Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Scoble on Hi-Def DVD:

I was hanging out on the AVSForum the other day and saw several posts from people who said that in their comparisons HD-DVD is far superior to BlueRay tests.

Today those posts are getting reported in CentreDaily.

See how the grassroots could be changing popular opinion?

Maybe, but I rather suspect that the biggest driver of opinion for the two formats will be this. For the HD-DVD:

prices start at $500

For the Blu-Ray:

prices start at $1,000

That differential will hit everyone, including those that pay no attention to the online forums. I'm sure that a set of influencers touting performance differences will have an impact - but the price differential will have a bigger one.

James Governor points to the curtain behind which lies the smallish pile of data upon which Gartner build magic quadrants.

James McGovern:

Since industry analysts tend to focus on features at the expense of security, I figured I would use several tools to determine of what quality Ruby is relative to both Java and .NET. I wanted to also include a version of SmallTalk, more specifically the version that James Robertson evangelizes but wasn't sure of if benchmarking information could be published.

Heh. Unlike some of the big vendors, who get their panties in a twist over the idea of independent benchmarks, we don't care. If they don't look good, hey - they don't look good, and either we have work to do, or there's a problem with the test. Either way, we'll learn something.

Btw, it's Smalltalk, not SmallTalk :)

Happy Fourth of July!

I posted on Ted Neward's failed analogy (in a post about O/R mapping) a week or so ago. Yesterday, at the party we had, a few of us were talking about this and that, and James McGovern's blog came up. One of my friends made an excellent point:

How can you take him seriously, when he posts the kind of silly, unrelated pictures he does?

Exactly. That's a large problem for his blog, and it's the same one Neward had in his post about O/R mapping. When an otherwise ancillary point overwhelms your message, you've failed in the basic task of communication. On McGovern's blog, most of the images he posts are political, and they are bound to irritate roughly half of his potential audience. A lot of the others are just pure nonsense images. In general, none of them have anything to do with the content of his posts.

Those images are like annoying popups - they detract from his message, and make it far less likely that his thoughts will be taken seriously.

Boris Popov has some small, but very cool mods that might help you trick out your VisualWorks image:

Here’s another package that we use quite a bit here, NewSystemIcon. It adds two new sub-menus to the System menu that allow one to pick a non-standard icon to be used throughout the image as well as a menu to change a global background color. Some may find this useful when running multiple images at the same time or simply when they need to differentiate special ones.

Head on over to his blog for some screenshots.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

James McGovern suggests that Microsoft should OSS their products:

Now if he would only do the same thing to his operating system, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange. Seems like an opportunity to one up the folks over at Oracle. I wonder if this will get any industry analyst attention?

Yeah, right. How about the firm you work at, James - would it work out well for the employees if they started giving their core products away for free?

Scoble talks about syndication technology, referencing this post by DeWitt Clinton:

Users don’t care about specs, or arguments about formats. When you understand that you’ll understand how RSS got so big in the first place. Dave Winer evangelized RSS by building a publishing tool (Manila and later Radio UserLand) and an aggregator (Radio UserLand and later Share Your OPML.

Where’s the Atom publishing tool and aggregator that demonstrates Atom’s superiority?

Makes me wonder whether Robert got through more than the first paragraph of the post. Two thirds of the way down, DeWitt says:

Put it this way -- I couldn’t be doing half of the work that I’m doing right now on search syndication without Atom. Sending back search results snippets over RSS is one thing. Syndicating rich search content is an entirely different thing, and that requires a non-lossy syndication format.

My recommendation to application developers today is to use Atom 1.0, not RSS, as the basis for your content syndication.

The tools for Atom that demonstrate it's superiority are exactly what DeWitt said: they're all the tools and services being built up around micro-formats. Now, it didn't need to be this way - RSS could have been that spec. Sadly, Dave Winer wouldn't allow for that. For reasons understood only by Dave, he thinks that the lossy nature of RSS is a feature. When people on the RSS Advisory Board disagreed with him, he called their employer (note the resignations). When that wasn't an option, he tried threatening someone else with a lawsuit. Meanwhile, his enablers - like Scoble - say nothing. RSS could have been the unitary spec had Dave not been a complete jerk, and people like Scoble bear some responsibility for that by never, ever calling him on his BS.

Looks like someone is building a Smalltalk implementation native to .NET - have a look at the Vista Smalltalk blog. This is a great explanation of the value, to my mind:

As internet connectivity improves, we will increasingly be building ad-hoc, highly connected applications. Think of how online games or workgroups might evolve as Peer-to-Peer networking becomes commonplace, or think of how applications aggregating data simultaneously from dozens of webservices might evolve.

We will need a more powerful way of doing programming to build ”instant” applications robustly and quickly.

Smalltalk originated in the powerful biological concept of “protected universal cells interacting only through messages that could mimic any desired behavior (Alan Kay)”.

With its simple messaging paradigm and minimal syntax, Smalltalk is probably the best language yet invented for harnessing the increasing potential of the Internet.

Based on this YouTube video, you really, really don't want your fan to fail on an AMD based machine...

Apple is tempting me again:

Apple® today introduced a new $899 configuration of the 17-inch iMac® designed specifically for education customers featuring a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, a built-in iSight(TM) video camera and iLife® '06, the next generation of Apple's award-winning suite of digital lifestyle applications. The 17-inch iMac for education is available immediately and will replace the eMac®, Apple's last CRT based computer, providing students and teachers everything they need to learn and create in today's digital classroom, all in the ultra-efficient iMac design.

My daughter is a student, see...

Well this is interesting. Amanda Congdon is out at Rocketboom - and according to her, not by her choice. The main page at RB takes you straight to the archives - and the Friday show from last week was pretty lame. No way to tell why she's gotten the boot, of course - but Rocketboom was Amanda Congdon. They'll need someone fairly dynamic to replace her, that's for sure. Also curious - seemingly no word from Rocketboom as to what's going on. I think they'll find that the lack of transparency is a problem.

Update: Let the speculation begin - anyone doubt that Amanda would be a huge addition to Podtech?

This is the sort of report that likely keeps a few people at the GooglePlex awake nights:

Internet advertisers paid $800 million for bogus clicks on their marketing messages last year, shaking confidence in the industry and prompting many to reduce spending with Google, Yahoo and other Web sites, according to a study to be released today.

While that's a big number, what really matters is how big it is in relation to all ad spending. Some of that context comes further down:

In today's report, advertisers say that 14.6 percent of all clicks are bogus. Moreover, three-quarters of advertisers said they had been victims at least once.

Which still doesn't tell me how big the space is. It may not matter though - the perception is what matters, and this story plays that up:

The study found that 27 percent of advertisers reduced or stopped spending on click-based advertising. An additional 10 percent said they intend to curtail spending.

"In our opinion, it is not acceptable that advertisers fund the illicit profits of the scammers," Chuck Richard, vice president of Outsell, said in the report. He added that the fraud is easy to get away with and that Web sites have done little to stop it.

I have no idea how accurate that survey is, but 27 percent is a decent size number. I've been wondering if/when click fraud would impact Google, and we might be getting near that point.

Update: Steve Rubel talks about the problem

RocketBoom has posted a statement on their site - after this week off, they'll be back next week with an interim host. Dave Winer has captured a screenshot for when the statement moves elsewhere.

Even more: Cali at GeekbriefTV has Amanda's video and Andrew's statement. Follow the link to watch the video. I don't know either of them, so it's all he said/she said to me...

And More: Jason Calacanis is pitching Amanda on his blog. Amazing...

I've discovered that I like listening to podcasts while I jog, and I noticed that Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch has been podcasting for awhile now. I finished listening to his June 26 interview with the Digg guys today, and something Mike said at the end of the interview struck me.

He was stating that - over time - user editing (i.e, the kind Digg does with its community) will beat out mainstream publications like the New York Times. He figures that the best writers will go independent, and their work will get picked up by sites like Digg. The bottom line - people will select democratized content over edited content.

I'm not so sure. I like Digg, and I check it regularly (using the feed in BottomFeeder). I do find that I'm reading fewer newspapers, but I haven't given up on editors. Rather, I've come to settle on a new set of them completely. Rather than faceless people at the (pick your paper here), I use various bloggers as my filter into the news. I follow people like Arrington, Scoble, Udell, and a raft of others (yes, even Winer - I may dislike his stance on RSS, but he does pick up on stuff I'm interested in) for tech news. I also use Techmeme and Digg - and, truth be told, the signal to noise ratio is way, way higher on Techmeme - nowhere near as much crap gets promoted up.

Which is not to say that Digg serves no purpose - far from it. I just wouldn't count on it as my sole source of input. Digg gets stories that would rarely get past a first cut on an editor controlled site, which does have value. There's room for both models, and I think most people will use both.

Guido van Rossum watched Alan Kay give a presentation recently, and has a number of kind things to say about Squeak, and about Alan's talk. Go read it all.

James McGovern misses my point - I said here that the images he posts (most of which have no relationship to the text) are a distraction. He responds:

IT folks need to stop being so serious. One can learn alternative perspectives in a variety of ways. If images distract you then you can choose to not look at them. In the blogosphere there is no audience only folks who can freely choose which channels of information they choose to listen to or ignore. I would say though that several bloggers have indicated that imagery is a good thing.

What he misses is that the images distract from his message, period. It doesn't matter how, or why. It's just the way it is. Accept that simple fact and move along, rather than trying to explain why the problem shouldn't be a problem.

I had a notion that things were being unsaid vis-a-vis RocketBoom, and this morning they got said. Check out Amanda Congdon's long missive.

Update: Mark Evans notes that this is a PR nightmare, with most of the damage likely to land on Andrew Baron - regardless of who is mostly at fault:

A quick scan of the blogosphere suggests if Baron intends to fight a PR war against Congdon, he's going to lose - and lose badly. She's got a tremendous amount of goodwill and support so Baron has everyone to lose by trying to make her look back - even if she's wrong.

I think he's got that right. That post by Amanda makes them both look bad, but most of the resulting stench is going to stick to Baron - and I'm not saying that it should. I don't know either one of them, so I have no way of knowing the whole truth of the matter. What I can see is the way the PR wind will blow.

I agree 100 percent with Doc on this:

Which speaks to my concerns about Net Neutrality as well, and why I kinda hope the whole telco "reform" effort in Congress crashes and burns. I think Net Neutrality is a terrific rallying cry and a fine sentiment to carry around in the marketplace. Meaning it's a fire to which we should hold the carriers' feet. But I worry about making it into law.

As Michael Powell warned F2C several months ago, be careful about getting what you wish for. Unintended consequences are a certainty, and it takes a generation or more to unscrew screwy legislation, if it ever gets unscrewed at all.

The net isn't broken now; there's no telling what consequences will flow from yet another complex series of "reform" bills on net neutrality.

Dare Obasanjo reports that MS is going to ship support for ODF in the next rev of Office. This should be a fascinating thing to watch: MS Office will support an open format, and also beats the free tools in terms of legacy operation and disabled access. That last one will likely make for some quiet crow eating in some state governments.

Bruce Tate has some nice things to say about web development in Smalltalk (Seaside) and Ruby (Ruby on Rails) - and contrasts them both favorably with the standard Java approaches. The section on Seaside is in the second half of the article - have a look.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

This afternoon, Troy and I were trying to figure out why he couldn't load the feed for one of the internal blogs into BottomFeeder. At first, we thought it might be some kind of oddball network/proxy issue, and brought in one of our IT people to answer questions. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary there, so I had Troy go to the System menu in BottomFeeder and open up a workspace. This is one of the cooler things about the application; you can write Smalltalk script just like you can in a development workspace. So, I had him try this:

(HttpClient new get: 'internalUrlWentHere') contents.

That worked, so I had him try out the test code I normally use to look for feed issues:

doc := Constructor  
	documentFromURL: 'internalUrlHere' 
	forceUpdate: true 
	useMaskedAgent: false.
cls := Constructor determineClassToHandle: doc content.
target := cls objectForData.
feed := cls 
	processDocument: doc content
	from: 'internalUrlHere' 
	into: target.

Inspecting the feed variable at the end showed that the url was reachable - what we had was a cache problem. I had Troy reset his cache in Bf, and all was well. I'll have to see about not caching bad results, but the cool thing was that we could do this in the runtime - he didn't have to set up a dev version in order to try this stuff out.

That's the power of Smalltalk, right there.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I have no idea how this ad campaign for the new Sony PSP (now available in white, apparently) - managed to make it out of the fevered brain of a really stupid ad exec. Seriously - follow the link, and have a look at the image.

Technorati Tags: marketing

I've finally gotten around to updating the Atom support for the blogs here. The feed names are the same (which means, for instance, that my Atom feed has an odd name), but it's all Atom 1.0 now.

Technorati Tags: atom

Lee Ann Prescott digs up some real numbers on how the audience and usage of Digg differs from those of the New York Times. It's a good summary of how and why they are different, and serve different audiences. I made some related points on this earlier; Mike Arrington responds thoughtfully here.

Last night I noticed Dave Winer's post on Podshow, where he pointed out that they are hijacking content. I flagged his post as something I'd want to take a further look at when I wasn't so tired. This morning it's gotten to be a bigger story. Geek News Central is (understandably) torqued, and it's hit Techmeme. Here's what Dave said last night:

They're doing lots of nasty stuff, for sure. I'm not happy that they're taking over my content, putting their copyright notice on it, creating their own version of my RSS feed, adding their crap, and taking out my copyright.

And here's Geek News Central this morning:

I am sitting here beyond pissed, not because they have my site automatically listed on their site that is fine because they are a directory, but in the way they have done it, this makes people assume that my podcast is part of Podshow, and diminishes my brand. They have made it near impossible to get to my home page from their site unless your really dig it's 100% unacceptable.

That's really, really stupid of PodShow. It's one thing to aggregate pointers to content - it's something else again to actually copy it for commercial use. This is the sort of thing that gets lawyers after you, and with good cause.

Technorati Tags: copyright

There continues to be speculation on Nintendo's launch price for the Wii:

Nintendo responded to the rampant speculation on Wii price and launch date by stating today that they'll announce both of those little details in September. This makes a September launch increasingly unlikely, but doesn't say much more than that. After the announcement a McNealy analyst stated: "Our position remains that the Wii could retail as low as $199 instead of $249, and October is a reasonable timeframe."

If they launch under $200, that will hit what I like to call the "impulsive" price point, which would drive a lot of holiday sales.

I periodically get asked about problems running VisualWorks on Debian and/or Ubuntu. I got a summary from one of our engineers last night:

The two issues are:

1. locale initialization failure running 32-bit VW on 64-bit system
2. Font lookup failure

Jeff Hallman reports that the locale issue has been fixed by upgrading his 64 bit Ubuntu installation to the latest stable release. There isn't anything we can do about this problem internally, it's a problem with glibc and xlib not seeing the same available locales.

I just completed a bug report for the font lookup failure. I think that the problem needs to be fixed at the X server level, but the 'xset fp rehash' thing is still a viable workaround.

That last paragraph indicates that you should add that line - xset fp rehash - to your linux startup script for VW.

Well, this is interesting:

Japan's SONY CORP. (TSE:6758) has taken out an 80 billion yen (US$698 million) syndicated loan from a group of 20 or so domestic financial institutions to diversify its sources of funding, The Nihon Keizai Shimbun learned Monday. The move marks the major electronics firm's first bank loan since 1995.

I heard about that on yesterday's Buzz Out Loud podcast, while I was off jogging. Like the hosts, I wonder whether the huge PS3/Blu-Ray investment is starving Sony of ready cash for other things they want to do - apparently, much of that money is earmarked for completely different parts of the business.

This follows the ongoing layoffs at Sony - 10,000 by 2008. If the PS3 launch goes badly, it could be some very rough sailing for Sony...

I thought that the "White is Coming" ad campaign Sony launched was a really, really bad idea. Sony is now finding out just how brain dead an idea it is: The NAACP is complaining (quite rightly, I think) about it now:

"The days of blacks being portrayed in minstrel shows are long gone, and with good reason," said Rick Callender, chapter president. "The minstrel show was an awful chapter in history and this ad smacks of that age and time. It is even further unacceptable that some corporations still think it is okay to use racially charged media images. The latest Sony ad conjures up bad memories of when stereotypical and offensive images of people of color were accepted means of selling a product. Sony should immediately apologize and discontinue these archaic, advertising tactics."

You have to wonder about both the ad execs and the corporate execs who okayed this campaign (follow the link to see the image - I'm not about to copy it here). Just how clueless do you have to be to think that it wouldn't offend large numbers of people?

Technorati Tags: marketing, management

I'd been thinking about commenting on Scoble's piece on Silicon Valley for awhile, but hadn't gotten around to it. Here's the bit that I thought was silly:

If you’re a geek outside of San Francisco or Redmond, it’s hard to get a job in the industry.

And, worse, if you are a fledgling company and you need to expand, if you aren’t in one of those areas it’s hard to find great potential workers.

This is part of the echo chamber kool-aid that Scoble (and others, I'm sure) have imbibed. What got me thinking about this again was this post - the author makes what I consider to be a key point:

First, I think the valley is actually an obstacle to doing business. The number one cause is the cost of housing. I work in Seattle. When I price houses in the bay area, they cost just about twice what my house costs. Since I measure salaries in median home price multiples, I’d have to take a 50% pay cut to move there. All bay area companies freak when I simply double my salary when asked about my expectations. Second, the local talent is overrated. Its young (people with low overhead who don’t mind paying $1500 for 400 square feet of living space), but inexperienced. So you need more boy wonders to get the same job done as you might if you hired seasoned professionals. Given a million$ budget, I’d prefer to hire 5 senior guys at $200k rather than 20 at $50k. I’ll get more done.

Very, very true. We happen to be looking for a Smalltalk engineer at Cincom right now (the job will be formally posted on Monday). The Valley is probably not one of the places we'll hire in, even though we have our main development office there. Why, you ask? Raw cost. The salary requirements for a developer in the valley will be at least 1.5 times those of someone living somewhere else (nearly anywhere, other than New York City). As the black bag guy says, I can hire a number of good people outside of the valley for the cost of one there - and it's only getting easier to support remote workers. Most of our engineers are located neither in the Valley nor in Cincinnati (our corporate HQ).

A great example of this kind of thing is DabbleDB. Avi started that firm well outside the valley, and has been growing it organically. I haven't asked him specifically, but I'd bet that Silicon Valley wasn't high on the list of places he and his fellow dabblers would want to go - their standard of living would drop like a rock.

I had this choice myself, actually, back in the 90's when I joined ParcPlace. HQ was in the Valley. They hired me as a trainer/consultant, and the need to travel would have dropped a lot had I moved west - regular classes were taught out there, while I always had to fly (either to CA or to a customer site) living here. On the other hand, my cost of living would have skyrocketed. At the time, my wife and I were able to afford a house that cost (1990) about $170K. The same house in the greater bay area would have been about 3X that. If you think management would have increased my salary commensurately, dream on.

Mind you, there are some flaws in what black bag says as well:

They [Europeans] also balance their lives and walk away from their computers to think now and then. They take holidays. Much was dicussed at gnomedex about the echo chamber. Europeans are better at leaving the echo chamber and experiencing life. The wide range of cultures in a smalll geographic region give them better perspective. They get 6-8 weeks of vacation, free health care, and job security/unemployment benefits lasting up to a year. Tech workers want to give this up? Don’t think so. This is a key advantage.

The cost of living in Europe is a lot higher than it is in most of the US as well. And those labor protections? They are a great deal for the workers who are employed now, but something of an impediment to getting hired in the first place. Europe is not one of the places we are looking to hire, for instance - and a large part of that is the state of labor law.

Bottom line, I think Robert needs to get outside the echo chamber (and I don't mean to Montana - that might be too far out). The Raleigh Durham area, Denver, the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, and the Washington DC metro area are all large tech congregations - and all have far, far lower costs of living than the Valley (even the DC area, which, to be honest, is getting somewhat insane). Right now, if I were planning to start a firm up, the Valley is the last place I'd look. Startups are prone to failure as it is - why increase my costs from the get go?

Time for my weekly look at the logs. BottomFeeder downloads proceeded at a rate of 175 per day last week - I should be releasing 4.2 sometime this coming week. Here's the breakdown:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	611
CE ARM	132
Linux x86	131
Mac X	90
Update	73
Mac 8/9	52
Windows98/ME	41
HPUX	25
Solaris	22
AIX	16
Linux Sparc	15
Linux PPC	9
Sources	4
CE x86	2
SGI	1

Next up: The HTML Page accesses by tool:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	58.7%
Internet Explorer	24.5%
Planet Smalltalk	6.4%
MSN Bot	3.5%
Opera	2.6%
Other	3%
Megite	1.3%

That's about the normal tool distribution. Finally, the RSS tool usage:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	18.1%
BottomFeeder	17.4%
Other	11.7%
BlogLines	9.8%
Net News Wire	8.5%
Internet Explorer	6.8%
Safari RSS	5.3%
NewsGator	4.3%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.5%
SharpReader	1.7%
Planet Smalltalk	1.7%
MSN Bot	1.5%
RSS Bandit	1.4%
RSS 2 Email	1.2%
BlogSearch	1.1%
JetBrains	1%
Feed Reader	1%
Opera	1%
Liferea	1%
Lilina	1%
Java	1%

That distribution looks normal as well. Another week in the books.

There's a New York Times Op/Ed piece that makes some interesting points about the real state of things in India - there are a lot more tragically poor people there than there are rising technocrats:

Nor is India rising very fast on the report's Human Development index, where it ranks 127, just two rungs above Myanmar and more than 70 below Cuba and Mexico. Despite a recent reduction in poverty levels, nearly 380 million Indians still live on less than a dollar a day.

The article makes the point that India also isn't seeing the rapid industrialization that China is seeing - visit any store in the US, and a ton of things are stamped "made in China". Not many say "made in India". There's another thing the piece doesn't address, and that's the middle phase that industrialization leads through. Look at the history of the US and Europe during the 19th (and into the 20th) centuries: what you see is rising labor problems, as the people working in the new factories get just well off enough to want a better life. From a few scattered reports I see in the media, I think China is starting to see that. India will see the same thing. The results of that unrest don't have to end as well as they did in the West either - there's just no telling how it will go.

The next couple of decades should be fascinating to watch that way.

You can see the desperate attempt to cling to a rapidly dying business model here, with a quote from ABC:

I would love it if the MSOs, during the deployment of the new DVRs they’re putting out there, would disable the fast-forward [button],” Shaw said. “People can understand in order to have convenience and on-demand (options), that you can’t skip commercials.” Source: Media Daily News

It's not advertising itself that is doomed - it's the notion that the audience can be forced to watch them that is. You want ads that work? You're going to have to deal with the coming world of narrow-casting, where the audience is breaking into more and more niches. It's not 1975 anymore, when a single show could command the bulk of an audience at a given time. There are too many alternatives:

• On-Demand movies
• NetFlix (et. al.)
• Video Gaming
• Direct over the net streaming video

If broadcasters think they can command a mass audience with lame devices that force us to watch ads, they have another think coming. What's next - monitors that ensure we don't go to the bathroom during the commercials? Figure out what kind of audience you have, and start delivering messages that they have interest in. You'll have a happier audience, and a happier set of advertisers. You know, an actual win-win.

Update: Via Doc Searls, I read the rest of the linked MediaPost story. To get an idea as to just how far outside the reality zone the network folks live, get a load of this quote:

Shaw also threw cold water on the idea that neutering the fast-forward option would result in a consumer backlash. He suggested that consumers prefer DVRs for their ability to facilitate on-demand viewing and not ad-zapping--and consumers might warm to the idea that anytime viewing brings with it a tradeoff in the form of unavoidable commercial viewing.

"I'm not so sure that the whole issue really is one of commercial avoidance," Shaw said. "It really is a matter of convenience--so you don't miss your favorite show. And quite frankly, we're just training a new generation of viewers to skip commercials because they can. I'm not sure that the driving reason to get a DVR in the first place is just to skip commercials. I don't fundamentally believe that. People can understand in order to have convenience and on-demand (options), that you can't skip commercials."

Umm, yeah - I live to watch those ads. Shaw is simply going to have to deal with reality. The ground is shifting, and the "one size fits all" broadcast ad model is dying. It may be harder work to figure out what your audience is actually interested in, but - once you do - you might actually be able to sell them something.

Technorati Tags: advertising, media, marketing

The LA STUG is meeting this Monday:

LASTUG Meeting

When: Monday July 10, 2006
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
This event repeats on the second Monday of every month.
Event Location: High Tech High, Los Angeles - Meeting Room
Street: 17111 Victory Blvd
City, State, Zip: Lake Balboa, CA, 91406

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I've just posted a new development build of BottomFeeder 4.2 - if this holds up, I'll mark it for release next week. The docs are updated (Thanks Rich!), and it should be ready (or close to ready) to go.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, rss, aggregator

I've been reading Doc's take on various newspapers (especially the one closest to him, like today's post). Giving it some thought, I don't think net friendliness is the biggest problem that a lot of papers have. Sure, it's a big problem, but I think there's a bigger one: focus. Consider the blogosphere for a minute. How many bloggers are there that try to cover the entire playing field (sports, national news, local news, etc, etc)?

Not many.

I think the future for successful local newspapers will be in understanding that. It's not that they need to emulate blogs, it's that they need to emulate the focus. How many papers focus on current events in a locale? Other than the free local paper that gets tossed once a week, not many (and if yours is like the one that arrives here, it doesn't do a great job either). That's where I think local media needs to go - more local. Why even try to cover the same ground as the national dailies?

From the Smalltalk IRC channel, a description of FDD:

[11:27] all i need is a forehead and a spacebar
[11:29] Are you working in Eclipse?
[11:31] don't remind me
[11:32] I figured you must be if you were doing Forehead driven development.

Heh.

In a post about a few things, Doc Searls asks this about soccer's (lack of) popularity in the US:

Is the relative lack of professional soccer popularity in the U.S. perhaps due to the absence of advertising opportunities, since the game goes on for 45 minute periods with no time outs?

That explains part of the TV coverage problem (although banner ads would certainly work). Part of it is simply what Americans are used to seeing. When we watch a sport on TV, we are really, really used to instant replays. With the way a soccer game flows, there's often no time for that. Sure, using a DVR you can do it yourself - but it's not the same thing.

Another thing is scoring. Soccer games can go a long, long time without a score - the just finished world cup finale went from minute 19 to the shootout without any scoring - and after the Zidane headbutt, Italy had a man advantage for about 10 minutes. American sports fans are simply used to higher scoring games.

I think it's as simple as "tastes differ". Trying to "fix" soccer so that Americans would like it better would probably irritate the (very large) fan base in the rest of the world.

What a shocker - a writer for the Washington Post posts that Wikipedia is prone to inaccurate information on new (and controversial) topics - like the death of Ken Lay (former CEO of Enron):

Lay's death on Wednesday illustrates the problem, as chronicled by the Reuters news service, which watched the Wikipedia article on Lay evolve with alarming speed and wildly inaccurate reporting.

He gives a few examples, which demonstrate the politically driven nature of this sort of article on Wikipedia.

I've covered this ground before in a fair bit of depth, most recently here. The bottom line: holding up Brittanica as a better alternative is nice, except for one thing: there won't be a Ken Lay entry in whatever is on your shelf. By the time I got around to looking at the article on Wikipedia (today), it seems to have settled down into a straight biopic.

Stories in the Post (or any newspaper) aren't always right the first time out either. It's not just bias; there's pressure to hit deadlines, and there's the all too common incidence of early information being bad. Over time, newspapers tend to add more and better coverage - which is a lot like what happens with Wikipedia.

Technorati Tags: news

It was widely reported last week that RocketBoom would be back today with a new host - and that's still what the announcement on their website says, as of 10:52 am this morning (EDT). Hmm...

Update: As of 2 pm EDT, they've added a blurb at the bottom of the page promising an episode today. We'll see...

Update: The latest announcement says that the launch is delayed until tomorrow (July 11).

Technorati Tags: media, rocketboom, vlog

The Cincom Smalltalk team is looking for a Business Development Manager - the person hired will work closely with the Smalltalk management team to identify new business opportunities and partners. We are looking for someone in North America:

Business Development Manager

Cincom, the world's most experienced software company, builds, sells, and supports software for customer experience management, data access and integration, process automation, manufacturing business solutions, and business communications as well as offers IT and contact center outsourcing.

Cincom Systems employs powerful, motivated individuals who possess Character, Competence, Commitment and make a habit of exceeding expectations.

Our successful candidate will have 6 - 8 years plus experience in the following areas:

• Bachelor's degree or higher
• Over eight years experience with Smalltalk
• Must have experience in presenting Smalltalk message
• Experience as a Business Development Manager
• Research target markets and new industries to target
• Build up current partners and customer opportunities
• Work closely with Team to continually develop the message and UVP
• Develop metrics for qualification of sales leads
• Develop Business Case for overall product line and support in same for Partner organizations
• Assist sales support organization
• Identify key sales opportunities and either close or work with Star Team to close opportunities faster
• Ability to commit to 50% travel

If you are interested in becoming a member of our team, forward your resume and salary requirements to: employme@cincom.com. Please reference the Req. number 2807.

RESUMES ACCEPTED UNTIL POSITION IS FILLED

...an equal opportunity employer

Apply Now.

Visit the page now, or send me an email.

Technorati Tags: cincom, smalltalk, cst

The Cincom Smalltalk team is looking for a Field Application Engineer - the person hired will work closely with the Cincom Smalltalk customer base and new prospects. We are looking for someone in North America:

Field Application Engineer

Cincom, the world's most experienced software company, builds, sells, and supports software for customer experience management, data access and integration, process automation, manufacturing business solutions, and business communications as well as offers IT and contact center outsourcing.

Cincom Systems employs powerful, motivated individuals who possess Character, Competence, Commitment and make a habit of exceeding expectations.

Our successful candidate will have 6 - 8 years plus experience in the following areas:

• Bachelor's degree or higher
• Over six years experience with Smalltalk
• Provide detailed analysis to current customer to provide key technical information to Product Manager for product direction
• Through customer analysis discover services opportunities for upgrades, training and other revenue generating opportunities
• Provide specialist support during sales cycle to add credibility to product and close opportunities faster
• Assist with evaluation of add-ons and applications for potential product opportunities for Cincom and add-ons to core product
• Represent Cincom Smalltalk at industry trade events
• Assist with technical aspects of sales proposals
• Provide support when required during product implementations
• Able to commit to 50% travel

If you are interested in becoming a member of our team, forward your resume and salary requirements to: employme@cincom.com. Please reference the Req. number 2808.

RESUMES ACCEPTED UNTIL POSITION IS FILLED

...an equal opportunity employer

Apply Now.

Visit the page now, or send me an email.

Technorati Tags: cincom, cst, smalltalk

The Cincom Smalltalk team is looking for a Senior Smalltalk Engineer - the person hired will work with the rest of the Cincom Smalltalk development staff. We are looking for someone in North America:

Sr. Software Engineer

Cincom, the world's most experienced software company, builds, sells, and supports software for customer experience management, data access and integration, process automation, manufacturing business solutions, and business communications as well as offers IT and contact center outsourcing.

Cincom Systems employs powerful, motivated individuals who possess Character, Competence, Commitment and make a habit of exceeding expectations.

Our successful candidate will have 4-6 years plus experience in the following areas:

• Bachelor's degree or higher
• Must have five to six years minimum experience in Smalltalk
• Some experience in VisualWorks
• Significant experience in Object Oriented design of application frameworks
• Experience using VisualWorks to build user interfaces
• Strong written communication skills and good planning skills
• Familiarity with the internals of VisualWorks tool set
• Visibility in the Smalltalk community
• Publicly available work done in VisualWorks, especially various tools enhancements
• Exposure to fundamentals of usability and UI design

If you are interested in becoming a member of our team, forward your resume and salary requirements to: employme@cincom.com. Please reference the Req. number 2800.

RESUMES ACCEPTED UNTIL POSITION IS FILLED

...an equal opportunity employer

Apply Now.

Visit the page now, or send me an email.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cst, cincom

If this report on (yet another) Blu-Ray delay holds up, then Sony should just hoist the white flag. To quote McCoy: "It's dead, Jim".

Dare Obasanjo quote Debra Chrapaty (via Tim O'Reilly) on what's coming down the pike with "Web 2.0":

People talk about "cloud storage" but Debra points out that that means servers somewhere, hundreds of thousands of them, with good access to power, cooling, and bandwidth. She describes how her "strategic locations group" has a "heatmap" rating locations by their access to all these key limiting factors, and how they are locking up key locations and favorable power and bandwidth deals. And as in other areas of real estate, getting the good locations first can matter a lot. She points out, for example, that her cost of power at her Quincy, WA data center, soon to go online, is 1.9 cents per kwh, versus about 8 cents in CA. And she says, "I've learned that when you multiply a small number by a big number, the small number turns into a big number." Once Web 2.0 becomes the norm, the current demands are only a small foretaste of what's to come. For that matter, even server procurement is "not pretty" and there will be economies of scale that accrue to the big players. Her belief is that there's going to be a tipping point in Web 2.0 where the operational environment will be a key differentiator

There's a lot of truth in that, but at the same time, it depends. If your model is to handle a Digg/MySpace size audience, sure - that's a broadcast model (yes, I know that there's narrowcasting within that broadcast model). However, not everyone is after a huge audience - many people are after a niche audience right from the get go, and thus don't have huge scalability (or power) needs. If all you need is a handful of servers, location isn't going to be a huge problem. Based on what I see on the web right now, for every huge service like Windows Live, there are tons and tons of niche services that are going after a much, much smaller audience.

Scoble cuts through all the SEO nonsense and explains what should be obvious:

Without clicking anywhere find me a real human being. Not one made out of a stock photo agency.

You don’t need to look. There aren’t any. Not to mention that you can’t talk to a real human being. And I don’t see anything on those two pages that I’d like to link to. Which means they won’t get high search engine rankings no matter how many SEO firms they pay.

Which is like throwing money down the toilet. If you met THE PEOPLE behind these companies I think you’d be far more likely to listen to what they have to say. Or sell. And they ARE experts on their business. It’s a damn shame that they aren’t allowed to talk with us on their Web sites.

The context here is two website, here and here. The companies don't matter much - you could say the same thing for our (Cincom's) main website. The only way to directly communicate with us is via the blogs here, which is a large part of the reason I do this.

Most marketers are stuck in a broadcast mode of thinking - what they need to do is start engaging in the narrowcasting future.

Technorati Tags: PR, web

Yesterday, RocketBoom was coming back today. Last night, their web page lost the "coming back soon" stuff and started displaying an error message - and that message is still there now (7:30 AM, EDT):

Generally speaking, that's not a good sign...

Technorati Tags: vlog

Here's the smart analyst (James Governor), trying to say something positive about the apparently dumb analysts. He's received a "cease and desist" letter for the unpardonable sin of - wait for it - linking to something on the Gartner site and praising it:

Last Thursday I received an email, strangely enough from Gartner's Vendor Relations department, asking me to remove a link from monkchips, because it apparently constituted "unauthorised use".

So wait a second. I can't post a URL to a Gartner site? What exactly would be the penalty for doing so?

I guess Gartner is into anti-marketing now...

Technorati Tags: stupidity, PR, marketing

Andrew Baron explains the problems they are having getting RocketBoom back up - regardless of what happened between him and Amanda, it's clear that there was no plan in place for the "what if something happened to Amanda?" problem:

Producing Rocketboom every day is a challenge but nothing has ever been as challenging as what we are going through right now.

Rocketboom was obviously very dependent on Amanda's role. Since she left so suddenly, I have tried to get the episodes up and running as soon as possible, though I am not comfortable with the way they are going yet.

It's easy enough to recreate the same thing, the challenge here is to do the next.

There is a humorous short on the site now along with the explanation. This raises a broader issue for any outfit: What's your "bus count"? In other words, are there people on your team who - if they "got hit by a bus" - would bring things to an immediate halt? If so, then you have a problem that you better start addressing right now.

Technorati Tags: vlog, management

Rob Fahrni wields the reality stick on the Digg crowd, who think that the end of Win 98/ME support could boost desktop Linux:

I cannot see people that know how to turn on the computer, login, and double-click on the IE logo switching to an OS that's still geared toward complete gear heads. They'll run to a Mac before switching to Linux. I know, I know, BASH rulz! Of course that opinion and $4.50 will get you a quad-grande-vanilla-mocha at Starbucks.

That's about the size of it.

Technorati Tags: mac, windows, linux