Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

After a Thanksgiving hiatus, we get back to work with a screencast on distributed programming with Cincom Smalltalk - I demonstrate how easy it is to get Smalltalk to Smalltalk messaging working between two images.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, opentalk

Patrick Logan advises you to isolate the enterprisey systems as best as you can:

Having some large software vendor or partner inject SOAP into your data center is no reason to allow it to infect all of *your* work. Push WS-Complexity out to just those edges whose outside forces require it. Stop the enemy at the gates. Make the rest as simple as possible. Always assert your control over your own architecture or you will be a loser.

That's good advice. The WS* stack is a morass of complexity - it's starting to make the CORBA boomlet of the early 90's look simple.

Technorati Tags: development, WS*

If this isn't evidence that size breeds complexity, I don't know what is. In an explanation of how builds of Windows happen, Moishe Lettvin talks about how long it takes code to migrate from a typical development team at MS up to the central repository (or back down):

In Windows, this model [ed: one master repository used by all] breaks down simply because there are far too many developers to access one central repository -- among other problems, the infrastructure just won't support it. So Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. At a different periodicity, changes are integrated down the tree from the root to the nodes. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes. It should be noted too that the only common ancestor that my team, the shell team, and the kernel team shared was the root.

This explains a lot of the more frustrating bugs in Windows - an awful lot of the code is built based on not completely recent versions of the codebase. Heck, it sounds like no one really works on the "real" codebase - everyone has their own mirror, and all the mirrors reflect reality a little differently. It's kind of amazing that it works at all, actually.

Technorati Tags: Windows, Microsoft

MS continues to get horrible reviews of the Zune; take this one, from the Sun-Times:

The setup process stands among the very worst experiences I've ever had with digital music players. The installer app failed, and an hour into the ordeal, I found myself asking my office goldfish, "Has it really come to this? Am I really about to manually create and install a .dll file?"

...

"These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it," said Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group. "So it's time to get paid for it."

Well, Morris is just a big, clueless idiot, of course. Do you honestly want morons like him to have power over your music player?

Then go ahead and buy a Zune. You'll find that the Zune Planet orbits the music industry's Bizarro World, where users aren't allowed to do anything that isn't in the industry's direct interests.

That sound you hear is MS allowing the RIAA to dig in their fingernails, holding on to the corpse of their old business model.

Technorati Tags: DRM, music

Andres Valloud will be speaking at the NY Smalltalk User's Group this Wednesday:

Give me more classes is what Andres Valloud says. He will shows us how more classes can in some cases equate to better Smalltalk performance.

Andres will be providing us with an encore presentation of his recent OOPSLA presentation.

The next meeting will be Wednesday November 29th, 2006. It will be the last for this year since we will be taking a break for the holidays.

Follow the link for more info and directions.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, STUG

It became obvious to me this afternoon that I'm well into my 40's - a mild pain I'd had in the neighborhood of my hip, left side, stopped me in my tracks while I was out jogging this afternoon. Murphy's law being fully in force, it happened at the furthest point away from my house on my route. Trying to jog became excruciating - the pounding just creates incredible pain. I'm also walking with a distinct limp.

I'm hoping it's just a muscle injury, but I think I'll go have my doctor take a look. The last thing I need is some kind of degenerative problem with my hip.

Technorati Tags: health

The Jobs Report came in a little late this week - Thanksgiving does things like that to the schedules. In any event, here it is, from James Savidge: enjoy.

Technorati Tags: jobs, smalltalk, smalltalk jobs

Even if it doesn't go anywahere, I'm encouraged to see this kind of experimentation happening around Smalltalk:

Hello Smalltalkers, i've been experimenting a Smalltalk VM made in Python these days. Yes, it works fine but it's extremely slow of course. It's just an experiment; i will publish the code soon tough.

Leander Kahney doesn't have kind words for the Rhapsody music service, but I think his raspberry is somewhat misdirected; the real problem is in the OS:

To cut a long story short, every step has been a pain, from downloading new firmware for the player to updating the Windows' underlying DRM software. And that was just to get it working.

Once up and running, the first batch of tunes I downloaded generated nearly 10,000 errors. I couldn't believe my eyes. I wish I'd taken a screenshot.

Since then, the software has been dog slow and unpredictable. It's constantly downloading tunes that I'm unable to sync to the device.

The problem likely isn't specifically with Rhapsody - rather, it's with the excitement of DLL Hell on Windows. A few weeks ago, I wanted to do a COM Connect demo for Smalltalk Daily. I couldn't get VW or ObjectStudio to talk to iTunes via COM. At first, I thought it was a problem on the Smalltalk side (COM on VW does not have a good reputation). I got suspicious when the same problem arose in ObjectStudio. I started swearing when I had an engineer show me code that worked fine for him.

Uninstall, reinstall (of iTunes and XPlay), with many reboots in between. Everything worked fine after that. Which is where we get to the uniqueness of every Windows install

Ever pay close attention to installer messages? Periodically, they tell you (or warn you) that some DLL somewhere is being overwritten. Some of those DLL's are shared by multiple apps. That's what happened with iTunes here; I'd guess that some set of DLL's on Kahney's machine weren't quite correct, but the Rhapsody installer assumed they were. It's as I said in the title - every Windows installation is unique, and each has its own problems.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft

The sad thing is, reading this story doesn't immediately raise the BS filter - the MPAA and RIAA have done and said enough outrageous things (i.e., the assertion that every mp3 player is owned by a thief), that this seems possible:

Los Angeles , CA - The MPAA is lobbying congress to push through a new bill that would make unauthorized home theaters illegal. The group feels that all theaters should be sanctioned, whether they be commercial settings or at home.

MPAA head Dan Glickman says this needs to be regulated before things start getting too far out of control, "We didn't act early enough with the online sharing of our copyrighted content. This time we're not making the same mistake. We have a right to know what's showing in a theater."

I can actually imagine the MPAA asserting that, too. It's getting harder to satirize these people - I almost pity "The Onion"...

Technorati Tags: MPAA, satire

Today's Smalltalk Daily continues with Opentalk - we create a client class and a server class, and send some messages across.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, opentalk, distrib programming

It's tales like this one, from Mark Cuban, that breed distrust of the media. I don't trust the reporting from overseas any more than I trust the local stuff - if they can't accurately report an email thread, what can they accurately report?

It's not as if Cuban is the only one noticing this - Dave Winer has opined on this, and instances of fauxtography have been widespread in war reporting over the last few years. It's not new, either - remember the exploding gas tank incident staged by NBC for Dateline?

The trouble is, reporters play at being objective observers, but they aren't. They are as susceptible to bias as the rest of us, and are just as willing to cling to a worldview (even if the facts don't fit) as anyone else. Look at that BusinessWeek story (first link) Cuban got savaged by - in the reporter's mind, Cuban is a loose cannon, willing to say just about anything. Never mind what he actually said; the story just writes itself.

Technorati Tags: news

I thought Scoble's counting of HD's in the home sounded high...

I see a day when every home will have 10 or more hard drives. Heck, in mine I’m already up to 10. Two in my MacPro. Three external. One in my PVR that’s coming on December 12th (yes, we’re finally hooking the HDTV up to a satellite dish). One in my Voodoo machine. One in my Sony Vaio. One in my Xbox. One in my Thinkpad.

But then I counted the ones here. There are 13, plus a few USB flash devices. I think he might be betting low...

Looks like there'll be no end of excitement on the mound in NY next year:

On the day the Yankees officially welcomed soon-to-be 38-year-old Mike Mussina back into their Kate Moss-thin rotation with a two-year, $23 million deal, Brian Cashman said he believes Randy Johnson and Carl Pavano can be counted on to fill in behind Chien-Ming Wang and Mussina.

Johnson has reached his expiration date. I think Pavano passed his the first time he threw a pitch. Looks like it'll be another year of cringing at the starting staff, followed by horror when the bullpen is summoned...

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

This qualifies as a question that's almost too obvious to answer:

I have been traveling quite a bit lately and have had to rely on public Internet access. Much to my dismay I have found that most hotels and airports still do not offer free Internet access. Why isn't airport and hotel Internet access a standard free feature?

Umm - maybe because people are willing to pay for it? And seriously - since those of us passing through airports and hotels have no real way to protest the charges, what changes do you expect? Ever noticed the (huge) hospitality tax charged by hotels? The egregious charges for net access will disappear about the same time that does.

The 2006 worldwide Cincom Smalltalk Users Conference is next week - here's a last bit of information, including tips on getting to the show:

The conference will start as scheduled on Tuesday, December 5th, at 10:00, with the registration.

For your convenience, here (PDF) are detailed instructions on how to get to the conference venue, the Moevenpick Hotel in Frankfurt. Most of you will be arriving by plane and then take either a cab or public transportation to the hotel. If you arrive by car, please note there are only a few free-of-charge parking lots in front of the hotel - otherwise, you’ll have to use the hotel parking garage which costs 10 Euros/day for attendees of the conference.

Important Information:

Tuesday-Thursday, Dec 5th-7th: Conference

Please see conference program, an HTML version of the complete and final agenda, including speakers’ biographies and abstracts.

Speakers:

We will be providing a video projector to display your presentation on the screen as well as a microphone. Should you require any additional technical equipment, please let us know asap, at the latest by November 30th.

The presentation files will be made available (possibly as PDFs) to all attendees in a restricted area at www.cincomsmalltalk.com for the first 6-8 weeks after the conference. Afterwards, we will grant open access to all web visitors.

We will be audio recording the conference, including your speech. The podcasting will be offered on www.cincomsmalltalk.com with open access. Should you want to opt out of this, please let us know prior to the start of the conference.

Please note that the Moevenpick Hotel is a non-smoking hotel. It provides free-of-charge WLAN access in the lobby and the hotel rooms.

See you there!

Technorati Tags: users conference, cst, cincom smalltalk, smalltalk

We'll be trying an experiment in Frankfurt - we are going to try recording the presentations, and packaging them up as podcasts (they'll go into the normal podcast feed, so they'll show up on iTunes, etc). There's going to be a delay between recording and posting - even minimal audio editing takes time :)

Technorati Tags: podcasting, user conference, cincom smalltalk, smalltalk

Wal-Mart has entered the online video fray:

In a press release, Wal-Mart said the service is now available to its customers in all Wal-Mart stores nationwide.

With the purchase of the "Superman Returns" physical DVD, Wal-Mart said customers can also choose from three video download format options -- $1.97 for portable devices, $2.97 for PCs/laptops, and $3.97 for both portable players and PC/laptops.

So much for fair use - you see those tiered prices? That's the DRM tax.

So here I am, new USB drive in hand, plugging it in to Windows.... and no drive gets mapped. I wonder - is the cable bad? Try a different cable (same adaptor used by the camera, the drive and the audio recorder). Nope - same thing. Ok - lets try plugging it into the Mac. Pop - up it comes, working just fine. Hmm.

Back to Windows, into Device Manager. Here's where I delve into properties, see that it's not mapped to a drive. Hit the "populate" button there, and it lists drive H:, which happens to be an existing network share. Ok.... maybe I should move the network share to a different letter???

Sure enough, the new drive really, really wants to be drive H:. Why, I have no idea. It's things like this that make me read stuff like this, (yes, Sam has retracted that) and just laugh, long and loud. Yeah - Windows is just perfect.

Technorati Tags: stupidity

Something Awful has a brief Squeak tutorial up, which has been split off from a discussion of Seaside.

Mark Cuban talked about the connectivity issues of getting TV from the PC over to the TV. Dave Winer weighed in, mostly in agreement. I'd also agree that it's hard, and unlikely to spread quickly - but for another reason, which Scoble touched on, but didn't really explore.

It's about the complexity. It's hard to connect the current range of dedicated devices to the TV and get things working the way you want. 15 years ago, anyone could walk into any room in anyone's house and figure out how to work the TV. Now? It's often different across different rooms in the same house (use this remote, no not that one - make sure the correct input is chosen, no not that one, you can't change the channel while the DVR is operating...)

It's complexity squared now. Add in a PC, with all the attendant issues? Most people don't want to babysit a PC while they watch TV. We have a Media Center PC in the living room, and getting that to work with the TV was an exciting task - gosh knows how much worse trying to deal with HD would have been. Even now, the PC sometimes can't pump sound to the TV (oddly, sound for other things will still work), and it'll need to be rebooted - or everything it records will be silent. That's a load of fun when you only realize the problem after a show has started recording.

I have no idea whether an Apple offering in this space will be better (I suspect it will be), but the "which $%^&* input do I use now??" problem won't get any easier. What people will likely go for is a dedicated box, which is why I said Scoble touched on it with his points about the XBox.

Boy, lots of people were taken in by that BBSpot story yesterday. I linked to it as a satirical piece, as did Slashdot. Digg's post seemed to take it as straight news, and TechDirt noted that they got tons of tips on it from people who took it seriously. I'd wonder whether the mavens at the MPAA had a moment of self realization over that, but that's just crazy talk...

Technorati Tags: music, movies

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we wrap up our brief tour of Opentalk with a GUI on top of the client.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, opentalk

There's been a change in the licensing regime for GNU Smalltalk: it's all GPL now, with some additional modifications that allow inter-mixing of LGPL code (Smalltalk or otherwise) linked in at the image level - here's the relevant section of the post (but read the whole thing: there are lots of details):

In principle, the GPL would not extend to Smalltalk programs, since these are merely input data for the virtual machine. On the other hand, using bindings that are under the GPL via dynamic linking would constitute combining two parts (the Smalltalk program and the bindings) into one program. Therefore, we added a special exception to the GPL in order to avoid gray areas that could adversely hit both the project and its users:

Linking GNU Smalltalk statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on GNU Smalltalk. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination.

In addition, as a special exception, the Free Software Foundation give you permission to combine GNU Smalltalk with free software programs or libraries that are released under the GNU LGPL and with independent programs running under the GNU Smalltalk virtual machine.

There are some follow on questions and clarifications in the ensuing thread, which I'd also suggest reading if this is of interest to you.

Technorati Tags: GNU smalltalk, Open Source

I see that the "morons against WiFi" coalition has managed to get the UK government to look into it:

Ian Gibson, former chairman of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, last week called for the Health Department to set up an inquiry into the potential dangers of Wi-Fi communications. He said the threat should be seriously examined and that another inquiry should be carried out like the Stewart report into mobile-phone radiation.

Are the also out to ban radio transmissions, over the air TV signals, mobile phones, and cordless phones? Or are they limiting their cluelessness to WiFi?

I may be traveling to Germany this weekend, but the podcast is still happening. We will be talking to Peter Fisk, the Vista Smalltalk guy. No telling how long it will take me to get that edited and uploaded; I arrive in Germany at 6 AM Sunday, and will be doing the podcast at 1 PM local time. I may pass out before editing is done :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, vista smalltalk

Apparently, it's not enough to assert that all mp3 players are nothing by repositories of stolen music:

“Each of these devices is used to store unpaid-for material. This way, on top of the material people do pay for, the record companies are getting paid on the devices storing the copied music.”

Oh, no. Apparently, the entire internet is nothing but a massive instance of copyright infringement:

Now, there's a case called Electro vs. Barker which has become very important. This is a nursing student who was sued in her name. We made a motion to dismiss the complaint because doesn't specify any acts or dates or times of copyright infringement as the law normally requires. We've made several arguments like that before this motion and the RIAA put in an argument which basically fudged it. However, in this case they basically decided to go for the gold and they made a bold argument claiming that merely making files available on the internet is in and of itself a copyright infringement. It was a shocking argument because if it were accepted it would probably shut down the entire internet.

So here's my question - how do the MPAA and RIAA clowns manage to walk upright, given the rectal-cranial inversion they all clearly suffer from?

Technorati Tags: DRM, law, stupidity

I have a few things to take care of before I head to the Users Conference - for one thing, I need to get my car inspected by December 5, and that leaves today (my wife already filled tomorrow). So, Smalltalk Daily will be a little late today.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we get started with Web Services in VisualWorks - specifically, a small example of using the Google API.

Technorati Tags: web services, ws*, smalltalk

Steve Rubel notes that Yahoo is back to building walled gardens:

Has anyone noticed that Yahoo's love affair with RSS seems to be withering? In 2004 and 2005 Yahoo was all over feeds . It was an early leader in driving adoption, as a matter of fact. But in recent months I question whether they remain committed to RSS as a platform.

This is more than conjecture. In the past few weeks Yahoo has rolled out three major new web sites - Yahoo! Food , Yahoo! Advertising and Yahoo! TV . They're great sites, but none of them has feeds. There's a reason why - eyeballs.

Heck, I can't even get their podcast directory to add my podcast feed. It's valid - I check the feed validator after each new show just to be sure. Is anyone home over there at Yahoo?

Technorati Tags: Yahoo

I just finished "When Baghdad ruled the Muslim World". It covered the Abbassid dynasty, which held the caliphate from 750 AD to about 930-940 AD. There was a part of the story that echoed the last book I read, "The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization". Starting in the latter part of the 9th century, the caliphate came increasingly under the control of the military, and there were constant civil wars and succession conflicts. During the last few of those, Baghdad was besieged, and the irrigation system that had been built up was destroyed - and it's never recovered. The descriptions of Baghdad as a lush city with rich agricultural lands surrounding it sound nothing like the Bagdad that exists now (or that has existed at any time since the 10th century).

As with the other book, it's a reminder of just how fragile civilization really is. For all our advancements, we share the same thin veneer that Rome and the early caliphate did.

Technorati Tags: history

William Brogden makes a meaningless point in a "REST vs. SOAP" post:

Another important, but frequently unappreciated point is that, in contrast with REST which requires HTTP, SOAP messages can be moved by any transport method which can handle Unicode text. Because of the convenience of HTTP for penetrating firewalls and the fact that developers are most familiar with the Web, HTTP transport continues to be emphasized.

I'd bet you could count on one hand (and use very few fingers doing it) finding all the non-HTTP uses of SOAP. On the vendor side, who actually supports that?

On today's Smalltalk Daily, I walk through the Google API WSDL example again, using the WSDL wizard to generate some code for us.

Technorati Tags: web services, wsdl, smalltalk

Wired notes that the MPAA seems to like fraud:

Movie industry lobbyists quietly push California lawmakers to quash a measure that would have outlawed HP-style tactics designed to fraudulently obtain private information about consumers. The MPAA argues its antipiracy efforts would be harmed.

It's pretty clear to me why the BBSpot story was believed by so many people; the MPAA is nearly impossible to parody at this point.

Technorati Tags: DRM, MPAA

Jeff Jarvis tries to dissmiss criticism of the $100 laptop project - but I have a bone to pick on that:

I love the One Laptop per Child project (David Weinberger takes one for a spin here ) and think the criticism of it motivated by PC nitwittery (’you should solve every other problem the poor have before giving them a laptop’) or competitive greed (’how dare you make an inexpensive machine with inexpensive software?’) is ridiculous, even offensive.

PC nitwittery? You mean that some other basic needs, like sanitation and electricity are less useful? You don't think that a bunch of laptops handed out to the truly poor represent nothing so much as a target for extortion? Dismissing completely logical objections is itself stupid.

There are problems with "trying to solve every other problem first". On the other hand, some of those problems might well be worth looking into. Simply dismissing them out of hand is not an argument - it's a refusal to engage.

Technorati Tags: charity

Tomorrow I'll be flying to Germany, ahead of the Users Conference. I'll be there all week, so if you would like to ask me questions about Cincom Smalltalk, head on over to the Moevenpick hotel - I'm sure we'll be drinking wine and other stuff each evening after the conference.

Technorati Tags: cst, smalltalk

So I'm heading to Frankfurt tomorrow, on USAirways, and I decided to check flight status (I never do this). Probably a good thing I did - here's what I found out about the outbound flight from BWI:

Ok, this is fascinating. I contact USAirways. They apologize for not notifying me (so far so good), but then accidentally disconnect me. Sigh. Call back. While I'm waiting, I hunt around on Expedia to see what's there. Looks like there's an earlier PHL flight (goodie - longer layover), and a later flight (which would require moving my flight to Frankfurt as well).

I tried to see if they would move me to the later flights, but no dice - understandable, since they said there were only business seats left. I did express some surprise at that, since Expedia says that there are, in fact, coach seats.

At this point, the call center guy at USAirways got snippy, and tried to blame the whole thing on Cincom travel. Yeah, that's going to make me want to fly your airline again - blame shifting. Looks to me like the powers that be at USAirways need to look at the customer service end of things, and fix a few problems. When you cancel a flight out from under the customer, you don't engage in blame shifting - even if the travel agency was at fault. You accept the blame graciously, and move on. Otherwise, the customer is likely to look elsewhere for their next flight. I know I will.

Update: I checked with Cincom travel, and no - USAirways never notified them. Great job giuys - thanks for making my next flight not be on your airline.

Technorati Tags: USAirways, cancellation, air travel

This from Dave Winer:

BTW, according to Amazon, the package that I paid extra to have delivered yesterday, still hasn't left their warehouse. I know I can call them, enough people have sent me their hidden customer service number, but I'd prefer to bitch about it here on my blog. ";->"

and my earlier trouble with USAirways are why you want to provide a good customer experience. Word of mouth is no longer limited to a circle of friends; now it's just a Google search away.

Now this was a cool gift from my friends Mike and Jo: A USB Rocket Launcher:

Of course, it comes with targeting controls:

I now have office defense :)

So after an exciting lunch in the food court, I've found a power outlet and have the laptop up. Small glitch though; no wifi. How can the international terminal in Philadelphia have no WiFi access? I feel like I've taken a quick trip back to the 90's. Oh well - I can catch up on all the feeds that updated over night, and read one of my books.

Technorati Tags: WiFi, PHL

Time for the weekly look at the logs. This week, BottomFeeder downloads proceeded at a rate of 173 per day (I'm also getting another 30 or so per day from the CNet site, but the daily stats aren't really available there). The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	285
Update	238
Linux x86	144
Mac X	139
CE ARM	128
Mac 8/9	59
Solaris	46
HPUX	38
Linux Sparc	26
AIX	24
Windows98/ME	24
Sources	17
SGI	15
Linux PPC	15
CE x86	12
ADUX	3

I only have the Windows version available on the CNet site, and you can see that the Windows download rate on my site is down a little - it's transferred over. On to the HTML page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	42.9%
Mozilla	41.1%
Other	6.3%
Planet Smalltalk	4.8%
MSN Bot	3.5%
Opera	1.4%

A little more parity between IE and Mozilla this week - they are tied, for all intents and purposes. Finally, let's have a look at the syndication stats:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
BottomFeeder	19.6%
Mozilla	18.9%
Other	7.3%
Net News Wire	8.4%
Safari RSS	7.6%
Google Feed Fetcher	6.6%
Internet Explorer	6.3%
BlogLines	4.6%
NewsGator	2.7%
Planet Smalltalk	1.9%
Akregator	1.6%
Zibber	1.6%
Liferea	1.4%
Vienna	1.3%
SharpReader	1.1%
RSS Bandit	1.1%
JetBrains	1%
News Fire	1%
MSN Bot	1%
Python	1%
Jakarta	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
Java	1%
Opera	1%

And that's another week in the can

My network-free stay in Philadelphia was graciously extended by USAirways - it looks like yesterday's storms had after-effects lingering into today. We had two gate changes, and didn't get off the ground until after 5:30 (which means that I could have taken the later flight from BWI this morning, and gotten more sleep. Oh well).

Anyway, it looks like we won't be terribly late - we have strong tailwinds, and we'll make up more than an hour of the scheduled air time due to that. On another positive note, there's power at the seats, and my Targus adaptor works nicely with the plugs. Looks like the flight crew is bringing dinner along, so I'll be closing the notebook soon, and flipping over from music to podcasts.

Technorati Tags: WiFi, PHL

I finished a quick read this afternoon, while waiting in Philly: " In the Wake of the Plague ", by Norman Cantor. It's more of a "cultural history" of the plague, looking at the changes that followed after the death. A lot of hinge points came up:

• The death of Princess Joan, daughter of Edward III of England. She was on her way to marry the King of Castile. Had that gone through, there would have been dynastic links between England and Spain - who knows how that would have affected the future history of relations between the two?
• The pogroms against Jews (especially in central Europe) caused a flood of refugees into Casimir's Poland. That led to the large Jewish community in eastern Europe, which was later targeted by the Czars (and extinguished by the Nazis)
• The labor shortages in England, which led to a backlash by the monarchy and nobles - and in turn led to the peasant revolt of 1391 (which in turn led to more brutality).

Anyway, that's just hitting on a few of the high points of the book. Cantor's got a great conversational style, which makes the book very approachable. I recommend it highly.

Fortunately, I brought another book along: " Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World ". I'm not done with this one, but it's a fascinating look at the late 14th and early 15th centuries in central Asia, when Tamerlane raged across the steppes. The name we know him by is one he would have been offended by; it's a corruption of "Temur the Lame", which refers to an injury received in his early career.

Like a lot of rulers from that era, he was a complex mix of culture and bloodthirstiness - it's likely that he killed millions as he built his empire. One thing I didn't know - he's apparently been rehabilitated in Uzbekistan since the fall of the USSR. His birthplace is in that nation, and he's become something of a national symbol. It's enough to make you wonder how people like Stalin and Hitler will be viewed 6 centuries from now...

Technorati Tags: history

I've finally made it to the hotel (as you can probably tell from the backlog of posts that suddenly appeared). The room seems nice, and there's free wired (and wireless) internet service. That's an improvement from Philadelphia. I'm off to exercise; no idea whether I'll stay awake after that :)

There are some skype artifacts in this one - we spoke to Peter Fisk, author of Vista Smalltalk. Those artifacts were there during our chat, and while they are noticeable, they don't really get in the way. We had a great conversation, and I came away with a much better feel for Vista Smalltalk and where it's going. Hope you enjoy it.

Technorati Tags: vista smalltalk, WPF, .NET

Ralph Johnson talks about some interesting Squeak work:

The last few weeks I've been looking at Pavel Krivanek's project to break Squeak into smaller modules. Unlike most people, who start at the top and try to carve out pieces, he is starting at the bottom. He has developed several images. KernalImage is a Squeak image without any GUI. It has collections, numbers, classes, the compiler, but little else. It has a text-based UI that can evaluate Smalltalk expressions, and it can load files from disk. Pavel has a fileIn for Monticello, so then you can load any other package, as long as it doesn't have a GUI.

KernelImage is a place I'd like to see VW get to, with everything else loadable.

ArcterJournal:

Argh, I hate being a geek sometimes. When I see a computer belonging to a relative that's in such bad shape and instead of just leaving it alone I have to volunteer to "fix it up and make it better", leaving me to be here at the computer at 9 at night on a Sunday running virus scan after virus scan on an old and busted laptop.

That's exactly why I recommend Macs to my non-technical friends and relatives. My brother in law and I were commiserating over the this kind of thing recently. My father in law - a man with multiple degrees and doctorates, who built his own PC (and he's over 80) - needs this kind of periodic help. If he had a Mac, he wouldn't have those problems.

Linux? Sure, it's a possibility. For the non-technical user though, I think a Mac is simpler. And the intel Macs aren't much of a premium (price-wise) over PCs anymore.

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A new Smalltalk user group has been founded in Hungary - you can check out their website here.

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The Toronto STUG is meeting December 7:

The next Toronto Smalltalk User Group meeting and workshop is this Thursday, Dec. 7.

They're a great group - go visit them if you're in the area.

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Nick Carr notes that Google's "spaghetti strategy" hasn't been well received internally, either:

Brin has been particularly blunt. In early October of this year, the Los Angeles Times reported that "Sergey Brin is leading a companywide initiative called 'Features, not products.' [Brin] said the campaign started this summer when Google executives realized that myriad product releases were confusing their users. 'It's worse than that,' said Brin, Google's president of technology. 'It's that I was getting lost in the sheer volume of the products that we were releasing.'" The article also quoted Schmidt, who said of Brin's effort, "That is a big change in the way we run the company."

I suspect that the "20% time" thing - whereby the developers spend up to 20% of their time on pet projects - has a lot to do with the scattershot product strategy. I suspect that it also has a lot to do with some of the products that have been completely neglected (splog magnet Blogger, anyone?).

More than anything else, they need focus. The ad business is doing really well for them, but it's masking a whole host of other problems.

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