Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

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

Scoble lays out why you would want a PS3 (with the price caveat):

If you are like me, and have a 60-inch HDTV, and want the latest gear, you should be at a store tomorrow putting in an order for a Sony PS3. They go on sale tomorrow YouNEWB reports . At up to $600, though, these aren’t gonna be cheap Christmas gifts.

And then why you might balk:

I already have an Xbox. I’m not sure I’ll get a Playstation yet, though. I don’t have enough time to watch the HD-DVD’s that Netflix has been sending me, so don’t think I’ll need BlueRay.

There's the problem. I don't have an XBox 360, but I am planning to buy a Wii. After that, if I get a second system it will be an XBox 360. The two of those combined are going to come in under the price of the PS3. After that, I seriously doubt that I'll be looking to add another console to the mix.

Technorati Tags: ps3, games

Today's Smalltalk Daily goes over the ListBox widget in the VW UI Painter. We hook it up to the simple file reader we created yesterday, so we can view the results.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

If you have trouble installing on Linux, follow the advice given here - install csh, then run the installer. In the meantime, that issue has been addressed going forward (i.e., starting with the next release).

Technorati Tags: VisualWorks, smalltalk

Here's why Google isn't afraid of being relentlessly sued by content owners over YouTube: they are (and have been) negotiating deals with them:

SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced a strategic business relationship designed to make the music company's expansive music video collection available for online streaming at no cost to users. Starting this month, users can watch thousands of videos from SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT on Google Video. In the coming months, users will also be able to access content from SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT artists through Google's partner websites in its AdSense network.

I would not be at all surprised to see a bunch of these sorts of agreements coming in the near term. It looks like Google has more than just a smart tech staff.

Technorati Tags: YouTube, Google

I submitted the podcast feed here to the iTunes music store earlier today, and got notified that it was accepted. That's pretty cool - it should show up in the podcast/technology section sometime in the next few hours. In the meantime, you can subscribe via the Advanced>>Subscribe to podcast menu pick in iTunes, using the link above. The feed has all the appropriate iTunes meta data now, too.

This is good news:

Joe Torre will remain as manager of the New York Yankees, finally getting the word from owner George Steinbrenner after the team's surprise elimination from the playoffs last weekend.

Torre is not the problem. The problem is the lack of stable pitching, and I'd be willing to point that finger at the Randy Johnson acquisition. How many young arms could have been brought along and developed for the salary Johnson gets? Johnson is my age, for gosh sakes, and that's not a good thing for long term development.

The Yankees need to apply some of the Moneyball lessons to their pitching staff.

Technorati Tags: yankees, baseball

Ramon Leon explains why he likes Seaside - and Smalltalk - so much:

Seaside lets me work in Smalltalk, at every level, all the way from programmatic generation of the HTML and Javascript to configuration of the application. No HTML, XML, XSLT, or SQL is necessary to build a web application, just simple, pure Smalltalk. Programming’s never been more fun!

I do most of the work for this server in Smalltalk, too. It's a Web Toolkit (VW) app server rather than Seaside, but I implement nearly everything at the Smalltalk level. Sure, I have CSS and HTML pages, but those are templates, and I don't really spend much time on them. It is a real pleasure to be dealing with Smalltalk code all the way down :)

Technorati Tags: seaside

This is shades of a major Stargate SG-1 story line: replicators are trashing Second Life:

The weapon of choice for citizen-created content with grid-wide takedown intent is the self-replicating object script. These scripts cause objects to go forth and multiply in such an enthusiastic fashion that SL spends nearly all its efforts on the “go forth and multiply” work, leaving little time for ordinary avatars' running, dance animations, flirting, role-playing, buying, and selling. While some might argue that the social interactions can always wait for another time, those trying to run a business in SL have to make their nut by covering at least their land tier payments, and any sort of downtime is a serious problem.

I find this to be too amusing for words :)

Technorati Tags: second life, replicators

I've made this point before, but on a small scale (i.e., in discussing how many people actually contribute to a Wiki):

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

It apparently needs to be made over and over again - recall that Digg acted stunned by the idea that a small number of people were pushing most of the Diggs.

Go ahead and follow the link to Jakob Nielsen's site for data on participation rates.

Technorati Tags: social software

Thomas Hawk points out why people will keep using Bittorrent: doing things legally runs you smack into the wall, preventing you from watching content that you have legal access to:

So here's one more reason not to buy a TiVo Series 3. CNET's John P. Falcone has an article out about a glitch that prevents you from watching HBO with your TiVo Series 3 when using a JVC receiver.

"But when we moved onto another program--Revenge of the Sith, recorded off of HBO-HD--the screen suddenly went gray, with a TiVo warning emblazoned across the bottom: "Viewing is not permitted using the TiVo Digital Media Recorder. Try another TV input." Several other programs--Empire of the Sun (HDNet Movies), Simone (HBO-HD), and episodes of Battlestar Galactica (Universal HD) all yielded the same result."

The RIAA and MPAA scream about piracy losses, and then they set up stupid situations like this - which pretty much invite you to commit piracy just so that you can see stuff you paid for. What possible end does this achieve? HBO doesn't show ads anyway, so it's not like the time shifting does them any harm. This is just raw stupidity for the sake of raw stupidity.

Technorati Tags: stupidity

Doc Searls asks the salient question:

Forget about pilfered programs from Fox and all the BigCo jive. What would YouTube have been worth to Google if the user - generated stuff wasn't there?

Head on over to his place for his take on why Google Video never really took off, and why YouTube did. I was a skeptic on YouTube's chances, but I get what Doc is saying. Now, anyway. Six months ago, not so much :)

Technorati Tags: YouTube, Google

In Today's Smalltalk Daily, we stay with the simple UI we built yesterday, and add a dialog to request the filename (instead of hardcoding it into the application).

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Via Ramon Leon, I ran across this great write up on Enterprise development, and why it sucks eggs. It's things like this that make me happy that I don't live in that world - the software I build is built my way, and any problems are my own fault.

Technorati Tags: IT

Read/Write Web explains why 2007 will be the breakout year for RSS, and it comes down to two things - first, Internet Explorer 7:

Despite the issues with RSS implementation in IE7 which Marshall Kirkpatrick rightly pointed out - and Dave Winer agreed with - IE7 still represents a major milestone for RSS. It will almost certainly be the most used browser in the world within 12 months

Don't underestimate the impact IE 7 will have here. It's still the most widely used browser, and it will stay that way for the forseeable future. I'm already seeing an uptick in IE usage in my logs (on the RSS side) due to the slow rollout of IE 7 beta. This is one thing that will help make RSS mainstream. The other - Outlook:

"Work with RSS Subscriptions from within Office Outlook 2007. You can now fully subscribe to and interact with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds right from Office Outlook 2007, the most natural place to manage this kind of information. It’s easy to get started adding RSS feeds using the RSS Subscriptions home page within Office Outlook 2007."

Personally, I hate Outlook a lot, and won't work with it (I tried recently - I still hate it) - but I'm an outlier on this. Outlook is used by tons of people, and having built-in RSS support is going to really drive adoption, IMHO.

Ralph Johnson explains what patterns are, and what they aren't.

Technorati Tags: design, design patterns

Threadwatch claims to have a source on this:

GOOG is looking at Facebook at a 2.3bil price. This could be a total joke on their part, but the source is solid.

Hmm. Another all stock deal, or is this just nonsense? I've been hearing a lot about Facebook on CNet's Buzz out Loud podcast, but haven't paid much attention. There is a parallel with the YouTube deal though: Google had video, but YouTube had gotten marketshare. Here, Google has Orkut, but again: Facebook has the eyeballs.

Update: From the comments, I found Jeremy Warner's skeptical take on the YouTube acquisition. I have a problem with his column though, based on this assertion:

So far, so positive. Yet there is also a more sinister reason why Google is buying YouTube. It is to do with the fact that the two have a common set of business values in the sense that neither seems to care a fig about the law of copyright. Both rely on the use of free content to drive their business. They therefore have next to no cost, or at least one so marginal that it wouldn't be recognised by any traditional media company.

We all know about YouTube's copyright issues, but Google? What is he talking about? The news aggregation case, perhaps? Google's book search (which seems to lead to higher sales; go figure)? He doesn't explain, either because he's engaged in hand waving, or thinks it's too obvious to bother with. I'd like to know what he's thinking.

Technorati Tags: Google, web2.0, copyright

Late last spring, when I got my cholesterol and triglyceride levels from my doctor, I realized that I was going to have to change my eating habits. The constant acid reflux should have been a hint, too (my wife brought that up more than once). Looking at my diet, I had been eating tons of junk - potato chips, fries - and some stuff that wasn't necessarily junk, but that I shouldn't eat a lot of - pasta and bread.

I also started making more time to exercise, and I've increased my daily jog from 20 minutes to 45+. Importantly, I've made sure to carve out time for exercise while I've been on the road, too - something I had stopped doing. The results have been pretty good - I've dropped about 20 pounds, I feel a lot better, the acid reflux is gone, and - more importantly - the cholesterol and triglyceride numbers dropped to safe levels.

This came to mind because a friend of mine had a friend of his (acquaintance of mine) die of a sudden heart attack last week. He was still in his 30's, a decade younger than me. That's sobering news, and made me realize that taking better care of myself isn't just about better fitting clothes.

Technorati Tags: health

Peter Fisk's Vista Smalltalk is getting more attention.

That's the title of the new book I just picked up:

I've got a fascination with the Civil War period, and I liked "Battle Cry of Freedom", an earlier work by McPherson - he recommends this book by Jennifer Weber. This one looks very interesting as well. Here's the topic:

If Civil War battlefields saw vast carnage, the Northern home-front was itself far from tranquil. Fierce political debates set communities on edge, spurred secret plots against the Union, and triggered widespread violence, such as the New York City draft riots. And at the heart of all this turmoil stood Northern anti-war Democrats, nicknamed "Copperheads." Now, Jennifer L. Weber offers the first full-length portrait of this powerful faction to appear in almost half a century. Weber reveals how the Copperheads came perilously close to defeating Lincoln and ending the war in the South's favor. Indeed, by the summer of 1864, they had grown so strong that Lincoln himself thought his defeat was "exceedingly likely." Passionate defenders of civil liberties and states' rights--and often virulent racists--the Copperheads deplored Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, his liberal interpretation of the Constitution, and, most vehemently, his moves toward emancipation. Weber reveals how the battle over these issues grew so heated, particularly in the Midwest, that Northerners feared their neighbors would destroy their livestock, burn their homes, even kill them. Indeed, some Copperheads went so far as to conspire with Confederate forces and plan armed insurrections, including an attempt to launch an uprising during the Democratic convention in Chicago. Finally, Weber illuminates the role of Union soldiers, who, furious at Copperhead attacks on the war effort, moved firmly behind Lincoln. The soldiers' support for the embattled president kept him alive politically in his darkest times, and their victories on the battlefield secured his re-election. Disgraced after the war, the Copperheads melted into the shadows of history. Here, Jennifer L. Weber illuminates their dramatic story. Packed with sharp observation and fresh interpretations, Copperheads is a gripping account of the fierce dissent that Lincoln called "the fire in the rear."

I'm looking forward to this book.

The podcasts are available via iTunes now:

I've not been able to find it directly; only via the URL they sent me (which launches iTunes). It should end up being in the "Technology" section of podcasts, eventually.

Technorati Tags: iTunes, smalltalk

Scoble doesn't paint the full picture here. Sure, it's easy to get credit in the U.S., and it's easy to buy a lot of expensive stuff. The problem is the debt load you end up building up:

Let me tell you how it works in the US of A. You walk into Best Buy. Ask for a credit application. Fill it out. They approve you for $10,000 on the spot (as long as you’ve paid all your credit card bills on time). You head over to the big screen department, pick out your $4,000 big screen and your $600 Playstation 3, and a $500 HD-DVD drive. Then you pay something like $140 per month in payments.

And the interest rate for these on the spot loans? In the neighborhood of 20%. Sure, you might get 12 months same as cash, but that's a bet the store is making with you - the bet being that you won't actually pay it all off in 12 months. If you don't, that 20% gets applied retroactively to the entire original amount, and then monthly to the revolving balance after that.

Here's a better idea: if you can't afford to spend that money upfront in disposable income (i.e., cash) - then don't. You'll be a whole lot happier at the end of each month when the bills come rolling in.

Technorati Tags: debt

Today's Smalltalk Daily extends the LineReader class to handle field separators. While doing that, we get to see how Test Driven Development helps catch problems early.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I have to say I agree with Jon Udell here - the audio editing piece of podcasting is time consuming, and trying to get a decently normalized sound is hard:

Here's the deal, from my perspective as an audio newbie now plunged into the deep end. As my podcasting method has evolved, I've settled into two modes of editing. In one mode, I refine the content of the recording. That involves fine-grained internal editing -- trimming out excessive ums, uhs, and pauses -- as well as coarse-grained edits that remove less interesting passages in order to focus on the most essential parts of the conversation. Applying both methods typically reduces the final product to somewhere between 70% and 90% of the original length and, in my opinion, sharpens the result in a way that's well worth the investment of time. I've always enjoyed this kind of editing in the textual realm, and it turns out that I enjoy it in the audio realm as well.

The other mode involves the purely technical work of taming sometimes-noisy phone lines and evening out audio levels. As I've become more sensitive to audio quality, I've found myself spending more and more time on the leveling process. It's not only needed to balance the caller and the callee. There can be a ton of loudness variation just within the caller's track. When you start fiddling with that, you're on a slippery slope that leads straight into a pit of drudgery.

Like Jon, I stumbled across the Levelator (in my case, it was by listening to TWiT). It's a primitive looking tool, but it does the job - you put in audio that's all over the map, and you end up with something that's nicely normalized. There are artifacts - the tool sometimes picks up ambient noise and levels that, but I can see that in Audacity easily enough and chop it out. It's a very nice tool for this task.

Technorati Tags: audio, audio editing

There's the obvious "eyeballs to ads" thing, but this snippet from Slashdot makes an interesting point:

Google's core business model revolves around "fair use" and similar provisions of copyright law. I think they are most vulnerable in this area-- look at Belgium. So Google needed to buy YouTube for a couple of reasons related to this.

The first is because YouTube's business model also revolves around many of the same "fair use" provisions, and if YouTube loses its upcoming court cases, the fallout could fatally poison Google's business model. It would be very hard for Google to immunize itself from any judgments against YouTube that changed the interpretation of copyright law. Purchasing YouTube allows Google to directly counter such an attack with all its resources. It also decreases the likelihood of such an attack, since all the ambulance chasers who were smacking their lips in anticipation of an easy meal from YouTube's carcass are now slinking away, looking for easier prey that won't be able to fend them off for years with delaying tactics.

Under that theory, Google is a net loser if an (un-acquired) YouTube gets sued into oblivion, setting ugly fair use precedents on their way down. This way, Google gets to make their case (with their own high priced lawyers) if it comes to that. Note that Google went to visit Fox (MySpace) yesterday; they have a lot more clout in that meeting than YouTube would have had.

So to summarize: the YouTube buy wasn't just forward marketing, it was a defensive ploy. I might just buy that.

Technorati Tags: YouTube, Google

Joel reviews "Beyond Java", and then makes a good point about the hurdles you face as a software developer:

Programming consists of overcoming two things: accidental difficulties, things which are difficult because you happen to be using inadequate programming tools, and things which are actually difficult , which no programming tool or language is going to solve. An example of an accidental difficulty is manual memory management, e.g. “malloc” and “free,” or the singleton classes people create in Java because they don’t have top level functions. An example of something which is actually difficult is dealing with the subtle interactions between different parts of a program, for example, figuring out all the implications of a new feature that you just added.

The key is to try and get out from under the accidental difficulties. Manifest Typing is one of those:

Although Stevey [ed: Yegge] lists lots of accidental difficulties in Java, when you read the book, you will notice a theme, which seems to be that it’s explicit typing, where the programmer is asked to declare the type of things, that leads to most of the problems. For example, the inability to express data in Java code is mostly just a side effect of the requirement that types be declared explicitly. Yes, there are other problems in Java, but this is The Big Hairy Problem right at the heart.

To a historian, it’s starting to look like type declarations are one of those accidental difficulties that good programming languages can eliminate. Beyond Java is a good summary of the arguments and worth reading.

I certainly agree - I think the "Farside" cartoon Yegge used the other day is as good a summary of the problems as any.

Technorati Tags: static typing, dynamic typing

Here's a great plan - one that could only be dreamed up by a set of geniuses running a spam outfit:

• Get Spamhaus to blacklist your domain due to the enormous volume of crap you spew out
• Be mad that you get blocked, and sue Spamhaus in a jurisdiction they don't reside in
• Noticing that your judgement for millions of bucks didn't have any impact (gee, the out of country company ignored you - shocker), whine to a federal judge about it
• To cap the whole thing, watch ICANN say "I can't"

The statement from ICANN is just delicious:

Even if ICANN were properly brought before the court in this matter, which ICANN has not been, ICANN cannot comply with any order requiring it to suspend or place a client hold on Spamhaus.org or any specific domain name because ICANN does not have either the ability or the authority to do so. Only the Internet registrar with whom the registrant has a contractual relationship - and in certain instances the Internet registry - can suspend an individual domain name.

Heh. For some reason, the term "tool" keeps coming to mind in reference to the angry spammers...

Technorati Tags: spam, stupidity

If you go into the iTunes music store, move to Podcasts, and then do a Power Search - under title, use Smalltalk - the podcasts I've been doing here will show up, and you'll be able to subscribe straight from iTunes. Pretty cool.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at how to customize the display of an object in a user interface component - including the difference between customizing for a UI, and customizing for an inspector

The 2006 Users Conference in Frankfurt, Germany is getting closer - you can get all the details by clicking on the user conference icon to the left (or the one below, if you are reading this via the feed).

I'll see you there - check out the updated agenda, and be sure to register.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom, users conference

Grady Booch has a nice post up on the difference between SOA and Snake Oil Architecture. I particularlay like this:

Stripped away of all the hype, a Service-Oriented Architecture is essentially a variant of well-proven message-passing architectural patterns. The variance comes in the form that services are cleverly designed to take advantage of the Web-centric infrastructure that pervades many organizations: services allow you to send and receive semantically rich messages through firewalls.

Smalltalk arrived on the message passing frontier a long, long time ago. In a lot of ways, HTTP messaging resembles what happens in Smalltalk - you send the server a message, and if it doesn't understand, it sends you back an appropriate HTTP error message (kind of like a DNU in Smalltalk). The server doesn't crash, it doesn't throw up its hands and stop; rather, it awaits the next message.

This kind of architecture has to be flexible, and growable at runtime. Smalltalk has been that way since the beginning, and HTTP servers operate in much the same way - you can add messages that they'll understand in well understood, dynamic ways. It's kind of nice to see people understanding this strength :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, development, web%20services

Looks like Seaside is getting some attention:

Stephane Ducassé notes that Seaside downloads on SqueakSource have crossed the 200,000 downloads threshold. Rick Flower adds that this figure does not include the downloads of the VisualWorks port of Seaside, which is hosted on the Cincom public repository.

You can keep up with Squeak news at Weekly Squeak, and subscribe to their feed here.

Technorati Tags: seaside

Cote (of Redmonk) has a phote that really shows RSS evangelism in action. Who knew that RSS had monks :)

Technorati Tags: RSS

Here are the first moves in the Google/YouTube copyright thing - Time-Warner is making noises about infringement (now that there are deep pockets involved):

Dick Parsons, Time Warner’s chairman and CEO, says he plans to pursue copyright complaints against YouTube. Time Warner owns AOL, Warner Brothers, Time Inc, HBO, Time Warner Cable, Home Box Office, New Line Cinema and Turner Broadcasting System, but is no longer associated with Warner Music, which has already struck a deal to supply music videos to YouTube users. Parsons says the decision has nothing to do with the $1.6 billion Google-YouTube deal on Monday, but it’s worth noting that Time Warner had a vague interest in buying YouTube, and thought the price was too high.

Chuckle. Nothing to do with the Google deal my foot :) Before this, they could try suing empty pockets. Now, they've got Google. Send out for popcorn; this is going to go extra innings.

Technorati Tags: Google, YouTube

Jeff Jarvis notes how far removed from reality the media elite really are:

Gregorian says the journalist is the intermediary and interpreter “between society and knowledge” and that the journlist is “the guardian of our democracy. . . . Yo are the ones who keep democracy alive. Economic institutions won’t.” He says that news media outlets need to be made invulnerable to economic interests. He says “we don’t encourage people to be in the truth business. We encourage people to be in the profit business.”

I am afraid we continue to try to insulate and separate the old ways of journalism from the market — from the public they are trying to serve. That is terribly dangerous.

I agree with Jeff - whose "truth" needs to be protected from economics? Do I get to have the same protections? I could just as plausibly argue that Smalltalk is the best development language ever, and therefore we should be insulated from competition. Yeah, right. These news guys need to get real jobs.

Technorati Tags: web

Michael and I recorded episode 5 of Industry Misinterpretations earlier this evening - we spoke about a lot of things, some of them even things we planned to speak about :)

If you have feedback, please email me - and emailed mp3s might well get aired and commented on. We'll be back next week - see you then.

Update: Nothing to see here, move along :) Podshow PDN {podshow-e2dddbd29bb7640b840c04dffe1ace99}

Dave Winer:

I tune out the ad hominems. Try to argue, instead, by complimenting the intelligence and ethics of the person who opposes your viewpoint. Try to understand where they're coming from, and show that you understand. This one change would elevate discourse in the blogging community more than anything else. Matters like AdLink are always subject to judgement. Each of us has a different point of view. That someone sees it differently is a good thing, emphatically, it is not a personality flaw.

I think perhaps he should read some of his very own posts before trying to give out advice on this. In particular, he could start with his political rants.

Update: Dave responds. However, his response amounts to "ad homeneim attacks are ok if you really dislike someone. Umm, sure Dave. There's a sure-fire way to get a dialog going. If your intent is to start an actual dialog with people who disagree with you, that's not the way to do it.

Sure, I often toss around the same kind of attack (see anything I've written about the RIAA, for instance) - but in those cases, dialog isn't what I'm looking for. Apparently, neither is Dave.

It's time for the weekly look at the logs - BottomFeeder downloads proceeded at a clip of 228 per day; the details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Update	452
Windows	413
Linux x86	133
Mac X	119
CE ARM	117
Mac 8/9	78
Solaris	55
Windows98/ME	49
Linux PPC	35
AIX	30
Linux Sparc	30
SGI	29
HPUX	28
Sources	23
ADUX	6
CE x86	2

Next up - the HTTP page accesses. The screencasts and podcasts seem to be establishing an audience, which I'm fairly pleased about:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	40.9%
Mozilla	39.6%
Other	2.2%
Planet Smalltalk	5%
Lib Perl	4.5%
MSN Bot	5.4%
Megite	1.4%
Opera	1%

The IE numbers went up - I expect more IE 7 users are popping up - I've been seeing that in the RSS numbers. Speaking of which:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	20.5%
BottomFeeder	19.4%
Other	9.3%
Internet Explorer	7.3%
Net News Wire	6.4%
Safari RSS	5.7%
Google Feed Fetcher	5.6%
BlogLines	5.5%
NewsGator	3%
Abilon	2.7%
Planet Smalltalk	1.9%
Opera	1.6%
Akregator	1.5%
RSS Bandit	1.5%
RSS 2 Email	1.2%
JetBrains	1.2%
News Fire	1.1%
Liferea	1.1%
SharpReader	1%
Python	1%
MSN Bot	1%
Jakarta	1%
Java	1%

The IE numbers are rising, which tells me that IE 7 is spreading. It's been a good week traffic wise - up again!

The tools over at the RIAA have demonstrated just how lame their legal strategy is: when confronted with a plaintiff who demands actual evidence of wrongdoing, they do two things:

• First, ask a judge to allow a fishing expedition (we didn't actually have any evidence, sir. but if we could just look..."
• Second, give up when the judge says no

These people are complete tools. The sooner they die off with their outdated business model, the better.

Technorati Tags: music, DRM, RIAA, stupidity

Boris Popov has published a start at the YUI for Seaside on VW. Go grab it from the Public Store - and if you're interested, it sounds like Boris could use a hand with it.

Technorati Tags: seaside

Denis Bider:

If I come into your office in jeans and a T-shirt, I'm not disrespecting you, because wearing such an outfit doesn't mean disrespect in my world. It's an outfit I like to wear and which I find myself comfortable in. Likewise, although I myself would never wear a suit, I respect your decision to wear it and might admire how well it fits you.

This is all in response to this post I made awhile back. Let me try to explain what's wrong with that "accept whatever I'm doing" attitude - it excuses nearly anything. How about picking your nose in public? Or refusing to wash regularly, so that you smell bad? They're the same thing, and what they are is impolite. In social settings, politeness exists to reduce friction. People who don't get that are - whether they realize it or not - increasing the social friction between people.

Put another way, it's one thing to put your feet on the coffee table at home, and something else again when you do it while visiting.

Technorati Tags: lifestyle

I've busily been listing the podcast into various podcast directories beyond iTunes. You can also find us on Odeo and Podshow now, which is pretty cool, IMHO.

Technorati Tags: Industry Misinterpretations, smalltalk

It's no fluke - the Tigers seem to be the real deal. They way they collapsed during the second half, everyone (myself included) thought the Yankees would put them away. They lost one, then took three straight. And now they've swept the A's, and are headed to the Series. One thing's for sure - they'll be more rested going in than either the Mets or the Cards.

The main thing is this: they might be a wild card team, but they're no fluke. They brought their game with them to October.

Technorati Tags: baseball, tigers

Here's a case of marketing gone terribly wrong: McDonald's Japan ran a contest giving away mp3 players, and gave away a little extra with each one:

However the MP3 players were infected with QQpass a very dangerous malware. So your PC is infected once you connect the DAP and it starts logging and transmitting username, passwords and other vital information. McDonalds Japan has apologized and set up a 24 hour helpline for those affected by the spyware loaded MP3 player.

I added "DRM" to the tags because this smells like a music industry sponsored piece of stupidity. In general, you should be the only one with indigestion after eating at McDonald's - your PC shouldn't feel your pain.

Technorati Tags: DRM, PR

Looks like Edelman was trying to faux-blog on behalf of Wal-mart, a client of theirs. Here's what they were trying to do:

A pro-Wal-Mart blog called "Wal-Marting Across America," ostensibly launched by a pair of average Americans chronicling their cross-country travels in an RV and lodging in Wal-Mart parking lots, has been reduced to a farewell entry. One of its two contributors was revealed to be Jim Thresher, a staff photographer for The Washington Post.

Why would anyone think that was a good idea? At best, it was going to look weird - I mean, who parks in Wal-Mart parking lots in an RV while doing a cross country trip? Last time I looked, there weren't power, water, and septic hookups there. Given that, it's the sort of thing that's destined to be outed as a stupid PR stunt, with all the predictable fallout. To be brutal, this had Negative PR Event written all over it from the start (time from launch to outing: less than 3 weeks).

That's not the worst of it though. Thus far, Edelman is displaying a vast well of silence on this. Here's a question - where's Steve Rubel, or Richard Edelman? Not looking good, guys.

Technorati Tags: marketing, stupidity

Via Jeff Jarvis, I see that Dan Shanoff at Huffington Post objects to having journalists compensated based on the traffic they generate:

To treat journalists like mini-publishers is a slippery slope. For all of blogging's editorial opportunities -- the freedom to innovate or the chance to collapse the normally endless magazine response to timely issues -- the journalists are no longer simply doing their job.

When the mission is tied -- directly, through the incentive of increased financial compensation -- to maximizing traffic, the blogger is as much a marketer as they are a journalist.

Exactly how does Dan think it works now? Does he think that media outlets hire writers, and then just tell them to run off and "be creative"? Yeah, right. All this does is bring the rating system closer to the top. Ever wonder why newspapers add and drop op-ed authors, or comic strips, or sportswriters? Here's a huge hint for Dan - it's related to the eyeballs (i.e., traffic) they bring in. The advertisers are funny that way - they seem to care. I'm not sure what idealized world Dan lives in, but perhaps he could report on what color the sky is over there.

Technorati Tags: reporting, journalism

Battlestar Galactica has roared back with a great opening. Given the oddities of world-wide tv releases, I won't get into any real detail, but I will say this: if you were going to rank levels of badly off, things are worse for the characters on BSG (by a lot) than they are for anyone on Lost. Given the current situation on Lost, that's saying a lot.

I'm glad that things are looking up for the humans on BSG though - as good as the first two episodes were, I'm not sure I could stand watching much more of what Starbuck is going through. If you don't watch this show, you really need to ask yourself why.

Technorati Tags: scifi, BSG

Today's Smalltalk Daily takes a brief look at the Dataset Widget in VisualWorks.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, VisualWorks

Here's an article that makes the case that RSS is too hard for most people. While the article makes a few good points, the various aggregators on the market - like BottomFeeder - have mechanisms in place to deal with most of the issues raised. For instance: the biggest problem for most neophytes is "what do I subscribe to?" Well, BottomFeeder tries to make that easier via auto-detect. For instance, let's say I want to subscribe to news feeds from CNN, and I don't know what they have. In the "Add Feed" dialog for Bf, simply put in the main CNN URL, as I show in the image below:

Clearly, that's not an RSS or Atom feed. However, BottomFeeder recognizes that, and scans the HTML that came down for likely feed links (failing that, it executes a search in one of the syndication search engines). What it comes back with is a list of all the feeds advertised at that site (on that page):

Finally, I can pick one or all. In most cases, it would be simpler to select all, and then blow away the ones you don't care about:

I've made that screenshot smaller, which is why it looks blurry. In any event, the feeds get added to their own folder automatically. So even if you don't know what RSS or Atom is, BottomFeeder will let you find stuff easily.

Another quibble; the author of that piece didn't do some basic research:

To the average website visitor RSS feeds seem to be a geek toy requiring knowledge that they don't have time to gain or just are are not interested in. If web browsers included feed readers by default it would probably increase RSS usage 10 fold. But since none of the web browser makers seem to be interested in trying to do this RSS may remain unknown and unpopular for years to come.

Safari auto-detects RSS, and IE 7 will too - and IE 7 is coming out shortly. In fact, I expect that having IE 7 and Outlook 2007 support for RSS built in will spread the use of RSS very rapidly.

Technorati Tags: syndication, web

This tongue in cheek post made me smile this morning :)

Technorati Tags: cobol, java, smalltalk

Our October Digest is up on the main Smalltalk site - go check it out.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom

The folks at Instantiations have set up a new support forum for VA developers. Probably something that the Smalltalk-Central folks should take note of.

There's some Smalltalk in London this weekend:

This is the final reminder for the combined Smalltalk users group meeting this Friday and a Camp Smalltalk this Saturday.

On Friday:
Andy Bower, one of the main people behind Dolphin Smalltalk will be demoing Alchemetrics a trading system built in Dolphin.

John Aspinall will be demoing ReStore.

There's 20 names on the wiki so far, this should be a great opportunity to meet other Smalltalkers.

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

On Saturday:

There's a camp Smalltalk. Felix will be working on Smalltalk/X, Francisco will be working on Morphic Wrappers, I'll be working on Exupery. Come along either to work on a project or learn by working with different people. Bring a project, a laptop, or just yourself.

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

Remember to RSVP on the wiki. We need to provide security with a list of names so they'll let you in the building.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I got a tip from Dave Buck this afternoon, and grabbed a few episodes of the Polymorphic Podcast - specifically, the interview with Dr. David West. Dr. West has some very nice things to say about Smalltalk, and gives some good rationales for why Smalltalk - and languages like Smalltalk - are a good choice.

Follow these links to grab part 1 and part 2 of the interview.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, OO, design

Ok, this is amusing, and perhaps too close to home for some of us :) I like number 27...

Technorati Tags: web

This is pretty interesting: just how accurate are YouTube's statistics?

On Saturday night, I grabbed a video called “Sheep” from the Most Recent list and re-uploaded it under the username “themusichall”. I realized that I’d lost the audio in the process (converted it to the wrong format), but decided to leave it like that - nobody would voluntarily share a 7 second clip with no audio. I then set the page to refresh itself over Sunday night and - sure enough - it was among the most viewed clips this morning. Admittedly, 10,000 or so views doesn’t get you to the top - it’s on the 3rd “Most Viewed” page and ranks 10th in the Comedy category. But this is one computer refreshing one page with fairly long time intervals: I’m not going to make any suggestions that would encourage you to screw it up even more, but it’s pretty obvious how you could attain the number one spot.

Now, Google isn't filled with dummies, so you have to figure they were aware of this kind of thing. But who knows?

Technorati Tags: YouTube, Google