Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Dave Winer makes a good point about what MS could have (and should have) done with the Zune:

I met with the people doing the Zune at Microsoft in the summer of 2004, when podcasting was gaining traction (in Seattle no less), but wasn't showing on their radar yet. I explained how they could make their device a perfect podcast client. I couldn't tell what they were thinking of course, but it seemed they weren't convinced podcasting was real. Too bad, they could have made a simple product, not had to do any deals with Hollywood, and do an end-run around Apple, which still hasn't made the corner turn to DRM-less media (which is one of the most profound things about podcasting, and no accident, I assure you).

That's hardly the end of the missteps though; it's as if MS considered every bone-headed move they could make for the Zune, and went ahead:

• Doesn't work with Windows Media Player; requires a new application
• Doesn't work with PlaysForSure, MS' recent DRM theory. If you bought PlaysForSure music, that sound you hear is the theme song from "Jaws"
• WiFi that doesn't serve any useful purpose
• Music Sharing via WiFi that will generate gosh knows how many bug reports that end with tech support saying "it's a feature, not a bug"
• A player that's a little bigger than it could be, and is much heavier than an iPod.
• You buy music via a point system ($5 minimum up front to buy songs at $0.99 each) - unlike, say, itms, where you just use that money thing so manv of us are familiar with

It's simply amazing that they could hit the market as a second mover and make that many initial mistakes. That last one on points is worthy of a whole "what were they thinking???" post of its own. I'd like to know what the product management/marketing team was thinking when they came up with this.

Update: CNN had Andrew Ross Sorkin on this morning to talk about the Zune. It was a classic "on the one hand, on the other" kind of review until the very end, when Soledad O'Brien brought out her new Nano shuffle. Ouch.

Technorati Tags: Zune, Microsoft, iPod

Via Glenn Reynolds, I'm reminded of the egregious charges hotels and conference centers charge for group net access:

There were 11 of us in a small conference room with a table that seated 12. Naturally, we all wanted access to the net, but the charge for that was $175 per person! That's $1,925 for internet access for the group. We (I) pitched a fit, and they agreed to cut it significantly, but it was still far more than what we were willing to pay.

This leads to absurd situations - at last year's LinuxWorld/NetworkWorld (note the second name) there was no internet access (the conference center wanted $300 per person). The question you have to ask yourself is - does that kind of charge plan actually work? Given all the business they don't get, does the business from the occasional moron who pays for it make up for it?

Publicity isn't that useful for this, since the people affected are transient, and may not return to the same hotel/center anytime soon.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we go a little deeper into Smalltalk processes, and learn one technique for easily dealing with background processes.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Nick Carr notes the existence of what he dubs"defensive blogging" - i.e., starting a blog so that you can have some control over what shows up in search results:

Leonsis is what you might call a defensive blogger. His main goal isn't to enter into a "conversation" with the AOL "community," but just to gain more control over the results that show up when people google him. In fact - and this really turns the whole corporate blogging ethos on its pointy little head - Leonsis is blogging not to increase the flow of information but to narrow it, for his own professional benefit.

I flagged this story as something of interest yesterday, but never got around to it. Today, it's a full blown meme :) I find that I like Doc Searl's take on this:

Doesn't always happen with me and Nick, but I couldn't agree more. Though I'd add that Ted is being both Machiavelli and Cluetrain compliant. (It isn't like the guy isn't getting clues, is it? He's not bunkered down in what Dr. Weinberger aptly called Fort Business.)

Avi (and others) have talked about getting Ruby to run inside a Smalltalk system - and now Avi has gone ahead and taken a first step in that direction:

Here’s the cool thing about JRuby for this purpose: one, it has a nice, classic object-oriented parser/AST/Visitor package, in Java. Two, it makes it very easy to access Java classes and implement Java interfaces from Ruby. That means, as it turns out, that it’s trivial to write a JRuby script that uses the JRuby parser to parse some Ruby code, and then pass the parse nodes through a Ruby visitor implementation. So I wrote a visitor that does the least work possible to translate the simplest Ruby program possible into something Squeak Smalltalk can load and run, and hey, it adds 3+4 and comes up with 7. I’m pretty sure this is the lightestweight bootstrap there can be towards the goal of eventually getting Ruby running on a Smalltalk VM. No new parser needed: we use JRuby’s. No new compiler needed: we use Squeak’s. No third party libraries needed (I never could get ParseTree built on my Mac). No new code that needs to be written in any language but Ruby. Cool.

Interesting approach - the code required to do that is here. Now it'll be interesting to see whether anyone else picks this up to look at - Blaine, perhaps?

This raises the question as to why one of the Smalltalk vendors (like, say, Cincom) doesn't take a crack at it. Well, the revenue model for it is not immediately obvious (meaning: you come up with a way to explain it to management - I haven't found that way yet :) ). Additionally, we have a fairly full plate of things we need to do to Cincom Smalltalk already, and the engineering team is over-committed on that.

That said, I think it's a cool idea. If there's money in it, a third party should be able to build support and help us sell it.

Technorati Tags: squeak, ruby

Apparently, Peter Scheer thinks he can be like Marty McFly - the news media can somehow take a quick trip to the past and fix everything:

What to do? Here's my proposal: Newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period -- say, 24 hours -- after it is made available to paying customers. The point is not to remove content from the Internet, but to delay its free release in that venue.

A temporary embargo, by depriving the Internet of free, trustworthy news in real-time, would, I believe, quickly establish the true value of that information. Imagine the major Web portals -- Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN -- with nothing to offer in the category of news except out of date articles from "mainstream" media and blogosphere musings on yesterday's news. Digital fish wrap. And the portals know from unhappy experience (most recently in the case of Yahoo) just how difficult it is to create original and timely news content themselves.

I don't know whether he's noticed, but this internet thing is global. Exactly how does he plan on getting every wire service and media outlet to agree to those terms? Heck, even if it were possible, he'd have a classic "prisoner's dilemma" on his hands.

It's time for people like Scheer to get beyond the old days. The net is here to stay, as is widely available free content. The RIAA and the MPAA demonstrate the futility of trying to fight the future; even as they get friendly legal regimes passed on their behalf, technology continues to outwit them. There's no re-entry to that mythical past where everyone picked up the evening newspaper for the latest news.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, news, stupidity

Carlos at Techdirt manages to infuriate the RIAA again simply by pointing out what the say, and what that means. Meanwhile, the shills at the RIAA continue to look like complete jerks. Witness this amazing assertion from their mouthpiece:

Like a trademark that becomes generic, the fair use doctrine is in danger of losing its meaning and value if CEA's self-serving claims are taken at face value. CEA has twisted and contorted "fair use" beyond its true intent, turning it into a free pass for those who simply don't want to pay for creative works.

Hey Cary - let me know when that rectal-cranial inversion gets to be too painful to stand.

Technorati Tags: DRM, stupidity

It's always runtime in Smalltalk -- Developer Workshop "Experience Cincom Smalltalk"

Workshop for OO developers looking for fun while programming
"Experience Cincom Smalltalk"
Frankfurt, Germany

Dynamic programming languages are a hot topic now; OOPSLA 2006 dedicated an exclusive forum to them. They are considered to be a serious alternative to Java, C# or C++ -- even within the IBM camp as you can tell from the following abstract:

"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." (Bruce Tate, "Delayed Binding", "Crossing Borders" site hosted by IBM)

But there are several dynamic languages. So why not using one of the "modern" ones, Ruby & Co? Or do you expect more from a software technology than just cost reductions through increased developer productivity and simplified maintenance? E.g.

• Power: one single technology for various applications and architectures!
• Openness: not an island solution!
• First-class tools: powerful, easy-to-use and seamlessly integrated!
• Performance and stability
• And happy developers: Having fun at work empowers extraordinary results!

In our developers' workshop "Experience Cincom Smalltalk", you can. From December 5-7, 2006. In Frankfurt/Main, Germany.

Further information about the workshop can be found here.
To register, please send an e-mail or use our registration form.

We're looking forward to your curiosity and willingness to experiment!

Best regards Yvonne Schickel
Marketing Manager
Cincom Systems GmbH & Co. oHG
E-mail: infode@cincom.com
Phone: +49 6196 9003-0

PS:
Should you know experienced Smalltalkers, feel free to make them aware of the Cincom Smalltalk User Conference, which will be running simultaneously with the workshop.

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, cincom, smalltalk, visualworks, objectstudio

Space is running short: Cincom Smalltalk User Conference, December 5-7

Cincom Smalltalk User Conference
December 5-7, 2006
Frankfurt, Germany

Many Smalltalk users have already registered for the upcoming Cincom Smalltalk User Conference, which will take place on December 5-7 in Frankfurt, Germany.

Well known keynote speakers from the Smalltalk world, SAP Labs and IBM Methods Group will be talking about hot topics. The Cincom Smalltalk team is going to deliver detailed technical insights and tips as well as a look at the future roadmap. Click here to find the complete agenda with further information about our speakers and their talks.

Fed up with only listening?
Then use our various opportunities for interactive communication! Debate with product engineering in the "Discussion Forum", get advice on open issues in one of the "Meet the Expert" sessions, present your applications and solutions within the scope of the "ShortCuts -- User Presentations". And exert direct influence on Cincom Smalltalk's development via your contribution in various "Birds of a Feather" sessions - set up your own on site, and make sure to check the schedule that will be posted there.

Further information on the conference and the registration form can be found here.

We're looking forward to meeting you in Frankfurt next month!
Best regards

Yvonne Schickel
Marketing Manager
Cincom Systems GmbH & Co. oHG
E-mail: infode@cincom.com
Phone: +49 6196 9003-0

PS:
Should you know any OO developer, who would like to learn an established dynamic language, please point them to the workshop "Experience Cincom Smalltalk", which runs simultaneously with the conference.

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, cincom, smalltalk, objectstudio, visualworks

Here's the news I couldn't find earlier - Sun is providing safe harbor for people nervouse about the GPL opening things up too much. Not surprising:

However, Sun is employing the so-called "classpath exception," a license addition that allows the company to place limits on the software that the GPL covers, Green said.

The effect is that programmers who create applications using Sun's open-source versions of Java can use choose a different license for their applications, he said.

"In the case of Java SE (Java Standard Edition), we're enhancing (the GPL) with the classpath exception," Green said. "So when you're working on top or shipping applications with the (Java) libraries and virtual machine, you're not affected by the Java license."

In addition, Java creator Sun will continue to offer a commercial license, a "dual-license" structure that gives other software vendors legal indemnification and official standards certification.

So it looks like commercial users who don't trust GPL don't have to deal with it. That raises another question though - for vendors who don't care, will this eat into Sun's licensing revenue? That will be interesting to watch.

Technorati Tags: OSS, GPL

On this morning's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at the process model in Cincom Smalltalk. While I'm using VisualWorks to demonstrate, the same will hold for ObjectStudio 8, which is using VisualWorks as its home environment.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Via Tim Bray, I see that Sun has decided on the license they'll use for OSS Java - the GPL. This will bring up an interesting issue: I get a lot of anecdotal reports of companies being concerned about using GPL software. So here's what I'm interested in seeing:

• Is Sun offering a dual license thing to deal with that, or is it less of a problem than I think it is?
• Is it a larger issue, and will companies stay on older revs of Java "just to be sure?"
• Will any larger company try to do a "hijack fork"?

Those aren't "I hope it fails" questions on my part, either - I'm genuinely curious.

Technorati Tags: OSS, GPL

Here's the entire problem with McGovern's blog:

On every single page within my blog, the following disclaimer appears: The opinions expressed herein may or may not represent my own personal opinions... yet folks seem to ignore this statement and go off assuming and miss the entire point.

If you aren't expressing your opinion, you're just being a gadfly. I guess it's fair to assume your blog is what I thought it was at first - an elaborate satire. The non-contextual, tinfoil hat variety political pictures certainly go right along with that theory.

Technorati Tags: stupidity

Drew, the RocketBoom guy shows us how not to turn down a business deal:

I have been losing sleep over it and decided this is just not going to be right for Rocketboom. While I expect this will be a big traffic loss for us, at heart, I really love Apple and will stick by them in this competition. I also remembered from last year that Microsoft was the first company to really make me feel as though I was being taken advantage of personally.

That's what's called "burning your bridges". Dynamiting them, actually. One of the commenters there put it best:

This really makes me want to negotiate with you regarding sponsorship opportunities on rocketboom.

If it goes badly, can i assume you'll badmouth my company, too?

This is the sort of thing you handle privately. If there's a need to make a public comment at all, it should not be disparaging.

Update: Scoble had this to say on his blog:

James Robertson says this isn’t the way to turn down a deal cause it blows up all bridges. I don’t agree. You define yourself and your business by the customers you fire. I’m sure that the next sponsorship deal that Andy gets offered will be a lot more like what Seagate gave me than what Microsoft usually offers.

I still don't think so. I think handling that sort of thing quietly would work out a lot better. I suspect that the PR/advertising people looking at RocketBoom don't think much of it either. When he gets other offers, it will be in spite of - not due to - this missive. Meaning, the large volume of traffic will be enough to push this mistake aside.

Technorati Tags: marketing, management

I've just finished two interesting books: "Copperheads" and "America Alone". They were both intriguing books, and pretty quick reads.

Then there are the books I'm either still reading, or waiting (not so patiently) for:

I'm still working on "The End of the Old Order", which covers the Napoleanic era from 1801 - 1805. The author (Kagan) says that there will be more volumes to cover the rest of that period, and I look forward to them.

I'm still waiting for "The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization" - Amazon is telling me that it should arrive next week. I sure hope so - it looks like a good book.

Technorati Tags: history

This week David Buck and I were joined by Bryce Kampjes, author of Exupery - and optimizing compiler targeting Squeak Smalltalk. Michael couldn't join us - a cold had him laid up at the time we recorded the podcast.

We had a good conversation though - if you're interested in how to make Smalltalk faster, this is a good place to start. I want to thank Bryce for joining us so late in the evening - it was after 10 pm by the time we got some basic audio issues worked out in the Skype hookup.

Vorlath demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of basic economics:

The money system is a colossal failure. It doesn't work. Those who have more make the rules. This means you are dependent on the rule makers to not screw up the money system. Any wealth you think you may have is imaginary. It's not about complaining when someone makes a lot of money. It's about others not making money in a system not of their choosing.

Read his whole post; that's just the summary. The bottom line is, he seems to think that the system of exchanging money for goods is a problem. Hmm - what would he propose as a replacement? Barter? For some utopians that sounds good, until you realize that most of us don't have anything specific to trade with - say - food producers. I'm a product manager, for instance, and I write some software on the side as a hobby. How would Vorlath propose that I buy vegetables? What do I have worth trading?

Heck, the money system is nothing more than an efficient barter system anyway - we've all agreed to use little bits of paper (etc) as proxies for physical items, so that we can all efficiently trade with each other - whether the two people trading have anything of value to trade each other or not. What's his proposed alternative?

Technorati Tags: economics

Nick Carr takes aim at excessive absurdity like this:

the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.” Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting -- through lists of flights, hotel, car rentals -- and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been assembled by a human travel agent.

Yeah, that will work. If I gave that information to a live travel agent right now, they wouldn't have enough to go on. Do I like theme parks? Camping? The beach? This is all nuts. I'm with Carr:

One last thing: I'm claiming the trademarks on Web 3.0 Conference, Web 3.0 Summit, Web 3.0 Camp, Web 3.0 Uncamp, and Web 3.0 Olde Tyme Hoedown.

I think that's the appropriate level of seriousness to apply here.

Technorati Tags: hype, web3.0, semantic web

Chris Petrilli explains things to James McGovern. If he bothers to read it, maybe he'll learn something. If not, there's always room for more bad implementations in your larger enterprises...

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