Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at making HTTP requests that require authentication.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, http authentication

I'm getting closer to the 4.4 release of BottomFeeder - I have to thank Michael Lucas-Smith for his suggestions on UI changes, and Rich Demers for spotting the bugs and inconsistencies along the way to implementing those changes. Here's a screenshot of the updated tool - click through for a bigger image:

Here's the same feed, but with an item selected:

The big change is the item toolbar, and the reduction of the (overly complex) menus in the item and content panes. You can grab the ongoing work via the dev links - and make sure to apply updates. I'm using the development builds myself now, so there's less need to worry about stability :)

Alan Knight noticed this story about a library that straddles the US/Canada border - and thus falls into the current fetish for rules over judgment. Witness the statement from US Customs:

Congress doesn't write legislation for exceptions,'' Klundt said. ``In this environment, everyone has different challenges.

This is the kind of stupid thinking I see at my daughter's school - where students can be expelled for carrying any kind of drug. That might sound reasonable until you realize that the regulation covers Mydol, cough drops... that sort of thing. What drives me bats is the replacement of judgment by rules. It's deemed too risky to leave anything to subjective reason; better to come up with a set of idiot rules that are easy to follow (even when they result in obviously stupid outcomes). Here's a Bonus link for more mind numbing "rules over thought" thinking in a Virginia school.

If this kind of thing were limited to a specific domain, it would be laugh worthy. Sadly, it seems to permeate everything.

Technorati Tags: stupidity, judgment

Scoble doesn't much care for the way social networks force organization on him:

So, what do I want? I want a social network that just lets me add contacts. Lets me add them for any reason. Lets me add them wholesale from other social networks. Lets me import them from Outlook. Or Facebook. Or LinkedIn. Or Twitter. Or Jaiku. Or Orkut. Or Gmail. Or wherever. And then lets me manage them on a granular level. Why can’t I add tags to each contact? Tags I pick. Not that are forced on me by some 22-year-old developer who has no idea about what a 42-year-old’s social network looks like.

It's probably some database guy who's forced that path on you, actually. Someone went ahead and set up a limited number of ways to save data, and that was the end of that. The same kind of tyranny has been plaguing HR departments for (literally) decades now, but they tend to complain less.

Technorati Tags: social media

I've just finished uploading a new development build of BottomFeeder (and there's already a downloadable update :) ). Grab the bits over here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, rss, atom, aggregator

Looks like Dell has learned from past PR nightmares - after their lawyers made the wrong move over the weekend, the PR department took control today and apologized for the lawyerly response. More over at Ars Technica.

Technorati Tags: marketing

Mathew Ingram points out exactly how much most newspapers get wrong about aggregation sites:

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has a great post about how newspapers can work with aggregators and the distributed ecosystem of the Web, instead of just moaning about how Google and Yahoo are stealing their business, as Tribune owner Sam Zell and others like to do from time to time.

If the people running the news sites spent a few minutes looking at their referer logs, they'd see what Mathew is talking about. I get tons of referrals here from Google; I'm sure that it's an avalanche for the major newspaper sites. If they started dealing with that reality - instead of fighting against it - things might start looking up for them.

Technorati Tags: newspaper

I just discovered Andrew Dubber's site - he writes on copyright and music, which is an area I dabble in here. This post, where he quotes Paul Birch, is illustrative of the problem we face with the content industry (music, movies, etc):

In response to Mark I actually think there is nothing wrong with making a copy for your own use, in a sense side-loading to an iPod or similar is an extension of that use. Under current copyright legislation there is a need for customers to be allowed that facility but without it giving rise to them then making multiple copies for sale. The very specific instrument that allows the one and not the other is the difficulty in drafting any amendment.

Birch seems to believes that ideally, we should be able to copy music for our own use - but since it's so easy to "do the wrong thing", it needs to remain illegal. This is the logic that left speed limits at 55 mph for decades, even as drivers nationwide ignored that limit. Andrew went on to point out how copyright law just hasn't kept up with digital reality very well:

When you looked at this page, you made several copies of it without even meaning to. There’s one at your Internet Service Provider and another in the Internet Cache folder of your hard drive (Copy my website, will you?! Where are my lawyers?).

What we have is old law and practice trying very hard to stifle the new reality, in order to preserve the now (increasingly defunct) business models that were premised on scarcity.

Technorati Tags: law

Widgetry reached the "1.0" milestone earlier this week - Sam announced that on his blog. A few people noticed that we didn't make much of that announcement, and that's true - we've talked (probably over-talked) about Widgetry for a long time, so we thought it best not to make a big thing about the release.

It's out there, we support it, and it will be included in a service pack we'll ship in August. We'll be formally releasing ObjectStudio 8 at that time, which is a very big deal for our ObjectStudio customers - it's a major upgrade. Details on the service pack will be forthcoming, but here's what it'll probably look like - a downloadable archive of component updates (new parcels, possibly updated VMs, that sort of thing). We'll make that available as we ship ObjectStudio 8.

So what's next for Cincom Smalltalk? Well, many people noticed Gemstone's announcement of Seaside support at Smalltalk Solutions - we saw the enthusiasm for that, and got a number of questions about what we plan to do with the Cincom Smalltalk port of Seaside. We plan to support Seaside, and that support will include a relational persistence solution. We are still in the early stages of what that persistence solution will look like, so I don't have any details yet. However, we won't be waiting on that for basic Seaside support. Michel Bany has done a great job of porting Seaside to Cincom Smalltalk, and we will be supporting that.

Right now, you can consider the Seaside port in the "preview" directory to be a public beta. Within the next couple of weeks I'll have timelines available for full support, and a first roadmap for our Seaside plans. Also - we would love to hear from you about this - where can we add value to Seaside while at the same time remaining part of the Seaside community? Send your feedback to me on that.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

Via Jeff Jarvis, I see that it's not just the management chain in the mainstream media that wants the world to stop so they can get off - the worker bees also want to cover their eyes, ears, and mouths, and chant "la la la":

The union said the day of protests was a response to the “accelerating threat to journalism and journalists from devastating cuts across the industry, resulting in chronic under-resourcing, downward-spiralling working conditions, job losses and falling editorial standards”.

“This will be a day of huge importance. The time has come for us to stand up as one and send a loud, clear message that our industry is in deep crisis,” said Jeremy Dear, the NUJ general secretary.

Read Jarvis' critique. It's fine to protest the shape of reality, but what do these people expect to actually do? Do they expect to wave a wand and have newspaper subscriptions magically restored to their former levels? It's a new media landscape out there, and they can either lead, follow - or get out of the way. Looks to me like they are actively choosing the last one.

Technorati Tags: stupidity

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at launching a Web Browser (IE, Firefox, Safari, et. al.) from within Cincom Smalltalk.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

This morning, I announced that we'll be supporting Seaside. This evening, I'm asking for feedback on that. The high level direction is fairly straightforward: Support for Seaside Support for Persistence built into Seaside for Cincom Smalltalk That leaves a lot unspecified - our engineers have been thinking about this, but I'd like our developer community to chime in too: What do you need from Seaside on Cincom Smalltalk? For that matter, what should we call it :) Any and all feedback welcome, either in comments here, or in email

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

Scoble has posted another interview I'd love to listen to, but have no interest in watching video for. Can we have an mp3 stream in addition to the video feed, please?

Technorati Tags: audio, video

A complaint I've heard a lot is that we have promised any number of grand new plans (Pollock/Widgetry being one example), many of them have taken too long to deliver - or worse, have simply failed to materialize.

Ironically enough, given that we are supposed to be the experts in Smalltalk development, we've historically followed a very "heavy" development process, and allowed projects to drive forward without incremental deliveries along the way. What that's done is make for disappointing deliveries on any number of levels - projects that never ship, or that ship slowly and incompletely.

We recognized that this had become a problem, and we've been changing our internal development process to be more lightweight and - dare I say it - agile. Along the way we've modified our product roadmap accordingly. After I announced that we would be supporting Seaside yesterday, I received a number of emails that could be summarized as follows:

"Oh great, another new direction you won't deliver on"

As painful as that was to receive, it's a message I understand. We have spent too many years telling you how great Pollock was going to be, and too many years neglecting obvious flaws elsewhere in the product. One change in the roadmap you may have noticed is that it's smaller. There's a reason for that: I'd rather promise things I know we can deliver than push out a huge list of things we can't.

What does that mean you'll see from us in the short term? We are releasing ObjectStudio 8 in August. At the same time, we will release a service pack for VisualWorks. That will probably be a download of updated parcels (and new Mac VMs - yes, those are still being pounded into shape). I'll be getting some scheduling information on the major areas of interest:

• Internationalization
• Seaside
• Improved Tools
• Deployment

over the next few days, and we will then have a better idea as to when we can push out the next major release after ObjectStudio 8. Between now and then, additional service packs are quite likely, and in line with the idea of incremental development and delivery. I'll also have more details on those admittedly vague "major areas" - for example, "Improved Tools" will get more details.

What won't you see from us? You won't see grandiose visions of "the next big thing" promised for delivery N years from now. You'll see incremental, step-wise improvements - which means that you can expect initial support for Seaside in months, with incremental improvements in that direction on an ongoing basis. The same will hold for the rest of the roadmap - you'll see incremental improvements delivered on a regular, ongoing basis - and I expect you to hold us to that.

Technorati Tags: product management

This came up in an email I got based on yesterday's post, but I would like to air this publicly - we don't intend to fork Seaside off and make a proprietary version. Seaside itself is portable between Smalltalk dialects, and we intend to take advantage of that fact. As well - the persistence solution we have in mind is GLORP, which is also portable across Smalltalk dialects. So - we intend to actively work with the community of Seaside develeopers (most of whom work in Squeak) to push Seaside forward. Obviously, we believe that Cincom Smalltalk will be the best and most scalable place to use Seaside - but we intend to work with the community on this one. Michael Lucas-Smith is taking the technical lead on this project, so if you work in Seaside now, and would like to get involved, get in touch with him. This isn't going to be a "go dark" project for Cincom.

Technorati Tags: seaside, smalltalk

Doc Searls points to Steve Lewis, who reminds us that as good as the various web resources we have are, there's still a ton of material out there that has never been examined, much less digitized. For instance:

Indeed, much of the history of Iraq and its antecedents ­ as of much of the Mid-East, North Africa, and the Balkans ­ stills lays buried amongst the millions of pre-1923 Ottoman documents stored in the Turkish national archives in Istanbul and Ankara.

That's not even the half of it, apparently. I'm reading "Osman's Dream", by Caroline Finkel - and she notes that those Turkish archives are becoming less accessible even within Turkey. Not for political reasons, simply due to language barriers. From her foreword:

The past is truly another country in Turkey, whose citizens have been deprived of easy access to the literary and historical works of previous eras by the change in alphabet in 1928 from Arabic script to the Roman alphabet familiar to most of the western world. At the same time, an ongoing programme to make the vocabulary more Turkish is expunging words of Arabic and Persian derivation - the other two components of the rich amalgam that was the Ottoman tongue, today in danger of becoming as 'dead' as Latin. On the other hand, works from the Ottoman centuries are now being published in modern script with simplified language, enabling modern readers to gain some understanding of what went before. The situation would otherwise be dire; imagine an English literary canon which lacked anything written before the 1930s!

As much of a "triumphalist" as I've been for things like Wikipedia, the true scholar's work is hardly obsolete.

Technorati Tags: archives, history

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at how to use a standard HTML file upload component with a Web Toolkit servlet.

Technorati Tags: servlet, smalltalk

We announced a series of ObjectStudio 8 seminars in Europe recently; the first one was held in Zurich today. So - I've posted some photos from the event.

Technorati Tags: cst, smalltalk, objectstudio

I've been quiet this morning - working on BottomFeeder keyboard handling. Looks like some the overrides I've added need to be addressed as well - the joy of moving an application forward from release to release :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at using Subcanvases - the basics.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, gui

Wow - DRM free music sells better, bringing more money to industry coffers. It's like the VCR fight all over again:

Early sales indicate that DRM-free music is noticeably more popular than DRMed music, EMI senior VP Lauren Berkowitz recently told Bloomberg. The world's third-largest music label began selling its music without copyright protections last month through Apple's iTunes Store and reports back that sales have been "good."

Follow the link to Ars Technica for details - the uptick seems significant. So the question is, how many facts have to die before the RIAA and MPAA get a clue?

Technorati Tags: DRM, RIAA

We have no plans at this point to deprecate the existing User Interface tools, or the existing UI framework. We realize that with the length of time it's taken to get Widgetry to production, the policy of doing only minimal fixes to the older tools and UI has been a problem for our customers. Replacing the existing tools with Widgetry versions would amount to further forcing our customers to stand still for the next year or two while that happened. So we have the following focus for Widgetry, Wrapper, and tools:

1. On Widgetry, we will be looking at the ability to combine both frameworks. This may mean embedding Wrapper canvases in a Widgetry UI, the reverse, or both. That is under investigation, and we are looking for feedback from our user community on the best path forward here
2. Given how long Widgetry has been under development, and the customer investments in the existing frameworks and tools, we don't believe that a wholesale replacement of the existing tools is in anyone's best interest right now. What you'll see is incremental improvements to the existing tools, including the UI Painter and the associated widget set.
3. We are supporting Widgetry, but we look at the current release as a first pass, intended primarily to garner feedback from early adopters. We do not expect mature projects to migrate to Widgetry at this point in time, and we don't want to pressure them to do so. We do expect the existing early adopters to send us feedback on what's good, what's bad, and what we need to improve.

Technorati Tags: product management, smalltalk

Forget XP, Scrum, Waterfall, etc - here's how software development really works :)

Technorati Tags: software development

I wasn't able to attend the ObjectStudio 8 seminars in Switzerland and Germany, but I have posted a photo gallery from the events. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: objectstudio, smalltalk, cincom smalltalk

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at customizing the keyboard handling for a particular widget in an application - using BottomFeeder and the DataSet as an example.

Technorati Tags: GUI, cst, smalltalk

I'm traveling up to Boston this weekend - my wife's brother lives up there, and we're off for a quick visit. It's a short trip - my daughter has more summer activities lined up than I know what to do with, and that all starts Monday.

We arrived in Boston this afternoon, and after my brother in law served us lunch - homemade pizza and soup - we headed over to the Museum of Fine Arts. We got there late, so only part of it was open. We were able to see the Asian collection, the American (pre-Columbian) collection, the Italian Renaissance collection, and the middle eastern collection. In theory, I wasn't supposed to take any pictures. However, a camera phone is pretty handy :)

That's a Korean Reliquary set, used in (I think) Buddhist ceremonies. Next, I snapped this shot of a Glazed Italian Renaissance piece:

Finally, a Buddha from the Asian collection:

There's a lot we didn't see - it's probably a whole day's visit (at least). If you hit Boston, put the MFA on your itinerary.

This is pretty neat. Back in October of 2006, I posted about some photos of the Crimean War that had surfaced. So imagine my surprise to see that the entire collection has been posted online - and the original photographer, back in 1855, was a James Robertson. There's an explicit notice on the site about permission being needed before you use the photos, so just follow the link to the King's Own Royal Regiment Museum.

Thanks to Peter Donnelly, the curator at the museum, for letting me know about this!

Time for my weekly look at the logs - BottomFeeder downloads went at a rate of 175/day last week. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	426
Update	167
Linux x86	121
Solaris	94
Mac X	85
HPUX	57
AIX	56
CE ARM	55
Mac 8/9	50
Linux Sparc	29
SGI	20
Linux PPC	20
Windows98/ME	14
Sources	14
CE x86	9
ADUX	5

Off to the HTML accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	54.5%
Internet Explorer	36.1%
MSN Bot	4.8%
Other	2.8%
Opera	1.8%

Looks like Mozilla still dominates my HTML accesses - which is not the case for the syndication numbers:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	32.2%
Mozilla	21.6%
BottomFeeder	11.1%
Net News Wire	4.4%
Other	4.3%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.6%
BlogLines	3.2%
Vienna	2.9%
Safari RSS	2.8%
FeedOnFeeds	2.7%
JetBrains	1.8%
NewsGator	1.7%
XML-FeedPP	1.3%
Akregator	1.1%
mioNews	1.1%
Liferea	1.1%
Python	1.1%
News Fire	1%
Jakarta	1%

I love the way Mike Arrington rationalizes being paid for quotes in advertising:

We do these all the time…generally FM suggests some language and we approve or tweak it to make it less lame. The ads go up, we get paid. This has been going on for months and months - at least since the summer of 2006. It’s nothing new. It’s text in an ad box. I think people are pretty aware of what that means…which is nothing.

Hmm. If it meant nothing, money wouldn't have changed hands. Why do companies like Cincom try to get customer quotes in success stories? Because it sounds less like market-droid drivel if an actual user of the software says it, that's why. Arrington knows this, no matter how hard he tries to rationalize it.

On this, I agree with Dave Winer's post.

Technorati Tags: advertising

I haven't been to the Freedom Trail in over 20 years; it ought to be fun to revisit it. Back later with photos.

We had a pleasant day out on the Freedom Trail - it was great weather, and I got a few shots taken with my camera phone. My daughter has a much better selection of photos, but I won't have time to get them online until I get home. In the meantime, here's my brief gallery.

Technorati Tags: Boston, Freedom Trail

James McGovern:

What if employees from Sun Microsystems such as Pat Patterson, Don Bowen and others were to get Sun to create a stupid little company that then immediately took all the IP and attempted to sell it as their own or at least use it within their own product where Sun immediately launched a lawsuit against them and didn't compromise forcing a judge to make a decision / ruling. This would do more for open source that a bunch of boneheaded bloggers babbling about harmony

Sometimes, the stupid coming from McGovern's blog just burns...

Technorati Tags: stupidity

Short trips are always tiring - the mad dashes to the airport are just too close together. This morning, the hotel we stayed in forgot our wakeup call, so we had a little extra jolt of adrenalin to power our way through the sirport. Then the baggage handlers at BWI all took a simultaneous coffee break or something; I have no idea how else to explain the near hour we had to wait for the bags. It was a good trip though - you can check out the photos I took of the Freedom Trail here.

I wish the author of this site explained what he meant by this:

At its best, code reuse is accomplished by sharing common classes or collections of functions and procedures (this is possible in C++, but not in Smalltalk or Java).

What does that mean?

Technorati Tags: code reuse

1 Terabyte drives are popping up all over - here's Seagate's announcement:

The drives come with either SATA (for consumers and enterprises) or SAS (for enterprises) interfaces and have an MFRP of US$399, which is the same as competitor Hitachi GST's 1TB drive.

Ponder that for a moment. I clearly recall buying a second 40MB drive back in the late 80's, when my first 40 MB drive was filling up. I also clearly recall thiking "I'll never need more disk". I'd say that again, but I know better. I'm editing audio these days, which chews disk. My daughter edits video, which chews mountains of disk. I can only imagine how much disk space we'll be chewing 3 years from now - but it'll be a lot.

Arden Thomas has put together a chart example using Cairo and Cincom Smalltalk - worth checking out.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I asked this morning what the heck was up with this post; now I see that the commentary is actually an old article (2001) from Dr. Dobbs:

Code reuse, the most common kind of reuse, refers to the reuse of source code within sections of an application and potentially across multiple applications. At its best, code reuse is accomplished by sharing common classes or collections of functions and procedures (this is possible in C++, but not in Smalltalk or Java). At its worst, code reuse is accomplished by copying and then modifying existing code. A sad reality of our industry is that code copying is often the only form of reuse practiced by developers.

A Smalltalk class can be thought of (never mind namespaces for the moment) as a global object. Therefore, any class method is - wait for it - a globally accessible "function".

We could also define a block and stuff that in a globally accessible variable, which would give Dr. Dobbs the same thing. Worse, this is Scott Ambler - who I would have assumed would know better.

Technorati Tags: code_reuse

Scoble points out why Techmeme has been teh suck of late:

TechMeme (which started out as a blog news engine) has totally switched its focus away from blogs. I’m tracking the Plaxo news. I was among the first two sites out with news about Plaxo’s new 3.0 platform. I have the only videos. Posted two of them. I have one of the first real reviews. Google’s blog search shows I have the most inbound links. Om Malik, who posted a story about Plaxo two hours after I did, even linked to me.

I've been following a lot fewer links back to the site from my aggregator - it's just gotten dull. As Scoble points out, there are plenty of other sites if you want straight news site aggregation - Techmeme used to be different - and different attracted my attention.

Technorati Tags: aggregator

James_Lileks asked for feedback on grocery store etiquette, and I thought this comment deserved some attention:

And the worst part is the attitude of the stockers. A couple of weeks ago I (very politely) said, "Excuse me," to a guy who was stocking paper towels, because he was in front of the brand I wanted. He sighed, rolled his eyes, and GLARED at me, as though he couldn't believe I would interrupt him in such a fashion. Someone needs to tell these folks that, as crummy as a job stocking grocery shelves may be, they have that job because the store has customers. And those customers don't really want to be there in the first place, and just want to get to the freakin' paper towels, already.

An awful lot of places seem to have retail staff like that - exasperation that a paying customer would ask a question is rampant. The thing is, it infects support lines, too. It's can be amusing to have an "aren't they dumb" conversation over beers, but at the end of the day, nasty interactions with staff tend to create blowback. It's far easier to create negative word of mouth than it is to create positive word of mouth, and people love to tell stories.

Technorati Tags: management, PR

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we make use of the custom color technique Arden explored this morning to set the background color of a button. The general technique is useful for any UI component.

Technorati Tags: cst, UI, smalltalk

I've never been completely happy with the way tabs work in BottomFeeder - I'm in the process of cleaning up that area of code, and making tabs function more like they do in Firefox and IE. I should be ready to throw a new build out soon. Here's what the latest development system looks like, with a search feed in the list - click through for a larger view.

Technorati Tags: aggregator, smalltalk