Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Looks like Nintendo will beat Sony to market as well - they'll announce the Revolution console on May 9th:

During its pre-E3 press conference in May, Nintendo disappointed many by revealing little about the Revolution. Other than showing off a mock-up of the console form factor and announcing the console would play NES, SNES, N64, and GameCube games, the game giant revealed little about the next-generation console. In the months since, it has let a few details about the Revolution trickle out, the most significant being pictures of its much-vaunted controller--which has been much-derided for its resemblance to a TV remote control.

That's good news for Nintendo, and more bad news for Sony.

So I have the new stereo, and it's got a USB input - which means that I can run a USB cable from my Mac over to the stereo, and play iTunes straight to the nice sounding equipment.

Well, in theory. I plugged it in, started iTunes - and got a vast well of silence. Hmm. Plugged the cable into my PC instead, and it recognized the device right off, and piped sound to it automatically. If I unplugged it, sound went back to the speakers. Pretty nice, and very simple.

Back to the Mac (I didn't really want the cable draped across the middle of my office). It turns out that the Mac can play out the USB port, but you have to manually toggle it to the output device you want. That works, but it was less obvious than I would have liked. The Mac is better at some things, but not at everything.

Ok, it does look like something a 17 year old would want - but the sound is much better than the old set of components I had, and it takes up a ton less space:

Also, there's a USB port - I need a longer cable than I have, but I should be able to hook that up to my Mac, and play iTunes straight to the stereo.

During my morning reading, I ran across this rant about the pricing on the XBox 360. Apparently, it's pretty darn expensive in Europe:

The XBox 360 is nearly upon us (in Europe) and guess what? It’s a rip-off! Why is that? Vendors who took pre-orders estimated the price to be around €410 for the 360 with the hard-drive and extra goodies. So imagine my shock when I went into GameStop in Waterford yesterday to see the price listed as €609! For a console? This is absolutely ridiculous!

Even at a 1-1 exchange rate (and it's not 1-1), that's pretty high. I touched on this topic awhile back. There a couple of rough segments in the game console space - there are hardcore gamers, and then there are recreational gamers. The first bunch is not immune to price, but it's close. The people who stood in line on the day of the launch are hardcore, for instance. I don't think this group is large enough to make up a profitable target though. There are more recreational gamers than there are hardcore types, and I would guess that it's a decent size difference.

Meaning? Well, the recreational gamer is not immune to price. As I touched on before, the current generation of systems (especially the Nintendo GameCube) fall into the impulse purchase zone. Like candy at the end of the grocery store line, the GameCube is at a low enough price point that it can be picked up on a whim. The PS2 and (old) XBox are slightly more expensive, but still come pretty close to that impulse buy - or, failing that, to the "big present for the birthday/holiday" line.

Now there's the 360. In the US, you are looking at $300/$400. That gets you to the outer edges of "big gift" territory, and is well outside of the impulse zone. In fact, for a lot of people, I'd say that the price point makes it a competitive decision with things like a new TV, or a new stereo, (etc, etc). In other words, we've moved from impulse all the way up to "your mom and I have to talk".

Now let's take that price that Digital Excess is talking about - over 600 Euros. That gets out into "now we're talking about real money" territory for an awful lot of people. Heck, you can get a whole PC for that price, and a pretty darn nice one for just a little more.

I have no idea what MS' manufacturing costs/sales costs are on these things. The high price in Europe may not be off the wall in those terms. However, in terms of the game console space, and the market that MS is trying to reach, it looks very, very steep to me.

I've got the new WithStyle code from Software with Style, and I've done a build - the results are available in the dev section of the download page. I'll let this one age a few days and see how it goes - if all goes well, we'll have a release.

A friend of mine sent me this - he captioned it "The pot at the end of the rainbow" :)

Scoble runs into the lack of an OPML spec:

I kept trying to open my OPML file in the OPML Editor and it wouldn’t open. I had a few complaints about that as well. I tried both the OPML file that NewsGator exported as well as the one that Bloglines exported. Newsgator’s OPML file wouldn’t even open (gave me an error) but Bloglines opened with blank titles.

I wish everyone would make their files compatible with the OPML editor, though. I’m using that a lot lately.

But it's ok - because Scoble tells us that users are king, and the format (and spec) doesn't matter:

But what Dave did was give me an application. It works. And, as a user, I wonder "if the format is so crappy, how did Dave get it to work in his own application?"

And, as a user, I wonder "why can't the developers just get their OPML to work with Dave's application?"

There's a reason for that, Robert. The *cough* spec *cough* is worthless. Every aggregator developer (myself included) has had to struggle with this since OPML came to be the standard way to exchange subscriptions. If there were an actual spec, you wouldn't see the entertaining differences between tools. So you know what? As a user, you do care.

When abstractions escape you, you get this:

A language where everything is an object is impossible. An object is something that groups other things together. So what are these things? Well, they're other objects. Ok, so these objects must contain some kind of data. Ok, these also contain objects. Where does it end? It ends with primitive data types. Or some kind of built-in type. It doesn't matter if they're abstract such as variants or templates, or down to the hardware such as 32 bit signed integers. These cannot be broken down. They're the basic data types that everything else is built on top.

Hmm - I wonder if this guy has heard of bytes. Or bits. Or heck, gates. The fact is, there's nothing special about 32 bit integers - they are an abstraction that is built on top of the really primitive lower bits of the system. So should we all go back to plug boards? That's where this guy's "logic" takes him.

All objects are, are a way of raising the abstraction level up another level - instead of dealing with (slightly lower level) abstractions like integers, we deal with objects. The idea is that such abstraction makes it easier to solve problems.

In a "pure object" language like Smalltalk, the complexity is carted off to the VM. In the hybrid languages, like Java and C#, the designers felt the need to share the complexity with everyone - probably because they never fully escaped from the view that the fundamental data types in C are the bottom.

First, a former Canadian Defense Minister said he was worried that the US was going to get the world into an inter-galactic war; now, I see that physicist Richard Carrigan thinks that ET could take over the world using SETI@Home. Me? I think both these guys have been watching way, way too much of "Pinky and the Brain"....

Scoble makes a point about feeds, but it's really a much bigger point - customers have a lot more control over sales situations than they used to. Subscribing to a feed is just an example of this: the writer is selling his content, and the customer gets to decide whether it's worth buying. For a lot of us, partial content just isn't:

I really try to avoid non-full-text feeds. I deleted many feeds I like that aren’t full text (like Shelley Powers’ feed, Chris Pirillo’s feeds, and Jeffrey Zeldman’s feeds -- all of which I deleted from my daily reading). Why? Because there are so many great feeds out there that I just don’t have time for people who don’t treat me the way I want to be treated.

See I use NewsGator. It only shows me headlines in one pane and the content in another pane. So I can scan feeds very quickly -- even though they are full-text feeds.

The same thing is true of selling in general though. When a consumer walks into a store, he's a lot less likely to be swayed toward the commission heavy choice than he used to be. The internet provides a rich source of information, allowing him to walk into the store much more fully armed with data than he used to be. Twenty years ago? Unless you were seriously into a hobby (i.e., subscribed to the right set of niche publications), then you were at the mercy of the sales staff. Now? Not so much. Decent information is a few searches away.

An awful lot of companies (and writers on the web, for that matter) don't fully get that yet. They still see themselves as holding the trump cards, and think that people have to come to them. The truth is, they don't. Not anymore.

Interesting:

The short answer is that we do not implement RFC 3023 currently.  The RSS platform uses MSXML (in XML conforming mode) to fetch and parse the data, so the behavior is inherited from MSXML.  Since MSXML is used by most products that we ship, it means the platform is consistent.  And nearly every other stack in the industry ignores RFC 3023 as well, so it's not a widely accepted interop point at the moment.

I find that interesting because the short answer from 3023:

If an XML entity is in a file, the Byte-Order Mark and encoding declaration are used (if present) to determine the character encoding

Is something I implemented in BottomFeeder a long time ago. At the time, I found that paying attention to the declared encoding declaration helped a lot. I guess the MSXML parser isn't built that way, and I'd also guess that the decision was based on the sources they ran into during construction of the parser. I was looking at RSS feeds, and the declaration seemed like an easy thing to do.

Dave Walker spots the flaw in Memeorandum:

The same dozen or so bloggers who only link to each other have been going on and on about Memeorandum for the last few months, and I’ve never really figured out why. I’ve never actually seen anything pop up there that wasn’t already being beaten to death by that same list of people -- if you’re looking for current stuff that’s worth a look I still think you’re better served by del.icio.us or digg or your own aggregator.

I don't think I'd consciously noticed that, but it's true. That's a function of Memeorandum's design - the site ranks a manually selected set of sources pretty high, and that's how it finds things. Here's the explanation from awhile back::

Fortunately, Robert Scoble has more info in his review here, having viewed the site in testing apparently for several months. The service uses a white list of tech and political blogs and then builds out inclusion of other sources based on what they link to. That can include other blogs or more traditional news sources.

That generates the "in crowd" set of links that Dave complains about. Like him, I find that I like Digg a lot. Like Slashdot, it picks up a bunch of stuff I don't really care about that much, but it does seem to hit a wider diversity of material than Memeorandum. They both serve a purpose - but knowing how they work helps me decide which to pay more attention to.

Berin Loritsch notes a difference between the way Java developers approach things, and the way Smalltalk developers approach things:

As I was writing about certain principles that influence simplicity, I came across the disparity between the typical Java way and the original Smaltalk way of designing your objects. Take for instance the problem of moving an object left 25 pixels and down 30. A Smalltalker would do something like this:

rect.moveLeft: 25 Down: 30

And in Java:

Point p = rect.getLocation();
rect.setLocation( p.X() - 25, p.Y() + 30 );

Anyone see the problem right away? In OOP 101, the principle is that you tell an object what you want it to do. Notice that isn't query an objects state and then modify it. In the Smalltalker's code, he is clearly telling the rectangle to move left 25 and down 30 and the parameters are verbose enough to make that clear. With Java we ask the object where it currently is, and assuming that bigger numbers mean right and down we give it a new location.

The point? Java developers are still working at the data structure level - there are objects, but they aren't really being treated like objects.

Here's a crime you don't see every day - unless you live in Baltimore:

Thieves are sawing down aluminum light poles. Some 130 have vanished from Baltimore's streets in the last several weeks, authorities say, presumably sold for scrap metal. But so far the case of the pilfered poles has stumped the police and left many local residents wondering just how someone manages to make off with what would seem to be a conspicuous street fixture.

The poles, which weigh about 250 pounds apiece, have been snatched during the day and in the middle of the night, from two-lane blacktop roads and from parkways with three lanes on either side of grass median strips, in poor areas and in some of the city's most affluent neighborhoods. Left behind are half-foot stubs of metal, with wires that carry 120 volts neatly tied and wrapped in black electric tape.

SciFi Wire thinks that CBS' Threshold may have bit the dust:

CBS has pulled its SF drama Threshold from the schedule for at least the next few weeks, following a lackluster ratings performance in a new Tuesday timeslot, Zap2it reported. Sources told E! Online that the show has been canceled; a CBS spokesperson couldn't be reached by Zap2It to confirm that.

That would be too bad, IMHO. While the premise of the show is "out there" (an alien signal can reprogram DNA), there's one big thing going for the show: there's no "evil government conspiracy" plotline. I'm getting kind of tired of that one, especially since X-Files beat it until it wasn't only dead, it's ancestors were begging for mercy. "Surface" has that conspiracy thing going (although, to be fair, there are so many defects in that show that picking on just one seems unfair).

Ultimately, I rather like the way "Threshold" depicts the ad-hoc government group fighting the alien incursion - they make stuff up as they go, trying to hold to a set of policies laid down by the show's protagonist. It seems a lot more realistic to me than a shadowy cabal that "really" runs things.

Scoble notes that people are still subscribed to his old feed:

My old feed on Bloglines has 9,204 subscribers. My new feed on Bloglines has 1,457 subscribers.

That tells me that people aren’t unsubscribing from old feeds and are just leaving them in place. It also tells me that Bloglines has a lot of “dead users.” (Users who aren’t using the service much, if at all).

Well, it tells me something else, too - the old feed is still there, rather than doing the right thing, and redirecting. Ditto the old blog. Most aggregators will automatically update subscriptions that redirect, but that assumes that there's a redirect to follow.

This is yet another reason why you shouldn't have a blog that is important to you hosted by a service - you have minimal control over that sort of thing.

Update: This won't work. Why? Because the tools used to pick up the feed won't understand the content - they are looking for http level directives. The problem is, asking people to make the change requires a two step (possibly more) process: Unsubscribe from old source, subscribe to new one. All manual. Meaning, lots of people will "mean to get to it", but won't.

Looks like I have at least one more build coming up. Michael is fixing a bug in WithStyle that can lock things up, under the wrong circumstances. Once that's done, I'll slam a new dev build up and we'll go back to "almost ready" again.

The home network is getting to the point where I'll have to look at something less ad hoc soon. Right now, there's a wired/wireless router in the basement (which is where the cable service comes in). We have 4 wires dropped to that, and everything else is on Wireless. That would be fine, except that the WiFi seems limited (and shaky) in the family room - which is where the big TV that now has HD is.

So... Down to Staples, where I bought a new router that supports wider range and pre-N - which will be useful if we decide to put a Replay or similar device upstairs. That wasn't the end of the problem - my wife's old machine and new machine were off the network - there's a hub connecting those two (until the old machine migrates off upstairs). So... back to the store, where I found a 4 port switch for $25. That solved that problem. Now, I just have to wait for a free few minutes to swap in the new router.

The joys of the networked home :)

Some people are reporting problems running VisualWorks on some Linux distributions - Ubuntu and Gentoo have come up, as well as Debian. Steve Kelly made a post on the vwnc list that has some answers:

A customer was trying out our MetaEdit+ app, (7.1 image, 7.2 VM) on Ubuntu 5.04, and received several primitiveFailed errors. The errors turned out to be when VW was trying to allocate a scaled Helvetica font - most font sizes needed were available as bitmap fonts, but whenever VW tried to use the scalable (size 0) font that xlsfonts said was available, it got a primitveFailed allocating the font.

I tried out 7.3.1, and that sat there at start-up grabbing all the CPU and increasing memory without ever opening a window. If the VISUALWORKS variable wasn't defined, it managed to open an empty "Source files invalid" window, and then Ctrl-Shift-y and printProcessorStacks revealed that it too had a process with an error trying to allocate a font. dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig didn't help, nor did several other approaches.

In the end I solved it by installing the Ghostscript extension package that lets X use the Ghostscript fonts:

  sudo apt-get install gsfonts-x11

Apparently the Helvetica (aliased?) there works better, or some change it makes to the fonts config files (the package install no new fonts itself). 7.1 works fine with different sized fonts, and 7.3.1 starts up fine.

Although I hadn't used it before a couple of days ago, Ubuntu looks very nice, and is currently the most popular distro according to www.distrowatch.com, so this may become an issue for others. It's a Debian based distro, using the X.org successor to XFree86 4.0, so possibly this problem may become apparent in other similar distros (Gentoo?). Hopefully posting here will save someone a few minutes!

All the best,

Steve

Time for my weekly look at the logs. BottomFeeder downloads went at 344 per day clip, slightly down from last week - I expect I'll see a surge (from existing users) when I get 4.1 out. With the latest NR updates from Michael, it should be soon. If the build I'm using now looks good, I'll release it on Monday. Anyway, the download details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	672
HPUX	421
Sources	320
Mac 8/9	295
Update	253
Linux x86	163
Mac X	153
CE ARM	76
Windows98/ME	24
Linux Sparc	8
SGI	8
Solaris	7
Linux PPC	6
AIX	5
Source Script	2

Next up, the HTML page blog accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	42.6%
Mozilla	38%
Other	11.8%
MSN Bot	4.5%
Google Bot	3.1%

Those numbers are about the same as they've been, maybe a bit more parity between the Mozilla and IE numbers. "Other" is pretty darn high though - there are a lot of tools being used in small numbers, apparently. Finally, the syndication feed results:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	33.2%
Other	13.4%
Net News Wire	11.1%
BottomFeeder	6.9%
Planet Smalltalk	4.6%
Safari RSS	3.9%
Magpie	2.9%
Internet Explorer	2.4%
NewsGator	2.3%
BlogSearch	1.9%
SharpReader	1.8%
Feed Reader	1.7%
RSS Bandit	1.7%
BlogLines	1.7%
RSSReader	1.6%
Feed Demon	1.6%
JetBrains	1.3%
Liferea	1%
Java	1%
Google Bot	1%
Python	1%
News Fire	1%
MSN Bot	1%

The array of tools used to get at RSS/Atom is still large, at least for my feeds. Given the distribution of Macs in the population at large, it's fascinating that NetNewsWire is so popular relative to other tools.

Chris Pirillo spots a feature of the new XBox 360 that gives it a big leg up on the competition - integration with the Media Center PC. The idea? Say you have a Media Center PC in the living room, and a new XBox 360 in the family room. bam - instant streaming between rooms. This is nothing new - TiVo and ReplayTV have supported that for years, as do the crap devices that the cable company provides.

However, this makes the XBox 360 more than "just" a gaming device for the non-hardcore gamer (and the family). Looks like an opportunity to me.

The Civ 4 patch is out, and it fixes my problem - Civ 4 works! To get the patch, start Civ 4, and when you get past the "Play" button, select "Advanced" - you'll get an option to download a patch. Do that, and use the Installer. Now, off to try it :)

Power supply for your new XBox 360 running too hot? The Smalltalk IRC Channel has a solution for you, and a marketing slogan for Microsoft:

a gaming console with built-in cup warmer. Beats the plain cup holder the competition features

There ya go :)

I have one more issue to look at with the Blog poster plugin, but the core of BottomFeeder is pretty stable now - once I get that issue sorted out, I'll have a release. In the meantime, there's a new dev build up.

It's sounding like Microsoft might have gotten too enticed by the idea of beating Sony and Nintendo to market for the next generation game console - there's the shortage of units, and some reports of hardware trouble:

Gamers' enthusiasm for the newly released Xbox 360 quickly waned after the first reports were posted online of problems with the machines crashing and overheating.

No word yet on how widespread the problem actually is, or what, if anything Microsoft plans to do about it.

Depending on two things - the actual size of the problem - and - more importantly - their response - this could end up doing them more harm than good. Microsoft has seen plenty of ham handed PR (Dell, Sony) recently - let's see if a big company knows how to respond.

That Christmas party staple - the backside copy - actually costs money:

Photocopier supplier Canon is warning customers to take better care of their office equipment during the Christmas period, claiming that the festive season traditionally leads to a 25 percent hike in service calls due to incidents such as the classic backside copying prank.

Not to mention costing a fair bit of pride later:

Geoff Bush from the north of England said one case he'd attended, where a young lady had cracked the glass mid-scan, also jammed the scanner so that it wasn't until the machine was fixed and her colleagues all sober that copies of her backside starting pouring from the machine.

I guess the copy repair guy knows all :) But wait - Canon has the solution:

Partly in response to this trend--or perhaps because of the "supersizing" of the western physique--Canon has now increased the thickness of its glass by an extra millimeter.

Heh.

It could be the direct rectal extraction:

On the other hand, the traditional RAS (research advisory service) analysts that deal with end users do very little systematic research. The RAS analysts count on their informal conversations with a statistically small and invalid population of self-selecting clients for much of their information. Most of the rest of the information then comes from vendor briefings. In both cases, none of the data points gathered goes into a knowledge management system or a data warehouse for systematic analysis it all resides between the ears of individual analysts. Long time Dataquest analysts when discussing their RAS colleagues say “For those RAS guys one data point is a trend, two is confirmation and why bother with three?”

So next time you get numbers - and they aren't from an analyst armed with actual research - watch your wallet.

Like just about everyone else in the US, I'm now stuffed. I'm thankful for everything I have though, and realize that lots of people aren't as fortunate. Happy Thanksgiving!

When I updated the NetResources exception handling, I made a small error - and that error broke support for authentication (both normal and digest). I've updated the dev stream, and I'm doing another full build now. The longest part of that is the upload to the server, which seems like a perfect use of computing resources on Thanksgiving :)

Sam Gentile points out that the MS TDD page - which many people complained about (my comments here) is being fixed. When companies pay attention to the feedback available in the blogosphere, they can turn a mistake into a positive experience. Or, they can be like Sony. Or, apparently, like Dell.

The Lisp guys make the productivity point:

Rails is not a Silver Bullet. However, widely reported results place productivity increases over modern Java methodologies (e.g., J2EE, Struts, etc.) in the 6-fold to 10-fold range (with many of these claims coming from long-time Java luminaries). Preliminary tests by our Technical Lead put the code reduction for a normal module in our Java stack converted to Rails at roughly 20:1.

This is what you would see with Smalltalk (or Lisp, etc) as well. If you want a leg up on the competition, you won't find it with Sun or Microsoft.

Seaside and Dabble are starting to get noticed

Well, odd in this part of Maryland, anyway. Snow!

Up Next:

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sony's little adventure into Rootkit installation may have even worse (for them, and possibly other labels) fallout: Second thoughts from the artists themselves. Van Zant's new album was ranked 882 on Amazon before the DRM scandal broke - now look at things:

Overnight, Get Right with the Man dropped to No. 1,392 on Amazon's music rankings. By Nov. 22 -- after the news made headlines and Sony was deep into damage control, pulling some 4.7 million copy-protected disks from the market -- Get Right with the Man was even further from Amazon's Top 40, plummeting to No. 25,802.

The Business Week article notes that most artists have been ok with DRM, as a way to prevent pirating. However, that kind of sales drop gets their attention - they are now seeing that the potential negatives are, in fact, pretty big. At the very least, I expect to see artists doing some due diligence with the labels over this kind of thing. More evidence of that:

"We're really upset about this," says Patrick Jordan, director of marketing for Red Light Management, which represents Trey Anastasio, former front man to jam band Phish. Anastasio's latest solo album, Shine, was released Nov. 1, just as news of Sony's rootkit was worming its way onto Internet blogs and listservs. "I'm expecting a decrease in sales," Jordan adds.

Indeed, Shine debuted with 15,000 sales its first week. But by week two, when the rootkit fiasco was in full swing, sales had plummeted to 7,000. Weekly numbers will be released Nov. 23, and Jordan is bracing for the worst. "It's been damaging, and certainly we're going to discuss that with the label," he says.

Another sign of the labels - like Sony - being way behind the curve - their failure to work with Apple:

As Sony BMG and other labels release more CDs with tracks that can't be dragged to iPods, artists are hearing from outraged fans. In response, some artists -- including Tim Foreman, guitarist for Switchfoot, whose Nothing Is Sound release was part of the Sony recall -- used a fan site to post instructions for disabling Sony content protections that prevent consumers from dragging tunes to their iPods.

It's one thing for fans to try and find a way around DRM schemes - when the artists start pointing out how to do it, it's a pretty clear sign of a disconnect.

The Sony debacle is, I think, simply the straw that broke the camel's back. The disconnect between artists, labels, and fans has been growing for a long time now - this event simply opened the floodgates and got people talking about that disconnect.

This year's Smalltalk Solutions will be held in conjunction with the Linux World and Network World Expo in Toronto, April 24-26. See http://www.lwnwexpo.plumcom.ca/ for more information on the conference in general. We are now looking for presentations concerning all aspects of Smalltalk usage, both commercial and non-commercial, and for all dialects and operating systems. That is to say, even though the main conference has Linux in its name, it is not a requirement that Smalltalk Solutions presentations involve Linux.

Note that the conference format will be slightly different from previous years, with tutorials held on April 24th, ahead of the main conference. Regular session slots will be one hour, rather than the 45 minute slots we have used previously.

To submit a proposal, please use the form at http://www.lwnwexpo.plumcom.ca/sts_call_papers.cfm which also includes more detailed information. You can also e-mail Alan Knight with any questions.

Finally, and most important, note that the submission deadline is November 30th, so get your proposal in as soon as possible!!!

Vassili has been talking about the new Announcement framework he's been building in anticipation of Pollock. So far, he's posted on it:

• First post
• Second
• Third

Runar has commented on it here.

Scoble wants to see some new stuff and get outside the echo chamber:

One great thing about traveling is that I get out of my echo chamber and see the world from new perspectives. I wonder who’ll be sitting next to me on the plane. Will it be a teacher? A janitor? An executive? An accountant? Will he or she hate computers? Love them? Be a Mac user?

Well. He'll be in Paris for a conference soon - if he wants a new perspective on web development, he should drop by the Paris Smalltalk party - I'm sure that someone there would love to give him a Seaside demo.

The Nintendo DS is getting cheaper:

For $99 dollars this December you'll be able to pick up a Nintendo DS at your local Target store

Don't underestimate Nintendo in the game console wars - price points matter quite a bit in this space.

French Smalltalkers have a party coming up in Paris on December 3rd:

Le groupe des utilisateurs francophones de Smalltalk (French Smalltalk User Group) vous invitent à une Smalltalk Party, c'est-à-dire une journée de présentation et de démonstration de Smalltalk et de Squeak.

• Lieu : Paris, INJS de Paris, 254bis Rue St-Jacques 75005 Paris, Salle Bébian
• Transports en commun : RER B - Station Luxembourg
• Date : le 3 décembre 2005 de 9h à 18h (pause repas dans un restaurant à petit prix du quartier).
• L'emplacement de la SmalltalkParty

Sounds like fun!

Chris Petrilli likes Seaside quite a bit:

I’ve been playing with Avi Bryant’s continuation-based web framework Seaside, which is written in Smalltalk. Wow. That’s all I can say. After some recent work with Rails, I had come to admire the cleanliness of the framework -- even if, on occasion, I had some complaints about short-cuts taken that need not be necessary. Compared to Seaside, Rails seems to me to be a jalopy. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a seriously pimped out jalopy, but the easy with which one can build interactivity and modify it on the fly with Seaside is mind-blowing.

Now, he does have some concerns about database interfacing - MySQL in particular. MySQL is a database that we are looking at seriously.

In contrast to Sony's woes, Microsoft has a different problem with the XBox 360 - not enough on the ground, and an audience that is absolutely rabid for the product. For instance:

The shortage is very real, and it has plenty of people angry and frustrated. At one of two Circuit City stores that I visited, there were two separate lines, one for people who had shown up before the store even opened and were given "vouchers," and another for the voucher-less people hoping that someone backed out of the deal. I got in the second line to gauge people's hopes and expectations. The result? The overwhelming majority of people in line were actually people who had pre-ordered units from other stores, most notably Gamestop and Electronics Boutique. One individual, Dennis, had two pre-orders, and was still in the (hopeless) line. Why? It's a common story: Dennis got a call from his pre-order stores. "Sorry," they said, "but we cannot fill your order, and will not be able to do so until after Christmas." Dennis claims that he placed both of his orders in July.

It's even getting uglier than that - robberies at gunpoint and the like. I've seen numerous reports like this one. Having a wildly popular product that people really want is a good thing, but MS is going to have to stay on top of this - excitement can turn to fury quickly.

Ian Prince has pictures and reporting from the Smalltalk party in Berne.

Mark Watson - like Ed Burnette, who he points to - advocate a slower moving Java language. Here's their point:

Java is great because of the huge amount of 3rd party software available for it. The majority of open source software in the world today is written in Java. It's nearly ubiquitous. But Java has to stabalize or we'll lose that advantage. It's 10 years old and it should be mature. Not dead, just mature.

What they point to is a problem that any commonly used language (like C and C++ before it) runs into - if your user base uses a diverse set of tools, then the amount of movement possible in the language itself becomes minimal. The pushback against new Java features is increasing for exactly that reason - and Burnette points out that C# doesn't face that problem, because MS can update it pretty much at will.

We do the same thing here at Cincom - any VM is downwardly compatible within a given generation (2.5.x, 3.x, 5i.x, 7.x) - but not down to a former generation. That allows us to make changes and not stay static - but it's a luxury we can afford because of the fact that we aren't in a commodity position, like Java is. It's an interesting conundrum - once a language reaches mass popularity, improvements to it become harder and harder - and you'll have to look outside that language for real jumps.

We are in the last push to get the winter 2005 release of Cincom Smalltalk out, but we aren't the only ones working on a Smalltalk product - the Object Arts guys have just pushed out Dolphin 6. Congratulations!

Ryan Lowe gets the value of dynamic languages after working in Ruby. Of course, I think Smalltalk is better :)

I had another look at the NetResources library, and I found out that it wasn't as flexible about setting the user agent as I'd like. I changed that, added a setting to my build, and now it's up - in the development downloads. The last few revs have been advertising themselves as Mozilla compatible, and there turns out to be a problem with that - at least one site I subscribe to classifies that kind of agent string as robotic. So, BottomFeeder is back to properly identifying itself, now that the right API is being used.

Over the weekend we went to see "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire". I really liked it - it started a bit slowly, I thought - but once it picked up steam it was "hold the edge of your seat" good. I thought they did a good job of portraying the interpersonal difficulties the characters were having in that book - something I had wondered about, given the action centering around the three challenges. The climactic scenes were well done - pretty much just as I had imagined them.

In my opinion, this is a movie well worth going to - run, don't walk.

Sometimes, being too aggressive about handling exceptions can be worse than not being aggressive enough. Over the last couple of months, Michael has been tweaking the NetResources library (it's in the public Store) to deal with some locking issues in the caching code. Last month, there was a change made that caused a few problems - it started trying to handle exceptions that it shouldn't. Here's the relevant code snippet:

	response := [client executeRequestDo: [:connection | client getNotifyingResponse: connection]]
		on: (self class httpExceptions, Error) do: [:ex | self behaviourForException: ex. nil].
	response ifNil: [^self].

The #executeRequestDo: message send executes the HTTP request (or not; it actually implements conditional-get). When you make an HTTP request, any number of bad things can happen - you can get timeouts, other network errors, redirects - if you don't get a response object, you'll get an exception. Some of those exceptions (like redirect) can (and usually should) be resumed - while others (server error) most certainly should not be. Still others - timeouts - can be resumed or restarted, but the decision is an application level issue.

Note the exceptions being caught - #httpExceptions is a list of http and network level exceptions, and Error is a catch-all. The logic is in #behaviorForException:. The mistake was in the old version of this method, and in the old version of the handling code. In the previous version of the above, the code was catching Error (i.e., pretty much everything, undifferentiated). Here's the handling code:

behaviourForException: ex
	ex class = Security.SSLBadCertificate
		ifTrue: [Security.X509Registry default addCertificate: ex parameter parameter].
	(self class possibleTimeoutExceptions includes: ex class) ifTrue: [^self class triggerTimeoutEvent: url].
	(ex isResumable and: [self class exceptionsWeShouldResume includes: ex class] ) 
		ifTrue: [ex resume]
		ifFalse: [self reportTheErrorType: ex]

What that does is check the sort of exception we got, and then handle it based on that information. The old code just checked whether the exception could be resumed and then did so; that led to situations where BottomFeeder would report low level socket errors - the code being resumed was in no state to be resumed. The relevant check is not only whether the exception could be resumed, but whether it should be resumed. In this case, that check is a simple check against this list:

exceptionsWeShouldResume
	"which ones should we actually resume?"

	^Array
		with: Security.SSLBadCertificate
		with: Net.HttpRedirectionError.

Note that the handler stuffs the certificate, which allows us to resume. In the original caller (excerpted at the top) there's logic for dealing with a redirect, so that gets dealt with. Other errors are presumed to be transient, and simply reported. For the purposes of an application like BottomFeeder, where we'll try to read a feed every hour (or whatever the interval has been set to), there's no reason not to ignore most errors. The only additional handling - which is done at the feed level - is to check the response to differentiate between a 404 (presumed to be transient) and a 410 (permanently gone). In the latter case, the app automatically disables the feed in question.

The bottom line is this - you shouldn't mindlessly resume exceptions. It's as sloppy as swallowing MNU errors, and gets you into states that are really, really hard to diagnose.

The legal blowback over Sony's DRM escapade continues: California was already suing, and now Texas and the EFF have joined in. This is going to end up being a very, very expensive mistake for Sony - and a huge distraction that they can ill afford.

Something for the puzzlewits at the RIAA to consider, if they have enough sense to do so.

Avi has some thoughts about SSE from the versioning/synching standpoint:

If you look at SSE as a versioning system, there’s one somewhat glaring omission, which is that it doesn’t seem to handle the repeated merge problem that plagues CVS. In an SSE context, that would happen when, for whatever reason, you try to re-sync with the same set of concurrent changes for a second time (possibly because you’re syncing with a third party who got them from the same place you did originally). In the SSE spec as it stands, these would get marked as conflicting a second time (and potentially a third, and a fourth…), even though the user presumably already resolved that same conflict when they first saw the changes.

It's a good (and constructive) critique - you should read the whole thing if XML formats are of interest to you. My concerns are more pedestrian - in looking at the spec, I see a two duplications between SSE elements and core RSS elements that concern me:

• link: "A required, URL attribute. The URL for related feeds". Ok, how and why is that different from the main (channel) link element?
• id: "A required, string attribute. This is the identifier for the item. The ID MUST be globally unique within the feed and it MUST be identical across feeds if an item is being shared or replicated as part of multiple distinct independent feeds.". Hmm - sounds an awful lot like RSS 2.0's GUID to me. This should be loads of fun in aggregated feeds when they differ.

Overall, it looks ok. Those two duplicates are a bit worrisome though.

With the launch of the XBox 360, Microsoft gets a leg up on Sony - a year's lead time to woo game developers and customers. Meanwhile, Sony is still trying to figure out what hurts, and why.

I guess it's cool that you can download the entire Wikipedia in XML, but wow - that's going to be one huge set of XML docs :)

Hypothetical Labs has an interesting take on what you should learn and why. I agree with the general principle being espoused, but I think he misses the static/dynamic divide. In any case, it's an interesting read.

Cary Sherman is a complete moron:

“The problem with the SonyBMG situation is that the technology they used contained a security vulnerability of which they were unaware. They have apologized for their mistake, ceased manufacture of CDs with that technology,and pulled CDs with that technology from store shelves. Seems very responsible to me. How many times that software applications created the same problem? Lots. I wonder whether they’ve taken as aggressive steps as SonyBMG has when those vulnerabilities were discovered, or did they just post a patch on the Internet?”

I can think of a lot of words to describe the way Sony acted in this case. Sadly, "responsible" isn't one of them. This statement from them kind of says it all:

Sony BMG’s Global Digital Business President Thomas Hesse: “Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”

Yes, they stepped away from that. After getting slapped repeatedly.

Paul Graham has a lengthy article on Web 2.0 up; I liked the article, and it's well worth reading in its entirety. I wanted to pick out a few segments that really resonated with me. First, on "Democracy" and the web:

The second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy. We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia may be the most famous. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it's good enough. And it's free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them. They're not part of the conversation.

I've said that about WikiPedia before, and it's true about a lot of things on the web. Graham makes an even better point about content that lives behind a pay wall on the web:

On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them. They're not part of the conversation.

Which is what's happened to the New York Times since they created "TimesSelect". No one links to them (for that matter, few people link to Salon, either). The ironic thing about the approach taken by the Times is that they've decided that you should pay for the commodity material - opinions (whether it's politics, sports, food, theater, whatever). I don't know whether the Times has noticed, but the web is awash in opinion content. The kicker is - their columnists just aren't good enough to warrant payment. It's not just them; almost no one is. Graham nails this in his piece:

My experience of writing for magazines suggests an explanation. Editors. They control the topics you can write about, and they can generally rewrite whatever you produce. The result is to damp extremes. Editing yields 95th percentile writing-- 95% of articles are improved by it, but 5% are dragged down. 5% of the time you get "throngs of geeks."

On the web, people can publish whatever they want. Nearly all of it falls short of the editor-damped writing in print publications. But the pool of writers is very, very large. If it's large enough, the lack of damping means the best writing online should surpass the best in print. [3] And now that the web has evolved mechanisms for selecting good stuff, the web wins net. Selection beats damping, for the same reason market economies beat centrally planned ones.

That's the problem that sites like the Times and Salon are raging against - there's simply too much "good enough" (not to mention the occasional really good) stuff out there. Why pay for opinion pieces? The funny thing is, The Times has something of value that the mass of the web can't do - actual news reporting. Anyone can do analysis and opinion mongering (not necessarily well, but you get my point) - but the Times is one of the few organizations with real global reach. They have (either directly or by agreement) people "on the ground" nearly everywhere - if an event (like the east asian earthquake, for instance) takes place, they can get news out faster than nearly anyone else. Meaning, that content actually has value. I don't know that they can charge for it, but they should certainly be able to command premium ad rates for it.

I'm doing the next Dev Build for BottomFeeder now - I'll have it uploaded by this afternoon. I've made some modifications to the network error handling - the library we use was catching too many errors and trying to resume (which could cause problems). There are a few other small changes here and there, and an update to the browsing code from SwS.

The whole DRM picture for CD's and DVD's just gets sillier and sillier. Have a look here - if you want to defeat DRM, all you really need is some tape:

Applying a piece of opaque tape to the outer edge of the disk renders the data track of the CD unreadable. A computer trying to play the CD will then skip to the music without accessing the bundled DRM technology.

The problem is not easily solved, either - there are tons of "legacy" players out there, and I can't see the industry being stupid enough to create a "day zero", after which no new CDs or DVDs will work on the older players. Not to mention the difficulty of getting the Linux community to care. Not to mention the fact that - in an international market - it just isn't that hard to get hardware from somewhere else (good luck convincing overseas vendors to avoid a money making opportunity).

Then there's the simpler issue - any noise in that direction would simply accelerate the move to downloadable content. Meanwhile, Gartner is proving that software isn't the only sector that they have a weak grasp on - check this bit of mutton-headedness out:

Gartner predicted that the music industry will start to lobby for legislation that requires computer makers to include DRM technology on their systems.

But the analyst advised that, instead of limiting what users can do with music they have already purchased, record labels should focus on tracking this use.

This would enable a "play-based" model where users are charged a fee based on how they consume music.

Yeah, "phone home" setups go down so well with people. Follow their advice on this one, and you'll have the kind of PR nightmare that Sony is dealing with.

Phil Ringnalda gets on these guys - they say that they'll rate your site for popularity, design, and usability. Meanwhile, when you visit with Firefox, you'll see this:

As if they would know :)

Learning Seaside points to a downloadable video of Avi and Andrew Catton's talk to the Vancouver Lisp group - they were demonstrating Dabble (details on that here) - Dabble is a database piece for Seaside. Check it out.

Update: More here.