Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Until I noticed where it was posted. See the story talking about how Windows might be the most secure OS.

According to a new Aberdeen Group report, open-source solution Linux has surpassed Windows as the most vulnerable OS, contrary to the high-profile press Microsoft's security woes receive. Furthermore, the Aberdeen Group reports that more than 50 percent of all security advisories that CERT issued in the first 10 months of 2002 were for Linux and other open-source software solutions. The report muddles the argument that proprietary software such as Windows is inherently less secure than open solutions. And here's another blow to the status quo: Proprietary UNIX solutions were responsible for just as many security advisories as Linux in the same time period. Could Windows be the most secure mainstream OS available today?

The report is from one of the analyst groups, and the site touts Windows. So take it for what it's worth...

ezBoard continues to get bigger. Here's the scoop from Vanchau in response to a question from Jason Jones:

Ezboard has well over 10 million registered members and runs on 150 servers .. All Smalltalk.. And the technology improves constantly... We have built some pretty cool stuff using a basic image and BOSS files as our flat file database

Well, I guess the BOSS file back end for this blog isn't so unreasonable ;-)

I just had an odd bug reported. In BottomFeeder, select an item, and then in the html pane, click a link. Then click the link again. Notice how nothing happens? BottomFeeder uses Twoflower for the html widget. The problem is, the Twoflower machinery keeps track of the page its currently on, and then doesn't submit a request if it's already on the requested page. This is probably ok if you are browsing with Twoflower, but most BottomFeeder users are launching an external browser - in which case, a mystifying nothing is just bad. I've just overridden the code in question, and verified that it works as expected. I'll eventually push a new dev build up.

Here's an idea - XP started out in Smalltalk (on the C3 project, specifically). XP and Agile Methodologies are getting a lot of buzz right now - and there are a growing number of XP user groups around the US and the world. One thing that would help get the word out on Smalltalk is a little pro-active behavior - take a look at the list, and see if there's an XP group near you. Then see if they would be open to a talk on Smalltalk and XP - you could go in and demonstrate the support for XP in Smalltalk - SUnit, the Refactoring Browser, etc. I think we all need to go outside the group more and be proactive. Thoughts?

Go read this

Resolved: whenever I see someone in the grocery store pick up an Old El Paso Taco Pizza kit, and they seem to be debating the purchase, I will spring forward, knock the box from their hand and shout RUN! POISON GAS STREAMING IN FROM THE JERSEY MARSHES! They will leave the store, and forget all about the Taco Pizza kit. I will have done my part.

It's well worth reading the whole thing. This is the same guy who wrote The Gallery of Regrettable Food, a truly funny send up of 50's food.

The Register is reporting that the RIAA has paid for the development of a worm to propagate into p2p networks. Have a look at the story here. This is a scary precedent, if it's accurate.

I changed the way comments show up in the RSS feed - new ones show up with a link back to the original entry. Unfortunately, the relative url (which is used for the posting itself) does not work and play well with the RSS feed. I have a fix, and will be posting it in a few

Then read this over at the Why Smalltalk site. It's a nice write up on what Smalltalk is, and why you should care

Smalltalk is the most mature object-oriented language on the market. Most other OO language implementations, ranging from Object COBOL to Java, have drawn inspiration from Smalltalk. (If you're not already familiar with what object-orientation means, see the OO page for a basic tutorial.) One of the distinctive features of Smalltalk (versus, say, Java) is that it does not require type specifications for variables and arguments. If you look at a typical Java or C++ program listing, you'll see that a great deal of space is taken up by type definitions, and related stuff such as casting (which is required, for example, to use Java collection classes). Some people argue that strong typing makes programs more reliable. Most Smalltalkers believe that the visual clutter necessitated by strong typing, and the fact that it complicates the language syntax, more than offset its advantages. In Smalltalk, the programmer just focuses on the semantics of the problem, writes simpler code faster, and has more time left for user feedback and testing.

So if you can't be in NY for my talk, head to Toronto for David Buck's presentation on ElastoLab. I've played with it, and my daughter, nephew, and niece all found it fascinating. It's a great example of a cool VW application.

Charles Monteiro put out this notice for the STUG meeting this Wednesday, January 15th:

Extreme Programming in Smalltalk
James Robertson, Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk will repeat a recent presentation he gave at an XP conference in Brazil. Extreme Programming was developed in Smalltalk circles , join us and get an insight into why.

Date	January 15th
Location	Suite LLC offices
Address	440 9th Avenue, 8th Floor
Time - 6:00pm to 6:30 pm	Open house
Time - 6:30pm to 8:00 pm	Main Event

Directions:
Take E or C train to 34th (Penn Station) walk to corner of 34th and 8th. Walk up one block to 9th. RSVP is requested. Please send mail to: Charles Monteiro with subject line of: NYC Smalltalk Jan 15th. Our meetings are opened to the general public. Invite a friend ! To join our mailing list simply send mail to: NYC STUG Any questions send mail to: Charles Monteiro Charles
Chair
NYC Smalltalk

This should be a good time, and it sounds like Charles has gotten RSVP's from a fair number of non-Smalltalkers. If you are going to be in NY, stop by and say hi!

I can definitely identify with this strip. Scott Adams got that about right...

There's a story out today claiming that SCO is mulling over an IP suit against the various Linux distributors. It all seems to be rumor mongering right now, but if it were to come to pass, can you imagine the chortles of glee that would emanate from Microsoft (and likely Sun) HQ?

I've been reading about Trackback and Pingback. The idea is to semi-automate the process whereby a site owner (in particular here, a blogger) gets notified about links to their content. The huh from me comes up due to site logs - what exactly is provided by these things (other than a whole lot of messaging) that you can't already dig out of your server logs? I've built some rough VW tools for parsing logs, and a few minutes in a workspace gets me all the information I could ever want about people referring to the various parts of my site. Gathering this information via the logs chews no additional bandwidth, uses information that's being gathered already, and means very little new code to write. So other than the buzzword bit, what's the point? I don't get it.

Well, it seems that I have egg on my face with this release. Awhile back in the Dev build cycle, I had changed the monolithic save file format to binary (BOSS) from XML. I released 2.6 yesterday, but I had not gone back and tried it out on a 2.5 XML format save file. That's what users are for - to point out how much testing I didn't do :-( I have uploaded a fresh build that fixes the problem - I tested on an XML save file from a user, and on one of my binary save files. All should be well now. My apologies for not catching this before I announced the release. Visit the BottomFeeder Home Page to get it

Have a look at this register story - there's been an attempt to have the DMCA laws prevent third parties from selling replacement inkjet cartridges. Follow the links at the end of the story as well - the DMCA seems to be being stretched in all sorts of directions. For my wife's color HP printer, the cost of two replacement cartridges can be nearly half the original cost of the printer! No wonder the printer vendors want to muscle out the competition...

I've often wondered about the odd pauses IE will sometimes have when browsing. There are times I've had to go so far as to start up a new instance. So I was interested when I stumbled across this post from last December. The author is talking about 5 year old behavior, but I still see those symptoms. I've seen others comment on IE oddness as well - have a look here, for instance. So what gives? Is IE specifically optimized for IIS, or is there something else going on here?

Then you should definitely buy this one. We play a lot of Settlers (including the many variants) as well. This new game is very well balanced, and moves along very well. It's a resource management strategy game, and all players get an action on every turn. Highly recommended.

Here's a story about China filtering blogs out.

"Bloggers" from all over China are reporting that they are unable to access their on-line journals or "blogs". Journals hosted at Blogspot.com and other blog providers have joined a growing list of sites blocked by Chinese authorities. An anonymous blogger in Henan Province said, After talking to other Blogspot users all over China it seems that the ban is present throughout the entire country. I know that a lot of people have blogs and that they will not be pleased to see their personal journals taken away for unknown political reasons. . . Initial scans indicate that blogspot.com is being blocked by IP number at the international gateway level.

Who knew that all this online blathering would get noticed?

Why Smalltalk's Jason Jones has set up a new discussion forum on ezBoard. EZ Board is a Cincom Smalltalk customer, and the site is powered by VisualWorks. Check out the success story

BottomFeeder 2.6 is finally released. Check the main site for download information and the changelog. Enjoy!

This is just too funny:

For three months, staffers at Piqua, Ohio's Flesh Public Library, which is named after the man who donated the land for the library, Leo Flesh, worked on the library's new website. But when the big day came in early December and director James Oda assembled the entire staff to premiere the finished site - www.fleshpublic.lib.oh.us - the library's computer system denied him access. The Internet filtering system used by the library to protect children from pornography had blocked the site because the url contained the words "flesh" and "public." As Oda later told the Dayton Daily News, "We banned ourselves."

I found this here

Hat tip to Bob Westergaard for this tip. Follow this link to ZD Net. You will see Cincom Smalltalk come up second. If you follow the Cincom Smalltalk link, you can add your own review.

The Family Room TV is over a decade old, and has a bum picture tube. Off we go to find a replacement. We are looking in the 45" and up range. Suggestions?

I blogged on this Slashdot thread the other day, and have been periodically going back to look at the followup postings. This one caught my eye today:

I prefer verbose logging too. I've been working with WebSphere Application Developer during the last year and I've never used the debugger. However verbose logging - IMHO - should be considered as a form of debugging too. Sure, it's not the boring act of step-by-step stumbling through control structures and loops glaring at a huge set off watches, but instead it focuses on what is important in a certain context (if logging is done properly) and is works much faster, because the result simply stays in the form of a log which one can take all the time needed to examine. An important pro of verbose logging to traditional debugging is that proper log statements preferably combined with assertions which validate the state of an object at runtime also provide very usefull documentation of a program. The remaining contra is extra code slowing down execution, even dramatically depending on the log format (imagine the time needed to format date/time information for each 5 or so lines of code). Comes to my mind the fact that object oriented languages use runtime linkage for virtual methods at great scale. Hence it should be possible to keep two versions of code, one containing debugging code and one that has been cleaned - eg. by a modified class loader for example, whic removes all calls to a classes from a certain package. This should enable switching at runtime from a clean non-logging version to a logging-version, if a certain condition is met. For example during a suspicious error, or simply a flag a user can set at the moment he or she detects a bug. This means that even production versions of software could be equiped with shiploads of logging possibilities having nearly no affection at all to their execution speed.

What is it with the C syntax crowd that generates "pride" in not using a debugger? In this case, it seems again to be the huge over-emphasis on early optimization - the code must run as fast as possible, even if we have no metrics on how fast is necessary. So there this guy goes, blinders firmly attached, happily unaware that tools exist that could make him a better developer. In fact, there they are, just beyond his grasp...

I posted a new survey last week - the topic is categorization of code. With the introduction of Namespaces and Store in 5i, a lot of people voiced concern over how code should/could be organized - by namespace, by category, by parcel, by package (etc.). Here's your chance to let us know what you think. Thanks!

Yet another Buffy fan

I've certainly seen this user before. ROTFL

A few weeks ago, I stopped using my Linux box as a router and bought a Linksys router. Since then, my wife's XP box has steadfastly refused to see the home LAN. It can ping, and do TCP/IP operations - just none of the Windows networking things. Since my Linux box and my Windows ME (bleah) box still talk, I don't think it't my fault. feel the ease of use...

I have been asked why I slam Sun and Java so much, and pay less attention to Microsoft. Partly, it's due to my low level of trust in anti-trust law in general - i.e., I don't have a lot to say about the monopoly case. On the language/development level, I think there's a big difference. Sun's mantra is all platforms, so long as you use Java. Microsoft's is any language, so long as you use Windows. To me it's clear which is the nearer term risk to anyone who favors Smalltalk. But there's more - read this

The technologists have won a rare victory over the marketeers at Microsoft this week: the latest renaming of the next release of Windows Server 2003 has removed the ".NET" branding that was first attached to the product in June 2001 - the original launch date of Microsoft's .Net strategy. The move is significant because, instead of attempting to push Windows as the default platform for .Net, Microsoft will now promote its flagship server platform as "Microsoft .NET Connected", a badge that third-party vendors will also be able to earn. As the Register's John Lettice explains:

"This logo will indicate 'its ability to easily and consistently connect disparate information, systems, and devices to meet customers' people and business needs (regardless of underlying platform or programming language).' That last bit may have some significance - is it perhaps more important that Windows has fallen off .NET than that .NET has fallen off Windows?"

Some significance indeed. The move relegates Windows to the status of just another server platform within the .Net Framework, Microsoft's umbrella architecture for web services, confirming that .Net is now more strategically important to Microsoft than Windows. How long before some version of Linux earns the "Microsoft .NET Connected" badge? That day may be closer than anyone expects - I predict it will be in the first half of 2004.

Does this make Microsoft all warm and fuzzy? Heck no. I liked the way Alan Knight put it on the IRC Channel the other day - MS, IBM, Sun (et. al.) are like Godzilla rampaging through Tokyo, and the best we can do is try not to get stepped on. They might sometimes knock down a wall in a way that helps us, but it will likely be an accident. In any case, this is why I slam Sun more often - Sun's current efforts, if successful, would be more damaging to Smalltalk than Microsoft's current efforts would be if they succeed.

My old Dell laptop has had it - for the second time in 12 months, the keyboard went flaky. Some keys typed multiple times, some not at all. And it changed. It made typing a nightmare, and I spend my day at a keyboard. So you can imagine how fun this was. Today, a replacement came in - I swapped in the old HD, the PCI cards, and voila - back in business. So how often do keyboards go bad? The dell notebook is the first one I've ever had with a bum keyboard. I've had systems from NEC, from IBM, from Panasonic, and from Toshiba. Do other people see this?

I got this from Dewayne Mikkelson's blog>]. Apparently, Adele Goldberg has published another book:

Article : Learning is a Community Experience : By Adele Goldberg - "Perhaps it is obvious - you do not learn alone, but you do take responsibility for your own education. (14-pages, 206 KB PDF) * Go to Learning is a Community Experience, published in the July/August 2002 edition of the Journal of Object Technology SynapShots Adele was one of the creators of the Smalltalk programming language. She worked at Xerox PARC with Alan Kay and later became the CEO of ParcPlace Systems where she worked to commercialize object-oiented technologies. This article contains her reflections on introducing object-oriented technologies and thinking to the technology world. Lots of good material. I was struck by this definition of an educated person:

We think that an educated person is one who knows a little about a lot, and a lot about some focused subject area - one who reads broadly so is conversant on many topics, but one who holds his or her tongue when the hard data is not there to back up the inclination of that tongue.

Wouldn't the world be a nicer place if more of us took that advice to heart?

Go read the whole thing

I taught the first class today. I only have 4 kids, aged 8-11. That makes it easy to get concepts across and give them plenty of hands on time. We used Squeak - it simply has far more kid friendly stuff than VW does. What I had them start with was the Energizer Bunny Alice world. They liked that a lot. They figured out the idea of sending messages to objects pretty quickly, and started working on combining actions to make the bunny do more interesting things. The hour passed quickly, and they all seemed to enjoy it greatly - and they were executing actual Smalltalk interactively! Try that with a set of Java tools

Jason Jone of Why Smalltalk writes:

Why Smalltalk now offers a home for authors to publish their Smalltalk and/or Object-Oriented articles to the web. This is a voluntary, non-profit effort. All articles will remain the intellectual property of the author. Why Smalltalk will only host the articles to further the educational advancement of the Smalltalk community. Send your submittals to Jason Jones Interested? Follow this link Jason

The comments for my previous post on this on this topic are interesting. Have a look

This job posting was forwarded to me by Charles Monteiro, who got it from Monster.com:

Java Consultant for financial client in New York/New Jersey area. Must have JAVA, SOCKETS, THREADS, AWT ,TCP/IP MUST ALSO HAVE SQL, DDL AND DO QUERY OPTIMIZATION WE DO NOT WANT ANYONE THAT HAS WORKED WITH EJB OR J2EE (ORB / RMI) - PLEASE DO NOT Apply if all you HAVE USED are THESE TECHNOLOGIES - these Java people are a different type that think a different way...SO NO EJB and NO J2EE.

That's just way too amusing. I can't think of any other language/platform I've ever seen anything like that...

XP in the large ROTFL Hat tip to David Buck

LoTR had been written by someone else?. Hat tip to Vassili Bykov.

This item is priceless. I'm copying the entire thing, in between chuckles.

Bacterial Backup BureauThe New Scientist reports that scientists have stored text data in the DNA of a living bacteria -- and then recovered the message after a hundred generations of reproduction:

The scientists took the words of the song It's a Small World and translated it into a code based on the four "letters" of DNA. They then created artificial DNA strands recording different parts of the song. These DNA messages, each about 150 bases long, were inserted into bacteria such as E. coli and Deinococcus radiodurans.

No word yet on if they've searched the DNA of creatures in the wild for pre-existing messages from ancient extraterrestrials. Lawyers from Disney and the Harry Fox Agency have sent a "cease and desist" letter to the E. coli and Deinococcus radiodurans demanding that they immediately stop reproducing Disney's copyrighted lyrics. At 7 cents a copy, the petri dish of ever-reproducing bacteria now owes $24 trillion in mechanical licensing fees, and counting.

His title for the entry alone makes it worth reading...

A new Survey is up. The topic for this survey is categorization in VisualWorks. For past surveys, go here

For Microsoft.

(TechWeb) -- Human error was the cause of a five-hour outage to Microsoft's .Net Messenger instant message service, a Microsoft executive said Tuesday. Technicians were installing routers to upgrade the .Net Messenger service, which underlies both Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger. The technicians incorrectly configured the routers. Service was out from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern time on Monday. Ironically, the routers were being installed to make the service more reliable.

I feel better now about the times I accidentally broke this server....

Earlier today I commented on a Debugger thread over on Slashdot. I went through the responses to my comment and found this hoary old chesnut

Smalltalk is interpreted, whereas C normally isn't. One of the powers of interpreted languages is the ability to easily add much more flexible debugging tools. Sure, you could create a debugging environment for C that had similar functionality, but you'd then be running your program on a completely different "platform" from that without a debugger. Along a similar line, I've seen many cases where a compiler was used to turn code in a normally interpreted language into machine code. Frequently, programs that ran just fine through the interpreter had serious problems in the compiled version. It ends up that there were bugs in the program that just didn't show up in the interpreter.

The C language community seems to be stuck in a time warp, perfectly content with crappy tools, and completely unaware that better things have been done in the past, and are being done now.

Well campers, it looks like another virus that targets Outlook and Outlook Express is out there. It also hits IE, and supposedly ICQ and IRC. I got this from The Fuzzy Blog.

Ms. Lavigne, a 17-year-old "skater-punk" pop star, joins a growing list of celebrities, most notably tennis beauty Anna Kournakova, who have served as virus writers' bait. Variously Called "Naith," "Avril" and "Lirva" by different antivirus companies, the virus spreads via e-mail, live-chat systems IRC and ICQ, music and file sharing on KaZaA and network file sharing systems, according to antivirus software maker Symantec Corp. (NasdaqNM:SYMC - News), which Tuesday labeled the virus low risk

Read the whole thing

I will be speaking at the NYSTUG meeting next week. This is the announcement from Charles Monteiro, who organizes the STUG there:

James Robertson, Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk will repeat a recent presentation he gave at an XP conference in Brazil. Extreme Programming was developed in Smalltalk circles, join us and get an insight into why.

Date:	January 15th
Location:	Suite LLC offices
Address:	440 9th Avenue, 8th Floor
Time: 6:00pm to 6:30 pm	Open house
6:30pm to 8:00 pm	Main Event

Directions: Take E or C train to 34th (Penn Station) walk to corner of 34th and 8th. Walk up one block to 9th. RSVP is requested. Please send mail to: Charles Monteiro with subject line of: NYC Smalltalk Jan 15th. Our meetings are opened to the general public. Invite a friend ! To join our mailing list simply send mail to: Subscribe

Smalltalk Solutions 2003 will be held at this hotel in Toronto. The conference is scheduled for July 14-16 - make your plans now. We are actively looking for speakers and tutorial presenters - contact Alan Knight if you are interested in presenting. This will be a great show in a really nice location. And heck, by July all the snow should be melted...

I ran across this at Slashdot, and immediately added a comment. I always find it amazing that so many C language family developers have no idea about what has been done in Smalltalk and Lisp.

Hat tip to Terry Raymond

TECH SUPPORT FOR HUSBAND 1.0 Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a slow down in the performance of flower and jewelry applications that had operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0 In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Romance 9.9, but installed undesirable programs such as NFL 5.0 and NBA 3.0. Conversation 8.0 no longer runs and Housecleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. I've tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail. What can I do? Desperate

---

Dear Desperate, First keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an entertainment package, while Husband 1.0 is an operating system. Try to enter the command: C:/I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME and install Tears 6.2. Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications: Guilty 3.0 and Flowers 7.0. But remember, overuse can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0, or Beer 6.1. Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will create SnoringLoudly.WAV files. DO NOT install Mother-In-Law 1.0 or reinstall another Boyfriend program. These are not supported applications and will crash Husband 1.0. In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have a limited memory and cannot learn new application quickly. You might consider buying additional software to improve performance. I personally recommend Hot Food 3.0 and Lingerie 6.9. Good Luck, Tech Support P.S. Whatever you do don't install Winemaker 5.5 and Vineyard Manager 3.0 with Husband 1.0! That will really crash your system! However, Cellar Inventory 3.0 can provide some relief for certain occasions... And I can confirm that Travel 5.1 will not work with Husband 1.0 and the same with EatOut 10.3 and Entertainment 2.8. However, Yardwork 4.7 works extremely well as same with RetirementPlanning 3.9

Thank goodness the wife doesn't read my blog ;-)

I really enjoy watching BtVS. So today I stumbled on this post over on Mark Bernstein's blog

It's interesting to see how Joss Whedon and (especially) Marti Noxon actually explore these issues instead of merely asserting them. I love Spirited Away, for example, but Miyazaki's masterpiece has a tacked-on moral (always remember who you are) that's hardly more organic than the notoriously-subverted lesson of the Wizard Of Oz (there's no place like home). This weakness comes with the territory; all of these are Parsifals -- bar mitzvah tales -- in which our hero sees the hidden world of grownups and, for the first time, does what adults do. The last line of Spirited Away, "I think I can handle it," is an idiomatic translation of "Today, I am a man." But Buffy isn't doing that any more. Spike's done the unforgivable, and he desperately needs to be forgiven. We've established that enduring terrible trials is necessary, but it wasn't sufficient: he has a soul again, against all odds and in defiance of natural order, but that doesn't really change things. How can Buffy love him? Faith (in Buffy) and prayer are unavailing. Good works don't do it; join the Scoobies, save them, save the world: been there, bored now. Nor is Love enough, clearly, for at this point Spike is once more love's bitch.

IMHO, Buffy has gotten better this year than last. I just hope that they don't do the MASH thing and linger well past the point of no return

I think 24 may be my new favorite program displacing BtVS. Tonight's episode was tense - and I didn't think things could get more tense after the last episode - guess I was wrong. Highly, highly recommended.

Just go read this. I found it very, very heartwarming.

Well, it looks like I'm not the only one who thinks that Sun is dreaming with the Java story. Have a look here

On my drive over to the Sun Tech Days presentation in Toronto, an idea kept rattling around in my head: Sun cares a lot about WORA (Write Once Run Anywhere). During the sessions that I attended, one of the things that Sun speakers stressed over and over again was the need for portability across different EJB containers. The question that I don't see addressed very often is: why does Sun care about portability? The answer to this question isn't immediately obvious. After all, Sun is a hardware company that doesn't appear to make money directly from its Java technology suite. Java, however, is the technology that brought Sun into the forefront of public / developer consciousness. So I believe the question really is one of how Sun can turn Java mind share into hardware profits. The answer to this question is that Sun wants Java applications to run on Sun hardware. In order to make that a reality, Java must be portable, otherwise there would be too much friction involved in migrating an application from one hardware / container platform to Sun's. By adopting this strategy, they have effectively tied the future of Sun to the idea that folks could develop Java code on their existing hardware, but that eventually, someday, those folks would reach into their checkbook and buy some Sun hardware. While this is not necessarily a bad strategy, I think this is a horrible strategy for Sun. Java portability is a double-edged sword that lets folks switch to Sun hardware, but it also makes it possible for folks to switch away from Sun hardware. The only way that this strategy can work effectively in the long term is if Sun can outperform the competition in the price / performance. I really don't see how this is possible, as Sun builds and sells proprietary hardware. Their hardware commands a considerable price premium over competitor's products today. In fact, no Sun hardware can be found in the top 10 results for TPC-C raw performance or price/performance. This premium is likely to continue to exist in the future because they lack the economies of scale that are available to the competition. Unless Sun can turn this around, it is likely that businesses will exploit Java's portability to switch away from Sun hardware.

I've said the same thing time and again - by making Java portable, Sun forgot what their core business is. They make virtually all of their money from Sparc servers. Thus, making it easily possible for people to migrate from eexpensive Sun hardware to cheap intel (Linux or Windows) hardware, Sun shoots itself in the foot. Business case studies will be written on this eventually - as an example of how not to invalidate your own market.

In following the various blogs I read, I keep coming across items discussing server logs, referers, etc. I got access to the server logs for CincomSmalltalk last night, and wrote some quick software for scanning through them. I could probably have downloaded something, but it took less time to write the Smalltalk code than to track through google, throw away the first N tools..... etc. So I got to looking at them, and realized two things:

1. I'm getting more blog visitors than I thought, since I'm not currently counting the views of the RSS file.
2. I also realized that BottomFeeder doesn't tag the User-Agent header in the HTTP requests it makes

That was easily fixed, and I cleaned up the HTTP request code while I was at it - that was written awhile ago, and had too many copies of the same code in multiple methods. Kind of a one thing leads to another case....

This Thursday I start a Smalltalk class for 4th and 5th graders. I would love to use VisualWorks (and probably would for high school) - but Squeak has more stuff that will be cool for the younger set. I'll probably start off with the Wonderland (Alice) stuff - the Energizer bunny should illustrate the object-message paradigm nicely, and be fun as well. This should be fun, and interesting. I've always said Smalltalk was simple enough for children - I can see how it goes with the 9 and 10 year old set.

I've been yapping about my ReplayTV troubles for awhile now. I've gotten a few emailed suggestions, for which I thank my readers. Nothing has helped though; it's looking more and more like a hardware problem. Which is where the tech support hell comes in. I spent two weeks just trying to get them on the phone. Then when I do get them, I find I'm speaking to people for whom English is a second language. Worse, they tell me they will call back, and they don't. On my second go around with them, I had to try all the tips that didn't work the first time, apparently in accordance with the support script - the second guy said there was no record of my earlier call. But at least he finally accepted that I have a hardware problem. Of course, he said that their systems were down, and would have to wait for a return call to get an RMA number. That was yesterday. What do I draw from this? If your company decides to outsource call centers to an overseas location, be prepared for very, very upset customers. Your customers won't be dealing with people who can solve any actual problems, and also won't be dealing with anyone who is actually empowered to solve any problems. Whatever you think you are saving in salary will get sucked up in angry customers who start giving you bad word of mouth. Like this rant, for instance...

The MPAA has lost one of its many attempts to control our future. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch. Found the tip here on a blog I read regularly.

Remember DeCSS? A program that a fifteen-year-old in Norway hacked out which could decrypt DVDs? The MPAA wanted that kid in jail and filed a criminal complaint against him in Norway. The local court has now issued its ruling, finding him innocent on all counts:

Head judge Irene Sogn, in reading the verdict, said no one could be convicted of breaking into their own property, and that there was no proof that Johansen or others had used the program to access illegal pirate copies of films. "The court finds that someone who buys a DVD film that has been legally produced has legal access the film. Something else would apply if the film had been an illegal ... pirate copy," the ruling said. It found that consumers have rights to legally obtained DVD films "even if the films are played in a different way than the makers had foreseen."