Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

First off, have a look at this post below - Cincom is profitable, and has been in business a long time. We are still supporting products that were released back at the founding of the firm. Second, the Smalltalk team is profitable within Cincom, and represents a sizable percentage of Cincom's overall revenues. Third, have a look at our product roadmap - we are moving Cincom Smalltalk aggressively forward in multiple directions - which is quite different than the message you'll get from some of the competition. Is Smalltalk a safe choice? It most certainly is - if you go with a committed vendor!

There's some good news about Cincom on the news wire - this will likely only be there a day or two, as they update those pages a lot. I've copied the content below:

CINCINNATI, OH - Cincom Systems, Inc. fueled by recent record-setting financial performances, including:

• Its second most profitable year ever in 2004
• The three most profitable consecutive years in its 36-year history
• Its 19th straight year of generating over $100 million in revenue a feat unparalleled in the software industry except for one other company ... Microsoft®

is hiring and investing in people to pursue its aggressive, long-term global growth strategy.

With over 100 well-paid job openings now approved, Cincom is seeking applicants in virtually all areas of the company, including: sales (pre and post), sales management, marketing, engineering, services, and product management. Plans call for hundreds of additional job openings in the next two years to meet aggressive revenue targets.

Cincom achieved its recent remarkable success during a tough and turbulent economic climate under the leadership of founder Tom Nies, the longest-serving CEO in the computer industry, and once hailed by former President Ronald Reagan as "the epitome of the entrepreneurial spirit of American business."

Giving Forward ... Jobs, Opportunities, Hope

Tom Nies believes strongly in a concept called "Giving Forward," according to Steve Kayser, Cincom's PR Manager. "That means utilizing the entrepreneurial spirit to create innovative products and services that then create jobs to lift the economic well-being of all.

Tom's entrepreneurial job creation "gives (pays) forward" benefits that contribute to the economic and social uplifting of society. True entrepreneurs create jobs, opportunities, and hope. Tom Nies has created more than 10,000 jobs and opportunities. Those jobs and opportunities spin, spiral, soar, and give back to the community and company many times more than ever invested.

This ripple effect benefits us all. These jobs help to provide income that is then used to feed and raise families, provide healthcare and security, buy houses and cars, and pay for college. The greatest "giving back" a successful person can do is to "give forward" by helping to enable, empower, and teach others the skills, traits, and values that have made them successful. The greatest payer-back of society may ultimately be, in the end, the "entrepreneurial job creator who gives forward."

But to what does Mr. Nies attribute the recent successes? One simple rule: "Help our customers grow their businesses faster and more profitably, with far less upfront investment, much less risk and much greater and quicker ROI. Simple rule. But it's worked so well for 36 years, why change now?" says Mr. Nies.>

About Cincom

Cincom, the world's most experienced software company, builds, sells, and supports software for

1. data access and integration
2. process automation
3. manufacturing business solutions
4. business communications.

Cincom serves thousands of clients on six continents including BMW, Citibank, Boeing, Northwestern Mutual, Federal Express, Ericsson, Penn State University, Messier-Dowty, Siemens, Rockwell Automation, and Trane.

For more information about Cincom's products and services, contact Cincom at 1-800-2CINCOM (US Only), send an e-mail to info@cincom.com, or visit the company's website at www.cincom.com.

About Tom Nies

Tom Nies, the longest-serving CEO in the computer industry (36 years), has the distinction of being featured in the famous Smithsonian Institution, and was recently honored as the 2004 Regional Technology Winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year program.

$5 Million for $1?

Tom Nies started Cincom Systems, Inc. in 1968 with $600, a card table, and a dream. He grew it into a global organization that now serves thousands of clients on six continents. The results of that $600 investment? It's generated over $3 billion in revenue, or ... $5 million of revenue for every dollar invested.

Over the last three years, Mr. Nies has led Cincom to its best business performance years ever through some of the most challenging economic conditions since the Great Depression, especially in the technology industry.

Media Contacts

Donna Hedge
Public Relations Specialist
Cincom Systems, Inc.
513.612.2305
dhedge@cincom.com

Steve Kayser
Cincom Systems, Inc.
513.612.2348
skayser@cincom.com

I was stuck on conference calls all afternoon, and my network connection was still flaky. I finally got off the last conf call (at least, the last one before 5:30....) and called Comcast. I ask when my problems should be fixed. They say "It's all better now". I counter with "No, it's not". However, as I'm talking to them, things do in fact improve. Websites are accessible again, I can use VPN, mail seems to be working. Looking at my router, I notice that the primary DNS server has changed. I suspect that the DNS server was the issue in all this. Maybe it'll all hold together next week...

We'll have a conference agenda ready to post in a few days - in the meantime, please visit here for information on registration. This event is three days in Frankfurt, Germany - December 7-9. We'll have a lot of the CST engineering staff there, and we'll be providing a roadmap for VisualWorks and ObjectStudio. There will also be a bunch of talks on both products, as well as time to meet with various members of our development staff. Here's a taste of the agenda:

• Building Web Applications in Smalltalk - by Alan Knight, lead developer on the VisualWorks Web Toolkit
• Opentalk for ObjectStudio - by Len Lutomski and Andreas Hiltner. Learn how to use OBjectStudio and VisualWorks together, leveraging the strengths of both products
• The VW DotNet Connect - by Andreas Tönne of Heeg, a Cincom Smalltalk engineering partner
• Agile Development in Smalltalk by Joseph Pelrine, well known Agile developer
• 64 bit support in Cincom Smalltalk, by Eliot Miranda, lead VM architect
• Risk Management at JP Morgan in Smalltalk, by Niall Ross
• Web Development using Seaside - by Avi Bryant (Seaside inventor) and Michel Bany, Cincom consultant

We'll have lots more as well - that's just a small sample of what's in store. I'll have a link to the full agenda as soon as it's ready to post. See you there!

I had the weirdest dream last night - the sort of thing that comes up on horror flicks a fair amount, but I had never experienced it myself. I woke up, and realized that the VCR display (the TV and VCR are on a stand next to the bed) was sideways - meaning that somehow, the stand had tipped over. I couldn't get the light to go on, and I couldn't wake my wife up - so I got up to turn the room light on. When I got to that switch, it wouldn't go on either. Which was weird, because there was clearly power. That's when I actually woke up. Bizarre - I've never had that kind of dream where I was sure I was awake before.

My net connection is still flaky. I had good access for awhile last night - my mail finally came in, for instance. This morning, things are squirelly again. Another exciting day in the partially connected world...

This has to be the worst looking system I've ever heard of - I hope no one actually has to use it. Take a look at that second screen shot, for instance. Phil must be involved, somehow...

It's not the best picture in the world, but it is the view out my office bay window. I get a fairly decent view of the changing colors from here. It's also a cloudy day here - it would have shown up a whole lot better had I done this yesterday when it was sunny.

This is pretty much my favorite time of year. Cross Country was my favorite sports season in high school, and I still love jogging down leaf strewn trails at this time of year. One of the nicer things about Columbia is the system of bike trails we have here (I'd post a link, but I can't get to the association pages at the moment). There are trails wandering through all the neighborhoods - you can get pretty much anywhere in this town on the trail system. At this time of year, the trails are just gorgeous. They tend to run through the woods, and with all the trees changing colors it looks great.

In a few weeks, all the trees will be bare, and all the leaves will be brown. In the meantime, it all looks beautiful

After my last post (below), my connection returned to normal - maybe 45 minutes after I posted. Figures - just when I had a good, solid rant going :)

So my network connection has been flaky all day - apparently, the damage has been getting worse all day too - when I first called Comcast, they just ran through their script. Later, there was a message "for residents of Howard County". Later, the message got updated to include about a fourth of the counties in Maryland. Supposedly, Comcast's bright eyed network people pushed through an "upgrade" so that they could offer VOIP.

So I'm stuck with completely flaky service at the moment, and Comcast has no clue when it'll be fixed. Meanwhile, they had their call center monkeys handing out wonderfully useless advice all day. I was asked to:

• Reboot my cable modem (this often does work, but not today)
• Reset my router to factory defaults
• Connect my PC to the cable modem directly, bypassing the router (never mind my multiple systems, or the fact that the modem is in the basement)
• I was told that switching my Linux box from a static IP (behind the router, not live on the net) to a dynamic IP would fix the problem

The suggestions seemed to get more insane as the day went by. I was only just told about the VOIP "upgrade" 10 minutes ago. Now, it seems to me that when you roll through a change that hoses off as large an area as this one did, you ought to have a plan for rollback. Only if you're a sane ISP, I guess. If Verizon ever offers service in my area, I'll have to switch just to encourage Comcast to pay attention...

If you've been trying to reach me via email since last night, there's a reason I haven't responded - my network troubles are affecting my email access. I can't get to any of the email systems I normally use. In this case, webmail doesn't help either; the servers can't be resolved from here due to whatever crazy DNS/routing issue Comcast has given me. I'll get back to you, but at the moment, I simply can't get the mail at all....

Sci Fi Wire reports that Ed Wood's long lost last film has been found:

Necromania, the long-lost final movie of Ed Wood, considered the worst filmmaker of all time, has been rediscovered, the Reuters news service reported. The 1971 movie is a porn film documenting the sexual enlightenment of a young couple at the hands of a coven of witches, the news service reported.

Wood, who created Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 From Outer Space, was the subject of Tim Burton's 1994 film, which starred Johnny Depp as the maligned moviemaker.

Probably not fare for Disney's Sci Fi Dine in Theater :)

I've been on the phone with Comcast all morning. Apparently, they changed out a bunch of equipment overnight, and that's been causing problems here in Howard County. What they told me to do was this - rest my router to factory settings. They figured it would pull the proper IP information after that. The Cable Modem actually gets the IP information iirc, but what the heck - I did it just so that they'd get off that page of the script. Well, as expected, that did nothing. I just got off the phone with a more knowledgeable tech, and he confirmed that my problem is not isolated - they have no idea why resetting the router is working for some people and not for others

The problem is DNS resolution. I can get to the NY Times, but I can't get to Yahoo. If I know the IP address in question, I can ping it. The part that's really screwy is that it's a partial problem - I can see this server, and the Smalltalk site for Cincom - but I can't resolve the main Cincom site. Truly bizarre. This pretty much shoots my productivity to heck, because the mail servers I use are on the list of sites I can't resolve. Arghhh....

Good service is the ultimate in good marketing - it leads to good word of mouth and return business. I've had that for a long time now from a local mechanic - Wheeler's Auto Service in Jessup Maryland. I think we were referred there by word of mouth in the first place, and we've done that kind of referral since. These guys are honest - they always give me the straight scoop, and - when they find things that might need repair - they tell me how critical it is. For instance, I just had gear shift problem repaired, and they found a potential issue with the bearings in the rear wheels. When I told them that I drive 1000 or so miles a year, they told me that I could just let that go for awhile, and get it dealt with later. When they looked at our minivan's erroneous gas tank readings, they warned us that a full fix could get quite pricey, and it might be a lot simpler to just track the mileage on the trip odometer. This is why I keep going back there for service

I had another good experience last week. We had ordered pizzas from Pizzeria Uno in Ellicott City. We ordered from there because my wife happened to be shopping there, and it would be easy for her to pick it up on the way home. When she got here, we found out that they had reversed the order - getting the ingredients backwards. We were short on time (my daughter had events that evening, and my car was in the shop) - I called to complain, and they said that they'd replace both pizzas and refund my money. It was out of my way to go back, but heck - they did the right thing. I grabbed a carry-out menu on my way out, because I'm sure I'll order from there again.

By not trying to extract the maximum dollar for any particular visit, these places have ensured that they'll get repeat business from me - and positive word of mouth. There are plenty of places that are more interested in maximizing the return on each individual transaction, without any thought to future business. Which model works better in the long haul?

Things are kind of screwy with my net connection this morning. There are tons of sites I just can't get to - I wanted to read a PR story on Dan Gillmor's site, but it won't load for me. There's a bunch of political sites I normally read that I can't reach. I was interested in Patrick's pointer to YAML, but I can't get there either. Is anyone else having this kind of trouble, or is it just me?

Update: Seems that Comcast mucked up an update of some sort here in Howard County, MD - there are all kinds of DNS resolution issues. Should be a productive day ahead...

StronglyTyped sketches out an interesting analogy in order to trace his thinking about static and dynamic langues. It's an interesting read:

After picking up several more items I went to check out. I emptied my cart and handed the items to the clerk. She gladly accepted all the items in the various containers and gave me a total. She then asked which form of payment. I selected my Visa card. She then asked me "credit or debit". Credit of course (I don't like paying ATM fees).

Pretty routine huh? We all know it too. It's very intuitive right?

Sounds like a dynamically typed system to me! LOL

Here's the thing. I've been religous about only using statically typed languages. But why? I don't know - I just grew up with it.

Well python has been teaching me to let it go! And you know what - it's not that bad.

Go read the rest; it's pretty good

The Red Sox finally did it - they won a World Series. They looked dead after the first three games of the ALCS - then their pitchers came to life, and the Yankees bats went silent. After they took New York apart, I don't think there was any stopping them - they had that crucial confidence that they had lacked for a long, long time. In fact, I suspect that this would have been a much tougher series for them if they hadn't gone through New York first. By slaying that demon, they were filled with confidence and played up to their abilities. Had they gone through the Twins instead, they may have had another round of oddness - instead of Ramirez' errors not amounting to anything, for instance, they might have added up.

No matter though - didn't happen. The upshot is that the Yankees now have real competition

Looks like Morgan Stanley is bullish on RSS:

The Internet has become a leading source for news and information over the past decade, but we believe the emerging acceptance (by users and publishers) of Web content syndication services will drive even broader deeper usage of the Internet as an increasingly relevant news and information medium. We see three factors that are combining to drive momentum:

1. rising usage of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) by content providers as a standard distribution platform for online content;
2. Ramp in the creation of blogs and other user-generated content; and
3. Yahoo!'s easy-to-use integration of RSS feeds (including blogs) that was rolled out in beta to its distribution channel of 25MM+ My Yahoo! users in late September.

individual's "always on" personalized Web page and the need to visit source Web sites to see if new articles have been posted is eliminated. All in, thanks to Yahoo!'s aggregation efforts, users get more information, they get it in a way that is organized / efficient, and their satisfaction rises. And, yes, the stickiness of My Yahoo! rises for its users, creating the potential for new revenue streams 26 1CNext generation content 1D should gain noticeable usage and revenue traction in 2005 26 We believe Internet usage should continue to grow rapidly

Interesting that an investment firm finds blogs and RSS so interesting.

Looks like the legends of "little people" may hearken back to something real: this piece in the Washington Post has the story:

Scientists have discovered a tiny species of ancient human that lived 18,000 years ago on an isolated island east of the Java Sea -- a prehistoric hunter in a "lost world" of giant lizards and miniature elephants.

These "little people" stood about three feet tall and had heads the size of grapefruit. They co-existed with modern humans for thousands of years yet appear to be more closely akin to a long-extinct human ancestor.

Researchers suspect the earlier ancestor may have migrated to the island and evolved into a smaller dwarf species as it adapted to the island's limited resources. This phenomenon, known as the "island rule" is common in the animal world but had never been seen before in human evolution.

XML has been the buzzword in the industry for the last few years. I'm starting to really, really wonder why. Take Web Services (please). How is this not a complete redo of CORBA, but using a textual format so as to slow the whole thing down? Heck, the WS* working group has even gotten as bad as the OMG used to be in terms of spewing out specs that no one cares about. Then there are configuration files. Everything needs to be in XML now. Again I ask, why? I have a simple theory about configuration files - they should come in one of two forms:

• Simple data that the user may be expected to hand edit? Use an ini (key=value) style file. Why? Because they are simple, and anyone can figure them out. Hand editing an XML file is just asking for trouble.
• More complex data that will only be changed by the application, or some application provided editor. This should probably be in a binary format so as to discourage hand editing. If the data is in a form that it should only be manipulated by the application, a textual format is the last thing you should be using

This is why I use an ini file for BottomFeeder settings. Knowledgeable users can hand edit the file to tweak settings, and it's obvious what the format is. I use a binary format for the application data - for one thing, it was too big to be optimal XML, and for another - I don't really want anyone trying to hand edit it. More and more, I'm finding that XML is becoming the useless answer to every question...

Vassili found this item, which explains why Smalltalk hasn't taken over yet. All we need is a d20...

We are in the process of locking down the next release - ObjectStudio 7.0 and VisualWorks 7.3. This is a major release for both products - ObjectStudio now fully supports Opentalk, which allows for clean interop between VW and ObjectStudio. That opens up the feature set of VisualWorks to ObjectStudio developers. VisualWorks has received a lot of work as well - a set of WS* tools, additional platform support (Windows CE4, PPC linux), and a lot more. I've got details here, and the product roadmap here. The best way to get the latest information on all this will be at the 2004 Cincom Smalltalk Worldwide Users Conference in Franfurt, Germany. I'll be laying out our roadmap in detail, and many of our engineers will be there to discuss the future of Cincom Smalltalk. See you there!

I'm going to be on Ottawa on November 3rd, and Toronto on November 4th. I'll be speaking about BottomFeeder for the STUGS in both cities, and meeting with a customer in Toronto. I'll be up for dinner and drinks in both places; it sounds like Dave is already setting something up for the 3rd - contact him if you would like to tag along.

Scoble is trying to list (and debunk) the various reasons that managers give when rejecting a request to blog. One thing I've certainly noticed is a lack of awareness. When I speak to groups and ask "how many of you know what a blog is?", the answers are literally all over the map. Some groups it's 90% or more; others it's 1 or 2 at most. There are still a lot of "heads down" development shops that simply don't know about the larger community - whether that community is Smalltalk developers or otherwise. First you have to spread that awareness. IMHO, blogging is still a bleeding edge thing - both in terms of the content creation side and in terms of the content consumption side. Ask a group what RSS/Atom/Syndication is, or what an aggregator is - you may be surprised at the level of knowledge on this...

Via Dave Winer comes a link to this fascinating hotel issue with net connections:

Seems Hilton Hotel chains are using a ISP service by a company called Greentree. They watch the outbound traffic of all guest connected computers. I have had intermittent problems with my connection just locking up. Turns out their monitor watches for too many concurrent connections and when a guest computer appears to be doing something it isn't supposed to it locks the offending MAC address out.

I spent about 30 minutes on the phone with a Greentree technician today and he determined aggreator which I have set to limit 5 total connections at a time was triggering the filter. We then tried the iPodder program and it did the same thing. Needless to say I am not at all happy as making News Aggreator runs is going to prove to be more difficult.

Now, I've never run across this particular issue in a hotel. I could deal with it by forcing BottomFeeder to do sequential (rather than forked) http queries, but it's never come up. What I have had happen was an unfortunate use of permanent redirect. I was staying at a hotel that had daily rates for net access, and you had to verify the use each day. I made the mistake of leaving Bf online overnight. When I got up, Bf had dutifully folllowed the permanent redirect of all my feeds and updated the urls. Argh! I've since learned to have Bf offline overnight at hotels that do the daily charge thing. Had they used a temp redirect, I would have been ok. Live and learn...

Tip of the hat to Bob, who's just pointed me to another easy enhancement to BottomFeeder. One issue with VW applications on Windows can be the menu disappearing below the taskbar. Well, as it happens, there's a package in the public store that addresses that problem: Win32TaskbarSupport. All you need to do is load that and menus will adjust themselves based on the taskbar location. It's now available as an update for Bf.

Way back when, I ran track and cross country. I used to love cross country - I was never that fast, but I had great endurance and I could beat faster runners if the course was hilly enough. I lost that advantage during track season - the 2 mile was my best event, but a track is very, very flat. I stopped competing after my freshman year of college - I found that I didn't like the team at SUNY Albany as much as I had in high school. That started a long, steady decline in the amount of exercise I got. By this year, I was down to jogging 1 1/2 miles or so 4-5 days a week.

I'm not really sure why - maybe it was boredom with the same old routes - I went out for a longer run about 3 weeks ago. Suddenly, I remembered something I had long since forgotten - the first mile or two are the hardest - after that I get into a "zone", and start to enjoy the run. Over the last few weeks I've built my distances up - I just got done with a 5 1/2 mile jog this afternoon. You know what? I've noticed that I'm not only enjoying the runs, I'm feeling better in general. I'm also starting to look at some of the longer possible loops that I could do from my house, and they don't look out of reach anymore.

I've remembered how much I enjoyed being a distance runner, and it's a good thing.

I have filtering issues on my end - my spam filters catch some stuff they shouldn't. But I have bigger problems with outbound mail. I get mail reporting BottomFeeder bugs from some people, and I simply cannot respond - all my mail bounces with a spam rejection. I'm sending from a comcast.net ISP account, so there's no good reason for that mail to get auto-rejected. If I don't seem responsive, it's likely that your server is bouncing my responses - because I respond pretty much immediately...

You may have noticed a problem with accessing this server - the blogs and the NC download application overnight and into this morning. I should really know better than to apply patches just before bedtime by now. Things are back to normal now though - sorry for the downtime.

Ed Foster makes an interesting point about the software industry vis-a-vis the license/ownership question:

If software is actually licensed, not sold, then the customer's right to use it remains despite damaged media, crashed drives, or malfunctioning DRM. If software transactions are actually an ordinary sale of goods (as many legal experts believe, by the way), then customers' fair use rights must remain intact. One way or the other, software publishers at least should be consistent.

I would have to agree with Ed here - we do try to have it both ways in this business. The nastiness over DRM in the music and movie industry is coming from an attempt by the RIAA and the MPAA to institute software style controls over an industry that really hasn't worked that way before. Something for us to chew on, I think...

The NYC Smalltalk Group is meeting soon:

We are meeting on Wednesday (October 27, 2004). See:

http://wiki.nycsmalltalk.org

Charles

Dear members:

NYC Smalltalk will be meeting on October 27th where we will review VisualWorks Web Tool Kit. Visit our wiki for more detail: http://wiki.nycsmalltalk.org

Our meetings are opened to the general public. Invite a friend.

Early in the development of BottomFeeder, there was some issue with file url handling in the (then current) release of VisualWorks. I created a hack work-around for the problem that worked, and then promptly forgot about it. In the interim, the bug in the library has long since been fixed, and my hack has always had problems with relative file urls. This finally caught up with me today when Bob ran into a problem with some scarping code he uses to create feeds for Bf. He not only found the problem, he went ahead and fixed it - and I've got the new code available as an update. Thanks Bob!

If the Red Sox win, my father will put the "I" in insufferable, that's why :) On the Buckner play in the 1986 Series, I had to prevent him from doing real damage to the TV....

There's been a lot of buzz lately about podcasting. There's already been backlash, even - complaints about how posting of large media files won't scale, etc. That's not why I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical for time management reasons. In general, I'd much rather read someone's thoughts online than listen to them. Why?

• It takes a lot less time, and I can have music on while I read
• Written thoughts tend to be far more well organized than verbal ones

I can skim a 1000 word essay pretty quickly - it takes a lot more time to listen to the same thing. It also takes more effort on my part. Give me the written word every time - it's like the difference between longhand and typing...

I've done something right - my daughter wants to go to this convention over her birthday weekend (she's turning 11 this year). We went to a day of a similar convention last summer, and she played a game of Puerto Rico at a table with five adults. She did ok - came in a close third in a low scoring game. She liked it when the winner asked the 4th and 5th place finishers "How does it feel to lose to a 10 year old?" So, we are going to go to Timonium in November and play in the PR tourney. It should be a good time.

Now Scoble is asking why there aren't search feeds at Google. Dave Winer mentioned this earlier, but in his case, it's because he hates Atom. Mind you, I still think Atom is a waste of time and effort, but that doesn't mean I don't support it in BottomFeeder. I can find search feeds from Google, Amazon, Feedster, Blogdigger, Headline news, NewsTrove, and Yahoo right now. There are likely a bunch of others that I just haven't stumbled on. Some of them are Atom, some of them are RSS. At the end user level, no one cares, since most tools work with either format....

So what kind of moron generates spam for a Wiki page via editing? There's been a rash of it on the VW Wiki at UIUC and on the CST Wiki. I've added IP filtering to the CST Wiki, and Ralph says they have a solution for the VW Wiki almost ready to roll out. The question I have is, how stupid do you have to be to bother trying to do this? It's very easy to roll these changes back. A pain in the butt, yes. Hard no.

The car I normally drive is pretty old - a 1989 Mitsubishi Mirage. It's been a very reliable car - it's got 124,000 miles on it, and it still gets 30+ mpg in town. That's really the only kind of driving I do anymore - I think I drive less than 1000 miles a year now. So I was unhappy when it refused to go into gear last week - I thought "this is it, the transmission dropped". Well, I got lucky. It turns out to be a much simpler problem to fix, less than $200. Big sigh of relief. Of course, that couldn't be the end of the story though. Our other car, the minivan - needs brakes, two new tires, and an alignment. Not terribly expensive, but it does tend to add up. I'm getting the minivan dealt with this morning, which is why I'm sitting in Starbucks instead of sleeping. While they fix my car, at least I can surf...

I need to plug some code that Michael created - check out the DiscussMethods package in the public Store. I used that to mark up the code in this post. It's really easy to use - just select a bunch of code in a browser or workspace, and select the 'copy styled xhtml' menu pick - then post it in your blog (or Wiki page). It's using the same kind of markup scheme as the RBCodeHighlighting package uses in the browser. Very cool.

This is an odd link for me to post, since it's political - take a look at this snippet of MSNBC from yesterday. Never mind the actual points of the argument, or the politics that underlie them, because none of that matters. What's important is the way O'Donnell tries to argue - loudly yelling over his opponent in an angry, spiteful fashion. Now again - never mind the politics - just look at it as marketing. Imagine being at a trade show, and hearing two technologists carrying on like that. Which one are you more likely to pay any attention to afterwards? To paraphrase something Alan has said to me, "the person who remains calm wins the argument". In marketing terms, always remember that perception is reality.

Now let me relate that to marketing in the technology sector. This is a large part of the reason that Sun was never able to out-market Microsoft in the past - McNealy would always come off as angry and unpleasant, while Gates and Ballmer were simply enthusiastic. It seems that Sun has learned from that - Jonathan Schwartz is never angry on his blog, and tries to make his points with humor. Far more effective than yelling or deploying lawyers, I think.

Scoble makes a lot of good points in this article, but the one below really stands out to me is this:

Three, blogs can reduce negatives. Is something bugging your customers? Well, they'll yell about it and yell about it until you listen to them and start having a conversation. Chuq is right on this count. Microsoft has made a corporate decision to change its public face -- I and the other more than 1,000 bloggers at Microsoft are stark evidence of that.

One of the things that Scoble - and the other MS bloggers - provide is a working feedback mechanism. Before Scoble and the rest of them got started, how could you possibly get useful feedback to MS? If you happened to be one of their MVP developers, maybe you could. That's a very narrow slice of their total market though, and the feedback from a group like that isn't going to be all that relevant across the entire company.

Here's an example - I've riffed about things I don't like in Word more than once. Now, I'm just one user, on a corporate Cincom license - if I call support, the kinds of issues I have simply aren't going to get listened to. With blogs though, they at least get noticed. Chris Pratley has responded to Word complaints from a number of people on his blog. Scoble has also been quite good about complaints - follow his blog for a few days and you'll see that he responds to people across the spectrum. What he's doing is nothing less than re-branding MS - slowly but steadily, he's helping make it look less distant and remote. A lot of companies could learn from that.

This is amusing. Via Blogging Roller comes this quote of a Sun response to an HP complaint:

Once again, in certain of the places this is a statement of opinion by Jonathan Schwartz. His opinion is based on his good faith assessment of the current climate of HP. Alternatively, however, Sun will also stand behind this as a statement of fact that is true and accurate based on the above substantiation. As detailed by the above facts, we have seen signs that HP is abandoning HP/UX. Jonathan Schwartz's opinions and even his vigorous debate on this subject as well as Sun's product comparisons and dialog on these commercial matters are inherent in Sun's competition with HP and are part of the free market system in which our companies operate. For our statements of fact, Sun has valid, objective and verifiable evidence. Accordingly, and based on the above, Sun affirmatively stands by its claims regarding HP/UX and will not agree to cease making such truthful and/or subjective claims.

This all comes in response to one of Jonathan Schwartz' bolg posts - this one here in particular. HP's response to this was to have their lawyers demand a retraction. This is a case where Sun and Schwartz have realized that there's a new playing field, and HP hasn't. Schwartz is out there offering up his thoughts - in public. The proper response for HP would be to get one of their people out there blogging as well - instead they've attempted an old school legal response. What's the result of that? Sun and Schwartz look good - and HP looks like a whining set of bullies.

I've had plenty of comments on Schwartz' blog posts, but I give him (and Sun) a lot of credit for playing in the marketplace of ideas. HP doesn't get it.

Freeform Goodness is reporting a new phishing target - Linux sysadmins! Take a look at his post - he's received a clever attack:

Anyway, I thought this was notable -- I've seen phishes like this targeted at Windows users, but this is the first I've seen specifically targeting unix admins. One would assume that they just collected a bunch of webmaster addresses, figuring (probably correctly) that a fair number of those boxes would be running Redhat. The email shows an attention to detail -- the HTML links to Redhat's real logo, linked from a Redhat server, and they even ran their HTML through Tidy!

Words pretty much fail me for this bizarre story.

We had a conversation on edit and continue in the new VS tools that MS is shipping in the IRC channel the other day - Sean Malloy gave his take on things over on his blog. As we discussed the differences in VS and in VisualWorks, we came up with the description Implement and Continue for the way it works in Smalltalk. What does that term mean? It means that you can do a lot more than small scale editing in the debugger in Smalltalk. You can implement new methods (the debugger itself can generate a stub when you hit a Message Not Understood - perfect when doing TDD, and you haven't actually written the code yet.

This all came up in this post from a couple of days ago. Interestingly enough, that item got linked on the MSDN VS 2005 page. If any of the MS oriented developers reading this are interested in having a look at Smalltalk, you can download it here.

I finally got around to watching Farscape: The PeaceKeeper Wars last night. The ReplayTV came to my rescue again, as I'd been watching the Yankees collapse while this was on.

The thing I liked most about this was that they actually ended it - there was no holding out the idea that there might be more - this was well and truly an ending. One of the main characters died (and that character died well) holding off a Scarran assault - I won't say who, because I'm sure there are people who haven't seen this yet. There were a few things that irritated me - the whole baby thing with Rigel was just silly, and - just like in Bond movies - I was always wondering why the bad guys didn't just do the simple thing and shoot the heroes when they had the chance.

Still, it was a worthy ending to the series - I'm glad they were able to wrap it all up.

Michael asked for a small enhancement today - he wanted to have the number of items in a category shown in the category list. That was easy enough, and the server does that now. This was another hotfix executed on the server, and it illustrates one of the strengths of a Smalltalk server, IMHO.

The server has a per-blog cache for each category - until a few minutes ago, that cache was simply a dictionary that looked something like this:

categoryName -> Set(filename1, filename2, ...)

Each entry was a set of filenames - the filenames being files that hold entries in the given category. When a category search comes in, the server merely grabs the set of filenames, gets the appropriate entries from each, and displays them. Well, now we wanted more information - so I created a small Object called CategoryHolder:

Smalltalk.Blog defineClass: #CategoryHolder
	superclass: #{Core.Object}
	indexedType: #none
	private: false
	instanceVariableNames: 'filenames numberOfItems '
	classInstanceVariableNames: ''
	imports: ''
	category: 'Blog'

All I did was move the set of filenames into an object, and included a count of items. That gets incremented each time a new entry falls into a category. Then I made the necessary refactorings in the handful of methods that dealt with this cache. Finally, I had to load the changes into the server. Once those changes were in, I had to script up a conversion method - which consisted of this:

| blogs |
blogs := Blog.BlogSaver allInstances.
blogs do: [:each |
		each categoryFileCache: nil.
		each setupSearchCategory].

Now, it's possible that you got an error browsing the blog if you happened to hit it while I was executing that - but it was all done in less than 30 seconds. The new functionality is there now, and all without cycling the server. That's the power of Smalltalk

The Cincom Smalltalk User's Conference is rapidly approaching - it's taking place this December in Frankfurt, Germany. I don't have a full schedule to link to yet, but I can give you a few details on what to expect:

• Lots of talk from Cincom Smalltalk engineering. A bunch of our technical staff will be there to answer your questions. They will also be giving talks on a variety of subjects:
• GLORP - where this open source O/R framework is headed
• The VisualWorks Web Toolkit and Seaside - both will be discussed
• dotNET connectivity and interoperability
• Opentalk interoperability
• The Product Roadmap for ObjectStudio and VisualWorks

There will be lots of other detailed technical talks as well, and an opportunity to talk to our engineers. Don't miss it!