Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

James McGovern gives some advice to me:

Minimally consider becoming an advocate of all developer tools to become 100% free of charge. This has happened in several other communities where developer seats are now free but the charge remains for production server implementations. This positions Smalltalk and similar tools that still have legacy models behind them to now be learned by folks in countries such as India where they can gain critical mass in order to support large enterprises who may consider developing with the tools.

Well, it turns out that Cincom Smalltalk is free for non-commercial use already - it's only when you deploy it that you need to pay for a license. Simply download it from our site, and use the online tutorials. He mentioned open source first; I'll point out that Java is not open source, and has spread quite widely. When you grab Cincom Smalltalk, all the sources are available. For commercial users, that includes the VM.

Figure out a way to get the folks over at RedMonk and other analyst firms to change their perception that Smalltalk is dead or has been delegated to minor-league status within the enterprise. Start first by adding influential industry analysts to your blogroll. I would suggest starting with Brenda Michelson and James Governor.

Actually, I read (and link to) James Governor fairly often. I don't always agree with him, but I like his take on things. As to this:

While you are adding folks to your blogroll, consider also adding several enterprise architects from Fortune enterprises. Don't attack them and instead engage in a meaningful dialog with them. Never alienate potential customers.

Well, maybe it's a personality flaw. I call things the way I see them. When I see stuff I like, I say nice things about them. When I see stuff I don't like, I say not so nice things. A suggestion back, though: you'll note that I don't do politics here. There's a reason for that; it's because I figure that people with different worldviews still have money to spend. Those pictures McGovern uses on his blog? They create a perception problem.

I'm with Mark Bernstein - links are neither currency nor attention destroyers, and asserting, as Seth Goldstein does, that "strong web bloggers no longer link" is just nonsense. There have been people who've raged against punctuation too, and they were every bit as silly. When I read a long missive that references someone else, a link to the source is proper web punctuation. Omitting it means that I have to waste time with Google instead, which is just stupid - and impolite.

Meanwhile, Gillmor is proving every day that listening too him actively destroys brain cells:

As for links being dead, Nick [ed: Carr] demurs with an "I don't really get what you're trying to say Steve." Amanda Congdon does. Dave Winer does. What's not to get? Links produce economic ripples that keep incumbents in charge; removing links puts users in charge. Clicking on a link does not pay the author; it pays the signaller (in this case the aggregator, publisher, or arbitrager of the link's "value.") The author of the content is paid in link credits, which tether him or her to the tyranny of the mediocrity of broadcast economics.

I can't get straight to Carr's comments, because Gillmor has some asinine notion that not linking to him empowers me (the reader). Here's a tip, Steve - if that's empowerment, I want a whole lot less of it. He's pushing the idea of what he calls a gesture bank, where we all share meta data in some kind of vast xml ocean. Sure, sure. While you go about building that, the rest of us will just follow the links. Those don't take any effort to create, while the whol gestire sea thing will require lots of buy in, as well as a new tool infrastructure. Given human nature, I won't hold my breath.

Gillmor continues with this:

That's the problem with links: We're all waitresses on this gig. We're waiting on the Big Day when we hit the Big Show, when Mike Arrington or Doc Searls or Dave Winer bestows the Big Link on us that gets us another 10,000 in ValleyWag bucks. Some of my best friends are linkers. Don't forget to tip your linkers. Don't want to link? What, and give up show business?

Umm, no. Links are mostly akin to footnotes in a book, except that they are a hell of lot easier to follow. Steve just doesn't get it. He's out there thinking that we all consider links a desperate bid for attention from the so called A-Listers. No Steve - we mostly think they're a way to get more information about a particular subject. Attention? Heck, I wish Gillmor would start paying attention...

Sony has gone public with details of their pricing for the PS3 - and it looks like the guesswork about how much money they are willing to lose per unit haasn't been far off. They are going $100 up from the XBox, at $499 and $599. That's pretty steep, IMHO - we'll see if my notions about game system price points hold water. The details:

The 20GB HDD version will retail for $499, and the 60GB HDD version will go for $599. They promise 4 million launch units by December 31st. Update: 05/09 03:57 GMT by Z : Apparently, not only does the $499 system have a smaller harddrive, but it has fewer features as well.

Now it's down to how many units actually sell, and who's right about what the market will bear.

Update: Meanwhile, Engadget has a rumor about pricing for the Nintendo Wii.

Sadly, this could be me :)

Bob Congdon isn't sure about the new Mac ads:

The Mac is a young guy in casual clothes with a boyish stubble. In contrast, the PC is a middle-aged, suited business man. Do these two look familiar? It's no coicidence that the Mac looks like Steve Jobs circa 1975 while the PC is an overstuffed caricature of Bill Gates.

The ads may be entertaining but are they effective at getting users to switch? I'm not so sure. By relying on tired stereotypes Apple runs the risk of alienating and insulting the audience it's trying to convert.

I just saw this for the first time last night, and I thought it worked. The "what apps come bundled" thing was truly funny (although, to be fair, most PCs you buy from a vendor will come with some variant of Office pre-loaded). I don't think these ads will alienate anyone, but we'll have to wait and see whether they are effective.

Cincom's Helge Nowak sends along news of two upcoming events in Europe, both with a call for presentations/papers out:

There are two conferences coming up in Germany that would be very nice platforms to present Smalltalk with interesting talks as an up-to-date hot technology. While they are held in Germany both of them are interesting for international presenters and audience:

• Net.ObjectDays is a framework for a lot of interesting international sub conferences: http://www.netobjectdays.org/en/index.html
• these are the call for papers: http://www.netobjectdays.org/en/news/news.html
• iX Conference: the well recognised German IT magazine iX (http://www.heise.de/ix/) organises a conference on "Better Software!"
• this is the call for papers: http://www.ix-konferenz.de/

If it fits your plans, these are good shows - I've attended the first one before

Gee - what a shocker. OPML, yet another underspecified format that Dave Winer created, isn't as interoperable as people would like. As is par for the course, everyone is gushing about how great an idea the OPML sharing thing is, while tip toeing around the suckage:

First, I exported the group of feeds (the channel) from FeedDemon. That created an OPML file. Yet when I tried to upload it to Share Your OPML, I got an error that the file contained no feeds. I looked and it did - all the feeds were there.

So I then opened that OPML file in Dave Winer’s OPML Editor, did a ’save as…’ and then looked at that file. It had one thing the original didn’t - the <opml version="1.1"> container as the very first line. Uploading that new file to Share Your OPML worked without error.

So yeah, as I've said before, OPML just sucks. If the idea behind "Share Your OPML" takes off, I fully expect the following to happen:

• Various XML experts will start to notice the suckage, and point out what needs to be fixed
• As with RSS, Dave Winer will champion the suckage as a feature
• Various stupid work-arounds will be created by implementors, all of which will vary slightly
• Finally, a new format will be proposed to fix the problems
• Dave Winer will act stunned, and take it as some kind of betrayal.
• Meanwhile, his various enablers will refuse to call BS on him

Gee, it's almost like I've seen the movie before.

Demonstrating just how enterprisey he can be, Robert McIlree takes a shot at Chris Petrilli and me:

I got a 'visit' from self-proclaimed enterprise architect debunker Christopher Petrilli, and later, as it appears customary in posts by EA-types, from his sycophant James Robinson. Before I deconstruct their commentary, I'd like to thank both guys for the huge traffic they directed to my blog today. To those of you coming here from their links or a feed for the first time, welcome. Take the time to read my posts, judge for yourself where I'm coming from, and comments, whether you agree or disagree on anything I've written about, are welcomed.

So ask yourself - how reliable is a *cough* enterprise architect *cough* going to be when he can't get the spelling of one of his critics names right? It's not like my name is hard - it's right there at the top of my blog.

I can see it now: "ESB? Gosh, I'm sorry, I had it down as EJB..."

I should be 2 inches taller, given the location of the smoke detector in the bedroom. Here's the ladder set up to get there - believe me, I wasn't happy up near the top, changing the battery out:

This one gives you some idea of where the ceiling is:

So if I were 2 inches taller, I wouldn't need to be so close to the top of the ladder. My dad is over 6 feet tall; I could have used some of that :/

Dave Buck's excellent screencast demonstrating Smalltalk has hit reddit - go and give it some up points so more people see it.

Don Box asks a couple of Ruby questions:

• What's the performance penalty for passing/calling a block vs. executing the code "directly" on the current frame?  Does the cost go up/down if the block doesn't reference any symbols in the enclosing frame?  I know the answers for the CLR and C#, but I'm not sure my intuitions from that environment apply here.
• Do people wind up using blocks to model simple CPS-like idioms and if so, how does the runtime's stack management hold up?

I can't answer specifically for Ruby, but I can give my impression from its close cousin, Smalltalk. I created a simple class that ran one of two tests:

testDirect: n
	| val |
	val := Time millisecondsToRun: [n timesRepeat: [1000 factorial]].
	Transcript show: 'Direct for ', n printString, ' repetitions: ', val printString; cr


testBlock: n
	| val |
	val := Time millisecondsToRun: [n timesRepeat: [myBlock value]].
	Transcript show: 'Direct for ', n printString, ' repetitions: ', val printString; cr

Then I ran each test 1000 times, to get something representative. Over 1000 runs, I got 3100 ms for the direct run, and 3300 for the block (with a variance of about 100 ms per run). Upping that to 10,000 repetitions each, the difference between the two dropped to an irrelevant 60 ms (i.e., noise). So in Smalltalk at least, there aren't performance reasons to avoid blocks.

Which leaves it to being a "does it make sense from a design standpoint". Blocks are used quite frequently in Smalltalk in places where other languages have built in operators (i.e., various iteration methods in the Collection hierarchy). It's never caused an issue with the runtime stack that I know of - and the fact that Seaside (which carries full blown context stacks around) holds up tells me that there shouldn't be a problem.

That may not help for Ruby, but it does point out that a system using Blocks can be implemented efficiently.

Dr. Dobbs has a long write up on the state of Smalltalk - apparently taken in part from this year's Smalltalk Solutions. In particular, it's taken in large measure from Georg Heeg's talk. I didn't see his talk this year, but it sounds like it went well. Check it out - it's a nice write up

A small preface - here's what I think is going on with McGovern:

His blog is an elaborate piece of satire

If you follow the link to his blog, you'll find that he links here, with the comment "One blogger that has a great perspective that the community should read is Charlie Savage". Well - that blog is all about mapping and GIS. Somewhere, the guy who actually writes the silliness on McGovern's site has been having a great laugh at my (and others) expense, as we took him seriously. I suppose the images he uses should have been a bigger hint :)

Update: In the comments, Chris is of the opinion that McGovern is for real. In which case, there's possibility two, which I edited out of my original draft: He's perhaps the dumbest individual capable of walking upright that I've encountered in some time

Having said that, there's some (small) value in pointing a couple of things out:

James Robertson seems to be stuck in a loop on Smalltalk. Whenever there is controversy of any sort within the blogosphere, folks will more often that not express their perspective from the outsider looking in point of view. I wonder what James would think if he worked for a large Fortune enterprise...

Hmm - Seeing as how I'm the Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk, is my advocacy position so hard to fathom? If I didn't believe in Cincom Smalltalk, I'd be off working for a client company somewhere, instead of being the head cheerleader here.

Oh, and as to me working at a Fortune 500 company? Gads no. I worked in the US Department of Defense for a few years, and stifling bureaucracy is not my idea of a good time. Thanks, but no thanks.

I've said for awhile that the Tablet PC is a solution in search of a problem; Microsoft's new Origami idea is helping prove me right. The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro is highly unimpressed with Samsung's entry into the space. It ships with no CD/DVD player, which makes loading new software hard:

The tested Q1 arrived with almost no third-party software; a copy of Microsoft Office and last year's version of Norton AntiVirus were the only notable additions. The copy of Windows Media Player included an extra "skin" for that program, with large buttons meant to be selected with a thumb (should you want to employ something the size of two Walkmen duct-taped together as an MP3 player).

He also points out that the screen is small, and that using the Tablet interface for writing or typing is just painful. It only has 36 GB of disk, so you're better off with a video iPod if you want to store music and movies - it's smaller, and has more storage. With the screen size, using normal Windows apps is going to be painful (try using 800x600 resolution on your PC for an hour and see how you do). For $1100, this is an expensive door stopper that won't stop your door. I have no idea who the target market is; Since you can't slap a DVD into it, it's utility for watching movies while traveling is limited. It's too big to be an MP3 player. The screen is too small to be useful as a PC, and without a keyboard, it's not a desktop replacement.

Why dynamic is hard on static VMs:

Ruby actually requires more in the way of support than just continuations, but it's not necessarily impossible to implement on the CLR; it's just hard to implement on the CLR in a high-performing manner using today's CLR. That's part of what Jim is there to do, evolve the CLR to better support languages with Ruby's interesting featureset (like open classes and the "missing_method" method) in such a way that it doesn't tear down perf.

I've been following Less is Better, which covers implementing Ruby on the CLR. If you read there, you'll find that doing Ruby on the CLR pretty much means implementing a full VM on top of the CLR. Which tells me that the CLR is not that nice an environment for a dynamic language. The JVM is no better, and will likely remain worse. Yes, I know that there's a JSR on that. Wake me in 2015 when they get around to implementing it, and try not to asct surprised when the level of baroqueness they've added (can you say generics?) is absurd.

The bottom line is, the original designs for the CLR and the JVM did not encompass dynamic languages and the things they do. They aren't optimal for the kind of lookup a dynamic language uses for methods - in fact, they have been optimized in a different direction altogether. Then we get to continuation support - not critical for all dynamic languages, but useful if you want something like Seaside. Just look at this reasoning:

Continuations are not impossible to support, however they are currently more or less impossible to support given the current lack of access to the underlying stack frames in the managed environment--you'd need some support from the runtimes (either the JVM or the CLR) to make it work. Such runtime support would not be too difficult to add, however, as both environments already have rich and powerful stack-walking mechanisms (because both environments use the thread stack as bookkeeping tools, among other things, and need to be able to crawl through those stack markers for a variety of reasons, such as security checks), and it would not be hard to create a runtime-level mechanism that allowed code to "take a snapshot" of the stack--and its related object graph--from a certain point to a certain point, and save off that state to some arbitrary location. In many respects, it would be similar to serializing an object, I believe.

To summarize: "Continuations won't be hard on the CLR, so long as we can achieve 6 impossible things before breakfast". Sure. I'll return to what I said above - the static VMs weren't designed with this in mind, and adding it won't be easy.

Here's a simpler idea: You want the advantages of a dynamic language? Why not use a system that was designed that way? You know, right tool for the job and all that...

Janko Mivsek announced the latest version of Aida/Web on the vwnc mailing list, and I thought I'd give it a wider distribution:

I invite you to try the newest release of a web application server Aida/Web from:

• demo and discussion page: http://aida.eranova.si
• VW parcels: ftp://ftp.eranova.si/aida/aida-5.0.tar.gz
• Cincom Public repository, bundle AIDA/Web

AIDA/Web is a web application server based on Swazoo and a framework for building complex web applications of many sorts. In that respect it is similar to Seaside. It has everything you need for a real web app, together with Ajax.

It is also a mature one, running real web apps since 1996. It is used in many intranet business apps from Gas billing system for all gas in Slovenia to logistics management system called e-logis and recently a CMS like system for Quality and Business process management.

A new version has a lot of new stuff:

• Integrated Ajax support, (among others: async update of any element, autocomplete fields, in-place editing)
• integrated Ajax libraries Prototype and Scriptaculous (javascript in methods)
• Javascript components like Calendar
• WYSIWYG editor support (TinyMCE)
• strong WebGrid support with Ajax sorting and filtering
• Scheduler for scheduling one-time or periodic events
• WebDAV support

Installation:

• load parcel Swazoo.pcl
• load parcel AIDAWeb.pcl
• doit SwazooServer demoStart
• in web browser open http://localhost:8888
• login with admin/password

More on:

• http://www.eranova.si/aida
• http://aida.eranova.si (demos, discussions)

Enjoy!

You can usually find Janko on the Smalltalk IRC Channel as well

Scoble gets a demo:

We're getting a demo of Croquet from Julian Lombardi and David Smith of Open Croquet , which is a 3D world. Something like Second Life, but runs P2P.

We have just seen a new world.

Cool stuff, this Smalltalk :)

Update: As David Buck says in comments, this was hardly the first demo; I blogged the 2003 Smalltalk Solutions presentation.

I think Eric Raymond's post on the new generation of boardgames (starting with Settlers of Catan back in the 90's) is ontop something. I'm not as hungry for the kind of wargame that he is; for one thing, it's a lot harder to find like-minded gamers for that than it is for the more general game. That, and I'd have to be convinced that a wargame didn't involve investing an entire weekend :) Anyway, I think Raymond is spot on with this evaluation of the changes:

I enjoy strategy games. I’ve been playing them since the heyday of the elaborate hundreds-of-tiny-counters hex-map historical-simulation wargames in the 1970s and early 1980s. But those games don’t get played much any more, largely because they took so long to set up and learn; after 1985 or so younger gamers moved to computer simulations instead, and as the hex-wargame genre stagnated many old-school gamers eventually abandoned it in favor of military-miniatures gaming.

The set up is a killer. I used to play Third Reich (a European Theater level game of WWII), and just setting up for a game took over an hour - part of that was deciding how to do initial deployment. It took forever, and the game mechanics were tedious. Computer Automation has taken that ground over, I think. Where I've gone is the so-called "EuroGame":

Be that as it may…in the late 1990s we started to see a new wave of fresh, innovative game designs in a different style. Settlers of Catan in 1995 was the harbinger. This game of trade and civilization-building featured an elegant combination of simple mechanics with tricky, relatively deep strategy. There are several possible routes to victory in Settlers, all requiring both positional tactics and careful management of constrained resources. The game is made more attractive by colorful, high-quality physical furniture and tasteful artwork. It can be played lightly and socially or in an intense minimaxing mode, and (importantly) is really designed for three or four players though it can be played one-on-one. It rewards repeated playing.

Our current favorite is Caylus, which combines many of the elements of Puerto Rico and Settlers of Catan. It's a longer game, but well worth it, IMHO. I'm not looking to get back into wargames like Raymond is, but I'm sure glad that board game design has had a renaissance.

InfoWorld has a scary article about how malware can get right under the SSL connection to a bank, and execute a "man at the endpoint" attack. The problem? Once malware is on the machine, any transaction that occurs is trusted - and "safely" encrypted. Thus everything looks ok to both the bank and the customer, even though they may be seeing differing transactions. Here's the gist:

“The problem is,” according to one bank regulatory security auditor, “SSL isn’t broken. SSL states that the connection between your PC’s network card and the bank’s network card isn’t compromised. This is still true. Nobody is sniffing the transaction off the wire. Instead, this is a ‘man-in-the-end-point’ attack.” In other words, the Trojan is sniffing or manipulating the transaction before it is ever sent across the Internet to the bank.

...

“It’s not a problem of authentication but one of transactional authorization,” says Bruce Schneier, leading security expert and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security. “No matter how hard you make the initial authentication for the end-user or hacker, the malware can just wait until the authentication is done and then manipulate the transaction.”

So what does my post title have to do with that? Well, InfoWorld interviewed a number of bank and regulatory personnel. Here's the bottom line - changing the security setup looks politically (corp. politics-wise) difficult, so it's not going to happen - at least, not until something really awful happens (and gets reported). In other words, not before you see the scary tag-lines on the 7 pm news:

When told how SSL-evading Trojans can bypass any authentication mechanism, most offered up additional ineffective authentication as a solution. When convinced by additional discussion that the problem could be solved only by fixing transactional authorization, most shrugged their shoulders and said they would remain under pressure to continue implementing authentication-only solutions.

They were also hesitant to broach the subject with senior management. It had taken so long to get banks to agree to two-factor authentication, they said, it would be almost impossible to change recommendations midstream. That puts the banking industry on a collision course with escalating attacks.

You've seen this one before. Someone (maybe even you) recommends some new security procedure. You then find out that as effective as you would like - but it was expensive, both in monetary and political terms - to implement. People had to change their business processes and implement new systems to support it - and now you've found that it's not enough. The all too common result: "Let's ignore it and hope it doesn't hit us".

Which is where bank and regulatory management seems to be on this. From the sounds of it, it's not executive management either - it's not getting that far. It's middle tier people, afraid to stick their necks out on something that will cost money to fix. Wait until this hits the fan - the finger pointing is going to be everywhere.

Bill Hobbs has a good roundup of the way the WKPA lawsuit imbrogolio fell out. Ad Age gave McCartin a chance to give his rationale for ending the suit:

"It had really taken on a life of its own and it had really become more of a distraction to the business at hand, which is to advance the tourism industry in Maine," Tom McCartin, president of WKPA, said about his reasons for dropping the suit. "And above all, as I think any good agency would tell you, we have the interests of our client at heart."

Read the next paragraph, and you'll find that the client was getting pretty peeved at the blog-storm:

Dann Lewis, director of the Maine Office of Tourism, was not available for comment. But he had told Ad Age earlier that the suit was affecting his office staffers time more than his state's image. "The only thing that's hurting us is it's distracting a number of my staff from dealing with the issues that really matter here -- our day-to-day activity in promoting tourism to Maine."

Which goes right back to what I said about this at the beginning - WKPA created a Negative PR Event. Maine will get past this (and I would not be surprised if they get past it by ending the contract with WKPA). WKPA, on the other hand, is going to have to live with this for awhile. As they pitch clients, those clients will be doing something that didn't occur to WKPA before all this - looking them up in the search engines. Before this, a search for WKPA gave back inocuous results. Possibly disturbing for reasons of omission - i.e. - "why is an ad agency so invisible on the web?" - but not negative.

Now? It's pretty much all bad, and it'll stay that way for a good while. That will almost certainly hurt their business. The only question at this point is whether they've learned anything by it. A smart company would put a summary of this on their own website, admitting that they were in error - and apologizing for it. That way, people searching for corporate references would find an explanation that came from someone other than critics. Don't hold your breath though - their website is a pure Flash thing. Utterly non-sticky, and utterly useless.

This week's logs should be a little different - there was a huge traffic spike from Thursday evening forward: this post got posted to the top of reddit.com, and then it appeared on slashdot yesterday afternoon. The server survived all that with only a brief hiccup - which is pretty good considering that I'm running on an underpowered PIII with only 256MB of RAM! Anyway, the numbers for BottomFeeder downloads:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	646
Mac X	152
Linux x86	128
CE ARM	85
Mac 8/9	76
Update	48
Solaris	30
HPUX	30
Windows98/ME	29
AIX	17
Sources	13
Linux Sparc	11
Linux PPC	9
SGI	3
ADUX	2

That's a slight uptick, to a rate of 182 per day. Not bad, and there was a spike on Thursday and Friday - the downloads ran at a rate of 230 per day for those two days. Now the HTML page accesses, which should show an interesting spike for those days as well:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	69.7%
Internet Explorer	23.3%
Other	2.7%
MSN Bot	1.9%
Opera	1.4%
Megite	1%

The total number of unique IP addresses nearly tripled, with nearly all of that coming on Thursday and Friday - and look at the percentages - Mozilla up about 5 percent over the normal distribution, and up enough to drive most of the bots that hit my site down into statistical irrelevance. I guess you can tell what the Slashdot reading crowd browses with :) Finally, the RSS accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	28.9%
BottomFeeder	15.1%
Net News Wire	9%
BlogLines	9%
Other	9.4%
Internet Explorer	6.4%
Safari RSS	4.5%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.7%
NewsGator	1.9%
BlogSearch	1.7%
RSS Bandit	1.6%
Planet Smalltalk	1.5%
JetBrains	1.2%
SharpReader	1.1%
Feed Demon	1%
Java	1%
News Fire	1%
Liferea	1%
Attensa	1%

The number of tools that made my cutoff of 1% dropped slightly, which is consistent with the HTML results. The overall number of unique IP addresses hitting the feeds rose by over 1000 last week - I hope some of them stick around. Anyway, that's the roundup on the activity - the server stayed up, and took the traffic.

Currently, the MS Live team is busily blowing that first chance with Darren Barefoot:

We run Google AdWords campaigns for a few of our clients. Seeing an opportunity to get a jump on some of the competition, I figured I’d sign up to adCenter and check things out. Unfortunately, when I tried to sign up, I encountered the following message

Microsoft adCenter does not currently support the web browser you are using. Please sign in using Internet Explorer 6+. More about system requirements

Scoble has noted this, and it seems like the MS Live team has as well. However, they should have noticed it before they went live.

Last night, my post on the "Is Google Full" thing hit reddit.com. This afternoon, it got slashdotted. That's caused a wee bit of stress on the server :) Smalltalk seems to be handling the load though, and it's a back version too - I haven't yet upgraded from VW 7.1 (for a variety of lame reasons). I'm off to dinner, but I'll be back to check later.

The concept of a Negative PR Event seems to have finally sunken in at WKPA: they've dropped their suit. As the Media Bloggers association said in a statement:

"As it should be, the story of 'Warren Kremer Paino and the Maine Blogger' is now a cautionary tale", said MBA President Robert Cox, "future potential plaintiffs would do well to consider WKP's experience in attempting to silence a blog critic through the Federal courts.

PR professionals should pay attention to this mess - this is where things go when you decide to use the lawsuit howitzer against the blogosphere.

It's looking pretty bad. I updated my earlier post, after noticing that a Maine legislator is calling on the state to drop WKPA. The link-fest of negative news continues; Instapundit posted on the legislator story today; Jeff Jarvis' take back on April 27th is looking prescient. Scroll down to the bottom of this post to see how many people have commented on the matter - or go to Technorati and see their linkage.

It's turning out to be what I described back when I first noticed this - it's a Negative PR Event that's going badly for WKPA and their client. And their client has started to notice.

I've alluded to the patching capabilities of BottomFeeder before, but it seems that I've never actually gone into much detail. I had an email on that this morning, so I figured I should post on it.

The basic capabilities are built into the product - assuming you've left the compiler in your runtime, loading new code in via file-in or parcel loading is easily possible. What I added for my application was this:

• An HTTP based interface, allowing the application to query a server for updates
• an XML based manifest system whereby the client can check what's already loaded versus what's on the server
• An ability to have the updates loaded after download, without the normal development-time dialogs

If you have access to the Public Store Repository, you can check out the package PatchFileDelivery (which should have no dependencies on BottomFeeder - I may have to weed a couple out). The name is something of a misnomer, due to the evolution of the package. When I started, I was delivering small patch parcels, but I moved away from that and on to delivery of new versions of already loaded parcels - it made version control in the runtime a lot simpler. The basic steps look like this:

1. Execute an HTTP Query to the server for the XML manifest
2. Client compares Manifest to what's loaded
3. Client offers any available updates to the user
4. Selected updates are downloaded via HTTP
5. If requested (and if possible), updates are loaded immediately

So let's take a brief look at those steps. The manifest is a collection of ComponentDefinition objects. That class looks like this:

Smalltalk.Patch defineClass: #ComponentDefinition
	superclass: #{Core.Object}
	indexedType: #none
	private: false
	instanceVariableNames: 'parcelName parcelFilename version oldVersion releaseDate vwVersion isPlugin descriptiveName description fileSize allowDynamicLoad '
	classInstanceVariableNames: ''
	imports: ''
	category: 'PatchFileDelivery'

The important pieces of that are the version, parcelName, and allowDynamicLoad. The last one of those is a flag to the client - if it's false, the component in question requires a restart. That comes up when I have an update that does major changes to the UI, for instance. There are ways of dealing with that, but I figured a restart was simpler, and haven't really received complaints. The version is just that - a value derived from Store, the source file repository I use. The name and version are compared to what's loaded to come up with the list for the user.

Once that's figured out, the user's selections are downloaded via HTTP. The only difference between the base HTTP capabilities of VW and what I do is the progress dialog - and that's code that was submitted by Bob, one of our engineers. The change? Additional code in a subclass of the relevant HTTP class to raise notifications of status. Once the code is downloaded, it's either simply saved, or saved and loaded. If it's the latter, the following code gets used to load the new version of the parcel:

actuallyLoadParcelFrom: parcelFile

	[[Parcel loadParcelFrom: parcelFile] on: Parcel parcelAlreadyLoadedSignal, CodeStorageError
		do: [:ex | ex resume: true]] 
			on: DuplicateBindingsError
			do: [:ex | ex resume]

The first handler catches the "already loaded" signal - which normally raises a dialog. I didn't want that, so I catch it and just have the system resume with true. Which illustrates one of the cool things about Smalltalk exception handling, btw - the ability to rewind back and have the system move along with the correct answer.

The second handler catches transient errors that arise during the load of the new parcel - in some situations, the new version of code can look like a duplicate code binding. That gets resolved as the load continues, so I just catch it and continue. Which again demonstrates the coolness of Smalltalk exception handling.

Once that's done, we have the new code loaded and are ready to run again. What about the next startup? Well, BottomFeeder looks in a known directory for new versions of code, and that's where the upgrade manager saves them. So when the application is started up, it does step (5) from above. And that's it - pretty simple.

WKPA continues to take an online beating over the lawsuit they've brought against Lance Dutson. Have a look at the results of a Technorati search for Warren Kremer Paino Advertising. That's PR all right, just not the kind any agency wants. It's not much prettier with a Google search either. Yahoo results and MSN results look pretty bad for them too.

The longer this goes on, the more damage it will do to WKPA - they'll be living with bad search results for a long, long time as a result of this - and that won't help them in their prospecting.

Update: Seems the legislature in Maine has noticed that this isn't reflecting well on the state. What a shocker:

A Maine legislator, Stephen Bowen, has written to the state tourism office to request the suspension of Warren Kremer Paino Advertising's contract with the state.

Seth Godin points out the obvious, which is apparently too obvious for those bright guys at WKPA:

Most lawyers view their job as a defensive one. They use phrases like, "keeping you out of trouble."

Unfortunately, when they interact with the public or with a partner or even a landlord, they are marketing your organization, whether they want to or not.

I rather suspect that a lot of lawyers are going to be slow figuring this out, given their love of obscurantist language.

Bob Nemec announced that Yanni Chu will be talking about Seaside at the next TSUG meeting on May 18. Check it out.

Everyone has their moments; mine happened the other day when I was setting up the new STIC blog. I had everything set up, had the server recache its setup files (so that it would know about the new service), and did the basic configuration of the new blog from its ini file. And the thing returned 404s. This baffled me for a couple of hours - I went so far as to ask the guy who admins Apache if there was a configuration problem.

Then I actually looked at the problem as if it were my fault (which it was). Dohhh - the various SSP files have been factored to load in some include files, so that I don't need to maintain parallel versions of every basic file. I had forgotten to copy those over to the new directory. Which about like forgetting to plug the computer in...

Without giving too much way, I consider it a bad sign when the body count on "Lost" is higher than the body count on "The Sopranos". Just saying...

I've just started reading David Fromkin's "A Peace to end all Peace", which covers the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern Middle East - with all the attendant joy that came with that :/ It's very readable, and even though I've just started, I really feel like I've gotten new information: Fromkin's description of what happened after the Goeben and Beslau entered Ottoman waters in August of 1914 is very different from what I read in Barbara Tuchman's book. This promises to be an eye opening read.

You have to wonder about any publication that employs a fact challenged guy like Andrew Orlowski. Have a look at the latest article he has, which made it to Digg today. In a discussion about supposedly bad search results from Google (I hadn't noticed, and this is the first I've seen anyone talk about it), he says this:

Recently, we featured a software tool that can create 100 Blogger weblogs in 24 minutes, called Blog Mass Installer. A subterranean industry of sites providing "private label articles," or PLAs exists to flesh out "content" for these freshly minted sites. And as a result, legitimate sites are often caught in the cross fire.

But the new algorithms may not be solely to blame. Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt has hinted at another reason for the recent chaos. In Google's earnings conference call last month, Schmidt was frank about the extent of the problem.

"Those machines are full," he said. "We have a huge machine crisis."

And there's at least some anecdotal evidence to support the theory that hardware limitations are to blame.

That's a fairly nasty bit of selective quoting. Orlowski leaves the impression that "full" machines are causing search problems. Follow the link though - that comment came in reference to the huge capital infrastructure spending that Google is engaged in:

Google continued to make substantial capital investments, mainly in computer servers, networking equipment and its data centers. It spent $345 million on such items in the first quarter, more than double the level of last year. Yahoo, its closest rival, spent $142 million on capital expenses in the first quarter.

Referring to the sheer volume of Web site information, video and e-mail that Google's servers hold, Schmidt said: "Those machines are full. We have a huge machine crisis."

Jordan Rohan of RBC Capital Markets called Google's capital spending "unfathomably high," noting that it spent the same percentage of its revenue on equipment as a wire-line phone company.

Boy, it sure sounds different when you actually put it in context, doesn't it? This seems to be Orlowski's stock in trade though - pulling stuff out of context and making wild assumptions - sometimes he just makes crap up.

The stupid thing is, you could write a worried sounding article about Google and their capital spending from the source he links to - heck, one paragraph down from what I quoted above, Rohan says the following:

"If Google's market share continues to increase, and its position as the central hub of the Internet is reinforced, an extra $1 billion is a worthwhile investment," Rohan said. "The day market share peaks, we have a problem."

Now there's potential grist for a story. Orlowski seems to be blind to actual stories though, even when he links right to them.

The PTO just allowed Microsoft to patent the obvious:

US Patent 7039699, as it is formally known, will provide developers with an Application Program Interface (API) which can be called from languages such as JavaScript, ASP, and VBScript. The permanent cookie can contain four data types consisting of bits, counters, dates, and strings. In the patent description, Microsoft also notes that the cookie is flexible enough to allow for new data types in the future. But boring technical details aside, what is Microsoft's goal with the patent? Nothing but the obvious.

See the referenced page for the details; this is just stupid. The PTO needs to impose a moratorium on software patents; preferably a permanent one.

I'm with Derek on this one:

So George Lucas apparently lied when he said that "the original material simply didn't exist" to create unaltered versions of the original trilogy.

.. Because this September, Lucas has decided to milk that cash cow one last time , and make available DVD versions of the really-and-truly original version (with "Star Wars" even having the '77 crawl that simply says "STAR WARS", and not "EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE").

Step away from the director's chair, George.

Hmm. I see that Eric Clayberg of Instantiations has posted a call to port Seaside to VA. It's interesting:

Currently, Seaside is available for Squeak and VisualWorks. It has not been ported to other dialects such as VAST. We would like to see it ported to VAST. To that end, we are issuing a challenge to the VAST user community to port Seaside to VAST. To make it worth your while, we are offering a reward of a full license to VAST and all of our add-on products (a $9,595 value) to the first *five* people who successfully and independently port Seaside to VAST (we want to make sure that anyone who gets it working is rewarded, not just the first to finish).

The Seaside web site states that "Many Smalltalk VMs do not support the stack-copying techniques Seaside uses to implement backtracking". According to the site, this includes VAST. Assuming that this is true, you may need to be creative and come up with slightly different implementations based on what VAST can do. The most important criteria is that the public API surfaced by Seaside works as specified. Tutorial examples should also work unmodified.

So... if you don't support continuations in the base product, how would you get an actual port? I know that Michael has a VA (and VW now) framework he calls SimpleWeb, which he claims does some of what Seaside does. I haven't looked at it in detail; maybe he should submit it and claim the prize :)

However, I noticed that the port to Dolphin involved some work by the Dolphin guys themselves to support continuations. Seems to me that Eric is going to have to put some skin in the game, beyond just offering free licenses.

If you have contributed code to Cincom Smalltalk (i.e., lives in the "contributed" directory) - or would like to - then point your browser here for instructions.

Check out the CST Technical Blog for the latest information on support resolutions for Cincom Smalltalk - both VW and OST.

Well, this is interesting. Apparently, the folks behind Lost are going to sprinkle clues into the ads in order to compel DVR users to lay off the Fast Forward button:

To find the new adventure, you must watch the show's entire Wednesday episode. TiVo and DVR users be warned: There are clues in the commercials as well.

"It's TiVo-proof," Benson said. "We will surprise the audience with where and how things are placed as far as clues and content and information. The whole experience is designed to dig deep and find lots of interesting stuff."

Apparently, this is related more to a "Lost Experience" thing that they are running as an extension (and expansion) of the series. It's an interesting test, but it will be hard to get real numbers for how well it works.

Here's another all too common story from the customer support arena:

• Outsource Support in order to cut costs
• Give the new support staff a rigid set of scripts to follow, and no flexibility to adapt to circumstances
• Make sure to answer complaints with vaguely related, and irritating form letters
• Be utterly stunned when people aren't happy with you

I have some experience with this kind of "support" - I dealt with the fine outsourced support at ReplayTV here and here. This is the worst kind of situation, because there are no hard numbers other than the easy to find savings from lower cost support staff. The soft costs of having customers and prospects progressively more irritated by sub-standard support? That's harder to figure out, and doesn't show up on the spreadsheets that management looks at. Are those costs higher than the savings you get? It depends on the business you're in. If you support a complex product or service, then the soft costs likely outweigh the easy to spot personnel savings - but it will be really, really hard to quantify.

Say hello to Bob Nemec, STIC's new director. He'll be posting about STIC's activities, and asking the community for support and suggestions. Why not stop by and subscribe now?

The clowns at WKPA should be ashamed to show their faces - over on Ad Age, McCartin (their President) explains why they brought the suit:

Tom McCartin, president of WKPA, is most concerned about Mr. Dutson's public posts because if potential clients search for the agency online, they will likely see Mr. Dutson's critique-filled blog before the agency's own Web site. As a result, Mr. McCartin says his business, which sees capitalized billings in the $40 million range, has been hurt. And he wants to protect his reputation.

Here, let me translate: "We here at WKPA are way too stupid to understand how search engines work. Why, just look at our website if you don't believe me! Nothing but WKPA approved verbiage should be allowed on the internet when talking about us, because we can't be bothered to learn new things. Why, if it worked in 1990, it should still work!"

McCartin should listen to Steve Rubel, who knows something about PR in the internet era:

"The last thing you want to do is sue [bloggers]," Mr. Rubel said. The publicity will be so negative that you probably would save face by negotiating as far as you can, he said. Publicity is bound to be bad for the agency because it is suing an individual who likely doesn't have the same defensive resources.

Which is what I said when I first commented on this. WKPA has created a negative PR event, which is bad for them and bad for their client. I wonder how happy their client is at this point? Going forward, I can't imagine that this will do good things for their prospecting efforts:

WKPA: Hire us, we'll promote you!

Prospect: You mean, like you promoted the State of Maine? Hmm, no thanks!

Welcome to 2006 guys.

The javascript editor on the comment page doesn't work, and yields empty comments when people try to use it - a failure obnoxious setup, as it happens. After some prodding by Troy, I've adjusted for Safari - when you decide to comment from Safari, you should be directed straight into the non-Javascript editor. If for any reason that doesn't happen, let me know - and follow the link that does take you to the non-JS page.

Warren Kremer Paino Advertising continues to just not get it. They still have their suit against Lance Dutson out there, and the negative PR just keeps piling up. Last week, a Google search for their agency turned up mostly b2b references; now, it shows an awful lot of negative stories. Interestingly enough, they do seem to understand that they look bad - last night, Scott Johnson's post ranked first - this morning, three older stories have popped right to the top. So they do understand that they have created negative PR, but thus far, at least, it looks like they think they can game their way out of it.

Meanwhile, mainstream press is starting to notice the story - PBS, The Wall Street Journal, and the Boston Globe (that's an older story). All of this looks like it's getting somewhere - Lance Dutson reports that the end client - the State of Maine tourism folks - have noticed the negative PR:

I received a call Friday from an assistant to Jack Cashman, he is the head of Maine’s Department of Economic and Community Development, and a member of the Governor’s cabinet. His department oversees the Office of Tourism, this is Dann Lewis’s boss.

Cashman wants to set up a meeting between me and Warren Kremer Paino, to mediate this. The meeting is tentatively set up for this Thursday.

Sounds to me like the client is pushing back on the agency some - at least they realize that negative PR events are not what they are paying for.

Now, recall what I said about this last week - the facts of this matter are nearly irrelevant at this point. What's happened is that a large corporate entity has decided to shut down a gadfly by pulling out a bomb. A decade ago, this would probably have worked. Outside of Maine, no one would have noticed, and the gadfly in question would have backed off (and likely been ruined by the suit). Now, the broadcast power that Glenn Reynolds wrote of in "An Army of Davids" makes it much, much harder for companies to do that. Instead, they have to actually do the hard work of making an honest response to criticism. Which is better for all of us.

Update: After writing this, I notice that Glenn Reynolds has posted an article on the more general topic - why trying to silence bloggers doesn't work - up on TCS Daily.

I agree with Lore Sjöberg - adding "comentary" to old Star Trek episodes does sound lame:

Star Trek 2.0 is the cable station's effort to combine classic episodes of Star Trek with the worst aspects of the web. It takes episodes of Star Trek, the original Shatner-soaked tales of noble-yet-lusty exploration of the galaxy's mysteries, shrinks them to about two-thirds of their original size, then fills up the new margins with ostensibly interactive and theoretically interesting elements.

I loved the shot he took at "Enterprise" at the end though. After dissing all the new "interactive" stuff, he says:

Luckily, we still have the DVD sets, and in all fairness G4 still shows the series in its original format once a week. That's a relief, because this version is a bloated, beeping, boring mess. It's still better than Enterprise, though.

If Rick Berman is still wondering why they are excluding him from the next movie, he should read this review.

Last week, HostingMatters was hit by a large DOS attack - a political blogger was being targeted, and 100 other sites were collateral damage. Now tonight, it looks like LiveJournal and TypePad are being targeted by a DOS attack. Via Glenn Reynolds:

Anil Dash emails: "TypePad appears to be down because I think connectivity to the hosting facility has been knocked out for us as well as everybody else in the facility. I'm just finding out more now, but that's why even the status site is offline, as well as a bunch of other companies' websites. We'll be updating the status.sixapart.com blog ASAP with more info."

I notice a number of sites seem to be hard to reach at the moment. A reader reports that LiveJournal is down, too.

This has the look of a "wave of the future" kind of thing. There have been plenty of reports of botnets being available for hire - this is something we are going to see a lot of.

Update: Looks like SixApart got the problem taken care of. I'd love to know more about the source of it though.

I feel better about my outage yesterday - Instapundit notes that Typepad is down. I guess misery loves company, or something..

You certainly can't put one over on those bright folks over at Gartner - why, they just realized that Vista may not ship until mid 2007. Wow - that kind of incisive thinking must be worth pennies. I sure hope no one is spending more than that for such nuggets of wisdom from the magic quadrant gang.

I've got the first tutorial updated, and the second one nearly done. I'm going through them to make sure there are no hiccups, and I've had someone volunteer to have a look - so once it's all set, I'll have it up on the website to replace what's there now. With luck, no other problems will fall in my lap between now and then.

Update: I finished, and sent the changes back. Hopefully, the web guys will have it up soon. It wasn't hard, but it was tedious. There were a bunch of browser screenshots, all showing the old (pre-7.3) category view. That was causing confusion for people, and tedium for the updater :)

There's a new blog search engine in town - Sphere. TechCrunch has some details - I'll have to set up a few search feeds and see how it compares to the other engines I'm using. I'll have some impressions in a day or three.

The LA STUG is meeting on the 8th:

Monday May 8, 2006
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Event Location: High Tech High, Los Angeles - Meeting Room
Street: 17111 Victory Blvd
City, State, Zip: Lake Balboa, CA, 91406 Map

Notes:
There is usually an after meeting meeting at Jerry's Deli in Van Nuys that goes on to an indeterminate time.

If there is a problem getting there call Darius Clarke, Mike Klein or John Dougan for assistance. The phone numbers are in the lastug contacts database on Yahoo!.

BusinessWeek is reporting that Sony is set to take one heck of a bath on the launch of the PS3:

The results for Sony's game division during the current fiscal year will not be good however, as the company ramps up investments for the PlayStation 3, which launches worldwide this November. Sony expects the segment to hemorrhage 100 billion yen ($871.6 million) in operating losses during the business year as it prepares the PS3 for launch.

That's a pretty big loss, and one that would take a large number of games to fill back in. The context this arrives in is critical for Sony:

Sony Corp. today announced details from its fourth quarter and full-year fiscal results. For the quarter ended March 31, 2006 the company lost 66.53 billion yen (around $569 million) on 1.85 trillion yen in total revenue. During the same period one year ago Sony lost 56.5 billion yen on total revenue of 1.7 trillion yen. However, the wider loss was largely attributable to a difference in taxes paid compared with a year ago. Sony's operating loss was actually down a bit year-over-year on a slight increase in sales.

That looks pretty bad to me, but there is a silver lining for the game division:

Although Sony's Electronics segment posted a loss, its game division remained profitable for the year.

Which is why they are willing to take that huge bath on the PS3 launch - if things hold up for the PS3 in terms of game sales, they figure they can get to a profitable position down the road. Personally, I'd question the overall ROI on the launch as a whole, but hey - they aren't paying me to make those decisions. They only sold a little more than 2 million PS2 units last year, but that's mostly due to buzz over the PS3 (why buy the old when the new is coming?) - they were selling 6 million in the previous year.

I still think it's a huge hill of losses to make up - and the game division will face some serious questions if their sales projections don't hold up.

The power equation in music is shifting a little bit away from the RIAA - Apple just renewed their contracts for downloadable music, keeping the price per song at 99 cents. That's a setback for the music execs, who really wanted variable pricing.

Apple Computer on Monday revealed it had renewed contracts with the four largest record companies to sell songs through its iTunes digital store at 99 cents each. The agreements came after months of bargaining, and were a defeat for music companies that had been pushing for a variable pricing model.

The music industry’s big four - Universal, Warner Music, EMI and Sony BMG -- were not immediately available to comment.

Still not a complete win for end users - after all, iTunes still uses DRM. But it's movement away from the RIAA - which is good.