Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Time for the weekly look at the logs. It was a light week - downloads were at 127/day last week. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	254
Linux x86	110
Update	105
Mac X	98
CE ARM	56
Mac 8/9	52
Sources	36
Windows98/ME	35
HPUX	33
AIX	32
Solaris	30
Linux Sparc	15
Linux PPC	13
SGI	10
CE x86	7
ADUX	6

Overall traffic is always down between Christmas and New Years. The HTML page tool distribution last week:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	42.6%
Internet Explorer	38.8%
Planet Smalltalk	5.6%
Other	5.7%
MSN Bot	5.2%
Noxtrumbot Crawler	2.1%

And off to the RSS tool distribution:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	18.4%
BottomFeeder	15.9%
BlogLines	8.8%
Internet Explorer	7.8%
Google Feed Fetcher	7.7%
Net News Wire	7.3%
Safari RSS	4.2%
Other	4.1%
Planet Smalltalk	3.9%
Vienna	3.4%
NewsGator	3.1%
Lib Perl	1.8%
RSS Bandit	1.4%
News Fire	1.2%
Python	1%
MSN Bot	1%
SharpReader	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
Jakarta	1%
BlogSearch	1%
Liferea	1%
JetBrains	1%
Opera	1%
Java	1%
Live Journal	1%

At first glance, this bug - the fact that you can push Internet Explorer so far to the side of the screen that you can't retrieve it - seems like something that should have been fixed right off. Heck, there's even a page that explains how to recover from it at Microsoft's site.

I'd guess that this falls into that nether region of "ya know, we should fix that" bugs. It's the sort of thing that's annoying to people who run into it, but never quite rises to the top of the bug parade for the internal developers. Every product has annoyances like that - there are scads of bugs listed in our bug tracking system for Cincom Smalltalk that fall into that category.

The nasty thing is that these sorts of bugs linger, wasting the time of the hapless few who run smack into them - my wife lost an hour to the IE one yesterday, while she was trying to make room on her screen as she sorted through photos. So yes, I could deliver a fine rant about how it's a dumb bug, and how it shouldn't exist - but there's this beam in my eye, see...

Technorati Tags: product management

I haven't paid a lot of attention to the new "Google Tips" thing (try a search that includes the word "blog", and look under the paid results). It seemed innocuous enough to me, but it looks like I'm in a pretty small minority. TechCrunch highlighted a post by Blake Ross, and now it's crossed over from the tech blogs to the political ones - I spotted criticism from Glenn Reynolds, and from National Review's "Corner" blog this morning.

That means that the meme is picking up steam, and I think Google's going to have to take note. Matt Cutts (Google employee, with an "unofficial" Google blog) addressed this on the 29th, but it looks like that's not going to be enough. I suspect that Google would be better off letting this initiative die. The positive benefits look to be minimal, and my initial yawn doesn't seem to be the common reaction.

Technorati Tags: marketing, management

Oh, here's a great idea - let's trade one 40+ pitcher away, and replace him with another 40+ pitcher. With this kind of "thinking" in the Yankees front office, I look forward to another July of juggled starting pitchers, as the old guys go down with injuries:

While the Yankees continue their efforts to trade Randy Johnson -- Arizona still seems the most likely landing spot -- they are envisioning Roger Clemens as the one to replace Johnson, to the point where they hope to convince Clemens to move up his possible 2007 start date, sources said.

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

I put together a brief (just over 7 minutes) prediction podcast this afternoon - here's my end of year list of predictions, but bear in mind that (as I said in the podcast) the first one is more of a wish/desire than a prediction:

1. Microsoft will start to get serious pushback on the copy protection madness they've included in Windows Vista
2. 2007 will see even more interest in dynamic languages, as things like Vista Smalltalk and JRuby gain attention on the major platforms - which will help provide small openings for the rest of us in that sector
3. There will be in an increase in statements that the blogosphere/podosphere has peaked (or will peak) in 2007 - especially from larger analyst firms
4. The Mac will start to be taken seriously as an alternative path up from 2000/XP
5. There will be no relief from Spam and Splogs in 2007

That's it - Happy New Year!

Technorati Tags: predictions, 2007

We've left December, and fallen into the dull gray of January. The weather matches the end of the season; it's slate gray outside, 50 degrees (F), and raining. Tomorrow it's "back to the grind" after a week off work, too. All that, and a Christmas tree to take down :)

For the podcasts I've been releasing from the user conference, there's going to be an omission - the keynote from Scott Ambler. I'm not sure what we did, but we recorded the first 10 seconds of it, and then lost the rest. Sorry about that.

It looks like some reality is wandering into the corridors of the RIAA: some of the labels have noticed that people like podcasts, and that some podcasts use music:

Ted Cohen, a digital-media strategist who for many years was an executive at EMI Group PLC, says that keeping up-and-coming artists "protected" from use in podcasts has often backfired. "We've protected them so well nobody knows they exist," he quips.

However, I suspect that there's going to be a problem with the ad model they've chosen:

For now, Rock River has struck licensing deals only with Sony BMG, to include four to eight songs in podcasts created on behalf of its clients. The "Chrysler Music Legends" series focuses on a specific artist in each program, and includes 30-second ads from the car maker at a few points in the program. Subjects of the biographical programs have included Miles Davis, Johnny Cash and Journey.

Thirty seconds is too long. It's long enough that it would be worth my while to skip forward and just avoid the ad. Some of the podcasts I listen to are sponsored, and have ads; the best ads are like the Earthlink ones on CNet's "Buzz out Loud" - short and to the point, so that I don't bother skipping them.

Still, this is forward progress for the labels. Hat tip John McIntosh.

Technorati Tags: music, DRM

Scoble notices the PR gap between Apple and other computer makers (like, say, Dell). To a certain extent, Apple has "PR Capital" that they've spent years working on. If they don't fix some of the reported reliability issues with their new machines though, that "PR Capital" is going to evaporate. That sort of thing can happen very quickly, too.

This session from the third (and last) day of the conference featured Michel Bany talking about Seaside, which he has ported from Squeak to Cincom Smalltalk. The talk was heavy on Demos, but Michel did a good job of describing what he was up to - I think this translated fairly well as an audio-only talk. You can grab the matching slides for the talk here.

Technorati Tags: users conference, smalltalk, cincom smalltalk, web20, seaside

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we dive into some basic XML use in Smalltalk: how to generate an XML file using a SAX driver. In this screencast, we load in an RSS SAX Driver and generate a test RSS feed. Tomorrow, we'll continue by looking at it in more detail.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, XML, SAX

Ryan Tomayko's response to being dugg is both amusing and all too true.

Technorati Tags: Digg

Gordon Weakliem sure has been getting a lot of snow in his neck of the woods - wander over there and see what the neighborhood kids have been up to.

Meanwhile, here's the beginning of the year weather around here:

No igloos around here anytime soon :)

I just saw a "how to stop feed scraping in 3 steps" post, and it's a simple - but mostly ineffective - answer to the problem. The answer given is to find the offending IP address in your logs, and then add a rewrite rule to send that IP away. There are two things that make that a less than optimal answer:

• Most bloggers don't have access to the HTTP server they are being hosted on
• Too many spammers have "farms" of IP addresses at their disposal

The second problem is the bigger one; trying to do blocking on individual IP addresses is a tiresome game of whack-a-mole, and - trust me - the bad actors have way, way more patience than you do.

Technorati Tags: RSS

In this session from the 2006 Cincom Smalltalk Users Conference, I spoke about my experience in scaling a web server (the blog server this is hosted on). You can grab the slides I presented here; the audio quality isn't too bad (at least compared to the other ones from the conference).

Technorati Tags: users%onference, smalltalk, cincom%smalltalk, web

SciFi Wire Reports that the fourth Indiana Jones movie will start filing this year:

Following an announcement by George Lucas that the long-awaited fourth Indiana Jones movie is moving forward this year, Variety reported that the script by David Koepp has been approved and filming will start in June.

Now, I loved those movies (even the mostly panned second film) - but I'm not sure that the aging Indy will hold up that well. On the other hand, Ford is a good actor, so maybe it'll work. All complaints aside, I'll probably go see it :)

James Governor cuts through the fog surrounding the "free evaluation laptop" issue, and gets at the real problem - which is something I really wish I had thought to notice:

Check out the specs… “an AMD Turion 64 X2 dual-core 2ghz CPU, 2GB of DDR2-667 RAM, AMD-ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 on a 15.4″ widescreen. It also has a 160GB SATA drive, HD-DVD reader and burner as well as a 1.3mp camera.”

That’s some pretty heavy specifications. The message I take away is not that Microsoft has an ethical problem but that the hardware upgrades required to run Vista smoothly are going to delight PC manufacturers most of all… If you need a Ferrari to have a decent road experience then Redmond, we may indeed have a problem. 2gig2gig…

Unless you're a serious gamer, you probably don't have a system anything like that, and it is telling that they sent out such high end systems as part of the evaluation. Sure, they didn't want the OS to crawl for the people getting them, but that's pretty far up the scale to go in order to ensure that. The Thinkpad I'm using right now has 768MB of RAM and the HD is small (just 35 GB). Yes, I always want more disk, and I could certainly use more memory - but XP typically runs fine on this hardware. I can only imagine how Vista would operate on this system...

Technorati Tags: Windows, Vista

Chris Petrilli explains why simpler is better:

I would rather take an easily modifiable, open platform that I can make do what I need in a specific environment. Everyone else can play with the “serious” software, and keep adding on gee-gaws until it tips over and collapses of its own weight.

Which is one of the things that Smalltalk excels at - it's open, and can be viewed as play-doh in the hands of developers. While some people look to have every single possible checkbox filled, people like Chris are actually delivering the goods.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, ruby, dynamic

Today's Smalltalk Daily is a bit late - I was on calls all day. However, better late than never - and I took a look at the SAX Drivers as I announced yesterday.

Technorati Tags: XML, SAX, Smalltalk

You have to love the RIAA: as reported by TechDirt, it seems that they want to keep the wholesale prices that iTunes pays a secret:

In one of the recent lawsuits, UMG v. Lindor, where the defendant is challenging the damages amount, the RIAA is refusing to disclose the wholesale pricing details unless they can require Lindor's attorneys to keep the prices confidential. Her attorneys refuse to do so, on the grounds that the information really isn't confidential, and the only reason the RIAA is hoping to keep the prices quiet is to assist them in other lawsuits. Perhaps that would be lawsuits like the one they're facing from a bunch of musicians who feel that the labels are cheating them out of revenues owed from digital downloads.

At least it's clear who all the lies and DRM are for; it's certainly not the artists. Which makes the crap being pulled by Microsoft with the Zune and in Vista even more infuriating.

Technorati Tags: DRM, RIAA, law

Following up from yesterday's post on the Vista Laptop giveaway, I ran across Dave Taylor's post - which is a lot like James Governor's, but with some numbers thrown in to pop the issue:

Think about this: Microsoft dropped about $1500/laptop * 90 laptops + shipping (my rough estimate puts that at a little less than $150,000) to get some positive digital ink. That's a fairly expensive campaign for the blogosphere, and by comparison if we assume that their boxed Vista product costs them about $20/unit, that same $150,000 could have been spent on seeding Vista to about 7500 bloggers.

Microsoft and Edelman didn't send out boxes with the OS DVD, though, did they?

And so, the question that I'm amazed that no blogger seems to have asked is why didn't they send out the OS and let us install it on our own computers?

The answer, once you think about things this way, is obvious, and that's the real story here:

Microsoft Vista is in fact a bear to install and has prohibitive hardware requirements.

Before the fanboys that seem to be attracted to MS criticism show up, think about that - the people who got the notebooks (and could have gotten DVDs) are all pretty tech savvy. Presumably, they would be capable of getting Vista installed and taking a look at it.

Now sure, sending Vista out that way would presume that each of the bloggers had a spare machine on which to install Vista (say I had gotten such a DVD - I don't have a spare machine like that lying around, other than an aging PIII laptop). So I don't think this argument should get as much weight as Taylor wants to give it. I haven't been paying tons of attention to magazines like PC World and PC Magazine - have they done base installs? Typically, that kind of evaluation is done by the trade press.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Windows, Vista

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we start looking at Smalltalk servlets, starting with the GET api.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, web, servlet

I've added a link to the Smalltalk Daily directory page under the "Information" links. It leads to a summary page that categorizes all of the screencasts I've done since September, 2006.

Technorati Tags: cst, cincom smalltalk

I just got this from my European Smalltalk colleagues:

Join the Cincom Team at OOP in Munich, Germany

Mark your calendars!

Keen on learning how you can boost innovations and reduce time-to-market by combining Smalltalk using explorative modelling.? Then join us at our SMALLTALK LIVE! event at OOP in Munich, on January 24, 18:30: Dr. Ralf Ehret, SAP, will share his experiences with Smalltalk projects at SAP Labs.

You can also meet with the regional Cincom Smalltalk team at the Cincom booth from January 23-25.

Both events . SMALLTALK LIVE! evening and the exhibition . will take place in the ICM Neue Messe Munich center.

For registration please e-mail us at infode@cincom.com and we'll send you a complimentary guest ticket.

If you missed the users conference, but would like to hear about Cincom Smalltalk and SAP, here's your chance.

James Governor makes another excellent observation:

What are the implications for the enterprise? If you think you can succesfully run your business as a top down fiefdom, a command and control structure, then by all means encumber all your documents and files with DRM. But if you want to enable your employees to innovate then a little more freedom might not be such a bad thing. That’s the thing with command and control - its inefficient and so bound to fail in the long run.

Outfits that don't trust their employees to do the right thing are just going to have problems. Better to trust and weed out the bad apples than to treat everyone like a suspect.

For those of you who want to bring up various regulations surrounding various businesses - bear in mind that the classification scheme used for documents by the US government has managed to get by without DRM for years.

Technorati Tags: DRM, enterprisey

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we continue with the servlet example - this time, demonstrating how to handle a form with a post servlet.

Spotted in Yankees on WCBS

Randy Johnson's time with the New York Yankees was short and unfulfilling. Moving to end a two-year stay that began with a nasty sidewalk confrontation and ended with a messy playoff loss, the Yankees reached a tentative agreement Thursday to send Johnson back to the Arizona Diamondbacks for reliever Luis Vizcaino and three minor leaguers.

That's good news - more young arms good, fewer old arms, better.

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

It turns out that we did get the audio (just not optimally. I'm editing it now, and should have the session up eventually. Warning - the noise reduction has left artifacts in the audio.

Jason Calacanis wonders if competing sites will cut into Digg's future:

Someone speculates today that digg is going to take a hit from the hundreds of smaller sites that are going vertical in the social news market place. They make a really nice long list of all the social news sites (let's not call them digg-clones because delicious is really responsible for the current movement). The concept is why would folks go to digg if they could got to a more focused site in a vertical?!

There's a simpler problem, IMHO - revenue. I was listening to TWiT this afternoon, and Michael Arrington mentioned that they just got another round of financing - which they wouldn't need if they were revenue positive. So my question is - will they survive long enough to get bought? Will a large corporate owner decide that the name recognition is worth whatever their asking price is?

A related question: In the absence of Sarbanes-Oxley, wouldn't Digg be a public company by now? How many other small tech companies are in the same mid-state, unable to go public due to the high costs of SarbOx?

Technorati Tags: web, law, IPO

Well, last week was a good one for BottomFeeder downloads - Windows downloads jumped for some reason (no idea why):

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	1443
Linux x86	191
Update	185
Mac X	112
CE ARM	68
Mac 8/9	57
Solaris	38
HPUX	27
Sources	24
AIX	22
Windows98/ME	19
Linux Sparc	18
Linux PPC	16
SGI	12
ADUX	6
CE x86	2

That's a rate of 320/day, a rather large jump. I must of gotten linked somewhere that I missed. On to the HTML page downloads:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	41.5%
Internet Explorer	38.3%
Other	2.3%
Planet Smalltalk	5.5%
MSN Bot	5.4%
Zibber	3.9%
Opera	1.7%
Accoona	1.4%

That looks like the normal distribution I see. On to syndication stats:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	17.7%
BottomFeeder	16.8%
Internet Explorer	9.5%
BlogLines	8.4%
Google Feed Fetcher	6.7%
Net News Wire	6.6%
Vienna	3.9%
Safari RSS	3.7%
Planet Smalltalk	3%
Zibber	2.9%
NewsGator	2.6%
Lib Perl	1.8%
Akregator	1.5%
News Fire	1.5%
RSS Bandit	1.4%
SharpReader	1%
Liferea	1%
Python	1%
BlogSearch	1%
Jakarta	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
Opera	1%
Java	1%
MSN Bot	1%
JetBrains	1%
Live Journal	1%
Feed Reader	1%

And that wraps up the stats - still a lot of tool diversity in the space - but the Google Reader is getting some mindshare.

Well, I can't pass this kind of day up:

After I pick my daughter up from skating, I'm off. She'll likely want to come along - I won't be back online for hours, so have a great day!

It was hardly winter - the temperature got up to (or close to) 70, and there was very little wind on the course. We didn't get on the course until almost 3; there was some screwup with the tee time. My daughter played with us, and took a few shots with my camera phone:

That's an old farm silo - the course was beautiful, and on the former site of farmland. The old buildings are just scenery now. We played right up to dark:

Here's one more, of another part of the old farm:

It was a great day out on the course - and I shot a 46. Not bad for January :)

I had the chance to play two consoles at the party I was at earlier today - an XBox 360, and a Wii. The interesting thing was this: the Wii and the 360 were in the same room, and everyone (adults and kids) that wanted to play, played the Wii. The XBox only got put on after the guy with the Wii went home with it :)

We had a great time playing the Wii Sports golf game - yes, the graphics suck - but that doesn't matter. The game play is really, really cool. I think "Mario Cart" on the motion sensing remote is going to be a real winner. We played Gears of War for a bit after the Wii left and yes - the graphics were very cool. But - the controller is, well, a stock game controller for which you have to memorize the functions. The Wii with the sports games - you just hop right in and play.

I know which console I'll be buying this year, and it won't be a 360 or a PS3 :)

Technorati Tags: console, games

Here's a nicely positive review of Cincom Smalltalk Non-Commercial. Curious about Smalltalk yourself? Give it a try!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom

Troy summarizes the difference between a Mac system and a Windows system:

I think Windows is like a bit like a Tamagotchi, if you don't stroke it, it whines and gets flakey, while Mac OS knows its place in the world and lets us work.

He also links to this, which compares the two (from InformationWeek). For the Windows fanboys ready to show up and tell me I'm full of it - I have relatives with Macs, and other relatives with Windows. None of them are highly technical. Want to take a wild guess at which relatives I don't ever have to play system doctor for?

Technorati Tags: Vista, OSX

Michael couldn't join us this week - we scheduled for Sunday morning, and he just wasn't able to stay awake that long. David and I discussed some little known features in Cincom Smalltalk:

• thisContext - the sixth reserved word
• what "super" really means
• constants in other bases 2r10110101 7r463250
• Symbol literals with embedded quotes, spaces, etc eg. #'that''s amazing!'
• printStringRadix:
• byte-array literals #[3 8 98]
• expandMacros
• PrintConverter
• user-defined pragmas
• compilerClass
• SmalltalkCompiler >> evaluate:
• SmalltalkCompiler >> parse:class: -- using a visitor to traverse the parse tree

We had a good conversation - give it a listen and send us some feedback. Another way to let us know what you think - leave a review on the iTunes podcast page (search for Smalltalk), or on the Podcast Alley page.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

It seems that my fingers got button pressing happy when I posted the podcast earlier - I accidentally set the "explicit" flag on it. That's been properly set now, but there's no telling when iTunes (or other servers caching the xml) will update. I've sent the correct pings; hopefully, it'll all reset.

So I just finished the book "The J Curve" by Ian Bremmer. It's actually a lot like Barnett's " The Pentagon's New Map ", but with a different metaphor. It's a quick read, and is more of a case study than Barnett's book - he goes into detail on a number of nations on both sides of his stability metaphor. I'd recommend it.

It dawned on me that I've been doing this blog for just over 4 1/2 years now - and I'm still having fun with it. I decided to have a look at my posting history. Since June 1, 2002 I've pushed up 9660 posts (not counting this one). That averages out to 5.7 posts per day over that timespan. I was a little surprised by the year to year variability in posts:

Year	Total Posts	Per Day
2002	502	2.3
2003	2248	6.2
2004	1921	5.2
2005	2570	7.0
2006	2386	6.5
2007	33	4.7

Obviously, there hasn't been enough of 2007 to draw any conclusions about yet - but once I settled in (after the 1/2 year+ in 2002), I've maintained a pretty active level of posting - with 2004 being just a little quieter.