Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

I spent the day bogged down in a syncronization exercise. Steve Kelly has been making updates to the Silt server, and we were trying to create a unified version that would load the same on 7.1 and 7.4. The issue? I extended the DES class, and between those two versions it migrated between namespaces. This made life difficult. For now, I'm back to maintaining parallel versions. However, the server will be moving to 7.4 soon, and I'll be able to kill off the older version.

The good news is, I'm off to play Civ IV and Caylus this evening!

Via Instapundit, I found this interesting story on the crossover between video games and military action:

But there's another reason, not often talked about, for the success of CROWS. The guys operating these systems grew up playing video games. They developed skills in operating systems (video games) very similar to the CROWS controls. This was important, because viewing the world around the vehicle via a vidcam is not as enlightening (although a lot safer) than having your head and chest exposed to the elements, and any firepower the enemy sends your way. But experienced video gamers are skilled at whipping that screen view around, and picking up any signs of danger.

So maybe all that time on things like "Call of Duty" aren't just entertainment - I can see my daughter's retort to get off the GameCube already: "But dad, I'm doing this for the good of the country!"

I have to take this announcement from Microsoft - that they will not be supporting EFI bootup with Vista, and will instead rely on the creaky old BIOS - as something of a good sign.

Why? Well, stop and think about it for a moment - it means that Microsoft actually considers Apple to be a viable competitor. The only reason for them to make dual boot a pain is to keep Apple software off of systems that have Windows. They realize that dual booting into Linux is irrelevant - Linux on the desktop is a non-starter. Apple though? Clearly, they think that might be a problem.

I get Jonathan Schwartz' complaint about the default use of Windows by so many organizations - both public and private. On the other hand, I can deal with Word docs on my Mac without a problem, and my Mac also handles Windows Media player files just fine. Interestingly enough, my Mac is a better citizen on my local LAN (from a Windows file sharing perspective) than the other machines are; one of my wife's machines sometimes just disappears from the LAN without losing connectivity otherwise. Go figure.

I suppose I should get to the ironic part - Schwartz is out advocating for the ODF format. Meanwhile, Corel just backed away from ODF in WordPerfect (reported by ComputerWorld this week). If Microsoft wants to really put egg on the face of the ODF backers, they'll ship support for the format in Office 12. Now that would be amusing.

Travis Griggs explains how Smalltalk is simpler - in looking at some new C# features, he says:

First of all, I'm amused that people continually get more excited about language feature creep than better libraries using the language. It's always "bolt some more syntax on."

...

Variations that use arrays and or optionally send messages ad nauseum. It's all in the messages. No new language feature necessary.

Anonymous types are next. Apparently, they're missing ad hoc structure defs. What to say. I'm sorry. This kind of stuff just isn't a big deal for us. I could make a proxy object that would do something like what it does. Again, it's all in the objects and messages. No syntax necessary.

Here's news from STIC:

Dear Professional,

Fantastic Early Bird rates are on for LinuxWorld and NetworkWorld (LWNW) Conference & Expo--but only for another week!

LWNW is a unique conference and tradeshow that gives you more ROI than any other event of its kind. And until March 17th, you can get even more value: up to $200 off on-site admission rates.

The 3-day conference of 80+ sessions is completely non-commercial. All paid sessions are presented by authors, analysts, IT consultants and end user IT specialists, demonstrating real-life examples and case studies to ensure you get the maximum educational experience. To read more about the conference details, speakers and sessions, visit http://www.lwnwexpo.plumcom.ca/conference.cfm.

New this year: We are proud to be hosting the Smalltalk Solutions Conference. In addition, we are offering the ITIL Foundation Certification course with bonus admission on the last day of the event.

Be an Early Bird now--customize your curriculum later. Even if you haven’t picked your sessions yet, you can still register before March 17th’s Early Bird deadline to take advantage of huge savings. Your itinerary can be selected or modified until the event date.

Tradeshow registration is included with all conference packages. Just want to see the tradeshow and keynotes? Pre-register today--no charge for admission and you’ll avoid the line-ups.

If you have any questions about sessions or what the best package is for you, please contact our hotline anytime at 1-888-823-7586 x211.

STIC members don’t forget to contact Suzanne Fortman for your 25% discount code.

See you there!

STIC would like to have Smalltalk Solutions be the venue to help connect Smalltalkers looking for work with employers looking for Smalltalkers. If you are an employer looking for staff, then we want to help - you can send your information to Suzanne Fortman, who will coordinate for STIC at the show. What we'll need:

Company Name (or appropriate contact info if that's not feasible)
Opportunity Location
Position type: Fulltime or project, expected duration if the latter
Preferred Smalltalk Dialect(s)
Relocation Required, assistance availability
Specifics of the Opportunity - short summary
How to respond (email/phone/web)

All of that will end up at the STIC booth at Smalltalk Solutions, and on the general LW/NW conference board.

I came across this post from EZBoard's CEO this afternoon - Ezboard is currently built in Cincom Smalltalk, as you might be aware (there's a success story on our website). In the post, he talks about a new application architecture they are building, and in that discussion, he said the following:

ezboard was built on an older technology that has reached its end of life for web site development. It is time to replace ezboard's software platform so that we can bring you the new features you want while the improving security and stability of the service. It is not possible to attach new technology to ezboard's software in a reliable way. This is why we are building a completely new message board platform called Yuku.

Well, I need to address that statement, because it conveys a false impression about Cincom Smalltalk. Our current release of VisualWorks (the product they are using) is 7.4 - you can see the release page here. As you look through that, you'll see that we have a full platform suite supporting many things, including web development. Heck, the site you're reading this on uses Cincom Smalltalk as the engine, and I'll be giving an experience report on the technology at Smalltalk Solutions.

EZboard started using VisualWorks back in the 3.0 timeframe. Back then, the non-commercial product (which is what they started with) did not include the web server frameworks, which was, quite honestly, a mistake made by the previous owner of VisualWorks. The upshot is, they built their own HTTP application server framework, and their own object storage framework using serialized object files. I can well believe that it is difficult to move forward; this post I made yesterday has a lot to do with my own issues in carrying forward an application I wrote 3 years ago that uses serialized object files for storage. Today, I'm in the midst of an exciting data scrubbing mission based on that application's architecture.

Bottom line, there's nothing EOL about Cincom Smalltalk, or any application built with it.

Via Chris Petrilli, I came across something that made me laugh out loud - Go read Amy Hoy on her more recent issues with Internet Explorer. I've not pushed the edge on browsers the way she clearly is, but I do run across oddball issues with the CSS we use on the blog server from time to time. Read the whole thing, but this is just priceless:

And yes, we are both using the exact same version of IE, right down to the millionth decimal and little spatters of text indicating the XP service pack revision. (I'd never really thought it possible to make unusable version numbers before, but Microsoft proves, once again, that you can achieve anything if you just try hard enough.)

You'll have to visit the post to read the background for that comment :)

Remember AutoLink? You might have forgotten, because after many months of overheated hyperbole, it's still part of the Google toolbar, and the net hasn't devolved into the morass of rewritten links that some people were absolutely convinced was about to happen. Here's an example of the overheated rhetoric that was being deployed - The Register write an article titled "Google AutoLink: Enemy of the people?" That article was written in March, 2005.

Things have gone awfully quiet since then - almost as if the loudest objectors noticed that it was not, in fact, the end of the web as we know it, and decided to stop writing on the subject. This illustrates a problem that blogs and online media share with their older cousins in print, TV, and radio - it's very easy to declare disaster, create a blogswarm of posts agreeing that "something must be done". After awhile, people start to notice that the sky isn't falling, so - in their best Emily Litella voice they mumble "never mind" - and move along to the next pseudo-disaster.

The main difference on the web is that dissenting voices get a chance to object - something which is mostly not possible when the mainstream media has one of their drive-bys.

Sci Fi Wire reports the good news!

SCI FI Channel announced that its hit original series Battlestar Galactica will return in October with a full 20-episode third season.

Tim Bray posted a brief set of comments on Ray Ozzie's ETech talk:

He’s pumped about RSS as “the DNA to wire the web”; the connective tissue between active websites. He talks about “Composite Applications”; for example, Unix pipes are weaving together a composite app. Claims < is like “copy”, | like “cut”, and > like “paste”. Then the question arises: “Where is the clipboard of the Web?”

The demo was “Live Clipboard” (integrated with Windows clipboard). “Great way to bridge from Web to PC”. Smart, structured, tagged data on the clipboard. You can paste in a feed object, which then remains dynamic.

Granted, it was pretty well pasted-together vaporware. But the idea might have legs.

I have to admit to being a huge skeptic about the mashup idea. Sure, there have been a few interesting demos on the web, and I'm sure that some mashups might even be useful. However - it's still a house of cards, as far as I'm concerned. Why?

• Who's going to create a mission critical application that depends on some foreign (i.e., not under your control) component that is remote? What happens if it goes offline, or if the people controlling it change the API?
• Non-demo applications tend to have non-trivial APIs, which tend to require intense communication to hammer out. I don't see that happening amongst disconnected groups.

For some social applications like wikis and blogs, sure - this will work fine. For other stuff? I'm completely unconvinced.

Tim Bray on the "Attention Economy" at ETech:

Their answers took two forms: “I don’t get it” and “Yeah, sounds like you might be able to build some cool stuff with it”. I’m in the first camp: I freely admit to Not Getting It. But I can report some of the more compelling things that were said. I omit some presentations because I missed then and others because, as far as I could tell, they consisted entirely of vacuous hand-waving.

I have to agree on the "not getting it" part. Most of the verbiage I've seen spewed on Attention makes my eyes wander immediately. As Tim indicates, beyond counting links as votes, I'm not sure what really works.

Well, I finally managed to get through a task that I've had a mental block on all week. I was on the hook to prepare some documents for a set of upcoming meetings, and they wer by no means exciting :) Useful and important for the discussion, yes. Deadly dull to work on as well. I finally got them shipped out though, so I can get along to the data migration task that's sitting in front of me.

We are migrating the services on cincomsmalltalk.com to a new server, and part of that is an upgrade of our PostgreSQL database. As it happens, one of the applications I wrote against that DB (helpfully labelled "temporary", as I expected to need it for weeks - it's been deployed for over 4 years now) has some serious data problems. Tomorrow is data scrubbing day.

Smalltalk Solutions 2006 is coming up fast - speakers have to get their presentations in by the 15th of this month, and the first day of the show is April 24. Go register now, so you can attend presentations like "I have Nothing to Declare but my Genius" from Brian Foote:

With mainstream language design mired in ennui and retreating into formalism, the field has been effectively ceded to a ragtag, de-facto coalition of old-school dynamic stalwarts, scripting language designers, and ad-hoc domain specific API architects. A generation of research in this area can be distilled down into three overarching ideas, the rest is filigree. This talk will explore these ideas, examine how and why these currents are converging, and show why the large scale, dispersed, heterogeneous, polyglot world of 21st century computing demands nothing less than this degree of commitment to dynamism.

See you in Toronto!

Dave Winer points out a patent application by Apple that is truly, truly stupid - pretty much every extant aggregator provides an example of prior art for all or part of what Apple is claiming to have invented. I think it's past time to get patents out of software.

There's a long thread on whether to comment code in comp.lang.smalltalk - reading it, I think there's a bridge not being crossed by any of the proponents. The case for comments was made by Vassili on his blog here; read the cls thread, and you'll see plenty of the other side - this being a good example.

On the one hand, Vassili points out that comments are another form of communication between the current developer and future developers - and more communication is usually better than less. The caveat I have is the matter of bit rot. Over time, code gets changed for a variety of reasons. Maintenance, refactoring, what have you. The comments almost never keep up. What started out as a well intentioned comment with high communicative value often ends up as a misleading marker to the past. I have no idea how to fix that problem, either. The decisions to update code are made over a long period of time, and whether a given developer "has time" to muck with the comment is typically an ad-hoc decision.

Perhaps a development standard, taken on by the whole group would help. I don't know - if it were easy, that long winded cls discussion wouldn't be happening.

Bob Congdon, speaking about Steven Yegge's Tour de Babel post:

Note that Steve wrote this in 2004 which, based on Steve's estimate of expansion rate, means that Amazon may have over 100 million lines of C++ code by now. As a point of comparison, Notes/Domino R6.5 (a complex beast) was documented as containing just under 20 million lines of C/C++ code. Compare that to some other estimates of size such as Windows XP's 40 million lines of code. What exactly is in Amazon's 100 million lines of C++?

That's a brick wall being approached at a pretty high rate of speed, IMHO. Forget the language - 100 million lines of anything are simply incomprehensible.

Rogers Cadenhead discovers that some bumper stickers fall into the "be careful what you ask for" category :)

Looks like my cable modem has served it's last bits, or my signal suddenly got weaker for no good reason. I'm reduced back to *gasp* dialup, while I await the princely arrival of Comcast's technician - which won't be until Thursday. Oh, the joys of great customer service from the local monopoly...

Update: I should know better than to take the word of Comcast phone techs. He said that "there was no problem in my neighborhood" - which certainly explained the truck parked by the cable box up the street, with two technicians replacing a circuit board. The good news is, I don't need to wait for the service tech now.

Dare Obasanjo has a nice summary of a scaling talk given at ETech - lots of good stuff, but this bit at the end is especially interesting:

One big lesson learned about database scalability is that 3rd normal form tends to cause performance problems in large database. Denormalizing data can give huge performance wins.

Step one: Defeat the Architecture Astronauts :)

Boy, do I ever identify with this post from Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post:

My house is littered with partially read books, moaning for someone to put them out of their misery. I approach the basement library like a doctor assigned to perform triage. What book shall be given life, and picked up anew? And what consigned to oblivion? "The Known World," by Edward Jones, is one I'll finish, and "The Little Friend," by Donna Tartt, if I can just figure out where I put it. But already the stack of stuff I'm supposedly reading is getting so high that I fear it will fall on me. All that unread material may literally crush my spirit.

Well, "crush my spirit" is too strong - but I sure recognize the problem. My bedstand is littered with partially read books...

This was inevitable - astroturfing campaigns in the blogosphere, leveraging the meme trackers and Google. This one is political, but the same thing could easily be used for anything. Hat tip Scoble.

Hmm. Winer doesn't like Wikipedia because of the lack of editorial control. Now he doesn't like sites (like Yahoo) that use DMOZ (editors). The beauty of the web - as opposed to print media or TV - is that we as consumers get both, and can evaluate them against each other. The more the merrier, I say.

Torsten says:

What if they would take the next step and directly start using Smalltalk. I'm sure they will enjoy the wonderful world full of objects.

Come on in; the water's fine!

Who knew? The Russians pack heat on every space flight, as part of their post-landing survival kit:

“In 1965, two cosmonauts overshot their touchdown site by 1,200 miles and found themselves deep in a forest with hungry wolves. That's when Russian space officials decided to pack a sawed-off shotgun aboard every spacecraft. It took Russian search crews more than two hours to locate the spacecraft and another two hours for helicopters to get support crews to the landing site.”

Heh.

If you grabbed the latest development build of BottomFeeder, you may have noticed that the blog client suddenly disappeared from the plugins menu. That's a glitch in the way I did the build; it will be back when I do the next build. In the meantime, you can execute this code in a workspace (see the "System" menu) to bring it back:

| plugs |
#{RSS.RSSFeedViewer} ifDefinedDo: [:cls | cls
		registerPluginClass: BlogTools.PostingTool
		startupMessage: #openWith:
		label: 'Bottom Line'].


plugs :=  Array with: (RSS.RSSFeedViewer getSingleInstance class plugins last).
RSS.RSSFeedViewer getSingleInstance addPluginMenuItemsFrom: plugs.

To get that to execute on every startup, just save that into a file called ".btfrc" (without the quotes) in your BottomFeeder directory.

The VUB held a Dynamic Languages day in Brussels last month, and they have the presentations, and some of the demos available for download. They also have quicktime movies of the presentations available for download. For more info, check out the website.

Via Dave Winer, a link to this post from a woman who's tired of hearing "it has to be easy enough for my mother to use":

I'm so tired of people talking about how their mother wouldn't understand something. I've been hearing this for 20 years, and it's sexist and ageist, and wrong and unfair, and how about let's get rid of this offensive idea. I'd never say that about my mother, who has a PhD, and is pretty smart. I certainly wouldn't want to encourage her helplessness! At one point I leaned over to Tara Hunt and expressed this sentiment. Then I realized that she's a mom, and said so. I wonder how many mothers were in the room and how they feel about always being held up as the paragon of cluelessness.

It's not about being smart or stupid. It's about the level of usability that is typically not built into software. Recall this post I made on our excellent adventures with the Media Center PC we bought. My wife and I are both software developers, and were willing to go through the pain of setting that up. It's not that "my mother" wouldn't be smart enough; it's that she would actually be smart enough to call BS on the usability and send the thing back. I linked to this post from Doc Searls a few days ago, where he related the following:

Add to this the sad fact that audio/video sales showrooms are a confusing mess. One guy who works for one of the big-box retailers recently told me the return/swap rate on flat screens exceeded 50%, because too many people are baffled beyond endurance by the complications of hooking them up, and the results afterwards.

Are all of those people idiots? No, they just have better things to do with their free time than ponder a confusing mass of cables and ports. Software developers - and apparently, most hardware manufacturers as well (with the notable exception, IME, of Apple) seem to have a "the more the merrier" attitude about possible configurations.

The menu on the archive pages for the blog server has been slightly non-functional for awhile (it didn't start on the current date, and it didn't remember your selection). I had been ignoring that for awhile, and Steve Kelly went ahead and fixed it. Thanks Steve!

I've posted updated BottomFeeder development builds - these are under the "Dev" label on the download page. Bear in mind, this is early development, so don't grab unless you are willing deal with potential problems :)

The funny thing is, this article by Steve Yegge on programming languages and how (and why) different ones succeed and fail reads a lot like "The Thirty Years War" that I'm reading. One of the primary goals of many developers is not to use the best tool for the job at hand, but to stamp out heresy:

During those years, I wondered why Python wasn't as popular as Perl. It seemed like a much stronger language than Perl. That's just my opinion, of course, and there were certainly things I missed from Perl, so I'm not claiming that Python is the be-all, end-all of language design. But it seemed like the best thing out there.

Why wasn't it more popular? It seemed to be getting crushed by marketing forces -- by fiery-eyed Perl zealots who went around and gained converts, one at a time. Perl was acting like a virus, and spreading rapidly, while Python sort of limped along, growing much more slowly. Richard Gabriel, of course, had already pointed out that C and Unix were virus-like in his famous short essay, The Rise of ``Worse is Better''.

I'm not sure whether I should be amused or depressed, actually.

eWeek's Peter Coffee took a look at Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks recently, and had a talk with Suzanne Fortman and I. He's got it written up in this week's issues, which should be out today. He has some nice things to say about the product, which he installed using the NC CD:

Version 7.4 of VisualWorks became available at the beginning of this year, offered in both a supported commercial version and an unsupported but full-function noncommercial version that can be downloaded at smalltalk.cincom.com.

VisualWorks offers developers a capable tool set with a remarkably long list of contributed components and utilities that are supplied under varied license terms.

Versions of the 7.4 release on Microsoft's Windows XP and Apple Computer's OS X delivered a polished development experience in eWEEK Labs tests on both platforms, with well-paved pathways for interactive graphical interface development and efficient packaging of finished applications for convenient deployment.

I got a couple of quotes, and BottomFeeder got a mention as an example of cross platform deployment:

After one of the Labs' past development "Shoot-Out" competitions, we reported that watching a Smalltalk developer recovering from an error was like watching someone perform brain surgery on oneself. But Smalltalk has since become somewhat safer for journeyman developers with the addition of such features as namespaces, as we learned from Cincom product manager James Robertson, in Cincinnati, during a conversation with the Labs late last month.

Robertson brings a developer's perspective to his work. He's better known to the open-source community as one of the lead developers of the BottomFeeder news aggregator client for the RSS and Atom protocols.

Very nice stuff. I'm located in Maryland though :)

At the moment, the 4.2 (development) download of BottomFeeder is pretty much "bleeding edge" - so if you download it, be aware that there may well be odd problems. I'm still adjusting to the sub-system framework in VW, and the RTP's usage of it.

Phillip Greenspun on Java as a choice for building web applications:

After researching how to do bind variables in Java (see the very end of http://philip.greenspun.com/internet-application-workbook/software-structure), which turns out to be much harder and more error-prone than in 20-year-old C interfaces to relational databases, I had an epiphany: Java is the SUV of programming tools.

A project done in Java will cost 5 times as much, take twice as long, and be harder to maintain than a project done in a scripting language such as PHP or Perl. People who are serious about getting the job done on time and under budget will use tools such as Visual Basic (controlled all the machines that decoded the human genome). But the programmers and managers using Java will feel good about themselves because they are using a tool that, in theory, has a lot of power for handling problems of tremendous complexity. Just like the suburbanite who drives his SUV to the 7-11 on a paved road but feels good because in theory he could climb a 45-degree dirt slope. If a programmer is attacking a truly difficult problem he or she will generally have to use a language with systems programming and dynamic type extension capability, such as Lisp. This corresponds to the situation in which my friend, the proud owner of an original-style Hummer, got stuck in the sand on his first off-road excursion; an SUV can't handle a true off-road adventure for which a tracked vehicle is required.

Not only are Java developers using the wrong tool for the job at hand, they are using the wrong tool for pretty much any job they might come across. It's an old column by Greenspun, but it's still highly applicable.

Phillip Greenspun addresses the "why aren't there more women scientists" via the more general question: why aren't there more scientists, period. He gives an example:

How closely does academic science match these criteria? I took a 17-year-old Argentine girl on a tour of the M.I.T. campus. She had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, so maybe this was a good time to show her the possibilities in female nerddom. While walking around, we ran into a woman who recently completed a Ph.D. in Aero/Astro, probably the most rigorous engineering department at MIT. What did the woman engineer say to the 17-year-old? "I'm not sure if I'll be able to get any job at all. There are only about 10 universities that hire people in my area and the last one to have a job opening had more than 800 applicants."

That addresses the problem of why so few people (in general) enter the field. It doesn't speak specifically about women though. All I have is anecdotal evidence - my sister went into aerospace (not academic - she got a job in industry straight out of university). The pay was good, the hours no worse than for any other professional (like, say, cs). She left the field completely after less than 10 years in. Why?

She had her first child, and decided that she couldn't stand having her daughter being partly raised by other people (day care). She and her husband ran the numbers, and decided that they could afford to have her quit and stay at home. Is this something all women do? Not hardly - a quick glance at the number of women working will tell you that. However, it's still a much larger number of women who downshift from work after having a child, compared to men. For the purposes of wondering why there aren't more women in some highly competitive fields, it doesn't even matter why that's the case - given that it's true, more men are going to rise to the top in those fields simply on a numerical basis.

Greenspun's examination of pay and working conditions do play a major role. If you're planning to have a family, pay does matter, and so do the working hours. My brother in law got himself a PHD a few years back in the bio-tech field, and we watched how he got treated (by his professor) while he was doing his research. Believe me, it wasn't well. The hours he put in were long, and the pay was beyond insulting - it came pretty close to serfdom, in my opinion. Greenspun elaborates on the pay problem:

Even a public schoolteacher actually does better than a scientist. Consider the person of unusual ability who takes that bachelor's in science and decides to become a schoolteacher instead of going to graduate school. At age 22, the schoolteacher is earning a living wage and can begin making plans to get married and have children. By age 30, when the scientist is forced to start moving around to those $35,000 per year postdocs, the schoolteacher is earning $50,000 per year. By age 44, when the scientist is desperately trying to switch careers, the schoolteacher is making more than $90,000 per year for working nine months (only the better school systems pay $90,000 per year, but remember that we posited a person with a high IQ and motivation sufficient to get through graduate school in science). Being a public employee and a member of a union, the schoolteacher cannot be fired but may at this point in his or her life begin thinking about a comfortable early retirement and some sort of second career.

I'd question his "living wage" for a teacher at 22 - I took that track back then, and I was making $14,500 a year at 22. I couldn't afford an aprtment of my own, and I was living in the New York suburbs, not in a big city. Even so, working conditions were better than what my brother in law faced, and - had I stuck with it - the pay would have reached a tolerable level well before I hit 30.

Bottom line, multiple things enter into the disparate numbers of men and women in fields like academic science. If I had to guess though, the working conditions of those first few years of doctoral and post-doctoral work have a lot to do with it. From the outside looking in, it looked a lot like what medical interns deal with at hospitals, only without the promise of better pay down the road.

So who does go into these fields? Read Greenspun's essay, and see what the decision making process looks like to someone from China or India (etc). Which explains why you find so many people from those countries in the sciences quite well, I think.

Read the rest of his article - I think he explains the disparity quite well in the summary part of his essay

Via Rowan, I just noticed that Avi Bryant and Andrew Catton won the best in show award at the Under the Radar Conference - with this set of panelists. As Michael said, that should make a few people rethink Smalltalk.

Scoble decries the "snark" in blogs, especially the more heavily trafficked ones:

Why is all the snark going on? Cause everyone wants traffic. Why did I call this the John Dvorakification? Cause he figured out in the 1980s (yes, he’s been at this so long) that if you attack a community (particularly the Apple one) that everyone will get all up in arms and will start talking about the attack. That translates into traffic. Traffic = advertising dollars.

Sometimes, it's just about calling BS on something. Like, say, the "helpful" nature of Microsoft's upcoming DRM. Or the walking atrocity that is OPML. Or the fact that Dave Winer tends to leave a trail of enemies wherever he goes, and is then utterly stunned as to how that came about. Or about the supposed safety of explicitly typed languages.

As the saying goes, sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.

Looks like BellSouth is about to be grabbed by AT&T - which will leave us with two big telcos - Verizon and AT&T. Kind of like the way Standard Oil was mostly rebuilt when Exxon bought Mobil a couple of years ago. Over the long haul, it looks a lot like the lawyers are the only ones who win from anti-trust suits.

Well, it looks like we have a bang up season finale coming up for all my favorite shows - SG Atlantis, SG-1, and Battlestar Galactica. I just watched Friday's BSG on the Replay; looks to me like we're going to see a resolution of Baltar's current "in-between" state. My wife came up with an interesting thought as to why Six is in his head, now that we saw (a week ago) that he's in Six' head back on Caprica. When she died, and got "backed up" - there was a "crossing of the streams", if you will, between her mind and Baltar's. I'll have to see how that pans out, but it's the best explanation I've seen so far.

It's getting so that the end of the Sci-Friday season is like the end of baseball season for me - months of anticipation until it starts again!

Richard Monson-Haefel explains why Groovy will be the dynamic language of the future:

The future seems obvious: Dynamic languages are growing in popularity and their productivity and broad applicability cannot be ignored. The Java platform is supported by a huge ecosystem of 4 million-plus developers and thousands of tools and APIs. If any dynamic language is to be successful it has to (a) be standardized (b) appeal to Java developers (c) be fairly easy to learn, and (d) leverage the existing Java ecosystem. There is only one dynamic language that meets those needs and that's Groovy.

Well, even within that theory he's ignoring the CLR and Iron Python - and given the far greater penetration of Windows than anything Sun is doing, it's a pretty big omission. But never mind that - let's go to the basic problem in the argument, as I see it.

The big complaint people make about niche languages is "what if I can't find developers?" Groovy does not solve that problem. Sure, it uses Java Byte code, but so what? Who programs in Java byte code? The argument fails for the simple reason that the platform - whilke important - is not the biggest issue in front of developers and their management. They worry about resources (i.e., staff) and interoperability. If they can get both, the VM being used isn't really much of an issue. Memory is now cheap, so chewing a few extra MB for another platform just isn't the problem it was a decade ago.

To take Groovy on specifically - it looks a lot to me like a checkbox item Sun did, and then promptly abandoned. "Dynamic languages on the JVM? Sure, we've got this Groovy thing!"

Never mind that there's almost certainly more Jython out there than Groovy. Richard has stumbled onto a solution for a problem that few people care about.

Chris Petrilli is looking at Domain Specific Languages as a possible solution to some issues he's having at work:

In searching for a better way, I started thinking about Domain Specific Languages , or a language crafted for a very narrow problem domain, often implemented in another language. Lisp is the quintessential tool for this problem domain.

Quick recommendation: Have a look at Steve Kelly's blog - and then run over and have a look at his product

I continue my tack of reading more than one book at once, which only slows the whole effort down. I'm still reading "Grant's Memoirs" - reading his thoughts about the northern press tells me that frustration with the media is hardly a new thing in American history. Then, I started reading "The Crusades Though Arab Eyes", which is a fascinating piece. It's compiled from contemporary Arab sources, and opens a whole new window on the era. Good stuff, I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in that period of history. Finally, reading about the Crusades got me interested in the entire area of religious fanaticism - I read two books by Bernard Lewis recently, on the fanaticism that is prevalent in the Islamic world right now. I picked up "The Thirty Years War" by Victoria Wedgewood, because the West went through its own era of religious fanaticism in the wake of the Protestant schism with the Catholic church. It's a well written book, and is giving me a decent background in that period - about which I knew just about nothing previously. Again, if you want some balanced background on the topic, this book is highly recommended - the author's style makes for a good read.

I had a small Silt request this afternoon - in the IRC channel, someone wanted a "printer friendly" link for posts. So, I just added that - it will bring a CSS free, black and white single post page, with a Javascript print function at the top. I've posted the new code in STore, but have not yet pushed a new version of the pre-built stuff.

Frank Hayes describes more than one IT department here:

How many people in your IT shop understand what gives your company a competitive advantage? That comes down to products, people and processes -- what your company sells, who makes and sells it, and how it's made and sold. Anything that contributes specifically to getting customers to buy from your company instead of a competitor is a competitive advantage. Anything else, well, isn't.

Too many IT people forget that, and optimize their own jobs first, and the work of the company itself second. The key thing they need to remember: they're just plumbers. Other people do the work that pays their salaries, with their (IT's) help.

I was in New York City last Wednesday - had a customer meeting and the NYSTUG meeting. Suzanne had her camera along, so we have some nice pictures. After the first meeting, we met Mark Grinnell for lunch - Mark is the lead engineer on ObjectStudio, and is the one who threw together the OST 8 COM demo I posted awhile back. So here's a shot of Mark while we had lunch in his neighborhood:

We also got a picture of Mark and I pretending to work as I searched for open WiFi, and then Suzanne with Mark - and finally, the waiter took a shot of all three of us:

After lunch, Suzanne and I headed back downtown - Mark has two young children that he had to take care of, so he didn't make it to the meeting. This first shot seems suspiciously staged to highlight my bald spot:

In this one, I'm off to the side - that's Charles Monteiro in profile. Charles is the guy who keeps the NYSTUG going - this meeting was all his legwork

Time for my weekly look at the logs - downloads of BottomFeeder proceeded at a clip of 197 a day last week, a slight bump up from the previous week. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	425
Sources	243
Update	214
Linux x86	122
Mac X	98
CE ARM	53
Mac 8/9	53
HPUX	38
Solaris	37
Windows98/ME	37
Linux Sparc	22
AIX	22
Linux PPC	6
SGI	3
ADUX	1
CE x86	1
Source Script	1

Next up, the HTML page accesses for the blogs:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	50.3%
Internet Explorer	26.1%
Everest/Vulcan	6.2%
Google Bot	6.5%
MSN Bot	4.8%
Zibber	4%
Megite	2.1%

More bots :) On to the RSS traffic for the week:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	25%
BottomFeeder	16.5%
Net News Wire	10%
BlogLines	8.3%
FeedFetcher	5.5%
Safari RSS	3.8%
Internet Explorer	3.3%
RSS Bandit	2.8%
Feed Reader	2.1%
Everest/Vulcan	1.9%
SharpReader	1.7%
Magpie	1.7%
Planet Smalltalk	1.6%
NewsOutlook	1.5%
BlogSearch	1.4%
MSN Bot	1.4%
FeedFlow	1.4%
NewsGator	1.1%
AttensaOnline	1%
Liferea	1%
JetBrains	1%
Google Bot	1%
Java	1%
Feed Demon	1%
News Fire	1%
Jakarta	1%
Other	1%

The tool diversity there does not seem to be decreasing, that's for sure.

Scoble defends himself against Drew Bell, who pretty much calls him a hack. I like Robert - he's straightforward, and I think he's an honest advocate for Microsoft. Which leads me to this: I'd really like to see him weigh in on PVP-OPM, which is going to be part of Vista. I consider it to be a complete atrocity, and I would really, really like to see Robert tell me why I shouldn't.

It doesn't really matter whether the subject is politics, technology, science, sports - the bottom line is that journalism has just as many lazy placeholders pushing paper as any other field. Put another way, Dilbert isn't just suffering in the technology field - his - and more importantly, Wally and the boss - are alive and well everywhere. Here's an example, which I found at InstaPundit - here he's quoting from "The Appearance of Impropriety"

Most reporters aren't scoop-hungry investigators. They're wage earners who want to please their editors with as little effort as possible, and they're happy to let you provide them with ideas and facts for publishable stories. That is why most publicity is positive for people and their businesses.

...

An experiment by a group of journalism students at the University of Tennessee demonstrates just how willing reporters can be to accept facts and story ideas that involve little work. The students concocted a fictitious press release from a group opposing "political correctness" and mailed it to a number of newspapers. Most did not run it, but quite a few did -- and none checked the details one way or another. One newspaper even embellished the story with additional details that were not included in the original press release. When word of the experiment got out, journalists were predictably outraged, with one even saying that it violated the bond of trust (!) between journalists and public-relations professionals. A more likely explanation for the outrage is that the experiment uncovered a pattern of shoddy work that its practitioners would have preferred to keep unexposed. Not plagiarism, perhaps, but something that in many ways is worse.

That puts a whole new spin on the way analysts work in the technology sector too - how many of the reports we see weren't just funded by one (or more) companies, but actually written by them as well? Analysts are no better or worse than anyone else, so I'd guess that the answer is a disturbingly high number.

This also explains the herd mentality of things in the IT industry. Industry analysts and journalists get hopped up - all at the same time - about some great new thing that appears on the scene (Java, WS*). A perfect storm of articles appears touting the new stuff, and why everyone should use it. Enter the average IT manager, who again - is no better or worse than anyone else, and who tries to keep up by reading a few magazines. Wow, he thinks - "everyone" is talking about technology X. The development staff suddenly gets blind-sided by a set of inexplicable requirements.

This behavior isn't terribly different than general media reporting - combine a small set of manufactured news with instant polling (the methodology hidden in small print at the back of some PDF), and you get a news story from nothing at all.

The only defense against this is to read as many sources as you possibly can, and see if you can possibly find the real nub of the matter (any matter) from across the spectrum of sources you look at. Sadly, that nub is non-existant an awful lot of the time. Reporting that "our current systems work just fine" is every bit as boring as "Not a lot of importance happened today".

There was an annoying bug in the (non-Javascript) comment form - preview mode was using the wiki style markup, whether the "use markup rules" checkbox was on or not - and the actual submit paid attention to it. After James got after me, I fixed that.

As if phones at the movies aren't bad enough - Scoble brings his notebook

My son is bummed. His iBook can’t get on the Internet. No wifi in Petaluma’s new movie theaters. But my Verizon card works just great.

Yeah, that's what I want - two people with glowing screens distracting me from the screen...

I have got to stop taking the 7:09 USAirways flight from Dayton to DCA. Third trip in a row that it's running late, on a Friday, ensuring alousy evening for me. Sigh.

Scott Granneman does a good job of showing how DRM is bad for all and sundry. It hurts the law abiding consumer, causes ongoing irritation with the vendor (key marketing tip: irritating your customers is not a good strategy) - and, ironically, by blocking otherwise legitimate usage, it forces people to break the law in order to get around restrictions. An example - after buying a DVD archive of the "New Yorker" magazine, Scott found out that he could barely use it:

No dice. The issues were available as DjVu files. No problem; there are DjVu readers for Linux, and it's an open format. Yet none of them worked. It turned out that The New Yorker added DRM to their DjVu files, turning an open format into a closed, proprietary, encrypted format, and forcing consumers to install the special viewer software included on the first DVD. Of course, that software only works on Windows or Mac OS X, so Linux users are out of luck (and no, it doesn't work under WINE ... believe me, I tried).

Read past that - he points out that it's not that hard to get around these issues, but - based on the DMCA - you are committing a felony when you try to do that. Another key marketing tip: Making your customers felons is not a winning strategy. Read the whole thing, as they say.

Windows Vista won't suck. No, wait, it will. Well - bear in mind that the negative comments come from a Linux site, so obviously - YMMV. Here's the positive spin:

While the kernel in Vista is still primarily the same one as in Windows 2000 and XP, there have been some significant changes to tighten up security. Fewer parts of the OS as a whole run in Kernel mode - most drivers run in User mode, for instance. Things that run in Kernel mode are prevented from installing without verified security certificates, and even then they require administrator-level user permission. In Vista, it should be much more difficult for unauthorized programs (like Viruses and Trojans) to affect the core of the OS and secretly harm your system.

That's from the upside article. The whole thing is a set of technical points on why Vista will be cool. Admittedly, if security is better, that will be good. However, this doesn't sound encouraging:

However, Vista also requires far more hardware oomph than previous Windows systems. I'd say Intel's recommendations are pretty much a minimum for Vista. I would only add that if you expect to see the fancy desktop, you need to invest in, say, an ATI Radeon XPress 200, an Nvidia nForce4, or a high-end graphics card.

The truth is that very, very few people are going to be upgrading their existing systems to Vista. To make it work well, you're really going to need a new computer. If you didn't buy your PC in 2006, I wouldn't even try to run Vista on it.

That kind of upping of requirements is nothing new, of course. On the other hand, when you combine it with the nasty stuff they are doing with DRM, it starts making me sweat.

Mark Watson explains how "Duck Typing" just makes things easier. Saving a few minutes here, a few minutes there - over time, it adds up

This sounds way too alarmist to me:

"You get these contrails from the jets. The rate at which they're expanding in terms of their fractional cover of the stratosphere is so large that if predictions are right, in 40 years it won't be worth having telescopes on Earth anymore - it's that soon.

"You either give up your cheap trips to Majorca, or you give up astronomy. You can't do both."

Now, I'm hardly an astronomer, but - isn't light pollution as big a problem here? I know that I have a lot more trouble seeing the sky where I live now (suburban Maryland) than where I grew up in New York State.

JSR-292 could make Java more inviting for dynamic languages:

There is growing interest in running a variety of programming languages on the the Java platform, and consequently, on the Java virtual machine (JVM). This interest is increasingly focused on dynamically typed languages, in particular scripting languages.

To make it easier to produce performant, high quality implementations of such languages, we propose to add support at the virtual machine level.

Specifically, we seek to add a new JVM instruction, invokedynamic, designed to support the implementation of dynamically typed object oriented languages. We will also investigate support for hotswapping, the capability to modify the structure of classes at run time.

However, it looks like there's some skepticism within the Java community:

My big question is how this affects Java's security model, particualrly since "The invokedynamic instruction is in many ways similar to the existing invokevirtual instruction. However, it is much less constrained by byte code verification rules. Instead, it relies on dynamic typechecking to ensure the integrity of the virtual machine." This is scheduled for Java 7, Dolphin. Comments are due by March 13. (Seems a bit short for such a major change.)

To really support a language like Smalltalk, you need what they are calling hot swap. Being able to make dynamic calls is a start, but that's it - a start.

Well - it seems that Firefox might be getting itself a new, "less is more" UI. That looks to me like a direct response to IE 7. I've had problems with the beta I grabbed, but I do like the more minimal UI. It stays out of my way, and gives me more screen turf. This is good news, IMHO - it's no longer the case that MS is simply reacting to Firefox.

I'm heading into meetings today, so there won't be a lot of posting until later. The good news is, they should be good meetings.

Yet another example of faith in the spell checker gone wrong: a lawyer looking to use the latin term sua sponte ended up filing papers that referred to sea sponges:

That left the justices reading -- and probably laughing at -- such classic statements as: "An appropriate instruction limiting the judge's criminal liability in such a prosecution must be given sea sponge explaining that certain acts or omissions by themselves are not sufficient to support a conviction."

At least it was a clean case :)