Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Scoble not only misinterprets me, he puts words in my mouth:

If I go into a Toyota dealership to look at a Corolla, I wonder if they'd agree to sell me one of its Avalons (a much higher priced car) for the price of the Corolla? No? Of course. Now isn't that evil!

But that's what James wants Microsoft to do. He wants Microsoft to invest in the network, pay the bandwidth, the salaries of the folks doing everything, wants a state-of-the-art data center so his IM always stays up and doesn't get flaky, but then wants to use it from any third-party client that can attach to the network. That, and he wants Microsoft to leave open a security flaw so that his third-party network can get access.

Not what I said, or what I meant. Here's my post - I'm happy to see MS patch security holes - maybe if they patched more, I wouldn't be buried in the "ms security" (yes, I know they aren't from MS) virus emails. But back to IM - if cost mattered much to MS, they would be charging for access to the IM network - because making sure that only MS clients access it simply doesn't address the supposed concern.

With the addition of all the new bloggers to this site:

• Michael Lucas-Smith
• Richard Demers
• Avi Bryant
• Sam Shuster

I had to reconsider the logic I used for showing recent items. The logic had been, show all items for the last N days. This worked fine for me - I post at least a little bit nearly every day. However, not all blogs are alike - some people post in more of a burst mode. What that meant was that periodically, some of the blogs here would have no items showing - not a good thing! I've updated it so that, in the case where there are no posts over the last N days, the posts from the most recent day will show up.

I've been thinking about the way I handle updated posts in BottomFeeder. Right now, the new post comes in as new, and the old post remains (until it ages off). I've had a couple of questions about that - so I've got (unreleased) code that would replace any and all old items with matching GUID's (within a given feed, not across feeds) with the newly updated item. Is this desirable? I don't have strong feelings about it either way, so I'll take suggestions....

Showtime is renewing "Dead Like Me". It's a truly cool show - I really like the idea of grim reapers being low level flunkies, with no clue how or why they get their tasks. Link via Freeform Goodness

Blaine Buxton has a blog - subscribe to his feed here. I worked with Blaine way back in the day at PPD - check out some of his cool Smalltalk projects...

Blaine Buxton is working on Smalltalk code (Squeak) that will read/write Java serialized objects. He's got it in SqueakMap and it's partly working. Go check it out!

The last opportunity for goodies for the next release of Cincom Smalltalk is fast approaching - October 15th. I just got my blog code and the code for BottomFeeder prepared for 7.2 and ready to go for the release - in my case, it meant removing a few overrides.

Scoble and MS so don't get the point. The value of the IM network isn't in your client - which you give away - it's in how many people have signed up for the service. Sure, the bandwidth for the service costs money - that's a choice you made when you decided to ship a free client. By cutting off third party access, all you've done is reduced the value of your network. If you're worried about costs, charge an access fee for getting in - and don't worry about whether they use your tool, or Trillian, or whatever. AOL and Yahoo have the same clue free sort of thought process on this. The problem isn't who implements the tools - it's how you decide to pay for the service. Your "solution" to this problem is just stupid.

Daniel Steinberg unwittingly shows us why static typing adds so much complexity to a language and to the lives of developers using it, in a discussion about auto-boxing.

Gordon Weakliem points out an interesting observation from Joel Spolsky - the construction industry misses time/budget estimates all the time as well. Think about other industries - how many movies do you hear about that run on budget and on time? The interesting thing about this is how software, movies, and construction are similar - in many, many cases they involve working with a lot of people you haven't worked with before - using a management team that may not be known or respected by all those involved. In other words, they are all ad-hoc projects that run with ad-hoc teams. There are some directors who seem to work with the same actors (and crews) time and time again - and I'd bet good money that, as time goes by, their on time/on budget numbers get better. Just as any construction crew that stayed together would - just as any software crew that stayed stable would.

Now think about that for a minute - because it actually runs counter to the way a lot of management teams think about software. What do they bring in for a new project - a team of consultants. What does the consulting firm throw in? A group that likely has no real experience as a team working together. That's probably one of the big reasons that large projects fail - the team never gels. It would probably be better to add a small number of new hires and work on the project with an established team of internal developers who have experience working together (I suspect that this is why the smaller consulting firms often do a better job than the big ones - they only have a small team of people who have worked together more than once).

Alan Cooper has a fascinating look at the way costs are accounted for in the software business. His take - we still do it the "old fashioned" way - using the rules learned in the manufacturing age. His premise: these rules don't work well at all for software development:

You and I create software, and business executives create revenue streams and profit centers. You and I measure our success by the product's quality, and business executives measure their success by their investments' profitability. They do this by applying the language of business mathematics, which recognizes fixed costs, variable costs, corporate overhead, and R&D, but, unfortunately, has no model appropriate for software or programming. Accounting is the basic language of business, and its categories are so fundamental to all business measurement and communication that contemporary executives have internalized them completely. They see programming as another corporate expense to fit into an existing category. Most simply treat programming as a manufacturing effort"a variable cost. This is the worst possible choice because it prejudices their business decision-making hopelessly

That summation certainly applies at most of the shops I've seen. I wonder if changing that perception will require the retirement of the current crop of management in most places....

The myRSS feed for Goodstart leaves (IMHO) a lot to be desired. I sat down last night (in between power outages) and created a site scraper for Goodstart - the new feed is here. Enjoy!

Stephanne Ducasse has an announcement about an upcoming talk in Switzerland:

SSUG the Swiss Smalltalk User Group in collaboration with CHOOSE is glad to invite you to the next half-day tutorial given by J. Pelrine (MetaProg GmbH):

"SCRUM: A Methodology to Keep the Team Going" on tuesday, October 14th 2003 from 14h to 18h at the IAM Room 001. http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ssug/Events/20031014.html

Scrum, one of the agile processes, has been used to develop systems and products since 1995 on thousands of projects in hundreds of organizations. Scrum implements in several days and delivers increments of functionality within thirty days. Scrum wraps existing engineering practices. Because Scrum is a development management process, it has also been used for such projects as marketing, research, and hardware product development.

In this talk, we'll discuss how Scrum and all agile processes work, the theory behind them and their underlying practices of inspection and adaptation. Then we'll look at Scrum's detailed practices of iterations, increments of code, emergence of requirements and design, and self-organization of teams. Through these practices, Scrum introduces a heartbeat of regular productivity to an organization that foments customer and engineering collaboration. If XP is wrapped by Scrum, XP's engineering practices ensure the quality of this code and stability of the emerging product, while Scrum provides the organizational framework which allows development to flourish.

References:

Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle, Agile Software Development with Scrum (First edition), Alan R. Apt, 2001.

Mike Beedle, Martine Devos, Yonat Sharon, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, "SCRUM: A Pattern Language for Hyperproductive Software Development," Pattern Languages of Program Design 4 , Neil Harrison, Brian Foote and Hans Rohnert (Eds.), pp. 637-652, Addison Wesley, 2000.

Biography

Joseph Pelrine is CO of MetaProg, a company devoted to increasing the quality of software and its development process. He has had a successful career as software developer, project manager and consultant, and has spoken about it at such diverse places as IBM, OOPSLA and the Chaos Computer Club. In addition to being one of Europeís most experienced eXtreme Programming practitioners and coaches, he is also Europe's first certified ScrumMaster.

Tutorial Fees
140 CHF for Choose member
120 CHF for SSUG members (in fact 100 CHF + 20 CHF for registration)
80 CHF for students
200 CHF SI member
250 CHF others

SSUG Sponsors:
Daedalos Consulting AG ( http://www.daedalos.ch ), iFace AG ( http://www.iface.ch ), Object-Oriented Limited ( http://www.object-oriented.com ).

REGISTRATION

Fill in the form below and send it to tschmid@iam.unibe.ch . You will then receive an invoice from the University of Berne.

I want to register to the SCRUM tutorial held at Bern the 14 October 2003. 
Name: ______________________________________ 
Email: ______________________________________ 
Company: ______________________________________ 
Company Address: ______________________________________ 
Company ZIP/City: ______________________________________ 


Please check: 

[[ ] CHOOSE member 
[[ ] SUGS member 
[[ ] students 
[[ ] SI member 
[[ ] Non-Member 

Damn, and I was right in the middle of some code I wanted to finish off. Blasted hurricane.....

I went to bed after that - and now here it is, not long after 7 the next day. Power is back, winds have died down. I took a walk around the house - we don't seem to have suffered any visible damage. Someone not too far away did though - there are singles on the side lawn from a nearby roof. Our drainage worked - there's no standing water on our patio, or in our basement. Looks like we came through Isabel with only a short power outage

I spoke too soon. The wind is still whipping, and we are periodically getting buckets of rain - but the power just came back online. So I've got connectivity, lights, cable tv - the whole shebang. Maybe they replaced the tinfoil they use to connect us to the grid....

Well, that was like THeoden asking "Is that all you've got", apparently. The power just went out - I had time to shut down the Linux box because of the battery backup. So here I am, no net, no power, no TV. Time to get the portable radio fired up, I guess. It looks really vicious out there now - the wind is sweeping the rain down the street, and the trees are going back and forth. I don't expect power back until tomorrow; the vrews are probably far busier with other, worse problems...

I don't have a lot of battery left - and from the sound of the wind, electric power isn't coming back tonight. I'm going to shutdown the laptop and just listen to the storm.

Well, that was like Theoden asking "Is that all you've got", apparently. The power just went out - I had time to shut down the Linux box because of the battery backup. So here I am, no net, no power, no TV. Time to get the portable radio fired up, I guess. It looks really vicious out there now - the wind is sweeping the rain down the street, and the trees are going back and forth. I don't expect power back until tomorrow; the vrews are probably far busier with other, worse problems. In the meantime, I'm on via dialup, using a candle for light - while I wait for a $%^&*( java applet to download weather maps.

So the winds are blowing, the rain is coming down hard - and, other than the sometimes power blinks, I've got great network connectivity. Three days ago, with clear blue skies and no weather events within 100 miles, I was suffering 50% + packet drops. Weird.

I'm trying to figure out which is the stranger thing - The Register report that new EU law would require companies to patent all new software projects (huh???) - or the way the tree outside my window is swaying in the high winds we are already getting from Isabel. I simply have to be misreading this....

The storm is coming - and it looks like what we'll get here is lots of rain. The problem with that is, we are already nearly twelve inches over normal rainfall this year - so the ground is saturated. This will certainly be a test of the drainage system we installed this summer.

The class I was teaching ended early - the employer of my students has a half day today, and some of them were home already, doing storm prep. Everyone is just waiting to see what happens....

So today, I started covering GUI building in VW. That means covering the UI/domain model split, which means explaining how one hooks a UI to a domain - which involves, ultimately, getting into AspectAdaptors. I've yet to see a class where this didn't cause a lot of zoning out. We didn't go into any depth - more or less, I explained what they are good for, how they work, and that understanding them in depth really isn't critical at this point (these are Smalltalk beginners). I guess what I'm curious about is this - anyone have a "surefire" way to explain the concept to newbies?

We had a few run of the mill things to do before the hurricane arrives - many of them things we should have done anyway. We put together some shelves, and stacked up unpacked boxes on top of them (in case the basement floods). We removed the grill and light chairs from the patio, along with some of the planters that could get damaged. We even took the precaution of laying the pieces of our concrete benches flat, so that high winds wouldn't break them. None of this was hard, but it all took time. And it seems that we forgot dinner in all the excitement as well! Storm or no storm, I have one more day of the Intro class to deliver - short probably, since the customer has a half day in anticipation of the weather.

On the other hand, this post puts this level of "difficulty" into perspective

It's the oddest thing - here we are preparing for Isabel - and the weather for the last two days has been magnificent - perfectly clear blue skies, cool, pleasant temps (mid 70's daytime) - perfect weather. There's absolutely no hint (other than from media) that anything is coming. This made me think of this in terms of people who lived before weather satellites and radar - say as recently as 70 years ago. They wouldn't have had any real clue that anything was coming until the skies got dark - today and yesterday would have had no forboding at all. The massive preparations we see, the media coverage - it's all very recent - not very far back, the arrival would have been a complete surprise to all but those actually on the coast - the ones who would have seen a few days of rising tides.

Scoble says that the Longhorn team should read this post. I agree - especially this part:

The IT industry is maturing. Hopefully, this maturity will result in a slower introduction of new features, which in turn will let companies focus their attention and resources on making existing technology work better for users.

Here's a tip - move those damned video drivers out of the kernel and make the OS as stable as it used to be in NT 3.51

Seems that Tim Bray's patent thoughts have sparked some thinking by Don Park on the subject. The interesting thing - to me, at least - is how Don ends up defining the utility (or lack thereof) of patents (not just in software either, but in general):

To be more precise, if your patent gives your solution advantages in quality of service, then it's legit.  But if your patent leads to the only solution, then you are a troll.  If your patented formula makes cars go faster, I am fine with that.  If you patented the idea of automobiles, I am not all right with that and all for public's right to steamroll over such patents.

This is reasonable, but extremely difficult to get right as a matter of law. In fact, Don's thinking sounds an awful lot like the famous Supreme Court (US) justice thought on pornography - I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. The problem with this is, lots of people share that thought, but most of them will disagree on whether the particular thing they are looking at qualifies. Back to the drawing board....

Scott Knowles quotes some interesting points on innovation and openness. The example is in manufacturing, but the point covers software as well:

Patent and copyright laws protect the first to claim legal ownership, but deny the origins of their work and, as badly, forestall future improvements by others.

That's an excellent - and all too unheard - observation. Sure, most people will never look at the source and try to make changes. But if you allow it, some will. An awful lot of the most useful things in VisualWorks arrived through the work of outsiders - because of the fact that VW - commercial and NC - ships with full sources.

I've been teaching the new intro class for two days now - it's kind of an education for me as well. I knew the rythms of the old course, where people got into trouble, etc. With this new one, I don't know yet. I was able to get some immediate feedback this afternoon though. After we went through an exercise, I demonstrated SUnit, and how the RB integration works. The students seemed to like the integration, and then I had a task for them - take some broken code (a one up/one down counter) and write tests for the broken methods. The tests should fail - once they got that far, they had to fix the code.

It took some of them awhile, but they got the test methods coded, and the methods fixed. Yeah, this is backwards in TDD terms. On the other hand, getting code without tests is an all too common occurence - so learning how to create tests for the expected output is a valuable exercise in its own right. Now, if I can take my own advice and start creating tests for BottomFeeder....

Linux Today disses Gartner:

IT consultant Benjamin Robson and Open Source advocate Con Zymaris have criticised a study issued by the technology research company Gartner, which made the central point that migrating desktops to Linux makes sense only in a very limited range of situations.

Robson, who is president of the Victoria Chapter of the Information Systems Security Association and a senior consultant with Fulcrum Infrastructure Services, said Gartner should be ashamed of the report. "Gartner has long been losing credibility with its studies on (aspects of) the IT industry, and this is yet more evidence as to how bad their research is," he said.

Research? They don't do research - they just make stuff up

Tim Bray has some very interesting - and conflicted - thoughts on software patents. He's discussing it from the inside - and here's where he ends up:

The people in the system with the worst conflict of interest are the patent attorneys and various flavors of intellectual-property expert, who are always willing to argue passionately and at great length about the importance of securing patents, and how this is an essential part of any business strategy. They seem to really believe what they're saying, but when I listen to them my mind's eye just can't help seeing the fat envelopes stuffed with carefully-itemized five-figure legal bills crossing my desktop.

A cynic would say it's a self-perpetuating system whose costs greatly outweigh its benefits, and that we're hopelessly stuck in it. But then, I'm a cynic.

His essay is well worth reading - it's from a guy with doubts working inside the system, rather than just being a soapbox oration from someone with an opinion on the subject.

Linux Today reports that O'reilly is interested in publishing a Linux analog to their "Windows Annoyance" book. The mere fact that such a book is being contemplated tells you that Linux is getting to be more mainstream - at the desktop level....

Ted Leung has a thoiughtful post up on what open means to him. In a nutshell, he says that open means that you can fork the code - although he goes beyond that and touches on GPL/LGPL issues as well. Worth reading.

Yeesh. The highest probablility track for Isabel have it aiming right here, where I live. Thursday and Friday should be fun....

Freeform Goodness points to two stories here and here - Ford is upping their Linux usage.

The Register quotes intel's CTO:

Moving beyond 32-bit addressing is "really not needed for several more years", he told reporters attending the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose.

Translation: We screwed the pooch with the itanium, and you don't really want to buy Opteron or G5, do you?

There's a new Smalltalk book in German:

Johannes Brauer: "Grundkurs Smalltalk: Objektorientierung von Anfang an Eine einführung in die Programmierung Vieweg Verlag, Wiesbaden 2003 ISBN 3-528-05818-8 - EUR 19,90 (incl. CD)

Here's a link

I've survived the first day - although it looks like I'm going to have to add additional material. That's ok though; there's lots of GUI that could be covered....

Tim Bray quotes a great statement about software technology - XML in particular: Spaghetti doesn't want to be free

Sam Gentile points out the all too common disconnect between "leading edge" developers and the user communities they serve - we get our breath taken away by cool new things - while they want solutions that work with what they have. Excellent point.

Via Clarence Westberg: a bridge from Squeak to .NET. Interesting

This week I'm going to be doing something I haven't done in a long, long time - teach the VW Intro to Smalltalk class. At this point, the biggest adaptation for me is going to be the work hours - I am so used to working at home and setting my own hours that having to conform to a more normal "9 to 5"day is going to be a shock all by itself. I don't know how much network access or time I'll have during the day, so blogging may well be very light during the day this coming week.

If Isabel follows the middle of the (current) projected storm track, the drainage we installed this sumer will certainly get an acid test. Right now, the middle of the projection is right up the Chesapeake Bay.

There's an interesting article on CNet News about Sun and McNealy's management. That's not really what caught my eye though. Down near the bottom of the article is this quote from McNealy:

"The thing that scares me to death is that people are afraid to tell me what they really think," McNealy told CNET News.com in 1996.

That's a problem for lots and lots of companies - all you have to do is spend some time consulting and you'll figure that out. The "rank and file" workers have many complaints, but how many of them ever filter up to the top? In the most successful companies, I'd guess that the feedback reaches the executive offices. In too many cases, it doesn't - for a variety of reasons:

• People fear repercussions for speaking their mind
• People believe that management "will never listen"
• Senior management is blockaded by a wall of real or perceived sychophants

It may even be the case that management would be overjoyed to hear what regular employees think - but some combination of corporate culture and people issues prevents the interaction from ever happening. It would be interesting to find out how many senior execs actually want honest feedback, but are prevented from getting it due to layers of preventative culture.

I had to get up an an ungodly (for me, anyway) hour this morning - my daughter's girl scout troop is setting off for a camping trip, and she had to leave the house by 7:45. For me, that's early. So of course I sat down at the PC, and found a Bf bug report. Simple issue - the VW http client code doesn't recognize urls with a # character. Well, that's a problem. One of the cool things about Smalltalk is that - when you find a framework bug like this - you can patch the framework. That's what I did, in addition to raising an internal bug report. This is as opposed to most systems, where you can report the bug to the cendor/maintainer - and hope for the best, developing a hacky work-around in the meantime (if you can). In BottomFeeder terms, this created a problem in spawning a browser on any BlogSpot link - the links to feed items all have # characters. The fix is in now - you can upgrade from the update tool. In the meantime, I should go back to bed....