Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

I love the fact that advocating Java in a vociferous way is pegged as normal - but being a Smalltalk (or Lisp, etc) advocate gets you labeled as a nut case:

James Robertson, smalltalk nut case and long-time Java detractor in c.l.j.a. (then again, I noticed most smalltalk nutjobs are Java detractors - it must come with the territory)....

Question the status quo, and there's just no end to how much you'll be called nuts. Interesting side point - most of the posters in c.j.l.a. who come at things from a Smalltalk viewpoint have used Java and other statically typed languages; while most of the Java folks arguing back haven't used any dynamic language.

The Yankees have 100 victories and the AL East pennant, and - so far - the Giants (football) seem to remember how to play the game. Somehow, the Red Sox managed not to succomb to their typical fall swoon (yet) - but then again, they have a series against Oakland (and then likely the Yankees, unless they manage to lose to Minnesota). Over in the NL, the Cubs managed to make it to the playoffs. Now, imagine for a minute - if both the Sox and the Cubs advanced to the series, one of them would have to win. Since that would mean the end of life as we know it, it can't happen.....

Ted Leung explains the concept of software monoculture far better than I did the other day.

I got a request for supporting file urls this evening, and added support for it. This is only in the dev stream - it will show up in 3.2 when that is released. This should be useful for tracking local changes that can be published as RSS...

Now that I have a bunch of other bloggers on the site, I'm starting to get requests from them for api access to the blog server. That brings up the ugly truth of the matter - this server sort of grew haphazardly, and the api has been mostly implicit. Well, I spent most of today starting to address that issue - and in the process cleaned up some inefficiencies. I haven't deployed the new code yet; I still want to test it out some more before I do that.

The feeds (from this blog and from the ones in userblogs now have embedded comment support. You won't see them for anything cached in BottomFeeder unless you regenerate the feed.

The FTP service has been restored - so if you were trying to download Cincom Smalltalk NC, you should be able to use FTP again

David Buck points out how Smalltalk tools enhance your productivity - and in the process, implicitly shows why Java/C# (et. al.) developers and Smalltalk developers talk right past each other when the subject of debugging comes up - Smalltalkers are talking about a much different tool.

The FTP server is not working at the moment; I'm trying to get ahold of the admin. For NC downloaders, that means you should use the http service instead of the ftp service for the time being.

Chris Double shares a comparison between a Java struts and a Smalltalk Seaside weblog implementation. If you like lots (and lots) of code, pick the Java one :)

This site was unavailable for a period of time overnight, due to a power outage in Cincinnati. Things are up and back to normal now though; sorry for the inconvenience.

Simon Phipps notices that Windows is a monoculture. Apparently he's without a sense of irony - since Sun's vision is also one of a monoculture - one where every application runs on the (frozen in 1996) JVM, and dynamic languages have no place whatsoever.

I really, really like Michelle Branch's new album. A lot :)

Can your platform do this?

Then you need to go read Avi's post - it explains the concept in a nutshell.

Scoble points to some suggestions for Windows Update. There's one I vehemently disagree with: making critical updates mandatory. Or worse, as rumor has it, make the updates a requirement of the license. The updates aren't tested well enough for that. Let me give an example:

• After the last critical update I applied, IE stopped being able to use proxy servers. And the one I need to work with is IIS. Now, whenever I need to use VPN, I fire up Netscape - it actually works
• After a critical update to my wife's system, it stopped being able to get a dhcp address from the Linksys router at boot. Every reboot, networking had to be manually set up until we bailed and just gave it a static IP.

Is it any wonder that I tend to hit Remind me later on updates? My experience with them is decidedly negative. Now, I know that updates can be hard - I've screwed up BottomFeeder updates via insufficient testing. On the other hand, MS is a big company with lots of testing staff; Bf is a small effort by 2 people, with occasional help from others. Windows Update needs to work a lot better before most people will feel comfortable with it.

The Smalltalk Community Blogs site continues to grow. Travis Griggs has started blogging, and David Buck will be coming online shortly. Welcome!

Tim Bray has a new Mac - this seems to be a mini-trend in the technical end of the blogsphere (maybe elsewhere, I don't know). Are Mac sales picking up? I know a number of people who have recently bought Macs, and all of them tell me I should as well. Hmmm

Lambda the Ultimate notices the online pdfs for the Smalltalk Report. I think we are gradually replacing the kind of content that the old ST Report had with the Smalltalk Community Blogs

Via Scoble comes a link to Weblogsinc - a company who's purpose is building b2b oriented blogs. I thought there was a business opportunity here somewhere :)

I updated the blog server awhile back so that - when a blogger hadn't posted in a few days - the server would scan back to their last post. The trouble is, I didn't think that carefully about the code, and I only tested it against blogs that had posts - not against a new (empty) blog. Well, this evening I went about setting up a new blog, and boom - that caused problems. The server just kept scanning back infinitely, since I hadn't considered that case. Well, now I've handled that, since I added a new blogger.

Oh, I'll post details on the new blog once the first post goes up

If you won't stop browsing until they pry the mouse from your cold, dead fingers - then visit this site for instructions....

Loosely Coupled refers to a recent post by Sean McGrath on software development - Sean's point is that we can learn a lot about simplicity by looking at Http:

What would a simplified software interface look like? Well, by analogy with the hardware world, it would be one that just supported the basic receive and transmit functions. A real world example? For 'receive' substitute 'GET', for 'transmit' substitute 'POST'. In other words, HTTP.

Now, as Loosely Coupled says, this is oversimplyfying some - it takes a fair bit of elbow grease to create all that simplicity :) However, the point isn't so much for the service implementor as for the service user. Look at blogs for an example - Everyone talks about SOAP, but what do the tools and blogs support? XML-RPC. Why? Simplicity - implementing XML-RPC yourself is simple; implementing SOAP generally isn't - even if you have a toolkit.

So what does this answer? It explains why so many Java developers use JSP, but so few use EJB. It explains why consultants favor SOAP, and line developers like XML-RPC. It explains the growth in simple http based services as opposed to complex SOAP based ones. Anyway, have a look at the post.

The Register reports a correlation between Sobig and DDOS attacks on Anti-Spam sites:

Earlier this week two anti-spam services, Monkeys.com and the Compu.Net "block list", announced their closure due to DDoS attacks, and other attempts by spammers to make their operation as difficult as possible. Their closure follows an earlier decision to discontinue the popular if controversial SPEWS block list (which was run by Osirusoft.com) for similar reasons (see postings to news.admin.net-abuse.email for more info).

Linford tells The Reg that Spamhaus has been under constant "extremely heavy" DDoS attack since early July. He believes the attack against his site and others originates from Windows machines infected with the Sobig worm, controlled by spammers over IRC networks.

Looks like semi-open war is breaking out on this front - and available bandwidth is going to end up being the collateral damage.

I made a modification to BottomFeeder yesterday - I had the current sort selection follow changes in feed selection. The VW widget doesn't do that by default (even though, IMHO, it should). With help from our GUI toolkit guy on the ST IRC Channel, I added that support. However - not well. The state of the sort selection was being improperly tracked, and that led to surprising results. I've fixed it now - changing fields will result in the same sort as you had on the former feed.

Blaine Buxton reminds us of some old treasures in books about software - Peopleware and Psychology of Programming. Another one that still rings true - because too many people have yet to learn the lessons, I guess - is Fred Brooks' classic The Mythical Man Month.

Doc Searls relates the story of an individual who, after joining the ACLU, started receiving lots (and lots) of junk mail from them. This is similar to what happened to me after I donated money to a political party (never mind which one). As in Doc Searls story, I've been buried in mail solicitations from the party - at this point, I'm thinking they have spent more money soliciting from me than I donated in the first place....

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