Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

I put together a brief (just over 7 minutes) prediction podcast this afternoon - here's my end of year list of predictions, but bear in mind that (as I said in the podcast) the first one is more of a wish/desire than a prediction:

1. Microsoft will start to get serious pushback on the copy protection madness they've included in Windows Vista
2. 2007 will see even more interest in dynamic languages, as things like Vista Smalltalk and JRuby gain attention on the major platforms - which will help provide small openings for the rest of us in that sector
3. There will be in an increase in statements that the blogosphere/podosphere has peaked (or will peak) in 2007 - especially from larger analyst firms
4. The Mac will start to be taken seriously as an alternative path up from 2000/XP
5. There will be no relief from Spam and Splogs in 2007

That's it - Happy New Year!

Technorati Tags: predictions, 2007

Oh, here's a great idea - let's trade one 40+ pitcher away, and replace him with another 40+ pitcher. With this kind of "thinking" in the Yankees front office, I look forward to another July of juggled starting pitchers, as the old guys go down with injuries:

While the Yankees continue their efforts to trade Randy Johnson -- Arizona still seems the most likely landing spot -- they are envisioning Roger Clemens as the one to replace Johnson, to the point where they hope to convince Clemens to move up his possible 2007 start date, sources said.

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

I haven't paid a lot of attention to the new "Google Tips" thing (try a search that includes the word "blog", and look under the paid results). It seemed innocuous enough to me, but it looks like I'm in a pretty small minority. TechCrunch highlighted a post by Blake Ross, and now it's crossed over from the tech blogs to the political ones - I spotted criticism from Glenn Reynolds, and from National Review's "Corner" blog this morning.

That means that the meme is picking up steam, and I think Google's going to have to take note. Matt Cutts (Google employee, with an "unofficial" Google blog) addressed this on the 29th, but it looks like that's not going to be enough. I suspect that Google would be better off letting this initiative die. The positive benefits look to be minimal, and my initial yawn doesn't seem to be the common reaction.

Technorati Tags: marketing, management

At first glance, this bug - the fact that you can push Internet Explorer so far to the side of the screen that you can't retrieve it - seems like something that should have been fixed right off. Heck, there's even a page that explains how to recover from it at Microsoft's site.

I'd guess that this falls into that nether region of "ya know, we should fix that" bugs. It's the sort of thing that's annoying to people who run into it, but never quite rises to the top of the bug parade for the internal developers. Every product has annoyances like that - there are scads of bugs listed in our bug tracking system for Cincom Smalltalk that fall into that category.

The nasty thing is that these sorts of bugs linger, wasting the time of the hapless few who run smack into them - my wife lost an hour to the IE one yesterday, while she was trying to make room on her screen as she sorted through photos. So yes, I could deliver a fine rant about how it's a dumb bug, and how it shouldn't exist - but there's this beam in my eye, see...

Technorati Tags: product management

Time for the weekly look at the logs. It was a light week - downloads were at 127/day last week. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	254
Linux x86	110
Update	105
Mac X	98
CE ARM	56
Mac 8/9	52
Sources	36
Windows98/ME	35
HPUX	33
AIX	32
Solaris	30
Linux Sparc	15
Linux PPC	13
SGI	10
CE x86	7
ADUX	6

Overall traffic is always down between Christmas and New Years. The HTML page tool distribution last week:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	42.6%
Internet Explorer	38.8%
Planet Smalltalk	5.6%
Other	5.7%
MSN Bot	5.2%
Noxtrumbot Crawler	2.1%

And off to the RSS tool distribution:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	18.4%
BottomFeeder	15.9%
BlogLines	8.8%
Internet Explorer	7.8%
Google Feed Fetcher	7.7%
Net News Wire	7.3%
Safari RSS	4.2%
Other	4.1%
Planet Smalltalk	3.9%
Vienna	3.4%
NewsGator	3.1%
Lib Perl	1.8%
RSS Bandit	1.4%
News Fire	1.2%
Python	1%
MSN Bot	1%
SharpReader	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
Jakarta	1%
BlogSearch	1%
Liferea	1%
JetBrains	1%
Opera	1%
Java	1%
Live Journal	1%

I'm pleased to see that the download stats for the podcasts are steadily improving - what we could really use is more feedback. You can always send comments to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com, or head on over the the iTunes listing (fire up iTunes, search for "Smalltalk" in the podcast section) and create a short review - or head over to the Podcast Alley listing and leave one. Thanks!

David Weinberger has the best description yet of the new UI stuff in Vista:

Vista is all about protecting Hollywood from its audience, even if that means degrading the utility and performance of the PC that runs Vista.

Oh, and Vista also has some eye-candy...like the treats the vet gives your dog to distract it as she wields the scalpel.

I agree with David - WPF and Aero are ultimately pretty distractions, meant to make you not notice the cuffs being attached to your wrists. I'm glad other people are picking this up; I've been beating this drum for awhile now.

Technorati Tags: Vista, PVP-OPM

Via Steve Rubel, there's news of this truly cool gadget: without violating the DMCA, rip any content to your iPod:

The device allows you to preserve your audio and video memories without having to rely on a conversion service or risk long-term damage to the original medium, and no computer or special software is required. The converter plugs into any audio or video device equipped with RCA connections and S-Video (standard on nearly all A/V components) with its included audio/video cables. Simply push the record button, and content is converted to digital MP3 (audio) or MPEG4 (video) format, three hours of 320 x 240 resolution video content takes up approximately 1 GB, and is stored immediately onto an iPod

And that's why the RIAA and the MPAA keep harping on and on about the "analog hole" - the "analog hole" translates to "let the consumer use the media they bought, the way they want to use it".

Technorati Tags: DRM

Here's an interesting book I picked up for myself a few months ago, and hadn't gotten around to reading: " The J Curve ", by Ian Bremmer. The author posits that nations exist on a J shaped curve (imagine the J lying somewhat sideways, with the long side to the right). On the right you have stability vis more open and transparent societies (The US, most of Europe, India, et. al.). On the left side you have stability via authoritarianism (Cuba, Syria, North Korea, et. al.). Note that in this comparison, left/right refer to the "J", not to political positions.

The book explores the idea of how to get an authoritarian regime make the move through the instability at the bottom of the curve and over to the higher levels of stability available as they progress up the right side of the J. It's interesting reading - I'm not terribly far into the book yet, and certainly not far enough to make any kind of judgement on his policy prescriptions (and he does offer them). I will say this: it's a thought provoking book - worth reading, IMHO.

Technorati Tags: current events

This is fascinating - I correctly identified 7 of the 10 items - see how well you do separating the CG graphics from the real stuff.

Technorati Tags: CGI

I ran across an old (2000) Christmas gift that I hadn't read yet: "The Test of Battle" by Paul Braim. It's a study of the performance of the AEF (American Expeditionary Force) during 1917-1918, when the US entered WWI. It was disturbing to read just how unprepared the (just drafted) US military was for that war; The US sector was able to push the German army back mainly via sheer weight of numbers and attrition - quite different from the modern military's approach to war.

This anecdote from the end of the book kind of sums that up: Smythe cited a pithy summary on this matter [ed: the poor/nonexistent training given to the troops] by the American military author Harvey DeWeerd: "The AEF learned to fight through bitter experience, not through any legerdemain with the rifle".

Technorati Tags: history, WWI

The weather here hasn't been bad for winter, but slate gray skies and rain are fairly un-cheerful (especially with Christmas in the past). We had been thinking of heading down to DisneyWorld in February - we have annual passes, so the park entry itself is "free" for us.

But...

It looks like everyone else had the same idea for the same week. There's a period in February when my daughter's school is mostly off (end of the marking period) - and none of the Disney resorts have availability. I guess it wouldn't have been uncrowded...

Doc Searls points to an essay on the changes in the VC/startup world (at least with respect to software):

Think about it. Free software and cheap infrastructure basically eliminates the whole raison d'etre for venture capitalists. Companies are cheap to start. All the stuff you used to need millions for is now free. That means venture capitalists just don't matter any more. It isn't about being lucky enough to get $5 million in funding; it's about starting something with the cash in your pocket. If you make something and it's good enough, the guys with $5 million in funding will come to you, because those guys are basically just money in search of intelligence, and it's a lot better to be intelligence in search of money. If you're intelligence in search of money, you'll choose the best way to get money. The best way to get money isn't to find some VCs to beg, borrow, or steal from; the best way to get money is to make something people will pay for. So if you're intelligence in search of money, you'll make stuff people want to pay for, and you won't even bother with the VCs, because they need you more than you need them.

There's some truth to that, and Avi Bryant's venture is an example of it. However, it's a narrowly focused truth - specific to the software (especially web based) business. It's not at all true of things in the bio-medical field, for instance - where there are still serious costs to getting off the ground. So this is a good point, but it's a limited point. Don't say goodbye to the VC folks completely - just watch as they exit the software field.

Technorati Tags: startup

Not exactly what Aaron Swartz wants, but pretty close: you can use GMail via POP with any email client. I use it that way with Eudora, so that I have offline access.

A free Gmail clone. A lot of people I know use Gmail for email. It's not because they don't have access to servers or can't afford a couple gigabytes of disk space. It's because Gmail is simply the best interface for email out there right now. It'd be even better if it was free software, though.

The biggest problem with Gmail is that you can't run it offline. But if it was free software, you could run it on your local machine and use it even when not connected to the net. This would also have the nice benefit of making it much faster for the user. Some synchronization code would be necessary, but it'd be worth it.

For me, GMail works like any other email system that way, except that it provides easily searchable archives to boot

I guess I won't worry about my habit of saving data across multiple external drives - it saved me a lot of grief when one of those drives dropped dead.

Last night, I noticed that the data on one of my drives was corrupt - fortunately, I only lost a handful of data that exists in multiple other locations (I've been using the drive mostly as a staging area for posting to the website). I copied off what was copyable, and rebooted so that I could try reformatting the drive. Good thing I did the copy first; after rebooting, Windows didn't think the drive had anything on it at all. I've moved the drive over to the Mac in hopes that I can at least re-format it - but it looks like a total loss at this point.

The relatively mild weather continues here; while I was trying to find a wind blown trash lid this afternoon, I discovered that I have bulbs coming up in my back garden! Meanwhile, Denver is getting hammered, again:

Between 8 and 18 inches will be piling up on the ground over the next 24 hours. A couple of feet can be expected in the foothills as the storm pulses into Friday and even Saturday.

I wonder if there are still people trying to get out of Denver from the last mess before Christmas...

I have to admit, I was surprised by this story - the iPod vending machines that have started appearing in some airports and hotels are doing quite well:

"We've done about $55,000 in a month in gross sales just for the one on Concourse A," said Leopold, executive vice-president and owner Business Traveler Services. "This is becoming the future for some high-end products in places like airports where space is at a premium."

My question is, what music do you put on one of these? Are they impulse buys by people who have libraries on their notebooks, but left their older iPod at home? Do people rush right over to the iTunes store? I have most of my music on my Mac Mini, so if I bought one of these on the road, I'm not entirely certain what I'd do with it - at least right then and there.

Update: Here it is, right at the end of the story:

Leopold said there are plans to add a music-download kiosk across from the Zoom machine on concourse A.

Still - it takes me awhile to ponder my buys from iTunes - while getting music from a Kiosk may well be easy in terms of the transfer, I can't see that it would be easy in terms of time investment (especially with people stacked up behind you).

Technorati Tags: iPod

Scoble is in New Orleans, and I can tell you that I'm not surprised by his first report from there:

Regarding the neighborhoods here, it’s dark, so I can’t see the full extent of the devastation, but the little bit I can see is simply horrific. Driving along I saw boarded up homes and buildings. Many of which still have spray-paint messages left by rescuers that say whether or not there were any bodies inside.

I predicted as much back on September 3rd, 2005.

See this island over here? That's where all the people who care that MS ignored Winer live.

There's not enough bad press for Microsoft over the absolutely atrocious DRM they've put into Vista. I'm very pleased to see some pickup - with luck, more people will take note of this kind of nonsense:

Vista is disadvantaging high-end audio and video systems by openly disabling devices. The most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format) which doesn't have any content protection. It must be disabled in a Vista system when DRM-protected content is being played. Equally a high-end component video interface (YPbPr) also has no content protection and must be disabled when protected video is being played.

Of course, MS is the same outfit giving kickbacks to the recording industry for every Zune they sell. At this point, Microsoft is truly making the world just a little bit worse every day.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Vista

Joi Ito has been posting on his dietary changes, and I found this interesting:

In addition to the change in the way things taste, my cravings and hunger have changed a lot. First of all, I don't feel hungry very much. I feel hungry when my body starts to run out of energy. Exercising accelerates my hunger. The hunger isn't so much a craving as a sort of "running out of batteries" feeling. It actually feels good because I feel like I'm cleansing my system... sort of like when you empty a glass of water. Although this may be my imagination, when I sit down to a meal after this sort of hunger, I can feel the point (about half-way through the meal) where the energy starts to flow into my system and I become more alert and energetic.

I changed my diet about 7 months ago, after my doctor read me the fairly terrible cholesterol and triglyceride levels in my blood. I also had a fairly nasty acid reflux problem - I was consuming a bottle of Tums Ultra per week.

I didn't go on any kind of organized diet - I just cut out the foods that were giving me acid reflux problems, and added in regular helpings of fruit and vegetables. Those (the bad foods) were the same ones that gave me bad numbers anyway, so it all worked out. Basically, I cut way, way back on bread, pasta, peanut butter, french fries... that kind of thing. The upshot - no more acid reflux, my numbers are great, and I've lost a bit over 20 pounds.

I don't miss any of the crap I used to eat, either. I'm not really sure why this was easy for me, and I know that this sort of dietary change isn't easy for everyone - but it's worked out quite nicely for me.

Technorati Tags: diet, nutrition

One of the songs I bought today was "Into the West", the signature song from "Return of the King". Strains of it are played at various points in the movie, most memorably when Gandalf explains that death is not the end to Pippin.

In any event, I've really been wanting the version sung by Annie Lennox, and I grabbed it today. It's a song that can bring tears to my eyes.

Technorati Tags: movies, LOTR

Scoble has decided to be on hand for a political announcement from one of the 2008 Presidential candidates (ye gods - the election season just ended). Anyway, here's what he has to say about it:

Already look at how people are posting information about the candidates to Wikipedia. No more “control the message” here. The only way to control this beast is to lay it all out there and make yourself, and your views, open to everyone.

Hmm. He's way, way more optimistic about that than I am. So long as he's headed to this candidate's launch - and maybe he'll take a PodTech camera to visit other candidates over the next 18 months, too - perhaps he could ask some questions about issues that the tech community is interested in: software patent law, the ever lengthening lifespan of copyrights (along with the DRM mess that comes with that), and whether net neutrality should (or should not) be dealt with in law. Those are all things that don't fit neatly into the US left/right, red/blue story line - but things that us techies care a lot about.

Technorati Tags: politics

I got some nice books for my birthday (November) that I haven't gotten to yet - I'm still plowing through " The End of the Old Order ". I just got two new books that look interesting though (and enough book store gift cards to keep me in reading for months):

This one looks interesting, and it should give me a good background for the book I just finished on Tamerlane. One of the successor empires of Khan's, "The Golden Horde", was finished off by Tamerlane

I also got this one:

I know less about the battle of Iwo Jima than I'd like - my father in law fought there. From what I have read, it was one of the most awful fights of the Pacific campaign.

Looks like the reading backlog is full again :)

Technorati Tags: history

Nick Carr links to Philip Dawdy, who massively misses the point:

The computer, some of you may recall, was supposed to free us. We were supposed to have so many automated tasks and so on that we'd be done with work by 3 p.m. and off to the social club. Things haven't worked out this way at all. Not only do we do more work for more hours than we used to before the computer age, but even when we are not working per se, we have become slaves to our fictional selves on Web 2.0. I worry about people younger than me who have no idea what human communication and hanging out were like before the PCs and Macs turned into these hyper-communication tools. The Net has become our social club. In Seattle, any popular coffeehouse is filled with people who just sit at tables on their laptops and communicate with other fictional selves on the Net instead of doing the least bit of the communication and interaction -- positive or negative -- with people sitting five feet away. All those people, all that weird isolation. Zombies.

There have always been outsiders - anyone wonder what people like Dawdy thought of "The Beats" back in the 50's? One of the cooler things about the connectivity offered by the net is the ability to find other people with similar interests regardless of distance. Take my podcast - I do that with two friends, one in Ottawa, Canada, the other in Canberra, Australia. That simply wasn't possible (without massive monetary expenditures) before things like Skype appeared.

Sure, there are people who "fall into" the net and never come back out. There are people who fall into bottles (and needles, etc), too. Dawdy is ultimately something of a Luddite - he's not sure what's been lost to technology, but he's positive that we lost something.

Technorati Tags: Luddism

Sci Fi Wire notes the latest sign of Potter-Mania: The fate of Harry (and friends) is of enough interest to attract gamblers:

A British bookmaker is taking bets on whether boy wizard Harry Potter will die in the seventh and final book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as well as the identity of the killer. Other bets on the plot include the possibility of marriages, births and the deaths of other characters.

I finally managed to redeem my itunes card today; looks like Apple's store was overloaded yesterday (likely a good sign for them). However, I'm now in the middle of the "DRM shuffle" - which looks like this:

• My library is on the Mac
• I buy the music on the PC
• I rip a CD out of iTunes
• I import the CD into the Mac

So on the one hand, the DRM is easy enough to bypass. On the other hand, there's no good reason I should have to do this at all - it would be simpler to just buy the music on the Mac in the first place. Sigh...

Technorati Tags: music

Patrick Logan, like Dave Winer a month or so ago, can't stand the new, ajaxified Yahoo TV listings:

I used to go to maps.yahoo.com and tv.yahoo.com with ease and comfort, knowing I'll get what I want quickly. But no longer.

I am on the lookout for a simple TV listing and a simple map, no Ajax required, or frankly, not even desired.

Web design seems to go through "fashion" phases. I recall (years ago now) when "everyone" had to use Frames - the funny part being that Frames were intended to solve the same problem that Yahoo is trying to "solve" here. The hardest part of design (and I'm not about to say that I'm an expert in this area) is knowing when something isn't broke and doesn't need fixing.

This is what I'm getting from the ITMS when I try to redeem the gift card I got from my parents:

So much for being ready to buy stuff :/

Engadget explains how to make your RFID infected passport completely secure, using tools you have lying around the house.

There's still a pile a dishes to run through the dishwasher, but things are mostly back to normal around here - we cleaned up last night after everyone went home. It was a very nice Christmas for us - hope you enjoyed yours.

Now my office is completely defended: I have a 14 second movie (WMV) of my cylon snowman online - and a picture of the missile defense. The office is now safe from all intruders :)

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've got the podcast listed at Podcast Alley now - check it out.

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.

Technorati Tags: law, stupidity

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!