There's some unintentional irony in the slide deck that Sam Ruby posted from his FOSSSL talk. The slides are interesting - it's clear to me that dynamic languages are finally getting noticed by the mainstream. The irony? The fact that, just as one part of IBM (where Sam works) is noticing that dynamic languages are the wave of the future, the part that actually had one on hand is dropping it.
Well, this is interesting - according to Technorati, this blog is number 62 on the list for information about marketing. I hadn't really thought of this blog in those terms, but I guess I bring the topic up often enough.
Now, before I get all puffed up, I need to remind myself of something important about search engine results: very few people even scroll down on the first page, much less bother going to the second (or later) page of results.
This slashdot story does indicate an overly broad sense of security in the Mac community, but it's not time to panic.
"The IT security manager of the University of Otago, New Zealand, has been educating his OS X users in security best-practices. According to Mark Borrie, many Mac users believe they were immune to security problems -- a trap many Mac fans seem to have fallen into. He said around 40 percent of the computers at the uni are Macs. "On the security side of things I reckon the Mac community has yet to wake up to security. They think they are immune and typically have this idea that they can do whatever they want on their Macintosh and run what they like," said Borrie. "If I can get our Mac users up to speed and say 'you are not immune' -- so when [the malware] hits, hopefully we will be pretty safe," he said. "We want to be ready for the first big Macintosh virus -- because it will come. Some day, somebody will say 'I am going to create a headline and write a virus for Mac'," said Borrie."
Well, say someone wrote a Mac virus. It's going to try and spread like Windows viruses do. Now, when a Windows virus hits, and tries to infect another system, the odds of hitting a Windows system are pretty good (simply given the large market penetration). Look at Macs, by comparison. Say my Mac gets infected, and immediately tries to infect the other machines on my LAN.
Oops - three Windows boxes, two ReplayTVs, and a Linux box. It's going to find similarly slim pickings (probably slimmer) as it looks outside my LAN. It's not that any given Mac couldn't get infected by malware - it could. It's that the liklihood of an outbreak are very slim.
Why not Smalltalk? Follow the link and find out why this guy picked Smalltalk, and stay tuned for his experiences with it over the next little while.
Bernard Notarianni points to a Smalltalk party in France, being organized by Serge Stinkwich. There's a lot of lead time - it's December 3rd of this year. Make your plans to attend now!
I'm down to a few things for BottomFeeder 4.0. Rich has a number of good suggestions for the tabs, and I intend to follow those up. That will impact his ability to get the updated documentation done, so we'll have some lag there as well. Things are moving well though - I expect to have this all wrapped up within 2 weeks. Fingers crossed :)
Here's what's coming up in the new release:
That's the major stuff - a whole raft of bugs were fixed, and the blog posting tool saw some fixes as well. All in all, this should be a great release.
It's been a quiet couple of days on the blog, as I've been at a customer site (Cargill). We had a good day and a half of meetings, and I wish I could say more about what they are doing with Smalltalk - it's very cool stuff. Suffice to say, a lot of the foodstuffs you get daily went through the supply chain with the help of Cincom Smalltalk .
Anyway, I'll be back in the saddle again tomorrow, and expect to be back at my normal blogging pace.
Lesscode looks at Sam Ruby's FOSSSL keynote slides, and titles the post: "Reinventing Smalltalk, one decade at a time". Heh.
Scoble is hyping the upcoming PDC, telling us that something really big is coming. Color me skeptical - the last really big thing I recall MS talking about was list extensions to RSS (yawn). I'll believe it when I see it.
I'm in Minneapolis, MN today and part of tomorrow, visiting Cargill - a large customer of the Cincom Smalltalk group. They've spent the last decade+ building a large suite of applications they call LYNX - to summarize a lot, it's a system that deals with the grain origination business, through the supply chain from the farmer to the end purchaser. I can't go into a lot of details - like Cincom, Cargill is privately held, and they have a lot of proprietary value locked up in this system. They've evaluated it against various COTS systems over the years, and have always made the determination that LYNX served their needs better.
We got a lot of background on the business and application architecture from them. The application work started around 1992, when they decided to get rid of the various legacy stovepipe systems they had. Later on, Y2K compliance came into play. Just from a Smalltalk perspective, they have an interesting architecture - they have a multi-tier system with VSE clients and VW servers. The VSE clients use CORBA to communicate with VW.
That actually gets into something that not a lot of people know about - there's a VSE CORBA client (not suitable for running servers - it's incomplete) that shipped way back in the day. Cargill has been cheerfully using that code for years. They also wrote their own VSE/VW code compatibility layer - the entirety of their domain model is portable between VSE and VW. The GUI stuff, obviously, is not portable - and they are very interested in Pollock development and our roadmap.
Like I said above, I can't go into many details on the applications themselves - but I can say that Cargill is very happy with Cincom Smalltalk, and is looking to hook the LYNX system up to other systems that are being developed and deployed throughout Cargill. They are getting ready to kick off a fairly large effort soon, and that's what this meeting was all about. The last time they scheduled a large effort (back in 2000/2001), we came in and had extensive conversations with them. Those conversations bore fruit in the work they deployed out in 2003, which saved them a ton of money and streamlined their operations.
It's always fun to talk to a customer doing cool things with the product!
Dave has been having laptop troubles with standby/hibernation. It seems to be a prickly area. I always put mine into standby (and let it lapse down to hibernate, and it seems to work fine. The Thinkpad has been marvelous that way. The old Dell, on the other hand - I had to completely disable hibernation, because it never came out of it well. Likewise, some of my co-workers report the same problems with their Thinkpads. There's been progress by the vendors in this area, but it still seems way more fussy than it ought to be.
Meanwhile, I had a strange issue - I thought my battery wasn't charging. It ran down to 5%, and plugging in was doing nothing. Fortunately, the old "slide it out, slide it back in" trick worked - it wasn't connecting fully, I guess. Laptops are still fussy beasts...
Rob Fahrni spots a really cool combination:
HPANA: "Additionally, a special edition 'Harry Potter iPod' will be made available featuring the Hogwarts school crest, designed by the author." - I never thought I'd purchase an iPod because they're just too darned expensive for what they provide, now I may have to change my mind.
James Governor links to a great post on the need for simplicity:
Adrian then hits on a great point:
Why does Sainsbury have an "elaborate system" where surely a simple system would suffice?
I love that. The argument (or recieved wisdom) that elaborate means better is nonsense.
In IT we hear it about things like PHP all the time. Oh no - what you really want is a more scalable system (in enterprise software that invariably means a more elaborate one). Sometimes however there is an argument for lesscode, less software.
Elaboration tend to mask and degare responsibility because you can blame the system if something goes wrong. [We'll see a lot of that in the next couple of months].
Exactly. This goes straight to the point I made yesterday as well - do you want the complex (and supposedly scalable) system a long time from now, or the simple one that works right away? Too many IT people always gravitate toward the former, regardless of what the use case is.
This pretty much defines what I mean by "limited power" when I discuss Java and C# - I'm fairly surprised by this:
Unlike Java, C# contains the goto statement which can be used to jump directly from a point in the code to a label. Although much derided, gotos can be used in certain situations to reduce code duplication while enhancing readability. A secondary usage of the goto statement is the ability to mimic resumeable exceptions like those in Smalltalk, as long as the exception thrown does not cross method boundaries.
Back to the future, complete with goto statements. Amazing...
This post documents one way to generate an RSS feed - by iteratively building up an XML document, using the basic XML framework in VisualWorks. That's pretty much where I started 3 years ago, when I first started creating a feed for this blog. I pretty much left that code alone, since it works, and I felt no compelling reason to revisit it.
Later on, I wanted to create local (i.e., file urls) RSS feeds scraped from websites that don't support syndication. This time around, I looked into using a SAX driver. The basic class I created is RSSSaxWriter:
Smalltalk.RSSSax defineClass: #RSS_SAXWriter
superclass: #{XML.SAXWriter}
indexedType: #none
private: false
instanceVariableNames: ''
classInstanceVariableNames: ''
imports: ''
category: 'StoreRSS'
I created specific subclasses for the various RSS versions I wanted to support (although in practice I really only use RSS 2.0). The easiest way to see how I use this is to look at a script I wrote to scrape a cartoon I read.
| contentBlock out writer rest str content | contentBlock := [:builder :chunk | | lnk | lnk := 'http://www.comics.com', chunk. builder link: lnk. builder title: 'Monty: ', Core.Date today printString. builder description: '<img src="', lnk, '">'. builder pubDate: Core.Timestamp now]. out := 'monty.xml' asFilename writeStream. [writer := RSS20_SAXWriter new output: out. writer prolog. writer startRSS. writer startChannel. writer title: 'Monty'. writer link: 'http://www.comics.com/comics/monty/index.html'. writer description: 'Monty'. writer pubDate: Core.Timestamp now. writer startItem. writer title: 'Monty: ', Core.Date today printString. content := 'http://www.comics.com/comics/monty/index.html' asURI valueStream contents. str := content readStream. str throughAll: '<IMG SRC="/comics/monty'. str upToAll: '<IMG SRC="/comics/monty'. str throughAll: 'IMG SRC="'. rest := str upToAll: '"'. contentBlock value: writer value: rest. writer endItem. writer endChannel. writer endRSS] ensure: [out close].
Fairly simple to follow - and a whole lot easier than building up an XML doc from scratch. Ignoring the scraping bits, you just tell the writer what the values are for various tags, making sure to start/end various sections (like 'channel'). To get an idea what's behind some parts of that, let's look at a couple of the SAX driver methods. Here's the #startRSS method:
. startRSS self startElement: 'rss' attributes: (Array with: (XML.Attribute name: 'version' value: self version)). self cr.
All that is, is a convenience method around the general #startElement:attributes method (there's a simpler #startElement: for cases where you don't have any attributes to worry about):
startElement: localName attributes: someAttributes self startElement: '' localName: '' qName: localName attributes: someAttributes.
The rest looks a lot like that - to see the implementation, load package RSSScriptRunner from the Public Store - it has all the code for this. The upshot is, you can use a SAX driver to easily create an XML document, and creating a new SAX driver isn't hard - you simply start with the framework class SAXWriter and customize.
Amazing - apparently, just about the only team that the Devil Rays can beat is the Yankees. This is what happens when your management thinks that a staff of pitchers my age is a good idea. Bah.
Spotted in a ruby on rails delicious tag set:
when you get to technologies that survive much more (or purely) due to its technical merits than promotion efforts, such as Python, Ruby or Smalltalk, you start to realize that the people that compose the communities around those platforms have something
There's actual passion behind these languages. As opposed to Java and C#, where there's bland conformity...
Here's an all too typical story in SD Times - writer Jennifer deJong lets a Forrester analyst say something utterly absurd:
“In the early days of agile, only heretics used tools,” said Liz Barnett, a Forrester analyst who follows agile development. But that is no longer true.
Umm - XP, which is where the entire agile movement comes from, was developed by Kent Beck and the C3 team. Hmm - what were they using on that project? Smalltalk (VisualWorks, specifically). Last time I looked, VisualWorks is a tool filled environment.
How frelling hard would it be for a journalist or analyst to do some minimal research? Is typing into the Google box too hard for these people?
I hope that Sci Fi does better with this series than they and Fox did with Sliders, which started with such promise. I love alternate history books (like the ones Turtledove writes). Here's the blurb:
SCI FI Channel announced that it is developing What If, a "speculative future" series that poses intriguing scenarios of alternate realities. The program, from NBC Universal Television Studio in association with New Line Television, asks, "What if a moment in time could change the world forever?"
I understand what Stallman is after with his comments here. I dislike the way DRM and software patents are going as well - and have said so here numerous times. However, what's the likely result of changing the GPL to penalize patented software and DRM? Expect a lot more firms to develop strong allergies to the GPL
I blogged about this Javacast the other day, and I finally got around to listening to it today. Tune into it at minute 1:22. The guys describe a small web app that they built using a "lite" Java stack - Spring and Hibernate instead of the full J2EE stack. Time to build - 4 months. Ok, they decided, on a whim, to try Ruby on Rails. Time to build?
4 Days
That's a pretty amazing productivity jump, and they were pretty shocked. They went on to state that dynamic languages just have it all over Java in this sphere, mentioning Ruby, Lisp, Python, and Smalltalk (stating that Ruby has momentum).
Then there's an interesting riff starting at minute 1:26, where they go into Continuation based web development, and they point out how much simpler things like Seaside are - they went so far as to say that they figure that in 3-5 years, we'll all be doing development like this. They mentioned Seaside and Squeak specifically (note - Seaside works in VW as well). They point out that you can't get there in Java, because you can't do Continuations. Instead, there are frameworks that build huge state machines (complexity alert!).
So, if you want the power and productivity now, you can grab VW or Squeak and start using Seaside. Or you can get the all too typical pale reflection in Java...
There are more influences out of Smalltalk than most people realize - take the Eclipse Foundation, for instance - 1/3rd of the fulltime staff came out of Smalltalk.
Hat tip James Governor
Of course, those of you want the real deal instead of the pale reflection can download it :)
We sure don't need this: that system of disturbed weather off the Florida coast has turned into Tropical Depression 16. Follow the link to see where it's headed. We need this like we need a hole in the head...
Over the last few weeks, I've noticed that Eudora was getting very sluggish, and would often tie itself up for minutes at a time. Seems I was keeping too much mail around for it to handle in any kind of reasonable way. I subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists, and get the all too typical spam load - so I receive well north of 300 emails per day. I hadn't deleted any mail since 2003, and Eudora was having trouble with folders that had tens of thousands of messages. So... I whacked all the older ones (after saving copies), and Eudora was back to its formerly snappy self.
Anyone know if Thunderbird is able to hold large amounts of mail without this issue?
I like Graham's latest essay. My readers know that I don't often think highly of Graham's essays, but this one caught my eye. Agree or disagree, it's thought provoking.
The National Hurricane Center is tracking Tropical Depression 15. It's east of Florida, and could track across the state into the gulf. Of course, it might just break up and go away too, there's no telling yet. Here's hoping it breaks up - the gulf coast doesn't need another event right now...
So my wife wanted to export her mail - the messages and account settings - from Outlook Express on machine 1 to Outlook on machine 2. You would think this would be easy - same network, all MS apps - but no, it's a two step dance of pain. Here's what we ended up doing:
Sheesh. It was fairly quick once we figured it out, but there was no good reason for us to have to take the side trip through OE on machine 2. Someone needs to find Ballmer and crew and point out the term "Usability". It's pretty damn clear to me that they haven't heard of it.
Heh - even better. We finally got it all done, and my wife actually looked at Outlook. Her reaction makes me look downright positive about that abortion of an application. The user interface is more cluttered than I remember it - like many MS apps, it seems to have gotten worse with age. So now it's off to find a mail client that isn't cluttered as all get out and can import from Outlook...
I've found a few more issues with the new tab support - changing Look and Feel caused startup problems, and you could get errors when clicking near (but not on) a tab. There were a few other things as well - an update is available in the dev level updates. bear in mind, if you don't have the latest dev updates (with tabbed browsing), this is all something you can ignore for now.
I also fixed a browser launch bug on Unix/Linux. In some shells, urls with ampersands were being taken badly - the ampersand being seen as a request to background the task rather than as part of the url. I fixed that, and the person I tested it with reported that it worked just fine.
I love seeing stuff like this:
Seaside is incredible too, I picked it up very quickly reading 3 pages of overview, playing with demos, and then on to coding. There's plenty more to learn, I'm sure, but my web app is up and running with suprisingly little code. Learning/using Java frameworks was never this easy.
The environment in VisualWorks is awesome - integrated refactoring browser, code critic, sunit testing framework - it feels like home, one I never want to leave again. Unless something more like Smalltalk than Smalltalk comes along. :)
Wilfred Springer clearly hasn't seen the refactoring tools in Smalltalk, or he wouldn't have let loose with this:
But I also remembered some conference sessions on dynamicly typed languages that I attended in the past. None of these sessions ever mentioned the fact that refactoring tools can be so much more powerful if the type is known before runtime. Renaming an operation in a large codebase would be practically impossible. Tracing the usage of a class would be equally hard.
Seems the Java guys are starting to realize that there are simpler ways to solve problems - this weeks JavaCast talks about Seaside, amongst other things. Very cool.
Dave Winer noticed something interesting about Technorati's new blog search - various tags that you would think would be associated with a given blog aren't. This is related to something Tim Bray commented on the other day - the current rankings are reflecting who has and hasn't charged in and claimed the 20 tags that Technorati lets you associate with your blog. Over time, that should sort itself out - what we are seeing right now is the equivalent of a sorting algorithm after the first few iterations.
If you've grabbed the development build or updates, and have tabs - there are some areas where you can run into problems. I'm running the dev build myself, so I'm fixing issues as I run across them. Keep in mind that the development builds are not necessarily completely baked.
Browsing around, I discovered that the city of New Orleans has a disaster plan - i.e., they had a stated plan of action for this kind of situation. One of the sadder things I'm seeing right now is a desperate attempt by partisans - of all stripes - to grab this disaster and use it as a stick with which to beat their opponents. I'd guess that mistakes were made up and down the chain here:
On that latter point - take a trivial example, backup of crucial data. We all know that hard drives fail, and that we'll face a loss of data at some point. We know this. And yet, how many of us (myself included) fail to do backups diligently, subconsciously thinking "it won't happen to me"? Now, when we do lose data, how many of us decide to point the finger at IT, since it's far easier to do that than look at ourselves?
On the first point, how many of us know a "stickler" who insists on following "the rules", no matter what the situation is? Bureaucracies are loaded with that type of personality.
There's a lot of finger pointing happening here, with the addition of partisan game playing by all and sundry.
I have a few more shots from today's outing - here's one my wife took at sunset:
Now, here's a nice shot my wife took as we were out on the water. You can click through this one for a bigger version:
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:
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:
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.
|
| Subscribe to WebVelocity |
| Visit this group |