SCO is going down, and they seem to have no idea why:
In a statement published this week, SCO Group blames the success of Linux and "negative publicity", as causes for its decline -- the company may need to wind up its operations after its copyright case against Novell collapsed, prompting it to file for bankruptcy.
I wonder where that negative publicity could have come from? Perhaps letting the lawyers run PR for SCO didn't work out?
Technorati Tags: law
I woke up this morning to discover that the migration I did last night - moving the blogs to a new server - had a few lingering issues. A bunch of generated urls were wrong, the RSS feeds were borked.. in general, a mess :)
I've been plugging away at that this morning, and most of the issues are resolved. Comments are still broken, as is the "printer friendly" view. I'm looking at those now
Update: Turns out that comments were broken due to a way too specific set of Apache rewrite rules. It should be good now.
Update2: The feeds have been fixed - the links in them were all messed up this morning.
While we here at Cincom are very fond of Seaside, it's not the only web framework around for Cincom Smalltalk - in fact, it's not the only cross-platform web framework for Smalltalk. The folks behind AidaWeb have fans of their own - one of them, Damir, has started a blog to promote it- it's a cross-Smalltalk dialect web framework. Damir is a newcomer both to Smalltalk and AidaWeb - it's nice to see this kind of enthusiasm. It supports all the web 2.0 goodness you would expect in a modern web platform - and you can get it either from the public store repository, or in the contributed section of our product or NC CDs. You can also head on over to the main AidaWeb site to get the latest news.
Paolo Bonzini has announced the launch of a new website for GNU Smalltalk.
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at handling Zip files in Cincom Smalltalk
I wonder is that sound I heard earlier today was a vein bursting down at stupid-central (otherwise known as the RIAA) - Amazon has a pretty clear statement on DRM on their "how to rip a CD" page:
Many of our customers have already figured out that one cheap way to get DRM-free MP3 files is to buy them on CD and rip them themselves. Luckily, we offer everyday low prices on many terrific titles to help you stock your portable player. For those of you who haven't yet dabbled in ripping your CDs, we've created this handy ripping guide that takes you through it. It's quite easy, and if you own a portable music player, it's a legal, cost-effective way to fill it up.
On the other hand, Amazon doesn't seem to hate their customers. I can't really say that about the music labels...
Randy Coulman has started a blog here on our site - you can subscribe here.
Tim Bray on Ruby:
Why are we doing this? Because, in my view, Ruby isn’t finished. It’s a great substrate for Rails, it’s immensely useful for building all sorts of things, but it’s not fast enough . I agree with Avi Bryant’s argument that a language isn’t finished until it’s fast enough to extend itself. Frankly, none of the language enhancements proposed for Ruby 2.0 make my heart go pitter-patter. But give me a Ruby with performance as good as a really good Smalltalk VM, and the space of things for which you need statically-typed languages shrinks to a really uninteresting size.
Of course, you can always try out the really good Smalltalk VM now....
Technorati Tags: smalltalk, dynamic languages, ruby
Doc Searls is wondering whether Facebook (et. al.) are the new "broadcast networks" - and whether they suffer from the same weaknesses:
We have the same problem with Facebook today that we've had with broadcast media for the duration: their customers are their advertisers, not their users; and in fact they sell the latter to the former.
Microsoft is tacitly admitting that the Vista rollout has issues: they are quietly informing OEM's that they can include an XP "downgrade" with no objections from Microsoft. CNet Reports:
While Microsoft is still pushing Vista hard, the company is quietly allowing PC makers to offer a "downgrade" option to buyers that get machines with the new operating system but want to switch to Windows XP.
Now, if Vista were a roaring success, we wouldn't be seeing this kind of thing. I suspect that MS ought to downsize their OS development staff by about 90%, and lock what's left in an off-campus building...
Since I relocated the blog server, some of the RSS and Atom feeds have been borked from time to time. I just realized why - it was an undeclared variable issue. Doh! It should be fixed now.
I'll be in Cincinnati all week, in a planning meeting. I don't know whether I'll have time to get "Smalltalk Daily" out at all during the week - the office isn't a great place to create a screencast with audio, and I don't know that I'll have time in the hotel room to get to it. So - during the upcoming week, you can have a look through the archives - there's now just over a year's worth of material in there :)
Technorati Tags: screencast, smalltalk
Serge Stinckwich has announced another Smalltalk party in Paris this December - with concentrations on Seaside, Croquet, and Squeak. Sounds like fun - the announcement is in French.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
This week we discussed DSLs (Domain Specific Languages), and how Smalltalk already has much of the power people reach for in a DSL. Along the way we talked about the various parsers that have been written for Cincom Smalltalk. As usual, we hit a number of other topics. We also talked about an upcoming position shift involving James and Arden Thomas.
As usual, feel free to send feedback to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - if you include your question in mp3 format, we'll play it on the air. You can also visit us on iTunes, over at Podcast Alley, or in the Facebook group Industry Misinterpretations.
Enclosures:
[http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/audio/2007/industry_misinterpretations54.mp3 ( Size: 13735573 )]
This morning's hot tip: don't patch your server at 5AM. I realized that the podcast still hadn't been pushed out this morning, so I tried to do that - while also realizing that I had allowed travel time on the assumption that I was heading to the close airport (BWI), when I actually needed to get to the far one (DCA). Thus, a bad patch was applied and I took the server down :)
Obviously, it's back now.
How primitive is the DCA (Washington Reagan)? There's no Wifi (paid or otherwise) - so anyone stuck there who wants to get online has to go old school:
Productive, it's not :)
Via Doc Searls, we learn that the networks are still ruled by the deeply, deeply stupid. NBC is offering its own download service - the kind that only a moron could love:
In their haste to try to break Apple’s well-earned stronghold on the content download market, NBC is starting its own download service. Rather than charge for the downloads, the downloads will contain unskippable commercials, and according to the Times the downloads will “degrade after the seven-day period and be unwatchable.” Jeff Gaspin, president of NBC Universal Television Group, calls this “kind of like Mission Impossible.”
Yeah, I'm dying to replicate those stupid unskippable ads on DVDs (movies that were new 5 years ago!), and then have it be unwatchable after 7 days. Wake me when they grow a brain.
I learned something interesting on the vwnc mailing list this morning - Niall Ross has ported Pier from Squeak to CST - the initial port is in the public store. Cool! Here's the top of the Pier page summary on what Pier is:
Pier is a powerful and extensible implementation of a meta-described content management and Wiki system, written with objects from top to bottom
Another small nit has been fixed - it turns out that the export to Twitter was pushing out relative urls - which meant that the "new blog post" notices were fairly useless. That should be fixed now.
Update: hmm - not so much...
We have some interesting podcasts getting recorded this week:
So it should be a fun set of podcasts - I'm not sure what schedule I'll be releasing them on, but these are coming up.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
Patrick Logan asks a good question:
Pier may be the best extension of Ward Cunningham's "wiki" concept. And it is built on Magritte, which may be the best self-describing meta application system on... well, on earth.
And Cincom Smalltalk may be the best OO dynamic language system, probably the best such commercial system, and has all the openness that Smalltalk systems have had going back to the early 1980s. In fact CST's lineage goes all the way back. (Why would you use Ruby when you could use Smalltalk???)
Seaside works out of the box now, and we'll be supporting it as of January.
Sitting here and looking at how forms work in Seaside, it hit me just how much simpler Seaside really is. I've done planty of SSP and Servlet style form handling; it's not complicated, and sure, there are frameworks that do nice things like pull data out of forms and stuff them in specific instance variables of an object. However, you still have to create the form and the servlet. Consider the Seaside equivalent of a form:
renderContentOn: html html form: [html heading: 'Get the Field Set' level: 2. html text: 'Field'. html textInput callback: [:input | field := input]. html break. html submitButton callback: [self save]].
Yes, that's missing style information, and it's a trivial form - but just look at what's there - you can tell exactly what's happening in the form by looking at the code. That's a far cry from the way things work over in the servlet world.
Michael Lucas-Smith explains what's going on with the Seaside work in Cincom Smalltalk.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
Ramon Leon gives us a simple Wiki example in Seaside - the funny thing about this is, here at our interal "Camp Seaside" this week, we used a Wiki as a small example to build yesterday. Needless to say, Ramon's example is better than what we did yesterday :)
Caveat: as Ramon points out, use Pier if you want a production Wiki - this is a tutorial scale example.
Boy, this is exactly the kind of thing I want floating around in my neighborhood - especially after the local hackers get at it :)
Urballoon -- an "urban media space" wherein a balloon hovers three stories in the air, equipped with a projector and a wireless connection. The balloon / projector is used to "broadcast" images or text sent to it via a website onto the ground below. Anyone can hop on the page and create a message for the balloon, so we'll assume they have very good profanity filters.
I have enough stuff I don't want in my inbox - I don't need it outdoors, too :)
This is interesting - Yahoo is shuttering it's Podcast search/index site. I guess I can stop pushing out the Yahoo media tags :)
I love this notion that having manifest type information tells you anything of value. Here's Cedric Beust on the matter:
This "continuous tax" is defined by the fact that when you need to maintain or use an API that was written in a language such as Ruby or Python, you have very little information available to you, and even if you eventually figure it out by looking at the sources of the tests (does anyone ever do that?), this knowledge you gain is ephemereal, and you will have to go through that same exercise if you need to modify this same portion of code a year later.
I have no idea why it helps me to know that an arbitrary variable is of type int or char. When confronted with an API like this:
this.startServer();
and some list of arguments, I'm helped a whole lot less than I am by something like this:
self startServerOnPort:
In the latter example, the name of the method describes the argument(s). In Smalltalk, you get method names that describe their arguments right in the method name - in languages like Java, you get long lists of easily interchanged variables, forcing you to look in secondary sources for the correct incantation.
Yes, there's a continuous tax, all right - but Cedric Beust is the one paying it, not me :)
Technorati Tags: smalltalk, dynamic languages
We had a pretty good day of Seaside based meetings - we wrapped up at dinner after 2 podcasts:
It's been a good week :)
Today's Smalltalk Daily comes courtesy of Andres Valloud, who's part of our engineering staff. The topic: hashing in Smalltalk, which is one of his passions.
It's an interesting juxtaposition between the Yankees and the Mets - the Yankees have spent the last two months roaring back into contention - they have the wild card, and put a real scare into Boston for the AL East. Meanwhile in Queens, the Mets have been doing a 1978 Red Sox imitation - the Phillies are now tied for first place with two days left in the season - and there's no guarantee that the loser will make the playoffs, because the NL West teams are vying for the wild card, too. The Yankees are set - the Mets are in nail biting mode.
Technorati Tags: baseball
When you lose evangelists like Chris Pirillo from the Windows camp, it's a bad sign:
Do I recommend Windows Vista? Not a snowball’s chance in………..I’m waiting on Apple to release Mac OS X Leopard. As far as I’m concerned at this point, Microsoft is taking a huge hit. The future of Windows, in my opinion, is inside a Virtual Machine or BootCamp on a Mac.
Sure, there are going to be a lot of people running Windows for a very long time - but the "bleeding edge" crowd isn't part of that crowd anymore. Microsoft Windows is now part of the background - commonplace, but not terribly interesting.
Hat tip Rob Fahrni. - and don't miss what he says about the appropriate choice for your non-technical friends/family who need a new machine:
The most obvious choice is Macintosh, period. If your parents already have a Windows box and $600.00 they can score a Mac mini and hook it up to their existing monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Apple pays very close attention to the user experience, everything just works.
Could not have said it better myself.
Here's what we needed to wind up our planning meeting: a fire drill:
See how excited Andreas looked to be heading back into the building :)
Joe Wilcox lists a lot of reasons for Vista's "thud" arrival, and tries to explain how they don't imply failure. Based on how MS wanted this OS to roll out, I'm not sure what else you could call it - it's simply not a positive sign that OEMs have asked for (and gotten permission for) the ability to ship XP on new hardware sales.
Technorati Tags: PR
|
| Subscribe to WebVelocity |
| Visit this group |
