Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Michael Lucas-Smith demonstrates refactoring by tearing apart some code I slapped together yesterday. Want to know how TDD works in Cincom Smalltalk? Have a look (flash).

Technorati Tags: refactoring, development

CNet reports that HP's board is meeting again, and will hold a press conference after the market closes on Friday:

Hewlett-Packard's board of directors is meeting Wednesday amid widening controversy over the tactics used in a probe into media leaks, CNET News.com has learned.

An HP representative declined to comment on the agenda for the board meeting or say when in the day it was scheduled to take place.

HP also plans to hold a press conference Friday afternoon, after the stock market's 1 p.m. PDT closing. An HP spokesman confirmed the event, but would not comment further.

On a Friday, after the bell rings. Gee, it's almost as if they want to bury the story, or something. Eventually, they'll do what needs to be done, and boot Patricia Dunn. In the meantime, they just keep fueling the smell storm.

Technorati Tags: stupidity

Well - this is encouraging. WiFi in the air might not be dead:

Panasonic has set about securing agreements covering a minimum of 500 aircraft in the next 60 days. That schedule is being driven by the need to be ready to serve ex-Connexion airlines within a tolerable time after the discontinuation of that service by the end of the year. “We can’t drag our launch decision on until, say, February,” Bruner said. “There will inevitably be a dark period between the end of Connexion and the start of our service, and we want to keep that as short as possible. We already have 150 aircraft committed and feel confident we’ll make the 500. But if we’re falling badly short in 60 days’ time we will not go.”

Getting that up-front commitment sounds smart to me - it means that they have an actual plan with revenue attached. I hope this works out, because I'd love to have a network option next time I make a long haul flight.

Technorati Tags: WiFi, air travel

In today's Smalltalk Daily, I go through some more aspects of Smalltalk syntax. I've also learned more about the tools I use to create screencasts - this one is smaller (800x600), so it ought to fit on the screen better. You can navigate here for the flash presentation.

Don Park explains how bad the rot has gotten:

I am not into ragging on and on about a topic. When something creeps me out, I deal with it and move on. Short of turning myself into an activist, I am going to just exercise my rights as a consumer/investor: refusing to buy. So I am just going to strike HP off my shopping list and not invest in HP stock regardless of how cheap it looks until the word 'HP' no longer disgusts me.

At some point, HP is going to need to acknowledge reality and do a clean sweep of everyone who was involved in the pretexting mess.

Update: Every time I think the HP story can't get worse, it drills deeper into the muck. Witness this:

Hewlett-Packard conducted feasibility studies on planting spies in news bureaus of two major publications as part of an investigation of leaks from its board, an individual briefed on the company’s review of the operation said yesterday.

The studies, referred to in a Feb. 2 draft report for a briefing of senior management, are said to have included the possibility of placing investigators acting as clerical employees or cleaning crews in the San Francisco offices of CNET and The Wall Street Journal.

I'm not sure what's going on here - makes me wonder whether Dunn is living out some fantasy about being a secret agent. Did she read too many "Spy vs. Spy" episodes in Mad Magazine as a child?

I believe that the case of the Belgian newspaper against Google News (they didn't like Google listing their stories) is what we call a pyrrhic victory:

Take a look at this search. It returns zero results, just this message:

In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 1237 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at ChillingEffects.org.

That’s right: those Belgian newspapers wanted Google to pay for the privilege of sending them readers, so Google is going to take their greed and use it to cut off their legs. Want to bet those papers lose tens of percentages of their traffic? All statistics say yes, and I’ll bet the Hitwise blog is working up a real pretty chart to prove it.

That's going to leave a mark. The funny thing is, Google is complying with the letter of the order that came down. If the newspaper in question was looking for invisibility, they certainly won. Otherwise - not so much.

Technorati Tags: news

Wow - Yahoo is doing something interesting: selling a major artist's album online in mp3 format:

"We're trying to be realistic," said Ken Bunt, senior VP of marketing at Hollywood Records. "Jesse's single is already online and we haven't put it out. Piracy happens regardless of what we do. So we're going to see how Jesse's album goes (as an MP3) and then decide on others going forward."

This should be interesting to watch. It's my contention that DRM doesn't prevent piracy - it just makes life difficult for the rest of us. Will sales figures back that up, or will this be too small a test?

Technorati Tags: DRM

Elton John on iPods:

"I don't have a silly iPod. I like to go buy the whole artist's work. If I'm going to watch My Name is Earl [in reference to the fact that the show's star, Jason Lee, was sitting next to him], I'm not going to just go and watch one program, I'm going to watch the DVD of the first series, and I'm going to watch the whole thing together."

There are two things to day about that:

1. You can play entire albums from an iPod. Just yesterday, I listened to a full Sheryl Crow album that way
2. Sometimes, most of the songs on an LP just don't appeal to me - are you saying that I have to sit through the stuff I dislike?

Methinks that Elton should look at an mp3 player before he talks smack about them. Now, perhaps he could comment on the whole DRM lock-in issue...

The 4.2 release of BottomFeeder had a number of irritating bugs that I've fixed since July - including a fairly severe bug in the code that identified old/new items. It turns out that if an item had expired out of your cache, but had been seen before, I had a boolean test backwards. Yes, this means I should have tests :)

In any event, you can grab the new release from the download page. If you have BottomFeeder installed, you can update this way:

• download baseapp-Windows.zip, or baseapp-win98.zip, or baseapp-nonWindows.zip (depending on your platform)
• Delete any .pcl files in BottomFeeder/app. Also delete BottomFeeder/plugins/Blog-Tools.pcl
• Extract the contents over your current install
• Restart BottomFeeder

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, rss, atom, aggregator

I mentioned the fact that MS was hosing their partners and customers down the other day with the release of the Zune player - "plays for sure" simply doesn't. From the EFF:

This is a stark example of DRM under the DMCA giving customers a raw deal. Buying DRMed media means you're locked into the limited array of devices that vendors say you can use. You have to rebuy your preexisting DRMed media collection if you want to use it on the Zune. And you'll have to do that over and over again whenever a new, incompatible device with innovative features blows existing players out of the water. Access to MP3s and non-DRMed formats creates the only bridge between these isolated islands of limited devices.

So this is a twofer: if you have been buying music from an MS partner, Microsoft just screwed you over. Likewise, if you made the mistake of being an MS partner, you now wonder what that splitting pain your backside is.

This has got to be one of the most bone-headed PR mis-moves I recall a company making purposely. It's one thing to be accidentally stupid - this is willful stupidity.

Not just stupidity, either - people who have "plays for sure" music are sitting in a legally suspect situation. If you use software to bypass the old DRM, you're going to run afoul of the DMCA. Will you be prosecuted or sued? I'm not sure I'd want to take the no side of that bet, given the way the RIAA has been operating over the last few years.

Technorati Tags: music, DRM, PR

Spotted in The Product Management View

This all comes down to customer experience, one sour experience can lead us away, to other companies or other options. A little honesty and expectation setting can go along way, in the case of my missing bag, it would have made all the difference in the world. Such a sour experience means I will evaluate alternatives in the future.

That's the summary to a good post about lost luggage and the tales the airline company told while the luggage was busy not being found. I've had similar problems with airlines and factual information, with two sets of circumstances:

• Lost bags
• Delayed flights

The latter circumstance comes up far more often, and the amount of pure dissembling that airline reps are willing to spread amazes me. If you don't know anything, just tell me that. I'd rather hear that you have no idea, than be told "just another 30 minutes" every hour or so. Is there a PR moron working for most airlines who thinks that we would rather have authoritative sounding BS than non-authoritative sounding honesty?

Technorati Tags: marketing, crm

I've put together another daily Smalltalk screencast. This one is a little different, and I think I'll be doing them this way most of the time. I used Wink to capture a set of screenshots, and then added audio for them. The entire thing is available as a flash movie, and is pretty small - just over 4 MB. Continuing from yesterday, I cover some basic Smalltalk syntax.

I got a lot of help from Andres Valloud, who did some very nice audio cleanup on the podcast Michael and I did last week. You can grab the updated podcast from this post.

If you live in LA, and are interested in learning Smalltalk, then this news is for you:

I wanted to let you know that there is a beginning Squeak Smalltalk class starting Wednesday the 20th from 1-3 pm at my place in Bloomington (Fontana). Several adults who want to learn Squeak will be attending.

Ben Cooper plans on seeking VC money and forming a small start-up company to do reconstruction of the Smalltalk byte-code to marry with the new generation hardware he is in the final stages of bringing to market. He wants to "blow-out" the image and make it into an internet-aware class/image system. He has identified 5 products that can be monetized to everyone's advantage and that VCs would be interested in backing.

P.S. Ben is particularly interested in finding individuals who have gone deep into the Squeak VM and know Slang and also are good at the primitives.

If any of you are interested in any part of this message please email privately.

Donna HAWTHORNE
CENTER FOR INNOVATION
BLOOMINGTON
(NORTH OF RIVERSIDE)
18211 Hawthorne Ave.,
Bloomington, CA 92316

Donna Charles Schrokosch
Founder / Chair
Hawthorne Center for Innovation

For contact information, join the Yahooo Mailing List

Technorati Tags: squeak, education

It remains to be seen whether I manage to keep this up daily, but here's my intention: push up a brief Smalltalk screencast daily for awhile, introducing both VW and OST. The first one (VW) is here.

The idea behind this is simple: you've downloaded CST non-commercial, have started it up, and are thinking: "now what?"

I thought the HP spying story was bad before, but CNet's latest report makes it even worse: apparently, the people Dunn hired tried to plant spyware on CNet's reporter's computers:

Those briefed on the company's review of the operation say detectives tried to plant software on at least one journalist's computer that would enable messages to be traced, and also followed directors and possibly a journalist in an attempt to identify a leaker on the board.

It's not enough that Dunn stepped down from Chairman, but stayed on the board. There ought to be real consequences for that.

Technorati Tags: HP, HP leak

James McGovern asks:

I wonder if James Robertson would care to comment on why StrongTalk is the best version of Smalltalk available and is of higher quality than Ruby on Rails?

Well, first off, Cincom Smalltalk is the best version of Smalltalk to get started with. StrongTalk is an unfinished prototype, not a product you could actually use to build deployable software. There are ideas in Strongtalk that might well be worth integrating into Cincom Smalltalk, but that's about it.

As to Rails - I haven't worked with it, so I can't comment on it specifically. People I respect like it, so I'm not going to go negative. However, I will say this: Cincom Smalltalk has a far, far better set of development tools available for it than Ruby does, including tools that enable Enterprise integration - MQS, a full WS* stack, COM integration (on Windows), a .NET connection (again, on Windows), and CORBA (cross platform).

But hey - don't take my word for it. Grab the latest non-commercial product, and try it for yourself. I'm planning a series of "getting started" screencasts, which should make the "I've got it downloaded, now what?" questions easier to answer.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom smalltalk

Scoble wonders why there's no interest in the new Acrobat 8:

Then I went to Google Blog Search and Technorati and did searches for other bloggers who are covering the new Acrobat announcements. Nothing. Even CNET’s News.com has nothing up about it. You would think that at least someone would post the ceremonial “that sucks” kind of commentary. But, no, just silence. It’s like everyone is reading about the HP scandal and forgot that other stuff could happen.

Interesting. But if some new video service or a new Web 2.0 company or service were announced right now (even from my own company) it’d get covered all over the place.

Well, it's probably because people already know what Acrobat is, so a new version of it simply isn't that interesting (in the "breaking news" sense). As a Product Manager, I know very well how hard it is to get anyone excited about the next version of a product that's been around for years.

Oh, and about that video - a screencast would have been far, far more useful there - sure, have the intro with the Adobe PM, but then flip to a screencast. I'd rather see the product than watch camera zooming.

I'm still playing around on the low end here, but I went down to Best Buy and bought myself an inexpensive Plantronics headset microphone/headphone combo. That ought to prevent the echo we had in our Saturday effort, and I've tested out the audio quality on my end - it was tons better.

Technorati Tags: audio

I've been mulling the video blog debate that cropped up on techmeme this weekend. On the one hand, we have Brad Templeton saying "Please don't vlog". I like some of his points - it does take more time and attention to consume video (compared to text and audio). Podcasts can be listened to in the car or while exercising (i.e., during otherwise "dead time" when your eyes are busy). Video blogs require most of your attention though, and unless it's a screencast - i.e., something that's walking me through something I want to learn - I find little value add.

On the other hand, Scoble makes a few good points on the "picture is worth a 1000 words" side of the equation:

Here’s a test. Give me one minute of video or 10,000 words to explain to me what Halo 3 does. The video will beat the text every single time, even if you have a Pulitzer-prize winning author write the words.

That's true, but: most of the video blogs I've seen don't add any value in that direction over pure audio. Even many of Scoble's vlogs for channel 9, when he was at MS: more than once, I wanted him to put the damn camera down and have the tech person he was talking to switch over to screencast format (so that I could actually follow what what being demonstrated).

I have to say that there's kind of a continuum of technical skills required here - for text, you need to be able to convey your ideas clearly. You don't need a lot of graphical skills; even if your pages are horrible HTML, as long as your color choices aren't illegible, you can make your point. Audio podcasts are another step up, as I'm just learning now. The tools aren't that hard to use, but unless you have a studio handy, you need to be prepared to spend an hour or two (more when you first get started) cleaning up the audio, adding music, hacking out awkward pauses... it's a lot more work than editing text. If you save in mp3 format, you can figure on about 1 MB per minute, so the time to upload isn't too bad, and the storage requirements aren't onerous.

Then there's video. Sure, anyone can take video now (my daughter's $129 Samsung camera takes decent video, especially considering that price tag). However, the space requirements are much larger than with audio, and the editing process takes longer - I've not done it, but my daughter has been creating movies of girl scout events for her troop, and it takes eons to render stuff on the Mac mini. Sure, it would take a lot less time if I bought a new Mac pro, or an up to date PC - but with what I've got lying around, it takes a lot of time.

Then there's uploading and storage - suddenly things jump from 10's of MB to hundreds. Yes, disk space is cheap, but try doing a few - and see how well the purchasing department buys your argument as to why you need a storage farm :)

At the end of the day, I don't think most of the vlogs I've seen would lose much by being pure audio. For technically oriented stuff, a screencast is probably more useful than full video. Where does that leave me? It leaves me thinking that you should really consider your content and audience before you decide to whip out the digicam.

Technorati Tags: vlog, podcast

I learned a little more about the way Audacity works, and cleaned up the podcast some. Navigate to my earlier post, and give the cleaned up version a go. Next week, we should be on track for a much better audio experience.

Engadget reports on a flaming Thinkpad - it looks like I should have knocked wood last week...

Technorati Tags: batteries, thinkpad

Time for that weekly look at the logs. BottomFeeder downloads backed off a bit, to a rate of 198 per day. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	628
Update	203
Mac X	121
Linux x86	120
CE ARM	92
Mac 8/9	51
Solaris	36
Windows98/ME	26
HPUX	24
Linux Sparc	22
AIX	20
Linux PPC	16
SGI	11
Sources	9
CE x86	4
ADUX	4

That takes us to the HTML pages accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	50.2%
Internet Explorer	35.8%
Planet Smalltalk	5.4%
Other	3.7%
MSN Bot	2%
Opera	1.9%
Megite	1%

That looks like the normal distro for that. Finally, RSS/Atom tools:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
BottomFeeder	21.5%
Mozilla	12.4%
Infomonster	12.4%
Net News Wire	7.8%
BlogLines	5.2%
Internet Explorer	5.1%
Safari RSS	5%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.9%
NewsGator	3.2%
Rome Client	2%
Planet Smalltalk	1.8%
Opera	1.2%
Akregator	1.2%
Strategic Board Bot	1.2%
Liferea	1.1%
SharpReader	1.1%
RSS Bandit	1.1%
News Fire	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
JetBrains	1%
BlogSearch	1%
Java	1%
MSN Bot	1%
Python	1%

That wraps another week - with a few new bots, looks like. We'll see if they stay around.

Michael Lucas-Smith and I have decided to give podcasting a whirl - we hope today's episode will be the first of a regular (probably weekly) effort. Next time, we'll be more careful about audio quality; you can hear a slight echo of Michael from my speakers.

Anyway, we discussed recent goings on in the dynamic world - Sun hiring the JRuby guys, Strongtalk, Iron Python at MS, Vista Smalltalk at MS, and then we descended into a rant about the DRM in the new MS Zune player. Anyway, give it a listen and let us know what you think.

Technorati Tags: podcast, industry misinterpretations, dynamic languages, smalltalk, strongtalk

Arden Thomas has started up a blog here - Arden was an SE and consultant/trainer for ParcPlace back in the day - more recently, he's been working with a shipping company (in VW) in New Jersey. You can subscribe to his site here.

So I've seen a few people rave about ZeFrank - I took a look at the 9/14 show, which was supposed to be particularly good.

Hmm. I suppose if 7th grade level bathroom humor floats your boat, perhaps - it's not particularly inventive to come up with takeoffs on "Harry Reid" or "John Boehner" though. After about 30 seconds of that, I decided that it was about half as funny as Ze Frank thinks it is, and just shut it off.

When he graduates to 8th grade humor, someone let me know.

Michael and I talked about doing a podcast last night - I ran across some software that does a good job of recording conversations from Skype. So, we gave it a shot this morning. Without enough caffeine, it seems - next time, I wear headphones so as not to have a speaker echo :)

Anyway, I'm doing some post processing on the audio now, and I should have it up later today. We plan on doing this kind of thing regularly, perhaps once a week.

Well, it looks like the Zune is going to give us an interesting conflict: DRM versus the Creative Commons license. From the Creative Commons FAQ:

If a person uses DRM tools to restrict any of the rights granted in the license, that person violates the license. All of our licenses prohibit licensees from “distributing the Work with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement.”

Why does that matter? Well, we have to go to the details on how the Zune player will share music over WiFi:

Zune accomplishes this amazingly stupid feat by wrapping shared music in a proprietary layer of DRM, regardless of what format the original content may be in. If Microsoft’s claims are to be believed, this on-the-fly DRM will be seamless and automatic - which must be some kind of first for Microsoft.

What Microsoft has created is a new form of viral DRM. Zune will intentionally infect your music with the DRM virus before passing it along to one of your friends. After three listens the poor song dies a horrible DRM enabled death. Talk about innovation.

This illustrates one of the fascinating little edge cases that DRM runs into. How often will this come up? I have no idea - is there much music under that (or similar) licenses? Probably not that much, but I suspect that there's going to be more of it.

Of course, I also await the obvious bug: some guy gets a song this way, and the protective code wipes his entire library instead of just the one song. Yeah, that DRM sure is adding value.

Technorati Tags: law, license, creative commons

It looks like partnering with Microsoft in the music space was a huge error: and it looks like customers of those partners are taking it in the shorts:

Microsoft's Zune will not play protected Windows Media Audio and Video purchased or "rented" from Napster 2.0, Rhapsody, Yahoo! Unlimited, Movielink, Cinemanow, or any other online media service. That's right -- the media that Microsoft promised would Play For Sure doesn't even play on Microsoft's own device. Buried in footnote 4 of its press release, Microsoft clearly states that "Zune software can import audio files in unprotected WMA, MP3, AAC; photos in JPEG; and videos in WMV, MPEG-4, H.264" -- protected WMA and WMV (not to mention iTunes DRMed AAC) are conspicuously absent.

If you made the mistake of getting into the Plays For Sure DRM room, MS just hacked off your kneecaps. Explain to me again how DRM is "no problem", and how consumers shouldn't care?

Technorati Tags: PR, marketing, music

Wired reports that Virgin Atlantic Airways is not only forbidding non-plugged use of Apple and Dell notebooks on board their airplanes, bu the batteries have to be wrapped and checked:

Virgin Atlantic Airways is restricting the use of Apple and Dell laptops and their Sony-manufactured batteries on its flights. The restrictions are in response the August recalls of millions of batteries used in the two companies' notebook computers due to a risk of overheating and fire, and it affects owners of Inspirons, Lattitudes, iBooks, PowerBooks, MacBooks or MacBook Pros. Virgin will allow customers to use these laptops, but only with seat-side power supplies (if you're flying coach, too bad). The batteries must be wrapped and confined to the owners carry-on luggage and kept separate from the computer. Korean Air recently imposed similar restrictions on laptops using Sony batteries. Virgin said they'd lift the restrictions "as soon as this safety issue is resolved."

If that spreads to other major carriers, I think we'll see a lot of very unhappy business travelers. Makes me glad that I'm carrying a Thinkpad, but that was a sheer luck of the draw thing - Cincom was equipping us with Dell notebooks a few years back. This is one to keep your eye on if you travel by air.

Technorati Tags: batteries, recall

This news on cell phone use has made me bring this image back:

From the story:

California will become the fourth state in the country to ban motorists from holding cellphones while driving under legislation Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced he will sign into law today.

Should I feel better if I get plowed into by someone holding a Big Mac in one hand? How about someone holding a Mocha from Starbucks? What about the mom or dad trying to get the kids in the back seat settled down?

But not to worry - at least in California, we'll be safe from hand held cell phones. Don't ask about what happens when the phone rings, and people have to scramble to plug the headset into their ears at 60 mph, either.

Bah.

Technorati Tags: stupidity

Popeye is not amused:

Federal health officials worked Friday to find the source of a multistate E. coli outbreak and warned consumers that even washing the suspect spinach won't kill the sometimes deadly bacteria.

One person died and dozens of others were sickened in the nine-state outbreak, linked by Food and Drug Administration officials to bagged spinach.

This is one of the downsides of the kind of distribution network we have in the US (and in the rest of the developed world, for that matter): when there's a problem, it's not always obvious where it originated.

I don't buy bagged spinach, but I buy a lot of bagged lettuce, and pre-made salads.

The RIAA's nightmare continues. I thought I had heard something about a new Russian law targeting All of MP3, but then this morning I heard about AllTunes: a client front end to the site. It looks like buying inexpensive MP3's is still easy to do there. If I were going to do that, I'd want to be very careful about the payment method though.

Technorati Tags: DRM, RIAA

Here's a welcome blast from the past: Professor Peabody is coming back!

DreamWorks Animation is developing a computer-animated film based on Mr. Peabody & Sherman, the classic animated TV shorts about a time-traveling dog and his boy, Variety reported. Rob Minkoff (The Haunted Mansion) will direct the film, based on the shorts that were introduced in 1959 as part of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.

I loved those segments when I was a kid :)

It looks like YouTube's carefree existence might be coming to an end: Universal is starting to get torqued about their service:

Universal Music chief Doug Morris launched a loud salvo at YouTube, warning the upstart Internet firm that it could come into the legal crosshairs of the world's largest music company.

YouTube, the prolific swapper of videos online, consistently violates the music industry's copyrights when it allows users to post videos, Morris said in a speech at a Merrill Lynch conference in California.

Mind you, the clues aren't very thick at Universal - they think they lost money on MTV videos:

Morris related a frequent historical gripe often mentioned by music execs, saying the industry made a costly mistake in the 1980s when it agreed to give MTV free music videos. At the time, the industry saw the fledlging video trend as mere publicity to sell albums, rather than as a revenue generator itself.

"The poster child for this was MTV," Morris said. "Twenty-five years ago, they built a multibillion-dollar company on our software.

Yeah, no one ran out and bought a CD (at extortion prices, I might add) after seeing "Money for Nothing". Right. Does the elevator go all the way to the top over there?

I'm not condoning theft, but does anyone think that a video of someone lip synching to a song (recorded with poor quality) is something I want instead of a CD or an iTunes download?

Technorati Tags: law, YouTube

Nick Carr explains why Web Office suites will have a slow takeup:

Whatever the flaws of Microsoft Office, most end users are comfortable with it - and they have little motivation to overturn the apple cart. What is absolutely unacceptable to them is to take a step backward in functionality - which is exactly what would be required to make the leap to web PPAs today. Web apps not only disappear when you lose an internet connection, they are also less responsive for many common tasks, don't handle existing Office files very well, have deficiencies in printing (never underestimate the importance of hard copy in business), and have fewer features (Microsoft Office of course has way too many, but - here's the rub - different people value different ones). Moreover, many of the current web apps are standalone apps and thus represent an unwelcome retreat to the fragmented world of Office 1.0. Finally, the apps are immature and may change dramatically or even disappear tomorrow - not a strong selling point for the corporate market.

There's another thing about connectivity, and it's going to be true for a long while yet: travel. Say I fly to Europe, or Asia. I might well want to do some work on the way. If I rely on "Web 2.0" apps, I'm stuffed: there's no connectivity in the air, and there's not likely to be any anytime soon. There is power though, on an awful lot of carriers. Which means that I can work if my tools reside on my laptop.

If they reside in the cloud? Not so much. Until they get that teleportation thing working, expect to see Office on the laptops of the traveling business guy.

Technorati Tags: Office, Web2.0

Chris Pirillo asks some good questions about Microsoft's direction with the Zune:

I don’t get it. Should I be using Napster, URGE, or Zune? Should I be using the Clix or the Zune? Should I be using Windows Media Player 11 or the Zune Marketplace software? There are too many choices, many of which are not interoperable, coming to me from the same company: Microsoft . Instead of simplifying the market, they’ve made it slightly more complicated with Zune (and likely pissed off countless partners in the process).

If you partnered with MS in the music space recently, that pain you feel is from the stick they just beat you with. Contrast this with Apple, which has a nice, simple message: iPod/iTunes. Someone at Microsoft failed Branding 101.

Technorati Tags: Zune

Travis Griggs has been hired to join our Smalltalk development staff:

Starting September 25th, I won't be able to consider myself an "extra" to the Cincom Smalltalk development process any more. I'll be a real live employee working on the inside, rubbing elbows with, and learning a lot from a very talented team of people. I am very excited about this opportunity. It's a good opportunity for me, and sort of an obvious end game after 15 years of very active Object/VisualWorks involvement.

This is great news for all of us at Cincom - Travis is a great guy. He'll be at OOPSLA this fall, so say "hi" if you see him there. Welcome!

Oh, if you want the lowdown on "Extra" up in the title, read Travis' post :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

We've released a new set of VMs for the latest (7.4.1) release of VisualWorks. head over to the main site for details.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

So I was browsing my Congressman's website, and I ran across a link to the "New Direction" document his party is pushing out. Curious, I decided to take a look. Here's the full URL:

http://democraticleader.house.gov/NDResources/nd06.doc

What would possess you to put up a Word Document for download? Heck, as bad as the resulting HTML is, Word has been able to save to HTML format for awhile now. Who's the bright guy who made that call?

John Duimovich says everything that needs to be said about the new closure support coming to Java soonish:

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Unreachable Clause. It exists as certainly as do generics, primitive types, exceptions and inner classes, and you know that they are bound to give to your code its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Unreachable Clause! It would be as dreary as if there were no java.lang.Object Smalltalk. There would be no childlike faith in type systems, no runtime errors, no exceptions to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, no programming joy. The eternal light which complex type systems fills in programmer's heads would be extinguished.

Heh. Read the rest :)

Technorati Tags: java

Spotted in CNET News.com:

Not to be outdone by Apple's big ipod announcement, Microsoft is reportedly getting ready to take the wraps off Zune

Anyone else noticed the obvious disparity in marketing skill? The September 12 Apple announcement was heavily anticipated, while Microsoft's Zune announcement is a back page story.

Technorati Tags: music, iPod, Zune

Unlike Sony, Nintendo looks to have set themselves reachable goals for the Wii launch. I grabbed this from ExtremeTech:

Nintendo's Wii will ship November 19 and retail for $250 if a report by The New York Times (by way of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer -- who appears to have leaked the story early, as it hasn't shown up on the New York Times webpage, yet) turns out to be legit.

Additionally, the report details that Nintendo expects to ship four million units worldwide by the end of the year (it does not specify whether that is the calendar or fiscal year). For $250, consumers won't just be getting the Wii-system, however. From the report:

Nintendo intends to announce today that every Wii will come with a game compilation called Wii Sports -- including tennis, golf, baseball and bowling -- meant to show off the machine's intuitive controls.

Since Nintendo isn't trying to bundle a bunch of new components, they should be able to hit that date. With the $250 price tag, I think they'll really hit the sweet spot of disposable income at the holiday season.

Technorati Tags: games, Wii, Nintendo

I've made the current (OS 7.1.1 and VW 7.4.1) documentation available on the Smalltalk site: just follow this link. The VW doc is all PDF files. The ObjectStudio doc is a self extracting executable you can download and install locally.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, documentation

We have a roadmap published on the Wiki, but I'd like to take a look at one of the areas that we are focusing on: ease of deployment. What I'd like to do is ask our community to rank a few things:

• Ability to ship a Cincom Smalltalk application as a DLL/Shared lib
• Easier integration of C libraries
• Easier creation of a Smalltalk runtime image/executable

Of those three things, which one most needs work? I have my view of the relative importance of them, but I'd really like to know what the Smalltalk developer community thinks. Either add a comment, or drop me a line.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cst

That static type system sure makes adding closures to Java simple - witness the latest update to the Java closure spec. I especially liked the discussion of Unreachable.

Now, contrast that with blocks in Smalltalk...

Technorati Tags: complexity, closures

The Yankees have the sort of problem most teams would kill for: more good players than there are spots to play them in. Matsui and Sheffield have been out for months, but both are back now. Their replacements have helped power the team to the commanding lead it has now, so - where to put them?

Technorati Tags: yankees

Wired reports that iTunes 7 DRM is already cracked:

The latest version of Hymn can already remove DRM protection from songs purchased from the iTunes 7 store to enable playback on non-iPod players.

So let me get this straight: DRM irritates paying customers, and prevents them from moving their music around as they want to. Bad actors can move music around at will. So....

From a marketing perspective, exactly whose needs are met by DRM? The customer? No. The seller? No. Who then? RIAA members too stupid to read, perhaps?

Technorati Tags: stupidity, music

This would be funnier - if it weren't so close to the mindset of the RIAA and MPAA:

"The great thing about our product is that it puts an end to all those troublesome issues that can arise when so-called content is mixed in with valuable DRM," said Microsoft representative Christopher Dixon .

"We have found that it is easier if we remove the superfluous content part that has traditionally been included in digital downloads. This is DRM that works."

File under sadly true...

Technorati Tags: humor

Cingular should have picked a better error message when they decided to start filtering out references to Engadget in their forums:

Oh, Cingular. We know you're pissed at us -- you stopped returning our phone calls a while ago after we posted that product roadmap we got our hands on -- but banning all mention of our name, as well as our URL, from your user forums is a little cheap and heavy-handed, don't you think? Guess you don't want your users making informed decisions about your service. Anyway, we must be doing something right, because here's the message users get when trying to post anything to Cingular's customer forums with the word "engadget" in it:

The message body contains the following prohibited content: 'Engadget' You must remove this content before submitting your post.

That just makes them look lame. You have to wonder about the brain wattage of the genius at Cingular behind that...

Technorati Tags: marketing, crm

We've added another Smalltalker to the lineup here: Chip Dice. He'll be talking about practical issues surrounding Smalltalk use in a business environment.

Subscribe here.

Technorati Tags: blog

Jon Udell notes the rising interest in dynamic languages.

Technorati Tags: dynamic languages

There's a fair bit of piling on Joel Spolsky this morning - I had a go at him here, after seeing Avi Bryant's post. This morning, there's a lot more - Bob Congdon, John Lam, DHH, and finally, Jeff Atwood, who asks (after a long list of Joel's most insane posts:

All of this makes me wonder: has Joel Spolsky jumped the shark?

I think there's a simpler explanation for this. Based on the success of his company, I very much doubt that Joel is an "in the trenches" developer anymore. He started the long march into the ranks of the formerly technical awhile ago, and now he's fully there - complete with idiosyncratic ideas based on out of date information.

It's clear that Joel knows his stuff when he talks management, product management, and marketing. It's less clear that he has anything useful to say about the practice of code production. That's not a bad thing - it simply means that he's no longer doing that work. Maybe it's time he recognized that.