Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

A lot of people commented on David Stutz's letter to Microsoft this last week. I gave the whole matter a few days to settle in before deciding to comment. He's got a lot of good points to make:

During this period, most core Microsoft products missed the Internet wave, even while claiming to be leading the parade. Office has yet to move past the document abstraction, despite the world's widespread understanding that websites (HTML, HTTP, various embedded content types, and Apache mods) are very useful things. Windows has yet to move past its PC-centric roots to capture a significant part of the larger network space, although it makes a hell of a good client. Microsoft developer tools have yet to embrace the loosely coupled mindset that today's leading edge developers apply to work and play

This is dead on - and some of the DRM rumblings could make it worse. If that stuff comes in, mobile use of Office tools is going to be hard - and that's not in tune with where things are headed at all. Then there's the crap that is Word HTML format - bleah!

There's more good stuff:

As networked computing infrastructure matures, the PC client business will remain important in the same way that automotive manufacturers, rail carriers, and phone companies remained important while their own networks matured. The PC form factor will push forward; the Pocket PC, the Tablet PC, and other forms will emerge. But automakers, railroads, and phone companies actually manufacture their products, rather than selling intangible bits on a CD to hardware partners. Will Microsoft continue to convince its partners that software is distinctly valuable by itself? Or will the commodity nature of software turn the industry on its head? The hardware companies, who actually manufacture the machines, smell blood in the water, and the open source software movement is the result.

This is, I think the crux of the matter. Everything is network connected, and it's only going to go more that way. Software spaces are being relentlessly commoditized - it started with tools, and is rapidly moving through other aspects of the business. Microsoft is not unique in this - most software vendors (including the one I work for!) are still not clued in on this, and will be in for a series of nasty shocks as it rolls through the industry. It's more than offshore outsourcing; it's an entire market changing shape.

If Microsoft is unable to innovate quickly enough, or to adapt to embrace network-based integration, the threat that it faces is the erosion of the economic value of software being caused by the open source software movement. This is not just Linux. Linux is certainly a threat to Microsoft's less-than-perfect server software right now (and to its desktop in the not-too-distant future), but open source software in general, running especially on the Windows operating system, is a much bigger threat. As the quality of this software improves, there will be less and less reason to pay for core software-only assets that have become stylized categories over the years: Microsoft sells OFFICE (the suite) while people may only need a small part of Word or a bit of Access. Microsoft sells WINDOWS (the platform) but a small org might just need a website, or a fileserver. It no longer fits Microsoft's business model to have many individual offerings and to innovate with new application software. Unfortunately, this is exactly where free software excels and is making inroads. One-size-fits-all, one-app-is-all-you-need, one-api-and-damn-the-torpedoes has turned out to be an imperfect strategy for the long haul.

Digging in against open source commoditization won't work - it would be like digging in against the Internet, which Microsoft tried for a while before getting wise. Any move towards cutting off alternatives by limiting interoperability or integration options would be fraught with danger, since it would enrage customers, accelerate the divergence of the open source platform, and have other undesirable results. Despite this, Microsoft is at risk of following this path, due to the corporate delusion that goes by many names: "better together," "unified platform," and "integrated software." There is false hope in Redmond that these outmoded approaches to software integration will attract and keep international markets, governments, academics, and most importantly, innovators, safely within the Microsoft sphere of influence. But they won't .

There's a lot of wisdom in that for us Smalltalkers as well - this is a bad time to live on an island. We are addressing that in VW - Web Services, truly headless servers, the separation of the tools from development.... but the train is on the tracks, and hurtling towards us.

Go read the whole article - it's well worth your time.

This is amusing - hat tip Gordon Weakliem

I hope there's more to this story than this:

During the afternoon, Neil came over to me and said that some of the other speakers (no names) had been incensed that I covered Java in my talk and said they had asked that I not participate in the evening Q & A.

And this:

The "Java Jam" cruise doesn't seem to include any speakers with a .NET background, and given this story, ".NET Nirvana" meetups in the future don't hold much promise for a second chance.

There's politics everywhere...

Gordon Mohr found another absurd patent claim. Just listen to the claim:

Claim link

A system and method for file management is comprised of hierarchical files systems, referred to as "areas." There are three types of areas: work areas, staging areas, and edition areas. A work area is a modifiable file system, and, in a work area a user can create, edit, and delete files and directories. A staging area is a read-only file system that supports select versioning operations. Various users of work areas can integrate their work by submitting the contents of their work area to the staging area. In the staging area, developers can compare their work and see how their changes fit together. An edition is a read-only file system, and the contents of a staging area are virtually copied into an edition to create a frozen, read-only snapshot of the contents of the staging area. One use of the system and method for file management is as a website development tool.

Go read Gordon's take; I'm not going to improve on it.

There's a facinating Register story today on a Paypal screw up. Apparently, they had the Pound Sterling to US Dollar conversion wrong for part of the day:

PayPal's dollar-sterling exchange rate today at 1 pound = 97 cents made some quick-witted individuals very happy. The real rate, as published at Xe.com's very fine currency converter, is 1 pound = USD 1.57861.

So what about ordinary Joe Punter who simply wanted to pick up a bargain or two? Today was not the day to use PayPal if you were paying in sterling, as this sad tale from Reg reader Bryan MacErlean, shows.

I paid $669 for a watch today got charged 680 pounds. Contacted paypal support initially they were adamant that 'the rate is blended and calculated by the computer so must be right'. 20 minutes later at international rates I managed to get put through to someone in finance only to get fobbed off to yet another person. They still didn't admit it was their fault - they think the USD is worth more than sterling. I am unsure about my legal position on this one...

Whoops....

I just added referer tracking to this blog. Just hit the referer link at the top of the page to see what links we have today. I have a process running that updates the list every three hours, which should be often enough.

There's another base image update being uploaded to the dev pages. This one adds back in the Mouse Wheel support for X11, after Reinout Heeck pointed me to a new release of that code that works with VW 7.1. If you have a dev build already, just grab bottomFeeder.im.gz (non-Windows) or btfWin-2.8.tar.gz (Windows) and replace bottomFeeder.im or bottomFeeder.exe respectively. I'm replacing all the base builds as well, so that new downloads will get the right stuff.

The base image should settle down and require no full replacements once VisualWorks 7.1 is released, and that's scheduled for the end of March.

Well, it's what I thought - Buffy is done in May. It's been a really great ride, and this year's show looks like it's going out on a high. I'll miss the show, but I think Virginia Postrel is right - the show would be a shadow of itself if they tried to drag it forward another year.

Anthony Lander has just posted a SourceForge project page for Pongo. Pongo is also available as a plugin for BottomFeeder. If you want to help out, you'll need access to the public store.

I spotted this post on Clarence Westberg's blog:

If I do Type.GetType("MyClass") it doesn't work, that is it doesn't find the class. If I do Type.GetType("MyNamespace.MyClass") it works but only if I am in MyNamespace. If I have a using statement and a reference it doesn't work either Type.GetType("MyOtherNamespace.MyOtherClass"). How do I get the type of a class not in my namespace?

Chuckle. Yet another problem generated by manifest typing. Over here in the Smalltalk pond, we don't have that problem. Actually, if you read through his various posts on C#, it's as good an argument for using Smalltalk instead as any I've seen - bogged down in syntactical issues, and not addressing actual business problems.

There's an ad running on my local radio for a fitness center, but the first thirty seconds or so sound like a patio version of the old "Spam Spam Spam" Monty Python Routine. I hadn't paid any attention to it, so the first few times it ran, I actually thought it was an attempt at self parody - i.e., an ad for Spam.

This time, I heard the end. Still wasn't clear though - the whole thing was implicit. I think a lot of advertisers are getting to be too clever by half. I see this on TV as well - ads that I have no idea as to what they are for unless I pay close attention. Maybe that's the point, but guess what? If I don't see the point in the first few seconds, I'm gone.

I've updated the BottomFeeder toolbar. Dave pointed out to me the the binoculars icon was typically used for search, so I made it the icon for the search tool, and added a different icon for upgrades. The new parcel is up, and should show as available for people using the more recent builds. It's also up for download from the dev build page

I haven't taught the Smalltalk class in a couple of weeks - the snow storm last week blew away a class, and if the snow keeps up the way the forecast calls for, tomorrow's class will be off as well.

In the meantime, I was very impressed with what happened last time around. I decided to introduce them to some rteal coding - with a browser. We took a very simple example - a simple "calculator" application that could add numbers. So we defined a class:

Smalltalk defineClass: #Counter
	superclass: #{Core.Object}
	indexedType: #none
	private: false
	instanceVariableNames: 'counter'
	classInstanceVariableNames: ''
	imports: ''
	category: 'Calculator'

We actually use Squeak, since it has a lot of cool things for introducing programming - the Alice stuff in particular. Anyway, they stumbled through the creation a bit - but they got the basic class/instance split more quickly than I thought they would. Once we implemented the ' ' message, a light clicked - they got it!!. They they ran off and did subtraction, multiplication, and division - the biggest question they had was what sign to use for multiply - they were not familiar with the asterisk notation.

But they got it. Very impressive, and lots of fun.

The Fuzzy Blog worries about how google will treat blogs over time:

So here's my question -- When will Google start to view blogging as subverting the ranking system? Am I really the most important Scot Johnson in the world? Is Jeremy Zawodny the most important Jeremy? Is Kasia the most important Kasia? Right now bloggers just plain love Google but a lot of that is because of how Google treats us. They view our blogs as "legitimate link farms". So when are we going to become illegimate?

He's getting to this because of how Google deals with people who try to game the page rank system. One could view blogs as gaming the page rank system, I suppose - heck, I come up third and fourth in Google.

On the other hand, as has been widely reported, Google bought Pyra recently, so I would think that they have a positive view towards the whole blogging thing. Time will tell....

Scott Knowles has an interesting post on the trend towards corporate blogging:

I said a few days ago rule numero uno for those looking to use blogs to promote their business is to "get blogging." According to some fellow bloggers, it looks like some are already starting out of the gates without a clue. Jupitermedia CEO, Alan Meckler has started a blog of his own.

But according to Doug Fox, "I think Meckler's weblog misses the mark. His barrage of attacks against Fred Rosen, CEO of Key3Media, producer of Comdex, may get him some short-term publicity, but it does nothing for his contention that he grasps the premise behind weblogs. Yes, Meckler writes in the first person, but he doesn't seem to have the slightest notion that blogging is, for the most part, a communal, shared experience."

It's all about the links. Scott is right when he later (read the whole thing) points out that a blog without links is going to be an island. I've gotten a fair number of my readers (and commenters) by linking to articles I've found interesting; deciding against such outside links is going to limit that cross-fertilization.

I started blogging here on my own. Heck, in the early days I just thought it would be cool to have some blogging code written in VisualWorks, and that the blog would be a community effort. It's led down a twisty path though. Almost immediately, I got an email from someone asking for an RSS Feed. At the time, I had no idea what RSS was. But that pushed me into creating a feed, which led to BottomFeeder. That eventually led to the blogger meetup, where I met Scott - and now to my comments on his post.

It's all about communal knowledge and feedback.

Is Marylanders panicking. There's snow falling, and more in the forecast. I think last night's weather made a mistake; they were calling for one to three inches starting tonight. Oops.

I keep seeing posts on how cool some complex blog API is. I have a client side API to this blog too. It's dead simple - I send an URL encoded form to a servlet interface - encrypted. This is truly simple, and required vitually no back end coding at all.

Compare that to a SOAP or XML-RPC interface. You have to set up a new server (yes, this is simple in Smalltalk). There are no real security standards using SOAP or XML-RPC, so you send everything in the clear. You spend tons of time creating the whole mess.

Or, you use technology that already works....

I've changed the update mechanism for BottomFeeder. We were delivering patches automatically at startup. The next release (and current dev builds) don't do it that way. Instead, all components can be updated on the fly - just hit the update button on the Toolbar, and a list of appropriate updates will be shown. If you decide to upgrade, the update(s) will be downloaded and loaded into the running system.

This is also the way you select plugins for download now.

Hey, we got there first!. Seriously, this is a great idea. The Cincom Smalltalk team have been using RSS to track two different source code repositories (one public, one internal) for months now - and we have another two feeds that track our internal bug database. The developers have found these to be really useful, and I expect that the CVS crowd will discover the same thing.

Matt Croyden quotes Brad Wilson:

At this point in my life, if a site doesn't offer RSS, I don't have the time to consume it.

What he said!. I find that I use BottomFeeder to follow news, and rarely bother with sites that don't provide a feed. it's just so much easier to have everything organized in one place, and updated in the background.

I've posted a new TypeLess plugin to the BottomFeeder site. Just use BottomFeeder to download it and restart. I'll be working on a more reasonable update system today....

Tip of the hat to Terry Raymond for this morning's wake up humor

I've posted new dev parcels on the site. Just download baseapp.tar.gz, and place the results in the app directory. We have made a few changes:

• Made error handling report better errors to the error log
• Changed the feed images so that they always fit in the image area
• Tweaked the look of the tabular view

Hat tip to Dave Murphy for the UI tweaks.

I just updated the site with the new code mentioned here, and everything works just great! I think it might be faster, which is nice. It's certainly easier to figure out on my end.

I just got the initial cleanup of the blog interfaces done, and I'm a lot happier with the new stuff. There was starting to be an explosion of code on the page - I had incrementally grown the API call to an 11 argument message send, and it was making the page really hard to make sense of.

I just moved the request parsing back into the image, and that made things much easier to follow. I've tested locally, and it all works. I'll be updating the main site sometime today. There may be a brief outage due to that.

The Fuzzy Blog has some interesting, and potentially disturbing info on the next revision of MS Office. It seems that the addition of a Rights Management System for Office docs could cause all of us grief:

News.com has a very, very interesting article on Microsoft expanding their rights management tool, RMS. And what it makes me think is that we could well see the file format for Microsoft Office 2003, the next version of Office, change dramatically. What they are doing is allowing a document to have an access control list (ACL) associated with it so that only users identified in that ACL will be allowed to read the document. Specifically when I read this:

"What we've done here is put persistent protection in the document itself," Nash said. "Even if the file is no longer part of the file system or the infrastructure of the company, the protection is still there as part of the file."

Oh happy day - files that can't be read! Imagine the fun of mergers with this in place. MS will likely see an immediate uptick in revenue from this:

What I have to think is that the underlying file format for an office document is going to change because of this. How else will this new feature be supported? And this will be both a financial godsend for Microsoft and an absolute disaster for their customers. I've lived through this before and here's what happens.

1. Microsoft releases new version of Office with new file format. We saw this in Office 97 which had a different Microsoft Word format than Office 95.
2. Every new computer comes bundled with the new version of Office and manufacturers (like Dell) that bundle Office don't even offer the old version of Office.
3. Joe Worker or worse Job Boss gets his new computer from IT and creates a new document. He emails it out to 10 people who need it. Unknowingly he uses a feature which requires the new file format.
4. The people that get it can't read it and go scream at IT. IT screams at its management. And the company ends up being dragged unwillingly to Office 2003, updating hundreds if not thousands of desktops in the process.

Yeah, that's about how it will go in my experience. But I think this may be MS outsmarting itself. Two reasons. First, according to MS, the first rev of this won't support offline use. Just imagine all the power users (high dollar salesmen and execs) creating an uproar when the doc they need to edit is not available during the 7 hour flight to Europe - and there's no tech support to fix it during that flight. That's a lot of angry high end types. Second, imagine the havoc that will be created in merged entities - none of the docs will cross old boundaries - and if each doc carries the information embedded, it will be a true nightmare for the IT staff to fix.

I've always thought that even in the absence of anti-trust rules, large, powerful companies eventually get in trouble when they overreach. This could be one of those things for MS.

I worked on the client side blog tools yesterday, and I'm happily using them now. So I'm now thinking of the basic interface to my blog, and have decided that I'm not entirely happy with it. I'll be refactoring the code base to make it simpler and more re-usable.

On weekends, we tend to play a lot pf boardgames with friends. We used to do a lot of role playing - I have my own game system even. That gradually ended though - it turned out that most of the wives like D&D style games a lot less than the husbands did. So we took to playing board games a long while back.

For a long while, we played a lot of Cosmic Encounter. My wife especially likes this game; it's got a lot of randomness. We got tired of that though, and found a lot of other great games - we spent a long time playing Settlers of Catan and it's various variants. We still play a lot of that - it's a game that stands the test of time.

What we have been playing recently is Puerto Rico. This is a truly great game. It moves quickly, and players get an action on every turn - you never really wait for the other players. At this point, we are playing a lot because I've won the last 4 or 5 games in a row - typically by one or two points - over my friend Mike. He's vowed to keep playing the game until he wins.

I highly recommend this game - it plays well, is very well balanced - and seems to play differently each time out.

Update: Mike sent me a better Puerto Rico Link

I posted my latest replay tv troubles the other day. Today, I figured I'd try one hard reboot of it to see if it would work well enough to tape a few things off of before it went back. No dice; that killed it. Soo off it goes, back to Sonic Blue. Then I had to rewire the TV, and get frustrated by that - I wanted to pipe an RCA video jack out of the VCR and an S-Video cable out of the cable box, both to the same input on the TV. I had hoped that cables would both work, based on the TV/VCR switch on the VCR. sigh No such luck. Now I just need to replay back, so that I can get a reasonable number of inputs and outputs going with high quality cables again....

I've added some support to BottomFeeder for mod-gzip, and reposted the dev parcels. If you are using the 2.8 dev builds, grab the new baseapp.tar.gz from here.

Looking around for new feeds while the rain pours down, I came across this. Yet another post on how to dull the pain of working in languages like C# and Java - here, just add these 10 time wasting steps, and all your troubles will be gone!. I suppose that's too harsh, but there it is. This whole Mock Objects thing is just too amusing for words:

PERFORM UNIT TESTING WITH EASYMOCK - Unit testing has grown in popularity partly due to the growth of eXtreme Programming. However, writing strong unit tests can be a boring chore. Mock objects can help reduce the tedium by faking the objects surrounding the target to be tested. The mock objects are then used to check that relevant calls were made to the target. EasyMock is a quick way to create mock objects while maintaining the power of unit testing.

Those of us using Smalltalk (or other dynamic languages) just shake our heads slowly. We can write the tests that refer to non-existant objects, have them fail, and incrementally add the real objects. No time spent on bogus objects that might not accurately test out, no money spent on products to fill that gap. iMNSHO, this is a large part of the productivity gap between Smalltalk and languages like Java and C# - theres just so much extra work to do in them....

If this rain keeps up, my new address will soon be in the Chesapeake bay, which will have expanded all the way up here..... First 2 + feet of snow, now 1 to 3 inches of rain. Feel the joy....

In building the runtime for BottomFeeder, I accidentally edited a necessary parcel out of the build script. The upshot? Lots of feeds didn't parse, due to the lack of XSL in the runtime. So I'm posting a new set of runtimes, which should be ready for download in about 2 hours.

A Smalltaker comments on .NET - Marten Feldtmann says:

Extending Classes

It's not possible to extend already existing classes. This seems to be very strange for me. No extensions like late asMySpecialMethod or isMySpecialTestMethod can be added to already existing classes. Other people postings in the MS groups tell me, that people consider this as bad OO style and it's good not to have it. I can not agree with that. Actually I think, that they consider it as bad OO-style, because .NET has a very limited source code management (one class must be represented by one file) and would not be able to manage constructions like this. But MS has noticed the drawback and announced to introduce late class extensions to .NET in the future. Perhaps this is then not seen as bad OO-style in the future.

Compile, Run, Debug cycle

The development cycle is very short in .NET, but on the other side it's much longer compared against Smalltalk - no doubt about this. .NET is still the old way: edit, compile, test. Debugging: ok, nothing compared against the possibilities of Smalltalk.

Deployment

Is this trivial ? Actually I do not know it yet, but I noticed, that I could not run several assemblies from the Internet, because it told me, that it could not resolve the version number of some prerequisites.

language - or library oriented

That's interesting: Looked into several books about C#, but most of the books describe the language: syntax etc - which is essential, but the libraries are not mentioned very much. .NET seems to be a language oriented system, and not a library oriented system. Look at some books and try to find out, how to read or write a file - in several books I've not find any hints about this ! Then you must read other books.

Class Browser

Again a strange world: a very large library, but no real Class Browser for browsing around. No good tool available. Some smart guys try to write browsers, but actually they never had seen Smalltalk - what a pitty ! Because with reflection very much of the Smalltalk Browsing stuff could be done. But according to some postings, the .NET world is file oriented. Source code must be in ONE large source file, all other possibilities seems to be strange ideas.

Stored Procedures

With .NET we see a push of using Stored Procedures ! Microsoft recommend the strong usage of stored procedures (of course: SQL-server :-))) to improve the speed of the applications.

The good points Documentation

Source code and documentation can be combined in one file and there's a way to create pretty good source documentation.

XML

XML is very well supported. If I see all these problems we had with VAST one can see, how much power MS put behind this idea.

Tools, that work together

One can see, that the tools within VisualStudio work together - that is nice to see

A large, large library Please take into account, these points are "fresh" impressions from a Smalltalker working in .NET for one week now and they may be simply wrong.

Interesting. Sounds to me like the C language crowd continues to relentlessly not get the power of OO and reflection. Smalltalk and Lisp developers everywhere have to shake their heads again, just like 1995....

So yesterday I posted this on implementing a web service to track the current Homeland Security Terrorist Alert Level. This was after seeing Matt's post on the topic. So in my email bag today, I received this:

It's bad enough we got to see the damn "High Alert" on the bottom of every news channel. The last thing I need is my computer telling me to panic. But, then again, I'm running XP so maybe I should :-)

heh. About right.....

So my new tv arrived today. This was cool - another toy to play with. Well, that's what I thought. The reality was way uglier. First, a valve in the out pipe from my sump pump burts - I found this out while pulling audio cables in the basement. Joy, there went a call to the plumber and a few hundred bucks. Went quick though - the guys I called were really fast. Ok, on to the tv. Move the cables, get the Replay reattached - oops, no network connection. No network! Check the cables, boot the notebook off it - comes up, sees the network. Oh joy, back to Sonic Blue tech support. I've dealt with them before, and I dreaded the talk. Sure enough: Me: The replay isn't seeing the network Them: Have you turned your firewall off? Me: My other Replay sees the net just fine Repeat until truly annoyed Sigh. I finally cadged an RMA number out of them. Customer service. Hah!

Scott Adams hits the nail.

There was an interesting bug in the last set of parcels related to the UI layout change. The current dev parcels should be downloaded and replace what was uploaded last night....

So after this post, I decided to look at how hard it would be to implement a simple color coded application. Turns out it's trivial. Load HSThreat from the Public Store to see just how easy....