Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

I'm packed and ready to leave (after a night's sleep, that is). It was a great trip - got a lot done, met a lot of users, and hookd up with the local Cincom staff (a great bunch!). Kuroda took me around a few parts of Tokyo today - the district where they sell electronics is amazing - as is the one selling cookware. Then we visited an old temple - I got some pictures of that, I'll post them when they get developed. Then it was off to the Ginza area for dinner. Shabu Shabu beef is interesting - you get served a big plate of raw, thinly sliced beef. There are condiments at the table, and a bowl of boiling water in front of you. In goes the meat, then out again in seconds - mix with the condiments and eat. Very good, and I managed it all with chopsticks (not one of my skills). I bought a few knick knacks to take back home - and I'm looking forward to my next visit here.

Ted Leung has some interesting observations on Eclipse and software communities.

Going to OOPSLA? Then checkout Camp Smalltalk at OOPSLA - This came via the Camp ST mailing list from Ralph Johnson:

It appears that OOPSLA is going to provide tables and chairs, but will let us bring power strips and the like. We are going to be in a hallway on the second floor of the Anaheim Convention Center past registration. I'll bring my projector and they are going to provide a screen for us. I doubt that they will have signage, since they just figured this out this past week, but perhaps I'll be surprised. I'll make sure that the student volunteers at the information booth know where we are, since we won't be in the program. I'll try to find out the exact location Sunday morning and get things set up.

just plug this into your next argument

Some people really, really wanted to go:

CHICAGO, Illinois (Reuters) -- A Toledo, Ohio, man who bid $60,300 bought the last two seats on this week's final flight of the Concorde.

I'm off to a magazine interview, and this afternoon, I'll be trying to see some of Tokyo before I leave tomorrow morning. I'll have some posts on the day this evening.

Update - The interview was with Solution IT, a local monthly IT journal in Tokyo. The interview went very well - lots of good questions, and an enjoyable conversation. They were interested in product direction, interoperability between VW and OS, and my thoughts on XP devlopment in VW. All in all, it was a good time

This afternoon I visited Tokyo University and was shown a pretty nifty application. Starting in 1990, they started building an application that aids in the design of - and simulation of - seagoing vessels. That was a pretty interesting application - it uses JUN for display, and is used by ship building companies here. Then they showed me another application that uses the same framework - but aids in the design of satellites. Very interesting stuff - it's always cool to see the things our customers are doing with the product.

After the visit, the office staff took me out to a very nice dinner - restaurant called Luke at the top of a downtown tower. The food just kept coming, and it was all good. The steak in particular was just amazing. I can't thank the folks here enough for the kindness they've shown me. It was too bad that it was raining - the view of Tokyo from the restaurant patio was excellent - but would have been far better in clear weather. Even so, the food was good, the conversation better, and the customer visits have been very good. I'm looking forward to the magazine interview tomorrow - and then it's back on the plane for the long, long flight home.

There are problems with the Cincom network right now - apparently, there are some virus infected systems inside the firewall, and they are flooding the network with packets - which is why access to the site is spotty right now. It will likely stay that way until business hours in Cincinnati.

Right after Matsui hit the go ahead single, I had to head to the office. So I missed the scoring in the 9th. Yanks win!

So it's not enough that the rain wrecks any chance of sightseeing this morning; now the game 3 (World Series) - which I have time to watch - is having a raiin delay. It's just not my day...

I've had a number of request for a different 'all new' view in BottomFeeder. Right now, showing all new goes into a 2 pane view. I've had requests for an all new view that stays with the tree - but filters out all the feeds and folders without new items. I got that done this morning while I watched the rain fall here in Tokyo. It's controlled by a setting - using the New button either gets the 2 pane or the 3 pane new only view, depending on the user preference. I'll see how that goes - if it's confusing that way, I'll rip the setting out and go to a new button instead.

I have the morning in front of me, but it's pouring rain outside! I don't have enough time to make an excursion to something indoors (a museum, for instance) - so I'm just stuck. Oh well...

Chris Pirillo doesn't think much of the new Outlook; I haven't touched Outlook in years, as one of the early releases irritated me so much. The more things change....

Dare Obasanjo talks about synching the state of a news aggregator whn you run in more than one place (home/work, say). BottomFeeder has supported ftp for that purpose for quite awhile now, based on an early user request.

I have a few hours of free time here in Tokyo this morning - I think I'll take a walk with the camera and see what I can see. Later on we go to the University of Tokyo for a meeting with a group of Smalltalk users.

Scoble points to a presentation at an O'Reilly conference - Disney is going to talk about how they leverage RSS. Sounds interesting....

I gave a talk on TDD in VisualWorks this evening. I had a large audience that was interested - I got a lot of questions at the end of it. Presenting how test first works in VW went over well, and it explained to people why it is that Smalltalkers view the debugger differently than a lot of others - in XP mailing lists, you'll see people talking about not missing the debugger - the RB, SUnit, and the PDP debugger in VW team up to make quite a productive team.

My hosts were very nice - it was a pleasure giving the talk.

I gave a talk on TDD in VisualWorks this evening. I had a large audience that was interested - I got a lot of questions at the end of it. Presenting how test first works in VW went over well, and it explained to people why it is that Smalltalkers view the debugger differently than a lot of others - in XP mailing lists, you'll see people talking about not missing the debugger - the RB, SUnit, and the PDP debugger in VW team up to make quite a productive team.

My hosts were very nice - it was a pleasure giving the talk.

Sometimes, you can handle too many exceptions. I was having trouble with syndic8 RSS queries in BottomFeeder. I was getting "100 Continue" messages back from the Cincom proxy server, and no results from syndic8 (as the query hadn't gone there yet). Well, it turned out that the fault was mine. I was catching HttpException (superclass of HttpInformationalException). It turns out that I shouldn't do that - the VW Http framework already knows what to do with a 100 message, and does the right thing. So by simply not catching the exception, my queries to syndic8 work behind the proxy server now.

CNET reports that the S&P has placed Sun on a credit watch. Fasten those seatbelts....

I'm in Tokyo this week, and I had some time yesterday to see some sights. My hotel is right in front of Tokyo Tower, so up I went. The observation room is 333 meters up - so you get a pretty good view of things. This is where I miss not having a digital. I have a bunch of nice shots, all taken with a 35mm disposable. I'll post some of them when I get back. Unfortunately, it was hazy yesterday - so there was no view of Mount Fuji from the tower. I lingered until nightfall - the view of Tokyo at night up there is amazing. If you get to Tokyo, take the trip up!

Martin Fowler explains what private/protected/public mean in terms of Smalltalk, Java, C++, and C#. The following was useful to me:

Smalltalk is often considered to be the purest OO language, and predates C++, Java, and C#. It didn't use keywords to control access, but used a basic policy. Smalltalkers would say that fields were private and methods were public.

However the private fields don't really mean the same as what they mean in C++ based languages. In C++ et al aaccess is thought of as textual scope. Consider an example with a class Programmer which is a subclass of class Person with two instances: Martin and Kent. In C++ since both instances are of the same class then Martin has access to the private features of Kent. In Smalltalk's world view access is based on objects, so since Martin and Kent are different objects Martin has no business getting at Kent's fields. But again, since everything is object based Martin can get at all his fields even if they were declared in the Person class. So data in Smalltalk is closer to protected than private, although the object scope makes things different in any case.

Lots more good stuff, especially for those of you working in a mixed language paradigm - I expect that it would be very easy to have misunderstandings based on simple misconceptions of these terms across languages

I introduced a pretty stupid bug into the dev stream of BottomFeeder yesterday. In writing out the settings, I was asleep at the switch - and instead of a line reading:

shouldDoBlah=true


I instead  had


self shouldDoBlah=true

Well, that resulted in a failure to read the file, and to the default settings being used. I've fixed this in the current dev download - apologies for any oddness

The referer list at the bottom of this page seems to be broken; it hasn't updated in quite awhile. When I get back from Japan, I'll have a look at the problem.

The World Series is taking place during the business day for me - but I can at least follow it all via web updates. Go Yankees!

The Massachussetts state government has adopted an open source/open standards policy for IT purchases. Massachussetts was, as I recall, the last holdout state in the MS anti-trust suit, so this is another shot across MS' bow from the state. Watch this whole story unfold nastily over the next few years - and watch politics drive it more than technical merit (and that would be different from the rest of the IT sector how, I wonder?)

ComputerWorld has a spread on MySQL takeup - looks like the little database that could is getting noticed:

MySQL is also upsetting the entire database market. Charles Garry, an analyst at Meta Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn., hails it as "a disruptive technology" that's commoditizing databases"so much so, he says, that "the future of the database market will be the standardization on MySQL."

Strong words, but adherents of the open-source database are passionate supporters, and they number in the millions. These users are drawn to it because it offers high performance, ease of use and a feature set broad enough to handle most of their database development needs. And it's cheap.

Indeed, MySQL's low cost never fails to come up in conversation with users. Mark Cotner, manager of network application development at Cox Communications Inc. in Atlanta, points out that his MySQL-based application cost less than $90,000 from soup to nuts, including the Intel-based servers, programming time and the approximately $4,000 annual license and support payments to MySQL AB, the Uppsala, Sweden-based company that oversees the development and distribution of the open-source database. An Oracle database license for the project would have totaled $300,000 by itself, he says.

I suppose this means that we (Cincom Smalltalk) should take a more serious look at MySQL - although there is a driver for it in the public store. This has got to be the best set of quotes in the article though, first from MS, and then from MySQL AB (the company behind MySQL):

Yet, despite MySQL's progress in the market, "we haven't found very much MySQL out there," says Microsoft's Rizzo.

"That's the best news I could have," retorts Mickos. "As long as Microsoft is in denial, we're fine."

They could both be right - so far.

Nicholas Petreley is usually off on an anti-MS rant; he used to be an OS/2 stalwart, and he's now a Linux backer. I've mostly gotten tired of his columns, but this week's ComputerWorld column is pretty good. He's got this one right; Sun is a deeply confused company right now.

So I'm stuck on this long flight (almost 5 hours left to go now), and I'm catching up on my journal reading - I'm reading the SDTimes columnists, and I come across something interesting - in an article by Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols, I read this:

It (Jackpot) is good, but there's one problem with Jackpot - The program, which was supposed to work with Java in general, hasn't been updatd since the fall of 2002. I fear, like so many other debugging efforts, that it's been placed on the back burner

Well. There are, in fact, great debugging tools available - you just have to use Smalltalk in order to use them. Debuggers for Java aree forensic tools; in Smalltalk, they are surgical tools. Yes, I know there's some "fix and continue" support in Eclips, and in MS' VisualStudio now. I also know, from talking to people that use it - that it's nothing like what you get in Smalltalk. The Smalltalk debugger is a cod browser that lets you step through (and edit) code.

The point about Jackpot being dormant is interesting - there was a lot of buzz about that about a year ago from Gosling. I've always thought that the reason Smalltalk style tools fail to show up in the C language family is that they are so much harder to create in the presence of static typing and weak reflection support; maybe Gosling got tired of pushing the rock uphill. anyhow, here's the thing that popped at me in the column:

Enough is enough. It's time to make debugging code job No. 1. People have put up with bad programs for far too long

He's right - and the answer is over this way

There are some interesting comments on the .NET Guy's blog about the playoffs and world series:

Too bad Fox won't see those ratings in the World Series now that the Cubs and the Red Sox have been eliminated. Quite a few people cared enough to tune in to the *real* reality programming taking place live on their screens. No scripts. No setups. I watched Game 7 NYC vs. Boston. It was a thriller down to that final Boone HR. I would have definitely watched a Cubs vs. Red Sox World Series.

I'd be watching, except I'll be in Tokyo - and a half day off cut from the games - they'll be playing during business hours where I'm going. Just deal with it gang - the Bosox have a monkey the size of a small country on their backs, and the ghost of the Bambino is holding it there. In the meantime, the Yankees should do what they usually do - win.

Tim Bray thinks that browser based UI's hit a sweet spot. Scoble disagrees. I disagree as well. Browser based UIs are functional at best. In general, they stink. A lot. Go use browser based email for a day, and tell me I'm wrong. What the future holds, IMHO, is not one of browser based apps. Rather, it's one of network enabled clients with rich user interfaces - so long as those network enabled apps are capable of dealing with intermittant connectivity.

As I write this, I'm sitting in a cramped coach seat on my way to Tokyo. It's a long trip - direct from Chicago. Fortunately, I have seatback power - which means that I'll have something to do with all this free time (I have a bunch of books with me as well). I have no idea what kind of connectivity I'll have in my hotel either. I could be posting to myself for awhile....

Ted Leung has a post up where he points to an online history of lisp and the lisp machines. Worth looking at

If you want to develop and ship faster, then listen to Keith Ray. Here's the tip that popped at me:

Don't use the conventional solutions that everybody else uses - use the tools that can allow developers to go up to seven times faster. For example, use Smalltalk (see also Cincom) or Python or Cocoa instead of Visual Basic or Java or C++. Use WebObjects instead of EJB. If you do use Java, use Eclipse or buy IntelliJ IDEA.

If you use what everyone else uses, how do you expect to get a leg up?

If you have been using the development stream of BottomFeeder, and have tried using the new global filter capability, you may have seen some odd behavior. If you set the filter such that only new items showed up, and then deleted that filter - none of your old items came back. I made a mistake in the filter redefinition code such that I wasn't accurately resetting the filters. I had at least one report of "disappearing feeds", and then I saw the problem myself. The latest dev feed fixes the problem - if you have disappearing feed items, define a new global filter, save it, then delete the global filter, and save that - after grabbing the update.

So I'm reading this story about WinFS on CNet, and come across this quote from an MS VP:

NTFS is only one component of the revamped storage system in WinFS. Another key building block is the querying capabilities of Microsoft's SQL Server relational database, according to Microsoft. WinFS also will incorporate the data labeling capabilities of Extensible Markup Language (XML), Muglia said.

"Think of WinFS as pulling together relational database technology, XML database technology, and file streaming that a file system has," he said. "It's a (storage) format that is agnostic, that is independent of the application."

So reading between the lines there - does this mean that Longhorn will ship with an embedded SQL Server - and that all file system activity will generate database records (which would then facilitate searching)? That's what it sounds like to me. I could be wrong; it's just the first thing that popped at me. One things for sure - if I'm right, that will require larger disk drives. I wonder if you'll be able to turn that off?

I'm off to Tokyo tomorrow - the Japanese sales team has set up a number of customer and user group meetings for me. I've never been to any part of Asia, so it should be an eye opener. I leave tomorrow morning, and the time change - like when I traveled to Australia a few years ago - is sure to be a big adjustment. Look for my posts to come in at odd times of day for the next week.

After my recent post on the Yankees victory, I got this in email on the whole curse thing:

IMO, the goat curse is bigger. The Bosox' problem is not only their curse, but the fact that they play in the American League, which means they're always going to have to go thru the Bronx to get to the w/s. Plus, the fact that they play in the East, which means their only chance to get into the playoffs is as a wild card, which means they're never going to have home field advantage in ANY series. The Cubs, they have no such issues. They play in a dog**** division in the dog**** league. They're just screwed.

There's the expert analysis of the aituation...

This is mildly amusing. The internal name for what MS now calls COR (Component Object Runtime) was once COM3. They changed that before reasing. Why? Don Box explains:

On at least one version of Windows, if you created a directory called COM3 you could never delete it (COM3 is a reserved name for a serial port).

That's a legacy installed base issue raising its head for you.

The agony in Boston is going to be exquisite tomorrow - The Yankees pulled a game out in the 11th that Boston clearly should have won. Grady Little made a huge error in the 8th when he left Pedro in to face Matsui - Embree was ready - and Matsui doubled. The momentum turned then and there - you could pretty much tell that the Yankees were going to win from there. Interestingly, I was talking about this with a friend in engineering yesterday, and his comment on the Sox win last night was that they were just prolonging the agony, making sure that it would hurt as much as possible. Well, if you're a Red Sox fan, that's pretty much what happened tonight.

Now, the only question left is - which curse is bigger - the goat, or the Bambino?

I have to say that I agree with Danny Ayers about OPML. I spent this morning fixing up the OPML support in BottomFeeder. I'm not going to do better describing the problems than Danny did; go read his

Keith Ray weighs in on the whole exception business with some useful insights

I had a complaint that BottomFeeder wasn't properly handling OPML based feedlists, so I took a look - sure enough, it wasn't handling folders (embedded outline elements) at all. I retooled the code for that this morning - the dev stream now supports OPML based feedlists.