Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

There's only one day left to get early bird registration prices for the ESUG Conference in Lugano this August.

Technorati Tags: events, smalltalk

Time for my weekly look at the logs - BottomFeeder downloads went at a rate of 227/day, which isn't bad. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	504
Mac X	218
Linux x86	215
Update	157
Solaris	81
Mac 8/9	70
HPUX	69
Windows98/ME	63
CE ARM	58
AIX	42
Linux Sparc	30
Linux PPC	30
SGI	23
Sources	18
CE x86	10
ADUX	4

Next, the HTML stats - Mozilla still rules those, and my raw traffic bounced back after the holiday week:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	53%
Internet Explorer	39%
MSN Bot	4%
Other	2.6%
Opera	1.4%

The syndication usage continues to rise, and IE access to it is staying high:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	32.9%
Mozilla	22.3%
BottomFeeder	11.5%
Net News Wire	4.5%
Other	4.1%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.8%
Vienna	3%
Safari RSS	2.9%
FeedOnFeeds	2.7%
BlogLines	1.9%
NewsGator	1.9%
Akregator	1.5%
JetBrains	1.4%
Liferea	1.3%
XML-FeedPP	1.3%
Python	1%
News Fire	1%
Jakarta	1%

I could go extra negative on Vista, but it's useful to remember that XP wasn't fully "baked" until service pack 2. Vista has only been out for 6 months - so the sorts of driver issues mentioned in the linked article really aren't much of a surprise.

Update: I'm promoting this from the comments, as I've said things very much like this about Vista before. It's no accident that I'm running XP in Parallels on this Mac :)

I think that when Vista went back for a rewrite, they canceled anything new and concentrated on pleasing the media companies. They should have concentrated on pleasing the user and owner of the computer instead.

This looks like a satire page, but real or fake, the Hide-A-Pod is hilarious :)

Technorati Tags: iPod, zune

Well, I stayed up late playing Civ IV, and there in my mailbox when I finished was a Pownce invite. I have a few left, so if you're curious about it, send me a request and I'll drop an invite. It's a lot like Twitter, but without an API (yet - supposedly one is coming). Until then, it's more or less a semi-closed beta.

Still - I'll keep my eyes on it and see what develops.

Scoble on a Facebook app:

Add that component to your own Facebook Profile and hook it up to YOUR OWN Google Reader shared page (I call it a link blog, but Google calls them “Shared Items.”). If you do, you’ll see a page that lets you see your shared items, your friends’ shared items, and top shared items. Wait a second, top shared items? Yeah! But only from other Facebookers. It shows you top items for the past 12 hours, or 24 hours, or 48 hours, or the past week. And it shows how many times each item was shared.

Here's the part I find fascinating: 10 years ago, there were walled gardens like Facebook that had a lot of members - AOL (and its pre-internet brethren) that had made the jump to the web. There were even primitive social software applications - recall that AIM was initially an AOL only thing.

The nascent "web community" did nothing but talk smack about it. Yet here we are, a decade later - and Facebook is more or less "AOL 2.0". Sure, it's opened itself up to application developers more, but that has more to do with current "fashion" than with anything else.

So here's my question: why was AOL looked down on, and Facebook is admired? Is it as simple as "all the cool kids like Facebook" ?

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, facebook

Scoble answered my earlier query about Facebook, but I find his answer interestingly contradictory:

Heck, last night I was trying to use Anagram to see if I could easily save contact info from Facebook into Outlook. It wasn’t working. Turns out that it’s very hard to get data OUT of Facebook. (Anagram is a cool utility to grab emails, Web addresses, and other info off of emails and Web pages and add them to Outlook’s contact manager).

First, he notes that Facebook isn't terribly open - data goes in, and it doesn't come back out. You're left with the screen scraping kind of access that Jon Udell has written about so often. He then goes on to still call it open:

Look at how that cool new Google Reader app works inside Facebook. Data comes in, but it doesn’t leave.

That leads me to why Facebook is cool and AOL wasn’t. Facebook is somewhat open where AOL wasn’t open at all. Facebook is evolving rapidly because they opened up to third-party developers where AOL didn’t open up to third-party developers.

By that token, any proprietary application is "open" if third parties can write software for it. I think I'm still confused :)

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, facebook

It's getting to the point where every single time I see a news story on something I know, it's deeply flawed. Other people are noticing the same thing - see Duncan Riley on the WSJ's "10 years of blogging" column. How hard can it be to use Google?

Technorati Tags: fact checking

Worse than Failure explains how blogging works at your larger enterprises :)

Sci Fi Wire reports that Farscape might come back as an echo:

SCI FI Channel will revive its popular original show Farscape as a Web-based series of short films on SCIFI.COM's SCI FI Pulse broadband network, part of a slate of new original online programming.

Before the last season, this would have been of more interest to me. It got really, really stupid during that last season.

This week we talked about Application Development in Smalltalk - using our experience with BottomFeeder (James), ElastoLab (Dave), and WithStyle (Michael). We ended up talking about graphics, process models, and C interfacing as they relate to building real apps in the real world.

It was a wide ranging conversation, and we had a lot of fun doing it.

Technorati Tags: application development, smalltalk

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at the Settings framework in Cincom Smalltalk - and how you can use it to provide your own application settings tool.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

It's been one of those days where I've felt busy the whole day, but it's hard to remember exactly what I was busy with. I did have a bunch of conference calls, and those chew up time :)

Anyway, I'm headed to Cincinnati for a few days tomorrow - but never fear, I've got "Smalltalk Daily" episodes queued up right through Thursday.

Technorati Tags: travel

Looking around the blogs I read, the buzz for the last few weeks has been all Facebook, all the time. Before that, it was all Twitter. There's also a bit of Pownce buzz going around. I joined Twitter and Pownce, although I can't really say that I've seen a lot of value in either one; there's tiny bits of information conveyed in both, and the people I really need to talk to I deal with via IRC and IM. Sure, if I had a gazillion people to track, I'm sure IM would get out of hand. Then again, I couldn't possibly keep up with that many people, either.

So anyway - that leads me to today's ponder point: should I be using Facebook? I can tell from Scoble's posts on it that it can suck down time if you let it; on the other hand, it might well be a useful way to make and keep contacts - see Dare Obasanjo's post today, for instance, on some of the high profile users.

So I'll toss the question out for feedback: would using Facebook pay me back enough dividends to make up for whatever time I would have to sink into it?

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, facebook, social media

Well, let's see how this plays out - I've joined Facebook - we'll see how it works out :)

Technorati Tags: Facebook

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at the API for File Dialogs.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Old media is getting beaten up everywhere - newspapers are just one of the more visible victims. In the tech world, the "old" tech journals are getting ripped. Forbes notes the decline here - you can also see it in things like ComputerWorld. Just this week, they flipped from the tabloid format to the smaller magazine form.

That's not the biggest problem though. As Forbes notes, if your journal exists to break tech news, how can you possibly survive against the 24x7 nature of sites like ValleyWag and Engadget? News analysis is one possibility, but you can get that online, too. As the ad dollars for these pubs decline, I expect the free distribution (I get tons of free journals) to start drying up fast.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, journals

Thinking about Facebook this morning, a friend of mine said "I'm concerned that having a face in a place and not being active there is worse than not having a face.". Which is probably true - it's like having a blog you stop posting to, or an email address you ignore.

So - I went ahead and set up a "Smalltalkers" group on Facebook, to give us Smalltalk people more presence. I'll have to see how that goes, and whether I end up keeping up with it - I already have various projects (plus my real job) to deal with :)

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, facebook

Why, a flamethrower, of course - for weed clearance :)

Dare Obasanjo points out an issue with static typing when it runs into dynamic services:

While I was driving to the office I noticed another email from one of the services that integrates with ours via a SOAP-based XML Web Service. As part of the design to handle a news scenario we added a new type that was going to be returned by one of our methods (e.g. imagine that there was a GetFruit() method which used to return apples and oranges which now returns apples, oranges and bananas) . This change was crashing the applications that were invoking our service because they weren’t expecting us to return bananas.

However, the insidious thing is that the failure wasn’t because their application was improperly coded to fail if it saw a fruit it didn’t know, it was because the platform they built on was statically typed. Specifically, the Web Services platform automatically converted the XML to objects by looking at our WSDL file (i.e. the interface definition language which stated up front which types are returned by our service) . So this meant that any time new types were added to our service, our WSDL file would be updated and any application invoking our service which was built on a Web services platform that performed such XML<->object mapping and was statically typed would need to be recompiled. Yes, recompiled.

And yet, this sort of thing makes some people feel safe.

Technorati Tags: static typing, dynamic typing

You have to love this - I'm in Dayton, waiting for Arden to arrive, and I decided to refresh my Facebook page. Here's what I got:

That's "Web Marshal", which has apparently classified Facebook at Porn. It also calls a bunch of blogs I read that way. All I can say is... lol.

Update: Click through for a larger image

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we continue our look at some of the other APIs in class Dialog - confirm dialogs, warnings, etc.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

About a week ago, we had some phishing files uploaded to the Wiki - which caused us a bit of grief. Today, I see that the Italian police have found the people behind the scam:

The Guardia di Finanza (Military Financial Police) cuffed 18 Italian citizens and eight Eastern Europeans as part of "Phish and Chip", an operation aimed at dismantling a gang targeting users of Poste Italiane's home banking services.

I'll have to keep monitoring the Wiki though - it's not like these are the only bad actors out there.

Technorati Tags: phishing

If you like irreverant and snarky takedowns of the "web 2.0 elite", then have a look at the Uncov blog. This week seems to "throw rocks at Steve Rubel" week over there.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0

Well, this is good news: The RIAA has been ordered to pay the legal fees for one of the innocent people they decided to extort sue:

In what appears to be the first known case of its kind, the RIAA has been ordered to pay a defendant nearly $70,000 in attorney fees and costs after unsuccessfully suing for copyright infringement.

More of that wuld be a good thing.

Technorati Tags: RIAA

How can you tell when a vendor doesn't have to care about their customers? When they do things the Comcast way:

Last month Dave Winer noted that Comcast's installation procedures require the use of Internet Explorer. Another Comcast user makes the same complaint. "They helpfully provide you with a CD that has a custom Comcast-branded version of IE5 for the Mac, because Apple hasn't shipped a Mac in quite a few years that has IE5 on it by default."

Even Comcast's web page shows an apparent bias against Mac users — or anyone not using Internet Explorer. When you click the page's "Games" hyperlink, an error message pops up, warning that the site "is not optimized for Firefox browsers or Macs."

If they had to compete for customers, instead of being the only (or, at worst, one of two) choice, would they act this way? I really doubt it

I've reorganized the index page for Smalltalk Daily - the Seaside screencasts were on the general web development page; now there's a Seaside specific page.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk daily

Ok, I just got something out of Facebook that I probably would not have gotten another way: I connected with someone I used to hang with back in high school, who I had not seen since the early 1980's - he must have found me via the high school class lookup. I have to admit, that was kind of cool.

Technorati Tags: social software, web 2.0

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at a native Dialog hookup (Windows) that Runar Jordahl contributed.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

A month ago, I thought the season was all over for the Yankees. Now? It still doesn't look great, but note that they are only 6 games down in the loss column:

If this tightens up, we might start to see 1978 comparisons tossed around.

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees, red sox

This weather will probably clear by the time of my flight (6 PM), but it's probably playing havoc with planes heading in and out of the area now. Meaning, we might have problems catching up to us. Fun, fun.

Those are some nasty cells. Here's what it looked like outside the window a few minutes ago:

Travis explains how to ensure that a VW Listbox always has a selection, using validation rules. Pretty neat.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I thought that waiting in line for the iPhone was nuts, but I guess I shouldn't say that too loud: I'll be in line tonight with my daughter for the last Potter book. We waited last time, as well, and while the B&N experience was kind of anti-climactic, it was worth it. I might bring my notebook along and report from the line - we'll see how things go :)

Greg H has some interesting thoughts on Facebook, social media, et. al. - he begins by questioning what they are good at, and notes a big difference between Facebook and LinkedIn:

For one thing, the organizational features of Facebook are atrocious. I'm in a group now that I feel would be very useful for networking going forward: my fellow law school classmates. Check out the myriad ways USF School of Law members/alums have listed the fact that they attend the law school. While I'm sure there are wonderful undergrads, I don't care about networking with them. LinkedIn? Very easy to find fellow USF SoLers. LinkedIn strikes me as being much more interested in people with more structured networks. Facebook -- though less so than MySpace -- seems to eschew structure.

Related to that is the kind of structure Facebook does have. A colleague of mine noted that Facebook seems overly interested in your dating ideas; that's likely a legacy of it being a University oriented tool, but still: if I'm looking at it as a business tool, the initial set of questions don't make me take it seriously. Quite the opposite, actually: I had to get past the initial "obviously, this is for teens and 20-somethings" idea just to get started.

Zuckerman has gone quite a ways with what he's got, but if he wants something that business people are going to take seriously, he has to provide a "No, I'm not looking to hookup next Friday" path into it.

Update: Phil Windley has some related thoughts.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, facebook, social media

Via Mark Bernstein, I ran across a post from Joel Spolsky on comments in blogs.

"When a blog allows comments right below the writer's post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody ... nobody ... would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words. Look at this innocent post on a real estate blog. By comment #6 you're already seeing complete noise. By #13 you have someone cursing and saying "go kill yourself." On a real estate blog. #18 and #23 have launched into a middle eastern nuclear conflageration which continues for 100 posts."

I haven't attracted too many trolls to this blog, but anyone with decent traffic can get buried in anonymous (unrelated) nonsense fairly easily. Sure, if you run a political blog, you have to see that coming. But on a real estate blog?

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at the configuration options that are available for the System Browser.

Technorati Tags: development, smalltalk

So I have a question about the proposed "piracy fee" that Canada is considering for the iPod (and other players: If you pay that up front, does it then follow that you have already been charged, and can freely share music? That came up in the comments on the linked page. Sometimes I wonder just how much the RIAA and their international arm wants to torque off customers. There doesn't seem to be a limit to the stupid...

Technorati Tags: music, RIAA

I'm glad I didn't say too many things about iPhone line blogging, because I'll be live blogging from the parking lot of Borders tonight, while we wait to get the last Harry Potter book. I should have reserved two copies - my daughter won't possibly let me have hers before she finishes it :)

Technorati Tags: books, events

Well, here I am at Borders - watting for midnight so we can get our book. I've set up on the grass in front of the store - I can't get the WiFi signal to stick from here. Hey - move 50 feet closer after I got the wrist band that sas "you get a book", and I'm in. So anyhow - here's the view looking across at the store - the line stretches back to the CompUSA (my daughter is holding our spot right now).

Here's the view from where we started, looking up the line:

And the view from the front, looking down the line:

Well after midnight, and still waiting :)

That last post was mostly composed while I couldn't get a signal. We're still waiting, with our wrist bands - and here's the line:

Well, I've got WiFi, and my daughter is re-reading the fifth book. We'll manage :)

Technorati Tags: books

Phil Windley explains. I have to admit, Parallels just rocks. I was snaping pics here at Borders earlier (yes, we are still waiting), and the image editor I use to muck with images is a Windows app (IRFanVew). I mailed the images from my phone to my gmail account. I got them in Mail.app, and opened them up in that editor - then posted from my posting tool (part of BottomFeeder). It's just too slick.

Technorati Tags: Windows

It's almost 1:15 AM - my daughter's group (they have people grouped by color based on when they got here) is up next. Meanwhile, battery power is low - and the line is still amazing:

I'll have to sleep in tomorrow, that's for sure.

Technorati Tags: books

Boy, that took awhile :) I took this around 2, as the line wound down:

And this just now, after getting home after 3 AM. Now, read more, or sleep. Hmmmm.

Technorati Tags: books

Well, I'll be reading, won't I?

Well, I just finished the seventh (and last) Potter book. It was worth spending the day with - without giving anything away, I'll say this: the story will end up looking great on screen. If you don't have the book, run - don't walk - and get it, along with any previous ones you haven't read yet.

Technorati Tags: Harry Potter

It's been a good week for BottomFeeder downloads; 237/day. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	755
Mac X	194
Update	140
Linux x86	133
Solaris	75
Mac 8/9	71
CE ARM	58
HPUX	55
Windows98/ME	51
AIX	38
Linux Sparc	31
Linux PPC	19
SGI	18
Sources	10
CE x86	9
ADUX	4

On to the HTML tool usage:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	58.6%
Internet Explorer	30%
MSN Bot	5.9%
Other	2.4%
Opera	2%
noxtrumbot	1.1%

Which leaves the Syndication Tools:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	23.9%
BottomFeeder	15.3%
Internet Explorer	12.1%
Net News Wire	6.5%
Google Feed Fetcher	6%
FeedOnFeeds	4.2%
Viena	4.2%
Safari RSS	3.6%
NewsGator	2.8%
Akregator	2.8%
BlogLines	2.8%
JetBrains	2.1%
XMLFeedPP	1.9%
Other	1.9%
Liferea	1.8%
Python	1.7%
Java	1.3%
News Fire	1.1%
MSN Bot	1%
Jakarta	1%
RSS Bandit	1%
SharpReader	1%

Looks like the small traffic drop last week took most of my IE users with it :)