Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Jon Udell sounds like he'd like to offer multiple enclosures (given various format needs), but - there's a problem. The *cough* RSS Spec *cough*:

So, to Greg's question, which of these formats should be in the enclosure? Flash, QuickTime, or WinMedia? (Additional wrinkle: the Flash FLV format requires delivery of a Flash-based player, as well.) If I enclose all three, that starts to get hefty. And last I heard, sticking multiple enclosures into an RSS 2.0 item is a nonstarter

Of course, Winer could have written that into the spec. Heck, he could stop being a pain in the neck, and let someone else add it to the spec. Then again, monkeys might fly out of my butt, too.

I saw the news that Apple was pulling out of India the other day, and - since it was call center/support related, chalked it up as another example of management actually hearing the tooth grinding of their customers. Apparently, I was wrong, as Paul McDougall of InformationWeek has analyzed it and come to a different answer - he relates it to IBM's expansion there:

IBM is betting big that India will for years to come be the center of excellence for software development and related work like IT services and help desk support. With this in mind, IBM wants to flat out own India's technology landscape and it's apparently CEO Sam Palmisano's belief that half measures won't do. There's too much potential competition down there on the Subcontinent.

And Apple?

Apple's decision to shut down its services center in India just three months after its opening is the right one only in so far as the company really had no other choice. The Mac and iPod maker realized it's just too late to the party in India. There are now too many companies chasing Indian IT talent to try and build a base there from scratch. In all likelihood, IBM's plans to spend billions more in the country put the final nail in Apple's own Indian ambitions.

Hmm. So India is full, what with all those IBM suits running about - there's no way Apple can get any kind of operation running there, so they may as well give up. Well. It's really too bad that Google never happened here in the US, what with the IT sector being full and all - the talent was elsewhere, so Google just dried up and blew away, right Paul?

Perhaps Not.

There's a phrase Paul might want to examine: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". Perhaps Apple's pullout has no inherent relationship to IBM's actions there. I seriously doubt that anything like this happened in Cupertino:

Jobs: So why can't we hire more smart folks in India?
Staffer: Sorry Steve, IBM hired them all. That <expletive deleted> Palmisano at IBM hired every last IT guy on the subcontinent

Jobs: <expletive deleted>! Just pull out then, it's all we can do
Staffer: Yes sir!

That seems to be how McDougall sees it. All I can think of to say about that? *LOL*

If you like Smalltalk - any implementation - do you want to go where we are going with Cincom Smalltalk? Or where these guys are going - which is apparently deeper into Eclipse-Land. Door number one includes a lot of improvements and advancements in Smalltalk, while door number two is focused elsewhere.

The LA STUG is meeting on June 12th:

LASTUG Meeting

Monday June 12, 2006
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

This event repeats on the second Monday of every month.

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!

The NY STUG is having a joint meeting with Patrick May, of the NY Ruby user group tomorrow evening. Details on that are on Charles' blog.

Scoble on the Google Spreadsheet:

Ahh, middleware 2.0 wars coming soon to a browser near you. Why? Cause as Google gets more people to try its spreadsheets more people will ask for more features. If they don't get those features the PR will turn back toward Microsoft's approach (since our Office has a lot more features than Google's offerings do). There will be pressure on at Google to add features but DHTML (er, Ajax) will simply run out of gas. So, you'll start seeing middleware coming down. (Runtimes like .NET, Flash, Java, and WPF, are what I'm thinking about -- I'd bet that Google is working on a browser-runtime of its own that'll add a lot of local functionality to Web clients).

I don't think most users of this kind of software will want lots of new features. The target for this isn't power spreadsheet users - it's small groups that want to collaborate with (relatively small) datasets. We've seen an example in this space already: DabbleDB.

Consider most spreadsheets you see. Do most people use any of the non-basic features? Or do most people do a quick set of calculations, and possibly some simple charts? I'd say it's the latter, by a very wide margin. I think Robert misreads the target audience for this kind of application, and even for the spreadsheet in general. Heck, I'm in Product Management, and I can tell you that I create only very simple spreadsheets - which is what I suspect most people do.

Sure, there are power users, and they use a lot of the advanced stuff. I doubt that any of those users are serious targets of this kind of online application.

I guess this qualifies as "if I can't see it happening, it's not work" - HP is moving some of their IT staff away from telecommuting and back to office life:

The architect of the HP division's change, Randy Mott, is regarded by Wall Street as a mastermind of operational efficiency based on his days as chief information officer at Wal-Mart Stores and Dell. Since joining HP as CIO in July, Mott's philosophy on building a strong IT workforce starkly contrasts with that of competitors, who encourage telecommuting to retain skilled workers who desire better work/life balance.

Mott said by bringing IT employees together to work as teams in offices, the less-experienced employees who aren't performing well -- which there are "a lot of" -- can learn how to work more effectively.

In an office, "you're able to put teams together that can learn very aggressively and rapidly from each other,'' he said.

The problem is right there in the second paragraph. If there are "a lot" of ineffective employees, then you have a problem that won't be solved by putting them in an office. What you have is a management problem.

Now, not everyone is capable of working out of a home office - some people really do need the close, daily interaction with other staff in order to be effective. I rather expect that this move will lower morale in the group in question though, and will lead to the higher performing staff jumping ship. I think it would have worked out better to identify the ineffectual employees and replace them. That would have required actual management effort though, which this guy clearly didn't want to expend.

Suzanne and I spoke to James Governor and his colleague Michael Cote' at RedMonk - it was a good conversation. They asked us a number of good questions and gave us some things to chew over as well - it's nice to connect a voices their blogs. We'll certainly stay in touch as we take our products forward.

Oh, and something interesting that James and I agreed on early in the call - James McGovern had a good post up this morning that I agreed with (will wonders never cease :) ).

Chris Petrilli links to Steve Dekorte, who has a post up on the idea. Here's Chris:

First, pre-fab offers the ability for substantially higher quality materials at a lower cost. For example, by assembling pieces of a house in a controlled atmosphere (i.e. a factory v. rainy outdoors), you can control the bonding of various elements. In addition, by using larger tools and jigs to cut and form things, you can make sure that the things are repeatable.

Second, by manufacturing in larger volume at once, you can make sure that things are “right” the first time. Most problems I’ve seen in construction stem from the ad-hoc nature of construction. Even when it’s two identical floor-plans, the walls are in slightly (sometimes as much as 6-8”) different locations.

While I agree in general, it's not going to be easy to move off the ground we are on now. In my neighborhood, for instance, most of the builders were "custom" builders. Meaning, they had floor plans, but gave us (the homeowners) a bunch of options - including ad-hoc ones we thought of - to customize. We ended up changing a lot of things, and I know a lot of other people in the community did as well. This is a model that people understand, and getting them to shift will be hard work.

Now, there's nothing that says you couldn't get better results with a "mass customization" pre-fab style of building - heck, you might end up with better results (in one room where we wanted a cathedral ceiling, we got a tray instead, due to construction issues). The hard part will be getting buy-in from potential homeowners - and getting past the existing builders, who will likely resiist this idea every bit as much as the music labels resist change.

Learning Seaside points to www.loop.aero, which seems to be using Seaside.

Steve Rubel notes that Leno is available on iTunes (has been for awhile, I guess - I just hadn't noticed). I suppose the RIAA's goons would prefer that he sell this stuff months later on CD, but - as I noted in my last post - the artists (and apparently, some of the content owners, like NBC) understand the changing landscape:

NBC tomorrow will expand The Tonight Show with Jay Leno presence in the iTunes store, which to date has received lackluster reviews for its lack of depth. According to the network's PR rep, NBC will make available Leno's full monologue and comedy sketches the very next day on iTunes for $1.99 each. A “multi-pass” package pulls together a month’s worth 20 downloads for $9.99.

I expect to see a lot more of this.

TechDirt notes that there are an increasing number of artists who are embracing the web - and not buying into the RIAA's chicken little rhetoric. Which begs the question: other than the labels, who exactly is the RIAA helping? If the artists are starting to wonder, then the rest of us should as well.

My cousin is a part time musician, and he's got nothing but contempt for the RIAA and its actions. None of it is helping him or the band he's part of.

More evidence that the US PTO needs a severe beating:

Internet phone company Net2Phone has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against rival Skype Technologies and its parent company, eBay.

...

Net2Phone alleges that Skype, a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay, violated its "point-to-point Internet Protocol" patent. The patent calls for the exchange of IP addresses between processing units in order to establish a direct communications link between the devices via the Internet.

A patent on point to point IP? You mean, a patent on some of basic plumbing of the internet, or do they think that the form of the packets they send between hosts are somehow innovative? As to p2p, it's not as if that hasn't been done before, either.

Steven Dekorte:

So if we write generic code that actually takes a "type of anything," that type can only be an Object, and our generic code must only call Object methods on it. So really, we are restricted to code that is already "generic to Object," except for casting up to Object and down from Object, which this wonderful new syntax will do for us. Sounds like it's a solution for collection classes and not much else, doesn't it?

As opposed to languages like Smalltalk (Pythin, Ruby, etc) - where any method you write is able to deal with any object that conforms to the API. As Steven puts it:

Languages like Python, Ruby Smalltalk and Io on the other hand, compile a single method which will work at runtime on all types which respond to the talk method - even ones defined at runtime and all without defining the types of the variables in the calling methods.

You can have simplicity, or complexity. Which makes for a more productive developer?

Steve Rubel has a lead on a new Google product:

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google tomorrow will launch a Web-based spreadsheet application on a limited test basis. No further details are available.

Hmm - I wonder if this is a "great minds think alike" thing (DabbleDB), or an attempt to jump into the slot that Avi is creating?

The RIAA must be so proud:

Officer Goins stopped a car because he noticed an equipment violation. As Officer Goins exited his vehicle, McLaughlin, the driver and sole occupant, leaned toward the passenger seat. When McLaughlin told Officer Goins he had a firearm, Officer Goins observed a semi-automatic pistol on the passenger seat and several compact disks (CDs) in the car. Officer Goins suspected the CDs were "pirated," because they were in a "poor quality made CD case with the labeling." He requested assistance from two other officers that had received training concerning CDs. Minutes later, Officers Barker and Perkins arrived. Officer Barker testified that he saw CDs on the front passenger seat and on the floorboard of the car. He testified that "based on [his] training with the recording industry the thin cases and the homemade labels in the cases led [him] to believe they were bogus CDs." He explained: They were thin case CD's and the labels on them were real blurry. You couldn't really make out the reading on them that well. You could just look at them and tell that they were bogus. Concluding that the CDs were illegitimate, the officers seized the CDs they saw and searched the car for others.

During the search, illegal drugs were turned up. The troubling thing is that the search was made due to "bogus" CD's. Better not burn that podcast to a CD in order to play it in your car - your RIAA trained local police force will seize them and accuse you of piracy.

It's a bad thing when you run out of dates.

I got asked why I turn comments off on older posts - "older" meaning anything that's aged off the front page (and out of the feed). Well, the simplest way to explain that is a snippet from a log I keep of spam attempts on the server. Not a lot of detail here, but here it is:

<<< Matched Against: insurance-ratings >>>
<<June 5, 2006 10:43:45.330>>
<<SPAM: Text Match>>
<<June 5, 2006 10:43:45.455>>
<<COMMENTS OFF>>
<<June 5, 2006 10:43:45.665>>
<<COMMENTS OFF>>
<<< Matched Against: insurance-ratings >>>
<<June 5, 2006 10:43:46.428>>
<<SPAM: Text Match>>
<<< Matched Against: insurance-ratings >>>
<<June 5, 2006 10:43:49.477>>
<<SPAM: Text Match>>
<<June 5, 2006 10:44:39.131>>
<<COMMENTS OFF>>
<<June 5, 2006 10:45:05.746>>
<<COMMENTS OFF>>
<<June 5, 2006 10:46:04.345>>
<<COMMENTS OFF>>
<<June 5, 2006 10:46:08.027>>
<<COMMENTS OFF>>
<<June 5, 2006 10:47:26.502>>
<<COMMENTS OFF>>
<<June 5, 2006 10:47:44.774>>
<<COMMENTS OFF>>
<<June 5, 2006 10:54:42.368>>

The "COMMENTS OFF" bit shows that someone tried adding a comment to an older post. I have the content saved in a directory - it's all spam. The text match lines show matches against my black-list, which is a simple text file of "bad text". That catches an amazing amount of crap too (I use the same approach on the Wiki).

Anyway, this is why I turn off commenting on older posts. It would be too much for me to keep up with, adjusting the filters. I have the ability to leave comments open on individual posts, and when I do that, I get a post specific feed (which allows me to monitor it).

I also use a simple "too many hrefs" filter - I figure anything that comes in with more than a small number of links is junk (and while that has snagged a few good posts, it mostly catches link laden spam. Anyway, that and an IP throttle, and I catch most things. I'm getting tired of the trackback spam - I rarely get actual trackbacks. I may just turn those off completely.

My last post linked to an IEEE article that illustrated the kind of technological damage that the RIAA and MPAA are (and are trying) to inflict on the rest of us, in a desperate attempt to preserve their existing business models. The good news is, the internet itself is going to make that quest very, very difficult. Consider AllofMP3, a music site out of Russia. There's an NYT story on it this morning, which points out what the RIAA sees:

Music industry officials say AllofMP3 is a large-scale commercial piracy site.

"It is totally unprecedented to have a pirate site operating so openly for so long," said Neil Turkewitz, executive vice president of the Recording Industry Association of America, which is based in Washington.

The reality is, it's legal in Russia right now, and they accept standard credit card payments - which makes it accessible to anyone with net connectivity. The RIAA can't touch it, because it's out of their reach. That's where things are headed, unless the RIAA removes their collective head from their posterior lobes. They can either let us buy music (etc) on reasonable terms, allowing us to move that music around on our own devices - or they can watch as we do it ourselves, using offshore sites in jurisdictions that don't care.

You think the RIAA will shut all of these sites down? Sure, sure - just like various governments have managed to shut down money shielding in various countries. If governments can't stop the flow of huge piles of cash outside of their tax systems, I doubt that the RIAA will be able to stop the flow of MP3s.

They really have two choices: Be part of the game, and adjust their business models, or watch as the game happens without them.

Perhaps the worst law passed by any government recently is the DMCA. Sure, it passed back in the late 90's, so calling it recent is something of a stretch - but the bad effects are still piling up. The DMCA didn't just regulate how copyrighted material could be used - it outlawed entire categories of real (and potential) products. A good example? The ReplayTVs we have in our living room and family room. Both offer internet sharing of content (effectively useless due to bandwidth issues) and commercial skip. The manufacturer was driven out of business by the wolf pack of lawyers sent by the MPAA - out to make sure that I watch every commercial that comes my way.

That's hardly the only example. Consider DVDs - As the IEEE says:

You're likewise out of luck if you're looking to buy software that lets you copy a DVD onto your laptop's hard drive; it's no longer for sale, at least not in the United States. Even if you want to put the movie you bought onto a pocket-size video and game console, such as Sony's PlayStation Portable, which allows users to watch video stored on flash memory or a miniature hard drive, you can't legally do so, because you'd have to “rip,” or decode, it to make the transfer—and the studios claim that this action violates the DMCA. When you rip a CD, be it to an audiotape or an MP3 file, you're not breaking any laws. But to rip a DVD you need to somehow get around the encryption technology built into a standard disc, and since such circumvention is forbidden by the DMCA, if you rip a DVD, you are breaking a law. Under the DMCA, legality doesn't depend on how the copy will be used but rather on the means by which the digital content is copied.

You have to ask yourself - why can you rip a CD and put it on an iPod, while you can't rip a DVD and put it on the video iPod? Are the two so different? The RIAA would love to make CDs the only way to listen to music, and put them under the same regime DVDs are under. Fortunately, that's probably not possible anymore - but video continues to get locked down - the "broadcast flag" might not be designed to piss off customers, but it will sure have that effect. Imagine - you set your DVR to record the latest episodes of "Dr. Who" - you don't get around to watching it for a few weeks, as other things come up - and *poof* - the DVR will have helpfully blown the content away, and not because of any settings you put in for how long to hold onto the content. Joy.

The basic problem is that copyright has been turned on its head. It's supposed to be a short term incentive that will encourage creative works. Instead, it's been turned into a long term lockbox for corporate icons (Mickey Mouse, anyone?). It's high time to drop the copyright terms back to something reasonable, and stop beating the end customer of content until morale improves.

Go ahead and read the entire IEEE piece - it's worth the time.

Mini-Microsoft provides some links to a funny Microsoft focused Da Vinci Code riff. Scroll to the bottom; there are four five parts so far.

You can file this one under "why don't things like that happen when I play golf?"

Via David Weinberger, I see that truth continues to be stranger than fiction. I don't think I would have believed that a (trying to be) serious "Captain Copyright" site exists unless I saw it myself. So it looks like I'm violating their policy by linking, because of this bit from their access rights page:

"Permission is expressly granted to any person who wishes to place a link in his or her own website to www.accesscopyright.ca or any of its pages with the following exception: in order to protect the moral rights associated with this site, permission to link is explicitly withheld from any website the contents of which may, in the opinion of the Access Copyright, be damaging or cause harm to the reputation of Access Copyright. Specifically, permission to link is explicitly withheld from sites featuring pornographic, racist or homophobic content. If you link to or otherwise include www.captaincopyright.ca on your website, please let us know."

Heh - cut down, that says: "You can link to us only if you agree with us. Otherwise, not so much". I think I need to quote Bugs Bunny: "What a bunch of maroons!"

Michael has posted his photos from Smalltalk Solutions (and an ancillary visit to the Ottawa STUG).

Via Chris Petrilli - the shocking experiments involving diet coke and mentos :)

This is interesting - the "stock" binary search algorithm fails (for the mainstream statically typed languages):

 
1:     public static int binarySearch(int[] a, int key) {


 2:         int low = 0;


 3:         int high = a.length - 1;


 4: 


 5:         while (low <= high) {


 6:             int mid = (low + high) / 2;


 7:             int midVal = a[mid];


 8:


 9:             if (midVal < key)


 10:                 low = mid + 1;


 11:             else if (midVal > key)


 12:                 high = mid - 1;


 13:             else


 14:                 return mid; // key found


 15:         }


 16:         return -(low + 1);  // key not found.


 17:     }


 

Line 6 causes problems if (low + high) overflows the size of an int. This is a non-problem in Smalltalk, of course; you seamlessly get large integers and everything "just works". I found the fixes amusing; they are all ways of coding around the limits of the type system.

Here's a hot tip for marketers who use phone surveys - my time is valuable, so if you want me to answer, you'll have to:

• Use people who speak English well. If I can't understand them, and they can't understand me - then I don't have the time to be bothered
• If your people ask a question, and I answer categorically (i.e., I say "I have one child"), then the survey shouldn't proceed with questions that ask about other children. In other words, pay attention.

If you can't be bothered with those two things, I can't be bothered with your survey.

It's time to look at the logs again. Traffic seemed a bit down, I think due to the short week after Memorial Day. In the meantime, BottomFeeder downloads stayed stable at a rate of 158 per day:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Update	331
Windows	296
Linux x86	120
CE ARM	99
Mac X	91
Mac 8/9	63
Linux Sparc	19
HPUX	19
Solaris	17
AIX	16
Windows98/ME	12
Sources	11
Linux PPC	10
SGI	3
ADUX	2
CE x86	1

Next, on to the HTML page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	59.6
Internet Explorer	28.4
MSN Bot	3.7
Other	4
Megite	1.7
Opera	1.6
Jakarta	1

Mozilla dropped slightly, and IE edged up. I wonder if that's a one week artifact, or if more people are trying IE 7? Time will tell, I guess. On to the feeds:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	25.4%
BottomFeeder	21.1%
BlogLines	8%
Net News Wire	8%
Other	7.9%
Internet Explorer	5.1%
Safari RSS	4.6%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.5%
NewsGator	2.2%
RSS Bandit	1.5%
Planet Smalltalk	1.5%
BlogSearch	1.1%
MSN Bot	1.1%
SharpReader	1%
JetBrains	1%
Feed Reader	1%
Java	1%
Jakarta	1%
News Fire	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
Liferea	1%
Everest/Vulcan	1%

That looks about the same as always - still an awful lot of tools in use there.

Information on the ESUG 2006 conference tracks has been posted. Also, check here for a listing of presentation materials for past conferences. I'll be attending; see you in Prague!

I've put up a Wiki Page with the links (in order) to the two screencasts in this series, and I'll be keeping it up to date as I go along. I'm also posting links to ancillary files (workspaces now, parcels, etc. later) on that page.

Patrick Logan on using lots of processes in Smalltalk:

I’d thought a little about this for Smalltalk when I worked at Gemstone. I don’t know enough about the Squeak VM to talk about it. Like Erlang’s and Gambit Scheme’s VMs, it would require the ability to create many 1000’s of non-OS threads very quickly and run them all fairly. I think Cincom’s commercial Smalltalk VM might approach these numbers.

VisualWorks can most certainly handle that. In BottomFeeder, the default update loop spawns a process (Smalltalk) per feed, and executes an HTTP query for it (assuming, based on various update algorithm parameters, it should). I have 318 feeds in my Bf right now, and it does just fine spinning that many off.

Read the rest, where Patrick points out how Smalltalk processes and Erlang ones differ - but in terms of what Smalltalk can handle, lots of processes isn't a problem.

More Seaside buzz, from a guy going to OSCON:

Seaside is a somewhat heretical web framework. They generate their HTML. They don't embrace meaningful URLs. They use Smalltalk, of all things.

Of course, by making these crazy choices, they get insane amounts of power. When we were building Jifty, we stole liberally from everything that had good ideas. We dragged Rails down a dark alley and rifled through its pockets. We grabbed Catalyst's wallet.

But really, Seaside's killer features like Continuations and Halos...just stopped me in my tracks. Once we got them into our grubby little perlish hands, I realized: This is the way development is supposed to be.

Come on in, the water's fine :)

Following on from yesterday, I put together another screencast - this one is on simple File/IO. I've got two workspace files I mention in the screencast:

• The configuration workspace, which I use to load parcels
• The workspace with the simple file examples

To save those files, you should probably right click and pick the "save to disk" option that comes up in the browser you use. The screencast itself is here; it's 5:40 long, and just under 21 MB.

Update: A note Bob makes in comments - the configuration script uses Windows specific path separators. You'll have to modify them for other platforms

I see that one of the professionals doesn't like it when the little people get involved in journalism - opinion or otherwise. Here's The Washington Post's Gene Weingarten, warning a bunch of J-School graduates about the dangers they face:

My point is, this is a challenging time for journalists.

And because you are word people, you understand that "challenging time" is a euphemism often used to describe disasters of epic proportions. For example, Richard Pryor was facing a "challenging time" when he ran down the street half-naked and on fire.

What are your challenges, specifically? Let us begin with, quote unquote, getting a job. Good jobs in journalism have become scarce as newspapers shrink and die, broadcast media fragment to smaller niche audiences and the public appears more and more willing to receive its "news" online from nincompoops ranting in their underpants.

Now, Weingarten is a humorist for the Post, so some of this is tongue in cheek. A lot of it likely isn't though - people in his position - i.e., those who are paid to produce interesting opinions - are the ones facing the "nincompoops", as he puts it.

This is an area that vast swaths of the media haven't really grasped yet - punditry is no longer an exclusive little club. The op/ed page of a major daily was a major perch a decade ago - now, not nearly so much. It turns out that there are a lot of people willing - and happy - to produce opinion pieces regularly, and do so mostly for the satisfaction of making their point publicly. That's a major problem for those paid to produce 1-5 columns a week. Many bloggers put out that much content every day. Opinion journalism has shifted.

Why do I say that a lot of the media hasn't gotten that? Well, look at the New York Times. What do they charge for? Access to their pundits. Why they think those people are worth charging for is a mystery to me - and it has nothing to do with their politics. I can find equally (or more) incisive content freely available, from exactly the same political perspective. Why would I pay to read it?

Then there's the all too common practice of locking the archives behind a pay wall. The net result of that is to make anything in the Times (or other pubs with the same policy) effectively unlinkable. Why should I link to something that will disappear within a few weeks? If someone finds a link to one of my posts 3 months from now, any link over to a Times article lwill lead to a black hole. I don't know if this is a generational problem, or just a refusal to grasp the obvious. Either way, it's a problem.

Going back to the humor piece, here's the advice I'd give the J-School types - get a real job first. Learn something about how the world works before you try to be an observer of it.

With cheap hosting and inexpensive, but powerful video cameras, something new is starting to appear: individual news services. I've seen a couple of examples of this, across a fairly wide spectrum of interests and politics:

• Regular Podcasts - Gillmor Gang is a good example of this
• Regular Video blogs - RocketBoom and HotAir's Vent are good examples

Heck, there's the whole iTunes podcast and videocast section, the things above are just examples. The thing about video is this: just as blogs have been able to dissect print media - video blogs are able to dissect regular newscasts. The cost of running a network made video prohibitive until recently, but now it's in the hands of anyone who wants to jump in.

The media landscape is rumbling. I expect that the next few election cycles here in the US should be absolutely fascinating because of all this.

Bureacracies can come up with the most insanely stupid answers. Which is where this gem of a story comes from. When explaining why New York City is getting less anti-terror funding next year, a Dept of Homeland Security spokesman explained:

New York has no national monuments or icons, according to the Department of Homeland Security form obtained by ABC News. That was a key factor used to determine that New York City should have its anti-terror funds slashed by 40 percent--from $207.5 million in 2005 to $124.4 million in 2006.

Heh. I wonder if if they've seen this:

Ironically, the Statue of Liberty is listed as a National Monument. It's things like this that prevent me from believing in conspiracies. Large organizations - public or private - are just too stupid to manage a good conspiracy :)

One of the things I've brought up a few times is the problems with the current advertising models - and I mean all of them. TV ads? Defeated by the bathroom and DVRs - not to mention the dreaded remote control. It's my belief that the entire TV advertising model is built on air, and everyone involved has agreed not to question it. All it's going to take is one kid to come along and ask about the emperor's lack of clothes, and *poof* - up in smoke it'll go.

Then there's the online model, which doesn't even have age to recommend it. Today, Mark Cuban brings up something I've mentioned a few times - the click fraud thing is far bigger than anyone is willing to comtemplate. The money is too good, and the chance of being punished too small - it's the perfect storm for massive fraud:

The number of splog/fake websites being created EVERY HOUR is exploding. Based on the comments Im getting on my blog from what must be legions of boiler rooms creating marginally understandable comments , with links back to “affiliate websites” and legit email addresses in an effort to legitimize those sites. There must be just as many more in place to sign up those sites for ad publishing networks.

Now i have no idea how much money is being lost to click fraud. All i know is that when the black hat hackers see easy money, they take it. I also know that they are greedy and a jealous bunch. The more they see the more they take, so you can pretty well bet that the amount of click fraud is going up by the minute.

Heck, there are dirt cheap products that enable this - you don't even need to be a hacker. Even more than the TV model, this whole thing is a house of cards, but without any actual supports. Eventually, a reality check will stumble by, and the advertisers - the ones paying the money - will start to question the value. At that point, Google and Yahoo are going to be dealing with sucking chest wounds, and Microsoft - a company that has actual products - will be laughing all the way to the bank. Again.

I was flipping channels this evening, and ran across the Yankees/Tigers game in the 7th - Yanks up 6-5. I watch Proctor on (in relief) setting the Tigers down without difficulty. On to the ninth inning - Rivera is unavailable this series, but by gosh, it's the ninth inning - we just have to take the effective pitcher out and slap in a closer. It's Farnsworth, he of the erratic control and high ERA.

Sure enough, he gives up a walk and three hits, losing the game. The question I have is, why the heck was he in there? Proctor was pitching well, and it didn't look to me like the Tigers were able to hit him. Torre just followed the baseball bible: "Ninth inning, must bring in new pitcher in a one run game".

Bah. Farnsworth lost the game, but Torre's following of orthodoxy was the root cause.

Troy isn't happy with the editing quality of a few recent tech books he's bought

I've decided to do a few "getting started with Cincom Smalltalk" screencasts, and I've just uploaded the first one. This one is focused on "what do I need to load". When you start VisualWorks, there are a number of packages you can load - which ones should you load if you want to have a decent beginners set? I won't claim that the set I came up with is definitive, but it's a start. Next time, I'll walk through what these packages do, and then I'll move on to some simple development problems. Here's the screencast - it's just over 5 minutes, and a trifle over 21 MB.

I went for a run of the mill checkup a few weeks ago, and my doctor didn't like the cut of my cholesterol and tryglyceride levels (the latter was very high). So, she slapped me on medication and sent me to a cardiologist. I had that visit today, and thankfully, nothing's wrong - ticker is in good shape. I'll say this though - if I never have another stress test, it'll be too soon.

The test was easy enough - walking and jogging on a sloped treadmill. The heart monitor stuff was a real pain though. First, they had to shave part of my chest - I now look like someone has run a bunch of miniature lawn mowers in circles on my chest. That should look great at the beach :)

The upshot of all this is, my days of throwing caution to the wind and having as many fries as I want look like they're over. The good news is, I actually like fruits and vegetables - I'd just gotten into bad eating habits. The even better news is, simply changing my eating habits resulted in a drop of 8 pounds over the last 2 weeks. Yes, I was eating a lot of crap :)

An innovative way to "fix" an iPod - drop it from a 3 story height:

You might recall my little bit of fun with my 4th Gen iPod and its fun little trip off my balcony to test out the iFrogz case. For those too lazy to click the link, the gist is that my iPod was already dead from Ye Old Click O' Death, so I decided to give the iFrogz a rigorous drop test... twice, from three floors up. What I hadn't counted on was that the darned thing would start working again following the drops.

Of course, the drop didn't really fix it - but it led him to the diagnosis - go check it out.

NOAA's tropical storm feed is live again, as the official season has opened.

Via Scoble, I ran across Paul Graham's latest essay - "How to be Silicon Valley". He starts off by observing what makes Silicon Valley - well, Silicon Valley:

It wouldn't be surprising if it were hard to reproduce in other countries, because you couldn't reproduce it in most of the US either. What does it take to make a silicon valley even here?

What it takes is the right people. If you could get the right ten thousand people to move from Silicon Valley to Buffalo, Buffalo would become Silicon Valley.

He then goes on to say that you need two types of people: nerds and rich people - nerds to build stuff, and rich people to fund them. There's a lot of truth to what he says, but I wonder what he'd make of Avi's path to starting up - something he spoke about with Andrew Catton at Smalltalk Solutions. My notes on what Avi said then:

DabbleDB came out of their experience in consulting - the ad-hoc spread of semi-shared data that really should have been fully shared (eg - emailed spreadsheets). Had they tried this a decade ago, they would have gone the whole VC "take the money" route. That's not the way they went - they believe in a "late binding" approach to business planning. Once you take venture money, a lot of options get closed off - you are committing to a specific set of plans.

"Taking Venture $$ is a premature optimization"

It's certainly easier to try what Avi and Andrew have done now, than it would have been a few years ago. They mentioned that they did most of their communication through IM chat and email at first, and managed to build up the core of DabbleDB while they were working elsewhere. In essence, they traded sweat equity (extra hours) for venture capital.

It's not limited to the US, either - the Software With Style guys started out inside another firm, and are only now venturing out - as Avi and Andrew did, with a services contract in place.

Will the ability to create "virtual" Silicon Valleys replace the need for the real thing? I doubt it, but it should make it possible for a lot of people to get involved in the business without their having to relocate. I'd much rather live here in suburban Maryland, for instance. Further down, he gets into what makes for an area that will attract the right kind of people:

The exciting thing is, all you need are the people. If you could attract a critical mass of nerds and investors to live somewhere, you could reproduce Silicon Valley. And both groups are highly mobile. They'll go where life is good. So what makes a place good to them?

What nerds like is other nerds. Smart people will go wherever other smart people are. And in particular, to great universities. In theory there could be other ways to attract them, but so far universities seem to be indispensable. Within the US, there are no technology hubs without first-rate universities-- or at least, first-rate computer science departments.

He hasn't said it, but there's another piece there - most "highly mobile" people are young. Now, it also happens to be the case that most people willing to burn the candle at both ends are young, so it works out. However, there are plenty of great people you can get - but only if you don't demand that they relocate. We (the Cincom Smalltalk team) hired a number of great Smalltalkers a few years back, and only one of them moved (his choice) to California. The rest of them stayed where they were - they had families, many with children, and were established where they were.

It's harder to get people to move as they age - we lay down roots, we make friends, our kids go to school. Taking a kid out of school is a very hard thing to ask, and it's also very hard to drop friends who who've spent a lot of time with. Sure, you can "keep in touch" - but keeping in touch is not the same as the weekly game night, to use my example.

The bottom line is, I'm not sure that the future is in Silicon Valley, or places like it. It's on the network, and wherever people want to live. The limiting factors of time dilation still exist; it's possible to have constant communication with people a few timezones away. Once you get out as far as 5 or six though - it's a near impossibility. You have to be virtually close, but not necessarily physically close.

I touched on the VC need earlier, and Graham goes back to it at the end of his essay:

Venture investors, however, prefer to fund startups within an hour's drive. For one, they're more likely to notice startups nearby. But when they do notice startups in other towns they prefer them to move. They don't want to have to travel to attend board meetings, and in any case the odds of succeeding are higher in a startup hub.

I'd be very, very interested in hearing his toughts on the style of startup I brought up earlier. There are problems with VCs - they exert control, and they enforce othodoxy on your firm (I saw this at ParcPlace). Graham extolls the need for the nerds to be in control, and if there's one thing that VCs do, it's prevent that. I expect to see less centralization like what happened in Silicon Valley, not more.

Looks like the CompUSA guy's theory was bad. I brought the Mini back this afternoon, just got it set back up, and had an email back from Apple on re-downloading purchased music - and the machine started to get flaky. Menus disappeared, applications misbehaved, and then it wouldn't reboot. Suspiciously like the other day. So, I think the HD is just toast. Back it went, and now I wait for the call from them.

In the meantime, not all was lost - Borders is next door to CompUSA here, so I waled over and got a book that was recommended to me (via email): "TWO QUEENS IN ONE ISLE: The Deadly Relationship of Elizabeth 1 and Mary Queen of Scots"

I may give Sun and Schwartz a lot of crap over their business model, but I have to admire the openness and transparency they are using to carry it forward. Take note: this is the new PR and management model you're seeing.

Chris Pirillo on the O'Reilly matter with "Web 2.0"

As has been stated by both Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis , Tim and his partners were 110% justified in protecting their conference brand. Anybody and everybody who holds a trademark on something profitiable (or, as is the case for O’Reilly, ungodly profitable) understands and supports the decision that was made - not necessarily in how it was handled, but certainly the reasoning behind it. I respect Tim’s personal and professional position in the matter, having a few not-quite-as-profitable brands of my own to protect. Anybody who’s ever owned a trademark [read: profitable brand] should wholly understand. That’s the kicker, underscored by Dave’s editorial: O’Reilly is NOT a non-profit organization.

As I said the other day, the biggest part of this has nothing to do with the law. O'Reilly and CMP have filed for a rademark, and they have all the legal rights they want to assert it. The question is - given the way PR now works, was it a good idea to have the lawyers charge out before they talked to PR? A few years ago, that would have been a stupid question. Now it's anything but, as Tim is rapidly finding out. O'Reilly has branded itself as a champion of open source, which means that this effort actually harmed their brand.

The rest of it - all the legal stuff? Utterly irrelevant. A "valuable mark" has little value after you step in it.

The Mini is back, but we lost all the data - thus the network drive that I bought for automated backups :/

Anyway - recreating my entire music library was going to be a royal pain in the butt - and even though Apple's DRM is (relatively) unobtrusive, it prevents one from getting songs off the iPod and over to a computer. Not a problem - shareware to the rescue. There were a number of applications mentioned on this page, and I grabbed "iPod Liberator". As I write this, my music library is being pulled off the iPod and back to the Mac. I'll still have to contact Apple support - my daughter lost her stuff as well, and the iPod doesn't have her library. We did make backups of all the music to CD though, so there's no actual lossage.

The upshot - all the DRM has done is make things less convenient - not impossible. Eventually, this will be seen as a bad marketing move.

Oh, and the "long tail" reference? I had a number of people point solutions out to me via my blog. Thanks to all!

Indian public sector employees are realizing that outsourcing doesn't all flow to the shores of India:

According to India's Economic Times, Indian workers employed by the country's reserve bank this week held demonstrations to protest possible plans by the bank to outsource some routine jobs to the private sector. The Times provides the following quote from K K Sharma, secretary of the All India Reserve Bank Employees Association: "We have two main demands--implementation of the revised pension scheme and no outsourcing of jobs from RBI."

The article makes it sound like the jobs are likely just being privatized, but from there? Who knows? I've seen other reports of jobs moving from India to China, Vietnam, (etc).

None of this is new, of course - textile jobs migrated from France to England, then on to New England. From there they went to the US south, and then migrated to Asia (and South America). Heck, even the patent/copyright fights aren't new - English manufacturers complained bitterly that New England plants were stealing their patented designs. Everything old is new again...

I've been thinking of doing a few "Intro to Smalltalk" screencasts, and I'd like some suggested topics. I'm thinking of some basic stuff - file i/o, creating a simple GUI, etc. Anyone have any other suggestions? Bear in mind that I don't want to create an overly long thing. Either leave a comment here, or drop me a line.

Instantiations is channeling the marketing team from DarkPlace-DodgeyTalk - I just saw this in comp.lang.smalltalk:

I'm trying to figure how Instantiations did subscribe me (and some fellows smalltalkers) to a Java newsletter, when the only thing I did is register to download some goodies and documentation of *Smalltalk* more than a year ago.

I received the following mail (snipped):

 -- BEGIN OF MAIL
Subject:        Last Chance to Register: Bring Java Back to the Desktop
From:   Instantiations Inc. <newslet...@instantiations.com>
To:     <me>

*Eclipse RCP Webcast
**LIVE From Times Square

Wednesday May 31, 2006
2:00 - 3:00 PM EDT
Registration Closes Tuesday
 -- END OF MAIL

How to believe them when they say they will improve VAST? :-(

Heh. Know your audience, and all that :)

Head on over to Donny's blog and find out how the piracy from one torrent site is of more value than the GDP of France. Oh, the humanity...

Looks like my guess about Wii pricing was wrong. I figured on $199 (I thought about saying "or $249, but didn't). I should have gone with the bigger number:

Gamers still mulling their options following the unveiling of cool new consoles from Nintendo and Sony at the recent E3 2006 conference might want to take a closer look at the Wii, given that Nintendo has formally priced the machine well below the competing boxes.

The price, $250, is half the cost of Sony's $499 PlayStation 3 console and considerably less than Microsoft's top-end Xbox 360 that sells for about $400.

It's now a matter of which games they have ready at the point of release.

Tim O'Reilly responded to the Web 2.0 trademark kerfuffle today, and it's a good response. I'll highlight one piece to make a point:

CMP let us know recently that they were worried about potential dilution of the conference brand by other companies putting on Web 2.0 related conferences using the same name, and I agreed with them that it was an issue that we needed to deal with. I was not aware, however, that CMP intended to send out cease and desist letters to anyone in the short term, let alone to a non-profit organization with whom I'd previously corresponded about the event they were putting on. (Gina Blaber, the head of our conference team, was aware of the letter, however, and approved it, and that's why Sara Winge, in her postings, did not disclaim O'Reilly's responsibility.)

At this point, lawyers are in the PR business as well as the legal business. I'm sure they don't like that - it's not something they aimed for, any more than PR people aimed for law. Be that as it may, that's the way it is. The mistake here was in PR terms - CMP's lawyers did exactly what Warner Kremer Paino did when they sued Lance Dutson - they created a negative PR event. Sure, there are difference. CMP has a valid trademark, and they sent a letter rather than a lawsuit.

In PR terms, none of that matters. The end result is, they made O'Reilly look bad, and did potential harm to the business. Tim states that people piled on prematurely, and that may well be the case. I'd argue that CMP's lawyers prematurely sent their letter as well. Not on legal grounds, but on PR grounds. It used to be that PR and marketing had to run things by legal first, to check for potential trouble. Now it runs the other way as well. I'm not sure that Tim fully gets that, because he states:

Just to be clear, neither CMP or O'Reilly is claiming the right to all use of the term Web 2.0, as some of the posters assert. We just want to keep other conference companies from putting on on events that trade on the name and concept that we created. And don't tell me it's not possible to have a Web 2.0-related conference without using Web 2.0 in the name! Microsoft's Mix 06, Google's Zeitgeist, the Ajax Experience -- these are all web 2.0-related conferences that don't use the name.

The question he's got to ask himself is, was the standard legal treatment of a cease and desist letter worth the PR nightmare it caused? I think a phone call to IT@Cork first, followed by a letter if that had been unsatisfactory, would have worked a whole lot better. It's a new ballgame out there for PR - and if O'Reilly wants to surf the Web 2.0 wave, he's got to deal with that reality.

I've had an "I'm not impressed" incident with the Mac - the HD just went and died. It's unclear whether the filesystem went bats, or whether the drive is bad - it's under warranty, so the Apple tech at CompUSA is dealing with. The data on the drive is a total loss though. So now comes the fun part - getting back the stuff I bought off iTunes. Ideally, I could just copy it off the iPod. But noo.... the ugliness of Apple's DRM concessions to the RIAA kills that.

Bah.

I received confirmation from the law firm representing Jason Tomczak in the Nano scratch case - they are representing him, and he does say that the lawfirm that brought the case never had him down as a formal plaintiff. I'll post the email they sent me if I get their permission to do so. In the meantime, maybe it's time to contact the firm that claims to represent him, and get their side of the story.

Update: I called the law firm that claims to represent Tomczak, and left a voicemail. We'll see if they have anything to say.

Update 2: Here's the note that Cameron Totten, of Sherman & Nathanson, sent me:

The facts as stated in the open letter are correct and alleged in the lawsuit we filed on behalf of Mr. Tomczak against the Hagens firm and the Meyer firm. I am interested in learning more about the blogger in Maine. Can you provide me more information or direct me to some links on the topic? If you need any more information from me, please feel free to contact me.

He's referring to the infamous Warner Kremer Paino thing, which I mentioned in my mail to him.

David Weinberger points to this amusing imagination of a town that ran sidewalks like ISP's want to run internet access. There's a simple problem with the whole scenario though: Sidewalks are generally city (or county) property, which means that they are a "public utility". As such, the city can regulate usage, and not allow any specific private interest to do so.

The internet though? Some parts are owned, other parts are public, still others live in some quasi-public status. It's really not the same thing at all. Not to mention that various municipalties do, in fact, regulate usage of the sidewalks. You can't set up a business on one, and in many places, you can't (legally) ride a bicycle on one either.

My problem with the net neutrality debate is the apocalyptic tones being used by everyone involved. The telcos and cable providers would like me to think that video is going to overwhelm limited bandwidth - yeah, right. I've seen various doomsday predictions of a bandwidth crisis for years, and it never seems to materialize. On the other hand, we have other people telling us that the ISP's are entities of raw evil, ready to slice up bandwidth into tiny little chunks and screw us all over.

Neither of these dark visions represents reality. We've had a mostly unfettered net for a long while now, and I seriously doubt that consumers will be willngly led to gated communities of crappy service - with or without regulation. Likewise, I seriously doubt that video is about to kill the internet star. In general, I trust the market to deliver reality far, far better than I trust government. When we invite government in to "give" us net neutrality, there's going to be a price. That price would probably involve content restrictions "for the children", along with a raft of other "good stuff" that would end up limiting my freedom of expression. To the people calling for net neutrality laws, I say this: be very, very careful what you ask for. You might not like the form in which it's delivered to you.

Rogers tries an experiment - outsourcing his blog to India for a week. It sgould be interesting to hear the perspective of someone in India for a change.

I've been doing this blog since June of 2002 - if you go back to that first post, it's clear that I had no idea where I was going with the blog - I started it up as a multi-author blog (yes, the Silt server has support for that). Since then, I've been posting regularly - it's been 1459 days, with 8254 posts - that's between 5 and 6 posts a day over that time period.

The interesting thing (to me, at least) is that I'm not tired of it, and I don't see it as a chore. It's still fun, and I'll keep posting as long as it's fun. Besides, there's always something new showing up in my aggregator that makes me want to go off on a rant...

Mike Arrington writes about the disruptive nature of CNet's AllYouCanUpload photo site, and how it's going to impact other offerings of this nature:

AllYouCanUpload is a site that makes uploading photos as easy as it can possibly get. They’ve removed all of the friction. You do not need to register for an account. You just use the uploading tool and you are shown the image along with codes to post the photo on sites like Myspace, ebay and others (I’d also like an option to have the image links emailed to me). Unlike Photobucket and Imageshack, AllYouCanUpload is completely free, and no advertisements appear on the uploading areas of the site (there are ads on the hosted part of the site, which you see if you click on a hosted image). There is no limit to the number of photos that can be uploaded or the total amount of storage that may be consumed. There is no limit on the size of an image, and images are not resized unless you request it. And possibly most importantly, there are absolutely no bandwidth restraints.

What struck me is something else, and it's a trend that started with gmail - storage space is now so cheap that companies aren't even bothering to charge for it. How cheap? Well, I was at CompUSA two days ago, and ran across this drive: a one terabyte Maxtor drive. It's being marketed as a one touch backup solution, and it's being sold for $899.

I still recall buying my second 40 MB hard drive back in the 80's, and thinking to myself that I was set - no way I'd need more space than that :) Now I have a 256 MB USB keychain lying around, and there are things like the Maxtor drive for sale. With storage effectively unlimited, all we need now is reasonably fast (and bi-directional) network access. At that point, "the network is the computer" may actually be true.

The 14th ESUG Conference is taking place in Prague in September (4-8) - and they want student volunteers:

Are you a student, and do you want to attend ESUG (the premier European Conference on Smalltalk)? This year, ESUG again has a student volunteer program you can apply for. Your duties will be few, and you will have to help the local organizers.

ESUG does not pay travel costs, but the conference will be free. Depending on the number of students the hosting will possibly also be free. To volunteer, follow this link.

The program is now available here

I'll be coming to the conference, so I hope to see you there