Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

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

I usually like the History Channel, but this evening we stumbled across something really odd. Here, a screen capture will explain the problem:

For those of you who aren't movie buffs, that's "The Road Warrior". I visited Australia a few years back, and I can state for the record that I was never chased by a wild gang of gasoline craving whack jobs. Did I miss something?

Technorati Tags: stupidity

In a world on the brink of who knows what, at least I can look to baseball for some solace - the Yankees are winning again:

It might be a coincidence, but since Torre gathered his players in the visiting clubhouse at Jacobs Field on July 5, the Yankees have won six of seven and averaged seven runs a game.

They are steadily gaining ground in the race for a playoff spot, and yesterday they thumped the Chicago White Sox, 14-3, at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees trailed Boston by a game and a half in the American League East after the Red Sox beat Oakland last night.

The three runs scored against them is more relevant than the 14 for; it means that there's some actual pitching going on. If that holds up, they might just well end up on top of the eastern division at the end of the season.

In another useful escape from reality, I'm off to see "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest". Don't blow any holes in reality while I'm gone :)

I've seen other people comment on this, but I'm wondering too: how is YouTube staying afloat? Yes, I know that NBC is running video there, and paying for it. I also know that Disney bought time on it a few days ago for the launch of "Pirates of the Caribbean". However, they face some real problems:

• The constant threat of litigation from copyright infringement
• The bandwidth costs for pushing all that content

Are they doing something to bring in revenue that I'm missing?

Now here's a good day in baseball:

Mariano Rivera earned his 400th career save in a win that put the Yankees a half-game behind the first-place Boston Red Sox in the American League East.

The A’s took the series from Boston and left the Red Sox with a half-game lead over the Yankees in the American League East.

It's all tied up in the loss column, and the White Sox look vulnerable on the wild card. Things are looking up!

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

Scoble points out that there's a huge measurement problem for podcasting:

Speaking of which, I wish I had better metrics at PodTech.net. I wish I knew how many listeners we REALLY have. Or, whether the people who download a file actually listen to it. Or, whether they listen to the whole file, or just part of it.

Podcasting and video podcasting won’t be taken seriously as businesses until we figure this stuff out. Advertisers want proof that their money is spent well.

I'd say that it's a general web problem - heck, I'd say that it's been a general TV and radio issue for awhile too. Advertisers trust the Nielson ratings, but how good are they, really? I have no idea, and I doubt that you do, either. "Everyone" decided to trust them, and that was that.

The web makes that kind of rating system difficult - heck, the proliferation of cables services made that difficult for TV. The theory is, you can find a (relatively small) segment of representative viewers, and translate their habits to the entire market. That's very different than measuring sales - at the end of the month, Frito-Lay (to take an example) knows exactly how many bags of what they've sold (and where). We have nothing like that. I listen to podcasts while jogging now, and I have a pretty low "bored now" threshold. I've bailed on more than one podcast, and I'm sure others have as well.

It's worse than that though. In the old days, there were a handful of TV choices - so if you polled a decent sample as to what they watched, it translated up pretty well. TV has gone narrowcast now - I have over 500 channels now, and what we watch is all over the map (the DVRs only make it more fragmentary). The web started out as a narrowcast service, and it's getting more and more that way all the time. I don't even know that we can get reliable numbers that mean much.

Technorati Tags: marketing, advertising

We've reached that glorious time of year in Maryland where the great outdoors is a steamer:

Yeah, that looks like fun to go out in :)

Our partner Georg Heeg has put together an interesting little package in the public store repository - you can show existing smalltalk code in a pseudo-C syntax. It's read-only (i.e., you can't write code in it) - but possibly interesting for newbies. Load it in, and have a look at the new tab that appears in the browser when you select a method. Here's an example - first, Smalltalk code:

cstDelete
	"delete Item on server"
 
	| destination |
	destination := self getDeleteURL.
	self validatePost
		ifFalse: [^self message: (UserMessage defaultString: 'You did not enter a username and/or password' key: #postingToolUserValidationMessage2) asString].
	^self postDeleteTo: destination

And the matching C-like stuff:

ANY cstDelete (void)
	/*delete Item on server*/
 {
	ANY destination;
	destination = self -> getDeleteURL();
	self -> validatePost() -> ifFalse:(((void) {
			return self -> message:(UserMessage -> defaultString:key:("You did not enter a username and/or password", S"postingToolUserValidationMessage2") -> asString())});
	return self -> postDeleteTo:(destination)}

We saw "Pirates of the Caribbean" yesterday afternoon, and it was a classic summer "popcorn" movie - entertaining, fun, and worth seeing. The only downside is that it's an obvious bridge movie - but we knew that already. Just watching Depp play Jack Sparrow is worth the price of admission.

Well, it makes sense for there to be a power overload on a day like this, but that doesn't make it any more pleasant. I'm doing this via the joys of dialup:

I didn't want to work today anyway :)

Does Nick Carr purposely misread things, or does he really miss the obvious? He calls Jeff Jarvis on the carpet for this post, which is a response to the equally clueless Amanda Chapel. Here's what Jeff wrote:

Chapel is disgusted by the whole Dell Hell affair and because of it she calls what I write the Communist Blogifesto and calls me “some malignant corporate subversive” (which, I suppose, beats “worm“).

Which is a response to this:

Jeff, you’ve crossed a line. You’re no longer a Newmark-like dis-intermediary hero set out to circumvent your former media bosses and radically improve a business. You are now sounding like some malignant corporate subversive. Listen to yourself: “behind me a mob with pitch forks and torches storming castle Dell;” “we are the bosses now;” “companies have the opportunity to hand over control to customers.” That’s not inspiring a "conversation" comrade; you’re yelling “fire” in a crowded peasant theatre.

Oh please. It's nothing like that at all. What Amanda seems to be upset about is simple: us "little people" don't have to take a complete lack of customer service lying down anymore. There's at least a possibility that we'll be heard now - and in the case of Dell, Jarvis was hardly the only one receiving sub-standard service (something Dell finally figured out).

Hey Amanda: Here's a clue (you certainly need one) - it's no longer safe to provide crappy service. A decade ago, you could get away with it. Now you can't. It's that simple. If you don't like that, then I'd guess that you don't much like this thing called "work". The proof that she doesn't get it - this:

As it relates to Dell, you think Michael Dell gives a shit about you. He doesn’t. He reports to the bank. He cares about Wall Street. I, the stockholder, am his main concern.

Well - here's the thing: when the management chain stops caring about the customer, then eventually, the shareholders feel the pinch in lower share value. Lower sales tend to lead to that. Amanda seems to think that there's no connection between the shareholders and the customers. What Jarvis is doing is pointing out that in fact - there is. To this, Amanda sticks her fingers in her ears and chants "la la la".

Meanwhile, Nick Carr, ever ready to get the simple stuff deeply wrong, praises the prancing idiot and shouts at the person making a reasonable point.

Technorati Tags: PR, management

I find this highly amusing. Go read this comment Amanda Chapel left (did I hit a nerve, or what?). Then, head over to her bio:

I have 15 plus years experience in marketing communications. I am a former vice president in the Consumer Marketing Group at Weber Shandwick, one of the world’s largest PR firms. Prior to Shandwick, I spent about 10 years bouncing around various top agencies. This includes senior posts at Cone Communications in Boston and Porter Novelli in Chicago. I cut my teeth at Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising in London.

With that "screw the customers" mindset, I'm sure she must be heck on wheels with PR events. Not necessarily the sort you want, mind you...

Technorati Tags: marketing, management, advertising

Scoble is showing off better journalistic ethics than most journalists - he's demonstrating that it's all about transparency.

Technorati Tags: marketing

Looks like my post on YouTube was timely - they've been sued for copyright infringement.

I'm hardly an expert, but I'm teaching my daughter to play golf. We are hitting an "Executive" (i.e., all par 3 and par 4 holes) course tomorrow morning (early - it's going to be hot again). She's just getting started; I bought her a set of clubs last month. I'm playing Best Ball with her - it keeps the frustration level down, and it also has some of her shots counting (I throw plenty into the woods :) ).

Scoble is having trouble with GMail and Pop access:

Our corporate Gmail is supposed to work with Outlook but there’s a problem and I haven’t figured it out yet. So I’m stuck on the Web page until I figure out why the POP system isn’t working with Outlook 2003.

Hmm. I use gmail, and I have it all coming into Eudora via Pop - so I know it works. I wonder if this is a configuration issue that Robert hasn't figured out yet, or one of those all too common "embrace and extend" things that Microsoft is so well known for?

Technorati Tags: microsoft

In this case, the stupid user is me, so I'm not trying to frag anyone :)

Yesterday, we lost power for about an hour. When I brought the old Linux box back up, I couldn't start KDE, and GNOME was acting oddly. My first thought: Oh gosh, the HD finally went (this is an old box, a PII 400 with only 20 GB of disk - running Redhat 7).

It took me until this morning to do what should have been obvious: look at disk space usage. Whoops, 100% of the space in the home directory gone. That's a small problem. Fixed that, and the whole problem went away.

This is encouraging: Matsui is making good progress:

Matsui also has been playing catch in the outfield during batting practice, though he can only catch balls that are lobbed to him; he isn't allowed to shag fly balls yet. Matsui is targeting an August return, which would be ahead of the September prognosis he received right after his injury. "If it turns out to be that, that's fine," Joe Torre said. "We certainly hope it is."

The same article mentions that Sheffield should be back before September as well. Just in time, it seems.

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

Ed Foster does great work in illuminating poor customer service problems - this week's target happens to be Toshiba. These are the stories that stayed buried pre-internet; there are those who would prefer it if they were still buried, so that the *cough* professional *cough* PR flacks could still market to the *cough* professional *cough* writer class.

What I wonder is, what makes anyone think that they can promise tier one service, deliver tier Z service, and have it remain a secret?

Technorati Tags: PR, marketing, management

Looks like the recent bombings in Bombay have generated a side effect: a bunch of free blog sites are being blocked in India. The ironic thing is, the site I found this information on lists work arounds for the problem. Which means that this is a huge inconvenience for the non-technically oriented, and no problem at all for the people it's aimed at.

Sounds a lot like some corporate IT groups I hear about.

It's not always the case that the Enterprisey, Web 2.0 ish solution is the best solution. Especially when you've outsourced to Elbonia :)

One company still committed to the itanium, that is. SGI was using it, but their many problems have driven them to chapter 11:

Remember Data General (DG), the server and storage vendor that, despite some great technology, ultimately failed to capitalize on it and was sold off to EMC back in 1999*? Well SGI's new CEO Dennis McKenna was adamant in an interview with me that, despite the company recently filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US, his company is not now simply looking for an exit strategy as DG once did.

Regardless, if they do come back, I very much doubt that the iTanic will come with them. So when will HP wise up and notice that the canoe is empty?

Now here's an interesting development. Jason Calacanis wants to get some positive PR for the new Netscape site, and also wants to steal some thunder from Digg. He's looking to pay the top users of Digg to switch:

We will pay you $1,000 a month for your "social bookmarking" rights. Put in at least 150 stories a month and we'll give you $12,000 a year. (note: most of these folks put in 250-400 stories a month, so that 150 baseline is just that--a baseline).

You might wonder how successful that will be - but then again, $12k isn't exactly peanuts either. According to Richard McManus, there's a fairly small number of Digg users who are responsible for a disproportionate number of stories:

A page on digg.com called Top Diggers shows that a select group of digg users are highly influential. These top diggers have a higher chance of getting a story digged to the homepage than other users. Unsurprisingly Kevin Rose is right at the top, with a whopping 119 of his 120 submitted stories making it to the homepage (he has a 99% "Popular Ratio")! What was the single story that *didn't* make it, I wonder?

That small number is no surprise. Go to any USENET newsgroup, and pick any interval of time you care to select - you'll find that a ton of posts are from the same small group of people. At one point in the late 90's, I was posting pretty heavily to comp.lang.smalltalk, for instance. I've since channeled all of that interest here, to my blog. Any social networking site is going to show the same kind of thing - people are people, and the dynamics of this kind of thing don't change that much, even if the destination does.

The question is: can Calacanis pull it off? It's not a lot of money if he limits the buy (and his post explicitly says that he will). It's enough money to raise eyebrows on an individual level - this should be fun to watch.

Update: Mike Arrington thinks that this is evidence of a failure at Netscape, which is now desperately looking for users of their new portal.

Technorati Tags: web, tagging, digg, netscape, PR

It would be a good thing if the kind of IT thinking exemplified by Roger Grimes just went away. It's perfectly sensible to demand a secure compute environment, but that shouldn't come at the cost of preventing actual bill paying work. Here's Grimes:

As expected, I caught a lot of flak for last week’s column suggesting that one of the better, real security solutions an administrator could implement is to prevent unauthorized programs from executing on business-owned computers.

You think? The problem with this theory is that there are new classes of applications all the time. Take news aggregators, for instance. The marketing and product management types need to keep their fingers on the pulse of customer commentary. Sure, there are online apps they can use, but some will prefer desktop applications. Grimes' policy would just ban them outright. What about IM? Sure, there are corporate solutions, but those cost money. Is it a better use of IT's time to ban IM clients and spend real money on an "enterprise" solution?

Those are just a couple of examples. This kind of thinking tends to lead to truly anal, productivity killing IT behavior - like mandating a specific email client as the only one allowed. When your security policies mostly prevent value, you've gone too far. Grimes is a prime example of this:

IM is a good example of an app that users love but isn’t necessarily good for business. About a decade ago, IM began to appear in corporate environments, installed and used by end-users without IT or administration approving it. Heck, IM vendors went so far as to create firewall-evading install routines to ensure their IM products would intentionally circumvent IT-initiated firewall policies. IM has even been incorporated into a few corporate communication products.

But for the most part, it’s a complete waste of time for most businesses. Employees aren’t sending IMs to other employees and partners about business issues. It’s mostly a way for employees to conduct more private personal chats on company time without being seen connected to a telephone all the time.

Hey Roger - you're full of it. I use IM for business every day. It's how I stay in touch with the geographically distributed team I work with. Heck, I use IM for personal stuff once a week, at most. I use IRC for the same thing. The "non-work" stuff that happens on IM and IRC is equivalent to office chatter at the coffee machine. The paragraph above makes me wonder just how in touch with the real world of work Grimes is these days.

Nick Carr manages to miss the point again, pointing to this post - which is accurate, but not relevant to the discussion:

Most people, maybe even nearly all people, do not want to enter into a relationship with the businesses who sell them things. They want the comfort of a nearly anonymous transaction, sometimes even without capable assistance. Relationships of all types that last longer than 30 minutes are hard, difficult work. Why would anyone want to engage in this everytime he buys a DVD player? Don't we all hate the fact that the cell phone companies force a 1-year relationship on us?

True enough. The problem doesn't exist when things go right; what Jeff Jarvis (and others) have been going on about is what happens when things go wrong:

• You buy a product
• The warranty says you get some kind of service when things go wrong
• You call the vendor, asking for warranty fulfillment
• The vendor, all too often, tries really hard to wiggle out of the warranty

Ed Foster has made a career out of documenting these kinds of things. It's not that we want an intimate, ongoing relationship with the people we buy from; it's that we don't want to be lied to when things go wrong. Carr seems to be ok with that - I interpret the vast majority of his posts as a tossing of his hands in the air, followed by a breathless "well, what did you expect?"

I'll tell you what I expect - I expect the terms of service to actually mean something. If you intend to never fulfill them then heck - fire customer support, drop the price commensurately, and slap a sticker on the product that reads "Sold as is". That would at least be honest.

Technorati Tags: PR, management

Dare Obasanjo examines the "why don't you support X" problem:

Microsoft is the only company I've worked for us a full time employee which means that sometimes I wonder how different my perspective of inter-office interaction is from that of the average software developer with a wider range of experiences. For example, one thing I've noticed about internal mailing lists is that there are always people who seem to assume that they are smarter and more knowledgeable about a product or technology than the people who actually work on the product. You can tell these people by the way they point out obvious features that are missing in the product and berate the team for not having them

It's no different here, and I doubt it's much different anywhere else. From the outside, any given feature always looks "simple". For instance: I get asked about VisualWorks fonts all the time. Believe me, if it was something simple, we would have done it already. We have a cross platform product, and many of the frameworks date back to a time that predates Windows, Mac, and X11. Which means that making those frameworks work and play well with what's gone on in the wide world isn't always simple.

Even without that particular issue, any vendor trying to solve a problem always has the following problems:

• The tyranny of the existing codebase
• The need to maintain some level of backwards compatibility

Customers always want improvements, but - at the same time - they want all their old stuff to keep working. There's an obvious tension between those poles, and product management (in this case, me), is always trying to navigate that tension as best as it can.

Follow the comment thread on this post, and watch while Carl Gundel tries to explain that Ajaxy applications not only could be written in Smalltalk, but already have been. Heck, even this blog server does some of that; the comment and posting pages all use an in-browser WYSIWYG HTML editor written in Javascript. The back end Smalltalk server neither knows nor cares how the content it gets was produced.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Apparently, email is now snail mail 2.0:

Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder - a parent, teacher or a boss - or to receive an attached file.

But increasingly, the former darling of high-tech communication is losing favour to instant and text messaging, and to the chatter generated on blogs and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

Please, someone explain this trend to my inbox :/

Technorati Tags: communication