Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

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

I don't have any iTunes metadata associated with that feed, but the enclosures will get picked up. I've subscribed myself in iTunes to test it, and it works fine.

Technorati Tags: iTunes

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.

Technorati Tags: marketing

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

Doc Searls wants to invert the CRM relationship and have customers in control of of more of the relationship:

We need to equip the customer with something that facilitates relating to vendors - and takes some of the relationship burden off the vendors as well.

As he notes elsewhere in his post, a lot of the problem is that we (customers, that is) don't always know what we want. Think back - before mp3 players in general (and iPods in particular) broke onto the scene, who knew they wanted one? There are plenty of products like that, and I see a real problem with having prospective customers voice their inchoate desires.

Additionally, most of the time we don't really want a relationship with a vendor. For instance: I bought a nice digital audio recorder (hand held, for doing in person podcasts) over the summer. I shopped around online, picked what I wanted off Amazon, and ordered it. At no point in time did I have any interest in forming a "relationship" with Olympus (the vendor I ultimately bought from.

But wait - what if I'm in the market again 2 years from now? Well, I barely have the patience to retain critical business information I'm being paid to keep - I'm not about to expend effort to maintain some kind of VRM system. Heck, I couldn't be bothered to keep a calendar until Google made it virtually effortless. I see where Doc is going, but I have doubts as to how many people are willing to expend the effort to get there. Not because it's a bad idea; simply because it would take effort...

Technorati Tags: advertising

Patrick Logan notes that many people are already using images, and just don't realize it:

But the thing is *all* my languages are now image based. Ever since I started using VMWare, my entire machine's state is saved and restored, rolled forward with snapshots, linked and branched, etc.

Also, consider your the hibernation feature of your laptop: that's nothing more than an image snapshot as well.

Bryce Kampjes just announced a 2 day Smalltalk event at the JP Morgan offices in London:

We're holding another Smalltalk Users Group on Friday the 20th with a Camp Smalltalk on Saturday the 21st of October. Andy Bower will be speaking on Friday along with John Aspinall on ReStore.

I'll be doing something on Exupery at the Camp Smalltalk and Felix will be working with Smalltalk/X. Other projects are welcome, please add them to the list.

Details on the Wiki pages below:

• http://www.xpdeveloper.net/xpdwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=SmalltalkUK20061020
• http://www.xpdeveloper.net/xpdwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=SmalltalkUK20061021

If you plan to come please RSPV on the either web page at least 2 days before so we can tell corporate security to let you in the building.

Sounds like a good time.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, camp smalltalk

I'm reading "The Confident Hope of a Miracle", which is about the Spanish Armada's failed attack on England in 1588. There was a passage describing the Armada's leave-taking of Spain which reminded me of a lot of the software failures you read about:

As the vast Armada set sail on the afternoon tide, the Pope's special emissary to Lisbon sent a report to the Vatican of a conversation he had held with one of the highest officer's in the Spanish fleet.

"If you meet the English Armada in the Channel do you expect to win the battle?"

"Of Course"

"How can you be sure?"

"It's very simple. It is well known that we fight in God's cause, so when we meet the English, God will surely arrange matters so that we can grapple and board them, either by sending some strange freak of weather, or, more likely, just by depriving the English of their wits. If we can come to close quarters, Spanish valour and Spanish steel (and the great masses of soldiers we shall have on board) will make our victory certain. But unless God helps us by a miracle, the English, who have faster and handier ships than ours and many more long-range guns, and who know their advantage just as well as we do, will never close with us at all but stand aloof and knock us to pieces with their culverins without our being able to do them any serious hurt. So, we are sailing against England in the confident hope of a miracle"

If your business or project plan resembles that last paragraph, then it's probably time to pack it in. I'd wager that a lot of "web 2.0" business plans are setting sail in the confident hope of a miracle.

I think Peter Wright needs to look up the term "transparency". He responds to Jason Calacanis' attack on PayPerPost by saying this:

So, let's put this in perspective. Jason's company markets solutions to advertisers targeting blogs. Presumably it costs quite a lot of money to get your product on Engadget, while we can place your product pretty much anywhere you want for anything from 20 bucks up. So, nothing to gain? How about badmouthing the competition? WebLogs Inc markets products through blogs, so does PayPerPost. Difference? We're cheaper.

Hmm. Maybe Jason needs to use smaller words when he talks to Peter. Here's the difference:

Jason..... isn't.... hiding.... his.... affiliations

There, spacing the words might help Peter grasp the issue. PayPerPost pays people to say nice things about a product, but without those people revealing that they are being paid. It's not at all like what Calacanis is doing - last time I checked, it was quite obvious that he's being paid by Netscape. I'm on a smaller stage here, but hey, I'm doing the same thing - promoting Cincom Smalltalk as part of my job as Product Manager.

What PayPerPost is doing is like Product Placement in tv and movies - except the blog audience doesn't know that the products are being placed. Back when Willow opened up her Apple notebook on Buffy, we all knew that Apple was paying for that spot. With their bloggers, we don't. It's like having an acquaintance tell you to see some new movie, and finding out later that he had been slipped $20 by the studio to say nice things about it.

It's spam. Nothing more, nothing less. And it has every bit as much value.

Technorati Tags: advertising, marketing, spam

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we step back from the UI Painter for a moment and build a domain model first. This involves a bit of instruction about the file and stream libraries in VW.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Well, here's a sign of change in the music business: Tower Records is gone:

After a lengthy auction stretching over two days, a federal bankruptcy judge on Friday approved the sale of Sacramento-based Tower Records to Great American Group, which plans to liquidate the music retailer.

I think this is a combination of factors. First, retailers like Target and Wal-Mart started pushing the retail price down. Then, online stores like Amazon made impulse buying easier online. Finally, Apple added the music store, and made instant gratification possible. Left out in the cold: old style retailers in thrall to the high prices they had become accustomed to.

On the other hand, I know my wife will miss Tower - she really liked their online store.

Thomas Hawk has some issues with the mainstream media, and he makes this point about their tech reporting:

When they do write about tech it's mostly superficial puff pieces that are boring and designed to be read by the person who doesn't really understand technology.

The thing is, it's hardly just technology that gets treated like that. I notice that the typical coverage of anything that I know something about tends to suck (the main exception being sports). This is a general media problem, not simply a problem with tech reporting. The big media companies think that you can have a generic reporter cover any story; it hasn't really occurred to them that subject area experts might be useful.

Technorati Tags: reporting

I released a number of fixes and enhancements for BottomFeeder and the posting tool this morning - I added the ability to add iTunes tags to specific posts, and to have feeds with that information attached. Along the way, a few bugs cropped up, and I just got them fixed - grab the updates if you're interested - things do work fine without them if you're not that concerned.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I guess I have to classify this as media - I was listening to TWit this afternoon while jogging, and the TWiT crew - especially Leo - had nothing good to say about the (increasingly credible) rumors that Google is acquiring YouTube. I'm still wondering about the lawsuit impact - Google has deep pockets, and there are a lot of content owners clamoring for bits of YouTube's hide. On the other hand, Google isn't filled with dummies - they've got to have a plan for that.

Back to the main bit. This was first reported by Mike Arrington, on TechCrunch. Based on all the chatter today (NY Times, FT, etc), this is starting to look real. So I had to laugh when I heard Laporte taking these reports to task, saying that they were all based "on a blogger" - he didn't even bother to give the source. Sounds to me like Arrington had his antennas properly attuned for this one - and it looks like Laporte might want to issue an apology. For chuckles, here's the show notes for episode 72:

Vista ship dates, Windows Genuine disadvantage, and why Google will never buy YouTube.

We'll see...

Scoble points to the press release - Google is buying YouTube. Looks like "everyone's" assumptions about YouTube (including mine) were flat wrong; they got their payout. As noted by TechCrunch, their investors got a hell of a payday too.

For lots of details - head on over to TechCrunch now. All I can say is - wow. I seriously did not expect this.

Technorati Tags: YouTube, Google