Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Charles Miller has some thoughts on job satisfaction (or the lack thereof) - and I think (at least in the "knowledge worker" domain) you can divide people into roughly two groups, based on his last questions:

• Work is the sacrifice that we make so we can do the things (outside of work) that we enjoy, and that fulfill us
• We spend a lot of time at work. If we’re not doing something that we’re passionate about, that gives us some kind of fulfilment, we’re wasting a big part of our lives.

I'd bet good money that most of the "workaholics" you know fall into that second category. Me? I love what I do, which is why I spend so much time on it.

Yesterday, I was listening to this podcast over at Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" site - I like his podcast quite a bit, and the topic yesterday - the Bronze Age Collapse - was fascinating. You can get some information on it here, at Wikipedia - but the problem is, we're talking about an era beginning around 1300 bc - so as you might expect, records are sketchy.

I don't know why I find systemic collapses so interesting, but I do. I really liked "The Fall of Rome and the end of Civilization", for instance - and while we know more about the fall of the western empire, historians still argue over what went wrong, why it went wrong, and why it got so bad (and even over whether it got so bad).

One thing seems to stand out in these kinds of collapses - before-hand, you had a world with a working system of international/long distance trade - which brought a fairly high level of specialization. Afterwards, you had a loss of connectivity, and - without local access to the kinds of specialized knowledge they had become dependent on, people fell backwards - sometimes very far backwards.

That makes me consider the modern world - just in time manufacturing, international trade that ties most of the world together, extremely high levels of specialization. The modern world is a fragile thing, and we sit just as much on the edge as the citizens of 4th century Rome did, or the citizens of 1300 bc Anatolia. As catastrophic as WWI and WWII were, they were like small hiccups compared to a systemic collapse. Something to think about, I guess.

As much as I dislike Java, it's indisputable that there are lots of available libraries, and using them from Smalltalk would be convenient. Well - Joachim Geidel has been working to make that possible from Cincom Smalltalk. I found this in the VWNC mailing list:

I have posted an updated version (0.29) of JNIPort for VisualWorks to the Cincom Public Repository.

JNIPort is an interface which makes it possible to transparently use Java libraries from Smalltalk. It invokes a Java VM using the Invocation Interface functions of the Java Native Interface (JNI). It can automatically generate wrapper classes for Java classes, enabling you to write code like this:

        | jvmSettings jvm zfClass zipfile entries |
        jvmSettings := (JVMSettings new)
                        name: 'JVM with ghost class generation';
                        yourself.
        jvmSettings usesGhosts: true.
        jvmSettings jniPortSettings useJNIHelperLibrary: true.
        jvm := JVM newWithSettings: jvmSettings.
        zfClass := jvm findClass: #'java.util.zip.ZipFile'.
        zipfile := zfClass new_String: 'MyZipFile.zip'.
        zipfile size_null. "--> answers an Integer"
        entries := zipfile entries_null.
        entries asAnEnumeration
                do: [:each | Transcript cr; print: each].

The methods new_String:, size_null, entries_null will be generated in a "ghost class" when the JVM accesses the Java class - no need to write code! (But be prepared to wait some seconds for ghost class generation during JVM creation.)

Most of the unit tests are green, but there are still some bugs:

• There are some tests which fail because using out-of-range values for short and byte values does not raise exceptions as expected.
• One test fails because of a bug somewhere in the conversion between Java and Smalltalk strings (only for two-byte characters).
• When using a JVM with ghost class generation, accessing the result of methods answering single characters is broken (methods answer a Character, but try to use it as an Integer).
• Callbacks from Java do not work yet, they raise an Exception because the Java side does not find the callback methods.
• Using "lazy ghost classes" to avoid the long setup phase when starting a JVM using ghost classes does not work yet.

What's next (feel free to help me):

• Fix the bug in String conversion.
• Fix the bug of trying to interpret Character results as Integers for JNI methods answering jchars.
• Add checks for out-of-bounds values for short and byte values.
• Make callbacks work.
• Add a GUI for configuration, monitoring, and inspecting ghost classes.
• See what happens when using Java 1.6.

Joachim Geidel

This is a cool project, and it looks like we'll be including a snapshot of the code on the CD in "contributed".

Technorati Tags: java, interop

The traffic engineers in my area (Howard County, Maryland) have become enamored with "traffic calming" - the idea is explained here, but it can be explained a lot more succinctly: someone let the highway department have too much fun with a batch of play-doh, and they decided to toss the shapes they created onto the roads. Here are two pictures of some of the stupidity in action in my neighborhood:

The road hazards here are in the center of the road, going around a turn. In the winter - as you can see above - they can't be plowed properly. Heck, the snow and ice in question fell a week ago, and there it is, still in the roadway. In fact, chunks at the end of these are missing, as plows have previously ripped them out. Worse, snow and ice are just left in the center of the street between the hazards (fun if you want to turn across it).

Even when there's no snow, you should see school buses try to make their way around these - or moving vans, or emergency vehicles. As best as I can tell, the morons who advocate these things have never actually driven a car. When I get a chance, I'll take a photo of the lovely "S" turn they've implemented in a different part of the neighborhood - that one actually aims you into oncoming traffic. These things are just stupid, and many of the chokers they've put up have eliminated bike lanes as well.

Technorati Tags: driving

On this morning's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at inserting conditional breakpoints into a method.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, debugger

Traveling early on a cold morning is unpleasant enough, but today I got an extra bonus - the aircraft wasn't hooked up to external power, so there was no heat before they turned the engines on. Lovely - I wore my coat and gloves for the first 20 minutes of the flight. The flight crew was nice about it though, which helped.

I saw this in Digg:

In a speech Friday night to the Annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, Google co-founder Larry Page stated that Google was developing Artificial Intelligence and that the company wasn't far off from completing real AI.

It immediately brought a recent set of cartoons from "User Friendly" to mind. Start here on February 8th, and move forward.

Technorati Tags: humor

Via Chris Hanson comes word that OpenCroquet.org is now running a snazzy new wiki. Check it out.

Technorati Tags: croquet

I've been in and out of meetings today - I came in to chat with our Mantis team - they were interested in how the Smalltalk team uses blogs, podcasts, and screencasts to "get the word out". That was fun, and we had a good conversation about it. After that, we had some Smalltalk planning, which will be continuing over dinner. I head out early tomorrow - have to leave the hotel at - ugh - 4 AM :/

It's great to sit back down at my desk and be greeted by another round of "random verbiage spam", designed to defeat the Baysian filter I don't run. One script later, and it's all gone.

Dave Winer mentions an ad that I hate as well, and it was doing even less for me:

Ever see those ads on TV for a desipicable product called Head-On? The ads suck, and you know they did it deliberately because later they run an ad with a very unpleasant person saying how much the ad sucks, but they love the product. An ad for headache medicine that gives you a headache. Followed by a meta-ad (an ad about the ad) that gives you two headaches for the price of one. Oy.

Before I saw this post, I had no idea what the product was even for - the ads were so annoying that I just tuned them right out. I think the company behind this product needs to fire their ad agency, pronto.

Technorati Tags: advertising

Too see what happens when the music industry gets what they ask for, look no further than Canada, where they managed to get laws passed that apply fees to blank media and music players. As the market for that kind of media expands and blurs (phones that play music, USB sticks, etc), the regulations just start getting stupider - and they start offending more and more people. Consider:

The CPCC takes precisely the opposite approach. It is demanding an increase in the levy to 29 cents per blank CD, a price that would result in huge market distortions given that the collective admits the levy will account for more than half of the retail price of blank CDs.

Moreover, it is seeking to reinstate a levy of up to $75 on digital audio recorders such as the Apple iPod. The collective claims that the levy will exclude cellphones and PDAs by limiting its application to devices that primarily play music, however, distinguishing between devices is nearly impossible since dozens of products (Apple iPhone, BlackBerry Pearl, Palm Treo) are music players, cellphones, digital cameras and email devices rolled into one.

The CPCC is also seeking to extend the levy to storage media such as secure digital (SD) cards, despite the fact that its own data shows that 75 per cent of content copied on to these cards is not music and 80 per cent of people say that the content they last copied on to these cards was not music. These results will not come as a surprise to digital camera owners, yet that has not stopped the collective from demanding up to $10 per card.

That route goes the same place as the 55mph speed limits did in the US - massive disrespect for the law, and otherwise law-abiding people making an effort to get around the rules. That's the kind of system the RIAA really, really wants.

Technorati Tags: music, stupidity

Last week's podcast suffered from low audio levels, especially for Michael's segments. I hadn't tried to boost that originally, because of some noise on the line. However, I got more than one complaint about the audio being too soft, so I've reposted the episode. You can grab it directly here, in case places like iTunes don't re-index it.

Wired reports that Australia is planning to phase out incandescent bulbs:

The Australian government on Tuesday announced plans to phase out incandescent light bulbs and replace them with more energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs across the country.

I understand the motivations; other issues aside, they are longer lasting and more energy efficient. However, it's pretty hard to find fluorescent bulbs that produce "warm" light. I have one here in my office lamp, and the best I can say for it is that I find it tolerable - I've had it in for a couple of weeks, and I'm still not happy with the light it provides. I'm still experimenting, trying to find a fluorescent bulb that doesn't suck. I'd be pretty unhappy if they were my only choice.

That "thud" you heard is the sales volume for Windows Vista. Seems that pushing an incremental update to XP (but one that ups the memory and graphics requirements a lot), while simultaneously adding brain dead DRM technology wasn't the best move ever.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, Vista

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we continue to explore the Cincom Smalltalk debugger. Today's topic: variable watches.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, debugger

Scoble said something that I couldn't agree with more:

Shipping is a feature. I keep getting reminded of that. Scientific American has a long article on the MyLifeBits research that Microsoft (er, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell) is doing. You can see these two guys in a video series I did while back at Microsoft.

That's very, very much the case. Cool code that stays in the lab is equivalent to code that was never written. Later on, he mentions something else:

This is why I’m scared by what Ray Ozzie is doing. Clearly Ray has bought into the Steve Jobs’ school of “keep it secret, don’t talk, and ship something cool.”

The difference is, Apple ships new stuff all the time, while Microsoft seems to be mired in endless delays. This is a lesson I'm taking forward in my role here at Cincom as Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager.

Evan Williams touts Odeo as tops amongst Podcast indices:

"Odeo is the only vertical podcasting site that has emerged from the pack: it received 5X more traffic than its nearest competitor, PodcastAlley.com for the week ending 2/17/07, and achieved an overall rank of 14,982 in the Hitwise rankings."

That's fascinating, because Odeo hasn't managed to update my podcast feed in nearly three months - even though it checks out as valid. So... perhaps they could work on that?

It's anecdotes like this that fascinate me:

The biggest impact of the Civil War was on the Middle East rather than the Middle East on the Civil War. The biggest impact was cotton. When the North blockaded Southern cotton the textile mills of Europe went dry. So they turned to the only other place in the world that had cotton of a similar quality and that was in Egypt. The price of Egyptian cotton went up about 800 times. Egypt made a lot of money. And with that money they built wonderful buildings and palaces, they built the opera house where Verdi used to perform, and they also built the Suez Canal which completely changed the face of the Middle East.

In 1869 the cotton market in the South came back and the Egyptian cotton market went bankrupt. Egypt went bankrupt and that led to the British occupation of Egypt that lasted for 70 years. There was actually a direct line between the Civil War and the Suez crisis of 1956 during which the Egyptians tried to nationalize the Suez Canal. Britain and France invaded. And so, really, the reverberations from the American Civil War in certain ways continue to course across the Middle East.

I've read a lot about the Civil War, and a fair amount about European history - and there's a connection that I had never seen before. History continues to echo back at us, with current events being influenced by things long forgotten - and many times, things that are seemingly unrelated.

Tim Bray has a long exposition up on the idea of using the web as a means of financial disclosure (as compared to the traditional press release route). This is something Sun's CEO brought up last year, and there were objections at the time - although I disagree with most of the objections. Tim does a great job of dissecting those objections, so I won't bother doing so myself - just read what he has to say - makes a lot of sense.

Technorati Tags: finances

Sometimes, "experts" are a lot less intelligent than you think. Take this story in ComputerWorld, for instance - it's yet another "the tubes are failing" thing from the so called experts:

Nick McKeown, a computer scientist at Stanford University, heads up one such program. He says the Internet is “broken” in at least two places -- security and mobility.

...

“But if the user is moving around, you end up with a whole lot of hooks and kludges to keep track of the user,” he says. “There have been various proposals for a mobile IP, and they are all awful. They barely hold together now, but all the routing mechanisms will just break when there are many more mobile devices.”

That's just utter gibberish. The servers generally aren't mobile - they pretty much stay where they are, at "well known" IP addresses. Clients move around a lot - on Tuesday, for instance, this notebook was on a wired network at my hotel in Dayton, then on WiFi at the airport, then on Wired (and WiFi) here at my house. And believe it or not, the tubes didn't clog, the sky didn't fall, and life as I know it didn't end. I have a clue for McKeown: the rest of the network doesn't care where my mobile devices are, or whether they happen to be online or offline. I care, and some apps on my devices might care. The rest of the world? Not so much.

The stupidity gets much, much worse though: Here's McKeown's "solution":

McKeown and his colleagues have developed a prototype network called Ethane, which centralizes security rather than putting it all around the network in firewalls, virus scanners and the like. With Ethane, all communications are turned off by default. A host joining the network must get explicit permission from a centralized server before it can connect to anything except that server. And the server won’t grant permission unless it is able to determine the location and identity of the requestor.

You know, I like single points of failure as well as the next guy, but McKeown can have it, thanks. I'll stay with the less secure - but vastly more robust - system we have now. To get on the net at an arbitrary airport or coffee shop now, all I need is WiFi and a DHCP server that can route me. Under his system? Well, let's just say that I expect various interoperability issues with that security setup. Fortunately, the net is too big to be re-bootstrapped, so McKeown's ideas will stay where they belong - in the lab.

Technorati Tags: stupidity, security

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at probes and watches in a little more depth - in particular, we look at Expression Watches and "Top of Stack" probes.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, debugger

Howard Kurtz of the WaPo asks the right questions about Satellite Radio in the wake of the XM/Sirius merger: why does Satellite Radio exist in the first place?

The reason these two companies have 13 million subscribers willing to cough up $12.95 a month for something we all grew up thinking should be free is that commercial radio has self-destructed.

All these folks (including me) are paying for satellite because they're tired of cookie-cutter radio formats stuffed to the gills with commercials. They're also fed up with focus-grouped music stations that play the same 60 songs until you start hearing the chords in your sleep.

There's no good reason that the FM dial had to go to heck. When I travel now, I carry my iPod, and listen to that in the car - and the iPod is the only real competition for XM/Sirius. I grew up listening to radio, and - back when it didn't stink - the ads didn't bother me that much.

Technorati Tags: management, radio

Sooner or later, reality will shine in on the puzzlewits at the RIAA. In the meantime, there are signs of progress:

The company behind the Puretracks.com music store said it is immediately offering songs from artists such as The Barenaked Ladies, Broken Social Scene and Sarah McLachlan under a partnership deal with major independent labels.

The labels include Nettwerk Music Group of Vancouver, Arts & Crafts Productions of Toronto, the San Francisco, Calif.-based Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA) and Beggars Banquet Records of London, England.

Those are small indie labels, but some of the artists are prominent. I expect kicking, scratching, and biting from the RIAA all the way to the end.

Technorati Tags: music

So I'm seeing a new trend in Wiki spam - this kind of stuff has been hitting the VW Wiki at UIUC lately:

 

<center>
<u style="display: none">
"Bozo spam hrefs go here"
</u>
</center>

Even worse is the crap like this:

 

"bunch of keywords here"
<p>
<meta http-equiv=refresh
content="0;url="url to redirect to here"<p>

You see the keywords for a second, and then get immediately redirected. Truly, truly ugly stuff. I have filters for this kind of stuff for our Wiki, but all I can do about the UIUC one is run repair scripts that use HTTP to revert.

Oh, how innovative! I'm watching "Jericho", and it looks like the plot is turning towards - wait for it - "secret government conspiracy". Wow - no one has ever used that one before. Is it even possible to have a plot line that does something different?

Technorati Tags: stupidity

I'd want to listen to this, but it's 44 minutes of video:

While everyone is over in London at the Future of Web Apps Conference ( great writeup of day 2 is here ), I thought it would be fun to put up my interview of Sebastian Moser . Don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of him either before he wrote me in response to a request to talk with more developers.

That length would fit perfectly into my exercise time (and probably the commute time for a lot of people, too). Please Scoble - give as an audio only feed!

DOME is a domain modeling system built in Cincom Smalltalk, but it's been falling further and further away from newer versions - until now. There's work in progress to get a full update published - you find find the development Wiki here, and grab the work itself in the public repository.

Technorati Tags: design, modeling

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we learn how to aggregate watch windows (from debugger probes) into a single window - thus reducing screen clutter.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, debugger

Doc Searls quotes Michael Rosenblum at a conference in Boston:

"Ice was a fantastic business, for two thousand years... they were probably having conferences like this, talking about ice ponds and straw and shipping routes..." Then in 1873 a guy named Perkins invented refrigeration. "And your ice business was dead."

When the public has their own transmitters, what's the need for a "public resource" like PBS? For that matter, all of radio is in danger, with the growth of satellite radio and podcasting. The supposedly scarce bandwidth just isn't so scarce any more. For radio to stay around, the people in that business need to figure out what niche they serve that the competition doesn't, or can't.

Technorati Tags: radio

Peter Fisk quotes an ZDNet's Ryan Stewart (I don't have a direct link yet - Peter blew the link, I'll update when I see it):

I had been told that a CLRified version of “WPF/E” would be shipping in the 1.0 release but I think the plan for the team is to make a lot of small updates in quick succession so that they can grow the product as customer needs expand. It’s a good strategy, but even “less than a year” is a long time to wait for managed code.

It's kind of amazing that Microsoft's UI team for their future UI isn't eating their own dogfood. There may even be good reasons for it - believe me, I know a fair amount about the difficulties of working with disparate teams who have independent development histories - Cincom's other products pre-date the entry of Smalltalk to Cincom, for instance. For Microsoft, however? These guys are all supposedly on the same team.

Technorati Tags: windows, WPF, CLR

Alan Knight has posted a link to the session list for Smalltalk Solutions 2007 at it360 - registration isn't online yet, but the site does say that it should be ready on February 26th (you can register for an update on that now). Alan's session info is a DabbleDB application, which is kind of cool all by itself :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

File this under "what, you mean there are risks in this strategy?"

The cartel of record companies in Capitol v. Foster have filed a motion for reconsideration of US District Court Judge Lee R. West's decision to award the defendant Debbie Foster attorneys' fees. In it, the plaintiffs lay out their disagreement with the judge's reasoning while taking time to point out that the fees awarded far exceed any damages they could have recovered should their suit have been successful.

What a complete bunch of tools. I swear, some prosecutor should start applying the RICO laws to the RIAA.

Update: Oh geez - the RIAA is willing to just lob grenades everywhere they go. I hadn't considered this, from Wired:

Predictably, the RIAA has filed a "motion for reconsideration" of Judge West's decision to force the RIAA to pay for Foster's legal fees. In the motion, the plaintiffs emphasize a key point: They want the judge to rule that the owner of an ISP account is responsible for all activity on that account, which could have a chilling effect on public wireless access and open hotspots. (The appeal also made the point that Foster should be held liable if she was aware of the infringement occurring via her account; in the case of someone with an open Wi-Fi network, that could constitute something as simple as experiencing traffic slowdowns.)

If they got their way on that, any entity that offered a net connection - Starbucks, a hotel, a municipality (etc) - would have a huge potential liability on their hands. They might well decide to just discontinue in order to not expose themselves. Yeah, there's a world I want to live in.

Technorati Tags: music

Doc Searls:

Did you know that all your channel-branded TV stations - WCBS/2 in New York, KPIX/5 in San Francisco and every other "Channel (fill in a number)" that has been around since the 1940s - are going to be marched off those channels and onto new ones in 2009? And that your TV will no longer get anything at any of the over-the-air channels those stations occupy today? WCBS will be on channel 56. KPIX will be on channel 29. Every station, somewhere else.

For reasons outlined well by Scoble, I'll believe this when I see it - and I'll be astonished if I see it at all.

Jeff Jarvis has some good words of advice for newspapers: Go Local:

Try this on as a new rule for newspapers: Cover what you do best. Link to the rest.

That’s not how newspapers work now. They try to cover everything because they used to have to be all things to all people in their markets. So they had their own reporters replicate the work of other reporters elsewhere so they could say that they did it under their own bylines as a matter of pride and propriety. It’s the way things were done. They also took wire-service copy and reedited it so they could give their audiences the world. But in the age of the link, this is clearly inefficient and unnecessary. You can link to the stories that someone else did and to the rest of the world. And if you do that, it allows you to reallocate your dwindling resources to what matters, which in most cases should be local coverage.

I can get news coverage for (insert national or international story here) from the wire services, or locals in those areas - I don't need the local paper to regurgitate it. Local school board news? Who else is going to give me that?

Dave Winer quotes Cory Doctorow on what's wrong with the kind of DRM system the iPod has:

Cory Doctorow : "I think that it's reasonable to assume that Apple won't always make the world's best music player. I'd like to keep my options open. But the longer you own an iPod, the more likely it is you'll buy more iTunes music, and the fewer options you'll have."

That's correct; not everyone is willing to go through the "DRM Shuffle" that I do, nor should they have to:

• Buy music on Machine 1
• Rip a CD from iTunes
• Import the CD into Machine 2's library
• Manually key-in the track info

If I bought enough music, I'd automate the last step - but I don't buy music direct from iTunes that much - mostly, I buy CD's to avoid the whole problem. However, lots of people just buy their stuff straight from iTunes, which builds up their lock to the iPod over time.

I'm not sure about the point Winer adds though:

And don't miss that lockin doesn't just come from format lockin, it's also a closed box, only the manufacturer can add featues. Jobs said the reason the iPhone isn't an open platform because it's a phone, but that doesn't explain the iPod's closedness.

I get his point, but the iPod is a consumer gadget - and as such, most people probably don't want all of the issues that come with open-ended configurability. Think about your PC, and the kind of behavior it tends to exhibit over time - and compare that to an arbitrary stereo component. Now ask yourself which one is closer to how most people think about their iPods...

Technorati Tags: iPod

Giovanni Corriga needs your help - if you're a Smalltalker interested in Google's "Summer of Code":

Google has recently announced the third edition of its Summer of Code program.

In this program Google provides funding to students to work on open source projects.

I think Squeak could benefit, both technically and in advertisements, from partecipating in such a program.

Unfortunately, the deadlines are pretty tight:

• March 12th for Squeak to apply as a mentoring organization
• March 24th for students to apply as developers for the program.

I'm trying to have Squeak apply to the program. So if anyone would like to partecipate to this effort, either as a mentor, or as student developer, or just to provide ideas and suggestions, please contact me ASAP at my personal email.

Follow the link above for contact info.

Technorati Tags: squeak, Google

Dave Buck finds some developers who are pining for Smalltalk - which isn't really that far off :)

I see that the Hearst corporation is releasing their own "newspaper reader" software:

In a continuing effort to expand the reach of its content, Hearst Corporation today announced an alliance with Microsoft Corp. that will allow Hearst media properties to utilize Windows Presentation Foundation technology to create "News Reader" software. Hearst's initial deployment of the News Reader software, which launches in beta at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer today, is a downloadable application providing computer users with a new way to view newspaper content onscreen.

The Times has one of these, too. Here's the thing - with this approach, if I want to read N papers, I need N pieces of software. Yeah - I can see trying to make that pitch. They could achieve the same thing via RSS/Atom and their own re-branded reader software.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at the Settings that are available for VisualWorks.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Chris Petrilli explains why Windows has so many problems - the complexity involved is just unfathomable:

I believe that Windows XP is actually unknowable in its complexity. I don’t believe anyone at Microsoft knows how it works, or really cares, and I certainly don’t believe that it’s fathomable by any human being. This is in stark contrast to UNIX and its derivatives, or even Windows NT 3.51 or 4.

Technorati Tags: microsoft

This is annoying. I headed over to Yahoo movies to check on listings - we are considering taking in a movie this afternoon. So this is what greets me:

Ok, what's up with that? last night, the movie titles were links to a Yahoo page with more info, and the running time was available. Now all I have is a "buy tickets" link (and only for theaters that offer that). What's up with giving me less information?

Technorati Tags: yahoo

Doc Searls responds to my answer to his earlier post, with stuff that I agree with, but think doesn't matter a lot:

Even for old analog-only TVs, there are plenty of workarounds, including plain old cable TV. A very small minority of viewers today get their TV from antennas. And if that's how Scoble's dad gets his analog TV, all he'll have to do is get a converter that turns his digital TV to analog. There will be plenty of those around by February 2009.

That's all true - it's not that hard to get that stuff done, and it's pretty cheap. The problem is, I don't think that matters a lot. This looks to me a lot like a classic "perception vs. reality" issue. Go talk to a few 50+ non-technical folks, and see how they consume TV. Never mind the fact that most of them get cable, and thus won't be affected by this changeover at all. All that has to happen is for a few people to decide to scare-monger on this - i.e. - "they are trying to take your TV away!" - and this simple problem will start to look absurdly complicated. It shouldn't be that way, and it doesn't need to be that way - but I won't be at all surprised if it goes that way.

Technorati Tags: regulation

Add Don Dodge to the list of people who have swooned over the concept of a specific reader for a newspaper to the point where they just don't get it - he says this in response to Scoble, who had the same questions I did:

Newspapers and magazines have very powerful brands. Part of that brand is the look and feel or presentation of the information. The layout, the font, the headlines, and the advertising are all part of the reading experience. The newspapers and magazines want to replicate the news reading experience on line. Sorry Robert, but you can't do that with an RSS reader.

These News Readers will download the whole newspaper or magazine to your laptop or PDA within a couple minutes. Then you can read it at your leisure on the plane, bus, taxi, or where ever you are. No need for an Internet connection, and no need to scroll through hundreds of individual RSS feeds.

That's true. The trouble is, it doesn't matter, either. With an RSS reader or a web browser, I can read any news content I want, anywhere. With this reader, I can read the content for exactly one newspaper, period. What if I think to myself "well, that's what the Times thinks; I wonder what the WaPo has on it?" In Don Dodge's world, I download a second reader (and another for every paper I ever want to read). In mine, I use a single piece of software.

If the people behind this want a snowball's chance in heck of getting anywhere, then they'll need to define a common format that works across newspapers, and support it. They'll also have to figure out how to support that software, and convince people to use it instead of the tools they already have. Gee, there are even two formats out there that do this already; go figure.

Pretty doesn't matter here, as Matthew Ingram noted.

Technorati Tags: news

I saw this in a TV Review feed I follow - never mind what TV show it's about, I wish I had penned the line :)

An old adage cautions that every successful filmmaker has a highly personal dud in them, just yearning for the industry clout to set it free.

BottomFeeder downloads were down to a more normal run rate of 153/day last week - the details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	325
Update	191
Linux x86	116
Mac X	98
CE ARM	62
Mac 8/9	58
Solaris	50
HPUX	49
Linux Sparc	24
SGI	24
AIX	24
Sources	17
Linux PPC	16
Windows98/ME	10
ADUX	7
CE x86	2

On to the HTML pages accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	45.1%
Internet Explorer	39.7%
Planet Smalltalk	6%
MSN Bot	4.6%
Other	2.9%
Opera	1.7%

That looks like the normal traffic flow there. Finally, the syndication stats:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Planet Smalltalk	26.9%
Internet Explorer	17.7%
Mozilla	13.7%
BottomFeeder	11.4%
Other	3.2%
Net News Wire	4.7%
BlogLines	4.1%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.5%
Vienna	2.7%
Safari RSS	2.5%
NewsGator	1.4%
Akregator	1.2%
Python	1%
SharpReader	1%
News Fire	1%
RSS Bandit	1%
Liferea	1%
JetBrains	1%
MSN Bot	1%

That's a pretty big jump for IE; version 7 must be rolled out further, or it might be Outlook (which apparently doesn't change the agent string). I see Planet Smalltalk is still over-polling as well. Bad bot

The latest Cincom Smalltalk Digest is online now; you can also subscribe via email.

Technorati Tags: cincom, smalltalk

I find the sort of argument laid out here (by Rogers Cadenhead) mostly wrong-headed. Sure, there's a deficit of women in IT in general (and thus, in the ranks of speakers at conferences). The answer isn't to go out and purposely pick up a few tokens and pop them on stage to make people like Rogers feel better, though.

Here's the thing - pursuing intellectual diversity at a conference would be far more useful than worrying about gender/creed/race. Who cares whether you get a mix of those classifications, if they all come from the same Silicon Valley startup culture? Wow - I can listen to 10 different accents and pitches, and hear the same thing anyway. You want some diversity? Start looking beyond the same old set of people, companies, and parts of the country/world.

Travis has been working on some cool platform linkups recently:

A new version of Cairo has been posted. Under some guise, I have had this working under each of the three major display platforms. I've been able to do Cairo things under live Windows windows, and now I've got X11 windows (and pixmaps even) working. And Aqua pretty much works. With the annoying notion that you have to cover the window to get it to update properly. :) That should be easy to fix I hope. For Windows I need to chase down why the surface goes stale often after a pop up menu has obscured it. And under X11, some VW floating point ops if followed soon by certain cairo calls don't behave as expected. Something about some floating point flag. These are all surmountable hurdles though. And any other person that was properly motivated would be more than welcome to load and help fix these issues. It's time for me to start putting together my Cairo presentation for Smalltalk Solutions. I'll be doing it in... Cairo of course.

You'll also want to read this, and this.

We recorded this week's podcast yesterday afternoon - we had a conversation about threading - green, native, and the uses of both in the face of the multi-CPU, multi-core systems that are being built. It's about 38 minutes, including James Savidge's jobs report. We had a good time with this one; hope you enjoy it.

As always, send feedback or questions to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, threads, processes, development

Maybe someone should let the TV industry know about the existence of the internet, and what it means for the quaint notion of staggered rollout around the world:

Australian TV viewers are waiting longer than ever to view their favourite overseas produced televisions shows, driving them to use BitTorrent and other internet-based peer-to-peer programs to download programmes from overseas, prior to their local broadcast.

According to a survey based on a sample of 119 current or recent free-to-air TV series', Australian viewers are waiting an average of almost 17 months for the first run series' first seen overseas. Over the past two years, average Australian broadcast delays for free-to-air television viewers have more than doubled from 7.9 to 16.7 months.

Yeah, there's a way to keep your viewers happy and reduce the amount of illegal downloading - make things worse. In a stupid contest between the RIAA, the MPAA, and the TV execs, it entirely unclear who would come out where.

Jason Calacanis is running the risk of trying to do too much, too fast in his new exercise regime - jumping into what amounts to interval training almost immediately is likely to give him a bum knee or shin splints. Here's the thing, and I say this as someone who's been running/jogging since for over 30 years now: find a routine you can do consistently, and stick with it. Don't get obsessed over your daily weight, or over utter irrelevancies like the number of calories burned in a single workout. Get into a groove that you can stay with for the long haul - because your progress over the course of a month, or even a year, just doesn't mean that much.

Technorati Tags: exercise

I got to Barnes and Noble briefly last night, and was able to use one of the gift cards I received last Christmas - I picked up "Final Impact" by John Birmingham". It's the third in his alternate history yarn about a future (2021) task force that gets sent back in time to 1942 - which creates havoc with the timeline, as all the despots of the era learn where their policies are taking them. It's a fun read, and certainly lighter than what I have been reading :)

If you like Turtledove and Clancy, you'll like this series - it's like a cross between the two, and in very much the same style.

Update: Well, I just finished the book. I have to say, the ending felt "phoned in". I liked this series, but the final book seemed rushed. Makes me wonder whether he's planning - like Turtledove, with his civil war to WWI series - to just keep going with the timeline.