Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

When your Lexus can get sick from a Bluetooth phone, then you know that your car is just too darn smart for its own good. Hat tip to Doc Searls and Kim Cameron:

Lexus cars may be vulnerable to viruses that infect them via mobile phones. Landcruiser 100 models LX470 and LS430 have been discovered with infected operating systems that transfer within a range of 15 feet.

"If infected mobile devices are scary, just thinking about an infected onboard computer..," said Eugene Kaspersky, head of anti-virus research at Russian firm Kaspersky. "We do know that car manufacturers are integrating existing operating systems into their onboard computers (take the Fiat and Microsoft deal, for instance)."

Can I have an analog car, please?

Just like all the children are in the top 50% at school, Joel points out that all of our employees are hired from the top 1% - or at least, we like to tell ourselves that. This is one of the best pieces of advice in the article:

By the way, it's because of this phenomenon 14the fact that many of the great people are never on the job market - that we are so aggressive about hiring summer interns. This may be the last time these kids ever show up on the open market. In fact we hunt down the smart CS students and individually beg them to apply for an internship with us, because if you wait around to see who sends you a resume, you're already missing out.

If you are using VW 7.3 (part of the fall release of Cincom Smalltalk), then you'll wantto bookmark this page - engineering and support will be posting patches there as they become necessary. Visit the main patch page here in order to locate appropriate patches for releases going back to VW 5i.3.

One thing I should point out - those pages do not represent all possible patches for a given release - rather, they are a listing of the most critical ones. If you are having a problem that does not seem to be addressed there, then contact support.

Now that I've got my new laptop set up, I figured I should look at the age of my backups. I have an external (network or USB) 160 gb drive for that, and I decided to move it from a net drive to a usb drive with this machine. That was fine, except that all my files and directories were giving me "permission denied" errors. I had a brief moment of panic, thinking I'd lost my backups - but thenit ocurred to me that I should see who owned the files. Dohh - that was the problem. After I swapped ownership, all was well. Sometimes, the problems are blindingly simple...

Via Phil Windley, we learn the limits of Business Intelligence software:

So I'm waiting in line at Safeway to buy groceries. Like most supermarkets these days, they've got a loyalty card program and offer reasonable discounts at checkout for cardholders. An older man in front of me wants to purchase items that are on a card special, but doesn't have his card and can't remember his phone number. The clerk says, "hmm, wait a minute." He starts punching in phone numbers at random, and after a few tries gets a "hit" and uses it to apply the discount. I wonder who just had hemorrhoid cream added to their past-purchases profile? Gotta love that inevitable weak link in business intelligence systems.

You can see the confusing results of this for yourself by buying books for yourself on Amazon - followed by a few unrelated gift purchases. The recommended reading list then gets to be "interesting", to say the least :)

I pointed to Morgan McLintic's blog earlier, but I should mention that it looks like a good resource on PR stuf. Subscribe here

Travis was wondering where all the innovation was in relation to the Refactoring Browser - and Sascha Doerdelman points to it. Looks like Niall Ross has been busy.

In a post about a lot of little things, Ted Leung points out - in passing - just how truly ubiquitous network access is becoming:

Also, today was the first day that I was actually able to use the Wifi network on the ferry. The WSF isn't quite ready to declare the system ready for use, but the Mobilisa folks let me register for an account, and have answered my tech support queries, so I figure I' m beta testing. So far I've used the network in the Seattle terminal, the Seattle terminal parking area (very important) and on the Tacoma and Wenatchee. Unfortunately the network didn't work in the Bainbridge Island parking area (very bad). And for some reason unknown to me and to SpeakEasy, my DSL provider, I can't access the servers at my house from the ferry network. The Mobilisa folks haven't figured that out either, yet, otherwise I would have posted from the ferry.

Now, put that together with Clemens Vasters' post from yesterday - posted from 36,000 feet via Connexion. We are rapidly approaching the always on world. It wasn't that long ago that there really wasn't a network (for most people, most of the time) - when I started at ParcPlace in 1993, I had dialup access to email, and that was about it. In just 12 years we've gone from that to always on. This is a huge change, and it's one that I don't see a lot of discussion on in the "traditional" media.

I think that these maturity levels that martin Morgan McLintic defines for agency/client relations apply to marketing departments as they relate to business units as well. Lots of good food for thought here

Back in the mid 90's, one of the (ever changing) slogans that ParcPlace-Digitalk adopted was "How fast can you respond?" Interestingly enough, that slogan was somewhat prescient - as Morgan McLintic notes in a post on PR responses to blog attacks:

The challenge from a PR perspective is what to do. To respond formally may exacerbate the problem. To ignore it can cost you dearly (ask Kryptonite). And so here we enter a realm where crisis public relations meets customer service. I think the best starting point is to establish the facts internally - does the attacker have a point? Here you have to be candid and try to see the offended blogger's perspective.

Morgan points out that you have to look at the seriousness of the charge before you decide to respond - I'd add that you have to also look at who's posting it. Like it or not, there are A-listers and there are B-Listers (and people lower down the food chain). There's a huge difference between one of the A listers going negative on you and someone with far less Google juice doing it. Part of your decision making process s going to have to be along the lines of "will searches tuen this rant up?". If the answer is yes, that ratchets the importance of the rant up. Of course, you have to also take the source into account in other ways:

The response needs to be considered carefully. The phrase 'Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel' applies here. A blog has a lot of space which has the potential to be filled with a personal diatribe of unfounded tosh. If the response is ill-judged or taken wrongly, the situation could be made worse. As a default, my approach would be to watch but say nothing - crises frequently blow over without turning into a wildfire, despite the initial smoke.

Which is to say, you don't want to elevate the relevance of an attack unnecessarily. This is similar to deciding how (or whether) to respond to a negative review in a trade journal - a lot depends on the source. The decisions don't get easier or harder when the rant is online; they just have to be made more frequently.

Cyrus explains some error reporting code in the current beta of VisualStudio - basically, VS is either going to throw a "recoverable Watson" at you when an exception occurs, or queue them up for later reporting. The idea is to have more information sent back to the team in Redmond. I'd be curious to know how this works out, for a very simple reason - in my experience, people - users and developers both - never read the text of the error messages that come up. They tend to hit <return> and move along. It looks like the default for this is going to be "send the information to MS". It will be interesting to see how that works for them.

Via Blaine Buxton, who got this from lemonodor:

Bruce Eckel, author of Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++, is working on a new edition of Thinking in Java: This language, which was once hailed (admittedly, by the PR flaks at Sun itself) as being "much easier than C++" really isn't anymore.

When your strategy is to add features via complexity, that's where things end up

Hmm - Frank Hayes doesn't sound nearly skeptical enough about Oracle's migration plans:

Let's say Larry Ellison is right. Suppose Oracle does hold on to PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards users by finding a way to let them migrate gracefully to a best-of-all-worlds merged product that's now code-named Project Fusion and is supposed to be ready by 2008

How will Oracle do that? Nobody knows. It's never been done. Today, ERP migration is hard and painful. Making it easy will require a huge leap forward in migration technology.

But what if Oracle is serious about this and it really happens? Then things get interesting -- and not just for PeopleSoft users.

I think Hayes needs to run the oracle Installer a few times - that'll disabuse of him of the notion that Oracle can pull this off. I still have nightmares about the 8.1.5 installer - half the reason I haven't upgraded the OS on my Linux box recently is fear that I might have to upgrade Oracle - which takes me to this morning's confidence building installation of Oracle client libraries on my new laptop. 600 MB later (for the client?), I had the installation files. Partway through the install, Windows popped up a message telling me that system files had been modified with unrecognized versions... and the installer was the only thing that could have done that. Yeah, that made me confident.

I think it's time for PeopleSoft/JD Edwards users to start sweating - if for no other reason than that they'll have to face the Oracle installation tools...

Bob Congdon points to a snowy tribute to Calvin and Hobbes. I wish we had enough snow here to do some of those!

This is cool news - the Universal subscription client supports a bunch of newsreaders, including BottomFeeder:

I added USM capability for 20 RSS readers into the USM reference implementation client. Click here to download the installer. The installer will prompt you for your preferred RSS reader. The supported RSS readers are My Yahoo!, My MSN, Bloglines, NewsGator Online, Ampheta Desk, Awasu, Bot a Blog, Bottom Feeder, FeedValidator, fyuse, Headline Viewer, IzyNews, mobilerss, NewsIsFree, NewsMonster, nttp://rss, Radio Userland, Syndic8, Wildgrape, WinRSS. I don't spend much time debugging, so please send me feedback and bugs.

There's some interest in a Southern California Smalltalk STUG - see the Usenet post. Apparently, a meetup has been planned. The DC meetup last week went quite well.

Just in case you were happy to see IBM and Sun releasing (some) patents, have a look at Tim Bray's post on what we aren't hearing about. The ones he highlights truly are atrocities...

If you are attending OOP (in Munic, Germany), then check out Joseph Pelrine's talk on agile testing in Smalltalk:

On January 26, I'll be speaking at the annual Smalltalk evening at the OOP conference in Munich. The topic will be on agile testing in Smalltalk

Derek continues to expose poor practices by various and sundry copanies he deals with - today's target is Charter One, and it sounds like they deserve all the scrutiny they can get:

There was an article in the local rag about a theft from the local branch of the Charter One bank. Apparently there was a bag of paperwork and check-deposits waiting for a courier to pick them up. That bag was stolen and absconded with.

According to the article:

A letter from the bank to customers who made deposits that day at the Wall Street office said the bag contained "branch work for the day" and that the depositors must "obtain replacement items for any check you deposited on January 14, 2005."

Boy, that's convenient. Makes me all warm and fuzzy that Charter One handles my mortgage...

I see that there's been another report of paid blogging over in the political realm. I'm not so interested in what the topic was - I'm more interested in the paid blogging itself. I can't find a reference, but a few months ago there was some buzz about a blog equivalent to product placement - i.e., some company pays you $$, and you blog (without revealing the payment) on a product and its virtues. What's going on in politics right now is the same thing. It seems to me that disclosure is the best policy.

If people don't know that you are being paid to promote something - and then that fact leaks out - your credibility is shot. I think this is true in any marketing effort - be it political or business. Once your credibility is shot that way, it's going to be very, very hard to get it back - everything you say is going to be examined with the paid, undisclosed marketing in mind. If, on the other hand, you disclose what you are up to, it's different.

Yes, I live in the suburbs. Bob Congdon notes that his Starbucks density is 19 (5 mile radius). Mine is a paltry 4 :)

Sriram Krishnan attended a TechEd conference, and has a good set of notes posted. I noticed this in passing:

Every attendant gets a number of points, and he can give any number of these points for any feature he believes is important. The features with the most points get implemented. The last time the board took a vote, the edit and continue feature got 0 points, which means it probably won't become implemented in the feature, unless a lot of pressure is applied by developers and clients.

Hmm - I thought I've seen other people (from MS, but I could be mistaken) say that this would be added to "Whidbey". In any event, I find it fascinating that a development board would think this is so irrelevant - really makes a Smalltalker scratch is head and go "huh?"

I see a lot of what Scoble points at in this post, and yes, I'm guilty of this "look at me, I'm so busy!" kind of chest thumping as well (although, at the moment I have only 2 emails sitting in my inbox :) )

All day while going around the Blog Business Summit I've been asking people: "How many emails do you have in your inbox?"
One famous blogger (I won't name names, sorry): "4,200."
Another: "2,100."
Another: "700."
Russell Beattie reported on his blog yesterday: "274."
Me? It's embarrassing how much. 148 in my "priority 0" folder (and a ton more in my lower priority folders).

A slight variation is to "complain" about how many unread RSS items you have. Just in case anyone thought that software developers were really any different than anyone else :)

Via Doc Searls comes a pointer to some funny definitions - I like these:

POCKETS OF RESISTANCE 13 "Sounds like someone having trouble pulling their hands out of their pants pockets." 13 Joe Hutley, Las Vegas, NV.

ENEMY COMBATANT 13 "Makes no sense. Do we have friendly combatants? Neutral combatants? Or how about enemy bystanders? If they are your enemy, just say so." 13 Bill Sellers, Hampton, Va.

Hehe - there are some other good ones there as well.

Slashdot reports that the Enterprise folks aren't giving up on the show - no, they plan some real stupidity to wrap things up:

"It seems Star Trek: Enterprise isn't about to go down without a fight. TrekToday is reporting that Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis will guest-star on the season finale of Star Trek: Enterprise, to reprise their Next Generation roles of William T. Riker and Deanna Troi. Hello stunt casting! The news has been confirmed on Sirtis' official fan site."

Thank goodness for quality SciFi like BattleStar Galactica - where the characters actually seem to have substance, and a third dimension...

The MPAA wants nothing less than to overturn the betamax decision. If they get what they want, it could get very, very ugly...

It certainly looks like ebay will sell anything - you think they could be more careful with their wording? Hat tip to Mike

Panopticon discusses Singletons, mostly (but not exclusively) in the context of VB. I thought this deserved some comment:

In most languages, you have to manage singleton objects yourself. This is usually accomplished by sealing the type (i.e. making it NotInheritable), making it uninstantiable (i.e. making its constructor Private) and exposing a shared property called something like DefaultInstance that returns, well, the default instance. If only the language would do that management for you automatically, how nice would that be? If only...

In Smalltalk, Singletons are typically by convention (there are exceptions; built in things like SmallInteger, for instance) rather than enforced. For instance - say I want a single instance of class MyWebService - I'll typically write code like this:

Smalltalk defineClass: #MyWebService
	superclass: #{Core.Object}
	indexedType: #none
	private: false
	instanceVariableNames: ''
	classInstanceVariableNames: 'default '
	imports: ''
	category: 'Web Services'

"class methods"
new
	^super new initialize.

default
	^default isNil
		ifTrue: [default := self new]
		ifFalse: [default]

reset
	default := nil

The idea is, all usage runs through the #default method. Now, this has pros and cons. The obvious con is that we don't have enforcement of singleton status, merely a convention. You can be a little more rigid by moving the lazy initialization into the #new method - but even then, developers can always invoke #basicNew. The point is, it can be gotten around with some level of effort. Paradoxically, that's also a pro - because it makes ad-hoc testing easy. We can create a new instance "on the side" without munging the "default" instance.

As is always the case in Smalltalk, the decisions are mostly left in the hands of the end developer rather than in the hands of the system. Is that a good thing? I think so, but YMMV

I've been watching 24 for 3 years now (through one absurd plot point after another, but nevermind) - the pacing is what I like better than the stories. Sometimes though, the absurdity of a situation just jumps out and bites me. A couple of examples come to mind from the ast two episodes:

• Jack has to keep the suspect (Kalil) from leaving the gas station long enough to get satellite coverage. He decides to fake a holdup.

Ummm - how about slashing the tires of his car? Or perhaps walking into the store and just being a jerk, forcing the clerk to pay attention to him? That one passed quickly, but the next one was a whopper. The terrorists are using the internet to broadcast a show trial, and the rescue forces are 20 minutes out - so they decide to bomb the place. Ummm - did anyone think to call the power company and just cut the power to the site? They knew where it was - a local blackout would have been easy.

It's things like this that jar you out of the plot and into "wtf??" mode during it. "Enterprise" does that all the time - and 24 is getting worse about it. At least there's Sci-Friday on Sci-Fi channel :)

Ted Leung makes some interesting points about development tools and the power they give you - if those tools actually grok the system they are being used to build

With Python, the tools are different. Right now I use a combination of Emacs and ipython for much of my work. When I start having to interact with code in the application layer of Chandler, then I find it useful to have Wing in order to present a usable debugger interface (I can hear James Robertson cringing all the way from the other side of the country). But none of these tools really understand what a Python program means either.

This is one of the biggest failures those of us in the Smalltalk (and Lisp) communities have - the failure to properly explain to people what it is we have, and why it's of value. Apparently, all most people see is that Smalltalk is different (and to many people, different = bad all by itself). Ted points out the value underneath the hood, and it's something we need to be better about explaining.

So, relative to my various posts on the joys of Windows networking, I now have a question - if I want to copy across the network, why is the DOS XCOPY command so much faster than the Windows shell copy/paste operation? I can't believe that the little paper animation is slowing things down that much; something else is at work here. Very odd.

Ian Bicking has a post on exception handling - specifically, on handling arbitrary exceptions:

But there's other cases. Anytime you won't be there to babysit a process, you need to handle unexpected exceptions. For a command-line utility, you can read the exception when it occurs, no big deal. But for a long-running or batch process you need to intelligently deal with exceptions. Also for processes that are run by non-developers: you want to capture the error information so a developer can look at it, and then try to keep going if you can.

You'll want to read Ian's entire post; I'm only excerpting a small amount here. This does illustrate something of interest to me though - for a deployed application (especially a deployed client application), you want to be able to catch all exceptions. In Smalltalk, that's straightforward - the system already does that.

During Smalltalk development, an unhandled exception will give you a notifier (which offers you the option of debugging). Clearly, that's not what you want at runtime. On the other hand, you would like something like this:

• Catch all exceptions
• If it's possible to continue after handling the problem, do so
• If it's not possible to continue, at least save work and quit cleanly

In a VisualWorks application, the way you accomplish this is to look at class Notifier. What you can do is create a new class - either a subclass, or a separate class that implements the API - and swap it in as the default exception handler. When you package with RuntimePackager, it does this with it's own handler (default behavior - log the error and quit). You can change this behavior to anything you want - on a per exception basis. Very powerful, and extremely useful.

Tim Bray relates a small story about Canadian customs and pc/software imports - I had a funny experience at the border once with Cincom Smalltalk non-commercial CD's. I declared them as I went into Canada to attend a conference - I had about 100 with me. The agents I met had the devils own time trying to figure out how to charge me for importing free software :) In the end, they charged me $50 CDN and off I went. They didn't hassle me - it just took them awhile to figure out what to do.

The unadulterated stupidity that is Windows networking continues. Let's see how Windows can irritate the crap out of me now:

• In the middle of a huge file transfer, decide that "wow, I see another wifi network. Let me disconnect you from the one you are on to inform you about it"
• In the midst of a large transfer, simply offer a cancel dialog when, for no good reason at all, you can't transfer a specific file. Claim that it's in use, and force me to start all over again. Whatever you do, don't offer an option to skip and continue
• When I restart the transfer, don't offer to only grab only the files I already have. Force me to decide one by one, or just do a wholesale replacement

Thank you, Microsoft. The next time I have to fork over my own money for a machine, it's going to be a Mac or Linux box - because this just sucks. Hey Scoble - the Tablet stuff is completely irrelevant, because your base networking code is just a pile of steaming dung. Next time you visit the campus, make sure you let the Windows networking team know what a complete mess they've made of Windows.

Interesting tidbit from Slashdot here:

"In a very low key announcement on his blog, Ben Goodger, lead developer for Firefox, has announce that effective from a couple of weeks ago, he has become a Google employee. In practice his day to day job won't change that much, in that he will still lead Firefox through its forthcoming releases, but with Google paying his wages, we can be sure that new and interesting overlap between the Mozilla Foundation's browsers and Google's services are sure to develop."

Is this just "funding" of ongoing Firefox development, or something more interesting?

The saga continues. I love the way files get copied across the network - a random amount of time spent in a dialog stating "Preparing to copy", followed by a slow motion transfer of bits. Then there's directory sharing - whether you can share a given directory or not seems to be a random event - when I wanted to share "Program Files" (in order to transfer my mail client), I was told that I could drag the folder over to "Shared Documents", or I could walk through the network wizard, which seems to have some other purpose entirely. Which part of "just open up the effing machine, darnit" isn't clear here? Why do I have to walk through a million steps to accomplish something that ought to be simple? I swear, it would be simpler to burn a CD....

The good news is, corporate sent me a new notebook. The bad news is... they sent me a new notebook. Transferring software is always so much fun - memo to Microsoft - get that bozo who thought up the registry over here, and let me slap him around a few times. Are you listening Scoble? Your software people may have found application level ini files somehow inelegant, but they allow for easy movement. Sigh. Moving on from that nightmare, there's the font nightmare. What's with the extra jaggy fonts on XP? My old notebook doesn't look like this, and yes - I tried setting ClearType - exactly zero effect. Grrrrr.

Update: I found the ClearType setting turned off under "effects" when right clicking on the desktop; I guess the MSDN pages on the MS site that claimed to be turning that on were not completely accurate. In any case, it looks better now. Still mystifying - was it off by default from MS, or from my IT group's build?

The Slashdot crowd weighs in on Schwartz' open letter to IBM:

"Sun's President and CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, yesterday published an Open Letter to the CEO of IBM, Sam Palmisano, in which he alluded to "behavior reminiscent of an IBM history many CIOs would like to forget" - a reference to Sun's frustration that IBM isn't supporting Solaris 10 with WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli, Rational and MQSeries products. In his "Dear Sam" letter - circulated via his blog - Schwartz refers first to the "long history of partnering" between Sun and IBM, and claims Sun customers have made repeated calls to IBM about having the choice to run IBM products on Solaris 10." *cough* Kettle, meet Pot.

Heh

Ted Leung makes a good point - you are what you write. The new norm in interviewing is being Googled, and - if you have a blog - what you've written there will show up.

Recently I've been doing a bunch of interviewing at OSAF, and I'm experiencing something new. Of course, we all know that people Google each other before meeting each other, so I sort of expect that people will Google the folks that they are interviewing / interviewing with. Recently, some of the folks I've interviewed have brought up information that they Googled on me (predominantly from my blog) during the interview. This has lead to brief moments during the course of the interview where I really felt like I was being interviewed (which of course is really always true). Just more first-hand experience of the way that blogs and search engines are changing our day to day lives.

I remember being told about my permanent record back when I was in school - I think this means that I actually have one now...

Ben Hammersley points to two disturbing facts about internet usage:

According to the Pew Internet Survey:
Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or "sponsored" results and unpaid results...two-thirds say they could walk away from search engines without upsetting their lives very much.

Meanwhile Brian McWilliams points out a recent survey by Forrester Research (PDF), that has 41 percent of U.S. internet users have made purchases in response to spam.

Just in case the overwhelming volume of spam was confusing you...

Ten is a good number has some interesting information on how the soundtrack for "2001: A Space Odyssey" came to be.

Looks like I called the Pats/Steelers game too. No big surprise there - I don't think these games were hard to call. Patriots/Eagles it is - and I'm not calling that one yet :)

Well, it looks like I called the early game correctly. Now let's see about that AFC game...

Johnny Carson died last night. For those of us roughly 40 and over, Carson personified late night - more than Leno, more than Letterman, it was "Hereeeees Johnny!" - for an awfully long time. heck, "Carnac the Magnificent" is still a catch phrase around our house. Rest in Peace.

When I first turned the game on a couple of hours ago, here's what I was wondering - why the heck are the refs out there with no gloves?. I understand why some players don't want to wear gloves (better grip on the ball and all that). But the refs? What's up with that?

We got off with a small snowstorm and winds - just look at what Massachussets is dealing with:

SNOWFALL ACCUMULATIONS OF 28 TO 38 INCHES ARE EXPECTED ACROSS EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS...GENERALLY 20 TO 30 INCHES ACROSS CENTRAL MASSACHUSETTS...MUCH OF SOUTHWEST NEW HAMPSHIRE AND RHODE ISLAND... AND 1 TO 2 FEET ALONG THE CONNECTICUT RIVER VALLEY IN SOUTHWEST NEW HAMPSHIRE...WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS AND NORTHERN CONNECTICUT. A FEW SPOTS IN EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS MAY REACH 40 INCHES BEFORE THIS STORM WINDS DOWN. DRIFTS OF AT LEAST 6 FEET ARE LIKELY ACROSS EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS.

If we got that much snow here, things would be shut down for a week. We've had 30+ inch accumulations twice since I've lived in Maryland - I was driving the Washington beltway a week after the last one a couple years back, and they were still removing snow (with front end loaders). This area simply doesn't have the kind of equipment you need for that.

Update: You can get National Weather service RSS feeds here

Looks like a slow Sunday ahead. It's cold outside - 16 Farenheit - and winds are gusting to 30. Meanwhile, the traffic through BottomFeeder seems light - I don't have anything to rant about :) There are the football games in a few hours - I can watch the Eagle march over Atlanta (I'll be shocked if it goes the other way), or the Steelers get trounced by the Pats (again, I'll be stunned if it goes the other way). I suppose more coffee might be in order...

We didn't get the huge snowfall that had been predicted yesterday - more like 4-5 inches. That's enough for good sledding, especially when the temperature stays down around 20 (Farenheit). My daughter and I got the toboggan out, and headed for "the hill" - a nice steep slope in the neighborhood. Lots of kids and adults had already gathered, and more piled in all afternoon. We had a pretty good time - it was so packed kids were periodically getting bowled over by other kids on uncontrollable sleds - the rubber inflatable kind. We stayed out a fai while - I didn't even have to clear the driveway, because my neighbors did that for me (to be popular in the winter here, try being the only one in your neighborhood with a snowblower :) ).

Looks like there's a security breach in Java - anything older than the latest. I still say that trust relationships matter more than sandboxes, because developers - all of us, whether we use static languages, dynamic languages, whatever - we all make mistakes, and in far too many cases we only learn about them later...

It looks like forward marketing and legal departments are going to keep running into each other - last week it was Apple, this week it might be Microsoft. I have a feeling that the whole concept of confidential sources is going to get a real test before this is all over.

I made a comment in this post's comments about the memory requirements for BottomFeeder. By extension, it was about memory usage in VisualWorks applications in general. With that in mind, let's take a look at that. If I bring up a base VW 7.3 development image, and execute ObjectMemory dynamicallyAllocatedFootprint, I find that I'm using 14 MB of memory. Where is that coming from? There are two places:

1. Perm Space - all the classes and objects that start off in the image
2. The rest of the memory spaces:
1. Eden
2. SurvivorSpace
3. LargeSpace
4. StackSpace
5. CompiledCodeCache
6. OldSpaceHeadroom
7. FixedSpaceHeadroom

You can't do much about perm space without doing a strip (typically with RuntimePackager). The other spaces are well documented in the class side comments of ObjectMemory. You can find out how much space they take up this way: ObjectMemory actualSizes. That will return an array full of numbers, representing the bytes used. In a base (development) image, they look like this:

#(307200 61440 204800 40960 655360 591904 204800)

You can adjust those with the #sizesAtStartup: message - it allows you to send multipliers (x factors) by which to make those bigger. For instance, if you are going to be creating lots of objects quickly, it might make sense to make Eden and the survivor spaces bigger. That's still not a lot of space - at present, BottomFeeder is taking 65 MB on my desktop. Most of that is oldSpace - i.e., objects that have become permenent within the context of the runtime - my feeds, items, etc.

I mentioned that I had preloaded a lot of code - I have. Things like Opentalk, all the network libraries, SOAP, just rafts of stuff. That's something like 16MB of stuff in my base image. Now, I'm not really trying to limit what I load or take stuff out at all - I pretty much just package the image (i.e., make it a runtime) and go. You can do a lot better, and many people do. For instance, Liberty Basic - that's a 3mb download, and it's a Smalltalk application.

I'm only now getting back to work - we had the in-laws over for a brunch, and my morning was swallowed by my own mistakes. Last night, on my way to Smalltalk Meetup, I lost my phone. Somehow, it slipped out of my pocket on the metro - so much for that. I went to the Verizon store this morning, and ran into a few hurdles. They were actually quite nice - they let me replace my old phone for the upgrade price even though I had no insurance and had bought the new phone just 6 months ago. It still took forever - the guy in front of me in the service line wanted a personal introduction to every feature on his new phone, and I had to wait to get my address book transferred from my penultimate phone to the new one - complicated by the old phone's complete lack of charge. That ate up 2 1/2 hours. I'm happy with Verizon's service, I just wish it hadn't chewed my morning up...

I share a lot of Rogers Cahdenhead's frustration over RSS 1.1 - it's another solution in search of a problem - see here for the format that exists due to antipathy for Dave Winer. However, there's a reason I added support for it to BottomFeeder - I just knew that Id get asked about it, and it's simpler to pre-empt that and just add support. It was simple enough; I subclassed the RSS 1.0 handler and overrode 4 methods in the subclass - done. I'm entirely unclear as to what problem it solves, but there it is...

Last night's Smalltalk meetup went pretty well - I ran into some old and new faces. We retired to Fuddruckers from Starbucks (thank you Victor for arranging that!) after we ran out of room in the corner of Starbucks. We had a good time - kudos to Matt for arranging it. I look forward to the next one.

PR Opinions (naturally enough) likes the analytical groups:

The influence of the analyst community in the technology purchasing decision is a much coveted resource. It is one of the reasons that technology vendors are anxious to access, inform and influence these analysts. Typically the bigger vendors spread their analyst budget around a large number of firms. However the smaller firms, with limited funds have a far more difficult time and often budget decisions are driven by broader marketing requirements. With this market dynamic there is always risk.

I have been working with industry analysts in North America, Europe and Asia, on and off, for well over a decade. In my experience, the majority of analysts and their firms, offer impartial, informed and valuable advice to their clients - whether those are vendors, end-users or a combination. But as with any market (think Public Relations ladies and gentlemen!) you always have rogue elements who offer biased, "pay-for-play" services which are about as valuable as you'd expect.

Hmm - you can check my archive for my somewhat more jaundiced view. They offer this view by James Governor:

"Suffice to say that sometimes the industry analyst business looks something like the Mafia... some analyst firms appear to run a sophisticated version of the protection racket. If you pay up we let you do business - if not we can make life real hard for you by smashing the place up/downgrading your products. Its an open secret in the business, the corpse out in the backyard we all catch occasional whiffs of...It is becoming increasingly clear that the industry analyst business is ready for an overhaul."

Now, I'm not sure that I'd go quite that far - but the bias in the tech industry is somewhat akin to the much talked about media bias thing in politics - it's not that the media are purposely slanting one way - or that analysts are purposely slanting one way either. It's more that they are all coming from the same "culture", and you get an inadvertant "groupthink" thing going. This is why many media stories (think the OJ trial) get a real herd mentality behind them, I think - and it's also why the analysts tend to mirror the IT industry supposed consensus.

What you get from the analyst groups is their distilled notions of popularity - not any kind of meaningful technical analysis. That's fine as far as it goes, and it does have value. You should just be aware of what you are getting.

I linked to this post by Phil Ringnalda earlier - he makes the point that spammers are going for quantity, not quality - they spray their efforts far and wide (because they can), and don't really care if the effort succeeds. Like Phil, I've got the logs to prove it :) Now, I don't suffer nearly the volume of spam attempts that sites running the common blogs servers do - hello, security through obscurity. Still, I get a daily ration of attempts. I turned off comments on all posts that fall out of the RSS feeds awhile back - I downloaded all the posts and scanned for spam a few months ago and was unpleasantly surprised to find a fair amount of spam lurking in posts that I had long since forgotten. The fact that I've disabled comments for older posts hasn't entered the consciousness of whoever tries to spam the CST blogs; every day there are attempts, and every day it's to the same small set of old posts. To quote one of my colleagues here at Cincom, and so it goes...

Lambda the Ultimate points to a critique of OOP. Needless to say, I don't agree - but then again, you won't learn anything by only reading things you agree with :) I'll make one small comment:

Consider the profound contradiction between the OOP practices of encapsulation and inheritance. To keep your code bug-free, encapsulation hides procedures (and sometimes even data) from other programmers and doesn't allow them to edit it. Inheritance then asks these same programmers to inherit, modify, and reuse this code that they cannot see -- they see what goes in and what comes out, but they must remain ignorant of what's going on inside. In effect, a programmer with no knowledge of the specific inner workings of your encapsulated class is asked to reuse it and modify its members. True, OOP includes features to help deal with this problem, but why does OOP generate problems it must then deal with later?

Why does OOP generate problems it must then deal with later? All this leads to the familiar granularity paradox in OOP: should you create only extremely small and simple classes for stability (some computer science professors say yes), or should you make them large and abstract for flexibility (other professors say yes). Which is it?

I'd say that this has more to do with black box development vs. white box development than with OOP per se. But heck - don't take my word for it - read the whole thing.

Just in time to deflate my own sense of importance (witness this post) comes this from Doc Searls - here's a link to the NASA page he references:

January 10, 2005: NASA scientists studying the Indonesian earthquake of Dec. 26, 2004, have calculated that it slightly changed our planet's shape, shaved almost 3 microseconds from the length of the day, and shifted the North Pole by centimeters.

...

None of these changes have yet been measured--only calculated. But Chao and Gross hope to detect the changes when Earth rotation data from ground based and space-borne sensors are reviewed.

All I can say is... wow.

Well, well. I've been saying that WS* is the new CORBA for awhile now, with the only significant difference being port 80. Looks like the IT press is starting to think similar thoughts - have a look at Alexander Krampf's op-ed in SD Times:

Is it me, or does all of this seem eerily familiar? I can't help comparing today's Web services hype to the CORBA boom of the 1990s.

What happened and which technological revolution did I miss that makes all this a reality? It must have been XML and SOAP. But wait 14while XML is a great way to store and exchange information, it does so in a very verbose manner. And SOAP is really just another RPC protocol that happens to use XML instead of a binary data representation.

Deploying Web services requires a stack that includes XML parsers, Web servers and additional infrastructure. I just don't see that huge a difference between what Web services offers to me today and what CORBA offered to me five years ago. Back then, I needed to know IDL (Interface Definition Language). Today, I need to know all the different Web services schemas. And keeping track of the various standards and specifications is another enormous challenge.

I recall watching the ParcPlace distribution team trying to keep track of the vast array of CORBA services that were spinning out in the early to mid 90's - and believe me, the view of WS* specs rolling out looks like the same thing all over again.

This is probably the best advice on WS I've read yet (it's a good general point as well):

Web services are yet another tool in our increasingly large arsenal of integration approaches. They have many admirable characteristics and will make a valuable contribution in helping businesses operate more efficiently and serve customers better. Let's just make sure that when we choose Web services, we do so because they are the appropriate solution for each integration problem and not because we have a free Web services stack sitting around with nothing to do.

There's an interesting op-ed piece in Computerworld - I was taken in by the notion of a "Toxicity Survey". Everyone in the marketing sector has read Moore's "Crossing the Chasm" - Thornton May says it's time to move on:

Inappropriate and outdated mental models on why and how technologies enter the organization: The days of "crossing the chasm" are over. Geoffrey Moore, the creator of this once-dominant descriptive framework, has moved on; vendors should too. The simplistic, product-centric characterization of customers as innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority or laggards has given way to a much more fragmented and nuanced set of behavioral buying clusters. Just as society has fragmented into categories such as soccer moms, NASCAR dads and underemployed knowledge workers, so too have technology entry points atomized. Most vendor marketing programs haven't been successful at targeting the tribal leaders of these buying clusters.

I'll have to give this one some thought. In most marketing circles, Moore's chasm work is near gospel - certainly the conservatism of the late majority is evident in the space. The rest of the piece is thought provoking as well. I'll have to chew on this one.

In the thread that followed this post, I was asked whether I had read this OOPSLA 04 paper. I had a brief look last night, and more this morning. Here's what jumped out at me:

What is new here is the application of this technology "outside the box" of a debugger.

A debugger is used in a different mode than the editor - first you edit your code, then you switch to the debugger and manually run the code with some inputs. The debugger presents an entirely different UI and mode of interaction than the editor. The goal here is to eliminate this mode-switching by unifying the debugger and editor into a single tool with a consistent UI. This can be described as an example-enlightened editor.

In addition to sidelining the debugger, this approach supplants the need for a Read-Eval-Print-Loop: the canonical exploratory UI to an interpreter. Expressions typed into a REPL are instead now just example snippets in a source file, with their results appearing in the example view rather than inserted into the transcript. Results are automatically refreshed whenever the code changes, which avoids the hidden pitfalls of anachronistic definitions

Here's the part where the Smalltalkers realize that yes, in fact, there's nothing that fascinating here: A debugger is used in a different mode than the editor - first you edit your code, then you switch to the debugger and manually run the code with some inputs. The Smalltalk debugger is both a debugger and code browser - it's not the separate tool that the author discusses. I'm sure that this kind of tool looks very interesting to people using the mainstream languages - while to those of us using Smalltalk it elicits mostly "I've had equivalent capabilities for years now". Not identical mind you, but very much akin.

After that section, the author discusses unit tests, and how they are useful as examples. Nothing to argue with there - many developers view unit tests as something close to a documentation replacement. The unit testing assistance that the tool offers looks interesting, but - in theory, you write the test first. Thus, picking out a code snippet that qualifies as an assertion puts the cart somewhat before the horse. On the other hand, I hardly qualify as a testing purist, so this kind of support likely would be useful - if it helped generate a unit test. As outlined, it suggests that the tool is obviating the need for a separate test. That's likely a bad idea - once the initial developer leaves, this artifact goes with him. A separate unit test survives as a marker.

Ultimately, I'm not convinced that it's a good idea to encourage people to not write separate tests - which is what this paper argues for. Tests, like code, are primarily communication - a link between the original author and the future maintainer. Code maintenance always goes on longer than initial development, and any increase in the communication between the original author and the future maintainer is a good thing. The path suggested by this paper would reduce communication... not a good thing at all. I realize that the author posits a new set of IDE tools where all of this is integrated - and if it was all tied together, it would be more impressive. I still don't see it as much of an advance over the Smalltalk debugger I currently have though.

Yes, picking inauguration day was probably not the brightest idea on our part. When I suggested the 20th instead of the 13th (I was out of town on the 13th), I hadn't thought of this :) In any case, it looks like taking the DC Metro to the Gallery Place/Chinatown stop is the best way to go - and according to the metro's planner, it's open today and tonight. Once you get there, walk north past the MCI Center to the Starbuck's at 800 7th street, and you'll be there. The meetup starts at 7 PM - with all the inauguration hoopla, it's probably a good idea to give yourself plenty of time. I'll have the latest Cincom Smalltalk non-commercial CD's if that's any motivational help :)

We aren't as pathetic as Raleigh :)

Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent explains why the excitement over "noFollow" in the Blogosphere is misplaced:

This is the key point. If rel="nofollow" works, if it's applied universally, it will actually have the reverse effect. It actually gets less effective the more it is implemented. Why? Because the comment spamming sites are in competition with *each*other*, and not with any legitimate businesses. They're not so much trying to get the best pagerank for their term, as trying to get a better one than their rivals. That's a key distinction. If the playing field is levelled by rel="nofollow", then everyone involved will be forced to try all the harder to get their links out there. The blogosphere will be hit all the harder because of the need to maximise the gains. As there's no more effort in hitting 6 million blogs as there is in hitting 1 million, this really won't bother the spammers one bit. All it does is shift the problem from the high pagerank blogs we here might have, with rel="nofollow", custom sanitize settings, and mt-blacklist in full effect, all the way over to the less technically adept. And that is one enormous customer service problem heading towards Blogger, 6A and the rest.

That's about the size of it. You really have to keep in mind that spamming costs the spammer nothing - so these techniques don't really affect their behavior. See Phil Ringnalda for more along these lines.

Update: Ben Hammersly updated the post I linked to with this excellect observation - one that I certainly hadn't thought of:

Meanwhile, Scoble points out how it can be used in other ways, and undermines the second aspect of the attribute: as respecting rel="nofollow" will involve losing an enormous amount of implicit metadata, any tools that are interested in that will be forced to ignore it. Technorati will have to choose if it's a site that measures raw interconnectivity, or some curious High School metric of look-at-that-person-but-don't-pay-her-any-attention that the selective use of the rel="nofollow" attribute will produce. For many purposes, this would mean the results are totally debased and close to useless.

Compared to my interest in the previous post, news of X-Files 2 work just makes me yawn. The big question: "Why?" Yeah, I know the answer is "too make money?" :) Seriously though - the series had jumped the shark many seasons before the end, and the first movie was pretty lame...

This could be good news for Heinlein fans if the screenplay doesn't get the all too typical Hollywood treatment. I've always thought that The Moon is Harsh Mistress could make a great movie - now, maybe we'll see the effort made. For the record, I wasn't that down on the film "Starship Troopers"...