Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

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

Robert Scoble ranks the meme trackers - Techmeme, TailRank, and Digg. I almost never visit their home pages (I track mainly via RSS), so this is an interesting comparison.

Technorati Tags: IT, news

ArcterJournal likes Heroes:

Wow, I gotta say that each week Heroes keeps getting better. It's one of those shows I wish I never heard about until after the season is over so I can watch them all one after another without the pain of having to wait 7 days to see what happens next. I don't often rave about TV shows, so when I do you know it's good.

I like it too - the "wake up" scene with the cheerleader this week was pretty darn creepy. I have to admit, I had a chuckle at the end, when Hiro visits from the future with a message. I couldn't stop myself from inserting "in the future, I stopped being a nerd" :)

It is a cool show though - worth a place on your DVR.

Technorati Tags: scifi

In today's Smalltalk Daily, I take a brief look at the Menu building tool in VisualWorks.

Update: Fixed the link

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

The Smalltalk User Group meeting planned for the 18th (tomorrow) has been postponed until the 25th. Charles explains:

Due to the upcoming heavy rains on Wednesday, the fact that a lot of our members drive including our presenter which is coming from deep Jersey, the fact that the 18th also happens to be one of our regular's birthday which he will be spending with his immediate family, we shall be postponing our presentaton till next Wednesday the 25th which will be in direct conflict with OOPSLA

We apologize for any inconveniences

the management
NYC Smalltalk

(Re) mark your calendars!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, nyc

PR. Differently calls BS on Edelman's behavior (including the apology):

You're going to tell me Steve couldn't have just walked into Richard's office and been like, "Richard, this isn't cool - We're creating some bad Ju-ju, and we're gonna get busted." Would Richard have listened? Maybe. But Steve commented ""I am sorry I could not speak about this sooner. I had no personal role in this project. There is a process in place that I had to let proceed through its course. This is why it took some time."

You're EDELMAN'S BLOG EXPERT. YOU HAD NO ROLE IN THIS PROJECT?  And Columbus sat below, writing out star charts for his next trip to Asia. He had no personal role in actually FINDING America.

Can't say I disagree with him.

Technorati Tags: marketing, social media

Dave Winer gets this dead on:

I practice this myself. There are some things I'm expert at. And some experiences I have that are newsworthy even though I'm not an expert. When I went to the DNC in 2004, I wasn't an expert at the political process, but I brought a digital camera, a MP3 recorder, and my laptop, so I took pictures, did podcasts, and blogged. Put enough normal people in a room covering an event, and you've got coverage. And in my recent experience with MacBooks, a few reporters offered to do phone interviews, which I declined. I said I had written it all up on the blog, all of it is on the record, for attribution, and having a pretty good idea how the interview process works, and the results it produces, the only rational thing for me to do these days is to decline the interview. I predict that more and more people will do that, unless the pros get their act together.

When we went on vacation last summer, I had someone from a local paper do a "man in the street" interview with my wife and I about the security regime at the airport (this was right after the whole "no liquids" thing). We spoke to the woman for 30 seconds, and she was taking notes. When I got back, I saw the item in a local paper - she invented quotes.

That's just shoddy. Digital recorders are cheap, and it would have been very easy for this reporter to get what we actually said down - but that would have been too hard, apparently. The pros in media aren't as professional as they think they are - and the level of respect they get (see: any survey on public attitudes about reporters) reflects that reality. They keep not getting that, and it's going to cause increasing pain for them over time.

Update: Dave added more here. Also good stuff.

Technorati Tags: reporting

Spotted in PR. Differently

What does it tell you about Sirius' gamble on Howard Stern when they have to offer it for free for two days to get more people interested?

What it tells me is that there are now tons of free choices available across all possible media outlets. It tells me that in the unlimited channel space that is the internet, that you have to be pretty darn good to get a decent sized paid audience. Personally, I've never liked Stern - his schtick has always been about "he said what on radio??", or "he did what on tv??", or, when he was married - "he did what, and his wife doesn't care??"

Well, he's now divorced, and he's on a channel where "outrageous" behavior is common. Why should I pay to hear Stern, if I can get someone like Ze Frank for free? His stuff isn't to my taste, but I suspect that there's a fair bit of cross-over in those audience bases. The difference? Ze Frank is free, Stern is behind a pay wall. Sort of like Times Select, really.

Stern was a phenomenon so long as his behavior was outside the norm, and he was the only one beating that particular drum. Those things are no longer true.

Technorati Tags: marketing, advertising

Via Instapundit.com:

The truth is, all candidates use it -- or suffer the consequences. When Wesley Clark entered the 2004 presidential race, he caught a cold, lost his voice, and was unable to campaign for several days. Some people speculated that the pace of a national campaign had knocked the former NATO comander off the campaign trail. I knew it was because he hadn't learned about hand sanitizer. National candidates shake hundreds, if not thousands, of hands every day. They will get sick unless they wash their hands early and often.

Consider the average trade show/conference - you meet tons of people, you shake their hands - and then you blame the post show cold on the airplane. I'm thinking it might not be the airplane air. This isn't something I've given much thought to, and I don't come down with serious colds all that often. If you do, you might want to consider the advice above.

Technorati Tags: health

The studio lawsuits against user video sites have begun:

Universal Music has launched the established media industry’s first legal action against rapidly growing user-generated websites by filing copyright suits against start-ups Grouper.com and Bolt.com.

In separate lawsuits, Universal alleged that Grouper and Bolt had built up traffic by encouraging users to share music videos from its artists without their permission.

Apparently, putting lawyers and music industry executives together doesn't give you anything like a peanut butter cup; more like a crap sandwich, I should think.

Let me think - when music videos are put up this way, who exactly is getting hurt? I thought the whole point of such videos was to promote the music (and thus CD or digital sales). Leaving no marketing opportunity unquashed, Universal has pulled out the stupid stick.

Technorati Tags: marketing, PR

allofmp3.com to the RIAA: Go pound sand:

"They [the music studios] are concerned with making money for themselves not the artists. In our opinion, we and the artists are better off dealing directly with each other. In fact we believe it is the future of the music industry," they said.

Anything that torques off the RIAA is just fine in my book.

Technorati Tags: DRM

Travis has posted a screencast comparing SUnit and SUnitToo. meanwhile, Michael has posted a bunch of new ones - check the entire category.

Technorati Tags: screencast

When I saw this reported on various blogs earlier today, I thought: "huh??"

But then I read Chris Petrilli's thoughts on the subject, and it started to make sense. It's kind of a cool idea, and - even if it doesn't sell much - I think it works as good PR.

Technorati Tags: Sun, datacenter

Michel Bany, the Cincomer who has ported Seaside from Squeak to VW, gives some tips on loading it:

Bundles SeasideForWebToolkit and SeasideForSwazoo are containers for a script that loads the actual Seaside bundles choosing bundles with similar version numbers.

The Seaside bundles can also be loaded manually in the following sequence :

1. Seaside-VW
2. Seaside
3. Seaside-WebToolkit or Seaside-Swazoo

In this case you may load whatever versions you want, for instance :

1. Seaside-VW 2.6b1.103
2. Seaside 2.6b1.103
3. Seaside-Swazoo 2.6b1.84

There may be some issues with the Seaside servlet at present; that's being looked at.

Technorati Tags: seaside, smalltalk

Here's one of the problems with outsourcing your manufacturing widely - you really need to be careful about quality checks. Otherwise, you get things like the iPod virus fiasco:

The company said that a small number of video iPods made after Sept. 12 included the RavMonE virus. It said it has seen fewer than 25 reports of the problem, which it said does not affect other models of the media player, nor does it affect Macs.

From a PR perspective, Apple did the right thing by taking responsibility (and even managed to get a shot in at MS in the process):

"As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it," Apple said on its site.

THis doesn't mean that you should run a vertical stack like Henry Ford did back in the 1920's - but it does mean that you need to "trust, but verify" rather than just "trust".

Technorati Tags: manufacturing, quality assurance

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at the process of writing external files.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I just made a small change to the behavior here on the site. You'll notice the enormous lists of category and syndication lists have been shrunken down to pull menus. Michael suggested that to me last night (to be fair, Vassili has mentioned it more than once too). In any case, it's done now - the sidebars should be easier to navigate.

Steve Rubel notes that advertising dollars seem to be getting lower. I say "seem to be", because it's based on an analyst report (Blackfriars Communications), and I know nothing about them. Anyway, here's what Steve notes:

Actual dollars spent on advertising this year was sharply lower than the original estimates. This according to an analysis by Blackfriars Communications. Worse, the same story is true online.

Researchers had predicted that 10% of overall advertising spending this year would go online. Meanwhile, it ended up at 7% of budgets. Plus, the entire pie shrunk as well.

That could be air leaking out of the web 2.0 bubble. We'll probably know within a few months, one way or the other. One thing's for sure - a lot of startups are very, very dependent on ad revenue. Could Yahoo's difficulties there be an early warning sign?

Technorati Tags: web2.0

There's Dynamic as done in Java, and then there's the real thing, as I do it in my blog server all the time (just this morning, in fact). Code that didn't exist when I first wrote the server? No problem. Replacing methods as the server runs? No problem. Creating new code and just loading it? How do you think the recent addition of iTunes tag support (necessary before I could get the podcasts listed in iTunes and other podcast directories) loaded? I wrote the code, tested it, and had the server load the results. Suddenly the RSS generator was dropping new meta information out.

Here's an old post on how I do the same thing in a client. On the server, the steps are as follows:

• Create new code in my test environment
• Once it works, export the diffs between the old version and the new one (i.e. a Smalltalk file-in for patches to existing code, or a new parcel for completely new stuff)
• On the server, create a small script to load the changes
• Hit the script, have the changes load. On the fly, as the server runs

That's it. No need to write code in some custom fashion to deal with things that didn't exist before - the Smalltalk system just accepts that they're there, and deals with it. This is yet another example of the mental cruft you have to deal with in a language like Java. In Smalltalk, that cruft just doesn't exist.

I'll be over here, being productive. You Java guys can read the multi-page post on how to do the same thing in your world :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, development, cincom smalltalk, dynamic languages

Doc Searls sums up what needs to be said about PayPerPost:

Yesterday I said PayPerPost makes you an ass****. Your job is to serve s***. You reduce yourself from a human being to an orifice for excreting messages. That may have seemed extreme or unkind; but hey, what's the difference between that and showing up on a bull**** detector?

What more needs to be added?

Technorati Tags: marketing, advertising, integrity

In other pretzel twisting, see how much of an unnatural act you have to commit to get something vaguely like "duck typing" in Java.

As I said earlier today, I'll be over here, being productive. You Java guys knock yourselves out.

Technorati Tags: duck typing, dynamic languages, smalltalk

I commented on a "Java dynamic code" post earlier, and got a few comments - so I pushed up a screencast showing how to generate new code (methods and classes) at runtime in Smalltalk. It's way, way simpler than the Java example, and I show that in the screencast. Watch it here; enjoy.

Technorati Tags: java, smalltalk, dynamic languages

In today's Smalltalk Daily, I take a look at writing binary files.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I just got bitten by a browser incompatibility I didn't know about - IE doesn't do "onclick" handlers in menus. Since I just changed over to that, it's kind of a problem. So, I now detect the browser agent and feed IE 6 the older (long) lists. Sorry about the break.

Technorati Tags: blog

David Buck announces a Vista Smalltalk presentation in Ottawa, November 1st. I wish I could justify a trip up to see that!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, Vista

The best argument against "net neutrality" legislation was something Jerry Pournelle said on last week's TWiT podcast. To summarize (this is not an exact quote), he asked whether we should trust the Congress to write a law (any law, on either side of this) that would not have some fairly horrid unintended consequences. Never mind the intended consequences.

I know I don't. I'd rather have no new law in this area at all.

Technorati Tags: net neutrality, web

Scoble is giving IE 7 a whirl:

But IE7 does have some challenges ahead of it. Some sites in it render very slow. Most notably for me, Google Reader. I’m also using the new Firefox 2 and Firefox is a LOT faster. IE7 is frustratingly slow on Google Reader. It seems to hang whenever new stuff is being downloaded in the background via AJAX. To be fair, Google is probably pushing the browser in all sorts of ways, even the MSN team decided to back off on its use of AJAX due to speed problems, though (Live.com used to have an infinite scroll capability, which I really loved but they got rid of it after speed complaints came in).

I can't speak to this directly; I haven't grabbed IE 7 yet. What worries me about IE 7 has to do with the internal websites here at Cincom. When I tried one of the betas, it simply didn't work with our main intranet site. It may well be fine now, but I'm a bit leery.

Technorati Tags: IE7, Firefox

I found this post on "languages that suck" interesting. There's a small issue with the metric used to find Smalltalk though. I'm not going to argue that Smalltalk is "mainstream", but it does have a bigger footprint than this site would suggest. How so?

Well, one of the metrics is the availability of code files online:

As in the first study, all data were collected from search results retrieved via Google's Code Search. For each target language, three pieces of information were initially gathered:

Total Files

An approximation of the language's footprint in Google's database (and thus its popularity). Determined by one of the following queries: lang:<language-name>, lang:"<language-name>", or file:.*\.ext where ext is the file extension of that language's source code files.

Here's the problem - Smalltalkers don't tend to share source code that way - especially in the two dialects that get a lot of attention online: Squeak and Cincom Smalltalk. For Squeak, there's a lot of stuff shared via SqueakMap, and for CST, there's the Public Store. Neither is going to show up in this kind of search. As well, Smalltalk source files don't have a standard file extension across dialects (or even a completely interchangeable source format).

Something to keep in mind.

Update: You can look at some package detail for the Public Store here (475 packages listed) and for SqueakMap here (669).

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Is sanity starting to pop up inside the music industry? The WSJ seems to imply that it might be:

But now there's a growing recognition among some record executives and performers that the people who are downloading illegally are frequently huge music fans and that marketing to them may be more desirable in the long run than suing or otherwise harassing them.

Whoa, that might be too much thinking all at once for these clowns. Still, it's progress - they seem to realize that their bozo tactics aren't working, and the people downloading are fans. Many of whom would grab music legally, given the right incentives (i.e., if the market actually responded to the public feedback). So this, while it's condescending, is at least moving in the right direction:

Hence the alliance between Jay-Z and Coke. By inserting promotional material into the decoy files, and then planting those files prominently on file-sharing sites, record labels and other marketers can turn what is now an antipiracy tool into an advertising medium. "The concept here is making the peer-to-peer networks work for us," says Jay-Z's attorney, Michael Guido. "While peer-to-peer users are stealing the intellectual property, they are also the active music audience," and "this technology allows us to market back to them."

That Google ad thing might be inspiring them. I'd call this a fluke, but Disney recently showed signs of intelligence as well:

"We understand now that piracy is a business model," says Sweeney during the Keynote address at Mipcom. "It exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates compete the same way we do - through quality, price and availability. We we don’t like the model but we realize it’s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward."

Umm, yeah. The Buzz Out Loud crew has been pointing out for eons that most people would prefer to stay legal - if only the industry didn't try to shove crapware (DRM) down their throats. Tapes didn't kill CD sales, and DAT wouldn't have either. Downloads won't kill the for profit music sector, unless the studios keep being morons.

The RIAA has taken a quarter step in that direction:

This week the MPAA's CTO Brad Hunt had his own realization: "I understand that if we frustrate the consumer, they will simply pirate the content." He then goes on to explore how the MPAA is pushing for some degree of DRM interoperability

DRM is the problem, which is why I call it a quarter step. They seem to be aware that there's a problem; that's better. Next, they need to recognize that DRM is a bug, not a solution.

Now, before I start sounding all sunshiney on this, there is bad news: The IFPI (think international version of the RIAA) is suing anything that moves:

THE music industry has launched a new wave of 8000 lawsuits against alleged file-sharers around the world.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which represents the world's music companies, said the new cases were brought in 17 countries, including the first ones ever in Brazil, Mexico and Poland.

I guess there has to be a conservation of cluelessness.

Technorati Tags: DRM, RIAA

Wendy Seltzer explains in detail why you would be absolutely nuts to upgrade to Vista. head on over there for details, but I love the lede:

Reading the Windows Vista license is a bit like preparing for breakfast with Lewis Carroll's Red Queen: You should be ready to believe at least six impossible things about what users want from software.

I agree with her - those terms are utterly absurd. I shouldn't have to register my software, and MS shouldn't care if I install new components in my PC. With this, they've now reached the same levels of titanic stupidity that IBM attained in the late 80's.

Technorati Tags: license, EULA, Vista, Microsoft

Peter Fisk needs a small correction hee:

A company which did survive the transition was Digitalk which did an absolutely brilliant job of porting Smalltalk/V to Windows. After writing Windows applications in C, the experience of using Digitalk Smalltalk (1.0 and 2.0) was a total liberation. Forget about the mixed-mode pointers; make a window? - no problem! And I wasn’t the only one to feel that way. By the end of 1994, there was a thriving community of Digitalk developers.

Of course, it didn’t last - Digitalk never brought out a 32-bit version.
Unfortunately, Digitalk never enjoyed the same success with their 32-bit offerings.

In fact, not only did they bring out a 32 bit version, they brought out a Windows/95 logo certified edition - Visual Smalltalk (and the enterprise edition, VSE). Digitalk then merged with ParcPlace, and things got all wonky (no need to go into that here). Point is, not only did Digitalk come out with a 32 bit edition - they got out early, and got it logo certified.

Update: Peter corrected his post.

Technorati Tags: VSE, Digitalk

Scoble notes that many people don't use the Yellow Pages anymore:

Geoff reports he doesn’t. I don’t even know where mine are. I’d hate to work there, although there’s still money left in that old model cause there’s still lots of people who don’t look to their computers for everything.

Most of those people, though, are older than me. That means that business model has 20 years left in it, if that.

It really depends on what you're looking for. Need an electrician to come out and look at something? You can waste time in Google trying to narrow the search, or you can open the big yellow book to "E", and find what you need in seconds. For an awful lot of local businesses - electricians, plumbers, that kind of thing - the Yellow Pages are still far more efficient.

Technorati Tags: advertising

In today's Smalltalk Daily, I look at a better way to serialize objects to disk: the BOSS package.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, object serialization

Looks to me like the recording industry finally figured out that the law wasn't the best attack vector for going after allofmp3.com - instead, they hit them directly in the wallet: Visa and Mastercard have announced that they will no longer process payments there.

That's going to affect their behavior a lot more than arcane negotiations at the trade talk level ever would have.

Technorati Tags: law, copyright

Awhile back, Scott McNealy said "Privacy is dead, deal with it". That got a lot of play at the time, but fell into bit bucket over time.

Today, Bruce Schneier explains just how far reaching that assumption is:

Everyday conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it. Of course, organized crime bosses worried about phone taps and room bugs, but that was the exception. Privacy was the default assumption.

This has changed. We now type our casual conversations. We chat in e-mail, with instant messages on our computer and SMS messages on our cellphones, and in comments on social networking Web sites like Friendster, LiveJournal and News Corp.'s (nyse: NWS - news - people ) MySpace. These conversations--with friends, lovers, colleagues, fellow employees--are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails.

We know this intellectually, but we haven’t truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting that we’re being recorded.

This goes well beyond any legal worries over government monitoring. That sounds like I'm back burnering that issue, and - for the purposes of a larger point, I am. Let me start with an example.

I communicate with other Cincomers (and a variety of other people) via an IRC channel. I'm on that channel most of the time, and the traffic is all being logged - both by my IRC client, and probably by every other IRC client. Ten years from now, someone who I've had a falling out with could dredge up some extended bout of silliness we engage in from time to time, take it out of context, and embarrass me greatly. Heck, it might go beyond embarrassment - if it was stupid enough "bathroom humor", it might do actual damage.

IM is another communication channel I use, along with email. Email is persistent, and IM logs can be saved. There's no telling what someone could do with an out of context message (or, an in context one made under a presumption of privacy). As Bruce says above, we operate as if we're engaged in an "over the fence" chat, only these are all logged, and could come back to haunt us.

I'm grateful that I didn't have blogs, email, IM, and IRC chats to leave a paper trail on me when I was in college - today's students do though, and their transient acts of silliness - acts that would have dropped into the ether 20 years ago - could easily come back to haunt them in 2 or 3 decades. I fully expect politicians to get chased by decades old logs in the coming years, and for political battles at corporations to work the same way.

Unlike Bruce, I don't really think legislation will help much. I chat with people in other countries on the Smalltalk IRC channel all the time. US law won't mean anything to them. Likewise, overseas emails and IMs won't be affected by whatever privacy regime Schneier idealizes. Ultimately, I think we are going to have to internalize the new reality of a logged world. I'd recommend a book - James Halperin's "The Truth Machine". part of the world built in that book is a constant logging (video, audio, etc) of everything - mostly by people themselves.

Technorati Tags: privacy

I have an an idea for Smalltalk user groups - if you can record your meetings (hopefully with compelling speakers), I'll be happy to post the recordings in my podcast feed. Just send me an audio file (compressed in a zip or gzip would be best). I'd advise sending any such things to my gmail address, as the Cincom email filter might well eat the attachment.

Scoble lays out the issues with making money for online video solely through advertising:

Here’s the trouble. Most people I know are getting advertising revenues of between $10 and $40 CPM. That means that for every 1,000 people who visit a Web site, an advertiser is paying somewhere around $10 usually (often less, and in some cases, far less — Jeremy Wright told me he was only getting about $.50 CPM when he runs Google’s ad bar).

Now, that sounds great, particularly if you can get a big audience and when you write a blog that has minimum creation costs (yeah, some posts take hours, but others can be done in minutes and you don’t need anything but a computer to do this). That low cost of production is why Jason Calacanis was able to create $25 million in value by lashing together 100 bloggers. But, let’s look deeper at video.

First, the videos I’m putting up are around 200MB a piece. The bandwidth distributors I know are charging $.14 or more PER GIGABYTE to distribute those videos. So, that comes to $28, or more for 1,000 downloads (if my math is right).

That's going to be a problem, I think. It's just going to be very hard to get arbitrary video segments paid for - sponsorship works, but does have strings (implicit or otherwise). For those of us using podcasts and screencasts strictly for promotional purposes, this isn't really an issue - it's just part of the overall marketing budget. For others, it's currently a challenge.

Technorati Tags: advertising, video

Jeff Jarvis spots a nascent trend in the newspaper business:

Virtually every major paper is making the shift to local coverage, often as it cuts deeper into editorial operations. Only recently, the Dallas Morning News announced it was closing its national bureaus while cutting 20 percent of its newsroom staff. It was becoming a local paper again after several decades of rising stature for its national and international coverage. More than 100 people were let go.

Similar, if less dramatic, changes are taking place at such papers as The Washington Post, New Jersey’s Bergen Record and Herald News, and the Richmond Times Dispatch. And joining them all is Gannett, the largest newspaper chain and publisher of USA Today.

“We’re going to get hyper-local,” says Tara Connell, a Gannett spokesperson.

I'm not sure what that means for USA Today, but it makes a lot of sense for other papers. I can get national and international news from a bunch of sources, and my local paper is not the first place I'd look for that stuff. On the other hand, who else is going to cover the local crime beat, or the meetings of the local county council? The national networks won't do that stuff, nor will the newswires. The local papers could do that, and they could easily do it better than anyone else.

It doesn't even have to cost that much - local reporters won't command (or even need - you might well get by with a bunch of stringers interested in specific local areas) nearly the salary requirements of a "big" reporter. It's back to the future time for local media, and not a minute too soon, IMHO.

Technorati Tags: news

Whenever the bright boys at the RIAA wonder why the public hates them, they might look at stories like this one: a firmware update to the Zen Vision:M product disabled the FM radio capability, due to "copyright issues". Yeah - recording songs off the radio, complete with the station lead-in and out is really a threat to music sales. There's a reason people don't have any respect for these clowns; they don't deserve any respect.

Technorati Tags: music, law, RIAA