development

Using the wrong tools

October 21, 2004 22:15:54.990

Bruce Eckel needs a dynamic language. He has a long post going into why this simple exercise doesn't work:

What I was attempting to do in this example is create a sum over a sequence of elements. I'd like to do this in a generic fashion in order to create reusable code. Presumably, the only thing that makes sense to sum is something numerical 13 so the bound or base class should arguably be Number. Generics are called for because I want to work with the broadest number of sequences, so the logical thing to do is only constrain it to be able to produce an Iterable<? extends Number>. It's also important that we get the exact type rather than using wildcards so that the correct operations can be performed.

Many paragraphs later, we discover that it simply can't be done in Java, at least not in a generally reusable way. Here's how you do it in Smalltalk:


| collection |
collection := #(0.75 4 7.27d) asOrderedCollection.
collection add: 3/5.
sum := collection inject: 0 into: [:subTotal :next | subTotal + next].

That's it - and most of that was setting up an example collection with disparate elements. Now compare that to the Java attempts....

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smalltalk

Niall's ESUG 2004 Report

October 21, 2004 15:49:36.016

Niall Ross has delivered his ESUG 2004 report. It's a large document - 69 pages. My ESUG 2004 posts can be found here

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itNews

Luddite, or just cynical?

October 21, 2004 12:08:32.394

Ed Foster has posted an interesting letter from one of his readers. A fair amount of it reads like the guy's a luddite, but I think there's general cluelessness here as well:

"Essentially -- if anything has to talk to anything else -- I avoid it," the reader wrote. "Because it won't. Or it won't without a lot of coaxing. Or an upgrade. Or a separate service charge. Or the moon being in the right phase, you standing on the left foot, and reciting Shakespeare. In fact, a lot of my 'time saving tools' have been costing so much time spent fixing glitches caused by 'computer errors' on the part of software or the institution that I've dropped:

  • "High Speed Internet: The time spent downloading or uploading mid sized files on dial-up is now exceeded by the time spent downloading and installing the latest fixes and patches to keep out viruses I never had to worry about when using dial-up. Cost? Don't go there.
  • "PDAs: I loved my PDA -- but problems using it with the Outlooks address book always put me traveling, out in the middle of nowhere, only to find the latest update before I left wrote gibberish all over my travel instruction to where I was going, or over critical contacts. So now my contact file is back in Word, where I have total freedom with the fields and can see what I'm getting. Besides, the PDAs are getting outlawed at many of the facilities I visit, due to camera concerns (mine doesn't have one, but tell that to the sixth grade graduate behind the security desk).
  • "High-End Cell phones: No longer do I go for the high end with features, modem capability, and programmability. I get the basic phone. You spend more time trying to learn a new entry system, menu structure, etc every eighteen months or so than the features save you. (Not to mention the cost of the cables, software, etc.) Now I enter the number and punch whatever button I need to call."
  • "Online bill payment: The time spent recently correcting an error by the electronic transfer company -- which modified an electronic address on its own initiative, and sent the money elsewhere -- cost me over $300 in fees and interest charges that I never recovered and more time and phone effort than I would have spent if I had written checks for the last two years.

I think this guy complains too much on a bunch of this. Broadband vs.dialup? Please... if you think dialup is competitive, you're either stupid, or haven't actually had broadband. And mind you - dialup is no protection against viruses and worms. Thinking so is a sign of very, very weak thinking. Now, I've never really glommed onto a PDA - but then again, I've never been much for paper organizers either. I think this is just an entire segment that I don't deal with at all. The riff on picture phones is a real problem though - I like my picture phone, but I'm just waiting for the first time I have to leave it behind. His riff on cell phones just sounds clueless. I've upgraded phones a bunch of times, and each time, my vendor has been able to transfer my old phone book over. As to menu systems - please. Each phone I've gotten has been different, and I've spent maybe 10 minutes adapting to each one. The next riff, on online bill payment and fraud - I've had the kinds of problems he's mentioned with paper and checks. Guess what - this is a function of your vendor's back office technology, not of the front end browser interface. If that sucks, you're going to get stuffed whether you point and click or use a pen and checkbook

This guy is clearly an old dog, and the new tricks are apparently way too much for him. And by old dog, I don't mean age - my father in law, who is over 80, is way more clued in on this stuff than this guy. Someone issue this guy a baseball cap and send the golf cart to his place - it's time for the retirement home...

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sports

Back to the 80's

October 21, 2004 0:01:30.043

I've been following the Yankees for decades now - I started watching their games on WPIX in New York when I was a kid in the late 60's. Back then they stank - a lot. They improved in the late 70's, and won a pair of World Series - but Steinbrenner drew all the wrong conclusions from those wins. Rather than recognizing the great pitching, he remembered Jackson's home runs. So all through the 80's, he kept looking for just one more lefthander to clinch the deal.

Not coincidentally, the Yankees went nowhere all those years, until 1996. The last 8 years they've been really, really good - and they also had really, really good pitching. Does anyone think that Vazquez and Brown are adequate replacements for Pettite and Clemens? The lineup is still fearsome - but the pitching is anything but.

The only questionable thing for the Sox all night was bringing in Pedro Martinez in the 7th - on short rest, in relief - and at a point whe Lowe had completely handcuffed the Yankees. He gave up 2 runs, but Bellhorn got the Sox back one against Gordon (who's been a punching bag in the ALCS) the next inning. On the Yankees side, I cringed when Gordon came out. The Sox had just man-handled him the entire series; and like clockwork, he gave it up again to make it 10-3.

The Red Sox managed the unthinkable - they came back from a 3-0 deficit and earned a trip to the World Series. Heck, after vanquishing the Yankees they may even win it. Meanwhile, here's hoping the Steinbrenner figures out what the problem is - and here's a tip - it's not hitting...

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rss

If it's not RSS, it doesn't exist?

October 20, 2004 12:57:29.222

I guess in Dave Winer's universe, only RSS syndication sources exist:

New feature: If you do a search on the Baltimore Sun website, you'll see a beautiful white-on-orange XML icon providing the search results in RSS. Subscribe to the feed to peform the search every time your aggregator updates. Don't you wish Google did this?

I guess that the Google feed building support in BottomFeeder just doesn't exist then. Huh. That's too bad, since I subscribe to feeds that way.....

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smalltalk

What kind of transition do you want?

October 20, 2004 10:46:12.616

Over on the VAST Newsgroup, there's an interesting thread about the future of VAST. This is all the more interesting due to the "transition" talk that IBM hosted at last year's Smalltalk Solutions. If you've been hearing about transitioning from VAST - and if the transition offer is to Java or .NET - you should realize that there's another choice. Any migration to Cincom Smalltalk is going to be a ton easier than moving to Java or C#. We have service partners with experience in this area as well, so if you want to stay in the Smalltalk world, take a serious look at Cincom. Take a look at our product roadmap - we are evolving and advancing Smalltalk rapidly. If you want a committed Smalltalk partner, you know where to find one :)

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development

You can have your cake

October 20, 2004 9:54:36.465

Panopticon posted on dynamic/static issues awhile back, and I've been pondering the post. This morning, I have a few thoughts on it. The gist of his post is that he likes the immediacy of dynamic languages (which he refers to as scripting languages) - but then caveats it this way:

In the end, I think anything that helps the average programmer be more productive is a good thing. By and large, static typing satisfies this dictum: static typing enables all kinds of programmer productivity features like Intellisense, better error messages at compile time, etc. (One could argue, I suppose, that you could lose the static typing and use type inferencing instead, but I wonder whether it would be possible to build a complete enough type inferencing ruleset that: a) was implementable, b) made some kind of sense, and c) could compete with just stating the damn type of your variables.) Dynamic environments also do this: edit and continue (pace Franz et al.), continuable exceptions, being able to call functions at design time, etc. So I think marrying the two worlds has some facinating possibilities.

Well, most of those things are possible in languages like Smalltalk. Intellisense - we have code completion tools as loadable components in VisualWorks. As it happens, this isn't something most Smalltalkers seem to want... but it's there. Compile time errors - that gets into an interesting definition issue.

In languages like C#, Java (etc), compile time is a "heavier" thing than it is in Smalltalk. Sure, there's incremental compilation support in some of the IDE's out there - but in Smalltalk, there's really no difference between compile time and runtime - we compile methods one at a time as we go, and we can immediately test. Some people use agile methodologies - they write the tests fiest, and then run them. Others do workspace twiddling and then migrate to a browser (this is more in line with how I develop - it's how I learned Smalltalk). Either way, there's no gap between runtime and compile time - there's really no interval that a Smalltalker refers to as compile time.

To some extent, this gets back to what I posted yesterday - in this debate, as with debuggers, Smalltalkers and developers using the mainstream languages tend to talk right past each other - we use the same words, but we don't really mean the same thing at all. From our perspective, you really can have your cake - and eat it as well.

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BottomFeeder

Text size fix for Bf

October 20, 2004 9:42:58.288

There's been an annoying issue with manual text size changes - up until this morning, if you had adjusted (using the toolbar) the size of the text up or down, the html would render once in the default size, and then again in the size you had selected. I figured out how to address that issue this morning, and posted a fix. Grab all updates and restart - you should see smoother rendering after that.

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sports

They won't die

October 20, 2004 0:35:04.211

I have to give the Sox credit - over the last three games, they've had plenty of opportunities to lie down - and they didn't do it. At the same time, the Yankees lead batters have gone to sleep since the third game.

Tonight's game had some oddities - two calls by the umpires were reversed after huddles (both correctly, as it happens, and both against the Yankees). That's a fairly new thing in baseball - I remember watching games as I grew up, and calls were never reversed - once an ump made a call, it stuck - good, bad, or indifferent. The main problem with the huddle approach is that it slows down a game that desperately needs speeding up.

Either way - the Sox have done what no other MLB team has ever done - forced a seventh game. Either the Yankee bats wake up, or the unthinkable will occur.

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marketing

Perception is Reality

October 19, 2004 11:57:57.722

So the Google Desktop is getting a lot of hype - lots of people are saying "why do we need WinFS if we have this?" - an example is the BitWorking post I linked to the other day. Others are trying to point out that WinFS is supposed to be more than desktop search, like Julia Lerman and Dare Obasanjo. What they are trying to do is an attempt at swimming upstream against the perception tide:

The fundamental premise of the above statements is that the purpose of WinFS is to make local desktop search better or to use a cruder term to create "Google for the Desktop". It may be true that when it first started getting pitched one of the scenarios people described was making search better. However as WinFS progressed the primary scenarios its designers focused on enabling didn't have much to do with search.

That may be the case - I haven't followed WinFS talk well enough to have any real idea. However, the conventional wisdom on WinFS is that it's all about search - and that's why the "Google Desktop obviates WinFS" meme has been spreading. Microsoft is going to need to start talking about the other benefits of WinFS in a compelling way, or this notion of WinFS is all that will exist...

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sports

Two Great Games

October 19, 2004 10:27:57.275

I have to admit - even though I hated the final outcome - the last two games of the ALCS have been great baseball. At this point, the main question is this - just how much more sleep am I going to lose before it ends? And heck, we haven't gotten to the World Series yet!

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development

Disconnect

October 19, 2004 10:16:19.862

Here's an example of something that tends to lead to Smalltalkers and non-Smalltalkers talking right past each other. Take a look at Sam Gentile's post on unit testing and debugging:

As a C# MVP, I am obligated to tell you that Edit & Continue is in C# now in this build regardless of my feelings, which are the same as John Robbins here. Program logic should not be tested in the debugger. You are wasting your time and your company's time if you do so. The debugger is for intractable problems. Unit tests with the place to verify, refector and edit as you go; not the debugger. Thats why NUnit-AddIn and VS Team System are so important - that's the way to do it.

Now, this is where you'll often see people like me queuing up the Wow, he doesn't get it music. I've come to the conclusion that it's a development culture difference. In tools like VS, the debugger is a completely separate tool - it's not a code browser that can debug, it's a debugger with some very, very limited code changing capabilities (see this post for an example of that).

In Smalltalk, the debugger is just another browser that knows how to step through code. If we run across an unimplemented method - we can generate it in the debugger, and then step into it. We can then write the code with all the state being available. In particular, we can do this while running the test we wrote - the one we wrote first, before we wrote the code.

Ultimately, the difference is at the environment level - the strengths and weaknesses of the tools affects our view of how to appropriately use them. For people using languages like C#, Java (etc.), most agile developers have come to the conclusion that the debugger is a tool that you use only in extremis. For Smalltalk developers, on the other hand, the debugger is your friend - it's part of your normal development toolset, to be used on a regular basis.

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marketing

Blogging is a channel

October 19, 2004 9:58:44.731

Scoble has a great post up on the value of blogging to a company. To summarize, it puts a face on an otherwise faceless entity. Take Scoble for instance - there's the caricature of Microsoft you see in trade rags, and then there's the voice that Scoble himself provides. heck, he doesn't always agree with his management, which gives him more credibility.

He gives a number of good examples - both of the failures of silence:

Kryptonite. Lately I've been asking audiences I've been speaking to "who knows the Kryptonite story?" 75% do . If you don't know the story, do a Google search for Kryptonite and "Bic Pen". We'll wait. We just watched the destruction of an American brand. 75% know about it. Why? Because of one or two weblogs and the new word-of-mouth network. Yes, Engadget and Gizmodo do have that kind of power. Engadget alone has 250,000 of the most influential readers the world has ever seen. My second question is: "What have you heard from Kryptonite about this issue?"

And also of good examples - Mark Cuban, Channel 9 at MS, a nifty looking Ford blog. Scoble has all the links and explanations on this - go ahead and read his article.

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events

Come to the Cincom Smalltalk User Conference

October 19, 2004 9:37:08.640

Want to hear about the future of Cincom Smalltalk? Then come to the upcoming Cincom Smalltalk User Conference this December. Here are the details:

When does the conference begin and end?
Tuesday, December 7, 2004, 10:00 AM - 7:30 PM - followed by a buffet dinner.
Wednesday, December 8, 2004, 08:30 AM - 7:30 PM - followed by a buffet dinner.
Thursday, December 9, 2004, 08:30 AM - ~1:30 PM

Where does the conference take place?
Relexa Hotel Frankfurt/Main
Merton-Viertel/Lurgiallee 2
D-60439 Frankfurt/Main
Germany
Phone: +49(0)69/ 957 78-0
E-mail
www.relexa-hotels.de

We'll have a lot of our engineers there ready to answer your questions - see you there!

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law

Not getting it at all

October 19, 2004 8:25:23.413

Well, in the "should have made you think" category, we have this post from Jonathan Schwartz. You might have thought that the Kodak suit and settlement would have led to a new set of thinking on IP and software patents; you would be wrong:

First things first: nothing's changed. In terms of patents, and intellectual property, nothing whatsoever about the Kodak settlement suggests Sun's position on IP has changed. Moreover, the settlement was all about ensuring what Kodak was doing to Sun, they could do to no one else in the Java community.

Translation: "Your house just burned down! Are you going to rethink your objections to smoke alarms? Nah, they could still wake me up from a sound sleep". Mind you, it's not just Schwartz and Sun that need to wake up from this patent slumber; it's the entire industry. Sun can't move until or unless other companies do. This particular suit could have been a useful teaching moment though...

And obtw - there's no capital T in Smalltalk :)

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sports

They'll play a sixth

October 18, 2004 23:02:35.713

This was just too much irony to see all at once. Sixth inning, Pedro went over 100 pitches. 3 runs were in already on a double by Jeter with the bases loaded and 2 out. He stayed in. He loaded the bases again, but managed to get out of that jam. That's not the ironic part though. As I was watching that, ESPN Classic was showing last year's seventh game. As Jeter came to the plate, the Classic game was showing the eighth inning - right as Little came out and left Martinez in. The rest, as they say, is history - 5 outs from the World Series, a tired Martinez lets the Yankees tie the game.

Flash back to this year - Mussina pitching well after the first inning, and Boston into their completely depleted bullpen. All the Yankees had to do is get to the eighth - and hope that Rivera didn't do what he did last night.

The Yankees threatened in the 8th. Cairo doubled, Jeter moved Cairo to third, and Sheffield walked. Timlin got A-Rod on strikes, but that brought Matsui - who's been Godzilla to the Red Sox' Tokyo this series - to the plate. That was it for Timlin - Francona brought in Foulke. He did the job, getting Matsui to fly out to left. Gordon stayed in for the eighth, which may have been a mistake - Ortiz led off with a shot over the monster to make it a 4-3 game. Typically, Gordon didn't hold up to the pressure, and left with runners on 1st and 3rd - with no outs.

Varitek tied the game with a shallow fly to center - if the 6th looked like Deja-Vu all over again from last year's game 7, then the eighth looked like a replay of last night's late game. Rivera retired three in a row, with the damage being the man Gordon left on third. Fans in New York and Boston had to be glad that this game began at 5 - because another extra innings game could last awhile. Foulke continued to his job in the top of the 9th - 3 pop ups. There was some excitement with a walk to Sierra and ground rule double from Clark - but nothing came in. The Sox really got lucky on that double - had it stayed in the park, Sierra would have scored easily.

Damon's agony continued in the 9th. He finally got a hit - and then got thrown out stealing on a great throw by Posada. The 9th ended quietly, and sent the game into extra innings. Through 13, the closest anyone got to scoring was the Yankees in the top of the 13th - on the power of 3 passed balls. Wakefield pitched out of that mess though, and the game just kept going.

That set up Ortiz to be the hero again in the 14th - he hit a looper into center, sending Damon home for the winning run. The series goes back to New York. Once thing is for sure - it's not going to be an easy win for whoever gets to the World Series

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marketing

Not getting it

October 18, 2004 21:25:44.996

Sam Gentile is missing something fundamental about Google Desktop. The fact that it's the same interface as the internet search People like metaphors that they are already familiar with

X1 has all that aggressive speedy lookup technology that Bill poured into Lotus Magellan, a product that people still yearn for 15 years later. It blows Google Desktop away. because its so fast, it finds anything in Outlook and the file system, the split second you type the first character of your search item. Jim Blizzard has a good list of reasons. No stupid web browser where you have to go through it's interface and do the extra work of clicking on the link. Of course, Google Desktop has the advantage that it is free but it is neither revolutionary nor the best.

I'm sure that a smart client would have advantages here. On the other hand, how many users already have a browser open, and know how to use bookmarks?

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development

Looks like it's not 1978 yet in MS-land

October 18, 2004 20:29:19.341

Sean Malloy explains just how lame edit and continue is in the VS world.

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rss

Syndication and advertising

October 18, 2004 15:49:02.573

If I hadn't thought that the Atom mailing list had gone mostly around the bend already (how many date format emails can you possibly pay attention to?) - then the reaction to this piece on advertising in a feed would have convinced me. There was a suggestion to add an extension to Atom in support of ads. Yeah, that'll work. All clients that would so much as bother to enable that extension raise your hands now.

This is astoundingly simple, and it's already happening. Syndication content is text or HTML. Which means.... you can put ad content in as an item. Apparently that's just way, way too simple for some of the deep thinkers over on the mailing list - if there's not an RFC deploying toxic word fog on the issue, it's not solved yet. Pardon me while I snore...

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itNews

Google Desktop

October 18, 2004 13:33:02.170

I have to say that I agree with BitWorking on Google Desktop:

This is just like WinFS.

Except that it is shipping today.
And it just works.
And it doesn't require an upgrade to your operating system.
And it doesn't require you to manually tag all your files with meta-data.
And it works outside your "Documents and Settings" folder.
And it's only a 400K download.
But besides that, it's just like WinFS.

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BottomFeeder

Latest updates

October 18, 2004 9:32:52.745

With the latest BottomFeeder updates you should see some nice improvements. Image download happens in the background, and there's reporting on the progress of that. The update that went live this morning added reporting of that progress to the status bar area - you'll need to restart after grabbing it. As always, let me know if there are issues.

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sports

Not with a complete whimper

October 18, 2004 1:26:17.548

Well, the 6th inning is the point that people would have pointed to had the Sox lost tonight - it's where the Sox made the kind of muffs that make Boston fans wince. They were up 3-2, and then Matsui tripled. He came in on a funky chopper that Mueller couldn't handle at third. Then a wild pitch sent Williams over to second. Posada got on. Another wild pitch, but they got lucky throwing Williams out. Then a bobbled ball by Bellhorn at second let Sierra get on, and they walked Cairo to load the bases for Jeter. They got Jeter on a routine ground ball, but by this time the score was 4-3 Yankees. While they only scored two runs, it had all the features of recent post season Yankees/Sox matchups - a questionable pitching change (Lowe out, Timlin in), followed by a bunch of muffed plays in the field. You could almost hear the oxygen being sucked out of Fenway at that point.

It stayed that way though 7, and then the Yankees brought in Rivera - who closed out the 8th easily. Meanwhile, The Red Sox brought in Foulke in the 7th - and this was his first 3 inning appearance in a long, long time. He did the job though; held the lead to one run.

So it came down to the bottom of the ninth, with Rivera on the mound, protecting a one run lead. He couldn't do it; Millar got on with a walk, a pinch runner came in to steal second, and Mueller drove him in. A sacrifice bunt sent Mueller to second, and that brought up Damon - who only had one hit in the entire series. And now it was the Yankees turn to muff plays - a hopper to first was bobbled, leaving mean on 1st and third with 1 out. Rivera struck Cabrera out, bringing up Ramirez - and no rbi's to this point in the series. Walked on a hight 3-2 pitch, leaving the bases loaded for Ortiz. Things just couldn't get more tense than this. Ortiz popped it up, sending the game into extra innings. At that point, the real question was: With the Sox pen so depleted after last night's game, would they be able to hold the Yankee bats down?

The Red Sox sent Embree out - he only lasted 2/3rd of an inning last night. Did his job in the 10th though - got the side out quietly. Gordon came in and did his job in the 10th - it now came down to a battle of bullpen staying power.

To the 11th - Cairo ripped a single, and Jetter bunted him over to second. At this point, Embree was throwing nothing but fastballs. He got lucky on a shot by Rodriguez that Cabrera saved at short. Embree pitched around Sheffield, and Francona brought in Myers to face Matsui - the guy who's done more damage than anyone else during this series. Myers walked Matsui on 4 pitches to load the bases, and off he went - in came Leskanic. He got slapped around last night, and tonight he faced Bernie Williams with the bases loaded and 2 out - he did the job tonight though, getting Williams on a shallow fly to center. One thing is for sure - if the Sox didn't score soon, they were going to run out of pitching choices.

The 12th started with Leskanic still on the mound, and Wakefield warming up. Posada got himself on with a broken bat looper to right. Sierra accidentally sacrificed Posada over - he lined a ball into Leskanic's leg. He stayed in while Wakefield warmed up. Meanwhile, the Yankees got Quantrill ready to face the heart of the Sox's order. Leskanic finished Cairo off, and the Sox came up to try their luck against Quantrill. And that's how things got to game 5 - Ramirez singled, and Ortiz' bat finally woke up with a 2 run shot. The Red Sox get a game 5, in less than 16 hours.

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general

Rockets are Cool

October 17, 2004 22:58:09.240

This afternoon my daughter's girl scout troop had an outing to Goddard Space Center. The girls had put together some rocket kits recently - we had a kit from Estes rockets. It turns out that a local rocket club meets at Goddard once a month on Sundays, and helps anyone else who shows up launch a rocket. It's all pretty safe - the rockets are lit of electrically from a launch pad, so there's no fire, or fuses. Here's a shot I took just after my daughter's first rocket went off - I missed the launch itself (kind of hard to catch with a cheap camera phone :) )

That one went pretty well - it had a streamer instead a parachute, but it came down nicely and in one piece - we can slap another engine into it and try again sometime. Here's a shot of the second rocket, which looked like a cruise missile:

Again, I missed the launch itself. This one went up, but the parachute didn't deploy properly - and it came down hard. The nose buried itself in the ground, and the rest of the rocket came apart (it can be re-glued - it didn't actually shatter). Here's what that rocket looks like ( I can't find the first one on the estes site):

All in all, it was great fun - we'll definitely do it again.

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BottomFeeder

BottomFeeder 3.7 redux

October 17, 2004 10:45:20.994

After getting a few bug reports, I spoke with Michael. After he pondered the background download code of WithStyle for a bit, he had a patch - not only did it go into his nightly build, but he was kind enough to send it to me immediately. So, there's an update available for the existing build. I decided that this warranted a fresh set of builds, so the downloads on the site have all been replaced - if you want to start over with 3.7, just grab the appropriate base-app*.zip file, and replace the exe or VM.

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sports

Nothing but bat

October 16, 2004 22:34:39.969

Gads, as I start writing this, it's only the 4th inning - and the score of the Yankees/Sox game is already 11-6 (Yankees). The pitchers have all been rocked - starters and relievers alike. The Yankees are on their second pitcher - after Brown got rocked, they brought in Vasquez, and he got touched for two - and his control is looking none too good. Meanwhile, Arroyo got shellacked. His replacement, Mendoza, lasted part of an inning before they went to Leskanic - and he just gave up 5 runs. They brought in tomorrow's starter, Wakefield to close the inning down. I guess they'll be handing the ball to Lowe tomorrow night. At this rate, the core could be in double digits for both teams, and it could read like the score of tomorrow's Patriots game.

So here it is the bottom of the fourth - I guess with a 5 run lead, the Yankees feel ok leaving Vasquez in (and he just struck out Bellhorn, so maybe it's ok). This is going to be a game that depletes the pitching staffs if this keeps up. Sheesh, I spoke too soon - a walk to Ramirez after a boatload of pitches, followed by a single to right by Ortiz. Sturtze is getting loose (and let me tell you, that doesn't fill me with confidence) - and there's only one out. Vasquez is not finding the strike zone - and wow, did he get lucky. A line drive right at Olerud, and he was able to tag Ortiz before he got back to the bag. If Vasquez is back out there next inning, I'll be shocked.

I guess this counts as live-blogging - I'll just keep updating the post as stuff of interest happens.

Well, that didn't take long. The top of the fifth was looking quiet with 1 on (Jeter) and one out, and then bam - A-Rod doubled. Now it's 12-6, and there's A-Rod in scoring position. I wonder what the Sox will do if Wakefield starts getting pasted? That bullpen is starting to look very, very thin. And abm - Sheffield pastes another ball for a double, bringing A-Rod home - 13-6. The Sox bench is looking like a wake right now, and I don't think I've ever seen Fenway so quiet - you could just about hear a pin drop... As things have gone tonight, that was a fairly light inning - only 2 more runs scored. It's going to be a long, long night for the Red Sox bullpen at this rate...

Well, Vasquez is back out, and he's being effective. He actually threw a 1-2-3 inning! On to the 6th, and we'll see if the Yankees can get Wakefield torched out.

Maybe things are settling down for awhile. Posada went deep, but to dead center for an out. Huh. Sierra pasted one as well, but to left-center - just about the only place that ball could be caught. Two outs, but Francona can't feel good about those balls - Wakefield dodged two bullets just now. Well, lucky or not, Olerud went quietly - 1-2-3 for Wakefield. The Yankees have a little over 2 innings before they can go to Rivera - I expect to see him out there in the 8th. We'll have to see how the next few innings fall out...

Hmm - Olerud must have hurt his foot on that ground out. He's out, and now Cabrera has just slapped a double to that odd corner in center left. Damon just continued his ineffectuallness in this series - shallow pop out. Fox knows that the game is close to being a laugher - they are out in the stands interviewing Steven King (so this must be a horror movie :) ). Bellhorn just struck out, so we have Ramirez up with 2 gone. And Ramirez goes down on strikes, so it looks like Vasquez has found his pitches, and he's making them. On to the 7th - things are just getting quieter and quieter at Fenway.

And Cairo gets on with an infield hit - The Yankees have their first man on again. Jeter hasn't done much tonight (one walk) - and Damon makes a nice grab on a looper to center. Almost another Red Sox moment as Bellhorn drops a pop in shallow center, but they got Cairo at second - he was assuming an easy out there. Still, 2 outs. Now Fox is looking at stats on teams that have come back from 3-0 in a 7 game series - none in the MLB, none in the NBA - and only 2 in the NHL. In other words, if the Sox lose tonight, the fat lady is warming up. And in anticipation of that, Sheffield just pasted another ball into the green monster for a long single. Wakefield is out, Embree is coming in. Another scoring possibility for the Yankees.

And Matsui just got a single, scoring A-Rod and sending Sheffield to 3rd! 14-6, and no pitcher for the Sox has been up to the task tonight. This game is just washing away from them. And wow - Bernie Williams just put it past Damon, and 2 more runs score, and Williams get sto second. Fenway is now like a crypt - it's filled with the walking dead Sox fans. And Posada finds the wall, scoring Williams, Posada to second for another double. It's now 17-6, and Fox needs to go find Steven King again. Sierra grounds out, and the inning is mercifully over for the Sox. I don't think the Yankees are going to need Rivera at this point - not unless a comeback of epic proportions takes place. At this point, I'm not seeing it. For tonight at least, the Sox are done.

Well, there's some life left in the Sox. Ortiz doubled and Varitek homered - 17-8 now. More bad news for the Sox though - it looks like Ortiz may have hurt himself on his swing somehow. The Yankees have Quantrill warming up, and it looks like Vasquez is just about done. After a shaky start he did enough; he chewed up the middle innings. Nixon got a lot of that ball, but not enough - just a long out. Looks like Quantrill is coming in.

Another hard hit ball by Mueller, but Matsui managed to hold it to a long single. Two outs though, and Quantrill looks like he's got decent stuff tonight. Well, I spoke too soon. Cabrera just lined a single, so Damon comes up with 2 on. Damon flied out harmlessly to left, continuing his inability to hit in this series. No further damage - and Sturtze and Gordon are both warming up. With the 8th inning coing up, I don't expect to see Quantrill go back out. Of course, the open question is - will the night get any longer for Red Sox pitching in the top of the 8th?

Wow, another pitcher for the Red Sox. Mike Myers, and they've also put Mirabelli behind the plate. He's usually the guy who catches Wakefield, and Varitek has been hitting well - I'm not sure I understand that move. Myers got Clark (the replacement 1st baseman) on strikes - his delivery muct be hard to track. He's got a normal overhand delivery, but also a side-arm sinker ball thing. Another strike out - the Sox have finally found a pitcher who isn't off his game tonight. Well, Jeter fought out his at-bat for a single. A close play at second on a good stop by Bellhorn - ends the inning, and Sox finally get another quiet half inning. Two left to play - it's looking like 3-0 advantage Yankees.

Well, Quantrill is still in. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised - why waste another pitcher when you're up by 9 with 2 innings left? This is why Torre gets paid the big bucks and I just comment on thus stuff :) Bellhorn struck out, and Ramirez quietly flew out to center, so it looks like Quantrill has settled in. On Fox, the announcers are talking about the likely starter for game 4 (probably Lowe) - and who's left in the Sox pen for tomorrow. They have used a lot of pitchers tonight. Quantrill gets Ortiz on strikes, so keeping him in looks like the right call - on to the 9th.

Heck, I hit the bathroom and I missed something - looks like Sheffield got on base. Whoa - Matsui just hit a 2 run homer. 19-8. Williams just got a single, so it looks like Myers only had one good inning in him. Wow - the Sox are warming up Foulke - their closer. You never want to bring in your closer when you're down by 11 runs. But heck, what can they do? They've blown through the pen. Posada just got a single, and now there are 2 on, no outs, and Sierra coming up. He struck out, and Clark lined into a double play. The Red Sox survived that inning - but it's just too late.

Well, Gordon is coming in after all. One down, Mirabelli popped out to second. I'm always nervous when Gordon pitches, but I don't think he can blow an 11 run lead. Wow - according to Buck on Fox, we just passed (combined for both teams) 400 pitches. Wow. Now, there's why Gordon makes me nervous - fastball out over the plate, and Trot Nixon slammed a double off the wall in left. Down 11 runs, it's ok. In a typical set up man's spot, it's nerve wracking. Speaking of which, a wild pitch sent Nixon over to third. Millar just struck out, so the Sox have one out left. A soft fly to center, and Gordon did the job. Game over - and the Yankees have their foot on the throats of the Sox.

The ironic thing is, the Red Sox were favored coming into this series. Both teams can hit, but everyone thought that the Sox had the better pitching staff. Of course, the Yankees did win the division, so the Sox pitching couldn't be that much better. Still, in a short series, the thinking was that Schilling and Martinez would mow the Yankees down in the first two games, and then they could just split the next four - just like the Diamondbacks did in 2001. It didn't go that way - Schilling is hurt, and he got shelled. Mussina pitched well for almost 7, and Lieber did very well for 7. Martinez pitched well - but not well enough. Brown got knocked out early, but Vasquez and Quantrill chewed up the middle innings well, and the Red Sox staff served up a steady diet of gopher balls. So at the end of the day, the Sox are faced with having to execute a comeback of the sort that has never been managed by any MLB team in a 7 game series - return from a 3-0 deficit. At this point, I'm thinking sweep.

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BottomFeeder

Bug in 3.7

October 16, 2004 22:14:41.325

I've had a few reports of people having problems viewing content in the just released 3.7 - as it happens, the WithStyle guys found a flaw in the html component - and they have a fix. I should have an update out within 2 days (I have to await their build). Once it's out, I'll redo all the builds and upload fresh, so that first time users won't have to grab the update. I'll post on this again when the fix is available.

Update: The patch is available. Grab Both WS updates and restart - things should improve after that

Update: Another tip - if you still see problems, check to see whether your system has hyper-threading support. If so, right click on the BottomFeeder process and set affinity to one CPU - that should address the problem.

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smalltalk

Smalltalk in action

October 16, 2004 12:55:41.982

Blaine Buxton points to an interesting sounding trading system written in Smalltalk (Dolphin). Of course, no discussion of trading systems is complete without a reference to the Kapital System written in Cincom Smalltalk by JP Morgan.

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general

Congratulations to Eric

October 16, 2004 12:31:03.847

Congratulations are in order for Eric - he's about to start working for Gemstone. This is great news for Eric, and great news for Gemstone. It will be interesting to see Eric making the transition from the end user side of the fence over to the vendor side. It's great to see things turned around so quickly for him!

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sports

What are they smoking?

October 16, 2004 10:35:49.272

So I'm looking at the various sports page reporting of the Yankees/Sox series - the Boston Globe has this piece up. They are still trying to figure out a way to get Schilling out there. This is just the height of irresponsibility - they way the injury has been described, it seems to me that they are toying with Schilling's career in the vain hope of a win. And it's a pretty slim hope, too - look at how he fared with that ankle in game 1. It's time for the Sox to sit the guy down and let the surgeons work. They shouldn't be risking any more damage to him. I realize how much they want to win - but this is just irresponsible...

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sports

Boston panics

October 15, 2004 16:54:10.083

ESPN documents the latest Sox troubles:

Perhaps it's time for the Red Sox to sue George Steinbrenner over missing child support payments for Pedro Martinez because at the moment, the court system appears to be Boston's only viable way of beating the Yankees. Here's the situation after Wednesday's 3-1 loss, perhaps the most dire Boston has ever faced that didn't involve Ben Affleck

We'll see how tonight goes (if it doesn't rain). The Yankees are in a commanding position; a win tonight will pretty much put it away.

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development

VisualStudio finds its way to the 1970's

October 15, 2004 16:23:37.867

Oh look - VS will have edit and continue next year. Good job making it into the 70's guys :)

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tv

Tru out

October 15, 2004 14:22:40.740

I should never express the fact that I like a show; every time I do, this happens. Looks like my friend Mike was right; it's toast...

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BottomFeeder

BottomFeeder 3.7 is out

October 15, 2004 13:59:23.815

I've just released BottomFeeder 3.7. This release includes WithStyle instead of Twoflower; the html display is much, much better. Bf now supports CSS, and a number of example stylesheets have been included. Documentation now ships with the download, and is thus accessible offline - something a number of people asked for. If you have an existing installation, you should be able to just grab the appropriate baseapp-*.zip file, and replace the image (or exe), VM. You should delete all the files in the 'app' directory as well. I'd like to thank Michael Lucas-Smith - without his help, I'd have never been able to get NetResources and WithStyle working for me. I'd also like to thank Troy Brumley, Travis Griggs, Mark Derricutt, and Eric Winger for beta testing the in development versions of this release; some of the early releases were pretty raw, and they were all a very helpful. Rich Demers did his usual great job with the docs; any bugs or defects you find are all mine. Enjoy.

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cst

Store for Sybase

October 15, 2004 11:53:39.825

The Cincom Smalltalk community comes through again - there's an implementation of Store for Sybase out there now. I ran across this on comp.lang.smalltalk

StoreSybase adds Sybase support to Store. It is tested with VWNC 7.2.1, Linux (FreeBSD 4.8) and Sybase 11.9.2. It uses a CTLib connection to Sybase. It may be downloaded from:

ftp://ftp.cincomsmalltalk.com/pub/goodies/StoreSybase/StoreSybase.tgz

Be sure to read README.syb before installing.

ERRATA:

  1. If you want user/group management, install it when asked during database table installation. Installing it later doesn't work.
  2. Despite what the User/Group Privileges Tool may lead you to believe, checks for read permission are not implemented. Everyone has read permission on everything.

Enjoy!
Carl Mascott
cmascott_del_t...@att.net
If replying by e-mail please correct my address.

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travel

On the road again

October 14, 2004 9:31:43.203

I'm off to Raleigh-Durham this morning, giving the "what's new with Cincom Smalltalk" speech to a customer we haven't visited in awhile. I think they'll be pleasantly surprised at all the work we've been doing - they've been in "heads down" development for quite some time. We'll see how it goes.

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development

Did anyone say Corba?

October 14, 2004 9:28:52.777

Mark Baker points to more evidence of creeping complexity (shades of the OMG spec-a-day approach) from the WS_* crowd. Web Services started out looking lightweight. Lately, it looks like a ton of bricks sitting on top of a sea of lard...

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open source

Now comes the hard part

October 14, 2004 9:27:37.140

Jonathan Schwartz points to some of the recent successes of OpenOffice and StarOffice - having the EU formally recommend it is good for Open Office, and good for competition - heck, maybe MS will wake up and fix some of the lingering annoyances in Word. The hard part is still ahead though - there are lots of shops that have built a large amount of MS Office specific support into their systems - in particular, replacing things like Excel will be very difficult due to the macro intensive systems that are out there. For people getting started, the choice looks pretty clear - Office is expensive - and to my mind, irritating. Open Office isn't much less irritating, but it's free. Things are dicier in the large user community though...

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