Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

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

Andres writes about the first round of the coding contest, which begins this Friday - and runs through April 22nd:

The exciting time when everything starts is coming. As soon as this Friday begins according to Pacific Standard Time, I will put some files in an FTP server. Ten days will go by, and then three finalists will be selected to compete in a follow up blitz round at Smalltalk Solutions.

Full details on round 1 can be found here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Turns out Heinlein was right: There really is no such thing as a free lunch. Today's lesson comes from MySpace:

Today MySpace made the decision to prevent Photobucket users from posting their videos and remixes to their MySpace pages.

This action by MySpace means that all of the videos and remixes you created will no longer show up on your MySpace profile, blog and comments section. More specifically, if you attempt to add new videos or remixes to your profile, they will be removed.

As Scoble notes, this is ultimately a business decision: MySpace is not in the altruism business. Information may want to be free, but someone has to pay the utility bills.

Technorati Tags: management, free

James McGovern correctly notes that many companies are happy to use free software (the open source aspect is secondary, IMHO), and not worry that much about support issues:

Too much of the discussion around open source has been centered around software vendors and paid support models. The assumption is that enterprises won't go it alone in terms of using software without someone providing a holding hand. The funny thing is that many enterprises are doing just that. Ask yourself how many enterprises use Eclipse? Then ask yourself how many enterprises pay for support for Eclipse? Once an enterprise starts getting a taste of what it means to support themselves then the economic model changes significantly towards something more positive. The real question if folks can understand positive may not come from the perspective of a software vendor but it can benefit large enterprises in an economically sound way.

What he's not pointing out is that Eclipse is backed by a large vendor (IBM), which is a large part of the reason why people are comfortable about it. It's easy to be happy with free software that is being continually improved; the harder question is what companies would do if IBM decided that Eclipse wasn't worth whatever it is they spend on it. Right now, Eclipse is a loss leader for IBM's paid software; as with any loss leader, if IBM decides that it's not pulling people over to the paid side, the seeming altruism will come to an end.

At the end of the day, stuff has to be paid for - development machines, bandwidth, and - more than anything else - people. There's only so much forward progress that happens without a paid staff of developers.

Technorati Tags: management

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at using pragmas to dynamically add menu items to an application.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

If you've seen the roadmap from us, and would rather attend a tech session on Tuesday at 11 AM, then head on over to Dave Buck's session on Interactive Visualization:

VisualWorks contains standard widgets to allow you to see and manipulate simple data but when your data starts to become complex it's hard to see everything and how it's organized. The Business Graphics package can help you see some kinds of data but doesn't allow you to interact with your data. In this talk, I present a few techniques to see and interact with complex data. A histogram control lets you see how your data collects into groups. A hyperbolic graph viewer shows large networks by laying them out in 4D hyperbolic space and projecting them onto a unit sphere giving a fish-eye lens view of your network. A map control lets you visualize geographic based data and a time selection control allows you to see and edit temporal information. Although the code presented in this talk is proprietary and can't be released, I will show some of the implementation and optimization techniques to allow you to create similar controls yourself.

See you in Toronto!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Tim O'Reilly has posted a long - and thoughtful - response to many of the criticisms of his original "code of conduct" post. It's well worth reading, not least because he lays out his thinking on the matter, rather than just posting a set of guidelines.

Technorati Tags: blog, conduct

We still watch "Lost", but I have to tell you - we have been liking it less and less. The focus on "the others" has been annoying, simply due to the fact that they have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I mean seriously - when you see a plane crash, what sort of person is it whose first thought is "let's go screw with their heads"? Apparently, we aren't the only ones up in arms - John Podhoretz has a great take on this at "The Corner":

Trust me. Lost can't "unjump the shark." It's over, and viewers have figured it out, which is why it's lost 40 percent of its audience over the course of this year. The show's central gimmick has been to lay out a mystery, leave it unresolved, then go on to layer a new one on top of an old one. There are, I think, at least 20 pieces of plot that have been left out there to rot. For you fans, they include: What happened to Michael and Walt? How did Eko's plane from Africa end up on the island? Why did the Smoke Monster kill Eko? And on and on and on. You just can't do this to an audience. It's a giant con game, and eventually the people you're trying to con get wise and turn on you with savage anger.

Ultimately, I think it's like "The X-Files" - the writers don't actually have a grand plan, or - worse - the one they have is deeply stupid, and they've come to realize that themselves.

Yes, this does describe a common tendency - although there ought to be a "drink coffee" box on there somewhere :)

With the Swallow client deployed, I figured it might be worth mentioning two things I learned about deploying a Widgetry based application. I've brought them up before, but it's worth mentioning again, in one place. So - say you've built your Widgetry based UI, and you are using Runtime Packager to package it. Step one:

The important point here is "Action on last window close" - you want to set that to "Continue processing". Why? Well, RTP is not (at present) aware of Widgetry, so when your first window opens at startup, the runtime manager notices that there are no UIs open - and promptly quits. So - implement a method in your UI that does this:

ObjectMemory quit

When you need to quit. Second, your application will likely use Widgetry dialogs, with class DialogUserInterface. Well, when you confirm/cancel a dialog, the Runtime system again notices that there are no Windows present (again, it's not aware of Widgetry) - so it quits. What you need to do there is create a noWindowBlock:

WindowManager noWindowBlock: [:mgr | true].

That just tells the runtime system to move along and ignore the "no window" state. Mind you, as Widgetry moves into deployment, these issues will get fixed by our engineers. If you are doing "bleeding edge" development though, it's useful testing information.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Remember when the clowns at Warren Kremer Paino Advertising worked with a State of Maine office to sue a Maine blogger, in an attempt to shut him up? Well, it seems that the kind of stupidity behind that instinct is still alive and well. Last week, a Tennessee blogger raised the hackles of a placement firm. The blogger maintains that JL Kirk and Associates offered to "grease the skids" on job placement if he paid them $4000 - he and his wife decided that was sleazy, and blogged about it.

Well, that got the law side of the house at JL interested - they sent a cease and desist threat to sue - and that promptly got blogged. There's a good summary of this at the " Captains Quarters " blog, including this:

Well, now we have both sides of the story. I have no direct knowledge of which side is telling the truth. Coble could be lying and perhaps defamed JL Kirk Associates. However, let's ask a couple of questions about this:

1. Are you, the CQ reader who looks at both communications, likely to believe JL Kirk or Katherine Coble? Given the nature of both communications (read Katherine's posts!), which sounds more likely to be true?

2. Given that even a fairly moderate criticism (even if unreasonable) of JL Kirk prompted this 16-ton legal approach, would any of you be tempted to do business with them?

3. Did anyone at JL Kirk or King & Ballow, JLK's legal representatives, ever consider that issuing this kind of threat amounted to throwing gasoline on a lit match? Did any of them understand the blogosphere at all? And given that level of cluelessness, would CQ readers do business with either firm?

The full text of the take-down letter - which also gives JL Kirk and Associate's side of the story - is here. Here's the problem - it used to be that the corporate entity held all the cards here. Now, that's no longer the case. The Coble's have gotten a lot of publicity for this, and none of it has been good for JL Kirk and Associates. What they've failed to realize is that legal action of this sort is no longer simply legal action - it's part of a company's PR and marketing. As such, when you pull out the "big gun" of a lawsuit threat, you had better be sure that the facts line up your way in both a legal sense and in a PR sense - or you could end up - as WKP did - with a phyrric victory at best, and an embarrassing PR black mark regardless.

Technorati Tags: marketing, law

I'm not the only one presenting a product roadmap at StS 2007 - Instantiations is doing so as well:

This session will discuss the current state of Instantiations, VA Smalltalk and new features included in VA Smalltalk 7.5 such as the Refactoring Browser, the SUnit Browser, ENVY/QA, Windows Vista support, etc. Future development plans for version 8.0 and beyond will also be discussed. VA Smalltalk V7.5 enables software developers to create highly portable, scaleable, multi-tier business applications using object-oriented technology. VA Smalltalk allows for incremental and rapid development of new Smalltalk applications. Developers can build and deploy enterprise Web service solutions for dynamic e-business using VA Smalltalk.

See you in Toronto!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

In case the folks at JL Kirk and Associates were wondering why their tactics against the Coble's were a bad idea - check out the top of Google blog search (and the same thing is happening to the Google search results already) for JL Kirk.

The first 10 results are bad news for JL Kirk and Associates - what their legal team probably thought was a quick slap down on a "little guy" who couldn't fight back has now become a major PR problem for them - and moreover, one that won't go away soon - try a search for WKPA and see how their first page of results look - the first hit on them is negative, even now, nearly a year after they dropped their suit.

Technorati Tags: marketing, lawsuit, legal

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at reading the Windows registry. As an example, we grab the available proxy server information so as to save the user a few keystrokes.

Andres reminds us that there's still time to sign up for the Coding Contest:

Just a bit more than 12 hours to go until the contest starts. This is your last chance to register! If you'd like to participate, send me an email here. You can see the full details of the contest in this previous post.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, contest

Yann Monclair has posted iCal schedules for Smalltalk Solutions. Head on over for download/subscription links

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Avi Bryant, the original developer of Seaside, and David Heinemeier Hansson, original developer of Ruby on Rails, discuss the two approaches with InfoQ. It's a reasonable, balanced discussion, with a lot of mutual respect. Well worth reading.

Technorati Tags: ruby, rails, smalltalk, seaside, web2.0

I've made the point that's explained very well here: the music industry is painfully moving away from the album model and back to the singles model:

As you can see from the chart above [ed: follow the link], legal downloads are expected to continue their growth, but not at a rate that will be able to make up for the decline in CD sales. Although sales of a single track online arguably cost less for the record company due to the lack of physical distribution costs, the fact that music fans are picking their favorite songs from albums instead of buying the whole disc eats away at the advantages of digital distribution from a revenue standpoint.

The labels don't like it, but the business is shifting out from under them. Rather than fight the future with DRM and lawsuits, they should try to adapt.

Technorati Tags: management

Ramon Leon shares some thoughts on RoR and Seaside.

Technorati Tags: rails, smalltalk, ruby, seaside

Peter Fisk on the IBM experiment with the PC Jr:

My theory is that is was probably a deliberate strategy to stratify the marketplace into “gaming computers” for the home and “business computers” for the office. The keyboard design of the PC Jr guaranteed that it would never be used for either word processing or data entry, which were two markets that IBM dominated at the time.

Which leads to a Microsoft comparison:

My feeling is that they are following IBM’s defensive strategy from 20 years ago and that WPF/e is a marketing move, like the PC Jr., whose real purpose is to divide the marketplace. They are trying to engineer WPF/e so that it is good enough to be popular, but not good enough to be a threat to their established lines of business. Which explains why it is taking so long.

Peter has spent a long time playing in the WPF/.NET playground, so I think he's got a good perspective on this.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Windows

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a first look at Smalltalk memory zones and memory policies.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, memory

On Tuesday afternoon, Travis Griggs will be talking about Cincom Smalltalk and Cairo - integrating the two will bring a lot of nice capabilities to Cincom Smalltalk:

The CairoGraphics Project is an OpenDesktop project that is a ...2D graphics library with support for multiple output devices. It's gaining momentum rapidly as a cross platform way of doing modern anti-aliased graphics for multiple backends. Bindings exist for many different languages and toolsets, including GTK+, Ruby, and Python. This presentation is an overview of the language binding for Smalltalk, specifically VisualWorks. Attendees will leave with a general understanding of the general drawing model, how that is mapped in Smalltalk, as well as some of the techniques used to interface with the library.

See you in Toronto!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cst, cairo, graphics

Via Gordon Weakliem, I found these words of wisdom from LaughingMeme:

You’ll never build a successful site if you build to scale from day 1, scaling is always a catch up game, but it’s the best game there is.

That's been my experience with this site - which I'll admit, doesn't get anything like the traffic that the big guys get :) However, I do get a lot more than I did back in the summer of 2002 when I started - and I've learned what to do (and what not to do) the only way I could - by example

Technorati Tags: web

Laura Ries looks at the Don Imus mess from a PR/Branding perspective - and brings some light (as opposed to heat) to the situation that is relevant to anyone involved in PR and/or marketing.

Technorati Tags: branding, marketing

Speaking of PR mistakes, it looks like the news just keeps getting worse for JL Kirk and Associates. David St. Lawrence notes that the all too predictable Google Bombing has taken place, and - worse - a negative Better Business Bureau report on the company has now become prominent (follow the first link to see that). Instead of being locked in a cabinet in the basement, it's now out there for everyone to see. And hey - not only is the news bad for JL Kirk, but now the law firm - King & Ballow - have managed to cover themselves in negativity as well.

Law firms used to be able to intimidate people into silence with these kinds of tactics, but the power isn't solely on their end any longer. The only thing left to speculate on is this: how long before JL Kirk and King & Ballow throw in the towel, and decide to stop taking broadsides at close range? Damage like this, from Lamplighter:

Demand letters are often the most effective way of remedying a problem without having to go through the trouble and expense of litigation. However, before sending a demand letter one should (1) determine that there is an actual legal basis for the demand and (2) determine whether it would be counterproductive to send the letter. Here it appears that both J.L. Kirk and Mr. Korpady ignored these two little questions. As a result, instead of the bad publicity (which was earned) being limited to a single blog, J.L. Kirk & Associates, King & Ballow, and Mr. Korpady have become the poster children for anti-free speech, bullying, abuse of the legal system, and poor legal analysis. Not a reputation I would want.

I think we can safely say that this particular move was not good for future business.

Technorati Tags: marketing, management

With the latest damage caused by patent law here in the US, I think it's time to step back and ask a basic question: are patents now doing more damage than harm? The Vonage case is just the latest example of patent law being used to shutdown a competitor (without regard to prior art questions). There's also the entire (and utterly absurd) area of "business process" patents (like Amazon's One-Click Patent). I think it's time to look further than reform - we need to step back and ask whether the patent system we have is hurting us more than it's helping

Technorati Tags: patents