Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at adding a widget to a running application programmatically

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, visualworks

Scoble shows that he doesn't really see the problem MS has with Mesh:

The only good excuse I’ve heard so far why Microsoft Mesh isn’t interesting is “I hate Microsoft.”

The problem is fairly basic - and, based on their stealth announcement, I believe MS understands the same thing: this is the sort of net based extension of Microsoft technologies that would have been really interesting 5 years ago. Now? It's far less interesting, given the vastly more open nature of Amazon's service, and the existence of Google's platform.

Ultimately, this is a conservative offering aimed squarely at Microsoft's installed base. There's nothing wrong with that, and it might well help to retain that base in the "paying customer" column. It's hardly game changing though.

Technorati Tags: web services

Spotted in Wired Top Stories

With 1Q earnings from both companies out and nobody blinking as a key deadline passed over the weekend, Microsoft appears to be no closer to buying Yahoo than when it made its $44.6 billion bid nearly three months ago.

If Microsoft is very lucky, their management will be spared the consequences of this extraordinarily stupid idea. The two companies would not mesh at all - either from a technology or a culture standpoint. It would be a large scale version of what happened with ParcPlace-Digitalk, and let me tell you - that went very, very badly.

We announced that ObjectStudio 8.1 was Vista Certified, and today we got ahold of the official certification artwork from Microsoft. The logo certification applies to ObjectStudio 8.1. While we support VW on Vista, it's not logo certified

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, smalltalk, vista, microsoft

Kara Swisher has a useful "back to earth" tonic for all the cool kids who think Twitter (et. al.) is the biggest thing ever:

And so I asked a large group of people–about 30–and here is the grand total who knew what Twitter was: 0

FriendFeed: 0

Widget: 1 (but she thought it was one of the units used in a business class study).

Facebook: Everyone I asked knew about it and about half had an account, although different people used it differently.

This shouldn't really be a surprise, but I'm sure lots of techies will be surprised by it. Just as there are poitical junkies and news junkies, there are social media junkies - and the gap between when the junkie knows about some "big new thing" in their field of interest and when the "rest of the world" knows about it can be very, very large. Sometimes that gap is never crossed - and it's useful to keep that in mind.

Technorati Tags: social media, twitter

Scoble says that Google is iterating after the Enterprise shops:

I’m convinced that Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, has a five-year plan to put Google’s foot inside the enterprise door.

Yes and No. IMHO, Google isn't really interested in the current enterprise shops - as Scoble says, they are way, way too deep into legacy to flip. They'll be happy to make inroads, but that's not really where they intend to win. Where they intend to win is with newer shops - the places that will be "the enterprise" in 10-20 years. Those shops are small now, and way, way easier to convince that they don't need the weight of the full set of tools from Microsoft, IBM, SAP (etc). They'll happily go along with Google Apps, SalesForce, Amazon EC2... and not look back.

If Google plays their cards right, in 20 years they'll be protecting their Enterprise turf from the scrappy new contender of the day - and Microsoft will be a smaller, less influential company from a bygone era.

Technorati Tags: enterprise, SOA, google

I mentioned that ObjectStudio 8.1 was out and Vista Certified - and now the non-commercial version is ready to be downloaded. Check it out now!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, objectstudio

This looks like an interesting project: JavaConnect:

JavaConnect is a Visualworks Smalltalk library that allows a seamless interaction between Smalltalk and Java. A Smalltalk application can access any Java object and send messages to it, just as if it were a Smalltalk object. Its implementation relies on a connection between the Smalltalk environment and a standard Java VM environment using Visualworks' DLLCC and Java's JNI. The Java application thus executes on a regular Java VM and the Smalltalk application executes on the regular Smalltalk VM.

Looks very impressive - I'll have to download it and give it a whirl.

Technorati Tags: java

We've been working on Web Velocity - our Seaside application server product - for awhile now. In the recent release of Cincom Smalltalk, we announced support for Seaside 2.8, but there's much more coming. This morning, I thought I'd do a brief "Hello World" demonstration of how easy it is to get started with the product. I'm using one of our first internal development builds - but we intend to go into beta soon.

The beta program will be partly open - we'll be inviting interested parties in. If you are interested in giving a new Seaside based product a real spin - as in, you are willing to try and build something in it, and work with us to get it ready for production - let me know.

I've got the video available in four forms:

• Full Quality MP4 (15 MB)
• 320x240 MP4 (4.5 MB)
• Full Quality WMV (31 MB)
• 320x240 WMV (7.5 MB)

Also on YouTue:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside, web velocity

One of the most inefficient (and error prone) ways to build an image is a manual process. On today's Smalltalk Daily, I use my build script for BottomFeeder as an example of how to start automating.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, scripting

(Smalltalk) Dave Thomas gave an interview to InfoQ at last year's OOPSLA, and the video is online now. It's short and interesting.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, java, soa, mda

Wired tries to handicap winners and losers in the Microsoft/Yahoo game, but they miss the bottom line: if Microsoft ends up buying Yahoo, it's a lose-lose for everyone:

• MS will be out of a ton of money
• Yahoo, like a car off the lot, will start losing value the instant it's acquired
• The culture war between the MS and Yahoo employees will be horrid, and damaging
• The software that dies in the "my way or the highway" fights that are inevitable after an acquisition will dilute the value of both companies over time

Take this to the bank: if the deal goes through, MS will be wishing it hadn't within months - and former Yahooligans will be lamenting the loss.

Oh man - this story about AT&T possibly dropping the price of the iPhone to $199 has me thinking. In October, I can either re-up with Verizon or walk away. I had been thinking that I'd just get an international capable phone and move along. Now I have to think...

Technorati Tags: iphone, apple

Mike Arrington has another entry in the "how stupid can a media company be?" sweepstakes. This week's pile of stupid comes from Marvel (the comic book guys) who want to shut down a screening of Iron Man that Arrington arranged - even though he worked with Paramount to make it happen.

You have to wonder about the thought process (such as it exists) in media companies...

Technorati Tags: marketing, stupidity

I understand the whole concept of language evolution, but exactly when did people start writing "Coo" instead of "Cool"? What's with the dropped L?

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at automated builds for deployment.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, automated builds

Gemstone has gotten their GLASS beta out the door:

The beta is shipped with GLASS.230-dkh.130 and GemStone-dkh.270 (both can be found in the GLASS project on GemSource). GLASS.230-dkh.130 is equivalent to GLASS-dkh.114, except for references to the UTF8 and HTML encoding primitives.

If you want to find out more about Seaside - in Gemstone, Squeak, or Cincom Smalltalk - then head on over and register for Smalltalk Solutions now. If you don't know Smalltalk, but would like to learn about Seaside? Well, I'm giving a tutorial on that exact subject!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Cincom is expanding the business team for Cincom Smalltalk:

Smalltalk Marketing Collaboration Specialist
As a Marketing Collaboration Specialist, you will be responsible for activities to produce very high quality collateral pieces, email and web content, as well as audio and video promotional events in print and electronic media. You will be team oriented and possess outstanding communications abilities. You will be able to juggle competing priorities in a fast-paced professional environment to deliver outstanding results with minimum supervision. Manage consistent, ongoing communications with external and internal customers. Maintain the Cincom Corporate and Smalltalk website to meet or exceed Customers needs and attract prospects. As well as manage customer reference database and help improve and increase overall customer experience.

Key Qualifications

• Four year degree in business or marketing, or an equivalent undergraduate education
• Minimum four (4) years experience with print and electronic media and customer collateral oriented to the computer technology sector
• Outstanding interpersonal skills and advanced writing abilities
• Solid knowledge of internet technologies and experience with the following:
• Microsoft Office Applications and Adobe Photoshop (or equivalent applications)

If you are interested in becoming a member of the Cincom Smalltalk STAR Team, please forward your resume to employme@cincom.com. Please reference PRF 3063.

RESUMES ACCEPTED UNTIL POSITION IS FILLED
...an equal opportunity employer

About Cincom®
Now in our 40th year, Cincom delivers software and services to clients worldwide who need to innovate and simplify complex business processes. Cincom's easy-to-use, high-value solutions empower clients to overcome operation obstacles, paving the way to higher productivity, sustainability, and profit. Cincom serves thousands of clients on six continents.

Cincom Smalltalk
Cincom Smalltalk [VisualWorks® and ObjectStudio®] is an object-oriented application software development suite for creating and maintaining portable, cross-platform business applications. Developers of scalable internet, intranet, and client/server applications utilize Cincom Smalltalk programming tools to build applications quickly and efficiently and to deliver significant productivity benefits vs. Java, C#, C++, or Visual Basic®.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, marketing, pr

Sounds like Gemstone is building a Ruby environment? InfoQ has the scoop.

Technorati Tags: ruby, gemstone, smalltalk

You'll find a lot of people who look down on Gary Gygax, and the game system (D&D) he created - heck, back when I ran a game myself, I not only created a game world, I devised my own magic and combat systems, because I thought the D&D one "sucked". However - I wouldn't have been inspired to do that had D&D not been created first.

This article makes an even bigger point - Gygax was the progenitor of all modern video games:

In creating Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax and co-creator Dave Arneson didn't just build a blueprint for the digital RPGs to come; they built the progenitor of most contemporary video games, irrespective of genre.

because video games - unlike older games - have a story to tell:

Today most gamers take it for granted that games have stories, yet most traditional games -- chess and checkers, tag and hide-and-seek, baseball and basketball -- don't have any story.

We have Gygax to thank for a lot of that. Sure, his magic system had holes, as did his combat system. He was the pioneer though, who paved the roads that other people followed and improved. Anyone who likes the places those roads have taken us owes Gygax some thanks for that.

Technorati Tags: dungeons and dragons, rpg, video games

Joel Spolsky is even harsher on Mesh than I was:

It's Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can't stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn't stop him.

How on earth does Microsoft continue to pour massive resources into building the same frigging synchronization platforms again and again? Damn, they just finished building something called Windows Live FolderShare and I haven't exactly noticed a stampede to that. I'll bet you've never even heard of it. The 3,398th web site that lets you upload and download files to a place on the Internet. I'm so excited I might just die.

That's pretty much why I yawned through the announcement. MS is just floundering in terms of direction. Maybe they do have a fit with Yahoo - two large, directionless companies that manage to make money based on legacy...

Technorati Tags: mesh

It looks like Psystar isn't a hoax after all - Engadget has a benchmark test. I can say this - I wouldn't want one, at least not until they get the fan to not run all the time. It's loud.

Technorati Tags: mac clone

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at a common problem people have with Smalltalk's process model - by using a bug that cropped up in the server you're reading this on :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

This news about iTunes - movies being available there on the same day as DVD release - is huge. Combine that with "On Demand", and you can see that DVD sales are headed to the same place that CD sales went:

Hollywood Reporter says that Apple is expected to announce today an across-the-board deal to sell new release films at its iTunes Store. The deal is said to allow Apple to offer a "broad slate of top-shelf films" day-and-date with home video releases -- a long time sticking point with brick-and-mortar interests who want to keep their early-release edge on digital downloads. The deal includes Fox, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal, Sony Pictures, Lionsgate, New Line and more -- all of which are currently inked to deliver rentals through iTunes.

IMHO, Sony isn't going to enjoy the Blu-Ray win for long.

Technorati Tags: dvd, iTunes

A few weeks back I put together this tutorial for Seaside on Cincom Smalltalk - in both screencast and standard web tutorial formats. So I have a couple of questions:

• Is that material useful?
• What could/should I add to it?

Thanks!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom smalltalk

I like both of these, but I do have a preference. Which one do you prefer?

Update: I was very unclear. What I'm really after is whether you like either (or both) of these as things Cincom would use in a booth, at a trade show. Sorry about that.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside, cincom smalltalk

Luca Bruno passes on some Syx information - looks like the project is advancing.

Spotted in Cafe au Lait Java News and Resources

Sun announced financial results for the third quarter of their fiscal year that ended in March, and they weren't pretty. Sun lost $34 million, 4 cents per share. Total revenue was $3.266 billion, down down half a percentage point from the same quarter last year.

I think Sun shareholders ought to start asking questions. Like, say - "WTF were you thinking, spending $1B on a database company with $60M in annual revenues and no profits?"

Questions like that might force Schwartz to stop yelling "open source" and start pondering an actual business model. I won't hold my breath though...

Technorati Tags: sun, stupidity

This is pretty cool:

Johan Björk announced the release of SqueakFS, which allows you to browse and search all objects contained in your squeak image from your local file system. The file system functionality is provided by a socket client built on top of FusePython. This client translates file system paths into squeak objects and queries a server running in the squeak image for details on these objects. In order to do this, SqueakFS uses FusePython for file system support and is dependent on both FUSE and Python and will only work on UNIX systems. SqueakFS had been developed and tested on Linux 2.6 and MacOS Leopard running on Intel systems.

Not how I would want to browse Smalltalk code myself, but I can definitely seeing it as useful - heck, if you made it read-only and posted it to an HTTP server, it would make the entire image crawlable.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a brief look at the New Prerequisite Engine - which makes setting pre-reqs for Store packages and bundles a lot easier to manage.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom smalltalk

The "strategy" in my title is hardly worthy of the name, but it seems to be working for Apple in terms of corporate penetration:

So she launched a test, letting 600 Juniper staffers use Macs instead of the standard-issue PCs that run Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows operating system. As long as the extra support costs aren't too high, she plans to open the floodgates. "If we opened it up today, I think 25% of our employees would choose Macs," she says.

Funny thing is, she has never received a single sales call from Apple. While thousands of other companies scratch and claw for the tiniest sliver of the corporate computing market, Apple treats this vast market with utter indifference

We've had them come in bottom-up at Cincom, too. The initial trickle became something of a flood this last year, with both the Smalltalk groups and corporate marketing dipping fairly deep. From a pure business strategy standpoint, it's interesting to watch.

Technorati Tags: Apple, windows

I have to admit, this headline made me chuckle:

Intel Faces Atom Shortage

Thank goodness there are still plenty of Quarks :)

If this deal does go through, it will be great news for anyone who competes with Microsoft - a combined MS/Yahoo would be a crippled behemoth bleeding staff and losing projects. The Vista launch might be looked back on as a relative success after this.

The funny thing is this: EU regulators will probably try to stop the deal if it gets that far. However - if they really wanted to improve competition, they would allow it to happen. The raw chaos that would ensue the consummation would be a boon to all the other players in the industry.

Randal Schwartz was interviewed by Ronaldo Ferraz after FISL - there's a Portuguese version, and an English version. It covers Randal's Seaside work and advocacy.

Best Quote:

we have two commercial smalltalks (Cincom and GemStone/S) as well as two open smalltalks (Squeak and GNU Smalltalk) all supporting Seaside. This allows a nervous manager who might be hesitant at selecting a strictly "€œvolunteer-based"€ language to also have two commercial vendors to pick up support. Options are good!

The thing to remember about Seaside is this: there's no lock in. If you use Seaside in Squeak, and decide you want to get commercial support from Cincom - your whole codebase should migrate cleanly. That even applies to the database layer, so long as you use Glorp.

Technorati Tags: seaside

Well, it's not all peaches and cream on the Mac all the time. I just got a new external HD for the machine, and started setting it up. It was recognized right away, but it was (of course) formatted into NTFS. I've never had a problem just reformatting to a native FS, so I unmounted the drive, pulled up Disk Utility, and got started.

Oops.

It turns out, there are issues with these drives and Leopard - I could not get it formatted. Google to the rescue though - a quick search pulled up a support page with an email query tool. After I sent that, I got some nice (not linkable - gah!) information - with some fairly complex sounding directions, but hey - they worked. Now all I have to do is get my data reorganized....

Since that data isn't easily linkable, let me throw it here so other people might be able to find it - this is what you do if you tried formatting the drive, and it's now in a mostly useless state. If you have a Mac running Tiger around, there's a simpler answer - prepare the drive on the that, then move it. Otherwise:

1. Open Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility
2. Select the external drive and click on the Partition tab
3. Click on the Current Volume Scheme drop-down menu and divide the drive into 2 (or more) partitions
4. Click Options. From the Partition Schemes provided, click on the GUID Partition Table radio button. Click OK.
5. Click Apply. The Partition Disk screen opens.
6. Click Partition. At this point, the volume dismounts from the desktop and the drive is partitioned and formatted into multiple drives with GUID Partition Table scheme.
   Note: When Volumes are created, Time Machine may open asking if you would like to use the volume for backups. Click Cancel to proceed.
7. When finished, select the Disk Utility from the Apple Menu and choose Quit Disk Utility (recommended)
8. Relaunch the Disk Utility, select the external drive
9. and click on the Partition tab
10. Click on the Current Volume Scheme drop-down menu and select One (1) partition.
11. Click Options. From the Partition Schemes provided, click on the Apple Partition Map radio button. Click OK. Select other options as desired (e.g., Volume Name, Install Mac OS 9 Drivers, etc.).
12. Click Apply. The Partition Disk screen opens.
13. Click Partition. At this point, the volume dismounts from the desktop and the drive is partitioned and formatted into multiple drives with Apple Partition Map scheme.
    Note: When Volumes are created, Time Machine may open asking if you would like to use the volume for backups. Click Cancel to proceed.
14. When finished, select the Disk Utility from the Apple Menu and choose Quit Disk Utility (recommended)

Technorati Tags: seagate, external hd, onetouch4 plus, leopard, onetouch4 plus macintosh, onetouch4 plus leopard

Scoble:

Yahoo is a bleeding animal. Left lying, gasping for its breath, after a larger animal (Microsoft) struck and then walked away after it proved too difficult to eat.

Reality:

Yahoo's revenues were $1.82 billion for the first quarter of 2008, a nine percent increase compared to $1.672 billion for the same period of 2007. Marketing-services revenues were $1.572 billion for the first quarter of 2008, a seven percent increase over the year-ago period. Gross profit for the first quarter of 2008 was $1.063 million, an 11 percent increase over the first quarter of 2007.

Not great, but black is better than red. For all the verbiage, this is good news. Neither company has to go through the raw chaos that a merger would have brought.

Mathew Ingram thinks Yahoo should have taken the deal:

In my view, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has gone way beyond fiduciary duty and has been effectively blocking this deal in any way possible. I expect to see the stock tank, and deservedly so. If I were a shareholder, I would be calling for Yang’s head. This deal was by far the best opportunity the company had to achieve some value.

Depends. It would have been a nice deal for the large shareholders, I suppose. For the company and its products? Not so much.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, yahoo

I've seen a lot of scifi flicks that used "electronic insects" to scout - but I had no idea they were close to a reality:

British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives.

Every time I turn around, some scifi thing from a movie I've seen materializes...

This week we had a very full set of news, Smalltalk and otherwise. We discussed:

• The Newspeak video with Gilad Bracha
• The Smalltalk Solutions schedule
• The Release of a new Seaside book
• Microsoft Mesh
• Twitter troubles
• Clutter
• The recent SQL injection attacks
• Gemstone and Ruby

It's a pretty packed conversation :) As always, send feedback to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or visit us on Facebook, Ning, and iTunes. You can also vote for the podcast at Podcast Alley.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, smalltalk solutions, squeak, newspeak, glass, seaside

It was bound to happen sooner or later - I posted the podcast with duplicated content last night. I've just reposted with the extra content pulled, and updated the site. Sorry about that!

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at dealing with file paths in a platform neutral fashion.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, platform neutrality

I received a number of complaints about the Google calendar widget, so I sat down and generated a simpler layout it this morning. If you visit www.stic.st, you'll find this:

View the Smalltalk Solutions 2008 Agenda here. Interested in the full details? View the Detailed Agenda here.

Agenda by Day:

• June 19
• June 20
• June 21

Comments? Send them here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, smalltalk solutions

Spotted in CNET News.com:

Sun's business model does not work and it hasn't worked for a long time. Moreover, open source, MySQL, StorageTek, and SaaS (software as a service) will not fix it.

CNet follows with a few more details, but not a lot of ideas. Here are a couple that might work:

• Fire Schwartz. The kind of CEO who spends $1B on a $60M, revenue-neutral business is the kind of CEO that Sun can't afford. Who knows what shiny piece of non-profitable open source software will catch his fancy next? Whatever it is, Sun can't afford it
• Start charging money for things that cost money to make. Being free can make you popular, but it can also lead to simple questions, like: "how do we make payroll?"

Will that happen? Nah, the pain isn't severe enough yet. Sun will have a layoff here, a layoff there - eventually, someone will notice that Schwartz brings negative value and hire a cleaner to sort through Sun's mess. In the meantime? Expect lots of wasted motion

Technorati Tags: Sun, stupidity