Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Doc Searls got a photo of the same storm I blogged about last night. He used a real camera, so his photo is a lot more impressive.

Advance Registration for Smalltalk Solutions 2006 ends April 23rd - the day before the conference. There's a lot of great stuff this year, including the Toronto location with LinuxWorld/NetworkWorld. For instance, Giorgio Ferraris is talking about RAD in Smalltalk - using Cincom Smalltalk:

Smalltalk is an extremely productive environment, this presentation is about a framework for VisualWorks Smalltalk, that allows the development of standard data entry applications at a speed close to using a 4GL, but with an application strongly based over an object-oriented architecture, so, when the play will became hard... The talk is an updated and enhanced version of the one from Smalltalk Solutions 2005. Similar concepts have also been used in the development of Java and C# frameworks. The intended audience is developers and managers facing the day to day dilemma of building fast or building well. Experience in building business applications (in any language) is required.

See you in Toronto!

Financial Times has an article up about the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray war, and seems to be of the opinion that this war is a bad thing for consumers. I disagree - we have two potential paths here, and while Blu-Ray has some technical advantages, the HD-DVD format is going to be vastly cheaper in the near term. What consumers will get is an actual choice as to what they value more. Better than the industry deciding by fiat, IMHO.

My suspicion is that cost will win out in the short term, and that will end up driving the long term. Here's the relevant detail from the story:

And so, the war is on. Toshiba, which has recruited Microsoft and Intel to its camp, is in the middle of a 40-city US tour to promote its HD-DVD format and hopes to steal a march on the competition by shipping the first $499 players to retailers later this month.

Sony, meanwhile along with Philips and Pioneer persuaded Dell, the world’s biggest personal computer maker, and most of the Hollywood studios, to back the rival Blu-ray format it began developing more than a decade ago. Its players are expected to go on sale a few months after HD-DVD and will cost twice as much. Yet the Sony coalition believes its technology is superior. It is also hoping to secure a boost from the November launch of the PlayStation 3 video game console, which has been fitted to play Blu-ray discs and is expected to fly off the shelves.

Unless Sony and its partners can find a way to drop that price, I suspect that the 2X factor will be a killer. The fact that the Blu-Ray will ship in the PS3 won't matter so much IMHO - I seriously doubt that the PS3 will displace the stock DVD player from the stereo component stack. Next Christmas, when the real sales battle starts to pick up, prospective buyers will see one thing: the respective price tags. Technical superiority simply won't trump a 2X difference. If you disagree, step into the Wayback machine and ponder the mid-80's sales figures for plain old DOS IBM clones versus the Macintosh.

Now, I could be wrong - one of the critical backers Sony has (so far) is the movie industry. If the market has tons of Blu-Ray disks, and only a relative handful of HD-DVD disks, things might go the other way - even with the price differential. It will be interesting to watch this play out.

BitWorking demonstrates that RSS is not the only point where personal politics enter the syndication space; witness this post on Atom 0.3 vs. 1.0

This is very cool - Gabe Rivera, the guy behind memorandum, has started up a version of the tracker for baseball. There's already a tech tracker and a politics tracker - now there's one for baseball fans. I am so subscribed :)

I've been mostly ignoring the hype about the dangers of Avian flu, but I think I might start perking my ears up now that I've been reading "The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague In History". It's a nice background on the run up to the epidemic - the situation of medical science in the US at the time (only just out of the dark ages), and the people who made it that way. That's followed by a description of the how the flu spread - it was greatly helped by the US mobilization for the war. The huge military cantonments that were built for new draftees were ideal breeding grounds.

The scary part of that pandemic was how many young people got killed. Normally, flu kills the weak - the very young, the very old, and those who have compromised immune systems. That one killed people in the prime of life, and the reasons are truly terrifying: apparently, the body's immune system went into overdrive against the virus, and killed the lungs as an unintended side effect. Not in a pleasant way, either - the descriptions sound reminiscent of the symptoms of Ebola.

In most respects, this book is scarier than any horror flick...

Patrick Logan is pleased that OOPSLA will be in Portland this year, and notes an interesting symposium on the day before the formal conference start:

The day before OOPSLA will be the Dynamic Languages Symposium.

Maybe OOPSLA is worth attending again.

Hmm - I don't like the look of this weather info for my area:

That's a severe T-Storm warning, and a Tornado watch. Swell :/

Update: A few minutes later, the sky went from daylight to this - and we even got a little hail.

Bryce Kampjes announces a Smalltalk party in London (UK), April 8:

We're holding a Smalltalk party in London on Saturday the 8th, this Saturday. Stephan Taylor will be talking about software process. The same Stephan Taylor that wrote "Pair Programming with the Users". Oli Bye will be demoing SqueakNOS, Smalltalk running as it's own OS. And I'll be talking about Exupery, a JIT for Squeak.

There are details here.

Rogers points out that the movie industry can be every bit as stupid as the music industry:

Six studios have begun selling movie downloads this week on Movielink . Purchased movies can be kept forever for computer viewing and burned to DVD but can't be watched in DVD players. There's also a limit on the number of computers that can view a movie, and the service and site require Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player.

Prices for new movies are higher than DVDs -- Nicolas Cage's The Weather Man sells for $27 on Movielink and $22 on Amazon.Com . So you're getting less convenience at more cost, though no one had to package, ship or stock the movie.

Hmm. I can pay extra for something that I can't watch on my HD capable, 51" TV? Or I can pay less and watch it there. I think the morons at Movielink need to look up the phrase "value proposition".

Update: Sheesh, I missed the best part. Not only is MovieLink Windows specific, it's IE specific. Here's the text you get in Firefox:

Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service you must use Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, which supports certain technologies we utilize for downloading movies.

Click here to get the latest version of Internet Explorer. We do not support Mozilla or Netscape. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

So it's a useless service that only runs in the least capable browser on the market. All that and you can't use your stock DVD player. Such a deal!

Spotted in RedState:

I will vote for whoever, Democrat or Republican, promises to get rid of Daylight Savings Time. In the alternative, I will vote for whoever implements my wife's plan whereby Fallback occurs on Monday morning at 8am and Spring Forward occurs on Friday afternoons at 4pm.

Heh.

It's the end of the sports drought for me - I've never followed basketball or hockey, so once football season wraps up, it's just dead until April. It's back to baseball though - the season is finally starting. If the Yankees pitching staff can hold up, they'll do fine - but that's a big if. When your ace is only two years younger than I am, it's not a positive sign, IMHO.

Smalltalk Solutions 2006 is coming up fast - the show starts in 3 weeks. There's still plenty of time to register - and don't forget to contact us about the STIC discount! Registrations gets you into all of the talks, both LW/NW and StS - including tutorials. For instance, Blaine's got an interesting sounding talk:

Smalltalk has a highly reflective and lively environment that can be used to augment traditional unit testing. It allows us to do things that are only dreamed about in other environments. We can easily question and interrogate code or any aspect of the system. It is not hard to implement tests to ensure code correctness, enforce metrics, and scrutinize resource allocations. You can be creative and take the stance of using tests to stop and minimize the cost of change. There is a large variety of characteristics that can be tested, from run-time correctness to code quality. This presentation will give real world concrete examples in Smalltalk.

See you in Toronto!

It's reassuring to know that Microsoft isn't the only company out to hose me off for not having the "correct" technology mix - the new hi-def DVD players are going to ship with the same kind of stupidity embedded: If you don't have the right cable, then you'll get a downgraded picture. So like PVP-OPM, you'll have:

• A legally owned TV
• A legally owned DVD
• A downgraded image

These people can all go... somewhere. I see no reason to replace my perfectly good HD capable TV, and Hollywood's fantasy fears about piracy aren't convincing me. When you have a product that doesn't give me the finger, let me know.

I managed to pare my reading list down some while I was on the road - I finished three of the books I've been plowing through:

• Wedgwood's "The Thirty Year's War"
• Maalouf's "The Crusades through Arab Eyes"
• Vinge's "Deepness in the Sky"

The first two are part of my continued history reading - the Wedgwood book is both deeply fascinating and deeply disturbing. If ever there was a time for the phrase "All it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing", it was that era in Central Europe. Throughout the petty kingdoms that then made up Germany, there were multiple possible paths to peace throughout the time of that war; none were ever taken, as there was always temporizing or possible princely advantage.

The second book was really interesting. Taken from contemporary Arab chronicles, it shows how the deeply split Arab world saw (and responded to) the crusades. The short answer is, they did not respond well, initially. The Islamic Empire had long since split up into multiple independent feifdoms, and many of them were at war when the Europeans first arrived. It's an eye opening account, especially if you've only ever seen the history from the Western side.

The third book was far lighter, but - ironically enough- I had more trouble getting into it. I first started reading it a year ago, and put it down. The story is actually quite interesting, but it's slow to develop. It picked up speed at the halfway point though, and I really liked the sections on the non-humans. There's some good commentary in the book on what can happen when you think the horizons are closed, and everything that can be discovered has been. In that sense, the book reminded me somewhat of "Infinity Beach", by Jack McDevitt.

Next up, I'm switching gears a bit - I've just received "Freakonomics", by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. We'll see how that goes.

Having a child get into middle school is an excellent way to learn just how much you've forgotten. I taught math at the secondary level years ago, and yet - when my daughter came to me with some simple (7th grade) geometry problems, I discovered just how much had leached out of my brain over the years. Use or lose it applies pretty darn well to knowledge.

On the other hand, I have a tool at my disposal that past generations of parents didn't - the web and search engines.

Matt Croyden on S3:

How mad would you be if the power company turned off your power for several hours without warning, or if you woke up in the morning to find that you couldn’t take a shower? Pretty mad I imagine. I was just a little bit annoyed last night because my flickr backup wasn’t working. I couldn’t have retrieved anything from S3 if I had wanted to, but thankfully I didn’t need (or want) to.

What if I were building out a Carson -style startup using S3 for storage? That would have been 7 hours of downtime for my app too. Hopefully the beta testers weren’t too pissed off. Hopefully I wasn’t showing a demo of it to anyone.

This is why some of the hype over services like these are over-blown. You simply cannot build a business on a service over which you have no control. That control doesn't need to be physical, of course - lots of things are manufactured from parts that come from all over (just in time manufacturing). You think companies that build that way don't have service level agreements in place with their suppliers?

Ahh, the wages of being a complete jerk in public: Rogers Cadenhead has switched over to Atom. The various technical issues that cannot be resolved in RSS have been dealt with in Atom, and even erstwhile allies like Rogers have moved on. I've never updated my Atom feed here, but perhaps it's time to do so.

Still catching up, the logs for the last week. BottomFeeder downloads proceeded at a 266 per day clip; the details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	519
Sources	436
Update	391
Linux x86	132
Mac X	126
CE ARM	91
Mac 8/9	78
Solaris	29
HPUX	22
AIX	13
Linux Sparc	10
Windows98/ME	7
Linux PPC	5
SGI	2
ADUX	1
CE x86	1
Source Script	1

On to the HTML Pages:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	60.2%
Internet Explorer	18.8%
MSN Bot	1.3%
Everest/Vulcan	3.8%
Other	13.9%
Megite	1%
Google Bot	1%

Looks a lot like the previous week. Finally, RSS tool accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	24%
BottomFeeder	16.8%
Net News Wire	9.7%
Other	11%%
BlogLines	7.9%
Safari RSS	4.4%
MSN Bot	4.3%
Internet Explorer	4%
Google Feed Fetcher	3%
RSS Bandit	2.2%
NewsGator	1.7%
Planet Smalltalk	1.5%
Magpie	1.4%
SharpReader	1.1%
JetBrains	1%
BlogSearch	1%
Liferea	1%
News Fire	1%
Java	1%
Feed Reader	1%
Feed Demon	1%

That looks a lot like the previous week as well.

Time to catch up on my log posts, which I missed with the travel of the last week and a half. First up: BottomFeeder downloads from 2 weeks ago, which ran at a rate of 275 a day:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	545
Sources	489
Update	290
Linux x86	171
Mac X	111
Mac 8/9	97
CE ARM	89
Solaris	36
HPUX	32
Linux Sparc	23
AIX	17
Windows98/ME	11
Linux PPC	8
SGI	3
Source Script	3
ADUX	2
CE x86	2

Next: The weekly HTML page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	67.7%
Internet Explorer	17.1%
Everest/Vulcan	4.2%
MSN Bot	3.8%
Other	3.6%
Google Bot	2%
Megite	1.6%

I love one week anomalies like that sudden jump in Mozilla accesses. Anyway, on to the RSS tool accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	26.2%
BottomFeeder	18.7%
Net News Wire	8.9%
BlogLines	7.9%
Other	9.4%
Safari RSS	4.8%
Internet Explorer	3.6%
Google Feed Fetcher	3%
RSS Bandit	1.8%
NewsGator	1.8%
Magpie	1.6%
Planet Smalltalk	1.6%
SharpReader	1.5%
JetBrains	1.1%
BlogSearch	1.1%
MSN Bot	1%
News Fire	1%
Liferea	1%
Java	1%
FeedFlow	1%
Everest/Vulcan	1%
Feed Demon	1%

Still a lot of tool diversity there.

I've just uploaded a new dev build of BottomFeeder - this integrates the last few rounds of bug fixes I've done. I still have a few things to do for the 4.2 release, but it's starting to come together.

The Omaha Dynamic Languages group is meeting April 4th. For details, see Blaine's blog.

Keith Ray notices the comments to this Mini-Microsoft post (542 of them when I looked). If even a handful of those represent the thinking of developers on the Windows team at Microsoft, then they have a huge, huge problem on their hands. I've said before that I thought Microsoft had coded their way into a mud filled corner with Windows; all those years of thinking that everything belonged in the OS have finally come home to roost.

Heck, the EU and US authorities shouldn't worry about what MS bundles; they ought to encourage more of it. The more coupling MS introduces, the worse it gets for them, and the better things look for Apple.

For the varying attempts at humor, check out:

• Pollock solves world problems
• Scoble decides to be evil-er
• Slashdot for Girls
• Google Romance

I'm sure more will stumble along during the day, but those ought to bring a giggle or two

Carl Gundel is speaking to the NYC STUG about Liberty Basic:

I've been invited to demonstrate and speak about the new version of Liberty BASIC I'm working on. The venue is the New York City Smalltalk Users Group on April 6th, a Thursday evening. The reason this group invited me is because Liberty BASIC is developed in a version of Smalltalk so it's an interesting project for other Smalltalk developers.

I've been given permission to invite Liberty BASIC users to come also for a sneak peek. The meeting will be held a couple of blocks from Madison Square Garden. I'll post more details about the meeting place when I have them.

I hope we have have a few members of the Liberty BASIC community join us.

Well, look at this - Microsoft has gone ahead and worked around the hacks at Eolas, who wanted to get paid off for their ability to fool patent office staff. They claim to feel bad for users. Sure. And I'm the Queen of Romania, as Dorothy Parker once said:

Eolas Technologies says the decision by Microsoft to modify its Internet Explorer browser at the expense of a seamless user experience is a "disappointment" and a "shame."

It's a shame that these morons haven't gotten lost in the jungle too. Their COO is apparently miffed:

"Microsoft is apparently of the position that this [IE modification] helps their litigation position. I can't comment on the specifics of whether that's true or not. Our position remains the same. We are ready to have reasonable discussions on licensing the technology," Swords said.

Here, let me translate: "Microsoft didn't want to pay us off for our non-invention, but we're still ready to extort money from them if they feel stupid".

Rogers has switched to Atom, and his switch surfaced a subtle bug in BottomFeeder. The Atom 1.0 support built on the older 0.3 support, and it turns out that a hack I used back then to find feed links was problematic in Atom 1.0. That's fixed now, and the update is online (for the 4.2 development build only)

Scoble on blogging and ROI:

The common theme I'm hearing is Werner (and the other Amazon employees who commented here, and elsewhere that I'm seeing) want numbers. They want statistics. Proof. Science.

Where I gave them stuff like " blogging doubled sales at Stormhoek winery, according to its CEO." Or "Munjal Shah, CEO of Riya, says blogging is very important to his new company." Or "Axosoft raised more than $14,000 in just a few days with nothing more than a few links on some blogs." Or " Foldera got more than one million signups for its service in 17 days by doing nothing more than talking to six bloggers." Or, a tailor in the UK saw his sales go up by 10x by doing a blog. That probably wasn't well enough communicated, or it wasn't the kind of answer that would convince Werner. That means I need to go back and do some more homework or at least learn to communicate better while being interrupted by an executive with strongly formed opinions.

Here's the thing - you won't be able to find "hard numbers" for blogging and ROI. Not now, probably not ever. How many hard numbers do you find for any CRM effort? That's what blogging is, really - Customer (or Prospect) relationship mangement. It's a way to communicate with a wider audience than you can via more traditional marketing outreach efforts. Have we ever found solid ROI numbers for those more traditional efforts? I don't think so - best I can tell, we try to track down initial leads that came via marketing, and then marketing takes credit for anything that's even remotely related to a marketing campaign.

I'm not trying to knock marketing efforts with that. It's just that marketing is very hard to measure objectively. Sales is easier - either a sales person did or did not close a sale. At the end of the year, there's a real number to look at, and there are previous years to compare to. Sure, it's still a little fuzzy, because sales gets impacted by things out of their control. My point is, marketing measurements are even less objective, and I don't really see a way to firm them up. Which takes me back to blogging. It's another aspect of customer/prospect outreach, and - for all the same reasons - hard to get solid numbers for.

James McGovern on Java and Scripting:

With scripting support, Java will continue to grow by leaps and bounds and may even be the death of other languages delegating them to second-class citizenship. Other features that many of the conference attendees will be talking about that matter include discussions around clustering support, native platform GSS/Kerberos integration, Support for the Simple and Protected GSS-API Negotiation Mechanism (SPNEGO) and the ability to integrate enterprise applications into management consoles via the JMX protocol.

Fascinating. I wonder what his reaction to the SPA 2006 conference would have been. The feel there was that Java was very much not the way to the future.

Note to self: Never accept the kind of routing that I did yesterday. I finally got back to BWI just before 7 pm local time - which meant, beginning with the cab ride, I had been in transit for 19 hours. Even after more than 12 hours of much needed sleep, I still feel like I have tennis balls in my ears...

Learn From the Experts on How and Why to Use Cincom Smalltalk

CINCINNATI, Ohio -- March 30, 2006 -- Cincom Smalltalk engineers will present at the upcoming Smalltalk Solutions Conference to be held April 24-26, 2006 in Toronto, Canada. Some of the discussion topics include cryptography, object-relational persistence and web applications using Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks.

A few of the Cincom Smalltalk Engineers presenting at Smalltalk Solutions include:

Alan Knight -- Tutorial: Using GLORP

GLORP is an open-source library for object-relational persistence. It includes some very sophisticated mapping and performance features, and current plans are for it to be incorporated as the core mapping layer in a future revision of Cincom Smalltalk's database toolset. This tutorial is designed to give an introduction to the concepts, capabilities, and best practices using GLORP.

Martin Kobetic -- Cryptography for Smalltalkers 2

This presentation will introduce cryptographic hash functions and public key algorithms and discuss some of their applications and practical aspects. The talk will include demonstrations using the Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks security library.

James Robertson -- Building a Blog Server: A Smalltalk Web Application

This session will go through the process of building, maintaining, updating and scaling a Smalltalk web application server and show the ancillary areas of the technology XML, RSS, XML-RPC. Also discussed will be the ease of modifying a Smalltalk server in place, without taking it offline and the transition from single user to multi-user – all without downtime.

Visit the Cincom Smalltalk booth 1133 in the exhibit hall and receive a copy of the non-commercial version of Cincom Smalltalk Winter Edition.

About Cincom Smalltalk

Cincom Smalltalk enables software developers to build applications quickly and efficiently, including scalable browser-based and client-server systems. Cincom Smalltalk delivers significant productivity over Java™, C#, C++, or Visual Basic®, allowing developers to bring their products to market significantly faster.

About Cincom

For nearly 40 years, Cincom has delivered innovative software and services that enable thousands of clients worldwide to simplify the management of complex business processes. We empower our clients to outperform their competition by providing ways to increase revenue, control cost, minimize risk and achieve rapid ROI.

Cincom serves clients on six continents including BMW, Citibank, Boeing, Northwestern Mutual, Federal Express, Ericsson, Penn State University, Milacron, Siemens, Rockwell Automation and Trane. For more information about Cincom's products and services, contact Cincom at 1-800-2CINCOM (USA only), send an e-mail to info@cincom.com or visit the company's website at www.cincom.com.

Media Contact:

Suzanne Fortman
Cincom Systems, Inc.
Marketing Manager
949-722-8928
sfortman@cincom.com

Sheesh, maybe EVDO is the way to go. In London (where sadly, EVDO would not be helpful), t-mobile wouldn't let me roam. In JFK, at terminal nine, I had a weak WiFi signal that got me t-mobile access for a few minutes, and then dropped dead. Finally, here at Logan (yes, my routing makes no sense), I find that Comcast provides the WiFi, but they provide no way for me to login as a Comcast user (apparently, Massachusetts and Maryland are independent Comcast fiefdoms. Fitting, in a way, since I've been reading about the 12th century of late). Sigh.

Well, the good news about this plane trip is that I had a project to do that killed most of the travel time: updating the intro course for VisualWorks to VW 7.4. In the prior release, we moved packages into the base, which makes the beginning view of the product different: Instead of seeing categories in the left pane of the browser, you see packages and bundles. I've updated the materials to reflect that.

Next, I'm going to have the online tutorial materials sent to me, so that I can do the same updates to that stuff.

I managed to get to Heathrow early this morning, and I thought I'd have time to get a quick update - the airport has T-Mobile WiFi, and I have a pay as you go account. It works fine in the US, so I refreshed the browser and followed the directions. Sure enough, there's a pull down menu for non-UK users, and I was able to select T-Mobile US. Logging in brought me to an unhelful "general error; try again later" message. The same thing happened last Monday on my way in, so it's not just a one time thing. Do they actually support roaming?

In a post about the new MS Office, Runar mentions Pollock:

Previously there has been focus on how Pollock will make sure the GUI looks good, by ensuring screen updates do cause flickering. Pollock definitely also need to have focus on drawing speed.

Pollock is not really even in beta yet. We are closing in on the first supported release (see the roadmap here) - and here's the thing - don't worry about the performance issues. Our developers have been focused on the "heavy lifting" thus far, and, even before they get to serious optimization (and optimization is a large part of the internal roadmap), they know of a number of things which, when optimized, will make performance improve a lot.

We don't follow the theory of premature optimization here - we want to get the big things right before we focus on the rest of it. Rest assured, Pollock will be fast when it's ready to walk out the door.

One of the most interesting things I saw at this show was the change in mindset about development. Last year, dynamic languages were interesting, but the main thoughts were still on Java. This year? Completely different. In talk after talk, and in side conversation after side conversation it became clear that Java is regarded - at least by the attendees of this show - as a thing of past. Oh sure, it's still in use, and it will remain in use for a long while. It had no champions though, and plenty of people expressed the thought that Sun's release of 1.5 was the straw that broke the camel's back - the level of complexity being grafted onto the language was just too much. Heck, mention the phrase "Java Generics" at this conference and you were likely to hear snickering.

Via Mike Gunderloy, I found this amazingly evil piece of work: a "Mass Blog Installer" tool. Witness the brave new spam world being ushered in by the people behind this - they start off sounding like they offer a valuable service:

f you have been hosting on Blogspot, you know how fast your blogs can disappear.These days Blogger is deleting blogspot hosted blogs ... and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. They are also blocking posts through the API with 'Captchas' and saving them as drafts all in an effort to stop the abuse of their service. Unfortunately, your hard work ends up down the drain. What can you do to save your work and stop the carnage?

Sounds good, right? Until you read down and find out what's going on:

That's right - Google can't delete your blogs if self hosted. I have tested Blogger blogs hosted on my own domains and have not once been shut down or stuck with a post captcha. Now that I have the Blog creation process automated, it is a piece of cake to crank out 100s if not 1000 blogs in one day. After many months of testing and posting, all blogs are intact and generating traffic.

Oh the joy - automated splog creation. This might be why I'm seeing more splog results showing up in my search feeds. These tools are so very proud of themselves, too:

I was shocked at the power of creating a blog network. This shot my AdSense income up to an amazing $135 per day only one month later. I can also report that the sites and blogs have been holding their traffic and income as I write this letter.

This is like that classified ad jerk you see on late night TV, but scamming Google AdSense. They even realize that what they are doing is slimy; that becomes clear when you read the rest of the letter. Ponzi was clearly born in the wrong century...

Well, it's been a great 3 days, even if I spent most of them jetlagged after traveling to London from Maryland by way of Los Angeles :) For people who like the notion of an unconference - you want to attend SPA 2007. These folks were doing a "conference for particpants" before anyone else had the idea. I'll be back next year, and I intend to arrive earlier.

If you ever have a chance to hear Dave Thomas give this talk, run, don't walk. He gave a great talk on the "received wisdom" that too many of us in the software industry follow. Chief amongst those, of course, is declarative typing. I can't summarize the whole talk - he was funny, and his slides were amusing. If Dave is speaking at a conference near you, go.

Update: Bernard has posted some of the preliminary outputs from the session. First, Laura Hill's preliminary notes are here. The audio of the session has been posted here.

I participated in a fascinating discussion forum this morning - Laura Hill and Bernard Horan (both of Sun) organized a "fishbowl" on the topic of distributed workplaces. That works like this - there were 7 chairs arranged in a circle in the center of the room, with a large ring of chairs around them. There were 6 of us in that center ring, and discussion kicked off with our opening statements on distributed working (which we had submitted previously). From there, it was an open discussion under the following ground rules:

• Only people in the bowl could talk (fish)
• People on the outside could get up and enter the bowl at any time
• There always had to be at least one open chair in the center

What that means is that people are entering and leaving the bowl regularly. We got participation from nearly the entire audience, and the conversation ranged over a lot of stuff: whether remote working is desirable, whether it works for anyone, how you can manage agile development, how you do communication.

The talking really focused on communication - both on tools (IM, NetMeeting, IRC, phone), and on the practice - how often, ad-hoc or planned, how often you need face to face meetings, that sort of thing. It was a good time, and a good discussion. In know that Laura and Bernard were taking notes and recording the session, so if any of that comes online, I'll link to it.

Here's a talk I'm seeing at a lot of conferences - something to address the widespread worry about offshoring of IT sector jobs. Personally, I'm skeptical of governmental programs to "address" the "problem" - this is nothing new. Take textiles, for instance. Between the 18th and 21st century, that industry moved from France to the UK, on to New England, then off to the US south, on to Latin America, and now to Asia. In all that time, there have always been high value textile jobs in all the "losing" areas.

I also wonder about the supposed gap between comp sci graduates and the job market; in general, the market tends to solve those problems by itself. Put another way, I'm wary of solutions that chase ill defined problems. The bottom line is, costs in the IT sector are dropping inexorably, as they have in other industries that have globalized. There's no way to get around the existance of highly trained, rapidly industrializing populations in places like India, China (etc).

Also, I wonder if one of the problems isn't the uptick in demand for credentials before hiring into a development position. When I got into the business in the late 80's, it was quite common for people to get into software development who did not have software related degrees. I certainly didn't; most of the people who worked where I first worked didn't have software degrees either. Good comment from a professor in the room on this: no one has a shared understanding of the term "software engineering", if you go across university departments, industry, etc.

Here's a good consensus - the difficulty arises in attempting to have developers over there (wherever the offshoring location is) and the managers here (US, UK, wherever). The difficulty is that there are communication difficulties that add huge overhead to such projects. Project management in general is bad in the software field; adding a large communication disruption into that already poor discipline just makes things worse. IMHO, the companies that ought to worry are software development firms (like Microsoft), who will, over time, find that new firms in India (etc) will be at least as effective as they are, but with lower costs. The company that isn't actually in IT, but has IT needs won't be nearly as impacted.

Steve Ballmer on "home based" PR:

Question: Do you have an iPod?

Answer: No, I do not. Nor do my children. My children--in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.

It's a nice thought, but a tad unrealistic. Witness this (rather old) post from Scoble.

March 28, 2006 - The Smalltalk Industry Council (STIC) is pleased to announce the election of Bob Nemec as the new Executive Director of STIC. Bob Nemec, Vice-President of Northwater Objects, has been an avid Smalltalk developer since 1990. Bob’s first act as Executive Director is to host a State of STIC meeting during Smalltalk Solutions 2006. The STIC meeting and STIC open enrollment is scheduled for Monday, April 24, 2006 from 5:30 – 7:30 pm at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

"Allen Davis has done an incredible for job for STIC during the past 5 years, it was Davis who resurrected STIC and brought Smalltalk Solutions to the success it is today. Allen’s enthusiasm and advocacy for Smalltalk will continue with Knowledge Systems Corporation remaining on the Board to support Bob Nemec. We thank Allen and look forward to many more years of service with STIC, " said Alan Knight, Smalltalk Solutions Conference Chair.

"The decision to step down was very difficult for me, although it was the right thing to do for the Smalltalk Industry Council. Due to the success of Smalltalk, I have been overwhelmed with Smalltalk opportunities and cannot dedicate the time I would like and STIC needs in order to continue to build the Smalltalk Community, "stated Allen Davis, former Executive Director for The Smalltalk Industry Council (1999-2006).

"I look forward to working with the enthusiastic and dedicated people of STIC, and the broader Smalltalk community, to raise awareness and understanding of what Smalltalk is. Smalltalk is by far the most enjoyable and productive development environment to work with; we have a chance to make that fact self evident to a broader audience." said Bob Nemec.

Smalltalk Solutions 2006 is the premier forum for bringing together Smalltalk users, developers and enthusiasts. This year’s conference will be held April 24-26, 2006 in conjunction with LinuxWorld and NetworkWorld Toronto, advanced registration ends April 23, 2006.

To register for the conference go to http://www.lwnwexpo.plumcom.ca/smalltalk.cfm. Remember STIC members receive a 25% discount off advanced registration.

The Smalltalk Industry Council (STIC)

The Smalltalk Industry Council is a cohesive Smalltalk community where information, technical issues, new ideas and concerns are openly discussed to benefit the industry. STIC members are users and vendors of Smalltalk tools, components, databases and services. The Smalltalk Industry Council has been reorganized and reformed with the core board members from Cincom, Instantiations, GemStone and Knowledge Systems Corporation.

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

Bob Nemec announced my June talk to the Toronto STUG:

The next Toronto Smalltalk User Group meeting will be Thursday, June 15th, with James Robertson, Product Manager of Cincom Smalltalk. James will have just finished his talk at the Syndicate conference. This will be a good time to talk about how his talk went, how Smalltalk Solutions worked as a part of Linux World & Network World, and the state of Smalltalk

I'll be up there for the Syndicate conference, where I'll be talking about blogging from a PR perspective. Make sure to join us for drinks after the STUG talk!

This a is a case study of a mobile phone operator - the idea being to specify behavior and run tests all by filling in a few forms. A look at the issues of defining and testing a web application - present some approaches, a 2005 case study, some of the tools used. Requirements:

• Underlying business logic needs to be explicit
• Marketing oriented requirements tend to be imprecise - concentrating on user stories, providing few usable test cases. They had to feed the requirements back to marketing for verification

For testing, you cannot rely entirely on vendor testing - you need to test the configuration. The testing in question here is functional testing. To create the test specification:

• specify system behavior, end to end
• highlight boundary conditions and end points
• model the tests while system functionality is still fluid
• tests should be specified before detailed APIs are specified
• maintain traceability between tests and requirements

Some of the tools considered: WebRunner, HttpUnit, HTMLUnit, Homebrew XML based requirements management tools. Various toolsets were considered afterwards - FIT, WATIR (Ruby), Selenium (Javascript), Agitator, Canoo Web Test. These latter tools were unknown to the team when the project was ongoing. They ended up using the homebrew system.

The Problem: A Mobile Internet Content Filter. There was no software available at the time to filter inapproriate content from mobile systems. A definition: "on-net" means on the operator's portal.

The Solution: Interpose a proxy between mobiles and "off net" (i.e., general internet) content. Apply rules to determine whether the content is appropriate. Redirect on failure of that test, allow user to change the settings.

There are a few possible outcomes:

• Access Denied (can change settings to allow)
• Illegal Page (cannot view under any circumstances - some 2000 sites are so classified in the UK)
• Allowed (normal viewing)

The "Denied" category has rules that involve the operator and their classification scheme - these become policy rules. Testing types?

• Automated tests for basic stuff
• User acceptance testing (manual)

The first is the one they needed to deal with. Test cases were based on use cases, requirements, exception conditions. Did not attempt to achieve complete decision coverage, instead using representative test cases. The tools that were developed:

• XMLSpy/Authentic - Schema per data type, stylesheets per data type
• Java - Documentation Generator, batch file to execute from files, FilterTestSuite based on HttpUnit
• Directory Load Scripts - Templates for the data files

And then a demo. The tools they created allow them to store their test cases as XML docs. The test cases are created via an XSchema driven form.

Spotted in The Product Management View

For example, consider Froogle, a fantastic opportunity for Google, given how so many people clearly start their e-commerce shopping process with a Google search. I can only believe that Google is intentionally holding back on this product for strategic or contractual reasons because I can't otherwise explain the lack of progress. Similarly with Gmail, another great opportunity to leverage the community's affinity for Google, that now is two years old and hasn't progressed much since its debut. Another terrific opportunity is the Google Desktop, but even very basic capabilities (like moving a file to a different folder) remain unsupported. And Orkut, the social networking site that launched at the right time and should have leaped when Friendster stumbled, also seems deserted by its product team. And Google Base. Why did they bother? And the list goes on.

Google has said over and over again that they are an engineering led company, and point to the fabled 20% time policy as a source of pride. The downside? It tends to lead to engineers driving off after bright shiny objects without regard to their actual value. In Google's case, it's led to a bunch of products that are 80% complete, and stay in perma-beta. Why? Likely because the relevant engineers lost interest once all the hard (read: interesting) problems were solved, and no one else there has the power to herd them toward actual delivery.

ComputerWorld reports:

Microsoft has joined a group that takes part in the International Standards Organization voting process to standardize ODF.

I saw that coming :)

After lunch (which I skipped to exercise) and a nap (ad-hoc, in front my laptop in the common room), we're on to XML database applications with Chris Wallace. He's starting off with some XQuery examples. The backing data is in an XML database (eXist).

Heh. He says that XQuery and eXist are the most fun he's had in software since Smalltalk, which he's used since 1983. The focus with these tools is on data more than functionality. He's doing all this to explore the design space (XML Databases and Documents). In terms of information systems, the focus here is on semi-structured data (RSS, anyone :) ). The problem space includes spreadsheets, documents, ad-hoc databases, and web integrated data.

The database he's using supports XQuery, XUpdate, XSLT, XQuery extensions, and free text searching. It supports a RESTful interface (Java servlets), SOAP, and XML-RPC. One of the example applications he's working on is a Faculty Online Database - currently the data exists across Access, SQL Databases, flat text files, spreadsheets, etc. The plan is to simplify all that and still support distributed data ownership. Code:

• 3000 lines of XQuery
• 3000 lines of XSLT
• 300 of XSD (One schema)
• 10 lines of PHP (not much web work done yet)
• 25 pages online thus far

When storing data, trying to use "real world" identifiers as much as possible (names, room numbers, etc). Reduces the gap between the real world domain and the system, but it does have issues - you can easily hit duplicates (example: if I mention "Dave Thomas", which one do I mean? pragDave, or Bedarra Dave?).

In terms of data, decided against using attributes - just went with more elements. Integrity? Schema validation is too weak and too restrictive. NXD stores any well formed XML. Referential Integrity? RDBMS' are "eager, integrity failures have to be repaired outside the db. NXD - stores data on demand, but integrity failures can be persisted. repair is inside the db. XML ids only checked within a document, NXD stores all nodes with internal ids.

For information systems, veracity of the model is what's important.

Functionality delivered via:

• XQuery generating HTML
• code moving to lunction libraries and XSLT as it matures
• XQuery for request input, sessions, selection of nodes, computation of views
• XSLT to generate the interface
• CSS for presentation style

Shelly Powers decries the aggregator, as it stands between the reader and the design of a site. I can't find a better way than this to say it: I don't really care about site design. I seriously doubt that it matters that much to anyone. Shelly thinks that aggregators hurt the spread of community by isolating us from the blogroll; heck, when was the last time anyone's was actually updated? I go months without thinking about it.

Consider: before the web, there were bulletin boards. They were isolated by telephone number, limited by available modems/lines, and text only. And yet, huge communities started there. In its time, USENET had (and still has, actually) a large community - and that's all text as well. If people like what you write, they'll come back. If you tell them (by linking) who else is worth reading, they'll follow. The color styles and pictures in the browser are nice, but they're secondary. If the text isn't worth bothering with, nothing else matters.

Update: Jeneane Sessum doesn't get it either. I read the content, not the pictures. Comments can be supported via the Comment API, which most aggregators support (sadly, few feeds actually offer it). I can "walk around" the part of the blogosphere I am interested in a lot faster with an aggregator than I can with a mile long bookmark list.

Product Managers are, or can be:

• On site customers (what if you don't have any yet)
• Product owners (what does it mean to own a product)
• Product sponsors (what responsibility does a sponsor have)
• Product champions (who are you fighting against)

PM is the business process that actively manages the lifecycle of the product. It's neither R&D nor sales, but the intersection of them. "Responsible for everything and authority over nothing" [ed] - very true :). The PM role in a software firm is different from the role of a PM for a "physical" product.

Focus of this "think tank" session: what does a PM do, how do they do it. What skills/traits are needed, and what sort of organizational support?

The session was a set of exercises meant to make us think about the process of product management - the outputs for that will end up on a wiki in the next few weeks; when that happens I'll update the post.

Today's invited talk is on project retrospectives, and a retrospective on the book "Project Retrospectives" by the author, Norman Kerth. The idea: after a project (any sort), it's a good idea to sit back and discuss what lessons were learned from it.

It's not enough to just gather and identify "what went wrong" and point fingers - the idea is to have the retrospective become a post project ritual that focuses on learning, not blame. For purposes of the retrospective, assume that everyone did the best job that they could at the time with the skills/tools/resources available to them at the time. Example: The campfire discussion of the buffalo hunt in "Dances With Wolves". The upshot: No one person has a complete picture of what happened - you need the perspectives of all the participants, so you can see the things you missed.

Important - you want an "atmosphere of safety" in order to get honest (and complete) feedback. The key things to learn in a retrospective:

• What worked well?
• What have we learned?
• What would we do differently next time?
• What still puzzles us?
• What needs furher work?

The way corporate culture changes is by changing the stories they tell about themselves. Constant learning implies a continual change in the way work gets done. Many organizations simply don't want to change. Some teams do want change:

• Agile teams
• Software Process Groups
• Teams at Wits end
• Consulting firms
• Highly Dynamic firms by design
• Disaster Response teams

Retrospectices can also be useful after milestones are reached, or after a merger, or after a manager/lead has been replaced. in other words, after an important event.

Good question: What do you do about people who lie, or spend their time working to undermine someone else? The idea is to focus on the events that happened, not on the people themselves. Seems to me that this might require a highly focused facilitator with many teams.

Anyone remember the disaster that was the CORBA security serice, or the CORBA resource management service? Well, it looks like the WS* working groups want to revisit the chaos. Tim Bray surveys the damage.

Scoble on anti-smoking:

Hey, Chris Abraham, I'm an anti-smoking fascist. It's one thing I appreciate about California. Have you noticed that the housing prices have gone up continuously since smoking was banned there? Hmmm. Glad to hear Scotland is joining the fascist groups. When we got back from Europe EVERYTHING stank. Yuch.

Hmm. This is all good so long as the "nasty habit" being banned is something you don't like anyway. The trouble is, when the "it's not good for you" nannys get started, they don't know where to stop. Second hand smoke bothers me a whole lot less than the self righteous fanatics who want to "help" me.