Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Donald MacQueen reports:

pdfs of issues from 1991 through 1996 are online here

very cool!

Frank Hayes has an interesting theory about some IT shop outsourcing:

But if it feels like upper management is sticking it to IT, that just may be what's happening.

And if you can step back from the situation, it's easy to understand. Lots of those business people have felt like the IT department has been sticking it to them for years. But they were stuck with IT. There was no way to get rid of those arrogant, high-handed blankety-blanks in the IT shop.

Until now, that is.

And now that there's finally a way to do it, they will. Even if it means buying into improbably optimistic estimates of cost savings and unlikely claims of quality and effectiveness from outsourcers. Maybe it's all wishful thinking -- but after years of feeling like hostages to the IT shop, what these executives and managers mainly wish is to dump their IT departments.

IT shops arrogant and not mindful of user needs? Perish the thought....

Gordon Weakliem points out something I didn't know about C# - it has structs. Bleah - so much for OO....

If you have goodies to update for the next release of Cincom Smalltalk, see this page for instructions. Thanks! The deadline is October 15th.

At least in Europe, there's good news on the software patent front:

In its plenary vote on the 24th of September, the European Parliament approved the proposed directive on "patentability of computer-implemented inventions" with amendments that clearly restate the non-patentability of programming and business logic, and uphold freedom of publication and interoperation. The day before, EC Commissioner Bolkestein had threatened that the Commission and the Council would withdraw the directive proposal and hand the questions back to the national patent administrators on the board of the European Patent Office (EPO), should the Parliament vote for the amendments which it supported today. "It remains to be seen, whether the European Commission is committed to "harmonisation and clarification" or only to patent owner interests", says Hartmut Pilch of FFII.

Now, if we can just get the US PTO to see the light on this....

You might have noticed a small server outage this morning - I had enough updates to apply that I just stopped and restarted the server rather than apply patches. It's all better now :)

Blogging Roller thinks Java is sensible, and C# (.NET) is the hazard. For the rest of us, Java and .NET are the elephants stampeding across the savannah, crushing anything that gets in their way - whether it has value or not. There's not a dime's worth of difference between the two...

Michael Lucas-Smith reports on a bunch of fascinating development in VisualWorks - including Netscape plugins running in VW windows. Go check it out

Doc Searls - and everyone else, it seems - has gone completely bonkers over Verisign grabbing incorrectly entered urls and redirecting to their search pages. So.... let's see. I type an URL wrong. Would I rather see a search page, or a lame 404 page? Exactly why all the fuss over this? If you don't want to use their search, retype the url. And hey, that's exactly what you would have to do if they weren't redirecting. Sheesh - get a grip gang.

Update - there are some good comments on this, things I hadn't considered. As I said in a comment: What this points out (to me) is the disconnect between application usage of http, and 'Joe browser' usage of http. This kind of redirect is a problem for the former, and a non-issue for the latter. When I posted this, I had my 'Joe browser' hat on, and didn't consider the development aspect. Hmm....

Ted Leung hits Jonathan Schwartz of Sun on more silliness - now Schwartz thinks the world is coming to an end because the PTO wants docs in Word format. Oh, the humanity!

Ed Foster reports that the campers aren't happy - MS is considering making Windows Updates a mandatory part of the license. Yeah, like I want that. My wife's system lost the ability to do dhcp on boot after a Windows update, and hasn't ever gotten that back. We went to a static IP, which solved the problem. Others are even less pleased:

"We now use our firewalls to block the users from going to Windows Update site and attempting to patch things themselves," wrote one reader. "The extremely high cost of ownership -- partly due to all of these problems and patches -- weighs heavily against any future purchases of Microsoft products. If Microsoft decides to make patches mandatory, it will effectively remove our ability to control the patching process in a way that protects our company from their screw-ups. It will be the final issue that leaves us no alternative but to migrate to Linux. How's that for irony? A Microsoft innovation that forces me to purchase Linux instead."

Here's a tip - no one cares about Longhorn. No one cares about the "great new features". What they care about is having stuff that actually works now.

India blocks Yahoo Groups. That sure makes them look like technical wizards...

I came across an interesting oddity today in this Oracle feed - look at the link - it's set to '/'. Well, that's useful. What the heck is up with that? I now have code to work around that issue... I sure wish that feed owners would be more careful though

Alan Knight reports from the JAOO conference in Denmark:

I'm at the JAOO conference in Aarhus, Denmark. This is the first time I've been to this particular conference, and in fact I'd never heard of it before they invited us to speak, but I'm quite impressed. Aarhus is lovely, the facilities are good, and the selection of talks is excellent.

Contrary to the name (which stands for Java And OO) there's a diverse set of topics. The program says it nicely -- "Historically, JAOO was a Java conference, but times are changing and so are we".

Yesterday I heard a particularly interesting talk from Lars Bak, one of the Self/Strongtalk/Java Hotspot engineers who has now started a company to do small embedded systems in Smalltalk. (He also presented at the ESUG conference). By small embedded systems, he doesn't mean PDA's, which are now looking increasingly like PC's from two or three years ago. He's talking about a 32K VM and full programs that run in 128K. One of his example applications is Bang & Olufsen, who are looking at embedding this sort of program into audio systems -- not in the amplifier, but in the speakers.

Today I listened to Martin Fowler's talk on architecture, which was interesting, but had one particularly nice quote at the end. Someone had asked about Object Databases, and Martin was very positive about them. He'd had a lot of success with object databases in the past, and "I believe that many of the systems we build today in Java would be better built in Smalltalk and Gemstone."

I'll post more if/when I get it!

Charles Miller explains with examples why this article on Java productivity is right:

Problem: I have a list of objects. I want to create another list containing the 'id' property of those objects.

Solutions:

• Ruby

list.map { |i| i.id }

• Java

List ids = new ArrayList();for (Iterator i = list.iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) {    ids.add(new Long(((Thingy)i.next()).getId()));}

• Java w/ 1.5-style Generics and For Loop

List ids = new ArrayList();for (Thingy x :list) {    ids.add(new Long(x.getId()));}

And the Smalltalk for that:

list collect: [[:each | each id]

I think that all speaks for itself...

Our power came back on - the piece of tinfoil they apparently use to connect my part of the neighborhood must be taped back down. I had more stable power as a kid growing up in a neighborhood with overhead lines and lots of old trees.....

Scoble thinks the tablet PC is innovative. Apparently, he's missed the many, many pen computing initiatives over the last 10 years. Evolutionary, yes. Innovative, no.

I swear, there is something seriously wrong with the power hookups in this neighborhood. Even the smallest storm knocks us out - but just the street I live on - not any of the side streets flaring off us. Someone at BGE screwed the pooch when they wired this community....

Via freeform goodness comes news of a weather site that is testing RSS as a format for weather forecasts. So far, they only have the DC area feed going (but hey, I live in the area!). Cool idea.

Newletter publishers are feeling the twin burns of virus laden email and spam - according to the latest surveys, 17% to 38% of opt-in email is being blocked by spam filters - and who knows how much is being deleted by overly aggressive client side filters. Steve Outing of Editor/Publisher writes:

Recent studies show that opt-in messages (that is, e-mail that people have asked to receive) are now erroneously blocked as spam by ISPs and e-mail services at rates of 17% (according to a Return Path study) to 38% (Mail.com study). Let me repeat: 17% to 38% of the e-mail you send out to customers who ask for it -- or even pay for it -- does not reach them. Sometimes it gets shuttled into a "junk" folder where it probably won't be seen by the subscriber; sometimes it's just unceremoniously deleted without the subscriber's knowledge, or the publisher's (since the filters often don't send bounce messages that would let you know what's happening).

Of the subscribers (62% to 83%) who do successfully receive e-mail from ethical publishers, there's another big chunk who don't open it. The typical opt-in commercial/marketing message is opened only about 40% of the time, according to the most recent Doubleclick E-mail Trend Report. E-mail newsletters typically fare better, but nevertheless a lot of them sit unopened. As users' in-boxes fill up with more and more junk, it's common for people to simply miss asked-for mail and inadvertently delete it -- or because of information overload, simply not have time to read it.

Don't expect it to get better anytime soon - with the flood of "security update" virii coming at me, I'm in full bore auto-delete mode - who knows how many mails I might have actually wanted have been deleted. Just like the badly behaved child in grade school, the spammers and virus writers are ruining email for the rest of the class. I find more and more that I'm using RSS and IM for communication. Content producers are starting to realize that there's a problem - look for more and more content to move to RSS.

Blogging Roller has a an interesting article on the process whereby the performance of roller has been gradually improved. While he's using Java, most of the points are completely independent of that, and illustrate how you can't optimize until after you see the problem. Worth a look.

I wrote about Sun's Linux comments here the other day. I received an interesting email response - I've snipped the company name, but it's a nifty retort to Sun's thinking on this:

Perhaps this clown would be interested to see how company name removed is no longer purchasing any Sun hardware. Everything coming in is now a Dell box running Red Hat Enterprise. I have migrated our entire Smalltalk system off our 24-processor Solaris box onto four RH boxes, and I had to remove some of my parallel calculation engines, because they were running too fast and causing too many accounts to sit around in "pending" state waiting for the C program (still running on the Solaris box, because the C guys can't get it to run on the RH box without crashing) to pick them up.

My users have all moved their UIs off Solaris and onto RH. I have provided two startup icons for everyone's Windows box, one to start on Solaris and one to start on RH. The RH is so dramatically faster that NOBODY still runs the Solaris script. Too bad about it not being safer, more robust, higher quality, and dramatically less expensive. Gawd, how in hell can this guy say "dramatically less expensive" with a straight face? It's amazing. Are you sure this guy's last job wasn't at the Iraq information ministry?

While I can't id the company, it's not a small shop with three people - it's a major Fortune 100 firm, running business critical applications on Linux (with VisualWorks!). I think Schwartz needs a quick reality check....

Critical Section gets to the heart of the matter:

If you look at any technology which targets developers, the adoption rate and ultimate adoption percentage are a function of how easy it was.  HTML was easy, the adoption rate and percentage were very high.  Java was pretty easy, and the early adoption was good, but J2EE is not easy and the later adoption has not been that good.  (Many more people program in Java than build applications using J2EE architecture.)  COM was not easy.  COM+ was not easy.  DCOM was not easy.  So far I have not found .NET to be easy, in fact even just understanding what it is was hard, let alone how you use it.  MS does not have a history of making things easy, and this has hurt them.  The things MS did which were easy were the most successful " look at VB, for example.

That's a very good point - so long as yo also understand that easy often translates to familiar - no one with any sense would say that Java is easier than Smalltalk (in an objective sense) - but given the large body of C/C++ knowledge, it sure was more familiar. In passing, he makes a comment about Atom vs. RSS in ths regard:

In the blogging world, Movable Type is easy.  RSS is easy.  XML-RPC is easy.  Meanwhile RDF and SOAP are not easy, and nobody uses RDF and SOAP.  This Atom thing is going to die a quick death from lack of adoption, because the guys behind it are nerds who don't understand easy.  Dave Winer understands easy, it is his biggest virtue.

That cuts right through all the bs you see in the blogging world and puts things in perspective. Watch the Atom group not get it - loudly

Joshua Marinacci wants to use a dynamic language and doesn't know it yet. Quick, someone show him Smalltalk!

There's a mailing list off of Yahoo for aggregator developers - and it's got an RSS Feed. I think I'll find that much easier to keep up with...

Jonathon Schwartz of Sun - their exec VP in charge of Software - proves that 'de nile' is more than a river in Egypt:

Also, let me really clear about our Linux strategy. We don't have one. We don't at all. We do not believe that Linux plays a role on the server. Period. If you want to buy it, we will sell it to you, but we believe that Solaris is a better alternative, that is safer, more robust, higher quality and dramatically less expensive in purchase price. How much is the nearest competitor's cheapest enterprise offering? And it doesn't come with a portal server, application server, Web server messaging, calendaring, clustering, high availability services and directory services provisioning. Give me a break. Ours is $100 an employee. How much is theirs? Bring it on. We will also indemnify you for Solaris, and if IBM says you don't need it, then why do they have so many lawyers suing people over patent and copy violations.

Wow. That's FUD and stupidity in one neat, tidy package. Linux plays no role on the server? Solaris is cheaper? On which planet? Indemnify against SCO?

And this is precious - you can translate Sun's indemnification offer to: "We will offer you something truly useless, but that sounds useful if you don't know the details"

If you use Linux on the server, even if we sold the distribution to you, you are on your own. If you buy our Java desktop solution [which includes SuSe Inc. Linux] you are completely indemnified as long as you run it as a desktop solution. And by the way, don't take our desktop product and put it on the server. We are indemnifying them for our products. If we incorporate someone else's component we will make sure that we can indemnify it. I have licenses to all those issues that SCO is suing IBM for. If I didn't have them, I certainly wouldn't indemnify them.

Gads. Someone take away his kool-aid before he hurts himself....

While I had added support for this awhile back, I had made a mistake in the implementation. I wasn't properly using the API in class HttpRequest - and that meant that feeds requiring authorization didn't get the headers set correctly. That's fixed now - thanks to the work of the folks here, who set up some test feeds for developers. With those examples, I was able to find an swat the bug this morning. If you need to use an RSS Reader that can handle private feeds, grab the update.

Via Ted Leung comes this epiphany from Phil Greenspun - Java is the SUV of programming languages:

A project done in Java will cost 5 times as much, take twice as long, and be harder to maintain than a project done in a scripting language such as PHP or Perl. People who are serious about getting the job done on time and under budget will use tools such as Visual Basic (controlled all the machines that decoded the human genome). But the programmers and managers using Java will feel good about themselves because they are using a tool that, in theory, has a lot of power for handling problems of tremendous complexity.

Go read the whole thing - it's worth the time

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....