Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Spotted in Learning Seaside:

Lukas Renggli's talk from the Studencki Festiwal Informatyczny in Cracow in is now online, (61 minutes).

I posted about this event a few days ago.

Technorati Tags: seaside

Comcast's management needs to watch "The Princess Bride", and pay attention to the famous line from Inigo Montoya:

"I don't think that word means what you think it means"

The word in question is "unlimited", with respect to bandwidth. From today's Boston Globe:

Amanda Lee of Cambridge received a call from Comcast Corp. in December ordering her to curtail her Web use or lose her high-speed Internet connection for a year.

Lee, who said she had been using the same broadband connection for years without a problem, was taken aback. But when she asked what the download limit was, she was told there was no limit, that she was just downloading too much.

Then in mid-February, her Internet service was cut off without further warning.

Amongst other things, this is just stupid, stupid PR. If you tell me that I have "unlimited" bandwidth, then don't come back later and tell me that I have a limit - or even worse, refuse to tell me what that limit is! It's become completely clear that Comcast doesn't actually offer unlimited bandwidth - and that fact isn't really the problem. The problem is that they claim to offer unlimited bandwidth. I'm typically not a huge fan of regulation, but this seems like a pretty cut and dry case of "truth in advertising" to me. Regardless, it's truly, truly stupid on a PR level.

Hat tip Doc Searls.

Technorati Tags: PR, marketing

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we continue with yesterday's detail form. We do three things:

• Set up the layouts for the detail and master form (the List UI) appropriately
• Embed the Detail form in the List UI
• Respond to the selection event by filling the detail form with the selected person

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Jeff Jarvis explains how Viacom is being deeply, deeply stupid with their billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube. I love this part - first, Jeff quotes the complaint:

Because YouTube directly profits from the availability of popular infringing works on its site, it has decided to shift the burden entirely onto copyright owners to monitor the YouTube site on a daily or hourly basis to detect infringing videos and send notices to YouTube demanding that it “take down” the infringing works.

To which Jeff notes:

Uh, their complaint there is with the law.

Just when I thought big media couldn't get dumber, Viacom comes along and proves me wrong.

Technorati Tags: law, YouTube, Viacom

I see a Sci Fi channel middle of the week movie brewing:

Meat-eating killer frogs have invaded a pond in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, leaving environmentalists wondering how to stop their deadly march before they move on to bigger waters.

The African clawed frogs have chomped through everything from turtles to fish in Lily Pond, near the California Academy of Sciences, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Steve Rubel notes that Ajax based sites are screwing with Google's indexing:

According to a report, the reader content that's being added to the new USAToday.com is not going  not be indexed by Google or other search engines. That's because all of the new goodies, including reader blogs and other social-networking and bookmarking features, were built with Ajax. Man all that potential Google Juice is going to waste.

There's something mostly unsaid here: Google took advantage of the explosive growth of the internet with new and better crawling algorithms. With these changes afoot, that leaves the door open for some other smart guys to step up and do a better job. I don't know if it'll happen, but there is an opening.

Technorati Tags: Ajax

James Governor explains the nature of reality to Viacom:

What would happen if Google just said

“OK, Viacom: henceforth your media will disappear on Google. Searches on Viacom or any of its media properties will turn up nothing.”

Would that be illegal or something? I wouldnt have thought so. Could someone sue Google for not being included in its search engine? I can’t see what grounds they would have. And would Viacom fold if Google did take this approach? In a heartbeat I should imagine. That’s the problem for Viacom - it needs Google more than Google needs Viacom.

Boy, I wish I'd thought of that - it does show that Google actually has the deck clearing cards on hand if they want to play them. I'd bet good money that this hasn't really occurred to Viacom - after all, they are the "big, important media company". The world has shifted beneath their feet, and they aren't bright enough to realize it.

James McGovern asks a question about corporate education classes:

Have you ever noticed that the vast majority of educational courses targeted at corporate America are introductory? Have you asked yourself why aren't there more courses that teach advanced concepts? We all understand that advanced concepts logically depend on simpler concepts but thinking should stop there. Humans don't learn using predicate logic, so advanced concepts can be taught even to children, so as long as the person teaching them has some level of competency.

Back in the old days, when I was a VW instructor for ParcPlace, we faced exactly this quandary. Customers would ask us about advanced material, since our public offerings were mostly introductory. There was a reason for that, and it was based on the actual behavior of corporate customers.

When we gave an advanced course, companies would send people to it who weren't prepared. Happened every time I was involved in an advanced course, even when sales and services management made a point of telling the customer that the material assumed a certain level of pre-existing knowledge. We would show up, and find that half (sometimes more) of the class was completely unready for the material - and that made the entire thing unfair to both the prepared students and the unprepared ones - neither group really got the instruction they needed.

I suspect that we weren't unique in this regard - ask around the professional training ranks, and I'd guess that they would all say the same thing.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we add a resizing splitter to the master/detail UI we've been working with.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Andres will be heading to Argentina in May, and he and Suzanne Fortman (our Program Director for Cincom Smalltalk) will be meeting with various groups. Interested? Let us know.

We've got the most current training schedule for Cincom Germany posted here.

Technorati Tags: training, education

After a mild December, it got pretty darn cold around here in the latter half of January, and all of February. The icy patch on my lawn (where the snow piles up from shoveling) finally disappeared today, during the 70+ degree temperatures. Further proof: my daughter took a couple of photos of the early flowers:

File this one under "someone has to do the work with Buffy off the air":

Serbian vampire hunters have acted to prevent the very remote possibility that former dictator Slobodan Milosevic might stage a come-back - by driving a three-foot stake through his heart.

According to Ananova, the politically-motivated Van Helsings, led by Miroslav Milosevic (no relation), gave themselves up to cops after attacking the deceased despot in his grave in the eastern town of Pozarevac. Milosevic popped his clogs back in 2006, while on trial in a UN war crimes tribunal for various unsavoury activities connected with the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia.

No word yet as to whether the body turned to dust or burst into flames when the stake hit.

Technorati Tags: news

Here's a minor iPod annoyance - every so often, when my daughter has left iTunes up, and I attach my iPod while I have iTunes up, the iPod decides that it should try to attach to the other instance of iTunes. This is annoying, because I have to get my daughter to come in, have her log in, eject the iPod, and quit her instance of iTunes (otherwise, it's just "rinse/repeat" time). Shouldn't the iPod know which library it belongs to, and attach to that one? It's smart enough to tell me it isn't synched with the other library, so why can't it look at other running instances?

You don't want to create any crumbs when you eat the $1000 pizza.

Technorati Tags: news

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we learn how to dynamically "zoom" a part of a UI. Carrying on from the example we've used this week, we take the detail form in PersonListUI, and zoom it over the listbox that controls the detail display.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

You can now register online for the Smalltalk Solutions 2007 conference. Just head on over here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, registration

I agree with part of what Doc says about the net neutrality debate:

First, the Net is a vast set of connections on which countless services can be deployed. Telephony and television are just two. Because telephone and cable companies offer Internet connections as a secondary "service" on top of their primary businesses, we tend to think of the Net in the same terms. This is a mistake. The Internet will in the long run become a base-level utility, and we will come to regard telephony and television as two among many categories of data supported by that utility.

That much is probably true - people are starting to view a net connection the same way they view telephones: an essential service. However, there's a problem with the next bit:

Second, the end-to-end nature of the Net puts everybody on it in a position to both produce and consume. It is not just about consumption. It is at least as much about production. In the U.S., telephone and cable companies have deployed Net services in asymmetrical and crippled forms from the beginning. While this crippling is easily rationalized (typical usage is asymmetrical, and turning off outbound mail and web service ports discourages spamming), it also serves to discourage countless small and home businesses. Worse, "business-grade service" (symmetrical with no port blockages) is so expensive in most cases that it is essentially prohibited.

Potentially, anyone can be a producer. In practice, very, very few people actually are. Look at the stats on monster sites like Digg - while anyone can vote a story up, there's a fairly small population of regular users who are, for all intents and purposes, editors. The same dynamic holds with every forum, electronic or otherwise. In any community, the number of people involved drops dramatically as you go from "people who pay some level of attention to it" to "active participants".

While it's true that we don't have a lot of competition in the ISP space, we also don't have a lot of demand for upstream connectivity. Most people just download stuff, and that dynamic simply isn't going to change. The blogosphere has given megaphones to a lot of people who didn't have them before, but those people are the ones who would have found some way to be involved anyway. If we had actual demand for symmetric services, I do think you would see it. We simply don't, and I don't really expect that to change much.

Technorati Tags: news, net neutrality

Sam Shuster has posted an update on Pollock - which we are now calling "Widgetry".

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

The Squeak community is part of the "Summer of Code" thing that Google runs. If you're interested, go give them a hand.

Technorati Tags: squeak, OSS

Twitter is the current "big thing" amongst the tech cogniscenti - "everyone" has an account and is busily telling everyone what they're doing right now. Conspicuously missing from all this: an actual business plan to generates money:

Twitter was launched a year ago by Obvious Corp., a San Francisco start-up formerly known as Odeo Inc. that also runs a podcasting service. Twitter now hosts more than 30,000 posts a day and has more than 50,000 users, according to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. The service is appealing because of its simplicity, said the 30-year old, who formerly worked as a software engineer at a courier-dispatch service. "You find a lot of connection in just the simplest, most mundane updates from your friends," he said. Twitter doesn't charge users for the service, though he said it may charge for additional features in the future.

You have to love that last bit - it's an admission that right now they are simply spending money in the hopes that revenue will arrive someday, from somewhere. I doubt that advertising will be the answer; if you get updates on your phone, you'll never see them. Mind you, someone is making money on this - cell phone companies:

After joining Dodgeball [a similar service], Minneapolis Web developer Jenni Ripley, 33, upgraded her text-messaging plan with her wireless carrier when she exceeded her previous monthly quota of 1,000 messages.

I used to ask where the revenue model for YouTube was (turns out it was "get bought") - and I may yet be right - if Viacom wins their suit, you can expect the floodgates of litigation to open. That (a lawsuit) won't happen to Twitter, but I expect that the "search for revenue" will continue. On the other hand, if that text message usage is common, maybe Verizon or AT&T will pick them up.

Meanwhile, Obvious Corp's other service, Odeo, continues to be broken - which is apparently ok, since the entire company is busy sending Twitter messages to itself all day.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, business

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at toggling the state of a menu item (i.e., adding a check to indicate a binary state). Staying with this week's example, we keep the menu state in synch with the "zoom" state of our master/detail form.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I think Bill Gates would have done better to simply laugh off the Mac/PC ad question - instead, he got all snippy. Looks to me like Gates' previously solid marketing/PR skills are fading...

Technorati Tags: marketing, news

Looks like I spoke too soon about winter leaving - two days ago I was puttering in the garden in shorts, and yesterday I was out jogging in mid-70 degree warmth. Today?

I live in Columbia, which is smack in the middle of the ice zone. Bah.

Squeak is getting some good visibility over on the Google Summer of Code page.

Technorati Tags: squeak

Here's a question you haven't heard me ask before: What don't you need in Cincom Smalltalk? I'm not talking about things we haven't built that you think we shouldn't; I mean things we currently have in the product that you think we should drop. Any thoughts on that?

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Wow - you have to actually see this to believe it:

Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?

That sounds preposterous to me.

If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling computers without a windows. This clearly is not happening, so there must be some error in your calculations. I hope you realise that windows is more than just Office ? Its a whole system that runs the computer from start to finish, and that is a very difficult thing to acheive. A lot of people dont realise this.

Believe it or not, there's more. Hat tip Doc Searls.

Technorati Tags: windows

I recorded this week's episode during the week of March 5th, in Cincinnati. ObjectStudio 8 is about to enter open beta, with the upcoming release of Cincom Smalltalk - so it seemed like a good time to get Andreas Hiltner and Mark Grinnell in a room to talk about it. Joining me was Arden Thomas, our field application engineer.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, objectstudio

As if to make sure we remember when the calendar changes over, winter took a (hopefully final) shot at us last night - these shots don't show a lot snow, but what's there is pretty solid ice. And, my driveway has a nice non-melting northern exposure :)

Bah

Well, either downloads cratered last week, or there's a logging problem - BottomFeeder downloads look like an average of 16 per day, which is about 10x less than normal. The sorry details:

It helps when you actually download all the correct log files, instead of just the data for a few hours :) As it happens, BottomFeeder averaged 217 downloads per day. Whew :)

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	474
Update	195
Linux x86	126
CE ARM	120
Mac X	115
Mac 8/9	85
Solaris	70
Linux PPC	63
HPUX	59
Sources	52
Linux Sparc	50
AIX	37
Windows98/ME	32
SGI	26
ADUX	15
CE x86	3

On top of that is the 25-26 downloads a day I'm getting from the CNet based downloads. Anyway, let's see about the rest of the data, starting with the HTML accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	47.5%
Internet Explorer	40.9%
MSN Bot	6.4%
Other	1.9%
Opera	2%
Noxtrum bot	1.3%

Traffic for the HTML pages looks normal, except that Planet Smalltalk seems to have stopped being a bad bot

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	21.9%
Mozilla	19.6%
BottomFeeder	15.2%
Other	5.9%
BlogLines	7.2%
Net News Wire	5.7%
Google Feed Fetcher	4.6%
Safari RSS	4%
Vienna	3.3%
NewsGator	1.9%
Akregator	1.6%
Python	1.1%
News Fire	1%
MSN Bot	1%
RSS Bandit	1%
SharpReader	1%
Jakarta	1%
JetBrains	1%
Liferea	1%
Opera	1%

Wow - I guess IE7 is having an impact - my subscription numbers rose last week, and IE rose with them.

Phishing has taken the next step up (or down, depending on how you want to look at it) the food chain: fake blogs as a source for malware:

Fortinet gives examples of the sites, including one for a supposed fan of the Honda CR450 motor car, which attempts to infect visitors with the Wonka Trojan. In another, the fake blog redirects visitors to a store front purporting to be Pharmacy Express, a phishing site that has turned up in many spam emails distributed by the Stration worm.

"These are not legitimate blogs that were compromised. They appear to be deliberately set up to promote phishing, which is against our terms of service. We are investigating, and blogs found to include malicious code or promote phishing will be deleted," Google said in a statement to CNET.

Splogs as a source of spam links are nothing new, but this takes things to a new level - especially given the ease of creating search feeds that bring these things directly to IE, Firefox, Safari, or Opera.

Technorati Tags: spam, malware

Yesterday, there was a complaint in the VWNC mailing list about the sudden surges in items from the public store feed - whenever someone pushes a project out, there's often a number of versions of the same package/bundle that hit the feed all at once. Holger Kleinsorgen, the original author, fixed that problem with an update - now, multiple new versions of the same item will be listed in one RSS item. That should cut down on the artificial flood.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I'll be speaking at SPA 2007 - on Sunday, March 25th I'll be giving a six hour "Intro to Smalltalk" tutorial. We'll be using VW non-commercial (version 7.4.1), and doing a pretty immersive piece of learning. After that, I can relax and just attend the show - it's always been a fun conference in the past, so I'm looking forward to it.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, speaking

Carl Gundel demonstrates how easy it is to create a web application using Run-Basic - a server-side implementation of LibertyBasic. Head over here for the screencast. Run-Basic is powered by Cincom Smalltalk.

Technorati Tags: Basic

I just went through the static resources this server uses, and made sure that all of them are being served by Apache rather than the Smalltalk server. The Smalltalk server now handles only the dynamic loads; all the static resources (images, mostly) are handled by Apache. This falls under "best tool for the job", and is something I probably should have done a long time ago :)

I've just finished Ernst Jünger's "Storm of Steel" - he was a highly decorated German veteran of the first world war. Most of the books I've read about that (or any other) war have been strategic or tactical overviews; this is a personal look at how an average soldier's days were spent at the front. It's very explicit in terms of the horror - the author describes the effects of machine guns and high explosives in complete detail.

The book is neither anti-war nor pro-war; it's more matter of fact than that. None of us who live today can really imagine what life was like for the trench soldiers of that war, but this book gets you as close to understanding as is possible. If casual discussion of carnage bothers you, don't read this book - but I came away from it with a better idea of what my grandfather went through with the AEF.

Martin Fowler explains how things are different when server volume reaches epic scale:

A couple of years ago I was talking to a couple of friends of mine who were doing some work at eBay. It's always interesting to hear about the techniques people use on high volume sites, but perhaps one of the most interesting tidbits was that eBay does not use database transactions.

It's a fascinating look at how common conventions have to be re-examined when traffic reaches certain extremely high levels.

The Grokster case is coming back to haunt us all with the Viacom suit against YouTube. In Grokster, the court held that "inducement" to violate copyright landed you in hot water - which cracked the door open wide enough for Viacom to bring suit - even though YouTube seems to fall into the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA. Lessig explains:

The Grokster case thus sent a clear message to lawyers everywhere: You get two bites at the copyright policy-making apple, one in Congress and one in the courts. But in Congress, you need hundreds of votes. In the courts, you need just five.

Viacom has now accepted this invitation from the Supreme Court. The core of its case centers on the “safe harbor” provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The provision, a compromise among a wide range of interests, was intended to protect copyright owners while making it possible for Internet businesses to avoid crippling copyright liability. As applied to YouTube, the provision immunizes the company from liability for material posted by its users, so long as it takes steps to remove infringing material soon after it is notified by the copyright owner.

While this mess is being litigated, no one can be sure what is and isn't allowable under safe harbor. I'm afraid that the chaos Lessig predicts (read the rest of his column) is going to come about.

Technorati Tags: law

In the midst of a long anti-Scoble ramble, Neopolean makes the same kind of point about online video that I've been making for a long while now:

Nobody consulted me - and nobody should have - but if they had, I would have said to do audio, or even just images with text. A typical news site, but with the Scoble brand. Whatever I may be feeling about him this morning, I'm not going to deny that his name is worth something in this industry.

My guess is that Scoble and co wanted to "get in" on the growing popularity of niche video news sites. The difference is that, when you take a look at what some of the other more successful sites are doing, Scoble's videos are too long (in terms of the bandwidth it takes to serve them up). If you don't have gobs of dough in the bank, then every minute is important. By not editing out the boring bits, the videos are going up as-is, gigantic and all.

Very few people are going to sit at their PC's and watch a 45 minute video - when you see successes in online video, you see short - Ze Frank, RocketBoom - stuff that doesn't take long to consume. Long video just takes up too much time and attention to deal with - and if your answer is "just listen, don't watch", then my answer is "push it out as an audio mp3". Audio is a lot easier to consume than video, and can be consumed when it's too hard (or impossible) to read (a car, out jogging, etc).

Insisting on a video format just because you can is a nice way to increase your bandwidth costs and reduce the potential size of your audience. How that works as a business plan, I'm not sure.

Anthony Lander has started up a link blog - subscribe here.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at sending mail messages from within a Cincom Smalltalk application.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Neopolean and Scoble (in the comments to this post) are having an interesting little slagfest - and I have to say, I think Neopolean has the better argument. Scoble has gotten way, way too deep into the self referential "Web 2.0" Silicon Valley culture, and I think he's having trouble seeing the outside. In particular, he's not seeing the obvious problems with long form online video. I've been interested in a number of his interviews - and haven't listened to any. Why? Because it's way too much trouble to strip the audio myself and load the results on my iPod.

Here's another thing - as much crap as I give MS, I think they'll weather the storm that's about to arrive on the scene (look at the mortgage foreclosure news and the Web 2.0 bubble - something is going to give). The various "Web 2.0" companies with marginal business plans? Not so much.

Technorati Tags: PR

Charles points to the March 28th NY STUG meeting, with Panu Viljamaa:

In this presentation Panu will talk about Unit-Testing in Smalltalk, including a new simplified "Method-Tests" -API for doing so. He will demonstrate how unit-testing can be made more productive and totally integrated with the open IDE of Smalltalk. This presentation will be a precursor, and a dress-rehearsal for a more comprehensive presentation to be given at Smalltalk Solutions 2007, Toronto.

Sounds like fun - but I'll be in the UK then :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I added the static resources capability to the server quite awhile ago, when I migrated the Cincom Smalltalk site over to Silt. I hadn't really exposed that functionality beyond that one site though - and that changed today. If you look in the sidebar, you'll see a little "About Me" link - which I've linked to a small bio page. Any of the bloggers here can add that kind of "static" resource now, and edit it via the admin pages after logging in.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I love this:

Late last week Steve Ballmer gave an speech at Stanford in which he stated that Google is a "one trick pony" - that trick being search, of course.

Here's the thing - if I use the same level of evaluation, Microsoft is a two trick pony: Windows and Office. Sure, MS does other things, and so does Google. If you look just at revenue though, MS relies on those two things pretty heavily. Whether they are safer bets over the long term than Google's ad revenue is something else entirely.

Technorati Tags: Windows

I may be skeptical about Twitter, but it does have a lot of buzz at the moment. So - I've created a small domain model that can create objects from the XML status file that Twitter generates. If you want to try it out, load Twitter from the Public Store, and then try this:

client := HttpClient new.
contents := (client get: 'http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.xml') contents.
parser := XML.XMLParser new.
parser validate: false.
xml := parser parse: contents readStream
^Twitter.Constructor from: xml.

That's all it does right now - if you inspect the result, you'll get a collection of Status objects (each with a user). Michael and I intend to build a UI for it (the goal being a small notification application). If you're interested in helping out, go ahead and load that and have a look.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, Twitter

Lukas Renggli is giving a Seaside talk in Geneva, Switzerland on March 29: auditorium du Geneva Business Center, Petit-Lancy.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

We need a better name for the project, but we've got a (very basic) UI up for our little Twitter application. After I got the basic domain done yesterday, Michael added a UI and some basic network connectivity - we can now specify an update interval, and display the public Twitter stream:

The UI leaves a lot to be desired at present; the timestamps should be lined up, and you should be able to drill down into the user specifics for each item. It's a start, though, and you can load it yourself - grab the Twitter bundle from the Public Store. Volunteers welcome - and yes, it is a Widgetry UI :)

Technorati Tags: development

Today's Smalltalk Daily is short - we wrap up sending email with attachments and exception handling.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

The main thing slowing me down right now is the slooooowness of the Twitter service itself. We now have the ability (after setting timeouts way, way up) to read the public stream, and to send messages up:

After a rather long wait, this showed up in Firefox:

It's a start :)

Technorati Tags: twitter

The Squeak folks have a booth at Smalltalk Solutions 2007 - Chris Cunnington reports:

I am pleased to announce that Squeak will have its own booth at the Smalltalk Solutions show. I have just signed the booth agreement, and faxed it back to the it360.ca show management.

I got the idea for a Squeak booth by attending the Toronto Linux Users Group pre-show meeting in February. I figured if they could get a free booth as a non-profit, then so ought we.

The more the merrier!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, squeak

I've just pushed another version of the Twitter bundle up to the Public Store - it's cleaned up quite a bit from the last version - but there's still plenty to do. If you're interested, load the latest and have a look.

Technorati Tags: Twitter

Michael is asking for name suggestions for our little project - in the meantime, I've been slogging forward on the application. Oh - if you want to follow my truly exciting stream of test messages, you can go here, to my Twitter stream. Here's how it looks now that I've laid the UI out a bit better:

Still not a thing of beaty, but at least I have scrollbars now :) I also got access to the friends list working:

That's about it for now - I'll see what Michael has made of it in the morning.

Technorati Tags: Twitter