Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Sometimes, when I have a modification I think would be useful for BottomFeeder, I figure it would make sense to try it out in a runtime environment before I send it off as an update. I can package the thing up as a parcel and simply load it into my application, of course - I just open the System>>Execute Smalltalk Code menu item, and enter the following into the workspace:

Parcel loadParcelFrom: 'ParcelNameHere.pcl'.

I highlight that and execute, and then answer "yes" to the confirming dialog (which pops because I'm reloading a new revision of a parcel that's already loaded). Other times, I want to try a smaller modification - a few method changes (which, if they work out, I'll package as an update. In that case, I export the modified code from my development environment as a fileout, and then execute this in a workspace in the runtime:

'FilenameHere.st' asFilename fileIn.

That loads the small change. If it's something that shouldn't go into production, but that I'd like to load at startup anyway, I can save the new file into the BottomFeeder directory, and just slap the code above into the .btfrc file (which gets auto-loaded at startup, if it's there).

The cool thing about all this is that Smalltalk provides its own scripting language. I ship BottomFeeder with the compiler and workspace present so that I can experiment like this, and also so that other people with Smalltalk knowledge can dive in, if they want to. Unlike a Java application, I don't have to tell people to use a "simpler" scripting language - which, btw, should be a sure sign that there are problems in Java - if the base language is too complicated for that task, that's a problem - at least IMHO.

In any event, it's a neat thing about Smalltalk - and it's something that allows customization of a runtime application, if the developer(s) of that application want to allow that.

More fallout from the Sony Rootkit fiasco - the person quoted here works a Saturday shift at a classical music station. Here's what the DRM publicity has done for Sony:

The prospect of taking a recent Sony release into the production studio, and using a selection from it for a pre-recorded program, or one of the staff popping it into the CD drive of their desk computer to review… and corrupting the production and library index on which the whole station depends… well, it is enough to give us all the cold shivers. I’ve been told that the station librarian is not ordering any new Sony classical releases until this whole thing is resolved. Now, there are probably series techies out there who can explain that the chances of this happening are pretty low, that Sony’s anti-piracy spyware couldn’t possibly damage our library and production set-up, and would they even bother doing this with classical releases anyway? But however small that chance would be, we still can’t take it. CD’s with potentially damaging programs hidden in them, versus the security of systems upon which the whole station’s programming depends?

My wife was commenting on this vis-a-vis "mission critical" systems last night - how happy do you suppose the IT staff at your company is going to be when they discover that security holes opened by Sony's DRM allowed malware to get into the network? Especially when all the employee in question did is pop a CD into his laptop while he was on a plane, so he could listen to some music? Never mind what the actual risk of that happening is - the fact is, this is well on its way to being perceived fact.

The upside: with any luck, the negativity will be aimed at DRM in general.

The Times has yet another article about Wikipedia, and how you need to be careful about trusting it - it's not a bad article, although the title - "Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar" - certainly tells me something about the way the Times sees things. To wit - they have fact checkers, and those web folks don't. They bring up a good example of what can go wrong, with a guy who's name was smeared in a bio piece on the site.

However, it's not as if the Times' hands are clean of this sort of thing. Steven Hatfill comes to mind - the man who was publicly trashed as a "person of interest" in the Anthrax investigations from 2001. There were lots of breathless articles about him in the Times (and other media outlets) - and the damage done to Mr. Hatfill by the Times is far more extensive than anything Wikipedia has done.

In fact, the Times is now the subject of a suit brought by Hatfill. In the Wikipedia case, whoever put the bogus information on the page is unknown - but that's not true of the thing with the NYT. So before they get all high and mighty about the unreliability of Wikipedia, I have a simple question for them: why does Kristof still have a job after he went on a mission to destroy Hatfill's reputation?

Not only is the RIAA jihad against file sharing a huge PR mess, it's also technically illiterate. You have to love these folks - they really care about their customers. A lot.

It's only a few seconds, but the first movie footage ever shot, sometime prior to October 1888, is online here. Produced by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince

Gerard Brady is making the world worse:

Auto-Blog Builder is your automatic website site builder. Build a giant website with 10,000 pages instantly... all real content rather than spam pages.

This waste of oxygen is selling a product that builds splogs. And touting it as a "web innovation". What a complete loser.

Hat Tip Mike Gunderloy.

In the 80's, it was D&D. After that, it was evil music and video games. Now, it seems to be a combination of video games and blogs. "Our kids are in trouble and it's all the fault of (insert bad influence that we don't understand here)".

I love reading a fatuous article like this one, considering how the media likes to disparage bloggers as rank amateurs.

Not content to make fools of themselves with their DRM nightmare, Sony is paying to deface neighborhoods with graffiti ads (note - some strong language in the photos at the linked site):

Reports on the interwebs indicate that Sony or its ad agency has paid graffiti artists to spray paint images of little kids playing with PSPs in at least five U.S. cities: Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

You really have to wonder what passes for thought in the executive suite there.

My daughter's sleepover (or, stay up over, to be more accurate) is over. The last of the guests left, so things have gotten quiet again. We had eight girls here this morning, inhaling french toast and chatting. The stay up part was the tiring part - they didn't get to sleep until about 1, and then they were back up at 3:45, playing with the GameCube. Then some of them were up at 6, in search of breakfast. Whew!

Alex Singleton has some thoughts for the "no html email" crowd:

In the early days of the web, there was a debate between geeks about what the web should look like. There were some people, the "ultra-geeks", who thought that websites should be about content and that it was wrong for webmasters to "force" readers to view the content in a particular way. Instead, the fonts and sizes used should be set by the visitor in their own web browser. Fortunately, everyone ignored the ultra-geeks, and the "DTP geeks" won (the geeks who thought that web pages should look like they've been desktop published).

Just as progress has been good for word processing and web pages, progress is good for e-mail. Geeks will give you a long list of charges against HTML e-mail. Ignore them, go into the Preferences window of your e-mail program, and tell it to compose HTML e-mail.

I'm sure I'll get complaints from the holdouts who use things like Pine. The rest of us have moved on.

Spotted in Software and Programming:

To write an Operating System, you have to understand how the computer works. Right there, you have an advantage over everyone else. I don't know how many times I have to say it, but you cannot become a programmer unless you know how the hardware works. At the very least, how the CPU works. I find it amazing that some people graduate Computer Science with a degree and have no clue how computers work. Hardware programmers know the difference between a right shift for signed numbers and unsigned numbers. They are two different operators even though the symbol is the same in higher languages. In Java, they had to add an operator. Hardware programmers are frustrated that there's no operator that will give you both the quotient and the remainder at the same time. Hardware programmers find it annoying that you don't have access to the carry bit or other CPU flags in higher languages. Hardware programmers hate that they can't multiply two 32-bit numbers together and get the 64-bit result in higher languages. Same goes for dividing 64-bit integer with a 32-bit integer. Everything mentioned here should be standard in every programming language. This is what people who've only used high level languages don't get. That you're in shackles. You're being restrained. I don't need a safety net. I know what I'm doing. I don't have to be protected from myself. And I know many of you reading this don't need to be protected either.

Hmm - I wonder if this guy is an expert on every component in his house - including every tool he ever uses for something. Not to mention that 32 bit or 64 bit integers are simply lower level abstractions - higher level languages move you up a few levels so that you can worry about solving business problems.

Read the rest of his post - he's so buried in hardware trivia - the sort that is meaningless for most application problems - that it's amusing. As other people have said, an awful lot of software development is moving records back and forth from a database, with user interaction to make appropriate changes. Why exactly do I care about the graphics adaptor, or the way the CPU works for that?

Moving upstream to a portable language - like Java, or Smalltalk, for example - allows you to write an application that can move from one OS to another. I'd guess that any business that's evaluating a move to Linux, or to Mac OS X cares a whole lot more about that than they do about the trivia this guy frets over. Or even the ones contemplating their next OS upgrade.

I will agree that we don't need stupid shackles - but the ones I want removed have been - at least in languages like Smalltalk and Ruby.

Update: Gary Short agrees.

I've pushed out an update to the NetResourcesHTTP package - you can grab it via the update toolbar button. All it does is change the default agent string from what it was - reporting as "Mozilla compatible" to a NetResources specific string. The rationale is this - some servers look for "stock" agent strings and block requests from them - I've seen it locally. This should address that issue.

User Friendly explains :)

Time for the weekly log analysis - the BottomFeeder downloads are a little inflated, since I just pushed a new release - some of the downloads are existing users upgrading. That's reflected in the uptick to 457 downloads per day this last week. The breakdown:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	903
Sources	603
HPUX	430
Mac 8/9	416
Mac X	275
Linux x86	173
Update	129
CE ARM	72
Linux Sparc	46
AIX	27
Linux PPC	27
Solaris	26
Windows98/ME	25
SGI	25
CE x86	16
Source Script	6
ADUX	5

I'm always amazed at those Alpha numbers :) On to the HTML page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	42.8%
Mozilla	39.8%
Other	9.3%
MSN Bot	4.4%
Google Bot	2.7%
Java	1%

Not a whole lot of change there from the last few weeks. Finally, the RSS tool accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	30.3%
BottomFeeder	12.2%
Other	12%
Net News Wire	8.6%
Safari RSS	3.9%
Magpie	3.2%
Internet Explorer	3.2%
SharpReader	2.7%
BlogSearch	2.7%
RSSReader	2.5%
Planet Smalltalk	2.3%
NewsGator	2.3%
Feed Reader	1.9%
Feed Demon	1.6%
BlogLines	1.6%
RSS Bandit	1.6%
JetBrains	1.3%
Liferea	1.1%
News Fire	1%
Java	1%
Python	1%
MSN Bot	1%
Google Bot	1%

No drop in tool diversity there yet - the field is still wide open.

Glenn Vanderburg likes Seaside and Rails:

But there's a funny thing about pain: when your worst pain goes away, it doesn't take long to start being annoyed by the next worst. So it won't be all that long before Seaside's particular strengths start to look really attractive to developers who've grown accustomed to Rails' niceties. And then it'll be time for Seaside (or possibly some other continuation-based web framework inspired by it) to get the buzz again.

There are things Rails can learn from Seaside, certainly, but there are also thing Seaside can learn from Rails, and that learning will probably happen in both directions. As Avi pointed out in another blog this week, Smalltalk and Ruby are much more similar than they are different, so I see the two frameworks complementing (and, as above, complimenting) each other for some time to come.

The main thing is, more and more people are seeing that the roads taken by Java and C# are the wrong ones.

The final build that went out for 4.1 is using the default Agent String from the NetResources library, which flags itself as Mozilla compatible. This shouldn't be a problem, but I've seen a few feeds hand me back 412 precondition errors when using that string. So - if you see that (check the Help>>View Error Log menu item), then create a file named .btfrc in the BottomFeeder directory (same one that holds the executable), and place this text in it - it will get executed at startup:

Net.Resources.HttpClientModel userAgent: 'BottomFeeder/4.1 (', ExternalInterface currentPlatform second, '; ', Locale current name, ') NetResources/1.52'.

That's worked for me.

DeepCoveLabs asked me to post this:

DeepCoveLabs has an opening for a software developer. We write payment processing software used primarily by our main customer, a financial services provider with operations in Canada and Ireland. I once did a blog entry for Cincom and here is what I had to say:

DeepCoveLabs is in the business of developing payment processing solutions. We currently offer products for cheque conversion, multi currency credit card processing, international electronic funds transfers into about 30 countries, cheque printing in many currencies and languages, a currency exchange module and a CRM system for managing a payment processing operation... all written in Smalltalk.

Our team consists of a handful of developers all with strong Smalltalk skills. Current projects include:

• building a multi-currency credit card processing gateway mirroring our infrastructure across two sites with transparent fail over
• adding real time reporting of incoming payments from accounts worldwide
• extending the range of hardware our cheque scanning solution runs on
• enhancing the currency trading platform we have just deployed
• moving our file based reporting architecture to a web based one reviewing our DB design and mapping mechanism

Candidates must have several years experience with dynamic languages, ideally Smalltalk and have worked in an agile/test driven environment. Candidates with experience or skills in the following areas will have a distinct advantage:

• Payment processing and international banking
• Credit card processing
• Inter-bank communications and file transfer mechanisms
• DBA level RDBMS skills, especially MS SQLServer
• Network administrator level TCP/IP knowledge
• UNIX and/or Windows system administration

The work is located in Vancouver Canada and candidates must have a Canadian work permit. Interested candidates should send a resume and cover letter, including salary expectations to joerg@deepcovelabs.com.

Joerg.

Joerg Beekmann

DeepCove Labs

4th floor 595 Howe Street

Vancouver, BC, V6C 2T5

joerg@deepcovelabs.com.

I'm having trouble with what looks like a choppy translation, but it sounds like Open Source software may be facing some trouble in France. I'd be interested in hearing from someone who speaks French, and can read some of the original sources in French.

My daughter is having a sleepover birthday party - 10 or 11 girls, all aged 9-12 eating pizza, cake, playing GameCube, and pretending to sleep. I expect a loss of sanity some time this evening :)

Patrick Logan is favorably impressed by Dabble. Looks like it's getting a lot of positive reviews.

Cees de Groot is blogging now - here's the feed url.

Dare on my $100 laptop skepticism:

Attitudes like this really, really irritate me. The same way that there are rich people and poor people in the United States, there are also parts of Africa that are less well off than others. It isn't all one freaking desert with bony kids surrounded by flies from South Africa to Algeria. For example, in Nigeria there are probably more cell phones per capita in the major cities than in most parts of the United States. The fact that some people get to use the latest iPods and iBooks in the U.S. doesn't mean there aren't homeless bums eating less than three square meals and sleeping on the streets in the same zip codes. Yet I don't see folks like James Robertson posting about how every homeless person has to be housed and every orphan found foster parents before we can enjoy iPods and laptop PCs.

Well, there's a huge hole in that last sentence - the people being targeted here mostly aren't supposed to be buying these - heck, if they were, this whole thing would be simpler. When people decide what to do with their own money, it's all good. Dare might want to look at the comments from Misbehaving.net - that speaks to my concern a lot more closely than Dare's bogus strawman. Not to mention that his "put your money where your mouth is" argument is nothing more than loudly shouting:

I disagree, so you should shut up now

I'll be blunt - that argument is beneath Dare, and I thought he could do better. In the parts of the world where people can get cell phones (and, where there's infrastructure for cell phones) - by all means, offer these for sale. My skepticism comes from a couple of sources:

• Lack of infrastructure - what about network access, and support in case of problems? Dare is questioning my motives instead of looking at my actual concerns. A large part of the marketing for these points to the hand crank power. I'm guessing that if there are no plugs, there's no network either.
• Heck, I'd guess that hand crank radios would be more useful for most of the people we are talking about here. Radio signals are already there, and access to timely news would be of great value - especially things like weather information. The "how do I use this" barrier is a lot lower as well.

What my concern boils down to is this - I'm guessing that a lot of these will be handed out, and will not be put to any productive use - due to infrastructure and support problems. Other things - clean water systems, hand crank radios, access to better medicines - could make a much bigger impact in short order - and wouldn't end up going unused.

You want to disagree with me? Fine - make an argument. Do better than telling me to shut up.

Update: An article that disparages the whole idea, along with a lot of comments on both sides. Well worth reading - both the article and the comments. More thoughts here.

We are engaged in the last rounds of "is it ready" evaluation on the release - in fact, I have a conference call on that subject this afternoon. Things are settling down and getting close - so long as nothing mind bending comes up, we should have it out before Christmas. However, if we hit a show stopper, it could push us until after the holiday - time just compresses away at this time of year. We'll know soon.

Tim Bray sees that web development doesn't have to be hard; the mainstream languages and frameworks just make it that way:

Bruce claims that the “continuation” facility, commonly found in dynamic languages, snaps neatly onto the problem of making the Web look like a linear dialogue. Clearly, continuations are kind of hard to understand and not for casual or novice programmers. No problemo, says Bruce, frameworks like Seaside (layered over Smalltalk) hide the weirdness and let you just carry on an orderly dialogue with a user via a Web browser.

In my mind I was screaming “No! No! No!” because I’ve generally felt that the pain and complexity involved in object-relational and object-XML and object-messaging mapping outweigh the benefits; that if your application is based on exchanging messages, then the message exchange has to be visible to the application programmer. I’m not alone in having this kind of reflex.

Well, it seems that both Ruby on Rails and Seaside would tend to disagree, and the evidence is building up on their side.

And today I had a date with a Vancouver startup that I’ll write up when they’re ready; they have a very damn sophisticated Web app that I wish I’d been smart enough to think of, solid useful function and a ton of graceful little flourishes; and it’s all Seaside, all continuations, all simple methods that conduct orderly dialogues with the user. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you can abstract the Web away. Hmph.

A lot of people want to cling to the complexity as some kind of validation. It's nice to see that Tim's not one of them. I wonder what would happen if someone showed Scoble what Seaside can do?

Misbehaving points out something I referred to last month - the $100 laptop is solving the wrong problem:

Marthe Dansokho from Cameroon says that this cheap computer is the result of an insular American-user mind set.

"African women who do most of the work in the countryside don't have time to sit with their children and research what crops they should be planting," she pointed out. "We know our land and wisdom is passed down through the generations. What is needed is clean water and real schools."

I think I had that thought:

This is a pie in the sky solution, IMHO. It's like deciding to hand out cheap cars, and only later noticing that there are no gas stations for the recipients to use.

The problems in large parts of Africa are much more basic than needing laptops - clean water being one of them. Access to medicines for diseases we can cure being another. Not to mention the whole infrastructure issue - of what use is a low power notebook that has no network to connect to? In war torn Africa, who the heck is going to build out a network? And how the heck are they going to pay for it?

I'm sorry, but there are so many things that the money behind this project could have been better spent on.

Update: Julie Lerman wades in.

I mentioned the other day (in the context of RSS feeds, actually) that power is shifting toward the customer. Well - here's a great example of that. Thomas Hawk had a bad experience with a company, and posted about it. The vendor squealed like a stuck pig, but then something different happened - they apologized, and the main squealer got canned.

This is a huge lesson in this for every outfit that sells a product or service - if you under-deliver or over-price, customers now have a soapbox - complete with amplifier - with which to make an example out of you. If you didn't think that the customer was king before, it's time to start believing it.

There's a small bug in the 4.1 release if you are using LibTidy (look in Settings, under "Feeds"). This is only an issue for users on Windows and Linux x86 - we don't ship the library on other platforms. In any case, with the 4.1 release, we added a fix for the spacing issue - links were getting drawn without spaces between them and the following text. However, the fix for that unintentionally screwed up <pre> tags - a problem if you are viewing source code in a post.

If that's something you see happening, you can do one of two things: either turn LibTidy off, or use the update tool to grab the new revision of the library. It will load without needing a restart.

Pity the poor folks at Universal, having to figure out how to filter their incoming mail.

I think the Red Sox may be shopping for a new curse. Have a look at how overblown the custody battle for the ball that made the last out has gotten - on the last play of the 2004 Series, infielder Doug Mientkiewicz caught the flip from the pitcher, Foulke. He pocketed the ball. Now there's a suit over the thing:

In January, days after he was traded to the New York Mets, he and the team announced that the Red Sox would hold the ball temporarily and could display it across New England, along with the World Series trophy. But the agreement said he would get it back at the end of this year ''unless the ultimate issue of ownership has been otherwise resolved."

That clause led Red Sox lawyer John G. Fabiano to the Suffolk civil clerk's office yesterday. The suit asks the court to place the ball in a ''secure location" until ownership is decided.

The club's legal team said that Mientkiewicz had gained possession of the ball only because he was a Red Sox employee and that the ball remained the team's property. He played for the New York Mets last season, then was released, and is now a free agent.

Now, I have some sympathy for the team wanting the ball - certainly, Mientkiewicz holding onto it was an accidental byproduct of his playing first base. In other words, it's not as if the team actually gave him the ball. On the other hand, I have no idea what traditionally happens to the last ball used (if anything). At the end of the day, I think both Mientkiewicz and the team are going to come off looking stupid.

Of course, I'd be happy with a new curse...

Chris Petrilli is very impressed with Dabble. Sounds like I need to have a look at it

One of the things that fell out of BottomFeeder as we moved from the old network library (a hack job I created back in 2002-2003) to NetResources was error reporting at the application level. With the 4.1 release, that's back. If you pull down Help>>View Error Log, you'll see something like this:

What you see there is a list of errors that happened during the last few rounds of network updates. If you want to clear that, just hit the "Clear" button. If you want more details, hit the "Save to File" button - one of the results for the screen above look like this:

Time: December 1, 2005 10:53:25.358Description:NetResources Error: <<Net.HttpObjectNotFound (404 Feed not found error: FeedBurner cannot locate this feed URI. )>> on url: http://dwlt.net/tapestry/getfuzzy.rdf

Which tells me that when that feed was last queried, a 404 popped up. BottomFeeder treats a 404 as transient (there's a gone error - 410 - that Bf will use to mark a feed as dead). You might want to watch for repeated 404 errors though - it probably means that the site should have issued a 410.

Sony's DRM nightmare just got a little worse - a NYC law firm involved in a class action suit over the XCP software is bringing in Mark Russinovich as an expert:

Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals will be joining the legal team led by New York attorney Scott Kamber, who filed a lawsuit earlier this month against Sony BMG and First4Internet, the British company that produced the anti-piracy software. (This may be nothing, but First4Internet's Web site is looking rather Spartan at the moment.)

Meanwhile, NY's pit bull AG is irked with them:

As a fitting followup to yesterday's post on Sony's DRM shenanigans, today Eliot Spitzer announced his own interest in the case. Spitzer, the New York Attorney General, has gone on record as saying that he is not pleased with Sony. The source of Spitzer's displeasure is the fact that Sony's XCP-protected CDs are still easily available at retail.

"It is unacceptable that more than three weeks after this serious vulnerability was revealed, these same CDs are still on shelves, during the busiest shopping days of the year," Spitzer said in a written statement. "I strongly urge all retailers to heed the warnings issued about these products, pull them from distribution immediately, and ship them back to Sony."

In other news, Microsoft is whistling past the graveyard with their PVP-OVM thing in Vista. A more intelligent company would not only pull it, but make some positive PR about pulling it. Looks like they may need a savage beating with a cluestick before that happens though.

Those nasty Google copyright control rays are everywhere.

For those high risk car buyers, we now have the programmable kill switch:

A new gizmo is upping the odds that even the most hard-knock customer will come up with the car payment. Hooked into the ignition system, the gadget comes in a handful of versions with one common conclusion: No pay, no start.

And it works:

Not surprisingly, default rates are high. It's not unusual for more than a third of the cars sold off such lots to wind up being repossessed. Since Patriot began using PayTeck three years ago, its repos have dropped from about 45% to less than 15%. Madden figures he has close to 500 of the $200 units on the road -- an investment that has not only cut repos but boosted business.

This is only being used for high risk sales, sounds like. Makes me wonder about systems like OnStar a bit - put that kind of remote capability together with this kind of policy...

It used to be that nasty retailers could intimidate a customer - or, at worst, limit the damage to (direct) word of mouth. Now, your obnoxious and stupid behavior can be broadcast around the world.

I made this point the other day, but this is a great example. The whole "Dell Hell" and Sony XCP things are also great examples. One dumb employee, or a set of stupid support policies, can just ruin your entire day.

I've just released BottomFeeder 4.1 - the web pages are updated, the docs are online, and the new release has rolled into the download area. Here's what's new:

• Reorganized feed menu to make feed modification easier to access
• Added support for the "del" key (feeds/folders)
• Bug fixes in the Network support libraries, fixes update block bug
• Bug fixes in the item identification code. Should prevent spurious return of old items as new
• Bug fixes to the blog posting tool's startup
• Added a new Quick Start Guide to the Documentation
• Fixed bugs in the Loading of Example Feeds from the website
• Modified the startup feeds for new installations
• Numerous small bug fixes elsewhere

This is mostly a bug fix release - the network libraries in particular have been cleaned up and made stable - there were issues with the library that came with 4.0. I've been running the code for awhile now - the base BottomFeeder and NetResources libraries have been stable for quite some time now. The Software With Style guys let me know that the latest release of their stuff fixed a number of problems I was having, so I've updated that (the display area of the viewer). Enjoy!

Dana VanDen Heuvel explains where DRM drives the public:

My dad recently bought the new Trey album, a CD "infected" with XCP. After being initially unable to get it on his MP3 player and then reading the rootkit aftermath, he said: "This is what I get for trying to buy a CD. I should have just downloaded it."

I'm guessing that his dad is not an expert on these kinds of issues - more of a middle case, really. And look where he ended up - exactly where Sony/BMG would rather he didn't. Best case: he goes for legal downloads using something like iTunes (lower profit margins). Worst case: He reads up on p2p file sharing, just to make sure that his PC doesn't get taken down again.

That's where MS is headed with PVP-OVM in Windows Vista.

Update: I'm not the only one thinking this way:

"Dell, HP, Gateway, Sony, IBM and the rest of Microsoft's partners will find themselves painted with the same brush. You cannot enforce the DMCA any more than you can force people to buy American cars. Take a hint from General Motors: The word eventually gets out that you have inferior products and the price isn't right. Microsoft's OEM partners will become the buggy whip manufacturers of the 21st Century."

I didn't know John Vlissides, but Ralph did, and he has some moving thoughts on his passing.

Steve Rubel points to worries about RSS and attack bots:

Security researchers at Trend Micro are warning that RSS is a lucrative target for future bot worm attacks. What's worse, they're saying the onslaught will hit once RSS becomes a feature in Internet Explorer with Windows Vista.

Users of BottomFeeder are completely immune to such problems.

This month is birthday month around here - my daughter has hers on the 14th, my wife's is on the 25th, and mine is on the 29th. So it's a pretty busy month, between all that and Thanksgiving. Victoria's birthday party hasn't even happened yet - something about getting her room cleaned up first came up :) It's finally happening Friday.

Whew! And here comes Christmas...

I've finally gotten the timing bug killed off in the blog poster - an exception could get tossed at startup of the tool that made the HTML toolbar mostly disappear. That's sorted out, and the latest build is up under the dev downloads. If I don't see any issues, I'll release it tomorrow or Thursday. Whew!

Dvorak has an interesting column up on orphan data formats and the lossage that comes in their wake:

Curiously, the apex of lost media is in our own era. The problem cannot get worse than it is. The irony is that this is an era where unprecedented technological revolutions are taking place, and yet we're losing important information. This has to be as tragic as the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria around 47 BC.

he gives some good examples, including mid 90's era digital cameras. The irony is, a 35mm camera that you bought 20 years ago is still useful.

Rich Demers returns to blogging with some thoughts on Vassili's Announcements framework, and how it might be used in SmalltalkDoc.

So MS had their huge launch for the 360, and got a lot of buzz - I've seen the systems at local stores, and yes - the graphics are very cool. However, the severely limited number of systems they've got available is a real problem. The initial batch sold out immediately, and now there's a rump marketing campaign for a system that you can't actually buy. And mind you, there are 26 shopping days left before Christmas.

I was thinking that the overheating problem with the power supplies was a sign that they rushed the release to hit the Christmas window - and this shortage is another sign of the same thing. With so few units available, it looks to me like they would have done better to just hold off until they had units available in quantity - and without that over-heating problem.

I wrote about PVP-OPM (Protected Video Path-Output Protection Management) awhile back. Now, I'm thinking about it in light of the Sony XCP debacle. Here's what Microsoft has to say about this stuff:

Protected Video Path - Output Protection Management (PVP-OPM) makes sure that the PC's video outputs have the required protection or that they are turned off if such protection is not available.

Ok, let's stop and think about that. I have a Thinkpad notebook sitting in front of me. It was built 12-18 months ago, so it most certainly does not have the kind of "protections" that MS is talking about here built in. Let's say I still have it when Vista comes out, and I make the mistake of upgrading. I then take a DVD which I legally purchased and try to play it while I'm on a long flight. Bam - MS will tell me to sod off, since my device isn't properly protected.

Now, consider what kind of actions that incents me to take. I've got legally owned content, and a legitimate license to the OS. The OS won't let me watch the content. What to do? Well, there are two possible paths to take:

• Figure out how to crack the stupid content protection so that I can play my legal copy of the content
• Just decide that buying content from the sort of company that invests in this type of scheme is a bad idea in the first place

You know what the answer is? Stay with XP. XP is good enough, and doesn't include this kind of bozo "protection" scheme that puts a wall in front of law abiding users, and does nothing to get in the way of people out to steal content. Better yet, maybe that will be time to look at Apple, and investigate whether they plan to do something this stupid. So here's a tip for MS (listening, Scoble?) - you want to walk into the same set of razor blades that Sony is dealing with right now? Go ahead, include this OVP abomination in Vista.

Just don't tell me that you're "helping" me. Instead, slap a label on the CD that states that MS is sucking up to the RIAA and MPAA. Might as well have truth in advertising.

ThinkSecret has the goods on the latest Mac Mini news - they are moving into the media hub space that the Mini belongs in:

Apple's Mac mini will be reborn as the digital hub centerpiece it was originally conceived to be, Think Secret sources have disclosed. The new Mac mini project, code-named Kaleidoscope, will feature an Intel processor and include both Front Row 2.0 and TiVo-like DVR functionality. advertisement

While the specific model and speed of the Intel processor in the new Mac mini is unknown, sources are confident the system will be ready for roll-out at Macworld Expo San Francisco, in line with other reports Think Secret has received that Intel-based Macs will be ready some six months sooner than originally expected.

I suspect that the Mac version of this will involve a whole lot less swearing than the Media Center PC has - not to mention that it will take up a whole lot less space.

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock reminds us that exceptions impact real people - they aren't just annoyances for developers to deal with when writing code.

Ted Leung details how he got started with computers. Fascinating stuff - the last paragraphsreally grabbed me:

School played a very limited, and if you are ungenerous, obstructionist role in all of this. Everything that I learned about computers I learned outside of the established school system, and I actually had to work around one of my (well intentioned, I"m sure) teachers. I learned on my own, and at the feet of actual practitioners. Perhaps it's not all that surprising that Julie and I have chosen to home school our kids. Some of you know that they've done a little Python, and they're just about to get started on Squeak (more on all of that in future posts). Whether they turn out to be hackers is not for me to say, but I'm at least going to do my best to make sure they got the kinds of opportunities that I got.

I find that I'm supplementing the local school quite a bit for my daughter. Their teaching of history is especially atrocious.

You know you're getting old when the first thing that comes to mind as a great present is an earlier bedtime. Boy, am I tired this morning - dang schoolbus schedule :)

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.