Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at customizing the "print" behavior of objects - meaning, how they display themselves in an Inspector.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Charles Miller laments the architected Matrix :)

Technorati Tags: SOA

In building a Widgetry based runtime (the Twitter client that Michael and I have been working on), I've learned a couple of things that you'll run into. Mind you, these are transient issues that will go away as engineering deals with them (they'll be addressed as Widgetry moves into production) - but if you're out on the leading edge, here they are:

• When using the RTP to prepare your GUI app, for "Action on last window close", don't set "Shutdown image" - instead, set "Continue Processing". Then set up your own quit behavior
• Specify a custom NoWindowBlock - otherwise, when you open Widgetry based dialog boxes, you'll be in for a nasty surprise

The problem in both cases is that RTP currently makes assumptions about the kinds of Windows you have open, and doesn't "see" Widgetry based Windows. So in case (1) above, your image will quit as you start it. Very annoying :)

In case (2), dialogs prompt the NoWindowBlock as they close, which again, sees "no windows" and offers to open the launcher or quit - not what you want. I used this in my build script:

WindowManager noWindowBlock: [:mgr | true].

Not sophisticated, but it gets the job done for my little application.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, widgetry, pollock

David Sifry has more details than you'll need :)

Technorati Tags: blogosphere

Travel has thrown my schedule off again - I forgot the logs report. BottomFeeder downloads went at a respectable clip last week: 268/day:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	543
Update	256
Mac X	164
Linux x86	150
Solaris	112
CE ARM	100
Mac 8/9	86
Windows98/ME	74
HPUX	72
Linux Sparc	63
Sources	63
AIX	62
SGI	52
Linux PPC	51
ADUX	23
CE x86	4

Up next: The HTML page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	47.7%
Internet Explorer	41.2%
Other	2.3%
MSN Bot	3.9%
MSRBOT	2.6%
Opera	2.3%

Opera keeps sneaking up - let's have a look at the Syndication Numbers:

Wow - IE usage is really rising - I guess the RSS support in IE 7 is good enough for a lot of people

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	34.9%
Mozilla	17.1%
BottomFeeder	12.6%
Other	4.5%
BlogLines	5.3%
Net News Wire	4.4%
Google Feed Fetcher	4.1%
Safari RSS	2.7%
Vienna	2.6%
NewsGator	1.8%
Feeds on Feeds	1.6%
Akregator	1.4%
RSS Bandit	1%
Python	1%
News Fire	1%
MSN Bot	1%
JetBrains	1%
Jakarta	1%
SharpReader	1%

Hey, this is cool - as I write this, the "Industry Misinterpretations" podcast ranks 33rd in the Technology section of Podcast Alley. That's really cool:

If you like the podcast, head on over and throw a vote or review our way.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Ramon Leon makes a good point about learning Smalltalk:

Edward was lucky, he had a Smalltalker handy to show him the ropes, few have that opportunity. I’m still amazed by how many people think they can grok Smalltalk by seeing syntax examples. Smalltalk isn’t its syntax, it’s its environment. Smalltalk is a living world of running objects, there are no files, no applications, just what’s running. To understand Smalltalk, you have to either actually use it for a while, or have a seasoned Smalltalker demonstrate it to you. Reading sample code just won’t cut it.

While I can't guarantee a person at your shoulder, I can point out our free download, and the Smalltalk Daily screencasts to help you get started.

In case you missed it, registration for Smalltalk Solutions 2007 is now live - head on over here to register for the conference. Note: If you go to the STIC site and sign up as a STIC site and sign up as a member, you'll get a 25% discount. There's a lot of great content - check out the schedule of talks and tutorials.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Monday at StS 2007 opens up with a three hour tutorial from Chad Fowler: Ruby for Smalltalkers:

Since its introduction in 2004, Ruby on Rails continues to make waves in the web development world. Released in a storm of hype, the Rails framework has drawn acclaim and criticism---from hero worship to FUD-laden negativity. Claims of Rails' 10x productivity increase were met with both skepticism and seemingly religious fanaticism. Love it or hate it, Rails has cast an industry-visible light on the dynamic language world Not surprisingly, Ruby on Rails is written in Ruby. Ruby borrows heavily from Smalltalk. Therefore, Smalltalkers have a serious advantage when approaching Ruby on Rails for the first time. This tutorial will exploit that advantage, presenting an overview of the Ruby on Rails framework from the perspective of someone who already understands the power of a real Object Oriented language and the many idioms which Ruby has borrowed from Smalltalk. You'll leave this fast-paced tutorial with the tools and understanding to use and explore Rails on your own.

See you in Toronto!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, ruby

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at customizing the way an object shows itself in a GUI widget, such as a listbox or dataset (grid).

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Chris Petrilli coins a great phrase (see the title) in his post about online behavior:

Take, for example, “freedom of speech,” which has been a hallmark of the American experience for many years. There are some who, mistakenly, believe that it is an absolute right, without limit, and without restriction. It is not. One is not allowed to say things that specifically endanger other people’s lives, such as yelling “fire” in a crowded room. Additionally, one can not conflate the right to say something with the right to be heard. I might wish to say irrational and crazy things -- and often do -- but that does not require anyone around me to provide support, whether in the form of monetary commitments, or even a forum.

That's the point I've been trying to get across, with a few prominent people - like Scoble - just not getting it (see his update, near the bottom of the post). With freedom comes responsibility - and ceding the latter will not lead to more of the former. Quite the opposite, actually.

Technorati Tags: accountability, speech

It's all explained here :)

Smalltalk Central has re-launched - and the feed technology behind it comes out of BottomFeeder :)

After the Ruby for Smalltalkers tutorial, Joseph Pelrine keeps things moving with "The Scrum Methodology":

Agile software development methodologies, XP being the most known one, are becoming more and more accepted. They take the different nature of software seriously and help in delivering usable software to the needs of the customer on time and on budget. At the same time minimizing risks. Scrum is an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or managing any work, a proven and successful project management methodology that fits nicely with agile processes - especially XP. We will show and explain the underlying principles. report from real life projects, and answer your questions about Scrum.

See you in Toronto!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Scoble talks Semantic Web:

Basically Web pages will no longer be just pages, or posts. They’ll all be split up into little objects, stored in a database (a massive, scalable one at that) and then your words can be displayed in different ways. Imagine a really awesome search engine that could bring back much much more granular stuff than Google can today. Or, heck, imagine you could view my blog by posts with most inbound links.

This is in reference to Radar Networks, which is apparently in stealth mode (yawn). Here's the thing though: unless I misunderstand the above, I see two problems:

1. All kinds of possible copyright questions, depending on what (and how much) gets cached
2. The "meta-search" objection that Jason Calacanis brings up

I'd be curious to know how those things will get resolved, or why they aren't actually problems.

Technorati Tags: semantic-web

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at dealing with HTTP servers that require authentication - whether that means Basic or Digest. We also look at Proxy server support.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

We've got our first cut of Swallow up now - check out the website. There's a zip file to download (it's just a one file installation right now). We expect Mac and Linux support to follow soon.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, smalltalk

This is April?

Not exactly golfing weather :/

Back when Vassili first started talking about Announcements, I really didn't see the point - I had just switched BottomFeeder over from change/update to Trigger Events, and those seemed sufficient. Now that I've been working with Widgetry (Swallow), I see what the advantage is. Consider a trigger event that notifies you of a keyboard event:

Subscribing:

someObject when: #keyboardEvent send: keyboardEvent: to: self

This depends on the triggering object sending an argument along:

kbdHandler triggerEvent: #keyboardEvent with: keyboardEventObject

Which is fine, except for one thing - the object being sent is sent more or less simply by convention, and the triggering object has to send it along. Now consider the way an Announcement works:

Subscribing:

	(self paneAt: #input) inputField 
		when: KeystrokeAboutToBeProcessed
		send: #possibleCREvent:
		to: self.

What do I expect to see as the argument? An instance of the KeystrokeAboutToBeProcessed class - so instead of pushing symbols around, we push full objects around. This particular one is sent like this:

targetPane 
	announce: (KeystrokeAboutToBeProcessed keyboardEvent: aKeyboardEvent)

The nice thing is, we've moved "up" a level from symbols to objects. None of that was clear to me back when I read about it - it's like an "aha moment" all over again.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

There's a coding contest again this year, run by Andres Valloud (the newest member of our VM team here at Cincom). Here's the summary:

Phase 2 of the Smalltalk Solutions Coding Competition will take place onsite at IT360 - Smalltalk Solutions 2007.RM 201F Prizes include: 1st prize: iPod Video 2nd prize: iPod Nano 3rd prize: iPod Shuffle Each of the finalists will also receive an individual membership to the STIC (Smalltalk Industry Council)

Show up to see how they do - I'll be blogging this again, and possibly podcasting from the room!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

The Squeakers are hosting a booth at StS 2007:

Toronto, Canada - 2 April, 2007. Continuing the tradition started in Karlsruhe, the Squeak community will host another trade show booth at the Smalltalk Solutions Conference 30, April through 2, May in Toronto, Ontario. The booth will demonstrate Squeak and a variety of Squeak products such as Seaside, eToys, and Morphic. We encourage all to visit (Booth #627) and experience the power of Squeak today.

Technorati Tags: StS2007, squeak

Nick Carr spots where the real money is going for Web 2.0 - infrastructure:

The 470,000-square-foot data center is the first of an expected six centers that Microsoft will build on the Quincy site, a former bean field. The facility will ultimately encompass 1.5 million square feet of server-packed space. Nearby, Yahoo, Intuit, and Ask.com are also building big computing centers to power their online services. The attraction of the area is cheap power:

High-tech companies come here for the nation's cheapest hydroelectric power rates, thanks to Grant County's two enormous dams, which pump out power as cheap as 1.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, said Tim Snead, the city's administrator. That compares with a national industrial rate of 9 cents. The data centers gobble up 40-plus megawatts of electricity each.

That power consumption represents real money being spent.

Technorati Tags: infrastructure

Like many large companies living off past glories, MS is starting to lose track of their customer base - consider Walter Mossberg's observations about his new Vista machine:

I also was shocked at how long this machine took to restart and to do a cold start after being completely shut down. Restarting took over three minutes, and a cold start took more than two minutes. That suggests the computer is loading a bunch of stuff I neither know about nor want. By contrast, a brand new Apple MacBook laptop, under the same test conditions, restarted in 34 seconds and did a cold start in 29 seconds.

Over time, this has always happened to a Windows machine - but now it seems that MS is allowing the "bit rot" to set in before you even get the machine. My Mac Mini, a 2 year old G4, boots almost instantly. The XP notebook I'm working on right now? It takes minutes to shut down, never mind restart - and even once the desktop shows up, there are scads of things firing off in the background.

I suspect that MS is closer than anyone thinks to the same brick wall that IBM slammed into back in the early 90's. It won't kill MS, anymore than the wall killed IBM - but it's going to hurt a lot, and cost them a lot of influence.

Update: Scoble notes that this is an unintended side effect of the various governmental attempts to "help" consumers with the MS "monopoly".

Looks like the chinks in the DRM armor are opening up: EMI did a deal with Apple for non-DRM'd music, and it looks like the same deal will go to MS:

Microsoft has hinted that it may be close to reaching a deal with EMI to sell songs without anti-piracy protection via its Zune platform.

We've had unprotected digital music for eons now - the CD. All this does is move the industry away from the unreality zone they desperately wanted to live in.

Technorati Tags: music, apple, microsoft, EMI, RIAA

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at making threaded API calls using DLLCC - i.e., making a C level call that will not block the VM.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, threads

It's not just Windows that has wonkiness - my Mac has less, but it can be very strange. For instance: I have a USB iMic which provides a line in/out. I use that to record podcasts on the Mac, and I also use it on Windows when I record audio for "Smalltalk Daily". Here's the weird part: sometimes, when I unplug the iMic from the USB hub on the Mac, the Mac decides "whoops, not only is there no iMic, there's no external Maxtor drive". Since that's where all the iTunes stuff lives, it's very annoying. The solution is to unhook the USB cable to the drive (generating an error message), and then hooking it back up.

Steve Rubel thinks that Twitter will be sold soon - and he thinks Facebook may be one of the suitors.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, Twitter

The image rendering issues on Linux/Mac were fairly simple - I should have a build for those platforms uploaded this evening, or tomorrow morning at the latest. If you're interested in other platforms, just take the Linux download (when I push it up), and use the appropriate VM from the NC download. Since that's a fairly large download, let me know if that's onerous - I can supply others on the site if demand warrants it.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I've built (and tested) Swallow for Linux (x86) and for OS X (x86 and PPC). There are downloads available for those on the website now - note that the OSX build will be updated in a few days, as a better VM becomes available.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, smalltalk

We had Bob Nemec, current Director of STIC on yesterday - so we talked about the state of STIC and Smalltalk Solutions 2007. You can visit the STIC website here, and join - there's a 25% discount at Smalltalk Solutions for members. We also discussed some of the talks coming up at the conference. As always, James Savidge has the jobs report - but as he mentions in his latest post, he could use some help.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, STIC, StS2007

Spring brings both bulbs, and... snow flurries:

Mind you, it's closing in on 11 AM here, so it's still fairly cold - the dusting was happening around 2 AM last night.

I've updated the Swallow build for Mac, so that we don't force the Windows look and feel.

Peter Fisk points out the kind of thing that big companies fall prey to: internal discontinuity that leads to external confusion:

The .Net libraries contain *two* complete user interface libraries - one based on WinForms (Win32 API) and one based on WPF (vector graphics). And to make life interesting, a lot of the components have exactly the same names (eg Button, ListBox, etc) even although they are totally incompatible. Ok - maybe a smart developer should be able to figure it out (old style vs new style). But then, there is a third set of components (WPF/e) which is supposed to play a big role, but nobody will say what is going to be in the libraries (* because it’s still a secret *).

Mind you, smaller outfits run into this kind of problem as well (quick - count the number of parsers hidden inside VisualWorks :) ) - but it's far more prevalent in big organizations. MS is getting closer and closer to that brick wall...

Technorati Tags: Windows, WPF

A big thanks goes to Troy, who created an appropriate icons file for Swallow on the Mac - instead of the "Rubik's Cube" VW icon, it now shows up appropriately with the Swallow icon. Thanks, Troy!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, Twitter

The new owner of the Tribune company has an interesting idea: stop letting search engines grab their content "for free":

It's time for newspapers to stop giving away their stories to popular search engines such as Google, according to Samuel Zell, the real estate magnate whose bid for Tribune Co. was accepted this week.

...

"If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?" Zell said during the question period after his speech. "Not very."

If Zell wants his paper to not be indexed, it's pretty simple - he can have his web monkeys modify the robots.txt file (which Google honors), and bam - it'll stop. The problem is, with the indexing gone, no one will find his papers. This isn't a simple problem - and I'm not sure there's an answer that involves anything that looks like the legacy business model, either.

Update: Jason Calacanis points out the many, many things that Zell doesn't understand - and how the reporters covering the story didn't get it, either.

Technorati Tags: newspapers

Time for the weekly log scan: BottomFeeder downloads proceeded at a nice clip: 275/day. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	432
Mac X	318
Update	287
Linux x86	171
Solaris	103
CE ARM	94
Mac 8/9	86
HPUX	69
Sources	66
Linux Sparc	63
AIX	63
Windows98/ME	50
SGI	49
Linux PPC	49
ADUX	24
CE x86	2

Decent spread - off to the HTML logs:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	45.7%
Internet Explorer	37.2%
MSN Bot	9.9%
Other	1.7%
MSRBOT	2.3%
Opera	1.6%
Ocelli	1.6%

Which is back to my normal distribution between browsers. Finally, the syndication distribution:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	33.9%
Mozilla	16.2%
BottomFeeder	11.8%
Other	5.5%
BlogLines	5.2%
Net News Wire	4.8%
Google Feed Fetcher	4.2%
FeedOnFeeds	3.3%
Vienna	3%
Safari RSS	2.4%
NewsGator	1.8%
Akregator	1.7%
MSN Bot	1.2%
RSS Bandit	1%
Python	1%
News Fire	1%
SharpReader	1%
JetBrains	1%

The interesting thing is, my HTML views are staying stable, while the syndication numbers are rising.

I posted something like this the other day, but now that Swallow has been posted online, you can get executables for everything shown:

You can click on the image to see the full screen - that's BottomFeeder (RSS/Atom), TypeLess (IRC - a Bf plugin), and Swallow (Twitter).

Technorati Tags: BottomFeeder, Swallow, Twitter

Ok, I haven't seen "Grindhouse" yet. But I'm watching the Roeper review, and he's making a point about how he loves Tarantino's "dialog". Excuse me? Tarantino does blood and gore well, but - as a dialog writer - he's way, way over-rated. Consider "Kill Bill 2", where he started to believe his own press clippings - and took an intense part 1 and slowed it down to to the point of sheer boredom. If Grindhouse contains more of this kind of "dialog", and less action - then someone just needs to sit Tarantino down in front of "Pulp Fiction" and remind him that his dialog only works when he keeps the action moving.

I think it was warmer on Christmas than it is today on Easter:

Mark Shuttleworth has a great tagline on what DRM is an instance of:

There are some ideas that are broken, but attractive enough to some people that they are doomed to be tried again and again.

He goes on in a brilliant essay about the pointless costs the content industries (music and movies in particular) have piled on themselves in their vain attempts to stay with their pre-digital business model. Here's the question the content owners ought to ask themselves:

I wonder what the cost of all the crypto associated with HD DVD/BluRay is, when you factor in the complexity, the design, and the incremental cost of IP, hardware and software for every single HD-capable device out there.

Now ask the same question about the worst DRM schemes around (including the absolutely ludicrous PVP-OPM on Vista). All these schemes do is irritate the people who want to pay you, while doing reasonable things (like taking the content from a DVD they own onto a PC for travel purposes). The pirates? They aren't even slowed down. So DRM persists mostly via mindless inertia, and a sheer lack of interest in the customer base.

Technorati Tags: music, movies

Here's another example of how the RIAA is letting the legal department be the marketing/PR wing for the music industry - and how sometimes, they run smack into the actual marketing and PR group:

Launch Radio Networks reports: The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which has become notorious for suing anyone from high school students to retirees for downloading music from the web, has gone after web sites such as Idolator that have posted leaked songs from the upcoming NINE INCH NAILS album, "Year Zero". The problem, however, is that the tracks were leaked intentionally. Several songs from the album were left on computer hard drives at venues on the band's current European tour, with fans finding and posting them on the web for others to download and swap. According to Billboard.com, the RIAA sent cease-and-desist emails to web sites that posted the tracks, leading one industry source to say, "These f***ing idiots are going after a campaign that the label signed off on."

It must be very, very hard to be a PR flack for a studio right now - half or more of your time has to be spent trying to explain why your legal department is trying to sue your customer base...

Technorati Tags: marketing, PR

Doc Searls adds his voice to Jason Calacanis' on the Zell nonsense that came out the other day:

Earth to Post: Putting editorial on the Web is itself permission for anybody to read it, search it, index it, and link to it. Google is not the Web, which is where people and organizations put material for the purpose of sharing it. If you don't want people to read editorial anywhere but on paper, don't put it on the Web, or embed code that tell search engines not to index it. The Agence France-Press is clueless as hell about this, and the fact that Google settled a copyright-infringement suit with them means nothing about what the Web is or why one puts stuff there. Most importantly, don't expect to succeed in a world that looks more and more, every day, to the Web as the place to find useful editorial, if you keep that editorial off the Web.

As I said the other day, if you don't want Google (or other robots) indexing you, it's simple: just implement robots.txt properly, and you'll stop being indexed. Just don't be surprised when the number of inbound visitors drops like a rock. I have no idea what the visitor distribution for the newspapers looks like, but here's what Google Analytics says about mine:

Looks like cutting search engines off my site would be a very, very bad idea - and I suspect that it would be an equally bad idea for Zell's papers. I also suspect, based on his speech, that he's never seen the equivalent graph for his newspaper.

There's an even bigger problem for most newspapers. Pick up your local paper - for me that's either the Washington Post or the Baltimore Sun. Flip through the news pages - notice how few stories there are that aren't wire pickups? Before the web existed, it made sense for the local paper to be an aggregator of various wire stories. Now? I can get all of that myself - which is why I don't have a newspaper delivered. What about editorials? Well, contrary to what the editors at the WaPo seem to thik, their editorial staff simply isn't any more thoughtful than what I can pick up around the political blogosphere (and I can find a far more varied set of viewpoints that way, too).

All of which leads to an interesting question: what value can a paper provide, whether it's in paper form or online? Well, how about local stories? The New York Times isn't going to go deep on county level happenings in the DC metro area, but the Post could. The problem is that the Post (and every other paper, for that matter), has an elevated view of their own importance. They think the local stories are beneath them; thus they don't bother. What they don't realize is that the national stuff is all on the wires, on TV, and on the net already - they can't add any real value there. People like Zell are going to continue to get creamed as long as they try to cling to an increasingly out of date world-view on newspapers.

I'll say this: any paper that managed to bring Doc on as a consultant, and actually listened to him, would do well.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, media

Bill de hÓra has some relevant thoughts for the *cough* thought leaders *cough*:

First, both enterprise software and services organisations need to rein in their marketing and sales divisions, as strange as that might sound. In essence, they need to stop promising miracles. What has happened with WS-* promotion, and what is happening with SOA is bad for the industry, bad for shareholder value. Customers will come to reject the vendor/analyst/consultant triumvirate if it comes to appear to be nothing more than a racket. In effect, that would be a rejection of the entire market. This helps no-one, least of all customers, dependent as they are on software and related services. More realistic approaches to the market need to be found - "rip and replace" of IT assets isn't a sustainable model (ironically WS-* in the beginning was about avoiding such expense).

The enterprisey architects will pay no attention to this though, and will continue to drink the analyst kool-aid - because doing anything else would be a (personal) political risk. Failure is way, way safer than trying something that isn't "mainstream".

Technorati Tags: SOA

If we have web 2.0, why not supermarket 2.0?

I've just ported my syndication library (the one used in BottomFeeder) to VW 7.5. The library itself (Bundle SyndicationHandling in the Public Store) didn't need any changes - but the NetResources library it depends on did. I got that updated and pushed in - for simplicity, I created a new Bundle: NetResourcesAppBundle.

So - any projects that need Atom and/or RSS support, there you go.

Technorati Tags: RSS, Atom

The final event on Monday's agenda at Smalltalk Solutions is the finale for the Coding Contest:

Phase 2 of the Smalltalk Solutions Coding Competition will take place onsite at IT360 - Smalltalk Solutions 2007. Prizes include:

• 1st prize: iPod Video
• 2nd prize: iPod Nano
• 3rd prize: iPod Shuffle

Each of the finalists will also receive an individual membership to the STIC (Smalltalk Industry Council)

See you in Toronto!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Tim Bray points to this YouTube interview with Dick Dale, a guy who's carved his own path in the music industry. It's worth listening to for the perspective of a musician on the way the labels operate.

I see that Tim O'Reilly has put his money where his mouth is, and come up with a proposed code of conduct for bloggers. While I don't intend to follow all the points on his list (I don't plan to get rid of anonymous comments, for instance), I applaud his efforts. Out of the entire list, this stands out as the most important:

We won't say anything online that we wouldn't say in person.

The rest, as they say, is commentary.

SCI FI Wire reports that Grindhouse is getting a slow pickup:

Grindhouse was a box-office horror over the Easter weekend, opening in a disappointing fourth place with only $11.6 million, despite positive buzz for the faux double feature from directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, the Hollywood trade papers and wire services reported.

When you bring a movie to market that runs over 3 hours, it has to be really, really god to make big money. The production costs for this flick were reportedly low, so it might still end up on the positive side of the ledger - but how well would it have done had they dropped it down to 2 hours, or - even crazier - syndicated it out to cable TV as a 2 or three part serial?

First thing Tuesday morning, Thomas Gagne gets things started with "There is no Spoon: Overcoming Object-Relational Impedance Mismatch in OLTP Systems". There was a long discussion on this topic in one of the Smalltalk forums earlier this year, so I expect a vigorous session:

OO programmers have long believed their classes and objects should map directly to tables and rows. That belief is so compelling it has spawned an industry of object relational frameworks, specialized consultants, conferences, and best practices catering to itself. This presentation will discuss how thinking of the database as though it were a single (very large) object allows programmers to exploit the strengths of both OO and relational models without either imposing its design on the whole or diluting the purity of each.

See you in Toronto!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, RDBMS

Jeff Jarvis points out that "taking the pledge" offered by O'Reilly has some interesting risks:

So imagine the challenge to Section 230 . . . . A lawyer says to a blogger in the witness box: ‘You put that badge on your site saying that you are responsible for everything on that site and you do kill comments that violate your code, which assures that no one will be libeled or defamed, and yet you left up this comment (wave printout menacingly) that defamed my good client.’ If I were that attorney, I would say that you waived the protection of Section 230. That would be dumb. And dangerous.

I allow annonymous comments here, and the only real policing I do is to get rid of spam and bad language - some people flame me for the latter, but hey - my site, my rules. I hadn't really considered Jarvis' point, but it looks like the code of conduct movement could end up biting back in ways O'Reilly hasn't considered.

Update: Chris Petrilli adds related thoughts - with some experience from when he worked at an ISP. The TWIL podcast also gave that idea some bounce this week.

Technorati Tags: media, ethics

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we deal with something of an edge case: how to work with an NTLM proxy server if your client system is not in the same domain as that proxy server. I suspect that this may be less of an edge case as time goes by, with all of the remote work that keeps popping up.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Radio Userland finally supports Atom 1.0

Eric Winger notes that the Portland STUG is meeting on Tuesday (tomorrow night).

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Tim O'Reilly has done the unimaginable: he's gotten nearly the entire blogosphere to agree: nearly everyone hates his proposed code of conduct. From Mike Arrington to Nick Carr, and everywhere in between, all you can hear out there is a long, sustained raspberry.

Just for jollies, I joined Jaiku - and set it up to receive all my Twitter updates (see Rafe Needleman's instructions for that information). I'm "jarober" on both sites, so it should be easy enough to find me. Of course, you can follow my Twitter stream by grabbing Swallow.

Technorati Tags: web2.0

Ed Foster notes that DRM can bite the average user back pretty hard - preventing you from watching content you legally bought:

"I recently let my girlfriend borrow my DVD player because hers went out," the reader wrote. "Well, I thought, that's okay because my computer is hooked up to my TV and I had a DVD drive on the computer so I can still watch my movie collection. Boy, was I wrong. It seems that three out of the last four DVD movies I had just bought will not play on my computer."

The DVDs that wouldn't play were "Flags of our Fathers" by Warner Bros, "We Were Soldiers" by Paramount, and "Battlestar Galactica 2.5" by Universal, the reader said. "Each time it comes up with 'Macrovision distribution failed' error message and playback is not possible. These movies were purchased at WalMart just days before, but here I am with legal copies of DVD movies and I can't play them. A couple of days later when my DVD player was back, the movies play just fine on the player."

For the folks out there that want to chime in about how this is an "edge case", and few people have a PC hooked to their TV? I think XBox with Media Center counts, and that's becoming fairly popular - and the same asinine DRM is baked into that kind of device. More and more people are using iTunes to watch stuff (we regularly watch stuff through iTunes, without an Apple TV - all we needed was the PC that's hooked to the TV already, and we use iTunes there to stream from the Mac. I don't know whether Apple has the same level of stupidity built in that MS does, but give them time - as AppleTV picks up, the MPAA will ask for it.

The bottom line on this is simple - it doesn't stop pirates - they use easily available software to bypass the controls. The people it stops are law abiding but not technically deep people who just want to watch stuff they already own.

Technorati Tags: MPAA, stupidity

Tuesday morning at 11 AM, I'll be talking about the Cincom Smalltalk Product Roadmap:

James Robertson will be describing the roadmap for the Cincom Smalltalk product Suite (VisualWorks and ObjectStudio 8). There have been changes to this roadmap over the last few months. This session will explain where the suite is, where it's been, and where it's headed. This should be of interest to all Smalltalkers, whether they use Cincom Smalltalk now or not - and it will also be of interest to software developers and managers who may be thinking of examining Smalltalk. This will be an interactive session - I expect to entertain questions as I talk, and will be responsive to any and all of them.

See you in Toronto!

Technorati Tags: cst, smalltalk

Actual usage of software is the best way to find bugs - especially ones you hadn't thought to look for. BottomFeeder has a syndication library that it uses for creating feed and item objects, and that library is now being used by Smalltalk-Central. Recently, I extended the way feed filters work - they had been used solely to filter items out (i.e., a match against a filter kicked the item). Mark Roberts wanted a positive filter, so I extended the library a bit while I was in Cincinnati.

However, the filtering had a flaw - the filters run sequentially, and while filter1 might keep an item, filter2 might knock it out. That's not really the behavior Mark was looking for, and since he was the person requesting the feature, it really should have worked the way he wanted it to. So this morning, while he explained the problem on the IRC channel, I fixed the code - it was a simple matter of having items remember whether they had been positively filtered during the filter loop. That's all done, Mark's happy with the code, and it's published.

Turns out that talking to the customer for a feature is usually the best way to understand the request.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

James McGovern:

One of the biggest observations I have noted amongst my peers is that none of them have ever bothered to attend a conference in the UK. It seems though that many folks from Europe have attended US conferences though. Likewise, it seems as if UK based conferences never bother seeking out US based speakers with any frequency with the exception of John Zachman and Donald Tapscott. I haven't spoken at a conference outside of the United States since 2003. Maybe I am long overdue and simply awaiting another invite.

Fascinating. I'm not a speaking celebrity, so I don't get speaking invitations - either in the US or elsewhere. However, I do notice the various calls for participation that conferences push out, and I apply to speak at ones that look interesting. Sometimes I get accepted, sometimes I don't - recently, I gave a Smalltalk Tutorial at SPA 2007 in Cambridge, UK - and it seemed to be well received.

There's really only one way to broaden your exposure, and it doesn't involve kicking back and waiting for an invitation.

Technorati Tags: conferences, speaking

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we go over keyboard shortcuts. You'll have to listen to the audio to make sure you know what keys I'm pressing. The shortcuts in CST are different than in most editors, but they do afford some nice capabilities.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cst

Doc Searls makes a lot of good points on the issues the newspaper business has with the web - and notes that they have the value proposition wrong on new/old stuff:

That division is roughly between what I call "the news" and "the olds". The irony here is that papers charge for the news and give away the olds in print (the olds being fishwrap and recycling fodder), while they do exactly the opposite online. So they compete with themselves in both areas. Specifically, by giving away daily editorial online, they undermine street and subscription sales; and by charging for archival editorial, they remove their goods from the vast reference library that Google and other search engines have become. What papers that do this are saying, essentially, is that the news has sales value in itself (instead serving as free bait for advertising - a model borrowed from commercial broadcasting and all those free papers piled up outside coffee shops and restaurants), while the olds is worth $2.50 per story.

There are researchers who will pay that $2.50, but very few. Why the news media thinks it's worth getting a few nickels for that (while the new stuff that we care about is free) is a mystery. What they ought to be doing is outlined above: Make the old stuff available (so that Google, et. al. can give them more authority) - and use AdSense on both the old and new stuff to bring in some actual revenue.

Like the RIAA and the MPAA, the newspaper guys are stuck in a different era, and are having trouble finding their way out.

Technorati Tags: newspapers

Sadly, I can't attend ESUG this year (my daughter's school schedule conflicts) - but it sounds like a great conference, and Cincom will have folks there:

For the 15th consecutive year, ESUG is organizing its International Smalltalk Conference in Lugano, Switzerland next august. Beside giving talks, submitting your software to the awards, and attending the conference, you can support ESUG action by pushing your companies to sponsor the event. Three packages are available:

• Silver ESUG Sponsor: By paying € 500 per year, the logo of your company/association is displayed during the ESUG conference. You are entitled to mention that you are an ESUG sponsor, and to use the ESUG logo in that context.
• Gold ESUG Sponsor: By paying € 1000 per year, you get all of the above, and you are also recognized as a sponsor on our ESUG website http://www.esug.org. ESUG correspondence and distributions (CD, Documentation) will also feature your logo. You also get a 10% fee reduction on the ESUG events for up to 5 people of your organisation.
• Platinum ESUG Sponsor: By Paying € 2000 per year, you get all of the above, but you get a 20% fee reduction on the ESUG events for up to 10 people of your organisation.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

This year's Dynamic Language Symposium (at OOPSLA) is October 22nd, in Montreal:

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, Tcl, 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.

It's a positive sign to see so much interest in dynamic languages!

Technorati Tags: development, smalltalk, OOPSLA, DLS