Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

While reading this CNet story on a proposed extension of copyright law, I flashed on the scene in the original Star Wars flick where Leia first learns about the Death Star - right after she explains that more oppression will only lead to more rebellion.

That's about how I feel about the RIAA's and MPAA's latest wet dream - some of the provisions are just insane:

Criminalize "attempting" to infringe copyright. Federal law currently punishes not-for-profit copyright infringement with between 1 and 10 years in prison, but there has to be actual infringement that takes place. The IPPA would eliminate that requirement. (The Justice Department's summary of the legislation says: "It is a general tenet of the criminal law that those who attempt to commit a crime but do not complete it are as morally culpable as those who succeed in doing so.")

How do you define "attempted" copyright infringement? My guess is that this is an attempt to get rid of all "fair use" rights in one fell swoop. Just consider what the goons at HBO have to say about HD content, and you'll understand what they're playing at here. Amazingly enough, it gets worse:

Create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software. Anyone using counterfeit products who "recklessly causes or attempts to cause death" can be imprisoned for life. During a conference call, Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it.

That example is so contrived as to be nonsense. I'm hardly in favor of copyright infringement (heck, Cincom sells copyrighted software!) - but life imprisonment? But wait - there's more:

Allow computers to be seized more readily. Specifically, property such as a PC "intended to be used in any manner" to commit a copyright crime would be subject to forfeiture, including civil asset forfeiture. Civil asset forfeiture has become popular among police agencies in drug cases as a way to gain additional revenue, and is problematic and controversial.

Oh boy - a local cop overhears you at the grocery store, talking about a song that a friend mailed you. Next thing you know, they're breaking down your door and taking away all of your equipment. Is it just me, or are music and movie folks suffering from a completely overblown sense of their own importance?

Update: Scoble wonders just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Technorati Tags: law, DRM

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at what's coming next for the code browser in Cincom Smalltalk.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Ahh, Disney - Lileks is writing about his family's trip to DisneyWorld. Makes me wish two things: first, that I could turn a phrase like he does. Second, that I was in DisneyWorld right now :)

Technorati Tags: DisneyWorld

Matthew Ingram notes that the newspaper moguls are still in complete denial:

“Don’t believe all you’re being told about the death of the press: more people all over the world are reading newspapers. What’s more, they’re still a powerful medium for advertising,” he says in a piece for The Independent. In other words, just ignore the dramatic declines in readership and the stories of newspapers laying off thousands of people or putting themselves up for sale. Just a flesh wound.

Someone needs to ask these guys a simple question: How many people 25 or under do you ever see with a newspaper?

Technorati Tags: newspapers

Charles Monteiro has announced that Carl Gundel will be speaking at the next NY-STUG meeting about Liberty Basic. www.runbasic.com

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

It was bound to happen sooner or later - what's a cross between Twitter and Digg? Why, Truemors - a site for posting "rumors" in Twitter style. Perfect for hit and run trash...

The more I think about the proposed copyright law, the dumber it sounds. Wired weighed in this morning:

The bill would also make it a criminal act to export pirated materials, as opposed to merely importing, and would grant the feds wiretapping authority when investigating copyright and trademark cases, a power the government does not currently have. Thanks to a new "attempt" provision that wouldn't require the actual commission of a violation, the bill could conceivably be expanded, in an extreme case, to interpret a computer full of music next to a spindle of blank CDs as an act of piracy.

You might say that such an intepretation sounds nuts, but consider how far the push against tobacco has gone since the early 1960s (and never mind what you think about that - just consider where things were then, and where they are now. Then look at the proposal on copyright again).

So along those lines - based on the way the RIAA sees the world, owning CD's and having software like iTunes installed could easily be construed as an attempt to infringe copyright.

Technorati Tags: law

ObjectStudio 8 is now in open beta - you can grab the Windows Installer here. We are in the process of getting ObjectStudio 8 Vista Certified -you should start following the OST blog for news.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, objectstudio

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we go through the new icons in the Refactoring Browser. Have a look at the image below (click through for a bigger image) - that's what I'm talking about.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, development

The ESUG guys have some advice for getting to Lugano, the location for ESUG 2007. Timing for me is bad this year, which is a shame - I'd love to visit Lugano :(

This is interesting - even as asinine new copyright proposals get floated, there are signs that DRM for audio is dying the death from a thousand cuts: Amazon is joining the party:

"Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device," Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chief executive, said in a statement. Users will be able to play their music on virtually any device, including PCs, iPods, Zunes and Zens, as well as burn the songs on CDs for personal use.

Someone explain this to the CTO of HBO - but be sure to use small words.

Technorati Tags: music, copyright

My wife wanted to extend the gardens in our back yard - so this morning I headed outside with a shovel to get the grass up. I did that rather than rent a turf cutter because:

• My car is way too small to carry one
• Getting them to deliver it would have been $50 each way, plus the cost of actually renting it.

So, four hours later, I had this:

Now I'm thinking that the $100 would have been totally worth it - and my back will be only too happy to second that tomorrow...

Andres Valloud will be speaking about unit testing in Smalltalk at UBA in Buenos Aires this Friday at 7PM. Follow the link for details.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Spotted in Chronos

"English doesn't BORROW from other languages. English follows other languages into dark alleys, beats them up for their words and goes through their pockets for loose grammar."

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at some basic exception handling.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

If you lose money on every single transaction, then volume doesn't help you much - unless you can sustain that push long enough to drive the competition out of your space, of course. In the video game business, it's becoming increasingly clear that the PS3 isn't doing that:

On Wednesday, Sony reported that losses for the January-March quarter widened from the same period a year ago to 67.6 billion yen (563 million) in red ink, largely on launch costs for the PS3, or PlayStation 3, which went on sale in November in Japan and the U.S., and in March in Europe.

The funny thing is this: they are selling plenty of units, even with the high costs - more than I would have thought, honestly:

Sony shipped 5.5 million PS3 machines in the fiscal year through March 31, fewer than the 6 million the company had targeted. Nintendo shipped 5.84 million Wii machines worldwide during the same period.

So contrary to the conventional wisdom, they aren't doing so badly in volume terms - the problem is in the price point and design. Nintendo is demonstrating that you can do just fine without high end graphics (and with units that actually sell for a profit all by themselves) - while Sony is hemorrhaging money. They have other problems at Sony too - problems which stem, IMHO, from the fact that the hardware division and the software division (music/movies) are often at odds in terms of how to serve consumers.

Meanwhile, Sony seems to think that they'll break even in games next year:

Earlier this year, Yuhara had said Sony plans to break even in fiscal 2007 in the gaming business. On Thursday, he said he hoped Sony's game operations will turn a profit by fiscal 2008.

Based on those losses, I'm not sure how. The PS3 must still be very, very expensive to manufacture. To make up that deficit, they'll have to sell an astonishing number of games. Now - if Nintendo could just get sufficient stock of Wiis in the retail channel, I'd buy one...

Technorati Tags: games, PS3, Wii

The Weekly Squeak has been doing a series of interviews recently - Michael Rueger, Steve Hunter, and Bert Freudenberg. Good stuff - worth reading

Steve (he knows who he is) will pay for sending me this. I'll have to enter therapy...

It's been a weird travel day. I got to the airport (BWI) with 45 minutes lead time to see huge lines at the AirTran counter - turns out their computers were down. It moved fairly quickly though, because they just called out flights as they got close, checked you off on a printout (probably faxed from somewhere), and issued a hand written boarding pass. Weird - but oddly efficient (makes you wonder about automation).

So I got through that, got to my hotel. I'm about to head to bed, and the TV - inside the closed armoire - decides to turn on. Hmm... I hope tomorrow isn't downhill :)

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we go a little deeper on exceptions, and look at some cool things that Smalltalk lets you do with them.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

There's another interesting lesson out of the bogus iPhone story from yesterday - you have to get out in front of a breaking story fast. Here's Ryan Block of Engadget explaining how the story got posted in the first place - they tried to get a statement from Apple:

So after verifying that the email was indeed sent to internal Apple email lists -- but before publishing anything -- we immediately contacted Apple PR, trying to reach our contacts on their PR team that handles iPod / iPhone matters. It was before business hours on the West coast, though, so we even called an Apple PR manager via their private cellphone in search of a statement. When no one was immediately available, we left voicemail and email.

After some agonizing over the story - and taking into account that Apple often goes with "no comment" - they posted the story. Inside of the two hours, the email they relied on was debunked (but it was a very well done fake).

I don't really cast any blame on Engadget here - they had what looked like a hot story that checked out, and they tried to get Apple to comment. Well, you might say, it wasn't business hours in California yet - cut Apple some slack. I sympathize with that, but the rules of the game have changed. Just as your network administrators have someone on call 24/7 to handle emergencies, any company in the public eye needs PR people who are on call 24/7. It's unpleasant, but less unpleasant than having your stock take a hit on a rumor that runs wild (or worse - a real story that breaks before you were ready for it).

Technorati Tags: marketing

I finished my meetings up early in Cincinnati, but not quite early enough - I was back at the airport 15-20 minutes too late to catch the early flight home. So - I wait until 6, which is my scheduled flight.

This would be more pleasant if the network connections here at Dayton were better. On the positive side, it's free. On the negative side, they have some network filter for web pages (it blocked a Smalltalk Wiki page as porn - go figure), and they blocked both my IRC client and my VPN. Boy, this is going to make for a fun few hours :)

Nick Carr notes an amusing contextual ad from Ebay :)

This is kind of cool - Avi Bryant gave a keynote talk to the Ruby folks at RailsConf - and 3 weeks ago, Chad Fowler gave a keynote to us Smalltalkers at Smalltalk Solutions. I guess the dynamic language crowd just gets along :)

Technorati Tags: development, ruby

Tim Anderson notes that Visual Programming seems to be making a comeback:

The first true visual programming environment I used was IBM’s VisualAge Smalltalk. I liked it and thought it was a shame when IBM reverted to pure code-based development with Eclipse. Admittedly, complex applications got fairly confusing, with lines everywhere.

From a parentage standpoint, IBM was copying the functionality in PARTS, which came out of Digitalk's Visual Smalltalk. The problem was always the level of granularity - if you use a tool like that to lay out a UI and connect widgets and domain models, you get what we used to call "green haze" - too many lines on screen to see anything at all. I said then that I thought such connectivity might be a good idea if it was used at a higher (component) level - and that's what Tim notes is happening now:

Now it seems visual programming is back. The other day Scratch hit the news, a cool visual programming environment for kids. I like the way that jigsaw-like shapes are used to indicate whether or not two blocks can be fitted together.

Yahoo has Pipes, drag-and-drop RSS feed combination and transformation.

Now here comes Microsoft PopFly, online visual programming for Silverlight.

I suppose I really ought to play with Pipes, since it's living at the level I always thought might be useful (although - the catch is creating components that have useful connecting points). I'm still a bit skeptical about all of this, but it's nice to see an old idea being tried again, at what I think is a more appropriate level.

Technorati Tags: visual programming, wiring, PARTS

Here's a question that came up in comp.lang.smalltalk - it comes up about Smalltalk fairly often, actually:

For me the problem is knowing where to get started, how to move around the environment (the IDE), finding/searching for items of interest (eg. methods, classes), how to start building a small self-contained application, etc.

Can anyone recommend how to get started, or suggest an online reference?

For Cincom Smalltalk, there are two things we've set up to make getting started easier:

• Online Tutorials
• "Smalltalk Daily" screencasts

The screencasts are flash movies that explain various aspects of the environment; you can view them in an ad-hoc' fashion or in order (which might be useful for complete beginners). Enjoy - and send feedback my way!

Technorati Tags: education, tutorials

It's been another good week for BottomFeeder downloads: 297 per day:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	1171
Update	260
Mac X	208
Linux x86	144
CE ARM	57
Mac 8/9	50
HPUX	39
Solaris	37
Linux Sparc	27
SGI	18
AIX	17
Windows98/ME	15
Sources	14
Linux PPC	11
ADUX	6
CE x86	5

Another big week of Windows downloads; The CNet site is also picking up a fair number. On the HTML page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	45.6%
Internet Explorer	43%
MSN Bot	5.1%
Opera	1.9%
MSRBOT	1.9%
Other	1.5%
Accoona	1%

Finally, the Syndication accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	36.5%
Mozilla	18.8%
BottomFeeder	10.1%
Other	8.3%
BlogLines	3.8%
Net News Wire	3.8%
Vienna	3.8%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.6%
Safari RSS	2.9%
Feed On Feeds	2.6%
Liferea	1.8%
Akregator	1.5%
NewsGator	1.4%
Python	1.1%

It looks like consolidation in RSS/Atom consumption is happening, driven by IE7 adoption.

It's hard enough to get a Wii that I've now subscribed to the Wiitracker site to get tips. Thanks to my friend Mike for the tip - but no joy yet :)

I have to admit, About Us is a pretty interesting site. Their crawler does a fairly decent job of picking up information - but I think they ought to give up on their attempts at auto-capitalization :)

Here's the Cincom Smalltalk page over there.

Technorati Tags: web2.0

I'm getting ready to push another version of BottomFeeder out - the new features will be limited, but I'm adopting some "less is more" approaches to the UI - by cleaning up settings and menus. The goal is a somewhat sparer, easier to deal with interface.

Technorati Tags: RSS, Atom, Aggregator, Smalltalk

Nick Carr picks a few bones with David Weinberger over this segment from his new book:

For decades we've been buying albums. We thought it was for artistic reasons, but it was really because the economics of the physical world required it: Bundling songs into long-playing albums lowered the production, marketing, and distribution costs because there were fewer records to make, ship, shelve, categorize, alphabetize, and inventory. As soon as music went digital, we learned that the natural unit of music is the track. Thus was iTunes born, a miscellaneous pile of 3.5 million songs from a thousand record labels. Anyone can offer music there without first having to get the permission of a record executive.

He goes through a long explanation of how the LP came out of a desire to accommodate classical music, and not as a way to force people to buy lots of tracks they didn't want. What he conveniently skips over is what happened with the introduction of the CD: With the LP, we had both long form if you wanted it, and singles (45s) if you wanted a track. During the 50's and 60's, and into the 70's, the single was a great way to get a few tracks inexpensively. Then along came the CD, and the music industry did exactly what Weinberger says above: they tried really hard to kill the single. I bought tons of CDs during the 80's and 90's where I recall thinking "but I only wanted 2 tracks"

Well - I can get that now. As to this, from Carr:

But it's the middle tracks of the platter that seem most pertinent to me in thinking about Weinberger's argument. Between Keith's ecstatic, grinning-at-death "Happy" and Mick's desperate, shut-the-lights "Let It Loose" come three offhand, wasted-in-the-basement songs - "Turd on the Run," "Ventilator Blues," and "Just Wanna See His Face" - that sound, in isolation, like throwaways. If you unbundled Exile and tossed these tracks onto the miscellaneous iTunes pile, they'd sink, probably without a trace. I mean, who's going to buy "Turd on the Run" as a standalone track? And yet, in the context of the album that is Exile on Main Street, the three songs achieve a remarkable, tortured eloquence. They become necessary. They transcend their identity as tracks, and they become part of something larger. They become art.

For the three of you who care, sure. For the rest of us? We're quite pleased to ignore the utter dreck and buy the handful of tracks we want. I just recently avoided the "filler" songs on a Beach Boys collection and picked up the 15 or so tunes I actually like. I can almost hear Nick Carr screaming about that, but hey - he's free to buy the whole thing, and I'm free to buy a few tracks. Back when CD's ruled, I had no real choice in the matter - if I wanted one song from a CD, I either bought the CD, recorded it off the radio, or did without - and mostly, I did without. Now? I actually pay someone real money. Let Carr try to wrap his head around that idea for awhile.

Technorati Tags: marketing

Today we discussed "Less is More" in the context of software development and Smalltalk. That led into a discussion of language features and what kinds of development that leads to. We covered a number of topics, and eventually mentioned a few news items relating to Squeak.

We hit on UI development for awhile, and Michael mentioned this site as something worth looking at. If you have feedback, send it here. Or - head on over to Podcast Alley and vote for us.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, development

SciFi Wire reports that "Jericho" is dead - and fans don't like the way it closed out:

CBS, which canceled the post-apocalyptic series Jericho last week, posted a statement in response to fan outcry that the show ended on a cliffhanger and promised it would wrap the show up in some fashion.

I don't think "Jericho" merits that level of outcry, this is an "own goal" kind of problem. Whedon always wrapped a storyline at the end of a season to avoid this problem - and it looks like "Heroes" is doing the same. Other writers could learn from that.

I see there's some confusion over the BottomFeeder build script I posted - centered around the reference to "repositories.xml" in it. Since I'm not about to post my own Store connection info, here's how to create that file. Open an existing VW image - a non-commercial image will be fine, since it has read-access to Store. In the launcher, save the repository info as shown below:

Now you might need to go into the file and modify the connection name - see this line:

"load from Store - connect to public store first"
profile := Store.RepositoryManager repositories 
	detect: [:each | 'cincomsmalltalk' = each name] 
	ifNone: [nil].
profile ifNil: [^self].
Store.DbRegistry connectTo: profile.

I used the name 'cincomsmalltalk' - change that to match the name you use to connect to the public repository.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Jon Udell spoke to Allen Wirfs-Brock recently - Allen is now at MS:

More than 25 years ago, Allen Wirfs-Brock created one of the early implementations of Smalltalk. He was working at Tektronix at the time, as was Ward Cunningham who became the first user of Tektronix Smalltalk. Allen later served as chief scientist of Digitalk-ParcPlace and CTO of Instantiations, then joined Microsoft four years ago. His original charter was to work on future strategies for Visual Studio, but recently in light of growing interest in dynamic languages at Microsot he's returning to his roots.

Here's a link to the mp3 - now I know what I'll be listening to during tomorrow's workout :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, dynamic languages

I've got a VW 7.5 based development build (i.e., a runtime) posted on the download page - scroll down to the dev links to grab it. If you have Bf installed, you can just grab the latest runtime (baseapp*.zip) link and replace the files you have with the ones in the archive. Enjoy, and let me know if you run into problems.

Update: Hold off on this until I update the post again :/

Update2: You can safely grab it now.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, aggregator

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at a new feature of Cincom Smalltalk: easy to change code formatting option.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, code formatting

Who thought this:

Would make for an inviting convention center? Quick, get the Imperial Guards!

Technorati Tags: humor

One of the biggest media changes happening right now is the shift of power between journalists and everyone else. It used to be simple: The media was the only venue for getting something across, so you worked with journalists as your intermediary. Well, the web has disintermediated a lot of things, and now it's working on interviews. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz noted that yesterday:

It is a transaction that clearly favors the person asking the questions. A print reporter writes down someone's answers, then picks and chooses how much, if any, to use, how to frame the quotes and where to put any contrary information. Television correspondents slice and dice taped interviews in similar fashion.

But in the digital age, some executives and commentators are saying they will respond only by e-mail, which allows them to post the entire exchange if they feel they have been misrepresented, truncated or otherwise disrespected. And some go further, saying, You want to know what I think? Read my blog.

A decade ago, you didn't really have that choice, but now you do. A decade ago, if you thought you had been misquoted, what could you do? Write a letter to the editor that would probably fall down the memory hole is about it. Now - you can not only record the entire interview (email or audio) - you can post it yourself.

How can media adapt? More transparency. I recall that the NY Times used to (maybe they still do) post entire speech transcripts in the paper. There are no "space limitations" online, so if a journalist like Kurtz interviewed someone, it would be simple to post the summary story along with a link to the full content (audio/video/text). This would give them more credibility, and the journalists still have one advantage over people like me in that regard: they have staff to handle the posting details. Journalists may not have the level of control they once had, but they can stay in the game - all they have to do is play by the new rules.

Technorati Tags: interview

Turns out the dev builds have a number of problems. I'm in the process of rebuilding now, and will have new ones posted this afternoon. Bear in mind that using the dev builds is inherently risky - you should always backup and be ready to back down to the regular build.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I think this has something to do with this. If you have to manually deal with hundreds (or thousands) of spams, things are going to get tiresome very quickly. Heck, when I have to delete 10-15 spams (which happens about once a week when the nonsense word bot hits me), that gets tiring. If I were getting hundreds (or more) spams, I'd just turn comments off...

Dare Obasanjo points out that "making it up in volume isn't necessarily a great idea:

As a business, increasing your market size is nice but maintaining your profits is even nicer. If you have 200,000 customers and make $80 profit per customer, would you be interested in doubling your customer base while making $20 profit per customer due to lowering your prices? The point here is that simply increasing the size of your market or the number of your customers does not translate to increasing the business's bottom line.

This is worth pondering, too:

The experiences of the software industry seem to contradict Mike Masnick's diagnoses and recommendations for the music industry. Giving away your most valuable asset and hoping to make it up by selling peripheral services and add-ons is more likely to destroy your company than become your redemption.

The bottom line is, giving away your crown jewels may make you feel better, but it will also impact the size of your paycheck - and probably not in a positive direction.

Technorati Tags: OSS

The music industry has never been right about how technology changes will impact them - witness this article from 1962, where impending doom is predicted based on the jukebox:

Perhaps the lawmakers really couldn't have foreseen in 1909, the year the copyright law was passed, that there ever would be such a universal dispenser of culture as a jukebox. With rare shortsightedness, they passed a special amendment specifically exempting coin-operated music machines from being considered as a public performance. In those days, such machines were no more than novelty gadgets, but they have since burgeoned into big business. Dimes and quarters are being swallowed up in ever-increasing amounts, to the nonlicensed tune of over $500 million annual profit. Yet no matter how often a song is played, its composer and lyricist receive no royalty.

Yeah, the industry was just crippled by those doggoned jukeboxes...

Technorati Tags: RIAA, DRM

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at File Dialogs in Cincom Smalltalk - and how you can toggle off platform dialogs if you really want to.

I've pushed up new BottomFeeder Dev Builds. These should work better than what I posted yesterday.

Technorati Tags: aggregator, smalltalk

Here's something I've never really understood: Ads on TV run louder than the shows they surround. All that really does is irritate the heck out of us. You get the volume adjusted for the show you're watching, and then an ad comes on. It's a mad scramble for the remote to turn the ad down, and then another to adjust the volume again when the show comes back.

How does this serve the interests of the advertisers? All it really does is give me a negative association.

Technorati Tags: advertising