Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

We had a treat this afternoon and early evening - my cousin Eric works with a boat owner, Dave - here's a picture of the boat that my daughter took. This pic is from after the outing we took with Eric, his son Chad, and Dave:

So, back to the beginning - we met Dave a month or so ago, before we went on our trips - Eric told us that he was interested in learning Puerto Rico. We didn't get to that game that evening, but we got a very pleasant boat outing this evening - and we'll get to the game at some point in the near future.

It's a very nice boat, and it was a wonderful day for an outing - sunny, not much breeze, clear blue skies. Here's an idea of what the day was like - my daughter took this while we were out:

We sat up on the prow of the boat for a fair bit of the trip - my daughter and nephew loved it up there, so Eric and I got out there as well. You get a great view of things from there, and a good breeze, depending on what the weather is like. Here's a shot of Eric and I up there:

After we pulled back into the pier, we sat upstairs for a bit and chatted before dinner. While we did that, Victoria got this shot of the sunset over Baltimore and the harbor:

I'll post a few more shots in the next post - my wife is just pulling some pics off of her camera.

This is so true that it hurts. Read this, then ponder the next few ads you see.

New Orleans will be rebuilt, but it will never be what it was. Consider - the process of:

• Plugging the Levee holes
• Draining the water
• Inspecting/Demolishing buildings

Will take many, many months - I'd say longer than anyone is guessing right now. The historic district seems to have mostly escaped, and will be one of the first places to come back - property owners there will actually have property to come back to. The rest of the city?

Well, consider - there's some proportion of the population (many of the 80% who evacuated, I'd guess) who have family and/or friends who will be able to take them in. For those people, regardless of their age, this will be like a return to being 18 (or 21, if they went to college). They'll have to start all over again, with nothing but a helpful push from their families. How many will return to New Orleans? Not many, I'd guess - most won't want to put their lives on hold for the next 6-12 months.

Then there are the people who are only being evacuated now - they have even less than the first group. Many of them don't own homes (I saw census bureau data that stated a 49% rental rate in the city). They've lost almost all the goods they did own, so there's very little holding them to the city - no jobs, no family - nothing. Unlike the group above, these folks probably don't have as many outside family/friends to go to (if they did, I suspect they would have gone there earlier). This means that they'll start without the helping push, but they'll have to start again nevertheless. And like the first group, I very much doubt that they'll sit in a holding center for 6-12 months when there's nothing to return to.

So what do have left? The residents of the historic district (or buyers of their property in the interim - there will be speculative buying on the cheap going on). Business interests that need to be there - import/export, energy, fishing. However, that's going to be limited by the willingness of insurers to sponsor construction - and believe you me, those outfits are going to take a very critical eye toward rebuilding in areas that are under a lot of water. Regardless of what new plans come down the pike to rebuild levees stronger, everyone knows that it will be a multi-year effort to do that - and any new construction will be in danger while that happens.

Consider the history of Galveston, TX after the ruinous 1900 hurricane:

While Galveston received financial help from the county, state and federal governments, a large portion of the burden had to be carried by the city itself, at the expense of other projects.

McComb sums it up about as well as it can be:

"Human technology made it possible - for the city of Galveston to remain on such unstable land. The city did not flourish. Houston - left the island city far behind. Galveston simply survived.

That's the future history of New Orleans, right there - and bear in mind, that as bad off as Galveston was then, New Orleans has it worse. Galveston, like Biloxi today, merely (I hate to put it that way) has rubble to clear before rebuilding could start. New Orleans has all that water...

It's time for my weekly look at the logs. First up - the BottomFeeder download report:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	1877
Mac 8/9	691
HPUX	414
Linux x86	355
Mac X	305
Sources	256
Update	124
CE ARM	117
Windows98/ME	104
Solaris	21
Linux PPC	11
SGI	11
Linux Sparc	6
AIX	5
Source Script	5
CE x86	1

Those numbers are still up at the 600+ per day level - while I was traveling, I must have gotten noticed somewhere. That's cool, since the next release is imminent. Next, the HTML blog accesses - see what the tool distribution looks like:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	44.5%
Internet Explorer	35.1%
Other	10.6%
MSN Bot	6.8%
Google Bot	3%

Either my readership is getting more diverse (and the raw numbers are up some), or MS is making headway with IE - or, looking below, the MSN Bot is still creating churn. Finally, the distribution of tools on the RSS feeds:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
MSN Bot	24%
Mozilla	17.9%
BottomFeeder	11.6%
Net News Wire	9.3%
Other	7.8%
Safari RSS	4.1%
BlogSearch	2.9%
Internet Explorer	2.6%
BlogLines	2.4%
NewsGator	2.2%
SharpReader	2.2%
Planet Smalltalk	1.8%
Feed Demon	1.6%
Magpie	1.5%
Lilina	1.1%
RSS Bandit	1%
Liferea	1%
Feed Reader	1%
Feed Tagger	1%
JetBrains	1%
RSSReader	1%
News Fire	1%

Looks like the MSN Bot is still creating lots of churn - there is no way that it should be responsible for that much of the RSS grabbing - not two weeks in a row. The gnomes in Redmond need to tweak that puppy...

I didn't think that a columnist could surprise me with raw ignorance any longer, but I was wrong. Have a look at the lack of understanding on display here - eWeek's Jim Rapoza is utterly baffled by syndication and aggregators:

But after years of really trying to like RSS feeds, I'm finally waving the white flag. This is another technology that just isn't for me. (And, yes, I realize that some of you are reading this column after receiving it through an RSS feed.)

As I do with IM and cell phones, I think part of the problem is that feeds— while empowering in some ways -- also remove some of the user's independence. Once subscribed to a feed, you just keep getting it, whether you want that day's info or not. No matter how I get the feeds delivered, they eventually become noise on my desktop or even an actual nuisance that I'd rather not deal with. Feeds delivered through e-mail clients are the worst, as they eventually become associated with other e-mail nuisances, such as spam.

My adventures in RSS feeds have succeeded in making me really appreciate Web browsing. I've decided I much prefer to go to Web sites and blogs to see if there's new information I want to read that day. I just feel as if I have a lot more control that way, and, using the grouped bookmarks features in Mozilla and Firefox, I can quickly look at multiple similar sites.

It's actually hard to stumble across this level of ignorance without trying. It's one thing to dislike the potential overload from RSS - I tend to max out around 300 feeds, myself. But Rapoza just doesn't understand the basics. You get the data whether you want it or not? Which part of "unsubscribe" is too hard for this guy? In my aggregator, I select a feed, and then pick the "remove feed" menu option - bingo, no more data from that source.

Apparently, Rapoza thinks that Winer and Scoble are going to show up at his house and throttle him if he dares to unsubscribe. And they pay this guy to produce drivel like this...

Now that I've got the major features for BottomFeeder 4.0 packed away, I've got another task coming up on my plate - comment registration for the Silt server. I'd like to run this as follows:

• Continue to allow anonymous comments, but such comments will go through the fuill spam check gauntlet
• Add Registration, where anyone who registers and then logs in can comment without the full spam check

The main question is this - should registration be site wide, or blog specific? I'm still pondering that one.

GNU Smalltalk 2.1.12 has just shipped, and Instantiations has delivered VA Smalltalk 7. Looks to me like there's a Smalltalk solution out there for every need and desire :)

Blaine has the lowdown on the upcoming Dolphin 6 release. Looks like Andy and Blair have been busy :)

Bob points to something I missed today - the Adventa success story. Here's what Adventa says about Smalltalk:

Yes, there are more engineers in the world who know "C", there are more who claim to know C++ and "Visual this" and "Visual that" but the fact remains, and we prove it every day, there is not a software engineer anywhere, working in any language, that is more productive than a "Smalltalker." It was obvious to us in 1988, in the year 2002, there is still "none-better." JAVA? Maybe, someday. Right now, JAVA is many years behind Smalltalk in terms of maturity, capability, reliability, etc. It's good for lightweight apps, but can't match Smalltalk for productivity and reliability.

There's a dev update for BottomFeeder posted with tabbed browsing in. I'm about to start a build, so that I can push up new builds that have the latest stuff, without the need to grab updates. There's a new tab item on the toolbar, as well as a menu pick. Each tab also has a small menu allowing you to tear a tab off or close a specific tab.

I would have had this done sooner, but it took me a bit to realize that menus for tab items were an extension added by TypeLess (the IRC plugin) - and I was missing a crucial (but not so obvious) bit of the API. I got that handled, and it's working nicely now.

Update: The downloads are available under the development links now

Dare Obasanjo sounds pretty disenchanted with working at Microsoft:

A good example of this is taking a look at Windows from the consumer perspective. The decisions that Microsoft has made over the past couple of years from abandoning feature work in Internet Explorer until Firefox became popular to a lot of the original intentions around the 3 pillars of Longhorn (Avalon, WinFS & Indigo) are the actions of a company that is more interested in protecting its market share than one that is trying to improve the lives of its customers by building great software.  Of course, it's not only customers that get the short end of the stick. Employees also have the consequences of this kind of thinking to deal with as well. The primary way this manifests itself is integrated innovation, a buzzword that translates to more dependencies among shipping products, less control of one's product destiny and longer ship cycles. A lot of the frustration you see in the comments in places like the Mini-Microsoft blog are a direct consequence of this focus by our executive leadership.

The amazing thing is, he intends to stay there for the short term. The above is an amazing airing of "dirty laundry" - and, I think, a bridge burning exercise.

I've got a brief look at ObjectStudio in VW here - this is very early access stuff - I got walkbacks doing some things. In any event, a couple of screen shots to show you that things are progressing:

That's the menu pick showing ObjectStudio inside VW. Now, the next one is OST after it's been fired up:

Just a brief glimpse, and there's a long way to go on this - but it's progress

I'm pretty close to the 4.0 release of BottomFeeder. I've got tabbed browsing in, but there's some wonkiness in the menus for the tabs that needs to be worked out. It's something simple, I'm sure - but I've got bunches of other things distracting me today. Amongst other things, I'd like to post some screen shots from the ObjectStudio in VW work I referenced the other day - but corporate is having some VPN connectivity issues right now, and I can't get to the internal download sites.

Additionally, I'm working on various and sundry other small projects. I should have the problem sorted out soon, and then it's just a matter of documentation - there are obvious UI changes associated with the new tabbing.

I ran across an interesting analysis of the flood issues in New Orleans in "Civil Engineering" - written well before the current disaster. There's a ton of information in this about the danger that faced the city, and what the answers had been over the years. The bottom line on this is, the plan for anything as powerful as Katrina was "pray it doesn't happen". Consider:

In 1999 the Corps was authorized by Congress to study the feasibility of various proposals for protecting the city against such devastating storms. An obvious possibility would be to raise the current levees to a height deemed acceptable by an AdCirc analysis. That, however, would also require widening the levees, which may not be possible in many areas because of the proximity of homes. Among other alternatives, Naomi will investigate the possibility of creating an immense wall between Lake Pontchartrain and the gulf to keep water out of the lake during a severe storm. Such a project would involve constructing massive floodgates at the Rigolets and Chef Menteur passes, where storm surge would enter the lake.

According to Naomi, any concerted effort to protect the city from a storm of category 4 or 5 will probably take 30 years to complete. And the feasibility study alone for such an effort will cost as much as $8 million. Even though Congress has authorized the feasibility study, funding has not yet been appropriated. When funds are made available, the study will take about six years to complete. “That’s a lot of time to get the study before Congress,” Naomi admits. “Hopefully we won’t have a major storm before then.”

Forget levees for a moment, and consider the other problem that is busily creeping toward New Orleans - the loss of coastal marshland. The taming of the Mississippi has meant no new floods as bad as the 1927 horror, but it's had a nasty side effect - the protective buffer of marshland (the bayou) south of the city is disappearing, fast. At current rates, New Orleans will be a gulf coast city within 30 years. That would mean that - notwithstanding the current flooding - Lake Ponchartrain would be the least of the problems facing the city - a similar storm hitting in 30 years would visit the storm surge that wiped out Biloxi and Gulf Port on downtown New Orleans:

“We’re trying to enforce human decisions on a natural process,” says Naomi. “What we’re trying to do is take a snapshot of geologic time and say, ‘This is what we want; this is where we want to live.’ The question is, Is it going to be feasible in the long term?”

Naomi says this question will not be answered with levee feasibility studies alone. It will also require a more complete understanding of the natural processes at work in and around New Orleans. For example, the wetlands of coastal Louisiana, which would act as a buffer and slow any storm during its approach to the city, are dying because the freshwater and nutrients that historically flooded into them from the Mississippi can no longer escape the river. At the same time, the sediment deposited here by the river long ago is subsiding, and no new sediment is overflowing to replenish it.

That's not the worst of it, believe it or not. The entire southern portion of Louisiana is sinking:

The true situation, however, is almost too grave to consider. “Coastal Louisiana is sinking under its own weight,” Dokka says. “The ground in Louisiana is ultimately going to go under.”

Indeed, the state is subsiding so quickly that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Geodetic Survey (NGS) considers the orthometric markers in Louisiana surveyed every decade for the North American Vertical Datum (NAVD) to be “obsolete.” Dokka and his colleagues, together with experts from the NGS, are now using high-powered transponders and numerous Global Positioning System satellites to develop “true” elevation points in the state on the basis of their relation to the center of the earth.

Using a rate of subsidence measured at a tidal gauge off the coast of Grand Isle adjacent to an original NAVD marker, Dokka was able to calibrate rates of subsidence at hundreds of other markers around the state. His results indicate that the elevations of some areas have dropped as much as 2 ft (0.6 m) since they were last surveyed for the NAVD. Based on Dokka’s “true” elevations, some of the Corps’s levees in New Orleans may be more than 1 ft lower than their posted elevation.

Which means that the entire levee system is just so much whistling past the graveyard.

New Orleans has been in an exposed condition for well over a hundred years. This time, the city's luck ran out. The main thing we can do now? Visit this FEMA page, which lists charitable organizations that are helping out. Donate to or volunteer with one of them.

Jon Udell is posting on the RSS redirection issue:

It's been almost three years since I first wrote about the problem of RSS feed redirection. From time to time I'm reminded that it's still a problem, and today I noticed that two of the blogs I read were affected by it. I was subscribed to John Ludwig at www.theludwigs.com/index.rdf, and today's entry says "Feed moved -- pls check out www.theludwigs.com/index.xml." In fact he's got an index.xml and an atom.xml, and the latter seems to correspond to what's actually published on the blog, but either way the issue is that we've still yet to agree on a standard way for newsreaders to follow relocated feeds.

Well, there's a solution already - HTTP redirect. I know, I know - as Jon says, not everyone controls their own server, and not all hosting providers will provide that service. Still, it seems like the KISS solution would be to advocate for hosting providers to agree to N days (weeks, whatever) of standard redirect service followed by a 410. Solves the entire problem, most aggregators already handle redirects - and it doesn't require the invention of funky one-off, feed level answers.

What am I missing?

Here's some live-blogging from New Orleans - far better feel for what's actually happening on the ground than the media reports I'm seeing.

And in the "who would have thunk it" category, here's a network vendor still on the air from the city - up in a tower with supplies and generator power.

Derek asks the question that's been in the back of my mind, and I'm sure it's been in the back of other people's minds as well:

So now that New Orleans is underwater, and the devastation of property is huge, various charities have started beating the drums about raising money to "rebuild New Orleans".

I'm forced to ask myself one simple question: "Why?"

As he says, it's not as if this threat was unknown - it's been the "crazy aunt in the attic" of New Orleans for decades. It's worse than the coastal communities that get whacked from time to time, because at least the water leaves those - as bad as Biloxi was hit, for instance, it's not underwater.

CNet has a story about yawning - the whys, wherefores, etc. Check it out, and see how many times you yawn while you're doing so :)

Tim Bray makes some assumptions about threading and scalability here:

In that recent Ruby piece, I remarked that Ruby threading struck me as kind of feeble, and that threading is getting real important. Well, I know one way to solve that problem. So I tracked down JRuby geek Tom Enebo and got some news and he pointed to me to some code that I think is pretty cool.

On that threading thing, Tom tells me that “We currently implement Ruby threads using Java native threads. It is our plan to continue doing so.” So, JRuby is ready for the threading era.

That may not be the best way to handle it. We actually have some good experience in this area, due to the port of Opentalk (our communications framework) to ObjectStudio for the last release. ObjectStudio maps its threads down to platform (in this case, Windows) threads. That makes them non-deterministic and much harder to control. It also means that any error made by a developer in an individual thread has the ability to tie things up very nicely - at the platform level.

In VisualWorks, threads are green. This makes them really, really inexpensive. For instance, in BottomFeeder, I spawn a thread per feed (I'm subscribing to 309 as I write this). I don't need to worry about thread pools, or overwhelming the platform. If I tried such a feat with native threads, I'd have to worry about those things.

Sure, you'll say, but what if I have a multi-CPU (or multi-Core) box that I want to take advantage of? Simple - run more than one image (process) and have them communicate as needed. That's actually the classic Unix approach to scaling, and it works quite well. The programming model is vastly simpler - I don't have as many complex synchronization issues to deal with. External APIs (such as database calls, etc) can already be threaded at the platform level, so you don't have a blocking issue.

Update: Patrick Logan has some thoughts on the issue.

I just added some simple (and obvious) modifications to the posting tool that ships with BottomFeeder - obvious keyboard shortcuts:

• shift-insert -- paste
• shift-delete -- cut
• ctrl-b -- bold on/off
• ctrl-i -- italic on/off
• ctrl-u -- underline on/off
• ctrl-l -- hyperlink on/off

All things I should have added a long time ago, but hey - better late than never :)

Holy smokes - I was flipping between Fox and MSNBC this evening, and both networks had interviews with a spokesman from the Army Corps of Engineers. It doesn't sound good. While the water level in New Orleans is no longer rising, that's only because the water has reached its natural level. Apparently, they just found more breaches in the flood walls that they weren't aware of, and they've not been successful in their attempts to block them. Why? They aren't accessible by land or water, and they can only do so much from the air.

It gets worse. Even once they get the holes plugged, they then have to drain the city. The spokesman said that would be a 3-6 month job. So what we have is a nearly unprecedented situation in the US - hundreds of thousands of refugees who won't be able to return home for months. Many of them may not ever get home. Consider the buildings in flooded New Orleans. First, there's whatever wind damage they took during the storm. Add in a few months of being marinated in semi-toxic water. What do you end up with? A whole lot of buildings that need to be condemned and demolished, that's what.

Things are going to stay bad for New Orleans for a long, long time.

This is a Q/A session with the Army Corps of Engineers - and it sounds like the "Best Case" scenario is pretty tough. Never mind that the caveats thrown out are pretty big. There is simply no telling when - or, to be really pessimistic if - New Orleans will recover.

It could get worse too - have a look at this story - here's the kicker:

Once the levees are fixed, Maj. Gen. Don Riley of the Army Corps of Engineers said, it could take close to a month to get the water out of the city. If the water rises a few feet higher, it could also wipe out the water system for the whole city, said New Orleans' homeland security chief, Terry Ebbert.

Thus far, they have had little luck plugging the holes in the levees - and the water is still rising. I understand why the Governor of Louisiana has a "deer in the headlights" look when she speaks in public - it must be horrible to be in charge of a state, and be utterly powerless against this sort of thing. All we can do now is donate to the Red Cross, and pray that the experts can get those holes patched.

Patrick Logan is not impressed with the WinFS effort, saying that the WinFS team is stuck in outdated thinking.

Susie is based on Little Smalltalk, updated and aimed at specifically at scripting. Have a look

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:

• Native Windows GUI
• Database Modeling Tools
• OLE embedding

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.

ESUG has the answers - check it out

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...

Hat tip Sylvie Noël

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:

• With the freedom to say what you want comes the responsibility to live with the results. Say nasty things about your employer in public, for instance, and don't be surprised when you get the axe.
• No one owes you a soapbox.

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:

• If it's not complex, it can't scale
• If it's not complex, it can't be a full solution

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.