management

No Reviews, Please

October 17, 2007 7:32:03.132

While I understand what the Cafe in this story is worried about, trying to pre-censor customers is not the best way to proceed:

What I was told, in a nutshell, is that the café staff has encountered a stream of would-be critics “with attitude,” predisposed to take issue with or be critical of the business. Whether or not this is a correct perception, there are many more outlets (Yelp being only one) for customers and consumers to voice opinions about businesses on the Internet. And there’s little most of these businesses can do about it, for better or for worse.

For good or ill, you just have to take the commentary. Anyone can be a critic now; it's no longer limited to the food guy at the local paper. Are you going to get unfair, negative, personal attacks? Yes, you will - but putting up a sign that asks people not to do that isn't part of the answer, IMHO.

Here's what I do, in my role as product evangelist: I have search feeds set up for various terms that might come up in a discussion of our product: Smaltalk, Cincom, Cincom+Smalltalk, etc. I scan the results every day, and I respond to the negative ones - not with exasperation, but with questions for details on the problem tat generated the negative post. Is that going to solve every issue? No - there are trolls, and there's nothing you can do about them. Over the long haul, your dedicated customers will recognize and tune out the trolls though.

Ultimately, you can't stand back and to stop the tide of commentary. The best you can do is jump in and try to ride along.

Hat tip Mathew Ingram, which is where I noticed this.

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screencast

Smalltalk Daily 10/17/07: HTTP and Scripting

October 17, 2007 11:53:46.279

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we use Smalltalk as a scripting solution for a simple HTTP issue - restoring spammed Wiki pages.

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Macintosh

MacBook Pro and Sleep

October 17, 2007 13:44:18.542

Phil Windley has a good rundown on how to adjust the sleep/hibernate modes on the MacBook Pro. I'm posting this mainly so that I can find this later, when I want it :)

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development

When your tools suck...

October 17, 2007 20:09:43.360

I love this theory that not having a decent debugger is somehow a good thing - here's Giles Bowkett:

Asking why Ruby has weak debugger support is like asking why a dolphin doesn't have gills. Ruby has weak debugger support because Ruby programmers shouldn't be using a debugger. Ruby supports TDD and BDD better than any other language except possibly Smalltalk. Debugger support is for languages that you can't run tests against gracefully.

Yes, Smalltalk supports it better, in large measure because we have a debugger. For instance, have a look at this short (unnarrated) screencast. The summary: The Smalltalk debugger can support TDD:

Debugger Screencast

So no Giles, the absence of a debugger is not a feature - it's a fairly significant lack in your toolset.

Update: I love this. I left a short comment on Giles' blog, with a tinyurl link back here. His justification for deleting my comment:

when I said write politely or post in your own blog, I didn't mean that links to rude blogs were somehow not rude. I wish you people were more respectful with my time. There was a very reasonable counterargument, complete with excellent screencast, which I had to delete. Please understand, if your comments are rude, I will delete them, no matter how well-reasoned they are, no matter how polished their presentation, no matter how much I might respect you. I do not tolerate rudeness on my blog, and there are no exceptions. Please respect my time and your own. Posting comments I'm guaranteed to delete is wasteful.

Sounds a little odd, especially when we we get here:

For a quick summary, the commenter did a screencast of the Smalltalk debugger. The screencast showed the debugger in action. I admit, it looks cool. However, it still looks like a crutch to me. The screencast's argument was basically, look, here's the Smalltalk debugger, see how cool it is? Therefore it can't be a crutch. Of course it can. Haven't you ever met a beautiful woman who was mean to people, or a highly intelligent alcoholic? People make crutches out of their best features in real life all the time. Somehow it's impossible in computers? Of course not. Haven't you ever seen a useless but fun high-tech toy? A feature can be cool and still a crutch nonetheless.

Hmm. Yes, my post here is snarky. However, if Giles thinks I was just showing something cool, he missed the entire point of the post: the Smalltalk debugger supports TDD. Watch it again, Giles - I wrote a test, ran it. It failed. I debugged the test, had the debugger create the missing method for me - whereupon I wrote the code for the method in the debugger, and ran the test again. That's not a crutch: it's taking TDD to the next level.

Face it, Giles - you have the worst of this argument. Ruby ought to have a Smalltalk style debugger, and if it did, every Ruby developer would use it. The fact that Ruby doesn't have such a debugger is not a feature. Does this mean that Ruby sucks? No, of course not. I just think the argument that not having a debugger is a good thing is lame.

Update2: When you know you've lost, just close comments to make sure you get the last word. Oh, and make sure to swear (see his update stream for that) while you're at it - that shows 'em:

Although I am aware that the Smalltalk debugger works in the context of TDD, and was initially aware of that when I wrote the post, before any comments were made, because anyone with any knowledge of Smalltalk's history or the history of TDD knows that, it doesn't change my opinion that debuggers work backwards. Debuggers are based on the idea that the code base has enough places bugs could happen that the work of locating the bug is involved enough to justify machine assistance. This is not true of well-tested code. More importantly, the whole point of [T|B]DD is that you identify the bugs before you write the code. As tools which track down bugs in existing code, debuggers presume and encourage a workflow which is exactly backwards.

Umm, yeah - because we all write perfect code the first time, right out of the gate. Sure. And stop/restart is ever so much more productive than what I showed in the screencast, where you never leave the context of your code. Sure Giles - it's far more productive to do the test/run/break/test/run/break cycle than what I showed. You keep believing that - I'll be over here, being productive :)

Update 3: Oh, this just takes the cake - In the comments, Giles says:

Why on earth would I? How is supporting me rude? Why would I be offended by an offer of support?

So it's pretty simple, really - suck up to him, and it's open season. Disagree, and you get edited out. I've seen that behavior on political blogs, but sheesh.

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smalltalk

Automating Your Builds

October 18, 2007 6:27:00.007

Randy Coulman has put together a good series of posts on automating builds - his shop uses CruiseControl for that. Check it out.

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screencast

Smalltalk Daily 10/18/07: TDD and the Debugger

October 18, 2007 9:27:53.151

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at how the debugger can be an integral part of Test Driven Development in Cincom Smalltalk: by keeping you in the flow of your coding.

For this screencast, I also prepared a couple of different formats. You can download a 5MB mp4 here. Or, you can visit YouTube - I uploaded the video there (given the downsizing of the video size, it's a bit blurry there).

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support

Going Medieval

October 18, 2007 12:26:51.048

When your customer service drives this kind of hammer wielding behavior from the proverbial "little old lady who drives to church on Sundays", then you're doing something wrong:

"I scared the tar out of some people, at least," she says. "It had never occurred to me to take a hammer to a phone company before, but I was just so upset. . . . After I hit the keyboard, I turned to this blonde who had been there the previous Friday, the one who told me to wait for the manager, and I said, ' Now do I have your attention?' "

Somewhat extreme, but I have to say, I've been tempted when the phone rep tells me "we don't support Linux", or "we don't support Mac" - when the problem is that the cable modem has no signal.

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news

Life Imitates RoboCop

October 18, 2007 17:58:57.802

Not a good imitation, either: the headline reads "Robot Cannon Kills 9, Wounds 14". There's a headline I would not have predicted back in high school.

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development

Coding Without Taxation

October 18, 2007 20:00:34.428

Russ Olsen takes the absurd "continuous tax of dynamic languages" argument and throws it back at static typing fans. I think Russ' points are pretty good.

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screencast

Smalltalk Daily 10/19/07: Using XPath

October 19, 2007 11:32:07.521

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a brief look at using XPath in Cincom Smalltalk.

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seaside

New Seaside Tutorial

October 19, 2007 11:48:15.422

This is good news for anyone looking for up to date Seaside info - Michael Perscheid has announced a Seaside 2.8 tutorial. It's Squeak based, but the code maps over to Cincom Smalltalk as well. I'll likely do some screencasts on it next week.

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media

Inertia

October 19, 2007 12:34:30.631

Mathew Ingram points to some interesting "River of News" work that Dave Winer has been doing, and wonders why the papers themselves haven't been trying anything similar:

I don’t understand why the Times -- or other newspapers, for that matter -- don’t provide that kind of alternative search or browsing tool themselves. It’s not rocket science (no offence, Dave) and it might even attract users who don’t want to use the linear approach that most papers default to. Why not have a keyword tag cloud too? The Washington Post had a demo of such a feature awhile back as part of its Post Remix lab project, but it never became part of the actual site, which I think is a shame.

I think the answer is simple inertia. Newsapers are an old business - they have fairly set ways of doing things, and geting changes to take place is hard. Heck, never mind newspapers - look at technology companies. Most of the "old" ones are 30-40 years old at most, and you would think that technology companies would be open to change - but you would be largely wrong.

Look at Microsoft now, or IBM back in the 80s. Look at how much difficulty established vendors have with things like Open Source. The news media is being forced to deal with a huge change in a very accelerated fashion - it's just the "old think" of the established players that stands in their way. The thing is though, it's not any different elsewhere in the business world - media is just being forced to adjust more quickly.

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smalltalk

On Debuggers

October 19, 2007 13:15:11.855

I'm looking back at the debugger kerfuffle that broke out a couple of days ago - Giles "disagree with me and no comment for you" Bowkett dug the hole deeper in his updates:

  1. Debuggers encourage a backwards workflow
  2. Debuggers are a historical artifact of C pointer mechanics and primitive flow control

If he's ever seen a debugger and actually understood what he was looking at, he wouldn't have such ideas. Let's go back to C for a moment, since he brings it up. I spent my time in the C dungeons years ago, and I used both "printf debugging" and a decent symbolic debugger. When you have a pointer error, not using a debugger is just an invitation to waste time. You can argue that the error should not have happened at all - and sure, having a good test suite will prevent a lot of problems. Bottom line though, you end up with pojnter bugs - even if your code is perfect, the code you integrate with is something else again. Maybe Giles enjoys pounding his head against the keyboard; I don't.

Let's move on from C though, to better languages like Smalltalk and Ruby. I did a screencast of the Smalltalk debugger in action, doing TDD. Never mind the TDD part for a moment - just consider what I was doing: I was writing code in the debugger, with all the application context and state available to me. Ask yourself: when you are crafting new code for something, is having that information helpful? Yes, you should have tests, but that doesn't matter - having the tests and the context is highly useful.

The way Troy put things in the comments echos something I've said for years: with most debuggers (and I suspect that this is all Giles has had experience with), you're a forensic pathologist. The patient is dead; the best you can do is figure out what killed him, and prevent the next version of the app from dying of the same thing. With Smalltalk, you're a surgeon: the patient is sedated, and you have him on the table. You can not only figure out what made him sick - you can fix it and let him walk off under his own power.

That's a huge thing, and it's one of the keys to Smalltalk's productivity. The "fix and continue" support in Eclipse and VisualStudio are pale imitations - your ability to fix things is highly constrained. In Smalltalk, you can do whatever you want: add new instance variables to classes (which will modify all extant instances), add new code, modify existing code, anything. You can do as complex an operation on the patient as you can imagine. Oh - and when you get an exception while debugging, you get another debugger - as opposed to being tossed out of the debugger.

Even that doesn't get at everything though. There's an internal discussion going on here at Cincom, as to whether the term "Debugger" really captures the entire idea for us. This is actually a good question, because the tool is far more than a debugger. It allows you to look at all system state at any time. One of the things I did when I was first learning Smalltalk was to hit ctrl-c (ctrl-y now) and just walk through the UI code: it allowed me to look, in real time, at how the system operated. I do this with code I don't really understand now, too. When I look at Seaside, I often drop into the debugger to look around - because it's easier to look at the real state of the system than it is to try and imagine it all in my head.

And that's the problem with Giles' "Debuggers are harmful" thesis: he somehow expects developers to keep all state in their head at all times. You know what? One of the promises of computers is that they allow us to offload a lot of the drudgery to the system - because it doesn't mind handling it, and it's pretty good at it. It's no longer 1975 - we don't have to stack up the punch cards, run the mental tests over and over so as to prevent a botched (and expensive) run: we can ask the system to explain itself.

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spam

Spam Attacks

October 19, 2007 17:31:34.555

It's apparently spam season - there's been a wave of spam pounding the blogs this last week. Most of it has been blocked, but the occasional piece has gotten through - and I then get rid of it by hand.

The type of attack is the classic "untrain the Baysian filter" thing - a string of nonsense words, followed by a link. However, there's been some variation. The first wave included links that went to good sites - I guess this is to cause grief for blacklist filters. Now, the spam I'm seeing has two links: One an href, the other plain text. Which one goes to a spam site and which one goes to a "real" site varies.

The bottom line is, the spammers are changing their tactics again.

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PR

I've joined the club

October 19, 2007 17:40:24.242

I've joined the "called by Brian Connolly club". For those of you following the tale, he's the guy behind this mess. Today, he called, getting my business line from corporate HQ. Odd conversation; he's now playing "good cop" to his earlier "bad cop". He had some weird notion that Cincom sold blogging software :)

Here's a tip for you, Brian: next time you make a cold call, do some minimal research so that you have some small idea what the person you're calling does for a living. Oh, and doing a reverse lookup on the phone number he called from, it tracks back to the same place fingered by Mike Krempasky when he looked into this guy.

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smalltalk

Demonstration Videos

October 19, 2007 21:47:41.969

I've added a new section to the main Smalltalk site - Smalltalk Videos. There's only one video there right now, and I don't expect the content there to increase as quickly as "Smalltalk Daily" does - but it's a start.

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smalltalk

What the Debugger Is

October 20, 2007 12:05:13.104

I really like this explanation of the Smalltalk debugger - especially since it comes from a new Smalltalker, not one of us arrogant jerks from "back in the day" :). Ben Matasar offers this:

I think the name debugger gives people the wrong idea about what it is, at least in Smalltalk. When I first came to Smalltalk in December of last year I tried not to use the debugger, and I did think of it as a crutch. Now I use it all the time to get my bearings around a codebase. In fact, I write quite a bit of my code directly in the debugger, often with my web browser spinning in the background waiting for me to send the response.
I now think of it as a method context browser, where you have an active REPL at every step of the call stack. This is nice because you can send messages to the objects, to poke them and figure out how they're going to respond to messages.

Remember that most of coding is reading other people's code. Ask yourself this: is that code more understandable on its own, or in its proper context?

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general

The Annual Halloween Party

October 20, 2007 12:38:04.283

Tonight's our annual Halloween party - as always, I have to make a last minute run to the store for supplies. There's also the Halloween decorations, and general cleaning to finish up - it should be a busy afternoon of preparations.

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media

Misreading the News

October 21, 2007 0:04:53.636

Nick Carr tries to cite a very dense paper to make the case that the NY Times was actually succeeding with TimesSelect:

Even though news may, for better or worse, want to be free on the web, that doesn't mean that charging for online news is always wrong. Jarvis dismissed TimesSelect as "a cynical act doomed from the start." More likely, it was a wise business decision that made the Times, and its shareholders, more money than they would have earned without the paywall. Gentzcow's paper will serve as a profitable read for any manager struggling with setting strategy for an online operation that cannibalizes a traditional business line. What it underscores is that setting prices should be a rational act, not an ideological or sentimental one.

Here's the problem: the study and Carr both assume that my choices are limited to paying for TimesSelect or not getting the information. This ignores reality - there are more news sources available to me than I can shake a stick at. Much of what was behind the paywall was op/ed pieces; there's certainly no shortage of opinions available for free on the net. The problem with Carr's theory is that he assumes that I can't substitute for the stuff behind a paywall. I think the editors at the Times learned something over the last couple of years that Carr still hasn't figured out: it was all too easy to find substitutes for their supposed superstars.

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podcasting

This week's Podcast

October 21, 2007 9:56:18.000

We are recording this week's "Industry Misinterpretations" tonight - we have Stephen Travis Pope on as our guest. Stephen is a long time Smalltalker, going back to the early days at PARC and ParcPlace. I met Stephen about a decade ago, when I co-taught an "Intro to Smalltalk" class with him.

He's been doing musical work in Smalltalk for most of the last 2 decades - you can check out his Siren system here. We'll be talking about Smalltalk history and his musical work.

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browsers

Browser Back and Forth

October 21, 2007 10:14:21.639

I'm still waiting for one of the main browsers for the Mac to stabilize. Safari is mostly ok, but periodically gets into a confused state - this morning, my wife's Mac stopped being able to deal with Javascript. It was enabled, but wouldn't work until we killed the application and restarted. Very odd.

I had switched to Firefox, but I switched back - it seems very unstable on the Mac, locking up for no good reason more than once per day. On Windows, Firefox is a pig (the developers really, really need to use a decent GC), but it seems mostly stable. On the Mac - not so much.

So I switch back and forth, waiting for stability...

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travel

Insecurity at the Airport

October 21, 2007 10:22:19.411

One of the things that continues to boggle me about the long lines at airport security stations is the security risk created by those long lines. Think about it - if someone wanted to create an incident, isn't a huge line of immobile people a target? That's why the "tomato juice" story from yesterday caught my eye:

People were welcomed to Terminal D of LaGuardia Airport with a line so long, it was difficult to tell where it began, or where it ended - all because someone spilled tomato juice on an x-ray machine.

So in short, a team of two people could create havoc: the first one "accidentally" takes out a scanner. The second one waits for the line to get big, and uses a bomb. If and when something happens, I wonder if anyone will question the ruleset that created the problem.

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cincom

Video Viewing on the Site

October 21, 2007 10:41:07.984

I noticed a comment about the mp4 video files I have been posting - Safari wasn't picking them up. Well, it turns out that I didn't have the mime type set up properly on the server side, so proper handling in the browser was hit or miss. That's been fixed now - I just tested in Safari myself.

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spam

The Spam Storm Explained?

October 21, 2007 18:32:05.715

The Guardian may have the reason for the last round of spam attacks that I (and everyone else) have been seeing on the net: a growing botnet:

It gets worse. Storm's delivery mechanism changes regularly. It began as PDF spam, then morphed into e-cards and YouTube invites. It then started posting blog-comment spam, again trying to trick viewers into clicking infected links. Similarly, the Storm email changes all the time, with new, topical subject lines and text. And last month Storm began attacking anti-spam sites focused on identifying it. It has also attacked the personal website of a malware expert who published an analysis of how it worked.

I had been wondering about those waves (PDFs and e-cards) of spam. More recently (I mentioned this the other day), I've been seeing tons more comment spam than normal. I wonder if there's a specific plan, or whether someone is building a huge "rent a bot" (or heck, maybe they already have) network? Would I see a difference between spread attempts and spam campaigns that were paid for?

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screencast

Smalltalk Daily 10/22/07: Turning on Syntax Highlighting

October 22, 2007 8:30:27.979

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we turn on color syntax highlighting - which makes things easier to follow in the code browser.

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podcast

Industry Misinterpretations 58: Siren Song Part 1

October 22, 2007 9:03:56.642

Yesterday, I spoke to Stephen Travis Pope. Stephen has been part of the Smalltalk community for a very long time, stretching back to the Xerox PARC days. I first met him back when I was a trainer at ParcPlace - he was doing consulting work at the time, and co-taught a class with me.

Stephen has been working on what is now Siren for about twenty years now - there's a lot of information about it - and its history - on his website. We talked about a number of things - Smalltalk design, his work with Siren, the state of Smalltalk - so this is a two part episode. I'll have part two out next week.

As always, please send all feedback to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or head on over to iTunes and leave a review, Podcast Alley and cast a vote, or visit us on Facebook at the Industry Misinterpretations group.

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Enclosures:
[http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/audio/2007/industry_misinterpretations58.mp3 ( Size: 11940491 )]

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management

When Everyone Wants to Lose

October 22, 2007 10:59:11.928

I'm reading this piece from Deadline Hollywood, and it's telling me that both the writers and the owners are ok with a strike - because they both think they'll win. I wonder if there's anyone sane enough to consider how long it took baseball to recover from the 1994 strike - or how hockey is dealing with the aftermath of the lockout?

Somehow, I'm thinking that a schedule full of reality shows isn't going to cut it - and I don't know that Hollywood has a Cal Ripken around to bring the shine back, either.

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itNews

Parallels or Fusion?

October 22, 2007 17:34:34.020

Phile Windley has done a review of Parallels and Fusion, comparing and contrasting them. Sounds like Parallels is the right product for my needs, but yours might differ.

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development

Reality Check

October 23, 2007 6:37:21.923

This post from Shelley Powers looked like it had promise - pondering the notion of flawed but popular languages - but then I saw that she filed Java under "Perfect", but barely used.

*cough*

Filing Java under either 'perfect' or 'barely used' is just odd. And C++ as simple and approachable?

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screencast

Smalltalk Daily 10/23/07: Polymorphism in Smalltalk

October 23, 2007 9:59:10.377

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at how Polymorphism in Smalltalk makes for simpler code.

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PR

The first rule of holes

October 23, 2007 10:21:31.048

Looks like Comcast hasn't figured out that "stop digging" is a good rule of thumb when you find yourself in a hole:

Last week, the folks at cable giant Comcast asked for more time to give a nuanced response to a report that the company was blocking some peer-to-peer traffic on its network. The public relations staff at the Philadelphia company seemed genuinely baffled by accusations that it was interfering with file-sharing applications like BitTorrent and Gnutella. They stubbornly insisted that they did not monitor or block any Internet traffic despite strong evidence to the contrary.
...
Speaking on background in a phone interview earlier today, a Comcast Internet executive admitted that reality was a little more complex. The company uses data management technologies to conserve bandwidth and allow customers to experience the Internet without delays. As part of that management process, he said, the company occasionally but not always delays some peer-to-peer file transfers that eat into Internet speeds for other users on the network.

This is the kind of thing that might not even look bad if Comcast were being open about it. Instead, it's been discovered by people digging. It's not as if BitTorrent is exclusively pirate-ware, either - Linux distros use it to ship files, as do others who have lots of content to push.

Heck, it ends up looking even dumber than that - Gizmodo is reporting that Comcast is also blocking Lotus Notes:

The EFF found that not just Gnutella -- another file sharing app -- was being blocked, but Lotus Notes, an app businesses use to share calendars, emails and files over the net had its traffic interfered with as well.

Yeah, all those pirate Notes users are a problem. Sounds like they've got a brain dead monitor that looks for two way synch traffic, period. I wonder if they'll end up accidentally killing Feed readers and iTunes next. What Comcast needs here is a little transparency. I understand the idea of limiting bandwidth hogs - what irritates me is having no idea what counts as "bandwidth hogging". I download new builds of our product from the engineering group about once a week. If I changed that to daily, would I end up falling into the "evil" bucket?

Update: I agree with Mike Masnick of TechDirt:

Besides, what's wrong with simply telling people what the limitations are and then going after the violators for terms of service breaches? In being so secretive and misleading about it, all it's doing is causing many more people to get upset with Comcast and think that they're being targeted (even if they're not). It's a ridiculous PR situation for Comcast to be in -- and it could be solved easily enough if Comcast stopped beating around the bush, stopped giving gobbledy-gook doublespeak responses that don't actually answer the questions people are asking and simply told people what they're doing and why.

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law

No Shame

October 23, 2007 15:34:47.187

I see that Amazon still has no shame in the patent arena. Having (finally) had the "one click" patent tossed, they've been awarded a patent for this:

Search engine system supporting inclusion of unformatted search string after domain name portion of URL

I have a question for the three people who are listed as the *cough* inventors *cough* - Andrew Jassy, Udi Manber, and Jonathan Leblang (and the moron of a patent examiner who let this through): do you feel any shame at all for having your names associated with a clearly bogus patent? Here, let me show you the term I have in mind for this "invention": obvious.

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itNews

A Reason to Switch

October 24, 2007 6:45:25.970

I was just telling people (last weekend at our Halloween party) that I saw no reason to switch my internet service to Verizon's FIOS - and then this story comes along:

Some residents of New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey who live inside the boundaries of Verizon's FiOS network will be the first to be able to take advantage of Verizon's new 20/20 FiOS service. As the name implies, 20/20 FiOS is a symmetrical 20Mbps connection (same speed in both directions), and it's one of the first symmetrical services to target the consumer market.

If they extend that to my area, I have a reason to switch. All I can say is, wow.

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smalltalk

Smalltalk at OOPSLA

October 24, 2007 8:21:46.808

Nicholas Chen reports on some Smalltalk happenings at OOPSLA this week. Sounds like I missed an interesting conference.

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screencast

Smalltalk Daily 10/24/07: Launching a Web Browser

October 24, 2007 8:45:50.719

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at launching a web browser from within Cincom Smalltalk

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cst

October Smalltalk Digest

October 24, 2007 11:10:23.129

The October Cincom Smalltalk Digest is now online.

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itNews

Billions For Facebook?

October 24, 2007 12:22:18.652

Mathew Ingram asks the obvious question about the Facebook acquisition rumors: $15 Billion? If that amount bears any resemblance to reality, then perhaps the bidders should look back at the Skype deal for instructive second thoughts.

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spam

The Spam Fight Might Create Casualties

October 24, 2007 13:26:34.787

Ok, this is interesting in a "inside Google" sort of way. TechCrunch reports that Google has launched a de-ranking offensive against blog link farms. This is a good thing, because search results will often take you to these bogus sites rather than the original content source.

However - as with any such battle, it looks like there's been some collateral damage:

The AOL owned Weblogs Inc was not immune, with leading Gadget blog Engadget dropping from PR 7 to PR5, Autoblog (6 to 4) and DownloadSquad (5 to 4).

That caught my attention, because the PageRank of this site is a decent 7 (scale of 10). It's just weird for my blog to have better PageRank than a site as popular as Engadget. I suspect that this move is going to create an awful lot of tooth grinding.

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cst

Role Change

October 24, 2007 14:49:10.463

I've mentioned this before, but we formally announced the change today in the Cincom Smalltalk Digest for October: Arden Thomas is now the Product Manager, and I'm now the Product Evangelist. Which is really just a formalization of what we were each doing anyway. Arden is a great guy who's been around Smalltalk a long time - he gives some of that background over on his blog.

Interestingly enough, Arden and I go back a ways. We both worked at ParcPlace and its successors in the 90's - and in 1995 we switched jobs - I moved from training and consulting to Sales Engineering, and he went the other way. We each had it in our heads that it would drop our travel requirements :) Even further back, we attended the same high school at the same time - Arden even had my dad as a math teacher. We didn't know each other back then - which is too bad, because I could have written him hall passes :)

Anyway, this is a good move for everyone, and it should help us keep the Smalltalk ball moving forward. Why don't you go ahead and subscribe to Arden's blog now?

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cst

OOPSLA Posts

October 24, 2007 21:14:19.842

Travis has posted up a bunch of updates from this year's OOPSLA conference - here are the direct links:

I'll update the links if there are more OOPSLA related posts from any of the Cincom attendees.

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