I've just watched the 200th SG-1 episode, which we recorded while we were away. Yes, they had some fun things in there. However, the episode was entirely navel gazing, and I would have much preferred a real episode that involved the actual story arc.
Bah.
I suppose people will say "I'm one to talk" - but I'm amused by the tone taken by "Naked Conversations" co-author Shel Israel in response to Nick Carr's latest a-list comments:
Nick, I read a few minutes ago that you are about to take a vacation. I hope you enjoy your space away from the blogosphere. Don't worry about your rankings while you are away. I'm sure when you come back, you will manage to offend enough lovers of this new conversational media, that your A-List ranking will remain secure.
The other thought is that maybe you should reflect on just quitting your blog. You don't like the blogosphere. You certainly don't seem to like those of us who are dedicating lives and energy to its promotion, and--don't be offended by this Nick--we really won't miss you a whole lot if you just sit down and shut up.
Hmm. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I disagree with Carr quite frequently - but I keep reading him because he raises interesting points that are worth thinking about. Apparently, Shel thinks that some points of view aren't worth hearing about - which runs somewhat counter to his book's premise.
In any event, Carr is writing in a fairly obvious style - he's adopted the curmudgeon pose, ready to call BS on many things. That's fine, and it's usually interesting - even when I disagree. I have no idea what Shel's problem is, but perhaps he's the one who needs to step away from the keyboard and take a few deep breaths before he goes back to it.
Via Doc Searls, I ran across this interview with Warren Buffet. They asked him a few questions about the newspaper business, and his answers are applicable to a range of news and entertainment venues:
Certain newspaper executives are going out and investing on other newspapers. I don’t see it. It’s hard to make money buying a business that’s in permanent decline. If anything, the decline is accelerating. Newspaper readers are heading into the cemetery, while newspaper non-readers are just getting out of college. The old virtuous circle, where big readership draws a lot of ads, which in turn draw more readers, has broken down.
He's definitely got that right, and most of the media people seem utterly oblivious to it. My daughter doesn't even consider the newspaper as an information source; she hits the web first (and pretty much only). With TV, she doesn't really have brand loyalty - the DVRs have changed that. Heck, I don't have any left for TV either - I have no idea what day, time, or network most of the shows I watch are on. For me, shows live in the "recorded" bin.
The same thing is happening with movies. Some people like to claim that movie attendance would go back up, if only the studios would go back to making better a product. I seriously doubt that, and I doubt that - in general - movies are worse (or better) than they were during any arbitrarily chosen "golden age". Before TV, there were no choices other than movies (ok, radio - but the difference was stark). Now there's TV, the stuff on your DVR, the internet, various video games (on a variety of devices) - there are simply more ways to stay entertained, and most of them don't involve getting up, driving to the multiplex, buying over-priced popcorn, and hoping that the audience remembers that they aren't in their own living room.
The entertainment business is now a whole slew of niche choices, and it's never going back to a unitary movie night. The same is true of TV and "must see" evenings - between the web, game systems, and DVRs, that's over too.
A lot of media execs could stand to learn this, and reading the entire interview with Buffet would be a great place to start.
Technorati Tags: media, entertainment
The WaPo has a story on TV watching and DVR usage - there's some interesting stuff about studio responses to the fast forward button, but then there's this:
It also turns out that DVRs are not killing live viewing or shuffling the weekly prime-time schedule, at least not yet. From Sunday to Friday, 84 percent of all prime-time television viewing in DVR households is live, according to Nielsen Media Research. According to the same data, 61 percent of all prime-time programming recorded by DVRs is watched on the same days it airs.
That sounds very wrong to me. Every DVR owner I talk to has the same reaction to live TV - it's simply agonizing. It's not the ads per se, even - it's that a 60 minute show can be watched in 45 minutes off the DVR, while live, it's the entire hour. I'd really like to know where that 84 percent number came from, because it doesn't line up with how we operate, or with how anyone I know with a DVR operates either.
Technorati Tags: DVR, PVR, media, entertainment
Wired reports that some of the digital holdouts have glommed onto reality:
Bob Seger turned the page, and Metallica finally found justice for online fans. Now, only a few remaining big-name musical acts refuse to make their songs available on Apple Computer's popular iTunes Music Store.
Of course, some artists are still waiting - perhaps for Godot:
Analysts say the online holdouts -- including the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Garth Brooks, Radiohead and Kid Rock -- probably can't avoid iTunes forever as fans flock to the internet to buy music.
And some are still clearly delusional:
But the artists argue online distribution leaves them with too small a profit. And, they say, iTunes wrecks the artistic integrity of an album by allowing songs to be purchased by the track for 99 cents. Some bands, such as AC/DC have released albums on other, more flexible sites, but not iTunes.
Apple gives most of that money back to the labels - last I checked, it was something like 80 cents. Meaning, if the artists have a beef, it's not with iTunes, it's with the same people who've been screwing them over for years. As for the "artistic integrtity" argument - get over yourselves. Most of the time, I want to listen to a handful of tracks from an album (sometimes only one). If you want to sell me an entire album of music, then make it worth listening to - don't cry me a river over supposed "artistic integrity".
Technorati Tags: iTunes
Andres will be talking about the StS 2006 coding contest at the September 13th NYSTUG meeting:
Well, well... the time has come. I will be giving a presentation at New York's Smalltalk User Group on September 13th. The topic is the Smalltalk Solutions 2006 Coding Contest. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I will :). See you there --- don't miss it!
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
Here's something Scoble needs to work on, and perhaps it should come before Web 2.0 parties: the podtech website. Here it is in Firefox - the text is clear, but it doesn't all fit in the browser page:
That gray text color is a horrible mistake - it makes it very hard to read. I thought that maybe the page was "designed for IE", and perhaps it was: it all fits in the browser:
I've got IE 6 here, and boy, the text is fuzzy as heck - just click through the image to see what I mean. It's completely unusable, at least in my IE on my machine. It's also lame that it doesn't work correctly in Firefox.
Mind you, the pages here aren't perfect either, so I could be accused of rock throwing in a glass house :) However, PodTech is a startup, and they can't really afford to drive people off their website. I'd like to find more good podcast content, and an easier to navigate website would help a lot.
Update: Scoble agrees, and is (not surprisingly) working to fix it. I can understand the difficult discussions over how the site should look; the main website here at Cincom sucks eggs, and I can't get anyone to listen to me on that, either :)
Technorati Tags: podcasts
Kent Newsome has been engaged in an interesting conversation over the shape and form of the blogosphere, but I think he's gone off the deep end with his latest post:
Which I think means that the more people who have access to the blogosphere, the more control will flow down blogger's hill, which will make the disenfranchised bloggers happier, which will be good for the blogosphere as a whole. There is certainly mathematical truth to the first two parts of that statement and it sounds like the words of a valiant, if idealistic, social reformer. But it is also self-evident that merely being included in a population, be it bloggers or citizens, does not end the struggle for equal opportunity. Sure, power shifts naturally as water flows naturally. But there's more to it than that. The efforts of those upstream, be they the ruling class or the dam builders, can impair and corrupt the process. To say that the natural effects of inclusion will solve the problem without further effort is to abandon a battle half won.
Here's a hot news flash: Life isn't Fair. It's not going to start being fair, either. Heck, the above makes as much sense as me demanding equal time for Smalltalk: "Hey, there's too much Java development going on, and that's not fair. Some of those projects simply must start using Smalltalk, in order to ensure equal opportunity for development languages".
Yeah, that's going to happen. No one is entitled to a large pool of readers - and a lack of them isn't a problem that needs solving. I have no idea where Kent is trying to go with that post - but let me ask this: what's the proposed solution?
Technorati Tags: media
Hmm - Erik writes that he doesn't like dynamic languages after moving from Python to Ocaml:
This particular error is typical of a whole class of errors that can exist in dynamically typed programs [0] but may never show up until the program is in the hands of a user. Personally, I think programs blowing up like this in the hands of users is unacceptable. Unfortunately, its also extremely common; so common that most regular computer users would have experienced things like this at least once. To me, this is a failure of discipline of software engineering.
Here's his error:
try: data = my_obj.read (1024) except: print "Read on '%s' failed" & my_obj.name ()
The error is the ampersand in the exception handler, which didn't hit until the first error. Well, that's why we have testing in general, and unit testing in particular. Personally, I find that specific kind of error rare, but it would be caught immediately with a small test.
What did he do wrong? Well, under what circumstances would you put a data read/entry function into an application and deploy it without testing how it deals with bad data? Seriously - this is not a problem that type checking will solve for you very often - the much more common error I've had in my own code is a correct statement with logic problems - something a compiler won't catch (what do you mean I can't write a file there?).
The problem he talks about is not, in general, one that you can solve with type checks. It's one you can solve with testing. Getting more feedback from the compiler may help him feel better, but it won't actually help much.
The Yankees clocked the Red Sox the last three games, but tonight is a nail biter: 5-5 going into the bottom of the ninth. Mariano Rivera against Ortiz and Ramirez. You can cut the tension with a knife on every pitch.
The big question: if Rivera holds the Sox down, who will the Sox pitch in the 10th? Papelbon just threw more than 40 pitches.
Update: Oh man, the Yankees had to make it exciting. Rivera got out of a bases loaded jam with a strikeout and a weak grounder to the box. I can tell you what the Boston Sportswriters will be up in arms over, especially if the Yankees win: Youkilis bunting with Ortiz at second?
And now it's bullpen vs. bullpen: The Yankees have Rivera for one more inning, and the Sox have the bottom of the barrel - with no left handers :)
It shows: Giambi just took Hansen downtown for the go ahead home run. Great effort by Coco Crisp to catch the ball - that collision with the wall looked scary, and could have broken an arm. He's ok, which is good news.
The punishment continues: Cano doubled, and Posada lined a homerun down the right field line that was barely fair. It's now 8-5. With Rivera on the mound after the next out, things look good for the Yankees
With the non-power end of the Red Sox lineup in, Rivera shut them down with one weak hit - Yankees win, 8-5. The announcers just made a point about lingering damage into tomorrow: the 5th game in this set starts in less than 12 hours, and Papelbon threw 42 pitches. If the game is close, the bullpen could be an adventure again.
Scoble is taking some blowback over his "what's a blog" post. It wasn't clear from that post, but what he's really after are the influencers - and the private or semi-private sites don't count in that particular calculation:
I’ll tell you what executives from big companies (like Kraft, Procter and Gamble, GM, and others) who were at MSN’s OWN ADVERTISING CONFERENCE told me. An influencer is worth THOUSANDS of times more than a non-influencer (influencer is someone who tells other people stuff, which is why blogging is getting so much advertising attention lately). That’s why Google is charging more per click than MSN is (Google has more influential users). That’s why Federated Media is closing advertising deals left and right.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote on this topic years ago in "The Tipping Point". What the advertisers want are the influencers (for obvious reasons). Doing a group buy across MySpace (or Spaces, or something else like those services) works, but it's inefficient.
To a very large extent, I think Robert and his critics are talking past each other.
Technorati Tags: PR, advertising, blog
Ad Age is getting a bit too happy over a survey from Jupiter Research on how people get news and information. They start their story with an anecdote:
Digital properties may be VC darlings, hot on Wall Street and coveted by advertisers. But try telling that to Dave and The podcasts, RSS feeds and blogs that so engage the daily time and energies of the leading-edge digerati are alien or unknown concepts for most of the U.S. adult population. Jean Bretzlauf, 57-year-old accountants in a well-to-do-suburb of Denver. Dave has an iPod but no idea what a podcast is. Neither is familiar with RSS. And while they read the online versions of their local papers, they also subscribe to Rocky Mountain News and several magazines -- Reader's Digest and women's mags for Jean, financial and sports rags for Dave. They catch the morning news and never miss their favorite prime-time TV shows. And they've never logged on to watch online
The fact that they read news online is telling. There's been more than one story broken by bloggers that's leaked back into mainstream sources - consider the Rathergate saga or Trent Lott's difficulties, for instance. On the non-political side, consider "Dell Hell". The thing is, the blogosphere is influencing stories that get into major media - which means that PR and advertising people need to pay attention to it (even if their audience does not directly do so).
As I mentioned this morning, many of the influencers are blogging and podcasting. Those are exactly the people that Ad Age's readers want to talk to.
Technorati Tags: marketing, advertising
Larry O'Brien jumps on my post about productivity:
Let me tell you a story: there's this programmer -- let's call him Gary -- who architected a system for a startup company and wrote some of the foundational code. Six years later, the company calls up Gary and says "We're doing $100M a year in transactions on the system and, without significant alteration of your initial architecture, can handle somewhere in excess of 10,000 simultaneous users. We're interested in 'taking things to the next level' and are looking for someone to help us architect it and write some of the foundational code."
So Gary, who is generally thankful that he can get by making a modest living as an independent contractor, thinks "gee, here's a situation where I am justified in charging an 'elite' consulting rate. Whatever I charge these guys, they will have every reason in the world to pay it." So let's say that X equals the rate that Gary charged these guys six years ago. What's your guess as to the rate at which the company walked away from negotiating a 5-month contact with Gary?
That doesn't really have anything to do with what I was talking about. Pricing yourself out of a market is a language and productivity independent thing - I've seen Cobol developers do it. If you get too greedy, sure - you lose a job, and the company ends up with the short end of the stick. On the other hand, the system built by the 10 commodity guys is not going to be less dependent on their knowledge of the code - I've seen companies completely shaft themselves by firing a consulting company, only to learn that no one is left who understands the code.
Here's the thing: Smalltalk is simple, and thus easier to pick up. A system built by 2 people probably has fewer areas of oddness than one built by 10. I've walked into many shops, looked at Smalltalk code I've never seen before, and picked up on how it works fairly quickly. Over many years of C programming, I was never really able to do that with C.
The bottom line: it matters who you hire. If you bring in someone who trys to extort money from you, the mistake was made long before the extortion got started.
Update: Larry Responds
Technorati Tags: smalltalk , productivity
I just got an email about this cool Nasa site - a 5 minute animation of the 2005 hurricane season. Turn the volume on; there's an audio track as well.
Technorati Tags: hurricanes
Today's game was no slugfest - Lidle did a great job for NY, and Wells did a great job for Boston. The difference in the game was a double, a sac bunt, and a wild pitch - the Boston pen held up, other than the wild pitch. The standings after this:
Boston started 1 1/2 back, 2 in the loss column. They now live 6 1/2 back, 7 in the loss column - and 4 1/2 back in the wild card race. The Yankees look ready to cruise into the playoffs with another AL East crown. Unlike last year, the Yankees bullpen seems to be up to the task.
I was asked by our marketing group to talk about why we have the blog site here, and how we got into it. I sent the response by email - here's what I wrote:
We got into blogging mostly by accident. In 2002, I had started to read a fair number of blogs, and thought: "How hard could it be?"
So I created a blog server from scratch, using Cincom Smalltalk. At first, I had no idea how the thing was going to work - in fact, if you go back to June of 2002, you'll see that I set it up as a group blog. By later that month I was the only one posting, and I made it my own.
I started out doing Smalltalk advocacy, but expanded the topics I wrote about as time went by. I also added in other bloggers to the server, and steadily added features to my software to support that. It took awhile, but I ended up building a decent sized audience (10,000 - 20,000 pageviews daily, 4500+ subscribers to the RSS/Atom feeds).
One of the most important things to be as a blogger is persistent and regular: you need to post on a regular basis, and you have to hit within the zone of your chosen topic(s). I avoid partisan politics, because I'm posting on a corporate server. On the other hand, I do swing at IT industry politics and analysts, since I'm working in the field they cover. It took me awhile to figure out the appropriate tone to use - I probably still use more sarcasm than is wise, but that's part of my personality - always has been, always will be.
Persistence is important because it can take a long time to reach an audience: I had something like 12 pageviews a day for months in 2002, and it took me over a year to break into the 100s. Many bloggers give up at that point (and some complain that it's "impossible" to overcome the hold of the "A-Listers"). If you keep at it, use an honest voice, and - most importantly - have something interesting to say - you'll get noticed. My blog gets picked up by Techmeme, which helps a lot - but I had to post for a long time before that happened.
Regular posting is important as well. I regularly purge feeds from my aggregator if there hasn't been a post in a few weeks. You don't have to post as often as I do (I've averaged nearly 6 posts a day, including weekends, since 2002) - but you have to do it. Having a brilliant essay once a month isn't as valuable as having something decent every day - if you prefer essays, then you are probably looking at the wrong forum.
I like to think that this has helped gain visibility for Smalltalk in general, and Cincom Smalltalk in particular. I get links from non-Smalltalkers regularly - which is good, as it means that they are at least aware that Smalltalk is still here. If you do a Google search for "Cincom" , you'll see that 4 of the top 10 results are for Cincom Smalltalk, and that Cincom Smalltalk is the first Cincom product that hits the list. If you Google "Smalltalk Blog" , you'll see that I hit the top spot. I don't use any SEO techniques, mostly because I think they are a waste of time. What I do is post early and often, and talk about Smalltalk regularly.
I've also learned to use my aggregator to search for references to Smalltalk, Cincom, VisualWorks, ObjectStudio, competing products, and my name - which picks up commentary about things I would otherwise miss (and which I often link to). In this fashion, I maintain my position as an engaged member of the part of the technical blogosphere in which I live. I also spot inaccuracies that should be addressed, and praiseworthy mentions that should be linked to. It's all become a major part of my job as Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager.
Comments or emails on this welcome!
Eric Winger announces Gemstone's latest GemBuilder support for VW (and VA):
GBS 7.0.2 is the third release to support the latest GemStone/S 64-bit servers with 64-bit object IDs, and the first release to support VisualWorks 7.4.1. It also fixes a number of bugs present in earlier versions.
Follow the link for full details.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
SCI FI Channel confirmed that it will not renew its record-breaking original series Stargate SG-1 for another season, but will pick up its spinoff series Stargate Atlantis for a fourth year.
I like SG-1, but I think it is running out of gas. The 200th episode was proof of that, to my mind. I'm happy to see the StarGate world continue though.
Dave Winer illustrates one of the things I really dislike about political discourse right now: it's utterly detached from historical reality:
It is important to look back, to remember that last year we lost of one our cities, and many thousands of our people lost their homes. A culture died, and our political life is a void until we really feel that. It has never happened in the United States before. We've never lost a whole city like that.
I can come up with a few examples without even trying: Galveston Texas, destroyed in the 1900 huricane. It was a burgeoning center of the oil business; all of that left, never to return. Galveston is now what New Orleans will end up being: a sleepy tourist center.
Then there's the 1871 Chicago fire, which destroyed most of the city. It was rebuilt, of course - Chicago's location guaranteed that.
Anyone near San Francisco should note the 1906 quake (and follow on fire), which destroyed much of that great city. Johnstown, PA mostly vanished in 1889 in a terrible flood.
I could go on, but you get the point. Many people seem to think that the gulf coast devastation is somehow unprecedented, and that the US has never faced a natural disaster of that magnitude. I'm not trying to discount the suffering - but I am trying to put it into perspective. Natural disasters of similar (or greater) scope have hit North America before, and will do so again. In the winter of 1811/1812, quakes from the New Madrid fault actually changed the topography of the region. It was lightly settled at the time, but a similar quake now would do damage that would make Katrina look like a picnic.
Katrina did severe damage to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, but there's no reason to claim that "nothing like it has happened before". There are plenty of examples, and claims to the contrary do nothing but demonstrate your ignorance.
I've got a replacement for our main Smalltalk website ready to roll - you can have a look at it here. Probably still needs some tweaking, but the nice thing is that - unlike the old site - it has a feed.
CNET News quotes GameIndustry.biz - they quote an EA exec who thinks that the Wii may be priced as low as $170:
While many gamers are getting ready to decide whether they want to shell out as much as $600 for Sony's PlayStation 3 this holiday season, one Electronic Arts executive thinks Nintendo's own next-generation console offering, the Wii, will come in at a much more attractive price.
According to GameIndustry.biz, EA vice president and COO David Gardner expects the Wii, Nintendo's unfortunately named console that was previously known as the Revolution, to retail for about $170 in Japan.
Even at $250, I think the Wii will do very well. If the Wii does come in at $170, it sure will make the PS3 look expensive...
I listened to the first part of the latest Gillmor Gang this afternoon while jogging, and that's the only reason I stumbled on the new blog that Steve Gillmor has set up - someone mentioned the name (I've forgotten who, and since Steve is utterly opposed to providing a transcript, it's just not worth my time to try and find the reference.
In any event, his new blog is what I'm on about - it's over here, and I only found it via a Google search - and it's the fifth entry (the old ZDnet InfoRouter pops to the top). That makes it harder to find than it should be (what, a link from the old blog would have been too hard?) - and Steve is continuing his practice of calling links "dead".
Here's the thing - that point of view shows that Steve is fairly deeply out of touch with how things work on the web. Sure, as he said in the Podcast, the blog is findable, even though he didn't point to it. However, that's only because he's a well known person with a reputation. Let's posit a new blogger starting out this week who follows his advice about links. Remember the line about a tree falling in a forest? It's the same thing. An arbitrary, not already well known person has to link to things unless they want to remain invisible.
Even for a well known person, it's an affectation. It makes everything you refer to harder to track down. Take his latest post: he refers to Om Malik and Robert Scoble. Both are easy to follow from my post, since I tossed in links. From his? Well, either you have those urls memorized, or you have them in your bookmarks, or you have them in your aggregator already. Otherwise, it's time to haul out the search engine.
Yeah, that makes my life as a reader of content sooo much easier. Do the world a favor, Steve - take the extra two seconds and add links. It's useful for your readers.
Technorati Tags: attention
Patrick Peralta on hiring:
One of the most interesting anecdotes that Chad gives is when he is going through hundreds of resumes looking for Java developers. After having spent many hours going through candidates that were unqualified, he suggests adding Smalltalk as one of the required keywords for the resume search. Even though Smalltalk won't be used in the project, using this technique he is able to narrow the resumes down considerably. The developers that make this cut turn out to be "diamonds in the rough." These are the guys that really enjoy to program, and people that enjoy to program are usually pretty good at it.
Now, imagine if you put these guys to work in Smalltalk... Nah, you wouldn't want your projects delivered sooner, now would you?
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
There's been a good conversation surrounding the spending habits of the Yankees, and whether it's a good thing for the health of baseball in my recent post. As it happens, I just ran across an ESPN story that claims - wait for it - that the Yankees are losing money:
Forbes Magazine reported that the Yankees became the first MLB team to be worth more than $1 billion with a baseball-best $277 million in revenue.
However, Forbes said the Yankees lost $50 million last season because the team paid $77 million in revenue sharing. The New York Daily News also reported in December that the Yankees lost at least $50 million and possibly as much as $85 million last season.
Now, I've been very skeptical of the sob stories that the owners put out about constant money losses - if it were as bad as they let on, the league would be down to 4 or 5 teams. On the other hand, I can definitely buy the idea of Steinbrenner wanting to win so badly that he's gone into the red for the year. For many owners (in baseball and other sports), teams are nothing more than expensive hobbies.
The Onion comes up with an all too real mobile phone charge plan.
Hat tip Doc Searls.
Sci Fi Wire reports that Tom Cruise has been offloaded by Paramount:
Paramount Pictures is ending its 14-year relationship with Tom Cruise's film production company because of the actor's offscreen behavior, the company's chairman said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
Seems that the small box office for MI:3 got their attention...
On the vwnc mailing list, a question came up about loading patch parcels at runtime:
I'm having problems loading "patch" parcels into a runtime image, because Overrides happen to access class comments and method sources (which are absent from the runtime product). It's getting more and more frustrating to poke around in the Override class tree and apply fixes here and there ... Is there a better and simpler solution for this?
As it happens, I load updates at runtime in BottomFeeder, and those updates have had to deal with the same problems. You have to be ready to handle a few exceptions during the parcel load. In a development image, you'll get prompted for some of these issues, whereas in a runtime you just want to have the load happen. Here's the code I use:
[[Parcel loadParcelFrom: parcelFile] on: Parcel parcelAlreadyLoadedSignal, CodeStorageError
do: [:ex | ex resume: true]]
on: DuplicateBindingsError
do: [:ex | ex resume]
What that does is ignore overrides and "already loaded" issues, and just plows forward. For some applications, you might care more deeply about those exceptions, and want to act differently.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
Less is better is talking up dynamic languages at BarCamp:
The original un-conference in Toronto this weekend, August 26 and 27. I’ll be leading on a session on “Why Dynamic Languages!”. I suspect that I’ll be preaching to the choir since BarCamp tends to be populated with lots of folks from the Web 2.0 startup space who naturally gravitate towards technologies like PHP and Rails. I want to tell my version of this story, and encourage folks to tell their own version of the story to anyone else who will listen.
Sounds like fun
I'm shocked, shocked to learn that Digg is being gamed by a relatively small set of users:
2 days ago I submitted a story to Digg regarding the Arizona Cardinals name of their new football stadium, and it ended up with 17 diggs. Well, yesterday while going through my RSS feed, I saw that the same story had made the digg/sports home page. One of them with 11 Diggs which is less then my submission and another with 470 Diggs and counting. Both stories were submitted well after mine, and the one currently on the sports home a whole day after.
After contacting a few of the prominent "Diggers" in the sports section (who asked to remain nameless), I asked them all the same question on how their stories always get "dugg" and I was taken aback by the answers. These "diggers" all have some sort of advanced notification system, from email list servs, message board, and even IM bots to notify their digging network.
Digg has editors; they are just ad-hoc and unpaid.
Technorati Tags: digg
There have been tons of news stories about companies blocking (partially or even fully) internet access so as to "keep people working". I've thought that was a really stupid idea for a long time; would you want to work at the sort of outfit that treated you like a 5 year old in need of a filter? Here's more on the subject, from an MS employee with the title "Senior Design Anthropologist" (I love that title, btw):
Jobseekers will think twice about employers who lock down work internet access, a senior Microsoft executive said today.
“These kids are saying: forget it! I don’t want to work with you. I don’t want to work at a place where I can’t be freely online during the day,” said Anne Kirah, Microsoft Senior Design Anthropologist.
“People that I meet are saying this to me every day, all over the world.”
The web, IM, and IRC are all crucial parts of my job; I couldn't work without them. Manager who implement lockdowns (outside the national security zone) are looking at this completely wrong: if you have an employee who spends too much time browsing the web (etc) instead of working, then you could try actually managing - discipline (or terminate) the bad actor.
What we have in outfits that just "punish the class" are managers afraid to do their jobs.
You have to love this: Mikael Grev of JavaLobby says that closures are too hard for Java developers:
Not only are the guys behind the Closure proposal very smart, they are also experts at what they do. Very probably the best in their field. They are also IMO very intelligent, which means they get the grasp of things very quickly, like most of the people hanging out here at JL I guess. The problem is that no one stands up for the normal, averagely smart "Java-Joe". There is a simple reason for this. He does something else (like having a life, ;) ) while we geeks are discussing closures and the fine print of the different syntaxes. The problem with this is that he neither have been involved in the construction of this "feature" nor has he even been asked whether it's a thing he wants or solves any of the problems he has.
Closures will make the code harder to read. That's a fact I think no one denies. It sure has its uses and I drool over the clever code I can write and that not many corporate average Joe can decode. Code that I don't understand that they don't understand.
Hmm. Here's how closures look in Smalltalk:
block := [:arg1 | someObject doSomethingWith: arg1].
to use it:
result := block value: someArgument.
Boy, that sure is hard. Looking at the Java example referenced here, there's the extra cruft of type declarations (which serve to make it somewhat harder to read IMHO - but hey - if you work in Java, you probably zone out on that anyway). To be brutal, if you can't figure out how to read code with closures, you probably can't figure out methods, functions, and subroutines either. In fact, if you can't figure out closures, you're probably the kind of person who creates one class with a method called main() - and no other classes. I've seen that kind of code in Smalltalk, and I'm sure it exists in Java too.
There's a full post on closures for Java here. There's cruft due to the need for explicit typing, but they don't look that hard. I have called them lipstick on a pig, but hey - at least they make the pig somewhat more functional.
Hat tip Blaine Buxton.
This is cool - there's going to be an Erlang talk at ESUG this year. I've been curious about Erlang for awhile now, so here's an opportunity to take a look at it.
Just when you thought it couldn't get worse for Dell, news like this flies by: Qantas won't let you have the battery in while your machine is running on the onboard power. So it's either run on battery, or run on power without the battery. Not a hug imposition, but a another slap to Dell. Apparently, this is spreading to airports as well:
However, some airports are making people tape up their batteries entirely, which means your laptop's only usable if you plug it in.
To my mind, this is the end game of trying to be the complete low cost provider in a commodity space. Dell laptops aren't that much cheaper than anyone else's, but they've been having suppliers shave pennies to get where they are. I'd guess that their battery suppliers shaved a few too many. Add in their well known problems in support (same issue: cost), and you have a real PR nightmare.
Even worse, according to the Buzz out Loud (CNet) folks, Dell knew about the battery problem in October 2005, but sat on it until this summer. Sheesh.
Update: Dell responds in the comments
After a week of wrangling, the International Astronomical Union decrees that Pluto does not meet the qualifications to be classified a planet. For the first time since 1930, there are eight planets in the solar system.
It's now classified (along with other small objects out that far) as a dwarf planet, because:
Much-maligned Pluto doesn't make the grade under the new rules for a planet: "a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit."
Pluto is automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune's.
Alas poor Pluto :)
I thought I had updated the build scripts on the BottomFeeder download page, but I was wrong - the old ones (for the 4.1 version) were still out there. I've just updated them now. If you register for the Software With Style developer program, you should now be able to do a source build of BottomFeeder with VW 7.4.1.
Esther Derby says that you should have low tolerance level for jerks at work - because they'll cost you one way or another:
I still hear people justifying jerk behavior because "he's a star" or "she's a creative type" or
.... Bottom line is that jerks cost your company.
She gives some good examples - and ammunition for any arguments over whether the more difficult people are worth it or not.
Via Joel Spolsky, I ran across the coolest Firefox extension:
IETab takes advantage of the fact that Internet Explorer is available as an ActiveX control, which is available to be embedded in any Windows application, to open certain websites in Firefox using Internet Explorer. Whenever a website comes up complaining that you need to get "Netscape 4.0 or some other modern browser" you can just right click on the tab and it'll pop up right in Firefox being rendered by Internet Explorer. You can set up a list of websites that always come up in IE tabs
There are screenshots of the settings screen over at Joel's; you can list websites that will always use the IE control. This lets you route around the damage of people who think that IE specific websites are ok (like, for instance, the folks here at Cincom who maintain the internal websites. Sigh). Runs in its own tab, which is very nice.
Wired has a simple summary article up on how Lithium Ion batteries can go bad. It sounds to my (mostly uninformed on this issue) ear like small manufacturing errors - the kind you might expect when you are trying to shave costs to the bone - are a real risk factor here.
I ran into a funny little bug in the Http client code in VW 7.4.1 via BottomFeeder - I stumbled on a report of difficulty reading this feed: http://planeterlang.org/rss20.xml. Here's the thing that caused a problem in the headers:
Content-Type: text/xml;charset=
The parser tries to read the charset, and makes assumptions about there being something to read - and of course, bails out. I hacked a quick fix to just have it assume utf-8 in those cases, and reported the bug to engineering for a more permanent fix in the base product.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
Troy, commenting on life in his new neigborhood:
As I've noted in prior posts, the neighborhood feels more alive and genuine than other places I've lived or looked at. We have some neighbors who sit out on their stoops, and I generally wave and say hi when I walk past while walking Duncan.
The idea that urban life is somehow more "genuine" than suburban life is amusing. For most of human history, people lived in small groups, village sized or less. In that respect, urban life is every bit as artificial as suburban life. I don't begrudge anyone their choice of where to live - people differ, and if living where you live makes you happier, that's great. I'd just like to see this meme of "urban = genuine" die the death that it deserves.
When I first heard Dave Winer talking about "River of News" for mobile devices, I thought "why not just push the stock page or feed with a style sheet specific to the smaller device?"
Well, I wasn't the only one with that thought; Tinfinger explains.
Technorati Tags: syndication, css
My daughter attended a skating camp during the last week of summer (school starts next week) - and today they had an end of camp recital. So, I took a couple of shots of her having fun on the ice:
It's back to the school year next week.
BottomFeeder downloads went back to more normal levels this week: they dropped down 157 per day. The details:
| Platform | BottomFeeder Downloads |
| Windows | 464 |
| Update | 182 |
| Linux x86 | 124 |
| Mac X | 105 |
| CE ARM | 59 |
| Mac 8/9 | 55 |
| HPUX | 27 |
| Windows98/ME | 26 |
| Solaris | 14 |
| Sources | 14 |
| AIX | 12 |
| Linux PPC | 9 |
| Linux Sparc | 8 |
| SGI | 3 |
Next, the HTML page accesses for the week:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Mozilla | 48% |
| Internet Explorer | 32.1% |
| Planet Smalltalk | 10.4% |
| Other | 3.9% |
| MSN Bot | 2.6% |
| Opera | 1.8% |
| Megite | 1.2% |
The percentages are about the same as ever. The cool thing is, the traffic for the site as a whole continues to rise slightly, week on week. Finally, the RSS feeds numbers:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| BottomFeeder | 22.4% |
| Mozilla | 18.2% |
| Other | 13.4% |
| Net News Wire | 8.6% |
| Safari RSS | 5.5% |
| Internet Explorer | 5.5% |
| BlogLines | 4.4% |
| Google Feed Fetcher | 4.1% |
| NewsGator | 3.7% |
| Planet Smalltalk | 1.8% |
| SharpReader | 1.6% |
| Opera | 1.4% |
| RSS Bandit | 1.2% |
| Liferea | 1.2% |
| RSS 2 Email | 1% |
| News Fire | 1% |
| BlogSearch | 1% |
| MSN Bot | 1% |
| JetBrains | 1% |
| Java | 1% |
| Python | 1% |
Those look about the same as always. Off to another week - and then to ESUG at the end of it.
The cross platform nature of Cincom Smalltalk has helped another person - here's The Lutheren Zephyr, who was looking for a reader that would work on Windows 98:
Dad to the rescue! Hearing of my predicament my dad offered me an old laptop, allowing me to blog on the train to and from work. I am now equipped with a Sony Vaio SuperSlim Pro notebook, model PCG-5211. It's about 6 years old, and runs Windows 98 (which is no longer supported by Microsoft). Since it is running Windows 98, I had a challenge finding a RSS reader that would work on Windows 98 AND allow me to read blogs offline. But I found one - BottomFeeder.
Actually, you can draft posts for a blog using the blog posting tool as well :)
Technorati Tags: smalltalk, portability
Kevin Burton makes a very good point about search:
This is the elephant in the blog search corner that Technorati doesn't want to talk about. Most consumers just want to search. They don't think about blogs. If you're searching Google for 'Firefox' and the top result is from a blog and the second result is mozilla.org why would you not show the first result?
That's pretty much the case. If I want to search a specific blog (something I do far more often than search "the blogosphere", I use the advanced page in Google and limit the domain. When I search, I almost never think about blog results as a separate thing.
Peter Fisk is showing off a simple network game using Vista Smalltalk. He's integrated Jabber as well, which is neat. I found this interesting as well:
The mechanism for updated the remote player’s board is based on a special kind of text message. If a message is preceded with “@@@”, then the first three characters are discarded and the rest of the message is treated as a Smalltalk message. This technique could be used for collaborative work group applications as well as games.
That's a trick I've used myself in demos before.
Scoble makes the impact of spam more clear: the spam blocker used by WordPress blogs is down right now, and that means that WordPress bloggers are getting buried:
The problem is that bloggers who don’t use Wordpress.com blogs mostly don’t see this as an issue. It’s a HORRIBLE issue here when Akismet isn’t doing its job. Since I’ve started using Wordpress.com Akismet has blocked more than 64,000 spams.
My spam solution is built into my blog, which means I'm unlikely to have this specific problem (I have different ones though - maintaining the code for it being the primary one). The tragedy is that you can't really get by without some kind of anti-spam solution. While Akismet is down, the simplest answer for affected users is to turn comments and trackbacks off. Might be overkill, but it's probably better than spending all your waking hours deleting spam.
If you have feeds that sit behind an HTTP Authentication scheme, they stopped working with the 4.2 release of BottomFeeder. This was a regression - I hadn't noticed a few code changes between VW 7.4 and VW 7.4.1. I looked at that yesterday afternoon, and fixed the problem - look for the NetResourcesHTTP update in the update tool.
There have been a few glitches like this, so I think I'll roll out a 4.3 release that simply wraps up all the bug fixes. If I have time for that this week, it will be out before Friday. If not, it won't be until after ESUG.
I'm wandering through some of the posts I flagged for later last week, and ran across Steve Rubel's comments about the huge number of splogs. This caught my attention after seeing the troubles WordPress users are having without Akismet.
Now, spam and splogs are slightly different, but it's all part of a continuum. According to research that Steve points to, 56 percent of the English language blogs are actually splogs. That affects a lot of the numbers that get tossed around; you need to keep that in mind the next time Dave Sifry posts a "state of the Blogosphere".
With all that crap out there, the various search engines are just getting buried. However, note this:
Unfortunately, what's absent from the piece is any accountability directed at the powers that supply these spam blogs with their funds: advertising networks. It seems to me that the splog problem needs to be attacked by not just the publishers and the search engines, but also by the contextual search ad providers who are making it easy for spam bloggers to make money. Google, Yahoo and others will need to raise the requirements for publishers who want to enroll in these lucrative programs. Publishers should have to prove they are legitimate before they can sign up for Adsense or any other contextual ad service.
Well, that gets into something interesting: what is Google's actual motivation to stop this stuff? Seriously - if a splogger is pushing up AdSense that makes money, Google is getting a cut. There's a financial disincentive for them to take action. Yahoo (et. al.) have the same issues. We can wish that wasn't the case, but it is. Bearing in mind that they have to answer to their shareholders first, I'm skeptical that they are going to do much about it.
Don't believe me? Flip to the back of PC Magazine. You think they're going to stop selling ads to some of the more "interesting" vendors back there? It's about as likely as online vendors putting a stop to a money making operation.
Technorati Tags: advertising, splog
I listened to the latest Gillmor Gang podcast (Trust Gang Part IV) today, and in segment 4, Seth Goldstein talked about where he's headed with the Root Markets idea. I've never completely bought into the whole idea of "attention streams", but the explanation of where this is going reminded me of something:
Remember beanz, digicash, and flooz (internet cash)? The idea was that you signed up with a company, and then you exchanged something (access to your personal information, typically) in exchange for "internet cash". You could then go to online vendors and exchange that digital cash for real goods. Except... vendors didn't want beanz, they wanted Visa. Or Mastercard. Or... you get the idea.
The gang was hung up on what I'd consider the trivial point - you would have to trust Root Markets well enough to let them manage your "attention data" (the history of what you visit on the web). Heck, we already trust Google, Yahoo, and our ISPs with that data (at least implicitly). The harder question is, why would a vendor of widgets want to take "root beanz" instead of a credit card? To some extent, this tells me that "Web 2.0" is headed for the weeds in the same way that "Web 1.0" did. When people start running back to already rejected ideas, it's a bad sign.
John Duimovich links to Joel's post on monoculture in software development, and then adds to it:
First penny: if you're looking for a job implementing programming language runtimes and you only know Java... umm... I suggest you learn a couple more languages starting with C/C++ (so you know how programming carelessly can really hurt hurt hurt you) and then Scheme (so you learn about recursion, first class functions, continuations, and programs as data) and then finally Smalltalk (so you can experience true object oriented programming and pure programming joy).
What happens when you get stuck in curly brace-ville?
The downside is you may be spoiled for lesser programming environments, and become surly and depressed once you understand the sad truth of the programming language landscape today.
He then links to Peter Fisk's Vista Smalltalk, which is getting to be a very interesting read.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
I've seen a lot of dumb posts, but this one, by mgreenly is right up near the top of the stupo-meter:
Scoble went on a witch hunt today because some one was scrapping his blog content and re-using it. The problem is he's syndicating 100% of his content in his RSS feed. Which means he's all but signed a letter of permission for the public re-use of this content. Even worse in this particular case it was being re-used with attribution and a link back to his actual blog.
Hmm. So a book is an invitation to photocopy, then? How about a newspaper - is that a license to copy too? How about CDs - are those a license to rip and redistribute? How about web pages - are they a license to scrape and redistribute?
Which part of copyright law is this guy not clear on? The ease of copying does not change who owns the copyright. Fair use allows for copying for personal use. It doesn't allow for unrestricted redistribution without permission - and the things Scoble is pointing to don't fall under fair use, IMHO.
There was a fatal plane crash this morning, but that didn't stop Conan O'Brian at the Emmys - he went right ahead and did a plane crash satire (riff on Lost). That's just incredibly lame - I don't care how tightly scripted the show was, there's this thing called "good taste"...
Technorati Tags: good+taste
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