Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

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.

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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

It seems that complexity is not its own reward: industry analysts are noticing that Java gets in the way when you're developing loosely coupled "service oriented" applications. Here's Richard Monson-Haefel on the problem:

Even with the simplification of enterprise APIs in Java EE 5, the "platform has grown too complex to be workable for enterprise developers." However, a later statement is that "JEE5's failure to address complexity is a harbinger of the Java EE platforms' fall from dominance in the enterprise development platform arena." The implication is that the complexity is in the wrong place, not addressing actual problems, but existing in development and deployment.

SOA emphasizes interoperability more than cross-platform deployment, and the analysts say that Java EE is ill-suited for this (despite the existence of efforts such as Project Tango to directly address this.)

I think I've been saying that for awhile; it's nice to see other people catching up with the obvious. When you get buried in language complexity issues (generics, anyone?), then actually solving business problems gets to be troublesome. Doing loosely coupled services is going to be a lot easier in languages like Smalltalk, Ruby, Python, and even Perl. Of course, the Enterprisey types are already in full defense mode - from the same page:

In other words, most applications don't need a service model, and wouldn't benefit from one. As a result, catering to a service model would be a waste of resources and time. One architect from a Fortune 100, dismissed the report, saying that it's "an analysts group's cry for attention by trolling."

Note the courageous "standing behind his words" thing :) Let the architects man the barricades - I'll be over here, being productive.

Technorati Tags: java, soa

Looks like Sony finally figured out that single country advertising is increasingly becoming a thing of the past - they've pulled the "white is coming" PSP ad from the Netherlands:

Sony said that the Netherlands campaign intended to highlight the color contrast between the existing black PSP and the new ceramic white PSP. Instead, the ad campaign riled California Assemblyman Leland Yee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a youth civil rights education project called Sojourn to the Past. Those critics condemned Sony’s use of the racially charged photo to sell a product and said it recalled an age and time when black people were portrayed in minstrel shows.

I mentioned at the time that this ad campaign was ill advised - at best. It's pretty much the same mistake Ted Neward made in in O/R analogy post: an ancillary point rose up and became the story, overwhelming the desired point.

Technorati Tags: advertising, marketing, management

Valleywag calls BS on the latest from RocketBoom, noting that just before yesterday's "we were very dependent on Amanda" line, Andrew Baron had posted a "but I did just about everything" missive.

What it boils down to is this: before this happened, Andrew didn't realize that his bus count was 1. Now he does.

Update: There's a new update on rocketboom.com. Supposedly, they'll be back this afternoon.

Technorati Tags: vlog, management

I haven't been following the EU anti-trust thing with Microsoft very closely, but it's been pretty hard to miss of late. Here's a CNet piece on it:

After years of investigation, the Commission found in 2004 that Microsoft used near-monopoly power from its Windows operating system to harm competitors making work group servers, which run printing and sign-on services in offices.

The Commission ordered Microsoft to give rivals the information needed so their work group servers could compete on a level playing field with Microsoft's own. The company must help its rivals interconnect smoothly with Windows.

I wonder if any of the commissioners have actually used Windows, Linux, and Macs on a network. I have all three here, and oddly enough, the Mac and Linux boxes (and this is an ancient Linux - Redhat 7!) do a better job with Windows networking than the XP boxes do. I have XP on my latop, and my wife has 2 XP boxes in the living room. The three boxes can only intermittently see shared drives and printers - I've never really understood why. The Mac - it always sees everything without a problem. Ditto the Linux box.

Given the way Windows networking *cough* works *cough*, maybe Microsoft's real problem is that they need to share the information with themselves.

Technorati Tags: windows

Marc Gunther of Fortune decries the "loss" of mass media:

I think the explosion of choice has left us poorer in at least two arenas. The first is journalism. (Yes, as a Fortune writer, I've got a stake in the health of the mainstream media, which bloggers call the MSM.) The network evening newscasts, big-city newspapers and the national news magazines once had the money, access, skills, commitment and power to deliver lots of original reporting and put important issues on the national agenda. Today, they are all diminished.

Those evening newscasts were never that good (yes, I include Cronkite in that). "Everyone" watched them because there were three main choices (plus a handful of independent stations) in most areas. I gre up outside of New York City - in that media mecca, we were able to get 7 stations. When I went to college near Albany NY, we were getting 3 or 4. It's not that people liked having the limited choices; that was what we had.

It's a narrow-casting world, and there's no going back

RocketBoom is back, and I'll give them credit - they are handling the host change with a decent sense of humor.

The various leaks about the new host were right - it is Joanne Colan. What will be interesting to watch is whether RB purposely tries to break dependence on a single host by bringing in more than one.

Technorati Tags: vlog

Our engineers are having an internal Camp Smalltalk out in Santa Clara this week - my daughter has a performance for her drama camp, so I couldn't attend. Suzanne has been out there, so I have some pics. Here's a team shot from a dinner at the Fish Market:

There's a lot of work going on too - with a geographically distributed team, these kinds of get togethers are a good idea to have from time to time. From left to right, that's Vassili Bykov, John Sarkela, Andreas Hiltner, and Steve Dahl:

Here's one more work shot, taken in the conference room at the SC office.

Word is, the sessions are going well, and lots of good work is getting done.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom

Nick Carr seems to think that "professional" writers are essential to a healthy ad-space on the web:

By contrast, there's plenty of supply available for banner ads. The problem here is that advertisers don't much like the space that's available, particularly the space that's near user-generated content: "The complex task of spreading media spending across thousands of small Web sites, many with different ad formats, means that advertisers tend to return to heavily trafficked sites, where supply is at a premium. Even on the big portals, marketers are leery of having their ads placed near consumer-generated content that might be objectionable."

The upshot? Expect higher prices and slower growth in online advertising until supply catches up with demand. As ever, good content is king, and the flood of amateur content doesn't appear to meet advertisers' definition of "good." Maybe professionals aren't so dispensable after all.

I've got a news flash for Carr: mass media just isn't coming to the web. You and Fortune magazine are going to have to adjust to the real world, and realize that narrow-casting is the future.

Meanwhile, advertisers are going to have to do something they aren't used to: work. They are going to have to start figuring out where their target audience is, and start delivering information that people actually want, instead of mindless pap that we desperately want to skip over. More "professionals" is exactly what we don't need.

Technorati Tags: advertising, marketing, PR

I've pushed BottomFeeder 4.2 out the door - it's been stable for quite awhile now, but I have moved up to VW 7.4.1 as the base instead of 7.3 (the previous release). Moving to 7.4.1 gets me NTLM proxy support for free, which is great - especially since Cincom uses NTLM internally :) Here's the change log:

Changes from version 4.1

• Upgrade to VisualWorks 7.4.1 as the base
• Added support for NTLM based proxy servers
• Added support for the PhotoCast module
• Bug fixes for the Atom 1.0 support
• Bug fix for a problem saving synchronization files
• Bug fix for online to offline toggle - ensures no attempted net queries happen when offline
• UI change - all "Notification" references are now "Alert" references (consistency)
• Bug fixes for OPML output
• Fixed a serious bug with the "connection problem" dialog - only get one now
• if you subscribe to a feed: url, it should work now
• Various Small bug fixes

If you use 4.1, you'll need to replace your runtime. No need to reinstall - just replace the image or executable, and delete everything in the "app" directory. You can also blow away the files Blog-Tools.pcl and IRC-BottomFeeder-Plugin.pcl from the "plugins" directory.

You've heard of "sleeping with the fishes"? Here are our engineers, "sleeping with the servers":

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom

Gordon Weakliem points to Charles Miller, who has run into the infamous hotel 301 problem - Charles says:

On a recent trip to the USA, Scott stayed in a hotel with a ‘net connection. The connection was one of those with an arbitrary web-based registration that made sure you’d agreed to their ass-covering terms of service. Until you had agreed, the hotel’s proxy would redirect any HTTP connection to the registration page… using the 301 status code.

Within a few seconds of plugging in the ethernet cable, all of Scott’s RSS subscriptions had been silently replaced with the hotel’s registration page URL. All the original feed URLs were lost.

Considering this, Gordon writes:

Lots of aggregator developers have been burned by the hotel proxy problem. The problem is that as a developer who read the spec, you tend to think that other developers did the same. The interesting thing is what to do with the 301. So you ask the user if they want to accept the redirect. Does the user even understand what that means? Let's see, "Some server is saying that the resource at http://example.com/rss.xml has moved to dumbhotelproxy.com. Do you want to change your subscription?" Considering the amount of effort people are putting into making it easy to subscribe to an RSS feed (because the users don't know what to do with XML, or the orange XML button), I have no idea how to pose that question such that the user might actually do the right thing.

I ran across this one myself over 2 years ago with BottomFeeder (thank goodness I back up feeds at startup!). I stay in hotels that have 12 or 24 hour subscriptions often enough that I wanted a permanent solution to this problem, so I came up with one:

1. When I see a redirect, I cache the old address
2. If I see more than a handful (default: 3) of redirects to the same place, I stop the update loop and restore the old urls

Here's the code I use to make that call:

 
 

httpRedirectEvent: anUrl
	"we got a redirect - check to see if we have more than one this
cycle that went the same place.  If so, assume that we have a proxy
of some sort, and revert it all back"

       self redirects add: anUrl.
	(self redirects occurrencesOf: anUrl) > self tooManyRedirects
	       ifTrue: [self resetOriginalsAndStopUpdates: anUrl.
	                       self redirects: OrderedCollection new].

Each redirect generates an event, which ends up in that method. You can see how it works, and it's saved me from this problem more than once. Now, how easy do other frameworks make it for you to do this sort of thing? I have no idea. It was a few minutes work to solve it in Smalltalk though

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, rss, aggregators, development