Doc has lots of details on the state of the Gulf coast - and it's not good. Something like 80% of New Orleans is underwater, and it sounds like the attempt to use giant sandbags to patch the biggest levee breach have failed. It's going to be a long, slow recovery for the gulf coast - and not all of it will come back as it used to be.
We have an interesting project going on right now - we call it ObjectStudio in VisualWorks. As you probably know, Cincom Smalltalk consists of two Smalltalk environments - ObjectStudio and VisualWorks. Most of our customers use one or the other, but we do have a number now who are using both. That number is going to increase soon, I expect.
ObjectStudio is a pure Windows development environment, and is usually used for Client/Server projects. VisualWorks is cross platform, and suitable for a wider range of projects. The biggest difference between the two has been at the VM level - VW has a modern, JITing VM which is very fast, and very scalable. ObjectStudio, on the other hand, has a slower, purely interpreted VM. Additionally, an awful lot of things that are implemented at the image level in VW are implemented at the VM level in ObjectStudio.
Which explains where we are taking ObjectStudio - into VisualWorks. ObjectStudio will ship as a separate image (we also plan to make it loadable), hosted inside the VisualWorks environment. That's going to entail some changes for ObjectStudio developers, but it will also entail a number of new capabilities - every feature of VisualWorks will be available in ObjectStudio, and every feature of ObjectStudio will be available in VisualWorks.
There will be some changes - at present, ObjectStudio threads map to native Windows threads. In the OST in VW release, ObjectStudio threads, like VW ones, will map to Smalltalk level green threads. Using the VisualWorks VM, ObjectStudio applications will be a lot faster. There will also be some code changes necessary - we will have a white paper detailing that list ready shortly.
The good news is this - the key features of ObjectStudio:
will all be available - just as importantly, these will all be available for VisualWorks developers as well. This is not simply a change and upgrade for ObjectStudio developers, but a set of new capabilities for VisualWorks developers as well.
Stay tuned for the white paper - I'll have links once it's ready. As to timing? We may have early access (meaning, pre-beta level) available this winter. As engineering moves through the development cycle, I'll have more details.
I've posted this before, but the delicious Smalltalk page I set up is a great place to find Cincom Smalltalk related links.
A lot of the early reporting on Katrina sounded like this - "it was bad, but whew! New Orleans dodged a bullet".
Well, it looks like that sentiment was expressed too soon. Apparently, at least three levees have failed, and New Orleans is filling up like a soup bowl. Take a look:
Last night, MSNBC had reporters outside the Superdome, looking dry. It looks like my earlier worry about getting people out of the Superdome might become a live problem. From the MSNBC reporting:
Some hospital patients were airlifted to the Superdome as a precaution, and NBC's Brian Williams reported from the edge of the French Quarter that what had been dry land “was filling with water” by 5 a.m. ET. “We have a new problem in this city,” he said. By 8 a.m., some French Quarter streets were under several inches of water.
NBC's Kerry Sanders, reporting from a helicopter above the city, said “it's basically one giant lake here in New Orleans.”
It's going to be a long time before they get this straightened out. To see the problem, go watch this Nova video, which was produced earlier this year, in the wake of the Ivan near miss.
Update: Here's a news feed from one of the New Orleans area TV stations. Lots of updates, both text and video.
If this NY Times story is right, we have the killer appliance in the wings - a cell phone/iPod combo. Add in a camera, and boom - it's a one-stop category killer, IMHO.
Ted Leung is right on the technical issues here, but not on the wider buzz:
Lots of people are up in arms about IM clients. People are complaining about the Windows client for Google Talk. People are complaining about the lack of Mac and Linux clients. But I think that this is misguided. The real value and potential in Google Talk is that Google might be building an open, un-siloed IM network. It will be interesting to see whether "don't be evil" actually works in this case, because starting another closed, siloed IM network would definitely count as evil (not to mention pointless) in my book.
To be specific, the bleeding edge technology-philes are "up in arms". The users don't care. I say this based on one of the main target customers for IM technology - middle school and up age kids. My daughter is an avid IM user, as are most of her friends (the exceptions being kids with parents who don't allow it). The lot of them use AIM. I've never heard them complain about not being able to chat with so and so due to the silo problem - all the kids just download AIM and move along.
Which is why there's no real pressure to fix this - from the standpoint of the vendors, there is no problem - our rantings on the subject just don't matter to them.
Some companies are filled with slow learners. Witness Dell - they are still adjusting to the "Dell Hell" storm from Jarvis and company - and they are dragging their feet on a maintenance issue:
In most businesses, when a product is discovered to have a defect that's likely to cause it to fail, the manufacturer issues a recall for the affected units. Is there any reason that shouldn't be true in the computer industry as well? That's what many IT mangers with large installations of Dell Optiplex GX270 systems have to be wondering right now.
How many times do they need to get slapped before they realize that a blog storm isn't good for business? At least in this case, it seems like the answer is: a lot. If you see your company heading down this road, be very afraid...
Via Scoble - just check out this Google search. Talk about a specific use of Advertising :)
I love this story in the Telegraph:
Would you rip files at a high or low bit-rate? Do you prefer AAC, WMA or MP3? If you are completely baffled by these questions, you are probably a woman. The terminology relates to downloading music, and a recent study by the British Phonographic Industry found that 96 per cent of tracks are downloaded by men.
Apparently, the British Phonographic Industry is chock full of people who can't think. They based that number on credit card references, hmm? I guess that means that every song my daughter has downloaded was actually downloaded by me, since it all hits my credit card. It's always a good thing when you torque off 1/2 your audience and you demonstrate raw stupidity at the same time...
Torsten Bergmann has a link to a downloadable movie of Avi's Seaside presentation in Vancouver.
I had a good meeting with a local (DC Metro area) telecom customer - they realy liked the look of where the product has been going the last few releases. We spent over an hour talking about the new stuff, and then I had a brief chat with the local division manager. That was enlightening.
It seems that an increasing number of decisions - even relatively low level ones, like whether to upgrade a particular product - are being influenced by Sarbanes-Oxley. Between the actual provisions of the law, and the perceived documentation needs, there's a lot of caution. Documentation on what's changed is very important, as is the need to track specific software configurations - these folks were concerned about the latter. Why? They are using an older rev of our product, with ENVY. They understand how to document all of that stuff with what they have now, but aren't sure how it would work with Store.
I found that interesting. There's work for us to do on that score, but also education. Sarbanes-Oxley is starting to have an interesting impact on vendor/client relations, that's for sure.
One of the things that differentiates Smalltalk from a lot of the competing development systems is the full OO nature of it - everything is an object, and all the objects respond to messages. That extends all the way through the system, in ways that often surprise newcomers. For example - consider the creation of a new class - here's a screenshot of the browser:
That's the browser, and the text you see in the lower pane is actually a template for a message send - a keyword message that will create a new class (in the latest releases, there's a class creation dialog that simplifies this, but that's not my point here):
Smalltalk defineClass: #NameOfClass
superclass: #{NameOfSuperclass}
indexedType: #none
private: false
instanceVariableNames: 'instVarName1 instVarName2'
classInstanceVariableNames: ''
imports: ''
category: 'Blog'
If you replace the templated sections with your own specifics, and then execute it, you'll get a new class. Why is that of interest?
Well, consider a runtime system that needs to interface to a database, with a need to bring in new kinds of domain objects on an ongoing basis. The runtime can create new classes on the fly, if that's how you want to deal with that. That may sound exotic, but I've got plenty of customers doing exactly that.
Now it's a waiting game - will it be the worst case scenario for New Orleans, or will they skate by? We'll know in the next few hours. In the meantime, I still don't think I'd want to be holed up in the Superdome - if there's local flooding - even just for a few days - it could get very unpleasant in there.
I'm off to northern VA this morning for a meeting with a local customer - I get to experience the joys of the DC metro system again. In the meantime, it's "glued to the tv" time, watching coverage of Katrina hitting land.
Here's what NOAA is saying about the impact area, in and around new Orleans:
MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER. AT LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL...LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.
It gets worse from there. I'm starting to think that the Superdome as a refuge point could end up being a very bad idea...
Just check the 10 possible warning signs here.
I thought this was a clueless parent until I got to the AMD and "Lunix" section :)
Rogers Cadenhead points to a scary video from Nova that explains what's possible with Hurricane Katrina. If they get that nightmare, it's entirely possible that New Orleans is a total loss - like a car that isn't worth rebuilding. Time to get out, if you unlucky enough to still be in that area...
It seems that my initial worries about Grokster were not overblown - check out what Lessig has to say about the matter - using Apple and iPods as an example:
So did the Court give innovators certainty? Consider how the Grokster rule applies to what everyone thinks should be the easiest case: the Apple iPod. Is Apple clearly free from Grokster liability? Amazingly, the answer is no.
Apple has sold about 15 million iPods, each capable of holding between 1,000 and 15,000 songs. Its iTunes music store has sold about 500 million songs for 99 cents each. That works out to only 30 songs or so per device. Does this surprise Apple? Did it really expect that people would buy a 60-gig iPod for $400 and then put $14,850 of music in it? No. Apple expected precisely what it advertised - that people would "Rip. Mix. Burn." music from CDs to iTunes and, in turn, to their iPods. After all, as the ads say, "It's your music."
Well, is it? That's still unclear. Congress passed a law to give consumers the right to copy music to analog devices - cassette tapes. But courts have held that that law does not extend to digital devices - iPods.And if it took a law (rather than the principle of fair use) to give you the right to make a mix tape, then, as many have argued, it takes a law to authorize transferring songs to an iPod.
Before the Grokster decision, this was not Apple's problem. It had built a machine "capable of" substantial noninfringing uses, like a VCR or cassette tape deck. How people used the iPodwas irrelevant to Apple.
Now a court is supposed to decide whether a company like Apple "promot[ed]" or "fostered" copyright infringement through design, behavior, or words. And while no court would ever actually hold Apple liable, the point that ivory tower sorts miss is that there is nothing in the judges' ruling to stop litigation against Apple before Apple has spent millions on lawyers.
The problem here is that the ruling relies on intent rather than acts. So - a device is apparently ok if the vendor doesn't imply some kind of intent to misuse it. What's wrong with that, you ask? Well heck - the court just put lower courts (and lawyers) in charge of determining intent. Is the iPod ok? That depends on who the court decides to believe - the RIAA's lawyer, or Apple's.
When law relies on intent rather than on acts, things get really, really ugly. Lessig is right - this was an awful ruling, and the pundits who declared that it was all clear for industry and the masses had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. What devices are allowed, and how they are allowed, will now be determined by a set of twisty legal rulings over the next decade or so. Given that, how much money do you think will go towards backing innovation in this space?
I ran across this lawsuit story a few days ago - apparently, one of the nicer outfits that brings you comment spam, link spam (etc) has decided to sue over comments left on a blog - claiming that said comments reveal important IP. Yeah, and I'm the queen of Rumania. The faster the clowns at Traffic Power sink into well deserved bankruptcy, the better.
That's not really what I wanted to post about though :) That issue resulted in a post from Scoble, which generated this utterly clueless response from Blog Herald:
More details on Aarons blog here. Intuitive Systems also has more details. Robert Scoble, in a fit of insanity is suggesting that the solution is to moderate or turn off your comments. How bout free speech Scoble?
This really isn't a hard issue. Free speech does not imply an obligation on my part to provide a soapbox. Comments are a privilege, not a right. You think otherwise? I invite you to write content for (insert your favorite magazine/newspaper here). Is it a free speech violation when they reject your content? How about when a publisher of any sort rejects your manuscript?
People confuse free speech with the (non-existent) right to a soapbox all the time. Free speech means that you are free to say what you want, when you want. However:
People forget those two things all the time.
I haven't looked at the logs since I went on vacation (and to ESUG) this month, so it's been awhile - I'm not going to bother with the missed weeks for now, but after looking at the BottomFeeder downloads for the last week, maybe I should - the download rate doubled to over 600 per day:
| Platform | BottomFeeder Downloads |
| Windows | 2397 |
| Mac 8/9 | 569 |
| Linux x86 | 395 |
| HPUX | 379 |
| Sources | 233 |
| Mac X | 225 |
| CE ARM | 126 |
| Windows98/ME | 93 |
| Update | 54 |
| Solaris | 33 |
| Linux Sparc | 18 |
| Linux PPC | 15 |
| AIX | 2 |
| Source Script | 1 |
Up across the board, but the Windows downloads especially. Maybe I need to go on vacation more often :) Next, let's see what happened with the HTML accesses to the blog sites:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Mozilla | 54.6% |
| Internet Explorer | 28.6% |
| MSN Bot | 7% |
| Other | 5.8% |
| Google Bot | 3% |
| BottomFeeder | 1% |
Nothing strange there - the distro looks like it usually does, with the vast majority of html accesses coming from Mozilla based browsers. Finally, a look at the RSS accesses:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| MSN Bot | 46.3% |
| Mozilla | 12.2% |
| BottomFeeder | 8.3% |
| Net News Wire | 7% |
| Other | 4.8% |
| Safari RSS | 3.1% |
| BlogLines | 1.9% |
| NewsGator | 1.9% |
| Internet Explorer | 1.6% |
| SharpReader | 1.5% |
| BlogSearch | 1.2% |
| Lilina | 1.1% |
| Planet Smalltalk | 1.1% |
| Magpie | 1% |
| Feed Demon | 1% |
| RSS Bandit | 1% |
| Liferea | 1% |
| Feed Reader | 1% |
| Feed Tagger | 1% |
| Java | 1% |
| JetBrains | 1% |
Well - I vaguely recall reading that MSN had cut loose with their search bot, and then reined it back in - I guess I'm seeing that in the RSS logs there. If we exclude that, it looks pretty much like it always has.
Markus Denker announced a bunch of Smalltalk related video - available via Google - on the ESUG mailing list:
ESUG (European Smalltalk Usergroup) is proud to announce that the following videos are now available at Google Video. Thanks for Andres Valloud for collecting and encoding the videos!
Google Video allows only for streaming and is usable from windows only for now.
The videos will soon be available as a data DVD via ESUG. The video there will be playable on all systems, players for Mac and Win will be included on the DVD.
- What is Squeak? (Alan Kay)
- Squeak and Croquet Demo Etech03 (Alan Kay and David A. Smith)
- Croquet: A Collaboration Architecture (Alan Kay and David A. Smith)
- The Computer Revolution hasn't happend yet. Keynote OOPSLA 1997 (Alan Kay)
- Beyond VI -- Talk from euroko03 (Marcus Denker)
- Alan Kay: Education in the Digital Age
- Alan Kay: Graphical User Interfaces
- Bytecode-to-bytecode adaptive optimization for Smalltalk (Eliot Miranda)
- Dan Ingalls: Object-Oriented Programming
- Alan Kay: Doing with Images Makes Symbols
- Self; The Video
- Doug Engelbart: The Demo
Matthew Morgan makes a trenchant observation about software development:
I do find it striking, though, that no language with a simple, regular syntax has ever achieved mass popularity. If a simple syntax is a huge win for a language (witness Lisp macros or Smalltalk closures), why haven’t any of these languages taken off?
I'm not going to argue that this is a full explanation, but there's a kernel of truth in what I'm asserting here - there's a love of complexity by the vast majority of developers. Running through the subconscious of the industry is something like this:
The tendency to over-architect and over-design in this industry is just enormous.
Ed Foster has found out what drives AOL's "you can't leave, ever" subscription policy:
Spitzer's people had found some particularly interesting facts about why AOL customers would meet with such resistance when they wanted to cancel the service. "The investigation revealed that the company had an elaborate system for rewarding employees who purported to retain or 'save' subscribers who had called to cancel their Internet service," the announcement read. "In many instances, such retention was done against subscribers' wishes, or without their consent. Under the system, consumer service personnel received bonuses worth tens of thousands of dollars if they could successfully dissuade or 'save' half of the people who called to cancel service. For several years, AOL had instituted minimum retention or 'save' percentages, which consumer representatives were expected to meet. These bonuses, and the minimum 'save' rates accompanying them, had the effect of employees not honoring cancellations, or otherwise making cancellation unduly difficult for consumers. Many consumers complained that AOL personnel ignored their demands to cancel service and stop billing."
There's a larger management issue going on here. You'll often see managers ask "why doesn't sales sell blah", or "why is sales trying to sell X instead of Y?". Well, the above explains it - it's almost always all about the compensation plans. Need to sell more services, and can't figure out why it's not happening? Look at the comp plan - it likely doesn't incent that behavior.
In many cases, the comp plan is the result of many years of adjustments, often made for reasons that are no longer remembered. It can easily be the case that you think you are motivating a certain behavior, but - in reality - are motivating something else entirely. What's the answer to this problem? Talk to your sales staff. Believe me, they've read the comp plan, in detail. They can tell you exactly what the plan is motivating.
The download application for Cincom Smalltalk Non-Commercial has been given a facelift - and, we've added a new network installer - grab a small download, specific to each platform - and get the install going.
Apparently, Jason Kottke thinks that he's the only one who ever had this idea. News.Com has an article on it today, he posted something similar on the 23rd. Here's a hot tip Jason - that's an old meme that's been being tossed around for many, many months. And I thought I had a big ego...
Blaine points out that new technology - any new technology - takes a lot longer to go from concept to adoption than you might think. He references this book. Blaine's take on it:
Where am I going with this? I think this applies to computer languages and frameworks. The rest of the industry keeps edging toward Smalltalk and Lisp. The road to Smalltalk was started with C++ (by mimicing OO features) gaining acceptance. Later, it was java (VM, garbage collection) and now, python and ruby (late-binding, dynamic typing, closures, etc). Each jump has taken about ten plus years each. What will the next jump be? I'm hoping it will be toward the image because it's the only piece missing. But, we still have about ten years before critical mass. Are you patient? I think I can be.
Chris Petrilli has a very telling description of a lot of software development - "Resume driven architecture". Heh
SD Times has an article on Agile Development vs. Build process - their contention is that build tools lag behind methodologies and the IDEs:
“Teams that want to be more agile are headed for a train wreck if they have long build times; they’ll need to find ways to build all or part of the software more frequently to get the kind of continuous feedback that helps agile teams move quickly,” said Clark, who hasn’t used BuildForge. “But I don’t see that as a tool problem as much as it’s a build process problem. That is, I don’t think tools will help as much as getting someone on the team to optimize the build process will.”
Optimization may be easier said than done. New languages and libraries ooze increasing amounts of code while the 20-year-old Make-based infrastructure lags behind advanced IDEs. Worse, ongoing coding projects create deeply recursive and dependency-laden groups of Makefiles that only a conjurer can untangle.
While Smalltalk doesn't suffer from the complexity of "Make" (et. al.), builds can get to be complicated - we had a number of conversations about this at ESUG last week. When I posted my build process for BottomFeeder recently, the first comment I saw was "it's too complicated". This is an area that the entire industry - including my end of it - needs to improve.
Lesscode thinks that Java has reached a point of no return (in terms of complexity), and that Ruby on Rails is poised to eat its lunch for web development. It does look like dynamic languages are getting another look.
Stephanne Ducasse just pointed me to Planet Squeak, an aggregation of blogs related to Squeak, Tweak, and Croquet related blogs. Check it out - the sources for the site are all listed with their individual feeds as well. Here's the feed.
Matthew Morgan asks a question about various languages (he mentions Smalltalk, Lisp, and Scheme, among others):
So, these languages are often more elegant and concise than their mainstream counterparts, but they also require more mental effort to decode (especially when reading other people’s code). I suspect this is the kernel of truth behind the idea that these languages are only for Smart People. But even Smart People would be better served by a language that didn’t require that extra effort. Is it possible to escape the dichotomy of expressiveness versus readability?
He gives an example - I don't know Scheme, so I can't comment on its veracity. However, in Smalltalk, I can't think of anything that makes the language harder to decode - quite the opposite, actually.
Redhill consulting points to an interesting reaction from the Java-ites:
RoR is quickly becoming the Godwin's Law of Java language related discussions: "As an online Java discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Ruby or RoR approaches 1 (i.e. certainty)." -- Marc Stock
There's this too, from the same place (comparing to Godwin's law):
Any programming language and Smalltalk
That's it, define contrary opinions out of existence :)
Dave has put together an intro article on Smalltalk, specifically oriented at people who know Java and/or C# - and would like to add Smalltalk to their arsenal. Check the article out here.
ARmageddon reports that Gartner now wants to charge customers extra for reprint rights to the utterly valueless "magic quadrant" diagrams. The tragedy is, there are probably plenty of people willing to pay for that.
As predicted, the Borg is executing its plan to squeeze more revenue from vendors (see links below). We have now received several confirmations from the AR community that Gartner now asks vendors to purchase reprint rights as a condition to quote Magic Quadrants in their press or marketing rights.
We thought we were in for a hellish trip - just as we boarded, they told us that air traffic control systems in London had crashed, and we were looking at a three hour ground hold. Hmm - fortunately, that cleared in 45 minutes, and they made all but 20 minutes of that up in the air. That still left us with a 5+ hour layover - but good fortune again, we were able to get our bags switched to DCA, and put on standby - worst case - we get out for DCA at 6 instead of out for BWI at 8:15.
Unfortunately, WiFi here is really spotty - I had it last week down by K19 (weakly), but there's nothing here by K4. Sigh....
Missed that flight - waiting for the 6:00pm. And sitting on the floor outside the Admirals club, grabbing the tmoble hotspot :)
Bitwise magazine plugs Smalltalk (Dolphin, to be specific) in this article - I like this part:
In some respects, all those modern OOP programming languages (C++, Java, C#, Delphi et al) still haven’t yet caught up with the innovations made by Smalltalk over quarter of a century ago. Some of them (such as C++ and Delphi for Win32) are hybrid procedural/OOP languages. And even ‘pure’ OOP languages such as Java and C# are still not quite as pure as Smalltalk. Besides, Smalltalk has a few neat tricks (the ability to select and execute any arbitrary piece of code is one of my favourites) that those copycat languages lack.
“I invented the term 'object-oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind" :: Alan Kay
I don't think he had C# or Java in mind either :)
Now here's an article I can really get behind - Kevin Barnes draws a rough categorization of development languages - between "freedom" languages (Smalltalk, Ruby, Python, et. al.) and "Safety" languages (Java, C#, et. al.). He's made some very good points, and also makes it clear that his (and my) side of this argument does involve a few tradeoffs. First off, take a look at his definitions:
What, pray tell, is a “freedom language”? Freedom languages are those languages that put the individual programmer at the center of their philosophical world. They work hard to remove any language constructs that reduce programmer freedom, and add the most powerful constructs available. Many are post-modern languages and most tend to be syntactically dense.
The other kind of language is the “safety language.” Safety languages think first about the creation of contracts between modules, objects and functions. They focus on teams rather than individuals. They remove language features that are confusing or frequently misused so that there are fewer opportunities to make mistakes and so there can be clear separation of concerns and maximum verifiability. These languages are full of barriers and check-points and well-defined paths and they tend to be syntactically verbose.
With that out of the way, we get to something I've always found irritating - the presumption by "safety" advocates that the (so called) scripting languages are just toys:
The advocates to safety languages tend to deride freedom languages as “scripting” languages or “fringe” languages. They are only fit for hacking out small projects and putting together demos and whatnot. They focus on static-type-safety as one of the most fundamentally critical elements for ensuring program completeness. They may also talk about execution efficiency (memory, speed, etc). They tend to view freedom languages as improper for a larger team of programmers with mixed skill sets. The heart of their arguments is basically that these languages are not “safe” for large projects.
Kevin makes some great points about this, and I'm not going to try to quote his entire article - you should just read it and see what you think. I do like this, from near the end of the piece:
There is one other strange quality to the safety languages. They all look the same. The safety ideal has manifested itself in even the simplest elements of syntax. The providers of safety languages want constructs and syntax that will be comfortable to people who write code in other “major” languages. They want companies to be safe from an inadequately small developer pool. Many languages that started out looking different (Basic or Pascal) have over time morphed to take on the look and feel of the other safety languages. It’s very easy for someone familiar with C++ to read C# or Java or VB or Delphi. They have a lot harder time figuring out Ruby or Smalltalk or Python. Think I’m exaggerating?
Kevin points out that this presumed familiarity is less valuable than you think - stepping into any large project, the idioms and strategies (i.e., the design) used by the developers will matter more than the language selection in terms of getting up to speed. In any case - as I said - read the whole thing. I agree with almost everything Kevin's said here, including his caveats.
Mike Stall explains the complexity of the VS suite:
Visual Studio is over 43 million lines of code, there are over 30 teams working on different pieces, with roughly 700 developers checking-in code to 11 different virtual build labs that are then integrated on a rotating schedule producing over 100 different builds of the product daily. In addition we have interdependencies with SQL and MSDN.
No need to wonder why it's late - that many developers is a solid sign of an ongoing death march, complete with the attendant tight coupling to other systems that they don't fully control. That's got to be a complete horror show to have to work on...
We are headed home tomorrow morning - we've had a great time, and wished we'd allocated more. On our way back from an excellent dinner at a Spanish Restaurant, my wife took a few nice shots of the area at night - the hotel is in a bustling area, very loud at night (especially on weekends) - lots of bars, restaurants, and clubs. Here's a shot that will give you an idea:
There's a lot going on. Lots of good food though - I'll need to get back into my exercise regime at home! Here's a beautiful shot of the tower at Grand Place, lit up at night:
I'm winging my way home tomorrow - I'll be back at my desk on Thursday
We visited this castle - in Brussels itself - quite by accident. We got turned around driving in Brussesls (have I mentioned the sign issue?), and ran across a castle in the middle of a small park. There was an open parking spot, so we scooted in. There's a small museum there, but it was closed - we had used up that part of the day elsewhere. Here's the history behind the castle:
And here's a view of the castle from a few steps back:
From Bouchout castle, we drove to Beersel. With our poor grasp of French and the previously mentioned Belgian aversion to signs (never mind the absolutely insane drivers :) ), we had some trouble getting there. We arrive just before 5, and the castle was still open - the groundskeeper didn't charge us for entry either. Here's a picture of the front - this castle is very old, the main part dating from the 13th century, with the towers being extended in the 16th:
Here's the interior - note the stage? They put on concerts there. Must be an interesting place for them. The bridge leading in is pretty wobbly. The moat was mostly gone, but that's a restoration thing - they should have it all back together in 3-5 years. Anyway, the interior:
My daughter and I walked up the towers - you can go about halfway up. We also walked all along the guard wall. It's decayed a fair bit, but this was definitely a cool castle.
We took our last day in Belgium in the car, trying to see some local castles. I'd still like to see Ypres, but we ran out of time this trip. Anyhow - we drove north out of the city to Bouchout castle and the associated national park (the grounds). There's a beautiful castle there, along with gardens and a greenhouse. The latter was being rehabbed, so we only saw some of it. Here's a shot of Bouchout castle, taken by my daughter:
Here's another shot, from the back:
We also walked the grounds, which are quite nice - very peaceful. Also uncrowded, which was a big switch from the crowded downtown area we are staying in. Here's a shot from inside the greenhouse, of some semi-tropical plants:
This next one is fascinating - lilypads that look like little boats. These things are huge for lilypads - if you could get a frog to use a paddle, he'd be all set:
lilypads.jpg "Large Lilypads")
That was our trip there - we passed through more of the greenhouse though. Sadly, Bouchout Castle is only open for events - conferences, seminars, etc. Now wouldn't that be a great place for an ESUG or Cam Smalltalk?
After a long PR pounding, Dell finally discovers that customers matter:
Dell Computers, which came under fire this summer from blogger Jeff Jarvis, says it has new procedures for dealing with the blogosphere. The company’s public relations department monitors blogs, looking for commentaries and complaints and, starting about a month ago, began forwarding complaints with personally identifiable information to the customer service department so that representatives can contact dissatisfied consumers directly, said Dell spokeswoman Jennifer Davis. The move appears to have been triggered by a series of “Dell Hell” posts penned by Jarvis about his problems with a Dell computer. Jarvis first wrote about the topic in June, and continued posting updates through the summer.
“Obviously, Mr. Jarvis’ experience could’ve been handled better,” Davis said.
And it only took them this long to notice :)
Jonathan Schwartz throws the DRM question back at the movie industry, and detects a double standard. It's a great commentary, but have a look at these excerpts - the media exec asks him about "digital watermarks" being required, and Jonathan responds:
Rather than provide a response in the room, I turned a question back to him. First, the network you're supposing will deliver a movie to a theater or a camera to a file server is the same network I'm presuming will run throughout your datacenter. On the internet, it's tough to distinguish a feature length movie from a data warehouse application (bits is bits) - so would your datacenter folks support the tech industry certifying content behind your firewalls with a digital watermark? In running business systems?
...
After a few days, I got a response. He'd spoken with their CIO, who dismissed the relevance of my proposal to manage all digital assets under the same scheme. "You'd have to start by proving I've stolen something."
Kind of illustrates the whole problem. Schwartz gets this right, and I hope he presses this with all the media execs he talks to. Now if Microsoft and Apple would do the same...
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