Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

File some of the quotes in this story under "buzzword bingo":

• XML can cut in half the personnel costs of running a website
• XML gives us the best chance to own our own data, because it's not in a proprietary format, so we're not beholden to a vendor
• OpenDocument format, and applications that read it, are far more likely to be available in 300 years when our great-grandchildren want to read the electronic records we create today

Wow. I bet XML walks the dog, gets the bacon, and cooks it up too! Little did I know that saving a document in XML form prevents duplicates from cropping up too:

• With XML, documents are only published once and can be viewed by any application. What's more, an error only needs to be corrected once and the changes are automatically made throughout any other version of the document. In addition to risk prevention, XML offers efficiency payoffs such as eliminating the need for a Web publisher.

Wow. can we get XML beatified?

Torsten points to a new DabbleDB Video.

Justin Gehtland rips James McGovern a new one. He quotes James here:

“I also couldn’t find the equivalent of instance variables. Wouldn’t that make reuse at an enterprise-level somewhat problematic?”

Wow. I can tell you, I'm not that familiar with Ruby, but I know that it has all the basic OO building blocks. I put together a post awhile back where I created a Smalltalk equivalent to some Ruby code. It sounds like Justin's right - either McGovern can't use Google, or he can't read with comprehension. Either way, "thought leader" is kind of an inapt description of his, umm, "skills". Here's how Justin translated the above:

I think this is just a translation problem. Let me tell you what James was actually trying to say: “I’ve never looked at Ruby, written a line of code in it, or read a blog entry about it. It threatens my Java-based hegemony, though, so I’d better get out in front of the issue right away.”

Because there is no other possible explanation for being a “thought leader” on software and being unable to ferret out the exemplars of the Big Three (inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation) in any object oriented language in under 30 seconds.

Who IS this guy?

Who indeed? Not someone you should trust with any of your development needs, if this represents his thought leadership in action.

I just ran across an interesting article series that IBM sponsors: Crossing Borders. The stated purpose of this article:

The Crossing borders series looks at how non-Java™ languages solve major problems and what those solutions mean to Java developers today. This article explores continuations, the technique behind frameworks like Smalltalk's Seaside. Continuation servers make it much easier to build Web applications by offering a stateful programming model without giving up the scalability inherent in statelessness.

This article is from Bruce Tate. Good stuff.

I was watching an episode of "The Closer" a week ago, and one of the running gags in the story had LAPD personnel abusing FBI agents (butting into a case) for their lack of technical sophistication (i.e., no email access). I didn't think much about it at the time, but now today I see this story. I guess the plot had a point :)

As if Sony's Rootkit wasn't bad enough, now I read that StarForce has malware that will slow down your CD/DVD access and reboot the machine if it thinks anything is wrong. Lovely. Here's a list of games StarForce is used in; I'd recommend avoiding all of them.

Dave Winer wrote an interesting essay on the topic of formats and working together - I think it's mostly reasonable, but I do have a problem with one section: the relevance of personalities:

The people who make it about personalities are missing everything. It’s as if what was going on on a baseball field is a result of personalities. To some extent of course it is, but it’s also about how you swing a bat, catch and throw a ball, how good your eye is and how good your mind is. In software the quality of your thinking matters even more, in fact that’s all there is. And so many people miss the big picture, without even trying to see it. The notable thing about Phil, is that in a crowd of people who aren’t trying, he is. His reasoning ability isn’t remarkable, what is remarkable is that he cares enough to reason. And if you want to do that, you need to get your mind out of the schoolyard, and start thinking about the media revolution we’re in the middle of.

Personality impacts every other aspect of work - in tech and in sports. The attempt at a sports analogy is interesting - there are plenty of examples of teams riven by internecine conflict: The Eagles last year come immediately to mind. If you don't think that the war of words between McNabb and Terrell Owens impacted the team last season, you don't know sports. Look at the Yankees back in the 80's - lots of talent, no World Series trips. Look at the Red Sox in the years before their Series win - a lot of their problems had to do with internal conflict.

When one person becomes the center of a storm, it creates side effects. Read Tim Bray's post from this morning, and you'll understand how and why Atom came to be. It was due to the intransigence of exactly one person.

ARmadgeddon thinks that the big firms like Gartner have a safe future, because they still provide perceived value to their clients. He may be right, but I have a small quibble, and it doesn't have to do with analyst firms specifically. It has to do with size and the slowness that accompanies it.

Back in the 80's, IBM's bloat nearly killed it. They recovered, and they are still very important in the industry. During the 90's, everyone thought that MS was too dominant - I think they are just entering the danger zone of too much size and not enough agility. They could survive like IBM has; they could also crash and burn like DEC did.

I don't think analyst firms are immune to this, and Gartner has certainly grown itself to a size where "slow and ponderous" could be a problem.

It's as if there are two default positions for thinking on the blogosphere: it's either triumphalism over the entrenched "media elites", or it's disdain over the blogosphere's "unwashed masses" getting the good seats.

This is nothing more - or less - than a natural progression that started a long, long time ago. When the printing press was first invented, it was a sea change - suddenly, the number of people who could get their words on paper jumped up. It was no longer the case that only the authorities (spiritual or temporal) could get things down on paper and distributed; a decent sized swath of the emerging middle class could do so as well. In Germany in particular, this led to a rise in pamphlateering, something you could almost call early blogging.

Over time, the cost of getting something printed and distributed centralized somewhat - an area can only support a finite number of newspapers, for instance. That didn't change a lot with the introduction of radio and television - broadcast facilities are expensive, and bandwidth is limited. By the mid twentieth century, getting an opinion published for broad distribution still had plenty of gatekeepers. They were no longer priests or princes, as they had been before the invention of the press, but they existed.

The web has changed all that. Suddenly, bandwidth limits and costs both disappeared. As we move into the second half of the first decade of the 21st century, we have something truly new - anyone and everyone can publish. That doesn't mean that anyone publishing will get attention - having a soapbox doesn't guarantee an audience by any means. It does mean that we are no longer limited to whatever opinions the media elite want to hand out though. As I noted this morning, there's text, audio, and video for every imaginable niche. When I was growing up, finding a local source for information on games was really hard - board gaming (especially the subset I was in then, war gaming), is a niche audience. Other than the occasional scare story about "those weirdos playing D&D", information was very limited, and hard to find - especially if you lived outside a major city.

Now? Well, have a look at Steve Wessel's post - there are podcasts galore devoted to boardgaming. My options for getting information on this niche are no longer strictly limited. Are there downsides to that? Of course. Not every niche interest is uplifting, and some of them are downright scary. You can find online communities devoted to anything and everything, not all of it good. As Glenn Reynolds puts it, we've got an "Army of Davids" now - and they can be devoted to anything. How you see that army depends largely on who you are - to people in niche communities that have been underserved by traditional media, it looks like a lifeline. To the editors of existing newspapers and news networks, it looks more like an angry mob with pitchforks.

You can see the disparate reactions here and here, in differing views on MySpace. Nick Carr sees a mostly boring bunch of all too typical poseurs; Scott Karp sees a cesspool of virtual filth that ought to be moderated. I can't say I've looked at MySpace specifically, but - based on the rest of the blogosphere - I'd say that it's both and neither - at the same time. What you see there is what you see everywhere on the web - an abundance of opinions and lifestyles, unchained from the limits of physical space. Unable to find a group of like-minded people (on any subject) where you live? Go online, and you'll find them waiting. For some people, the sheer variety of communities is scary. The traditional media, with their inherent limits (bandwidth and costs) excluded a lot of that from our view. What the web and inexpensive/free publishing has done is turn the lights on - and some people think that much of what they see is roaches scurrying for the dark.

The thing to keep in mind is that the viewer is always in control. We can always turn off the TV or radio, for instance, and we can simply not visit the corners of the web that bother us. The impulse to control traditional media gained traction because of the limits that media has - operating a TV station is expensive, and bandwisth is limited. Even with cable and satellite systems, there's only so much content that's going to come down that pipe. The web is different - there's no limit to how many sites there can be, and we don't all have to go to the same ones. What we have is the potential realization of the freedom that Gutenberg's invention promised.

Tim Bray gives a good summary of how and why Atom and the associated publishing protocol exist.

Steve Wessels pointed something interesting out this morning - there are a bunch of podcasts devoted to boardgaming. The web really does have content for every imaginable niche. My wife and I play games with friends every weekend (our current favorite: Caylus). I'll have to look into these podcasts. Right now, Lileks is the only one I subscribe to.

The Daily WTF explains what happens when you let "Enterprise" get on you. Ewwwww.

I just got around to watching last week's "24" episode on my DVR, and I had an epiphany - combining plot elements from that episode with various SciFi flicks I've watched over the years, I now know how to live through a VX nerve gas deployment on a space station:

1. Go out where the Nerve gas is, so I can vent the gas to outer space
2. Make sure to hold my breath, so I won't be affected by the deadly nerve agent
3. Hold on really tight, so that the explosive decompression doesn't suck me into space
4. Once all the air is gone, close the hatch to the outside, and get clean air into the area I'm in
5. Once the air rushes in, take a breath

This is a highly useful set of information to have put together, and next time I'm in space with terrorists who have nerve gas, I'll know what to do.

There's still time for Advance Registration for Smalltalk Solutions 2006. Do it now, so you can attend talks like Bryce's on Exupery - an optimizing Smalltalk compiler he's developing:

How fast can a pure dynamically typed object oriented language be? Exupery is a native compiler for Squeak written in Squeak. This presentation will begin by outlining the current compiler, then go on to outline the future design.

See you in Toronto!

I just put together a short (just over 3 minute) screencast on the support for Stdio and on Subsystems in VisualWorks. There's a bell in the middle - I forgot to turn my email client off. Also, if you look at the console, you can see my typos while getting things set up :)

Dare Obasanjo makes an excellent observation, and one I'd love to see James McGovern address:

The funny thing about a lot of the people who claim to be 'Enterprise Architects' is that I've come to realize that they tend to seek complex solutions to relatively simple problems. How else do you explain the fact that web sites that serve millions of people a day and do billions of dollars in business a year like Amazon and Yahoo are using scripting languages like PHP and approaches based on REST to solve the problem of building distributed applications while you see these 'enterprise architect' telling us that you need complex WS-* technologies and expensive toolkits to build distributed applications for your business which has less issues to deal with than the Amazons and Yahoos of this world?

Heh. I couldn't have said that better myself. This summary is great as well:

If you are building distributed applications for your business, you really need to ask yourself what is so complex about the problems that you have to solve that makes it require more complex solutions than those that are working on a global scale on the World Wide Web today.

Very good question to ask the Enterprise Astronauts, I think.

Runar Jordahl explains how to use probes in VisualWorks. This is an area I haven't explored nearly deeply enough!

Julie Lerman:

Has this ever happened to you? An idea pops into your head and you open up your web browser to check it out. But because the home page of your web browser is pointed to a news website, the minute you see the home page filled with news (good and bad) you completely forgot what it was that you had meant to look up only one second ago

Yeah, that happens to me too - more often with a Smalltalk image than a browser, maybe, but the same thing. This resonated because of something that happened last night - my wife sat down at her PC, which is across the foyer from my office. Right after sitting down, she burst out with "Why am I here?"

Aging is definitely better than the alternative though :)

Spotted in planet squeak

We're holding a Smalltalk party in London on Saturday 8th of April. This will be a great chance to hear a few talks about Smalltalk and related technologies, and meet other Smalltalkers.

The party is being hosted by Pinesoft at their offices beside Chancery Lane tube.

That sounds fun, and I wish I could make it. I'll probably still be recovering from my whirlwind trip to SPA 2006 though :)

Dave Heinemeir Hansson rips James McGovern's "Enterprise" land grab. Like my post on the subject, David recognizes this inertia for what it is:

So by Enterprise, Architect, and Enterprise Architect standards, this gent must be the top of the pop. Thus, allow me to make this perfectly clear: I would be as happy as a clam never to write a single line of software that guys like James McGovern found worthy of The Enterprise.

I'll second that - if you follow the lead of people like McGovern, expect to find higher costs, lower productivity, and later delievery times. But hey - you'll be part of the "in crowd", using "analyst approved techniques", so everyone will buy you a round when you go bankrupt. That's got to be worth something. I really like David's summary of the McGovern thesis:

With that out of the way, we're faced with a more serious problem. How do we fork the word enterprise? The capitalized version has obviously been hijacked by McGovern and his like-minded to mean something that is synonymous with hurt and pain and torment.

There's a better way - it's here and here.

Update: Not all analysts are stuck in the "Enterprise zone". The guys at Redmonk seem pretty well grounded.

At least someone at Sun gets it: Gilad Bracha is helping push the idea of hot-swapping in the JVM (JSR 292). However, it's no simle problem for them:

Now before you get all excited, I need to be very clear: we are not making any promises with respect to hotswapping. Full hotswapping support in a system with mandatory static typing remains an active research topic. We really don’t know how far we can go.

There's the problem, of course - locked in the static typing dungeon, they now see that the grass really is greener on the outside. The trouble is, getting there won't be easy, and may not even be possible - given where they are now. This all could have been solved back in 1995, had Gosling been an actual visionary. Too bad he still hasn't gotten the memo. In the meantime, Gilad knows what the benefits are:

This reluctance to commit doesn’t stem from a lack of support for hotswapping, or a lack of appreciation of its value. As an old Smalltalker, I know what we’re missing here. Once you’ve used a system with these dynamic capabilities, you’re hooked for life.

Which is why I'm a Smalltalker :)

Derek Wyatt let's slip some uncomfortable truths for the scions of music and movies: DRM is impractical, and is ultimately a waste of time and resources. We actually went through this years ago, with PC Games and locked floppy disks. That failed too, for the same reasons. There are two really good points he made. One:

The problem is that digital rights management relies on locking content away, and as long as we have general purpose computers capable of running whatever code someone cares to write then there will always be ways around those content locks.

That's not about to change, either. With the rise of open source systems, you're not going to see full lockdown. More relevant are the social issues. To wit:

My daughter is fifteen and cares about copyright. She knows that I rely on it in order to get paid for what I write. But she does not care for copy protection when it stands in her way, and will happily rid DVDs or strip DRM from downloaded music in order to use material flexibly - and fairly.

She buys CDs and DVDs and books, and respects copyright for what it is, a limited monopoly on certain forms of exploitation and use. She does not believe that it is an absolute property right, and she knows perfectly well that ripping a CD is not theft in the way that stealing a disc from a shop is.

That's the major problem for the RIAA and the MPAA: their customers simply don't believe what they say. The vast majority of "theft" is simply fair use. The moguls know it, and we know it. What's going on now is simply denial on their part.

Jonathan Schwartz is flogging the idea of the rentable grid - apparently, Sun is pretty close to being able to offer their $1/hour/CPU service within the US. I hadn't considered the export control issues with this before, and I'm glad I'm not on the management end of dealing with that one - sounds hard.

I do have a few skeptical thoughts though. A computing grid simply isn't - as Schwartz would like us to believe - like electricity. The power I use isn't any different than the power a factory uses (other than volume). Computing, on the other hand, varies. What about storage of whatever application is going to run on this grid? What about network latency? What about the language my application currently resides in? Unless I'm missing something, there are some fairly serious problems with just dropping my grid and using theirs.

I don't know if this rumor has any basis, but if it does, it's going to be painful for Sony - they'll have to pull all the PS2's with the dual shock controllers:

Reports are trickling through this evening that Sony has indeed lost its patent case against Immersion technologies and will be forced to halt sales of its PS2 console.

Immersion last year sued Sony for infringing on its patents. Immersion claims that it owns the technology that powers the rumble in Sony's Dual Shock controllers. It also sued Microsoft for its rumble features in the Xbox, but the boys from Redmond settled out of court.

Could be some interesting times in the console world if this one pans out.

It's Dave's world, we just live in it:

Me, I'm tired, and I don't enjoy being the the go-to guy for snarky folk who try to improve their page-rank by leading idiotic tirades about their supposed insights into my character. I want to enjoy the ability to plan and think before my would-be competitors have a chance to position themselves to grab the fruits of my labor. Too much transparency can be a hindrance, so I'm looking for less of that, and more fun, and more options.

Retire already, and take your self importance out to pasture where it belongs.

It's fairly easy to not get the point when you wish away most of the problems. Step one: wave your hands at contrary evidence as a way to get large amounts of contrary evidence out of site:

The focus of this blog is on Ruby and not on other dynamic languages. For those, they will get their own blog entries. Ruby, to me feels like a trainwreck waiting to happen. So lets list out reasons why Ruby currently makes zero sense for developing enterprise applications

Translated: "Ignore all that Perl, Python, Smalltalk, and Lisp out there. When I said "dynamic, I meant Ruby!". Uh huh. Having done some hand waving to dismiss the decent sized amount of contrary evidence, let's move to step two: without citing any evidence, call all the available book (on Ruby only, naturally) bad:

While there are lots of books on Ruby, none of them are good. Most are mediocre and deal with the simplistic aspects of writing software. The publishing community tends to focus on introductory titles and eschew books that are for folks who already know how to program, which constrains one's ability to do anything complex. Of course the agile community, doesn't count learning on the job as part of the cost of a project

The straw man is taking shape now: "No one uses dynamic languages, err, I mean, Ruby, and besides, the books all stink". On to step three: invoke analysts and large consulting firms as the authorities, and use the time honored tactic of assertion from authority:

Much of the guidance that the enterprises receive come from either big consulting firms such as Accenture, DiamondCluster, Wipro, Bearingpoint and others. If it isn't on their radar then it probably won't reach critical mass. Likewise, the other perspective comes from industry analysts who usually make irresponsible recommendations and oversummarizations of most problem spaces. In this particular scenario, industry analysts aren't even wasting their own time talking much about Ruby.

Yeah, the delivery track record of large consulting firms is so good. These are the outfits that wave five experts at you, and then - once the ink is dry - bury you in an army of untrained new hires. Let's bring in those crowd following analyst firms while we're at it, too - they always do a great job of following the money... err, the trends. Or something.

I could go on, but the post only gets more incoherent from there. What I'd like to know is this: why is this guy so threatened by dynamic languages in general, and Ruby in particular? You might almost get the idea that he's heavily invested in the status quo, and doesn't want to see things change. The tip off there is a few paragraphs down from where I got tired of abusing the article, when he brings up "enterprise architects".

Clearly, I'm doing something wrong in Civ IV. I've been playing Michael online for a few weeks now, and he consistently gets a few techs ahead of me - which rapidly becomes a deficit I can't get out from under. I'm doing something wrong early, and I think it's the build sequence I use at start. Here's what I have been doing:

1. Warrior
2. Worker
3. Barracks
4. Settler
5. Archer

I think I'm getting killed at step 3 - the barracks takes a long time to build. Should I be building a settler at that step? Doing that prevents the city from growing during the settler build. Maybe I should build a stop gap unit, like a scout or another warrior, and then go to the settler? I'm open to suggestions...

In the minds of the RIAA and the MPAA, the answer is simple - DRM is far, far more relevant than any small time concern you might have with safety. Freedom to Tinker has had a look at the latest wrangling with the Copyright office over DRM exceptions. There's been a request to allow removal of DRM for software/hardware that deals with critical/life saving equipment, and the helpful folks at the RIAA/MPAA said this:

Furthermore, the claimed beneficial impact of recognition of the exemption -- that it would “provide an incentive for the creation of protection measures that respect the security of consumers’ computers while protecting the interests of the record labels” ([citation to our request]) -- would be fundamentally undermined if copyright owners -- and everyone else -- were left in such serious doubt about which measures were or were not subject to circumvention under the exemption.

Pish tosh, they say - who cares bout a life here, or a life ther? One of the nurses in the ER might be using an exempted device to pirate music!

At this point, we need Buffy or Angel. Clearly, we're dealing with Wolfram and Hart here.

Gordon Mohr points to a seven minute tour of DabbleDB from the Under the Radar conference. Very cool stuff, and of course, all Smalltalk on the server side :)

Patrick Logan has a number of cynical posts up on WS* - check here, here, and finally, here. His observations about Ebay in particular are worth pondering:

Anyone with an incompatible toolkit or language though is not left out in the cold... ebay provides an HTTP and POX interface for each method. Can ebay's approach be considered a success for SOAP and WSDL given this lack of universality?

If WS* were actually easy, and if toolkits were actually compatible, would companies like Ebay bother to maintain a completely parallel RESTian infrastructure?

I've been reading "The Thirty Years War" by Victoria Wedgwood for a bit now - and it's both eye opening and depressing. Eye opening because the war was somewhat different than I had thought.

My impression had been that it was purely a war of schismatic fanaticism - Catholics and Protestants having at it in central Europe. It looks to me like religion was more of an excuse than a cause in this case. Certainly various rulers imposed (or tried to impose) their religious sensibilities once they took over an areas; that's what Ferdinand (then Holy Roman Emperor) tried to do, stamping out Protestantism and trying to impose Catholicism. However, that was something he did in a secondary fashion - it looks to me, based on this book, that it had a lot more to do with dynastic ambition on his part.

Stir in the dynastic clashes of the Hapsburg (Austria/Spain) and Bourbon (France) families, and you got a mess. Various alliances switched in ways that would make a modern person's head swim, being more familiar with the post-Westphalia nation state system. Then you have to stir in the mercenary armies of the era, something we simply haven't seen in the West in hundreds of years.

It's all very depressing, because - to hear the author tell it - there were various points between 1618 - 1648 where the bleeding could have stopped, but various acts of omission prevented that.

I'm chaperoning a girl scout trip today - to the local Roller Skating rink. I've only skated a couple of times since high school, typically at parties I've taken my daughter to. It was a very popular activity back in the late 70's, in the area I grew up (East Fishkill, NY). Should be fun, so long as I can stay off my posterior :)

Digg notes that the SciFi channel has acquired the rights to Firefly - which they hope will lead to a second season. I have my doubts. If you saw the movie, you'll almost certainly have doubts. Not only did they tie up the storyline involving River - they killed off a couple of characters that I would call crucial if the story were to continue. I rather suspect that Whedon is done with this story, but I'd be pleasantly surprised to be wrong.

It's that time again - the weekly log post. First up, BottomFeeder downloads. They ran at the fairly normal rate of 233 per day last week:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	597
Sources	313
Update	198
Linux x86	117
Mac X	99
CE ARM	99
Mac 8/9	54
Solaris	34
Windows98/ME	28
HPUX	28
Linux Sparc	25
AIX	18
Linux PPC	10
SGI	6
ADUX	3
Source Script	2
CE x86	1

Next up - HTML page accesses, by tool:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	53.8%
Internet Explorer	21.9%
Google Bot	6.5%
Other	5.8%
MSN Bot	4.7%
Everest/Vulcan	4.6%
Megite	1.7%
BottomFeeder	1%

That's about the same distribution as always. Next up: Syndication pages access, by tool:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	23.8%
BottomFeeder	19.5%
BlogLines	8.6%
Other	10.5%
Net News Wire	8.3%
Safari RSS	4.7%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.1%
Internet Explorer	3%
RSS Bandit	2.1%
SharpReader	1.9%
NewsGator	1.7%
Magpie	1.6%
Planet Smalltalk	1.6%
BlogSearch	1.5%
MSN Bot	1.1%
JetBrains	1%
News Fire	1%
Liferea	1%
Google Bot	1%
FeedFlow	1%
Java	1%
Everest/Vulcan	1%
Feed Demon	1%

Still an awful lot of tool diversity there, and a disproportionate share of Mac users. Interesting, that last part.

Mike Arrington - apparently Winer's lawyer in the Weblogs.com purchase, drops a little bomb at the end of a post he made:

The only thing I will add is that I was part of the weblogs.com transaction and was also very dissapointed with Rogers Cadenhead’s performance. I have no information on the second part of the dispute.

In the comments, he refuses to say why he was disappointed. Add one more piece to the drive-by assassination of Cadenhead's reputation. Arrington drops a turd on him, and then says, more or less, "oh no, it wouldn't be proper to discuss this". Sure - after unloading a full round on Cadenhead, he counsels silence. There a lot of words to describe that kind of behavior, and none of them are printable here. "Tool" does comes to mind though.

Winer reciprocated with a wet kiss of a post. Fascinating how some companies are Threats to the Universe, and must be stopped by our hero Dave (some nasty comments he's made about Six Apart and Technorati come to mind), while others are just keen. Doesn't have anything to do with the legal relationships involved, I'm sure.

Rogers responded to this mess here, apparently wondering why someone else has decided to join the pile on party.

Today is your last chance for early registration for Smalltalk Solutions 2006! You'll want to register early, so you can attend sessions like Randy Coulman's talk on FIT:

Many agile software development teams have struggled with how to write automated acceptance (or customer) tests for their software. Ward Cunningham's Fit (Framework for Integrated Tests) was introduced as a solution to this problem. In Fit, customers and testers write tests in the form of tables, which are interpreted by special purpose "fixture" code that calls into the system under test. This seminar introduces acceptance testing using Fit, FitNesse, and FitLibrary in Smalltalk and includes information for the customers and testers who specify the acceptance test tables, and the developers who implement the fixture code.

See you in Toronto!

It looks like Dell has learned from the "Dell Hell" incident, and is monitoring blogs for mentions of the company's products. However, it looks like they might be being a trifle too pro-active - this guy had nice things to say about their monitor, and got a message that started with:

Thank you for contacting Dell about your issue. I'm glad to be of assistance. I sense you are not getting optimal performance from your system. I want to help you get it working quickly so you can enjoy your computer.

I think they need to put real people, instead of automated systems, in charge of that monitoring :)

After a long absence from the blogosphere, it looks like Steve Waring is posting again. Welcome back!

Via Alan Lovejoy comes this bizarre story:

Talk about a wild night near Seguin. A cow came flying out of its trailer, sent DPS and police scrambling, and left two police cars going up in flames.

It looks like I need some help with MySQL. I'm looking at some code that uses MySQL as a back end, and I need a working ODBC connection to it. I've got MySQL 5.0 (from the MySQL Website) installed on Windows. I used the installer, and had it install everything. I then grabbed an ODBC Driver from here.

So now, I try installing a driver, and when I use the "test connection" option in the ODBC console, I get this:

[MySQL][ODBC 3.51 Driver] Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client

Trouble is, that looks like the most up to date client. I'm sure I've misconfigured something; anyone have a tip? Thanks in advance.

Update: Found the solution on this MySQL help page.

I get a good amount of feedback on BottomFeeder, and Rich would like the same kind of thing for the documentation he's provided. On the sidebar, I've added links to four posts he put up asking for feedback - basically, Rich would like to know where the doc has been helpful, and where (if anywhere) there are gaps to be filled. The posts:

• BottomFeeder Tutorial Questions
• BottomFeeder Quick Start Guide Questions
• BottomFeeder User's Guide Questions
• BottomFeeder Technology Guide Questions

Thanks!

Wow, I stumbled on this today, after a tip from Boris. Apparently, it's Dave's world, and the rest of us just live in it. Sheesh, retire already, and stop the ongoing damage. Maybe I should start a counter, you know: Day Infinity, Winer still spreading venom...

Tim Bray has some good thoughts up on WS*, REST, and other related topics. This is all in the way of what you might call a concurring opinion (with a few differences) to this post by Darryl Plummer. Good stuff, I think, and well worth reading.

Stefan Tilkov:

I used to be a strong believer in static typing back when I was doing C++ programming. (That was actually something I did for a really long time — I was, in fact, somewhat religiously convinced there was a multitude of conceptual advantages C++ had over Smalltalk. Blame it on my youth.) Nowadays, the only advantage of static typing I still concede is the better support for IDEs and code completion, which you arguably would not need if you didn’t start with a verbose, unmanageable and ungrowable language in the first place.

Cincom Smalltalk has optional code completion support, btw.

Winer is certainly a piece of work. In a post that talks about the mapping choices made by Microsoft in their feed API, he says this:

Dave Johnson experiments with the Microsoft Feeds API, and finds they've made some unusual choices, which may not be good for interop. The solution of course is to parse the XML yourself, and it's definitely not too late for the community to provide the equivalent of the Microsoft toolkit, if perhaps the community can discuss such a thing without flaming out.

Without flaming out? Now why do you suppose that happens? You might wander over to the RSS Public mailing list, where people were discussing exactly this kind of issue. The whole thing flamed out alright - as soon as Dave showed up and spewed venom all over the forum. Why did Microsoft make the choices they made? Because in the absence of a tight spec, that's the sort of thing that happens. They made their best guesses, just like I and every other aggregator developer did. If there were a tight spec, that wouldn't happen as much. Can we get that? No, we can't, and here are Dave's *cough* words of wisdom *cough* on that subject:

It's not that I want it to remain ambiguous, it *has* to remain ambiguous, because the roadmap says so.

It takes the decision out of everyone's hands, no one can change the spec, because the SPEC SAYS IT CAN'T BE CHANGED.

So he spouts that, and then - today - acts stunned that developers working with RSS might come up with different interpretations of the spec, since it is - in his words - ambiguous. He's not only a mean spirited, bitter man - he's an incompetent, mean spirited, bitter man.

BlogCritics is still flogging the rumor that Google is buying Sun. If it's true, I will certainly have a lower regard for Google's business acumen - such a deal makes no sense to me (unless you are Sun management, desperate to parachute out). The newest piece of the rumor? The NYT Dealbook is floating it:

Talk of an imminent sale of Sun Microsystems to Google has been swirling around trading floors and Silicon Valley for more than a week. Shares of Sun, which has a partnership with Google to develop and distribute each other’s technology, spiked up about 4 percent last week as a result of the rumors. The speculation got even more legs after Google purchased Writely, a maker of a Web-based word processor that some people viewed as a product to be added to Sun’s StarOffice suite, which Google may help distribute. It’s also convenient that Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, is the former chief technology officer of Sun.

BlogCritics says this about it:

The prices of Sun and Google are moving further and further apart, too, as the market is realising what may be truth in the rumour: at close of trading yesterday, Sun was up and Google was down again, a rare phenomenon by any standards.

I don't know, you think that might be a collective "WTF???" from the market, aimed at Google?

In today's blogosphere blow up, we have Rogers Cadenhead, Dave Winer - and a bunch of reactions - ranging all over the map. The one that kind of made me think was Scoble's post, and some of the comments in it. It's not the actual controversy that caught my attention though - rather, it's the reaction to it. Let me pull a comment from Nick Bradbury's post - the idea was expressed to some extent by by a lot of people, and by a number of commenters (on various blogs:

These public fights and taking-sides thing is starting to creep me out...

Here's the thing: Life is about taking sides, so buckle up and get used to it. If you have kids, do you maintain a constant state of non-judegementalism? If so, please warn me now, so that I never end up in the same room with them. When you see something wrong, you can criticize it, in the hopes of improving things - or, like all too many people, stay silent and offer tacit support for the bad behavior. Why is Winer such a consistent jerk? Because he has enablers all over the web, ready to step in and say "but really, he's not so bad...". That's what Scoble's post is doing - offering tacit support for Dave's consistent - and continuing - bad behavior.

Non-judgementalism isn't some kind of higher plane of existence - it's acceptance of all things, good or bad. The only thing that gets you is more bad, piled high, with an extra topping of obnoxiousness thrown in. We've all seen children acting out, and wondered to ourselves "what's wrong with the parents? Can't they control that child?" Well, we have the same thing here in the blogosphere. Too many people have bowed down and worshipped at the house of Dave for too long, and he acts just as you would expect: badly.

Update: Shelly Powers doesn't pull any punches, and calls this one the way it is. There are a lot of people who are staying quiet about Winer's bad behavior, and Shelly names names. It's past time for Dave's enablers to stage an intervention.

Update 2: As to the various people who plead that they can't take sides - go read Rogers' post. Then read Dave's response. Now, at that point, you might shrug your shoulders, figure it's a he said/he said thing, and leave it alone. However - cast your mind back to this post from the RSS-Public mailing list:

And with that, I am banging the gavel and ending this experiment of Rogers's.

Tomorrow I will talk individualy with all the corporate members of the "board" and ask them to resign.

Rogers may then wish to propose a new structure, one that is consistent with the "come back to earth" message.

They may wish to join with him, or they may not.

If anyone else decides to join up with him on the terms of the old "advisory board" I will talk with each of them individually, until they see that it serves no purpose.

This process will go on until Rogers gets the idea that it isn't go to work.

I may at some time send him a bill for all of my time that he is wasting. [ed: emphasis added]

Good night and good luck to all of you.

Dave

Well. After that, Dave went and pressured the VC's behind a few of the people on the board, and got those folks to drop off. As Rogers said in his post, there's no one Dave can pressure to get Rogers to back off, so instead, he tossed what amounts to a SLAPP suit at him. Boy, that sure paints all the people who won't call BS on Dave with glory, doesn't it? Heck, I went back and re-read Scoble's post - and what a mass of ill thought out FUD it is. For example:

So, what does my philosophy tell me to do? Protect the inventor. Protect the guy who brought us SOAP, XML-RPC, RSS, OPML, podcasting, and a few other things here and there. Against the angry mob. Why? Cause if I don’t, then maybe some new inventor will say “this space sucks, I’m gonna go somewhere that they appreciate inventors.”

And if that happens I’ll lose. We’ll all lose.

Sheesh, what a mass of crap. Dave hardly needs protection. He's the one tossing a lawsuit, as a thinly veiled way to get Rogers to give up the RSS Board. If Rogers decides to let that go (and I'd hardly blame him for doing so), then you watch - this suit will disappear. What I'd like to see is some of the supposedly leading luminaries of the blogosphere - Scoble amongst them - step up and grow a spine.

ON top of everything else, DRM sucks down additional battery power:

When it comes to the Creative Zen Vision:M's 14-hour claim, CNET got about 16 hours of playback time with MP3s from a full charge, which was a nice surprise. However, when they tried playing WMA 10 DRM crippled subscription tracks on it, they only got just over 12 hours; a loss of almost 4 hours (~25%) of playback time due to the battery-hungry DRM. CNET found similar results with other players with WMA DRM drastically reducing battery life by up to around 20%. Apple's FairPlay DRM seems to have less of an effect with battery life being reduced by around 8% when compared with MP3 playback.

The upshot:

When it comes to maximising battery life in a portable MP3 player, this is a clear sign that one should avoid playing DRM protected music if at all possible and also another good reason to get the music converted into a more battery-friendly format. While 2 to 4 hours may not seem a lot to some people, this can be the difference between listening to music to the end of a lengthy journey or getting left in silence a couple of hours before the journey is complete.

That's the RIAA for you, insisting on technology that drives you to find ways around it. That piracy they see? Like Dave Winer, they need a mirror to ponder the answer.

IMHO, any records Barry Bonds sets should have huge asterisks next to them - it's very odd to have your home run production go up as you age. The good news: Selig has finally realized that this might be a problem.

I've been away from the blog most of the day writing a draft article. I've been asked to write up my experience creating the blog server, so I've been trying to piece that back together from memory and older versions of the code all morning. I have the sheer excitement of a dentist appointment coming up too - fun stuff there.

Sony's release dates for the PS3 are starting to look like the planning for Longhorn (remember when it was being called that?). Yesterday, Sony pulled together a press conference to announce that the PS3 would launch in November:

Sony will delay the release of its much-awaited PlayStation 3 gaming console until November from its planned spring debut because more work is needed on its next-generation DVD technology, the company said on March 15, the Associated Press reported.

Translation: We tried to shove too many next generation things into this console at once, and we are really hoping that the prices will drop on some of the. Like, say, the DVD player. And this sounds discouraging:

Kutaragi said Sony is still trying to finalize the copyright protection technology and other standards for the Blu-ray DVD disc, the format for PlayStation 3, and next-generation video for the company's electronics gadgets in the works.

I wonder if they can screw the pooch as badly as they did with music CD's?

The Smalltalk Industry Council Announces the Second Annual Smalltalk Solutions Coding Competition

March 16, 2006 - The Smalltalk Industry Council (STIC) is pleased to announce the second annual Smalltalk Solutions Smalltalk Coding Competition.

The Smalltalk Solutions Technical Conference being held in Toronto will serve as the home for the coding competition finale. Smalltalk Solutions is the premier forum for bringing together Smalltalk users, developers, vendors, and enthusiasts.

Coding contest prizes include:

1. iPod Video
2. iPod Nano
3. iPod Shuffle

Each of the finalists will also receive an individual membership to the STIC.

The Smalltalk Solutions Coding Competition is broken into two phases of competition. The first phase begins on Friday, April7th at 9:00 am EST and ends on Sunday, April 9th at midnight EST. Registration is open and all participants must register for the competition by sending an email to Michael Lucas-Smith at by April 6, 2006. All coding must be done in Smalltalk, any dialect of Smalltalk.

The Second and final phase of the competition will take place the evening of Tuesday, April 25th onsite at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, home of LinuxWorld and Network World Smalltalk Solutions 2006.

Prize winners will be announced during the trade show on Wednesday, April 26, 2006.

Contact:
Suzanne Fortman
Smalltalk Industry Council
sfortman@cincom.com

Or

Michael Lucas-Smith
Software with Style
Michael.lucas-smith@softwarewithstyle.com

Gemstone is one of our most important partners in the Cincom Smalltalk business - and there's a nice description of why you would want to use their software here.

Looks like Rogers Cadenhead has found the dark side of Dave Winer - in the form of a "cease and desist" letter sent from an attorney Winer has retained. This is how Dave treats his erstwhile friends; it's not hard to figure out why fewer and fewer people can work with him. With respect to this "oh, it's hard to be Dave" post, Winer needs to buy a mirror. Every time he wonders why people dislike him, he can go have a look in it.

Oh, and to be extra clear - I take back every disdainful thing I ever said about Atom. The people involved in that effort knew about Dave, and I didn't. The whole thing makes a heck of a lot more sense now.

Thanks to Michael, the coding contest for this year's show is a go. The early details:

The 2nd annual Coding contest is on Phase One begins April 7th Interested parties should register with Michael Lucas-Smith before April 7th More details to come Prizes are: iPod video iPod nano iPod shuffle

See you in Toronto!

Well, it's less than an hour since I looked out my window at the trashcans blowing away - and away they've gone. Here's the same view across the street now:

All that's left is a forlorn trash can lid. The cans went down the street - you may not be able to pick them out here, but they are at the intersection at the end of this shot:

It's time to register for Smalltalk Solutions 2006 - early bird registration ends this Friday - Advance registration goes through April 17. The Advance registration is still a discount from on-site, but not as much of one. Contact Suzanne Fortman for the Smalltalk Solutions discount code, which will give you an even bigger break.

See you in Toronto!

There seems to be a rule in this neighborhood - if it's trash day or recycling day, the wind has to be gusting strongly enough to blow the cans and bags down the street. I just went out to rescue my trash can after it got emptied - and watched the wind blowing the neighbor's cans and lids down the street. Two of the three cans in this picture are from a house two doors down, and have landed there. Since I took the shot, one of them has jumped into the middle of the street:

I figured I ought to secure my own trashcan, so I took it back to the side of the house and weighted it down with a spare paving block - that's the gray thing sitting partly in the trashcan:

That's pretty much the only way to be sure around here :) A few weeks ago the can just disappeared - it came back a few days later. When people find trashcans they don't recognize, they drop them by the shared mailbox, figuring someone will claim them. There is some good news in all this - the weather has been just warm enough for the bulbs to sprout - spring flowers:

When it gets just a little warmer, it'll be time to get my grill tuned up. Mmmm, grilling....

Battlestar Galactica truly is the best show on TV - it's one of the few things on the air that inspires thoughtful conversation - like this. I'm not going to quote any of it, because I think it stands best as a whole.

Stupid in this case meaning my code :) I was looking at the bug list for BottomFeeder on SourceForge yesterday, and found a bug I should have dealt with a long while back:

(url here) is an example of a feed that doesn't have dates attatched to items.

I cannot sort items within a sub-folder by date if the folder includes such a feed.

Well, that seemed like something that shouldn't happen. I thought I was assigning default timestamps to items without them, but it turns out I wasn't. Why, I'm not sure; I guess it hadn't come up before. In any case, it was a simple fix. After getting an Item object from a feed, I have post processing code to clean up problems. That code does things like:

• Insert default titles
• Add the current time as the point of last update
• If there's no link, and the GUID looks like an URL, consider it the link as well

And now, it goes ahead and slaps a timestamp on items that are missing them. Most of this only applies to RSS; the Atom spec mandates behavior in these areas, so it's less of a problem.

I've posted a new development build of BottomFeeder - it has a few bug fixes, and moves to the latest release of Software With Style's components. The build scripts for that are not up to date yet - there have been a few changes. So, if you intend to build from sources, you'll have to hang on.

CNet has a report up on the changing face of voting machinery in the US. I'd say this is another expedition into "management by magazine" land, searching for the elusive silver bullet fix. Consider:

As a result, almost 82 million registered voters will have seen voting systems changes over the past six years. The number of counties using hand-counted paper ballots this November will be only about half as many as in 2000.

Hand counting may not be sophisticated, but - with decent monitoring, I'd guess that it's pretty darn reliable. Instead, we have a plethora of whiz bang touch screens with no paper ballots at all in many places now. The response to the 2000 election looks a lot like the 1995-1996 introduction of Java to me - endless bouts of "all the cool shops are doing this" silliness, with no thought as to what might be the best business solution.

I suppose I should be encouraged - the software industry is no dumber than anything else :)

Patrick Logan calls BS on some of the wilder claims made about SOA in the industry. He quotes the latest IEEE Software magazine (PDF):

In contrast to standard distribution middleware such as CORBA or Java RMI, an SOA implements processes as first-class entities.

Had I read that, I'd have the same bewildered reaction Patrick has:

This is on page 58 of the March/April IEEE Software magazine. I wonder if the editors have any more sense of how wrong this is than the authors?

First of all, SOA has no formal definition. Secondly, in any common use of the term SOA, there is nothing resembling a process, let alone a first-class process.

This is what happens when you let the marketing staff get ahold of a few buzzwords :)

Gablarski criticizes all of us who laughed at this patent, saying that it doesn't cover what we think it does. He highlights this section:

A host computer, containing processes for creating rich-media applications, is accessed from a remote user computer system via an Internet connection. User account information and rich-media component specifications are uploaded over the Internet for a specific user account. Rich-media applications are created, deleted, or modified in a user account, with rich-media components added to, modified in, or deleted from the rich-media application based on information contained in a user request. After creation, the rich-media application is viewed or saved on the host computer system, or downloaded to the user computer system over the Internet.

And says this:

Now read that very carefully. People are apparently reading the first sentence and stopping. This isn’t a list of “or”s here, the patent covers a piece of technology that incorporates ALL these things, not one or the other. This patent covers an application that is specifically designed to CREATE and manage multiple RIAs under a user account and either host them for the user or make them available for download. That’s the patent. Make more sense? It makes me wonder if people are really that stupid or if they’re just not reading everything.

Hmm. You mean like cookies interacting with a server to determine access and so on? Gee, that's never been done before either. So yeah, your AJAX application is fine, just so long as there's no user associated state involved. I stand by my original criticism.

Well, this was unexpected. I uninstalled the IE7 beta the other day, since it was unstable (and did not work with our internal websites). So I restored to IE6, and then noticed two oddball things:

1. Outlook Express was gone
2. Microsoft Paint was gone

The first one I didn't care about so much, since I use Eudora. I use Paint for some tasks though, and it was just gone. I can't restore it either - trying to do so prompts for the XP service pack 2 CD (yeah, like those exist), which I don't have. The big question: How the heck did uninstalling IE 7 beta kill Paint? What the heck is up with that?

Ten is a good number lings to a Reg Developer story that demonstrates something - it demonstrates that patent offices in Europe can be every bit as stupid as those here in the US. Here's Sun getting a patent for changing the byte code set for Java:

The Patent Office has concluded that Sun Microsystems can patent an invention for a reduced set of Java Bytecode instructions the form of instructions that a Java Virtual Machine will follow to execute a Java program.

Yeah, there's something no one ever thought of before - changing the byte code to be more efficient. At least the ruling patent official is really up to speed on modern developments:

"In this case, I do not consider that the invention lies in excluded subject matter as such, i.e. a computer program," he said. "The invention was almost certainly made at a much earlier stage in the creative process, before any computer program had been written (or flowcharts generated) with a view to implementing the invention."

Flow Charts? What year is it again?

Scoble and Winer need to get over themselves:

Anyway, I totally understand why Dave would want to walk away. I’m staring at hundreds of emails and just don’t want to deal with my inbox right now. I’m gonna take the rest of the day off and hang out at SXSW. My sessions are over and now I just have to catch up with the email. I totally understand why Dave wants to take off from his blog. The pressure is just incredible to do more, more, more.

Who made me a gatekeeper? I don’t want that job.

Sheesh, what pressure? I write here because I feel like it. I don't feel pressure to write - I see things of interest to me and comment on them. I toss up Smalltalk advocacy, with examples. It's nice that I've built a decent sized traffic stream, but it's not what motivates me.

If writing is no longer fun, then hey - stop. In the meantime, don't take it too seriously. None of us are Edward Gibbons writing about the fall of the Roman Empire - it's just not that serious. Some people need to step back, take a breath, and just have fun with it.

If you are arriving on Saturday or Sunday for Smalltalk Solutions 2006, and would like to meet up with other Smalltalkers before the conference, then hit this wiki page.

I'd say that putting the spotlight on bad DRM helps - witness this statement from Sony on the analog "hole", with respect to Blu-Ray DVD:

In an important aside, Don Eklund, SPHE's senior vice president for advanced technologies, said that Sony's initial Blu-ray discs — and all of its Blu-ray titles for the forseeable future — will be free of the "Image Constraint Token" that's built into the Blu-ray and HD DVD standards. This controversial digital flag instructs the player to down-res the video signal from its analog component-video outputs to a standard-definition image to prevent high-resolution recordings — but at the same time prevents viewing of HDTV images on any TV or device not equipped with a copyright-protected HDMI digital input. That would eliminate any gain in image quality for HDTV early-adopters who bought displays prior to two or three years ago, when DVI and HDMI digital inputs were introduced.

It's hardly all good - the very next paragraph says this:

Eklund noted that Sony's key piracy concern isn't with analog HDTV signals but with the digital HDTV signal coming off the disc, which both Blu-ray and HD DVD are protecting with the robust Advanced Access Content System (AACS) endorsed by the Hollywood studios. If analog copying does become a problem down the road, the policy could change, he said — but for now, "we have no plan to implement the Image Constraint Token. All of Sony's titles will come out of the analog output at full definition." He added that other studios still have the discretion to activate the token for all or individual titles.

My take on this? The DRM nightmare they got themselves into with the rootkit CD's has constrained them a bit - but only a bit.

Vassili starts talking about Splash:

To answer some of the questions I expect.

When will it be ready? For some definition of "ready", expect a preview in the release this fall. No promises as to the level of functionality of the preview--but much more than what you see above!

Yes, I will post it in the open repository. But, only when it gets to the point of actually being at least somewhat usable and useful. I don't want to spend time on publishing to two places until then.

It will not be a multiple-window setup like the current UIPainter.

Stay tuned to Vassili's blog for more information