Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

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

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

We watched the first episode of "Nightmares and Dreamscapes" tonight, and it was a spooky episode. I only have one nit, and it's this: the episode owed very little to Stephen King's imagination, and an awful lot to H.P. Lovecraft's. Watch it, and you'll see what I mean.

Scoble makes a good point about internal mail:

I left more than a gig of email at Microsoft. And that was after deleting all the crud out of it. What knowledge was in there? Tons of stuff about Channel 9 that would have been awesome for someone to use to learn about how things get onto Channel 9 and how it evolved. Gone. Deleted.

When an employee leaves, the silo that was their email is just gone. You'll never be able to capture all of that, but internal blogs and/or wikis could help. There are problems with that approach, of course - not everyone is going to be willing to do their information management that way. I suspect that it's something that ought to be looked at though.

PR Opinions doesn't like this post on Edelman's blog - here's what Edelman had to say:

An account person from GCI (one of Edelman's competitors) has unleashed a gratuitous attack on Jeff Jarvis, the widely-read blogger, in a comment on Jarvis' blog.

To which PR Opinions says:

This post leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

When a respected PR practitioner, who I have acknolwedged has in many respects been leading the way in online communication (as far as the large agency set go in any respect), takes time to write a pontificating post that takes a swipe at a competitor, I think it smells bad.

I have to disagree. It's fair to point out the bad behavior in your community - it's the business equivalent of expressing disapproval over the behavior of someone else's kids.

Technorati Tags: marketing

Yesterday, I took a swipe at Java, saying that the complexity of the language itself leads to enterprisey results. Today, I see that Gordon Weakliem has turned up a hilarious piece of contributing evidence:

Java in a Nutshell: 1264 pages.

I'll quote Matt Croyden, who has this to say about it:

With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, your programming language just might be complicated when you have trouble telling the difference between its Nutshell book and a telephone book.

Technorati Tags: java

I'll give Tom Yager this - when he's wrong, it's not by a little bit. He famously predicted that Apple would not move to the x86 (and then whitewashed the page). Today, Yager is spouting utter nonsense. First, this:

Where do things stand now? Fearless C, C++, and Objective-C developers have tools of their dreams that let them dig deeper than ever before into system, OS, and CPU internals. Optimization, at which .Net and Java can only play, is hot as compilers -- including the free GNU Compiler Collection -- evolve from heuristic to automated empirical optimization. Development tools watch your application run and then retune it based on observed behavior.

Hmm - I guess the HotSpot technology is something he missed. In a fully dynamic system (Smalltalk is where that tech came from), an optimizing JIT can make the code better as it runs, not just once - and retain full portability. Kind of nice when you want to have the same runtime shared between Windows, Mac, and Linux. Next, he just runs right off the rails:

Here’s a native code prediction that’s way under your radar: We’ll see more use of assembly language. When developers dare to handcraft architecture-dependent code, the performance of an application or a tweaked open-source OS can take off. Mac users know how far a simple change can take you; a lot of applications you wouldn’t think of as math-intensive go stratospheric when they’re enhanced for PowerPC’s AltiVec vector math accelerator. Developers coding for new, controlled deployments can afford to set high requirements that include a 64-bit CPU, OS, and drivers. And if you know you’re coding for Opteron and you’re ready to write to that architecture, baby, life is a highway.

Umm yeah Tom - I won't hold my breath waiting for that army of Assembly jockeys. Here's the thing - developer time costs real money, while CPU time is getting increasingly cheaper. Most development (yes, I know there are plenty of exceptions) do not need low level tweaks to be performant; better table design and cleaner SQL is usually a far bigger problem.

I'm not sure which part of the IT industry Yager is watching, but I'd guess that the color of the sky is different there. Here's a link to a post that shows some of Yager's other greatest hits.

Steve Rubel notes that Wikipedia has made page revisions available via RSS. Very cool, if you are tracking changes to a page of interest to you. He gives the feed for the Podcasting page as an example.

I've just ordered a digital voice recorder - my plan is to use it to interview some Smalltalkers at upcoming events (ESUG in particular), and post them as podcasts. I'll experiment on my own before then :)

Technorati Tags: podcast

Dell is starting to understand the new state of communications: they are starting to address some of the widely reported issues, like customer support. Check out this post, which goes into lengthy detail about the problems.

That's what communications is all about

Technorati Tags: marketing, management

Dave Winer:

Well, that's how most feed readers work, and it's just plain wrong. Your software should, instead, find the new stuff since the last time you looked and show you that first.

The first aggregator, the one I wrote in 1999, did. And so did the one that's in Radio UserLand, and so does the NewsRiver aggregator that's built into the OPML Editor. Until yesterday these were the only aggregators that worked this way. (To be fair there are developers who say theirs do, but I've never seen one that actually does.)

Hmm. Every news aggregator I know of does this - the only thing that differs is the mechanism. In BottomFeeder, there's a toolbar button that will show only the new stuff, in either 2 pane or 3 pane mode (I've got users in both camps). There are similar features in every tool I've seen or had described to me. I understand that he likes newspaper mode, but the reality is, people's tastes differ on this.

Technorati Tags: rss

Troy in a tie. Next, someone will show me two Windows boxes with file shares that "just work"...

James Governor goes into more depth on the Gartner Cease and Desist thing. Here's what Gartner's letter says:

Recently, the following blog post from July 4, 2006 came to my attention: http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/index.html. In it, you link directly to the following report: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/sas/vol2/article1/article1.html. This report is a reprint which a vendor has purchased for its own use. Therefore, your link constitutes an unauthorized use, and it must be removed immediately.

I tried the link - it's accessible, not behind a paywall or anything like that. If a vendor purchased that from Gartner, then the vendor ought to ask for their money back - it's publicly available information.

Real Tech News reports on a really stupid idea out of the UK: elimination of standby mode for electronics:

Basically in an effort to save energy, the British government is planning to outlaw the standby mode in most home and office electronics - arguing that they eat up about 8% of all energy costs each year. This means that every TV set, home computer, office printer, and so on will not longer have a standby mode but will only offer on and off.

Hmm. I suspect that standby mode saves power on balance - people forget to turn things off, and their devices sleep, consuming less power. Most people will probably just leave things on so as to not get delayed by lengthy startups (especially computers). I wonder if they included laptops in that - the original story doesn't make it clear.

Gordon Weakliem calls me out on the GUID usage here:

RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, and Atom all provide a way to handle post identity: the <guid> element, the rdf:about attribute, and the <atom:id> elements, respectively. Unfortunately, not everyone provides this metadata, or does it incorrectly: for instance, CNN doesn't give you GUIDs , the Cincom weblogs just use big integers (these look like they might be dates, but I'm not sure), and PHP.NET is re-using the rdf:about attribute on different posts. The problems, from last to first: if you identify posts by GUID, re-using a GUID amounts to modifying a post, though that doesn't seem to be the intent in this case. Using big integers is poor practice, because an integer isn't a GUID. Recall that the GU part stands for globally unique : if you use integers as GUIDs, you're just hoping that there won't be a collision, especially if your protocol is to increment a counter with each new post.

Yeah, I know I should be using the full post link for the ID instead of the number. In my case, the ID is only unique within a given blog, not necessarily across all blogs on the site. The number is a timestamp, so it's a pretty sure bet that it'll be unique within a given blog. If I had it to do over again, I'd do it differently. I just don't know that I want to flash every subscriber with faux new posts. I probably should at some point.

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	485
Mac X	346
Update	216
Linux x86	129
Mac 8/9	112
CE ARM	96
HPUX	28
Solaris	17
AIX	17
Linux Sparc	12
Windows98/ME	11
Sources	7
Linux PPC	3
SGI	2
CE x86	1

Off to the HTML page accesses for the week:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	59.4%
Internet Explorer	27.6%
Planet Smalltalk	4.9%
MSN Bot	2.7%
Opera	2.1%
Other	2.3%
Megite	1%

That's about normal distribution-wise. The good news - overall pageviews are still rising. Finally, the RSS/Atom hits:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
BottomFeeder	17.4%
Mozilla	17.1%
Other	12.8%
BlogLines	9.3%
Net News Wire	8%
Internet Explorer	6.5%
Safari RSS	5.5%
NewsGator	4.5%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.8%
BlogSearch	1.9%
SharpReader	1.7%
Planet Smalltalk	1.7%
RSS Bandit	1.3%
MSN Bot	1.2%
RSS 2 Email	1.2%
JetBrains	1.1%
Liferea	1%
Java	1%
Opera	1%
Feed Reader	1%
Lilina	1%

I'm going to have to go into detail about that "other" category at some point...

With the addition of some internal blogs here at Cincom, there's been a real desire to make posting easier. So I've been delving into TinyMCE some more, and upgrading my usage of it. Here's a screen shot of the online posting form I use:

That's a shrunken picture, but you can see the HTML controls on the text area. The new addition is an image button, which goes along with the file upload servlet. This makes it possible for Silt bloggers to upload files without using a blog posting tool - something I know presents something of a barrier to entry.

Now, it happens to be the case that TinyMCE supports "paste from Word", preserving markup. I'll be looking at adding that too.

Technorati Tags: blog, smalltalk, cincom

Mark Cuban has some thoughts on the future of TV over the internet, and they aren't positive. Here's a line that will throw the net neutrality crowd into a tizzy:

But wait there’s more. You still have to pay for that bandwidth somewhere. Yes peer to peer helps save bandwidth at the originating end. But it doesnt help at the destination end. 100 peers on a network segment will still use the same amount of bandwidth on that segment as 1 destination with no peers. 10gbs of programming still has to find its way to the destination. So clogged pipes in that last mile are going to clog further as more content is delivered is delivered at higher bit rates. Which in turn mean that fewer broadband bits can be delivered at busy times to last mile users. Net Neutrality will pretty much guarantee that this is a problem forever and ever.

Beyond my worries over a net nanny coming along for the ride with network neutrality, there's the problem Cuban gets at above: regulation guaranteeing neutrality will end up freezing current technology in place. Anyone think that what we have no is "good enough"?

Technorati Tags: tv, hdtv, broadband

Scoble talks about speaking engagements, and whether they should be free or not:

Molly Holtzschlag (famous XHTML and Web development expert) writes that she will not speak for food anymore. I’m quickly arriving to the same conclusion. Speaking is fun and all (and good for your career -- one speech I did at a Silicon Valley user group back in the mid 1990s got me a $10,000 raise. So far that one speech has made me about $100,000).

As with most things, there's no hard line here. It all depends on what kind of situation you and your company/product are in. You may well need the exposure more than you need the cash. For some people and firms, that's not the case - and if they don't really need the exposure, then it makes sense to look for their time to be compensated. If you do need the exposure? Then the engagement itself may be pay enough. It boils down to being a management/PR decision.

Technorati Tags: management, marketing, speaking