Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

I just got this book in the mail:

It was recommended to me by Alan, and it looks good.

Google Video has a fascinating 8 minute video - it's footage of a journey down Market Street in San Francisco - in 1905. That's before the great earthquake and fire of 1906. The undirected, but clearly working, interplay of various kinds of vehicles - including horse drawn ones, is very engaging. Makes me realize that any ad-hoc video of our time will be something people hunger for a century from now.

Ed Foster points up one of the issues that any rollout of internet TV is going to face: ISP policies on bandwidth usage.

"I just got a call from Comcast saying I'm downloading too much and I have to cut it back or they will suspend my account for a year," the reader wrote. "Of course, I asked what I have to cut it back to -- they don't know. Just cut it back 'drastically,' they said. So I asked what the limit was and they don't know that either. It's the top X percent in a one-month period -- they don't know what 'X' is either. So asked if there was an account where there was no limit and they said I could open a commercial account. So I asked what the limit was on that and they didn't know -- just that it was higher."

So say you start buying movies through your XBox, or through iTunes - and you cross that magic "too many bits" threshold. Your ISP will not only threaten you with a cutoff, but they won't tell you what the limits are. I suspect that a long weekend spent downloading a relative handful of HD content could get you whacked.

Technorati Tags: IPTV

This is interesting: In the new Outlook, MS is using the Word rendering engine for display instead of the IE one. Now, I hate HTML email, and I have very little sympathy for newsletters that rely on it - but there are a lot of people who are going to be unhappy about this. For instance, Campaign Monitor:

Unfortunately, that [CSS support in Outlook] all goes down the toilet now. If your email breaks in Notes or Eudora, it was often an acceptable casualty, but if it breaks in Outlook, you're more than likely ostracizing too many recipients to justify your design approach. This certainly doesn't spell the end for HTML email, it just takes us back 5 years where tables and nasty inline CSS was the norm.

It's interesting that they did this; the only thing I can come up with is that the security issues with IE remain unresolved. Or maybe someone decided that they should use the same engine to display that they use to compose. Either way, it's going to make a fair number of people unhappy - for reasons like this:

Word 2007 supports a subset of the standard HTML 4.01 specification and of the Internet Explorer 6.0 HTML specification. Word 2007 also supports a subset of the standard Cascading Stylesheet Specification, Level 1. Word 2007 uses HTML elements that support a subset of the Word 2007 cascading style sheets properties. This article categorizes the Word 2007 supported cascading style sheets properties as follows:

Heh - so the display is going to suck worse than IE6. Amazing.

Technorati Tags: email, CSS, Outlook

On this morning's Smalltalk Daily, we get started with Seaside. The first trick: making sure to load the most up to date version from the public Store repository.

Update: There was a typo in the HTML file, which prevented the flash movie from loading. It's fixed now.

Technorati Tags: seaside, smalltalk

I'm seeing an interesting spam attack on the blogs here - it's a direct assault on Baysian filters - just a random jumble of words in a header font. I don't use a Baysian filter, so it's been kind of a pain to clean up. On the other hand, it's not really working out for the spammer, either - eventually, he'll want to send links to real stuff, and the filtering I do use will catch that. Now, to look at the logs for some clues...

Ramon Leon has been doing some interesting things with Seaside and Glorp - putting them together to get the productivity of Seaside backed by a database. Here's a post on doing the mapping, and here's another on creating a connection pool. The ActiveRecord for Smalltalk that Ramon mentions is a reference to this talk by Alan Knight at the Users Conference we had in December.

Technorati Tags: seaside, GLORP

Like any good humor, this is funny because of the grain of truth embedded in it: SOA Facts. My favorite from the list:

Guns don't kill people, the SOA WS-* stack kills people.

I rather expect that our engineers who work on WS* stuff will like that one :)

Update: ON second thought, I like this one better:

Ancient lore promises the day when a single unifying technology will bring openness and peace to all lands. That technology is not SOA. because SOA killed that technology.

Heh.

Here's the perfect t-Shirt for Wii fans :)

Illuminata Perspectives sums up the way Open Source is being used by a lot of companies:

In effect Open Source has become a free pass for all sorts of competitive actions that would once have been -- at a minimum -- roundly criticized. I don’t argue that (for the most part) such actions should be universally deplored or prohibited. It’s part of the way today’s software world works, and in many ways it provides direct advantages to IT customers. However, don’t mistake it for altruism -- and thereby get all shocked and disappointed when the same companies take some other action that is nakedly self-serving the next week.

What I personally love watching is the contortions - it was evil for Microsoft to make IE free in the 90's, but it's laudable for IBM to make Eclipse free now. Regardless of the availability of the source code, the net effect is much the same.

Looks like the prime winter bike riding and golf weather is on hiatus: it's back to a more normal January type of temperature this morning:

The high will be only 43 - not really all that cold, but not exactly pleasant for bike riding, either. Withe the muscle strain still preventing me from jogging, it looks like another day of either the gym or the treadmill.

Scoble is right - this post from Cisco's general counsel is fascinating. In it, he lays out Cisco's case for the iPhone trademark (and it looks like it's pretty solid). He explains Cisco's side of the argument, which looks reasonable. The interesting thing is this: Cisco recognizes that the trademark case is as much (or more) about PR than it is about the law.

So what have they done? They've taken their complaint public, where the tech bloggers (and the trade press) can see it. Rather than simply deploying lawyers and letting the case bog down for years, they've pulled out the soapbox as a way of creating a PR event - one that could easily go negative for Apple.

The closest analog to this I can find is what Rogers Cadenhead did a year ago when Dave Winer acted like a jerk (I know - what a shocker). It seems to have helped Cadenhead - the glaring light of publicity has a way of making bad behavior stand out.

PR and marketing folks - and corporate lawyers - should keep an eye on both ends of this fight.

Technorati Tags: marketing, law

Today's Smalltalk Daily is a "repeat" of yesterday's intoduction to ObjectStudio - but using ObjectStudio 8, which is presently in beta. The cool thing about OS 8 is that it has all of ObjectStudio's native Windows capabilities - but is hosted within VisualWorks, so it also has the entire VW class library to make use of.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, objectstudio, os8

Jon Udell raises some interesting things around a travel voucher that got flagged as suspicious by a travel agent: when things look odd, who do you trust?

This was an international conference, and the members of the advisory board live all around the world. The one I chose to contact, though, is the one who lives closest to me. Of course I'd be unlikely to call overseas first, because of long-distance tolls and time zones. But there were various folks in the U.S. I could have called, yet I picked the person who lives in New Jersey. Why? In retrospect I believe that's because New Jersey is closer to my home than Illinois or California. Of course it's completely irrational to trust a New Jerseyite more than a Californian for that reason. And yet, at a moment when nothing seemed certain, I acted out that irrational behavior. Trust shouldn't diminish as the square of distance but, in our unconscious minds, I think it probably does.

I think that has consequences for organizations that are outsourcing and building distributed (in the geographic sense) development teams. If the people remote, you need to do something to bridge the distance. I don't think phone conferences are enough - maybe some of the high end video-conferencing systems (the ones where you get a life sized, high-def image) can stand in for physical presence, but there are issues with those, too:

• Cost
• Convenience

What do I mean by convenience? Well, it's one thing if you have a remote team, all of whom are located in one place. It's another thing entirely if you've taken to hiring developers wherever they are. In the latter case, you don't have a high enough "critical mass" of them in any one spot - and until the price comes down, you aren't going to build video-conferencing into everyone's home office.

It's an interesting problem - and I wonder if relatively frequent travel for a significant part of the team is the best solution at present...

Technorati Tags: outsourcing

Peter Fisk continues to do cool things with Vista Smalltalk. Now, I have as many nasty things to say about Microsoft as the next guy, but the reality is, his product is another way to get Smalltalk in front of Windows .NET developers. We (Cincom) are not serving the .NET space directly, but it's good that someone is. Some of those people will want and need a cross platform Smalltalk at some point, and if they have a positive experience with Smalltalk, they are more likely to look at another Smalltalk at that point.

I love the way people get excited about "new" features that have been part of Smalltalk or Lisp (or both) for decades.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Peter Fisk speculates on how Smalltalk might find it's way to the iPhone - which would, in some ways, complete the circle on the DynaBook dream.

Speculation has already started on what code can run on an iPhone - perhaps Adobe Flash or Microsoft WPF/e. Some version of WPF/e will inevitably be ported either to the iPhone or to one of its competitors and, since Vista Smalltalk was designed for running in WPF/e, it is a matter of time until Smalltalk is available in at least some phones.

This morning on Smalltalk Daily, I get started with ObjectStudio by building a simple UI that hooks up to a database. You can get something simple working very quickly this way.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, objectstudio

Here's a tale about server setup that would pretty much ensure that women would not be doing anything with the server. For that matter, I don't think I'd want anything to do with that server, either :)

Via Jason Calacanis:

Wall Street has made a wager about who wins and who loses here.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Apple

This year they did - here are the flowerpots near the local grocery store:

One things for sure - the nicer weather has allowed me to ride my bike more than I thought I could at this time of year - a muscle strain is preventing me from jogging as much as I'd like.

The speculation is done: the iPhone has arrived. It certainly looks cool, and based on the Engadget reporting, it looks like it's a Cingular phone. So much for the "unlocked phone" hopes a lot of people had :) On the other hand, it does look cool - this might be the device that gets me off Verizon.

James McGovern is still focused on talking to the same "pay for play" people who do nothing so much as follow the big vendors. To answer his questions about Enterprise usage of Smalltalk, perhaps he should have a look here - more money washes through Kapital every day than his enterprise will likely worry about over the course of years.

Also, Chris Petrilli's comments from a few weeks ago are relevant here.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a quick look at using HTTP Cookies. The example uses the same simple form we worked on this week, and adds pre-filling of the input fields based on cookie data.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, web, cookies

I've been intrigued by Sling for awhile, but this new device, the SlingCatcher - it looks truly cool:

The premise is simple: instead of streaming your TV across the 'net to PCs (as with the SlingBox), the SlingCatcher does the opposite by streaming your PC's videos to the TV. The SlingCatcher is expected to retail for under $200 some time in the middle of 2007; it will come with HDMI and component connectors and will feature both WiFi and Ethernet for connectivity.

...

he SlingCatcher, on the other hand, is media-agnostic. It doesn't care what codec videos are encoded with, nor whether or not they have been purchased from an approved online store. It is designed to take video output and stream it, which means that you could use the SlingCatcher with video purchased from other online services, such as the iTunes Store or CinemaNow. In this way, the SlingCatcher may turn out to be a one-size-fits-all solution in a field populated with specialty products.

That's exactly the kind of product people want - a "plug and play" device that works with their other stuff. No one wants to have to buy all of their equipment from the same vendor - we want it to work just like component stereo equipment.

Hey look - DabbleDB has plugin capabilities, and it's simple:

So, with this talk of services over HTTP, you might be rightly concerned that the next step is to discuss Dabble’s XML web service protocol. You’ll be relieved to find out that Dabble plugins don’t speak XML. They speak CSV (Comma-Separated Values). Dabble passes UTF-8 encoded plain-text, comma-separated data in and expects UTF-8 encoded plain-text, comma-separated data out. Each row in your Dabble application generates a line in a CSV stream. To process a derived field for a Dabble category, you’ll simply need to process each incoming line of CSV and generate a new line of CSV as a response. If you’ve used a UNIX-based operating system, you’re probably familiar with the notion of pipes. The output of one program is piped into the input of another, creating a filter chain. This is conceptually the same as the way Dabble’s plugin IO works. Nice and simple.

Looks pretty neat.

Today's Smalltalk Daily is late - I got bogged down with other things this morning. In this session, I cover session variable use in the Web Toolkit.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

We set out the list over here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I've got the keynote from Scott Ambler up, as cleaned up as I could make it. There's some noise left in it, but it's a lot better than it started out (especially given that I had to reconstruct it from over 200 12 second files :) )

Anyway, here are the matching slides - enjoy.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, OpenUP, cincom, users conference

Michael Lucas-Smith has implemented a nice fix for external library declarations in DLLCC classes. Looks very useful!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Ralph Johnson summarizes a discussion of appropriate database use from the Squeak mailing list.

Technorati Tags: RDBMS, OODBMS

It dawned on me that I've been doing this blog for just over 4 1/2 years now - and I'm still having fun with it. I decided to have a look at my posting history. Since June 1, 2002 I've pushed up 9660 posts (not counting this one). That averages out to 5.7 posts per day over that timespan. I was a little surprised by the year to year variability in posts:

Year	Total Posts	Per Day
2002	502	2.3
2003	2248	6.2
2004	1921	5.2
2005	2570	7.0
2006	2386	6.5
2007	33	4.7

Obviously, there hasn't been enough of 2007 to draw any conclusions about yet - but once I settled in (after the 1/2 year+ in 2002), I've maintained a pretty active level of posting - with 2004 being just a little quieter.

So I just finished the book "The J Curve" by Ian Bremmer. It's actually a lot like Barnett's " The Pentagon's New Map ", but with a different metaphor. It's a quick read, and is more of a case study than Barnett's book - he goes into detail on a number of nations on both sides of his stability metaphor. I'd recommend it.

It seems that my fingers got button pressing happy when I posted the podcast earlier - I accidentally set the "explicit" flag on it. That's been properly set now, but there's no telling when iTunes (or other servers caching the xml) will update. I've sent the correct pings; hopefully, it'll all reset.

Michael couldn't join us this week - we scheduled for Sunday morning, and he just wasn't able to stay awake that long. David and I discussed some little known features in Cincom Smalltalk:

• thisContext - the sixth reserved word
• what "super" really means
• constants in other bases 2r10110101 7r463250
• Symbol literals with embedded quotes, spaces, etc eg. #'that''s amazing!'
• printStringRadix:
• byte-array literals #[3 8 98]
• expandMacros
• PrintConverter
• user-defined pragmas
• compilerClass
• SmalltalkCompiler >> evaluate:
• SmalltalkCompiler >> parse:class: -- using a visitor to traverse the parse tree

We had a good conversation - give it a listen and send us some feedback. Another way to let us know what you think - leave a review on the iTunes podcast page (search for Smalltalk), or on the Podcast Alley page.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Troy summarizes the difference between a Mac system and a Windows system:

I think Windows is like a bit like a Tamagotchi, if you don't stroke it, it whines and gets flakey, while Mac OS knows its place in the world and lets us work.

He also links to this, which compares the two (from InformationWeek). For the Windows fanboys ready to show up and tell me I'm full of it - I have relatives with Macs, and other relatives with Windows. None of them are highly technical. Want to take a wild guess at which relatives I don't ever have to play system doctor for?

Technorati Tags: Vista, OSX

Here's a nicely positive review of Cincom Smalltalk Non-Commercial. Curious about Smalltalk yourself? Give it a try!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom

I had the chance to play two consoles at the party I was at earlier today - an XBox 360, and a Wii. The interesting thing was this: the Wii and the 360 were in the same room, and everyone (adults and kids) that wanted to play, played the Wii. The XBox only got put on after the guy with the Wii went home with it :)

We had a great time playing the Wii Sports golf game - yes, the graphics suck - but that doesn't matter. The game play is really, really cool. I think "Mario Cart" on the motion sensing remote is going to be a real winner. We played Gears of War for a bit after the Wii left and yes - the graphics were very cool. But - the controller is, well, a stock game controller for which you have to memorize the functions. The Wii with the sports games - you just hop right in and play.

I know which console I'll be buying this year, and it won't be a 360 or a PS3 :)

Technorati Tags: console, games

It was hardly winter - the temperature got up to (or close to) 70, and there was very little wind on the course. We didn't get on the course until almost 3; there was some screwup with the tee time. My daughter played with us, and took a few shots with my camera phone:

That's an old farm silo - the course was beautiful, and on the former site of farmland. The old buildings are just scenery now. We played right up to dark:

Here's one more, of another part of the old farm:

It was a great day out on the course - and I shot a 46. Not bad for January :)

Well, I can't pass this kind of day up:

After I pick my daughter up from skating, I'm off. She'll likely want to come along - I won't be back online for hours, so have a great day!

Well, last week was a good one for BottomFeeder downloads - Windows downloads jumped for some reason (no idea why):

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	1443
Linux x86	191
Update	185
Mac X	112
CE ARM	68
Mac 8/9	57
Solaris	38
HPUX	27
Sources	24
AIX	22
Windows98/ME	19
Linux Sparc	18
Linux PPC	16
SGI	12
ADUX	6
CE x86	2

That's a rate of 320/day, a rather large jump. I must of gotten linked somewhere that I missed. On to the HTML page downloads:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	41.5%
Internet Explorer	38.3%
Other	2.3%
Planet Smalltalk	5.5%
MSN Bot	5.4%
Zibber	3.9%
Opera	1.7%
Accoona	1.4%

That looks like the normal distribution I see. On to syndication stats:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	17.7%
BottomFeeder	16.8%
Internet Explorer	9.5%
BlogLines	8.4%
Google Feed Fetcher	6.7%
Net News Wire	6.6%
Vienna	3.9%
Safari RSS	3.7%
Planet Smalltalk	3%
Zibber	2.9%
NewsGator	2.6%
Lib Perl	1.8%
Akregator	1.5%
News Fire	1.5%
RSS Bandit	1.4%
SharpReader	1%
Liferea	1%
Python	1%
BlogSearch	1%
Jakarta	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%
Opera	1%
Java	1%
MSN Bot	1%
JetBrains	1%
Live Journal	1%
Feed Reader	1%

And that wraps up the stats - still a lot of tool diversity in the space - but the Google Reader is getting some mindshare.

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