Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

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

Troy noted that a Cincom blog that's hosted on Typepad got heavily spammed the other day - he also noted that we don't seem to have the same level of problem on this server, which is running on Silt. There are a few simple, but seemingly effective things I've done:

• After a post expires off the main page, comments are disabled. I can turn them back on, and that creates a post level feed.
• There's a simple "too many hrefs for a valid comment" test. More than N hrefs, and you hit the bozo bin
• There's an IP based timing throttle
• Finally, there's a blacklist for text that - if matched - tosses a comment

Over the time, the first two have killed most of the spam attempts. I also turned trackbacks off when that became nothing but a spam system.

I've seen occasional complaints about comments going off too fast, but that's kind of the price of spam fighting. I'd really rather not have to monitor (via per-post feeds, an enormous comment feed, or email) old posts for attacks.

This news about the number of active particpants on a social website were no surprise to me:

It's an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

I've been involved with Wikis for years now, and that's how they operate as well. Out of your entire community of users, only a handful will add new content, or prune the old stuff. It's not surprising then that most YouTube uploads come from a small cadre, or that Digg is powered by a relatively small number of linkers.

Heck, think about any community, online or offline. How many people in the community actually do the work?

Update: Looks like 56 percent of Digg's stories come from a very small group of people.

Engadget has a short story on the "flaming laptop batteries" problem - I heard about this on the Buzz Out LLoud podcast Monday. Seems that cracked Lithium Ion battery cases admit oxygen, which can cause a nasty reaction with the Lithium. Here's the part that could give notebook users heartburn:

While the NTSB investigation hasn't pinned the blame on the batteries just yet, the FAA's has Harry Webster has testified that lithium-ion batteries can vent flammable liquid and "pose a risk to the cargo compartment." We've already seen warnings not to use your laptop on your lap -- think warnings not to travel with them are far behind?

Having said that, I'll note that these batteries have been in use for a long time now - so I'd be kind of surprised by any harsh action. Worth paying attention to though.

Technorati Tags: batteries, "Lithium Ion"

What stands between Barry Bonds and the all time homerun record? Nothing in baseball, it sounds like. A potential indictment though?

Barry Bonds will not be indicted immediately, but the ongoing federal investigation of steroids and possible perjury and tax-evasion charges against the San Francisco Giants star will continue, prosecutors said Thursday.

No matter how this turns out, the records set and approached by Bonds, Sosa, and McGwire will all end up with asterisks next to them. Maybe not printed ones, but asterisks nevertheless. Hank Aaron, Roger Maris, and Babe Ruth - they all did it the old fashioned way.

Technorati Tags: baseball

Boris Popov has added to the VW port of Seaside:

I have just published updated versions of Seaside, SeasideAsync and SeasideScriptaculous to the Cincom Public Repository. Since this is my first stab at the port (many thanks to Michel Bany for providing enough instructions) please let me know if you find any problems, I’ve given it a bit of stress-testing with our application and things seem to be looking up nicely.

I really need to look at Seaside seriously at some point.

Technorati Tags: ajax, continuations

Looks like Ted Stevens had a point - Flickr's tubes are filled:

We've had a temporary storage failure affecting a sizable chunk of old Flickr photos and are moving about 20 terabytes of photos across a few thousand miles (between two of our data centers) to ensure consistency and smoothness. ALL PHOTOS AND DATA ARE SAFE AND NOTHING HAS BEEN LOST. The site will come back up as soon as possible.

This is great news - the guy behind MST3K is back with Rifftrax:

Do you feel that some of the movies coming out of Hollywood are just, well, missing something? At RiffTrax, you can download Mike's running commentaries and listen to them along with your favorite, and not so favorite DVDs. It's like watching a movie with your funniest friend.

He's done "Roadshow", and has a poll up for what he'll take on next. Looks like great stuff

Patrick Logan reports that Portland, Oregon has a new Smalltalk mailing list.

Charlie Savage questions the conventional wisdom:

My take is that contrary to popular wisdom, a good language gets out of your way and lets you do what you need to. This is quite counterintuitive. Computer programs are pinnacles of brittle complexity - one tiny mistake in millions of lines of code brings the whole edifice crashing down. The natural inclination is to make the walls of that edifice as thick and strong as possible. Java is a great example of this line of thought

Later on, he says something I've said many, many times:

In more concrete terms, if code is buggy then you want to be able to write up a patch, throw it in a directory somewhere, and have the application load it automatically replacing the invalid code. Or closely related, you want to provide a simple mechanism to add in new functionality, just like Selenium does via its user user-extensions.js file.

That's what I do with BottomFeeder and this server - I patch in place, at runtime. Some people find that scary, but it works.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I thought about the fact that Digg has a small cadre of people pushing most of the content, and something kept nagging at my memory. This morning I saw Scoble post on it, and - while he didn't mention what I'd been thinking of - it came to me anyway.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book about this awhile back: "The Tipping Point". In that book, he pointed out the existence of influencers, who have a disproportionate number of connections to other people - and who can thus spread new memes (in news, in software, in fashion - any community) very quickly.

What we see with Digg is just another example of that.

Technorati Tags: community, influencers

Scoble posted on IT behavior this morning, and it's something that Roger Grimes should read - probablyu over and over again, until it sinks in:

A Scoble Moment at SAP. He talks about Jeff Nolan complaining about the IT department at SAP who blocked his IM. Oh, I never complained about IT at Microsoft. I didn’t complain when Microsoft blocked Skype. Nope, what did I do? I got EVDO and expensed it. Heheh! If IT turns into idiots, route around them!

That's what actually happens. IT thinks that they are "securing" things, everyone else knows that they are busy preventing the creation of value. Far too many IT departments over-estimate their value to the company, and the plethora of IT directed trade journals help them maintain that thinking.

Here's the thing: IT is a lot like what Ted Stevens thinks the internet is. They maintain the "pipes". If they do a good job, they can help the business create value. If - like too many IT departments - they get bogged down in meaningless standards, and start getting excited about monitoring the activity at every PC - then they are getting in the way, and reducing the amount of value that gets created by the people who actually pay the bills.

For most IT departments, the big thing they should keep in mind is that they are important only insofar as they allow other people to get work done. If their fellow employees think of them as a problem to route around, then they are a problem.

Technorati Tags: IT

Jason Calacanis addressed the uproar over his proposal to pay the top users of Digg to switch to Netscape's portal today. The funny thing is, this is nothing more than outsourcing:

The media elite are *very* threatened by this idea--just as they were threatened by the concept of paid bloggers. Why, because by making a wider talent pool drops the pay rates they're accustom to getting. There are thousands of great writers who got their start by free blogging who are now getting paid. Those new folks have lower pay expectations and the $1-a -word crowd was really pissed off about it. I remember someone in the stock photography business who got upset by me offering my pictures for free for commercial use. His problem was that my photos were as good as stock in many cases, and I was gonna take money away from the stock business. You know what, I don't care! It's *my* work and I can do what *I* want with it. This is the new world we've built here, and talent rises, wins, and gets to decide for THEMSELVES if they want to get paid or not. It's not Mike Arrington's choice, it's the content creators choice. For photos and blogging I choose to not get paid--for some of my others skills I want to get paid.

A couple of months ago, I spoke to a photographer about the stock photo problem - she came with us on a girl scout trip to talk to the girls about photography. Sure enough, the prices you can get for a portfolio of stock photos has cratered - it's really the same thing that's happening with online music. You hear a lot about music, because the RIAA is fighting tooth and nail to maintain their old business model. You don't hear as much about photography, because the people being impacted don't have an association that makes noise.

What Calacanis is doing is more of the same. Until very recently, being an editor was an elite job, open to a relatively small number of people. Sites like Digg and Netscape (and Flickr, del.icio.us) make it possible for anyone to be an editor. Are most people cut out for that work? No, not really. However, in a population base as large as the English speaking West, there are plenty of people with good instincts who are willing and able to do that work. As with photography, it's not necessarily their full time job, so they're happy to get paid pennies compared to what an editor at a large newspaper makes.

That last bit - being willing to take smaller compensation - is what drives the current editor class nuts. There's nothing they can do about it though - just like music and stock photography, prices are going to be driven down.

Technorati Tags: management

Borland announced that they have a buyer for their IDE tools, and that the deal should close imminently:

Borland Software has found a buyer for its development tools business, although the company will not - as was expected - take a stake in the new firm.

I'll be very interested in seeing who bought this - and even more interested in seeing what they do with pricing an licensing.

Technorati Tags: IDE, development

I've been saying that Java (as a language) has been getting more baroque and complex all the time; J2EE has been even worse. It's now to the point where even the J2EE community is starting to notice the stench:

Without getting back into the core of the debate -- others are more qualified than I am for that -- I must agree with Richard’s main point that J2EE as a platform has reached a level of complexity that makes it virtually unusable for even the most sophisticated Java developers. And for the rest of us, VB guys, PHP folks, or HTML crafters, J2EE is so arcane that we only wish we will never have to deal with.

When your initial language design places shackles on developers, it follows that the frameworks growing up inside that language will be complicated. Things that can be done quickly in Smalltalk, Ruby, or Python just take longer in a shackled language (final, anyone?).

Technorati Tags: development, j2ee

I managed to buy a new 19 inch LCD monitor, car stereo, and battery backup this afternoon with money I didn't know I had. It was my daughter's idea, to be fair.

We were at the bank, depositing an expense check. We noticed that they have a free coin sorter (free if you are a credit union member). She dug out more than $17 from her purse (I swear, women's purses are like bags of holding). Anyway, her idea involved the huge pile of coins that we had lying around the house, in bags and in an old packing box. That actually came to enough for all that stuff above, which was a pleasant surprise. So my office got a nice little upgrade with the found money :)

Looks like the rumor mongering over Microsoft's Zune project have some truth to them. Here's Engadget:

"Today we confirmed a new music and entertainment project called Zune. Under the Zune brand, we will deliver a family of hardware and software products, the first of which will be available this year. We see a great opportunity to bring together technology and community to allow consumers to explore and discover music together."

Sounds to me like they are going to expand out from the Media Center PC and the XBox into portable games and mp3 players. The interesting bit: apparently, the introductory device will be WiFi enabled - which sounds like you could download straight to it, without regard to your location. Now that would be nice - if I travel, I can't really put new stuff on my iPod - it's locked to my Mac Mini as its source. Having a free-standing device that could download anywhere there's WiFi - that would be a very cool feature. Also one that Apple will have to respond to.

Which leads to another question: Apple been pretty quick on the draw lately. Will they get a WiFi enabled iPod out before MS can launch?

Technorati Tags: gadgets, mp3, zune

It's time for the weekly look at the logs - downloads for BottomFeeder were up to an average of 262 per day, which is pretty respectable. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	873
Update	240
Mac X	176
Linux x86	135
CE ARM	86
Mac 8/9	82
Sources	53
HPUX	42
Solaris	40
Windows98/ME	23
Linux Sparc	21
AIX	21
SGI	18
Linux PPC	15
ADUX	10

A decent sized Windows jump, and an inexplicable Alpha jump (that version hasn't been updated in well over a year). On to the HTML accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	52.6%
Internet Explorer	30.6%
MSN Bot	4.8%
Planet Smalltalk	4.7%
Other	3.8%
Opera	2.3%
Megite	1.2%

Interestingly enough, the overall traffic on our blogs continues to rise slightly, week by week. I wonder what I wrote last week that attracted some extra Windows (IE) readers; that percentage is up a bit. On to the RSS tools:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
BottomFeeder	19.3%
Mozilla	16.7%
Other	13.6%
BlogLines	9.6%
Net News Wire	8%
Internet Explorer	5.2%
NewsGator	4.4%
Google Feed Fetcher	4.3%
Safari RSS	3.6%
SharpReader	2.1%
BlogSearch	2%
RSS Bandit	1.4%
MSN Bot	1.3%
Planet Smalltalk	1.3%
RSS 2 Email	1.2%
Liferea	1%
Java	1%
JetBrains	1%
Jakarta	1%
Opera	1%
Feed Reader	1%

That listing looks about like normal for the site. On to a new week!

Here's what my collection of coins bought:

Now there's a cool use of spare change :)

Peter Fisk is creating a new Smalltalk implementation native to Vista:

Vista Smalltalk is a very simple Smalltalk interpreter designed for the WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) environment.

This will be interesting to watch; follow the link for more information

Technorati Tags: windows, .net

Nick Carr writes about Dell's recent troubles, but avoids discussion about the long tail effect - perhaps because he's come out so strongly against it in the past. The basic problem:

I think that that's exactly what's been happening in the PC world. As PC prices have plummeted, thanks to cheaper components and ever more automated manufacturing, support costs have not fallen in tandem. Yes, you can get economies of scale in support and you can automate certain tasks, but in the end there's a heavy labor component to support that sets a floor for costs: customers need to be able to talk to a human being when they have questions or problems. Dell tested that floor recently, and it got burned by customer-support problems, so now it's having to reinvest on the support side of its business even as it continues to slash prices to hold onto market share. (In its last quarterly financial statement, Dell noted, "We have increased our headcount not only to accommodate our global growth but to also improve our customer experience ." [italics added]) That's a painful position to be in - and I think we can see that pain in Dell's recent financial announcements.

And how do you suppose that the word of mouth on the bad customer support problem spread, hmm? Perhaps it was Jeff Jarvis and the angry people behind him? You know, the ones Nick thinks should sit down and shut up? I think Carr needs to remove his blinkers and start paying closer attention to the Long Tail...

Update: Scoble relates the different experience with Apple:

This week Patrick’s power supply broke for his Apple iBook. So, I dropped him off this afternoon at the Apple store in Bellevue, Washington.

He promptly walked out with a new powersupply. I didn’t have to even be involved. He just got a reservation at the Genius Bar and took care of the problem himself. I wasn’t even in the store.

Dell can’t match that customer support. If he had a product from Dell he’d need to wait until Tuesday to receive his new power supply.

That's positive PR for Apple right there - and it came from their support department. A lesson for Dell, and the industry people who still don't get it.

Technorati Tags: marketing , manufacturing , PR

If you live in Queens, NY, it's a lot worse:

Tempers erupted across large swaths of Queens yesterday where 100,000 disgusted residents - 10 times more than previously revealed - remained without power for a fifth straight day as Con Ed fumbled toward a fix.

The utility giant still had no idea what was causing the crippling blackout during the hottest week of the year.

It's never a good sign when the power company has no idea what the problem is...

We are just starting to set up interviews for the open slots (here, here, and here) I mentioned here a few weeks ago - it's summertime, so getting everyone (internally and externally) together is taking a little longer than usual. The good news about that: if you wanted to apply, but thought it was too late - it's not. Make sure to send your resume (with the job number you're interested in) to employme@cincom.com.

Thanks!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom, cst

Writing about the developers of some new tools for Ruby, Joseph Moore says:

Ah, there it is --- These are Old Dudes! I love Old Dudes! And I really love Old Dudes Who Know Smalltalk! I was nurtured, sculpted, and brainwashed by Old Dudes Who Know Smalltalk from my very first day as a professional programmer, and they universally "get it". Young whipper-snappers out there, take note: if you ever here some Old Dude say the words "in Smalltalk you could blah blah blah" or "In VisualWorks you could yada yada", spend as much time with this person as possible. You will learn more from them about software development than the Young Dude who only wears black and thinks that the bash shell is "too bloated".

Why wait? You can grab VisualWorks and ObjectStudio now, and get the real deal :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I know some people consider them "old school", but I really like the virtual desktop idea - I've used them on Unix/Linux machines for years. I just found one for the Mac that looks promising - Desktop Manager. On Windows, I guess I've gotten used to the tray - I've never found a Windows virtual desktop app that I liked.

Technorati Tags: productivity

Bruce Boyer recently posted some thoughts about the state of our documentation (he's our lead documentation guy) on the vw-dev mailing list. This prompted the idea of posting a brief survey, which is now up. Let us know what you think!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom

Weather is such a funny thing. A few days ago, it was the all too typical Maryland July - hot, sticky, miserable - thank goodness I don't drive to work, since my car's AC doesn't work. Today, the weather was great after a huge round of storms overnight. We hit the golf course this afternoon, and it was just a great day -

The high today was around 80 - perfect golf weather. Yes, I know the rest of the US is apparently baking :)

Every so often people look at the old car I drive (a 1989 Mitsubishi Mirage), and ask me why I haven't bought a new one. It only happened more when I had a new engine dropped in last year (I figured it was about 3 car payments, so it's now worth it, to my mind). Well, today's post by David Weinberger only convinced me more. He's complaining about his new Yaris only getting 24 mpg in "in town" driving.

Hmm. My Mirage gets 32-35 in town. I've no idea what it would get highway; I hardly ever drive it that way. As well, the Mirage is hardly roomy, but look at this shot of the Yaris' interior at Toyota's site:

That's a sedan in name only; if you want to use your knees later, you'll sit in the front :) Heck, the Ford Windstar (Minivan) my wife drives gets 24-25 mpg. I think I'll drive my Mirage until it crumbles on me :)

Mark Cuban asks how to get people to go to the movies:

Only HDNet takes more time out my day than trying to solve this problem. Its the holy grail of the movie business. How do you get people out of the house to see your movie without spending a fortune. How can you convince 5 million people to give up their weekend and go to a theater to see a specific movie without spending 60mm dollars.

It's the wrong question, so most of the answers he gets are going to be wrong. The golden age of movies has passed. That doesn't mean that theaters are dead, anymore than TV meant that radio was dead. However, it does mean that the business is going to change.

The time between a theatrical release and the DVD release has been shrinking for awhile now. Why not eliminate it altogether? Sell DVDs at the theater, and make them available for retail buy the day after release? Large TVs and good home sound systems are here to stay, and you can pause the movie when the phone rings. Additionally, you don't need to worry about the ill mannered people 4 rows back who won't shut up.

The right answer is to accept reality - you aren't going to get crowds to the movies in the same kinds of large numbers as you have been able to. Not in a world filled with game consoles, home theaters, and DVRs. The real winner is going to be the company that sets up a commercial Bittorrent (or bittorrent like) system to stream movies to customers. Make it simple, and make it inexpensive. Skip the DRM, because the pirates will break it in minutes, and all you'll really do is irritate the paying customers. Offer one-off buys, but also go straight after NetFlix with a decent subscription model. Trying to get people to the theater is fighting yesterday's war. I'd suggest trying to fight elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: marketing, entertainment

In the survey I just posted, it seems that people really like the old (printed) cookbook. Apparently, the fact that most of that cookbook exists in the loadable help system is a very well kept secret :) Try loading the help today, and take a walk through it - while we don't have as much there as we would like, it's good stuff. Explore it and send me comments.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom, visualworks

Scoble on selling his house:

Other houses in our neighborhood have not sold as fast. The market is switching from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market but some markets remain hot. If you have a great house that the market wants it’ll pay the price. Stan knew that because he knew our market. If I tried to sell myself I probably would have just asked for Zillow’s price, which would have been a mistake. One thing I learned in the camera store I used to work at: it’s very easy to lower your price, it’s nearly impossible to raise it.

Well, let's see. He sold the house for $440k, and the cost was 6% (3% each way to agents). That comes to $26,400. Meaning, the actual clearing price to Scoble was less than $414,000. Had he sold it himself, and gotten the $414,000, he would have done marginally better. Would it have been worth his time? That I doubt, given his need to relocate.

My point? People assume that realtors are worth the money, because they assume that they get better sale value. There's actual research on this one (check out the chapter in Freakonomics), and that presumption doesn't hold up. For a realtor, selling for an extra $20k means very little, because their end of it is 3% ($600). That extra $20k would mean a lot to the seller, but it means next to nothing to the realtor.

The realtor wants to get something close to market value quickly. The actual seller might well be willing to wait for top value. Those two things don't necessarily line up. Does that mean you shouldn't use a realtor? It depends. I've always used one, simply because it was easier. Just don't assume that using a realtor means more money to you, because it probably doesn't.

It's sometimes interesting to read DDJ in order to get the fossil view of software development. For instance:

As time passed we kept sacrificing software performance in favor of developer productivity gains first by adopting object-oriented languages and more recently settling with garbage-collected memory, runtime interpreted languages and 'managed' execution. It is these "developer productivity" gains that kept the pressure on hardware developers to come up with faster and faster performing processors. So one may say that part of the reason why we ended up with gigahertz-fast CPUs was "dumb" (lazy, uneducated, expensive -- pick your favorite epithet) developers.

Yes, life was so much better back when everyone wrote in C, C++, or Assembly - we only had wild pointer problems every half hour or so. You know, I don't care how much more memory my system needs now, because a laptop with 1 GB of memory and a fast processor costs 1/3 (in absolute dollars - never mind the inflation adjusted difference) as much as my first desktop, which had 1 entire MB of memory and a 25 Mhz 386. I'll take the "dumb" programmers, thanks. This clown can go back to the *cough* more efficient *cough* days of yore. Have fun with DOS while you're there.

Technorati Tags: programming, development

I think we have competition for Windows in the laptop space: Apple's share of the market rose to 12% in June:

The MacBook and MacBook Pro are selling well enough to push Apple's take of the U.S. portable computer market in June up to 12 percent. During Apple's second quarter earnings report, the company noted that its laptop marketshare was at 6 percent in January.

I can definitely see a MacBook being useful for me - it would give me the ability to easily demonstrate the cross platform nature of VW on one box.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac

ABC gave their reasons for dropping "Invasion", which was an ok series that ran last year. I think there's some "days of yore" thinking going on over there:

Even with a lead-in like the hit show Lost, Invasion suffered a dramatic downturn in viewers, and ABC decided not to renew the alien mystery series, though it attracted about 10 million viewers a week. McPherson said in an interview at the Television Critics Association summer press tour in Pasadena, Calif., last week that he is aware that some fans were angry about the decision to pull the heavily serialized drama before its storylines were wrapped up.

I'm curious as to what they expected. In a the narrow-cast world we live in, a 10 million viewre audience isn't peanuts - especially if you try and find the right advertisers for it. "Appointment" TV started dying with the VCR, and the rapid spread of DVR technology is finishing it off. It's past time for the network execs to adapt to that reality.

Technorati Tags: entertainment, advertising

Dave Winer is somehow surprised that a Google search for RSS turns up "angry geeks" - in this case, "angry geeks" means "people who've had to deal with Dave Winer":

When you look at the results of the Google search, it's angry geeks complaining about RSS and saying they know the better way to do it.

All you need to do in order to understand the problem is peruse Winer's writing on the topic. He's proud that RSS 2.0 (and all previous versions, for that matter) are fundamentally broken, and even thinks that the broken-ness is a feature. Here's a quote from him on the RSS Advisory board mailing list that illustrates the problem. A few people were talking about Enclosures (can there be more than one? Should there be more than one? Could the spec perhaps be specific?):

And with that, I am banging the gavel and ending this experiment of Rogers's.

Tomorrow I will talk individually with all the corporate members of the "board" and ask them to resign.

Rogers may then wish to propose a new structure, one that is consistent with the "come back to earth" message.

This after people starting voting on their preference (one/many enclosures). Gosh forbid that the spec should actually lay that out, so that implementations could start becoming specific - couldn't have that. What we have now is a sea of inconsistency, simply because Winer can't see the wisdom of allowing some clarity.

The net result of that attitude is Atom's existence - something that would not have happened had Winer been even marginally reasonable. Next time he wonders why RSS searches turn up vitriol, he should look in a mirror. Then he can keep iterating until it sinks in.

Technorati Tags: syndication, atom

Phil Windley points out how customers have a lot more power than they did just a few short years ago:

The truth of the matter is that your customers are probably talking about your company right now. You can't control what they say. That's leaves two options: ignore what they're saying or join the conversations. The first option probably isn't good for business. How can you be part of the conversation?

His example involved a customer recording of a conversation with a service rep - which then got posted to the net. Word of Mouth advertising has always been viral, but it's been amplified by the net. A decade ago, you had to rely on someone in media picking a story up. Now, you mostly don't. That's tilted the balance of power more towards the customer, and a lot of companies are still trying to figure that out. The long tail can act like a scorpion's tail if you ignore it.

Technorati Tags: marketing, service, support

Looks like the MPAA picked on the wrong guy:

Last November, Shawn Hogan received an unsettling call: A lawyer representing Universal Pictures and the Motion Picture Association of America informed the 30-year-old software developer that they were suing him for downloading Meet the Fockers over BitTorrent. Hogan was baffled. Not only does he deny the accusation, he says he already owned the film on DVD. The attorney said they would settle for $2,500. Hogan declined.

Normally, they pick on college kids or other people in similar levels of financial distress. This time, they found a guy willing and able to fight. It will be a good thing to see the tactics they use brought to light in a court - and Hogan has the resources to make it happen.

Technorati Tags: DRM, MPAA, RIAA

Cincom Smalltalk is no exception - there are certainly parts of the toolset that just suck. My intention in bringing this up isn't to shame anyone; if I wanted to do that, I could simply point to some of the more interesting code I've been responsible for over the years - including parts of BottomFeeder. No, my point here is to list some of my dislikes, and see what other developers who use VisualWorks think. No promises about time to fix anything, either - there's a ton of work that needs to be done in the large bucket labelled "tools", and all I'm after here is some notion as to what people think hurts most. So:

The Change List tool:

Look at the second and third items there - I have never had any idea as to what the difference between them is. The "Forget" menu is understandable only to people who've used it for years. I could go on, but you get the idea - I learned the bare minimum to get by years ago, and have stayed away from the rest.

So what's your pet peeve in the VW toolset? If you could wave a magic wand and fix just one tool, which one would it be, and why?

Technorati Tags: visualworks, development

Sun continues to bleed money, but Schwartz says never fear, profits will be here... someday:

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday reported a loss of $301 million for its first three months under the leadership of new Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz. But in a conference call with analysts, Schwartz was bullish about revenue growth from the company's bread and butter, servers, which led Sun's revenue past analyst estimates. He pointed to strong growth for two new product lines, the "Galaxy" servers using AMD Opteron chips and the "Niagara" servers using Sun's UltraSparc T1 chip.

Update: Heh. Right on cue, here's Schwartz: "If you've seen the press release, you know we had a good fourth quarter to close out our 2006 fiscal year." Reminds me of an old quote - "Another such victory over the Romans and we are undone"