Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Argh! I was this close to getting a Wii tonight. At 1:20 AM, my WiiTracker feed spots available consoles at KMart.com. Sadly, I didn't notice it until 1:48 AM. At which point, I got this:

Via Dave Winer, we find out what happens when the masters of PR partner with the epitomy of customer ignorage:

Steve Rubel is one of the 38 percent. And since he cancelled his Verizon account, he no longer has a cell phone. Not a good situation for a guy like Steve. He's in PR. (Steve writes: "I actually have a backup phone from Edelman but it's my personal phone that was cancelled.")

Thomas Hawk's iPhone isn't working yet either. He describes waiting on hold endlessly with AT&T. Like Steve, his first memory of iPhone is going to be a wasted weekend trying to get started.

I have no idea whether 38 percent is an accurate number of people who can't activate, but it almost doesn't matter - the meme is out there. Maybe Apple should have found a partner that could spell customer service.

Technorati Tags: marketing

We get few enough days like this in Maryland in July - so I headed out to play golf this morning. I was hitting my drives well, but - the golf gods had their revenge on my iron shots.

I'd have more interest in Universal trying to expand the list of music partners if I thought they weren't just trying for more DRM. Here's the jist, from Reuters:

Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company, has declined to sign a long-term deal with Apple Inc.'s iTunes music store, leaving open the possibility for exclusive deals with other services, an industry source said on Sunday.

Wake me when they renounce DRM. Until then, sign me up for a huge yawn.

Technorati Tags: DRM

We got the podcast in late this weekend - 7 pm yesterday. So, I'm still editing it. We had a good coversation with Igor Dmytryk of EDC, which is part of the Canadian government. Interesting stuff on Smalltalk in the financial sector; it should show up later today.

Oh, and it's the beginning of a new month - if you like the show, head on over to Podcast Alley and vote for us, They clear the vote system each month :)

This week, we spoke to Igor Dmytryk of Export Development Corporation of Canada. They use Cincom Smalltalk to manage their financial services packages, which is one of the core parts of their business.

Our talk hit a lot of things, including why they use Smalltalk, and how they managed the transition from the 2.5 release of Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks to 7.2. We also found out that the "blocks in BOSS files" topic that we've talked about before originated in some work that Dave did at EDC - so we were able to explore that.

As always, if you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com, or head on over to Podcast Alley and vote for the cast - bear in mind that they clear the votes at the beginning of each month.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, financial services

Yet another Pot/Kettle thing from the Enterprisey one:

"Folks who blog but still don't understand blogging..."

Technorati Tags: humor

Dare Obasanjo - with lots of good linkage - explains why Walled Gardens (like Facebook) become popular. There's even an advantage to not having full external visibility - post stupid pictures (etc) from some collegiate party on MySpace, and you might find that hiring managers are a bit leery about you. Do it on Facebook, and it's invisible to anyone but your friends. I can definitely see that as being a huge thing for the current crop of high school and college age users of these networks.

Technorati Tags: proprietary, web2.0

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at an thread scheduler used in BottomFeeder. IN general, there are times when you would like to limit the number of "worker" threads; this example shows a simple approach to that problem.

Technorati Tags: process scheduler, smalltalk

I finally realized that I had fixed the link in the main post, but not in the feed - which is what iTunes hits. Doh! That's all better now.

This is kind of interesting - have a look over this forum for the Nokia N95 phone. If you're a Smalltalker, you probably recognize the venting. If you replaced N95 with Smalltalk, and iPhone with java, those posts could be from 1995.

Mind you, I don't have an N95, and I have no intention of getting an iPhone ($600???).

Technorati Tags: marketing

I like the way Dare Obasanjo comments on Universal Music Group's tactics with Apple:

So this is what it looks like when an industry that has existed for decades begins to die. I wonder who's going to lose out more? Apple because people some people stop buying iPods because they can't buy music from Jay-Z and Eminem on iTunes or Universal Music Group for closing itself out of the biggest digital music marketplace in the world in the midst of declining CD sales worldwide. It's as if the record labels are determined to make themselves irrelevant by any means necessary. 

I can't add much to that - other than to say I agree completely.

The last time I stayed in a hotel outside of Gatwick (London), I paid £75.00, and got a room with no TV, no clock, and no phone. I had to pay a £10.00 deposit for a wind up alarm clock :)

So with that in mind, this capsule hotel sounds like a great deal at £40.00 for 4 hours:

The study desk folds out of the techno wall with its own stow able chair and a complete range of power and connectivity including free internet access and cosy local lighting. Suit and dress hanging and storage for everything from your smalls to the loose change provide a place for everything and everything a place.

A 23”flat screen TV system with huge choice of films, TV, radio, internet and an input for your own music and iPod.

Order from a cabin service menu on screen or visit the galley where your cabin crew are on duty 24 hours a day.

So amusingly enough, the actual "hole in the wall" has better amenities than the metaphorical one I stayed in. Next time I have an early flight from Gatwick, I'll consider this place.

Technorati Tags: hotel, airport

Boris explains how to integrate Google Analytics with Seaside, and why:

We now return to regularly scheduled programming. First up, adding Google Analytics tracking code to your Seaside application. If you ask me, it’s an absolute must have if you are serious about your application.

The directions look really simple - simpler than doing the same for my blog server, as it happens. All I did was create an include file and copy it to the directories I needed to handle, but Boris' example shows the power of Smalltalk reuse, rather than the copy/paste variety.

Update: Boris adds more details you'll want.

Technorati Tags: seaside, analytics

Techmeme reports (via CNN) that the Wii is outpacing the PS3 by leaps and bounds in Japan:

Nintendo Co.'s (NTDOY) Wii video game console outsold Sony Corp's (SNE) PlayStation 3 by six to one in June in Japan, a Japanese publishing company said Monday.

Sony took two hits on the PS3: they got to market a yea after MS did with the 360, and they didn't see the Wii coming at all. I've been wondering whether Sony might be forced out of the console business due to the PS3 debacle, and I'm still wondering.

Technorati Tags: Wii, PS3

On today's Smalltalk Daily, I go over the syndication library used in BottomFeeder for creating feed objects from RSS and Atom. It's separately loadable from BottomFeeder, and today's screencast goes over the API entry points to the library

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, atom, rss, syndication

Does Apple know how to stage manage a launch, or what?

Apple over the weekend sold more than 700,000 iPhones to rocket past analyst predictions and shatter AT&T's record by selling more iPhones in three days than Motorola's RAZR did in its first month.

Now that's what I call a positive PR Event.

Technorati Tags: marketing, iPhone, Apple

Happy Fourth of July!

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Technorati Tags: Independence Day

Someone with too much time on their hands has figured out how to hack an iPhone into an oversized 8GB nano. Yes, I know it has WiFi, but still - for $600, you could find another WiFi solution...

Technorati Tags: iPhone, hacks

Gordon Weakliem thinks that Google was redirecting his subscription to Jon Udell:

I suppose it had to happen - Google Reader seems to have gone insane and replaced my subscription to Jon Udell with an apparently random selection from various Wordpress blogs. It seems like a rule of server based aggregators that they become flaky as they scale up, and there's usually issues with feed identity and redirects right in the mix in every case I've seen.

I don't think this was a Google problem. Why? Well, I saw the same thing yesterday in BottomFeeder - which is a client side aggregator I wrote myself, so I was pretty sure that the problem wasn't on my end. Now that I've seen someone else mention it, I'm thinking that the service being used by Udell (and the random site that kept getting swapped in) had problems.

We drove down to a friend's house for a small barbecue and fireworks thing today - the fireworks were mostly of the "shooting stars" variety, but we did have a few rockets and Roman Candles (predictably, those got fired first). I snapped a few photos; here's Brian (our host) mixing some drinks before the fireworks:

And one of the Long Island Ice teas being consumed:

Fortified with appropriate beverages, we headed out to set things on fire :)

We had a fun evening - hope your fourth was enjoyable!

Technorati Tags: fireworks

BottomFeeder 4.4 is close to release - in fact, the current dev build might be the release. I'm letting it sit for a few days to see how it runs, but the feature changes are done. With luck, I'll do the formal release next week.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, rss, atom, aggregator

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we load the Syndication Library into ObjectStudio 8 (beta), and take a look at using it there.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, ObjectStudio, ObjectStudio8

So I missed the FedEx tuck with my MacBook Pro the other day - they are supposed to come back by today. Fortunately, my wife is home, because I have to head out to pick my daughter up from camp soon. It would be too painful to come home to find "strike two" stuck to the door!

The MacBook Pro just arrived:

It's still installing updates; there's a lot to do to get things rolling :)

I'm slowly starting to get stuff moved over to the Mac; I'll be getting Parallels installed as soon as the XP install disks arrive (Vista? You must be joking). In the meantime, I'm seeing some of the instability that customers have been complaining about - and I can happily report that the VM team is working on the problem. Anyway - here I am!

Troy came across this today in his development environment, but I think this qualifies as universal "developer words to live by":

Cincom Smalltalk customer MetaCase has just shipped support for the Mac for their Industry eading product, MetaEdit+:

MetaCase has announced the release of MetaEdit+ 4.5, a complete domain-specific modeling (DSM) environment, for Mac OS X operating systems. DSM with MetaEdit+ offers companies a superior approach for effective software development, significantly increasing overall productivity. This release follows the November 2006 launch of MetaEdit+ 4.5 for Windows.

That's the power of Cincom Smalltalk - and of course the excellent work of the MetaCase flks.

Technorati Tags: DSM

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we build a simple aggregator example using a listbox with RSS Items (from the Smalltalk syndication library), and the IE ActiveX control for display. This is ObjectStudio 8, of course - and a tip of the hat to Andreas Hiltner for his help with the example.

Technorati Tags: ObjectStudio8, smaltalk

Microsoft is rejecting GPL3 out of hand, claiming that it is not now - nor will it be in the future - bound by any of it:

While there have been some claims that Microsoft’s distribution of certificates for Novell support services, under our interoperability collaboration with Novell, constitutes acceptance of the GPLv3 license, we do not believe that such claims have a valid legal basis under contract, intellectual property, or any other law. In fact, we do not believe that Microsoft needs a license under GPL to carry out any aspect of its collaboration with Novell, including its distribution of support certificates, even if Novell chooses to distribute GPLv3 code in the future. Furthermore, Microsoft does not grant any implied or express patent rights under or as a result of GPLv3, and GPLv3 licensors have no authority to represent or bind Microsoft in any way.

I don't even resemble a lawyer, so I have no idea how this will play out. I would guess that this will mean a fairly quick court test of the new GPL (as opposed to the old GPL, which went untested for eons). At the very least, that will be worth some popcorn :)

The Groklaw folks don't think much of MS' claims :)

Technorati Tags: gpl, microsoft, open source

I've been migrating things over to the Mac all day - I spent some of that time composing a document we needed for the business plan. I'm still waiting for the XP CD from corporate, too - I have Parallels, but need a version of Windows to go with it.

In the meantime, I'm liking the machine - it's solid, fast, and a pleasure to use. The screen is gorgeous, and the adjustable backlighting is great.

Boris Popov has posted a starting summary of changes from Seaside 2.7 to 2.8 - read the whole thing for migration tips:

I did a quick run-through today to see what it would take to move our application from the most recent version of Seaside 2.7 to the brand-spanking-new 2.8 snapshot Michel published this morning . Here are some notes about the changes I had to make and a few rewrite snippets to give you a starting point if you run into the same issues (you may not though).

Technorati Tags: seaside

Last night Dave Buck and I had a conversation about deployment issues, and that's going to be posted as a podcast soon. However, I have a cookout party to attend to first - so posting will be light today, and I don't expect to get the podcast up until later this evening or tomorrow. Have a great weekend!

Well, it was a holiday week - BottomFeeder downloads went at a rate of 132/day. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	230
Update	143
Linux x86	104
Solaris	83
Mac X	71
HPUX	62
CE ARM	55
Mac 8/9	41
AIX	33
Linux Sparc	30
SGI	22
Linux PPC	20
CE x86	11
Windows98/ME	8
ADUX	4
Sources	3

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	51%
Internet Explorer	39%
MSN Bot	5.5%
Other	3%
Opera	1.5%

meanwhile, even as IE use seems to be dropping on the pure HTML side, it's rising on the syndication front:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	37.6%
Mozilla	22.9%
BottomFeeder	8.2%
Other	4.5%
Net News Wire	4%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.6%
Vienna	2.8%
Safari RSS	2.7%
FeedOnFeeds	2.6%
BlogLines	2%
NewsGator	1.8%
Akregator	1.7%
XML-FeedPP	1.3%
Liferea	1.3%
Python	1%
JetBrains	1%
News Fire	1%

Dave Buck and I discussed Smalltalk application deployment Friday night - this is coming to you on Sunday for two reasons: first, Audacity crashed while we were recording, so I had to go to my PowerGramo backup. Second, we had a big cookout yesterday - so I didn't get to all the editing before today.

We covered deploying client apps and server apps, and how those differ - including a stroll through "the bad old days" and how hard it used to be to prepare a runtime application. I have to make a tip of the hat to listener Peter Fraser for the topic suggestion - he sent us a huge list of ideas recently, and they'll be fodder for many, many shows.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, deployment

My friend Mike brought his Wii over for our party yesterday, and he brought along the new Tiger Woods golf game - which is amazingly good. It's also hilarious - as you play, the announcers get very snarky about your game. Anyway, that success is contrasted by this Wikipedia article that Andres pointed out to me - apparently, Sony isn't the only console vendor with a few issues:

In the early months after the console launch Microsoft claimed in the press that failure rate was in industry average 3-5%. However, the company have not released any official statistics on the failure rate of the console since its launch, and the company's policy is not to do so, instead focusing on a prompt solution of any technical problems arising. Despite Microsoft's reticence, some retailers have reported abnormally high failure rates, with one ex-employee of a retailer estimating the rate to be between 30-33%. FOX News reported 2.5 million consoles broken in the world.

You can follow the link for the citations - there are links to various sources in the original text I've quoted here. I haven't heard about these issues cropping up with the Wii, but Nintendo also didn't reach very far into the "bleeding edge" for their technology.

Update: Boris Popov reports that a lot of companies could go to school on the customer service offered by Microsoft on this. Rather than obfuscation and denial, it looks like they have stepped up and taken ownership of the problems.

Technorati Tags: xbox 360

One thing is a constant about our parties: we always buy more food than we need. I have a bunch of burgers and hot dogs in the freezer, lots of deli meats, and more potato salad than I know what to do with. Witness my fridge:

Blaine Buxton riffs on what Smalltalk needs to do, and he's mostly on the ball:

Now, that being said, I think a better looking Squeak, VisualWorks, and VisualAge is a must. I think they should all look at Dolphin. Dolphin is everything a modern Smalltalk should be. It's gorgeous. The key bindings are consistent, tools are easy to understand, and it's a pleasure to work with. They are also constantly adding new tools to help productivity (IdeaSpace) as well. In fact, I usually show developers Dolphin first to get them interested.

He makes a lot of other good points as well. The thing is, Blaine's right - and we are working on many of the things he brings up. One of the things I'm committed to is "no 10 year plans". We'll be making continuous improvements in the product, and not deferring things off into the hazy future - because our customers need progress now, not later.

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, product management