Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Well this is weird. I set up a Facebook group for the podcast yesterday, and there was a steady stream of people joining it. I get up this morning, take a look, and the group has been disappeared. What's up with that? Is it an error, or was it deleted? If it was deleted, why didn't I get notified? Fortunately, I had invested very little time in that group - but it's not a good sign when stuff can just disappear with no notice.

Update: The group is back. I'd guess some kind of database issue was the problem.

Update 2, 1:30 PM: And it's broken again...

Update 3, 4:30 PM: And it's back

Update 4, 5:17 pm: Not only is it now having problems again, Facebook says it has no members and no admin. Sigh.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, facebook, social media

The Toronto Smalltalk User's Group is meeting this July 31:

The next meeting of the Toronto Smalltalk User Group is Tuesday, July 31 at 6:30.

Angela Wilson will be presenting a 45 minute talk at ESUG in August and would like to run through the presentation in advance.

Please join us for a sneak preview of:
Working Smarter, Not Harder: Development Tools, Processes and Automation

At Northwater we use GemStone/S with VA Smalltalk to deliver a rich application supporting our internal business clients. In this session she will share some of the approaches we've taken at Northwater, what's worked, and what's changed over the years.

We've created numerous specialized development utilities and we're continually refining our processes. The ability to extend the development environment has been instrumental in leveraging the productivity of our small group and improving the quality of the software we deploy. Angela will present some of the many tools used at Northwater, our development processes that depend on some of these tools, and the various forms of automation that pull it all together.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Via Dave Winer, I see that Sun is moving towards greater transparency:

He says: "On Monday, we will release our financial information first to the public via our website, RSS feeds and 8-K filing. Then, about 10 minutes later, we will release the information to the traditional private agencies and their paid subscribers."

IMHO, this kind of thing is more valuable than any regulations the feds have tossed at the industry, well, pretty much ever.

Dvorak has a Mac, and it seems that he likes it. I was a long time critic of the Mac as well, but I came around for much the same reason that he did:

I can see why the Mac is gaining market share, because the rationale for using one is simple. Do you want to deal with the agony of antivirus, firewall, antispyware, and other touchy software subsystems, many of which do not work well? Or do you want to boot Microsoft Word and write a document and be done with it?

That's certainly been my experience with the Mac, and it's been my wife's experience as well. To a very large extent, using a Mac is like using Smalltalk: do you want to follow the herd, or do you want to actually get something done?

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we learn how you can keep debugging later, without the trouble of getting back to the state you were in. It's all about the Smalltalk Image.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, debugger

Travis talks about some of the tool improvements, already in progress:

I just published a package called "Diggy" to the OpenRepository. Diggy is meant to be a short lived package. It's code that changes the VW debugger to use the Trippy Inspectors, rather than the old inspectors. Once it's stable, the package will be flattened back out into the original packages and removed.

Dwight Shih notes that China has a branding problem:

Recently, Sam Stevens sampled and savored a new canned cat food. I was ready to add it to his regular food rotation when I saw the words Made in China. And I paused.

There have been too many stories recently involving Chinese goods with problems - they could ask GM what that kind of inattention to detail does to a brand's image.

Technorati Tags: branding, marketing

Mathew Ingram puts his finger on the problem newspapers are having - the new ad model won't prop up the same stuff as the old model:

My friend Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 -- and others such as Lost Remote -- have already put their fingers on the crucial point that the newspaper industry is struggling with: namely, when your entire business model is predicated on scarcity (i.e., the scarcity of pages for advertising), how do you deal with the sudden abundance that the Internet has created? Supply and demand gets thrown out the window and other dynamics take hold.

What newspapers are facing is a large scale business model shift. The old model featured much higher ad revenues (which in turn allowed them to do more things). The new model doesn't have that, and this kind of change is hard - ask anyone who bought a house and then had their income drop, for instance.

This kind of thing is hardly new, of course - lost of companies have had products that "brought home the bacon" for years, but couldn't manage to find anything that completely replaced those products as they declined. No one enjoys a shrinking business, even if it's possible to run it profitably after the shrinkage - and it's often very hard to let go of "the god old days", when (insert old, expensive habits here) was possible.

Technorati Tags: media, newspapers

I've been quiet today, but busy - I'm getting the Smalltalk Daily content organized for distribution with the product. We are hoping that it makes the cut for the upcoming ObjectStudio 8 release.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk daily, screencast, smalltalk

It took me longer than I wanted, but I've created an archive of all the current Smalltalk Daily screencasts (which is why I didn't get one out today - this ate my afternoon). We are hoping to get these into the install, but it's pretty big: compressed, it's over 500 MB. If you want all the stuff to date on your own system, grab the file here - there's an index.html file all set to go to navigate.

This is just too amusing. I'm sure there's an intern or low level staffer just rolling on the floor :)

Martin Fowler's take on the state of play in software development tells me that a number of things we're ooking at in Cincom Smalltalk are dead on right now:

• Make it possible to ship Smalltalk as a DLL
• Make it possible to do "scripting" in Smalltalk

Take those capabilities, and ponder them with respect to this:

So are we returning to the language cacophony of the late 80's and early 90's? I think we will see multiple languages blathering away, but there will be an important difference. In the late 80's it was hard to get languages to inter-operate closely. These days there's a lot of attention to making environments that allow different language to co-exist closely. Scripting languages have traditionally had an intimate relationship with C. There's much effort to inter-operation on the JVM and CLR platforms. Too much has been invested in libraries for a language to ignore them.

So my sense is that we will see multiple languages used in projects with people choosing a language for what it can do in the same way that people choose frameworks now. I agree with Neal that we are entering a period of Polyglot Programming.

Interestingly enough, we talked about some of that stuff on today's podcast (which I'm still editing).

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, scripting

It's back to the logs: BottomFeeder downloads went at a rate of 149/day, which is about normal. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	343
Update	196
Mac X	145
Linux x86	111
CE ARM	56
Mac 8/9	42
Solaris	41
HPUX	22
AIX	19
SGI	17
Linux Sparc	16
Windows98/ME	15
Linux PPC	8
Sources	4
ADUX	4
CE x86	3

Which takes me to the HTML page accesses by tool:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	59.5%
Internet Explorer	27.5%
MSN Bot	7.3%
Other	2.4%
Opera	1.8%
Ocelli	1.5%

The Mozilla dominance on the HTML side continues - let's see about the syndication tools:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	24.5%
BottomFeeder	16.9%
Other	10.8%
Internet Explorer	10%
Net News Wire	6.9%
Google Feed Fetcher	6.1%
Safari RSS	4.3%
FeedOnFeeds	4.3%
BlogLines	3.1%
NewsGator	2.8%
JetBrains	2.1%
Liferea	2.1%
Akregator	1.8%
Python	1.7%
Vienna	1.5%
News Fire	1.3%
iTunes	1.1%
TVTonic	1.1%
Java	1%
Jakarta	1%
SharpReader	1%

Looks like my distribution has fallen back to the Mozilla dominated audience.

This is morbidly fascinating - Jason Calacanis has decided that Facebook (and social media in general) take too much time and effort to keep up with. Which is fine; last time I looked, these systems were all voluntary. Which makes Scoble's comments interesting - he's trying to convince people (Jason in particular) that Facebook is worth the time.

Here's the thing - it probably is, for those of us who aren't celebrities. We can keep our friends list to a reasonable size, and join (and create) groups that make sense for us. For celebrities? Either they're like Scoble, and they can revel in that level of attention, or they're like Calacanis, and it just gets overwhelming. For me, it works, so far. I don't spend much time on it, and I haven't gone nuts with the Facebook apps. I'm not actively going for a huge web of people - I'm more interested in connecting up with Smalltalkers who happen to be on Facebook.

Technorati Tags: social media, facebook

You have to love Comcast. We had a thunderstorm roll through, and our internet service and cable tv went down. Not a huge shocker; the thunder made the house shake. I called Comcast to report the outage - and that's when the fun started. I get their "technician" on the line, and he tells me:

"Our systems are being updated - could you call back after 6 AM?"

At which point I asked if they ran a 24x7 helpdesk, and he said they did. I told him no, they couldn't be 24x7 if they wanted to blow me off for 6 hours. At that point, I was put on hold, and when the guy came back, there was no talk of system updates - he took my account number, looked up my node, and told me that sure enough, the storm had taken us offline.

Why was that so hard? What I have to assume is that the helpdesk is being compensated based on how fast they "handle" calls. Blowing me off counts as "handling", so - if that tactic worked - I would have been off the line quickly, and by the time I got up in the morning, everything would probably be back up anyway.

However, that's not how I took it - and this post will be one more little straw in the growing pile of negative support stories floating around for Comcast.

Technorati Tags: PR, marketing

Scoble touched on something today that's a little worrisome - not in and of itself, but in terms of trends:

When I interviewed the Twitter team yesterday I talked about its use during disasters. Well, looks like the Los Angeles Fire Department is using Twitter to tell people about what its department is doing.

For non-emergency notifications, that's fine. In a real disaster though, your net connection is probably going to go out early. Not because the net itself is unstable, but because your connection depends on power.

My wife brought this up with respect to VOIP phone service last night. A Comcast ad rolled by, and she paused it to look at the fine print - which mentioned something on the order of 5 hours of battery backup. That's great - unless the power drops while you're asleep. In the morning, you'll simply have no phone service.

With the huge numbers of people on cable/satellite TV, we have the same problem for emergency notifications - especially once the analog "over the air" broadcasts end (supposedly in 2009). Right now, you could hook a small TV up to backup power and see something. After that flip? Not at all. What about Cell phones? The service near my parent's place in Florida still isn't back to pre-2005 levels yet. With the wrong kind of disaster, the towers just go offline - and your phone's battery won't last that long anyway.

Radio is still there, of course, and battery powered radios are common - and a good thing too, because in a real emergency, radio is probably the only reliable way to get access to information. It's an interesting change from 20-30 years ago. We have lots and lots of additional communications channels, but in a real emergency, most of the new ones are very fragile at the edge, where people access them.

Here's another case of a blogger being sued over something - and this time, it's not even something on his own blog. Instead of learning from the bad experiences of other companies that have tried this trick, are the lawyers actually devolving into stupider versions of themselves?

Hot tip number one: don't send your lawyers out into the world of PR. No good will come of it...

Technorati Tags: law, marketing

Mark Bernstein does a great job of explaining how some of the "old guard" in literary criticism just aren't keeping up. This is nothing new, either - I recall the old guard in the 80's criticizing the word processor as an abomination, saying that the typewriter forced the writer to carefully consider his words. I'm sure that the great grandfathers of those folks deplored the typewriter, as it made the creation of words too easy (compared to longhand). Going back hundreds of years, I know that Gutenberg horrified as many people as he enthralled.

The more things change...

This week we talked about scripting with Smalltalk - what works now, what doesn't, and what needs to be done. Like all of our podcasts, we roamed around a bit, including a few minutes on our Civ IV obsessions :) We mostly talked about scripting, and what kinds of things could/should be done to make that easier with Smalltalk.

As always, send feedback to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or head on over to iTunes and leave a review, or over to Podcast Alley and cast a vote for us.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, scripting

Scoble on Twitter:

The thing is I’ve met a couple of VCs who were considering investing in Twitter. The word on the street is that Twitter HAS a business plan and has done a lot of thought about where future revenues will come from. THAT is why they got invested in.

I rather suspect that their business plan is a one liner: "Get bought by Google/Yahoo/Whoever and cash out".

Technorati Tags: social media

I suppose the weather needed to emphasize my earlier point about emergency services and notification - our connection (and TV) service dropped yesterday around 5 PM. Fortunately, it was back up when we returned from the shoe shopping extravaganza, but again - during the outage - any emergency notifications coming via the net would have gone unnoticed. Meanwhile, my cell phone was almost out of juice - the Razr apparently uses power like the stereotypical drunken sailor uses alcohol...

There are the players who make watching the game a pleasure - Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn come to mind - and then there are the surly, sordid ones who soil any record they approach. That would be Barry Bonds:

Bonds has two choices here. He can keep swinging for the fences -- whacking at 3-and-0 pitches and hooking outside fastballs -- and take his chances with giving Dodgers fans or Padres fans the opportunity to ridicule him into posterity, to be viewed forever on DVD, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD and whatever new technologies are to come. Or he can make sure he hits only one home run this week, and save 756 for a seven-game homestand against Washington and Pittsburgh, the dregs of the National League. For Bonds, this city is the land of make believe. It forgives the shame be brings to the record because, well, because he wears the uniform of the home team. It's not any more complicated than that. Reality, though, exists outside of this safe house, and it threatens to be rather ugly.

I think it would be entirely appropriate for Bonds to break the home run record, and get booed for doing it. Ruth lived fast and died young, but none of what he was taking could be called performance enhancing. Aaron was a class act all the way, and while he probably played a season or two too long, he was one of the greats. Bonds? He's a walking disgrace.

Update: I'm with Andy Inatko on this. Hat tip John Dougan, in comments.

Technorati Tags: baseball

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look ata simple way to add a graphic to a Listbox - the #displayLabel method. It operates much like the #displayString method, but you need to do two things:

1. Return a Label (or subclass) from the #displayLabel method
2. Specify the appropriate property in the UI for the listbox display

Hat tip to Travis for this one - I didn't even know this existed before last Friday :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Dare Obasanjo takes a look at the A-List cognoscenti, and finds them lacking. Interestingly enough, a couple of us were chatting about Twitter and Pownce this morning, and we came to the conclusion that it was a Twitter "me too" where a bunch of developers got to dig into the Air stuff. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose.

I was listening to "This Week in Tech" this afternon while jogging - I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by the basic errors that flow through the show by this time, but today's was kind of a fun one. They had Molly Wood from "Buzz Out Loud" on, and since Dvorak was also on, they got into the whole Mac vs. PC thing. That's when the utter misinformation segment started :)

Now, I know some people have PCs and Macs that just act up compared to the norm - so it's possible tjat Molly Wood had one of those. However, she made a number of assertions that just left me going "huh, what?" In order, she said:

• Macs boot more slowly than Windows Boxes
• The iLife apps (iPhoto especially) are unusable, and crash a lot
• There's no way to view images in Finder other than one by one via preview

Hmm. My 2 year old G4 Mac Mini boots remarkably faster than the Thinkpad - it would be hard for me to compare the MacBook Pro - I've only rebooted it once so far. My daughter lives in iPhoto, and, when I told her this story in the car, she just laughed, and said that clearly, the person on the show had no idea what they were on about - which is also what applies to the final point. Here's Finder in image view mode:

Took me a second or two to figure that one out; it involved selecting a menu option. There's also a handy slider that allows you make the thumbnails bigger or smaller.

This again leads me back to my general skepticism about reporters. When they talk about subjects I know something abut, more often than not, they're wrong. Often very, very wrong. That in turn makes me skeptical about everything else, whether it's science reporting, political reporting, what have you. "Trust but Verify" seems to apply to all reporting. It probably always has though, and it's just easier to notice now.

Technorati Tags: reporting

Wired notes that the Trans-Atlantic cable connecting North America and Europe was completed on July 27th, 1866 - which revolutionized communications. We tend to think of the net as completely new, but it's really more of a continuum in communications terms: from slow foot/boat traffic, through telegraph and radio, and finally on to satellites and the internet. The 1866 cable was the biggest jump though: before that went down, news traveled from London to New York at the speed of sea travel. Afterwards? It was suddenly instantaneous.

Technorati Tags: internet, communications

I got a chance to try out Lexis-Nexis recently - to say that I am underwhelmed would be too kind. Let me see if I can catalog how it's been working for me:

• Slow as Molasses
• Power Search breaks on non-IE browsers

The latter one is simply amazing. Bear in mind that you have to pay to use this service - which again, is way, way slower than Google, and in the limited trials I've been able to put to it, it's certainly no better than Google. And to top it all off, it wants to (silently - it's not as if it warned me about browser issues) use IE rather than the browser of my choice. As I tried Firefox and Safari, I kept getting prompted as to what I should do with a DO file. As if I know :)

Finally, this just takes the cake: After I tried a Power Search using IE, this is what I got:

I suspect that my search feeds in BottomFeeder are just as (if not more) useful. At least they work :)

On today's Smalltalk Daily we do something a bit counter-intuitive: we defactor code as a way of aiding code reading and comprehension.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, defactoring, refactoring

I'm happy to announce that RC2 of ObjectStudio8 is available. You can download the install file from

ftp://ftp.cincomsmalltalk.com/pub/OS8/setup.exe
ftp://ftp.cincomsmalltalk.com/pub/OS8/setup.md5

Due to some restrictions in Windows Vista and some issues with the installer, we had to make several adjustments.

We have to use "Advertised Shortcuts", these shortcuts cannot be redirected or their properties be changed. The image and the ini files are installed into %MyDocuments% folder. The cls files installed in %ProgramFiles% are set read-only.

Be aware, that Microsoft seems to setup some UNIX-like directory structure here. Everything in %ProgramFiles% can be executed and read, but is read-only. All changeable files need to be in the users %MyDocuments% folder. All these things are necessary, if you want your users to use the regular user account in Vista and not the admin account.

Please keep that in mind for your individual applications as well.

We're confident that we can ship the final release in the very near future.

Technorati Tags: objectstudio, smalltalk, cincom smalltalk

For those of us who can't get enough Civ IV, there's the Polycast podcast - which has some great info on the new "Beyond the Sword" expansion. The only down side? Civ IV can definitely cost you sleep :)

Luís Oliveira gets the day started with a Lisp/Star Wars reference :)

Over the last few years, one of the more common complaints I've heard about Smalltalk is "not enough developers". Now that an analyst group has shot down that argument (in an SDTimes discussion about dynamic language adoption focused on Ruby Python, and PHP), can we put that one to bed?

Goulde and Hammond predicted that finding developers will not be too difficult. While they both conceded that, currently, dynamic language developers are commanding a premium price for their services, it is also possible to retrain existing developers to use these languages.

"There’s a lot of skill transfer across these languages. It’s not like you’re working in a totally different environment. They have enough similarities that developers pick it up pretty quickly," said Goulde. "These guys have worked with multiple languages for years. They try to use the best language for the purpose at hand. They’re not, by any stretch, skills limited to one language."

Unless you went out of your way to hire illiterate developers, having them learn something new should not be a problem.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, ruby

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at the package NumericCollections from the Public Store Repository. Here's part of the package comment for context:

NumericCollections adds the four basic numeric methods (+, -, *, /) to collections as well as some other methods that come as a natural follow on.

Collections can be sent any of the four basic math messages. And you can make collections be the arguments too. Some examples:

#(1 2 3 4) + #(5 6 7 8) --> #(6 8 10 12)

(Bag with: 2 with: 2 with: 6) / -2 --> Bag (-3 -1 -1)

Well worth looking at and playing with for ideas - and a neat extension to the system.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, numerics

Alan Knight explains that there's already some basic scripting support available for Cincom Smalltalk, if you load the Scripting Support package (and save the resulting image) from the public Store repository. For instance:

There are already some ways to run code from the command line in VisualWorks, e.g. -doit, -evaluate, but they don't entirely do what you want. So this adds the ability to just run a file from the command line, e.g.

vm scripting.im dostuff.st

or, if you have command line arguments, you can do them before the program, and put a -- option to indicate the program file. The program can also treat the rest of the line after it as arguments, which will show up in a variable named "arguments".

There's more detail over there; follow the link for all of it. I'll be loading that up and doing some screencasts on it, startig tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: scripting, cincom smalltalk

I understand what Ian Bicking was saying here - and yes, I know it's an ancient post from 2004 - but it serves as a launching point for a few things I wanted to say anyway :)

There's also the syntax -- it's not a bad syntax, but it's not the dominant syntax, and it clashes badly with the dominant syntax. It's hard to phrase one in terms of the other (i.e., they do not map to each other). The syntax is only a small part of it, but it's one of many things where Smalltalk reinvents everything from the ground up.

But there's a wee problem: Smalltalk came first. We didn't reinvent everything; the rest of the field went in a different direction from where we were. The end result might be the same, but I feel compelled to point that out :) This needs some comment too, however:

But it's more than just ravioli code. Smalltalk encourage a style where there's often no program at all. Everything is developed in a persistent environment where there's little distinction between code and infrastructure. You open a workspace, set up some objects and tie them together, then trigger a key method that sets it in motion. But as a result the program is hard to distinguish from your one-time workspace. Zope has a lot of the same problems, and interestingly this article advises that you follow a methodology that "Devalues the data that goes into any given ZODB storage," due the challenge of cooperating in such an environment. I know there exist better tools for Smalltalk collaboration than for Zope. But they are generally proprietary, so I dismiss them :P (I don't live in a Smalltalk world either, so please don't ask me to choose to abandon my existing tools)

Well, I know where he's coming from with that, but we've steadily been chipping away at that problem in Cincom Smalltalk for some time now. When the image starts up, there's a standard way to hook in and tell the system "my application starts here" - and the packaging tool uses it. I've written a couple of decent sized apps in the product now (BottomFeeder and Silt), and I understand this concern.

The bigger issue is the "separate environment" one - and interestingly enough, we addressed that last week on Industry Misinterpretations (and I just posted on a related topic a few minutes ago).

It has crossed my mind more than once as CST Product Manager that arrogantly telling everyone that all their tools are teh suck and they should just use the image is off-putting. We may not be able to get you to visit the Balloon, so instead, we intend to bring the Balloon to you. Over the next little while, we will be moving closer to where average developers like to sit - feel free to give us some helpful nudges along the way.

Technorati Tags: development

This is cool - American Airlines is bringing WiFi to the cabin:

Today, AirCell, the leading wireless data and voice communications provider in business aviation, announced it is teaming with American Airlines to test broadband services with passengers across the U.S. beginning in 2008. AirCell's new Broadband Internet service will allow business and leisure passengers to check e-mail, surf the Web, tap into an office network and stay current on the latest news, using their own Wi-Fi enabled laptops, PDAs, iPhones(R), BlackBerrys(R) and portable gaming systems -- while in flight. Passenger testing will be conducted on American Airlines fleet of Boeing 767-200 aircraft that primarily fly transcontinental routes. As the first to launch in-flight broadband capabilities, American and AirCell are pioneering the last frontier of domestic Internet service.

That will make the kinds of long haul flights I take on American much, much more enjoyable. Yes, I can already heare a few luddites getting ready to complain, but seriously - carrying enough books for a long flight just adds a lot of pain to my back :)

Technorati Tags: travel

Bob Westergaard has a nifty screencast up - he's porting the original Doom to Cincom Smalltalk.

The death toll reported so far is astoundingly low for a rush hour catastrophe, but - they haven't gotten to the cars in the water yet. Meanwhile, there are two new updates this morning:

• CNN has security camera footage of the collapse
• Captain's Quarters found a report on the bridge's structural state, and it looks like there were known problems

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at scripting in Cincom Smalltalk. For reference, you'll want to look at Alan's recent post on the subject.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, scripting

This article on "Coding Horror" is a nice sidebar to yesterday's post I made on "learning new stuff shouldn't be hard". It's not that it's hard - it's that people "imprint" on things they know:

Baby duck syndrome affects the way you learn to use computers and software. It can make it hard for you to make the most rational decisions about which software to use or when the learning curve of a given thing is worth the climb. In general, it makes the familiar seem more efficient and the unfamiliar less so. In the short run, this is probably true -- if you're late for a deadline, the best thing to do is not to switch to a new operating system in the hopes that your productivity will increase. In the long run, it's worth trying a few things knowing that they won't all work out, but hoping to find the tools that match your style best.

This goes well beyond software, of course. Look at almost any long lasting business process objectively.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, tools

Scoble has more faith in the staying power of a walled garden than I do:

OK, sounds like Plaxo is going to kill Facebook and bring down Facebook’s value by a few billion dollars. The bubble 2.0 will end. Zuckerberg will drag his tail away from the valley defeated. Etc etc etc. Right? It’s not going to happen. Here’s why. It’s too late and the walled garden will keep people locked in.

How's all that "walled off, custom content" on AOL doing at keeping people on the farm?

Technorati Tags: social media

Rajesh Jayaprakashh as a post that hints at a JSON implementation for CST:

Staying on the subject of Smalltalk, the VisualWorks JSON implementation is done. Don't know whether it is worthwhile (or good enough) to submit to the public repository.

If it's not there, yes - post it!

Technorati Tags: json

You can chalk this one up under "we hate our customers":

Sejas was enjoying the movie so much that she decided to film a short clip of the sci-fi adventure's climax to get her little brother hyped to go see it. Jhannet Sejas taped a few seconds of "Transformers."

Minutes later, two Arlington County police officers were pointing their flashlights at the young couple in the darkened theater and ordering them out. They confiscated the digital camera as evidence and charged Sejas, a Marymount University sophomore and Annandale resident, with a crime: illegally recording a motion picture.

Yes, it's a bad idea to pull out a camcorder in a theater - but anyone pondering this case for a nanosecond would understand that her actions would actually have led to another sale - so they deserved a little "don't do that" chat, not a criminal referral. Actual thought seems to be banned though:

Kendrick Macdowell, general counsel for the Washington-based National Association of Theatre Owners, said that illegal pirating of films costs the industry billions of dollars and that the industry was stepping up efforts to stamp it out.

Because of that, he said, there has to be a "zero-tolerance policy at the theater level."

"We cannot educate theater managers to be judges and juries in what is acceptable," he said. "Theater managers cannot distinguish between good and bad stealing."

Hey, what a coincidence: I can't distinguish between Macdowell and a stinky pile of refuse, either. Wait - maybe I can. The pile of refuse doesn't hate me

Technorati Tags: law, copyright, MPAA