This is the only kind of snowman we're likely to see anytime soon - so long as the jet stream keeps pumping warm air up from the gulf, anyway:
Then again, I'd rather have the rainy Christmas we're likely to have than the mess they've had in the Pacific northwest of late. We did make some progress - the gifts are wrapped, and food is being prepared:
And with that, a Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
I see that Sean Lindersay is trying to apply balm to the storm created by Microsoft's utterly bogus patent applications (the ones that deal with RSS and syndication). So let's review: this patent covers "finding and consuming Web subscriptions in a Web browser."
Hmm. BlogLines. Maybe Lindersay has heard of it? I know it can get kind of insular up there in the B0rg cube, but perhaps Lindersay could stop shoveling perfumed manure long enough to look around. Here's what he says by way of explanation:
First, these patents describe specific ways to improve the RSS end-user and developer experience (which we believe are valuable and innovative contributions) -- they do not constitute a claim that Microsoft invented RSS.
We have always fully acknowledged the innovators and supporters of RSS, like Dave Winer, Nick Bradbury and many others, and I can say, without hesitation, that I and my colleagues personally have the deepest respect for their invaluable contributions.
Yeah, yeah. Your patents are still full of crap and I'll say this: If Lindersay, Kim, or Ghandi (the two named on the patents) have a shred of decency, they'll move to get these applications pulled.
Doc Searls is spot on with this, on patenting software and business plans:
It is anti-productive, anti-competitive, anti-market, anti-freedom, anti-liberty and simply wrong for the U.S. (and for any country) to continue instinsting that 1) ways of doing business, and 2) the ever-growing periodic table of natural building materials we call software, should be patentable. They should not. We should write business method and software patent laws out of existence and start watching growth and progress happen all over the place.
After that, maybe we could reform copyright law...
Time for the penultimate log post of the year: this week, BottomFeeder downloads cruised along at a rate of 169/day (plus the 23/24 a day I get from downloads.com). The details:
| Platform | BottomFeeder Downloads |
| Windows | 331 |
| Update | 216 |
| Mac X | 134 |
| Linux x86 | 98 |
| CE ARM | 66 |
| Mac 8/9 | 62 |
| Solaris | 48 |
| HPUX | 45 |
| Linux Sparc | 37 |
| AIX | 33 |
| Sources | 28 |
| Linux PPC | 28 |
| SGI | 25 |
| Windows98/ME | 17 |
| ADUX | 9 |
| CE x86 | 7 |
Next: The HTML page accesses by tools:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Mozilla | 43.4% |
| Internet Explorer | 41.2% |
| Planet Smalltalk | 6% |
| Other | 4% |
| MSN Bot | 3.3% |
| Zibber | 2.1% |
| Opera | 1.6% |
The holiday traffic drop has started, and it looks like the audience I have is the core Mozilla plurality. On to the syndication stats:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Mozilla | 19.7% |
| BottomFeeder | 17.1% |
| Other | 2.8% |
| BlogLines | 9.1% |
| Net News Wire | 7.4% |
| Internet Explorer | 7.3% |
| Google Feed Fetcher | 6.9% |
| Vienna | 4.2% |
| Safari RSS | 4% |
| NewsGator | 2.8% |
| Planet Smalltalk | 2.5% |
| News Fire | 1.4% |
| Zibber | 1.4% |
| Akregator | 1.3% |
| SharpReader | 1.1% |
| Liferea | 1% |
| Lib Perl | 1% |
| RSS Bandit | 1% |
| MSN Bot | 1% |
| Python | 1% |
| JetBrains | 1% |
| Jakarta | 1% |
| Opera | 1% |
| Java | 1% |
| RSS 2 Email | 1% |
| BlogSearch | 1% |
The syndication accesses are about the same as always, which tells me that the regular readers mostly use aggregators. Now - on to last minute holiday prep!
Our time management skills could use a boost: you can see from this picture how many presents still need to be wrapped (and it's Christmas Eve already!)
There's still plenty of cooking to do as well - we have 11 people coming to dinner tomorrow. Hope your holiday is a little better organized!
David, Michael, and I did our "Year in Smalltalk" show last night - a month by month wrap up of Smalltalk goings on across the year. That means this one went a bit long - just over 50 minutes with James' Smalltalk jobs report. Hope you enjoy it - and, as always - send feedback, comments, etc to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com
Update: More directory updating. My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-902515a0bc7a7814a2721c389a7a8b7f}
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
Enclosures:
[http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/audio/industry_misinterpretations-12-23-06.mp3 ( Size: 18153932 )]
Joel constructs meaning from the drivel posted by Steve Gillmor - without links or explanation, there's really no other way to describe it than drivel). I think I know what Gillmor is after with the whole "gesture" thing, but making obscure references and refusing to link to information on said references simply subtracts meaning.
If your goal is to make a point, Steve - sorry, it's not happening.
Via Miguel de Icaza, I found this description of the "content protection" scheme that Vista is implementing. The short way to put this: Microsoft has implemented an amazingly ugly pile of mud that will yield lots and lots of bug reports. There's simply no way the system described will work well - it's too complicated.
Oh boy, here's another judge with no idea how the internet works: deep linking ruled out of bounds:
A federal judge in Texas has ruled that it is unlawful to provide a hyperlink to a Webcast if the copyright owner objects to it.
U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay in the northern district of Texas granted a preliminary injunction against Robert Davis, who operated supercrosslive.com and had been providing direct links to the live audiocasts of motorcycle racing events.
Lindsay ruled last week that "the link Davis provides on his Web site is not a 'fair use' of copyright material" and ordered him to cease linking directly to streaming audio files.
If you don't want content linked to, then use redirects, password walls (etc, etc). If you put content up in an accessible location, you are allowing it to be linked to. Can someone hand this a judge an "internet for dummies" book and read it to him? I'm not even expecting him to read it himself without assistance.
Update: There are a bunch of dumb analogies in the comments. Here's the point: by making a page linkable, you are - in fact - inviting people to pass through it. That's the way the web works. The door on your house is intended to be a barrier through which you invite people. You want a link to require an invitation? Fine - push it behind a password wall. Given the way the web works, a linkable location is an invitation. Anyone who thinks otherwise has a serious misunderstanding of the nature of the system.
In today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a brief look at creating HTTP posts. The example interacts with a simple servlet running in my test blog server in my home office.
I've just posted the last session from day 2 this morning - but I'm not planning to get any sessions uploaded at all next week. Cincom is mostly shut down next, and I'm at least taking a break from the audio editing :)
The day three sessions will start arriving after the new year. Happy Holidays to all!
Alan Knight gave a talk on Glorp at the users conference - he compared and contrasted Glorp and Ruby on Rails (and did a demo of Rails like actions using Seaside and Glorp). The slides are here.
Technorati Tags: Glorp, Ruby on Rails, cincom smalltalk, smalltalk, users conference
Enclosures:
[http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/audio/userConf06/alan-glorp-userConf06-13.mp3 ( Size: 14156232 )]
I see Microsoft has filed another set of bozo patents - two related to RSS. Here's the first blurb that's easy to make fun of:
If granted, one proposed patent would cover "finding and consuming Web subscriptions in a Web browser." The invention, for example, could allow a user to "subscribe to a particular Web feed, be provided with a user interface that contains distinct indicia to identify new feeds, and...efficiently consume or read RSS feeds using both an RSS reader and a Web browser".
Hmm. Call me crazy, but that sounds a heck of a lot like what BlogLines does. BlogLines has been around since before the June 2005 filing, so this seems to be an absurd attempt at overreach. Let's move on:
A related application, titled "content syndication platform," appears to describe a system that can break down feeds into a format that can be accessed and managed by many different types of applications and users.
Gee, you mean like OPML? Or like the various feed synchronization schemes that are out there? Here are the people who *cough* take credit *cough* for these bozo patents:
Jane Kim, program manager for RSS in Internet Explorer, detailed those features in a blog entry last year. Kim and her colleague Amar Gandhi, group program manager of the Windows RSS team, are among the inventors listed on both applications.
We can only hope that Kim and Gandhi will do the right thing, and try to get the patent application withdrawn.
In this session from day 2 of the Users Conference, Martin Kobetic demonstrated how you use Web Services from the product - using Cincom Smalltalk as a client and as a server. You can take a look at the slides here.
Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, smalltalk, web services, users conference
Enclosures:
[http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/audio/userConf06/martin-web-services-userConf06-12.mp3 ( Size: 9044591 )]
Cincom Smalltalk customer MetaCase got a plug in this week's SDTimes:
MetaCase’s MetaEdit Plus 4.5 isn’t based on UML. It’s a domain-specific modeling tool, said company CEO Juha-Pekka Tolvanen. MetaEdit Plus differs from UML offerings in that it models concepts “that are specific to a narrow area,” he said. For instance, instead of specifying an application in terms of classes, attributes and operations, as UML tools do, MetaEdit Plus specifies an application using concepts that are specific to that industry. “For the insurance industry, you could model an application in terms of damages, payment, risk and bonuses,” said Tolvanen, offering an example.
Steve Kelly has demonstrated their tools to me, and they are very cool. You can read his blog here, or Juha-Pekka Tolvanen's here.
Technorati Tags: DSM
Google has finally updated Blogger - after years of neglect that allowed it to slip into being a huge spam farm. I haven't been keeping up with splog happenings, but I hope they paid some attention to that during the update.
Sam Gentile opens a can of you know what on Steve Yegge:
I'd like to emphasize the not software part especially in light of Googler Steve Yegge's Ridiculous post who sprouted off for pages against Agile. He didn't know a thing about Agile which showed in his post - almost nothing he said was correct or substantiated. He glorified a cowboy egocentric coding style that is thankfully long gone from most companies. You get to do that when YOU DON'T BUILD REAL SOFTWARE and build glorified web sites that sell advertising that say "whoops" all the time. At least I know one company I'll never work for.
I gave a "webinar" this morning - the slides and audio will be appearing over here for people who register. I recorded the session (at least my end of it), and I'll be posting the audio from that in a few weeks (I want to give the site an exclusive for awhile).
I don't often agree with Dave Winer, but he has JSON nailed: what were the developers of that thinking? Just as XML formats have become somewhat standard, we needed to invent something different just for the heck of it? Here's the JSON format description - it's basically key value pairs, surrounded by curly braces and quotes. Yeah, I really want another parser in my application to bulk it up some more. Thanks.
Technorati Tags: stupidity
You can tell a gadget has gotten popular when stuff like this starts getting created for it. Seriously - who wants the iToilet?
Technorati Tags: iPod
In this talk from day 2 of the conference, Uwe Liebold of AMD Dresden discussed the approach AMD takes to testing. It's a good talk on an interesting subject - AMD runs their chip wafer fabs with a Cincom Smalltalk application, and they have very short windows during the year during which they can update their code. You can see his slides here.
Technorati Tags: AMD, testing, users conference, sunit, cincom smalltalk, smalltalk
Enclosures:
[http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/audio/userConf06/uwe-liebold-testing-userConf06-12.mp3 ( Size: 11450803 )]
Giles Bowkett has some provocative things to say about software development:
But say that we know the average technology business is really kind of pathetic. Say further that the only difference between a company running Seaside, a company running Rails, and a company running PHP is that the Seaside company has huge balls, the Rails company has some balls, and the PHP company has no balls at all. That's got nothing to do with the godlike qualities of any particular language. All that tells you is that very few companies opt to use the best technology available to them. And unfortunately, anybody who has noticed that Microsoft exists already knew that.
The culture of technology businesses has a serious problem, which is that technology decisions are generally made by people who do not understand technological issues. But saying that the best languages somehow require godlike intelligence, when they are in fact simpler to use, more intuitive, and in one case designed for little kids, that's just silly. The difference between a Smalltalk programmer and a Java programmer isn't really located inside their brains at all. Look a little lower down. It's a difference at the scrotum level. One of these programmers has a scrotum, and one of them does not.
Heh. It's a fun read - and I agree with him.
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 :)
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
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.
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
Enclosures:
[http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/audio/userConf06/martin-security-userConf06-11.mp3 ( Size: 13369797 )]
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
Enclosures:
[http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/audio/userConf06/alan-knight-store-userConf06-10.mp3 ( Size: 12124747 )]
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 :)
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
Enclosures:
[http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/audio/industry_misinterpretations_12-17-06.mp3 ( Size: 16515648 )]
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.
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