Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

There was a rather stupid bug in the generation of the per-category syndication feeds - the oldest ones were being fetched rather than the latest ones, based on a backwards boolean :) I've fixed that, and regenerated the files.

Dare Obasanjo cuts through a lot of the hype and complaints about whether posters/linkers (vis-a-vis Jason Calacanis and Digg) should get paid or not. In any popular field, there's always a market for professionals; the people who think that's somehow distasteful should just give away the tools they sell, and see how that works out for them. The more interesting thing is how Dare sums up:

The interesting question for me is whether sites like Digg are immune to the 1% rule or not. When I used to participate on Kuro5hin it was clear to me that a small set of users determined the focus of the site even though there were thousands of users who could vote on stories and rate comments. It was also easy to see how the direction and the topics covered by the site would change as certain cliques of users left the site. Digg looks to me to be just like Kuro5hin with a slightly better UI and a different community. I would be surprised if both sites don't face the same kind of issues when it comes to small sets of users dominating the content and focus of the site despite Kevin Rose's protestations that this isn't the case. 

Rose can protest all he wants, it's just human nature at work. You can see it on USENET groups, in mailing lists, on Wikis, blog commenters, etc. I suspect that if you asked a local politician whether they get a disproportionate number of calls from a small number of people, they would say yes. The fact of the matter is, most people in any community just lurk. Trying to claim otherwise is like spitting into the wind.

Bill de hÓra says that Seaside makes new kinds of web apps possible.

Technorati Tags: seaside

A long while back, I created a simple enclosure handler for BottomFeeder. It's pretty basic; it wakes up at night, checks your feeds for enclosures, and downloads them. The basic implementation had some issues though, based on the workings of VisualWorks. At present (this is slated to be fixed for the Winter release), http downloads proceed in memory. For things like your average HTML/XML page, that's fine. For things like podcasts and vlogs though, it can cause problems. Additionally, the initial implementation forked off a thread per download. Combine those two and you get to "all memory used up" pretty darn fast.

I changed it to do linear downloads, and I've also created a small application that just does downloads based on a settings file. So the manager will now look for that separate app, and if it finds it, dish off downloads to it. That way, any over-use of memory doesn't impact the main app, and long downloads won't tie up the normal operation of the tool.

I haven't released any of that yet, because I want to give it a real world test first. Next week, I'm heading to Cincinnati, so I'll get a chance to try it out. If it all works as I expect, I'll push the new stuff up for download.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, development, cst

I've had a few people tell me that I should be able to copy stuff to my iPod from Windows (even though the synch machine is my Mac), so long as I set updates to "manual". Well, not with iTunes. Hooked it up, and ITunes tells me that in order to use the iPod with Windows, I need to reset it to factory defaults. Absolutely brilliant. So it turns out that XPlay is going to be useful, allowing me to use the device as I want (and should be able!) to use it.

Sigh.

I'll be at corporate HQ all week - I'm giving an "Intro to Smalltalk" training class to an internal (i.e., other Cincom employees) group. Should be a good week. The week after that, my daughter is taking a 3 day golf camp - which will give me three mornings to fit some golf in. Then after that, it's off for the annual pilgrimage to DisneyWorld. This year we are staying at "The Beach Club" - which has the most amazing pool of any resort I've ever been to. Should be a good wrap to summer - and wrap it will be, with school starting up right afterwards, and ESUG on the way.

Where does the time go?

Apparently, making unauthorized copies of movies is ok, so long as it comes out of the marketing budget:

What happens when an organization that is best known for inveighing against the unauthorized copying of movies gets caught doing exactly that? The Motion Picture Association of America was caught with its pants down, admitting to making unauthorized copies of the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated in advance of this week's Sundance Film Festival.

But at least the copyright owner had given them permission, right?

This Film Is Not Yet Rated looks at the motion picture ratings system created and run by the MPAA. Director Kirby Dick submitted the film for rating in November. After receiving the movie, the MPAA subsequently made copies without Dick's permission. Dick had specifically requested in an e-mail that the MPAA not make copies of the movie. The MPAA responded by saying that "the confidentiality of your film is our first priority."

Fortunately for the MPAA, this may all fall under "fair use" rights. Which they have, and we don't - at least, according to them:

According to Mark Lemley, a professor at the Stanford Law School, the MPAA may have been within its rights to make copies of the film. Given that the MPAA's intent isn't financial gain and that the whole situation may rise above the level of trading barbs through the media into legal action, making a copy may be justified. Personally, I can't see any justification for an organization such as the MPAA ignoring a directive from a copyright owner, but IANAL. A "digital version" of the movie was submitted for screening, according to Dick's attorney, Michael Donaldson. If that digital version turns out to be a DVD, the MPAA could also find itself in hot water for violating the DMCA. Oh, the irony! Either way, the MPAA can't be happy about being put into a position where they are forced to justify the same actions they decry when undertaken by a consumer.

There's that pesky DMCA, which could make the whole thing illegal. They should all be asked to settle for $2500...

Technorati Tags: DRM, MPAA

Ezboard has been having fairly epic problems with their server software, most of which is written in Cincom Smalltalk. Rather than actually explain the problems they have had, they just want to point the finger at us:

The current ezboard program is written in Smalltalk, a programming language that is becoming obsolete. The current program has many bugs that can't be fixed because each time the developers try to fix them, it causes something else to break. That seems to be the nature of Smalltalk. In the beginning, the program was simple, but as more and more features were demanded and added, it became more complicated -- and more buggy. It is also becoming difficult for ezboard to find skilled Smalltalk programmers. As a result, ezboard has had to choose to stay as it is, adding no new features and fixing no bugs, or move to a new architecture that will make it simpler and quicker to make changes, add new features, etc., and that will still be easy for board owners to customize. That is the purpose of the move.

Hmm. They wrote the original application in VWNC 3.0, and didn't use VisualWave (the then current HTML technology add on for VW). Instead, they wrote their own server from scratch. They didn't use a database on the back end, instead serializing objects to disk. Those two early decisions came back to haunt them in a big way - we actually spoke to them about dealing with them inside Smalltalk, by:

• Updating to the Web Toolkit, which works in conjunction with your stock web server
• Upgrading from serialized objects to a database back end

Instead, they decided to go with a full rewrite in something else, and a general blasting of our product as a way of making excuses. There's no reason for them to do that. Just look at what they say instead: fixing bugs creates other ones. That has nothing to do with Smalltalk (or any other language, for that matter) - it has to do with whatever process they use to develop code. If that's happening to them now, I guarantee that it will happen to them in the future, without regard to what development/deployment platform they end up using.

Update: Looks like they pulled that post down.

Update: As shown in the comments, you can see the original posting in the Google Cache.

Technorati Tags: PR

Looks like the American League races are heating up - take a look at the current standings:

Six weeks ago, it looked like the wild card was definitely coming out of the central division - now that's up in the air. It also looked like Boston was starting to pull away, but that's no longer happening - the Yanks have been coming back strong (thanks to some decent pitching). If Matsui and Sheffield come back in late August/early September as expected, the end of the season will be a fun thing to watch.

Technorati Tags: yankees, baseball

When I pushed out version 4.2, I forgot one small thing: I didn't promote the Solaris x86 link up from the dev section to the regular release section. That's done now, so you can grab the version for Solaris from the regular downloads.

Time to look back on the weekly numbers. BottomFeeder downloads proceeded at a rate of 170 per day:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	449
Update	231
Linux x86	119
Mac X	116
CE ARM	78
Mac 8/9	72
Windows98/ME	23
Solaris	8
HPUX	19
AIX	14
Linux Sparc	13
Linux PPC	12
SGI	10
Sources	10
ADUX	4
Solaris86	3
CE x86	1

Looks like the normal distribution. Now a look at the HTML accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	49.7%
Internet Explorer	34.1%
Planet Smalltalk	4.9%
Opera	3.2%
Other	4.1%
MSN Bot	2.7%
Megite	1.3%

Finally, the RSS accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
BottomFeeder	20.9%
Mozilla	17.2%
Other	14.4%
BlogLines	10%
Net News Wire	8.1%
NewsGator	4.4%
Internet Explorer	4.3%
Google Feed Fetcher	4.2%
Safari RSS	4.1%
BlogSearch	2.5%
SharpReader	1.7%
Planet Smalltalk	1.2%
RSS Bandit	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
Opera	1%
MSN Bot	1%
JetBrains	1%
Jakarta	1%
Liferea	1%
Java	1%

It's somehow comforting to know that it's not only US law on internet matters that goes wonky. I posted on the asinine DOPA legislation this morning; in France, the government asked their constitutional council for a ruling on a law, and ended up with some very messy results - it looks like any open source reverse engineering of DRM is now criminal, with rather hefty penalties:

France's Constitutional Council has made a stringent new copyright law even harsher, modifying three articles of the law and striking out a fourth in a review of its constitutionality. The changes mean that unauthorized sharing of copyright files such as music tracks will become a criminal offense, while those who reverse-engineer DRM (digital rights management) systems in order to develop interoperable software will face six months in prison and a fine of $36,000.

This got discussed on today's (July 28, 2006) CNet Buzz Out Loud podcast, and they were asking the audience if this was as bad as it sounds. The ComputerWorld report sounds pretty bad - is it really as big a mess as it looks like?

Technorati Tags: DRM, music

James McGovern asks:

Ever noticed in the blogosphere that bloggers who work for software vendors never seem to list their customers in their blogroll

There's a reason for that: getting permission from a customer to say anything about their use of a product is not a simple matter of pushing them into your blogroll. Typically, getting permission to publicly say anything about their use of software requires a management decision.

Technorati Tags: PR, crm, marketing

I've been invited to give a webinar for the Product Management blog, and I've accepted. You can see the details here, or click the link in the "Information" section of the menu. Here's the summary for my topic:

Make sure you know what people are saying about you and your product. It’s a new, unfamiliar world for marketing and PR people. Until fairly recently, marketing communications were tightly controlled, and mostly one-way. Where there was a need/desire for two-way communication, it was done on terms set by marketing and PR focus groups, market surveys, analyst briefings (etc.). The emergence of the blogosphere has changed all of that, in ways that are every bit as profound as the sea change wrought hundreds of years ago by Gutenberg’s printing press.

He'll be talking about the need to keep track of the ongoing commentary that’s taking place, outside of the control of PR professionals. It’s no longer enough to have a consistent message;you now need to be aware of what’s being said about you, your products, or your client’s products at all times. He’ll give a few examples of companies not paying attention fast enough,and how that’s impacted their public image. He’ll also explain how he, in his role as a product manager, tracks references to the products he work with.

You'll learn how he tracks the ongoing commentary about his products, and how you can do the same thing to keep track of yours.

This looks like it'll be fun. The webinar is December 20th (all the early dates filled up fast!).

Technorati Tags: PR, marketing, communications

This long post on marketshare and context is a good tonic to the mostly meaningless numbers that get tossed around. I particularly liked the section on music players, with this summary:

In fact, the 30 million iPods sold so far this year and the 22 million sold last year are the best proof that users are choosing not to use their mobile phones to listen to music, but rather paying a significant premium to get a dedicated music player!

The next time you hear market share numbers being thrown around, consider the context. Numbers don't speak for themselves, they require critical interpretation.

That brings to mind a book I recently read: "The Origin of Brands", by Al and Laura Ries (see her blog here). The major thrust of the book is that products do not, for the most part, converge - rather, you see a lot of divergence as new product niches get created. Music players and phones are a great example of this - like many people, I own an iPod (mini) and a phone. Phones have to have a numeric keypad, which leaves a limited amount of space for other controls. For every phone I've ever owned, the interface to things not related to making calls have sucked - many times, the stuff related to calls also sucks. I can't really see how to add music with that interface sucking as well.

Then there's the music industry obsessions that come along. Say I had a phone that played music. My current phone has (barely worthwhile) internet access. I'd expect any music phone to allow wireless downloads of music - but no:

The handy iTunes menu interface on your ultra-sleek Motorola SLVR lets you scroll through your playlists, select a song and play it -- complete with any accompanying album art. You can even shuffle songs right from the main menu. And putting your music on the Motorola SLVR is as easy as syncing to iTunes, the world’s best digital jukebox. Just connect your phone to your Mac or PC, then choose the songs you want to sync or let iTunes choose them for you -- autofilling your phone with a random selection from your iTunes library.

If a music phone is to serve any purpose at all, it ought to allow wireless download anywhere the phone works. Otherwise, it's just a less than optimal iPod with crappy controls.

Technorati Tags: branding, sales

Gordon Weakliem notes that blogger (owned by Google) makes it easy for sploggers to pick up formerly legitimate sites:

I just noticed that Jeff Katz' blog, which used to be at gmorning.blogspot.com, has been taken over by a splog, in what appears to be a case of blog squatting. Jeff's last post was a bit over a month ago. No inkling of what happened, except that apparently Blogger allows weblog names to be recycled with no embargo period. You'd have to be insane to use blogspot as a blogging platform if this is the case. It's OK for recycling to happen, but they should place some sort of embargo when a weblog author relinquishes a blog - say a month where the feed will 410. Most aggregators will automatically unsubscribe you upon receipt of a 410. But, really, this is amazing - this morning the former CEO of Orbitz morphed into a spammer. Blogger is turning itself into a pariah.

For a company that claims to be fighting spam, Google certainly isn't doing some of the really simple stuff. This blog in question is sporting an immediate redirect out, to the splog. Like Gordon says, you have to be nuts to locate your blog on that service.

Technorati Tags: splog

I'm catching up on my trade journal reading, and I've gotten all the way up to the July 17th ComputerWorld. In that, I ran across this article which predicts which skills will be hot, and which will be cold, in 2010. Some of the predictions make a lot of sense - for instance, they predict that you'll need a storage administrator. Heck, with how cheap storage is getting, I might need one in my house :)

Others make less sense - here's one that's been predicted for years now on Application Development:

By 2010, applications will become commodities delivered by external service providers. Internal development won't be dead, though -- it will just be done differently in 2010, Foote says. The challenge will be selecting packages and tailoring them to what you need. "Code-writing disappears in this world, unless it's code-writing in customer-facing applications that offer strategic advantage," he adds.

That glosses over the obvious fallout from so many large ERP installations: tailoring third party applications is never as simple as management would like to think. Admittedly, there's a caveat above: "applications that offer strategic advantage". The question that ought to arise is this: "Will installing this third party package require us to change our processes?" Unless your company is small and nimble, a "yes" answer to that question should make you pause. Process changes become political footballs in companies, and that benefits no one. In many cases, it will be far, far cheaper to custom build something that follows your existing process simply to avoid the political issues.

Technorati Tags: development, IT, management

Dave Sifry (Technorati) just posted a short list of how to make your site popular. Follow the first link to see the details, but here's the bullet list:

• React to others quickly
• Make your posts easy to read
• Link, Link, and then Link some more
• Optimize for search engines (title and main URL)
• Post, Post, and Post some more

I'd add that you should post on a set of topics, so that people start to learn what to expect from you.

When the clueless legislate, we get clueless legislation. Just look at the "Myspace law" that the US House passed yesterday, by an overwhelming (410 - 15) margin. This is classic "for the children" legislation that makes no sense. Here's what it purports to do:

If the Resolution becomes law social networking sites and chat rooms must be blocked by schools and libraries or those institutions will lose their federal internet subsidies. According to the resolution’s top line summary it will “amend the Communications Act of 1934 to require recipients of universal service support for schools and libraries to protect minors from commercial social networking websites and chat rooms.”

Hmm. I guess USENET and IRC channels are ok then, since they aren't commercial. How do they propose to enforce this, anyway? It's simple enough to block questionable brick and mortar sites from a defined area near a school; you can just walk around. The net has "infinite" space though - and new social networking sites are being born (as others die) constantly. How do you block a category like this? Here's what Mike Arrington Marshall Kirkpatrick says about it, and I agree completely:

An incredibly vague law, DOPA will require schools and libraries to block access to a potentially huge range of sites on the internet. The goal is to protect children from adult predators. Sites that must be blocked include those that allow people to post profiles, include personal information and allow “communication among users.”

410-15 was a shocking vote. I write about it here because it has the potential to impact a huge portion of our readership and the companies we profile on this site. Though the viability of enforcing such a law is open to question, web services offering collaboration in education are looking seriously endangered. Secondary collaborative consequences of commercial web sites used in schools aren’t looking good either.

(A few minutes later) Sigh. I actually called my congressman's office on this. They told me "never fear, that's not our intent". A phrase comes to mind: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". The only way to enforce what this legislation calls for is to cut internet connectivity off in schools and libraries.

Technorati Tags: web, stupidity

Patrick Logan points to some actual Voodoo in Java-Land. In VisualWorks, all of the similar memory tricks are accessible at the library level, and are documented as well.

We launched a new Wiki today - Smalltalk Cookbook. The intention is to create some simple, but useful, content describing Cincom Smalltalk. Check it out now.

You have to love this take on Seaside from OSCon:

I'm having fun in this session, sitting next to Ben Bleything, and trying not to contribute to the sporadic chuckling and heckling about the voodooo magic of Seaside. This is definitely one of the more enjoyable sessions I've attended so far, but now that I've actually seen it in action, I really don't think Seaside poses serious competition to any of the major web frameworks. Too much voodoo.

Blaine Buxton was nicer about this than I'm going to be :) Here's my translation of what Obie Fernandez is saying: "It's too easy, I'm not seeing any suffering - how will I impress my friends if I don't spend endless hours at the keyboard???"

Get over it and try it out. Don't throw rocks because you think it looks like magic.

Technorati Tags: Seaside, smalltalk

I mentioned that I wanted some software to deal with my iPod from Windows (it's "home" machine is my Mac). The problem: when I travel, I have my Windows notebook, and it doesn't carry my music library. What I'd like to do is have the ability to update the podcasts while I'm away, and it looks like XPlay will let me do that. I can download the stuff I want, and drag/drop them over. Very cool.

Technorati Tags: iPod, music

This story about an iTunes Kiosk (where else to fill the new iPod you bought out of the vending machine?) triggered a long term issue I've had with Apple's DRM and registration system. My iPod "belongs" to my Mac Mini - that's the source for the stuff that downloads to it. However, if I'm on the road, I don't have my mini - I have my space starved laptop. What I'd like to be able to do is grab new podcasts (or music, but in my case, probably podcasts) while I'm on the road, and push them to the iPod. How can I do that without flipping the "home iTunes" repository for my iPod?

Technorati Tags: music, iPod

Here's why the RIAA hates digital music:

Record companies keep about 72.5 cents on average for a 99 cent song, Dave Jaworski, CEO of PassAlong Networks, at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit. PassAlong sets up online music services for other web sites. It has a big store on Ebay too.

At $17 for a CD, they get to keep more money per sale (and still pass virtually nothing on to the artist). It's all about the profit margin to which they've become accustomed.

Technorati Tags: RIAA

Nick Carr adds more commentary from Lee Gomes about the Long Tail issue I linked to yesterday. Good stuff.

Technorati Tags: marketing, sales

My initial reaction to this post from Paul Graham was something like this: "heh - he doesn't understand how Digg works". Heck, I even had a post written up along those lines. I've done a bit more reading though, so I trashed that post and started over. Since I've wandered into the middle of the story, I'll back up: there have been a number of stories about Reddit posted at Digg, and they all got pushed off the front page. A look at the search results with the "included buried stories" option tells the tale: the Digg community has been burying those stories.

Childish, perhaps, but not an editorial conspiracy. However, reading into it I ran across this - stupid joke, a guy posts a story on Digg, pointing to an identical story on Reddit, which points back. The title: "Recursion Defined". Ok, funny, haha. Here's the graphic of both stories so you get the point:

The thing is, Digg banned the user who submitted that. Hmm. That sure makes them look like a mature set of adults over there. It's not the most witty joke ever, but sheesh - it's not like it's incitement to riot or something. Maybe Jason Calacanis is making the guys at Digg nervous after all.

Technorati Tags: digg, reddit

This is perhaps the best diagnosis of Dell's problems with the consumer place I've seen. Laura Ries suggests that Dell should ditch the consumer space completely:

Today, consumers account for only 15 percent of sales, but a disproportionate percentage of the service calls. As a result, Dell’s service representatives are overwhelmed with consumers who have bought cheap computers calling for help.

...

So how can Dell cure its brand cancer?

Surgery. Cut out the cancer. Dell should get out of the consumer market and refocus the brand on the business community.

There's another possibility too - partner with one or more service providers (CompUSA, Best Buy) - not to sell their PCs, but to service them. I don't know how easy that would be, but it would certainly make support simpler.

Ries probably has the better solution though - and it's a generally applicable one. When you have a failing business line, the temptation is to fix it, even if the business line in question is the moral equivalent of horse buggies. Sometimes, it's better to change to a more well suited battlefield.

Technorati Tags: marketing, management

Here's a news story that hits the top of the stupo-meter:

Prosecutors say 24-year-old Marlon Brando Gill was angry and jealous when he forced the phone into Melinda Abell's throat in December. But defense attorneys insist the 25-year-old victim swallowed the phone intentionally to prevent Gill from finding out who she'd been calling.

That sounds pretty bad. Of course, you might wonder how anyone could actually force a cell phone down someone else's throat:

She testified yesterday that she couldn't remember how the phone got in her throat, saying she drank too much that night. Court records show that her blood alcohol content was three times the legal limit.

I think we need Dogbert for commentary on this one...

Nicholas Carr looks at a debate between Chris Anderson (of Long Tail fame) and Lee Gomes, who disputes some of his points. Carr comes down in the middle, which I think is reasonable:

But the 25% is not the whole story, either. To get a clear sense of the impact of the Net on the Long Tail, you'd need another statistic: Before the Internet came along, what percentage of total book sales lay outside the 100,000 titles stocked in a typical large bookstore? There have always been specialized bookstores, selling everything from religious and spiritual books to textbooks to foreign-language books to used and out-of-print books to poetry books (though their ranks have been pruned by Amazon and other online sellers). And you've always been able to go to a bookstore and order a book that it didn't carry on its shelves. Only by knowing how big the old Long Tail was can you understand how much larger it's grown with the Internet.

My guess - and it's only a guess - is that the Internet Long Tail is substantially larger than the pre-Internet Long Tail, but that, in its current form, it amounts to something less than a monumental change in the market. The important question, then, is this: Is the Long Tail going to get a lot bigger, or has most of the growth already happened?

That's an excellent question, and it would be nice to have good stats from Amazon. Anecdotally, I know that I've found books on Amazon, either by searching or by "people who bought X also bought Y". I've read books that I know I never would have found otherwise that way. That's anecdotal though, and says nothing about other people's habits. Like Carr, I suspect that the net has increased the size of the Long Tail - pre-net, you had to live in or near a large city to find specialty book stores, for instance. Still, I'd love to see actual data from Amazon and their competitors on this.

Technorati Tags: marketing, sales

I'm continuing to teach my daughter how to play the game - of course, that would go better if I didn't muff so many shots myself :) I decided to get her some lessons though - in August, she'll be attending a 3 day camp. With any luck, she'll return from that and start giving me tips.

Don Park brings up YouTube's business model, something I had in mind after I listened to TWIT while out jogging yesterday. The panel was talking about their burn rate, and they mentioned a figure of $18M in annual bandwidth costs (based on usage data from a few months ago). That's a pretty decent sized number. I know that NBC has started promoting their shows on YouTube, but are they bringing in enough to offset that enormous bandwidth use?

Sun continues to bleed money, but Schwartz says never fear, profits will be here... someday:

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday reported a loss of $301 million for its first three months under the leadership of new Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz. But in a conference call with analysts, Schwartz was bullish about revenue growth from the company's bread and butter, servers, which led Sun's revenue past analyst estimates. He pointed to strong growth for two new product lines, the "Galaxy" servers using AMD Opteron chips and the "Niagara" servers using Sun's UltraSparc T1 chip.

Update: Heh. Right on cue, here's Schwartz: "If you've seen the press release, you know we had a good fourth quarter to close out our 2006 fiscal year." Reminds me of an old quote - "Another such victory over the Romans and we are undone"

Cincom Smalltalk is no exception - there are certainly parts of the toolset that just suck. My intention in bringing this up isn't to shame anyone; if I wanted to do that, I could simply point to some of the more interesting code I've been responsible for over the years - including parts of BottomFeeder. No, my point here is to list some of my dislikes, and see what other developers who use VisualWorks think. No promises about time to fix anything, either - there's a ton of work that needs to be done in the large bucket labelled "tools", and all I'm after here is some notion as to what people think hurts most. So:

The Change List tool:

Look at the second and third items there - I have never had any idea as to what the difference between them is. The "Forget" menu is understandable only to people who've used it for years. I could go on, but you get the idea - I learned the bare minimum to get by years ago, and have stayed away from the rest.

So what's your pet peeve in the VW toolset? If you could wave a magic wand and fix just one tool, which one would it be, and why?

Technorati Tags: visualworks, development

Looks like the MPAA picked on the wrong guy:

Last November, Shawn Hogan received an unsettling call: A lawyer representing Universal Pictures and the Motion Picture Association of America informed the 30-year-old software developer that they were suing him for downloading Meet the Fockers over BitTorrent. Hogan was baffled. Not only does he deny the accusation, he says he already owned the film on DVD. The attorney said they would settle for $2,500. Hogan declined.

Normally, they pick on college kids or other people in similar levels of financial distress. This time, they found a guy willing and able to fight. It will be a good thing to see the tactics they use brought to light in a court - and Hogan has the resources to make it happen.

Technorati Tags: DRM, MPAA, RIAA

Phil Windley points out how customers have a lot more power than they did just a few short years ago:

The truth of the matter is that your customers are probably talking about your company right now. You can't control what they say. That's leaves two options: ignore what they're saying or join the conversations. The first option probably isn't good for business. How can you be part of the conversation?

His example involved a customer recording of a conversation with a service rep - which then got posted to the net. Word of Mouth advertising has always been viral, but it's been amplified by the net. A decade ago, you had to rely on someone in media picking a story up. Now, you mostly don't. That's tilted the balance of power more towards the customer, and a lot of companies are still trying to figure that out. The long tail can act like a scorpion's tail if you ignore it.

Technorati Tags: marketing, service, support

Dave Winer is somehow surprised that a Google search for RSS turns up "angry geeks" - in this case, "angry geeks" means "people who've had to deal with Dave Winer":

When you look at the results of the Google search, it's angry geeks complaining about RSS and saying they know the better way to do it.

All you need to do in order to understand the problem is peruse Winer's writing on the topic. He's proud that RSS 2.0 (and all previous versions, for that matter) are fundamentally broken, and even thinks that the broken-ness is a feature. Here's a quote from him on the RSS Advisory board mailing list that illustrates the problem. A few people were talking about Enclosures (can there be more than one? Should there be more than one? Could the spec perhaps be specific?):

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

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

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

This after people starting voting on their preference (one/many enclosures). Gosh forbid that the spec should actually lay that out, so that implementations could start becoming specific - couldn't have that. What we have now is a sea of inconsistency, simply because Winer can't see the wisdom of allowing some clarity.

The net result of that attitude is Atom's existence - something that would not have happened had Winer been even marginally reasonable. Next time he wonders why RSS searches turn up vitriol, he should look in a mirror. Then he can keep iterating until it sinks in.

Technorati Tags: syndication, atom

ABC gave their reasons for dropping "Invasion", which was an ok series that ran last year. I think there's some "days of yore" thinking going on over there:

Even with a lead-in like the hit show Lost, Invasion suffered a dramatic downturn in viewers, and ABC decided not to renew the alien mystery series, though it attracted about 10 million viewers a week. McPherson said in an interview at the Television Critics Association summer press tour in Pasadena, Calif., last week that he is aware that some fans were angry about the decision to pull the heavily serialized drama before its storylines were wrapped up.

I'm curious as to what they expected. In a the narrow-cast world we live in, a 10 million viewre audience isn't peanuts - especially if you try and find the right advertisers for it. "Appointment" TV started dying with the VCR, and the rapid spread of DVR technology is finishing it off. It's past time for the network execs to adapt to that reality.

Technorati Tags: entertainment, advertising

I think we have competition for Windows in the laptop space: Apple's share of the market rose to 12% in June:

The MacBook and MacBook Pro are selling well enough to push Apple's take of the U.S. portable computer market in June up to 12 percent. During Apple's second quarter earnings report, the company noted that its laptop marketshare was at 6 percent in January.

I can definitely see a MacBook being useful for me - it would give me the ability to easily demonstrate the cross platform nature of VW on one box.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac

It's sometimes interesting to read DDJ in order to get the fossil view of software development. For instance:

As time passed we kept sacrificing software performance in favor of developer productivity gains first by adopting object-oriented languages and more recently settling with garbage-collected memory, runtime interpreted languages and 'managed' execution. It is these "developer productivity" gains that kept the pressure on hardware developers to come up with faster and faster performing processors. So one may say that part of the reason why we ended up with gigahertz-fast CPUs was "dumb" (lazy, uneducated, expensive -- pick your favorite epithet) developers.

Yes, life was so much better back when everyone wrote in C, C++, or Assembly - we only had wild pointer problems every half hour or so. You know, I don't care how much more memory my system needs now, because a laptop with 1 GB of memory and a fast processor costs 1/3 (in absolute dollars - never mind the inflation adjusted difference) as much as my first desktop, which had 1 entire MB of memory and a 25 Mhz 386. I'll take the "dumb" programmers, thanks. This clown can go back to the *cough* more efficient *cough* days of yore. Have fun with DOS while you're there.

Technorati Tags: programming, development

Scoble on selling his house:

Other houses in our neighborhood have not sold as fast. The market is switching from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market but some markets remain hot. If you have a great house that the market wants it’ll pay the price. Stan knew that because he knew our market. If I tried to sell myself I probably would have just asked for Zillow’s price, which would have been a mistake. One thing I learned in the camera store I used to work at: it’s very easy to lower your price, it’s nearly impossible to raise it.

Well, let's see. He sold the house for $440k, and the cost was 6% (3% each way to agents). That comes to $26,400. Meaning, the actual clearing price to Scoble was less than $414,000. Had he sold it himself, and gotten the $414,000, he would have done marginally better. Would it have been worth his time? That I doubt, given his need to relocate.

My point? People assume that realtors are worth the money, because they assume that they get better sale value. There's actual research on this one (check out the chapter in Freakonomics), and that presumption doesn't hold up. For a realtor, selling for an extra $20k means very little, because their end of it is 3% ($600). That extra $20k would mean a lot to the seller, but it means next to nothing to the realtor.

The realtor wants to get something close to market value quickly. The actual seller might well be willing to wait for top value. Those two things don't necessarily line up. Does that mean you shouldn't use a realtor? It depends. I've always used one, simply because it was easier. Just don't assume that using a realtor means more money to you, because it probably doesn't.

In the survey I just posted, it seems that people really like the old (printed) cookbook. Apparently, the fact that most of that cookbook exists in the loadable help system is a very well kept secret :) Try loading the help today, and take a walk through it - while we don't have as much there as we would like, it's good stuff. Explore it and send me comments.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom, visualworks

Mark Cuban asks how to get people to go to the movies:

Only HDNet takes more time out my day than trying to solve this problem. Its the holy grail of the movie business. How do you get people out of the house to see your movie without spending a fortune. How can you convince 5 million people to give up their weekend and go to a theater to see a specific movie without spending 60mm dollars.

It's the wrong question, so most of the answers he gets are going to be wrong. The golden age of movies has passed. That doesn't mean that theaters are dead, anymore than TV meant that radio was dead. However, it does mean that the business is going to change.

The time between a theatrical release and the DVD release has been shrinking for awhile now. Why not eliminate it altogether? Sell DVDs at the theater, and make them available for retail buy the day after release? Large TVs and good home sound systems are here to stay, and you can pause the movie when the phone rings. Additionally, you don't need to worry about the ill mannered people 4 rows back who won't shut up.

The right answer is to accept reality - you aren't going to get crowds to the movies in the same kinds of large numbers as you have been able to. Not in a world filled with game consoles, home theaters, and DVRs. The real winner is going to be the company that sets up a commercial Bittorrent (or bittorrent like) system to stream movies to customers. Make it simple, and make it inexpensive. Skip the DRM, because the pirates will break it in minutes, and all you'll really do is irritate the paying customers. Offer one-off buys, but also go straight after NetFlix with a decent subscription model. Trying to get people to the theater is fighting yesterday's war. I'd suggest trying to fight elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: marketing, entertainment

Every so often people look at the old car I drive (a 1989 Mitsubishi Mirage), and ask me why I haven't bought a new one. It only happened more when I had a new engine dropped in last year (I figured it was about 3 car payments, so it's now worth it, to my mind). Well, today's post by David Weinberger only convinced me more. He's complaining about his new Yaris only getting 24 mpg in "in town" driving.

Hmm. My Mirage gets 32-35 in town. I've no idea what it would get highway; I hardly ever drive it that way. As well, the Mirage is hardly roomy, but look at this shot of the Yaris' interior at Toyota's site:

That's a sedan in name only; if you want to use your knees later, you'll sit in the front :) Heck, the Ford Windstar (Minivan) my wife drives gets 24-25 mpg. I think I'll drive my Mirage until it crumbles on me :)

Weather is such a funny thing. A few days ago, it was the all too typical Maryland July - hot, sticky, miserable - thank goodness I don't drive to work, since my car's AC doesn't work. Today, the weather was great after a huge round of storms overnight. We hit the golf course this afternoon, and it was just a great day -

The high today was around 80 - perfect golf weather. Yes, I know the rest of the US is apparently baking :)

Bruce Boyer recently posted some thoughts about the state of our documentation (he's our lead documentation guy) on the vw-dev mailing list. This prompted the idea of posting a brief survey, which is now up. Let us know what you think!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom

I know some people consider them "old school", but I really like the virtual desktop idea - I've used them on Unix/Linux machines for years. I just found one for the Mac that looks promising - Desktop Manager. On Windows, I guess I've gotten used to the tray - I've never found a Windows virtual desktop app that I liked.

Technorati Tags: productivity