Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Today's Smalltalk Daily covers a few more debugger features, along with some tips on how to use them.

If you would like to follow all of the "Smalltalk Daily" screencasts I've been doing - in order - then head on over to the Smalltalk Daily landing page on the Cincom Smalltalk site.

Technorati Tags: screencast, smalltalk

Jeff Jarvis notes the bloat that still exists in mainstream media productions:

At home, I took the exact same script and with some photos to illustrate my points and produced the segment alone, in my den, on two programs: iMovie and VideoCue, a Mac competitor to Visual Communicator, which gives you a teleprompter and the ability to drag-and-drop graphics, lower thirds, photos, audio, or video onto your script so the’re all recorded along with you (no need for editing). I’ve used these tools before and had to brush up on them anyway for my CUNY class. They make it incredibly easy to make TV. Will my segments look at good as CBS’? Well, that depends on your definition of good but probably not. Still, the thoughts and the talking head spewing them were exactly the same.

So compare: probably a dozen people involved in my little 1:30 at CBS; one person at Buzzmachine World Headquarters. Networks will collapse from their bloat.

I haven't gotten in video at all yet, but my daughter has - and yes, it looks like it's not that hard to create decent looking content (especially if your definition of "decent" is of the "talking pundit" variety). I doubt that the volume of people involved on the network side adds enough value to justify the numbers.

Technorati Tags: tv, news

In VisualWorks, we ship profiling tools (both time and space). What if you use Squeak? Well, Andreas Raab explains class MessageTally and its uses here. Good stuff if you need to look at performance issues in a Squeak app.

I spoke to Chip Dice this afternoon - he's the lead develop at Forest Investments. he sent me a few screenshots of their financial applications - there's going to be a lot more on that in a few days over at smalltalk-central, as they have a screencast on Smalltalk apps coming - Chip's is featured. Anyway, here's a shot of his "By Industry" screen (click through for the larger image):

Anyway, grab the mp3 for the podcast here. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, financial

Ars Technica reports that Sony has bitten the bullet: they've issued a global recall on Li-ion batteries:

Sony has finally bitten the bullet and issued a worldwide recall of all Sony-manufactured lithium-ion batteries used in notebook computers.  Earlier in the day, Lenovo/IBM joined the ranks of Dell, Apple, and Toshiba in issuing a recall for all Sony batteries that ship with their notebooks.

With the PS3 mess, this is the last thing that Sony needs.

Technorati Tags: batteries

Technorati Tags: batteries

Stuart Halloway explains why DRM sucks - it punishes those of us who follow the rules, while leaving the actual pirates free to run wild:

Well, thanks a lot. As a power user and a technophile, I go through a lot of computers. Two of the others are in my office in Chapel Hill, backups in case this one goes down. I buy premium (priced!) hardware and software, and I buy lots of it. I am an intellectual property Boy Scout, because it is the right thing to do, and because it is in my professional interest. And what thanks do I get? A big fat "You don't own what you paid for until you travel home and prove it (again)."

The real pirates have tools to get around that kind of problem. The rest of us? We just take it in the shorts.

Technorati Tags: music

Mike Bowler announces that Seaside will be wowing a Java crowd in Toronto:

The next meeting of the Toronto Java™ Users Group will have a presentation on the Smalltalk Seaside framework.

Look for jaws to be on the floor :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside, java

Dave Buck has announced the release of the first of a series of screencasts that STIC is doing. This one covers Smalltalk usage in industry; go have a look.

Technorati Tags: screencast, stic

Michael and I recorded episode 3 last night (actually, early this morning here; I was doing this at 1:40 am). I've just finished the cleanup and mixing of the audio and gotten it posted. We discussed what we normally load into a development image - mostly Michael, actually (my list is way shorter :) ). Anyway, feedback is always welcome - enjoy.

Another good week for BottomFeeder downloads: averaged 245 per day. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	449
Update	409
Linux x86	160
CE ARM	155
Sources	155
Mac X	135
Mac 8/9	63
Solaris	35
Linux Sparc	31
HPUX	31
Linux PPC	23
AIX	20
SGI	17
Windows98/ME	14
ADUX	12
CE x86	6

Next up: the HTML page accesses by tool:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	50.9%
Internet Explorer	34.6%
Planet Smalltalk	5.7%
Other	4.2%
MSN Bot	2.2%
Opera	1.4%
Megite	1%

Site traffic continues to rise, and the Mozilla share is staying high as well - although Opera is sneaking up a wee bit. Last, the RSS accesses by tool:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
BottomFeeder	18.4%
Mozilla	18%
Planet Smalltalk	10.6%
Other	6.1%
Net News Wire	7.3%
Internet Explorer	7%
BlogLines	6.6%
Safari RSS	5.6%
NewsGator	3%
Google Feed Fetcher	2.6%
RSS Bandit	1.6%
RSS 2 Email	1.4%
Akregator	1.4%
Opera	1.3%
Liferea	1%
JetBrains	1%
News Fire	1%
SharpReader	1%
BlogSearch	1%
MSN Bot	1%
Python	1%
Jakarta	1%
Java	1%

There's still a ton of tool diversity out there.

Peter Fisk is taking a different path with Vista Smalltalk:

Vista Smalltalk is different since the parser, compiler and basic classes are built into the runtime - there is no need to load an image file to execute simple Smalltalk commands.

I think there's room for both approaches, and this is worth watching

I think this move by Debian - forcing Firefox to change its name on that distro - illustrates one of the reasons that it's hard to take the OSS purists seriously:

The Firefox logo is trademarked, so Debian doesn't consider it to be Free and will not include it as part of its distribution. Mozilla claims that using the Firefox name without the official branding is a trademark violation.

Yeah, clarity for end users matters so much less than a trademark on a logo. What a bunch of buffoons.

I hadn't commented on Mark Cuban's "YouTube is dead" post, because I agreed with it, and thought the point was obvious: the only thing saving YouTube from being sued into the next century is their lack of deep pockets. Now sure - many of the "violations" are what I'd call fair use (people dancing/lip synching/singing along with background music, for instance) - but many of them are (music videos, for instance).

Then there's this hippie dippie moron, in full bore "let the music be free" mode (never mind the whole "how does the artist eat?" problem:

Selling Broadcast.com at the height of dot com frenzy, he wants to shut the door behind him, exclude all those who don’t play by the rules. He wants to see the death of YouTube, since they’re stealing the content and he’s investing money to gain a foothold in the movie/visual content business.

That's right, observing the reality of the situation is just sooo unfair. And look - he can get even dumber:

Society is made up of rules, they call them laws, but laws are made to be broken. Or maybe you never cottoned to rock music. Or came to the party so late that a rock star was someone who was famous, as opposed to someone who played by his own rules.

This guy needs to go camp out in Woodstock, and wait for the wayback machine to take him back.

Technorati Tags: music, stupidity

I've got two books that look interesting in my queue, but haven't started reading them yet. These are both history - I'm still not really in the mood for fiction.

Given current events, I figured it would behoove me to learn more about the history of middle east, and about religious currents there. If you look back through these posts, you'll see that I've had a few looks (I can't recommend "A Peace to end all Peace" enough, for instance) in this direction. This one takes a look at Wahhabism, which is the Sunni sect behind a lot of the extremism. At some point, I need to look into the "12th imam" business that seems to motivate many of the Shia extremists as well

I know far less about Napolean's time than I'd like, so I picked this up to get started. Before the 20th centuries' horrors, France and Napolean were the bugbears of European history - and his rampages across the continent set the table for all of that. It looks like a good read.

HP is still giving old style "ignore and evade" a go: Don Tennant of ComputerWorld reports from the HP Technology Forum event in Houston:

When Hurd concluded his remarks, he said he was going to take some questions. But rather than giving the audience the opportunity to use those microphones, he welcomed Novia back onto the stage. Novia held several cards with questions that he claimed came “from our crowd.” That struck me as odd, because I had arrived at the session fairly early, and I never saw anyone passing out or collecting any question cards.

The four softball questions couldn’t have been any more lame or self-serving. They asked about the significance of HP’s Mercury acquisition, how HP differentiates itself from its competitors, how Hurd sees HP Services going forward, and how the rest of the company is uniting behind the sales force.

Tennant goes on to say that Hurd avoided all media contacts as he made a quick exit (with PR/security people used as blockers), and that he couldn't get a straight answer as to the source of the problem by press time.

The blogosphere seems to have let this story go, so I'm pleased to see ComputerWorld is still on it. A few scapegoats have been named (and taken out behind the woodshed), but Hurd's reactions indicate that the rot went all the way to the top. I hope Tennant stays with this story.

Technorati Tags: management

Frank Hayes writes about making end users of IT more cognizant of security problems they create:

Say that instead of handling security problems invisibly, we made them highly visible to users. Suppose when one of those problem users opened a virus-laden attachment or triggered a firewall reaction or plugged a thumb drive into a USB port, that didn’t just create an entry in a security log. Suppose it instantly shut down network access for the user’s entire workgroup.

Oh, there would be screams. We’d hear them at the help desk almost immediately. And for once, those battered souls would know exactly, word for word, what to say: “It looks like Charlie downloaded a virus, and your group was cut off to protect the rest of the network. We’re working to clear the problem now.”

Well, that works both ways. How about we make support issues that go critical fall back on the mail admins who "solved" spam problems by having flagged email silently quarantined. I'm thinking something like this:

"Sorry Boss (company CEO) - Acme cancelled their contract because IT's spam protection system threw out every message they've sent us for the last month, and they decided that we were completely unresponsive.

What - notifications? No, neither their people nor ours ever got a bounce notice - the mails just disappeared. Talk to Ed in IT"

I think Hayes might want to step back from his "educate the users via pain" theory for a minute, and consider the motes in most IT department's eyes first.

Technorati Tags: IT

For those of you on Linux, the flash movie probably isn't viewable. David has posted an AVI version (31 MB) that ought to work.

Technorati Tags: STIC, screencast

I have to say, the argument used in this post is one of the most irritating things in the world to me:

If members of the Blogosphere are interested in having their opinion mean something significant, may I suggest they apply for a job at their local VC firm and see what happens? Or even better, if they discover a better way at solving a problem than currently exists, why not start a company that solves that problem and then go out and raise some money themselves? Turns out that criticizing a vision is easy if you don't have one to share yourself and but even more challenging if you do.

The subject of that *cough* argument *cough* doesn't even matter. It gets regularly trotted out across the board, in the tech industry and in politics - the gist being: "If you haven't done X, then you don't understand X, and are not allowed to have an opinion on it".

Excuse me? That's a theory designed to limit debate and give control to some nebulous set of technocrats who "really understand things". Thanks, but I'll take robust debate over that any day of the week.

Technorati Tags: marketing

Blaine Buxton will be talking about Smalltalk and Seaside this month in Omaha:

I'll be giving my Seaside talk at this month's Dynamic Language User Group. I will probably spend sometime explaining why Smalltalk is so cool. Then, we'll go through continuations and why cheap closures are good. There's more to Seaside than just continuations and I will also touch on that. If you have ever been curious about Squeak, Seaside, or Smalltalk, then come on by. It's going to be explosive! It will be October 3,2006, 7pm-9pm. I hope to see everyone there!

Here's the location specifics:

Creighton University

2500 California Plaza

Omaha, NE 68178

Check it out - Blaine's an egaging speaker.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

Today's Smalltalk Daily covers loading and saving code in Cincom Smalltalk (VisualWorks).

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

That noise you heard from the north was the sigh of relief from Torre and Guidry: it looks like Randy Johnson - creaking muscles and all - will be pitching game three against Detroit:

Torre was happy with Johnson's session and was confident the Big Unit will pitch against Detroit. Chien-Ming Wang will start Tuesday's opener and Mike Mussina will follow in Game 2 on Wednesday.

On to Tuesday!

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

If you're thinking about the Zune, this site is worth checking out - it has a bunch of photos of the Zune and the iPod side by side. Here's a nice comparison of the Zune's larger screen:

Head on over there to see the others. I'm happy enough with the iPod, but it's always worthwhile to see what's on offer from the competition

Technorati Tags: iPod, Zune

Nick Carr notes that both Google and Microsoft are standing behind their search engines in an odd way; I see this as a potential PR problem that can't end well for either outfit. First, stir in a gamed search result that places a hate site (Klan related, for gosh sakes) to the top of the list.

Next, when asked about the result by interested parties and embarrassed partners, call it a "sign of your integrity". First Google:

At Google, a Web site's ranking is determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to any given query, a company representative said. The company can't tweak the results because of that automation and the need to maintain the integrity of the results, she said. "In this particular example, the page is relevant to the query and many people have linked to it, giving it more PageRank than some of the other pages. These two factors contribute to its ranking," the representative wrote in an e-mail.

Then Microsoft:

The results on Microsoft's search engine are "not an endorsement, in any way, of the viewpoints held by the owners of that content," said Justin Osmer, senior product manager for Windows Live Search. "The ranking of our results is done in an automated manner through our algorithm which can sometimes lead to unexpected results," he said. "We always work to maintain the integrity of our results to ensure that they are not editorialized."

So, let me get this straight: if your marketing department tries to game Google results via invisible redirect sites, they ban you from the results. If, on the other hand, you're a hate group that has managed to game the system somehow, it's all ok. Hmm...

Now, there is a defensible position for these guys - if they start "playing god" based on political stances, there's a slippery slope down which they could slide infinitely - I can see why they don't want to go there. The fact is, however, they already go in and tweak results for various and sundry reasons, mostly dealing with spam/splog detection - so they already live on that slippery slope, whether they like it or not. I don't know that they want to fight on this particular ground - and I love the way Carr summarized their positions:

By "editorialized," he seems to mean "subjected to the exercise of human judgment." And human judgment, it seems, is an unfit substitute for the mindless, automated calculations of an algorithm. We are not worthy to question the machine we have made. It is so pure that even its corruption is a sign of its integrity.

I can just imagine the MS Live PR people wishing this would go away on its own...

Bryce Kampjes announced a Smalltalk meetup in London on a few Smalltalk mailing lists:

We're organising another Smalltalk event in London, this one is after work. Starting at 5:30pm with a presentation of Restore by John Aspinal.

RSPV required with a company name as it's being hosted in corporate

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Dave Buck demonstrates ElastoLab with the helpf of his son, and Michael gives a review of the "Programming Extensions" goodie in VisualWorks.

Technorati Tags: screencast

Cédric Beust went off on a rant about refactoring (specifically, renaming classes) in dynamic languages yesterday:

All the Smalltalk IDE did for renaming was search and replace, which is, frankly, the best it could do. And clearly unacceptable today.

It's simple, really: dynamic languages that are not statically typed (i.e. let you get away with not typing variables) simply *cannot* do certain refactorings, among which "renaming".

Pulling up my BottomFeeder development image, I spot class Text - specifically, the one in namespace XML (as opposed to the one in UI). I go ahead and rename that to XMLText, and then go look for class Text in namespace UI - and there it is, blissfully not renamed.

It seems that in VW Smalltalk, renaming is scoped by the namespace of the class in question. So - in practice (as opposed to theory), you'll be putting your new classes into namespaces - and you'll be disambiguating by using namespaces. So... any renaming of classes that you do will "just work". Can you come up with edge cases that will break? Almost certainly. Will you actually run into any of them? Probably not. In many, many years of Smalltalk work, I can't recall getting bitten by renaming a class - and most of those years preceded the introduction of namespaces.

Sure, code that's not loaded won't get that (or any other) refactoring, but that has to do with the image based environment - something that also makes renaming much, much faster than running over a bunch of text files. I hope Cédric feels a lot safer over there - I'll be busy being productive in the meantime, unworried over edge cases I won't hit.

Update: As Alan states in a comment, I misread this:

The limitations that Smalltalk has in renaming methods are precisely the limitations of not using methods monomorphically. In a statically typed language, you will have the same kind of issues as soon as you start using features like generics, or subclassing. I talked about this in more detail the last time this endlessly recurring issue came up, about a year ago, over here.

Technorati Tags: dynamic languages , smalltalk

The Portland (OR) STUG is meeting next week. For details, visit Eric's site.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Today's Smalltalk Daily covers a few basics about the VW UI Painter tool.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

The Smalltalk group in LA is meeting soon:

LASTUG Meeting
Date: Monday October 9, 2006
Time: 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Location: High Tech High, Los Angeles - Meeting Room
17111 Victory Blvd
Lake Balboa, CA, 91406 Map

There is usually an after meeting at Jerry's Deli on Ventura and Petit in Van Nuys that goes on to an indeterminate time.

If there is a problem getting there call Darius Clarke, Mike Klein or John Dougan for assistance. The phone numbers are in the LASTUG contacts database on Yahoo!.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

The UIUC VW Wiki got spammed yesterday - well over a hundred pages. When it's a handful, I manually fix them (unless someone beats me to it). The attack from yesterday was hanging out there though, so I sat down and wrote some workspace script - I just grabbed the page source for all the modified pages on Recent Changes, and stuffed that into a collection - looked like this, but bigger:

strings := #(
'<A href="/VisualWorks/VisualWorks+WebServer+-+history">VisualWorks WebServer - history</A> 18:20:49 (ah1-p4id-56.advancedhosters.com)'
...
).

From there, it was a matter of finding the right page to revert to. This little snippet just pulled the urls out of that mess:

urls := OrderedCollection new.
base := 'http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu'.
wiki := '/VisualWorks'.
old := 'VERSION'.
rep := 'PROMOTE'.
strings do: [:each | | url |
	stream := each readStream.
	stream through: $".
	url := stream upTo: $".
	urls add: url].

From that, I created the page history urls for each spammed page:

histUrls := OrderedCollection new.
urls2 do: [:each |
	|  url |
	url := base, wiki, '/HISTORY', (each copyReplaceAll: '/VisualWorks' with: '').
	histUrls add: url].

Then, grabbing each page, I scanned down to the second "VERSION" string, grabbed the good version number, and created the appropriate URL to restore the page back to the way it should have been. I added in a delay so that I wasn't doing a DOS attack on the server:

fixUrls := OrderedCollection new.
histUrls do: [:each |
	| content stream next num url tail|
	Transcript show: 'Getting: ', each; cr.
	content := (HttpClient new get: each) contents.
	stream := content readStream.
	stream throughAll: 'VERSION/'.
	stream throughAll: 'VERSION/'.
	stream atEnd ifFalse: [
		next := stream upTo: $/.
		num := next asNumber.
		tail := (UnixFilename named: each) tail.
		url := base, wiki, '/PROMOTE/', num printString, '/', tail.
		fixUrls add: url].
	(Delay forSeconds: 1) wait].

Now, with the set of "fix" urls in hand, I just ran each of them - another delay for the same reason, and a catch for HTTP exceptions - that way, I could cache any pages that didn't get fixed due to transient network errors.

missed := OrderedCollection new.
fixUrls do: [:each |
	Transcript show: 'Fixing: ', each; cr.
	[HttpClient new get: each]
		on: HttpException
		do: [:ex | Transcript show: 'Could not do: ', each; cr.
			missed add: each.
			ex return].
	(Delay forSeconds: 1) wait].

Then, simply rinse, repeat for anything that got missed. All the spammed pages there have been restored, and I didn't have to manually visit each one.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Michael explains the AutoComplete goodie in VisualWorks:

Today's goodie review is about the AutoComplete package, by Travis Griggs - is there any sin this guy won't commit? (The answer to that is within the package: Goto in public store).

View the screencast here.

Technorati Tags: screencast

I spoke to David Buck about goings on in Smalltalk last night - you can grab the podcast here.

Today's Smalltalk Daily goes a little deeper on the GUI Builder - specifically, I start explaining how you wire fields on a GUI to attributes in a domain model.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

The Yankees have started their post-season march - Jeter (5 for 5!) led the way to a 8-4 win. As usual, the bullpen was something of an adventure. Farnsworth ended up pitching a quiet 8th inning, but he did manage to raise some tension by walking the first batter on 4 straight balls - and then throwing a fifth ball to the next batter.

Things settled down though, and Rivera came in for the 9th to shut things down. I'd like to see the Yankees dismiss Detroit in 3 - we'll see how that goes tonight.

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

RedMonk's Cote' has a great SOA summary here:

The questions I've started asking when I hear a story about how great SOA is -- how much better a customer's IT-scape is doing because it's now got "SOA Inside!" -- "compared to what?" That is, what were the alternatives? The snarky, between the lines question being, "what makes 'SOA' different than 'programming'"?

I especially like the way the final question cuts through the vendor fog in the SOA mudpit.

Technorati Tags: SOA

I rather like this tag line about DRM: Defective By Design. It sums up what's wrong with DRM in 3 words. Nice, neat, simple. I guess we'll have to expand those three words over to "Windows Genuine Advantage" now as well.

Ed Bott has been all over this story, and I caught the latest twists on another ZDNet story, by David Berlind, who quotes a news.com story:

Windows Vista will have new antipiracy technology that locks people out their PCs if the operating system isn't activated within 30 days after installation….If Vista is not activated with a legitimate product registration key in time, the system will run in "reduced functionality mode" until it is activated, said Thomas Lindeman, a senior product manager at Microsoft. In this mode, people will be able to use a Web browser for up to an hour, after which time the system will log them out, he said….The new technology is part of Microsoft's new "Software Protection Platform," which the company plans to announce on Wednesday.

As David says, you better hope your doctor's pc doesn't get flagged as non-genuine on operating day. The problem with this kind of *cough* feature *cough* is the triggering conditions - any false positive is a disaster waiting to happen, and anyone who's been around software for the last few decades knows that no hardware/software test is 100% reliable.

Microsoft is trodding the well known path followed by most mature companies: they got big, their initial visionaries have left, and they're getting increasingly stupid about preserving existing revenues.

Technorati Tags: copy protection

Scoble draws the wrong conclusion:

It reminded me of the time when I worked the counter at LZ Premiums in San Jose. A guy came in with ratty jeans and a T-shirt. I treated him the same way I treated all the suits that came in. He noted that and bought a nice camera system. Later, after he kept coming back in and buying a lot of stuff, I learned he was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Said that I was the first sales guy who treated him well, which is why he brought his business back to me.

Last night I saw it again. I wore my standard jeans and T-shirt to a press meeting hosted by Become.com (a cool shopping search engine, they released a research report that found that people liked their shopping search engine better than Google). Everyone else was dressed up.

It's not a "statement" to go to a nice place dressed down. I used to think so, when I was in my teens and 20s, but I grew up. I don't much care for suits and ties, so I try to avoid going to places where they'll be required - but I wear them when they are expected. Thinking it's somehow "speaking truth to power" to dress down when a suit is expected is just childish.

Now, I'm hardly perfect on that score, but in my case, it's due to a different personality flaw: I just don't pay enough attention. More than once, I've had to buy a tie after arriving somewhere by plane :)

I was listening the latest Gillmor Gang (episodes 1 and 2 of "Midtail Gang"), and boy - Calacanis is just ripping into PodShow and the VC's backing it. Can't say I disagree with him, but it will be interesting to see whether the management at PodShow gets twitchy about that.

A lot of the recent gangs have turned me off; I can only take so much of Gillmor tweaking Arrington before it gets tiresome. When he lays off that crap - or, his target isn't present - the show can be interesting. I'll have to see what the other three parts bring to the table.

In today's Smalltalk Daily, I go over something simple, yet very important for new users: how to save and restart an image.

Update: Fixed the link.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Jonathan Schwartz (Sun CEO) notes that the regulations on transparency don't really take the internet into account, and asks the SEC to start doing so. Tim Bray chimes in with a few technical suggestions. This is the kind of forward thinking I'd like to see more of in this industry; without it (and with heavyweight stuff like SarbOx), there are growing reasons to not take a company public.

Gordon Weakliem makes a point that should have been obvious, but wasn't (at least to me):

As someone pointed out in the comments, you want this information to be accepted and managed by a third party (e.g. a regulatory agency), not managed by the company itself, at least for the financial filings. How about for press releases and the like - not-regulatory filings, but still material data? For similar reasons, I don't think that simply publishing to the web is sufficient in itself. I can name at least one popular blogger who's been taken to task for modifying or deleting postings and has been accused of "rewriting history" for doing that. There's certainly the potential for that if a corporate weblog were the exclusive source for those releases.

This is in reference to my earlier post on this stuff.

Dan Ingalls and David Griswold would like to do something with the open sourcing of the Strongtalk VM, and are inviting Smalltalkers to talk about it.

I was looking at this post from Steve Rubel, who links to some FeedBurner stats: apparently, the average podcast feed they have sports 70 subscribers. I was curious about the take-up on the podcasts and screencasts I've been doing, so I went to logs - and turned up some encouraging numbers.

Over the last week, there have been 181 unique accesses to my screencast specific feed, and 76 unique IP accesses that have come back at least once. On the podcast side, the numbers are 224 and 80, respectively. For the actual podcasts, the download numbers have been ranging between a low of around 40, and a high of almost 400.

I'm pretty happy with those numbers, given that I've just started.

Technorati Tags: podcast, screencast

BattleStar Galactica returns this evening, and that's going to give me a headache - the Yankees are playing too. Thank goodness for the PVRs...

In today's Smalltalk Daily, I take a look at reading files - which also involves a brief look at streams. We'll use that knowledge next week to read a file and present it in a GUI.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Michael reviews RBSUnit Extensions, a package that integrates unit testing into the VisualWorks system code browser. You can view the screencast here.

Technorati Tags: screencast

The NYC STUG will be hearing about building shrink wrapped software in Smalltalk:

Mark Pirogovsky, a frequent visitor to NYC Smalltalk , will provide us with a presentation on his experiences building shrink wrapped Smalltalk applications. He has actually worked on three large shrink wrapped ST apps.

The meeting will be held on Wednesday October 18th, 2006.

More details on our blog.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

eWeek has taken notice of podcasting, and has a write up of how it's being used by some large entities: IBM and MassMutual, for instance. Those two seem to be mainly doing internal communications and education, where the benefit is clear: for a far flung company, it's easier to put information out as an mp3 than it is to organize a cross timezone conference call.

My podcasting falls more into the Marcom area that eWeek mentions: I'm promoting Cincom Smalltalk (and Smalltalk in general) with the podcasts and screencasts I've been doing. It's a good way of getting information out that can be used asynchronously - and it's also inexpensive. My total investment to date has been downloading free software, buying a decent headset microphone, and buying a digital audio recorder for use in face to face recording.

It's all pretty simple, although audio editing does take time. I can definitely see where video podcasting would be a large step up in terms of work.

Technorati Tags: marketing

PR Differently reports that the WSJ has Google buying YouTube:

Journal is reporting Google might acquire You-tube, a deal worth a reported $1.6 billion dollars.

Hmm - if that's true, we'll get to see whether Calacanis and Cuban are correct: their theory is that any deep pocketed acquirer of YouTube will be sued over copyright infringement immediately. Now, Google could probably withstand that, but the question is: why would they want to? Has Google already gone to the RIAA and MPAA and made nice ahead of this deal?

Update: Interesting: Calacanis thinks Google would be a good home for YouTube, and lays out some reasonable thoughts on why he thinks so

Technorati Tags: video, YouTube, Google

You can tell it's a commodity market when you can buy it as a store brand down at the supermarket. Tesco anti-virus, anyone?

Technorati Tags: software

Yesterday's loss was a good game - 4-3. Tonight? Not only did the Yankees get taken out 6-0, they got shut out by Kenny Rogers. Kenny Rogers? Back when he pitched for the Yankees, I dreaded every trip he took to the mound. Either he just had the game of his life, or the entire Yankee lineup took sedatives before the game. What a complete breakdown.

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees