Lambda the Ultimate notes that Etoys is an important part of the OLPC initiative:
The Etoys end-user programming environment is becoming tremendously important because of its inclusion with the One Laptop Per Child XO . Etoys was invented by Alan Kay's research group and is in continuous development and use as an integrated feature of Squeak Smalltalk. The Squeak/Etoys community includes lots of researchers, programmers, teachers, and kids around the world.
I've used Etoys to teach Smalltalk - it's a great way to get concepts across to kids.
A dot net developer looks at Smalltalk, and notices that the shiniest things in .NET are pale imitations of stuff Smalltalk had back when the first IBM PCs were introduced.
Dave Buck does some fast alpha blending in Cincom Smalltalk, without dropping to C:
Using this technique, I can alpha blend two images of size 1128x680 within about 200mS on my system. Not bad for being pure Smalltalk code. With a primitive, I'm sure I can go much faster.
Michael notes that a lot of new stuff just hit the dev build of Cincom Smalltalk, so there are a few integration issues to sort out:
What to say, this build is going to be a bit messy for those giving it a go. It's the birth child of several major changes being merged in at once. It's very exciting, because many of the enhancements I've been loading in to my image (eg: RB4xx) are now in there by default. The new SUnitToo and SUnitToo(ls) are now included as well. There's lots of good stuff in there.
As an added bonus - Seaside 2.8 is included in the build and for the first time since we started this project, all the tests pass in the image straight out of the box! That's very exciting. In our development environment we now have over 300 unit tests that help us automate the testing of new Seaside versions. All of those pass too.
Our development versions of Seaside are now pulling in Glorp prerequisites if you load the Seaside-Glorp goodie as well. This brings Glorp+Seaside to a wider development audience and it should be getting a great deal more focus over the next few months as we gear up to the release of Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks 7.6 and then Web Velocity 1.0 some time after that.
The next release is scheduled for Q1 of 2008, so things should calm down by then - and the toolset will be incrementally better.
I'm trying to make sure that you can find Smalltalk information in a variety of places and formats. There's this blog, and the entire Cincom Smalltalk blog site. On the main CST site, we have:
I've done a number of screencasts on the browser, including one on the updates that are coming down the pike. Well, in today's dev build (available if you are in vw-dev), it's in the system:
Yes, that blue link will launch your default browser. Safari, in my case :)
Here's a concrete example of DRM suckage: if you bought video from Major League Baseball before 2006, your CDs are now useless. Why? Because they've abandoned the old DRM system and gone to a new one. Which also means that buyers of current MLB media are on borrowed time. From the Joy of Sox blog:
"MLB no longer supports the DDS system" that it once used and so any CDs with downloaded games on them "are no good. They will not work with the current system."
Ponder that next time you buy a song or show from iTunes.
Wood has blogged about this problem before, but for whatever reason (because it got picked up by Techmeme.com perhaps? Or BoingBoing? ) it got more attention this time — and MLB apparently heard about the rising storm of negative publicity somehow. An update to Wood’s blog says that he got a call from a representative for the league, who admitted that they had handled things badly, and said that everyone affected would be able to download their games again for free.
As I've said before, I'm completely convinced that studios are screwing the writers - heck, here's another example of what passes for "thinking" in that set, from Michael Eisner:
According to CNET's The Social, in addition to calling the strike "stupid," Eisner said that the studios "make deals with Steve Jobs, who takes them to the cleaners," adding that, "They make all these kinds of things, and who's making money? Apple! They should get a piece of Apple." Eisner then went on to say that, "If I was a union, I'd be striking up wherever he is."
Riiiiight. Should I get a piece of ABC, since I "pay" for the ads by watching them? With that out of the way, I have to say - I don't really agree with this piece at Forbes either, which backs the writers:
When 12,000 Hollywood writers traded pencils for picket signs this week, they took a huge risk. Even riskier: not striking. Losing to the studios now could doom their union as television gives way to the Internet.
I think my wife had the analogy about right when we talked about this last night. I mentioned something about the strike, and she said "Eastern Airlines". Remember them? The pilots struck, because they were being screwed over by the owners. However, the strike managed to be a lose-lose - Eastern just folded.
Now, I don't see the networks "just folding". However, I do see them losing touch with the younger demographic. My daughter, 13, already spends more time on the net than she does in front of the TV - and most of her friends do the same. With the few shows she does make time to watch ready to disappear, that tenuous connection to TV will just snap. Like the Eastern strike, the writers may well be outsmarting themselves - I don't know how much they can afford to lose from the younger, already drifting, demographic.
Sure, they're being screwed. The problem is, the cure may be far worse than the disease.
I just about fell out of my chair when I read this, from Hank Steinbrenner:
"It's pretty obvious which players we're not going to trade," the owner's son said Wednesday, before rattling off the team's most-prized young pitchers. "Chamberlain, Hughes and even Kennedy. Not for a position player."
Does this mean that Yankees management has finally figured out that "one more hitter" isn't the answer?
When you load Seaside into Cincom Smalltalk, there are a lot of "extra" packages beyond the main Seaside one. Today, I've started going through what those are, and what they bring to the party. Today's example: loading Seaside Asynch support.
Part two of our conversation with Dave Thomas will be released sometime this weekend - you can get part I here. It was a fun conversation, so be sure to grab both pieces.
Michael shows you how to drop into Assembler from inside Cincom Smalltalk:
For anyone who has ever been interested in taking total control of their computer from Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks or ObjectStudio - here's how you can bypass all the wonderful technology that makes up the VM, JIT etc and just ran whatever assembly code you want
It's always something. I left the MacBook in the office last night, so I didn't notice that the site went offline around 10:22 last night. I noticed this morning, but I didn't know quite enough about Apache settings to totally resolve the entire issue myself.
The server crashed, so most things came back with a restart. I got the public store back up, and the Wiki - but a CGI relay security issue was blocking access to the blogs and the main site. Thanks to one our engineers (thanks pete!) things are back to normal.
It's getting harder to remember when storage space cost real money. Yesterday, I ran across Mathew Ingram's post on S3 - he got a 75 cent monthly bill that handled all of his backup needs. This morning, I ran across this:
YouTube just announced the availability for Windows users of a desktop uploader (install page here). Users will now be able to do bulk file uploads. The company also raised its file size limit from 100 MB to 1 GB. Length will remain at 10 minutes though, so that just means more high quality video will be available on the site.
Meanwhile, a 500 GB drive down at Best Buy is $219. Whether you want to invest the upload time or the money, storage is getting close to free.
Here's another thing I'm posting mostly for my own future use :)
Apparently, Time Machine can be persnickety about what kind of drive it backs up to - unless you use this advice:
Run this from terminal and load up time machine to select your drive! You don't need to hook the drive up to the Mac first, you dont have to go chowning files and all that nonsense.
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we load another of the Seaside extension packages - CrossFade. This one adds a nifty image crossfade feature using Scriptaculous.
In this short video, I walk through some of the things you can do directly in the inspector - workspace scripting, code development in the mini code browser, and, of course, the basic inspection capabilities. You can watch the video here - or go to the YouTube channel, or the FaceBook group.
With "Times Select", it looked like the NY Times was gunning for its own death. Now, they seem to have come a full 180 degrees - opening the archives, and doing cool aggregation work:
The biggest change is the feature in the middle column of the technology page titled “Technology Headlines From Around the Web.” It presents a constantly updated list of hot technology stories. Notice what we are not worried about. We link off directly to other sites that we have no relationship with. We link equally to mainstream media and small blogs. Our job is to help people find the good stuff fast, both what we write and from others.
I think they are finally starting to understand how to get an online audience: don't be afraid to send it elsewhere - they'll come back for more links and information.
Lukas Renggli, noticing that Gemstone and Cincom are working to make Seaside easier, points out that the Squeak folks are interested in the same thing:
The Seaside One-Click Experience has been announced
The more the merrier - the end users of the code benefit in the end :)
Via Lukas Renggli, we learn that Smalltalk - by way of Seaside - is being grouped with some good company:
The CHOOSE Forum 2007 at the Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, in Brugg, Switzerland was very interesting. The topic was Languages for the Web and there were presentations and tutorials about OpenLaszlo , Google Web Toolkit , Ruby on Rails , and I was an invited speaker Seaside .
Google could be shaking up the US cell phone market with their Android OS - Popular Mechanics makes some good points:
But what’s got to be really scaring the carriers right now is the prospect of thousands of freely available applications that could subvert almost every communications product they sell. Why subscribe to Sprint’s GPS mapping service when you can simply download a free one that taps into Google Maps? Why pay for text messages to your friends when you can download an instant messaging client? In fact, why pay for cellular minutes at all when you can download Skype and just use your data plan? This sort of functionality has been creeping onto cellphones for years as they have become more and more like tiny computers. But OS’s such as Android threaten carriers with a loss of control over the applications on the phones on their network. And they may find themselves becoming nothing more than wireless Internet service providers, forced to compete on price and bandwidth (another brewing battle, by the way, with Sprint’s WiMAX rollout next year).
We could start seeing real competition in this space, which would be very cool. I'd love to have a non-crippled phone.
Dare Obasanjo has written two insightful posts about Facebook recently - one on the development of their platform, and what it means for the more popular applications, and the other on their social advertising model. I think there's a management risk in front of them though, and it's one most growing, successful companies face: hubris. Take the popular applications that Dare wrote about, like iLike. The smart thing to do, if Facebook decides that they ought to own that space, would be to buy iLike. The problem? Many growing companies develop an arrogance about their capabilities, and decide that they can - and should - write everything themselves.
Mind you, I have less than no insight on the actual thinking of Facebook on this - I'm just thinking out loud based on what I've seen in this industry. Time will tell, of course - from my perspective, it's time to get the popcorn :)
When NBC cancelled their iTunes deal with Apple, I wondered whether they could be any more stupid. Well, it looks like they can be a lot more stupid: their "NBC Direct" is like a bad flashback to the early days of the internet:
First and foremost, you cannot get these shows onto you iPod. Second, it's only available to PC users with IE only. Third, and this is the most annoying, you must download a crap-load of software to play the videos. NBC Direct is sorta like the Real Player or the old AOL. It gets into your computer and wont' let go. And we'll bet that it sends a nice stream of data back to NBC, too.
Did we mention the shows are only good for 48 hours after download?
It's as if they asked what the wrong things to do would be, and then - not getting the wrong part - decided to do all of them. Someone should mount a search party for this man's brain.
In the battle of bandwidth, binary beats text any time -- and that’s the purpose of Efficient XML Interchange (EXI), an emerging specification under development by the World Wide Web Consortium. EXI is a binary syntax for XML based upon the conclusions of the W3C XML Binary Characterization Working Group.
I'm just trying to wrap my head around the idea of "binary" and "XML" in the same sentence. The textual nature of XML was one of the main reasons we decided to go wild over it, right?
Podcasts - we've been doing the "Industry Misinterpretations" podcast for over a year now - it comes out weekly. We just released episode 61 this Sunday, for instance. You can:
Bottom line: there's tons of good Cincom Smalltalk information out there to show people. Feel free to ask me questions about any of it - or to give me advice about anything I should be doing differently/better
The browser will be sporting links to web based information in the next release - which is what motivated me to create this handy documentation page for Cincom Smalltalk. That link will be good for each release as it comes out.
At least for small values of Big :) This morning I received a PR email asking me to review arbitrary products. Here's the thing though - I'm doing Product Evangelism on this blog for a very specific product: Cincom Smalltalk. Given that, how likely is it that I'll be interested in promoting other development tools (one of the things listed in mail)?
I understand the concept of cold calling, but wouldn't a modicum of research be warranted?
It's a gray, rainy November day here - so what else is there for a Product Evangelist to do, other than set up another social network for Smalltalk? I've been playing with Ning this morning - come on over and join the Smalltalkers network.
This is why I think the writers and networks are both going to lose in the current writers strike - like the record labels, they simply don't recognize that the very ground they are standing on is breaking up, and the status quo is just not sustainable. When they do figure it out, I suspect it's going to be with a lot of screaming.
Fun story here of a banking intern who had to head home for a family "emergency," until he posted photos of himself at a Halloween party on Facebook. Boss saw it, copied entire office.
It's no longer (if it ever was) the case that "only the cool kids" hang out on Facebook. It's highly likely that your management is on there as well. If you want your activities to "stay in Vegas", as it were, here's a tip: don't post them on Facebook :)
At the heart of all of these facts and figures is the undeniable reality that the media marketplace has changed considerably over the last three decades. In 1975, cable television served fewer than 15 percent of television households. Satellite TV did not exist. Today, by contrast, fewer than 15 percent of homes do not subscribe to cable or satellite television. And the Internet as we know it today did not even exist in 1975. Now, nearly one-third of all Americans regularly receive news through the Internet.
and then followed with this:
If we don’t act to improve the health of the newspaper industry, we will see newspapers wither and die. Without newspapers, we would be less informed about our communities and have fewer outlets for the expression of independent thinking and a diversity of viewpoints. The challenge is to restore the viability of newspapers while preserving the core values of a diversity of voices and a commitment to localism in the media marketplace.
So let me get this straight: I have a lot more sources for news coverage now than I did in 1975 - back then, I had hideously bad local news (TV), a local newspaper that repeated news-wire coverage for non-local stories, and the national news on one of 3 networks at 7 PM - for a whopping 30 minutes.
Now I have the entire internet, including overseas sources, multiple cable news outlets - and still, if I cared, the local paper. I'm not seeing the problem, unless you define the problem as "how can Kevin Martin keep receiving a printed newspaper". He goes on at some length over how ownership rules for TV and newspapers ought to work, but that just doesn't matter: regardless of who owns the local paper, circulation numbers for the print edition are going to keep going down. Period, end of story. To be brutal about it, fretting over FCC rules is akin to arguing over how many angels can fit on the head of a pin...
I had an interesting experience with a product return today. First some background: my wife picked up a Wii game as a present for our daughter the other day. It sat in the bag for a couple of hours, and then she looked at some online reviews - and they pretty much sucked. So, we wanted to return the game - but in the interim, we had shredded the receipt (and she paid in cash).
So, I wasn't terribly surprised when Target said they wouldn't let us exchange it, even though the box was unopened. What I was surprised by was this: they'll accept such exchanges so long as the price was $20 or under, and they said the reason was inventory control. Basically, their software had no way to account for such a return. The clerk told us that they used to accept such returns - it's a relatively recent change.
This smelled like rigid software to me. Mind you, we had no receipt, so I'm hardly in a position to be angry about it. Now, I'm sure that the ERP software they use saves them money (at least on paper) - but having the clerk explain that they couldn't take it back due to their inventory system just didn't go down well.
Still, like I said - not having a receipt made this problem mostly ours. So I was pleasantly surprised by Sears' take on this. They were willing to take the exchange, no questions asked - so we not only exchanged it, we bought another game and a Wiimote.
I'd guess that an MBA would laud Target's inventory control and software - and criticize the one Sears has. What they would miss is that the more flexible system at Sears allows for exceptions - and people are really good at creating exceptions. The stores that allow for such exceptions are the ones that make me happier, that's for sure.
I was looking at the Seaside website this morning, and I thought a couple of small changes for Cincom Smalltalk would be nice - so I tossed an email to the Seaside list, asking who to talk to. Phillippe not only chimed right in, but made the appropriate changes within minutes of my asking for them. Thanks Phillippe!
At this point, MS is making money in the OS and Office space solely on inertia: it's not as if there's anything truly compelling going on there. Calling Vista the "Windows ME of 2007" is pretty harsh, but I think Dvorak gets this right:
Microsoft has extended the life of Windows XP because Vista has simply not shown any life in the market. We have to begin to ask ourselves if we are really looking at Windows Me/2007, destined to be a disdained flop. By all estimates the number of Vista installations hovers around the number of Macs in use.
The problem is simple: MS has gotten way, way too big. From what I've heard, the team working on Windows numbers in the thousands all by itself - which is likely most of the problem right there. Microsoft has tried to be all things to all people, and I think it's starting to bite back now. Their revenue numbers are solid, but they are losing influence - and at some point, like IBM in the 1980s, that loss of influence will translate into a loss in revenue (relative to their size).
If they were smart, they would break the company into multiple pieces, and let each one try to get back to being lean and hungry. I don't expect to see that anytime soon, though.
“We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong.
How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.”
As Mathew points out, this late in the game clue acquisition might be too late - the labels have spent a lot of time doing as much damage to their reputations as they could, and it may not be possible for them to climb down from the mistake. At least some of the insiders have figured out that there's a problem - perhaps Bronfman could call this bozo at NBC and share a clue or two?
