Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

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

This week, Michael and I were joined by David Buck. We discussed the Strongtalk VM, and what (if any) impact it will have on the Smalltalk community. You can grab the mp3 file here. In other news, we learned that Michael can foresee the future - you'll have to listen in to get that :)

This is for listing in the Odeo directory
My Odeo Channel (odeo/1affb33805715223)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, strongtalk

It's that time again. BottomFeeder downloads went at a good clip: 234 per day. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Update	546
Windows	519
Mac X	151
Linux x86	120
CE ARM	69
HPUX	40
Mac 8/9	38
Solaris	34
Sources	27
Windows98/ME	19
Linux Sparc	18
AIX	18
CE x86	14
SGI	12
Linux PPC	10
ADUX	7

Next, the HTML page accesses for the week:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	48.8%
Internet Explorer	36.2%
Other	4.9%
Planet Smalltalk	4.5%
MSN Bot	3%
Opera	1.5%
Megite	1.1%

About the same as usual, but overall traffic is up. The RSS stuff:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
BottomFeeder	19.3%
Mozilla	18.6%
Internet Explorer	9.2%
Net News Wire	7.6%
Planet Smalltalk	7%
BlogLines	6.9%
Other	5.1%
Safari RSS	4.5%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.9%
NewsGator	2.9%
RSS Bandit	1.7%
Akregator	1.5%
News Fire	1.2%
RSS 2 Email	1.1%
Opera	1%
Liferea	1%
JetBrains	1%
SharpReader	1%
Python	1%
Jakarta	1%
MSN Bot	1%
Java	1%

Must be more IE 7 out there, because IE usage against RSS/Atom is climbing.

The Bleeding Edge has a nice video review of the Zune online - if you're in the market, it's worth watching.

Technorati Tags: Zune, iPod

If you want to subscribe to my podcast feed, and have your podcatcher (for example, iTunes) pick up the podcast, simply subscribe using this url:

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/blog_podcast.xml

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Blaine Buxton reflects on why Smalltalk failed to cross over into the mainstream:

The first part of the quote is right. Smalltalk is too much change for most developers to accept. You have a new syntax to learn, a new environment to learn, and a completely different way of thinking. It's too much for a lot of developers. It's human nature. An image-less Smalltalk would have a nicer entry point since developers love their editors (you spend a lot of time there and well, when you learn one well, you don't want to leave it). The last part of the quote really hurt. I see myself as a lot of things. I see myself as rubyist, a smalltalker, a java programmer, and a bunch more. But, I can see where the arrogance of certain Smalltalkers can detract from the true message. It makes me sad. Smalltalk is a cool language to program in and I love talking about it. But, I know it has warts like anything else. I hope no one ever sees me as an arrogant Smalltalker. I want them to see me as passionate and thoughtful.

Much of that is true, although the stupidity of ParcPlace during the 90's should not be under-estimated. It was well nigh impossible to get Smalltalk inexpensively (much less free) for a very long time.

Part of the problem of "freeing" Smalltalk from the image is that Smalltalk is - to a very large extent - defined by the image. Sure, Vista Smalltalk is going without one, but that's new, and we'll have to see how that goes. Without the "live object" feel of an image, I'm not really sure that you have a full bore Smalltalk.

Technorati Tags: development

Anytime you go into a game with Jared Wright as your "do or die" guy, you have a problem. I thought before this game that the Tigers will take this game (and the series) if they scored first, and - here we are in the second inning, and it's already 3-0 Detroit.

The Yankees are flat. There just doesn't seem to be any gas in the tank at all - not unlike the 2004 LCS with Boston, game 7. They might come back, but at this point, I really don't think so.

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

Well, this is interesting. Via RabbitBites, I came across this YouTube profile. Fascinating data there - 24,000+ videos watched in 1 week of being a member? That plays into a few questions raised by RabbitBites and by TechDirt - are the numbers for YouTube to be believed? Makes me go hmmm.

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I have to hand it to the Tigers - they really want to win. The Yankees aren't just flat, they are gasping for air. The pitching is horrid, and the batters are chasing anything that's in the neighborhood of the plate. Unless something weird happens in the next few innings, this could easily end up being a laugher for the Tigers.

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

The pounding the Tigers just handed the Yankees shows something simple: A lineup full of power hitters is a nice thing - until it dawns on you that the pitchers have to go for nine innings. Over the course of a full season, the bats were lively enough, in the post season - especially in a short series - good pitching is key.

The Yankees need to trade away a few of those power hitters and get some young arms that don't suck. If I see Jared Wright in a Yankee uniform next April, I think I'll just scream. It's like the 80's all over again...

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

While I liked the cartoon Steve Yegge used to illustrate static typing, I have a question about today's post (and about his last one on Agile, for that matter):

Does this amount to anything more than argument by assertion? It's long, and he makes some points I agree with, but in all the verbiage about how agile development is just a superstition, I don't see any actual evidence being brought forth. Does this differ much from what he accuses the agile crowd of? Oh, and the cartoon:

Technorati Tags: agile, superstition, xp