Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

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

Supposedly, the high today will be in the 70s - but yesterday, the high was where we're at now:

Normally, I'd like the cooler weather, because it would make jogging more pleasant. However, I'm still giving the stress fracture time before I go back to pavement pounding...

Being a celebrity certainly doesn't mean having an ego deficit:

Ashton Kutcher -- Twitter's top tweeter -- warned he may pull the plug on his tweeting if the micro-blogging service partners on a reality TV show.

In other news, the sun reportedly rose in the east - although we have no way of confirming that without Kutcher on the case...

Technorati Tags: twitter, social media, celebrities

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at Glare, a library for enabling communication between Flex/Air front ends and Smalltalk backends. 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:

Smalltalk and Air from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: flex, air, glare, smalltalk, cloud

Earlier today I decided that it would be useful to have some simple query access to the Media Search application I posted recently; the following urls will now show useful results:

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/MediaSearch/MediaSearch.html?q=cloud

That will do a keyword search (across titles and content) for the audio and video content on our site. This one:

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/MediaSearch/MediaSearch.html?tag=cloud

will do a tag search (like clicking on a tag within the app)

As it happens, adding those kinds of public urls for a Web Velocity (Seaside) app is an easy thing. In my component, I added this method:

initialRequest: aRequest
	super initialRequest: aRequest.
	aRequest at: 'q' ifPresent: [:searchString |
		self setupSearchQueryFor: searchString].
	aRequest at: 'tag' ifPresent: [:tagString |
		self setupTagSearchFor: tagString]

And that makes those urls public - which means that you can use them easily in any non-Seaside app - for instance, you can hook up a stock search field using a servlet to hit those urls.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, webvelocity

One of the classic complaints about VisualWorks has been the emulated UI. I've gone back and forth on how relevant that is, but I'm starting to think that it's becoming less relevant all the time. Why? Have a look at this from O'Reilly Radar - it covers a raft of web technology coming downstream to the browser - simple video embedding, full canvas for graphics - you can "go native" in the browser, and have a powerful back end in Smalltalk, making it easier to write the business logic. It looks to me like the future is going to be browser based, with the most productive thing you can find for the far end. In that world, Smalltalk plays pretty well.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, javascript, html5

I'm sure this is what newspaper - and other traditional media - owners want to hear, but I don't think it's the case. This is Sergey Brin responding to a newspaper reporter's question:

Newspapers, he said, still deliver valuable content to the world. If newspapers take the time during the transition, to figure out what the next model might be, they can have a "strong sustainable form of revenue" for the future.

The value of printed news content is diminishing all the time. News is now a 24 hour, instant on thing - newspapers rely on the pace of a daily cycle. I think that means there's really no place for a printed daily news account. I'd suggest deeper analysis, but the weekly news journals have already tried that, without a lot of success. The problem is this: Not enough people want to pay anything for news or analysis in printed form anymore. I'm not sure what business model addresses that basic problem...

Technorati Tags: newspapers, news

Spotted in SCI FI Wire:

"The Next Doctor," the series' Christmas special, will air at 9 p.m. June 27, and the next special, "Planet of the Dead," is set for July. Dates and times for the final three shows are to be determined, but the next incarnation of the show is already in the works, with Steven Moffat taking over from Russell T. Davies as show runner and Matt Smith replacing David Tennant as the Doctor.

The two episodes discussed above aired in the UK at Christmas and Easter, respectively. Now they're airing in the US starting in late June. The problem with this is simple: fans of the show find out through this internet thing when the shows aired, and want to see them Did the BBC make it available via:

• Simultaneous air dates?
• iTunes?
• Streaming Media?
• Anything at all?

Nope. Like a lot of media people, it's still the 1980's in their heads, and having widely separated air dates around the world makes perfect sense. The amusing thing is watching this sort of person complain about piracy later. Heck, they might as well have erected a huge sign saying "please steal these programs".

I love it when the technically illiterate opine on things they barely understand - like the supposed ease of taxing email. From the NY Times' "Idea of the Day":

Such a tax is feasible, he says, since e-mail addresses are easily identifiable by Internet service providers and they could pass on the levy in their monthly bills to users.

So... does my ISP (Verizon) monitor my HTTP traffic and charge me for usage of GMail? How about my VPN for when I use corporate mail? Or does that get kicked back to the providers, who then have to somehow figure out how to pass that cost on to end users?

How about a spam email that originates from a location outside the US? Given the current email protocols, how does an email system tell whether the sender paid the tax or not? Assuming you find a way around that problem, how does that system tell whether the credentials that claim the tax was paid are valid or not? Does the author assume that those can't be faked either?

The funny thing is, my daughter's generation is already routing around this entire problem. Between things like SMS and Facebook, they avoid spam entirely - by avoiding email.

Technorati Tags: email, spam

Today's Smalltalk Daily takes a look at some of the smaller - but useful - graphical updates to the tools that are coming in the summer 2009 release. 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:

Look Updates from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: UI, graphics

There was a famous description of conservative ideology as a "man standing athwart history, shouting stop!" Well, that would make a fine description of this gathering of newspaper moguls:

There's no mention on its website but the Newspaper Association of America, the industry trade group, has assembled top executives of the New York Times, Gannett, E. W. Scripps, Advance Publications, McClatchy, Hearst Newspapers, MediaNews Group, the Associated Press, Philadelphia Media Holdings, Lee Enterprises and Freedom Communication Inc., among more than two dozen in all. A longtime industry chum, consultant Barbara Cohen, "will facilitate the meeting."

The problem is pretty well described by Doc Searls - these guys are trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again - sort of like the RIAA tried, and the MPAA is still trying, to do. It won't work out any better for them.

Spotted in Engadget:

During Palm's D7 keynote today in Carlsbad, Paul Cousino showed attendees that non-DRM music and videos could be synced with the Pre via iTunes (on Mac and Windows, naturally). In his words: "It shows up in iTunes just like a regular device."

I think this means that Apple is taking the new Zune HD - along with its tie ins with the Zune marketplace and the popular XBox - seriously. Now they can toss the "lock in" bomb across the way, which is kind of an odd place for the Apple/MS rivalry to be :)

Technorati Tags: apple, microsoft, palm pre, itunes

Copyright isn't dead; it's resting:

The Conference Board of Canada has just announced that it is recalling all three IP reports that it issued last week. It says that "an internal review has determined that these reports did not follow the high quality research standards of The Conference Board of Canada."

Update: Jesse Brown interviewed Anne Golden, CEO of the Conference Board of Canada. Golden admits that the digital economy report was plagiarized.

I'd make a snarky comment, but it seems superfluous....

The Cincom Star team will be traveling to Cologne, Germany this weekend for the Tuesday (June 2nd) one day Conference - you can join us there by registering (free), or just walking in - we'll be at the Marriott:

Marriott Cologne
Johannisstrasse 76-80
50668 Cologne
Germany

Phone: 49 221 942220

Here's the Agenda for the event:

9:00 --10:00 Continental Breakfast & Registration

10:00 --10:15 Welcome
Speaker: Suzanne Fortman, Smalltalk Program Director, Cincom Systems, Inc. A friendly greeting by the Smalltalk Program Director for Cincom, Suzanne Fortman.

10:15 --10:55 Smalltalk --Yes We Can
Speaker: Georg Heeg, Smalltalk Industry Council Executive Director
For more than 30 years, Smalltalk has been alive and powerful, agile and stable, modern and solid, flexible and fast, and adaptable to any new requirement. When someone walks up to a Smalltalker with a 130-year-long unsolved problem, the Smalltalker's answer is "yes, we can." In this exciting session, learn the amazing history and current successes of Cincom Smalltalk from Georg Heeg, the Executive Director of the Smalltalk Industry Council.

10:55 --11:35 Making Hard Problems Simple
Speaker: James Robertson, Smalltalk Product Evangelist, Cincom Systems, Inc.
In a down economy, the rules for business are changing. In this introduction to Cincom Smalltalk, James Robertson, the Smalltalk Product Evangelist, will discuss how Smalltalk is ideally suited for users who need to build custom applications that support complex, rapidly changing business requirements.

11:35 --11:50 Break

11:50 --12:40 Increasing Productivity with Limited Resources
Speaker: Dirk Verleysen, Senior Software Engineer, Cincom Systems, Inc.
The faster an application can get to market, the less time and money is wasted in development, resulting in a quicker return on your investment. Dirk Verleysen, a Senior Software Engineer for Cincom Smalltalk, explains how to accomplish this by simplifying the development process.

12:40 --1:30 Better, Faster, Cheaper --Attainable Goals in Software Development
Speaker: Arden Thomas, Smalltalk Product Manager, Cincom Systems, Inc.
With efficiency becoming the battle cry for most companies these days, everyone is being squeezed for faster work on a tighter budget. In this informative talk, Arden Thomas, the Smalltalk Product Manager, will demonstrate how Cincom's VisualWorks can help you attain these seemingly impossible goals.

1:30 --2:30 Lunch

2:30 --3:10 Agile Web Programming
Speaker: Arden Thomas, Smalltalk Product Manager, Cincom Systems, Inc.
In this compelling preview, Arden Thomas, the Smalltalk Product Manager, will introduce the blazing fast web development speed of Cincom's latest Smalltalk product release --Web Velocity

3:15 --3:30 Next Steps
Speaker: Smalltalk STAR Team
Open discussions, Q & A, Surveys.

Technorati Tags: cologne, conference

I've read a few books since the last time I posted about them. I finished "The Next 100 Years" a month or so ago - it speculates about the next century of history, and posits a fairly bright future for the US in that time. I'm not entirely sure I agree with the various projections made by the author, but it's thought provoking.

After that, I read an interesting book about the first publication of Soviet archives after the fall of the USSR - "Inside the Stalin Archives". The book isn't really about the horrors of the Soviet system (although it's got plenty of that) - it's much more the story of how Jonathan Brent (the author) navigated the ins and outs of post-Soviet Russia in the scholarly pursuit of history. It's a fascinating read on those grounds alone, and I highly recommend it.

Finally, I just finished "The Paradox of Choice" - a great little book that explores why it is that we feel so much worse when we have so much more. Basically, in the developed world we've set our expectations so high that virtually nothing can satisfy many of us: we're simply convinced that in the sea of abundance we swim in, there must be a better (vacation/gadget/marriage/what have you) out there somewhere. I really enjoyed this book, and came to the realization that it's not really about me - I've always been upbeat and optimistic, and nothing really gets me down for long. If you are the sort of person who ends up regretting many everyday decisions though, you'll learn a lot by reading this book. Either way, I recommend it.

Technorati Tags: history, sociology

You have to love the level of tunnel vision on display here. Scoble berates Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg for describing something as "Web 3.0", partly over this:

Short aside: It's interesting that neither Kara nor Walt show up very often on friendfeed, which is the best example of the 2010 Web right now. Kara Swisher has made a total of five comments there. Walt is even worse, doesn't bring any items in there, and only has six comments. How can you know what the 2010 Web is, if you don't use it and don't participate in it?

Shorter Scoble: "You don't use my favorite, relatively unknown walled garden, so how dare you try to name something? Only us cool kids over in the walled garden can do that"

As to Google's Wave announcement, which features prominently in the rest of Scoble's post? It looks interesting, but it remains to be seen whether Google can still launch a new product that people will use. Since GMail, what have they pushed out that has caught on in any real way? While it looks cool, Friendfeed also has tons of cool features compared to Twitter, and it's completely failed to get beyond being niche sized. There are only so many social software tools that regular people will use, and getting them to switch over from Twitter and Facebook will be non-trivial.

Technorati Tags: social media

I'm exaggerating, of course - email isn't dead, and won't be going away any time soon. However, it is slipping down the rungs of relevance quickly, replaced by things like IM and SMS. That's even more true for younger people than for the working set; if you have kids, ask them how much they use email.

Accelerating this trend will be the movement of IM towards something like what Googe unveiled yesterday: Wave. While I'm not sure Wave itself will catch on, the kinds of things Google is talking about most certainly will.

Technorati Tags: social media, im, email

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at Cairo graphics in VW - to get the Cairo libraries installed, you'll want to go to the Cairo website. 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:

Cairo in VW from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: graphics, cairo

Looks like Google planned to be the biggest news of the day, and they won the news cycle - taking it from Microsoft, who expected to have buzz around Bing. Via TechCrunch:

So what happened? Well, the company that will do no evil will certainly engage in a little stealth black ops mission when its required. Google knew full well exactly when Bing was going to launch. And they carefully planned the Wave launch to occur just minutes afterwards. They knew the crowd was ready for something cool. Not only did they have that free phone, but the day before Google VP Engineering Vic Gundotra told the crowd that there would be a big announcement the next day. People were ready and willing to be wowed.

They timed that right as MS was finishing the announcement of their renamed search engine (Bing) - and before the website went live. Looks to me like MS should have made sure the site was live before they went public. It's too bad, too, because if this video shows the tool the way it works, it could be pretty cool.

Technorati Tags: bing, wave, google, microsoft

My daughter and my wife have joined Twitter now - it must be mainstream :)

Technorati Tags: social media, twitter

Ahh, the world is back to normal:

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

Travis explains some of his thinking vis-a-vis external interfaces - and it's making me think about some of my own interfaces to systems...

Travis demonstrates - in 4 lines - how to create anonymous objects - instances of a new anonymous class that is like an existing class, except that you can inject instance specific behavior into it. So say you wanted to have a custom XML parser that handled a specific kind of error, but you didn't want to create a whole subclass, and you didn't want to change the behavior of the stock parser....

And yes, as Randal mentions, this is one of the things that makes Smalltalk cool :)

Technorati Tags: reflection

Whatever travel-related problems Michael had seems to have come my way. I met Arden in Philadelphia yesterday, and we promptly waited through a 2 hour delay - and then they had to switch planes, sending us across the terminal to the new one. We then had another long delay before boarding the new plane (and another one after boarding) - there were problems with the cabin lights. Fortunately I was so exhausted that I slept anyway :)

So anyway, I'll be arriving in Cologne late, which means that the podcast won't be out until later today. Which won't actually be that late, given the timezone differences.

This week Michael and I discussed Bob Martin's RailsConf talk - which I commented on here. We ranged across that and a few related topics, largely dismissing Bob's talk. 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!

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Technorati Tags: smalltalk, ruby, bob martin, railsconf