Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Since no one else in my family like Roller Coasters, I headed out to Magic Mountain this morning - got there just before the park opened, and had a blast on some really cool rides. I ride Superman three times in a row - no one was in line, so the ride attendant let us all stay on and keep riding. The only reason that came to an end was that we blew past the stop point and out to the maintenance yard. 15 minutes later, we were off and the ride was shut down for a bit. that was ok - it was a fun ride. I took a picture of that ride from the ground - here it is:

So that was fun. I wandered around onto other rides - the Collossus was fun - an old fashioned wooden roller coaster. Pretty fast, very bumpy. I also loved the Goliath - the drop from that is something:

So it was a fun day. I'm off to meet some relatives for dinner now, and see what the plans are for my daughter tomorrow.

It turns out that I have most of today to myself - my daughter is off with her cousin, who doesn't like theme parks (go figure). So, I've decided to head off to 6 Flags, which isn't terribly far from where I'm staying. I'll be in Sherman Oaks tomorrow, with the LASTUG meeting in the evening. Then Victoria and I have a very late flight on Tuesday - we may try California Adventure. Anyone have recommendations?

Phillipe Mougin attended the O'Reilly OSX conference last fall, and just forwarded me his notes. With his permission, here they are:

O'Reilly Mac OS X conference Notes

---

Last October, I went to the O'Reilly Mac OS X conference to give a Smalltalk presentation. This conference gathers Mac OS X users, system administrators and developers for a week of great technical sessions, discussions and informal events (want to spend an evenings eating Korean food with Apple engineers developing the new generation of object-oriented frameworks for Mac OS X? This is the place to be!)

Introducing Smalltalk to Mac OS X programmers is ridiculously easy. Why? Because of Objective-C, the "native" programming language of OS X. It is used by Apple to implement the object-oriented frameworks of OS X and is, consequently, a programming language of choice for development on Mac. And it just happens that Objective-C is a lightweight object-oriented extension of the C language modeled after Smalltalk. As the Objective-C creators explain, "Objective-C was formed by grafting the Smalltalk-80 style of object-oriented programming onto a C language rootstock". Objective-C allows developers to access the newest and greatest innovations Apple regularly introduces in its operating system and, with its flexibility and dynamic nature inherited from Smalltalk, it contributes for a significant part to this "special fun" people have when developing for Mac OS X.

The similarities between the two languages (Objective-C even uses our beloved message sending syntax!) make it easy to introduce Smalltalk to Objective-C programmers and to concentrate on the cool things Smalltalk has to offer like a pure and unified object syntax/model and an interactive environment. Objective-C developers are well aware of the Smalltalk roots of the language and Smalltalk is often present in the Objective-C community discussions about implementation techniques, object-oriented design patterns or evolution of the language.

The presentation itself was intermixed with live demonstrations. In particular, I used Ambrai Smalltalk to show the basic features of a Smalltalk environment. Ambrai is of particular interest to Mac developers because it has been built from the ground up for Mac OS X. It provides a native Aqua look and feel and access to native Mac OS X libraries. In particular, Ambrai is developing a Smalltalk/Objective-C bridge, which will let developers to make use, from Ambrai Smalltalk, of the huge and quickly evolving set of object-oriented frameworks provided by Mac OS X. I used Squeak to show some fun development tools for Smalltalk beginners, like the method finder, and to illustrate the concept of interactive object-oriented environment. For that, nothing beats the Squeak Alice world and its pink rabbit you can message interactively. Of course, I also said a few words about Croquet and its model for a scalable planet-wide synchronized distributed object system.

Finally I showed F-Script, my own project, an open source scripting and interactive environment. F-Script applies the Smalltalk syntax and concepts to the Objective-C object model, giving Mac OS X developers a rich interpreted environment they use to visualize, script and manipulate Objective-C objects. The killer F-Script demo consists in showing the graphical F-Script object browser. This is not your daddy's class browser! It's an instance browser that let you find, explore and manipulate (i.e. invoke method on) your objects, without writing code.

Giving this presentation was great, as the assistance looked quite interested. In the future I hope to see more interactions between the Smalltalk and the Objective-C communities.

You can download the presentation materials here (PDF)

Philippe Mougin

http://www.fscript.org

I mentioned that Silt now supports the toggling of comments on a per item basis by a site author (or authors). For instance, I opened this one back up, even though the post fell out of the main site feed. When an item is left open like that, a feed is generated. How do you find that feed? Well, if you browse an item like that, you'll find an XML link added to the item footer - you can subscribe using that. If your aggregator supports the embedded comments module, you'll see the post and all its comments. Even if it doesn't, you'll at least be notified that there are new comments.

End users do the darndest things. Here's a screen shot of Xonix, a plugin to BottomFeeder. See the problem? How did my daughter manage to get the game to play in that state?

Her comment: "o_0 Very weird... but, now I have a REALLY HIGH score...

We ended up with this before we lost interest:

Definitely odd :)

Patrick Logan points out that there are hidden bits of complexity in DotNet. From an email list patrick follows:

Passing a reference type by value lets the callee manipulate the object that is referenced. Passing a reference type by reference lets the callee manipulate the reference to the object itself - to change where the caller's reference points.

Like he says, ouch. Suffice to say, this kind of issue only comes up in Smalltalk if you are doing distributed development (WS*, CORBA, et. al.). It's not something I ever have to think about otherwise.

I know that podcasting is supposed to be getting big, but there's something missing, at least from my perspective. Maybe I'm just not subscribing to the right feeds, but I'm not seeing many enclosures (and of the ones I am seeing, a number are just images). Here's the thing - I subscribe to 266 feeds. I maintain a cache of about 80-100 items per feed. Out of all that, I have only 15 Enclosures. Here's the list I found:

• http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/wipo_dev_agenda_2.gif
• http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/syc_logo_2.gif
• http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/ju-IDG_interview.mp3
• http://chris.pirillo.com/_attachments/409562/silly.jpg
• http://chris.pirillo.com/_attachments/409562/sad.jpg
• http://chris.pirillo.com/_attachments/409562/happy.jpg
• http://chris.pirillo.com/_attachments/409562/angry.jpg
• http://chris.pirillo.com/_attachments/409562/thinking.jpg
• http://www.freeke.org/chewns/LetItSnow.m4a
• http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/casts/bottomFeederScript2.wmv
• http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/gems/democratic-response-2005-03-19.mp3
• http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/casts/enclosure_searching.wmv
• http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/Wilco on NPR with Matteen.mp3
• http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/mixter-logo.gif
• http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/image.jpg

So I'm curious - is there a lot of Enclosure use that I'm not seeing, or are people just not taking advantage of it? Heck, even Dave Winer, one of the proponents of Enclosures, usually just puts his audio stuff into his feed as a link in the description body. Is it that the blog client tools don't make it easy to define Enclosures? Is it that the common blog servers don't?

I have support in Silt for it, and matching support in the client poster. I note that the MetaWeblog API supports files, but I don't see a way to have that hook into Enclosure definitions - at least not any standard way of doing it.

In any event, this little exercise illustrated one of the cool things about BottomFeeder that I've brought up in my screencasts - the fact that you can write Smalltalk code directly in the runtime (try that in a shipping .NET or Java app). I was too lazy to create all of the links above by hand, so I opened up a workspace (from the System menu) and wrote the following:

|stream  |
stream := WriteStream on: (String new: 100).
stream nextPutAll: '</ul>'; cr.
RSS.Enclosure allInstances do: [:each |
	stream nextPutAll: '<li>'.
	stream nextPutAll: '<a href="', each url, '">', each url, '</a>'.
	stream nextPutAll: '</li>'; cr].
stream nextPutAll: '</ul>'; cr.
^stream contents.

I inspected the results, which gave me the list above. I flipped the post tool into tag mode (from XHTML editing), pasted it in, and then went back to the normal edit mode. This is one of the more empowering things about Smalltalk, actually - the fact that there's no artificial line between development and deployment - heck, I had forgotten to add the #printOn: method that I spoke about in the last podcast, so I went ahead and added that to the application while I was fiddling with the script. This is one of the reasons that Smalltalk is back at the house having lunch while Java and C# are still trying to find their underwear...

Maybe Ken Brown needs to give SCO a call and see how that fight against Open Source is going. Or maybe, just maybe, he could try actually adding value somewhere instead of just providing Carbon Dioxide for nearby plants...

The confused folks at Synchrony need someone to explain what "modernization" actually means. Hint: It doesn't mean moving a client server system from one language into a server based system built on top of WebSphere, in a different language.

Unless, of course, your goal is consulting fees rather than actually helping clients...

I'm about to get started on my LA trip - my cousin lives down in northern VA, so we are heading down to his place this evening - it will be a lot easier to get to a Dulles flight in the morning from Vienna, VA than from Columbia, MD. Don't know if I'll be posting later tonight - I'll likely stack a bunch of things up on the plane though.

I've been plugging away at the Silt server code - I've gotten new blog creation automated, with defaults fired from a server side settings file. The same thing manages the GUI blog creation tool that I talked about yesterday. So now, I can tweak a settings file, and then have any new blog I create get the default settings from there. Not rocket science by any means, but a nice admin touch. If you grab the Silt code from the server, you should always make sure to update you code and SSP files from the public repository, which always has the latest versions

There's been a lot of commenting on this post from a few days ago on the CLR and dynamic languages. Normally, comments automatically close down when an item falls out of the RSS feed. With the level of interest, I'm leaving this one open. There's a single item feed for it here, if you want to follow the fun in your aggregator. I'll close the comments down once things start to die down, most likely.

It looks like there will be some more noise from Cincom on the blog front soon - i.e., some more Cincom bloggers. I can't get into too much detail yet, but there's action afoot - and the Silt server is what's going to be used. This is pretty cool stuff, watching your own software get picked up and adopted :)

Well, I wasn't a huge fan of Point Pleasant, but it was ok. Off it goes though - March 17 was the end of the road for the show. The good news is, the last episodes of Tru Calling will appear in that timeslot. Via Sci-Fi Wire.

The schedule for StS 2005 is online now. Check it out. As an aside, it's looking a little rough, and has a number of TBD items. Those are being ironed out as I post this

Wesner Moise seems to have a few issues with a few things in the CLR, particularly weak references. He then goes on to call Smalltalk a "language of the past":

I had a lot of radical ideas that I didn’t mention, mostly involving features from various academic languages that unlikely to come in the next few years. I firmly believe that the new advances in languages will borrow heavily from languages of the past such as Lisp and Smalltalk. Already, we have seen the advent of garbage collection, closures and iterators in C#. Languages will also become more declarative over time.  

Smalltalk is hardly a language of the past - look here, for instance, and download it. It's also amusing to see him describe things that Smalltalk and Lisp have supported for decades as "radical ideas". Maybe the radical idea would be to drop the language that doesn't support 3 decade old "radical" ideas and use one that already does...

And obtw - VisualWorks supports weak collections. Too "radical" for the CLr, I suppose...

My post on the CLR has certainly generated a lot of comments. I think that I'll let that conversation keep going - I'm going to leave comments on for that post after the point when they would normally go off. The nifty thing is, that action will create an item specific feed that can be subscribed to - so I'll still be able to track it without having to remember to dig through the archives.

Eric explains some of the facts of life with respect to MSDN and the licensing of MS products:

Many companies and teams buy a single subscription and share it among all their developers.  This form of piracy is rampant.  Some folks probably even think it's legal.  It's not. We encounter this all the time when talking to people about our own products. 

User:  "Why should I buy Vault when SourceSafe is free?" 

SourceGear:  "Why do you think SourceSafe is free?"

User:  "Because it's on the MSDN discs."

If you have ten developers using Visual Studio, you're supposed to have ten subscriptions to MSDN Universal.  That's the way it works.

Well. If you look at their new pricing (just over $10k for "everything"), and realize that it's per developer, then it's clear that MS' products aren't as cheap as most people have assumed they are. Also note - the MS stuff is a subscription license - i.e., you pay each year. Which isn't so very different from what Cincom does, is it? Except.... consider - we only charge for deployment, not for development. Most vendors charge on both ends...

With all the gushing about Ajax of late, it's kind of nice to see Hani blasting it with both barrels. I haven't spent any time looking at XmlHttpRequest, so I can't really speak to his critique. But as usual, he lets loose with a full bodied rant :)

I'm back home for a few days - we had a productive couple of days in Cincinnati, and it looks like we have a lot of work to do in the next little while. There's some real interest in blogging back at corporate as well - there should be some increased activity from Cincom on that front in the near term future - stay tuned for that.

In other news, I figured out how to customize the editing toolbar in the Silt client poster (in the cab, no less - am I insane, or what?). I'll be pushing out a new version with toolbar options for bullet lists, numbered lists, and tables shortly. I've got to hand it to the Software With Style guys - they made that pretty simple.

I'll be off to LA in a few days - I'll be speaking at the new LA STUG, and taking my daughter to visit a cousin that lives out there/ Should be a pleasant excursion.

I just love this binary XML thing. John Bobowicz brings up the topic in an article I ran across today:

Is this a memory lapse?

It seems we've forgotten what the notion of a Markup Language is all about. XML, like other markup languages such as HTML and WML, tag portions of text documents for one reason or another. HTML marks up text for formatting purposes and XML marks up text to make data embedded in a text document more machine readable.

All of these things are about making documents more useful. Formating documents, embedding data in documents, etc, is the purpose of markup languages.

The other thing we are forgetting is that binary formats are platform optimized. This optimization is a leading cause for incompatibility between dissimilar systems.

We've been down this road before, and it wasn't that long ago. I give you... CORBA. I guess the only good things about binary XML and WS* is that the people involved aren't doing greater harm somewhere else...

Phillip Greenspun has a post up about his desire for widespread WiFi - I'm not sure that it would save fuel the way he thinks - if you examine his side trip thing, for instance, it would take a good amount of time to find the website and get the hours of operation - likely enough time that you would be past the exit (or already off and on the way down the road to the attraction).

That's not the biggest problem though. 802.11x isn't the same kind of protocol as digital cell (GSM, CDMA, etc) use - I've driven through neighborhoods with open wireless all the way down the street - at 30 mph (much less highway speeds) you can't acquire and keep a signal - by the time you get one, you've lost it - there's simply no handoff mechanism. IIRC, WiMax might sidestep that issue by making the coverage area wide enough - but it's not widely deployed yet.

Interestingly enough, the system that currently addresses that problem is one that Phillip addressed in his very next post - Verizon broadband services via the existing cell system. It's slow and expensive - I've read that it works all the way up and down the Amtrak NE corridor, and I figure it might be worthwhile for regular commuters on that route. For anyone else? Panera Bread or Starbucks are simpler answers.

I don't see anyone rolling out a single 802.11x system across the highway system anytime soon - too many nearby homes and businesses would poach off of it if it were free, and the installation costs would likely make the service expensive anyway (just look at the aforementioned Verizon system for an example).

I guess I needed some sleep. I had an amazing dinner last night with a partner, and got back to the hotel just before 11. I went straight to bed. I woke up once (who the heck set the thermostat to 76?) to set the temp down, but otherwise slept through to 9 am this morning. I tend to stay up too late watching TV at home to get that much sleep. Feels good!

Patrick Logan points to a post by Ramon Leon:

With or without Seaside, Smalltalk needs to return to the mainstream. The current crop of mainstream languages, pretty much feel like handcuffs in comparison.

Based on the comments to this post and this post, I'd have to say that a lot of people like handcuffs...

We've been meeting here in Cincinnati - the management team for Cincom Smalltalk, that is - to determine what our business direction will look like going forward. We've mostly been talking about possible partner relations (which is a very amorphous term in the way we are using it). Start looking for some noise from us in this direction over the next few months.

I'm starting to think that federalizing security at airports was one of the stupidest things that could have been done. We've combined the efficiency of government services with the detail orientation that the MVA is so well known for. Take this morning - I arrive at the airport at 6 am for a 7 am departure. Sure, they say I should arrive 2 hours early - sorry, but they don't need to claim that much of my sleep time. First off, the line stretches from terminal D (this is BWI) all the way over to terminal E. Second, they send someone over to facilitate those of us with upcoming departures - they shepard a bunch of us forward. Rampant line cutting ensues, as everyone in the new line is convinced that they are the only ones in a hurry.

I take a look at the normal line - it's moving along at a nice clip. They've got three - no wait, 2 lanes open for the "accelerated" line - one of the TSA crews had to take a break. Here's the first thing that eally torqued me off. I realize that there are work rules, and I realize that the screeners ability to focus will drop if they stay on duty too long. But still - when the lines are backing up over at the local grocery, they add checkers and open new lines - they pull people from other jobs for a few minutes until the lines die down. Nope, not the TSA. Rules are rules by gosh, and if travelers miss their planes... well, they should have just arived earlier. Never mind that the normal line got people through faster after that - I watched the people who had been behind me scoot through.

Which leads to the insecurity thing. Consider: there's a huge build up of people in line, in a small area, in the zig-zagging rope pens. There are no security checks to get into the terminal itself, just to get to the gates. Just how much damage could a guy with a few hand grenades do while the helpful TSA agents take their mandatory break? What they've managed to do is replace one problem with another - and even that's making the assumption that the new security is better than the old (I'm not convinced).

And what's up with having to take my PC out of it's bag? Two things:

• X-Ray machines see through the canvas bag
• No one else - not Canada, not Europe, not Australia - demands that I remove my PC from the bag

This process alone slows the line down a ton, and it achieves absolutely nothing. All the business travelers have to fish in their bags, pull the PC out, put it in a container. Then we all slow down so that we can watch the things and make sure they don't get lifted. What do we end up with? A system that:

• Slows the entire screening line down
• Adds no additional security
• Makes it a whole lot easier for thieves to make off with a PC unnoticed

Travel just gets more and more annoying, and for no good reason whatsoever.

Via Patrick Logan comes this insight from Steve Loughran:

By adding all the functions of CORBA to SOAP, WS-* replicates the old world of distributed computing, only with underpinnings (HTTP, XML) not designed for that particular role.

That's pretty much the size of it. We now have CORBA all over again, even including all of the superfluous services that three people on the planet might need, someday, maybe.

Death Race 3000 is apparently in the works - a remake of the cult classic "Death Race 2000". Can it possibly be as campy as the original?

The fact that Michael's response (see below) had to be emailed to me and then posted, instead of being put up as a comment is just more evidence of the damage that the spammers have wrought on all of us. Why are comments off on that post? Because I tend not to notice comments on posts once they fall out of the RSS feed, and I used to get spam in such posts. Sure, I could have comments emailed to me so that I could verify them - but I really don't need the extra email traffic. Just one more sign of the eroding commons...

Michael Hauser of BBN responds to this post - comments are now off for that post now, so - with his permission - here's his response. Sometimes, I really let my desire to let loose with a few ranting zingers get in the way of the point I'm trying to make :)

James,

I was recently made aware of your 3/14 blog posting about BetterBadNews. I am unable to post a comment on that posting, as you apparently have the comment feature enabled only for recent entries. So here is my comment:

I'm the technical implementor/consultant on BetterBadNews. While the site content often doesn't represent my position, I find it provocative, funny, and creative - attributes missing from the large majority of blogs in the 'sphere.

Before the March 5th entry was published, I registered my opinion that the needs of users trump the needs of publishers, and that the ability to annotate content and share that annotation can empower users, improve the quality of the conversation, and lead to greater freedom. This was a position that I didn't see being well represented in the online conversation. However, I do agree with those who have called for caution on this issue. While it's true in theory that the Google toolbar is opt in for users, in the sense that it must be explicitly installed, in actuality, much of the software installed on non-technical users' machines was installed not by the users themselves but by well-meaning friends or relatives. So the argument that only knowledgeable users would've installed Google toolbar, and would therefore know what it is and how to uninstall it, is quite specious. More importantly, autolinking sets a precedent that could be abused later by others (e.g., Microsoft, AOL, etc.) by, for example, building link alteration into the browser and making it less visible and more difficult to disable. By raising awareness of this danger, the community is helping to ensure that web annotation evolves in a direction that balances the rights of users, content publishers, and service providers. BetterBadNews chose to represent the opinions of those expressing concerns about autolinking, and that includes a broad range of people, some of whom are certainly as bright and clued in as you imply yourself to be.

To the extent that BetterBadNews confuses some of the technical details of this issue, BetterBadNews is reflecting both the complexity of the issue and the confusion in the distributed conversation in the blogosphere. That is a primary goal of BetterBadNews- to extend and reflect that conversation, including its confusion. Based on the feedback we're getting, many people get that that's what we're about.

Regarding the technical problems with our blog, thanks for your feedback. For me, it's one of many spare time projects and I haven't had time to work out all of the technical glitches yet. With respect to your specific complaints, there are technical issues with QuickTime/browser integration that may not be easy to solve. If you know how to implement a link that plays an embedded QuickTime movie without a page reload and without using an inline frame, please let me know. The obvious workaround is to put the text into the video itself - I have suggested this but I am not doing the video production and I was asked to put the "Click to Play" text below the movies in the interim. It is possible to embed the movie into an inline frame, using a link to dynamically load the frame, but this is more complicated and it's not clear that embedding movies in multiple inline frames in a page wouldn't create even worse cross-browser compatibility issues. I haven't had time to do the testing to find out.

Regarding the use of Firefox "instead of the great and powerful IE", we primarily use Firefox on Mac OS X, not IE Windows. The "turds" you refer to are difficult to eliminate across the various popular browsers. I just inserted CSS code to style the div surrounding the enclosure as position:relative, and that seems to have addressed this issue on Firefox-Windows, but some versions of IE apparently handle position:relative incorrectly, and this fix doesn't seem to solve the problem on Safari. If you can shed light on this issue, I welcome your input.

While your criticisms are valid from a usability standpoint, these misfeatures do not manipulate the user behind her back, disguising one thing as another, as some are concerned that follow-ons to Google autolinking could do. And as for "basic awareness" of the technology we're using, our blog is implemented on top of Zope, a sophisticated web application server, using COREblog with fairly extensive code mods by me to allow embedded video and support RSS2.0 enclosures. I'd say that shows more than basic awareness of the technology, though I certainly wouldn't claim to be an expert in all of the various technologies we're using. And it's not like your own blog doesn't suffer from any technical problems. In fact, just today you discovered and acknowledged an error in your feed. I'm sure that other technical problems could be identified if someone wanted to take the time to evaluate your blog thoroughly (e.g., I can see a text layout problem on your page as rendered by Firefox Mac as I write this), but to use such problems as evidence that you are clueless in an attempt to invalidate your opinions about technology issues would be either insincere or ignorant.

Sincerely,

Michael Hauser

The crew at Quallaby would like to get a Boston Smalltalk user's group set up - if you are interested, let me know and I'll put you in touch with the right people.

In this week's screencast, I have a short demonstration of the configurability of a Smalltalk application. It's short - I'm heading to Cincinnati for meetings tomorrow, and I'm off to LA on Saturday. What's nifty is the live development in BottomFeeder - I show off some scripting and code addition into the browser that's part of Trippy (the VW inspector). Enjoy. Oh - and as I did last week, here's the compressed AVI file.

Just a reminder to everyone that Smalltalk Solutions 2005 will be here before you know it.

For those of you who might not be familar with the conference, Smalltalk Solutions is the premier forum for bringing together Smalltalk users, developers, and enthusiasts.

When: June 27-29, 2005

Where: Beautiful, Sunny Orlando Conference

Hotel: Wyndham Orlando Resort: A tropical paradise in the heart of the world's most popular vacation destination

Help make this the best Smalltalk Solutions conference ever and sign up today at www.smalltalksolutions.com/registration2005.htm. Smalltalk Solutions is a Smalltalk Industry Council event.

Panopticon sets out to explain why they had to break compatibility from VB to VB.NET - and in the process, explains one of the main problems with the CLR for us dynamic language folk: the CLR can host any language, so long as it contorts itself into a C# style shape.

I understand Tim Marman's point about copyrights - he's correct in saying that the medium doesn't change the law:

As a producer, I have the ability to define how others can use my content. If we want to encourage sites to syndicate their content, we have to ensure that they can prevent people from using content in ways they don't want to allow. This is at the heart of a lot of the Creative Commons licenses, including the Attribution-NonCommercial license I publish my content under.

This license basically says you can repurpose my content here as long as 1) you attribute the content to me and 2) don't use it for commercial purposes. In other words, I want to allow people like Scoble to post my content on his link blog, but I don't want someone taking my content and using it in a book.

That's fine. The trouble is, that horse left the barn a long, long time ago. Take Search Engines, for instance - they are clearly being used for commercial purposes. They reproduce partial (potentially full) content wrapped in a different site's advertising policy. Take news aggregators - if you include full content in your feed, you've ceded control over how that content will be used - maybe not from a de jure standpoint, but that's irrelevant - you've done so in a de facto fashion. Any consumer of your RSS feed might be using their aggregator for commercial purposes (I certainly use mine that way). Are they in violation when they display your content locally using a custom stylesheet? What if we have an aggregator that works like the free version of Eudora, where it throws ads at you?

This isn't really new territory we're in - copy machines crossed this line (with respect to books and magazines) a long time ago. Back when I worked in an office, in the days before the internet was visible to most people, the local admins routed a folder of interesting stuff around. Much of it consisted of magazine articles copied in full and passed around. That was almost certainly a copyright violation of some kind - should everyone in the office have been arrested? There's kind of an informal understanding with copy machines - we ignore "the small stuff". The difficulty here is that we haven't come to a shared understanding of what constitutes "the small stuff" on the web yet.

I added per-category feeds late last week, but the presentation on the page was pretty sub-optimal. The XML links were pushed in with the categories, and it was all "bunched up" in there. There's already a syndication section of the page template - so I moved the syndication links down there. The sidebar is a lot longer now, but at least it's laid out nicely :)

Ralf Westphal has an interesting post up on the nature of software development. He asks a lot of good questions, ending with these:

If you doubt the immaturity of the software development trade, think a minute about the following:

• Why is deployment, i.e. handing the product to the customer, such a pain?
• Why do we still store the majority of code in text files which are hard to manipulate?
• Why do we still try to solve all those different problems with just a handful of different languages?
• Why do so many software projects fail (in comparison to building houses or producing movies)?

Read the whole thing - those final questions are fronted by some good writing.

Dana VanDen Heuvel has something interesting up this morning - there's a faux blog called "NigelBlog" associated with the show "Crossing Jordan". It reads like a real blog, and there are comments for each item. The only thing missing is an RSS feed :)

Well well, another "facts are bad, we want different facts" post. This is dumber than the nonsense I saw from Tina Brown yesterday, and I wasn't sure that was even possible. Shelley Powers has decided that some facts need to disappear down the memory hole:

So I’ll say this, directly and honestly, to Dave Sifry from Technorati: Dave, you are hurting us.

The Technorati Top 100 is too much like Google in that ‘noise’ becomes equated with ‘authority’. Rather than provide a method to expose new voices, your list becomes nothing more than a way for those on top to further cement their positions. More, it can be easily manipulated with just the release of a piece of software.

You have focused on comment spam and you see this as the most harm to this community, all the while providing the weapon that is truly tearing us apart. You are hurting us, Dave.

NZ Bear, you are hurting us. With your Ecosystem, you count links on the front page, which give precedence to blogroll links over links embedded within writings, and then classify people in a system equating mammals and amoeba. Your site serves as nothing more than a way for higher ranked people to feel good about themselves, and lower ranked to feel discouraged. There is no discovery inherent in your system — no way of encouraging new voices to be heard. So NZ, you are, also, hurting us.

Well gosh. We better stop measuring things - the measurements hurt. We better stop comparing things - comparisons hurt. The link counts and top 100 are what they are - deal with it and move on. Hiding those numbers won't change anything - they'll be the same whether they get published or not.

This is the kind of stupidity that argues against Advanced Placement classes, because it might damage someone's self esteem. Sheesh - you know what, if your blog isn't in the top 100, it's not a crisis. Mine isn't, and you don't see me whining about the unfairness of it all. You want to see more readers? Write compelling content. That's it! Write something people want to read. It's not as if women can't write - the book I'm reading right now is fascinating, and I note that the author is female. Not that I noticed before - I didn't actually care. What I care about is that it's well written, on a subject I'm interested in, and is teaching me something I didn't know.

This moaning into the wind about the unfairness of ranking is just idiotic. Sheesh, get over yourself already. Oh heck, I nearly forgot - she's claiming that the rankings are doing more damage than Comment Spam? Oh? I spend zero time fighting rankings in my blog server, but I have spent a fair bit of time on comment spam. On that basis alone, she has no clue what she's talking about. If she gets her way, maybe I'll start sending her my comment and email spam - after all, it's no trouble at all in her bizarro universe.

Patrick Logan points out that any hopes I have for real support of dynamic languages on the CLR are probably misplaced. I know Sun won't do anything on the JVM; they seem to think that adding doodads to NetBeans is all that's needed - the JVM is frozen, and it looks like it's staying that way. The bottom line - look elsewhere for dynamic language support.

"Pox Americana" is a very scary book, in its own way. What it covers is the Smallpox epidemic that spread through North America between 1775 and 1782. I've read about half; the first section covers the American Revolution- but from the perspective of the war as a disease spreader. Consider: American soldiers (British soldiers and their mercenaries tended to have immunity) were vulnerable to the disease, and were traveling over a much wider area than they ever had. The war caused civilian displacement as well - and both things spread the Pox. It looks like the native population took it hardest, and the author gives two reasons:

• Virtually no immunity in the population
• A population that was far more genetically homogeneous than the European immigrants

The latter problem seems to have been severe - the Pox spread between unrelated natives as easily as it did within a European family. Indian villages ended up having death rates of 50% and more.

It only gets worse in the part of the book covering what was then Spanish North America. Traveling missionaries and traders spread disease out of Mexico City and New Orleans, all the way up through the Pacific northwest. Evidence for the suffering there is fragmentary; there really aren't written records. From what little survives, it sounds like some areas ended up with as much as a 90% loss of population - particularly in the Spanish mining camps, where the natives were already being abused.

I'm in the middle of a section that covers the Canadian interior - disease spread there through the fur trading network that had spread. The British and French traded with the natives, who in turn often acted as middlemen to other tribes. It sounds like the Cree indians of the north suffered near annihilation.

This is scary stuff, and makes me realize how lucky we are that Smallpox has been eradicated. It also makes me worry about the potential for an avian flu pandemic - a bad enough virus with the kind of long incubation period that Smallpox had (up to 2 weeks) could wreak havoc on a tremendous scale.

It's shaping up to be a busy summer. I'm heading to Smalltalk Solutions, of course - Orlando, June 27-29. I'm actually going down a lot earlier - my parents live down there, and my sister's kids will be visiting - it's a chance for my daughter to spend time with her cousins. July isn't too busy yet - but August could be packed. I'd like to go to the WBC convention - that runs August 2-7. I already have a vacation to DisneyWorld scheduled for the 7th-14th... and then I'm heading to ESUG, which runs from the 16th -20th in Brussels. Looks like I won't be seeing that much of the house this summer :)

You may have had trouble reading my feed the last few days, depending on the reader you use. I know that BlogLines wasn't getting updates at all. It turns out that I had an error in the Enclosures I was putting up. The issue - They were listed as having 'unknown' for a size, and that's not what was expected. All that has been fixed now; sorry about that