Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Lukas Renggli will be talking about Seaside in Cracow:

The 10th March 2007 I will give a talk on Seaside at the Academic Computer Science Festival in Cracow, Poland.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

Dare Obasanjo weighs in on the "diversity" thing vis-a-vis conferences, and hits the same "group-think" thing I was on about over the weekend:

When I think of diversity, I expect diversity of perspectives. People's perspectives are often shaped by their background and experiences. When you have a conference about an industry which is filled with people of diverse backgrounds building software for people of diverse backgrounds, it is a disservice to have the conversation and perspectives be homogenous. The software industry isn't just young white males in their mid-20s to mid-30s nor is that the primary demographic of Web users.

Personally, I've gotten tired of attending conferences where we heard more about technologies and sites that the homogenous demographic of young to middle aged, white, male computer geeks find interesting (e.g. del.icio.us and tagging) and less about what Web users actually use regularly or find interesting (hint: it isn't del.icio.us and it sure [expletive deleted] isn't tagging).

Interestingly enough, the web seems to promote group-think. It's easier to find a lot of other people with an overlapping set of interests, and then fall into the mental trap of thinking that "everyone" thinks that way. Doesn't matter whether the topic is politics, software development, role playing games (et. al.). In day to day life, in the place you live, there are probably a lot fewer people interested in (insert some passionate hobby here) than you. On the net, there are lots of them, and it's easy to over-inflate your relative importance.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a starting look at the cipher code in Cincom Smalltalk - specifically, the block ciphers. Today, we start with some workspace examples.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, encryption

James Lileks has the DC Metro area take on snow down:

Everyone ran to the grocery store for the usual requisites, because we might be snowed in for weeks, if not months. I saw this behavior in Washington DC, when the threat of a half-inch of snow would empty the shelves of bread and Charmin. And milk. I presume you mash them all up into a stiff, nutritious paste that will keep you alive until the rescue teams find your body.

Suffice to say, you don't want to be at the local grocery store the day before a winter storm.

Andreas Hiltner reports on progress in the ongoing development of ObjectStudio 8 - which will be in open beta with the upcoming release of Cincom Smalltalk.

Technorati Tags: cincom, objectstudio

Via Jason Calacanis:

The way this works is that stories on digg can be buried (voted down), but unlike positive votes, negative votes don't have names attached to them. This was done in the early days, from what I was told from insiders, so that the staff of digg could kill stories they didn't like and blame it on the will of the community. This kept the digg staff's fingerprints off of things that were killed so the staff of digg could say "we didn't kill it, the community did." Very smart... but now it's coming back to haunt digg. I'd love to see the buried votes on some early anti-digg stories... you can be sure digg will never release that data.

What this does is ensure that Digg will become more and more like an overcrowded Usenet board - the trolls will end up owning it.

You have to love the US patent office - a small Texas patent shark picked up patent number 7,065,417 recently, and has filed suit against Apple, Samsung, and Sandisk over their "infringing" players. If judges and juries had brains, this suit would not only backfire, but would cost the bozo company in Texas money. Here's why:

• Date of patent filing: January 29, 2002
• Date of patent award: June 20, 2006
• Date first MP3 player released: late 1998

Heck, the first iPod beat this patent to market. Now, I'm not a high powered patent lawyer, but I can do basic arithmetic: 1998 came before 2002, at least in the copy of the Universe I live in. How did this patent get awarded? Are the people who work in the US PTO hermits who dwell in caves near Everest? The news media reporting on this isn't much better; a few quick Google searches turned up the relevant dates. Exactly how hard are these reporters working?

Technorati Tags: stupidity, mp3

You might remember the Lance Dutson saga, involving a blogger and the State of Maine's tourism board (along with their rather clueless PR agency). Well, it seems that the ousted head of that department is trying to say "not me! I had nothing to do with that!" now. I just got this in email, from a woman by the name of Linda Hutchins:

It's kind of old now, but I happened on you site, and the misinformation that Dann Lewis sued Lance Dutson.

(Please read the beginning of the truth here:)

http://truthaboutlewis.blogspot.com

As a matter of fact, Dann and his wife, and a few contractors went to a Boston PR firm, who told them ABSOLUTELY NOT to sue Dutson. (They already knew that)

So they went back to thier [sic] hotel and called WKP. There were 4 of them sitting their on a conference call, every one yelling at Peter Warrn [sic] NOT to sue Dutson.

And I realize that it defies any knid [sic] of intelligent logic, but they DID sue him. They claim that the suit was filed ACCIDENTALLY by a law clerk , while his boss was on vacation. ( I dunno....)

I omitted the enclosed email from a WKP flack - it seemed to be strewn with hyperbole I could do without. In any event, I pass this on as a way of presenting what the people Dutson wrote about have to say for themselves; draw your own conclusions. I left the spelling and name mistakes (it's Peter Warren, not Peter Warm) from the original email as is. Note also that WKP hails from NYC, not Boston.

Technorati Tags: law

Evan Williams continues to flog the broken Odeo:

But I was just poking around on it and still really like the way it works and looks (thanks to Biz for the killer visual design). So, there's that. (BTW, more interesting Odeo news coming soon!)

Here's a snapshot of the Odeo page for my podcast - the latest podcast they have is 13, and the latest one done is Episode 24:

Perhaps the "interesting news" relates to Odeo actually updating content when it claims it checked?

I have no idea why, but the power in my neighborhood has always been a bit flaky. Our lines are underground, so it shouldn't really be that way. This morning the weather is calm, mild, and sunny - so of course, the power was out.

The only thing I can think of is that there's always more power in use than the original plans assumed. That's not a huge surprise - most electronics have a sleep mode that continues to draw power, and I leave most of the computers running 24x7. While we have more computers DVRs than many people, we probably aren't that far above the average in this area - and the three refrigerators aren't at all odd.

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we encrypt some data, save it to disk, recover the data from disk, and then decrypt it.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, encryption

So losing power this morning wasn't enough; Microsoft had to add insult to injury. I put my notebook into standby mode until the power came back, and then brought it back once power came back. That should have been fine, right?

Well, scrollbars (other than in VW based apps - yay, emulation) just stopped working. I'd scroll up; they gave me the finger. My mail client kept crashing over this problem - heck, the task manager wouldn't scroll up (gosh forbid I'd have needed to kill an application at the top of the list).

One reboot later, along with all the waiting (my G4 based mini boots within 30 seconds - go figure), and things were back to normal.

Now, where did my productivity run off to...

The Toronto Smalltalk Users Group is meeting on March 1st:

The next meeting and workshop of the Toronto Smalltalk User Group will be Thursday, March 1.

We'll take a look at how Smalltalk-Central is implemented

And we'll talk about Magritte

See y'all Thursday (see web site for details)

Bob Nemec
[|] Toronto Smalltalk User Group
www.smalltalk.toronto.on.ca

Technorati Tags: STUG, smalltalk

Boy, I feel silly. I just watched Jon Udell's screencast on audio editing, and learned something about editing stereo tracks in Audacity that I didn't realize you could do. I had it in my head that selecting a section of audio selected all tracks - not just one of them. Dohhh...

Doc Searls makes a good point about corporate "soul":

Companies have souls. I said that in a speech I gave to a retailing conference in Lucerne on September 20, 2000, not long after Cluetrain came out. They have human purposes that transcend mere economics. These purposes have little to do with short-term opportunities, and nothing to do with cashing out or starting another business. For example, Nordstrom has the soul of a shoe store. Wal-Mart has the soul of a five-and-dime. (Something Lee Scott, the CEO of Wal-Mart, told me after attending that very speech - and agreeing with it.)

He then explains how far Starbucks has wandered from theirs. Go to Doc's site for the particulars; he explains it better than I'll recap. The question I have is this: Do you know what kind of soul your company has, and is it staying close it?

Technorati Tags: PR

Who would have thought: Distributed application services (SOA, in the new lingo) are hard:

Some industry insiders are noticing that few developers have a firm grasp on the skills they require to migrate to service-oriented architectures and manage the complexity of accessing and manipulating data.

Wow, there's a piece of information that was news... back around, say, 1992 or so. I must be getting cynical - I'm seeing too many things go in complete circles in this industry.

Technorati Tags: SOA, hype

We are in the market for a notebook for my wife, and these kinds of reports, from Chris Pirillo and Jason Busch are not encouraging me to make it a Windows box. Looks like it'll be an Apple machine.

Via Alan Lovejoy, I found this post from Jeffrey Massung - there's lots of good stuff on development there, but this is the point I wanted to highlight:

Let me state this unequivocally: Smalltalk is an application language! It's about creating applications; it's not about creating code. And there is a world of difference between the two. It's about removing the mundane barriers from the programmer so that he or she can focus on the real-deal, get it done, and move onto the next task.

That's the key thing about Smalltalk and productivity, actually - it gets out of your way and lets you focus on the actual problem, rather than on the infrastructure. It's why people like James McGovern are forever stumbling in the dark, never quite understanding why productivity levels are so low where they work:

Statically typed languages work better for the masses of unmotivated programmers that fill the corridors of large enterprises. They desire for computers to catch their mistakes. Likewise the notion of any enterprise caring about individual productivity of their developers is long gone. If enterprises continue to outsource to places such as India where folks may have lots of academic credentials but otherwise are horrific at software development (overgeneralization) then the ability to at least ensure that the code when it comes back that it can compile becomes crucial.

When your standards and expectations are under the floorboards, you'll dismiss anything that looks like it might create some islands of productivity. Better to let the entire ship sink than to let anyone have fun and be creative.

Technorati Tags: development, productivity

SDTimes has two opinion pieces this month on threading - both talking about a "thread maturity model", which tracks a programmers progress up the slopes of thread-ability. First, the opinion piece by Alan Zeichick - he seems to think it's all about training - here's his "level 5":

Adoption. All developers trained to use threading. Threading is addressed at the design, requirements and architectural states of development, in addition to coding and testing. Broad incorporation of threading tools into the toolchain. Newly adopted code, such as libraries and components, must demonstrate support for threading. Funded efforts to eliminate all nonthreaded libraries and runtimes. All threaded applications are tested against platforms with different cores/processors to identify runtime issues. Formal source-code validation techniques are used to identify potential failures.

Unless your runtime system was written to deal seamlessly with these issues, you'll never get there - period. The major issue, properly identified by the Erlang folks, is sharing. In Erlang, threads use a "shared nothing" model to ensure that you don't get deadlocks. Using Smalltalk, or Java, or C#, the way to do the same thing is to run N processes, and have them interoperate via heavyweight messaging. Larry O'Brien touches on that at the end of his piece:

Today, those who have achieved the “Optimizing” level of parallel programming mastery are vanishingly rare. During the days, they are locked deep inside telecom buildings, research facilities and hardware companies.

Erlang came out of telecom research - we had an interesting talk on it at last year's ESUG conference. A side note on all this - last week's podcast covered this ground. And see Runar's post on scaling via multiple images.

Technorati Tags: threads, processes

The music industry sees reality staring it in the face, but doesn't like the way it looks:

The discussions at a music conference here Tuesday started with an all-around bashing of Apple CEO Steve Jobs before moving to the plethora of issues plaguing the music industry.

Meanwhile, anyone who points out the obvious issue gets treated with an even more distorted view of reality. Here's the consensus view:

"We're running out of time," Ted Cohen, managing director of music consulting firm TAG Strategic, told the roughly 200 attendees. "We need to get money flowing from consumers and get them used to paying for music again."

And here's reality:

"The economics of the business are over for good and aren't ever going to be the way they were before," Scholl said. This is a position that some in the music industry are starting to warm up to.

The simple fact of the matter is, the box is open, and there's no shoving the bits back into it. What I really love is the industry's view of itself:

Gewecke also defended record labels against the criticism that the music industry has its head in the sand and just doesn't understand the Digital Age. He said that Sony BMG is working with technologists and retailers, and is constantly is looking for technological solutions to some of the industry's problems.

*Cough* - like rootkits? The business has changed. A decade ago, I pretty much had to buy an entire album when all I wanted was a single song. Now? Not so much. The industry dug this hole for itself, by promoting no talent acts and trying to force entire albums of chaff down our throats. They shouldn't be surprised when there's pushback on that, now that it's possible to pushback.

Technorati Tags: DRM

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at ARC4 - an example of streaming cipher support in Cincom Smalltalk. Using a streaming cipher differs a little bit from the block ciphers we've discussed over the last 2 days.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, encryption

I've started reading another "medical history" book - "The Ghost Map" by Steven Hunter. It's about the Cholera epidemic of 1854 in London, and the people who tried to track down the source of the illness. I haven't gotten very far into the book yet, but this gave me pause: Imagine if every time you experienced a slight upset stomach you knew that there was an entirely reasonable chance you'd be dead in forty-eight hours. Remember, too, that the diet and sanitary conditions of the day - no refrigeration; impure water supplies; excessive consumption of beer, spirits, and coffee - created a breeding ground for digestive ailments, even when they didn't lead to cholera. Imagine living with that sword of Damocles hovering above your head - every stomach pain or watery stool a potential harbinger of imminent doom.

We reach for antacid or Immodium, and hardly give such aches a second thought. A century and a half ago, it truly was a different world.

If you use BottomFeeder, and you like the Newspaper view, you've probably run into a bug where selecting a feed can lock the application up. As it happens, that turns out to be a fairly stupid bug on my part - and it's now fixed. If you use the update tool, (third toolbar item from the left), just grab the "BottomFeeder" update and have it load without restart. It should all be good after that.

Hat tip to Michael for his help, and to Terry Raymond for pointing me to the bug.

I ran across this just now (I know Runar posted on it earlier; I wasn't really paying attention then). So anyway, I opened up a workspace in BottomFeeder. Two minutes later:

| stream |
stream := WriteStream on: String new.
1 to: 100 do: [:index |
	(index \\ 3) = 0 
		ifTrue: [stream nextPutAll: '(', index printString, ')', ' fizz '].
	(index \\ 5) = 0 
		ifTrue: [stream nextPutAll: '(', index printString, ')',' buzz '].
	(index \\ 3 ~= 0 and: [index \\ 5 ~= 0])
		ifTrue: [stream nextPutAll: ' ', index printString, ' ']].
^stream contents

You might wonder why I dumped to a stream instead of the Transcript - well, I was doing this in my BottomFeeder runtime, so I didn't have a Transcript to dump to :) The output looks like this - I included the numbers in front of the Fizz and Buzz so I could be lazy about checking the output :)

 1  2 (3) fizz  4 (5) buzz (6) fizz  7  8 (9) fizz (10) buzz  11 (12) fizz  13  14 (15) fizz (15) buzz  
16  17 (18) fizz  19 (20) buzz (21) fizz  22  23 (24) fizz (25) buzz  26 (27) fizz  28  29 
(30) fizz (30) buzz  31  32 (33) fizz  34 (35) buzz (36) fizz  37  38 (39) fizz (40) buzz  
41 (42) fizz  43  44 (45) fizz (45) buzz  46  47 (48) fizz  49 (50) buzz (51) fizz  52  
53 (54) fizz (55) buzz  56 (57) fizz  58  59 (60) fizz (60) buzz  61  62 (63) fizz  
64 (65) buzz (66) fizz  67  68 (69) fizz (70) buzz  71 (72) fizz  73  74 (75) fizz (75) buzz  
76  77 (78) fizz  79 (80) buzz (81) fizz  82  83 (84) fizz (85) buzz  86 (87) fizz  88  
89 (90) fizz (90) buzz  91  92 (93) fizz  94 (95) buzz (96) fizz  97  98 (99) fizz (100) buzz 

Update: Dohhh - what if it's both :)

Sometimes I feel bad for the spammers - look at what someone proudly put up on the first page of the Wiki:

HACKED By Devil_Ghost

Thanks: Sefo & Local-Spy & Cefakar & MorsModre & Memo & Darbe

(bozo url here) :)

Wow - it's such an achievement to hit the "Edit" link, enter some text, and hit the "Submit" button. Truly, Devil_Ghost is an elite spammer - and it was such hard work, needing help from all his lame friends, too.

I found this list of "why people unsubscribe" interesting - mostly because of the top three reasons listed:

• Too many posts
• Not enough posts
• Partial content feed

Looks like it's a thin line between having enough content to keep people interested, and having too little (or too much) - so that they lose interest. I'd be curious to know what people think of my posting frequency in that regard.

I see where the RIAA is up in arms over some mild changes being proposed for the DMCA - changes that would restore a modicum of fair use rights back to consumers. Here's a contrast that struck me:

Shapiro and the CEA would get a significant boost from the bill, should it pass, due to provisions that would significantly shield electronics manufacturers from liability for infringement. The Act would make it difficult for rights-holders to receive statutory damages in most cases of infringement.

That sets off alarm bells for the RIAA. The FAIR USE Act "would repeal the DMCA and legalize hacking," says the RIAA. "It would reverse the Supreme Court's decision in Grokster and allow electronics companies to induce others to break the law for their own profit."

That's just stupid. To the RIAA, if I take a hammer and bust up a car, the hammer manufacturer is at fault. To them, any device that could conceivably be misused should be completely locked down in order to prevent misuse - never mind going after the actual misuse - they think it can be technologically prevented in the first place. That's not a possible future, and, if it were, it would be a very unpleasant one.

Technorati Tags: DRM, music

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we introduce the MD5 and SHA libraries in Cincom Smalltalk. Tomorrow, we'll make use of them to verify a network download.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, hashing

Whoa - CompUSA is shutting over half their stores:

In a statement Tuesday, CompUSA said it would shutter 126 stores -- it currently operates 225 in the U.S. and Puerto Rico -- within 90 days as part of a massive restructuring first unveiled last Friday. The restructuring will rely on the store closings, as well as a $400 million cash infusion and other expense reductions. CompUSA did not specify the source of the cash investment.

I would have guessed that online selling was the main culprit, but the story mentions that BestBuy is doing just fine - more than fine, actually, with growing sales. I guess CompUSA is just getting beaten out by BestBuy, Staples, and OfficeDepot...

Technorati Tags: business

I usually like Mike Arrington's posts, but yesterday, he fell into a classic forest/trees trap with the Digg imbroglio:

But my bigger problem is that Wired isn’t simply reporting news about Digg. They’re making the news. And they’re going negative. In the first example, they make a prediction that Digg will fall, comparing it to Friendster. No news was reported - it was just an out of the blue roundhouse punch at Digg. In the second example the reporter actually creates the story she writes about, and willfully violated the Digg terms of use in the process. And this was done for commercial gain - the Wired story describing this has received a ton of traffic (and is actually the number 1 story on Digg right now).

This is in reference to Annalee Newitz' "let's try to game Digg - yep, it can be gamed" experiment. Arrington attacks Wired for going after Digg and creating news. I have news of my own for Mike: Annalee simply publicized something that's happening - and that is news. Calling her reporting invalid because Wired's parent company also owns Reddit is willfully starting at the trees, all the while ignoring the forest.

Digg is being gamed massively in the political sphere (see Charles Johnson's site for info on that - and no, I'm not commenting on his, or anyone else's politics here). Politics attracts crowds, but I'd bet good money that Digg is being gamed in other areas, too.

Bottom line: you can push your head into the sand, like Arrington, and decide to ignore the problem based on who's talking about it. Or - you could actually pay attention to the problem itself.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we wrap up this week's topic of ciphers and encryption with a file validation using MD5 hashing.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

ESUG has put out a call for contributions for this summer's conference - due to be held in Lugano, Switzerland.

Doc Searls has a modest proposal for what to do with Anna Nicole Smithy's remains:

Well, since Dr. Perper has already conducted a complete autopsy, requiring the admitedly temporary reassembly of Ms. Smith's remains, why not divvy them up like the relics of a saint? Perhaps bits of the pop culture goddess could repose in reliquaries at CNN , Playboy and other shrines, sparing members of her faith long trips to the Bahamas, Texas or wherever.

My wife's cynical theory is that some of these stories get play so that media folks can arrange a pleasant vacation - and there sure seemed to be a lot more "on location" reporting about Natalie Holloway than there was about anyone who disappeared in, say, Fargo.

I spent some time at Borders last night, while my wife and daughter looked at fabric. I found one book I've been thinking of picking up, and another that just looked interesting. The first:

"Storm of Steel" by Ernst Jünger - a memoir of WWI from a frontline German soldier. The reviews for this book have been universally good; I'm looking forward to reading it.

"Stalin's Folly" , by Constantine Pleshakov, was written by a Russian born professor - a man whose mother lived through the war. It sounds compelling, and the first chapter or so was pretty spellbinding - it's partly informed by the Soviet archives, which only opened up after the collapse of the USSR. Another book I'm looking forward to.

Technorati Tags: history

Precision Systems has sent along their latest batch of Smalltalk job postings:

Precision Systems currently has Smalltalk positions open across the United States. Please contact me at recruitVR@PrecisionSystems.com if you’re interested in any of the following positions:

Northern New Jersey – multiple projects, various cities
Senior Smalltalk Developer (permanent, 6 month contract-to-hire and 12+ month contract)

New York, NY – multiple projects
Smalltalk Developer, Smalltalk Team Lead, and Smalltalk/Java Developer (contract and permanent)

Ohio – multiple projects
Smalltalk Developer (permanent)

Southern California
Smalltalk Developer (permanent or contract-to-hire)

Florida
Software Engineering Manager (permanent)

Texas – multiple projects in different cities
Smalltalk Developer (contract or 6 month contract-to-hire)
Smalltalk Developer (permanent)
.Net Developer, Smalltalk a plus (permanent)

Milwaukee, WI
Senior Smalltalk Developer and Junior Programmer/Analyst (permanent)

Don’t forget to pass along your co-workers and friends; for any new and successful referral to Precision we will pay you $1,000!

I look forward to speaking with you!

Vicki Ross
973-377-7500
Smalltalk Staffing Group – Precision Systems
RecruitVR@PrecisionSystems.com

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Avi has produced another screencast showing off DabbleDB - this one covering maps and charts.

Technorati Tags: dabbleDB

Looks like Vista is landing with a thud within the federal government, too. Cringely reports:

It seems that the DOT has put the kibosh on all upgrades to Vista, Office 2007, or IE7 for at least another six months. The document’s money sentence: “There appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products.” No problems with Washingtonian double-speak there.

Cringely's record of reporting isn't spotless, but this is consistent with what other people are saying about Vista.

Technorati Tags: Vista

James McGovern asks what most people think is a complicated question: how to measure developer productivity:

I have blogged on the need for metrics here and here and have even received wonderful insights from Todd Biske on other aspects that EAs should noodle. Awhile back, James Robertson commented without providing an answer. May I be so bold as to ask him what metrics would he use to measure developer productivity?

There's really only one metric that matters: are you getting software delivered to you that works well enough to accomplish the actual business that your company does? If the answer is yes, then you can stop gathering statistics right there. If the answer is no, then you have a problem. Too many people get bogged down in spreadsheets and bogus numbers - this really isn't that hard. Either the software you use gets in your way, or it doesn't.

Where Smalltalk helps is in the simplicity of the language - it stays out of the way of working on business problems. However: if your development process sucks, using Smalltalk won't help you - and from what McGovern writes, it sounds like process is a huge problem where he works.

Time for the weekly look at the logs - BottomFeeder downloads proceeded at a rate of 142/day last week (plus the 25/day or so I get from CNet). The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	334
Update	163
Linux x86	114
Mac X	84
CE ARM	59
Mac 8/9	51
Solaris	41
Windows98/ME	30
HPUX	28
AIX	24
Linux Sparc	19
Sources	18
Linux PPC	14
SGI	13
ADUX	6
CE x86	2

On to the HTML page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	43.1%
Internet Explorer	40.5%
MSN Bot	6.9%
Planet Smalltalk	5.3%
Other	2.7%
Opera	1.5%

And finally, the syndication numbers:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Planet Smalltalk	23.4%
Internet Explorer	20.1%
Mozilla	13.3%
BottomFeeder	12.3%
Other	3%
BlogLines	5.2%
Net News Wire	4.1%
Vienna	3.4%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.3%
Safari RSS	2.3%
NewsGator	1.4%
Akregator	1.1%
Strategic Board Bot	1.1%
RSS Bandit	1%
MSN Bot	1%
Python	1%
News Fire	1%
SharpReader	1%
JetBrains	1%

Other than the continued misbehavior of the Planet Smalltalk Bot, the big story is the jump in IE stats - which is actually multiple tools, given the agent string usage issue there. Even so - it's a big change in these stats.

Via Brad Wilson: apparently, my ability to bloviate has some value:

Heh.

This post from Dave Winer illustrates how a single instance of bad customer service can lead to a "word of mouth" PR problem. Something a lot of companies haven't really internalized yet is that any of the people they deal with might have a megaphone.

This week, David Buck and I spoke with Joerg Beekman of DeepCove Labs (full disclosure: David is consulting there). DeepCove Labs is in the financial services sector, where they automate check processing between various entities (both large and small, across and within international borders). It was a fun conversation, and they use Cincom Smalltalk for just about everything they do.

As always, if you have feedback of any kind, please send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com. Also - if you enjoy these podcasts, please consider giving us a vote over on PodcastAlley.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, checks, financial services

I'm headed to corporate in a few hours - we have a round of planning meetings set up this week. Posting may well be light until the evening hours during the week, but I do have a set of Smalltalk Daily screencasts queued up, ready to post.

Well - I've arrived - I'm back at the Staybridge, the hotel of choice for us Cincomers. It should be a full week of conversation and engineering planning - I should have a revised product roadmap to push out after we're done.

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we learn how to add a toolbar to a UI.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

OOPSLA 2007 is having a dynamic languages symposium again this year:

Dynamic Languages Symposium 2007

at ooPSLA 2007

Montreal, Quebec, Canada, October 22, 2007

http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/dls07/

---

Important dates:

• Submission of papers: June 1, 2007 *hard deadline*
• Author notification: June 30, 2007
• Final versions due: July 7, 2007
• DLS 2007:   October 22, 2007
• OOPSLA 2007:   October 21-25, 2007

Scope:

The Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) at OOPSLA 2007 in Montreal, Canada, is a forum for discussion of dynamic languages, their implementation and application. While mature dynamic languages including Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, Self, and Prolog continue to grow and inspire new converts, a new generation of dynamic scripting languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript are successful in a wide range of applications. DLS provides a place for researchers and practitioners to come together and share their knowledge, experience, and ideas for future research and development.

DLS 2007 invites high quality papers reporting original research, innovative contributions or experience related to dynamic languages, their implementation and application. Accepted Papers will be published in the OOPSLA conference companion and the ACM Digital Library.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

• Innovative language features and implementation techniques
• Development and platform support, tools
• Interesting applications
• Domain-oriented programming
• Very late binding, dynamic composition, and runtime adaptation
• Reflection and meta-programming
• Software evolution
• Language symbiosis and multi-paradigm languages
• Dynamic optimization
• Hardware support
• Experience reports and case studies
• Educational approaches and perspectives
• Object-oriented, aspect-oriented, and context-oriented programming

Submissions and proceedings

We invite original contributions that neither have been published previously nor are under review by other refereed events or publications. Research papers should describe work that advances the current state of the art. Experience papers should be of broad interest and should describe insights gained from substantive practical applications. The program committee will evaluate each contributed paper based on its relevance, significance, clarity, and originality.

Papers are to be submitted electronically at http://www.dcl.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/dls2007/ in PDF format. Submissions must not exceed 12 pages and need to use the ACM format, templates for which can be found at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html .

Program chairs:

• Pascal Costanza, Programming Technology Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
• Robert Hirschfeld, Hasso-Plattner-Institut, University of Potsdam, Germany

Program committee:

• Gilad Bracha, Cadence Design Systems, USA
• Johan Brichau, Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
• William Clinger, Northeastern University, USA
• William Cook, University of Texas at Austin, USA
• Pascal Costanza, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
• Stephane Ducasse, Universite de Savoie, France
• Brian Foote, Industrial Logic, USA
• Robert Hirschfeld, Hasso-Plattner-Institut Potsdam, Germany
• Jeremy Hylton, Google, USA
• Shriram Krishnamurthi, Brown University, USA
• Michele Lanza, University of Lugano, Switzerland
• Michael Leuschel, Universitaet Duesseldorf, Germany
• Henry Lieberman, MIT Media Laboratory, USA
• Martin von Loewis, Hasso-Plattner-Institut Potsdam, Germany
• Philippe Mougin, OCTO Technology, France
• Oscar Nierstrasz, University of Berne, Switzerland
• Kent Pitman, PTC, USA
• Ian Piumarta, Viewpoints Research Institute, USA
• Nathanael Schaerli, Google, Switzerland
• Anton van Straaten, AppSolutions.com, USA
• Dave Thomas, Bedarra Research Labs, Canada
• Dave Ungar, USA
• Allen Wirfs-Brock, Microsoft, USA
• Roel Wuyts, IMEC & Unversite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

The RIAA is still desperately trying to hold on to the radio broadcast model - have a look at the royalty rates they want to impose on streaming music:

A "performance" is defined as the streaming of one song to one listener; thus a station that has an average audience of 500 listeners racks up 500 "performances" for each song it plays.

The minimum fee is $500 per channel per year. There is no clear definition of what a 'channel' is for services that make up individualized playlists for listeners.

Their detachment from reality is nearly complete; there's simply no way to run a web streaming business on that basis unless it's on the scale of a radio broadcast business - and that's just not the way the web works.