Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

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"

Don Park brings up YouTube's business model, something I had in mind after I listened to TWIT while out jogging yesterday. The panel was talking about their burn rate, and they mentioned a figure of $18M in annual bandwidth costs (based on usage data from a few months ago). That's a pretty decent sized number. I know that NBC has started promoting their shows on YouTube, but are they bringing in enough to offset that enormous bandwidth use?

I'm continuing to teach my daughter how to play the game - of course, that would go better if I didn't muff so many shots myself :) I decided to get her some lessons though - in August, she'll be attending a 3 day camp. With any luck, she'll return from that and start giving me tips.

Nicholas Carr looks at a debate between Chris Anderson (of Long Tail fame) and Lee Gomes, who disputes some of his points. Carr comes down in the middle, which I think is reasonable:

But the 25% is not the whole story, either. To get a clear sense of the impact of the Net on the Long Tail, you'd need another statistic: Before the Internet came along, what percentage of total book sales lay outside the 100,000 titles stocked in a typical large bookstore? There have always been specialized bookstores, selling everything from religious and spiritual books to textbooks to foreign-language books to used and out-of-print books to poetry books (though their ranks have been pruned by Amazon and other online sellers). And you've always been able to go to a bookstore and order a book that it didn't carry on its shelves. Only by knowing how big the old Long Tail was can you understand how much larger it's grown with the Internet.

My guess - and it's only a guess - is that the Internet Long Tail is substantially larger than the pre-Internet Long Tail, but that, in its current form, it amounts to something less than a monumental change in the market. The important question, then, is this: Is the Long Tail going to get a lot bigger, or has most of the growth already happened?

That's an excellent question, and it would be nice to have good stats from Amazon. Anecdotally, I know that I've found books on Amazon, either by searching or by "people who bought X also bought Y". I've read books that I know I never would have found otherwise that way. That's anecdotal though, and says nothing about other people's habits. Like Carr, I suspect that the net has increased the size of the Long Tail - pre-net, you had to live in or near a large city to find specialty book stores, for instance. Still, I'd love to see actual data from Amazon and their competitors on this.

Technorati Tags: marketing, sales

Here's a news story that hits the top of the stupo-meter:

Prosecutors say 24-year-old Marlon Brando Gill was angry and jealous when he forced the phone into Melinda Abell's throat in December. But defense attorneys insist the 25-year-old victim swallowed the phone intentionally to prevent Gill from finding out who she'd been calling.

That sounds pretty bad. Of course, you might wonder how anyone could actually force a cell phone down someone else's throat:

She testified yesterday that she couldn't remember how the phone got in her throat, saying she drank too much that night. Court records show that her blood alcohol content was three times the legal limit.

I think we need Dogbert for commentary on this one...

This is perhaps the best diagnosis of Dell's problems with the consumer place I've seen. Laura Ries suggests that Dell should ditch the consumer space completely:

Today, consumers account for only 15 percent of sales, but a disproportionate percentage of the service calls. As a result, Dell’s service representatives are overwhelmed with consumers who have bought cheap computers calling for help.

...

So how can Dell cure its brand cancer?

Surgery. Cut out the cancer. Dell should get out of the consumer market and refocus the brand on the business community.

There's another possibility too - partner with one or more service providers (CompUSA, Best Buy) - not to sell their PCs, but to service them. I don't know how easy that would be, but it would certainly make support simpler.

Ries probably has the better solution though - and it's a generally applicable one. When you have a failing business line, the temptation is to fix it, even if the business line in question is the moral equivalent of horse buggies. Sometimes, it's better to change to a more well suited battlefield.

Technorati Tags: marketing, management

My initial reaction to this post from Paul Graham was something like this: "heh - he doesn't understand how Digg works". Heck, I even had a post written up along those lines. I've done a bit more reading though, so I trashed that post and started over. Since I've wandered into the middle of the story, I'll back up: there have been a number of stories about Reddit posted at Digg, and they all got pushed off the front page. A look at the search results with the "included buried stories" option tells the tale: the Digg community has been burying those stories.

Childish, perhaps, but not an editorial conspiracy. However, reading into it I ran across this - stupid joke, a guy posts a story on Digg, pointing to an identical story on Reddit, which points back. The title: "Recursion Defined". Ok, funny, haha. Here's the graphic of both stories so you get the point:

The thing is, Digg banned the user who submitted that. Hmm. That sure makes them look like a mature set of adults over there. It's not the most witty joke ever, but sheesh - it's not like it's incitement to riot or something. Maybe Jason Calacanis is making the guys at Digg nervous after all.

Technorati Tags: digg, reddit

Nick Carr adds more commentary from Lee Gomes about the Long Tail issue I linked to yesterday. Good stuff.

Technorati Tags: marketing, sales

Here's why the RIAA hates digital music:

Record companies keep about 72.5 cents on average for a 99 cent song, Dave Jaworski, CEO of PassAlong Networks, at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit. PassAlong sets up online music services for other web sites. It has a big store on Ebay too.

At $17 for a CD, they get to keep more money per sale (and still pass virtually nothing on to the artist). It's all about the profit margin to which they've become accustomed.

Technorati Tags: RIAA

This story about an iTunes Kiosk (where else to fill the new iPod you bought out of the vending machine?) triggered a long term issue I've had with Apple's DRM and registration system. My iPod "belongs" to my Mac Mini - that's the source for the stuff that downloads to it. However, if I'm on the road, I don't have my mini - I have my space starved laptop. What I'd like to be able to do is grab new podcasts (or music, but in my case, probably podcasts) while I'm on the road, and push them to the iPod. How can I do that without flipping the "home iTunes" repository for my iPod?

Technorati Tags: music, iPod

I mentioned that I wanted some software to deal with my iPod from Windows (it's "home" machine is my Mac). The problem: when I travel, I have my Windows notebook, and it doesn't carry my music library. What I'd like to do is have the ability to update the podcasts while I'm away, and it looks like XPlay will let me do that. I can download the stuff I want, and drag/drop them over. Very cool.

Technorati Tags: iPod, music

You have to love this take on Seaside from OSCon:

I'm having fun in this session, sitting next to Ben Bleything, and trying not to contribute to the sporadic chuckling and heckling about the voodooo magic of Seaside. This is definitely one of the more enjoyable sessions I've attended so far, but now that I've actually seen it in action, I really don't think Seaside poses serious competition to any of the major web frameworks. Too much voodoo.

Blaine Buxton was nicer about this than I'm going to be :) Here's my translation of what Obie Fernandez is saying: "It's too easy, I'm not seeing any suffering - how will I impress my friends if I don't spend endless hours at the keyboard???"

Get over it and try it out. Don't throw rocks because you think it looks like magic.

Technorati Tags: Seaside, smalltalk

We launched a new Wiki today - Smalltalk Cookbook. The intention is to create some simple, but useful, content describing Cincom Smalltalk. Check it out now.

Patrick Logan points to some actual Voodoo in Java-Land. In VisualWorks, all of the similar memory tricks are accessible at the library level, and are documented as well.

When the clueless legislate, we get clueless legislation. Just look at the "Myspace law" that the US House passed yesterday, by an overwhelming (410 - 15) margin. This is classic "for the children" legislation that makes no sense. Here's what it purports to do:

If the Resolution becomes law social networking sites and chat rooms must be blocked by schools and libraries or those institutions will lose their federal internet subsidies. According to the resolution’s top line summary it will “amend the Communications Act of 1934 to require recipients of universal service support for schools and libraries to protect minors from commercial social networking websites and chat rooms.”

Hmm. I guess USENET and IRC channels are ok then, since they aren't commercial. How do they propose to enforce this, anyway? It's simple enough to block questionable brick and mortar sites from a defined area near a school; you can just walk around. The net has "infinite" space though - and new social networking sites are being born (as others die) constantly. How do you block a category like this? Here's what Mike Arrington Marshall Kirkpatrick says about it, and I agree completely:

An incredibly vague law, DOPA will require schools and libraries to block access to a potentially huge range of sites on the internet. The goal is to protect children from adult predators. Sites that must be blocked include those that allow people to post profiles, include personal information and allow “communication among users.”

410-15 was a shocking vote. I write about it here because it has the potential to impact a huge portion of our readership and the companies we profile on this site. Though the viability of enforcing such a law is open to question, web services offering collaboration in education are looking seriously endangered. Secondary collaborative consequences of commercial web sites used in schools aren’t looking good either.

(A few minutes later) Sigh. I actually called my congressman's office on this. They told me "never fear, that's not our intent". A phrase comes to mind: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". The only way to enforce what this legislation calls for is to cut internet connectivity off in schools and libraries.

Technorati Tags: web, stupidity

Dave Sifry (Technorati) just posted a short list of how to make your site popular. Follow the first link to see the details, but here's the bullet list:

• React to others quickly
• Make your posts easy to read
• Link, Link, and then Link some more
• Optimize for search engines (title and main URL)
• Post, Post, and Post some more

I'd add that you should post on a set of topics, so that people start to learn what to expect from you.

I'm catching up on my trade journal reading, and I've gotten all the way up to the July 17th ComputerWorld. In that, I ran across this article which predicts which skills will be hot, and which will be cold, in 2010. Some of the predictions make a lot of sense - for instance, they predict that you'll need a storage administrator. Heck, with how cheap storage is getting, I might need one in my house :)

Others make less sense - here's one that's been predicted for years now on Application Development:

By 2010, applications will become commodities delivered by external service providers. Internal development won't be dead, though -- it will just be done differently in 2010, Foote says. The challenge will be selecting packages and tailoring them to what you need. "Code-writing disappears in this world, unless it's code-writing in customer-facing applications that offer strategic advantage," he adds.

That glosses over the obvious fallout from so many large ERP installations: tailoring third party applications is never as simple as management would like to think. Admittedly, there's a caveat above: "applications that offer strategic advantage". The question that ought to arise is this: "Will installing this third party package require us to change our processes?" Unless your company is small and nimble, a "yes" answer to that question should make you pause. Process changes become political footballs in companies, and that benefits no one. In many cases, it will be far, far cheaper to custom build something that follows your existing process simply to avoid the political issues.

Technorati Tags: development, IT, management

Gordon Weakliem notes that blogger (owned by Google) makes it easy for sploggers to pick up formerly legitimate sites:

I just noticed that Jeff Katz' blog, which used to be at gmorning.blogspot.com, has been taken over by a splog, in what appears to be a case of blog squatting. Jeff's last post was a bit over a month ago. No inkling of what happened, except that apparently Blogger allows weblog names to be recycled with no embargo period. You'd have to be insane to use blogspot as a blogging platform if this is the case. It's OK for recycling to happen, but they should place some sort of embargo when a weblog author relinquishes a blog - say a month where the feed will 410. Most aggregators will automatically unsubscribe you upon receipt of a 410. But, really, this is amazing - this morning the former CEO of Orbitz morphed into a spammer. Blogger is turning itself into a pariah.

For a company that claims to be fighting spam, Google certainly isn't doing some of the really simple stuff. This blog in question is sporting an immediate redirect out, to the splog. Like Gordon says, you have to be nuts to locate your blog on that service.

Technorati Tags: splog

This long post on marketshare and context is a good tonic to the mostly meaningless numbers that get tossed around. I particularly liked the section on music players, with this summary:

In fact, the 30 million iPods sold so far this year and the 22 million sold last year are the best proof that users are choosing not to use their mobile phones to listen to music, but rather paying a significant premium to get a dedicated music player!

The next time you hear market share numbers being thrown around, consider the context. Numbers don't speak for themselves, they require critical interpretation.

That brings to mind a book I recently read: "The Origin of Brands", by Al and Laura Ries (see her blog here). The major thrust of the book is that products do not, for the most part, converge - rather, you see a lot of divergence as new product niches get created. Music players and phones are a great example of this - like many people, I own an iPod (mini) and a phone. Phones have to have a numeric keypad, which leaves a limited amount of space for other controls. For every phone I've ever owned, the interface to things not related to making calls have sucked - many times, the stuff related to calls also sucks. I can't really see how to add music with that interface sucking as well.

Then there's the music industry obsessions that come along. Say I had a phone that played music. My current phone has (barely worthwhile) internet access. I'd expect any music phone to allow wireless downloads of music - but no:

The handy iTunes menu interface on your ultra-sleek Motorola SLVR lets you scroll through your playlists, select a song and play it -- complete with any accompanying album art. You can even shuffle songs right from the main menu. And putting your music on the Motorola SLVR is as easy as syncing to iTunes, the world’s best digital jukebox. Just connect your phone to your Mac or PC, then choose the songs you want to sync or let iTunes choose them for you -- autofilling your phone with a random selection from your iTunes library.

If a music phone is to serve any purpose at all, it ought to allow wireless download anywhere the phone works. Otherwise, it's just a less than optimal iPod with crappy controls.

Technorati Tags: branding, sales

I've been invited to give a webinar for the Product Management blog, and I've accepted. You can see the details here, or click the link in the "Information" section of the menu. Here's the summary for my topic:

Make sure you know what people are saying about you and your product. It’s a new, unfamiliar world for marketing and PR people. Until fairly recently, marketing communications were tightly controlled, and mostly one-way. Where there was a need/desire for two-way communication, it was done on terms set by marketing and PR focus groups, market surveys, analyst briefings (etc.). The emergence of the blogosphere has changed all of that, in ways that are every bit as profound as the sea change wrought hundreds of years ago by Gutenberg’s printing press.

He'll be talking about the need to keep track of the ongoing commentary that’s taking place, outside of the control of PR professionals. It’s no longer enough to have a consistent message;you now need to be aware of what’s being said about you, your products, or your client’s products at all times. He’ll give a few examples of companies not paying attention fast enough,and how that’s impacted their public image. He’ll also explain how he, in his role as a product manager, tracks references to the products he work with.

You'll learn how he tracks the ongoing commentary about his products, and how you can do the same thing to keep track of yours.

This looks like it'll be fun. The webinar is December 20th (all the early dates filled up fast!).

Technorati Tags: PR, marketing, communications

James McGovern asks:

Ever noticed in the blogosphere that bloggers who work for software vendors never seem to list their customers in their blogroll

There's a reason for that: getting permission from a customer to say anything about their use of a product is not a simple matter of pushing them into your blogroll. Typically, getting permission to publicly say anything about their use of software requires a management decision.

Technorati Tags: PR, crm, marketing

It's somehow comforting to know that it's not only US law on internet matters that goes wonky. I posted on the asinine DOPA legislation this morning; in France, the government asked their constitutional council for a ruling on a law, and ended up with some very messy results - it looks like any open source reverse engineering of DRM is now criminal, with rather hefty penalties:

France's Constitutional Council has made a stringent new copyright law even harsher, modifying three articles of the law and striking out a fourth in a review of its constitutionality. The changes mean that unauthorized sharing of copyright files such as music tracks will become a criminal offense, while those who reverse-engineer DRM (digital rights management) systems in order to develop interoperable software will face six months in prison and a fine of $36,000.

This got discussed on today's (July 28, 2006) CNet Buzz Out Loud podcast, and they were asking the audience if this was as bad as it sounds. The ComputerWorld report sounds pretty bad - is it really as big a mess as it looks like?

Technorati Tags: DRM, music

Time to look back on the weekly numbers. BottomFeeder downloads proceeded at a rate of 170 per day:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	449
Update	231
Linux x86	119
Mac X	116
CE ARM	78
Mac 8/9	72
Windows98/ME	23
Solaris	8
HPUX	19
AIX	14
Linux Sparc	13
Linux PPC	12
SGI	10
Sources	10
ADUX	4
Solaris86	3
CE x86	1

Looks like the normal distribution. Now a look at the HTML accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	49.7%
Internet Explorer	34.1%
Planet Smalltalk	4.9%
Opera	3.2%
Other	4.1%
MSN Bot	2.7%
Megite	1.3%

Finally, the RSS accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
BottomFeeder	20.9%
Mozilla	17.2%
Other	14.4%
BlogLines	10%
Net News Wire	8.1%
NewsGator	4.4%
Internet Explorer	4.3%
Google Feed Fetcher	4.2%
Safari RSS	4.1%
BlogSearch	2.5%
SharpReader	1.7%
Planet Smalltalk	1.2%
RSS Bandit	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
Opera	1%
MSN Bot	1%
JetBrains	1%
Jakarta	1%
Liferea	1%
Java	1%

When I pushed out version 4.2, I forgot one small thing: I didn't promote the Solaris x86 link up from the dev section to the regular release section. That's done now, so you can grab the version for Solaris from the regular downloads.

Looks like the American League races are heating up - take a look at the current standings:

Six weeks ago, it looked like the wild card was definitely coming out of the central division - now that's up in the air. It also looked like Boston was starting to pull away, but that's no longer happening - the Yanks have been coming back strong (thanks to some decent pitching). If Matsui and Sheffield come back in late August/early September as expected, the end of the season will be a fun thing to watch.

Technorati Tags: yankees, baseball

Ezboard has been having fairly epic problems with their server software, most of which is written in Cincom Smalltalk. Rather than actually explain the problems they have had, they just want to point the finger at us:

The current ezboard program is written in Smalltalk, a programming language that is becoming obsolete. The current program has many bugs that can't be fixed because each time the developers try to fix them, it causes something else to break. That seems to be the nature of Smalltalk. In the beginning, the program was simple, but as more and more features were demanded and added, it became more complicated -- and more buggy. It is also becoming difficult for ezboard to find skilled Smalltalk programmers. As a result, ezboard has had to choose to stay as it is, adding no new features and fixing no bugs, or move to a new architecture that will make it simpler and quicker to make changes, add new features, etc., and that will still be easy for board owners to customize. That is the purpose of the move.

Hmm. They wrote the original application in VWNC 3.0, and didn't use VisualWave (the then current HTML technology add on for VW). Instead, they wrote their own server from scratch. They didn't use a database on the back end, instead serializing objects to disk. Those two early decisions came back to haunt them in a big way - we actually spoke to them about dealing with them inside Smalltalk, by:

• Updating to the Web Toolkit, which works in conjunction with your stock web server
• Upgrading from serialized objects to a database back end

Instead, they decided to go with a full rewrite in something else, and a general blasting of our product as a way of making excuses. There's no reason for them to do that. Just look at what they say instead: fixing bugs creates other ones. That has nothing to do with Smalltalk (or any other language, for that matter) - it has to do with whatever process they use to develop code. If that's happening to them now, I guarantee that it will happen to them in the future, without regard to what development/deployment platform they end up using.

Update: Looks like they pulled that post down.

Update: As shown in the comments, you can see the original posting in the Google Cache.

Technorati Tags: PR