Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

I finally finished reading "Empire Express" last week. It was a good look at the building of the transcontinental railroad here in the US - the author did fairly exhaustive research, as he had a lot of personal details for the principle players at the Central Pacific RR and the Union Pacific RR.

The last segment went over the Congressional hearings on the scandals surrounding the build out - the bribery, the extra, useless track that was laid - forgetting the specific subject for a moment, anyone who has ever watched a Congressional hearing (pick your favorite scandal) would feel right at home - the 19th century ones seem to have been the same as the modern ones :)

It was a fun read - but an involved one, at over 700 pages. I'm now on to a another massive tome: "The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln" by Sean Wilentz. That should keep me busy for awhile.

Technorati Tags: history, railroads

I've been reading about Hulu this morning - the joint venture between Fox and NBC. They've launched in beta, and are allowing their various partners to start distributing content. There are a number of positive reviews around, but TechCrunch zeroes in on the big mistake they are making: they are still trapped in the TV scheduling mentality:

Just when particular videos will be available through Hulu - and how long we can expect them to stay on Hulu - will vary from video to video. However, as a general rule TV shows will be available on Hulu by midnight Hawaii time after they debut on normal television. As another general rule, Hulu will keep distributing TV shows until five weeks of newer episodes have passed, at which point older shows will presumably just disappear from the site.

That expiration thing is just stupid. I have plenty of friends who have gotten into shows well after they have been on the air - and they expect to be able to watch the older stuff to catch up. That might mean DVDs, it might mean iTunes - it could mean Hulu, if the people who made this scheduling decision weren't being dumb.

I caught up on "Buffy" that way, actually - I started watching during season 5, and F/X was broadcasting two episodes of the older shows every morning. I had my ReplayTV catch them, and after a couple of months, I was caught up. Hulu could offer the same thing, but it looks like a failure of imagination.

Does this mean they'll fail? No, but it does mean that they are limiting their potential success.

Technorati Tags: subscription

Suzanne Fortman sent me a few photos from OOPSLA - here are two that show some Cincom folks. First, Alan Knight with Jim Haungs (our new engineering manager):

And here they are again, with Brian Foote:

For more OOPSLA info, visit Travis Griggs' blog and just keep scrolling.

Technorati Tags: oopsla07, smalltalk

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at ExtraEmphasis - a contributed package that makes the tools just a little bit nicer to work with.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Arden explains what's coming from Cincom with Seaside support. We are also working on Glorp integration - but that looks like it will come along a bit later.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom smalltalk

I see that Nick Carr thinks that blogging will drive more navel gazing, and obsession with popularity and comments will chew up useful time.

Hmm - does that mean that before the internet, all newspaper op/ed writers were simply navel gazing egotists? Has it occurred to Carr that the medium (TV/Newpaper/Net) is less relevant than the personality of the people involved? I think Carr has become over-invested in his "IT doesn't matter/the net is filled with crap" thesis, and is now trying to make everything he sees fit it. Kind of like the way Heinlein got obsessed with linking all of his stories toward the end...

Here's a short demonstration of creating a Smalltalk class - it's about two minutes long, and just walks through the basics of using the Smalltalk coding browser. You can also view the YouTube video here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, browser, video

Here's what passes for thinking over at NBC:

In lieu of more flexibility on pricing, NBC U sought a cut of Apple's hardware sales. "Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content, and made a lot of money," Zucker said. "They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing."

I have a question for Zucker then - he's made millions off of advertising, which only pays because of people like me who watch the ads. So - you deserve a cut of Apple's hardware sales in the same way that I deserve a cut of your ad revenues.

I won't hold my breath :)

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at Registry (Windows) access from Cincom Smalltalk.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, windows, registry

I'll be away from the net much of the day - my wife has relatives in from Australia, and we are taking them to Annapolis today.

Two days ago, we picked my wife's relatives up in DC after a full day of touring, and decided to head down to the 18th and U street area for dinner - we found a nice little Cajun place to eat at. The Creole and Jambalaya were quite good - if it was easier to get in and out, I'd likely go back. As it was, we got lost coming back out, which turned a 45 minute drive home into a 90 minute set of circles :)

Anyway, it was a lot of fun:

They comped us on a nice dessert of Beignets, which motivated a sizeable tip. Tiny little place, too - I was standing at the entrance when I took this shot.

Arden has announced the name of our Seaside product: Web Velocity:

Web Velocity is the synergistic combination of Cincom Smalltalk, Seaside, Glorp (Object relational mapping software) and tools along with examples and documentation. This product will be targeted at folks wanting a development product to do leading edge database-to-web applications. On one hand you could compare Web Velocity functionality to Ruby-on-Rails (RoR), and we should certainly be able to compete in that market. On the other hand, we hope that the combination of products and tools make it easy for newcomers to use, and help grow the community.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, web, cincom smalltalk

We took my wife's relatives to the Naval Academy today - we had a tour of the place at 11 AM. It was a beautiful day, with temps in the low 60's and no clouds. All I had with me was my phone camera, but I took two nice shots of the Navy Chapel:

Later, we watched the cadets form up and march in to lunch:

The campus is gorgeous - well worth visiting. The Officers Club serves a great burger, too :)

I was fairly appalled when I read this "enterpirse" piece from Steve Jones - the fact that he's in charge of any project at all is pretty depressing. Not because he's actively opposed to dynamic languages - that's just a symptom. No, it's this kind of attitude:

This is the reason I am against dynamic languages and all of the fan-boy parts of IT. IT is no-longer a hackers paradise populated only by people with a background in Computer Science, it is a discipline for the masses and as such the IT technologies and standards that we adopt should recognise that stopping the majority doing something stupid is the goal, because the smart guys can always cope.

If you are willing to put up with bad developers and poor practices, I guess you'll come out the other end believing this sort of thing. In Jones' world, the best you can do is fight against the mediocrity. Gosh forbid you do any selective hiring, or train the staff you have - or even hold them to high expectations. No, better to expect nothing and get nothing.

That thinking combines pretty well with this NY Times piece I read yesterday - on why Enterprise applications tend to be hard to use. I'll go so far as to say that they'll keep being hard to use until the kind of thinking illustrated by Jones leaves IT.

Hat tip to Patrick Logan, who led me to the Jones post and to this one from Steve Vinoski.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we add code completion to the development tools.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, code completion

Supposedly, DirectX 10 was one of the reasons that gaming on Vista was going to be better than gaming on XP. Well... maybe not so much. Have a look at this post on ExtremeTech - it sounds like this is yet another reason to stay on XP.

Technorati Tags: vista, games

Dare Obasanjo has some good insight on what Google will likely accomplish with their entry into the social media API space: they'll force a standard.

If enough momentum gains around OpenSocial, then three things will happen

• Widget developers will start to favor coding to OpenSocial because it supports multiple sites as well as targeting the Facebook platform
• Eventually Facebook platform developers will start asking Zuckerburg and company to support OpenSocial so they only need to worry about one code base (kinda, it won’t be that easy)
• Other companies with proprietary widget platforms or plans to create one will bow down to the tide and adopt OpenSocial

That sounds about right to me - it will be interesting to watch two things over the next little while:

• What will adoption of this API look like?
• Will Facebook feel pressured to support it?

Technorati Tags: RESTful, API

For the curious people who asked me about the restaurant I mentioned here, I found the name - "Bardia's Orleans Cafe". It's well worth visiting. Here's a Washington Post review of the place - it's at 2412 18th street in the District.

The tragedy is, a lot of people are going to cheer Brendan Eich on in his response to Microsoft's Chris Wilson - simply because it's the "good guys" against the "bad guys". However, I had a bunch of red flags go off when I read this:

The pattern of general assertions about small being beautiful and sufficient for web application developers' needs, met by specific arguments listing use-cases where JS does not scale in time or space, or lacks basic data integrity, type safety, and programming in the large support, in turn met by absolutely zero specific counter-arguments -- this is a pattern we have seen over and over in TG1 this year.

If things go that way, I expect to see a larger, more baroque, harder to understand Javascript come out the other end. I've seen this movie before - it's what happened to Java when they added generics. I suspect that the best thing possible for the wider community would be a nasty fight at the standards board that prevented any "progress".

Technorati Tags: web development

I've been pondering the post from Steve Jones that I commented on the other day; it was while looking over the comments that I had a small epiphany - would Jones accept the "well, you can't expect much from the masses" theory in a home improvement project? Would he accept shoddy work from a contractor as quickly as he seems willing to accept it from a developer?

In general, how happy would he be if his attitude toward accepting mediocrity extended to every service he paid for? Does he just shrug his shoulders when a repair guy comes out and botches a job?

Technorati Tags: software development

Mathew Ingram notes that Apple is not immune to upgrade problems - the fanboys notwithstanding:

The growing number of reports about problems with Leopard, the new Mac OS, show that there is a lot more to it than that. I just heard from a friend -- a relatively recent convert to Apple PCs -- who said that the upgrade didn’t just present him with a blue screen (something that until now had been associated exclusively with Windows machines), but actually wiped out most of his data and a substantial number of applications as well. I don’t know whether his problems were a result of using the third-party Application Enhancer software or not, as some have reported.

I had decided to wait on Leopard, and it looks like it was a good idea. I'll give it a few months to sort out.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at reading images (graphics) into Cincom Smalltalk.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, graphics

I guess we'll find out whether open APIs matter to people - Google has announced that everyone but Facebook is onboard with their new "Open Social" system. Via TechCrunch:

MySpace and Six Apart will announce that they are joining Google’s OpenSocial initiative. Silicon Alley Insider reported the MySpace rumor earlier today. We’ve confirmed that from an independent source, as well as the fact that Six Apart is joining. Per the update below, Google has also confirmed Bebo is joining.

That's fairly big, because it means that one API now gives you "widget" access to multiple systems. Facebook had all the momentum right through yesterday, but I have to think that this takes some of the wind out of their sails. On the other hand, I don't know that I'm about to move the Industry Misinterpretations Group off Facebook - and the various widgets on these systems are mostly useless. The big thing is "where the people are" - so the question is, will this drive any movement off Facebook? If it does, they'll look back wistfully at that Yahoo offer they turned down.

Technorati Tags: social media

Goran Krampe has a bunch of OOPSLA posts - start here and keep scrolling.

Technorati Tags: OOPSLA

Mathew Ingram notes that the Times has moved into modern aggregation - as he says, newspapers have always been aggregators, and this is just the latest iteration:

When you click, you go to BlogRunner.com, which is a blog aggregator/headline engine that the New York Times acquired last year. I wasn’t initially that impressed with it when I first saw it (before the Times bought it), but I’ve been back several times since and I think it does a pretty good job. As Erick Schonfeld notes at TechCrunch, the Times is also building content aggregated by BlogRunner into other parts of its site, including at the bottom of news stories (the same way I use Sphere on my posts).

The Times has taken a couple of smart steps recently - they opened up their archives, they got rid of TimesSelect - now this. A lot of newspapers don't look like they'll manage the transition to digital real well - but the Times is starting to figure it out.

Technorati Tags: media, newspapers

On today's Smalltalk Daily, I show how to deal with malformed XML without creating a tag soup parser.

Update: The link actually goes to today's cast now :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, xml

Java and C# continue to crawl along the trail blazed by Smalltalk over 20 years ago - witness this post about creating your own foreach() method:

Even if you never use this code (I won't!), you can see at a small scale the power of thinking in closures, especially for implementing language features. This is one of the reasons why Smalltalk was such a small language - you could implement much of what Java programmers think of as language as library methods. Lisp and FORTH are small languages (at least conceptually - ignore Common Lisp!) for similar reasons. Java 7 is aiming in the same direction.

Of course, you can enjoy a small language now, instead of waiting for the gremlins of the JSR to figure out why it would have been a good idea :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, java, software development

Andres Valloud points to the burgeoning registrations for the upcoming Smalltalk conference in Buenos Aires:

The Smalltalks 2007 conference to be held in Buenos Aires just went past 100 registrations, and we are still 5 weeks from the conference. We have also been getting high quality presentation proposals. I can't quite tell what they are yet, but it is going to be a very interesting gathering.

Looks like it's going to be a great event!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, conferences

I just realized that my phone can, in fact take video. This should have been far more obvious - if you look at the keypad, there's a button that has two icons on it - a camera and movie camera. Is the video option under that? Heck no - you have to click the left arrow, to the screen with VCast options - down at number seven (in a locked cabinet, as it were) is the "Take Flix" option.

What idiot thought that was a good idea?

Technorati Tags: mobile phone

Looks like the ScreenWriters are going on strike - barring a last minute miracle in negotiations. That's going to mean really bad TV a few months from now, especially if it's prolonged. However, I suspect that both the writers and management are going to regret this if it goes as long (or longer) than the 1988 strike:

The writers’ union’s 1988 strike, which lasted five months and cost Hollywood an estimated $500 million, had a profound effect on the industry. It helped further fragment a TV audience already being seduced away from the big networks by cable and videogames; it is estimated that network viewership dropped 9 percent. And that was before the cultural onslaught of the Internet.

A nine percent drop is significant; I'd expect more damage this time around. Perhaps both sides ought to ponder the whole MAD theory...

Technorati Tags: tv, writers, strike

We have another two parter coming up on "Industry Misinterpretations" - this time with "Big Dave" Thomas - the guy who made OTI - and thus Envy and IBM Smalltalk - happen. We had a good conversation about software development, agile, and the part of Smalltalk history that Dave was part of. I should have the audio out sometime tonight or tomorrow, depending on when I get the ancillary pieces, and when I get the editing done.

There were some skype drop-outs, but I'm hoping that wasn't too bad - we'll see how it goes

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, oti, software development

Mathew Ingram points to a Canadian study that shows what most of us already knew: music sharing isn't hurting music sales. There are changes afoot due to digital sales pushing us back to more of a "singles model", but that's different:

“The analysis of the entire Canadian population does not uncover either a positive or negative relationship between the number of files downloaded from P2P networks and CDs purchased.

That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.”

I won't hold my breath waiting for the RIAA to acquire a clue.

Technorati Tags: RIAA, management, stupidity

Vorlath continues in his quest to prove Fred Brooks wrong, and mostly shows that he's really good at seeing trees. Forests? Not so much. He takes this assertion from "The Mythical Man Month":

Software is invisible and unvisualizable.

And attempts to call it debunked by pulling out a domain specific modeling tool example:

Let me debunk this once and for all. Take a look here . That's the node editor in Blender. With a certain set of primitive components, you can build ANY software. Anything in existence. So I'm not talking about Blender the software, or how to build the node editor. I'm talking about building software within the node editor. It works. And people like using it. This point of Brooks' that software is invisible is dead wrong. It's false. And it should be done with once and for all. People used to say that we'd never use graphical GUI's because text was so much faster and took less memory. Brooks says the screen is too small. Tell that to the people that make Blender and Lightwave.

We've just debunked 25% of Brooks' argument.

Not so much, no. You've shown a limited example for a fairly small field. There are fairly serious issues with the example - try building any non-trivial application using that kind of screen modeling. You quickly end up in what we used to call "green haze" with IBM's UI painter for VisualAge, or the old Digitalk PARTS system. It works really well for demos and relatively small examples. It doesn't scale at all well as your component space scales, because you quickly run out of screen turf for all the connecting wires.

There's also the small matter of the software that builds that modeler - is it also built in the modeler? Somehow I doubt it.

For any global assertion - like the ones from Brooks - it's easy to find anecdotal exceptions. It's fairly hard to find general cases that argue against him though.

Here's a question - if that kind of visual modeling is an actual debunking, then why is Vorlath bothering to design a new language? If he's found a general exception to Brooks' assertion, he should just be able to adopt the Blender system, right?

Technorati Tags: software development

This week, we spoke to Dave Thomas - he runs Bedarra today, but is best known in the Smalltalk community for his work at OTI with embedded Smalltalk, IBM Smalltalk, and Envy. We had a long and wide ranging conversation about the state of software development, the history of Smalltalk, and how Dave sees the industry now.

We went long, so I've split this into two parts - I'll have part 2 out next weekend. As always, if you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or head on over to Podcast Alley, iTunes, or the "Industry Misinterpretations" group at Facebook.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, OTI, Bedarra

SCI FI Wire reports that Heroes will wrap early if the writers strike is more than a quick demonstration:

TV Guide.com reported that producers of NBC's Heroes are shooting an alternate ending to the Dec. 3 episode that will wrap up the second season early in the event an expected writers' strike prevents the show from continuing with new episodes.

I'll say this: the strike will certainly get my attention if this happens. I don't watch tons of TV, but I do love Heroes. Going back to my earlier assertion though, I think any right/wrong assessment between the writers and producers misses the real problem: if this strike lasts long enough to take out shows like Heroes, the long term audience toll could end up surprising all sides. I'm not sure either side is thinking clearly about that.

Technorati Tags: stupidity

Who knew you could own a color?

I should have put this link in the podcast post, but completely forgot. Dave Thomas just published an article on Javascript in the Journal of Object Technology.

Technorati Tags: scripting, browser, web

Quick, someone get Paul Ingevaldson to work with non-IT people for a few weeks - maybe he'll stop spouting nonsense like this:

It has been my experience that IT professionals will do just about anything to please the user. Regardless of what is requested, the typical IT pro says yes. But what has it gotten us? We are being outsourced, offshored and told that we don’t matter. We agree to a major enhancement to a system during development, and we get charged with missing budgets and deadlines. We agree to modify an outside package, and then we are criticized when we incur ongoing maintenance costs.

Why are there so many end user developed systems out there? Could it be because the default answer from IT tends to be no? Could it be because - in general - they don't understand the business of the company, and are way too busy managing the pipes?

If his theory were correct, "Dilbert" wouldn't exist. He has a point about "the rest of us" not always understanding the true cost of the things we ask for, but it's a two way street full of misunderstanding - not the one way boulevard he imagines.

The last time there was a writers strike, "reality shows" like "Cops" were one result - another was a slippage in the number of viewers. Things are different now - unlike 1988, there are lots and lots of choices for eyeballs, from video games to the internet - Duncan Riley of TechCrunch nails that issue here:

The strike poses an interesting challenge for television at a time where internet usage has surpassed TV viewing time in most homes. Users are already choosing online entertainment over TV, how many more will switch off their televisions when their favorite shows stop going to air? These eyeballs present a real opportunity for online content creators at all levels; from the VC funded video startups through to the DIY part timers. The trends in viewer numbers have all been headed online to this point, this strike could well accelerate this trend, particularly if it lasts over the long term. It will be a chance for millions online to bloom

The writers think this is like a baseball strike, but I'm not sure they're right. There is a limited supply of top notch left handers who can throw strikes - there's no such shortage of writers. It's not as if the plotlines on most shows take enormous amounts of thought, either - most middling novelists have deeper plots than the average TV show.

I am completely convinced that the producers are screwing over the writers - these are the same clowns that guide the "thinking" behind the RIAA and the MPAA, after all. However, I'm also convinced that the writers have way, way less leverage than they think. Any strike breaking ballplayer has to live in the same locker room with the other players later. A writer? Last time I looked, creative writing required a networked PC, and that requirement doesn't involve any day to day contact with the current writers. Unfortunately for the writers, I just don't think they hold the cards they think they do.

Technorati Tags: writers strike

Google is in the middle of a pretty big play - look at "Open Social" and the Android mobile OS play together, and you see the same thing: Google wants you to have access to Google apps everywhere. Unlike Apple, they don't really care what device you use, so long as your searches, calendar needs, and mail are all coming from Google.

The ground they are fighting on with "Open Social" is tougher - while developers might like the idea of a common API, the users of Facebook will have to be enticed off by something better and/or cooler - meaning, Google's influence there is reduced. On the mobile side, Mathew Ingram is completely correct though - the market in the US is very, very ready for more openness.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at the brace constructor for Arrays - built into Squeak, and easy to add to Cincom Smalltalk. Here's an example - this: {3 + 4. Date today} - yields an array with two items - 7, and today's date.

This is mostly useful for code compatibility between Cincom Smalltalk and Squeak.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk