Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

I pointed to a Python debugger post from Ted Leung this morning (here). In the comments, I was asked to post an image of a Smalltalk debugger in the middle of a sort. So, I slapped this code down in a workspace:

| items |
items := RSSFeedManager default getAllMyFeeds first items.
items asSortedCollection: [:a :b | a title <= b title].

Then I hit the "debug it" menu option, and got the following debugger:

Now, what does that stuff mean? Well, the top pane is the stack - the reason you see "UndefinedObject>>unboundMethod in there is that I executed the code out of a workspace - in other words, the code is not attached to any particular class. Incidentally, the VW Web Toolkit uses this feature to execute SSP code on a web page. Moving on, the code pane is below the context stack, and there's a toolbar at the top (with tooltips). Below the code pane are basic inspectors - for instance variables on the left, temps and method arguments on the right. Double clicking on any of them will yield a full inspector. You can move up and down the stack, inspecting things, executing code (possibly into new debuggers), and re-compile arbitrary methods - rewinding the stack to that point. Very cool stuff - and it's why you don't tend to see Smalltalkers getting excited about "modern" debuggers in other languages with (subsets) of this capability...

This story on WiFi access at airports is fascinating - it sounds to me like it'll be a bouncy ride over the next few years as some of these early deals die from the absurd fees companies are paying airports:

A couple of interesting tidbits emerge about airline deals, too, that might explain why AT&T Wireless charges $70 per month for unlimited access to their Wi-Fi network, including $10 per day for airport usage: they pay Denver International Airport $250,000 per month or $3 million per year for the right to operate the network. Nokia built the network and paid DIA fees until they could exit, and turn off the business to an operator.

This reminds me of dot-com silliness...

Here's something you probably didn't expect to see - myself, Alan Knight, and Eliot Miranda (along with Tom Nies, Kim Thomas, Georg Heeg, Andrew Ignatow, Claude Poole, and Philippe Rouas) in suits. Oh, the humanity!

From left to right: Kim, Jim, Claude, Georg, Tom, Philippe, Alan, Andrew, Eliot

Dare Obasanjo offers an insider's view on Joel's "API" article. Worth reading.

We went to a local watering hole for a trivia game last night (we were awful) - so I thought I'd post two questions from the game. We blew one, got the second one mostly correct:

1. Rank by age, oldest to youngest: Latoya Jackson, John Goodman, Howard Stern
2. Name the four countries with the largest amount of reefs in their territorial waters - where countries includes all the possessions/territories of those countries

We blew the last question - getting it right would have gotten us 5th place (instead of the last place we ended up with). We got 3 of the four in the second question. I'll post answers in the comments later today

Update:

1. Goodman, Stern, Jackson
2. Indonesia, France, Phillipines, Australia

Sorry the answers were late!

Ted Leung points to some debugging tools that give Python some of the power of Smalltalk.

I got a laugh out of this post from Tim Bray:

Going through a bunch of source-code files and and, one by one, removing the dozens of print statements that let you focus in tighter and tighter and tighter on a really obscure problem until you could finally see it. Debuggers are OK, but when the going gets tough, the tough use print.

Uh huh. The "tough" use print statements, the smart grab a better set of tools. Print level debugging is just so 70's....

After an interesting post on MS and the Windows API, Joel put up some odd things today. In a wish list post for web stuff, he asks for this:

Javascript features to do fast REST queries back to the server, so I can implement things like a lush spell checker with the dictionary on the server. It should be possible to have a 300,000 employee directory on the server and create a web app that has a list box where you can type the first few letters of an employee's name and see a filtered list as fast as you can type on the screen.

Yeah, sure. On an ideal network connection with low latency, maybe. Unless you cache that dictionary locally, performance is going to suck eggs way, way too often. Some of his other wishlist items are unlikely for a variety of reasons...

I'm starting to think that Andrew Binstock doesn't understand the basic concepts of journalism - he writes articles, but he never, ever bothers to research any of his assertions. Take this week's gem in SD Times, for instance - he goes through a long discussion of population trends, and then quotes the following:

Consequently, Siegel predicts that offshoring will accelerate and our trade deficits with the developing world will increase dramatically. The end result, he feels, is that by 2050, the U.S. will no longer be the center of economic activity worldwide. That center will consist of China and India, with the then-older U.S. occupying the same declining role in the world economy as Europe does today.

Now, population trends are not an area of expertise for me. However, unlike Andrew Binstock, I've at least heard of Google. A quick scan of Google for China, India, and population trends brought me these links:

• China's aging population
• "China faces social problems caused by a sharp increase in its aging population, and the number of people aged over 60 in China exceeded 90 million at the end of 2001, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) warned in a recent report on the issue."
• Chinese economy not keeping pace with aging population
• "Within a few decades, China may be the world's largest economy. But barring a radical shift in social policy, China is on course to age faster than any major country in history, as its median age soars from about 32 today to at least 44 in 2040. Put another way, China will get old before it gets rich."

And what about India? Well, their population is not aging as fast as China's - but they are entering the same trendline. The UN reports that this is a global phenomenon. Finally, take a look at this paper:

Certainly, rapidly shrinking populations should alter the geo-political landscape. However, an article in the August 24th -30th edition of The Economist, has called into question some fundamental assumptions regarding the balance of power in the 21st century spurred by new U.S. population forecasts.

For 50 years, the U.S., Western Europe and more recently Japan have all been lumped together as rich countries, with low and declining fertility, and increasing numbers of old people, facing the same demographic problems. However, recent statistics found something unusual in the U.S. This trend between the U.S. and other industrialized countries began to diverge in the mid-1980s. Recent census statistics have found that the population has risen faster than it was previously thought in the 1990 census in the U.S. (281 million vs. 275 million) and the fertility rate is rising.

Someone hand this clown the url for Google, and show him how to use it before he writes again...

Sometimes I really wonder about the technology sector. Take a look at some of the quotes in this story, for instance:

"For Sun to have such a hold on Java seems a little silly to me," said Peter Underwood, vice president of software development at Wall Street Access, a N.Y.-based brokerage firm. "It's time to release the programming language to the open-source community", he said

"Sun makes phenomenal hardware. It has a great operating system. And it helped create a fabulous programming language," said Crowhurst, who runs a mixed Java and Microsoft shop. "But why they need to control Java, I don't understand."

Still, Java's future is assured, regardless of which way Sun heads. 1CWhatever happens, the Java standard will stay alive, 1D said Sharabu.

These people are deeply confused. Sun, like any other company, is a business. They aren't a charity - Java's goal was to drive more business to Sun (in the form of hardware sales). The end of the dot-com era, combined with an improved Windows (server) and the rise of Linux (on commodity hardware) has dealt a pretty serious blow to that strategy, and it's clear that Sun is still trying to deal with those facts. Still, why would they open source Java? Their hardware is getting less valuable every day - as time goes by, Java is becoming the most valuable asset that Sun owns. If they made it open, they would be doing a disservice to their shareholders - and ultimately, that's who Sun has to answer to - not developers. It's clear why IBM, BEA (et. al.) would like to see an open source Java. It's less clear why developers don't grasp the position Sun is in. Eventually, they are going to have to attempt to monetize their massive investment in Java. I fully expects cries of shock when that happens.

Now you can find out how long you'll have power in the event of a zombie takeover. I just knew that people needed to know this...

Charles Miller explains why a good DBA is worth the money.

Over on Planet Lisp, I found this reference to Joel's post from today:

The real significant productivity advance we've had in programming has been from languages which manage memory for you automatically. It can be with reference counting or garbage collection; it can be Java, Lisp, Visual Basic (even 1.0), Smalltalk, or any of a number of scripting languages.

Incredibly, there's more:

Whenever you hear someone bragging about how productive their language is, they're probably getting most of that productivity from the automated memory management, even if they misattribute it.

Wow! I haven't been in the mainstream developer community since, well, never, so I've always just kind of put up with the fact that I'm different; I don't understand them, they don't understand me, but, wow!, the chasm just seems to be getting wider and deeper.

Along the same lines, I'd direct you (and Joel) over here. Have a look at what kinds of things Smalltalk enables, and then see whether you still think that GC is all there is to the productivity gap. And heck, I haven't even gotten into the quagmire of primitive data types

Travis has been showing us why Smalltalk is cool. That's his latest effort - just go to the top and keep reading down.

PR News links to a very good commercial. It's worth the 30 seconds :)

InfoWorld reports on new IE vulnerabilities:

Four new holes have been discovered in the Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser that could allow malicious hackers to run attack code on Windows systems, even if those systems have installed the latest software patches from the Redmond, Washington company, security experts warn.

I picked a good time to switch to Firefox...

I linked to this piece by Joel in my last post, but only in relation to a rant about Windows. Read the rest of it - agree or disagree (and I find it hard to disagree with his major points), it's a very thought provoking piece.

Well, if this piece from Joel is accurate about this story, it explains a lot of the problems in Windows all by itself:

I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.

If they actually do this kind of thing, it's very, very bad. Why? These kinds of awful hacks tend to add up, and the crossing of 2 or 3 (or 4 or 5) of them end up generating interesting side effects. I've walked myself into this kind of corner in various tools of my own - I did this with the Blog Posting tool awhile back (and I'm still trying to find my way out of the nasty hole that I ended up digging). These sorts of hacks seem to make sense in the short term - but they end up making for a really hard to test system - one in which a combination of hacks makes for completely unpredictable (and, from the end users perspective, essentially random) behavior. If they did this for Sim City, you have to figure that they did it elsewhere. This is just bad, and the people at MS who thought this was appropriate should be removed. This is the sort of thing that rewards bad practices - heck, it positively encourages bad practice.

I see that Scoble is using Firefox, and the IE team at MS is unhappy about that. Well, good. They've been ignoring the rest of us for years - shoddy implementation of CSS, no tabbed support, "security" that is second to all - complacency seems to be their middle name. More power to Scoble if he can get them to have a few cups of coffee and wake the heck up...

Scoble has some more thoughts on the Tablet PC, and why we should want one. He lists some things it's better at, in his opinion:

• Sitting in coach on an airplane. Hmm. I do this a lot, and I don't see it. I typically want a keyboard when I'm flying, as I'll be responding to emails, looking at syndication items and blogging them, writing code... etc. Having just a screen has no value to me - I need the keyboard
• Computing while standing up. Hmm - I have about zero interest in that. if I wanted a computer while standing up, I'd want something small - if I can't use a keyboard, I want to be able to pull it out and put it away quickly - and that's not a Tablet
• If I need to take notes with a pen. Hmm - I prefer a legal pad for that. The screen simply isn't big enough to productively take notes on. Paper is.

Vertical markets? Yes, there are scads of those where a Tablet makes sense. I can't really see it breaking into the general PC/laptop space until the price is about the same as for a regular notebook though - for most of us, I just don't think there's a truly compelling need for a Tablet beyond the "cool" factor...

Every so often I see people ask "Why doesn't Smalltalk have a switch statement"? The simple answer is - "we don't need one". That usually ends up with something like this:

What if I'm parsing data that comes in with numeric (etc) values, and I want to take a different action on the different values?

Here's one approach to that problem - say you are going to get integers, and you need to execute a different action on receiving each:

setupActionDictionary
	self actionDictionary: Dictionary new.
	self actionDictionary at: 1 put: #handleOne.
	self actionDictionary at: 2 put: #handleTwo.
	...

And so on like that. So now, we can handle the receipt of the data like this:

executeActionFor: anID
	action := self actionDictionary at: anID ifAbsent: [#defaultAction].
	self perform: action.

actionID := self getNextIdentifier. self executeActionFor: anID.

That's about it. For those of you who don't know Smalltalk, the keys in the dictionary are symbols (which can be mapped to method names). Hopefully, those names would be better than #handleOne (etc), but you get the idea.

Bruce Badger spoke at the Sydney STUG. I figure I'll run into Bruce at the STUG meeting in July.

Scoble defends XP as a stable OS. He's got a point- XP is far better in this regard than any of the previous OS efforts from MS - my machine crashes rarely. On the other hand, it does rot. What do I mean by that? Well, two things - first, the longer I run XP without a reboot, the slower and more "funky" it gets. By "funky", I mean weird things start to happen - some app windows periodically decide that they are "always on top" - even though they were never set that way. Startup time for applications gets slower in general. A reboot usually fixes those problems (at least for awhile). There's another sort of slowdown as well - over time, the OS just runs slower, period. XP is not as snappy for me now as it was a few months ago, and I haven't been installing much new software. I have no idea why this happens, but I figure I'll likely have to do a clean re-install relatively soon. At that point, I'll be really unhappy over the whole installation registration thing, since I have no idea where I put that information. Then there's the periodic need to reboot for no good reason - after some update from MS or Norton, typically. Contrast that with my Linux box, running a relatively old (RedHat 7) rev of Linux. It's been up for 266 days now (the last downtime was a power outage that outlasted my battery backup). Is it slower? No. Is X11 getting "funky"? No. I have apps that have been running for months on that box. The production server in Cincinnati (running a more recent rev of Linux) has been up for 205 days. It shouldn't be down for power reasons anymore either; there's a solid generator backing up Cincom servers now.

Here's my bottom line, having run both XP and Linux for quite awhile now - if you run production servers (I don't mean clients!) on Windows, you are just nuts. Linux is easier to patch without downtime, and doesn't need to be rebooted every few weeks "just because". Apache is a whole lot more stable than IIS, and seems to be have far fewer nasty security issues associated with it. The VW app server I use for the various services on this box runs quite nicely with either Apache or IIS - the server over on the main site used to integrate with IIS, for instance. It was much harder to deal with. When a Windows server can be remotely administered via ssh and command line tools, maybe I'll have some motivation to consider it for production systems - until then, it's just not worth the trouble.

Camp Smalltalk is happening in Portland this summer:

Camp Smalltalk will be held from July 18-23 2004 in the vicinity of Portland, Oregon, USA. Camp Smalltalk is Smalltalk enthusiasts spending several days in small groups collaborating on a number of open-source projects to benefit the Smalltalk community. All Smalltalk dialects welcome.

I'll be in Australia during that entire stretch, so I'll miss it this time around.

One of the things that I've been trying to help build over the last few years is a better, more connected Smalltalk developer community. There's been lots of help from others - Pete Hatch, in particular, deserves a lot of recognition for what he's done to enable a lot of the things I've been involved in. What have we set up?

• The Cincom Smalltalk Wiki
• The NC download site
• The Cincom Smalltalk Blogs - Michael Lucas-Smith deserves credit for prodding me to open the blog up to other people
• The Cincom Smalltalk Surveys
• The Smalltalk IRC channel - Give Pete Hatch most of the credit for this
• The Public Store

Of course, we still participate in other community forums - the VW Wiki, and comp.lang.smalltalk. None of this would have been possible without the active participation of Smalltalk Developers - we can set up all the forums we want, but it doesn't work unless people come - they have, and we are very pleased with the results. Is there anything else we should be doing? Let me know

Over on Sam Ruby's blog there's a link to this RSS security check page. I tried the feed out in BottomFeeder - and as expected, none of the exploits is an issue for Bf. One of the nice things about Bf is that you can subscribe to anything, and the worst thing that will happen is your reaction to the content itself :)

This is fascinating. Reading journalists reporting on technology issues I know something about makes me really, really start to wonder about reporting in general. This paragraph:

Atom also allows any comments that are posted to a blogging site by readers to be syndicated, unlike RSS, which only allows the blogs themselves to be sent out as alerts.

is just awe inspiring in its cluelessness. RSS doesn't allow syndication of comments? I guess I don't really read Sam Ruby's comment feed then. And comments aren't actually embedded in my feed either. And apparently, the wfw comment module doesn't exist. I really wish reporters knew how to use Google. This reporter gets paid to be this publically uninformed?

Read this post and the last few in the same thread - sounds to me like jaybaz wants support for (the equivalent of) Smalltalk on the CLR...

Over on Rich's blog, there's been a comment thread vis-a-vis a Store. I thought I'd surface the issue here for further conversation - I'll do that by bringing up a few of Reinout's questions and answering them as best as I can:

First, I said that we would be shipping support for configurations. Reinout responds:

Too late for the shop where I work, we are already up-and-running with lineups as implemented by Cees de Groot. Why should we switch to Store config maps?

It's a fair question, and we are late to the party with this. Having said that, here's the answer - sure, you can stay with your solution - and it will probably be more specific to your needs than a general solution that we come up with. On the other hand, you end up supporting it, instead of having us do that. That's a non-zero cost that may matter someday. YMMV of course, but there it is.

Next, I brought up optimization - we haven't done a great job with indexing in all cases, and we issue a number of queries at points that don't work well over slower links. These are things we know about, and intend to fix. For that matter, we are highly motivated to fix these sorts of problems - our engineering team is highly distributed, and runs into this problem all the time. It's gotten better, and will continue to get better.

Next, Reinout lays out a problem:

Select three packages.
Imagine that these three packages' changes constitute a rename of one single class. Imagine one other person and a staging-bot simultanously publishing one of those packages, imagine three build-bots each busy building some image configuration containing these three packages.
Now pull down and select the 'publish' menu item.

I may be off here, but this seems mostly like a process issue. I consulted at a big Envy shop a few years ago, and they had this same exact problem - it's hardly unique to Store. If multiple people are fighting to publish the same package at the same time, then - IMHO - you have a process issue on your hands. What should the tools do here? At present, you'll get multiple forked versions that need to be merged - just like in any other source toolset I know of. I need to know what the proposed solution to this is...

Finally, there's this

Committing is "saving", a set of changes. I can roll back to any revision of these changes provided I remember its address (or UID, whatever). A revision carries its history. Publishing is asigning a version number and making the changes visible to other developers.

I don't get this. I rollback changes all the time in Store - loading previous versions, or even just previous versions of methods (I spent all day doing this with BottomFeeder today). I'm not following the problem here. Which isn't to say that there isn't one - I'm just not getting what is being asked yet.

A few years ago, we put in a patio - 20' x 20', ourselves. 9 1/2 tons of sand and gravel with a wheelbarrow, plus all the blocks. That was a lot of work, but it was worth it. Every year, weeds come up between the cracks, and every year I'm out there pulling the blasted things up by hand - my wife doesn't want something like "Roundup" used in our yard. This did make her feel a little guilty though, so she went out and bought me a solution to the problem - now I have my very own home flamethrower. Now all I need is a napalm backpack, and I'll be all set attacking enemy anthills :)

MS apparently patented FAT

In a discussion on the IRC channel, one of the regulars let loose with this gem:

You know, I was just thinking how Java really is close to the worst of all possible worlds... it's closed source, but basically no "support" provided

I mean, if I find a massive problem that effects me, what recourse do I have? I can't fix it myself, but Sun won't fix it for me

Heh. See my related post here

In a general trashing of Project Manager's, we figure out why this guy has so much trouble with them - he's the sort of prima donna developer that can make a project a living hell. Take this, for instance:

on a serious note though, a lot of the problems that are plaguing software development today are a direct result of bad, no wait, pathetic project management. these s******** are driving schedules, making feature choices, spouting off time estimates, making sure your time is wasted in meetings all g****** day, and then telling you your not going to make your deliverables because your not following the plan. i don't get it...most software developers i know are loud, egotistical, and very, very strong willed...how has this state of affairs happend? and why do we continue to foster this situation??

I think it happened to this guy due to cosmic justice - the Universe simply willed that his bad attitudes be paired with poor management practices....

jaybaz

So, when I propose No Private Methods, that's because it's the most extreme thing I could think of.  I want to know what that looks like, so that I know when I've got the right set of private methods.

He says this in a conversation about writing shorter methods. Sounds to me like he's iterating closer and closer to a Smalltalk kind of viewpoint.

Update: Now he wants everything to be an object, and notification of attribute changes. Hmm - you mean setters like this, maybe:

commentText: someText
	commentText := someText.
	self changed: #commentText.

This guy really, really needs to look at Smalltalk :)

Sun's John Clingan questions the reliability of industry analysts:

And are analysts completely on the level? There are those analysts who get paid to make a point. Companies pay analysts to make a point in their favor. Not coming to that conclusion means they will no longer be of value. Now, of course, coming to that point may be the 100% correct, and then the competition debunks it with their own analysis from another company (analyst shopping) who makes a 100% accurate counter point (ah, the chaos of statistics). I associate a .5 probability with this point so i have plausible deniability. How did I come up with .5? SWAG, man, SWAG. But at least I disclosed how I came about it.

IMHO, questioning these people is a good idea...

If you work in the software field, it's very easy to think that everyone is computer literate and has good internet access. Then you run across an item like this one in ComputerWorld, and you start to realize that you live in something of a bubble:

Support pilot fish is trying to explain to employees who are not office workers -- and have no computer experience at all -- how to view their new online pay stubs. "The built-in browser for a large Internet provider does not work well with the 'paycheck' Web site," fish reports. "The solution is to leave the ISP logged on and start Internet Explorer. I ask one user to do this, and he reports that Explorer is not installed. I ask, 'This is a Windows machine, right?' His reply: 'I just got it and don't know what is installed.' "

Now, ComputerWorld's SharkTank is playing this for laughs - but it points to something that an awful lot of us forget - there are a lot of people who rarely (if ever) get online. Heck, there are still lots of people who don't have a PC, and have no real interest in one either. For all the talk about the rising influence of the blogosphere, we should keep in mind that a lot of people have never even heard of it. So for all the sturm and drang around the various left/right political blogs - and for all the yelling around things like RSS/Atom - it's important to realize that a significant number of people have no contact with our world... and for the most part, they don't think they are missing anything.

My wife recorded all of "5 days to midnight" for me while I was in Cincinnati - and for a change, a Sci Fi channel mini-series was ok. Timothy Hutton did a decent job with the lead, and I spent the entire 5 hours of the series thinking that Drew Barrymore had been cloned 10 years ago - the girl playing the daughter looks a lot like Barrymore in her childhood flicks. I expect the suckage to return soon though - "Post Impact" is the next Sci Fi movie "event" - and ooohh, "Decoys" looks cheesy :)

The blog comment spam problem doesn't seemm to be subsiding - have a look at this post from last week, for instance. This site - my blog and the community blogs really haven't been affected much - there's been a handful of spam over the last year, and it was in ones and twos. There's a pretty simple reason for that - I'm not using one of the popular blogging systems. Now, it's not that any of those systems are at fault - it's that due to their popularity, it's worthwhile for spambot authors to target the comment entry systems of these blogging systems - for exactly the same reasons that there are scads of Windows based viruses and worms, and virtually none for the Mac platform. The target eco-sphere for Windows (or popular blogs) is big enough to warrant bots, while the target eco-sphere of the Mac (or off brand blog systems) is too small.

That's why I get the occasional manually entered (and easy to get rid of) spam comment, but I don't get the absolute floods of spam (like the one mentioned in the link above). Is there a solution to this? Sure, there are plenty of technically feasible solutions (the simplest being to just change the field names in your templates). The difficulty is always in the side effects (common posting tools may no longer be able to "see" your site at all). The various IP based throttles are semi-workable, but blocking that way can be anti-social in the face of proxy servers. The medium term result is most likely going to be a steady decline in the number of blogs with open comment systems...

I'll tell you what's louder - a herd of 5th grade girls having a sleepover. More than once, I wondered how that much noise could be being created by only 4 children....

I've been working on things related to the new (dev only) Newspaper view. I made it possible to select a folder and get a newspaper summary of all new items (or all recent ones) in a feed. That was easy. The complexity came in when I decided to add folders into the mix. I currently track 264 feeds, so selecting the top level folder could result in a huge mass of HTML - too much to display reasonably (not to mention the memory impact :) ). So, I've added paging links (next/prev) into those views. That wasn't too bad - but I still have some consistency issues with the way the keyboard navigation works with the new functionality. Even so, I've pushed it to dev - that way, I have a better shot at finding out what's still broken quickly.

Ted Leung spots a couple of posts (here and here) that make an interesting assertion:

science is the modern world's new superstition

This is truer than many people would like to admit, especially highly educated folks. I saw this a lot when I was an undergraduate. There were various members of the faculty at MIT that would loudly proclaim their understanding and mastery on various aspects of natural science. I always viewed this with some suspicion, and I always appreciated the professors who would get to a certain point and say "and we just don't understand how it works here"

Very much the case. Watch coverage of various "hot button" political issues that look to science for their backing arguments (from any side of the spectrum; this seems to be an equal opportunity thing) - and watch for arguments you might call "Scientific Argument by Assertion", or "My Expert is better than Your Expert".

Matt Croydon notes that Maryland (where I live, as it happens) is rolling out WiFi at visitor centers on the highway. That's very cool.

Eric Sink makes an excellent point about positioning:

If you are #2 in your category, you want to be #1, right?

Wrong.  You can't choose to be #1, but you can certainly choose to be #3 or #4.  The worst thing you can do is to try and beat the #1 player at his own game.  Instead, realize that not everyone in the market wants to play that game.  Offer those people an alternative.

Me-too-itis won't ever widen your market. You need to give people a positive reason to look at you, not a laundry list of reasons that point out how you are "just as good as" the other guy.

Over on Ralph's blog, the topic of sandboxing has come up. It's a great discussion, but there's one thing I don't always agree with:

The main bad thing that could happen is that imported code could change existing code. Smalltalk makes it easy to change code. "Obect compiledMethods removeKey: #copy" will remove the copy method from class Object. It would be very bad if imported code could do this to a running application.

While blowing away methods in base classes would be bad, blowing away methods in general may not be - in BottomFeeder, an update to the application can make major changes to base application code - and sometimes to overridden methods in various libraries. It's a complex issue.

I'm meeting with an important customer that is visiting Cincom in Cincinnati (from France), so blogging will be light to non-existant - I'm off immediately afterwards to the airport and home. In the meantime, try and wrap your head around this post on the nature of self from Steven denBeste. It's thought provoking, to say the least...