Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Ted Neward analogized the Vietnam War to O/R mapping, and now has to respond to the predictable complaints:

"The Vietnam War is a bad analogy for O/R-M." Vietnam remains, for most Americans, as the quintessential symbol for "bloody, ugly, unresolvable quagmire". And, as some have pointed out in comments on the blog post already, all analogies break down eventually, and this one is no different--as one commenter put it, nobody ever died from a bad O/R-M tool. (Though the day is not far off when such could occur, given the incredible spread of technology into all corners of our lives--it's not too hard to imagine a day when a patient dies because a doctor received incorrect information about a medical allergy from the enterprise system he/she uses to call up patient records.)

Rule number one when making an analogy: Don't pick one that will immediately drive the conversation into a ditch. It's like saying: "whatever you do, don't think of a zebra"...

Doc Searls, in the process of explaining how the non-compliance of low power FM transmitters (for the iPod, etc), gets to why I don't trust governmental regulation:

One is the fact that Congress and the FCC have done more to make "free over-the-air radio broadcast services" unattractive than a million little FM transmitters ever could. Between relaxed ownership rules and increased "indecency" fines by the FCC, the AM and FM bands have become boring beyond endurance. I have my problems with satellite radio too (for all their diversity, all the channels on both services are owned by one company apiece, and the two silo'd systems are entirely incompatible); but my Sirius radio provides infinitely more usefulness than I can even imagine getting from "free" radio today. All that's left for me on "free" radio are our local AM news station and NPR/PRI programs, most of which I get now via Sirius or podcasting.

Once the Feds define the net as a "public utility", it will go the way of TV and radio - with bozo rules like the ones Doc rightly condemns here.

Ed Bott is worried about where Microsoft is taking the WGA program, and I don't blame him. The non-denials from Redmond are none too encouraging either. The measured walk toward 1980's style IBM bureaucratic stupidity seems to be transitioning to a jog. If they actually start requiring that you have the upgrade system on, then they'll have broken into a full-blown dash.

Can you imagine the hair pulling in IT departments as they try to sort out driver problems after a blown upgrade that they couldn't test first?

We will have the Summer Release of Cincom Smalltalk shipping as of June 30th. As soon as that's done, we'll post the new bits for NC download. The details:

Release Date: June 30, 2006

The summer releases of Cincom Smalltalk are maintenance/bug fix releases. As such, you won't see any new features coming out. You will see enhancements, bug fixes, etc.

The new VMs for Mac OSX (Power PC only and intel Mac VM) will follow after the summer release, but before the Winter release). We will formally ship these new VM's in the winter release, but they will be available via vw-dev (and to other interested parties) before the winter release.

Highlights for VisualWorks

• Security - We are including an implementation of PKCS #8
• COM - The COM Automation Wizard can now save and restore settings to create a VW COM server image.
• Font Matching - on Font matching failures, the system will return the best match it can find instead of raising an exception
• WS* - Further Enhancements to various aspects of our WebServices implementation
• NetClients - We have implemented support for Digest Authentication and for NTLM Authentication

There are various other improvements and bug fixes; the file fixedARs.txt on the CD includes an exhaustive list

Highlights for ObjectStudio

• We are providing Early Access for ObjectStudio 8 by request only - please contact James Robertson if you are interested
• OLE bug fixes and enhancements
• Database bug fixes and enhancements
• Both the XML Parser and the Opentalk framework have been synchronized with the VisualWorks implementations

Looks like the hardware vendors have figured out that a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD format war isn't a great idea: there are plans to start shipping dual mode devices:

Samsung and Toshiba have joined forces to end the format wars for good. They are releasing a hybrid player that plays both Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats. But that’s not all! Sony and NEC are also releasing a dual-format player of Blu-ray and HD-DVD. This is back-up for Sony, since they did loose miserably with Beta.

I'm certainly more likely to buy one of those in the short term. My other option would be to hold off until a clear winner emerged.

Cincom's President, Tom Nies, is speaking at a UN sponsored conference in NY this evening. I posted details on this here last month.

Steve Rubel:

In a terrific reversal of its prior stance towards the site, NBC is set to run promos on YouTube , according to AP.

Maybe they could explain it to the MPAA and the RIAA.

Looks like Avi and Andrew have decided that they need an infusion - Om Malik is reporting that they've taken $2M in venture capital:

Dabble DB, a Vancouver-based online database / hosted application creation company has raised around $2 million dollars in Series A venture funding from Ventures West, a Canadian VC fund. Paul Kedrosky, a venture partner with the fund, is leading the investment in the eighteen-month-old company. The company will also come out of “beta” tomorrow.

That's interesting, given what Avi said about venture money last April:

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. So Avi's take: Taking Venture $$ is a premature optimization

Sounds to me like they are still in late binding mode though - they held off on venture capital until they needed it. I hope they don't run into any of the classic "business optimization" scenarios that can come with funding.

Update: Mike Arrington covers the story

Update2: Tim Bray has some kind words for DabbleDB, Avi, and Andrew.

It's still raining here - if you live in the US, you've probably seen the coverage of the rain on the east coast. Heck, I had something happen this morning that I've never seen - the rain last night managed to get into my car's gas line. I had to drive my daughter to camp, and the first 2 miles was an adventure. Here's the radar map right now:

Heck, if we get another 1/2 inch of rain, we'll break the June record for rain (set by Agnes in 1972). I'm just glad we don't still live in our old neighborhood, which was on a 100 year flood plain.

Dare Obasanjo has an excellent roundup of the WinFS crash and burn - go read it.

Via Doc Searls, I found this piece by Kent Newsome. He nails the reason why blogging (podcasting, vlogging, etc, etc) aren't taking off in so many companies:

What I'm still not buying is blogging as a tool for traditional businesses that sell traditional products and services. The people who manage these companies are going to have to cover a lot of ground to get from content blockers that don't let you visit ESPN to employees blogging on the clock. Not to mention all the corporate policies about what is and isn't fair game for blogging about that would have to be written and enforced. And then there are all the labor and lawyer problems that would arise if an employee got disciplined or fired for unacceptable content, etc.

In sum, most businesses don't trust their employees enough to allow them to blog.

Replace "blog" in that last sentence with just about anything. It goes double (or triple, or pick your multiplier) if your company is unionized - the fact that you need a union is illustration enough that there's a lack of trust.

Is this a killer? I doubt it, at least in the short/medium term. Apple apparently bans employee blogging, and they're doing quite well. Over the longer haul, I think firms that trust their employees will do better than the ones that don't - but it will likely require a new generation of management before we see that.

"Food" might be the wrong category here, but if you want hot sauce, have a look here - and take note of the special item they have at the top:

What you will find inside the Famous Reserve bottle is amazing, a 1ml pharmaceutical grade vial filled with this Pure Capsaicin Crystal.--No more than 999 Bottles will be offered

Now that's hot :)

So far, it's something like 4 inches of rain... since about 8 pm! Here's why:

It's a veritable flood out there :)

Chris Petrilli nails the difference between dynamic languages and the mainstream static ones:

I think that dynamic languages cater especially well to this issue for a few reasons. First, they do not muddle your code with non-core expressions. This means that 80% of my code isn’t spent making the compiler happy, or doing its job for it. The code that I write is focused purely on the problem domain that I’m trying to solve. This means when I go back, or anyone else does, there’s less time spent trying to understand why I marked something as final and more about what the logic does.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Who are you looking to satisfy: the requirements, or the compiler? The more of the latter that you have to spend time on, the less you end up with the former.

Scoble has a good take on a debate that he heard at bloggercon: do production values (in video/audio) matter?

In the discussion it was clear that there is a coming conflict between people who "do it for love" and those who are doing video to build an audience, which presumably they are doing so that they can sell advertising or get sponsorship. In other words there are those who believe in production values and those who think that the production values advocates are missing the point: that everyday people can now use video to communicate in a new way.

I think he gets that right - it all depends on the type of information, and the target audience. If I'm doing a screencast on Smalltalk, my target audience is developers - if they are interested, then production quality has to be "good enough" - my voice has to come through, and the screens I'm showing have to be easily visible. If, on the other hand, I'm trying to produce a drama series that people will watch (like they would watch TV), then my production requirements are way up there - the last thing you want is to be seen as the next Ed Wood :)

With the news that WinFS is dead, the only really new things in Vista are:

• A new UI look, that will apparently require a bunch of video memory
• PVP-OPM, which will serve to screw customers over
• Huge memory requirements, which will help various hardware vendors

Explain to me again why I should move up from XP?

Bill Machrone of PC Magazine brings up Liberty Basic and Squeak in his latest column:

You'll also see why Augment has a die-hard core of fans intent on moving it into the open-source world. Although Augment fully embraces mouse technology and the GUI, you drive it primarily with single-key commands. This may seem primitive compared with the nearly endless capabilities of Microsoft Word, but experienced Augment users will tell you that there's no faster or better way to create a structured, internally linked document that you and others can easily expand, edit, and link to other documents.

Two main efforts to breathe new life into Augment are under way; information about them is available at the HyperScope Wiki (blueoxen.net/c/hyperscope/wiki.pl?FrontPage) and at the Open­Augment Consortium (www.openaugment.org).

You can download OpenAugment from the latter site, but to run it you'll have to download a copy of Squeak—a multiplatform, open-source adaptation of Smalltalk-80, the language that did more than any other to codify object-oriented programming and extend object management to the graphical interface.

The Liberty Basic plug:

I had used Liberty BASIC (www.libertybasic.com) some years ago as a teaching tool when I was a counselor for the Boy Scouts' computing merit badge—so kill me. Liberty BASIC works in Windows and isn't as sophisticated as Microsoft Visual Basic, but it's easier to use. It's still a great way to produce custom Windows programs.

Carl Gundel produces Liberty Basic - the current version is done with VSE, but he's in the midst of a port to VisualWorks using Pollock.

Who would have thought that my pagerank is high enough to get a mention in a splog site like this? You have to love the sheer audacity of the title that popped into my name search: "don't MAKE a blog, TAKE a blog".

Amanda Congdon jumps on the pro-neutrality side of the argument with Friday's RocketBoom broadcast. The whole argument has a premise I simply can't take - that government regulations can protect me from the predations of the ISPs. Yes, I realize that we don't have as much competition in this area as we do in, say, toothpaste. However, I've been watching Verizon lay fiber through my neighborhood (and the county) all summer. I use Comcast now - they give me 15 mbps down, and between 1 and 3 up. That's a huge improvement over what I had just two years ago, and it came in response to Verizon's move into the area - not in response to any governmental "help".

So what will happen if we get Federal "help"? I'll say it again - we'll get the net version of the FCC. The laws that have thus far been shot down (the various attempts to enforce "decency" on the net "for the children") - suddenly, with the net being a public utility, a "compelling government interest" will pop up. Boy, won't that be fun. You like the freewheeling nature of political debate on the net? Thus far, it's been left that way - but once the net is a public utility, you'll be able to say hello to the same regime that rules TV and radio. Yeah, I'll sure enjoy that.

Pitching fear of the telcos is good fun, but at the end of the day, they have to compete with the cable firms (and with IP over powerlines, and various other small time things out there). The worst they can do is charge me too much money. I also have no patience for the tiered service scare stuff - we already have that. I can buy anything from dialup to 30 mbps down (or heck, T3 service, if I really want to pay). Bottom line - we already have tiered service.

There's an example of a "protected" public market out there: radio. Anyone happy with the radio market in the US? Anyone looking for low power radio stations? Whoops - regulated out of existence "for our own good". Everyone - including Amanda - loves to rag on cable TV service but ponder that for a minute - why is it that cable give you hundreds of channels, with mostly unregulated content, while over the air broadcasts are highly constrained? If you said "public utility", you guessed right. And before you screech about cable monopolies screwing us over, go look at your state and local laws - those monopolies are a direct result of legislation, not of business connivance.

If net neutrality passes, then 5 years from now, the US based net will be a vast sea of regulated blandness, much like the broadcast TV and radio space is. Only there won't be an easy way back out of the mess, because the wires will be regulated.

Time for the weekly look at the logs. BottomFeeder downloads ran at a rate of 148 a day last week - the details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	376
Linux x86	152
Mac X	108
CE ARM	90
Mac 8/9	62
Update	48
HPUX	46
AIX	33
Solaris	30
Linux Sparc	23
Windows98/ME	17
Linux PPC	16
SGI	13
Sources	11
CE x86	4
ADUX	4

I'm always amazed when I get a few Alpha downloads :) Off to the HTML page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	60%
Internet Explorer	28.9%
MSN Bot	4.2%
Other	3.8%
Opera	2.1%
Megite	1%

That looks fairly normal. The RSS tool distribution:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	19.9%
BottomFeeder	18.1%
Other	16.5%
BlogLines	9%
Net News Wire	7.7%
Internet Explorer	4.7%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.6%
Safari RSS	3.3%
NewsGator	3.1%
BlogSearch	1.9%
SharpReader	1.9%
RSS Bandit	1.6%
Planet Smalltalk	1.5%
MSN Bot	1.2%
RSS 2 Email	1.2%
JetBrains	1%
Jakarta	1%
Liferea	1%
Feed Reader	1%
Java	1%
Lilina	1%

That tool distribution isn't any different from average either. Another week ahead!

From the TSS Java Symposium:

Another tool, which I found was very impressive is CodeCrawler . Basically this tool is able to analyze source code (well not directly but that's not the point) and generates a graph of the classes found. Each class is linked to others and have color, width and height corresponding to number of line of code, number of methods and number of attributes. And the whole graph is dynamic, you can move things around. Pretty impressive... alas CodeCrawler in written in SmallTalk, but if you have to audit code, that's a killer tool.

I love the way he says "alas" - likes the tool, likes the way it works, cares way too much about the implementation. You might as well pull out Emacs and say "alas, not written in Java".

Scoble spotted this story about Boeing and Connexion:

Looks like Boeing is giving up on Wifi in planes because they've lost a billion and don't see that their investment will come back. Funny, didn't JetBlue just pay big dollars to add that to all their planes? 

I used the Boeing service on an SAS flight to Copenhagen and loved it. The problem wasn't with the Wifi. But there was a major problem elsewhere that'll keep people from using it: power.

My batteries in my laptop (and in most laptops I see on planes) last about two hours. Yeah, some models last four to eight, if you have additional "big" batteries. But most last about two hours the way you buy them out of the store.

Hmm. Most American Airlines flights I've taken over the last few years - both domestic and international - have had power at the seats. That hasn't been true for any other carrier I fly, and it's impacted my plans for long flights quite a bit. Any carrier that adds WiFi but doesn't add seatback power is just stupid - the phrase "lost investment" comes to mind. Scoble's right - why should I buy a network connection for an 8 hour flight if I only have 2-3 hours of battery time?

Friend of mine is looking for a job, and related this exchange:

[Person1] A fund nearby got in contact with me yesterday. They're looking for someone to write a portfolio/risk management system and heard about the one I wrote. They were very excited.
[Person2] person1: In Smalltalk?
[Person1] Until I told him I did it in Smalltalk. "Don't you think it's odd to write a system in a language like that?"
[Person1] That was his response

I love group-think. Offer to solve a problem, and anything that veers from the expected path raises flags. Sure, there are times that's a valid concern. But if you find a person to help you build a business - and you found them because of their previous expertise in the field in question - wouldn't actually listening to them make some sense?

Joi Ito talks about the loss of 6 months of information from his machine, and with it his World of Warcraft stuff:

I realize this may sound a bit high drama, but I'm sure I'm not the only one whose brain shuts down to almost all outside input during a broken computer incident. Now I'm running on a fresh install with very little baggage and it actually feels quite nice. This also means no World of Warcraft and possibly more blogging. ;-)

Based on the way I've seen that game discussed, there might be a case that it's approaching "Better than Life" from "Red Dwarf". I've never played, so that might well be over the top - comments?

James McGovern is a little over the top in his title for the linked post, but I think he touches on a good point with this anecdote:

My friends thesis was based on the fact that the enterprises who go down the outsourcing route tend to lower their expectations for individual consultant productivity when pursuing outsourcing arrangements. He stated once an American company has failed at attempting outsourcing to India, he gets to come in and pick up the pieces at a higher rate. He also mentioned that this allowed his 100% US firm to staff a lot lower on the food chain that prior to outsourcing. Clients generally don't do individual interviews anymore which has afforded him the ability to place less optimal resources on projects. In the past, he worked for one of the spinoffs from the big four consulting firms who had the notion of partner. While the partner would bill out at higher rates, they wouldn't necessarily bill 100% of their time to a client. He noted that the Indian outsourcing model had the same notion of a partner only that they stayed at a single client to work on relationship-oriented issues. He believes this is another opportunity for him to take folks who are losing their technical ability to not only make them billable but to do so at extreme rates.

I'd disagree that you can get away with sending sub-standard consultants in at high rates for any period of time. Clients will notice, and that will be that. On the other hand, the offshoring experience may well lower expectations, and James touches on that with this: "He noted that the Indian outsourcing model had the same notion of a partner only that they stayed at a single client to work on relationship-oriented issues." When the consultants are 12 timezones away, that's probably most of what gets done. There's not going to be any direct technical collaboration, nor is there going to be any communication between the developers and the end users. It's a complete return to the 1970's glass house of IT approach: toss the requirements over a wall, wait N months, and see what comes back.

That approach didn't work well back then, and I see no reason for it to work well now.

In an article titled "Java's new considered harmful", Doctor Dobbs describes Smalltalk:

The best example is an instance-controlled class, where the class writer wishes to restrict the number of instances. When the maximum number of instances is one, you have the Singleton pattern (described in Design Patterns by Erich Gamma et al., Addison-Wesley, 1995). Singleton is often used when the object corresponds to a unique item in the real world (such as the keyboard or computer itself), or when the object is the sole manager for some resource. Java's Runtime class is an example of the latter: Its single instance manages interactions between the Java virtual machine and native operating system.

In Smalltalk, simply override #new in your class, and have it hand back (or create if it's not there yet) the sole instance.

Sometimes only a few instances of a class are desired. Imagine a class representing ASCII characters. There are only 256 of those. If the class is immutable and doesn't carry any other information, only 256 instances of the class need ever exist--more would just clutter memory. For a more dramatic example, consider the Boolean class: Only two instances are ever necessary, one for True and one for False. In addition to saving memory, having only one instance per value also allows testing for equality using the "==" operator, instead of the slower "equals" method.

In Smalltalk, there are sole instance of True and False. Yes, there's VM support for that, but you can get the same effect in user code by overriding #new and #basicNew to not allow the creation of new instances.

For a more sophisticated and (currently) hypothetical example, consider the Integer class. There are many possible instances of this class -- too many to cache them all -- but we might conjecture that some values are more common than others. Probably Integer objects representing the numbers from -2 to 100 are more likely to occur than others. A clever implementation could cache objects for these numbers, saving the time and storage involved in their creation.

Heh. Smalltalk does this, with class SmallInteger. It's an optimization for smaller (2^^29-1) integers, with auto-promotion when you exceed that range. The article also points out the non-polymorphic nature of new(), and the various work-arounds used to deal with that. In Smalltalk, #new is just a method. Override it to your heart's content.

Nearly all the way down, the author gets to the nub of the matter - in Smalltalk, these problems simply don't exist:

In Smalltalk, where dynamic typing makes downcasting unnecessary and exceptions are not treated as rigorously as Java, class-based creation is convenient, elegant, and polymorphic (see SmallTalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation, by Adele Goldberg and David Robson, Addison-Wesley, 1983). In fact, it is the usual way to create objects in that language.

He describes all that a bit further down, and points to what he thinks is a flaw:

Smalltalk uses the class-based approach to creation. There is an object corresponding to each class, and instances are created by sending a new message to the class object. This is elegant and polymorphic. Indeed, it is common in Smalltalk programs to pass around a class object when polymorphic creation is required. But Smalltalk's mechanism suffers from a serious drawback: Initialization is not enforced. new creates objects but does not initialize them. The convention is to have an initialize method for each class that is called after new, but you can forget to call initialize, leaving the object in an invalid state. Why not combine creation and initialization by calling initialize from within new? Because new is polymorphic, so it must always take the same number of arguments (namely zero), whereas each class may require a different number of arguments for initialization.

Well, you aren't limited to #new. You can create your own class side creation methods (example: Point x: xVal y: yVal). As to initialization, I've had plenty of cases where I've not wanted my new object initialized, or initialized in non-default ways, so whether this is a flaw or a feature is a matter of opinion. I'm used to it, so I could easily be biased in the matter. Also, a new object wil all instance variables set to nil may not be invalid - that may well be the right starting state. It all depends on the use case.

In any event, it's a good article, and explores the problem. Read it yourself, and see what you think.

James Governor quotes Tim Berners-Lee:

This has to be the best first sentence to a blog ever:

"When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission."

Oh to be able to say that. Al Gore eat your heart out. Heck- Dave Winer eat your heart out.

"Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it.

Let's see whether the United States is capable as acting according to its important values, or whether it is, as so many people are saying, run by the misguided short-term interested of large corporations.

I hope that Congress can protect net neutrality, so I can continue to innovate in the internet space. I want to see the explosion of innovations happening out there on the Web, so diverse and so exciting, continue unabated."

He's almost got it, but then misses at the end. Note the call to have Congress protect the net. Hmm. That's worked out so well for radio and tv, hasn't it? You mark my words: If Congress passes a "net neutrality" law, it will turn the US based portion of the net into a "public utility". Once it's a public utility, then there will be a need to "protect" us from various bad things - after all, just like broadcast TV, anyone can see the net. So content regulations "for the children" will pop up - call George Carlin about the 7 forbidden words. The kinds of campaign (political) restrictions you see on radio and tv will hop over too - suddenly, any advocacy for a candidate will be an "in kind" contribution.

You want "net neutrality"? Then don't advocate for Congress to create it.

Update: Lessig gets it wrong too:

One clue to this Net Neutrality debate is to watch what kind of souls are on each side of the debate. The pro-NN contingent is filled with the people who actually built the Net — from Vint Cerf to Google to eBay — and those who profit from the competition enabled by the Net — e.g., Microsoft. The anti-NN contingent is filled with the entities that either never got the Net, or fought like hell to control it — telecom, and cable companies. (The one clear exception to this is Dave Farber, who has been described as the “Grandfather of the Net.” I’ve never understood either what that description could mean, nor have I understood how he gets from the premises in his argument to its conclusions. But to be fair, this is an exception to the rule I’m describing.)

I have no doubt that the backers of net neutrality have their hearts in the right place. What they miss is that things won't stay pure. Once Congress regulates the net in the name of neutrality, we'll shortly end up with an "internet FCC". At which point the backers of neutrality will wail that they didn't have that in mind at all - but it won't matter.

I've spent the morning getting the internal blog server up and running - the server was actually the simple part. I'm no Apache expert, and futzing with the ProxyPass stuff was something of a learning experience :)

Wow. The last time I examined my subscription list to look at how many feeds had enclosures, and how many items with enclosures there were, it was a pretty small number - 3 or 4 feeds, iirc, and less than 20 enclosures. Well. Seeing as how I'm sitting on a plane with nothing else to do, I figured I'd have a look. So I opened up a workspace in BottomFeeder, and then ran this code:

dict := Dictionary new.
RSSFeedManager default getAllMyFeeds do: [:each | | items |
	items := each allItems.
	withEncs := items select: [:each1 | each1 enclosure notNil].
	withEncs := withEncs select: [:eachItem | eachItem enclosure notEmpty].
	withEncs notEmpty
		ifTrue: [dict at: each put: withEncs size]].

That gave me a dictionary with 26 feeds as keys - a fairly decent size increase (my subscription list is about the same size - 317 then, 320 now). The number of items with enclosures has exploded: 547. That's a big, big difference from just a few months ago. Simply amazing.

I've considered the idea of podcasting myself, but I'm not sure what I could do that would be compelling - I work in Columbia, Maryland, and all my co-workers (and customers, for the most part) are remote from me. If anyone has ideas, I'd be open to them.

I ran across this interesting Podcast - it's a regular Ruby On Rails podcast, but this one spoke with Josh Susser, who came out of Xerox (not Parc) with a Smalltalk application background. There's some interesting talk about how Ruby is similar to Smalltalk, and in how it differs. I'd be curious to know whether Josh has looked at Smalltalk recently - I'd love to hear his take on Seaside, for instance

It looks like AOL's management is having their staff actively engage in anti-marketing.

First up: The "why can't I just cancel my service?" call.

Second: The "Dead? Like that's a valid reason to cancel" call.

This is negative PR on wheels.

We head back home this afternoon, so we went to the beach before heading out - these two shots were taken this morning, at low tide:

As you can see, we pretty much had the beach to ourselves.

I might need to create a separate topic for this. So it turns out that changing the default view for reading mail (at least in non-inbox folders) is an option in the View menu. Yes kids, I'm blathering about Outlook again :/

Today's fun job is trying to figure out how to get the Exchange server our IT group uses to not retain mail on the server. I like to just keep mail around - disk space is cheap. There are limits on the server side storage though, which makes sense across a wide user base. So - the simplest thing would be to turn server retention off. That's easy if you use standards like POP3, but it apparently requires stepping through a forst of modal dialogs if you made the mistake of using the MS proprietary Exchange services.

It also seems to be painful if you already created a set of folders - the steps that my IS group is telling me to take just don't seem to exist in the dialogs that I'm getting. MS Outlook - it's teh Sux0r.

Charles Miller on the elusive ease of use of Linux on the desktop:

Around the Atlassian lunch-room table, during a discussion of the relative merits of operating systems, it was noted that Linux-use around the office seemed to correlate quite strongly with having a beard -- something that was certainly true of the small sample present at the time -- and that traditionally, the length of one’s beard is an indicator of Unix expertise.

“You know why that is?”, Mike asked. “The rest of us actually have time to shave.”

That's about the size of it. I much prefer managing applications on a Linux server, but I just can't see myself fighting with Linux on the desktop.

Cincom's Cincom Document Solutions group recently gave a demo at the Acord Loma Forum - there's video online for that here. That's Nic Carter giving the talk

Update: It seems that the direct link above doesn't work right. Here are the steps to get to the demo:

1. Follow the link
2. In the "Channels" list on the lower left, select "2006 Demos"
3. Scroll to pages 9-12 (control for that to the right of "Channels"
4. Select "Cincom" in the list.

Christine Rosen of TNR has a review up of "An Army of Davids" - and boy, she doesn't like it. The review is a hack job of the worst sort though - the "I'm an elite journalist and you're not" thing shines through like a fog light:

Glenn Reynolds is an unlikely visionary. Before he emerged as the "InstaPundit," he was just a law professor at the University of Tennessee, writing on administrative law and the Second Amendment for publications like Law and Policy in International Business and Jurimetrics.

Step one: denigrate the author as a small time hick from nowhere-ville. This is the oh so predictable response from *cough* professional *cough* journalists. Quick translation of her point here: "Pay no attention to this guy. He's a professor from Tennessee, for gosh sakes!". That works so much better than engaging his actual points...

She then goes on to make the claim that the book is all about blogger triumphalism:

Like many of his cyber-colleagues, Reynolds believes in a form of triumphalism: that his medium has transformed the exchange of ideas and information. When this triumphalism appears in the course of a 200-word blog post, it seems remarkably plausible. As bloggers never tire of reminding the world, they brought down Trent Lott and Dan Rather and powered Howard Dean's ascent. But, at book length, as the ideology's core assumptions and convictions are laid bare, the idiocies and dangers of this triumphalism become all too apparent.

The book is about trends in technology in general, and it hops all over the place - so this makes me wonder just how carefully Rosen read the book. There's blogger triumphalism to be sure, but it's actually a small part of the book - Reynolds makes the point that technology is empowering people across the board, with blogs and the internet being one piece of that. Her verbal sneer became clear in this section:

The little guy can be a poet or a pop star; with technology as his handmaiden, anything is possible. But this follow-your-bliss vision of individual fulfillment has little patience for the standards necessary for judging genuine talent, which is why Reynolds's book reads more like a middle-aged hobbyist's utopian manifesto than a blueprint for cultural renaissance.

No patience for us paeons from Rosen - no, we should stand back and let our "betters" decide on what's popular, what's trendy, and what works. Best not to get in the way - we might strain ourselves, or something. I've seen the kinds of people behind the "standards, Christine - they're the bozos at the RIAA and the MPAA, and thanks - I've had enough. Give me the amateur who isn't trying to outlaw future technology any day, any time.

Now, I have to say that I thought Reynold's interview of Kurzweil was too wide eyed, so I actually agree with Rosen there. I was able to get past that bit of triumphalism though, and see the wider picture Reynolds was painting. In her seeming desire to keep the hoi polloi away from the keyboard, Rosen utterly missed that. That's very clear with her closing paragraph:

Like his fellow techno-utopians, Reynolds dismisses criticism of these ideas as "the usual skepticism regarding the new." As long as individuals control the technologies, we should welcome them, he argues. As for the risk of catastrophic unintended consequences from our use of these technologies, Reynolds is sanguine. "You'd better hope that I'm right," he says, chuckling. "It's basically an unstoppable phenomenon."

There's the call for the amateurs to step back, and leave it to the *cough* professionals *cough*. Sure, there's a plan. I think I'll take my chances with Reynolds and the amteurs - the "pros" simply haven't demonstrated that they have better judgement.

Patrick Logan links to Steve Loughran talking about CORBA:

Gnome is built on Corba. You can tell that by changing your hostname and noting how you can't start any apps by double clicking on the icons. That is an ORB at work, if ever I saw one.

And then finds Miguel de Icaza thinking RESTful thoughts:

I have been considering the implementation of a system that would replace D-BUS and CORBA with a simple HTTP framework.

Heh. We tried that - SOAP. With any luck, take two will be smarter. On the other hand, if it runs true to form, it will start out simple and then end up like (insert your least favorite ditributed RPC system here)...

I have a hot tip for the mother here: how about you actually pay attention to what you kid is doing online?

A 14-year-old Travis County girl who said she was sexually assaulted by a Buda man she met on MySpace.com sued the popular social networking site Monday for $30 million, claiming that it fails to protect minors from adult sexual predators.

The lawsuit claims that the Web site does not require users to verify their age and calls the security measures aimed at preventing strangers from contacting users younger than 16 "utterly ineffective."

The best "security measure" possible would have been the mom actually paying attention. Computer and net access are no different than other activities - monitoring usage is no different than monitoring offline activities.

I just moved over to using Outlook, and I'm recalling why I stopped years ago. Eudora is hardly perfect, but it doesn't have as much baked in stupidity. Consider the default view in the inbox - just the title of the message (possibly with a small preview), and no immediate view of the message. I created some folders and rules, and messages display in this odd two pane mode - with the list being horizontal and left of the message pane - instead of above it. Not to mention that neither pane seems resizable in the vertical direction. Hell, selecting a message doesn't mark it read - I have to do that by hand. - Correction - there's just a slight delay, at least in non-Inbox folders. In the inbox though, it's manual. Bah.

This is actually unproductivity software. Which begs the question, why am I using it? Well, our IT group supports Outlook only - and I don't see any reason to run two email clients on an ongoing basis. Thus, all my mail is now organized there. I'd love to go back to Eudora, simply because it sucks a lot less.

Oh, and a note to Scoble and his cheering about how daring it was to introduce that stupid ribbon? Good gosh man, have the Outlook team make the rest of the experience not suck. When you define UI trivia as daring, while leaving the suckage setting on "infinite", you haven't achieved much.

It's a whole new Dr. Who cast:

London actress Freema Agyeman (the U.K. soap opera Crossroads) is rumored to be in line to replace Billie Piper as the companion to David Tennant's Doctor Who in the show's expected third season, the British Sun tabloid newspaper reported.

I realize that this is all in the spirit of the original, but I liked the first season's cast a lot. I hope the new one measures up.