Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

No one should feel too smug over the whole Martian landing thing - Belgians just got taken in by a similar thing:

Suddenly and shockingly, Belgium came to an end. State television broke into regular programming late Wednesday with an urgent bulletin: The Dutch-speaking half of the country had declared independence and the king and queen had fled. Grainy pictures from the military airport showed dark silhouettes of a royal entourage boarding a plane.

Only after a half hour did the station flash the message: "This is fiction."

It was too late. Many Belgians had already fallen for the hoax.

I was able to find time (in between audio editing - ugh) for a Smalltalk Daily. In today's screencast, we create a VW server which makes a Google API call via WS*, and an ObjectStudio client which requests spell checks from the VW server. As with the last cast, this shows interop between our two Smalltalks, and across platforms.

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

Mike Arrington (with other tech bloggers) met with Bill Gates recently, and posted on the meeting. Sounds like MS is starting to realize that DRM is a mistake (makes me wonder: is the royalty to the studios actually an attempt to buy a way out of DRM?). Anyway - that potential realization is good news. This was precious though - one of the things Arrington noted about the meeting:

Seeing the look on Gates’ face when he walked into the room and every single one of us had a Mac open on the desk in front of us - Niall Kennedy had also set up a makeshift wifi network using an Airport

At conferences, there are always a disproportionate number of Macs. Makes me wonder what the market numbers will look like in 2-3 years.

Technorati Tags: windows, mac

Ralf Ehret of SAP Labs and Taylan Kraus-Wippermann of Heeg followed Mr. Roggenkemper's keynote with a a discussion of how Cincom Smalltalk and NetWeaver can interoperate. There was a demo in the middle of this, which showed the WS* communication. That part was not a whole lot different from the screencast I did hooking up VW to the Google API.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, SAP, NetWeaver, cincom smalltalk, users conference

Via Jeff Jarvis, I see that Amanda Congdon has done more than land on her feet after Rocketboom; she's landed at ABC News. The format is a lot like what she did at Rocketboom - seems ABC was smart enough to let Amanda be Amanda.

Gordon Weakliem notes that CAPTCHA is failing as a spam stopper - and that turning comments off for older posts is the best medecine:

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the only effective deterrent against weblog comment defacement is to disallow comments on posts older than a month.  Sam Ruby's system seems to be effective as well, though IIRC that's a multifaceted system - forcing preview, throttling comments from a single IP, probably other things that I don't remember at the moment.

I go further; I turn comments off for any post that's off the front page (and thus, out of the feed). I can track problems as they occur that way. There are people who've been dismayed by this, but hey - it's simply part of the damage caused by the baser elements out there on the web.

If you visit the Users Conference page over on the main site, you'll find links to the slides, audio for the sessions, and a photo gallery from the show. It was a great time, and more of the audio will be showing up soon.

In this keynote session from the 2006 Cincom Smalltalk Users Conference, Heinz Ulrich Roggenkemper explained how SAP Development Labs are exploring the use of Cincom Smalltalk. Georg Heeg spoke briefly to explain some of the help given by his organization to this effort.

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, smalltalk, users conference, SAP

Nick Carr points out one of the interesting conundrums in the free software arena: mostly, free software helps the big vendors:

IBM and Yahoo are pulling a Google on Google. The duo has announced that they'll start giving away a basic version of IBM's OmniFind software for searching corporate documents, undercutting one of the few products that Google actually charges for. Aimed at smaller companies, the free software can index up to 500,000 documents. Running on a server, it uses a customizable, Yahoo-like browser interface and integrates Yahoo web search results. Google currently charges $9,000 for a specialized search appliance - a piece of hardware called Google Mini - that can index up to 300,000 documents. The IBM-Yahoo offering undermines the market viability of the Google box in its current form, or at least at its current price, and also poses a threat to the efforts of corporate search specialists like Autonomy to expand into the small-business market.

The question you want to ask is this: were the bigger vendors generous with (hardware) license costs back when they gave away software in the early days? What makes all the advocates of free software think that the rules are different now - companies like IBM are not doing this out of a sense of altruism.

Via Patrick Logan, I came across Stefan Tilkov's post quoting Peter Lacy:

As I see it the [WS-*] is so large and complex, and the participants so tightly coupled, that scaling to even enterprise levels is out of the question.... you will not be able to use this technology to build a fully distributed enterprise architecture. I am shocked. I mean there is so much evidence to the contrary. Er, isn't there?

You can bet that lots and lots of enterprisey types will go with WS* though, because of the soothing balm of WS-fuscation coming from all of the analysts they listen to (along with the herd behavior they cling to) - better to be wrong as a group than to be right as an individual. When your highest desire is to sit in "low information density" meetings so that you can get other work done, it's easy to fall for this kind of crap.

In a response to Cees' post, this guy has the opposite viewpoint on "final":

One thing that made me go ‘whhueungh?!?’ is the conclusion that ‘final’ is a big mistake. I thoroughly don’t get this. Personal experience and generally accepted wisdom both agree that as a rule extending classes is a bad idea unless a class was designed for it in the first place. In fact, I litter ‘final’ statements all over the place. It mostly marks a class as: Don’t try and extend this! Just wrap it - to any developers that come after me. This works out fine. Where there is a generic element to extract (e.g. The functionality conveyed by java.util.Collection and java.util.Set where a HashSet is concerned) there’s usually an interface which gives you the option of wrapping. I wonder which classes he’s so bent on extending.

This assumes that any class is ever "done". I'd argue that such a beast simply doesn't exist, and that - as developers - we have absolutely no idea how the next guy down the pike who has to look atc our code is going to use it. We can guess, we can make assumptions - but that's about it. "Final" simply bakes in our assumptions, and gives that next guy the middle finger. Not with the intention of flipping him off, no - but flipping him off nevertheless.

I had time to put together a Smalltalk Daily today - this is Smalltalk to Smalltalk Opentalk, using ObjectStudio to VisualWorks - and Windows to Mac. I'll be plowing forward with this example for a few days.

Here's the last session from Day one of the conference. Andreas Hiltner and Mark Grinnell went over the major differences between ObjectStudio classic and ObjectStudio 8, and what steps developers will need to take in moving to OS 8. This one is just under 39 minutes, and the noise levels aren't quite as bad as they were in the posts I put up over the weekend.

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, objectstudio, smalltalk, users conference

Cees has a long post up comparing Smalltalk and Java - from the standpoint of a Smalltalker who has now spent a significant amount of time in Java. It's a long post, with fair critiques of both languages - well worth reading the whole thing. Here's the point I wanted to bring out, which I think is very important:

Ok, first what I miss - I dearly miss the image and the fact that a Smalltalk system is just always “there”, alive and waiting for your next command. In Eclipse, you will not find “Inspect” or “Debug” menu items in your pop-up, and I don’t think they are likely to ever appear. Although… Eclipse is already closer to a Smalltalk IDE than what I ever thought possible 5 years ago, so I’m not betting on it . But the system not always being alive is the biggest thing I miss - it hurts even more than the whole static typing thing.

There are a lot of benefits to having an image, and most people just don't even know what they are missing.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, java

Andrew McNeil, our man in Australia, has forwarded me this:

Due to public demand and the presence of a quorum there will be a xmas edition of the Sydney Smalltalk Users Group at the James Squire at Kings Street Wharf down at Darling Harbour.

Date and Time: Thursday 14th December from 6:00 PM.

http://www.malt-shovel.com.au/frames.asp?page=brewhouse.asp

No presentations are scheduled, but feel free to spontaneously break out in a demo. I should have a few CDs with me containing recordings of the Cincom Smalltalk Users Group conference in Frankfurt last week as well.

Look forward to seeing everybody there.

Regards
Andrew McNeil

It's a fun group down there; enjoy!

Technorati Tags: STUG

Hmm. It looks like Jason Pontin, who interviewed Bjarne Stroustrup recently, spent some time in a reality distortion field to prepare:

C++ remains the archetypal "high level" computer language (that is, one that preserves the features of natural, human language), and it is still used by millions of programmers. Many of the systems and applications of the PC and Internet eras were written in C++. For all that, the language remains controversial, largely because it is notoriously difficult to learn and use, and also because Stroustrup's design allows developers to make serious programming mistakes in the interest of preserving their freedom.

I might describe C++ in a lot of ways, but comparing it to "natural, human language" wouldn't be one of them. Stroustrup's comments in the interview are worth reading, but boy - the interviewer is living somewhere else. I wonder what color the sky is there?

Nick Carr is suggesting that the music studios may be close to that "when all else fails, try some actual thought" moment:

Last week, I noted a Wall Street Journal article describing how online sales of digital music appear to be flattening this year. Because those sales are dominated by Apple's iTunes store, the numbers suggested that music companies would be under increasing pressure to seek strong new outlets for online sales, which would in turn likely require the sale of songs in unprotected MP3 format - in other words, without copy protection.

I predict another year or two of raw stupidity, partially propped up by the hope of device royalties (thank you, clueless chowderheads at Microsoft).

Technorati Tags: DRM

There's still too much hiss under Niall's talk, but you can hear the whole thing. In this session, Niall discussed strategies for porting a running system from one version (or dialect) of Smalltalk to another, while still making changes to the old stuff.

Bruce Badger points to some screencasts that demonstrate setting up and using Store and PostgerSQL for Cincom Smalltalk.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Jeff Jarvis throws out some thoughts on what internet media is and isn't - and how it relates to classic journalism. Like Jeff, I'm not sure that the old rules apply real well to this medium - it's a work in progress either way.

There's going to be a break in production of Smalltalk Daily - or, if I do get to it, it will be later in the day. I have a lot of audio from the conference to deal with, and I'll be plowing through that for the next little while.

Ballbug reports that the Yankees may be getting Pettite back - and possibly Clemens:

The Yankees' solution for their immediate future may come from their recent past.  Andy Pettitte is committed to pitching again, and Roger Clemens could eventually join him for a reunion with the Yankees. 

It's like "Back to the Future" here. I'd rather get younger arms, but those guys do know how to win.

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

My return from Europe interfered with this post; here it is, a day late. BottomFeeder downloads went pretty well last week - a pace of 208/day (plus the 30 or so per day I'm seeing from CNet). The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	422
Update	356
Mac X	179
Linux x86	135
CE ARM	67
Mac 8/9	59
Windows98/ME	40
Solaris	37
HPUX	35
Linux Sparc	32
AIX	24
Sources	23
Linux PPC	19
SGI	15
ADUX	9
CE x86	5

So that takes me to the HTML page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	44.4%
Internet Explorer	41.3%
Other	6%
Planet Smalltalk	4.8%
MSN Bot	2%
Opera	1.5%

Traffic dropped a bit last week, and it looks like most of the drop was from IE users - the Mozilla numbers are back on top. Finally, syndication numbers:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	21.8%
BottomFeeder	17.8%
Other	8.6%
Net News Wire	8.9%
Google Feed Fetcher	6.8%
Safari RSS	6.5%
Internet Explorer	5.4%
BlogLines	3.6%
NewsGator	2.8%
Planet Smalltalk	2.1%
Java	1.7%
Vienna	1.4%
Akregator	1.3%
Zibber	1.2%
SharpReader	1.2%
Liferea	1.1%
RSS Bandit	1%
Python	1%
JetBrains	1%
News Fire	1%
Jakarta	1%
Opera	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
BlogSearch	1%
MSN Bot	1%

No slacking off of tool diversity there.

Michael, David and I spoke late last night, on a variety of topics. We started out on modeling languages in Smalltalk (kicked off by this session from the Users Conference). From there, we ended up in a general discussion of the issues surrounding software sales.

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, smalltalk, ruby, python, java, sales

Nick Carr, and the NY Times' Jon Pareles (who he quotes, below) don't like the new, more open media environment:

When it comes to producing and, equally important, filtering and packaging creative work, the masses seem every bit as crass and conservative as the corporate overlords they're said to be replacing. Maybe more so, in fact. As Pareles writes:

The open question is whether those new, quirky, homemade filters will find better art than the old, crassly commercial ones. The most-played songs from unsigned bands on MySpace -- some played two million or three million times -- tend to be as sappy as anything on the radio; the most-viewed videos on YouTube are novelty bits, and proudly dorky. Mouse-clicking individuals can be as tasteless, in the aggregate, as entertainment professionals.

There's a phrase the two of them should read until it sinks in: One man's trash is another man's treasure. Supposedly "sappy" music is fairly harmless - why do they care? If the market enjoys music these guys don't like, it's no skin off anyone's nose. How many years has Hollywood been promoting utter dreck through the Oscars, while the rest of us go off to see movies that actually entertain us? Sometimes, escapism is all you really want.

The pile of audio to be editing wasn't enough, so Michael, David, and I recorded a podcast last night. We spoke about the OS 8 project - actually, more on the idea of embedding some other language into VW in a similar fashion. That carried us back to IBM's VisualAge product line, and we sallied forth from there. I'm editing the audio now, and will have that and the jobs report ready later today.

Here's the talk given by Andreas Hiltner of Cincom, and Georg Heeg of Heeg on ObjectStudio 8. It's just under an hour, and provides an overview of the ObjectStudio 8 product.

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, smalltalk, objectstudio, users conference

I just love this kind of article - it shows up from time to time in a mainstream media production - probably in order to reassure the author that he's still relevant. This week's entry in the "columnists are soooo much better than bloggers" sweepstakes is Andrew Binstock, a man I've written about before - often enough that it's more useful to provide this google search than to point at individual posts. Suffice to say, Binstock has a casual relationship with the concept of research. Having gotten that out of the way, let's move along to this week's dreck:

You can quickly come to 90 percent of content if you add up the self-absorbed blogs of tweens, teens and college kids; the hate blogs; and, of course, the many, many abandoned blogs. Of the remaining 10 percent, you then eliminate topics that don’t interest you. You now are way under 1 percent -- yet you have literally hundreds of blogs to choose from. If software development is your thing, you’ll want to skim off the blogs by engineers or CEOs who are shills for their companies; those who evangelize their pet technology; and most especially, those who are always attacking or condemning some person, some company or some technology. Finally, you’re in the clear, with the handful of truly useful blogs.

Maybe, just maybe, Binstock has heard of this recommendation notion; i.e., "if I like this guy's writing, perhaps I'd also like this other guy he seems to like". Nahh, that would require research, and he's just allergic to that. Far better to spin out a few hundred words, collect the check from corporate, and keep stumbling cluelessly along.

The funny thing is, his entire article could just as easily refer to media (online and offline) in general. Ever been in a suburban hotel that's away from most things, where the only place you can find to get a magazine is the local quick mart? After you eliminate the porn and the celebrity rags, there's not a lot left.

Craig Latta got a spread in this week's SD Times - with an article about how he produces music with Smalltalk:

Most concertgoers are used to seeing large projection screens behind the performers. Trippy or poignant visuals are a standard part of any major musical performance these days. But when Craig Latta performs his extemporaneous pieces in front of an audience, the screens behind him project source code.

These musical performances don’t come from a set list, and his visual performances aren’t just precooked movie clippings or looped mandalas. Latta, instead, improvises the creation of both his musical and visual presentations. His instrument is the keyboard, and his music staff is accessed via Smalltalk.

Here's the roadmap session I gave at the users conference last week. I spoke for a bit over 30 minutes, including questions. I guess I didn't restate all the questions, and they weren't all audible - but they should come out decently from the context of my answers. In any case, enjoy. You aren't missing any slides - I didn't use any.

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, smalltalk, users conference

George Bosworth gave a great talk at the conference: "Small Matters matter a lot". The podcast runs just over an hour, but it's well worth listening to.

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, smalltalk, users conference, keynote

Here are some more photos from Bruce, starting with one of Mark Grinnell, in a talk about ObjectStudio 8:

Next, two shots of the feedback session near the end of the conference - first a shot of Suzanne, Georg Heeg, and I at the table, and then one of me talking to the audience:

Finally, one of Suzanne talking to the crowd:

Technorati Tags: photos, cincom smalltalk, smalltalk, users smalltalk

During the conference, Bruce Boyer took some photos (with a much nicer camera than I had with me). Here are a few of them. First, Alan Knight during his talk:

Next, Georg Heeg and Andreas Hiltner, during one of the ObjectStudio 8 talks:

Here's a picture of Michel Bany, during his Seaside for Cincom Smalltalk talk:

And a last photo for this post, Suzanne and Andreas Hiltner during one of the BOF sessions held in the evening:

Technorati Tags: photos, cincom smalltalk, smalltalk, users conference

It turns out that the artists don't really need more money from the public: just the studios:

Sure, the RIAA hasn't exactly been on the good side of the general public since, oh, this century began, but it sure isn't doing itself any favors with this latest hint of persuasion. While the agency has fought grandmothers, children, and cash-strapped citizens quite vigorously to "ensure artists are getting due payment," it has seemingly opened up a chink in its own armor by pleading with judges to "lower artist royalties."

Maybe Bronfman needs to buy a new house or something, now that he's given his own kids a "good talking to" about piracy.

Technorati Tags: PR

Here's the introduction to the 2006 Cincom Smalltalk Users Conference, held last week in Frankfurt, Germany.

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, smalltalk, users conference

Wow - Jon Udell is going to Microsoft. I wonder how well he'll fit in there? They could certainly use his spirit.

This post on Java Generics is as good an example as any for why dynamic typing is just better. The sorts of edge cases and issues being debated simply don't come up for Smalltalkers.

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck... you don't really need the compiler to tell you it's a duck.

Technorati Tags: duck typing, smalltalk, generics, java

Peter Fisk is doing what Smalltalk did back in the early 90's: getting out in front of the bigger players by being more nimble:

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been focused on building an integrated GUI designer for Vista Smalltalk. The most difficult parts are now completed and I expect that a functioning tool for building simple user interfaces will be available before Christmas.

I think Peter's work bears watching.

I gave my talk this morning, and then we had a feedback session, where Suzanne, Georg Heeg, and I took questions from the audience. Here I am, giving my talk:

Then we moved on to feedback, and here's the three of us when we started that:

And finally, the audience we sat in front of for that panel:

It's been a great set of sessions; now we have a set of BOF sessions to do before we wrap up with a dinner.

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, smalltalk, users conference

I couldn't take notes during Scott's talk - my machine was busy recording the talk. Scott introduced us to the open UP process that he's championing at IBM, which you can get information on here. Most of Scott's talk should come through pretty well on the podcast. I'll get that posted sometime next week - there's an awful lot of audio to go through though :)

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, smalltalk, users conference

One of the limitations for building web 2.0 apps: have to use existing (legacy, even) browser technology (i.e., what IE 6 can do). So we have XHTML, CSS 2.0, RSS, XML, HTTP, and Javascript. None of these are new - they are all mature technologies. So instead of a "big bang" of new stuff, we have a series of "small bangs".

So to Seaside: one major thing is that we have no templating. It's all done in Smalltalk. The metaphor is canvas and brushes.

Most of the presentation is a Seaside demo, which - without shooting video - I can't really convey well here. Michel concentrated on covering Seaside support for CSS, XHTML, and Javascript. On the latter, it uses the standard Scriptaculous libraries. One of the nicer things is that you write the actions in Smalltalk, and the Javascript gets created for you - you stay in Smalltalk at all times.

Another nice thing is that most debugging is in Smalltalk, using the Smalltalk debugger. Michel recommends using Firefox with the Firebug plugin at the browser level.

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, smalltalk, users conference