Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Tim Bray brings up an interesting problem: given an "official" link (with bad urls, and the propensity of government sites to change quickly), or something like Wikipedia - which do you choose? It's a deeper question that you might think:

I’d be astonished if the Wikipedia suddenly went away. But I wouldn’t be very surprised if it went off the rails somehow: Commercial rapacity, legal issues, or (especially) bad community dynamics, we’ve seen that happen to a whole bunch of once-wonderful Internet resources. If and when it did, all those Wikipedia links I’ve used (396 so far, starting in June 2004) become part of a big problem.

[Let me be clear: I am an unabashed partisan of Wikipedia. I think it is a triumph, a piece of evidence that being human is no bad thing; and I’ll do what I can, when I can, to help it. If I think I see it going sideways I’ll be in there shrieking and fighting.]

We make that choice anytime we link, actually - if we link to a blog, it could disappear and be replaced by a spam farm 3 years from now. It's the downside of making "permanent" posts in a transient medium.

Are first person shooters about to become underground only in Europe?

Violent video games might be banned across the European Union in the near future. Justice Ministers of the EU are seeking an outright ban on all violent video games and strict age limits on many other games. Germany is using its six-month position as EU president to push for the international ban. In addition to the gratuitously violent games, the ban could outlaw The Lord of the Rings" and "Star Trek" video games.

Yeesh. The only positive is that it's proof that idiocy is not confined to any one region...

Via Miguel de Icaza, I ran across Microsoft's "response" to the craptacular DRM they've included with Vista. Here, let me translate their dreck:

Windows Vista includes content protection infrastructure specifically designed to help ensure that protected commercial audiovisual content, such as newly released HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs, can be enjoyed on Windows Vista PCs. In many cases this content has policies associated with its use that must be enforced by playback devices. The policies associated with such content are applicable to all types of devices including Windows Vista PCs, computers running non-Windows operating systems, and standalone consumer electronics devices such as DVD players. If the policies required protections that Windows Vista couldn't support, then the content would not be able to play at all on Windows Vista PCs. Clearly that isn't a good scenario for consumers who are looking to enjoy great next generation content experiences on their PCs.

Translation: "We're a teeny tiny little entity - we'd never, ever consider using our market power in ways that might help the end consumer - no, we bent right over as soon as the MPAA came calling"

Contrary to claims made in the paper, the content protection mechanisms do not make Windows Vista PCs less reliable than they would be otherwise -- if anything they will have the opposite effect, for example because they will lead to better driver quality control.

Translation: "False positives? Bugs in the code? Never - we'll always properly identify everything, and there will never be any bugs associated with the DRM sub-system. Nope, never. Why, look at how reliable our OS code has been in the past!"

I'd continue, but you get the idea. Here's what I wonder - how many soul points did Nick White lose by posting that dreck?

Technorati Tags: Windows, Vista, PVP-OPM

Here are a few shots from various parts of our vacation - we head home tomorrow evening. First: A scene from the Indiana Jones Stunt Show at MGM:

Next - a kind of cool shot of a guy twirling a flaming baton during a a "Lion King" show at Animal Kingdom:

Finally, from the same show, the "monkeys" doing their routine on the high bars:

Back to the colder weather tomorrow :/

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at the Menu Editor - part of the UI building tools in VisualWorks.

At least in the USAirways area, near gates 50-59 - the WiFi is clear and free. Very cool

In response to a comment on this post - we will be shipping a new VM for the Mac in the upcoming release. We expect to have full support for the PPC platform, and we will have beta (at least) support for the intel Mac platform. We are still ironing out a few issues with the product on that platform, so we don't have a definite answer quite yet.

Technorati Tags: Mac, VM

Alan Knight notes that we have two openings on the Cincom Smalltalk team - one in engineering, one in support:

With Vassili's departure, we now have an opening in the Smalltalk Tools team. It's been been posted on the Cincom site, although it seems a bit tricky to find. It's also gone through the HR process of adding peculiar requirements - like 6 years of SQL Server and Oracle experience, and a requirement to reside in the Southwest Ohio area. Ignore those, we'll get that changed in the posting shortly. And although we're primarily looking in the Tools area, we're always interested in high-quality candidates even if experience doesn't precisely match the area we're looking for. And we're a very geographically distributed team - being anywhere in North America is probably fine.

I also note that we have an opening for a Smalltalk support position in North America. Similar caveats apply about the geographic location and specific experience required.

As Alan notes, don't pay a lot of attention to the specific job requirements - we are looking for good people!

Ramon Leon sums up a comparison of Rails and Seaside with this:

The price you pay… sessions and a little memory on the server. Yes it’s harder to scale than a session-less approach like Rails, but it will scale, and memory is cheap these days, far cheaper than programmers. Seaside, like Rails, is a very opinionated framework. Seaside’s opinion is that programming is the most expensive part of application development, so let’s optimize development time instead of CPU memory and cycles and throw out the (stateless/templated html) model of web development in favor of simpler web development in one language, where you have all of your tools available and aren’t constantly context switching between several languages.

My title demonstrates my cynicism - there are still people insane enough to think that manual memory management is a good idea; likewise, it will be very hard to convince their web counterparts that there's another way.

Technorati Tags: development, Seaside

With the craptastic release that is Windows Vista, Apple has a real chance to go for the big one - if Jobs actually has the vision for it:

VMware's own upcoming virtualization software for the Mac has been hamstrung by the trouble VMware has gone through trying to get Apple's blessing, and SWsoft's Parallels has been "crippled" in particular ways to make it more difficult to get Mac OS onto a non-Apple machine, but it seems like it's only going to get harder for Apple to have it both ways, and Intel's inclusion of virtualization in its own chips just compounds the "problem." Michael Dell has also reconfirmed his desire to pre-load Mac OS onto his own boring boxes "if customers wanted it and Apple would license it on reasonable terms," but that tantalizing offer doesn't seem to have swayed Apple yet.

If Jobs decides to go for volume rather than margin, the rules of the PC game could get a big shakeup - and Microsoft might get shaken out of their lethargy and release something with less suckage.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Apple, Windows

Just when I thought DRM couldn't get stupider, I see this article on the fun and games provided by HDCP (and PVP-OPM in Vista is an instance of this set of crapware):

When Popular Mechanics ran into this problem with their own test units, they put in calls to Sony, Westinghouse, and organizations involved with HDMI licensing. It was soon determined that the problem lay with the television set's "interpretation" of the HDCP standards that are built into the PS3's HDMI output. "The PS3 expects a response that the TV is copy-protection ready in a certain amount of time," Westinghouse monitor product manager Klaus Liborr explained to Popular Mechanics. "And the response wasn't coming quickly enough."

The fix? Upgrade the television set's firmware, a process that requires an in-house visit by a Westinghouse technician. Sets sold in 2007 will apparently come with a feature that will allow the user to upgrade the set's firmware themselves via a USB thumb drive, but one worries about the possibility of bricking a very expensive television set by botching the firmware upgrade. The problem isn't isolated to Westinghouse and the PS3, either. Other people have reported that Sony's first-gen stand-alone Blu-ray players and Sharp televisions suffer from similar problems.

That's just marvelous - the industry that wants us all to upgrade to new HD tech is working with a spec that's about as well defined as early revs of RSS were - which is to say, not well at all. It's one thing for an early adopter of news reader software to get frustrated with feeds that don't come in; it's something else again for the poor guy who just bought a 51" HD TV so he can watch the SuperBowl to get spec failure on Super Sunday. Not that the DRM advocates care; they think we're all criminals anyway.

Over the next few months, I suspect that the proverbial substance is going to hit the fan on this, as average consumers come face to face with stupid DRM that hoses them down. And believe me, handing them thumb drives to insert into their TVs isn't going to make them happier.

Technorati Tags: stupidity

Martin Laubach has started a new blog using the Silt server that runs this site. You can subscribe to his feed here.

Technorati Tags: Silt

Martin Laubach has a good post up on automating image builds. I've gone about 1/2 way there with BottomFeeder; it's still more manual than I'd like. I see some tips for fixing that :)

There's been a change in the way passport regulations work that might impact Americans traveling to and from Smalltalk Solutions in Toronto: passports are now required (for air travel - drivers don't need one until 2008) for entry and exit from Canada (Americans and Canadians used to only need a drivers license).

So - if you don't have a passport and plan to come, go ahead and apply now.

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at how you build a menu programmatically. While I'm plugging the results into a menu button, you can plug a menu built this way in anywhere that a menu is expected.

Technorati Tags: cst, smalltalk

I didn't post the weekly log stuff over the weekend, as I was in DisneyWorld - here it is. Looks like BottomFeeder downloads went at a clip of 291/day last week, which is pretty good:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	1205
Update	281
Linux x86	127
Mac X	109
CE ARM	60
Mac 8/9	55
Solaris	43
HPUX	42
AIX	32
Linux Sparc	21
Sources	16
Windows98/ME	15
Linux PPC	14
SGI	11
CE x86	5
ADUX	3

Those Windows numbers are even higher when you add in the results from CNet. The HTML page access results:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	44%
Internet Explorer	39.2%
Planet Smalltalk	5.5%
Other	3.9%
MSN Bot	4%
Noxtrumbot	1.7%
Opera	1.7%

And finally, the Syndication numbers:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Planet Smalltalk	46.9%
BottomFeeder	10.4%
Mozilla	10.4%
Other	6%
Internet Explorer	5.5%
Net News Wire	4.2%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.3%
BlogLines	3.2%
Safari RSS	2.4%
Vienna	2.3%
NewsGator	1.4%
News Fire	1%
SharpReader	1%
RSS Bandit	1%
Liferea	1%

Hmm - looks like something weird happened with Planet Smalltalk last week - I know they lost my feed for a few days at least. Guess I need to look into that :)

Ramon Leon explains succinctly why I like lazy initialization for variables instead of direct variable access:

On thing to always remember when using lazy accessors, is that one can’t ever access the instance variable directly from inside the class. You need to always use the accessor method. I’ve waffled back and forth between direct variable access and lazy initialization several times, but I’ve finally chosen lazy initialization as my preferred method because it allows one to grow a program better by allowing existing objects to be upgraded on the fly without worrying about uninitialized instance variables. I also enjoy being lazy.

In the two main apps I support - this server and BottomFeeder, I use on the fly updating. On the fly updating is way, way simpler when you use lazy initialization. Over time, I've come to the conclusion that on the fly updating is a highly desirable trait in an application, so I like lazy initialization. I suppose it depends on what kind of code you write, and for for what purpose - but for what I do, I agree with Ramon.

Technorati Tags: development

Runar Jordahl explains how the mainstream languages solve problems - they make your life more complicated.

Visual Studio now has the "new" feature Big Integers . Of course you have to declare a number up front to be “big”: There is no automatic overflow mechanism. You just have an exception.

Try this in Smalltalk:

1000 factorial.

Now try the equivalent in C# or Java, and make sure it can work with arbitrary integers that may exist in standing code.

Technorati Tags: types

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we get started on User messages - i.e., how to define a string that is not bound directly into the code of your application.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

We have a keynote set for Smalltalk Solutions 2007, April 30 - May2:

The CTO of InStream Financial, Thomas Gagné will be one of the keynote speakers at the Smalltalk Solutions Conference that will take place in Toronto, Canada on April 30 through May 2.

It's already shaping up to be a great conference - see you there!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, conference, it360

Rob Fahrni has bad news about the fruit (especially citrus) crop from California this year:

According to news reports this morning we've had 19 consecutive days below the 32 degree mark. Not good for fruit that matures in the winter months.

Looks like fresh fruit is going to get more expensive.

Wired has a round up on reactions to MS considering having staffers correct inaccuracies in Wikipedia pages:

When a blogger revealed this week that Microsoft Corp. wanted to pay him to fix purported inaccuracies in technical articles on Wikipedia, the software company endured online slams and a rebuke from the Web encyclopedia's founder for behaving unethically.

For all the yelling, I don't know that there's a real problem - an arbitrary MS staffer is no more likely to be biased than an arbitrary Wikipedia author - and it's entirely possible to get wildly negative content from MS haters. Heck - imagine if I were writing the entry on PVP-OPM, given my well documented dislike of Vista DRM.

I can't really fault MS for wanting to "police" the badness. On the other hand, it's easy to see where it could be considered astro-turfing (and MS has been accused of that before). To be honest, I'm not sure what the right answer is here.

Technorati Tags: wikipedia

Sames fills us in on what he's been up to with Pollock, and gives a glimpse at what's coming.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, pollock

This is a head scratcher to me - in Florida, there's a proposal to make information on lawyer websites harder to find:

Now, some members of the Board of Governors want to make websites subject to Rule 4-7.2. As reported in The Florida Bar News, “Rule 4-7.2 bars the use of testimonials, language describing the quality of a lawyer or law firm’s services, references to past successes, or language promising results, among others.” However, this information is available to legal consumers when they ask for it.

Chobee Ebbets, chair of the special Bar committee proposing these changes, said lawyers could “still post such information, but it would have to be in a restricted area of their Web sites accessed only by the viewer taking an affirmative action indicating he or she desired further information.” Florida Bar News, January 1, 2007.

Hmm. I dislike the "ambulance chaser" ads on TV as much as the next guy, but websites are not like TV or radio. If I head to a legal site (blog or otherwise), I'm actively seeking information - what benefit does it do me, as an end consumer, to make it harder for me to find what I'm actually looking for? By putting that stuff behind a password wall (or the equivalent), it will disappear from search engines, which will only make my life harder.

I'm not sure what "problem" this is supposed to solve, but it seems awfully silly to me.

Technorati Tags: law, advertising

Well, this is interesting - Norway is calling Apple's FairPlay DRM (operates only with iTunes and iPods) illegal in Norway - and France and Germany look like they'll join the party:

Apple's digital rights management lock on its iPod device and iTunes software is illegal, the Consumer Ombudsman in Norway has ruled. The blow follows the news that consumer groups in Germany and France are joining Norway's action against Apple.

So... Apple could license FairPlay, or they could just abandon DRM. Apple likes the lockin provided by FairPlay, but they've never been a big fan of licensing their software, either. Makes me wonder - will they decide that the iPod (and iTunes) are a big enough brand now that they can just kiss off DRM, and tell the studios that they had no choice? This will be an interesting one to watch.

Technorati Tags: copyright, law, iPod

Arden Thomas, our new Field Applications Engineer, will be presenting the Cincom Smalltalk product roadmap to the NYC STUG on January 31st. Check here for detaiils.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, stug

Seems that over 1/5th of Windows installations that have used WGA have failed:

More than a fifth (22 per cent) of Windows installations failed tests on their authenticity, according to figures from tests conducted using Microsoft's controversial Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool.

The BSA (Business Software Alliance) has chimed in predictably:

Figures from the WGA audit are lower than those from the Business Software Alliance, which reckons 35 per cent of business software is counterfeit.

Left unasked by the author of the story, or by MS, or by the BSA: How many false positives live in that 1/5th? I'm sure that many of the checks are from systems that have not been installed in accordance with MS licensing - but the real question is, how many have been, and failed anyway?

In a discussion about document formats, Tim Bray says:

Having said that, I still think OOXML is totally bogus; ECMA shouldn’t have gone near it and neither should ISO. The world does not need two ways to say “This paragraph is in 12-point Arial with 1.2em leading and ragged-right justification”. As I argued in 2005 , if you want to capture MS-Office-specific semantics (not a bad thing in principle) the right way to do it is a namespaced layer on top of ODF.

Hmm - should we apply the theory that "the world doesn't need two ways" to products, too? We had Smalltalk; what's the point of Java? We have Java; what's the point of C#? We have MS Office; what's the point of Open Office (and so on). Somehow, I doubt that Bray would agree with any of those assertions (and for good reasons).

And yet there he is, arguing for the "one true format" (which, coincidentally, happens to be the one Sun backs). Like other products, document formats can be good, bad, or indifferent. I haven't looked at either in detail, but I see little harm in letting people who actually care look at them and make an informed decision.

Tim does bring up the conflict of interest inherent in his point later in the post, but still...

Technorati Tags: OSS, formats

Michael isn't sure that servlets are the best way to deal with web requests, so he's exploring pragmas (or tags) as a way of approaching the problem. Here's a snippet of his post; I encourage you to read the whole thing:

So I got thinking about pragmas again - or as Travis wants to call them: "tags". I thought, what if I could just make one class and put all these adhoc response methods in there using tags. So I've come up with a couple of tags you can put in to a subclass of HttpServerTags.TagServer.

 

static_content
       <get: #('test.txt')>
       <string: 'text/plain'>
       ^'Hello World'

In this simple example we say that we respond to a GET request with path of /test.txt and our content type is text/plain. When we request the page, we get back a string of Hello World. Pretty simple and to the point.

The other examples are far more interesting; head on over and check it out

Technorati Tags: web

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we create a simple message catalog file and add it to the system.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, internationalization

Frank Müller has a write up of Smalltalk goings on at OOP, a trade show that's going on in Munich right now. Read the whole thing - here's the summary:

Beside the new SAP integration the concept of explorative modling using Smalltalk as the modeling language can be a door opener for new Smalltalk projects. While it is only used as a modeling tool customers don't have to be afraid of a new unknown technology. It is strongly seperated. But when he recognizes how fast developing the right thing with Smalltalk is, he'll possibly takes a deeper look. And, when SAP uses it, it can't be so bad. *smile*

If you can see this, you aren't affected (or have the DNS information cached). At present, there's some kind of lookup/router issue, either within our IT or in the outer ISP that serves us (and I'd guess the latter). affecting Europeans getting to the site (maybe other locations; I just don't know). So this is really more of an explanation after the fact - neither this site, the main CST site, or cincom.com are (or have been) offline - until this gets fixed, they've just been made invisible :/

Nick Carr relates some advice from Dave Sifry, which was directed at aspiring politicians. It fits for anyone though. My stupid college hijinks are invisible unless I decide to tell the stories; the generation passing through school now is leaving a much bigger crumb trail:

According to the FT, Sifry cautioned the attendees that "some Web 2.0 tools could backfire on the next generation of Davos delegates, warning that the Supreme Court justices and presidential candidates of 20-30 years time could be embarrassed by their juvenile MySpace pages and drunken photos on Facebook."

"Googling" job aspirants is fairly standard now - it will be interesting to watch the reactions of interviewing staff as they turn up records of lost weekends (and worse). Will they be forgiving, with an "everyone did that" attitude, or are people actually building up that "permanent record" that our high school teachers warned us about?

Technorati Tags: personal

Say hello to Andres Valloud, who is joining the Cincom Smalltalk team - primarily on the VM, but it's a loose boundary here:

I've been offered the opportunity to work at Cincom on VisualWorks' VM, and I have accepted it.

I have worked with Cincom's clients, and I know first hand how much trust goes into what I will work with. I am looking forward to take on this unique challenge --- both because of the fun and because of the responsibilities. It is a golden opportunity that I do not want to miss.

We're happy to have him, and we're still on the lookout for more.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Engadget notes that there are rumors of un-DRM'd music from major labels out there:

Details are admittedly scant on this one, and we must remember that these disclosures are coming out of France, but nevertheless, word on the street is that "at least one of the four major record companies could move toward the sale of unrestricted digital files in the MP3 format within the coming months." Reportedly, executives of several anonymous technology companies that are meeting at Midem are pondering the move to unrestricted digital music downloads, which just years ago wasn't even a remote possibility.

I wonder - right now, the labels are making most of their digital revenue via iTunes, and Apple is setting the terms there - in ways the labels have not been happy with:

• Support for one device only (the iPod)
• Fixed prices for individual songs

They haven't been able to find a way out of that, and - even though they collect most of the $0.99 themselves (supposedly, they get around $0.70) - they want more. We may actually be at a point where, having tried everything else first, they'll end up "doing the right thing" as a last resort.

Technorati Tags: DRM, iTunes, iPod, mp3

I like this comment from Shaman:

Methodology is killing software development. Pre-occupations with standards and enterprise architecture are taking away the creativity from software. Instead of being the software developer’s best friend, architecture oversight groups are assuming the role of armchair dictators and throwing a spanner in the software development life cycle. When was the last time an enterprise software architect actually coded the recommended reference architecture to see if it was even feasible? And how often is the software architecture updated to keep it relevant with business and technology advances?

Now, I do understand the point behind standards, and why businesses should pay (some) attention to them. As Shaman notes though, too many outfits go overboard, and empower standards groups beyond all reason. The first question you need to ask yourself is this:

Is this helping the customer (internal or external) get their solution sooner?

If the answer is no, then you probably have a problem on your hands.

Technorati Tags: standards

The best explanations of Smalltalk's productivity come from people who have used Smalltalk and mainstream languages in anger:

I just finished writing some blog software using VisualWorks Smalltalk and Seaside. It was unbelievably quick and easy - I shouldn't be too surprised, I *was* a Smalltalker for 5 years, but I last used it on a regular basis over 5 years ago. I'd forgotten how quick things can go. :) I can change some code and immediately hit refresh in the browser to see the change - and if there's a problem, I can click on debug in the web browser and immediately have a debugger up in Smalltalk to figure out the problem.

Seaside is incredible too, I picked it up very quickly reading 3 pages of overview, playing with demos, and then on to coding. There's plenty more to learn, I'm sure, but my web app is up and running with suprisingly little code. Learning/using Java frameworks was never this easy.

I've played a little with Seaside, and it does look amazing.

Technorati Tags: productivity, seaside

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at String Parameter Substitution - it turns out that there's functionality in Cincom Smalltalk that is conceptually similar to the features of printf() in C.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

This story about insurance software brought something to mind - the loss of employee level flexibility due to the type of software being used:

As the recent father of twin babies, Philip B. was relieved to learn that his employer's benefit provider, Sun Life Canada, made the insurance process really simple. Adding the little ones on the plan required no more than a phone call to provide birth dates, names, and that sort of thing. All seemed so easy, until the customer service rep realized what Philip was trying to do: "I'm sorry sir, but we need a different birth date for each of your kids."

"Uhh, er," Philip stuttered, rather puzzled, "they're twins? They were both born on the seventh of May, so they actually do have the same birth date."

"Oh yes, I understand," she said, "but our system cannot handle two people with the same last name born in the same month of the same year on the same plan."

I've seen this kind of thing elsewhere. You walk into a store, and - need to do some kind of one-off thing with an employee - an exchange, perhaps, where you don't have exactly what the software expects. A few years ago, employees could bend the rules a little if things seemed to be otherwise ok. Now - they are ruled by the software. If the software doesn't handle the particular exception that came up, then you as the customer are in for a trip to never-never land. I understand the point of these new systems, but I wonder - has anyone sat down and asked the line employees about the impact on customer satisfaction?

Technorati Tags: requirements, flexibility

Travis has posted on his SUnitToo tools - he bugged me about it today in the IRC channel when I mentioned that I was adding some tests to my Blog code while I refactored. So, I went ahead and loaded his stuff - it's in the public Store, but (and this stuff is being changed all the time) I had to load the penultimate version:

When prompted, load this version of the pre-req:

So what does that give you? Well, take a look at the browser view with two new tests that haven't been run yet:

The empty beaker indicates that no tests have run, and the tests have "?" next to them. See the changes when I run the tests?

I've chopped the bar at the bottom of the browser, but you get more indications now. So - let me break one of the tests:

That's pretty nice. There are other goodies as well - if you hit "debug", you'll get right to the failing assertion (where the old SUnit lands inside the SUnit code itself). All in all, if you use SUnit in VW or OS8, you should move to SUnitToo. Ohh - one more thing. To do that switch, check the "View" menu and toggle which testing tools to use. You can move back and forth at will, and the new stuff is API compatible with the old.

Technorati Tags: sunit, smalltalk

Runar Jordahl has pushed out support (Windows only) for more Windows styles - check it out

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Now this may be the perfect food - the caffeinated donut. With this, you can give up juggling the mocha and the chocolate creme in your rental car :)

It's time for the weekly look at the logs - BottomFeeder downloads proceeded at the respectable clip of 244/day. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	579
Update	505
Mac X	119
Linux x86	115
Windows98/ME	110
Mac 8/9	71
CE ARM	61
Solaris	37
HPUX	28
Linux Sparc	21
Sources	16
AIX	15
SGI	13
Linux PPC	13
ADUX	5

On to the HTML page accesses, by tool:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	43.1%
Internet Explorer	37.6%
MSN Bot	7.5%
Planet Smalltalk	6.1%
Other	3.9%
Opera	1.8%

Opera continues to creep up there. Finally, the Syndication accesses by tool:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	17.8%
BottomFeeder	14.5%
Planet Smalltalk	10.3%
Internet Explorer	8.1%
BlogLines	7.7%
Net News Wire	7.2%
Google Feed Fetcher	5.1%
Safari RSS	4.4%
Other	4.1%
Vienna	3.9%
NewsGator	2.4%
Akregator	1.9%
News Fire	1.3%
MSN Bot	1.2%
Python	1.1%
SharpReader	1.1%
iTunes	1%
Liferea	1%
RSS Bandit	1%
JetBrains	1%
Feed Reader	1%
Java	1%
BlogSearch	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
Opera	1%

iTunes is new to that list. And the Planet Smalltalk numbers still look awfully poll heavy to me...

Smalltalk Solutions 2007 is coming up sooner than you think - April 30-May 2 in Toronto, Canada at it360. Head on over here to register (more properly, pre-register - registration isn't quite live yet) for the conference.

We'll have a lot of people at the conference, and I'll be live-blogging - and I think I'll try to do some ad-hoc podcasts from the show with my digital recorder - we'll see how that works out. See you there!

Technorati Tags: conference, smalltalk

Michael Kölling complains that Microsoft not only claims this idea as their own, but also is applying for a patent on it:

The patent claims the invention of “a facility” (the object test bench) that “receives an instantiated object, displays the instantiated object visually, receives a command from a developer relating to the instantiated object, and provides a result corresponding to the received command. As an example, the facility invokes a method provided by the instantiated object or retrieves a value of a property of the instantiated object.”

Michael at least mentions that this feature of his tool (BlueJ) was "inspired" by Smalltalk - but hey - I've got a news flash for him - the above is as good a "pocket definition" of a Smalltalk inspector as anything I've read (sure, most ST inspectors are not graphical - however, I've seen plenty of extensions going back to the early 90's that are). So let me take a moment to yell at Dan Fernandez, one of the MS people involved in this patent: Have you so much as looked at Smalltalk, ever? Maybe if you had, your team wouldn't be applying for dumb patents for ideas they didn't invent. Kind of like the MS morons I mentioned here, who apparently filed their patents relating to RSS without ever looking at various online readers, like BlogLines.

I guess MS simply believes that tons of money and scary lawyers makes them right. Sadly, they might be right - but not terribly ethical.

Technorati Tags: patents, inspectors, law, stupidity

Scoble complains that he's not getting the audience he thinks he should since he headed to PodTech:

Another point? That I’ve become less interesting since leaving Microsoft. Well, I think that’s because Engadget isn’t watching ScobleShow.com . Including an interview with the Zune team that wasn’t linked to by Engadget or Gizmodo, either.

Over there, in just four months, I’ve posted more than 120 videos , gotten more than 70 interviews with Silicon Valley CEOs, and had some real interesting ones with Retrevo and gang at CES, among others. But, nah, that’s not as interesting as seeing inside Microsoft, is it?

The reality is, it's not as interesting at a business level. Why? Well, having Microsoft open up that way draws an audience, and - simply by dint of their size - they are going to get attention. PodTech is a small entity, so it's going to take more work just to get noticed. That's just the way it is.

Second though, I'll say something that I've brought up to Scoble before - video is not the best format for an awful lot of the stuff he's producing. Take most of these videos - to consume those, I have to be at my PC, with a screen. Yes, I could have a portable device like a Zune or a video iPod - but the point is, the video demands attention. When do an awful lot of people consume this kind of thing?

• While Driving
• While Exercising
• etc

In other words, at times when they can listen, but not watch. I get the distinct impression that an awful lot of video blogs use a camera simply because they can - not because of any value that the image adds. It's not that Scoble should eliminate the video; but he should add an audio-only component. I bet his audience would grow as a result.

Dave Buck, Michael Lucas-Smith, and I recorded the show yesterday afternoon, and we had an interesting conversation about common Smalltalk coding issues that come up. Here's what we convered:

• implementing = without implementing hash
• poor hash functions causing many collisions in Sets and Dictionaries
• multiple initialization with super new initialize
• failing to call super initialize
• improper copying (shallow copy vs. deep copy vs. partial copy)
• condition ifTrue: [^true] ifFalse: [^false]
• at:put: returns the element, not the collection
• failing to use 'yourself'
• not using streams and using collections instead which memory bounds you and creates work for the garbage collector
• collections created too small
• Not understanding the Process Model (specific to Cincom Smalltalk)

It's just under 40 minutes, and includes this week's Smalltalk Jobs Report from James Savidge. Questions, comments, or critiques? Send them to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, errors

Patrick Logan makes it clear that MS is just completely full of it with their recent patent on inspectors. I mentioned this the other day, but Patrick dug up some references.

Today, I'll call out the three *cough* inventors *cough* whose names are on it: Guatam Goenka, Partho Das, and Umesh Unnikrishnan. Here's a question - do any of you have any pride, or do you enjoy taking credit for work that was done well over a decade ago by other people?

Technorati Tags: patents, stupidity

Cincom's EMEA team (and Cincom's partner, the Heeg company) were at OOP 2007 last week - here are some photos that Georg Heeg sent me. below, that's Monika Laurent of Cincom talking to Ralk Ehret of SAP (who spoke at the users conference) in the center:

Same shot, slightly different perspective. That's Yvonne Schickel and Helge Nowak at the far left corner (both of Cincom):

Finally, the same shot again, from further back - off to the right in all three shots in Andreas Toenne of the Heeg company.

Vassili Bykov has posted a nice modification to the Refactoring BRowser - I think I'll keep this one loaded:

VB-Sketch-DontModeMeIn is an attempt to fix that within the constraints of the existing RB and the UI framework.

Load it. Close any open browsers. Open a new one. Look at a method source. Start changing it. Without accepting, click on another method. Or another class. Or search for a class. The button with a red circle and white dots at the bottom of the browser is the link back to the postponed edit left behind. The same works for class comments or any other tools. For example, while writing a class comment you can have a peek at class methods to remember what that instance creation method was called.