Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

I have no idea why Comcast is dragging their feet so much on the Tivo software rollout. Are there compatibility issues with the software and their installed base of boxes? Who knows? All we do know is that it's at least another year of swearing at the absolutely awful DVR interface they ship now:

Comcast first announced it would be using TiVo's software back in March 2005 and expected the majority of Comcast markets to be fitted with TiVo by mid-to-late 2006. However, only this month has Comcast began testing TiVo software on Motorola boxes with a handful of Comcast employees.

Comcast won't actually begin its first actual market trial until spring of next year and refused to comment on whether the TiVo service would be available to most Comcast subscribers by the end of next year.

The Comcast DVR is so bad that's I'd rather watch standard definition TV with the trusty ReplayTV. Yes, it sucks that bad...

I was perusing the latest Dr. Dobbs this evening, and ran into some information that generated some head smacking. I've complained about the Yahoo podcast directory not accepting my feed, and I just found out why - my feed was missing the requisite information.

As it happens, Yahoo has their own module - 'media' - which is a lot like the Apple 'itunes' one. I vaguely recall reading about that awhile back, but had long since forgotten. I went ahead and added the support to the server a few minutes ago, regenerated the podcast feed, and bam - Yahoo accepted my feed.

It looks like it'll be a day or two before it shows up, but that was the case with itunes as well. Yet another error that originated between the chair and the keyboard :)

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, ITunes

Inspired by this post, I had a look at the Google Analytics page for my blog to see where people get referred from. I know Yahoo is indexing my site; in the Apache logs, I see their bot. They sure don't send many people over though, relative to Google:

Technorati Tags: statistics, search

Smells like lawyers:

Apparently the nefarious straps were engineering the whole thing, since GW LLP claims "Owners of the Nintendo Wii reported that when they used the Nintendo remote and wrist strap, as instructed by the material that accompanied the Wii console, the wrist strap broke and caused the remote to leave the user's hand." Given the fact that the basic premise of these claims is a tad bit off (we're fairly certain those straps have been breaking after the Wiimote leaves the hand) and that Green Welling's main demand from Nintendo is that they replace the straps ( done and done ), we can't see this lawsuit getting too terribly far, but we suppose we'll have to wait and find out.

Where there's an ambulance, a greedy little moron with a law degree can't be too far behind...

Tim Bray comments on the deprecation of the Google API (I commented here), mostly by referencing this commentary from David Megginson:

Forget about the SOAP vs. REST debate for a second, since most of the world doesn’t care. Google’s search API let you send a search query to Google from your web site’s backend, get the results, then do anything you want with them: show them on your web page, mash them up with data from other sites, etc. The replacement, Google AJAX API, forces you to hand over part of your web page to Google so that Google can display the search box and show the results the way they want (with a few token user configuration options), just as people do with Google AdSense ads or YouTube videos. Other than screen scraping, like in the bad old days, there’s no way for you to process the search results programmatically — you just have to let Google display them as a black box (so to speak) somewhere on your page.

I feel stupid for having missed this yesterday, but one of the commenters on my post made the obvious point about that, which amounts to: "well, duh". To be more explicit, let me lift his comment out:

Never mind SOAP - I don't get how it could ever be in the interest of a search engine company to provide their technology through an interface that does not provide any way to earn them money. It would be one thing to offer such a service on a subscription basis, but I don't see any point of doing it without any way to recoup the cost.

Which explains the whole thing. Ask yourself: how does Google benefit (and no, warm fuzzies from developers don't count) by having an open API that anyone can use? It's a free lunch for any developer to ride on, and there's no real need to credit Google in any way. Meaning, there's no revenue there.

What an awful lot of people forget is that companies are not charities. Their purpose in life is to make money for their shareholders, not to make developers all happy about free stuff. Sometimes, those things overlap. In this case, it's very, very hard to see the overlap.

Technorati Tags: Google, search, API, mashable

Here's Martin Kobetic's talk on SSL and Certificate management from day 2 of the users conference. He did his presentation using a Smalltalk presentation framework he uses, so there are no slides yet. We may be able to get a PDF rendering of them - if we do, I'll link to that when they arrive.

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, smalltalk, security, ssl

The December Cincom Smalltalk Digest has been posted.

This is a good sign: Google is backing away from SOAP:

As of December 5, 2006, we are no longer actively supporting the SOAP Search API. We encourage you to use the AJAX Search API instead.

I really like the way this is described here:

It won't happen at once, it wont be overnight, but one day SOAP will be over. We will look back and wonder "what were we thinking". It will be up there with ActiveX, EJB2, and other things that we will describe as mistakes that should never have made it past the powerpoint stage.

The WWI reference is perhaps a bit overdone...

I'm a little late with today's screencast, but here it is - I cover some basics of using HTTP in Cincom Smalltalk, and take a brief look at a library that makes HTTP usage a little easier.

We have a new blog on the site, from the ObjectStudio team here at Cincom - you can subscribe here, or read the site in your browser here.

Technorati Tags: objectstudio, os8, cincom

Doc Searls reposted something from a few years back, and it makes even more sense now than it did then: the legacy advertising model is utterly broken, and it's held up more by inertia than by anything else:

...imagine what would happen to the TV business if mute buttons delivered "we don't want to hear this" feedback directly to advertisers. It would crash the whole industry's business model in a heartbeat.

Let's face it: there are only two kinds of advertising demanded by their consumers: yellow pages and classifieds. It's not coincidental that they're both ugly. Beauty isn't a value when the only purpose is to answer the simple demand for useful information.

Changing the current model isn't going to be easy. Not only are there the (mostly useless) MarCom types to shove aside, there's also an entire business model. Consider professional sports, especially the big ones (here I'm focusing on the US): the NFL and the NBA. TV networks pay huge amounts of money for the broadcast rights. That money is paid back to the networks via advertising, and the outflow to the leagues pay the huge salaries.

Reconsidering that model is like being the little dutch boy who pulls his finger out of the dike. It's a seemingly small act, but the side effects are huge. Ultimately, sports should all go subscription. Most likely the rest of TV should, too. Getting from here to there is going to be an interesting thing to watch.

Technorati Tags: advertising

Alan Knight gave a presentation on Store at the users conference on Wednesday, December 6th. He laid out the current roadmap, including our plans for configuration management support. The matching slides are here; if you have questions or comments, please send them to me, James Robertson.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom smalltalk

I'm sold. I was over at a friend's house this evening, and he introduced me to the Wii. What a great system! Sure, the graphics are better on the XBox 360 and the PS3; but that doesn't really matter. For me, the game play is everything, and that really came out in the Wii Sports game. The golf game was so much better than the GameCube (or PS2) one - you actually swing the Wii-mote to take the shots, and that makes it so much more fun.

I think Nintendo has a real hit on their hands. While MS and Sony fight over the same hard core fans, Nintendo is going to bring in a whole new set of casual gamers. After 30 minutes of Mario Kart, my hands hurt (GameCube). Same thing on an XBox or PS2 system (and the controllers on the new revs are the same). After 30 minutes of the Wii, I just wanted to play more :)

Technorati Tags: games, console, Wii

David, Michael, and I had a wide ranging discussion of design and code "smells" last night - in particular, those that strike developers using OO languages (and Smalltalk even more particularly). James Savidge's jobs report is there at the end, around minute 42 or so. We had a great conversation - hope you enjoy this one as much as we enjoyed doing it. For feedback and/or questions, send an email to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, java, C, code smell

There's almost nothing that advocates won't say about open source - here's a good example of the triumphal school of thought:

So, for example, I take it for granted that open source will be as successful on the desktop as it has on the server - with the caveat that the desktop itself may well be far less important in ten years' time. I also assume that everyone will be using ODF as the standard for document interchange and storage, and that GNU/Linux will consolidate its growing success in the field of embedded systems.

The question you have to look at is this: which open source projects have succeeded in a large way without major corporate funding? That's suddenly a thin list, isn't it? Here's another thought: had Microsoft released Visual Studio as free software 10 years ago, that almost certainly would have been seen as predatory behavior. IBM released Eclipse for free, and it's killed off all the commercial Java IDEs out there. Sure, the source is available - but why isn't that seen as predatory? The net effect has been the same.

I'm not nearly as cheerful about OSS as I used to be, and it's due to the fact that OSS in the hands of large companies is a "get out of jail free" card for what would otherwise be seen as predatory behavior.

Scoble has found a soft spot in Google's ad model:

Did you realize that over on Naked Conversations, our book blog about corporate blogging, we can’t put Google ads on there?

Why not? Well when we tried Google ads we got a ton of porn advertising (we’re the #10 result for “naked” ). Yes, we’ve out SEO’d the porn industry, but that means we can’t take Google ads cause Google ads (unlike ads, from, say, FM Media) won’t let us choose which advertising we want on our pages. So, we removed the Google ad bar from our blog.

This is what Dave Winer and I were talking about this morning. We’re looking at a lot of Google advertising on Gmail, on blogs, on Web sites, and other places and we’re unimpressed. On the main search engine it makes a lot of sense (and is why probably 98% of Google’s revenues come from advertising on Google.com). But on blogs? On Gmail? On other components? It makes a lot lot less sense.

Not everything can fit into the fully automated bin - for some things, you need some human intervention. When trying to sell an ad model to a marketing department, the problems Scoble brings up are going to be a huge smack in the forehead. There are plenty of seams to fill in Google's strategy right now.

Technorati Tags: advertising

Patrick Logan quotes the Seattle Times, which has nothing good to say about Vista:

If we assume Microsoft's costs per employee are about $200,000 a year, the estimated payroll costs alone for Vista hover around $10 billion. This is incomprehensible. A CEO has no idea how much his most significant product in six years cost to build.

Then the other incomprehensible "tidbit" is that it cost at least $10 billion USD. And they did not even get a new operating system out of it. The new product is really a face lift and some bug fixes on an aging infrastructure.

I'm sure someone at MS knows what the cost was; they use that for tax purposes. It's got to be an ugly number though, and it's even uglier if you ask: "Is there a truly compelling reason to move from XP to Vista?"

Technorati Tags: windows

Bob Lewis highlights an all too common problem in corporations: turf battles that involve IT:

I find myself in the midst of a turf war. The president of the company is battling the CIO over the issue of who should control the website. The president says it belongs in the Marketing department, the CIO says it belongs in IT.

Sometimes this is just a plain turf battle, and other times it's a sign of a much bigger problem: IT's real or perceived inability to execute. When business units start managing their own IT infrastructure, it's usually not because they have a real hankering for doing that; rather, it's because the IT department is seen as being incapable. That only leads to bigger internal turf battles - but the root probloem remains unsolved. Lewis gets to that issue here:

To the extent that the scope of the website encompasses areas beyond marketing, other areas also have content responsibilities - shareholder relations and recruiting being two of the most common. Another thought, that stems from the first, is that your president's thought process also worries me. He/she is making a common mistake - making a decision about organizational alignment based on the existence of a performance problem instead of fixing the problem. What I'm trying to say is that If IT isn't performing, keeping the website away from it still leaves the company with an IT organization that isn't performing.

Which points back to a general management failure. If business units won't utilize IT, that's a probably a sign that IT is broken. If management won't deal with that reality - and instead just tries to band-aid it by distributing responsibility (or allowing that distribution to take place) - then the root problem remains, and is a sucking chest wound for the entire organization. I suspect that this is a problem for an awful lot of companies.

Time for the weekly look at the logs - BottomFeeder downloads went at a rate of 166 per day (plus the 24 per day I'm getting from the CNet site - all Windows, that one). The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Update	280
Windows	264
Mac X	132
Linux x86	111
CE ARM	82
Mac 8/9	65
HPUX	42
Solaris	40
Linux Sparc	30
AIX	24
Sources	24
Windows98/ME	22
SGI	19
Linux PPC	14
CE x86	7
ADUX	7

Who knew there were seven Dec Alpha users without an RSS reader? Anyway - off to the HTML page stats:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	46.1%
Internet Explorer	40.9%
Other	5.2%
Planet Smalltalk	4.3%
MSN Bot	2%
Opera	1.5%

Back to my normal distribution between Mozilla and IE; the traffic spike I had has fallen back to normal - and the distro has gone back with it. Finally, the syndication stats:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	19.8%
BottomFeeder	19%
Net News Wire	7.1%
BlogLines	7.1%
Google Feed Fetcher	6.5%
Internet Explorer	6.3%
Other	5.1%
Safari RSS	4.8%
Vienna	4.4%
NewsGator	2.7%
Zibber	2.3%
Planet Smalltalk	2.2%
Liferea	1.4%
SharpReader	1.1%
Java	1.1%
Akregator	1.1%
Lib Perl	1.1%
RSS Bandit	1%
JetBrains	1%
News Fire	1%
Python	1%
Jakarta	1%
Opera	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
MSN Bot	1%

No end of tool diversity there

Peter Fisk has made the Lisp piece of Vista Smalltalk visible again - that came up in our podcast from 2 weeks ago:

Vista Smalltalk is descended from a Lisp interpreter that I started working on several years ago. I switched to Smalltalk syntax when the kernel was finally able to support messaging and dynamic object creation.

Now, I have begun re-integrating the Lisp reader and some built-in functions back into the Vst package. The lisp capabilities include basic functions such as “apply”, “mapcar”, “dolist”, “dotimes” and “eval” as well as macro expansion complete with “backquote”, “comma” and “at-comma” forms.

Kind of like peanut butter and chocolate :)

Technorati Tags: lisp

Slashdot asks "Why does everyone hate Microsoft?".

Hate is way too strong a word, I think. For an awful lot of people, it's simply a matter of seeing faults in the biggest player on the field. IBM attracted a fair bit of dislike back when they were the big guy on the block; MS is getting that now. Of course, like IBM back then, they don't help themselves much either. Consider:

• WGA: The activation scheme in Vista has the ability to disable your PC until you contact MS. Given the false positive problem, this is a PR problem waiting to get bigger
• Paying blood money to the RIAA: MS is big enough that they could have held the line with the Zune. Instead, they went along with the extortionists at the RIAA. A negative PR event was enjoyed by all
• Patch schedules: Patches to serious bugs? Monthly. Problems with DRM? Addressed immediately. Along with the above, it starts to make you wonder whether the studios have incriminating photos of someone high up the food chain at MS.
• PVP-OPM: Watch your legally owned content on any device you own? Not in Vista; again, MS sucked up to Hollywood.

For an influential company, they sure act like they are powerless in front of the studios. Most people's negative feelings come more from the constant security problems you get with Windows, along with the way you get bit rot over time. The stuff above doesn't help though; it shows a big company getting progressively stupider over time.

Technorati Tags: windows, microsoft

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we pick up where we left off yesterday, and add a GUI to the ObjectStudio client. This allows us to enter a misspelled word on Windows, make an St-St call over to VW on the Mac, and have the Mac send back the corrected spelling after a Google WS* invocation.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, objectstudio, visualworks

Here's what's wrong with too many corporations:

Another Enterprise Architect discusses why large enterprises no longer focus on productivity as there are many things much more important nowadays. I guess this leaves the Ruby on Rails and Smalltalk folks thinking we are enterprisey but in all reality, they need to start paying attention to forces that drive our economy or be doomed to derail

When you start thinking that trivia is more relevant than work, you've reached enterprisey nirvana. Filing reports may keep the regulators happy, but it won't pay any bills, or make customers happy. Somewhere along the way, an awful lot of people forgot that.

This session from December 6th has Jochen Eckert explaining the RUT-K scheduling software built for Deutsche Bahn in Germany. There was an associated demo of the software, but I think this came across fairly well. You can find the slides here (PDF)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, trains, cincom%20smalltalk, users%20conference

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