus of this "think tank" session: what does a PM do, how do they do it. What skills/traits are needed, and what sort of organizational support?

The session was a set of exercises meant to make us think about the process of product management - the outputs for that will end up on a wiki in the next few weeks; when that happens I'll update the post.

Shelly Powers decries the aggregator, as it stands between the reader and the design of a site. I can't find a better way than this to say it: I don't really care about site design. I seriously doubt that it matters that much to anyone. Shelly thinks that aggregators hurt the spread of community by isolating us from the blogroll; heck, when was the last time anyone's was actually updated? I go months without thinking about it.

Consider: before the web, there were bulletin boards. They were isolated by telephone number, limited by available modems/lines, and text only. And yet, huge communities started there. In its time, USENET had (and still has, actually) a large community - and that's all text as well. If people like what you write, they'll come back. If you tell them (by linking) who else is worth reading, they'll follow. The color styles and pictures in the browser are nice, but they're secondary. If the text isn't worth bothering with, nothing else matters.

Update: Jeneane Sessum doesn't get it either. I read the content, not the pictures. Comments can be supported via the Comment API, which most aggregators support (sadly, few feeds actually offer it). I can "walk around" the part of the blogosphere I am interested in a lot faster with an aggregator than I can with a mile long bookmark list.

After lunch (which I skipped to exercise) and a nap (ad-hoc, in front my laptop in the common room), we're on to XML database applications with Chris Wallace. He's starting off with some XQuery examples. The backing data is in an XML database (eXist).

Heh. He says that XQuery and eXist are the most fun he's had in software since Smalltalk, which he's used since 1983. The focus with these tools is on data more than functionality. He's doing all this to explore the design space (XML Databases and Documents). In terms of information systems, the focus here is on semi-structured data (RSS, anyone :) ). The problem space includes spreadsheets, documents, ad-hoc databases, and web integrated data.

The database he's using supports XQuery, XUpdate, XSLT, XQuery extensions, and free text searching. It supports a RESTful interface (Java servlets), SOAP, and XML-RPC. One of the example applications he's working on is a Faculty Online Database - currently the data exists across Access, SQL Databases, flat text files, spreadsheets, etc. The plan is to simplify all that and still support distributed data ownership. Code:

• 3000 lines of XQuery
• 3000 lines of XSLT
• 300 of XSD (One schema)
• 10 lines of PHP (not much web work done yet)
• 25 pages online thus far

When storing data, trying to use "real world" identifiers as much as possible (names, room numbers, etc). Reduces the gap between the real world domain and the system, but it does have issues - you can easily hit duplicates (example: if I mention "Dave Thomas", which one do I mean? pragDave, or Bedarra Dave?).

In terms of data, decided against using attributes - just went with more elements. Integrity? Schema validation is too weak and too restrictive. NXD stores any well formed XML. Referential Integrity? RDBMS' are "eager, integrity failures have to be repaired outside the db. NXD - stores data on demand, but integrity failures can be persisted. repair is inside the db. XML ids only checked within a document, NXD stores all nodes with internal ids.

For information systems, veracity of the model is what's important.

Functionality delivered via:

• XQuery generating HTML
• code moving to lunction libraries and XSLT as it matures
• XQuery for request input, sessions, selection of nodes, computation of views
• XSLT to generate the interface
• CSS for presentation style

ComputerWorld reports:

Microsoft has joined a group that takes part in the International Standards Organization voting process to standardize ODF.

I saw that coming :)

Spotted in The Product Management View

For example, consider Froogle, a fantastic opportunity for Google, given how so many people clearly start their e-commerce shopping process with a Google search. I can only believe that Google is intentionally holding back on this product for strategic or contractual reasons because I can't otherwise explain the lack of progress. Similarly with Gmail, another great opportunity to leverage the community's affinity for Google, that now is two years old and hasn't progressed much since its debut. Another terrific opportunity is the Google Desktop, but even very basic capabilities (like moving a file to a different folder) remain unsupported. And Orkut, the social networking site that launched at the right time and should have leaped when Friendster stumbled, also seems deserted by its product team. And Google Base. Why did they bother? And the list goes on.

Google has said over and over again that they are an engineering led company, and point to the fabled 20% time policy as a source of pride. The downside? It tends to lead to engineers driving off after bright shiny objects without regard to their actual value. In Google's case, it's led to a bunch of products that are 80% complete, and stay in perma-beta. Why? Likely because the relevant engineers lost interest once all the hard (read: interesting) problems were solved, and no one else there has the power to herd them toward actual delivery.

This a is a case study of a mobile phone operator - the idea being to specify behavior and run tests all by filling in a few forms. A look at the issues of defining and testing a web application - present some approaches, a 2005 case study, some of the tools used. Requirements:

• Underlying business logic needs to be explicit
• Marketing oriented requirements tend to be imprecise - concentrating on user stories, providing few usable test cases. They had to feed the requirements back to marketing for verification

For testing, you cannot rely entirely on vendor testing - you need to test the configuration. The testing in question here is functional testing. To create the test specification:

• specify system behavior, end to end
• highlight boundary conditions and end points
• model the tests while system functionality is still fluid
• tests should be specified before detailed APIs are specified
• maintain traceability between tests and requirements

Some of the tools considered: WebRunner, HttpUnit, HTMLUnit, Homebrew XML based requirements management tools. Various toolsets were considered afterwards - FIT, WATIR (Ruby), Selenium (Javascript), Agitator, Canoo Web Test. These latter tools were unknown to the team when the project was ongoing. They ended up using the homebrew system.

The Problem: A Mobile Internet Content Filter. There was no software available at the time to filter inapproriate content from mobile systems. A definition: "on-net" means on the operator's portal.

The Solution: Interpose a proxy between mobiles and "off net" (i.e., general internet) content. Apply rules to determine whether the content is appropriate. Redirect on failure of that test, allow user to change the settings.

There are a few possible outcomes:

• Access Denied (can change settings to allow)
• Illegal Page (cannot view under any circumstances - some 2000 sites are so classified in the UK)
• Allowed (normal viewing)

The "Denied" category has rules that involve the operator and their classification scheme - these become policy rules. Testing types?

• Automated tests for basic stuff
• User acceptance testing (manual)

The first is the one they needed to deal with. Test cases were based on use cases, requirements, exception conditions. Did not attempt to achieve complete decision coverage, instead using representative test cases. The tools that were developed:

• XMLSpy/Authentic - Schema per data type, stylesheets per data type
• Java - Documentation Generator, batch file to execute from files, FilterTestSuite based on HttpUnit
• Directory Load Scripts - Templates for the data files

And then a demo. The tools they created allow them to store their test cases as XML docs. The test cases are created via an XSchema driven form.

Bob Nemec announced my June talk to the Toronto STUG:

The next Toronto Smalltalk User Group meeting will be Thursday, June 15th, with James Robertson, Product Manager of Cincom Smalltalk. James will have just finished his talk at the Syndicate conference. This will be a good time to talk about how his talk went, how Smalltalk Solutions worked as a part of Linux World & Network World, and the state of Smalltalk

I'll be up there for the Syndicate conference, where I'll be talking about blogging from a PR perspective. Make sure to join us for drinks after the STUG talk!

March 28, 2006 - The Smalltalk Industry Council (STIC) is pleased to announce the election of Bob Nemec as the new Executive Director of STIC. Bob Nemec, Vice-President of Northwater Objects, has been an avid Smalltalk developer since 1990. Bob’s first act as Executive Director is to host a State of STIC meeting during Smalltalk Solutions 2006. The STIC meeting and STIC open enrollment is scheduled for Monday, April 24, 2006 from 5:30 – 7:30 pm at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

"Allen Davis has done an incredible for job for STIC during the past 5 years, it was Davis who resurrected STIC and brought Smalltalk Solutions to the success it is today. Allen’s enthusiasm and advocacy for Smalltalk will continue with Knowledge Systems Corporation remaining on the Board to support Bob Nemec. We thank Allen and look forward to many more years of service with STIC, " said Alan Knight, Smalltalk Solutions Conference Chair.

"The decision to step down was very difficult for me, although it was the right thing to do for the Smalltalk Industry Council. Due to the success of Smalltalk, I have been overwhelmed with Smalltalk opportunities and cannot dedicate the time I would like and STIC needs in order to continue to build the Smalltalk Community, "stated Allen Davis, former Executive Director for The Smalltalk Industry Council (1999-2006).

"I look forward to working with the enthusiastic and dedicated people of STIC, and the broader Smalltalk community, to raise awareness and understanding of what Smalltalk is. Smalltalk is by far the most enjoyable and productive development environment to work with; we have a chance to make that fact self evident to a broader audience." said Bob Nemec.

Smalltalk Solutions 2006 is the premier forum for bringing together Smalltalk users, developers and enthusiasts. This year’s conference will be held April 24-26, 2006 in conjunction with LinuxWorld and NetworkWorld Toronto, advanced registration ends April 23, 2006.

To register for the conference go to http://www.lwnwexpo.plumcom.ca/smalltalk.cfm. Remember STIC members receive a 25% discount off advanced registration.

The Smalltalk Industry Council (STIC)

The Smalltalk Industry Council is a cohesive Smalltalk community where information, technical issues, new ideas and concerns are openly discussed to benefit the industry. STIC members are users and vendors of Smalltalk tools, components, databases and services. The Smalltalk Industry Council has been reorganized and reformed with the core board members from Cincom, Instantiations, GemStone and Knowledge Systems Corporation.

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

Steve Ballmer on "home based" PR:

Question: Do you have an iPod?

Answer: No, I do not. Nor do my children. My children--in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.

It's a nice thought, but a tad unrealistic. Witness this (rather old) post from Scoble.

Here's a talk I'm seeing at a lot of conferences - something to address the widespread worry about offshoring of IT sector jobs. Personally, I'm skeptical of governmental programs to "address" the "problem" - this is nothing new. Take textiles, for instance. Between the 18th and 21st century, that industry moved from France to the UK, on to New England, then off to the US south, on to Latin America, and now to Asia. In all that time, there have always been high value textile jobs in all the "losing" areas.

I also wonder about the supposed gap between comp sci graduates and the job market; in general, the market tends to solve those problems by itself. Put another way, I'm wary of solutions that chase ill defined problems. The bottom line is, costs in the IT sector are dropping inexorably, as they have in other industries that have globalized. There's no way to get around the existance of highly trained, rapidly industrializing populations in places like India, China (etc).

Also, I wonder if one of the problems isn't the uptick in demand for credentials before hiring into a development position. When I got into the business in the late 80's, it was quite common for people to get into software development who did not have software related degrees. I certainly didn't; most of the people who worked where I first worked didn't have software degrees either. Good comment from a professor in the room on this: no one has a shared understanding of the term "software engineering", if you go across university departments, industry, etc.

Here's a good consensus - the difficulty arises in attempting to have developers over there (wherever the offshoring location is) and the managers here (US, UK, wherever). The difficulty is that there are communication difficulties that add huge overhead to such projects. Project management in general is bad in the software field; adding a large communication disruption into that already poor discipline just makes things worse. IMHO, the companies that ought to worry are software development firms (like Microsoft), who will, over time, find that new firms in India (etc) will be at least as effective as they are, but with lower costs. The company that isn't actually in IT, but has IT needs won't be nearly as impacted.

Update: Bernard has posted some of the preliminary outputs from the session. First, Laura Hill's preliminary notes are here. The audio of the session has been posted here.

I participated in a fascinating discussion forum this morning - Laura Hill and Bernard Horan (both of Sun) organized a "fishbowl" on the topic of distributed workplaces. That works like this - there were 7 chairs arranged in a circle in the center of the room, with a large ring of chairs around them. There were 6 of us in that center ring, and discussion kicked off with our opening statements on distributed working (which we had submitted previously). From there, it was an open discussion under the following ground rules:

• Only people in the bowl could talk (fish)
• People on the outside could get up and enter the bowl at any time
• There always had to be at least one open chair in the center

What that means is that people are entering and leaving the bowl regularly. We got participation from nearly the entire audience, and the conversation ranged over a lot of stuff: whether remote working is desirable, whether it works for anyone, how you can manage agile development, how you do communication.

The talking really focused on communication - both on tools (IM, NetMeeting, IRC, phone), and on the practice - how often, ad-hoc or planned, how often you need face to face meetings, that sort of thing. It was a good time, and a good discussion. In know that Laura and Bernard were taking notes and recording the session, so if any of that comes online, I'll link to it.

If you ever have a chance to hear Dave Thomas give this talk, run, don't walk. He gave a great talk on the "received wisdom" that too many of us in the software industry follow. Chief amongst those, of course, is declarative typing. I can't summarize the whole talk - he was funny, and his slides were amusing. If Dave is speaking at a conference near you, go.

Well, it's been a great 3 days, even if I spent most of them jetlagged after traveling to London from Maryland by way of Los Angeles :) For people who like the notion of an unconference - you want to attend SPA 2007. These folks were doing a "conference for particpants" before anyone else had the idea. I'll be back next year, and I intend to arrive earlier.

Via Mike Gunderloy, I found this amazingly evil piece of work: a "Mass Blog Installer" tool. Witness the brave new spam world being ushered in by the people behind this - they start off sounding like they offer a valuable service:

f you have been hosting on Blogspot, you know how fast your blogs can disappear.These days Blogger is deleting blogspot hosted blogs ... and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. They are also blocking posts through the API with 'Captchas' and saving them as drafts all in an effort to stop the abuse of their service. Unfortunately, your hard work ends up down the drain. What can you do to save your work and stop the carnage?

Sounds good, right? Until you read down and find out what's going on:

That's right - Google can't delete your blogs if self hosted. I have tested Blogger blogs hosted on my own domains and have not once been shut down or stuck with a post captcha. Now that I have the Blog creation process automated, it is a piece of cake to crank out 100s if not 1000 blogs in one day. After many months of testing and posting, all blogs are intact and generating traffic.

Oh the joy - automated splog creation. This might be why I'm seeing more splog results showing up in my search feeds. These tools are so very proud of themselves, too:

I was shocked at the power of creating a blog network. This shot my AdSense income up to an amazing $135 per day only one month later. I can also report that the sites and blogs have been holding their traffic and income as I write this letter.

This is like that classified ad jerk you see on late night TV, but scamming Google AdSense. They even realize that what they are doing is slimy; that becomes clear when you read the rest of the letter. Ponzi was clearly born in the wrong century...

One of the most interesting things I saw at this show was the change in mindset about development. Last year, dynamic languages were interesting, but the main thoughts were still on Java. This year? Completely different. In talk after talk, and in side conversation after side conversation it became clear that Java is regarded - at least by the attendees of this show - as a thing of past. Oh sure, it's still in use, and it will remain in use for a long while. It had no champions though, and plenty of people expressed the thought that Sun's release of 1.5 was the straw that broke the camel's back - the level of complexity being grafted onto the language was just too much. Heck, mention the phrase "Java Generics" at this conference and you were likely to hear snickering.

In a post about the new MS Office, Runar mentions Pollock:

Previously there has been focus on how Pollock will make sure the GUI looks good, by ensuring screen updates do cause flickering. Pollock definitely also need to have focus on drawing speed.

Pollock is not really even in beta yet. We are closing in on the first supported release (see the roadmap here) - and here's the thing - don't worry about the performance issues. Our developers have been focused on the "heavy lifting" thus far, and, even before they get to serious optimization (and optimization is a large part of the internal roadmap), they know of a number of things which, when optimized, will make performance improve a lot.

We don't follow the theory of premature optimization here - we want to get the big things right before we focus on the rest of it. Rest assured, Pollock will be fast when it's ready to walk out the door.