Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

InfoWorld CTO Chad Dickerson nails the value of RSS:

When I started using an RSS newsreader daily, some remarkable things happened that I didn't necessarily expect: I began to spend almost no time surfing to keep up with current technology information, and I was suddenly able to manage a large body of incoming information with incredible efficiency. My newsreader has become so integral that it's now sitting in my Windows startup folder along with my e-mail client and contact manager. I'm humming "RSS Killed the Infoglut Star" when I fire up my RSS newsreader in the morning.

That's what I've discovered as well. There are a handful of non-RSS enabled sites I still visit - Dilbert and Day by Day being my two favorites. Other than that, most of my browsing proceeds directly from BottomFeeder, based on the subscribed content I'm actually interested in. This is just so much better than going through an enormous favorites list each day. I'm starting to think that a combination of wikis and comment enabled blogs could easily replace most internal email as well - making it far easier to find out what's going on in projects I need to track. RSS is still in the what's that stage for most people, and the not Echo project will be seen the same way. That's about to change, with AOL jumping into the blogging fray. Doc Searls was right - RSS newsreaders are TiVo for bloggers. Soon, bloggers won't be the only ones.

Dear Abby weighs in on blogs and etiquette. Appropriate noises about the end of the world as we know it are off stage, left....

The technical jargon problem goes beyond the IT industry. Just as non-tech management and workers often have no idea what we are talking about, consumers have an even dimmer idea of what the industry is talking about. Here's a story outlining the problem. You can see the problem in any ad for PC products or new electronics - while many of us in the tech sector understand the terminology, most non-tech consumers are baffled:

Terms such as MP3 and Bluetooth are only understood by a small number of people, a report by a consumer research group found. The findings are bad news for the industry, as it suggests that the baffling terms are putting people off buying the latest gadget. "The technology industry must simplify its vocabulary so that consumers around the world can better understand the benefits technology can bring to their lives," said Patrick Moorhead, chairman of AMD's Global Consumer Advisory Board, which commissioned the study.

In the IT shop, this kind of thing causes grief - but in the consumer space, it costs money - it's hard to sell gadgets when the potential customer has no idea what the heck they are. If you have a ReplayTV or a Tivo, you've probably already seen this in action - when I first describe the device to friends and acquaintences, the common reaction is huh??. Then I show them the device. In a quick demo, people tend to ooh and ahh appropriately. This is looks like a problem throughout the tech sector.

It's also an issue in development. The blogging community seems to have no idea just how isolated from reality it is right now. while we argue and fuss over RSS and necho, go ask some line developer about blogs and RSS. you'll likely be surprised when you find out how much they don't know. What the entire tech sector needs is the Star Trek Universal Translator, so that we can communicate with the rest of humanity....

I read this story on MS bloggers with interest. It seems to me that MS is tacitly encouraging blogging, which is good - and the bloggers themselves are watching themselves. That's pretty much what I do here - since I post on Cincom's servers, I try to police myself. Eventually, some blogger somewhere is going to cross a line that irritates management at their firm, and it will be very interesting to see what (if any) fallout comes from that. I'm sure all corporate bloggers are wondering about that. In the meantime, we try to be interesting within our own self described boundaries....

I posted on this reverese engineering lawsuit earlier, and then came across this story in Linux Today. Combine the two together, and you end up handing MS (or any large company that gives source code access) an interesting weapon - any future open source efforts by developers who saw the shared source could be liable to suits given this precedent. It's an interesting potential issue; I wonder if corporate lawyers will try to use this.

It's clear what The Register means here, but I have to hand it to whoever put this eye grabbing headline up:

Spam and porn lift SurfControl

Yep, that one caught my eye and lured me to follow the link :)

Ben Hammersly notes that there are classes being taught on how to blog. Like he said, whoa

The Register pees on Oracle's cornflakes this morning:

As a leading influencer of IT strategy and directions, Oracle's IT vision is

• Data-Centric
• We're all heading towards one single enterprise database, and
• We are spending too much on hardware

For the first time Oracle appears to be seriously out of touch with the reality of IT architectural thinking. Most people would only agree with one of those three goals, and there is an alternative vision

Interesting takedown of a corporate level strategy.

It's not taking us anywhere:

Java's niche of being the COBOL replacement for the new century. And when I say niche, I must point out that this is a big niche. When viewed from the perspective of programmers employed, lines of code written and the direct influence on peoples lives from day to day over the last half century, COBOL is the elephant in the programmers' kitchen that everyone seems to try to ignore.

But in terms of advancing the art of computer programming, it's a niche nonetheless. The history of COBOL development has lied in advancing the art of COBOL, without appreciably much of that art making it beyond that barrier.

Java is successful, there's no argument about that. But it's leading to nothing new - all the interesting things are happening elsewhere - Agile didn't start in Java, AOP didn't start in Java - the list goes on. That makes Java an ok language for business (overly complex IMHO - I really don't think that the VB or Cobol crowd are interested in that level of complexity) - but it's not where the innovation is.

I posted a link to Mark Bernstein the other day in a post, and he's posted something else I agree with today:

nEcho continues to fly off the rails. I'm afraid this process is broken; perhaps, irreparably. (Roger Benningfield, Doug Miller, Zeldman) In the absence of any sort of agreement on the desirability of junking XML-RPC, it seems that people decided to 'declare consensus'.

This sure ain't the consensus I learned about at a Quaker college.

The upshot of requiring every server to support three separate interfaces will be to ensure that none of the interfaces will actually be definitive. This leads, in turn, to the standard being "whatever works". People will write software to cater to bugs. People will write clients for programs, not standards

Yeah, I'm in agreement again. Maybe all of us necho cynics should get together and drown our sorrows.... It is hard to keep up with the laundry list of API's being churned. Trackback and Pingback (at least 3 different forms, by my last count - and from the outside, how the heck do you tell which one an advertised link uses? Then there's going to be an necho variant, I'm sure. The Blogger API, and the MetaWebLog API's, and the necho variants (using gosh only knows how many forms - REST, SOAP, but not XML-RPC).... The level of complexity is growing by the minute.

InfoWorld reports on a court ruling that makes reverse engineering in software actionable, if the EULA forbids it. That sounds semi-reasonable, until you read more and realize that reverse engineering could be taken to be "we looked at a competing product to see what we could do better". The lawyers will be happy with this one....

While Sinbad is billed as a kid's movie, it's well worth seeing. The story is more complex than either of the last two (disappointing, IMHO) Star Wars flicks. It moved along well, had lines that worked both for the kids and for the adults - and was altogether entertaining. Recommended.

Today's spotlight is on Reg Crock's talk on Smalltalk and automotive systems:

Automotive Manufacturing Execution Systems In Smalltalk experience report Reg Krock: Locksley Creek Software Monday 4:45:00 pm to 5:30:00 pm

Abstract: This session would review the experience of implementing a distributed VAST solution in three automotive plants. The experience report would review the original design and how it improved from plant to plant.

Issues involved included guaranteed fast response time, robustness, agile systems using simplified rules and actions, and coordination of the entire system. The most recent system had a shop floor response time of approximately 20 milliseconds per event. It has met this and other requiements well, had a very smooth implementation, and is now a great success story.

Bio: Reg Krock has been involved in software development, in a variety of management and development roles, for the last 25 years. For the last 7 years he has been involved in the development of Smalltalk applications in the manufacturing environment, primarily real-time manufacturing execution systems for automotive plants. He has also been involved in the development of Smalltalk applications for the steel and automotive parts sectors.

It's that after the holiday weekend blah. Maybe the motivation will return later (after more coffee), or tomorrow. The good news is, only 1 week until Smalltalk Solutions. What are you waiting for - go register now!

My take is that this is fiction, but hey - decide for yourself. Via the .NET guy:

Someone anonymous posted to the Joel on Software message board about having their software protection cracked in just 3 days. Yeah, typical, but the real interesting one was this anonymous response:

We have a full time employee whose sole job is to be involved in the cracker community. He has high prestige because he has been first out the gate with several high profile cracks -- all of our own software of course. Because he is actively involved in producing high profile, high quality cracks, he has also acquired the personal contact info regarding a large number of other crackers. We maintain a mailing address for him near a foreign branch office to cover his own tracks.

This provides us with a couple of advantages: our cracked software contains a trojan that not only logs information about the users computer, but also scans their system for other cracks. This information is transmitted back to us and we share it with a few other companies that use this system. The information is stored in a database where it is made available to the FBI for use in their own investigations.

Sounds fishy to me, but maybe not.

Today's Spotlight is on David Simmons and Joseph Pelrine's S# tutorial. While I'm personally skeptical about some of the language mods Dave has made, it's clear that S# is raising the profile of Smalltalk:

Delivering Smalltalk natively on .NET with S#.NET and S#.AOS and Competing on a level playing field tutorial (extra cost applies) David Simmons and Joseph Pelrine: Smallscript, MetaProg Tuesday 2:00:00 pm to 5:30:00 pm

Abstract: This tutorial will present the working S#.NET and S#.AOS system toolset and language. Attendees will learn how to write secure, verifiable applications, components, and frameworks in Smalltalk that deploy natively on .NET.

Special focus will be given to both business and technical aspects of creating libraries in Smalltalk that can be consumed and/or sold for standard use and consumption by any other .NET language. If you want options for being able to write code in Smalltalk while conforming to mainstream demands for .NET interop compliance and compatibility with languages like C# and VB then this tutorial is for you.

S# is a modular superset of the Smalltalk-98 language offering a rich, generalized, object model for dynamic languages on both its own native SmallScript AOS platform and the Microsoft .NET Platforms.

Bio: David Simmons has been designing and developing language systems and virtual machines for since the early 1980's. He was the principal designer and architect for commercial toolset within QKS Smalltalk-91 and its multi-language, multi-threaded execution engine. His most recent work has been the design and development of S# within the SmallScript Language System, a modular multi-threaded platform for dynamic languages. His design work has focused heavily on complexity management, portability, modularity, performance, object models, and meta-object protocol capabilities for supporting a superset of today's popular programming language features.

I've expressed a fair amount of misgivings over (not) Echo, but Mark Bernstein puts it all together:

But to blithely assume that we can load developers with endless unfunded mandates (lots of the echo people want every weblog tool to support three different echo api's, in addition to blogger and metaweblog) and not have everything blow up.

Essentially all the professionals in this space -- people who go to work every day to build shipping products that use RSS -- are feeling queasy about nEcho. Everyone is on board -- and I think everyone is worried

That's where I'm at with this.

I've not been terribly enthusiastic about the echo effort. however, it does look like it's picking up steam, and it will likely evolve into something useful. So, the dev builds of BottomFeeder now support feeds in this format. Also, I've added an necho feed for this blog and for the comments. Thus far, the format is less useful (IMHO) than RSS 2.0 with modules, but it looks like something I need to support.

One of the things Store doesn't have is support for versioning external files. That's coming, but in the meantime, David Pennell of Quallaby has placed a File Repository package into the public Store. Here's what he says about it:

You might want to take a look at the FileRepository package that I just published in the public repository. I think you have something similar on the VW futures list - this seems like it might be useful for maintaining ASP/JSP pages.

From the package comment:

This package allows you to place text files under VW's source control. Create a subclass of FileRepository and add methods containing a <file:'filename'> pragma.

Refactoring Browser buttons are provided for comparing the internal and external version of files, updating the internal or external file and launching the Differator. Browsing a file method will automatically compare the internal and external file. You must close and re-open Refactoring Browser's in order for the extensions be activated. Internal files are not stored in the image, but are stored in the change file. Adding a post load action to a StORE package of the form: [:package | MyFileRepository updateAllInternalToExternal ] will cause external files to be created or updated if necessary when a package is loaded.

Enjoy, David Pennell Quallaby Corporation

Sounds very useful - check it out.

A lot bigger. AOL is going to introduce blogging to their user base. Expect some old timers to whine about this, but it's a good thing.

Andrew Birkett shares a revelation with us. It's a great read - go see what he's on about:

As I said earlier, you get a much more engaging experience if your objects are tangible and manipulable. The traditional presentation of source code as plain old text might be familiar, but it's hardly earth-shattering. Squeak has alternative ("tiles") rendering mode for source code which displays the structure geometrically. When you realise that the contents of your ASCII text file is just one particular representation of the "Platonic Ideal" version of your code, you start wonder if it's a good representation, or if it's a load of rubbish.

I sat down this morning and added support for the necho Format. It only took a few to add it - it's nearly identical (with different tag names to confuse things) to RSS. The current dev build - change your upgrade path to /dev at the end - will handle the new format. Thus far I'm ignoring the contributor tag, but I'll get around to that eventually.

Ted Leung comments on Gordon's productivity post 9which in turn, referenced Patrick Logan). I spotted that a few days ago. Ted writes:

I have much the same feeling. The one thing that I wish was different was performance. I know that Python is supposed to be for gluing C apps together, but I just did a little hacking on Kai Hendry's LuPy version of my Lucene plugin for pyblosxom, and it wasn't pretty. I wasn't sure that LuPy was reading the Lucene index files right, so I decided to reindex using a LuPy based indexer. Talk about slow.

I find this all kind of frustrating. I can say that I am vastly more productive in VisualWorks now than I was a few years ago - the tools are better, the language is better. Performance is much better - and you should see this talk at StS for info on how it's goiig to get better still. Smalltalk has evolved quite nicely, thank you very much - and I'm sure that the various Lisp tools have as well, although I have no real experience with them. There's actually fairly vigorous competition in the Smalltalk space, because we have multiple vendors - we get various takes on what works and what doesn't, instead of what Sun knows is best or what Microsoft knows is best. Why is Eclipse boring? Perhaps it's because - unlike Smalltalk and Lisp - it takes no advantage of being written in itself. You can't modify the environment, or even ask intelligent questions of it. Being able to do so is what leads to productive tools. Python doesn't quite get there, because - as a scripting language - people tend to use things like vi and emacs to develop. Productivity simply does not lie that way.

So what is this collective blind spot in the developer universe? Is it the siren song of Open Source and free tools? Are developers thinking that if its not free, they won't use it? That's part of it, I'm sure. And it's an interesting problem. certainly those same developers don't want to work for free - they want to be paid like everyone else. This leads to this theory: You should make money from consulting, not from the tools. To which I respond: Why?. You do realize that under that theory, small shops are pretty much locked right out? You need a certain scale in order to have a bunch of developers and a bunch of consultants. And before you say that the developers should be the consultants - not every developer is really suited to a customer facing position. Does the developer community really want to write off all the potential tool builders who are unwilling or unable to be consultants at the same time? Apparently so.

I think a lot of developers need to wake up and realize that "free" tools largely means bland, corporate tools - and bland, corporate languages. It takes a large outfit to be able to treat tools as loss leaders - leaving little room for small to mid-size outfits that might want to concentrate on different approaches. Even in curly brace land, all the interesting tools have been acquired (and then mostly disappeared). People seem to recognize that you get what you pay for - right up to the point where they select development tools. Then they expect a handout. If we stay on this path, we'll keep right on down the road described by Larry O'Brien.

Ted Leung has a great use case for RSS - who's going to do this first?

Bob Werken posted about PapersInvited.com, the Largest listing of call for papers in all areas of specialization.

This whole area would be a great application RSS. You could have RSS feeds for researchs in particular feeds. Those RSS feeds could be driven off the RSS feeds from the program committee chairs. The feeds could help with all the logistical announcements that go along with announcing a call for papers, reminding people that the call is going to expire, announcing the program, announcing the arrangements, and making announcements about the conferences.

Actually, I'm surprised that O'Reilly isn't trying to do something like this with an RSS feed for their conferences. I know I'd subscribe to a feed for OSCON and ETCON...

I fixed two small issues with BottomFeeder:

• If you had autho-browse empty descriptions turned on, you got an error. I fixed this in the 8.101 version of the code
• Some feeds use GUID instead of link - no good reason for that, but there are politics surrounding RSS. In any case, Bf now uses the GUID if the link is missing, and the GUID is an URL

What's nice about the update feature is that I don't have to manage farms of patches or rush a new version out - I can just have the application offer to upgrade itself.

I was pointed to this interesting article by Roger Whitney. It's a lessons learned paper dealing with Open Source development. There's a bunch of good stuff on things you ought to know about OS projects before you jump in - here's the most interesting (to me, at least) bit:

Engineering Lessons

C/C++ is no longer a viable development language. This may seem obvious to some people, and other people may recoil in shock. In college/grad school we were taught to believe that C/C++/Java, etc are the best languages in the world, so it was a very difficult transformation to accept that these languages are not viable development languages for application level work.

C++ is seen to be great for execution speed, static binding, object orientation, templates, and more. However, it is absolutely lousy for development time. Here's why:

• It requires compilation " as your code grows larger, the wait time to see if your code works increases. This delay directly affects how fast your code is developed.
• It's really, really, really hard for people to learn it, and this directly impacts the number of developers you will have on an open-source project.
• It uses static binding (Isn't that supposed to be a good thing?)
• There are no standard libraries for C++, so there's a lot of reinventing the wheel. (Yeah, there's the STL and others, but each one has a huge learning curve associated with it).

Java somewhat fixes the learning curve and the standard library problem, but still has the other two problems, and in addition requires the user to download the JRE before you can run any java program (a 25 MB separate install). One of my previous jobs had us trying to deploy a client-side Java program to much failure because of this hurdle. Server-side programming doesn't have this problem so Java may not be such a bad choice for that.

if you want to get somewhere in a reasonable time period, pick a dynamic language. If you're going to do that, look at Smalltalk.

Sunshine, but not unbearable, a nice parade - my daughter, as usual, was in it, and grilled steak for dinner. If the T-storms stay away, we'll probably head over to to Columbia fireworks display. Happy 4th everyone!

Today's spotlight is on Dave Astel's TDD talk:

Test-Driven Development tutorial (extra cost applies) Dave Astels: Adaption Software, Inc. Wednesday 2:00:00 pm to 5:30:00 pm

Abstract: This will be a very pragmatic tutorial, with a mix of lecture, demonstration, and hands-on exercises. Background, tools, and techniques of TDD would be covered, as well conceptual topics such as refactoring tests, building tests around fixtures, what makes for a good test, approaches to writing tests to maximize the benefit, etc. Hands-on means programming, so make sure to bring a laptop and be prepared to pair-up.

Bio: I've been programming is some fashion/capacity for over 20 years, over 12 of that using OO. I learned OO from Smalltalk and have at least 6 years of Smalltalk experience, in areas ranging from a mass-market, shrink-wrapped CDROM series of products to natural language processing and acquisition reasearch.

I am a founding partner of Adaption Software, based in Wolfville, Nova Scotia (home of Acadia University and Ivan Tomek). I have coauthored one book: "A Practical Guide to eXtreme Programming", and have just finished writing another: "Test-driven Development: A Practical Guide". Both titles are published by Prentice Hall.

I've recently taken over the Smalltalk port of Ward Cunningham's Fit framework (from Ward, John Brant and Don Roberts).

Sounds like a good talk to attend - hands on!

I'm off to join a local 4th of July parade - it's a beautiful day for it too. then it's off to the grill.

Gordon Weakliem comments on RPC's and simplicity:

Patrick Logan linked to an interesting article that's ostensibly on XML-RPC, but contains the following quote: "Python is one of the more popular languages for XML-RPC apps, because it has a very flexible way of creating remote procedure calls that look much like local ones." To me, this is interesting in that it highlights how people like to write code. First of all, there's the question of whether I even want to write RPCs. Then, there's the issue of programming language design. I feel like XML-RPC and SOAP were designed with curly-brace programmers in mind, where there's all this effort to generate proxies that look like LPCs, but totally ignore support for message style communications.

That's dynamic typing in action. I was doing CORBA with VisualWorks years ago - and while all the C/C++/Java guys complained about how complex it all was, I always found it to be pretty easy. Now, there's complexity to RPC development - checking for failure is never an entirely simple operation. However, there's all this extra baggage over in curly brace land. This goes back to the code generation thing - part of why the curly brace crowd is enamored of code generation is that they have to be - no person could stay sane and have to write all that proxy code....

In celebration of Independence Day, I've replaced the Cincom logo with the American flag for the day. My plans involve grilling.

I've noticed two trends that seem to be accelerating in the Java (and C# - generally speaking, the C language family) world:

• An increase in the number of configuration files - typically XML - that things have
• An increase in the amount of code generation - both the amount being done, and the amount being advocated.

Apparently, code is so incredibly hard to produce in the C world, that it's simpler to create a huge morass of configuration files - and generate a ton of code. Somehow, I have a hard time thinking of this as progress. Here's a comment on this trend by Charles Miller:

One example of this is JBoss, and its mass of thinly documented XML configuration files. Of course the developers know exactly how they work. They know where to find everything so they don't find the complexity annoying4. Find that a problem? It's Open Source and you can fix it yourself. However, by the time you know enough about a product to fix a problem like this yourself, you know enough not to be experiencing the problem any more. Hence it falls down the back of your priority list. Catch-22.

One of the Java Bloggers (Daniel Steinberg) talks about leaky abstractions. Joel on Software wrote on this last year (and why doesn't this guy link to it, since he mentions it?) - then he lets loose with this:

To make code more performant, you generally have to make it less readable. Readability often involves introducing abstractions. You don't talk directly to your data base, you use JDBC. You don't follow pointers to find the next element in a collection, you ask the corresponding Iterator to return next(). The problem with this, according to Joel Spolsky, is that all abstractions leak. Today in Java Today Craig Castelaz discusses this balance in "Living with Leaks". Craig looks at Spolsky's Law of Leaky Abstractions and Keppler's continuum of abstractions that predates Spolsky's work by a decade.

Hmm. Maybe It's that I use better tools, but I find just the opposite. cleaning code up and making the intentions clearer typically lead me to faster code. I consider this whole idea of "nasty code is faster" to be a hoary old chestnut that needs retiring, fast. Referencing the Cringely article (and why doesn't he link to it?) shows a high level of cluelessness. If he thinks refactoring is useless, he shouldn't be writing code, period.

Soon you will be able to reach through that net connection:

Researchers at the University at Buffalo, New York, announced last week they have developed a system that lets one person experience the sense of touch felt by another. They said they could transmit the sensation across the Internet.

Here's a solid prediction - the porn industry will be the first to figure out how to make money from this. Which means that you reall will have to wonder where that keyboard has been....

New cellphones used in 'digital shoplifting'. I honestly had no idea what the heck this story was about when I followed the teaser:

Tokyo - Japanese publishers said on Monday they will launch a campaign this week to stop digital shoplifters - people who visit bookstores to photograph magazine pages with their cellphones rather than make a purchase.

Digital shoplifting is becoming a big problem as camera-equipped mobile handsets are spreading fast and their quality is improving greatly, said Kenji Takahashi, an official at the Japan Magazine Publishers Association.

Starting on Tuesday, bookstores across the nation will put up posters urging magazine readers to "refrain from recording information with camera-mounted cellphones and other devices".

That's just fascinating. And I just about died laughing when I saw this line in the story:

The latest advertisement by the association, published in newspapers on Sunday, urged users not to write emails while walking.

lol

Today's spotlight is on Eliot Miranda's Adaptive Optimization talk:

AOStA An Adaptive Optimizing Smalltalk Architecture presentation Eliot Miranda: Cincom Tuesday 2:00:00 pm to 3:30:00 pm

Abstract: AOStA is a portable architecture for adaptive optimization in the context of existing Smalltalk virtual machines. The adaptive optimizer is a bytecode-to-bytecode optimizing and inlining compiler. It is written in Smalltalk, runs in the image, and in a meaningful way is portable across dialects. It runs above a JIT virtual machine with minimal extensions to allow introspection on in-line cache information, to provide simplified "go-faster" versions of certain primitives, and to callback into Smalltalk from "hot spots".

Bio: Eliot Miranda is technical lead for VisualWorks, the direct commercial descendent of Xerox Smalltalk-80, at Cincom Systems, Inc. Eliot has been working on Smalltalk VMs since 1983. Eliot got his degree in Computer Science at the University of York before becoming a research assistant and lecturer at the University of London. During this period he designed and implemented the BrouHaHa bytecode and threaded code VMs which achieved a good compromise of performance and portability through innovative C compiler abuse. After a brief digression collaborating on the Harlequin Dylan implementation, designing the stream and pickling systems he joined ParcPlace Systems in 1995. He designed VisualWorks' threaded interconnect, the programmer-productivity features of the parcel component system and significant performance improvements to the VM, all within the context of a merger, three name changes and a purchase by Cincom in 1999, and can say with some relief that the system is still commercially viable. Eliot has been a member of the ACM since 1988.

Via Michael-Lucas Smith we get the wild tale of Alice and Bob. Make sure to read all the way down.

Charles Miller points out why you should use your own tools:

I'm not making a particularly controversial (or new) statement when I say that when developing some project, having the development team "eat their own dogfood" is a very useful technique. If you are writing an email application, have the developers adopt it for their email. If you are writing an IDE, have the developers use the IDE to write its own next version. Nothing focuses a developer more than the desire to fix something that's annoying them personally.

True, very true. But it's also the case that you need other people eating your dogfood, or else you end up with tools thata suit you and no one else:

There's a flip-side, of course. One example of this is JBoss, and its mass of thinly documented XML configuration files. Of course the developers know exactly how they work. They know where to find everything so they don't find the complexity annoying4. Find that a problem? It's Open Source and you can fix it yourself. However, by the time you know enough about a product to fix a problem like this yourself, you know enough not to be experiencing the problem any more. Hence it falls down the back of your priority list. Catch-22.

I've come across this in BottomFeeder - there's nothing like having other people point out interesting aspects of your software to keep you on your toes. It's all too easy to end up with stuff you (and only you) can use. Go read the whole thing

Today's plug is for those of us who love to hate Java - Smalltalk on Eclipse:

Black Knight: Eclipse as a Smalltalk Development Environment presentation John O'Keefe and Eric Clayberg: IBM, Instantiations Monday 2:00:00 pm to 3:30:00 pm

Abstract: Smalltalk is arguably the world's most productive programming language. Eclipse is quickly approaching being the world's best development framework -- "an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular". Black Knight represents the marriage of these two premier technologies. It provides a set of Smalltalk Development Tools that bring the best features of existing Smalltalk IDE's into the Eclipse world, an extensible Smalltalk class library based on the VisualAge Smalltalk Enterprise code, and an executable runtime for applications developed in Smalltalk. Black Knight is an Eclipse Technology Subproject.

Bio: John O'Keefe has been doing software development since it was done with wires and patch-panels. He has been on the VisualAge Smalltalk team since 1992 and has been the Team Lead for the last 7 years. Most recently he has formed the Black Knight team to produce a new cross-dialect Smalltalk IDE.

The project name shows they have a sense of humor :)

Cincinnati (where Cincom and this server are located) had some t-storms rumble through, and there was a power outage. There was a bit of confusion as to how much time was left on the battery backup, so the server was taken down as a precaution. We were out for less than five minutes - but that killed a 200 day uptime - which went back to the installation of the box this is on. Oh well...

The Ottawa STUG has an interesting talk scheduled for tomorrow evening:

A new MacOS X Smalltalk Dorin Sandu, Mark Suska Ambrai.com Date: Thursday, July 3, 2003 Time: 6:30 PM Location: Carleton University (see details below)

We will introduce a brand new Smalltalk system that runs natively under MacOS X. After a tour of the development environment, we will cover the design and implementation of the user interface framework including the native interface to the OS. Time permitting, we will review VM design issues and discuss future development plans.

The meeting will be held in Room 5115, Herzberg Laboratories - building 13 on the map. Pay-parking is available in Lot 1, 2, and parking meters can be found along University Drive. Free parking is available across Bronson Avenue opposite Lot 5.

Please RSVP to david@simberon.com if you plan to attend.

Dave Buck will talk about VWUnit at StS - and he's published it into the public store now

Via Scott Knowles comes this survey showing that people hate pop ups - but advertisers benefit from pop ups more than from other online ad styles. Do marketing folks have to wonder why it is thatdistrust keeps growing? Mind you, i'm in marketing now - so this is a personal issue now....

I've been annoyed whenever I've received an email that asks me to verify that I'm not a bot by visiting a site and clicking a fuzzy image. It turns out that some people may be hosed by these schemes:

Many companies have recently begun requiring users to pass a verification test in order to access their services--typically by typing into a Web form a few characters that appear on the form in a guise that prevents a computer or software robot from recognizing and copying them. The technique, now used by Web giants Yahoo, Microsoft, VeriSign and others, seeks to block software bots from signing up for Web-based e-mail accounts that can be used to launch spam and from scraping e-mail addresses from online databases.

The scheme is winning high marks in the battle against unwanted junk e-mail. But it is also increasingly hindering the progress of Web surfers with visual disabilities--raising the ire of advocates for the blind, spurring plans for alternatives from a key Web standards group, and eliciting warnings from legal experts who say that the practice could expose companies to lawsuits brought under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

So it's not only irritating - it may well be a total block to the blind and visually impaired.

I've released BottomFeeder 3.0. The site is updated, the upgrade files are all up to date, and the new documentation is online. Enjoy! For some details on the new features, visit this wiki page

I've been doing a lot of work on the HTTP access layer of BottomFeeder - it turned out that the exception handling code had some issues, and that was causing reading problems for a variety of feeds. I went through the issues carefully over the last couple of days, and it all seems cool now. The doc is updated, the application now handles all the major RSS modules - so I think it's ready to go live. I'll be uploading files and updating the html site files for awhile - I'll make an announcement later when all that's done - including updating SourceForge and Freshmeat.

Via Bob Martin - what does God think of us. Heh.

Just in time for Canada day, today's spotlight is on Alan Knight's O/R talk:

O/R Mapping in Smalltalk presentation Alan Knight: Cincom Wednesday 2:00:00 pm to 3:30:00 pm

Abstract: Few areas arouse as many different opinions as storing objects in relational database. There are some fundamental issues in doing this efficiently. Also, we often don't have the luxury of designing our own schema, but have to deal with one that does not correspond well to our object model. This presentation outlines some of these problems and the way they are addressed in the open-source GLORP framework (http://www.glorp.org), as well as how we plan to move forward on database mapping software in future releases of VisualWorks.

Bio: Alan Knight is a senior developer with Cincom Systems, where he is involved with web application development and database mapping. Before joining Cincom he was with The Object People, where he served in a variety of roles, most recently chief architect for the TOPLink family of Object-Relational Mapping products, both Smalltalk and Java. He is a former member of the Sun JSR committees for JDO and EJB 2.0, co-author of the book Mastering ENVY/Developer, a former columnist for The Smalltalk Report, and a frequent speaker at a variety of conferences. He is also program chair of Smalltalk Solutions 2003.

Roger Whitney writes:

As a result of my struggles with SOAP & WSDL in Java, C# and VW I put together a short tutorial on creating SOAP servers and clients in VW 7.1. It contains several complete examples and has been used locally. The tutorial is available here.

A page listing a number of local VW tutorials can be found here

Hopefully the tutorial might help people avoid some of the problems I had in getting started with VW SOAP.

There's a new book based on VisualWorks 7.1 being published in Germany. The Cincom Smalltalk NC CD will be included with the book; I'll post more details on this when I have them.

Update And alert reader sent me this:

To see the book on Amazon (Germany) - browse here

The title is "Grundkurs Smalltalk - Objektorientierung von Anfang an. Eine Einfuehrung in die Programmierung" - which translates to- "Smalltalk 101 - OO from the beginning. An introduction to programming"

350 pages, should be available in September 2003 - Author is Johannes Brauer.