Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Travis explains floating point numbers in Smalltalk by exploring them in the inspector. This is one of the coolest things about Smalltalk - the exploratory learning that the system enables.

Technorati Tags: floating point

Last year's innovation awards were full of cool apps - here's your chance to have people see yours:

You are invited to submit your nice Smalltalk based software to the 6th ESUG Innovation Technology Awards. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, 500 Euros, 300 Euros and 200 Euros during an awards ceremony at the 17th International Smalltalk Joint Conference 2009 in Brest, France. No constraints are put on the software except that it should be Smalltalk-based or Smalltalk-related and all flavours of Smalltalk are accepted.

To submit your app, go here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, innovation awards

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at custom control structures in Smalltalk - specifically, building a case statement. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Custom Control Structures from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, case statement

I've received complaints about the last few "Smalltalk Daily" screencasts being quiet, and I just figured out why (after Randal made a suggestion in the IRC) - the upgrade to OS X 10.5.7 pushed the input volume for the USB mic I use down to the minimum. No idea why it would do that, but there it is. Things should go back to normal now, and I'll redo those three screencasts as some point...

Here's the video for Georg's talk at our Minneapolis event - I released the audio as last week's podcast. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Yes, We Can from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, minneapolis

I'm kidding, but seriously, this is something we would have called "out there" scifi 20 years ago:

Ronald Arkin, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, is in the first stages of developing an "ethical governor," a package of software and hardware that tells robots when and what to fire. His book on the subject, "Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots," comes out this month.

I hope he doesn't start using T- as part of his version numbers :)

Personally, I like the idea of having WiFi available in flight - and never mind the nay-saying below:

But there are handicaps, including the lack of electrical outlets in most coach cabins (so usage is limited by battery life), and the question of how much demand there actually is for an Internet hookup at the prices being contemplated. AirTran, for example, is charging $9.95 for flights under three hours and $12.95 for those over three hours.

So far, said Joe Brancatelli, publisher of the business travel Web site Joesentme.com, "there is zero proof" that a significant number of passengers are willing to pay for in-flight Wi-Fi service on domestic routes. (The Aircell service depends on land-based cellular towers and cannot be used on overseas flights.)

Mr. Brancatelli needs to get out more. In particular, he should wander through a terminal sometime, and ponder the number of people paying for a few hours (or a whole day) of WiFi for an hour or two of wait time. if people will pay in the terminal, I'll bet they'll pay in the air, too. The larger questions are:

• Can't we have a system that works on really long trans-oceanic flights?
• Will there be enough available bandwidth to make the purchase worthwhile?

I suspect that raw demand won't be a problem, but crappy service could kill it.

Technorati Tags: wifi

This Thursday (May 21) Carl Gundel will be presenting RunBasic (his Seaside based web implementation of Liberty Basic) in NYC:

Carl Gundel , developer of LibertyBasic , a development environment for Basic written in VisualWorks, will be presenting at NYC Smalltalk on Thursday, May 21st, 2009. He will update us on the evolution of his Liberty Basc IDE and its implementation as a Web based IDE based on VisualWork’s Seaside implementation.

The meeting starts at 6:30 PM - hit this link for directions to Suite LLC's offices.

Technorati Tags: basic, runbasic, nyc

Not that this involves rocket science, but I've discovered that running WiFi and BlueTooth at the same time just chews through the battery like a hot knife through butter. Not surprising really, but it's easy to forget and leave WiFi on and put the headset on... and then have no power left :)

Technorati Tags: iPhone, bluetooth

I'm just curious: Do MSI based installers always take a long time to "validate the installation", or am I seeing the picture below because I'm running Windows under a VM (Parallels)? I really don't know, but I'd love to find out :)

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at an old feature of the browser that is more useful than it used to be: the "Explain" menu pick. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Using Explain in the Browser from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, browser, code browser

Great post by Benjamin Pollack, explaining what's so cool about Smalltalk:

I guess this is why, despite all of its faults, I have a lot of trouble giving up on Smalltalk. C#'s a good language, and .NET's a good framework; but I cannot help but feel that this isn't an issue of reinventing the wheel, as much as forgetting that we can provide programmers the tools to make their own types of locomotion.

Read the whole thing; he has some really good examples.

I hadn't thought about it much, but it turns out that DRM is used in a lot of places other than music and movies. For instance, I had no idea that it was being used in car diagnostic systems to lock small players out.

The Yankees are looking good again - they made it 8 in a row. The pitching mostly held up as well - Rivera gave up a meaningless solo shot in the 9th, but only 3 other runs beyond that (and only 1 last night). Looks like this season could be a whole lot better than last :)

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

When business models change, a lot of the value propositions shift with them - and the people in the industry in question are often the last ones to see and accept the change. Richard Picard has an excellent piece exploring that idea with respect to reporting today in the CS Monitor:

Well-paying employment requires that workers possess unique skills, abilities, and knowledge. It also requires that the labor must be non-commoditized. Unfortunately, journalistic labor has become commoditized. Most journalists share the same skills sets and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask similar questions, and produce relatively similar stories. This interchangeability is one reason why salaries for average journalists are relatively low and why columnists, cartoonists, and journalists with special expertise (such as finance reporters) get higher wages.

This sort of thing is happening across other "news" businesses than media - consider the PR field. Up until fairly recently, corporate PR folks had the important task of getting the word out about their products to important sources in trade journals. Then two things happened with the rise of the net:

• General trade journals started to get beaten up, being replaced by niche publications working online (think of Engadget, for instance)
• The people responsible for creating technology got the ability to report on what they were doing themselves (blogs and social media)

Those changes not only cut the PR pro out of the loop, it eliminated the need for most of the people he was talking to as well. As Picard points out, that process has been happening across the media, and I'd argue that PR is pretty much a specialized media field. The net is relentlessly disintermediating things, and reporting is is just one example of that.

Technorati Tags: news, pr

Today's Smalltalk Daily picks up from yesterday's screencast on Explain, and adds some more detail. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

More on Explain from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, explain, code browser

One of the things people have brought up is that individual podcasts, screencasts, and videos are somewhat hard to find - you need to trawl through various archives pages. To partially address that, I've put together a Web Velocity app that allows for ad hoc searching of our media content. You can check it out here.

Technorati Tags: seaside, web velocity, webvelocity

John McIntosh has gotten his Wiki Server app into the app store - it's a Pier based (Seaside) wiki server.

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at some of the issues involved in deploying a Web Velocity application - specifically, this one, which allows ad-hoc searches across all audio and video content on our site. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Deploying Web Velocity to a Server from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, web velocity, deployment, seaside

Here's a cautionary tale for any company that has attracted detractors - and it doesn't really matter whether you think the detractors have a point or not. The point is, a supposedly finely honed message can be hijacked pretty easily. In the past, old missteps could be forgotten. Now? It kind of depends on how forgiving your audience is...

Technorati Tags: PR, advertising

This example comes from the music business, where Amazon is working with a smaller vendor to shove the big labels aside - but it's happening across the entire economy. People who previously added value by standing in the middle of transactions are being relentlessly kicked aside. This is a wave you want to get in front of, so that you don't get run over by it...

Tunecore will charge just $31 a year in upfront fees to handle a 10-track CD from pressing to delivery, passing all other costs through to the buyer. In other words, the service promises to remove nearly all of the risks of short-run CD manufacturing, which can cost musicians hundreds or even thousands of dollars for discs that rarely sell enough to cover expenses.

Those older costs supported a ton of people who happily shaved a few bucks of profit off the work of the artists - but that's coming to an end. It's not the only place, either. I rather suspect that the entire sales field is going to get massively shrunk in the next few years...

Technorati Tags: disintermediation, sales

ICE uses VisualWorks and GemStone to get stuff done - how well are they doing?

IntercontinentalExchange, Inc(R) (NYSE: ICE), the operator of regulated global futures exchanges, clearing houses and over-the-counter (OTC) markets has been named Exchange of the Year for 2009 by Energy Risk magazine.

You can use a mainstream language, and achieve mainstream results. Or, you can try something better....

Watch for a terminator near you:

"Petman will balance itself and move freely; walking, crawling and doing a variety of suit-stressing calisthenics during exposure to chemical warfare agents," the company promises. "Petman will also simulate human physiology within the protective suit by controlling temperature, humidity and sweating when necessary, all to provide realistic test conditions. "

When they give these things Austrian accents, it'll be time to build the bunker :)

Engadget notes that Dell's overly stereotyped "girl" marketing site "Della" has hit the trash heap. I heard about this on TwIT, but by the time I got around to looking, it was gone. When you try to market to caricatures of people, the people who notice usually end up laughing or irritated. Neither one really works as a way to attract sales :)

Technorati Tags: pr

There have been so many homers at the new Yankee stadium that everyone has a theory. Even the weather guys are weighing in now :)

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

Andres Valloud will be presenting to the PDX Smalltalk group next week:

Next Tuesday, I will give a new presentation at the Portland Smalltalk User Group. The talk is entitled The Laws of Form and Computer Programming, and it shows how two extremely simple principles govern what we do when we write software. The meeting begins on Tuesday May 26th at 6:30pm. The presentation will probably start at about 7:00pm ish. The location is the Fourth Avenue PSU building, at SW Fourth and Harrison, room FAB86-01.

Back on May 1st, Travis announced on the vw-dev mailing list that listbox selection behavior was changing (this will be visible to a wider audience once we go to release later in the summer. I'll just repeat what Travis posted on the mailing list:

A couple of builds ago, we finally got around to making our lists semi-modern in their interaction model. This means that you don't toggle off in a list without using a modifier key to do so. Also, we now use the apple/command key on Apple (tho the ctrl works as well), so Mac users can finally multi select in lists the same way the rest of their apps do. Also, on a button-2 click (to raise the menu), we now select. Which is also standard behavior.

It has some interesting affects on long time users of VW tools. New/younger users are just happy that it now feels more like what they're used to. But for the rest of us... we've gotten used to two side affects of the old behavior, which may take a bit of memory-muscle therapy to get used to, but it's not too bad, I got over it in a couple of days of occasional giggles at myself. One is the "pull back scope" thing in the browser, which Georg describes. You learn to use the modifier key or just select the item above and back on. It was interesting that I *naturally* do that in column view mode of the Apple Finder (which is kinda like the 4 list browser layout). But didn't naturally do so for VW. The human brain is a cool thing.

The other thing is that we're used to the pattern of selecting an item in a list, and then *anywhere* in the list, right clicking for a menu to operate on the item we just selected, even tho the mouse may be somewhere else in the list now. What will happen with the new behavior is that you'll end up selecting the item you've moved to. So the first memory-muscle that gets therapy (at least along my path to recovery) is that you start making sure where you menu-click at. You learn to left-click -> right click in the same spot. The second, is that you begin to realize, "I don't need the left click, I can just optimize that out of the loop now." This is standard behavior. And once I got used to it, I find I do like it better. Not just for the consistency aspect.

It's consistent with standard platform behavior, but something of a change for long-time VW users - I'm still getting used to it, especially with the right click behavior. The important thing is, it works the way any newcomer to the tools would expect it to work now.

This week we spoke to a long time "tire kicker" of Smalltalk, Sean McGinty. He's been looking at Smalltalk on and off for over a decade, so we thought it might be useful to find out:

• Why he keeps coming back to Smalltalk
• What prevents him from moving past tire kicking to real usage

That led to a discussion of the pros and cons of Smalltalk, what things we (as a community) could do better, and what things we do pretty well already. To listen now, click here.

If you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or visit us on Facebook or Ning - you can vote for the Podcast Alley, and subscribe on iTunes. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, im, tire kicker

Dave Buck points out that the International Ray Tracing Competition' website has been updated, and it's built with Seaside.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

"Terminator Salvation" pretty much delivers the goods, at least so far as this franchise goes. The new movie hearkens back to the first one a lot, and runs in overdrive - as the first one did - pretty much the whole way. That's why I liked it, because it was relentless in the same way that the original was. While it may not be a great piece of movie-making, it's a great addition to the series, and worth seeing.

Technorati Tags: terminator

Maybe not, if you plan to use it mostly for corporate purposes :)

Technorati Tags: marketing

Here's another talk from our Minneapolis one day Smalltalk event - this is me talking about Smalltalk productivity with some examples. It's kind of a "lightning talk". You can download my slides (PDF) here. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

The Smalltalk Way from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, minneapolis, seaside

Memorial Day goes back to the Post Civil War era:

I like the idea of a new Buffy-verse movie, but this?

A new incarnation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is being developed for the big screen, but don't get too excited, Buffy fans: This version wouldn't involve series creator Joss Whedon, would have no connection to the beloved TV show and wouldn't make use of such characters as Angel, Willow, Xander or Spike.

Yes, I realize Star Trek was just relaunched successfully, but that was decades after the original series, and many of the original actors aren't even alive anymore. Relaunching Buffy from scratch would be a much harder task, I think...

Technorati Tags: buffy, whedon

I've taken another look at the Cloudfork work that's been going on - it works nicely in VW - I'll be doing a brief screencast on hitting S3 buckets with it later this morning. Good stuff, and it should be enormously helpful to the Smalltalk development community - it works across VW, Squeak, and VA (possibly others, but that's what I know about). Great work by Ernest Micklei and the rest of the people working on it!

Technorati Tags: aws, cloudfork

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at the Cloudfork project - an interface to Amazon's AWS services (S3, SimpleDB, and EC2) for Smalltalk. We look at accessing S3 in today's screencast. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Using Cloudfork: S3 from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, s3, amazon, aws, cloudfork

Ernest Micklei has put up a nice little "how to" on building an AIR GUI that talks to a Smalltalk back end (VW in this case). Looks cool; I think I'll try it out

Technorati Tags: flex, air, glare

Earlier, I pointed to this post about Glare (Flex backend for Smalltalk), and said I'd be taking a look at the little example. Thus began my fun little foray into tools of minimal help :)

First, I downloaded Eclipse. That installed ok, although I must say - the colorful introductory screen with a bunch of icons isn't all that helpful. I created a new project and it dove into project view, which, while not terribly like Smalltalk, was at least understandable. I quit Eclipse, and downloaded the eval of Adobe's Flex UI tools. THose installed easily enough, although - like most installers - it stayed on the "nearly done" part of the progress bar forever. With that out of the way, I started Eclipse back up.

First check - it wasn't that clear to me how to start the plugin, but it was just an option when I created a new project. Ok, easy enough. That's when the nightmare of trivial errors began :)

Flex development takes place using XML. I'm sure that some developer somewhere thought this was a good idea - but he needs to be taken out behind the woodshed, stat. leading whitespace in your source file from a copy/replace operation while looking at a tutorial? Enter inexplicable error #1:

Configuration error encountered on line 1, column 8: 
'The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed.'

Googling was the only way to figure out that I had a leading whitespace in one of my XML files; the error message certainly didn't inform me of that. There were a couple more issues I ran across, but those were related to the examples on the Glare page being partially incomplete - you really need to go to the source page (which is linked from the article) to get the full source for the Flex code (there were missing imports - something I'm sure an experienced Air developer would pick up).

Anyway - at that point, it started working: I had a back end Smalltalk service feeding a little Air app:

Technorati Tags: flex, eclipse, air, flex, glare