Steve Rubel spots a trend:

CNET has expanded its presence online with a new virtual outpost inside Second Life . The space includes a building that looks like CNET's offices in San Francisco offices. It has an amphitheater where CNet reporters will conduct interviews and host events. According to 3PointD, other tech media brands will soon follow into Second Life. As this occurs watch for the PR media tour to become a fixture for certain clients inside the metaverse.

How far away from "Better than Life" are we, anyway?

Scoble congratulates Podshow on their second round of VC money:

Congrats to PodTech competitors Podshow, who just got $15 million in a second round of VC financing

Meanwhile, Jason Calacanis is extremely skeptical:

Lest there be no question, we are now in a full-blown bubble. What on earth Podshow is going to do with almost $25M in funding is anyone's guess, but it's not going to end well I can tell you that. To raise this money they must have had a $35-60M pre-money valuation. That means the VCs are going to look for a $300-500M exit at the very least, and that means they need to get to $30-50M in revenue. Not sure I see that happening.

What I wonder is this: what do they need that level of cash for - storage space and bandwidth? Staff? What, exactly? I have to agree with one of his commenters too: their website does suck. That may not matter that much; I get their content via iTunes. Of course, that means that most of their revenue is ad based. In a narrowcast environment, can you sell ads up to those numbers? I don't know, but it sounds like a lot.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, bubble, vc

Phil Windley attended a podcast show, and I picked this out from Leo Laporte (of TWiT):

Leo mentions that TWiT has started to take ads. Interestingly he gets quite a bit of pushback from listeners saying things like "now that you've started running ads, you'll never be honest about Dell again..." Certainly, this is no different than technology magazines or technology Web sites, but people feel differently about the editorial conflict of interest. Perhaps this is because podcasts are more intimate? He's not sure.

That's an interesting tidbit - I think it falls into the narrowcast model. When you have a magazine that's trying to appeal to a wide audience, the ties don't seem as close - but with the niche audience of a podcast, they seem to. I haven't paid much attention to the ads on TWiT, and I listen every week - great show, IMHO.

I missed this post from Redmonk guy Cote a couple of weeks ago - apparently, he got torched by the old "hotel redirected all my feed urls" bug:

I've been curious over the past few days why Vienna hasn't been pulling in new items from my feeds. So, I just went to dig around for more info, and was horrified to find out that all the URLs for my feeds -- you know, 100's of them -- to the "register for WiFi" page for the hotel. That is, I'm going to have to go track down all the URLs for the feeds and fix them.

It amazes me that there are aggregators left that fall prey to this. I got bitten by this in BottomFeeder a couple of years ago, and I promptly coded a check for it:

• Cache the old feed for any permanent redirect
• If we get more than a handful of redirects, and they are all to the same url, restore the cached urls and go offline

That's saved my bacon more than once since.

Technorati Tags: rss, syndication, redirect

Next time someone tries to "put a bug up your ear", you better hope it's not like this:

"Someone said I could have popped my ear drum," Asp said. "...But when I got to the [clinic], they took a look in there and saw it, and I was like, 'What the heck? How did I get a bug in my ear?'"

Asp could hear it, and it nearly drove him nuts.

"It was digging and biting into my eardrum," he said. "That went on for, like, 15 minutes. I could hear it -- a whole bunch of loud popping noises. It hurt pretty bad."

Ouch

Ramón León compares Seaside web development with .NET web development. However, the comparison holds for most non-seaside web frameworks, .NET or otherwise, IMHO

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

James McGivern boils down herd behavior quite nicely this morning:

We did have a brief conversation on analyst firms and my perspective on them. I do believe that all vendors I interact with should pay their fees to the large firms regardless of the value they bring. Not paying causes problems for us. It is easier within a large enterprise to acquire new technology when an indepedent third-party says it is a leader than when there is only your own evidence to support. Likewise, I know that my peers at work are incredibly brilliant and can see solutions in the marketplace before others but the real key is that we need to also choose products that are sustainable and will be used by other large enterprises.

So let me get this straight: you think small firms should pay large analyst firms so that you don't need to do actual work? If that's not enterprisey, I don't know what is.

In today's Smalltalk Daily (follow the link), I go over the debugger, with a brief introduction to breakpoints. Tomorrow I'll cover some of the niftier features.

As I mentioned yesterday, I've stopped providing enclosures for these, given the odd behavior in BlogLines.

We had a group dinner at PF Chang's last night - these two shots were taken after way too much food :)

That was taken by Suzanne. From the left side that's Sherry, me, Bruce, Juerg, Pete, Andreas, Georg, Mark, and George. The next one includes Suzanne:

Joel doesn't think much of agile development methodologies, and approvingly quotes Steve Yegge (who works at Google) - who also dislikes agile (a lot). Yegge goes on to describe what they do at Google as "good agile":

• there are managers, sort of, but most of them code at least half-time, making them more like tech leads.
• developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.
• Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously.
• developers are strongly encouraged to spend 20% of their time (and I mean their M-F, 8-5 time, not weekends or personal time) working on whatever they want, as long as it's not their main project.
• there aren't very many meetings. I'd say an average developer attends perhaps 3 meetings a week, including their 1:1 with their lead.
• it's quiet. Engineers are quietly focused on their work, as individuals or sometimes in little groups or 2 to 5.
• there aren't Gantt charts or date-task-owner spreadsheets or any other visible project-management artifacts in evidence, not that I've ever seen.
• even during the relatively rare crunch periods, people still go get lunch and dinner, which are (famously) always free and tasty, and they don't work insane hours unless they want to.

Unasked by Joel, and left unexplained by Steve: everything at Google stays in beta, pretty much forever. Hmm. Why do you suppose that is? Well, you get a bunch of "really smart" people together, don't put any product/project management together, and let them move around at will... what do you get? You get a bunch of projects that end up being 80% done (i,e., all of the technically "interesting" pieces are done, but that boring "polish" stuff isn't).

Agile is no silver bullet, but deciding not to have a plan isn't one either. Yegge can get back to me when anything beyond search moves out of beta over there, and when a "delete" button being added to gmail isn't touted as the greatest thing ever. Oh, and speaking of a boring task that someone at Google might consider paying attention to - the splog empire that Blogspot has become. Oh, wait - that's not "interesting", so of course none of the smart guys over there will touch it.

Technorati Tags: agile, development

It's been a good three days (other than the small cold I picked up), but I'm ready to head home. There's cheap WiFi here at CVG (Cincinnati airport), so I can get updated before I board.

If anyone thought that ISPs were going to get away with setting up their own private gardens, they should have gotten a wake up call this morning. Read through this Bostonist post to see what I mean - by the second update, it's clear that the "blockage" of Google services was due to a router problem. In the meantime, the story hit techmeme (and everywhere else) - and I expect that Comcast's helpdesk was inundated with calls.

Bottom line: Attempts to create walled gardens aren't going to succeed, period. If this level of uproar accompanied a transient outage, imagine the PR nightmare that would follow a real downgrade.

Technorati Tags: net neutrality, ISP

If you load yesterday's update, you'll see some of your feeds producing a crop of duplicates. That will settle down over time, but to make that stop, you can use the context menu option Update>>Regenerate Feed on each feed that has problems. What that will do is repopulate the feed from scratch. If you still have problems after that, let me know about it.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Wow - Curt Schilling just started some speculation:

"If I come back next year, I know that the offseason will be the hardest of my career," he said.

Wait a minute. Did he just say if?

"Well, going into next year," he backtracked.

That's going to keep Red Sox Nation buzzing during the offseason. If Schilling does bow out, that will leave a huge hole in their starting rotation - enough so that I'd expect the Blue Jays to be the major AL East competition for the Yankees next year.

Technorati Tags: baseball, redsox

In today's Smalltalk Daily, I look at adding methods to an existing class, but unlike yesterday - with testing. This involves loading some extra components into the system.

Update: I've pulled the enclosures, because BlogLines is auto-playing them. I'm not going to go back and update the ones from last week, but I'll pull the enclosures starting from last Monday. Stupid BlogLines...

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I had a conversation with Eduard Maydanik (he's the one who's far from the mic), Andreas Hiltner, and Mark Grinnell this afternoon - we talked about ObjectStudio 7 and ObjectStudio 8. Here's a photo that includes Andreas, Mark, and Eduard:

From the left, that's Eduard and Mark, Peter Hatch and Travis Griggs, and Andreas. You can grab the podcast here.

Suzanne took some photos during our meeting - here are two of them:

From the right, that's Bruce Boyer, Sherry Michael, Georg Heeg, and me.

From the right, that's Andreas Hiltner, Travis Griggs, and Peter Hatch. It's been a good two days so far :)

Technorati Tags: ObjectStudio, smalltalk

Take this for what it's worth; as I sit here, I haven't watched any of the videos yet. That sort of leads to my point though. The lead item is an interview with Jonathan Schwartz, Sun CEO. I'm interested in that, but I don't know that I want to devote 35 minutes to it in front of my PC. If it were audio, I'd simply push it to my iPod and listen to it during my next workout.

Some of the items are video oriented; the walk around with Thomas Hawk, for instance. But the interview, and the language war thing - I'd much rather have those as audio. I can listen to audio without my full attention, but that's simply not the case with video. Of the eight things he has, I'd say that five of them would go to audio easily (and be more useful that way, IMHO - but I realize that people might disagree).

I'll probably watch some of them; I just wish there were an audio only option. Maybe Scoble could do that as well? Strip out the audio to an mp3 file, and give us options? I'd prefer audio, some other people will prefer video.

Update: Holy smokes, the Schwartz video is 240+ MB. If that were available as an audio only mp3, I bet it would be 15 mb or so. For an interview, that's a lot to download...

Technorati Tags: vlog, podcast

I've got another fix for the duplicate item problem posted. The problem: after loading it, you'll see a large number of dupes (I changed the way the GUID is fixed in the absence of one in the feed). After that, it should be better. If you open up the "Execute Smalltalk Code" workspace and execute this after the update, the change won't generate as many duplicates:

RSS.RSSFeedManager default getAllItems do: [:each |
	(each link notNil and: ['*feedburn*' match: each link])
		ifTrue: [each guid: each link]]

Just highlight that code, pop the context menu, and pick "do it"

It looks like we'll have a German language (possibly others as well) version of BottomFeeder available shortly - Georg Heeg has been helping me get the code cleaned up for that (I changed over to message catalogs awhile back, but had a few issues here and there). The next major release should be available beyond English - very cool.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

The game console business could be the thing that pushes Sony into extinction. That's right: not just out of the game business, but out of business completely. Consider the numbers:

Sony has a book value of $27 billion. It has nearly $9 billion in cash. Sony's not going anywhere. Or is it?

Sony is looking at a potential for demise it has never faced before. With the failure of its TV and music electronics businesses and its up-and-down movie business, it has relied more and more on the video game business to keep profits up.

The problem is, the game business is a black hole. Sony will be eating somewhere between $200 and $400 (and I think those numbers are conservative, as they don't include sales and marketing) on each sale of a PS3. From a business perspective, I think they would be better off scrapping the PS3, taking the PR hit on that, and either:

• exiting the game console business
• follow Nintendo's lead, and build systems that can be sold at a profit

I don't expect either one to happen soon - there's too much pride and money wrapped up in the PS3. Like any large project, even the prospect of sure doom isn't enough to derail it. You see this sort of lemming-like charge to the cliff in software projects all the time - but here Sony is doing it with hardware. I'm hardly the only one ringing this bell; CNet has been on this story too:

In a February story for CNet, it was estimated that the total cost of components for the PS3 would be in the neighborhood of $725 to $905 -- and that was before it was rumored that Sony would have to put PS2 components in the box because the new chip lacked the ability to emulate the earlier PSOne and PS2 games.

The CNet story said, "The materials price estimates do not include marketing, software development, advertising or other costs, which will push Sony's total cost per console even higher."

Meanwhile, faced with the prospect of continued high costs - Sony is engaging in corporate denial:

Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi was not ambivalent about the pricing of the console -- he kept saying it was a premium machine, sold at a premium price. Want a PS3? Work a little harder!

"Our ideal," Kutaragi said, "is for consumers to think to themselves, 'OK, I'll work more hours and buy it.' We want people to feel that they want it, no matter what."

If Sony were the only vendor in this space, that might work. The XBox 360 is a nice system though, and it's a lot less expensive (never mind the Wii, which at $250 will be in the "what the hell" range for most prospective buyers). The loss numbers for Sony start to look very, very ugly: $1.8 B by April if they drop $300 per box, $2.4 B if they drop $400 per box. That's a huge bleed, and it's going to get attention all the way up the food chain at Sony HQ.

I think it's past time to put out the "sell" order on Sony stock.

Technorati Tags: ps3, games, Sony

Lime Wire calls BS on the actions of the RIAA - they are suing them for violations of anti-trust law. I'm not a big fan of anti-trust law, but for the tools at the RIAA, I'll make an exception. They can go... well, to a place that's unmentionable here :)

Technorati Tags: RIAA

Smalltalk Daily for Tuesday is up. Today's Smalltalk Daily covers a simple idea: how to add a new method to an existing class. Tomorrow, I'll expand on that by walking through the same process, but with a unit test first.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I'm in Cincinnati this week, working with the ObjectStudio 8 team. Our plan is to release it in beta form this winter, with a fully supported release coming in the summer (possibly winter - that decision is still up in the air). We are working with one early adopter now, and are in the process of adding additional pre-beta sites. If you're interested, contact me.

What is OS8, you ask? ObjectStudio used to be called Enfin, and has been around for quite awhile. It's a Windows specific Smalltalk system, which excels at building client/server applications. We've been adding integration with VisualWorks for awhile now, and OS8 is a big move in that direction. Using VW namespaces, we are hosting ObjectStudio inside VisualWorks. We are maintaining the OS library behavior, even as we move into the VW environment.

What's cool about this? Well, OS users get a much faster VM, and immediate access to all the VW libraries they've been hankering for: WS*, Web Toolkit, Cryptography - the whole nine yards. Meanwhile, VW developers get native Windows integration - native GUIs and embedded ActiveX controls. It's great stuff for everyone, and we're pretty excited about it.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, ObjectStudio

Fun for everyone - the Web 2.0 dead pool! Michael Calore has his predictions, and Wisdump has theirs. I don't follow this stuff well enough to come up with predictions of my own, but there's going to be a reality reset soon.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0

I'm headed to Cincinnati for 3 days - I just love these early AM flights. I'll be back online later.

Today's Smalltalk daily is brief, and covers the notion of abstract classes in Smalltalk. Navigate to the HTML page here.

Well - first it was O'Reilly's PR firm thinking they owned the rights to "Web 2.0". Now, Apple thinks they own the rights to the term "podcast". Is there a special school for lawyers and PR staff, where they learn to be brain dead morons?

Technorati Tags: podcast, PR

Based on this, and the last few weeks, I'm guessing that the residents of Red Sox Nation are desperately awaiting the end of this season, so that they can get on to next one. Since the 5 game sweep in August, it's been all downhill for the Sox - they may not even end up in second place in the AL East at this rate.

Meanwhile, the biggest worry for the Yankees is Mariano Rivera - will he be 100 percent for the playoffs? I'm looking forward to the post season - the Yankees may not win it all (anything can happen in a short series) - but they look like the team to beat right now. It's conceivable that we could have a 2000 recap - another subway series. Now that would be cool.

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees, redsox

Dave Winer's difficulties with his iPod illustrate one thing: even for the technically literate, the blocks on fair use can be a royal pain. Now, I've had numerous people tell me that you can manage music/podcasts (etc) from multiple (I think it's up to five) machines if:

• You have the iPod formatted for Windows instead of for Mac (otherwise, your Windows machine will see it as read-only)
• You change from auto-synch to manual

I haven't tried that though, since it didn't seem obvious. What I did is buy XPlay, a nice little application that lets me manage the iPod from my laptop (which doesn't have my music library - the disk is too small and too filled). When I travel, I grab podcasts from BottomFeeder, and then use XPlay to move them over to the iPod. No fuss, no muss - I'd recommend XPlay to anyone. It's less than $30 too!

Technorati Tags: iPod

OOPSLA 2006

OOPSLA 2006, which will be held in historic Portland, Oregon (USA), the birthplace of OOPSLA 20 years ago. OOPSLA is the premier gathering of professionals from industry and academia--practitioners, researchers, students, educators, managers, and more--all sharing their experiences with today's object technologies and its offshoots.

OOPSLA includes so many different things that you can't take them all in. It's wise to plan your week. Your registration fee gets you access to demos, workshops, panel discussions, invited speakers, birds-of-a-feather sessions, lightning talks, posters, and practitioner reports.

You can also check out DesignFest®, the Dynamic Languages Symposium, Essays, Research Papers, the Most Influential Papers Awards, the Doctoral Symposium, and the Student Research Competition. In addition, the Onward! track is “the place to reveal the revolutionary, air the provocative, and expose the subversive.”

Alan Knight, Vassili Bykov, Travis Griggs, Andreas Hiltner and Suzanne Fortman will be representing Cincom Smalltalk at the conference this year.  If you’re concerned that with such a full agenda you might not have a chance to meet with a Cincom representative and you want to schedule a chat, contact Suzanne Fortman.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I managed to get in 18 today with my buddy Brian before the rains came. It was an enjoyable round, even if we did stink up the course. The good news is this: I'm finally showing enough patience with my driver to hit it semi-reliably. If I could manage to get out regularly...

Jeff Jarvis, noting that two podcasters are hanging up their mike's, comments on the difficulties:

Step back from the keyboard before you start writing that made-up trend story. I sense that people ( Winer aside ) don’t flame out on blogs the way they might on podcasts and I think the reason for that is that podscasts are both more of a production and more of a performance. It’s harder. That’s also why fewer will start podcasts -- and why I haven’t. It’s easier to blather through a keyboard than a microphone.

It is more difficult. I've only done 4, and I can tell you - they take far more time and effort than posting. First, there's the actual time to have the interview (or conversation, etc). That's the easy part. Then comes the hard part - production work. It's at this point that you start to understand why radio stations (and TV, and movies) have sound people. Doing noise reduction, mixing, and lag correction isn't an insurmountable task, but it's not trivial, either.

Not everyone has the time to spend on it. Blogging takes very little time - with audio, you have to set aside an hour or three before you can get the results posted.

Now that I have a slightly better handle on the audio tools I use, Ive gone back and cleaned up the first two podcasts I did - with Rowan Bunning and Georg Heeg. The ambient noise is less of a problem in the Rowan interview now, so it should be easier on the ears. I also added in the same intro/exit music that Michael and I have been using for Industry Misinterpretations.

An added benefit - the mp3 files are much smaller :)

Time for that weekly look at the logs. First up: BottomFeeder downloads. They went up a bit, to 264 a day - I released version 4.3, so that's no surprise:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	595
Update	560
Linux x86	143
Mac X	124
HPUX	77
CE ARM	75
Mac 8/9	68
Solaris	65
Windows98/ME	42
Linux Sparc	26
Sources	19
AIX	17
Linux PPC	16
SGI	14
ADUX	6
CE x86	3

Next up - the HTML page accesses. Traffic rose last week - it looks like the podcasts and screencasts were a good idea :)

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	53.8%
Internet Explorer	31.7%
Planet Smalltalk	4.5%
MSN Bot	4.4%
Other	3.1%
Opera	1.5%
Megite	1%

And finally, syndication traffic - which also rose last week:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
BottomFeeder	23.2%
Mozilla	19.8%
BlogLines	7.3%
Other	7.3%
Internet Explorer	7.2%
Net News Wire	6.7%
Safari RSS	5.8%
NewsGator	3.1%
Google Feed Fetcher	2.3%
Planet Smalltalk	1.8%
RSS Bandit	1.5%
Opera	1.4%
Akregator	1.2%
Liferea	1.2%
MSN Bot	1.1%
SharpReader	1.1%
JetBrains	1%
News Fire	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
Python	1%
Java	1%
Jakarta	1%
BlogSearch	1%
Rome Client	1%

I'd guess that IE 7 is picking up more use - the stats for that browser are rising in the RSS feeds.

Engadget found another flaming Thinkpad - today's lesson: don't get smug about the laptop you have, lest you find that it can go all bonfire on you too :/

It appears that the exploding IBM ThinkPad that we spotted last week at LAX may not have been a fluke after all. Telsa Gwynne, wife of famed Linux kernel programmer Alan Cox, describes on her website how her husband's ThinkPad battery suddenly exploded last night (see the photo on the next page), after which "a couple of fires started where the (presumably) boiling battery landed," with one of the fragments taking out a nearby LCD monitor.

I know these are rare, and I know it's highly unlikely to happen to me. Still, that picture is sobering...

Technorati Tags: batteries, laptop

Michael and I spoke for about 40 minutes. I've just posted the podcast here - this week, we talked about a number of things in the dynamic language area, including Javascript, Smalltalk scripting, and Continuations. We had a good time - hope you like it.

Scoble reports that HP has offloaded Dunn - and says that it's not enough:

Patricia Dunn is gone from HP. PodTech was at the press conference and Catherine is working right now on getting up the audio from the press conference as well as a story about what she learned at the press conference although the story is already well out as you can see from Google News about HP. OK, that’s a start. Now it’s time to clean out the rest of the board. And fire the ethics officer who just wrote to his colleagues that he wished he didn’t ask about the legality of the situation -- ethics officers need to learn that they BETTER stay on the right line of the law AND of our privacy. And, Mark Hurd too. He’s seriously tainted in this whole thing. He needs to go too.

I have to say I agree with him. The smell reaches beyond her, and I don't think they should get away with one sacrificial lamb...

Technorati Tags: HP

Michael and I just wrapped up episode 2 - I'm in post production now. I have a few other things on my plate (It's Friday night, for gosh sakes :) ), so I may not have this out until tomorrow morning. It's about 40 minutes long this time too.

Serge Stinckwich has announced a Smalltalk gathering in Paris this November:

The french Smalltalk community organize a new SmalltalkParty for Nov 25th 2006 in Paris. More info (in french) available here :

http://community.ofset.org/wiki/Smalltalk_Party_Paris_2006

The program is not yet ready, but we would like to organize a small XP Dojo this year. Several demos are already planned : Plopp, MathMorphs and UbquiTalk.

By the way, Paris is not that far away from Belgium or Luxemburg ;-)

Dr. Serge Stinckwich
Université de Caen>CNRS UMR 6072>GREYC>MAD
http://purl.org/net/SergeStinckwich
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Sony has recognized that the $600 price tag is way too high, but I think this price cut (before it's even shipping) is a sign of two things: reality, and desperation. Here's the important bit from the story:

Sony will cut the domestic price of its basic PlayStation 3 model to 47,600 yen, or about $410, from an originally planned 59,800 yen, or $515. That puts the PlayStation 3 in the same range as the combined basic Xbox 360 and HD DVD player in Japan, where the duo will sell for 49,600 yen, or $427.

We knew Sony was going to be losing money on each console shipped at $600 - possibly as much as $400 (and that was just based on manufacturing costs - never mind what channel costs are larding on). This slaps an additional $200 loss onto each console sold. The bottom line - they are going to be bleeding like a hemophiliac when the PS3 ships. Mind you, this is a limited desperation move - the prices are (thus far) unchanged in the US. I wonder how long that differentiation will last.

Yes, MS is bleeding on each XBox 360 sale, but a lot less - and note that Nintendo will be making money on each console. I can't even begin to understand the business model where you plan to lose money hand over fist for years, with no hope of breaking even on the horizon.

Technorati Tags: ps3, consoles

The Toronto Smalltalk User Group is meeting on October 5th, and is starting a more regular meeting schedule:

The next meeting of the Toronto Smalltalk User Group will be Thursday, Oct. 5 at 6:30. We're switching from ad-hoc presentation meetings to monthly workshops on the first Thursday of each month. Wireless internet and power will be available for laptops, and we have an LCD projector for presentations.

A number of us are working on interesting work and open source Smalltalk projects, so there will be plenty to talk about. No RSVP required... just show up!

Bob Nemec
[|] Toronto Smalltalk User Group
www.smalltalk.toronto.on.ca

The Toronto group is a great bunch - pay them a visit, won't you?

In today's screencast, I explore classes and inheritance. Navigate to the flash movie here.

James McGovern gets up on a soapbox for the most absurd of reasons today - he's upset with a goodie bag:

In today's society, you would figure that folks would be a little smarter. Ignoring the environmental aspect of their stupidity, the gum wasn't even kosher. Ever heard of a place called the Middle East? You should whenever serving any food product ensure that it meets the standards of today's diverse IT population. Everything you consider should be Kosher at a mininum and vegetarian out of respect for those from India.

Oh, please. If you start worrying about every possible sub-population that might have problems with your package you'll go nuts. I fly a fair amount, and you know what's on most sandwiches I get? Ham. As it happens, I dislike ham - always have. I just throw the ham away. I don't pitch a fit, I don't get excited about the groups that might be upset about the choice - I just don't eat it.

Keith Fieldhouse at O'Reilly wants you to discover the power and influence of Smalltalk.

Just when I thought DRM couldn't get stupider, Microsoft goes and proves me wrong. With no market share in the portable player/music store space, they've figured out their response: screw the customers. From the license:

Windows Media Player 11 does not permit you to back up your media usage rights (previously known as licenses). However, depending upon where your protected files came from, you might be able to restore your rights over the Internet.

That's right kids, getting a new laptop? You might conceivably get your own music back, maybe:

If you encounter an error message that indicates you are missing play, burn, or sync rights for a file and you had these rights previously, you might be able to resolve the problem by restoring your media usage rights. You have several options to do so:

It goes on from there with an explanation of how far you have to bend over in order to have MS deign to give you access to your own stuff. You know, the DRM on Apple's stuff is annoying, but they do make it possible to get around it. The insanity on display here is just mind boggling.

The Inquirer is often a questionable source, but I'm with them on this piece.

Technorati Tags: music, stupidity

Hmm - it seems that YouTube thinks they have a value of $1.5B. Never mind the cash bleed, never mind the gaping copyright issues. Never mind the complete lack of a business plan - all that traffic just must be worth something.

I have a hot tip for these guys: people love free services that don't poke ads at them. In order to generate revenue, you're going to have to either start charging, or start poking ads. You'll also have to (somehow) get out from under the copyright issues. Whether people will like the site after those things come into play is an interesting question - I think the Napster example might be very cogent here.

This HP story just keeps getting worse. The latest? Hurd doesn't have clean hands, either:

Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd knew of plans for a disinformation campaign designed to find the source of leaks from boardroom discussions, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

The report implicates Hurd more deeply in the scandal than was previously believed. The HP CEO and President is set to replace Patricia Dunn as chairman of the company's board of directors in January. Dunn said she would step down September 12 as the result of an internal investigation into practices used to find the source of news leaks about matters discussed by the board.

This just gets worse, and worse, and worse. The PR stench is going to linger like a cloud of rotten eggs...

Technorati Tags: stupidity, HP

This news about voting machines in my state calls to mind so many IT projects. On the one hand, the governor has recognized that the touchscreens are a problem:

A week after the primary election was plagued by human error and technical glitches, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) called yesterday for the state to scrap its $106 million electronic voting apparatus and revert to a paper ballot system for the November election.

"When in doubt, go paper, go low-tech," he said.

On the other hand, the legislature is in the classic IT management "We spent all this money!" mode:

"We paid millions. These are state-of-the-art machines," said Miller, who called Ehrlich's announcement a political ploy to energize his Republican supporters.

Sigh. Politics, IT - there's very little difference. After enough money gets spent, no one is willing to admit just how bad things are. Better to just go along, and pretend it's all fine.

Today's Smalltalk Daily covers some basics about creating packages, namespaces, and classes using the System Browser. You can go straight to the HTML page here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

You have to love the irony - Patricia Dunn just got inducted into the Bay area business hall of fame. Her comments were kind of pathetic: she hoped that the Pope would continue to generate controversy in order to remove the spotlight from her.

Sheesh, if she had any sense of decency at all, she would have declined the award. If the Bay area Council had any, they would have pulled it.

Technorati Tags: PR, stupidity

This LiveJournal post explains again why benchmarks aren't always what they are cracked up to be. This guy looked at the Programming Languages Shootout site, and concluded that Smalltalk was very slow:

But not impossible. For example, compare C (as compiled with gcc) vs. Smalltalk GST (gnu Smalltalk). On the binary tree test, C is 28 times faster and uses 47 times less memory.

Hmm. VW Smalltalk (or any other modern implementation) while still slower, would have been much closer. Why? GST is interpreted, and in memory terms, uses a primitive GC. So what we have is an apples vs. oranges comparison. Clicking over to the VW comparison, it's about what I'd expect: 2.4 times slower. For that matter, GST was 10 times slower (not 28 - at least for the Gentoo side tests I looked at).

You should also note this disclaimer about code size, from the site:

Code Lines is even more misleading for Smalltalk than for other languages - we show Smalltalk source code in a verbose chunk file format used to archive or transfer source code between Smalltalk images.

Yep - no one ever reads Smalltalk in chunk format...