Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Looks like the movie sales are going well for Apple:

With half a million sales in just under eight weeks, customers are purchasing approximately 62,500 movies from Apple's iTunes store each week, or just shy of 9,000 each day.

"This underlines the strength and uniqueness of our film library, and indicates there is a consumer appetite for movie downloads that complements demand for DVDs," said president and chief executive Robert Iger.

Thus far, Disney is the only major motion picture studio who has agreed to sell its films through the ubiquitous iTunes service. However, News Corp's. Fox Entertainment Group and independent Lions Gates are reported to be in ongoing negotiations with Apple about making their catalog of films available to iTunes customers.

Those other studios seem to be wishing online sales would go away, allowing DVD sales to continue as they have. That's not going to happen - they should get on board, and stop leaving money on the table.

Technorati Tags: iTunes

It's time for the weekly look at the logs. Lots of update downloads for BittomFeeder this week - that jacked the average up to 274/day:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Update	730
Windows	480
Mac X	232
Linux x86	118
Mac 8/9	114
CE ARM	73
Windows98/ME	38
Solaris	32
Linux Sparc	27
HPUX	21
AIX	15
Sources	14
Linux PPC	12
SGI	6
ADUX	4
CE x86	2

That takes me to the HTML page accesses. Traffic was solid again this week, with the tool distribution slanting to IE. Probably a rise in IE7 usage:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	46.4%
Mozilla	38%
Other	3.1%
Planet Smalltalk	4.9%
MSN Bot	3.5%
LibPerl	2.4%
Opera	1.6%
Accoona	1.3%

Finally, the RSS tool distribution:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	20.4%%
BottomFeeder	19%
Other	1.4%
Safari RSS	6.8%
Net News Wire	6.6%
Google Feed Fetcher	6.3%
Internet Explorer	6.2%
BlogLines	5.1%
NewsGator	3.2%
Planet Smalltalk	2.4%
Strategic Board Bot	2.1%
RSS Bandit	1.5%
Liferea	1.4%
SharpReader	1.2%
Vienna	1.1%
MSN Bot	1.1%
News Fire	1.1%
JetBrains	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
Python	1%
Java	1%
Jakarta	1%
Opera	1%
BlogSearch	1%
Feed Reader	1%
Live Journal	1%
Feed Demon	1%
Shrook	1%
RSSReader	1%
Magpie	1%

The perennial question:

Jeff Sutherland is one of the few original signatories of the agile manifesto who has enough integrity to allow agile methods to grow beyond its founding members. In this blog he points out the benefits of Ruby running on the Java VM. He later suggests that SmallTalk should also consider the same approach. I wonder if him and James Robertson have ever talked?

We looked at this a long time ago, and the answer is, it's not really feasible. Ruby is an interpreted language, so the speed hit it takes from living on a static optimized VM is theoretical. With Smalltalk, it would be very real. There are an awful lot of dynamic behaviors that would either be lost outright or run like a dog on the JVM. The same holds largely true of the CLR, btw.

Sure, Sun is talking about adding some dynamic language support to the VM. The process to make those mods is long and slow though - and telling customers to take a 30% hit in performance in order to live on a different VM just doesn't sound that useful.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, JVM, ruby

Today is Veteran's Day, and I tip my hat to all the men and women serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. My grandfather fought in WWI, and that was no picnic either. He was one of the lucky ones - he came back (physically) unscathed. I can't think of a better tribute than "In Flanders Fields" by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918) (Canadian Army):

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Technorati Tags: remembrance

Having shown how to hit iTunes from VW, here's how I did the same thing in ObjectStudio. OST is more Windows oriented, so things were a bit simpler:

"Get a COM interface and a dispatch object"
ole := OLEObject newProgId: 'iTunes.Application'.
dispatcher := ole dispatcher.

"get the Playlist interface"
libPlay := dispatcher at: 'LibraryPlaylist'.

"Now add the file"
result := libPlay call: 'AddFile' params: (Array with: 'h:\audio\industry_misinterpretations_10-14-06.mp3').

Refer back to the same image from the previous post; it all worked the same way :) COM from Smalltalk isn't quite as hard as I thought it was.

Technorati Tags: objectstudio, visualworks, COM

I've been noodling around with the COM interface to iTunes, and - after some help from Troy and one of our engineers, I got things working - in both VW and OST. I got OST working first, but I have VW open now, so let's start with that. First, I used the type analyzer to get the GUID:

"View Dispatch interface methods and properties"
COMAutomationTypeAnalyzer describeID: 'iTunes.Application' asGUID.

Then, I grabbed the dispatch interface:

"Open an instance and try some methods."
driver := COMDispatchDriver createObject: 'iTunes.Application'.

Then, using the dispatch interface I grabbed the LibraryPlaylist interface and added a file:

"Get the Library playlist interface and add a file to iTunes"
playListLib := driver getProperty: 'LibraryPlaylist'.
playListLib invokeMethod: 'AddFile' with: 'h:\audio\industry_misinterpretations_10-14-06.mp3'.

Which led to this:

Next post- we'll have a look at the OST code.

Technorati Tags: objectstudio, visualworks, COM

Well - it seems that there's a judge out there willing to question bozo damage claims from the RIAA:

A US COURT is forcing the Recording Industry of America to explain why it charges people it catches pirating $750 a single rather than the 70 cents they flog them to retailers for.

Sounds right to me. If the label sells the good for $X, then the presumed damage would be $X. Anything beyond that is into the punitive realm. The RIAA doesn't much like this:

The RIAA fought to prevent the amendment to Ms Lindor's case, claiming it was not up to her to decide damages. They said that her complaint about the level of damages was without merit and if the amendment went ahead it would prejudice them.

Cry me a river. My sympathy for the labels dried up and blew away a long, long time ago. Which reminds me - David Geffen is justifying the "Zune Tax" this way:

David Geffen, the media omniboss, is quoted: 'Each of these devices is used to store unpaid-for material...' The new business rationale is that stolen music should be paid for by profit sharing of newly sold Zune music players.

The raw stupidity of the labels continues to amaze me. Hey Geffen: you can take the Zune, and this "all my customers are criminals" attitude and stick it. As for MS: I won't be buying a Zune, and I'll be advising other people not to as well. When MS wants to take a "our customers aren't crooks" stand, perhaps one of the Zune guys could make an announcement on that.

Technorati Tags: RIAA, copyright

Via Dare Obasanjo comes this fascinating tidbit about page load times - it's a nice companion piece to the data I linked to the other day:

Marissa started with a story about a user test they did. They asked a group of Google searchers how many search results they wanted to see. Users asked for more, more than the ten results Google normally shows. More is more, they said. So, Marissa ran an experiment where Google increased the number of search results to thirty. Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%. Ouch. Why? Why, when users had asked for this, did they seem to hate it? After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds. Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction. This conclusion may be surprising -- people notice a half second delay? -- but we had a similar experience at Amazon.com. In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.

I wonder how many web developers - myself included - had any idea that 1/2 a second had that kind of impact?

Technorati Tags: advertising

Allchin on Windows Vista:

During a telephone conference with reporters yesterday, outgoing Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin, while touting the new security features of Windows Vista, which was released to manufacturing yesterday, told a reporter that the system's new lockdown features are so capable and thorough that he was comfortable with his own seven-year-old son using Vista without antivirus software installed.

Hey Jim - I have a bridge for you. I guarantee that it will be more useful than Windows without anti-virus software.

Technorati Tags: microsoft

On this morning's Smalltalk Daily, we learn how to recover lost code.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Joel understand the business end of software development pretty well:

Consulting company comes in, gets all the programmers in a room, tells them all about Function Points and stuff, and how productivity is REALLY IMPORTANT.

Programmers remember that scene from Office Space where Bob and Bob, the consultants, recommended all the people to get fired.

Programmers start writing a heck of a lot more function points. For example you can triple the number of function points in your code simply by round tripping everything through an XML file. Big waste of time, prone to bugs, does nothing, but each file you touch adds a function point. W00t!

Some companies manage this sort of thing without the outside consultants. Some important executive reads a book. The book has important tips on improving productivity. All the people reporting to the executive get a copy of the book, and are told how much there is to learn from it.

The message as it's received down in the trenches?

"The beatings will continue until morale improves"

What most shops need is less "help" from above, and more real autonomy.

Technorati Tags: consultants, productivity

Thanks to some Javascript help from mlq in the Smalltalk IRC channel, I've been able to get rid of the lengthy category lists in IE6, and get the menus working in Safari. I made the necessary changes to the server a few minutes ago, so the sidebars in IE6 and Safari should be more pleasant from here on out.

One more barrier to getting a Mac for the office just fell: you can get your Mac with XP pre-installed now:

MacMall is offering configured bundles pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows XP Home or Pro software on new Apple MacBooks, MacBook Pros, iMacs, Mac Pros and Mac minis. The bundles are available with either Nova Development’s Parallels Desktop for Mac or Apple’s Boot Camp Public Beta.

That looks very, very cool. Now if I could just get my IT group to approve one...

It's not enough to pay extortion to the music industry - no, MS had to be even stupider. On the hit parade of "how many dumb things can we do at once", there are these two:

• The Zune introduces a new DRM scheme that is unrelated (and incompatible with) PlaysForSure. Using the old MS standard? You're screwed
• On Windows, and used to Windows Media Player? Too bad for you - it doesn't work with the Zune, either

Or, as the NY Times put it in a review:

Microsoft’s proprietary closed system abandons one potential audience: those who would have chosen an iPod competitor just to show their resentment for Apple’s proprietary closed system.

To make matters worse, you can’t use Windows Media Player to load the Zune with music; you have to install a similar but less powerful Windows program just for the Zune. It’s a ridiculous duplication of effort by Microsoft, and a double learning curve for you.

So how is the Zune? It had better be pretty incredible to justify all of this hassle.

On that score, the review sounds positive - it looks like the Zune hits the usability mark well. On the other hand, the WiFi thing is just weird: it allows song sharing with other Zunes, but not with anything else:

It all works well enough, but it’s just so weird that Zunes can connect only to each other. Who’d build a Wi-Fi device that can’t connect to a wireless network — to sync with your PC, for example? Nor to an Internet hot spot, to download music directly?

That's a feature that a dominant player like the iPod could make use of, given the ubiquity. The Zune? Putting in WiFi drains battery life and adds a feature that's just stupid. It would be truly cool to be able to buy new stuff w/o having to lug my laptop around - but no, couldn't have that. Most likely, MS' pals at the RIAA had a fit over the idea. The way the sharing feature is implemented is bound to irk anyone who uses it, too:

This copy protection is as strict as a 19th-century schoolmarm. Just playing half the song (or one minute, whichever comes first) counts as one “play.” You can never resend a song to the same friend. A beamed song can’t be passed along to a third person, either.

What’s really nuts is that the restrictions even stomp on your own musical creations. Microsoft’s literature suggests that if you have a struggling rock band, you could “put your demo recordings on your Zune” and “when you’re out in public, you can send the songs to your friends.” What it doesn’t say: “And then three days later, just when buzz about your band is beginning to build, your songs disappear from everyone’s Zunes, making you look like an idiot.”

That's not the way to build interest in a cool feature - it's a way to convince people that your device is broken, because a feature that looks like it should work won't. At a high level, this demonstrates how DRM is a bug, not a feature. At a usability level, it's a flood of user reported errors waiting to happen, all of which will have to be answered thusly:

"No, really - it's supposed to work that way"

Yeah, that will make customers happy. This also sounds like a problem for a second mover attempt:

The Zune store is also missing gift certificates, allowances, user-submitted playlists and so on. And believe it or not, the Zune store doesn’t let you subscribe or download podcasts. (Maybe Microsoft just couldn’t bring itself to type the word “pod.”)

Most likely, Apple's bozo attempt to own the term "pod" is getting in the way. However, it's a hole for customers looking to buy a Zune to replace their iPod. Listen to podcasts? You're on your own again, copying mp3 files from the net and hand pushing them. That's a lot of things, but useful isn't one of them.

Perhaps, as per common MS form, when they get to Zune 3.0, they'll have a real competitor. For now, I think I'll stay with the iPod.

Technorati Tags: zune, microsoft

The news that MS is going to pay "protection money" to studios on every sale of the Zune doesn't make me happy:

The New York Times reports that Microsoft has cut a deal with Universal Music Group which will allow the music giant to get a percentage of the sale of its upcoming digital music player, Zune. The report says that the amount being paid to UMG is going to be at least $1 per $250 device. Microsoft is going to extend the same deal to others in the music business.

This will keep the studios in the extortion racket, and ensures that DRM stays on the industry's agenda. Apple isn't perfect here, but this will ensure that I won't be buying a Zune.

Technorati Tags: DRM

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a brief look at the Time Profiler. For a detailed overview, I'd suggest a follow up with Michael's screencast.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, profiling

James McGovern on slide decks:

I wonder if the Web 2.0 folks have ever considered that their presentations are also information dense? Many corporate folks aren't used to such density and they may be overwhelmed with such tight delivery. In overload situations, folks will also revert back to the desire of reading things later even if they were in attendance which you now have robbed them of this chance.

This is in the middle of a riff about how "Web 2.0" companies in particular fill their presentations with too much information. In my experience, small companies tend to do the best job of keeping presentations shorter and to the point. When you find a wordy, rambling presentation, there's a very good chance that it came out of a large bureaucracy.

Now, bad presentations exist everywhere - I've put together plenty of them myself. I will say this though - if you rely on powerpoint decks for documentation, then you are dying the death of a thousand horrid practices.

Technorati Tags: management

Nick Carr has a long post up pursuing the idea that computer usage is bound to follow the model of electricity usage: moving from all DIY to a mostly metered model, due to the overhead and waste:

The energy-inefficiency of the machines themselves is compounded by the way we’ve come to use them. The reigning client-server model of business computing requires that we have far more computers then we actually need. Servers and other hardware are dedicated to running individual applications, and they’re housed in data centers constructed to serve individual companies. The fragmentation of computing has led, by necessity, to woefully low levels of capacity utilization 10% to 30% seems to be the norm in modern data centers. Compare that to the 90% capacity utilization rates routinely achieved by mainframes, and you get a good sense of how much waste is built into business computing today. The majority of computing capacity -- and the electricity required to keep it running -- is squandered.

Well, this needs a big "it depends". For large companies, with thousands of employees (or, millions of users, like Google), there's certainly going to be pressure to wring inefficiency out of the system. However, there's a simple reality: most outfits simply aren't that big. If your business is small, and the biggest use of a PC is to keep the books, then you really don't see those costs. The problem Carr outlines is a real one, but it's limited to a certain segment of the business population. With power, it makes a lot of sense to centralize - the mom and pop shop can't afford to build a coal fired plant in the basement. They can afford the 1-2 PCs they might need though, and selling them on a centralized vision is going to be hard.

Analogies are useful, but they only take you so far.

Technorati Tags: management

I really like the "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads, but it seems that the Mac guy (Justin Long) comes across as smug for too many people:

Apple's "I'm a Mac" campaign is almost perfect: It's funny, memorable, and efficiently lays out the advantages of Macs over PCs. Its only defect: Virtually everyone who watches it comes away liking the "PC guy" while wanting to push the "Mac guy" under a bus.

I can see that, but it never hit me that way. However - if it's not working, it's not working.

Technorati Tags: advertising

Apparently, Vista has gone RTM - and my question is, why? MS missed the holiday PC buying season, so it would have been smart to give testing another couple of months. There were nasty bugs discovered and patched a short while back; why not give it another 1-2 months? What's the upside to a January general release, as opposed to March?

Technorati Tags: windows, Vista

Proving that US lawmakers are not the only ones who have no grasp of the internet, Australia and Belgium are flirting with some truly stupid law: they want to force search engines to get opt-in approval before they index any pages (as opposed to respecting robots.txt). Here's the AP story:

"Given the vast size of the Internet, it is impossible for a search engine to contact personally each owner of a web page to determine whether the owner desires its web page to be searched, indexed or cached," Google said Tuesday.

"If such advanced permission was required, the internet would promplty grind to a halt," Google's senior counsel and head of public policy Andrew McLaughlin told the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee.

Can you imagine how badly search would work if this were the case? I wonder whether the rights holders have really thought this one through - how would I read content if I have no idea that it exists?

Technorati Tags: copyright, web

Just as application startup time matters, web page load time matters: if you go beyond about 4 seconds, you enter loser territory:

Four seconds is the maximum length of time an average online shopper will wait for a Web page to load before potentially abandoning a retail site. This is one of several key findings revealed in a report made available today by Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), commissioned through JupiterResearch, that examines consumer reaction to a poor online shopping experience.

This isn't a huge surprise - it tracks well with anecdotal experience I already have. Having good data might help convince recalcitrant web developers though.

Technorati Tags: user%xperience

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we create a Windows executable from the runtime image we created yesterday.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, deployment

The very unfunny Vista EULA can at least still be ridiculed freely :)

Technorati Tags: EULA, Vista

The LAStug is meeting on November 13:

LASTUG Meeting

Date: Monday November 13, 2006

Time: 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

This event repeats on the second Monday of every month. Location: High Tech High, Los Angeles - Meeting Room

Street: 17111 Victory Blvd

City State Zip: Lake Balboa, CA, 91406 Map

There is usually an after meeting at Jerry's Deli on Ventura and Petit in Van Nuys that goes on to an indeterminate time.

If there is a problem getting there call Darius Clarke, Mike Klein or John Dougan for assistance. The phone numbers are in the LASTUG contacts database on Yahoo! .

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Bruce Tate has another articel up on the "Crossing Borders" site hosted by IBM. In it, he discusses the advantages of dynamic typing, and contrasts it with static systems. Part way through the article is this description of Smalltalk, which is a great summary:

The whole Smalltalk language is built on the premise of delayed binding. Smalltalk developers build onto a continuously running application called the image. Because the image is always running, any addition, deletion, or update of a method in any class occurs at run time. Delayed binding lets Smalltalk applications keep running throughout the development cycle.

This is the thing about Smalltalk that differentiates it from other languages. It's always runtime in Smalltalk - the divide between development and deployment is very, very blurry. In fact, my test server for this blog is usually just sitting on my old Linux box, waiting for me to do something with it. When I have new code, I export it, toss it at the server, and load it into the running server.

Those changes often involve shape changes to live objects - including ones that are being used by requests to the server at the time of the code change. I don't shut the server down; heck, I don't even turn the listener off. I just use an administrative interface I set up to tell the server to look in the update directory for new code - and it loads it. This all works because of the lackof a full divide between development time and runtime in Smalltalk.

That leads right into something Bruce says further down in his article:

They [ed: dynamic languages] provide techniques that the Java language doesn't, such as overriding the behavior that happens when a method is missing. Remember, the Java language requires methods to exist for compile-time binding. Other languages allow open classes -- classes that can change based on a developer's needs. When you look long and hard at the evolution of frameworks, you find an increasing need for delayed binding, leading to increasingly unnatural bolt-ons in the Java language that complicate and obfuscate the language. Meanwhile, other languages sit ready and waiting for us to build just the sorts of frameworks that can lead to radically higher levels of abstraction, and much better productivity. The benefit to you is clear: you have a language that's more expressive and more productive.

The runtime/development time divide is something that grew out of a world of limited computing resources: memory and diskspace used to be expensive. At this point, they're cheap (and only getting cheaper. Inertia is the main force that keeps that divide around. having dynamic binding adds other possibilities as well:

Message passing takes on another dimension when you throw method_missing into the mix. Remember, this capability is open to dynamic languages, but completely closed to languages that bind at compile time to a type. The benefit of the early binding -- enforcing that the method must exist -- also turns out to be a core weakness. Ruby lets you override the method_missing behavior to invoke behaviors for methods that might not exist at run time. Active Record associates a class with a table and dynamically adds an attribute to each class for every column in the database. Active Record also automatically adds finders for each column, or combination of columns! For example, for a Person class mapped to a people database table having first_name and last_name columns, person.find_by_first_name_and_last_name is a legal Active Record statement, though no such method exists. Active Record simply overrides method_missing and parses the method name at run time to determine whether the method name is valid. The result is an extremely productive framework for wrapping database tables -- one greatly simplified through the power of late binding. But so far, I've only explored the invocation side. It's time to push forward into adding behavior.

One of the nicest things about having easily modified MNU (method missing) behavior is proxies. In Smalltalk, setting up proxy behavior (for lazy fetching from a database, or for over the wire method invocation) is trivial - the proxy overrides the default MNU behavior, and does the appropriate action (fetches the db data, sends an RPC message, what have you). In Distributed Smalltalk, a CORBA implementation for Cincom Smalltalk, MNUs raised remotely result in bringing up a debugger locally - the remote side handles the exception the same way it normally would, but with the debugger coming up locally. That debugger is a full Smalltalk debugger as well - it's not the "forensic pathologist" kind of debugger that you get in more traditional environments.

The funny thing is, the Java world is headed this way, but at the cost of ever spiralling levels of complexity. Trying to add dynamism to the static world of Java is a little like handing a bicycle to a fish:

The Java community's obsession with static type checking is curious because Java developers are now spending an ever-increasing amount of energy looking for ways to delay binding. Sometimes, the approaches are successful. Frameworks such as Spring exist primarily to delay binding, which loosens the coupling between client and service. Aspect-oriented programming allows delayed binding by providing services that extend a class beyond its current capabilities. Frameworks like Hibernate delay binding, adding persistence capabilities to plain, ordinary Java objects (POJOs) at run time through reflection, proxies, and other tools. Popular books teach developers how to program with POJOs, often moving beyond reflection with increasingly complex techniques essentially used to open up a class and delay binding, effectively sidestepping static typing.

When you start down that path, you might want to consider using a language and environment that were developed with that stuff in mind - right tool for the job and all that. Put another way - come on in, the water is fine.

Technorati Tags: dynamic typing, smalltalk, ruby, java

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we go through packaging an application for deployment.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, deployment

Today is election day in the US, so I'll be headed out to vote soon. Unlike a lot of people, I don't think everyone should vote. If you don't know who your local representative is, if you don't know who your local council members are - then do us all a favor, and stay home. The rest of you - go vote.

Technorati Tags: news

Robert McLaws noticed the Microsoft announcement of a new video (tv/movie) store for the XBox - you cab buy stuff and download it to the console. That's cool, but here's the first thought I had: why isn't the Zune mentioned anywhere? Is it just something Robert missed, or is MS off in left hand/right hand displacement mode again?

Side note which is disappointing: it looks like DRM is fully in play - I gathered that from this video of the features.

Technorati Tags: DVR, DRM

Jason Calacanis dpesn't think much of the "Spike the Vote" effort that's targeting Digg (and maybe other similar services soon):

As you may know, there has been an algorithm change at Digg. Now it takes about 60-100 Diggs to hit the front page depending on your category. Please note that you will only be able to spike a maximum of 50 votes for each story you submit. The spiking is meant to give your story a kick start; it's not meant to spam Digg. If your story has any legs at all, it should have no problem making the front page after 50 spikes. Spike the Vote is offering 250 points for $50 to a limited number of spikers to get the system started. Please respond to this message if interested.

Sometimes I wonder whether any of the people hosting free services have ever heard of "the tragedy of the commons". My first thought on reading about this effort was "well, duhh'.

Let's see: popular usenet groups tend to devolve into crap over time. So do popular mailing lists. Why would anyone think that social media sites are magically immune? There's a reason that I have spam filtering on, and trackbacks off. Open systems that don't have some kind of barrier are going to get gamed. If you don't get that, look up "human nature" until it sinks in.

Technorati Tags: social media, digg

This is probably the best news I've seen out of the Yankee camp in a few years - the Yanks picked up Sheffield's option so that they could trade him: for pitching:

The Yankees completed the first step toward trading Gary Sheffield yesterday, announcing that they have picked up the slugger's $13 million contract option for next season.

...

While Williams believes there is a chance Sheffield remains with the Yankees, the club wants to move him for young pitching. But Sheffield is coming off a season in which he played only 39 games because of wrist surgery, which may reduce his trade value.

Young pitching! It's almost like someone flipped a light switch over there, or something.

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

Things are getting complicated (legally speaking) on the internet. The Spamhaus/e360Insight mess opened a window into just how messy things can get - and how much worse they could become.

In that case, e360 sued Spamhaus in Illinois. Spamhaus didn't even bother to show up - being a UK based outfit, they told the court, in effect, to suck eggs. The court eventually ruled in favor of e360 (good luck collecting). It's at that point that things got messy. e360 noticed that the suit had had no impact, so they went to a Federal court and asked a judge to force ICANN to toss Spamhaus off the net. Now, ICANN said that they couldn't do that even if they wanted to (the domain registrar in question is Canadian based).

Right now, Spamhaus has lawyered up in Illinois and is appealing the case. This isn't the end of the problem though - Jim Rapoza of eWeek notes that things could (and probably will) get worse:

For example, European executives of online gambling companies have been arrested when they've traveled to the United States for breaking U.S. gambling laws. It probably won't be too long until we see an executive from a prominent American Internet company arrested while abroad for something that wouldn't be a crime here (for, say, selling books or movies online that are banned in certain countries).

The problem is that the web oozes right past national jurisdictions. The US can outlaw online gambling, but a European site (globally accessible) can still offer it. Likewise, free speech here in the US protects various odious things which are illegal in Europe. Those things are accessible online though (hello, Google book indexing). I think Rapoza's right - at some point, a US exec will deplane in Europe and get arrested for illegal content, in the same way that the US Dept of Justice has gone after gambling execs - and the stunned incomprehension of the Dept. of Justice will be the only entertaining part of that.

I don't pretend to have an answer to this, but an escalating stream of arrests in airports isn't it.

Technorati Tags: web

On this morning's Smalltalk Daily, we learn how to configure your Smalltalk web application with configuration files rather than using the browser interface.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, web

Ready or not: Windows 3.11 running on modern hardware. It's enough to make you wonder what MS is actually doing with all those CPU cycles in XP, never mind Vista...

We've been remiss about asking for feedback on the last couple of podcasts - so if you have any, send it along to podcasts@cincom.com. If you send an mp3, I'll play it on the air.

Michael has an answer for everyone who has ever been lost in a sea of tiny little methods, all alike:

This time we're looking at the Defactoring Tool - a novel idea that if you can refactor things in to lots of small methods, then surely you can defactor all those small methods in to one giant blob of code. And you can

Technorati Tags: screencast, software development

You can get BottomFeeder from CNet's download.com site now - the Windows installer only, but everything else is available on the normal download site. Just click on the icon below.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, rss, atom, news aggregator

Dare Obasanjo didn't manage to convince his girlfriend to get a Zune - apparently, the iPod enablement of her car provided a lot of motivation to stay with the iPod. That's where things got interesting:

When we went to the mall, the Apple store was busy so we got her new iPod from the iPod vending machine at Macy's instead. I'm not sure which was the most mind boggling thing about the purchase. The fact that iPod vending machines exist? The fact that there was actually a line at the iPod vending machine? Or that the machine seemed to be getting enough regular usage to be sold out of iPod Nanos ? Wow.

I've read about those vending machines, but never seen one myself. As Dare says, this definitely shows how far MS has to go in order to make the Zune successful - Apple has managed to make the iPod the "default" answer.

Technorati Tags: iPod

On the Smalltalk IRC channel this afternoon, I got pointers to some Smalltalk blogs I didn't know about:

URL	Feed
Sean McGinty	feed
David Cope	feed
lamneth	feed

Enjoy - hat tip Andres Valloud

Technorati Tags: blog

Dare Obasanjo shoots holes in David Hornik's (and Chris Anderson's) theory of abundance. From Hornik's site:

The basic idea is that incredible advances in technology have driven the cost of things like transistors, storage, bandwidth, to zero. And when the elements that make up a business are sufficiently abundant as to approach free, companies appropriately should view their businesses differently than when resources were scarce (the Economy of Scarcity). They should use those resources with abandon, without concern for waste. That is the overriding attitude of the Economy of Abundance -- don't do one thing, do it all; don't sell one piece of content, sell it all; don't store one piece of data, store it all. The Economy of Abundance is about doing everything and throwing away the stuff that doesn't work. In the Economy of Abundance you can have it all.

Dare does a great job of driving trucks through the holes in that argument:

All this talk of Abundance being the new Economy misses the point that Scarcity is still what drives all economic endeavors. What has happened with the advent of the Web is that certain things that were traditionally considered scarce are now abundant (e.g. shelf space, editorial content, software, etc) which means that the new economic lords are those that can exploit scarcity along another axis.

Read the rest of his post; it uses the iPod/iTunes store as a good example. There's another thing Hornik misses though, and that's quality of service. If any business attempts to "do it all", the end result will be a complete lack of focus. Laura Ries does a great job of explaining the flaws in that theory on a regular basis; I'd recommend nearly any post she's ever made for guidance there.

The short answer is this: those who try to be all things to all people typically end up being nothing useful for anyone.

Technorati Tags: sales, branding, marketing

The 2006 Cincom Smalltalk User Conference is coming up fast - it's being held December 5-7 in Frankfurt, Germany. Head on over to the conference page to get the details - and register to attend here.

See you there!

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, smalltalk, conference

This year's Halloween party came a week late, and it was at a friend's house, instead of here - we are still bogged down planning for a large family event later this month. I took this photo of the host tending to a cauldron of punch - sadly, my phone camera didn't catch the dry ice smoke (which was pouring all around it). It was a cool effect, and went well with her costume:

Technorati Tags: halloween, party

Engadget speculates that Sony won't even hit the reduced PS3 ship numbers they've promised:

If you haven't managed to procure a good, solid pre-order yet from a credible retailer, you just might want to take a good hard look at those unboxing pics we shared last night, 'cause it could very well be as close as you're getting to a PlayStation 3 in 2006. See, despite Sony's repeated reductions to the launch quantity predictions, EA thinks they're still "exaggerating" a bit, and we might actually end up with around 500,000 to 800,000 units by year's end in North America -- as opposed to the 1-1.2 million currently being predicted by Sony.

The Wii and XBox 360 are looking like better bets all the time.

Technorati Tags: console, PS3, sony

James McGovern illustrates why many large companies spend most of their time standing still. In response to the idea that analysts like to pass information by phone, he says:

Hmmm. So I guess you are saying that we must resort to establishing dialogs via phone calls? Have you ever considered why enterprises prefer documents? Maybe it is because we do a lot of work at home on our laptops after hours. Maybe by having printed material we can multi-task. If you have ever been in corporate America for any extended period of time, you would understand that there are lots of low density information oriented meetings which serve as an opportunity to do multiple things. Many people pretend to take notes when in all reality they are reading documents.

Well. I wonder if it ever occurs to him that those "low denisty information oriented meetings" are an utter waste of everyone's time? or that - realizing this - analysts like to get people on the phone so that they can get some level of assurance that attention is being paid? If you spend time multitasking in meetings, then the correct answer is that you don't need to be in those meetings. Full stop, period.

Time for the weekly look at the logs. BottomFeeder downloads proceeded at a rate of 197 per day, which looks good. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	470
Update	330
Linux x86	142
Mac X	89
CE ARM	78
Mac 8/9	59
Windows98/ME	53
Solaris	41
AIX	25
Linux Sparc	24
Sources	20
HPUX	18
SGI	14
Linux PPC	14
ADUX	6
CE x86	1

Next, HTML page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	46.8%
Mozilla	40%
Planet Smalltalk	5.1%
Other	2.2%
MSN Bot	2.8%
Zibb Crawler	1.8%
Opera	1.3%

Well, it certainly looks like IE 7 is having an impact on browser usage amongst my readers. Let's take a look at the syndication stats:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
BottomFeeder	21.3%
Mozilla	20.4%
Other	10.8%
Net News Wire	7.6%
Safari RSS	6.9%
Google Feed Fetcher	6%
Internet Explorer	4.6%
BlogLines	3.6%
NewsGator	2.9%
RSS Bandit	2.4%
Planet Smalltalk	1.9%
Liferea	1.2%
JetBrains	1.2%
News Fire	1.1%
SharpReader	1.1%
Nutch	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
Python	1%
Opera	1%
Jakarta	1%
MSN Bot	1%
BlogSearch	1%

That looks fairly normal, and on the syndication side, IE usage isn't rising that much

Michael, David, and I recorded episode 8 last night - we continued our conversation about image based development, and then went into Vista Smalltalk - the Ottawa STUG got a presentation on it last week, and David recorded a screencast. From there, we discussed debugging techniques, and how Smalltalk makes that very different (and more powerful).

James Savidge's jobs report is at the end, so stick around for that. You can grab the mp3 file here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, vista smalltalk, debugging, software development