Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Jason Calacanis wonders if competing sites will cut into Digg's future:

Someone speculates today that digg is going to take a hit from the hundreds of smaller sites that are going vertical in the social news market place. They make a really nice long list of all the social news sites (let's not call them digg-clones because delicious is really responsible for the current movement). The concept is why would folks go to digg if they could got to a more focused site in a vertical?!

There's a simpler problem, IMHO - revenue. I was listening to TWiT this afternoon, and Michael Arrington mentioned that they just got another round of financing - which they wouldn't need if they were revenue positive. So my question is - will they survive long enough to get bought? Will a large corporate owner decide that the name recognition is worth whatever their asking price is?

A related question: In the absence of Sarbanes-Oxley, wouldn't Digg be a public company by now? How many other small tech companies are in the same mid-state, unable to go public due to the high costs of SarbOx?

Technorati Tags: web, law, IPO

It turns out that we did get the audio (just not optimally. I'm editing it now, and should have the session up eventually. Warning - the noise reduction has left artifacts in the audio.

Spotted in Yankees on WCBS

Randy Johnson's time with the New York Yankees was short and unfulfilling. Moving to end a two-year stay that began with a nasty sidewalk confrontation and ended with a messy playoff loss, the Yankees reached a tentative agreement Thursday to send Johnson back to the Arizona Diamondbacks for reliever Luis Vizcaino and three minor leaguers.

That's good news - more young arms good, fewer old arms, better.

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we continue with the servlet example - this time, demonstrating how to handle a form with a post servlet.

James Governor makes another excellent observation:

What are the implications for the enterprise? If you think you can succesfully run your business as a top down fiefdom, a command and control structure, then by all means encumber all your documents and files with DRM. But if you want to enable your employees to innovate then a little more freedom might not be such a bad thing. That’s the thing with command and control - its inefficient and so bound to fail in the long run.

Outfits that don't trust their employees to do the right thing are just going to have problems. Better to trust and weed out the bad apples than to treat everyone like a suspect.

For those of you who want to bring up various regulations surrounding various businesses - bear in mind that the classification scheme used for documents by the US government has managed to get by without DRM for years.

Technorati Tags: DRM, enterprisey

I just got this from my European Smalltalk colleagues:

Join the Cincom Team at OOP in Munich, Germany

Mark your calendars!

Keen on learning how you can boost innovations and reduce time-to-market by combining Smalltalk using explorative modelling.? Then join us at our SMALLTALK LIVE! event at OOP in Munich, on January 24, 18:30: Dr. Ralf Ehret, SAP, will share his experiences with Smalltalk projects at SAP Labs.

You can also meet with the regional Cincom Smalltalk team at the Cincom booth from January 23-25.

Both events . SMALLTALK LIVE! evening and the exhibition . will take place in the ICM Neue Messe Munich center.

For registration please e-mail us at infode@cincom.com and we'll send you a complimentary guest ticket.

If you missed the users conference, but would like to hear about Cincom Smalltalk and SAP, here's your chance.

I've added a link to the Smalltalk Daily directory page under the "Information" links. It leads to a summary page that categorizes all of the screencasts I've done since September, 2006.

Technorati Tags: cst, cincom smalltalk

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we start looking at Smalltalk servlets, starting with the GET api.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, web, servlet

Following up from yesterday's post on the Vista Laptop giveaway, I ran across Dave Taylor's post - which is a lot like James Governor's, but with some numbers thrown in to pop the issue:

Think about this: Microsoft dropped about $1500/laptop * 90 laptops + shipping (my rough estimate puts that at a little less than $150,000) to get some positive digital ink. That's a fairly expensive campaign for the blogosphere, and by comparison if we assume that their boxed Vista product costs them about $20/unit, that same $150,000 could have been spent on seeding Vista to about 7500 bloggers.

Microsoft and Edelman didn't send out boxes with the OS DVD, though, did they?

And so, the question that I'm amazed that no blogger seems to have asked is why didn't they send out the OS and let us install it on our own computers?

The answer, once you think about things this way, is obvious, and that's the real story here:

Microsoft Vista is in fact a bear to install and has prohibitive hardware requirements.

Before the fanboys that seem to be attracted to MS criticism show up, think about that - the people who got the notebooks (and could have gotten DVDs) are all pretty tech savvy. Presumably, they would be capable of getting Vista installed and taking a look at it.

Now sure, sending Vista out that way would presume that each of the bloggers had a spare machine on which to install Vista (say I had gotten such a DVD - I don't have a spare machine like that lying around, other than an aging PIII laptop). So I don't think this argument should get as much weight as Taylor wants to give it. I haven't been paying tons of attention to magazines like PC World and PC Magazine - have they done base installs? Typically, that kind of evaluation is done by the trade press.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Windows, Vista

You have to love the RIAA: as reported by TechDirt, it seems that they want to keep the wholesale prices that iTunes pays a secret:

In one of the recent lawsuits, UMG v. Lindor, where the defendant is challenging the damages amount, the RIAA is refusing to disclose the wholesale pricing details unless they can require Lindor's attorneys to keep the prices confidential. Her attorneys refuse to do so, on the grounds that the information really isn't confidential, and the only reason the RIAA is hoping to keep the prices quiet is to assist them in other lawsuits. Perhaps that would be lawsuits like the one they're facing from a bunch of musicians who feel that the labels are cheating them out of revenues owed from digital downloads.

At least it's clear who all the lies and DRM are for; it's certainly not the artists. Which makes the crap being pulled by Microsoft with the Zune and in Vista even more infuriating.

Technorati Tags: DRM, RIAA, law

Today's Smalltalk Daily is a bit late - I was on calls all day. However, better late than never - and I took a look at the SAX Drivers as I announced yesterday.

Technorati Tags: XML, SAX, Smalltalk

Chris Petrilli explains why simpler is better:

I would rather take an easily modifiable, open platform that I can make do what I need in a specific environment. Everyone else can play with the “serious” software, and keep adding on gee-gaws until it tips over and collapses of its own weight.

Which is one of the things that Smalltalk excels at - it's open, and can be viewed as play-doh in the hands of developers. While some people look to have every single possible checkbox filled, people like Chris are actually delivering the goods.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, ruby, dynamic

James Governor cuts through the fog surrounding the "free evaluation laptop" issue, and gets at the real problem - which is something I really wish I had thought to notice:

Check out the specs… “an AMD Turion 64 X2 dual-core 2ghz CPU, 2GB of DDR2-667 RAM, AMD-ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 on a 15.4″ widescreen. It also has a 160GB SATA drive, HD-DVD reader and burner as well as a 1.3mp camera.”

That’s some pretty heavy specifications. The message I take away is not that Microsoft has an ethical problem but that the hardware upgrades required to run Vista smoothly are going to delight PC manufacturers most of all… If you need a Ferrari to have a decent road experience then Redmond, we may indeed have a problem. 2gig2gig…

Unless you're a serious gamer, you probably don't have a system anything like that, and it is telling that they sent out such high end systems as part of the evaluation. Sure, they didn't want the OS to crawl for the people getting them, but that's pretty far up the scale to go in order to ensure that. The Thinkpad I'm using right now has 768MB of RAM and the HD is small (just 35 GB). Yes, I always want more disk, and I could certainly use more memory - but XP typically runs fine on this hardware. I can only imagine how Vista would operate on this system...

Technorati Tags: Windows, Vista

SciFi Wire Reports that the fourth Indiana Jones movie will start filing this year:

Following an announcement by George Lucas that the long-awaited fourth Indiana Jones movie is moving forward this year, Variety reported that the script by David Koepp has been approved and filming will start in June.

Now, I loved those movies (even the mostly panned second film) - but I'm not sure that the aging Indy will hold up that well. On the other hand, Ford is a good actor, so maybe it'll work. All complaints aside, I'll probably go see it :)

In this session from the 2006 Cincom Smalltalk Users Conference, I spoke about my experience in scaling a web server (the blog server this is hosted on). You can grab the slides I presented here; the audio quality isn't too bad (at least compared to the other ones from the conference).

Technorati Tags: users%onference, smalltalk, cincom%smalltalk, web

I just saw a "how to stop feed scraping in 3 steps" post, and it's a simple - but mostly ineffective - answer to the problem. The answer given is to find the offending IP address in your logs, and then add a rewrite rule to send that IP away. There are two things that make that a less than optimal answer:

• Most bloggers don't have access to the HTTP server they are being hosted on
• Too many spammers have "farms" of IP addresses at their disposal

The second problem is the bigger one; trying to do blocking on individual IP addresses is a tiresome game of whack-a-mole, and - trust me - the bad actors have way, way more patience than you do.

Technorati Tags: RSS

Gordon Weakliem sure has been getting a lot of snow in his neck of the woods - wander over there and see what the neighborhood kids have been up to.

Meanwhile, here's the beginning of the year weather around here:

No igloos around here anytime soon :)

Ryan Tomayko's response to being dugg is both amusing and all too true.

Technorati Tags: Digg

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we dive into some basic XML use in Smalltalk: how to generate an XML file using a SAX driver. In this screencast, we load in an RSS SAX Driver and generate a test RSS feed. Tomorrow, we'll continue by looking at it in more detail.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, XML, SAX

This session from the third (and last) day of the conference featured Michel Bany talking about Seaside, which he has ported from Squeak to Cincom Smalltalk. The talk was heavy on Demos, but Michel did a good job of describing what he was up to - I think this translated fairly well as an audio-only talk. You can grab the matching slides for the talk here.

Technorati Tags: users conference, smalltalk, cincom smalltalk, web20, seaside

Scoble notices the PR gap between Apple and other computer makers (like, say, Dell). To a certain extent, Apple has "PR Capital" that they've spent years working on. If they don't fix some of the reported reliability issues with their new machines though, that "PR Capital" is going to evaporate. That sort of thing can happen very quickly, too.

It looks like some reality is wandering into the corridors of the RIAA: some of the labels have noticed that people like podcasts, and that some podcasts use music:

Ted Cohen, a digital-media strategist who for many years was an executive at EMI Group PLC, says that keeping up-and-coming artists "protected" from use in podcasts has often backfired. "We've protected them so well nobody knows they exist," he quips.

However, I suspect that there's going to be a problem with the ad model they've chosen:

For now, Rock River has struck licensing deals only with Sony BMG, to include four to eight songs in podcasts created on behalf of its clients. The "Chrysler Music Legends" series focuses on a specific artist in each program, and includes 30-second ads from the car maker at a few points in the program. Subjects of the biographical programs have included Miles Davis, Johnny Cash and Journey.

Thirty seconds is too long. It's long enough that it would be worth my while to skip forward and just avoid the ad. Some of the podcasts I listen to are sponsored, and have ads; the best ads are like the Earthlink ones on CNet's "Buzz out Loud" - short and to the point, so that I don't bother skipping them.

Still, this is forward progress for the labels. Hat tip John McIntosh.

Technorati Tags: music, DRM

For the podcasts I've been releasing from the user conference, there's going to be an omission - the keynote from Scott Ambler. I'm not sure what we did, but we recorded the first 10 seconds of it, and then lost the rest. Sorry about that.

We've left December, and fallen into the dull gray of January. The weather matches the end of the season; it's slate gray outside, 50 degrees (F), and raining. Tomorrow it's "back to the grind" after a week off work, too. All that, and a Christmas tree to take down :)

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.