Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Here's a talk at ESUG 2005 - porting a VAST/Gemstone app to C# and SQL Server. The cognitive dissonance part?

This experience report presents a process that is currently being used to migrate a large, mission-critical VisualAge GemStone Smalltalk system to C# and .NET. Described is an effective, test-first methodology that assures the .NET version system will be source-code identical to the existing GemStone Smalltalk system. Described are the steps of this migration process. Also presented are techniques to deal with the short-comings of the C# language. Experience with moving from GemStone persistence to SQL server is also discussed.

"source code identical"? What the heck does that mean? Especially given the "dealing the shortcomings of C#" bit. My brain hurts just reading that...

I was asked a question about my OSS rant in the Smalltalk IRC channel, so I thought I'd clarify. I'm not hostile to open source in general - heck, I've released BottomFeeder as open source, and we ship open source components (GLORP) with Cincom Smalltalk. What I object to are glib "it should all be free" statements by people like Eben Moglen.

Smalltalk has always been "open source" in the sense that all source is available with the product (at least in our case), and in the sense that the Smalltalk level code is all modifiable.

Register now, so you get the lowdown on Smalltalk usage in medical devices:

Using Smalltalk in Medical Instruments

experience report

Hodges, Andy: Medtronic

Wednesday 9:15 am to 10 am

Abstract: Our group is using Smalltalk to develop software applications for use in medical instruments. These instruments are used by clinicians to interrogate and program pacemakers, defibrillators, and other implantable devices. This experience report will describe our basic system and how the Smalltalk software interfaces to other system components, how we have adapted several agile practices (test first design, automated unit testing, shared ownership, limited pair programming), and how we merge with traditional development processes to create artifacts required by the FDA (requirements spec, VT spec, test reports, etc.). We have been able to successfully incorporate Smalltalk technology into a highly regulated, high process environment. It has provided the flexibility and productivity increases that help reduce our product cycle times.

Bio: I have been developing software at Medtronic, Inc. for almost 15 years. For the last 5 years, I have been working in one of our Research organizations and have been almost exclusively programming in Smalltalk. Our software systems are used in research studies intended to collect the clinical data necessary for the delivery of the next generation device features and algorithms.

See you in Orlando!

It looks like it's time for my weekly log analysis. First off, I'll have a look at the BottomFeeder downloads over the last week:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	701
Mac 8/9	368
HPUX	320
Mac X	196
Sources	190
Linux x86	186
CE ARM	125
Windows98/ME	57
Update	37
Linux Sparc	32
Solaris	10
Linux PPC	10
AIX	3
SGI	2
Source Script	2
ADUX	1

That's a total of 2240 downloads over the last week, for an average of 320 a day. Smaller than last week's, but in that variable 300-400 a day range that Bf has been hitting for quite some time now. And yes - I'm still baffled by all those HPUX downloads :) Now let's take a look at the HTML accesses, and see what tools are being used there:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	41%
Internet Explorer	34.8%
Other	15.4%
Net News Wire	2.5%
BottomFeeder	2.5%
Java	1.8%
BlogLines	1%
Opera	1%

That looks about the same as last time. Finally, let's see what the RSS access logs show this week:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	24%
Other	21.1%
BottomFeeder	17.1%
Net News Wire	13.9%
BlogLines	3.7%
SharpReader	3.6%
Internet Explorer	3.5%
NewsGator	3.5%
Liferea	1.9%
Planet Smalltalk	1.9%
Feed Demon	1.5%
RSS Bandit	1.2%
Feed Reader	1.1%
Shrook	1%
JetBrains	1%

That's a slight variance from last week's look, but not a lot. That's the long and short of it.

KBM responds to my OSS rant from yesterday:

What else? Now here is a play that might be of particular interest to the Smalltalk ecosystem, especially if IBM ( a big name if not an active player recently) leaves it: Smalltalk companies co-operate on the parts of Smalltalk where there is no worthwhile competitive advantage. i.e. they use a common base and compete on new more interesting areas. Co-opetition. Painful whilst the common base is constructed, but it could save money for each company. This saved money can now be used to either allow survival if customers leave the arena, or allows investment in new areas to compete with Java, C# et al.

So the fact that companies pay people to work on Open source is neither some new revelation , nor a dirty secret. I see it as a sign of people trying new business models - and some are succeeding.

The problem with that is, all the Smalltalk vendors already have that base implemented. There's really no motivation to go that way as a result. There's also the fact that the various implementations vary quite a bit. As to "trying to business models" - well, I'll make the point again: show me one that works for Cincom Smalltalk and funds the level of development we do.

Well, Lucas once knew how to make a good movie. He forgot how a few hundred million bucks ago. I went into this movie with very, very low expectations - and boy, I wasn't disappointed. The movie lost me early on, as a consequence of one of Lucas' boneheaded plot devices from the last movie - the whole "A Jedi must not love" thing. We end up with Padme and Anakin living together in the capital, but claiming that they've married in secret. Yeah, right - as if those Jedi mind masters wouldn't have figured that one out.

The whole movie went that way. We had a loosely connected set of battle scenes (and boy oh boy, I won't even try to explain the idiotic conspiracy theory behind Palpatine's war for control of the Republic - it didn't pass the smell test. See, here's the problem. We went to see "Sahara" last night. Think "National Treasure", but in the desert. Improbable plot, RoadRunner style escapes, the whole bit. However, here's what it had going for it:

• The dialogue worked
• The emotional interactions of the characters worked
• The pacing was relentless, so you never had to stop and actually consider the improbability

Which is why "Sith" sucked so much in comparison. The pacing was glacial. The dialogue was actually painful to listen to. The characters made stupid choices again and again. Not to mention the improbability surrounding the central fear point of the movie, that Padme would die in childbirth. Apparently, hyperdrive is one thing in the Star Wars galaxy, but knowledge of C-Sections - nope.

This was perhaps the worst movie I've been to in a long while, and that includes a lot of dogs. I don't know what Ebert and Roeper were smoking when they gave this film a thumbs up, but I rather suspect that the after effects of those drugs were very, very bad. My wife was tempted to just walk out, and there was a point halfway through when I nearly fell asleep.

My recommendation - if you have a choice between "Sith" and "Sahara", go see "Sahara". Heck, if you have a choice between "Sith" and "The Annihilators", watch the latter. Yes, it's really that bad.

For once this month, the weather is neither cold nor rainy. So I'm out on my patio, enjoying the WiFi, the breeze, and my gardens. Here's a shot of the one to my left as I sit here:

And here's a shot of the ones on the right:

Like the patio I'm sitting on, we sunk those circle stone paths ourselves, with shovels, bags of sand, and a wheelbarrow. It was a lot of work a couple of years ago, but it's all good now :)

I need to pound Eben Moglen with it:

The lawyer, also a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University Law School, said the time has come to again treat science like physics or chemistry, by promoting a free exchange of ideas the way Galileo Galilei proposed.

"We are responding to a lengthy, but temporary period during which software was a proprietary, closed science..." Moglen told the audience. "The consequences of that process produced bad software at high prices. We are reversing that situation. What we do is help people think well and share."

Moglen said certain incumbents, which he did not directly name, refuse to share their software ideas despite having originally taken much of the foundation of their products from the free software community.

Gee, that's nice of him. How does he suppose that a decent size software team funds development efforts without being able to hold the rights to it? Say we (Cincom) followed his advice with Cincom Smalltalk, and just gave it away. Just charge for support, I suppose Eben would tell me.

Sure. Experience in this industry tells me that people will avoid paying if they can, and delay payment for support until it becomes required. There's another problem as well - the vultures that would swoop in and offer cut rate support that we couldn't match if we hoped to keep our developers on staff. We have fewer people handling support than we have doing new development. That means that a competing firm - in a scenario where the entire suite was free - could swoop in with a handful of support staff and charge far less than it costs us to manage our developers. The result? We would either go out of business, or end up with virtually no developers on staff.

Has Eben looked at the big, successful Open Source projects? Like Apache, Eclipse, and yes - Linux itself? The dirty little secret is that all of those are funded by a handful of large firms. The reason? Open Source allows them to play the "Robin Hood" card against Microsoft. One of the things people forget about MS is that they became successful early on by offering lower prices for things than their competition did.

I'm hardly the only person thinking this - witness this article in Forbes Magazine:

Open source advocates have pushed McVoy to "open source" his product--that is, to publish the program's source code, or basic instructions, and let the world use it for free. But McVoy says it is simply not possible for an innovative software company to sustain itself using an open source business model.

"We believe if we open sourced our product, we would be out of business in six months," McVoy says. "The bottom line is you have to build a financially sound company with a well-trained staff. And those staffers like their salaries. If everything is free, how can I make enough money to keep building that product for you and supporting you?"

Which is exactly what I said above. Torvalds objects, of course - but I notice that he doesn't object to the salary that he gets as a result of big company largesse:

"Open source actually builds on a base that works even without any commercial interest [which] is almost always secondary," he says. "The so-called 'big boys' come along only after the project has proven itself to be better than what those same big boys tried to do on their own. So don't fall into the trap of thinking that open source is dependent on the commercial interests. That's nice gravy, but it is gravy."

I love that phrase "without commercial interest". Sure Linus. Next time that stupid thought crosses your mind, go trace where the money they use to pay you comes from. I'll caution you though - your head just might explode. McEvoy gets it right here:

"It costs a huge amount of money to develop a single innovative software product. You have to have a business model that will let you recoup those costs. These arguments are exceedingly unpopular. Everyone wants everything to be free. They say, 'You're an evil corporate guy, and you don't get it.' But I'm not evil. I'm well-known in the open source community. But none of them can show me how to build a software-development house and fund it off open source revenue. My claim is it can't be done."

No one has shown me a model whereby I could fund Cincom Smalltalk via an OSS model either - and I'll point out that the open source language environments out there are either

• Effectively funded by a big company (Eclipse)
• Run by tiny companies with a handful of staff, who are willing to do lots of side consulting

In that latter case, if you watch the products run by those small staffs - they don't tend to evolve that fast. Why? If you have to spend all your time paying the bills with consulting gigs, it's hard to do proactive product work.

Here's a tip for Eben, since he's convinced that the future is in non-proprietary software: Put your money where your mouth is. Instead of blathering, go run a company that builds OSS software for the general market, and let's see how far you get. And oh, Eben - since you think Sourceforge is such a vast well of great stuff:

Moglen said users who need software can find an abundance of code to use for software building in online machine tool shops, such as SourceForge. In that community, he said some 95,000 programming projects are being worked on by roughly 490,000 programmers in their spare time.

Why don't you also give us the activity stats for those projects? I know why you would rather not - it would be embarrassing. It's kind of like shouting "10 million blogs" without also pointing out that most of them have one or fewer entries, and will never have more than that.

It's payback time for the frankenstein procedure from last fall:

Red Sox were told Schilling could be out 12 weeks

I though it sounded like a bad idea for Schilling, even though it worked out for the Sox.

PR Differently makes a bold sounding prediction:

The second half of 2007 is when we will witness the death of the first "big" newspaper from the convergence of blogs, podcasts, and the like.

by this, I mean we will see the shuttering of a "major" player - think the Times, the Journal, something like that, and in its place will rise up the digital-only version. Be it "digital paper," (which will probably be cheaper than regular paper) or web/cast based, the newspaper will die as we know it, and others will follow.

I suspect that the NY Times subscription plan is going to be a lot less successful than they hope - I sure won't pay $49.95 a year for a paper with loose to non-existant editorial standards (think Jayson Blair), and with mostly dull editorial writers - I can get far more interesting commentary - from all parts of the political spectrum - from the blogosphere. Wouldn't surprise me a bit to see the Times be first in line, especially if their dead tree numbers keep dropping.

It's the last day for early registration for Smalltalk Solutions 2005:

Today is the last day for early registration for Smalltalk Solutions. After today, all registration fees will increase by $100. Please visit the Smalltalk Solutions web site to register.

If you have registered, then you need to hurry and reserve a room at the conference hotel. Our block of rooms is nearly gone. You can find more information about how to register here

See you in Orlando!

Podcasting is supposed to be the next big thing, and I don't really get it - although, using full disclosure here, I'm listening to a James Lileks podcast as I type this. The thing is, Lileks is funny - I enjoy his writing, and I like listening to his occasional diner bits.

Having said that, here's what I don't get about podcasts - they're like radio personality blather, but without the "radio voice". I've tried listening to a few podcasts - some by Winer, some by Curry, a few others. Maybe this is a personal taste thing, but I get the same urge when I hear those casts that I get when the DJ's on the local mix station start blathering - reach for the dial now!

The problem is, it takes a very long time to get someone's point when they insist on making it verbally. Something that takes 15-20 minutes verbally would take me fewer than 5 minutes to wade through in print. Which gets to the heart of the issue, for me: if your podcast could go to paper with no loss of information, you are wasting your time. This is what separates most podcasts from the sort of thing Lileks is doing - he's mixing in pop culture references in musical form, and I find that interesting. I'm sure that there are people who find Lileks dull - like any art, this is a matter of taste.

Back to the main point though - with a Lileks cast, it couldn't be delivered in print - not without a huge loss of information. Take your typical podcast though - it's 15-20 minutes of thinking out loud - a verbal rough draft, if you will. Thanks, but no thanks.

Gordon Mohr has a disturbing post on the interrelationship between Hepatitis B and the demographic overage of boys in Asia. It's engaging and disturbing, all at the same time.

Jonathan Schwartz relates an anecdote, illustrating that FUD is still being used by some of your larger firms out there:

It's also amazing to hear what our competition's been telling some of our European customers. IBM told several that they couldn't port their apps to Solaris 10 because Sun is withholding information - but only on Opteron. Which even the customers knew was ridiculous. It's tough to withhold information when the product's free, and code's open. (They offered another customer a "private version of WebSphere on Solaris 10, supported by IBM Global Services" - um, no thank you.) I'd like to thank the customers that continue to demand choice, and the ton of partners we're signing up to deliver it. I think we've cleared 1.5M license downloads.

They even do this on the niche level - go back to the SDTimes quote I pulled from an anonymous IBM source.

Scoble illustrates the quandary that dite owners are faced with in the syndication space. People like Chris Pirillo need visitors to their site (it's how they get paid - advertising). That means that they are driven to provide partial content feeds in order to "force" aggregator readers to the site. Sadly for him, this runs smack into this:

I'm tired of reading feeds that treat me badly. I have more than 1,300 full text feeds. There's one or two exceptions. The New York Times. CNET. Slashdot.

The ironic thing is, Pirillo's site illustrates what I wrote about over here almost perfectly. No, Chris isn't providing brochure-ware. But his site requires effort to read, and that extra effort - when combined with a partial content feed - makes it less likely that I'll bother. What am I talking about, you ask? Well, follow that link I provided to his site. Not only does he provide partial content in his feed - he only provides partial content on his site. If one of the extracts looks interesting, I need to follow a [more] link to read the whole thing. Uhh, Chris - that's not going to happen IMHO - not for most people. I understand the quandary on the feed side (although, IMHO, the answer is to provide full content feeds that point back to "premium" site only content - not to provide an extract that I'll blip by).

I don't think this post helps either:

I love how everybody whines when they don't get their way - it's human nature. So, for all of you who unsubscribed from my RSS feed because it wasn't the way you wanted it (even though you're not the one providing it or paying for it), then you won't ever know that I considered going back to full feeds.

Vinegar, honey, all that. If you want to drive people to your site, I don't think that useless extracts are the way to go - it's far easier for me (even with only 281 feeds, as opposed to Scoble's astounding 1300+) to filter it right out than to follow the link. While I get the problem, I don't think he's found the answer.

Don Park is more down on Atom than I am:

For example, what is the point of requiring all entries to have a unique identifier when feed clients have no incentives to reject feeds that violate that requirement? Filtering of duplicate entries from multiple sources is a quality of service problem that is best dealt with in a separate opt-in specification. Clients and servers that support the opt-in spec will be more popular if resulting differences in user experience and distribution are significant enough. If not, there was no need for it anyway.

The reality is, aggregator implementors are not going to charge out and ponder the spec in great detail. We are going to do a sanity check on Atom 1.0 feeds as they appear, tweak existing code as necessary, and move along. In BottomFeeder, RSS feeds, RDF feeds, and Atom feeds all end up being pushed into the same object model - from the end user's standpoint, a feed is a feed, and whether it's Atom, RSS, or RDF just doesn't matter.

The net value of the entire Atom exercise? Very close to zero.

As you know if you read Troy's blog, he's off having gastric bypass surgery. I've been getting email updates on his status, and this morning I found out that he had been suffering a small fever since just after the original surgey. Today they went in to check the sutures - they wanted to make sure that there was no infection caused by leakage. The good news is that there's no leakage, and his fever is going down. Here's the update I got:

Troy is out of surgery, and they did not find any suture leaks, or any problems with the surgery. They are not sure what caused the fever, but it seems to be going away this afternoon.

So good news for Troy!

When I announced CST Summer 2005 yesterday, the NC files for ObjectStudio weren't updated on the server - the 7.0 files were still there. That's been updated, so you should now see ObjectStudio 7.0.1 as one of the download options.

May the farce be with you :)

PVRBlog links to a Steven Levy piece on TV watching habits:

The result may be that when all the time-shifting and space-shifting is accounted for, most people will watch the same stuff by the same creators. In fact, even with today's relative abundance, most people stick to only a few channels. According to Nielsen Media Research, households that receive about 60 channels usually watch only 15. Households whose systems can receive 96 channels (around the national average) actually watch... 15. What's more, a recent study conducted at the UPenn Annenberg School for Communications showed that when people were offered more programming choices, they stuck to fewer selections—and, alarmingly, watched fewer news shows.

Well, the thing is that those "15 channels" vary a lot, I think. While each of us may only watch a small set of the available stuff, I'd bet that the small set varies quite a bit over different households (and varies quite a bit over time depending on the household demographics, as well). For instance - we watch a lot less Nickleodeon now that our daughter is 11 than we did when she was 5.

The hard bit of market research here is figuring out what part of the target audience any particular household is in.

Here's a blog that's all about PVR news - the PVR blog. Subscribe to the feed here.

Steve Rubel points to an interesting fake blog occurrence - where whoever is behind the fake blog is spamming negative comments about the company in question with positive spin. Fake blogs are getting more common - take a look at the results of this Google search on the term. Of the supposedly 10 million + blogs out there in the US, I wonder how many are either:

• Dead (i.e., one post and gone)
• Troll blogs of the sort I mentioned above

One things for sure - it'll be really hard for search engines to filter this out - not least because the service being abused most is run by Google...

Update: The faux blog has gone 404. I guess Panera Bread doesn't like being caught out :)

Is this the state of thinking in the Java world?

I spend half my time trying to identify what performance systems are doing by reproducing their behaviour in a performance testbed. It isn't always successful - I'd like to get profile information directly from the production systems, but even low overhead profilers can't get certain types of information in a low enough overhead way (I've tried, believe me I've tried).

One piece of info that is really useful to know is how many of each type of object has been created and has been GC'ed by the JVM. That information isn't available from the JVM, except if you use a profiler (with the honorable exception of JRockit which I think will give you this info in a low overhead way).

But all it takes is two instance variables added to each class object: countCreated and countGCed. And then the JVM just needs to increment each counter for each class when an object is created or GCed. That must surely be a neglible overhead added to the cost of object creation and garbage collection.

This is really the biggest bang for your buck I can think of to add to the JVM for improved monitoring of the system. With that information, so many things become possible, including automatic detection of memory leaks, identification of what may be causing high GC loads, etc.

Gads. Does this guy have any idea how many instances of an object could get created in a normal application? Remove your hands from the code browser, and return your seat to the full and upright position....

My windows inside Eudora were disappearing, and it seemed to make no sense - I'd summon one of the mailboxes from the list, move the mouse over, and *poof*, it would just disappear (but still be listed as open). Very bizarre. I couldn't get the windows to "stick", even after closing and reopening Eudora multiple times. Then I got myself into a very bad situation by telling it to float the mailbox window - and watching that one disappear.

This looked very bad. Then I moved the mouse to another app, and noticed that Windows thought that the center button was down. No amount of toggling fixed that - Windows was just in a bad state. Finally, I rebooted to clear that, and all was well. Really, really weird.

In comments to this post, Chui Tey said something I thought ought to be pushed up:

However, the phenomenal growth of aggregators again underscore the utility of simple, widely accepted formats in delivering tangible benefit to end-users. The world of WS-* in contrast spends 80% of their time making allowance for the 20% of users.

About the size of it...

I just love this quote from an SD Times story on Java platform evolution - Graham Hamilton writes:

We are resisting the temptation to make Java language changes in Mustang. We recognize that James Gosling achieved a genuine masterpiece with the simplicity of the Java language design, and we want to be very cautious in evolving the core language.

But at the same time, languages do need to evolve, and we are exploring a few key changes for the Dolphin release. We’re interested in introducing direct support for XML into the Java language. Many Java developers work with XML, and we’re interested in finding ways of smoothing that integration.

Simplicity? Of Java? Who are these people kidding? Compared to C++, perhaps. I'd guess that the author of this piece has never seen (possibly never even heard of) Smalltalk, Lisp, or Python. Simplicity my foot :)

And "direct support for XML" in the language? You have to love that - after telling us how "simple" Java is, he implicitly admits that it's lacking in power, since they have to extend the language in order to make XML easy to deal with. Hasn't been a problem in Smalltalk - I've had few XML issues in BottomFeeder or Silt. Then again, I wasn't dealing with a language designed by the sort of people who think "final" classes are a good idea, either.

I'm not sure whether this part should make me feel better, or worse:

The Java language is only one of many languages used with the Java platform. As part of Dolphin, we are planning to add a new Java Virtual Machine instruction, which is targeted at so-called “dynamic languages,” such as Groovy or Python. These languages need relatively elaborate mechanisms for executing method calls, and it seems that providing direct virtual machine support will both accelerate execution for these languages and provide final indisputable proof that the Java platform and the JVM are targeted at more than just the Java language.

Elaborate mechanisms? You mean things that VM teams have had in Smalltalk and Lisp VM's for - I don't know - about 2 decades now? It's nice to see that Sun is catching up with the latter part of the 20th century.

SDTimes has a story on IBM's shift of VAST over to Instantiations:

Instantiations characterized the move as a partnership, but an IBM spokesman who asked not to be named said it did not meet IBM’s legal definitions of a partnership and that the agreement was a way to end the life of the product while still providing support for its current customers.

IBM retains ownership of the VisualAge intellectual property, according to Instantiations CEO Mike Taylor. “We’re not buying anything,” he said. “We’re licensing the technology and the right to redistribute it from them. IBM retains intellectual property rights.”

According to Taylor, Instantiations’ corporate history goes back to Smalltalk’s creation. “Our roots go back to the very beginning days of Smalltalk, to 1980 when it was part of Xerox PARC,” he said. The company’s co-founders developed the first commercial version of Smalltalk at Tektronix in 1984, he added.

Hmm - interesting how IBM went out of their way to state that this was a way to "end of life" the product - and if you read the story in SD Times, they emphasized the migration aspect with Synchrony (i.e., the "we send an army of consultants in and convert you into a WebSphere shop path") more than the Instantiations path. It's an interesting story, just looking at the emphasis.

Steve Rubel points to an interesting comment from InfoWorld's Matt McAlister:

"The day InfoWorld's top news RSS feed received more requests than our home page, I started thinking a frightening thought - RSS is doing to the Web today what the Web has been doing to print for the last several years. We have disintermediated our Web site by offering our news in an easier to access format...again."

Well, maybe. What it means is that having a dull, brochure-ware site is no longer enough. You have to syndicate content that will give people a reason to visit whatever you aren't syndicating. If there's nothing there worth reading - you just didn't realize that you were failing before.

The Cincom Smalltalk engineering team has hit another delivery date - the summer release is out. This is a maintenance/bug fix release for both ObjectStudio and VisualWorks - as I've stated before, our current release plan calls for a major release once a year in the winter, with a maintenance release in the summer. If you're a customer or academic user - expect a CD shortly. If you use NC, we should have the new bits ready for download shortly.

Read the "what's new" information here.

Update: The NC site has been updated. If you've already registered, just hit the link you were sent in email and grab the latest. If you haven't downloaded before, register here!

Steve Kelly has some news on the DSM front:

Great news for those who would rather see co-operation than fighting over how best to obtain the benefits of model-driven development: Microsoft's Alan Cameron Wills and I will be running a workshop on Agile Development with Domain-Specific Languages on Monday June 20th at XP 2005 in Sheffield, UK. Alan will be familiar to many as co-author (with Desmond D'Souza) of the Catalysis approach to components in UML, and is now working for Microsoft on their DSL tools. To participate in the workshop, send a page or so about your Agile / DSM experiences to Alan by June 5th - more details on the workshop home page.

James Governor notes that MS is moving more quickly on RSS/syndication than Google is - and that they are being more transparent about it as well:

What is more, this post from Richard McManus is spot on in pointing out that MS is arguably ahead of Google when it comes to using RSS. Google's support for RSS is pretty lame so far, and unlike Microsoft, Google doesn't even have an enterprise business to support and defend. Where do i go to search blogs? Not Google but technorati or blogdigger. Google news doesn't support RSS. I can post blogs to RSS through MSN Spaces just as easily as i can use Blogger, and can find neat hacks in that regard.. Noone has built a vendor supported third party aggregator on top of Gmail (as far as i know), while Newsgator remains a favourite of RSS-hungry Outlook users. And you know what--MS employees actually usefully blog, which is more than you can say for our friends at the Googleplex.

Jon Udell has some thoughts up on dynamic languages:

The notion of custom-built "little languages" goes all the way back to Lisp and Smalltalk, as ultimately everything related to dynamic languages does. It's one of those deeply elegant principles that can take decades to unfold.

Interactivity is another. When I met with Jim Hugunin recently, he told me that when he shows IronPython to folks inside Microsoft, they're most impressed by his ability to wield .NET libraries in an exploratory way from the command line. Who would have thought that the read-eval-print loop would seem like breakthrough technology in 2005?

It's kind of amazing to see simple interactivity still blowing people away. I did a webex demo yesterday, where I spun up a workspace inside the BottomFeeder runtime and proceeded to demonstrate the idea of finding related content - by searching the live data and then slamming the results into the application - here's the code snippet:

| relations items feeds   viewer|
relations := Dictionary new.
relations at: 'aggregator' put: #('rssbandit' 'rss bandit' 'bottomfeeder' 'newsgator' 'feeddemon' 'feed demon').

feeds := RSSFeedManager default getAllMyFeeds.
zooms := Core.List new.
feeds do: [:each |
	items := each allItems.
	items do: [:eachItem |
		relations keysAndValuesDo: [:key :values | | matchOrNil toMatch |
			toMatch := eachItem description.
			toMatch notNil
				ifTrue: [matchOrNil := values detect: [:eachValue | ('*', eachValue, '*') match: toMatch] ifNone: [nil].
				matchOrNil notNil ifTrue: [| zoom |
									zoom := RSSZoomItem new.
									zoom feed: each.
									zoom item: eachItem.
									zooms add: zoom]]]]].

viewer := RSSFeedViewer getSingleInstance.
viewer  zoomFeedItemsView.
viewer  addColumn.
viewer lastStateChange: #goToAllNew.
viewer feedItemsList list: zooms

What that does is define a set of search terms, and then grab all the results together - nothing earth shaking. The part that surprised the demo audience was that I was doing it in a runtime - i.e., a delivered executable. Which leads me to this from Jon:

I do think that professional tools can help dynamic languages consolidate the ground they've been gaining. And to that end, conventional capabilities -- such as suport for testing, debugging, and version control -- will be prerequisites. But dynamic languages really are different in important ways, and their tools should be as well. It's time for some fresh thinking on this topic, and for some new approaches.

Well, the tools aren't only different - they are more flexible. Part of that is the simple fact that in Smalltalk, the environment is built in itself. That gives you a level of flexibility that Iron Python - which has to live within the closed strictures of the CLR - will never achieve. In Smalltalk, I can modify pretty much anything - sure, there's a wall at the VM level, but it's a fairly small one - all the interesting stuff is happening in the image.

This kind of silly putty flexibility gives you a lot of potential - have a look at this screen shot:

That's a browser, running inside the BottomFeeder runtime. I don't normally have source access there, so I'd see decompiled code if I selected a method. However, I could copy the sources for the component in question over and end up with a normal browsing environment if I wanted to.

This is what really separates the mainstream Java/C# stuff from a language like Smalltalk - and it also separates Smaltalk from things like Iron Python, which hae been pounded to fit into the CLR. There's very little separation between runtime and development time, and the developer can shrink that gap down to nothing if he so chooses. In anything JVM or CLR based, you'll always have that separation - always.

Here's an entire family that's been issued tinfoil hats :)

I've updated the server and the posting tool to support hot swapping of CSS files. It's not a complex thing, and I probably should have done this earlier. In any case, there are only two styles available at the moment, but others should be easy enough to gin up if you know CSS. Submissions welcome :)

Dave Winer is still stumbling in the dark, wondering where he might find a clue - this is in reference to some paranoia he's posted about Google along with his obsession with AutoLink:

They can just cut off our air supply. How could they do that. How how how? Well, remember we decided it was okay for them to modify our content way back in 2005. They didn't even have to ask our permission. Not only that, if we said no, they could ignore us. They're just giving the users what they want, and we believed them.

Gee, I sure hope he doesn't use any client side tools that modify content - like, say, ad blockers. Heaven forbid he were to muck with the revenue model of the site's authors, who depend on that advertising revenue. I sure hope he doesn't ever say anything nice about GreaseMonkey either. I certainly hope that he never used a pen or a marker on a textbook, and then passed it on to another student - by gosh the content was marked up in ways that the original author didn't intend! The horror!

I've got an update on Troy's surgery:

Troy’s surgery has completed, and it went very well. They were able to do the surgery lapropscopically, so Troy’s recovery should be shorter and less painful than otherwise feared.

He is still coming out of the anesthesia, and is on a ventilator as a precaution until he is fully awake. But the Dr. said that all went well.

Go Troy!

Early Registration for StS 2005 is ending:

All, Early registration ends May 26 for Smalltalk Solutions 2005. After May 26, the price of registration goes up by $100 USD. Hurry and sign up today before the early registration deadline.

Sign up now to save money!

James Governor thinks the "unthinkable" about Google:

See that mountain in the background that looks so small? Well if the economy suffers a really bad shock, hedge fund collapse, $70 a barrel, or whatever it is, then suddenly the mountain comes to the fore, and the perspective shifts. Could another firm buy Google outright? Lets say the bottom falls out of the advertising market, taking Goog revenues down to $3bn a year (currently doing 1.25 a quarter). Combine that with a major fall out on share price- say take P/E to a more realistic, yet still outrageous, 15. Who could afford $45bn?

Why not buy all the cool technology and brand and fire those expensive PHDs with their 20% own time who don't seem to be generating any cash yet? Why am i thinking about Google in this way? Partly because i have a post on the way about IBM's decision to give Google enterprise props. I am not a financial analyst, as you can doubtless tell from the proceeding commentary. But i just wanted to check myself and think whether Google is buyable/rideable.

Hmm - Which companies have piles of cash available that might be burning holes in their pockets under those circumstances?

James Governor makes some good points about where to go for information on RSS/Syndication/Blogging (etc):

I am skeptical News Corp is doing the right thing in bringing in McKinsey for its attempt to get it. How many McKinsey bloggers can you think of? Better to beg Udell to come along. And far more economical, i should think. You just know McKinsey now has a huge team of new MBAs (trawling the web to "get" RSS and all, probably with sex on the brain). They are being paid by Rupert to find knowledge that others have. Aggregating sure, but very top down and priced accordingly. So why not "view source" instead? Oh yeah- because McKinsey, like a premium beer, is reassuringly expensive. So Where are the McKinsey bloggers?

Pointing to Jon Udell is spot on - he not only follows this area, he lives in this area. Governor's points about equating expense with quality are spot on as well. News Corp is paying filet mignon prices, but is probably getting ground chuck level information...

Funny thing about that last post - immediately after I made it, I ran across this story on Sun's acquisition of Tarantella:

Tarantella Inc. is losing money and customers, but its thin-client technology found a potential savior last week in Sun Microsystems Inc., which is acquiring the Santa Cruz, Calif.-based company for $25 million in cash.

Kind of makes my point, I think. Sun is blinded by their vision of thin network appliances, but the market simply isn't that interested. Full bore PC's are too cheap, and they can function as either network clients or standalone systems.

Frank Hayes of ComputerWorld is debunking Nicholas Carr's latest attempt to define the end of corporate IT. In the process, he makes an interesting side point:

Users are the ones who experiment and create business innovation. So the most important place to put computing, and control of that computing, is in users' hands. Everything else -- networks, data, back-end applications -- is there to support those users. They do corporate computing. We in IT just help.

And if we replace their flexible, too-cheap-to-meter computing with thin clients and a fixed-cost, fixed-services utility, as Carr recommends? IT gains manageability, centralization and higher utilization. Business users lose the ability to innovate

This might be why Sun has had such trouble with the whole network computer thing. CPUs, disk space, and memory have been getting cheaper, so it makes less and less sense to centralize. The only cross current is the difficulty inherent in backing up so much data.

Sean Malloy passes on some news about Dolphin's plans for the product:

Andy Bower mentioned a while back, that Object Arts were toying with the idea of releasing a free version of Dolphin at the same time they released the full version of 6.0.

While they still haven't decided just what version of Dolphin they will be releasing into the wild, but they have now definitely decided that a version of Dolphin Smalltalk, will be available for free under the name of Dolphin Community Edition.

This is pretty exciting news for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Dolphin Smalltalk is the best pure Windows Smalltalk. If you are interested in developing applications on Windows, then it is without a doubt the version to use. Secondly, with a free version of Dolphin, it sets the entry level to a point where people who may not have checked it out before will definitely look into it now.

This is not official news yet. I knew about it for a while, Andy linked to the new Object Arts site in the beta test newsgroup, and it was mentioned on the new site. I asked if I could write something about it, and he didn't say no. So while I don't think that they are going to change their mind about a free version now, they may change their mind about what exactly a free version contains.

Interesting news, and it should help spread the use of Smalltalk.

Tim Bray asks some incisive questions about the terms for Google's AdSense for RSS Feeds:

What’s a Feed User? For a real dose of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, check out the “Terms and Conditions” language. Uncharacteristically for Google, it’s a bad piece of legal drafting; you have to agree that “You will ensure that each feed user complies with, and each feed user’s display of AFF Ads is in compliance with, all of the terms and conditions of the amended Agreement applicable to the Site in the same manner that such terms and conditions apply to You and the Site.”

Huh? What’s a “feed user”? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mean a person-or-program-reading-the-feed, but I’m also pretty sure that I don’t understand what it is they mean. And until I do, I’m damn well not going to sign up for “You agree you will be responsible and liable for any and all use of the AFF Ads by any feed user and will indemnify Google for any lawsuit or proceeding (a) relating to or arising from any feed user’s use of AFF; (b) relating to or arising from Your failure to ensure any feed user’s compliance with the terms of the amended Agreement; and/or (c) brought by a feed user against Google that arises from or is related to Your provision of AFF Ads to such feed user.”

This has the look of another license released by the lawyers without any "real people" having been consulted.

Let's wish Troy luck and a speedy recovery from his surgery. A friend of ours locally got the same surgery a few months ago, and he looks great - hopefully, things will go as smoothly for Troy.

Darren Oakey, commenting on David's post, has not only drunk the koolaid, he's swimming in it. To wit:

Static typing makes life easier because it SIMPLIFIES the decisions you have to make. Then it makes life orders of magnitude easier because it allows the IDE to provide useful and high quality information about what you want to do - there without changing context, without looking a different IDE. Final classes, checked exceptions make life EASIER because you don't make mistakes. The protect you from both misuse, and the far more common programmers affliction of stupidity - and that protection makes programming EASIER because your program works. First time and every time.

Yep, "final" makes things easier, IF the original designers thought of every possible contingency that I as a developer might ever run across, anytime, anywhere. Static typing makes it so easy that developer never, ever have to use casts. Not once - it simply never happens.

The last part of his comment is the telling part - he wants these things in order to protect the developer from his own stupidity. Just remember that the next time you use one of the mainstream languages - many of the "features" were designed with the idea in mind that you, the developer, are a moron.

As to his last comment, that these things ensure that your program works right the first time and every time? Pardon me while I go have a giggle fit...

Register for Smalltalk Solutions and find out how the chip fab industry works:

Commercial Machine Control using Smalltalk: An experience report from the Semiconductor Industry. experience report Raabe, Thor: Unaxis Wafer Processing Monday 9:15 am to 10 am Abstract: Unaxis has been shipping production equipment for Semiconductor Manufacturing for almost a decade with control systems based on ControlWORKS, a commercial framework written in VisualWorks Smalltalk. This presentation will describe the equipment, its capabilities, the use of Smalltalk and the ControlWORKS framework, and some experiences gathered while developing and supporting these products.

Bio: Thor Raabe is a Lead Software Engineer at Unaxis Wafer Processing where he has been developing semiconductor manufacturing equipment automation software using Smalltalk for 9 years. He has a full range of expertise ranging from troubleshooting hardware and driver code to system architecture and framework development.

See you in Orlando!

Slashdot reports that the MPAA thinks that digital piracy is costing Lucas money:

MPAA President and CEO Dan Glickman: 'There is no better example of how theft dims the magic of the movies for everyone than this report today regarding BitTorrent providing users with illegal copies of Revenge of the Sith. The unfortunate fact is this type of theft happens on a regular basis on peer to peer networks all over the world.'"

Earth to Dan Glickman: Sith has broken the single day record for movie revenues - so far it's raked in $50M. The entire set of films to date has brought in $5.7B in revenue.

So if this is the "best example" of how piracy costs film makers money, I think we can stop worrying. Is Glickman really this stupid? Does he have any idea how much of a moron this makes him appear to be?

David Weinberger lets the Boston Globe (and by extension, the entire MSM) have it with both barrels:

Note to Globe: You, Huffington, Walter Cronkite, the NY Times and the Mayor of Reading are all welcome in our blogosphere. But your concern that your high-toned bigness might just drown out our wee voices is misplaced. The blogosphere isn't a town the professionals can buy up; it's an infinite landscape that will have towns of every sort. We little, irresponsible bloggers are going to continue to find one another and delight in one another. And now and then we're also going to drop in on the upscale respectable towns — well, not the gated ones, of course — and, yes, sometimes we'll be carrying cans of spray paint. But we damn well will not be daunted.

Unlike radio and TV, the net isn't a place that can be bought out by a few gatekeepers - the barrier to publishing has been reduced to a simple desire to be heard. As I said in my last post, the only value-add that the MSM is now capable of adding is in actual, honest to goodness reporting. The kind that costs time and money.

Rogers Cadenhead hits the bullseye on the problems faced by the old line media as they try to adapt to the changed landscape. He first notes that Paul Ford tries to analogize from the cable tv experience - to wit, HBO managed to add value, why can't the Times? To which Rogers points out:

Interesting comparison, but I think it's far easier for HBO to beat network TV than for the Times to beat a horde of free online papers and bloggers.

That's a very good point. Consider cable TV, like HBO - they have more leeway than the free competition, as an artifact of FCC regulation. They can air content that simply can't make its way to the networks. You may agree or disagree with those restrictions, but nevermind - they exist, and they allow HBO (et. al.) to shift the playing field.

Now consider the plight of the Times. Straight news? There's tons of free content out there, from Google News and tons of other sources. Opinion, from their op-ed folks? I can find scads of free opinion pieces across the blogosphere, covering a much more intellectually diverse range than the Times op-ed page allows. What does that leave? It leaves real reporting. It leaves investigative pieces that bloggers don't have the resources to engage in, and that cable news nets won't air, for the most part.

Can the Times add enough of that to justify their subscription costs? I don't know, but the legacy of the Jayson Blair incident certainly doesn't help their cause. It's going to be a tough row to hoe, that's for sure.

I'm slightly more than halfway through "The Birth of the Modern", by Paul Johnson. It's a social/cultural/scientific history of the period between 1815-1830, when Johnson posits that the modern West was born. It's a fascinating book - kind of like the old PBS series "Connections" in the way it bounces from topic to topic, but in a more restricted time interval. Here's where the title of this post comes from - in a section on the rise of the Scientific method, Johnson writes:

In the years after Waterloo, scientific invention was of passionate interest to a rapidly expanding British and international public. That was the most important new factor. But it was still possible for a moderately well educated man or even a woman - a manual on chemistry was specifically written to appeal to ladies - to grasp the latest scientific developments. Indeed, an empiric engineer like Stephenson, who had no schooling, worked at the frontiers of technology alongside scientists like Davy. Physics and chemistry, science and engineering, literature and philosophy, art and industrial design, theory and practice - all constituted a continuum of knowledge and skill, within which men roamed freely. The notion of separate, compartmentalized "disciplines", later imposed by universities, did not yet exist.

Before someone gets their shorts in a bunch over the way he wrote about women there, recall that this is the early 19th century being discussed, not the modern era. The fascinating bit to me is that anyone with enough sense and curiousity could work at the bleeding edge back then - if modern knowledge is a staircase, people were still standing at the lower landing, peering up. It's certainly not like that now.

That's why the 19th century has such a romantic allure to it - it was, by and large, a time of piece in the West. Certainly there were large disruptions - the Civil War in the US, the revolutions (mostly abortive) of 1848 in Europe, the Franco-Prussian war. None of them swept the world though - there was nothing as huge as the wars or Napolean, or as large as WWI became. That meant that people were free to spend time, energy, and money on scientific and cultural pursuits. That's what happened.

There's a notion that science is advancing faster than ever before, but it's really not the case - the technologies introduced through the course of the 19th century and into the early 20th were far, far more disruptive. Consider communications technology, for instance. In reading about the negotiations at the Congress of Vienna, it was clear that the world hadn't changed yet - the ministers sent were mostly on their own, as dispatches from Castlereigh (of the UK) back to London took weeks going back and forth. Skip a few years forward and you had the telegraph - which brought instantaneous communication to the world. In 1815, it took months for the news of the volcanic eruption (which caused "the year without a summer") to reach Europe and the US. By 1883, when Krakatoa went up, it took a day or so. It's faster now, but not dramatically so.

Look at transport - with bad roads and horse drawn conveyances, it took days to travel from New York to Albany. With the introduction of the railroad, that dropped to hours. Sure, planes sped that up even more, and removed the need for the high cost railbed. The disruptive change in circumstances came with the rails though. Word of a news event could travel instantly (telegraph), and people could journey to and fro in hours, or days - instead of weeks and months. The coming of the steamship in the latter half of the century collapsed sea travel in the same way.

Now consider the changes we've faced since the 1960s, for instance. Computers and the internet? Well, computers existed back in the 60's, and we (at least in the West) were already attuned to the idea of changing technology. What we got was better and faster, not completely new. The PC and the laptop were incremental improvements, not wholly disruptive events. In the grand scheme of things, the telegraph was a bigger shock to the system than the internet was.

In the whole hullabaloo about Ballmer's alleged RSS comments (the original poster makes it clear that what he posted is not a verbatim transcript), I missed the most relevant tidbit - one of my readers pointed this out in email:

A. We believe RSS is important and will be around for a while but it is not going to change the world. It is a little too simple, that is also the reason everyone’s using it. We are working on more existing powerful stuff, around XML/web services [sic] that will address many issues beyond RSS. RSS will be around, but whatever we are working next will be cooler and more prevalent.

Emphasis added by me, btw. It's a little too simple? Right there, I think this speaks volumes about the corporate culture at Microsoft (not that it's absent elsewhere) - simplicity is bad - complexity means we accomplished something. Complexity means it's powerful.

In a nutshell, that's what's wrong with the IT sector as a whole.

Well, it seems to be time for my weekly log report - here are the results for the last week:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	775
Mac 8/9	480
HPUX	349
Sources	335
Linux x86	318
Mac X	241
Update	133
CE ARM	122
Windows98/ME	62
Linux Sparc	21
Solaris	20
AIX	14
Linux PPC	9
SGI	3
ADUX	1
Source Script	1

That's a total of 2884 over the last 7 days, for an average of about 412 a day - not bad, seems to be holding steady. I still don't get those HPUX numbers :) Let's have a look at the feed access:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	20.5%
BottomFeeder	20.5%
Other	21%
Net News Wire	14.9%
NewsGator	4.4%
SharpReader	4%
BlogLines	3.9%
Internet Explorer	2.8%
Planet Smalltalk	2%
Liferea	1.8%
Feed Demon	1.6%
RSS Bandit	1.1%
JetBrains	1.1%
Feed Reader	1%
Shrook	1%
Java	1%

Those numbers don't look too different from the last log check. Finally, a look at the straight browser accesses to the html pages:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	42.2%
Internet Explorer	31.8%
Other	15.0%
Java	3.5%
BottomFeeder	2.8%
Net News Wire	2.7%
BlogLines	1%
Opera	1%

Looks about the same as last week, although the aggregator accesses are a bit higher. Then again, the tested interval is shorter.

I was going to see The new Star Wars flick this afternoon - but the rain/wind storm knocked out power in one place in Columbia - the shopping mall where the theater we went to is! So instead, we had lunch (thus the title :) )

One of the cool things about BottomFeeder is that it's wide open to ad-hoc extensibility. I made a post about this 10 days ago - finding related content. This morning I thought I'd do a short screencast on the topic. The quality of this one might not be as good as the last few, but it's way, way smaller - the wmv file comes in just under 2 MB for 3 1/2 minutes. I'll muck around with the audio and video settings and see what I can do with the output in the future, but it here it is.

Here's an interesting tidbit from an impromptu interview with Steve Ballmer of Microsoft:

Q1. How important is RSS? A fad, important, huge or will replace the web/html dominance of the internet?

A. We believe RSS is important and will be around for a while but it is not going to change the world. It is a little too simple, that is also the reason everyone’s using it. We are working on more existing powerful stuff, around XML/web services [sic] that will address many issues beyond RSS. RSS will be around, but whatever we are working next will be cooler and more prevelant.

This touched off a mini-flurry of posting - Dave Winer assumes that it means MS is going to try to bury RSS. Scoble responded with a "look at all the cool RSS stuff we're doing!" post. Steve Rubel noticed the whole thing as well.

Here's the thing - all these guys assume way, way too much. You want to consider what kind of answer you would get had Ballmer been asked "Compare and contrast RSS and Web Services?" He's not a technical guy. He's a manager who was technical a long, long time ago, and I'd bet good money that his grasp of RSS and WS* stuff is limited at best. All this really demonstrates is that Ballmer should defer most of these sorts of questions down to knowedgeable staff instead of trying to answer them.

I've always wanted a Smalltalk balloon, and now I've got one!

Thanks to Jason Jones at STIC!

Ted Leung has a good observation about the Star Wars flick (which I haven't seen yet):

As for the movie itself, it's hard to say. Both the beginning and end were predetermined, so there was a limit to what could be done. Certainly there was plenty of action, and most of that was pretty good. The dialog was pretty bad, as expected. It certainly wasn't as bad as Episodes I or II, but I'm having trouble deciding whether it was good enough to edge out Return of the Jedi. Regardless, after 28 years, Star Wars is done.

The lack of any real mystery in where the film will end up certainly does limit the attraction somewhat. It comes with the territory, having been set in the past of the "first" three films. To some extent, that was the problem "Enterprise" had as well - you knew that it had to end with the founding of the Federation, just like you know that "Sith" has to end with the rise of Vader and the Empire.

Having said all that, I'm sure I'll go anyway.