Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Have a look at BitWise, which got a plug over on the astares blog. They have a story on Squeak this month, and they will be covering Dolphin 6 and Cincom Smalltalk in upcoming editions. Bookmark that site!

Our first day of the planning meeting is done, and, as usual, we haggled and argued over priorities and the relative importance of various aspects of the product. No, I'm not about to spill any "dirty laundry" we discussed :) We have another day of this tomorrow, at which point we should be ok for another half year. In the meantime, let me know what you think we should be up to.

Register for Smalltalk Solutions now, and find out what Cincom and our partner Georg Heeg have been up to with ObjectStudio:

Integration of Smalltalk Systems – E.g. ObjectStudio inside VisualWorks

presentation

Heeg, Georg: Georg Heeg Objektorientierte Systems

Tuesday 4 pm to 4:45 pm

See you in Orlando!

Interestingly enough, with the way we package Cincom Smalltalk we don't get a really good idea of what people are using. What do I mean by that? I mean that we ship both ObjectStudio and VisualWorks, with all their various components. So at our end, we would really like to know:

• Are you using ObjectStudio, VisualWorks, VSE? Which ones do you have in development/production
• For the Cincom Smalltalk product(s) that you use, which components are you making use of? Which ones do you plan to make use of?
• What platforms (OS/hardware) are you developing on? What about deployment?

This kind of information would help us a lot. Please send me feedback on this, either in comments or email.

I'll be in a planning meeting with engineering all day today (and tomorrow), so I won't be posting much. We should have a productive meeting, and I'll push out any useful details that I can

David Buck illustrates the richness of the Smalltalk libraries - and the comparitive paucity of the C# and Java ones. Throw the "final" wrench into the mix and you get productivity loss.

Suppose, though, that Smalltalk could know (maybe by type inference or by declarations) the types of the variables and it implemented a kind of Intellisense similar to that in Visual Studio. What you'd find is that the list of available methods is about 10 times larger than those in C#. This highlights the fact that the C# libraries are really quite sparse.

Read his whole post - the table he posted is quite revealing.

I got to experience one of the true joys of summer travel on the east coast today - thunderstorms. It was hot today - temps went past 90 with pretty high humidity. On the east coast, that means one thing - late day T-Storms.

So of course I arranged my flight to Cincinnati for 7:50 pm. I arrived at DCA to find flights backed up like crazy - the 5:40 departure to dayton hadn't left yet (it never did - they put some of those passengers on our flight). We boarded around 8, and then just sat until 9, as a rather nasty storm rolled by. Then they re-opened the door, and put on a few refugees from the earlier flight.

Maybe next time I'll have the sense to fly earlier in the day :)

Cincom CEO Tom Nies was interviewed by the Wall Street Transcript recently - note the highlighting of Cincom Smalltalk:

TWST: We'd like to begin, if you will, with a brief historical sketch of Cincom Systems, and a picture of things as they are now.

Mr. Nies: Cincom is one of the founders of the software industry. We were organized in 1968. Our foundations were laid in the areas of database management and applications development technologies. In 1980 or so, we began to provide applications systems with manufacturing and financial applications as well. Then, in the mid 1980s, we began to offer text and text-management and text-content systems. During the latter half of the 1980's decade, we also provided Network Management Systems, and today offer CRM, Call Center, and Configuration Management systems. In the applications development technology area, we provide Smalltalk offerings, which are major object-oriented technologies. We're now the world's leading Smalltalk provider as well. In the past three years, we've expanded our offerings beyond software. We now provide outsourcing services for application development, application hosting, call centers, and business process outsourcing.

Get Smalltalk from the source - download Cincom Smalltalk NC now.

Ted Leung points to the press release. To answer Ted's query about clones, turn to the News.com story:

After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that."

However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac."

Let the attempts to build an OS X capable wintel machine begin :)

If you like Lileks, then you simply can't miss today's bleat. A small sample:

And don't miss the Vision Statement. The slogan, "Pizza with a conscience," suggests that ordinary pizza is sociopathic, or at least has no opinion on factory farms and doesn’t care that the cheese cultures were kept in small smelly pens all their lives, or that the green peppers were doused with pesticides to make them robust and tasty. If your corporate pizza had a conscience, man, you would hear the ingredients weeping as you opened the box. Which is such a buzz killer. Eat me! Chew hard! I cannot bear this burden any longer - would that I crisped up in the oven and ended my life as a black wisp of smoke, evaporating like the cry of a baby seal in the cold arctic air. Yes, that’s what I want. I want the pizza shop’s slogan to be something like "Sausage so fresh the screams of the pig still bounce off the slaughterhouse wall!" Really I do.

Heh - it's worth reading in full

Jonathan Schwartz explains how $1Bn in cash is actually better than $4Bn in cash:

Let's start with basics. Pat Martin and team have done a fantastic job turning StorageTek around. They're profitable, and cash flow positive. On a non-GAAP basis, combined with Sun, we believe the deal will be accretive (additive) to earnings within the first year. Making money is a good thing. (Sun employees will recognize that as Priority 1.)

On a cash basis, here's an even simpler calculus for non-accountants - although the deal takes $4.1 billion to complete, STK has $1 billion in cash - meaning it takes $3 billion net to acquire the company. On $3 billion in cash, Sun generates around $100M in interest income. Using the cash instead to own STK swaps our interest income for STK's net income and cash flow. Which both exceed, obviously, our $100M in interest income. The shareholders are better off.

On top of this, we get the benefit of a common corporate infrastructure, increased purchasing power with suppliers, increased coverage - opportunties that represent upside to the above figure. And that's before we get to new revenue opportunities.

I think he went to the Abraham Beame institute for Advanced Finance - Bill Lyons was the other well known graduate of that school. Remember this post I made over the weekend - now read the last paragraph above. I've seen the results of "common corporate infrastructure", and it's not pretty. Then he touts the acquisition of sales staff:

With this transaction, Sun and STK combine to create one of the largest dedicated storage sales and service forces in the world - and combining our product roadmaps makes us a supplier of the broadest product line in the industry. (And unlike other notable industry combinations, there is near zero product overlap or redundancy - so customers can be assured of a seamless transition and roadmap continuity.) With healthcare information privacy, Sarbanes-Oxley, new FDA regs, securities compliance - anyone want to bet against the growth of archival storage or information lifecycle management? We'll be 3,000 folks stronger in going after the opportunity (which, at last count, measures about $65 billion annually) - and not just with tape, but with the combined organization and roadmap.

All I can say to that is LOL. When PPS and Digitalk merged, the first people who bailed were the sales folks. Why? They knew that there was going to be a period of uncertainty during which commissions were going to be harder to come by. There are always other opportunities for good sales people - the best ones at StorageTek are either out the door already, or interviewing. What Sun is going to end up with the low performers.

This is an amazing post by Schwartz, actually. Sun has been hearing a crescendo of "WTF??" reactions from all over, so they have to explain what passes for strategic thinking there with an immediate post from the COO. There is an interesting side point here - the fact that they posted this to a blog rather than (or in addition to) a standard press release is interesting.

There was a nasty settings bug in the Enclosure handling plugin for BottomFeeder - I've posted an update that solves the problem. Just check for updates and load the plugin.

Wired reports some good news on the Mars Rover Opportunity - NASA has gotten it out of the sand trap it had gotten stuck in. It took them a month, but it's done.

In a story about the rumored Apple move to intel, Wired manages to guzzle some koolaid:

What's new this time is a fast, transparent, universal emulator from Transitive, a Silicon Valley startup.

Transitive's QuickTransit allows any software to run on any hardware with no performance hit, or so the company claims. The technology automatically kicks in when necessary, and supports high-end 3D graphics. It was developed by Alasdair Rawsthorne.

Umm, yeah - I've got some software right here that manages my perpetual motion machine - it works great, and better yet, I can now get it to run on any hardware with no performance hit thanks to this.

If Apple has licensed QuickTransit for an Intel-powered Mac, all current applications should just work, no user or developer intervention required.

I love it when you hear the phrase "should just work, no intervention required". It's time to grip your wallet tightly when you hear that. Here's the thing - there is no painless platform move. If Apple is going to a new chipset, there are going to be porting costs, period. Now, the author might have a point as to why Apple is interested (intel's new DRM technology). But the whole "pain free" migration? If you wanted that, you should have been using Smalltalk - where the move between platforms truly is seamless - and BottomFeeder is an example of that.

I was initially enthusiastic about the nofollow idea from Google, but I quickly lost that and became extremely skeptical. Now there's a good summary post by IOError on what the outcome of all this has been - and it's not been the problem for spammers that some people initially thought it would be:

As we've seen, rel="nofollow" is Google's way of having bloggers effectively delist themselves from search engines under the guise of protecting them from comment spam. If you want your site to have more Google juice, and who doesn't, people have to link to you without rel="nofollow". It's that simple. Nofollow hurts the entire blogosphere, and if carried to its extreme, will result in most blogs being relegated to obscurity as they drop out of the top 100 search engine results.

Pretty much the size of it. The spammers don't care - so long as there's a link to follow, PagRank is just so much fluff to them. What this has done is de-emphasize blogs in Google's ranking scheme, which is something they've apparently wanted to do. Better yet (from their perspective), most of the bloggers cheerfully followed along.

Jonathan Schwartz tries to see if any of the warm glow that Apple emits might reflect his way:

So I'd like to personally invite you to adopt Solaris 10 as the underpinning of the next generation Mac. We both respect Unix, both respect innovation*, and both clearly see volume opportunities in extending choice to developers. We'd love to work together.

Sure, as if Apple would spend tons of cash to attach itself to a boat anchor like Sun. How's that StorageTek acquisition going for you Jonathan?

I picked my daughter up from a sleep over this morning (these should be called stay up all night overs, for truth in advertising purposes :) ) Anyhow - as we walked home, she made a point of telling me how hard it had been to fall asleep after getting such a good night's sleep Friday, and how she wasn't really tired. I sent her up to change, and found her fast asleep a few minutes later, after I wondered why things were so quiet. Not tired my foot :)

I keep hearing cheerleading on how big podcasting is getting, but I'm sure not seeing it in my subscriptions. In RSS, podcasts would be announced via enclosures. The draft Atom 1.0 spec has support for the same kind of thing (and heck - BottomFeeder already supports it :) ).

But let's take a look at my feeds and items. Here's a small script I ran against my 291 subscriptions:

| allEnclosures allAudioOrVideo |
rejectBlock := [:matchString :url | ('*', matchString, '*') match: url].
allEnclosures := RSS.Enclosure allInstances.
allAudioOrVideo := allEnclosures collect: [:each | each url].
allAudioOrVideo := allAudioOrVideo reject: [:each |
	(rejectBlock value: '.png' value: each) | 
	(rejectBlock value: '.jpg' value: each) | 
	(rejectBlock value: '.gif' value: each)].
^allAudioOrVideo

So what did that give me? A collection of 14 video and audio enclosures. At the very least, the feeds I subscribe to don't advertise podcasts as enclosures very often. Heck, Dave Winer, who's a huge proponent of the genre, almost never uses Enclosures - he just slaps a link to podcasts he's done straight into his items. So are people finding podcasts the same way they find other web content - just by stumbling on it? Is it simply the case that most blog client tools don't support Enclosure definitions? BottomLine does, although that support is specific to the Silt server (I can't see a general way of supporting client side enclosure definition in any of the APIs out there).

Oh, and another small aside here - see that Smalltalk script up there? That was run from a workspace in the runtime. Smalltalk is just cool that way.

Register today for Smalltalk Solutions - look at this keynote on domain driven design that Eric Evans is giving:

Domain-Driven Design Purch

Tuesday 2 pm to 5:30 pm

Abstract: Large information systems need a domain model. Development teams know this, yet they often end up with little more than data schemas which do not deliver on the productivity promises for object design. This tutorial delves into how a team, developers and domain experts together, can engage in progressively deeper exploration of their problem domain while making that understanding tangible as a practical software design. This model is not just a diagram or an analysis artifact. It provides the very foundation of the design, the driving force of analysis, even the basis of the language spoken on the project.

The tutorial will focus on three topics:

• The conscious use of language on the project to refine and communicate models and strengthen the connection with the implementation.
• A subtly different style of refactoring aimed at deepening model insight, in addition to making technical improvements to the code.
• A brief look at strategic design, which is crucial to larger projects. These are the decisions where design and politics often intersect.

The tutorial will include group reading and discussion of selected patterns from the book "Domain-Driven Design," Addison-Wesley 2003, and reenactments of domain modeling scenarios.

Bio: Eric Evans is a specialist in domain modeling and design in large business systems. Since the early 1990s, he has worked on many projects developing large business systems with objects and has been deeply involved in applying modeling and Agile processes on real projects. Out of this range of experiences emerged the synthesis of principles and techniques shared in the book "Domain-Driven Design," Addison-Wesley 2004. Eric now leads "Domain Language", a consulting group which coaches and trains teams to make their development more productive through effective application of domain modeling and design.

See you in Orlando!

In a political post on one of the blogs I read, I saw a great summation of the problem that many companies get themselves into - certainly this is what befell ParcPlace back in the 90's, and I think it's what's wrong at Sun now:

When American corporations have lost their way and can't figure out how to improve their market position, a common "solution" is to merge with another similarly befuddled company. This allows both companies to "grow," and permits executives to put off hard decisions for years amid talk of "synergy" and restructuring.

Look at the telecom sector - I think there's a reason that BellSouth has been successful. They haven't had to deal with the kinds of internecine warfare that crops up after a merger. Instead, they've been able to concentrate on their core business. I can tell you from experience - when entities of roughly equal size merge, there's no synergy - there's infighting.

Last night our daughter was of at a sleepover, so we headed off to meet friends at "The Three Nines" - a typical enough "drink until you drop" kind of place. While the ambiance isn't much, the food is good, the drinks are cheap - and the staff are quick to note when your glass is empty or your plate is pushed to the side. All in all, it's a good location for a trvia game. Which is not to say that we did well :)

A week ago, we managed to come in second, barely missing first. Last night, we were completely clueless - for far too many of the questions, we just had no idea. We came in dead last, with only a handful of correct answers. Still, it was an enjoyable enough evening, a good night out with friends. We had been going to a game that the same guy was running at a local establishment, "The Luna C Grille". That ended pretty badly - the service there was just awful, the food mediocre (but expensive).

The Columbia game had been at another local bar, but things got ugly there between the guy who runs the game and a few drunken regulars. The management of that place inexplicably decided that having 70 people in once a week was less relevant than the desires of about a dozen regulars. Who knows - maybe they do spend as much as the larger crowd if they come in every night.

Back to the game at the "Luna C" - the first week there were 7 teams, around 50 people total. That's a big crowd for this place - it's not usually that full. The service was just awful. The waiters spent a lot of time ignoring us, and looking annoyed when they did have to deal with us. This performance was repeated the next couple of weeks. It wasn't just us, either - fewer teams started showing up (one team was banned by the management when they became incensed enough with the lack of service that they just walked out). By the time Glenn (the guy who runs the game) called the game off at that location, only one team had not announced that they wouldn't come back.

This place is a mystery. My daughter is fond of a couple of the dishes there, and it's convenient to our house - so we've gone in a few times. The service has never been good. The place is trying to be an upscale restaurant, but - they are behind a Giant supermarket and the windows look out on the local gym. Scenic, it's not. Even if that's what they're going for, being rude to paying customers gets you one thing and one thing only - bad word of mouth. They now have that in a pretty big way, having irritated a whole bunch of locals who play in this game.

If you live in the Columbia, MD area, or are passing through - here's a tip. Avoid the Luna C Grille. You can pay a lot less for mediocre food and bad service.

I have an update to the search engine access report I put up last week - here's a chart (click on it for a larger version) of referrals to the various blogs here from search engines. I've added data for the AltaVista engine this time around:

There's a definite downward trend going on with respect to search engines. My daily traffic has been the same or slightly up over that time interval, but it looks like fewer people are finding the blogs via net searches. Not sure what that means at this point.

Register now for StS 2005 so you can attend talks like this one on Unit Testing strategies:

Unit Testing Seaside Components

presentation

Shaffer, C. David: Westminster College

Tuesday 2:45 pm to 3:30 pm

Abstract: I will present the freely available SeasideTesting framework and a small representative set of tests. SeasideTesting is a framework that extends SUnit to simplify developing and running tests of Seaside web components. This framework is unique in that it is designed specifically to allow both testing the rendered HTML result and direct access to the component instances. The advantages and some challenges that come with this capability will be discussed.

Bio: I am an assistant professor of Computer Science at Westminster College in Western Pennsylvania USA. In that capacity I teach all levels of undergraduate Computer Science. I am also sole proprietor of Shaffer Consulting and have been developing software in Smalltalk, Java, Python, C, C++ for more than 15 years. Recently I developed payroll and retirement management software and business to business web applications. I have several years experience with Java/JSP and also develop web applications using Python.

See you in Orlando!

Here's a funny send up of the song "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia :)

There's been a bunch of speculation as to what Apple's moves in the processor space will be, and what they mean - now that CNET has reported that they are making an intel based move. Of course, if they wanted to stay "out there" they could announce that they are adopting the itanium. If that happens, I can guarantee that you'll hear shrieks of pain from our VM engineers :)

In any case, there's the requisite Slashdot story, and this batch of speculation from Russell Beattie (and I'm sure that there's tons more that I'm missing). Some of the speculation is just nuts - witness Russell Beattie's maunderings:

Here's my bet: it'll be OSX Server that runs on x86 only. Everyone's hoping for x86 lappys or just a version of Tiger that'll run on everything, but I don't think it's going to happen. Or, here's another idea: Tiger Express. A version of Tiger which will run on your Wintel box and show you how nice it is on the other side... Maybe even an Ubuntu-style "live CD" that people can pop in and use on their Windows boxes without having to install a thing?

None of that makes much sense, IMHO. The original story gives a timeline for adoption - low end stuff in 2006, everything else by 2007. That makes sense, I think - if they could get access to cheaper hardware components, the price of their low end systems could drop (or stay constant as they beefed them up). The thing that's held me from buying a Mac is price/performance - visits to CompUSA and BestBuy consistently show that I can get an x86 box for $500 to $1000 less, but get twice the RAM and twice the HD. I'm sure I'm not the only one who notices that, and Apple's financial folks have to have picked up on it as well.

We'll certainly find out Monday - at which point all this speculation could be so much mush. The CNET story only mentions x86 chips in passing, and intel is desperate to find a meaningful partner for the itanium. I can definitely imagine Apple taking that route, although doing so wouldn't really help them in the price area much.

There's been some buzz in this direction, but now CNET is reporting that Apple will be switching from the PowerPC chip to intel. Hmmm - I'm skeptical, given that they didn't cross the hump from the 680x0 transition that long ago. Then again, it sure would make their hardware cheaper. I guess I'll be watching for this on Monday:

update Apple Computer plans to announce Monday that it's scrapping its partnership with IBM and switching its computers to Intel's microprocessors, CNET News.com has learned. Apple has used IBM's PowerPC processors since 1994, but will begin a phased transition to Intel's chips, sources familiar with the situation said.

Apple plans to move lower-end computers such as the Mac Mini to Intel chips in mid-2006 and higher-end models such as the Power Mac in mid-2007, sources said.

Update: Scoble seems to have some sources on this:

Make no mistake. This is a real story and I've gotten confirmation from people who know. I can't say more, though, cause I don't want Apple to sue me to find out my sources.

Read the rest - his speculations are pretty good questions

Next week we are having planning meetings for Cincom Smalltalk - if you have suggestions for us, now's the time to send them to me.

The Register rounds up some even more negative commentary on the deal:

"If Sun management called the HP/Compaq merger the collision of two garbage trucks, what is a Sun/Storage Tech combination?" Merrill Lynch's star analyst Steve Milunovich asked himself in a research note published today. "We're neutral to slightly negative on the acquisition. Sun used $3.1 billion of its $7.5 billion in cash for a deal that doesn't seem to accelerate revenue growth given that tape is a mature market."

The Register is willing to cut Sun some slack over this deal, but it looks puzzling to me

Here's one of the things that makes Smalltalk more productive that the mainstream systems - the ease of exploratory development. Sure, Eclipse has workspaces, and similar things exist in other tools - but it's a pale reflection of what you can do in Smalltalk. Remember this post from awhile back, where I talked about categorized searches in BottomFeeder? Well, here's the workspace I mucked around with in the running application:

You can click the image for a bigger view. I developed that code mostly in the running application, not in my development image. Why is that relevant? Because I was interested in that kind of answer, so I started scripting it - and once I had something that looked reasonable, I went back to the development environment - witness the code in a browser:

Concept to completion - pretty quick, since the code was virtually the same (there was refactoring in order to slot it into the update loop process and the framework). That's not the big thing though - the big thing is that the idea came to me while browsing through my feed data, and I was able to act on it in the runtime with the actual feed data. I didn't have to import the feed data into the development environment first - I was able to just noodle around in the runtime.

That's something that you can't really do with applications built on top of the mainstream technologies - .NET and Java. They aren't set up for it. With Smalltalk, it's just a byproduct of working in the system.

Larkware news gets to the heart of the matter on the "big announcement"

I worry about the smaller file sizes business, too. Are smaller file sizes really all that relevant in these days of rapidly-expanding bandwidth and disk storage? When was the last time you ran out of disk space because of the size of your Word documents and Excel spreadsheets? (Now, the size of your Visual Studio install, that's another story). It looks to me like the smaller size comes at a cost: "The smaller file sizes are enabled by a combination of industry-standard ZIP compressed files technology that automatically compresses each component within the file as well as the reduced overhead of an XML format." So, you don't actually have a pure XML file to work with; you have a zip file containing a batch of XML stuff. This raises the bar in terms of the tools you need to actually interoperate with the new formats. It's not going to be as simple as just plugging them into the same XML tool stack you use for any other XML file format.

Yes, sticking a bunch of XML docs into a zip file doesn't exactly make it a simple matter to "just plug in your existing XML tools". What we've actually got here is one sticky tarball (existing Office format) replaced by a new sticky tarball - the big difference being the word "Open" slapped in front of it for marketing purposes. LarkWare examined the license and came away thinking it was pretty opaque - you should read that yourself (IANAL). This riff is good too:

So what's the bottom line? Well, XML is nice, sure, but honestly, most users will never care. I don't care if you save my document in XML, Braille, cuneiform, or chicken scratchings, so long as you can get it back when I ask for it. Some tool vendors, who can puzzle through the license and handle the legalities, will find their jobs marginally easier. Microsoft will have an additional flag to wave at confused legislators the next time open-source advocates argue for a switch to non-proprietary software ("Look, even the name says we're already open!"). All in all, I see this as a nice PR move, and an interesting technical achievement, but not of any particular significance to most users of Office.

This is 90% PR, and maybe 10% meat. It worked, too - they sure got a lot of undeserved attention out of a nothing-burger announcement. Now maybe if they had announced that they were supporting the Oasis Office Document standard...

It's Friday, so it must be time to examine the server logs. Here's the week of BottomFeeder downloads:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	688
Mac 8/9	400
HPUX	350
Sources	234
Mac X	214
Linux x86	196
CE ARM	101
Update	45
Windows98/ME	40
Solaris	16
Linux Sparc	14
AIX	12
Linux PPC	7
SGI	5
Source Script	3
ADUX	2

That's about 332 per day, which is in the same range it's been for awhile now. More source accesses this week though - not sure why that would be, since I haven't pushed a new release. Let's see what's up with HTTP accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	50.1%
Internet Explorer	34.8%
Other	13.1%
BottomFeeder	1%
Opera	1%

Well, Mozilla access seems to be rising, that's for sure. Based on reporting I see on other tech blogs, I'd say that MS' browser share amongst the "thought leaders" is in serious trouble. Let's see what the tool mix looks like for RSS accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	24.1%
Other	23.4%
BottomFeeder	18.3%
Net News Wire	12.6%
BlogLines	3.5%
NewsGator	3.5%
SharpReader	3.5%
Internet Explorer	1.9%
Planet Smalltalk	1.9%
Feed Demon	1.5%
Liferea	1.5%
Feed Reader	1.2%
RSS Bandit	1.1%
JetBrains	1%
Shrook	1%

Looks like it's time to take a walk through the "other" data and break it down more. The rest of the data is pretty similar to the last few weeks. I'll have a look at search engine accesses tomorrow.

Spotted in ION RSS

I'm also becoming increasingly impressed with Newsgator. Their recent acquisition of popular RSS Aggregator FeedDemon was a further step in their plan to be a major RSS services company, particularly on the Microsoft platform.

There is the small matter of integration here - something I have a little experience with, having lived through the PPS/Digitalk mess. NewsGator is built on the .NET platform, and integrates with Outlook. FeedDemon is standalone, and is built in Delphi. Ok, you explain to me the technology integration path there :)

Register now for Smalltalk Solutions 2005, so that you can participate in the panel discussion on version control systems for Smalltalk:

Team Programming Systems

panel

The panel moderator is Eric Clayberg. Participants are Colin Putney, Niall Ross, and Bob Westergaard

Tuesday 2:45 pm to 3:30 pm

Abstract: A panel discussion on team programming, version control, and configuration management in Smalltalk.

Bio: Eric Clayberg, Sr. Vice President of Product Development for Instantiations, Inc., was Executive Vice President of Objectshare Systems, Inc. and Vice President of Development for ParcPlace-Digitalk, Inc. He is the primary author and architect of over a dozen commercial Smalltalk add-on products including the popular VA Assist Enterprise and WindowBuilder Pro product lines. He has a BS from MIT and an MBA from Harvard.

Bio: Bob Westergaard started his Smalltalk career in 1993 with ParcPlace Systems by providing support for VisualWorks customers. Working in support helped him to become familiar with the entire product line and third party products, such as ENVY/Developer. He was part of a three member support presentation team at the 1995 ParcPlace User's Conference. He currently is a member of the VisualWorks engineering team, where some of his time is spent working on Store and system integration. Two of his contributions to the Cincom Smalltalk public repository are Paste it Everywhere (a multi-computer clipboard using Opentalk) and an interface to the Simple DirectMedia library. He also contributes to the Cincom Smalltalk Community Blogs.

Bio:Colin Putney is a software developer at Quallaby Corporation, writing on network monitoring software in VisualWorks Smalltalk. He the author of OmniBrowser and co-author of Monticello, both open source development tools for Squeak Smalltalk. Though he has been programming for many years, he began working in Smalltalk in 2002

Bio: Niall ended his undergraduate career with two intellectual interests: computing and the theory of relativity. A quick check of how much commercial work was available to relativity and gravitation theorists decided him to do academic research in that field and then seek a commercial job in computing, rather than the other way round.

Niall started working commercially in IT in 1985. He was at first assigned to designing and implementing software engineering process improvements and only three years later did he begin significant writing and delivering of commercial software. This experience taught him that intelligent people can nevertheless form foolish ideas about software engineering if they have not worked at the coding coalface of real large commercial projects.

Learning from this, Niall spent the nineties working on software to manage complex, rapidly-changing telecoms networks. A side effect of this work was that it taught him much about how scale and rate of change affects software. Early in the nineties he discovered Smalltalk. The more he used it, the more he came to recognise its its power in this area. This perception was strengthened when he spent a year delivering a telecoms management system in Java.

At the end of the decade, Niall formed his own software company to offer consultancy in meta-data system design, in Smalltalk and in agile methods. He has since worked on a variety of meta-data-driven systems, mostly in the financial domain. He also leads an open-source project (http://customrefactor.sourceforge.net).

See you in Orlando!

Ok, so Sun is still losing money, and their share of the server market is dropping (even as overall server sales grow). They've been laying people off in droves since 2002. So what do they do? They spend $3.1B of their $7.4B cash pile on StorageTek - a slow growth backup company. I'm not the only one saying huh??

"We do question the rationale of a transaction which reduces Sun's cash hoard by 40 percent and does nothing to reignite revenue growth or profitability," Prudential analyst Steve Fortuna said in a report Thursday. "We would rather have seen the company buy back a billion shares and fire 10,000 people."

Ouch. This deal really makes no sense to me. Actually, it looks like McNealy is channeling that all around business genius, Bill Lyons. He just has more cash to waste...

Larry O'Brien mentioned Joel Spolsky's "Law of Leaky Abstractions" in passing while discussing Moore's Law and Silver Bullets. I don't really want to get into his main topic; I was diverted by this comment:

I strive to keep this in mind while teaching:

class Foo { 
	public static void Main(string[] args) { 
		System.Console.WriteLine("Hello, World"); } 
	} 

might be the most trivial C# program there is, but understanding every word and punctuation mark requires a survey of a dozen or so topics, each of which involves abstractions with plenty of leaks.

Compare that to Smalltalk: Transcript show: 'Hello World'. Up there, as Larry said, there's a whole lot of leaking going on. Before you can even get to the simple stuff, you have to explain wads of utter trivia. I'm not going to claim that abstractions don't leak out in Smalltalk - but I am going to claim that they don't raise a flood tide. In C# and Java, they don't just leak - they jump out and scare off the children and animals.

SDTimes asks why MS is so reliably late with software deliveries:

“Integration, integration, integration,” said Joe Wilcox, a senior analyst at New York City-based Jupiter Research. With Visual Studio 2005, the database, development tools, operating system and enterprise servers are more integrated than ever before, and that creates cross-dependencies. “If SQL Server slips, Team System slips,” added Tom Murphy, vice president of integration and development at research firm Gartner, referring to the life-cycle development edition of Visual Studio 2005. “When you architect systems that are interdependent, there are advantages. But that also makes them difficult to change.”

Here's a phrase MS could add to their development methodology handbook: "Loose Coupling"

The Marcom blog points to a follow on - EPIC 2 - to the widely discussed EPIC video.

I bet that adding XML will make your car shinier too. This story from Frank Hayes mentions in passing that XML came up in senate testimony of a new FBI information system:

Yes, it's nice that Sentinel will also be fully buzzword-compliant: Mueller told the senators the system will use XML to facilitate information sharing, which must have impressed the politicos greatly. But the actual technology is background noise.

I'm just pondering the notion of XML coming up in testimony to a senate panel. It's like waving a gollum doll to drive away demons, I guess...

The Toronto STUG is meeting June 8th - Bob Nemec asked me to post this notice:

The next meeting of the Toronto Smalltalk User Group will be Wednesday, June 8 at 6:30.

The meeting will be on the 42nd floor (not the 47th, as in the past) of the Bay Wellington tower, 181 Bay Street (Bay & Wellington, the north tower). When you step out of the elevator, go left, then left again. We're at the end of the hall. Look for the 'Northwater' sign.

Our web site should be back up in the next few days (I hope). We're still correcting a registration error.

---

Jean-Luc Roche will talk about his experience in France...

The "Mutuelles du Mans", one of the two big Smalltalk users in France, developed all their corporate software with VisualWorks v2.5 in the early 90's. They never took the time to keep up to date with new Smalltak releases and, by 2002, they were faced with the rather daunting task to port all their applications to VisualWorks v7.

The most challenging aspect of the project was arguably to migrate the environment development to StORE, the SQL-based repository that ships with VW v7 and replaces ENVY. I propose to take a look at the porting strategy we used, to describe the difficulties we met and, in that process, to explore the differences between ENVY and StORE.

---

Bob Nemec

Toronto Smalltalk User Group

The StS 2005 Contest winners have been announced:

The Smalltalk Industry Council is happy to announce the winners of the first portion of the 2005 Smalltalk Solutions Coding Contest. Congratulations on a fantastic job. The winners in no particular order are:

• Blaine Buxton
• Michael Lucas-Smith
• Andrei N.Sobchuck

As the winners of the first round, they receive:

• A Smalltalk Solutions 2005 conference registration valued at $670 USD*
• A complimentary individual membership to the STIC.

* This does not include travel, lodging meals, tutorials, or any other fees associated with conference attendance.

The top three submissionswho are able to attend the conference will meet on Sunday, June 26th for the second portion of the coding contest. The contest will run from 6:00-10:00 pm EST. *

* Please note, in order to compete in the second round of the contest, finalists must be able to attend the conference. The second round of the contest will consist of the three highest ranking contestants who are able to attend the 2005 Smalltalk Solutions conference

There are new updates (dev stream only) for BottomFeeder this morning - the big one being to the Software With Style XML Display/Editor component. The blog poster is much smoother with the new code, although there is one nasty little bug - if you have a link in a paragraph, hitting "return" won't start a new paragraph. The menu pick for that works fine, but not the keyboard action. Odd, but that's why it's in the dev stream.

The With Style guys are aware of the bug, and have tests that spot it already. There are some bug fixes for a few miscellaneous display issues as well, but again - if you decide to update, you need all the updates. I'm pushing a new dev build now, so you could just grab the new exe/im and replace what you have - that should be ready in an hour or two.

Another good fix - the spell checker now works correctly in the XHTML editor.

Update: The dev links on this page have all been updated with a fresh build. Just scroll down once you get to the page

Derek explains how to lose a sale through inconsistent and customer unfriendly policies.

There are a bunch of updates available for BottomFeeder if you are on the dev stream - if you grab any of them, you need to grab all of them. There's a bunch of improvements - image fetching should be faster for most feeds, and the posting tool feels faster.

I'll be doing a new dev build tomorrow and posting that, so that people who keep up with the dev builds don't have extra slow startups.

Steve Rubel says that the big news from MS (which Scoble hinted at earlier today) is that Office is switching to XML as their default save format. That's the big, earth shattering news? A format change that will take up even more space on my hard drive? Oh, puh-lease... wake me when something relevant happens. In the meantime, cue all the people who think that XML is the universal answer to everything - half of whom will applaud this, the other half of whom will condemn it. Bored now....

Scoble reports that ComputerWorld has started up a set of blogs. I'm just starting to take a look at them now...

If not, this could mean the end of civilization as we know it :)

Country Music Television has selected its first "vice president" for the Dukes of Hazzard Institute. The first task for the New York-based executive: Upgrade the Institute's new facilities.

In other words, get cable and a new TV set for his apartment.

Yes, Christopher Nelson's new job, which comes with a $100,000 salary and a one-year contract, will be to watch reruns of "The Dukes of Hazzard" weeknights on the Country Music Television cable channel and write blog postings for the network's Web site.

I think I just heard my aggregator barfing...

James Governor thinks that Eclipse might be the next client platform for applications, not just development:

I have long argued that Eclipse was going to shake up the smart client space. In fact, i was arguing that before IBM even began its rich client work under the auspices of the Eclipse organization. The thing is, Eclipse was never going to be just an IDE. It was never going to be a tool only used by developers or operators. Eclipse is a framework for everything, and when did a developer environment not drive an approach to the client, especially when it has so much cross platform widgetry?

He may be right; Eclipse is widely used. On the other hand, "extensibility" in Eclipse is limited to plugins - if you want real extensibility, you want the ability to sling code in the runtime. I did a screencast on that awhile back. I've added the feature discussed there to BottomFeeder since that cast, and it's available as an update. As to this:

Eclipse RCP may be nowhere near as rich as Flash, nor have even a micro-fraction the number of users. But it is an environment where tons of developers live every day. Where they can view source across any component. And as the Web has repeatedly shown, the richest experience doesn't always win. The sourciest does. Obviously AJAX building styles are in the mix too, for the same reason, and Flash and AJAX are showing nice familiarity.

The source for the entire Smalltalk image has always been available. Heck, as David Buck demonstrated awhile back, you can change the compiler (on a class by class basis) if you want to. Smalltalk may be a niche player, but it's definitely the "sourciest" environment around - and always has been.

One of the things many of us have come to internalize is the notion that the modern era - the 20th century in particular - was more brutal than any time that had come before. Reading Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" has disabused me of that notion - there's a reason she used the subtitle The Calamitous 14th Century.

The book focuses on 14th century France (and in turn, on England, as this was during the span of the 100 year's war). The casual slaughter she documents is startling. The first thing you have to realize is that warfare was a different matter then - states only partially existed, and loyalty was to individuals - lords and the royalty. After a King raised an army, he had to figure out how to pay it (typically via harsh taxation of the already poor peasantry). Woe betide the countryside if the army survived until "peace" was declared - many of the nobles who raised armies took to a life of rapine and pillage once peace came. It was bad enough in France after the black death hit in 1349 - the various companies of soldiers who were no longer fighting for the French or English in the wake of that catastrophe took to raiding the countryside.

One thing she documents is that the population of France may have dropped by half between 1300 and 1400 - due to plague, the 100 years war, and banditry. An absolute eye opener...

I was emailed a link to this post on language trends - the post notes that circa 1995, Smalltalk had good mindshare and decent usage, but by 2005 and dropped into niche status. He asks:

So what's the point of all this? Well for me it's background for a bigger story: The decline of Smalltalk. I'm interested in understanding why Smalltalk fell from its zenith as an OO language of choice in 1995 to its current status as a great platform that hardly anyone uses. Is this the future of Java? If I can better understand the fall of Smalltalk (not to mention Objective C), I can better anticipate the future of Java and other languages.

Well, there were two things that impacted Smalltalk usage - the actions of ParcPlace-Digitalk (later ObjectShare), and the actions of IBM. Let me address PPD/OBJS first. ParcPlace was a growing company in 1995, before the merger with Digitalk. Even then the company was showing some organizational strains - the management team was sub-optimal at best (finely illustrated by their decision to merge with Digitalk)

That merger ate the next 18 months and tons of cash. The company not only spent 18 months trying to merge VisualWorks and VSE, it:

• burned through cash making multiple fruitless acquisitions
• failed to release any new versions of VW or VSE during the code merge attempt
• failed to manage the merger itself, leading to internecine warfare within the engineering and consulting groups

Needless to say, that kind of thing didn't engender confidence in the customer base. That was bad enough - then rumors of financial problems started to float, and in winter of 1997 management announced EOL of VSE (without any migration strategy), the termination of the code merge of VW/VSE, and a new Java strategy. Thus the VSE customer base bled out, and the VW customer base, already nervous over the non-existance of new releases, wondered how much focus the product would get with the new Java focus.

Things went that way until the new management team came in and changed the company name to ObjectShare (one of the firms that had been acquired during the old management's mad buying spree). Things muddled along, the Java product was released with a thud, and VW 3.0 crawled out. The new management tried to prop up share prices and failed, and things continued to slide (again, not engendering confidence in customers or prospects). Finally, Cincom bought the Smalltalk business in 1999 (and things have been recovering on our end since then).

That explains part of the slide. For the rest, you have to look at the introduction of Java and the actions of IBM. As of the mid 90's, IBM had a successful Smalltalk product, and they had been basing all of their development environments on it - from VisualAge Smalltalk came a C++, Cobol, and ultimately, a Java toolset. IBM was doing well with this stuff, and had managed to scarf up most of the existing VSE accounts (since PPD had just ditched them). However, Java was getting a lot of buzz, and IBM was spending a lot of their own money to build the VA infrastructure. Mind you, this part is speculation on my part, but here's what I think happened:

• IBM saw the Java buzz growing
• They realized that it would be cheaper to be a free rider on Sun's Java than to maintain their own set of development tools based on VAST

That latter point was enabled by Sun making Java freely available, and licensing the JVM widely. While both actions helped the spread of Java tremendously, I am not at all convinced that they helped Sun in the least. That's another story though - in the Smalltalk world, IBM was slowing down their Smalltalk investments (culminating in their hand off of the technology to Instantiations this year), and ramping up their Java story. This didn't engender confidence in the Smalltalk customer or prospect base - especially when IBM's sales folks started aggressively pushing their Java line and talking down Smalltalk.

To summarize - ParcPlace (and its descendent firm, PPD/OBJS) committed suicide, which roiled its customer base and dropped confidence in Smalltalk amongst potential adopters. Meanwhile, IBM started moving away from Smalltalk and towards Java - which had the same effect. The other Smalltalk vendors of the mid 90's were too small to affect the growing meme that Smalltalk was dying.

Things are different now - Cincom has been working diligently on Smalltalk since late 1999, and we have a growing, profitable business. There are plenty of other Smalltalk dialects out there, including what is now going to be called VA Smalltalk. Smalltalk isn't in the mainstream at this point, but it's being used by a growing number of companies that want a productive alternative.

James Governor posts and links to some contrarian thoughts about Thomas Friedman's recent ode to globalization, "The World is Flat" - I particularly like this piece he quoted from Matt Tiabbo:

To recap: Friedman, imagining himself Columbus, journeys toward India. Columbus, he notes, traveled in three ships; Friedman "had Lufthansa business class." When he reaches India—Bangalore to be specific—he immediately plays golf. His caddy, he notes with interest, wears a cap with the 3M logo. Surrounding the golf course are billboards for Texas Instruments and Pizza Hut. The Pizza Hut billboard reads: "Gigabites of Taste." Because he sees a Pizza Hut ad on the way to a golf course, something that could never happen in America, Friedman concludes: "No, this definitely wasn't Kansas."

After golf, he meets Nilekani, who casually mentions that the playing field is level. A nothing phrase, but Friedman has traveled all the way around the world to hear it. Man travels to India, plays golf, sees Pizza Hut billboard, listens to Indian CEO mutter small talk, writes 470-page book reversing the course of 2000 years of human thought. That he misattributes his thesis to Nilekani is perfect: Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver.

Read the whole thing.

PR Opinions describes some "interesting" analyst reactions at a meeting recently:

• Sorry you can't meet with Analyst X because according to our records you briefed him/her eleven months ago and as you are aware non-clients can only brief a analyst once in any given twelve month period
• Thanks for getting in touch.  Unfortunately we never made any progress in working together and our analysts have to keep a balance between client and non-client work.  Why don't you see if there's an opportunity for us to do some business and come back to me.

That sounds just like the kind of "pay me and I might have an opinion you like" behavior I've come to expect from my favorite group of analysts. There are decent analysts out there, you just have to look carefully.

Dana Blankenhorn writes about how open source - both in writing and in software - is affecting both industries:

• The journalism model of superficial ads against superficial content no longer works.
• The programming model of paying for stuff not warrented to work no longer works.

There are new business models out there, models I've been writing about for many years. But publishers are doing quite well not paying writers, so they refuse to pursue them. And those software companies who sell services on top of free code, without helping pay the freight of people writing that code, are doing the same thing.

The solution is in our hands. Get me the funding and I'll prove it to you.

There is something of a free rider problem with business models built on top of free software. Mind you, it's a mixed bag - there are positives as well. The thing to keep in mind is that the FSF vision of paradise is every bit as flawed as the claim that Open Source is communist.

ION RSS points to two ethically challenged "services": RSS Equalizer and RSS Content Builder. Get a load of the dreck from the Equalizer plagiarizers:

"You see, regardless of what topic or subject matter you've built your website around, there's valuable content out there... articles and information written by some "expert" in that particular field.

And since that kind of content already exists - AND a large portion of it is available through the magic of RSS feed capability - YOU don't have to create the content yourself."

These are exactly the kinds of jerks that end up ruining things for the rest of us. Heck, they don't even have any shame - look at how the latter site promotes itself:

Have you tried hiring writers or searching for related articles in article directories around the web? If you have, you must know how tiring it can be to search through thousands of articles in hopes of finding something remotely related to your web site topic. Or if you have opted to hire writers you need to worry that they are being honest in their writing and haven't plagarized someone else's work.

Why worry about dishonest writers - cut out the middleman and just steal the content yourself! It's clowns like these that give the overreaching types at the MPAA and the RIAA enough oxygen to live.

Alpha Geek asks whether Seaside is contender, along with Ruby on Rails. In his comments, I spotted this:

I guess my biggest problem with smalltalk is it's greatest asset. I'm just not a huge fan of Smalltalks images. It's not like you have a seperate smalltalk application, you have a full run environment that has been customized to perform some function.

Granted, it's been nearly eight years since I've dabbled, but I still haven't seen a Smalltalk optimizer that reduces the image size by paring out unneeded code, maybe because with smalltalk it's impossible to make that distinction.

So, I posted this response, also in comments:

VisualWorks, descended from the original Smalltalk-80 at PARC, has shipped with RuntimePackager for years - and before that, with a more basic stripping tool. Here's an example Smalltalk executable for Windows

After you run the installer, look in the install directory - you'll find bottomFeeder.exe, which is a 13MB executable. The development image that I use is 38MB.

I'm somewhat surprised that people aren't aware that you can, in fact, create Small Smalltalk apps. Smalltalk MT is fully compiled, and I know you can create Small apps with Dolphin. Heck, I've created executables that are under 4MB using VisualWorks - although I don't really strive for small executables. There's been a fair bit of research on this in Squeak, too - check out this page, for instance.

David Buck is set to offer a VisualWorks training class. Contact him if you want to attend.

I blogged about the new categorization searches in BottomFeeder last week, there were two small problems:

• I iterated towards the core code in a workspace, and left a specific search string from testing in the code. Thus, it didn't really work.
• While it would have been natural to save the categorized searches as search feeds, that wasn't done

Both of those defects have been fixed now. You can define any kind of categorized search, and save it as a search feed. Just grab the latest dev update and restart.

One of the more interesting things to watch in business is the need for simple answers, regardless of the question. Take RSS and syndication, for instance - lots of PR folks are out there looking for an RSS "strategy" now. Have a look at this page, which tries to explain RSS to the uninitiated (yes, it's old - I point it out because I was pointed to it in email).

The focus of that page is on the utterly irrelevant aspects of syndication - the technical implementation. Sure, that stuff is of interest to those of us implementing aggregators and/or servers (that produce RSS) - but it's not of any use to PR and general business staff. How the content is syndicated isn't the interesting part - it's how the content is produced that matters.

What I'm seeing is a desire on the part of PR folks to have this be magic - to somehow wave a magic wand, and via the magic of syndication, have the stuffy old website suddenly be relevant. I have a hot tip for you - it's not enough. Syndication is a means to an end, it's not an end in and of itself.

What you really need is fresh content. More than that, you need content that is updated on a regular basis. Take your average corporate website - is there any good reason to visit more than once every few months? For the most part, no - the content is mostly static, and almost always completely bereft of actual human voice. There's no there, there, as was famously said about Oakland.

What do actually want? You want people to return to your website again and again. What do you usually provide? Bland oatmeal. Consider your TV viewing habits - do you watch TV shows that cover the same ground relentlessly, or do you watch shows that have plot development and action? Just so with your website - you need to have something that attracts people back. A better color scheme isn't going to do it, nor is just slapping a little orange RSS icon up. What you need is some useful and interesting content. To see the difference, go visit channel 9, and then visit microsoft.com. Which one of those two looks like it might be worth coming back to?

Register now for Smalltalk Solutions 2005, so you can hear Colin Putney talk about Monticello:

Monticello

presentation

Putney, Colin: Quallaby

Tuesday 2 pm to 2:45 pm

Abstract: In the last 2 years Monticello has emerged as a viable tool for source code management and versioning of Squeak applications. Having accumulated some real world experience with Monticello, we've designed a next-generation versioning engine which will form the core of Monticello 2.0.

This talk will examine three hard problems in versioning software, and explore Monticello's unique approach to solving them. Along the way, we'll also see comparisons to other versioning systems, including Store, ENVY and Monticello 1.

First is the "repeated merge" problem. This occurs when we have two (or more) parallel lines of development. Repeatedly merging code back and forth between the two lines can create artificial conflicts during merges, forcing developers to explicitly avoid conflicts as they work. A good versioning tool allows developers to save or merge their work at any time, and records enough history information to prevent spurious conflicts from arising.

The second problem is also one of spurious conflicts. Often, during a merge, we want to apply only some of the changes implied by the merge. But this "cherry picking" of changes introduces a risk that either spurious conflicts will be interoduced to future merges, or genuine conflicts will be missed. Again, the challenge for versioning tools is to record enough history information to allow developers to work naturally, while still doing merges accurately and automatically.

The final problem is so difficult that most versioning tools don't even attempt to solve it. Only Smalltalkers would demand to be able to update a running program with new code, including the kernel on which the versioning tool its self is running! Though still quite experimental, Monticello 2 attempts to solve the "brain autosurgery" problem as well.

Bio: Colin Putney is a software developer at Quallaby Corporation, writing on network monitoring software in VisualWorks Smalltalk. He the author of OmniBrowser and co-author of Monticello, both open source development tools for Squeak Smalltalk. Though he has been programming for many years, he began working in Smalltalk in 2002.

See you in Orlando!

I watched most of "BraveHeart" tonight - I hadn't watched it in a few years, and had forgotten just how moving a film it was. It coincides nicely with what I'm reading, "A Distant Mirror", by Barbara Tuchamn. The book chronicles the 14th century through the life of a minor noble, Enguerrand de Coucy. She sets quite a bit of background first, and analogizes a lot of the events to those of August 1914 (not a big surprise, as she had previously written "The Guns of August").

It's fascinating to read about this period - it's so alien to our time. The chapter that covered the black death, for instance - since the people of that era had no notions of micro-organisms, they attributed the deaths to all manner of superstitions. Of course, blaming "the other" came up then as it did later - there were a lot of anti-semitic pogroms. The eye opener (even though I had some vague notions about this) was the population loss - through the 14th century, due to the plague (more than once), wars, brigandage, etc - the population of Europe was nearly 50% lower by 1400 than it had been in 1300. That's a rough estimate, of course - it's not as if anyone was keeping accurate records at that point.

Sobering stuff, that, especially when you read about the 1918 pandemic, and the potential problem of avian flu.