Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Clocky: The alarm clock that hides from you.

For the final regular presentation on Tuesday at StS 2007, we have Michael Lucas-Smith talking about C connectivity:

Since C was first invented, other programming languages have found it necessary to interface to C libraries. Smalltalk is no different and yet after more than 27 years we're still struggling to adequately interface with it. Every Smalltalk implementation provides a mechanism for interfacing with C and they all have their quirks. We will discover how the different Smalltalk implementations try to solve the C interface conundrum and how other languages try to solve the same problem. We will explore the quirks and tricks of interfacing with C from VisualWorks by examples collected over the last 6 years pf interfacing with various open source C libraries. We will also delve in to the many tips and tricks that have been learned over the years when interfacing Smalltalk with C across different Smalltalk implementations. Other programming interfaces to other languages such as COM and Cincoms .NET connect will be explored as well. We will also look at how Smalltalk can better interface with C in the coming years, and why it is still relevant in modern computing

See you in Toronto!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, connectivity

Bill Hibbs rounds up the aftershocks from the JL Kirk and Associates mess, and points out how eminently predictable it all was. From a quoted story by Brittney Gilbert:

I have never seen a move as ham-handed and wrong-headed as the one made by JL Kirk Associates and their attorney(s). I have sat back and watched in sheer amazement as this transparent and completely obvious attempt to bully a blogger has backfired a thousand times, over and over and over again. It's been fantastic and fascinating to watch.

There was nothing in Coble's account that even closely resembles libel or "false and defamatory statements." Not unless you think a negative film or restaurant review counts as the the same.

Pretty much says it all. Next time I do the presentation recorded here, I'll be using this mess as my primary example of what not to do.

Technorati Tags: marketing, stupidity, lawsuit

PR Differently goes into detail on a PR misstep by Steve Rubel - yesterday, he twittered this:

PC Mag is another. I have a free sub but it goes in the trash

Yeah, there's a way to win friends and influence people :) You thought it was easy to lay eggs on a blog? Things like Twitter make it even easier for a passing thought to cause trouble. Today, Rubel did respond to the criticism.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we go back to Seaside with the Employee List example. Over the next few days, we'll build up a master/detail application, as we did with the GUI builder.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

Finally noticing that all the publicity surrounding this event was bad, JL Kirk contacted Katherine Coble's lawyer and told him that they did not want to litigate.

Note to the lawyers: contact your PR staff before you wave lawsuit threats.

Technorati Tags: lawsuit, marketing

I always thought this guy didn't get OOP, and this post just proves that point.

Tim Bray tells a story about a joke that went flat (the audience had no idea what Twitter was):

In March, I gave a keynote at Web Design World in San Francisco. Frankly, it did not go that well; in particular, the crowd didn’t laugh at my jokes. Here’s one of them, more or less: “Being a Web Guy at Sun is a little intimidating. At high level strategy meetings the Chip Guys talk about what they’ll be shipping in 2009, and both the OS Guys and Java Guys talk about things a year or two out. As for us Web Guys, well... three weeks ago, I didn’t know that Twitter would become the Hot New Thing.”

Going on, Tim asks the obvious question: if Twitter is experiencing massive scaling issues (tens of thousands of hits per second! at times), then how do we square that with the "no one has heard of it" problem?

I think what we have is a large niche of social software users. Periodically, I ask my daughter (age 13) or her friends about things I'm seeing or working with : Blogs, RSS, Twitter, social networks. The funny thing is, most of them are heavy users of IM, but very few of them have gotten past the "I've heard of that" stage with things like Xanga, MySpace, etc. Before I brought it up, none of them had even heard of Twitter (and they all declared it "stupid" upon seeing it).

The web, and social software in particular, allows for something unique: shared interests that extend far across geographic boundaries. So in a town of 100,000 people, it may well be the case that "no one" has heard of Twitter - but that lots and lots of like minded people across the planet (at least, in the connected parts of it) have. I don't know how big the net connected population is, but even a small fraction of it can add up to a fairly large number of people - especially when they all try to jam their way into the same doorway.

Update: Jon Udell adds some thoughts.

Second Update: "The Last Podcast" adds some further thoughts - this is probably a lot truer than many would like to believe:

As an aside: There seems to be this general idea that kids in college are at the forefront when it comes to technology. I say: BS. Most of my students can hardly get a photo off their digital camera. They don’t know how to use their computers beyond AIM and most don’t know how to even change the margins of a document in Word.

That would not surprise me a bit. I think us tech folks assume a wider usage of a lot of niche things. Most people are interested in utility, where we get interested because it's technically cool. Most people just want to use tools, not obsess over them.

Technorati Tags: social-media

The final event on Tuesday will be the Smalltalk Panel:

Anyone who is interested is welcome to attend and participate. Members from each of the STIC Board Member organizations will be available to talk to new members and those interested in find out more about STIC. The meeting will be moderated by Bob Nemec, the Executive Director of STIC.

Panel members are: Monty Williams from GemStone, Suzanne Fortman from Cincom, Ed Klimas from Instantiations and David Buck, an independent consultant.

A panel discussion on the issues of marketing Smalltalk to the decision makers, typically non-technical management that needs to balance the costs and benefits of selecting any development tool. Most Smalltalk advocacy material talks about the technical benefits: how you can build complex applications with less effort if everything is an object. But how do we prove this? How do convince a typically risk-averse manager that using a niche language like Smalltalk can provide competitive advantages that out-weigh the risks

See you in Toronto!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Instantiations has announced an update to VA Smalltalk. You can get details over here, in the readme for the release.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, I clean up yesterday's example so as to be more conformant with web and Seaside standards.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

Via Doc Searls, I found this from David Byrne (Talking Heads) - which pretty much explodes the notion that the major labels are killing internet radio "for the artists". This is about one thing, and one thing only: the preservation of a business model to which the big record labels have become accustomed. Our wishes as consumers, or the wishes of the artists who actually produce the music are entirely secondary (insofar as they come up at all).

Doc has some ideas for how we might deal with all this; follow the first link for more on that.

Technorati Tags: copyright, RIAA

CNET reports that Sony is paying for the PS3 the hard way: layoffs. The root of the problem? The PS3 is way, way above the "what the heck" price point, while the Wii hits it. Meanwhile, Sony has to fight with the bottomless pit of money from Microsoft (XBox 360) - because the XBox and the PS3 are going after the same gaming demographic. Meanwhile, Nintendo has the casual gamer space all to itself, and a price point that says "buy me now!"

Technorati Tags: PS3, Sony

Nick Carr notes that the kinds of periodic spikes in traffic that companies sustain (Intuit at Tax time, retailers near Christmas, flower vendors near Valentine's day, etc) result in an over-buy of capacity for most of the year's traffic load:

To run its business with private, dedicated servers, Intuit needs to build its data centers with the capacity necessary to handle the extreme spike in traffic - the peak load - that comes on tax-filing day. Thge vast majority of that installed capacity will go unused most of the time. Multiply that low capacity-utilization rate across thousands of companies, and you get a good sense of the wastefulness inherent in the proprietary model of computing, particularly as companies have to handle rapidly fluctuating web traffic. The only way to do cloud computing efficiently is to share the cloud - to establish a broad, multitenant grid (or a number of them) that balances the loads of many different companies. Otherwise, it'll be one cloudburst after another, and a whole lot of underutilized capital assets.

I wonder if Amazon has sales staff over at Intuit right now, pitching EC2? It looks to me like Amazon may have been crazy like a Fox with that initiative - because it's exactly the kind of "utility" grid that Carr is on about.

Peter Fisk has some thoughts on WPF/Silverlight - and in the process, explains why he's now building his Smalltalk implementation on an Adobe base instead of a .NET one.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, smalltalk

Obvious Corp. has spun Twitter out:

The time has come for Twitter to make that leap. We’re happy to announce that Twitter is graduating from the home of Obvious and becoming its own company -- appropriately named, Twitter, Inc.

I suspect that we'll start to see some kind of monetization plan coming out with that - and I bet it will be oriented more towards phones/mobile devices than the web.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, Twitter

First thing Wednesday morning at StS 2007, Bert Freudenberg is going to talk to us about EToys on the OLPC:

Smalltalk has been used to work with children since its beginnings in PARC's Learning Research Group. Now it takes part in what might be the largest educational project ever: "One Laptop Per Child" aims to enable education for children in the developing world. Etoys, a tile based authoring environment written on top of Squeak, is one of the central software components in OLPC's "$100-laptop". The talk gives a technical background on Etoys as it is implemented on the laptop currently, and highlights related research projects such as Tweak (which takes many "enduser" ideas to the system level) and TinLizzie WysiWiki (extending Etoys into a collaborative environment using Croquet and Web technology).

See you in Toronto!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, olpc

Over the last couple of days I've started seeing something interesting in Twitter: trolls, likely automated ones. I've gotten a few "friend" requests from users with enormous numbers of friends and followers - but their stream of "messages" is just utter crap - things like "now smoking crack", for instance.

Looking at the signup and API for Twitter, I don't think it would be very hard for a jerk with time on his hands to create a "friend-bot". Just pick a well known user, scan their friend list (available on their Twitter page), and start friending. As you get new ones, add to your list, repeat.

You don't have to accept these requests, but they end up as "followers" no matter what you do.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, web2.0

Rogers Cadenhead notes that the tech tools we love (and rave about in our blogs, podcasts, etc) are just that - tools. Like any other tools - cars, guns, knives, what have you - they can be turned to acts of good or evil.

Update: Dave Winer makes an excellent point - the bad actors will keep pushing the envelope on this stuff:

What's next? Isn't it obvious -- the latest and greatest stuff, Ustream, Twitter and mass murder. When you see a suicide bomber with a camera strapped to his or her head, you'll know that the bad has caught up with the good.

Today, justin.tv. Tomorrow, exploding heads.

Joel on Software talks about search in Outlook, and how MS went out of their way to kill a useful third part app:

The only possible explanation is that someone on the Outlook team is getting paid a bonus for convincing people to switch to Gmail.

The story has a happy ending. Last week Microsoft released a patch for Outlook 2007 which fixed the problem for me (I have a lot of big PST files, which, I'm told, is why search was so slow for me). Now I can search old email quickly enough that I don't forget what I was searching for by the time the results come up. It's not quite as fast as Lookout used to be, but it's a big improvement and makes Outlook less of a downgrade.

I'd call that pretty faint praise. Here's a question: why did MS care about Lookout? What possibly reason did they have for being so concerned? If a third party improves your product (thus improving its overall marketability), what's the downside?

Never mind the layoffs - Sony must have extra money to throw around. First, they implement a new copy protection scheme on new DVDs that breaks existing DVD players (including their own). Next, having noticed that customers are less than pleased by this, they issue a recall.

The net result: Bad PR for Sony, possibly lost sales, and an unnecessary expenditure of cash to fix the problem. Is someone paying Sony execs to produce own goals?

Technorati Tags: marketing, DRM

Scoble explains why you shouldn't use partial text feeds:

Out of, say, 1,000 people who are on the Internet, only a small percentage read a lot of feeds. Let’s say it’s 10%. That means only 100 out of any 1,000 people will read feeds and of those 100 people only a small fraction will bother with ZDNet’s feeds.

The thing that partial texters are forgetting is that the other 900 people will find out about you from an influencer. Someone who will tell them. So, your traffic growth will be far slower if you only offer partial text feeds. Many of my friends who are journalists or bloggers just won’t deal with partial text feeds anymore.

Here's how people who want to pitch full feeds should go about it - describe them as a loss leader. Sure, the small percentage of people who find you via RSS/Atom won't see your ads. However, the people who follow their links will. It's no different than offering a sale on some small item in order to suck people into your store - you'll make up the loss on all the other sales. With syndication, it's even better, because - as Scoble points out - there aren't that many people (relative to the whole audience) reading you that way. They happen to disproportionately be influencers though.

Looking for a Seaside/DB combination? Then this Wednesday morning StS2007 session is for you: Gemstone, Linux, Apache, Seaside:

The Seaside framework provides a layered set of abstractions over HTTP and HTML that can be used for developing sophisticated web applications in Smalltalk. Seaside was developed in Squeak and ports are available for VisualWorks and for Dolphin. While the Seaside framework elegantly addresses HTML generation and application flow-of-control issues, it still leaves a few challenges for the developer - including persistence and multi-user coorrdination. In this seminar we will demonstrate a port of Seaside to a new dialect: GemStone/S. As a multi-user, persistent Smalltalk implementation that has no native user interface, GemStone/S provides an excellent environment for serving HTML

See you in Toronto!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we add a form to our simple Seaside application - still no Ajax, but that's coming next week! In the meantime, we start looking at styling and callbacks.

Technorati Tags: seaside, smalltalk, web2.0

Bob Nemec has passed the torch on to Georg Heeg - I want to thank Bob for all his efforts this last year. Here's Georg's first message, sent to a few mailing lists:

Yesterday I have been elected as new Executive Director of the Smalltalk Industry Council (STIC). The first activities will be at Smalltalk Solutions in the week after next.

My main goal for the upcoming year is to broaden the awareness of the undisputed qualities of Smalltalk at computer responsible executives in enterprise management.

Here's to more progress!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I'm currently reading a very interesting book that covers the end of the Stuart Dynasty - "The Glorious Revolution" in particular: "Ungrateful Daughters: The Stuart Princesses Who Stole Their Father's Crown".

The author does an amazing job of turning up primary sources (letters from Mary and Anne in particular) that explain the complex web of motivations that led from James II to William and Mary. I'd recommend this book to anyone who's interested in this period of English history.

Technorati Tags: history, Stuart Dynasty

Don't expect stellar displays of logic when old, tired, and scared businesses try to use any trick they can find to attack an upstart. For instance, take a look at the National Association of Broadcaster's current line against the XM/Sirius merger:

Problem is, the only colorable argument against the merger is that it would create a monopoly for satellite radio. XM and Sirius cleverly (and probably accurately) headed that objection off by noting that satellite radio competes with a variety of technologies for the listener's ear. This put the NAB in an awkward position. The lobby would have to argue that despite its 15-year effort to derail satellite radio, satellite radio was not a competitor. Of course, the harder the NAB fights and the more money the NAB spends to promote this message, the clearer it becomes that the NAB fears the competition posed by an XM-Sirius alliance. In effect, the more the NAB fights the merger, the more it undermines its own argument against it.

I'm sure they'll think of something. In the meantime, I expect an uptick in subscriptions once this merger does go through.

Unless a catastrophe is reported this weekend, we are finally ready to ship ObjectStudio 7.1.2, VisualWorks 7.5, and the beta release of ObjectStudio 8. We apologize for the lateness of the release - we are looking to optimize some of our processes in order to not have a repeat :)

In the meantime, there are a few issues that people should be aware of:

• We are now shipping support for OS X on both Intel and PPC platforms. However, versions before 10.4 are not well supported.
• We are seeing OS X (10.4.9 for sure) complaining of a "corrupt" ISO with the CD. This is the only place we see this, so we are assuming it's an Apple issue. You can safely ignore the warning
• On Unix/Linux, the install script can fail unless you use an absolute path to the script. Yes, this is embarrassing, but it's also simple enough to work around.

The good news: we'll have non-commercial CDs at Smalltalk Solutions to hand out. So: See you in Toronto!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Scoble is looking for people who have made a choice between WPF and Apollo:

Are you a developer who has switched from Microsoft to Adobe or from Adobe to Microsoft because of either Apollo or WPF? I’d love to talk with you about why.

Sounds to me like he should talk to Peter Fisk :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

More talk about the full vs. partial feed thing, with some evidence from FeedBurner tossed in:

As people subscribe to feeds, they subscribe to more feeds. And that means they’re consuming more content, which means that each click out of the feed reader is taking the reader away from more content. In other words, feed reading is consumption-oriented, not transactionally focused. We’ve seen no evidence that excerpts on their own drive higher clickthroughs.

Which is why the author - like me - recommends full feeds. The only counter he lists is weak:

The main issue I see with publishing a full feed is the risk of your content being used by scraper sites. For those of you unfamiliar with scraper sites their sole purpose is to generate income through advertising by republishing content stolen from RSS feeds.

Scraping HTML is really not that difficult - whether you want to accept it or not, you crossed that particular bridge as soon as you offered a website...

This week's "Industry Misinterpretations" is in the can - we discussed some common "Smalltalk Myths". While doing so, a few references came up that ought to be linked to. First, some benchmarks Dave did against C#. Second, a link to some information on Craig Latta's Spoon project. Finally, we discussed the relevance of developer productivity vs. raw cycles, and I mentioned this recent post.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, development

Time for the weekly look at the logs - looks like BottomFeeder downloads dropped to 125/day last week. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	315
Mac X	110
Linux x86	101
CE ARM	86
Mac 8/9	44
Update	41
Solaris	37
Sources	32
HPUX	27
Windows98/ME	25
Linux Sparc	23
AIX	20
Linux PPC	7
SGI	5
ADUX	4
CE x86	1

On to the HTML page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	50.4%
Internet Explorer	37.4%
MSN Bot	5.2%
Other	1.9%
MSRBOT	3.1%
Opera	2%

Looks like Opera is still creeping up. Finally, the RSS results:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	29.2%
Mozilla	16.5%
BottomFeeder	13.5%
Net News Wire	5.1%
Google Feed Fetcher	4.6%
BlogLines	4.5%
Other	4%
Vienna	3.9%
FeedOnFeeds	3.6%
Safari RSS	2.4%
NewsGator	1.9%
Akregator	1.6%
XML-FeedPP	1.2%
Python	1%
MSN Bot	1%
JetBrains	1%
RSS Bandit	1%
Jakarta	1%
News Fire	1%
Opera	1%
Liferea	1%

Wednesday morning at StS 2007 we have another interesting talk: validation with SUnit:

SUnit Validation was originally conceived by Andres Valloud as a framework for instantaneous feedback on data consistency in the GUI. The framework brilliantly solves the classical problem of handling user inputs in the event that they do not make sense in the model. As envisioned initially, validators factor out repetitive checks that are usually found in the presentation layer. However, the experience has shown that validators are extremely helpful in identifying and solving a wide range of problems. The talk will summarize the experience of introducing heavy validations in a simulation system that has been successful for more than ten years in the Petroleum Industry. That includes new uses of the framework for the GUI, and applications to other areas as model diagnosis, validation of data imported from (and linked to) external sources, version upgrading, naming services, object deletion, SUnit testing, debugging support and automatic source code QA.

See you in Toronto!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, sunit, testing

I think Heinlein was right: TANSTAAFL. Look at municipal WiFi in Boston - they've banned that hotbed of danger, BoingBoing.

Sam Gentile has had it with Vista for the moment - but two of his complaints caught my eye:

• File copies and moves are broken even to the internal hard drives taking minutes
• File copies to a computer RIGHT NEXT to it over the network never complete and time out Publish

That reminded me of something Dvorak has been saying about Vista for awhile now - that Vista really needs one of the new hybrid drives (they have embedded flash drives to allow onboard cache operations). Now, I haven't so much as looked at Vista, so I don't really know - but it makes me wonder whether Microsoft might have jumped ahead of the required technology infrastructure by a year or two. The fact that Dell is back to offering XP as an option doesn't bode well, either.

First up on Wednesday afternoon at Smalltalk Solutions next week - Boris Popov is giving a Seaside experience report. Incidentally, we did a podcast interview with Joerg Beekman a few weeks back - Boris works for Joerg.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

I had an enjoyable afternoon and early evening playing board games. Mid afternoon, I took my daughter over to a friend's house, and 3 of us sat down to play Caylus. It's a good game, and I was trying something different - instead f running up the building track, I went down the resources track. Worked out pretty well; I won going away.

We broke for dinner, my wife joined us, and we played a game of Puerto Rico. My wife won that game - it was close, but I needed one more round of shipping than I planned for. After that, my daughter's outing was over and it was time to head home. A nice way to spend a day though!

Andres reports that round one of the Coding Contest is done, and we have 3 finalists ready for the blitz round at Smalltalk Solutions. Congratulations to all!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

On Wednesday afternoon at StS 2007, Panu Viljamaa will be talking about Method Testing:

A new framework for unit-testing that takes advantage of Smalltalk's "live environment" is presented. The approach, called Method Tests, relies on the ease of plugging into the Smalltalk compiler from within the IDE. Unit-tests associated with a method are then run automatically whenever you save a method. Every method becomes a "unit" of its own, with its own tests which at the same time express the method's "contract".This provides benefits not unlike type-checking, but for dynamic languages. The Method Tests framework makes writing tests easy, by providing a simple four-method API based on Smalltalk's block closures. The implementation and issues relating to testing dependent packages and subclasses are explored, and solutions provided.

See you in Toronto!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we render the selected employee onto the page after the form is submitted. That gives us a basic master/detail type application; we'll look at adding Ajax dynamics to it next.

Technorati Tags: seaside, smalltalk

Georg Heeg is the new director of STIC - I'm sure he'd love to hear your suggestions - or better still, an offer to help out.

We've pushed Cincom Smalltalk Spring 2007 out the door, just in time for Smalltalk Solutions. We'll have CDs to hand out there, and - as soon as the files are updated to the proper locations - we'll have them ready for download.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Now this is what I've been waiting for (in addition to Stargate, which returned recently) - Heroes is back with new episodes to end the season. The DVR is primed and ready :)

I've just updated the NC download application - the login page is gone, replaced by a simple Registration page. Once you register, a cookie will be dropped on your system, and you'll be redirected to the download page if you visit again. So I apologize for the inconvenience of having to register again, but it's part of making the whole process simpler.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I wrote about the silliness of the way Vista handles Installers awhile ago; they run with admin rights. Now, it turns out that it's even stupider than I thought:

"If Vista sees that you have created a Microsoft Visual C++ project with install in the project name, then that .exe will automatically require Admin Rights to run. Create exactly the same project, but call it, say, Fred, and the problem disappears," he explained. "Vista's security isn't just concerned with what an .exe is doing to your PC, but what it's actually called."

I think I'll call that security via stupidity.

Technorati Tags: windows

Smalltalk Solutions is coming up fast - if you register now, you can see talk like this one: using Smalltalk to automate your home:

During the remodeling of our house, we installed various home automation components using the KNX/EIB, X10 and serve@home technologies. After the installation, it became clear, that we needed an advanced control system in order to manage and integrate the various systems. This presentation will cover the implementation, the communication and the results of developing a home automation control system in Smalltalk.

See you in Toronto!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we move from VW 7.4.1 to VW 7.5 - the new non-commercial release went live on the site yesterday. We go through building up a new base image, which also involves going back to some of the components we loaded a very long time ago.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

If James Governor is right (and I think he is) - then internal IT shops are probably doomed:

Finally it strikes me we may be about to see something entirely new in the industry. Twitter is emerging as a core lightweight Web infrastructure but unlike earlier Web companies isn’t buying and building out its own infrastructure. Twitter is a hosted architecture of participation. Unlike first web wave companies, Google as poster child, this is On Demand purchasing.

Amazon was early with their elastic computing initiative, and I'm not sure that Sun has the right target for their "data center in a box" idea - but it looks like IT infrastructure is moving away from being a local concern. Back in the early days of electricity, "everyone" bought a generator - that didn't scale well, and the entire model moved to a carrier one. I think we are starting to see the same thing in IT infrastructure, only with a lot more competition. I suspect that companies that keep their IT internal - unless their needs are very, very unique - are going to be spending a lot more money than their competitors.

I agree with Doc Searls about Google's renaming of Froogle:

This is a perfect example of Branding As Camouflage. Or worse, as a mask.

Google's product search may have moved past price shopping alone. But Froogle was a great name. First, it was fun. Second, it actually meant something . So what if it meant only part of what product search is about?

I also agree with him that this is a lot like what Microsoft would do - give a product a dopey name that fits in with "corporate standards". Of course, the run of the mill marketroids like the change - which tells you all you need to know about this being a bad idea.

I asked my wife about this, because I've never used Froogle, and she uses it a lot. Her reaction went from:

Huh?

to:

What were they thinking?

So the closed loop of marketing/PR types think this is brilliant; the average person who might actually remember the name "Froogle"? Not so much. The new name - "Google Product Search" - sounds more like an OED entry than a name. I suspect Google went and hired some "professional" marketing types. Here's some free advice: Change the name back, and fire the automatons who came up with this idea.

Technorati Tags: branding, marketing

Tim Bray sent me this photo from Vancouver - it reminds me of something PC Magazine used to do, where they would run pictures that juxtaposed computer/internet services with mundane things that weren't related. So anyway, I'd like to thank Tim for sending this - it brightened my day :)

I have to say, I sympathize with Jason Calacanis on this interview thing - here's his comment on a request for an interview from Wired:

A WIRED journalist pinged me for some comments on Michael Arrington and his A-list blogger status. I told the journalist to send me the questions by email and he refused. He said Dave Winer did the same thing.

Journalists have been burning subjects for so long with paraphrased quotes, half quotes, and misquotes that I think a lot of folks (especially ones who don't need the press) are taking an email only interview policy. (Mark Cuban did this long ago).

Dave Winer weighed in as well, and while I don't often agree with him, I think he's correct about this. Here's the thing: take some subject you are conversant in, and then start paying attention to media reports on that subject. How often do you notice:

• The reporters are just completely out in left field, with no clue as to the subject matter
• People the reporters interview complaining about being misquoted?

I've gotten to the point where I'm extremely skeptical of media reporting in general, unless I trust the specific reporter. For people who are in the public eye, it's worse - any contact with the media is an opportunity to be misunderstood or misquoted - or to have your work described badly because the reporter simply has no clue about the subject matter.

So what's up with the title? Well, here's how Wired responded:

Calacanis Won't Do Phone Interview -- Cowardly

Jason McCabe Calacanis is complaining about a Wired reporter who wants to do an interview with him, but refuses to do it via email. He says it's "ironic" that a magazine covering the digital age refuses to use email for its interviews.

Yeah, I can see where that response is going to ratchet my trust in your magazine right up there - perhaps all the way to the level of respect that I reserve for my local highway department.

Technorati Tags: PR

I took a break from the history reading for a day to gulp down a quick techno-thriller: "Space Wars". It's a near future look at what might happen if the US' space platforms (spy satellites, etc) were successfully attacked. Not deep, but enjoyable enough, and a quick read.

David, Michael, James, and I have decided to do a podcast right after the coding contest wraps up on Monday - we'll hang out in the room and record it. If anyone wants to show up as an audience and ask questions, feel free - it could be fun!

So figure around 5:15 - 5:30 pm in Room 201F. See you there!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk