Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Gordon Weakliem quotes Joel Spolsky on the EA work practices I disparaged here:

I don't think EA forces the long hours because it's more productive ... I think they force the long hours to insure relatively high churn in their employees allowing them to bring in low-wage recent graduates rather than expensive experienced hires. The CMU report said they were trying to go from hiring 10% college grads to 75% college grads.People want to make video games because it's fun. For many people working in the industry, making games is what they would do if they were independently wealthy and could do anything they wanted.

As Gordon says, that's a very astute point that I completely missed.

Update: An article on Yahoo about the uproar

The Movie industry and the recording industry continue to wave their middle fingers at the rest of us:

One of these ads shows a finger clicking a mouse, alongside a headline emblazoned in red: "Is this you?" That's followed by a long list of user names and IP addresses typical of those found on file-sharing networks such as Kazaa, eDonkey, DirectConnect, Grokster and Lime Wire, which are named specifically. "If you think you can get away with illegally trafficking in movies, think again," the ad warns.

The ad campaign will also be supported by the Video Software Dealers Association, which plans to post versions of the ads in 10,000 video stores nationwide, the MPAA said.

The software, designed to scan hard disks for media and peer-to-peer files, will soon be freely available from the MPAA. A representative of the group said the program, developed by a Danish software company, does not yet have a name.

It will only identify files, not automatically delete them, the group said.

Explain to me again why I should be giving these gangsters my business?

Smalltalk Solutions is the premier forum for bringing together Smalltalk users, developers, and enthusiasts. This year's conference will take place June 27-29 in fun-filled Orlando at the Wyndham Orlando Resort

We are currently accepting proposals for all varieties of talks involving Smalltalk technology and other areas of interest to Smalltalkers. We need your participation to help maintain the high technical level of the conference! See www.smalltalksolutions.com/participate2005.htm for more information.

The Conference will conveniently take place entirely within the Wyndham Orlando Resort:

• Be Minutes from Meetings and Activities
• Save on Travel costs
• No walking Long Distances
• No Inclement Weather Worries
• Hotel Discount for Conference Attendees

Smalltalk Solutions 2005 has a great rate of $109 USD plus applicable taxes. Please call early (407-351-2420) and mention Smalltalk Solutions 2005 when making your reservations for the discount rate.

Wyndham Orlando Resort is a tropical paradise in the heart of the world's most popular vacation destination. Lush gardens and romantic lagoons make it easy to forget that this elegant resort is located on bustling International Drive. Florida's most thrilling theme parks - Walt Disney WorldR, Universal StudiosR Florida and Sea WorldR Adventure Park - and the Orange County Convention Center are only minutes away. Relax in a secluded, old Floridian-style villa. The hotel guest rooms are full of delightful touches like pillowtop mattresses and in-room movies.Suites with bunk beds and play areas just for kids are perfect for families.

Outside, enjoy a host of pleasures like Gatorville Bar & Grill and three gorgeous pools. Jog along a tropical garden path or visit our health club. Or find a treasure in one of the great shops that are just steps away. When the sun goes down, dine in the casual elegance of our Augustine's Grille. Then revel in Orlando's hottest nightspots on International Drive.

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• Free high-speed Internet access
• Free local and domestic long calls
• Free domestic faxes and copies
• Best available room on day of
• Express check-in and late check-
• Dedicated ByRequest Manager every Wyndham location

Smalltalk Solutions is a Smalltalk Industry Council Event. The Smalltalk Industry Council (STIC) is a nonprofit trade association whose goal is to promote the awareness of and increase demand for Smalltalk.

You know that home costs are rising when you see this:

A bag of bills stolen from a casino was snapped up by beavers who wove thousands of dollars in soggy currency into the sticks and brush of their dam on a creek in eastern Louisiana.

"They hadn't torn the bills up. They were still whole," said Maj. Michael Martin of the St. Helena Parish Sheriff's Office.

Must be inflation :)

Sci Fi Wire reports that both SG-Atlantis and SG-1 have been renewed. That's great news - good sci-fi lives for another tv season :)

Sun tests the OSS waters with Solaris:

Sun, which has never completely rebounded from the tech collapse in 2001, hopes the no-cost of Solaris 10 will not only attract customers but also expand the number of developers who write programs that work on computers running the operating system.

The result, Sun believes, will be renewed demand for its servers and services. The company also will charge subscription fees for Solaris support and service programs that are typically sought by the businesses and organizations that Sun targets.

Well, that depends on what they do with the license. In general, free works for open source software - but does not work for commercial code. Sun seems like they get this - check this from further down in the article:

Sun also has promised make the underlying code of Solaris available under an open-source license, though the details have not been released. With access to the code, Solaris users will be able to take advantage of its features when developing their own software and systems.

So it's an open question to some extent. On the other hand, how likely is it for Sun to attract the kind of community that Linux has? Linux has a lot more time and momentum behind it. Time will tell.

Laurent Bossavit explains the notion of "Cargo Cult" programming - the example being setting a temporary variable to null (i.e., one that is going out of scope)

You may object that the setting-to-null superstition is totally harmless. So is throwing salt over your shoulder. While this may be true of one particular superstition, I would be particularly concerned about a team which had many such habits, just like you wouldn't want to trust much of importance your batty old aunt who avoids stepping on cracks, stays home on Fridays, crosses herself on seeing a black cat, but always sends you candy for Christmas.

What superstitious coding practices does your group have?

Scoble made a long post awhile back on blogging, podcasting, and marketing. Here's an interesting exchange with Dave Winer:

And, in reaction to one of my answers:
"I'm getting some marketing spin here."

Goodness, what does Winer think blogging and podcasting are all about? It's all marketing spin. Scoble apologizes for that further down, but there's no apology necessary - we all do it. We all have whatever biases we bring to the table - personal, political, technological. What that means is that any conversation we have is - to some extent - spin. It gets somewhat more complex for those of us who are corporate bloggers:

In all honesty, I don't talk in public quite as freely as I do in private. For instance, I don't swear in public, but have been known to do so with my friends. I do a few other things in private that I don't do in public too.

I also don't talk about everything I think about what Microsoft is doing in public. Why? Cause I have to think about the dozens of constituencies that are listening and reading. My weblog, for instance, recently was forwarded around a competitor of Microsoft's, who'll stay unnamed here, (a guy who worked there told me that). I know people at Apple and Google and IBM and Oracle who read me. So, obviously, I'm not going to discuss things on my weblog that could help our competitors.

I think that's pretty clear, but wanted to disclose that it wasn't honest of me to say that what I say when the microphone is open is the same as what I'd say when the microphone is off.

"Do you feel you could say anything about Microsoft on your weblog?" Dave asked.

I said I do. But, clearly, that's not correct either. I can't say what's in Longhorn that hasn't been discussed in public (and there's a lot that hasn't been yet). I can't discuss undergoing legal issues. I can't discuss HR issues. I can't disclose financial results (assuming I knew them, which I don't) before they are released by officers' of the company. I do feel free to criticise the company when I see they could be doing something better (look at my comparison of Google vs. MSN's results, or read my memos to Bill Gates).

Clearly, most of us in a corporate blogging role are not completely free to speak our minds on all topics. Sometimes there's a policy - other times it's self censorship. In my case, I avoid certain topics completely - politics, for instance. There's no possible upside to that topic so far as I'm concerned - I'm trying to be a Smalltalk evangelist, and people who disagree with me politically could still be convinced technically. I also avoid dirty laundry. There are some aspects to the "way things work" in any outfit that are silly (or even stupid). Again, there's no upside to bringing those things up here. In some cases, my critiques could simply be my opinion, and in other cases, bringing them up here would make them harder to address internally. In other words, silence does not imply acceptance or agreement in all cases :)

Bob Congdon spotted something interesting - Pixar has posted a "How we make a movie" thing, in the form of a ViewMaster style slideshow. Having just seen "The Incredibles", it was kind of neat.

I'll be teaching a modified intro to Smalltalk (VisualWorks) class this coming week. I should have network access where I'm going (not far from my house, as it happens) - but blogging will probably be light, as I'll be busy.

What a fantastic movie - "The Incredibles" works for kids and adults. My daughter loved it, and the wife and I both loved it. The action was good, the story was good - and the basic message of the movie was good. Run out and see it now if you haven't already!

Patrick Logan points to evidence that Java manages extensions via complexity.

If you live in the UK, your PM now has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to.

Gary King points to a NY Times story (registration required) on a new police system that went live in San Jose. They practiced what you might call "Deploy First Development". There are so many things wrong with what they did that it's hard to count them all:

• Minimal testing
• No end user involvement in development

The latter is especially critical, since the system in question is used by dispatchers and patrol officers - here, let's pull a quote from a dispatcher:

It takes longer to give officers information about the prior arrest record of someone they have just caught, said Melissa Albrecht, a San Jose dispatcher for 15 years. "Does that two extra minutes make a difference when they're standing there with a felon?" she asked. "It could.'' In September, Ms. Albrecht sent a six-page memorandum to the police chief listing her concerns.

She credits Intergraph with many improvements. But the system still does not allow dispatchers to perform several tasks simultaneously, and this causes delays. "What they keep throwing at us is that the system works as designed, and my question for them is, 'Does this design work for us?' " she said.

Right there is a problem that is so prevalent in software development - "it works as designed", not "the design fits the use cases". In the entire article, there's really no justification given for replacing the older system that had been in use since 1990. Now, there may well be good reasons - they just didn't get listed. The sole rationale given is that the old system was customized, and the new system is off the shelf. I might translate that as: The old system was built with our specific requirements in mind. The new system was built with no one's particular requirements in mind.

It's not that COTS software is a bad idea; after all, we don't all roll our own spreadsheet software. It's that a real evaluation that involves the end users ought to be performed before you swap one in - especially in a mission critical area...

Check out the Sydney STUG meeting for November 15th:

Join us at the Sydney Smalltalk Users Group tonight where Bryce Kampjes will be speaking about the Smalltalk compiler he is working on.

Exupery is a bytecode to machine code compiler for Squeak Smalltalk. The entire compiler is fully written in Smalltalk. It's designed to combine a dynamic type feedback JIT with full traditional optimisation.

The problem with traditional JITs is they try to balance fast compilation for infrequently used methods with generating good code for hot spots. This is a mistake. It's impossible to do both jobs well. An interpreter will be faster for a method that's only executed once because compile time dominates. If the method is executed a lot, it's a hot-spot, then compilation overhead will be amortised.

A compiler for a multimedia system can not afford delays and should produce high quality code. This rules out compiling just before executing the method, and suggests using a slower compiler running in a background thread. Just the architecture that would suit writing the compiler in Smalltalk... And with time a lot more optimisations are possible.

Date: Monday 15th Nov 2004
Time: 6:00 PM

Venue:
James Squire Brewhouse
22 The Promenade, King Street Wharf
King St Wharf, Sydney
Tel : 02 8270 7999

Head down to the bottom of King st Turn right and it is a few hundred metres past some other restaurants almost opposite the Foxtel sign across the water

We'll be in the Ward room, which is an enclosed boardroom at the back of the James Squire. Go through the restaurant, past the left hand side of the bar and turn right.

Here is a url for the venue: http://www.malt-shovel.com.au/brewhouse.asp?Sydney=true

Sign up to the Sydney Smalltalk Users Group mailing list here: http://lists.openskills.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sydney-stug

I've been to that meeting place (last summer when I visited). It's a great venue - a brewpub with internet access :)

Today's my daughter's 11th birthday, so we'll be off doing the family celebration thing with her grandparents later on - she gets to pick a restaurant, and off we'll go. She's receiving her stream of birthday wishes from relatives on the phone now. Interestingly enough, we haven't had her party yet - she wanted to go to the game convention with me instead. That was fun, even with how badly I did there :)

The RoboDump:

RoboDump is a robot. Sort of. And it poops. Sort of. Forever. A horrible, never-ending bowel movement complete with straining grunts, horrific gas, splashes, and pee sounds.

I snuck RoboDump into the men's room at the office. Unfortunately, today turned out to be the day of a board meeting. Whoops! It still went over well; the office was abuzz all morning with gossip about the guy in the bathroom. Several people theorized it was the CFO. The janitor commented to someone in the hallway that he wanted to clean the restroom but "this guy's been in there all morning."

Well, I'm back from the gaming convention in Timonium. I went with my daughter and Mike - I didn't do at all well this time around. Last year, I won 3 straight games and came in third in the final - this time, I came in 3rd and 4th in the first two heats, and then 2nd (on a tie breaker!) in the third heat. heck, my daughter and Mike both won a game, so they did better. It was a fun time anyway. I learned some new games, and brought home a copy of TransAmerica - a nice, fast moving game that we all liked. Better luck next time!

Danny Ayers lets slip the real reason for Atom:

From the start I've thought of the benefits of Atom as including getting away from the messy politics, and having a format that includes most of the best bits of RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0.

Translated: "We all hate Dave Winer". The supposed reason:

Both RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 are pretty weak when it comes to inline content handling (1.0 largely because of its origins from the early RDF specs, 2.0 because of ambiguity about escaping). A lot of effort has gone into sorting that out in Atom. Errm, that actually contradicts Tim's argument a little - it is doing something new

This "ambiguity over escaping" is a hardy chestnut that keeps popping up. In theory, it's an objection. In actual practice, it's mostly a non-problem. So ultimately, IMHO, Atom exists because a bunch of people interested in syndication hate Dave Winer. Yeah, there's a great reason to create a code tax for the rest of us...

Well, I could have done a lot better at this con. The first game - 4th. The second - 3rd. At least my daughter is still in the running - she won one of her first two games...

Now here's a pathetic tale of idiot management. Mandatory overtime (in the form of long days and 6-7 day work weeks). Having been a union member (back when I was a school teacher), I'm not a big fan of unions. On the other hand, this is exactly the sort of abuse that unions tend to stop. I tend to think of unions as a necessary evil - there's no need for one with a decent employer - but there are plenty of situations (like the linked one) that positively cry out for one. The tragedy is that unions tend to overstay their welcome and become as stupid as the bad management they were created to fight against...

You'll have to read Doc Searls post on the contortions the music industry is going through to believe it. The position they ended up in can't be comfortable, and I'm not entirely certain that it's a physical possibility...

I've made a new modification to the Wiki Server in order to try and stop the flood of wiki spam that's been coming in. There's a potential downside; it's possible that a valid page edit could fail. If that happens to you, please send me email. I'm archiving off the (presumed to be bad) content, so I can always recover edits that get rejected. Let's see how well it works...

It turns out that the repercussions from this went one step beyond what I thought; the master feed wasn't being updated the last two days. It's back online now

We are on track for the next release of Cincom Smalltalk. Take a look at the information page here, and at the roadmap over here. We expect to ship before the end of the month - ObjectStudio 7.0 and VisualWorks 7.3

Dave Winer inadvertently explains why text is usually better:

I think we'll be lucky to get even limited metadata, and transcripts are completely out of reach. I'm not going to spend the time or money to produce them for my podcasts. And even if I could easily and economically produce a transcript, I wouldn't. Adam tried to excerpt my last podcast and found it impossible. I wasn't surprised. It was a sequence of thoughts, each building on the previous. Try to pull one out of context and it doesn't work. If I had to respond to people who had skimmed my podcast (by reading the transcript) I would stop doing it.

Text is easier to deal with in so many way. There's a place for audio, but not as a replacement...

I've placed the US flag in the menu to the right in honor of Veteran's Day here in the US. My grandfather (mother's side) was a veteran of WWI - Veteran's day is today in remembrance of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Coincidentally, I just started reading "Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918, World War I and Its Violent Climax", a book that covers the final endgame of that war. So here's a tip of the hat to my daughter's namesake, Victor Anderson - a man I never knew, but whom I've learned an awful lot about from my mother.

ComputerWorld has a long article on the morale situation in IT. Here's something that made me sit up and take notice:

Underlying workers' complaints about layoffs and burnout is a kind of mourning for what IT used to be - a well-paid profession made up of hands-on problem solvers who were respected for their abilities.

Today, in contrast, "if you want to be someone who is a doer, you pretty much have to be a contract worker," says the database expert. "You can no longer be an employee because they're hiring employees to manage and supervise the process, not to do the process. Management views the doers as a commodity."

Oh, really. When exactly was IT made up of problem solvers who helped out the user community? I've been an end user (from the perspective of IT) in all but one of my software jobs - and I don't recall any point where IT was viewed as positively as the above implies. The author of this article really, really needs to go back and read Dilbert from the early 90's forward.

Here's the thing that many (not all) IT departments completely forget - they are plumbers - they keep the water flowing, but they don't actually execute on the business plan. Yes, they have a critical role in helping the business users succeed - but it's an enabling role. Way, way too many IT staffers forget that - and they refer to users a Lusers.

You know the primary reason that outsourcing has gotten so popular? Because the track record of IT departments stinks. Outsourced IT may not have a better track record (personally, I suspect that it will end up being worse) - but it's seen as cheaper. Look at it from the business users side - if service is going to be awful, and if projects are going to fail ugly - why not at least pay less for the priviledge? IT departments have a lot of introspection to do, and the woe is me thing isn't helping them...

Update: On a related note, Frank Hayes notes that large projects tend to fail. Now, quick - what kinds of projects does IT love to embrace, and what kinds of projects tend to get outsourced? Hmm...

I bet Jonathan Schwartz isn't too happy with this ComputerWorld editorial. Sounds like the move from Unix to Linux is getting more and more widespread...

Microsoft might have publicized their new search engine a little too soon; when I tried it out just now, it was slow, and came back with this:

This site is temporarily unavailable, please check back soon

Update: Sriram Krishnan is equally unimpressed

Brad Abrams visited a University recently, and some of the student feedback he got was amazing:

WashU uses Java as its primary teaching language.  The thing that surprised me was that none of the people I interviewed really liked Java.  Their #1 complaint was that it is just too slow.  Usually when I pushed on this I either got generalization (it has to be slow because it has a GC) but some pointed out real issues such as startup time, small device or even throughput problems. One notable quote was: "I want to use C++ because Java is a toy language".  A lot of this push back struck me because *some* of the same criticism of Java can be applied to CLR based languages such as C# or VB.NET - I certainly hope an informed developer would not call C# or VB.NET "toy languages". Frankly I would not even call Java a toy language. 

This sounds like a visit to the he-man productivity haters club. C++ is a "real" language, and things like Java (or CLR based languages, or Smalltalk, etc) are toys? LOL

Now that's a fascinating use of RSS. Scoble points to this blog, which lists some interesting aspects of Halo2 - including this:

Additionally, are you ready for this? To the right here is a "GameViewer" with a view of each game, including perspectives on exactly where Robert kicked my ass in this specific game instance.

If that's not all? How about an RSS Feed of all my Halo 2 games?

Drink that in my friends. I wonder if there's some OLAP in there. I'd be fascinated to see the database schema.

That's kind of neat, I must admit...

Scoble points to an interesting resume in flash format. Apparently, it's not your father's job search anymore :)

Travis Griggs and Colin Putney have posted some information on how they automate builds using VisualWorks. This is good information - and something that we intend to make easier as we push out a Smalltalk Runtime system over the next few releases.

I get lots of questions about Pollock. There's a great place to learn all about it - Sam Shuster's blog. Sam is the lead developer for Pollock, and has been posting real examples of how to work with it.

Travis Griggs points out that it's often what you know that isn't so that's a real problem.

Another sign of the fetish over code generation. Does anyone else wonder why there's such a huge need for code generation over in the .NET and Java universes? Might it have something to do with overly complex systems?

The other day, I pointed to a startup error in the blog server. Well, it turns out that I had another bug that I only just noticed this morning. At startup, the server reads in the NC download registrations that have been made and sets up an internal cache to check against. Well, I had commented out some code that had been giving me trouble... and in the process, did not end up setting the cache up properly. Again, this is a failure to test problem on my part. So if you've had issues with NC downloads over the past few days, go ahead and try it now - should be fixed.

There's some good news on the NC download front coming up as well. With the 7.3 release, we'll have the installer network enabled (this already works for our vw-dev community). What does that mean? It means you'll be able to grab a small (less than 10 MB) download, and have the installer grab the components you need over the network. Should make for a much nicer install experience.

Don Park notes that the Atom folks are ready to declare victory and go home - after accomplishing very, very little. Dare Obasanjo made the appropriate points in the Atom mailing list:

• Thus far, Atom is RSS 2.0 with changed tag names and fewer features
• Aggregators have not had to make any internal data model changes for Atom

That latter point is what convinces me that this was a huge waste of time - in BottomFeeder, I have a set of parsing code for the various feed formats, and that's the only place in my application that is cognizant of Atom - the object model elsewhere neither knows nor cares.

Apparently, disliking Dave Winer isn't enough to drive a syndication format...

Jonathan Schwartz has a post up explaining how they (Sun) are going to monetize the rapidly expanding Java phone business (and the Java Desktop thing that he hopes will grow) - the back office servers that drive it all:

What's making the net work behind all those connected cell phones, set top boxes, automobiles, airplanes, medical devices, PCs and game machines (I could go on)? The very secure network infrastructure at the core of Sun's business. Who demands infrastructure of that scale? The network operators (the world's communications companies - satellite, wireline, mobile, you name it), and the leading services run through those networks (financial services being the most obvious, along with entertainment, media, and every other web service the world's contemplating for internet deployment, in-house or otherwise).

How big is that infrastructure market? Huge. And it isn't shrinking. We do billions of dollars in business with those companies, serving the very consumers described above - and our bet is they'll continue to grow. If you're going to bet on the value of the network, who better to partner with - rather than compete against - than the network operators and service providers.

That's not a bad idea, except for one thing - it's no longer 1997. Back in the late 90's, this idea worked pretty well, because there were only a handful of choices for scalable back office servers - Sun, IBM, HP. MS wasn't serious in that space yet, and Linux wasn't mature enough. Consequently, during the dot com boom, Sun sold scads of servers

Things have changed since then. MS now has credible server offerings. Linux is mature - and there are large outfits (IBM, for instance) backing the Linux play. Sun is not the low cost provider in servers - which is a problem for this strategy. To be fair, I don't know what I'd do in their position - but I don't think I'd be loudly touting a dot com era strategy as the route to salvation...

Patrick Logan points to this comment by Jon Udell from awhile back:

"When you think about it," Hugunin said, "why would the CLR be worse for dynamic languages than the JVM, given that Microsoft had the second mover advantage?" And in fact, while he had to do plenty of extra work to support dynamic features that the CLR doesn't natively offer, he notes that the massive engineering resources invested in the CLR make it highly optimized along a number of axes. So, for example, the CLR's function call overhead is apparently less than the native-code CPython's function call overhead, and this is one of the reasons why IronPython benchmarks well against CPython.

As Patrick says, I don't think that's the appropriate benchmark to use here...

At the end of this week, I'll be heading off to EuroQuest - a nifty board gaming convention that's held north of here. I've succeeded in my attempts to turn my daughter into a gamer - she is attending this convention with me on her birthday - her choice. We're looking forward to the Puerto Rico tournament, which is being held on Friday and Saturday. Should be a fun con!

There's one very good thing that building the blog server and BottomFeeder have accomplished for me - they've taught me a bunch of things about the product that I promote. I've been working with Smalltalk for a long time - since 1992. Until I pushed these two projects out though, I had never built anything "real" - I'd done consulting work, taught classes, built demos - but never anything that was intended to be really used. I run Bf on my desktop all the time now, and I use TypeLess (the plugin IRC client) to communicate with the community. I use the blog posting tool to post here

There's a difference between hacking around with a product (which is what I had always done before) and actually working with a product - which is what I do now. It's given me a lot better insight into the issues our customers face:

• The development tools themselves - browsers, Store, etc - it's one thing to have intellectual insight into limitations. It's another thing entirely to run smack into them
• Strengths and Weaknesses in the product - again, it's one thing to be an advocate - it's another thing to learn where your customers run into problems by slamming into them yourself

It's made me a better PM by taking me far more directly into the worldview of our customers. It's a place that more product managers ought to travel to.

David Brooks (registration required) has an interesting article on the ongoing decentralization of American life. He's addressing some of the political import of that, but I'm interested in the event itself - I live in one of these exurban areas that he talks about:

In my book I tried to describe the culture in these places - the office parks, the big-box malls, the travel teams and the immigrant enclaves. But when it came to marketing the book, I failed in two important ways.

I couldn't figure out how to tell the people in exurbia that I had written a book about them. Here I was writing about places like Loudoun County, Va., and Polk County, Fla., but my book tour took me to places like downtown Philadelphia, downtown Seattle and the Upper West Side. The places I was writing about are so new, and civic life is as yet so spare, there are few lecture series or big libraries to host author talks. The normal publishing infrastructure is missing.

I was about to give a reading in Berkeley when I asked a few of the bookstore employees if they sold many copies of Rick Warren's book, "The Purpose-Driven Life." They weren't familiar with the book, even though it has sold millions and millions of copies. I realized there are two conversations in this country. I was in the establishment conversation, but somehow I needed to get into the Rick Warren conversation and I could never find a way.

Columbia, Maryland is one of decentralized, exurban areas he's talking about. There are 100,000 people living here - but there's no actual city government (the Rouse company manages the various villages in Columbia, but our government is county level). There's a "downtown" in Columbia, but it's a mall and a handful of office buildings - surrounded by residential housing.

Most people living here live in single family homes with a yard - typically about 1/5th an acre or so. This kind of town is denigrated by urban dwellers as "having no culture", but there are reasons people choose to live here rather than in one of the nearby cities (Baltimore or Washington):

• Safer neighborhoods - there's far, far less crime here.
• Better schools - the neighborhood schools in Howard County are quite good, and that alone attracts parents in (it's one of the things that drove our decision to live here)
• Lots of good shopping and restaurants - we have a very wide variety of places to pick from in either category, and all of them are easy to get in and out of. In contrast, parking in Baltimore or DC is a nightmare
• Lots (and lots) of activities for kids. There are sports teams, dance clubs - you name it, there's a club or group sponsoring it

We almost never go into Washington or Baltimore - last time we hit DC was when relatives came and we toured with them. I can't recall the last time I went into Baltimore - it simply doesn't exist as a destination for me.

A lot of this is self reinforcing, I think. I grew up in an outer suburb of New York City - IBM country in Dutchess County, New York. Other than school field trips (and later, Yankee games) - I never went into New York. I never really felt like I was missing anything, either. There are lots of people my age who have the same sort of life experience - grew up in the suburbs, moved into one later on. We never experienced city life, and really don't have any notion that we are missing anything. I've visited lots of cities in my work life, and there are plenty of them I like - Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto - but I have less than no interest in living in that kind of environment.

This has all sorts of implications for marketing and politics - the suburbs aren't all like Levittown (and realistically, I wonder if they ever were)...

I had a problem restarting the blog server last night - I took it down in order to load in from scratch a new memory policy, and got bitten by an initialization issue I had created for myself. In the blog server, I initialize a particular blog this way:

BlogServer from: 'someInitializationFile.ini'

from: settingsFile
	| inst |
	inst := self basicNew.
	inst settingsFile: settingsFile.
	inst initialize.
	self default at: inst appkey put: inst.
	^inst

That looks simple enough - create the new blog instance, initialize it, and then stuff it in the dictionary I use for later lookup. Well, as it happens, the #initialize method ended up invoking code (while initializing a cache) that did this:

server := BlogSaver named: 'blogNameHere'

named: appkey
	^self default at: appkey ifAbsentPut: [self new].

That's where I trapped myself. The way #at:ifAbsentPut: works, the #new would get fired before the server object would get into the dictionary. #new would then go back through these actions.... and loop. How did I get into that mess? Well, by not testing the startup sequence on my test server. The server image had been running for quite awhile, and I had not tested the startup - even though I had added a fair bit of new code since the last time I restarted it. Lesson learned here - make sure to test the startup sequence before recycling the server.

Game releases are getting to be more and more like movie releases - Scoble has a number of posts up that illustrate that. Not completely alike though - a blockbuster movie would never be released this early in November (it would be held for the Thanksgiving/Christmas season). That makes me wonder - game releases seem to happen when they are ready. New TV shows are no longer released only in the fall. When will movies cross beyond blockbuster season?

Ed Foster points to where DRM is taking us - and I don't think that this road was ever paved with good intentions:

My new microwave won't work because it objects to the brand of refrigerator I have in the kitchen. And the aspirin bottle has detected a rival brand in the medicine chest and therefore can't be opened. And my mattresses tag-removal alarm system is ...

Well, OK, maybe things haven't gotten quite that bad yet, but it's certainly the direction that software Digital Rights Management schemes are taking us. Most distressing is the trend by game software publishers to use DRM that refuses to let the game play if software it doesn't like is detected on the user's system.

"They really have gone too far this time," one reader recently wrote. "Check out the links in this Slashdot discussion. Sims 2 checks your computer and will not run 'when active CD Emulation software is detected by the copy protection on the game CD.' That means Electronic Arts wants us to remove perfectly legal programs like Nero and Clone CD that are often pre-installed by the PC manufacturer! This can't be legal."

That's what I call user hostile behavior - it's worse than the bad old days of copy protection schemes.

Mark Cuban throws some well deserved rocks at the RIAA. It's really too bad that they are too stupid to listen. Their motto seems to be "when in doubt, sue!"

I guess Steven Culp wasn't empowered enough playing Major Hayes on Enterprise - he's moved up to being an emasculated husband on Desperate Housewives. And heck, the plotlines make more sense!