Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Scoble makes an excellent point about Analog TV, and the plans to get rid of it:

there are way too many people who still own analog TVs. My dad is one of them. He’s using a TV that I bought him back when I worked at LZ Premiums back in the 1980s. He’d like to get a new HD TV, but he comes from a generation that doesn’t throw things away just because a better one comes along. Not to mention that his house isn’t setup for a big screen. Oh, and older people vote, and vote more often than younger people. He also has a lot more resources than my generation does — resources that can go into getting heard.

The thing about voting patterns alone will make a huge difference. As well, for all the buzz about HD tv (and yes, I have an HD capable TV) - getting HD set up is complicated - more complicated than an awful lot of people (regardless of age bracket) want to deal with.

A small anecdote on that - I was at the dentist a few weeks ago, and while my daughter was getting checked, I chatted with two older ladies in the waiting area. DVRs? Something they had vaguely heard of, but had no interest in. I explained the idea to them, and it just sounded like too much work to them - they didn't even have DVD players (never mind Blu-Ray or HD DVD). There's an awful lot of that out there, and a lot of the people pushing home theaters just don't understand how widespread the confusion is.

Another anecdote: twenty years ago, you could walk into anyone's home, and change channels on the TV easily. Now? There are families where only 1 or 2 people understand the setups in every room in their own house. If my in-laws come over, we don't even try to explain the setup in the family room (which has the big TV). We just switch to the raw feed (the one which has no DVRs attached) so as to not create havoc or embarrassment.

Technorati Tags: HD, DVR, lifestyle

This is the sort of stuff that happens when you have monopoly (or even duopoly) service in a business - you get utterly arbitrary (and vaguely defined) terms of service.

With the kind of access most people have to broadband, if an ISP cuts you off for "abuse", you can end up completely in limbo. Which makes me wonder - with the nascent build-out of downloadable TV and movies, how many people are going to end up in the cross hairs of the local provider? You could easily push past the (not at all clear) bandwidth limits simply by buying "too much" through Amazon's Unbox, Wal-Mart's new service, iTunes, or whatever else comes down the pike over the next year. Heck, if you decided to travel overseas for a month, and watched TV via SlingBox, you could end up utterly screwed.

The whole IP TV thing is going to hit a brick wall if ISPs keep acting like this - and without competition, they have no real incentive to act differently.

Technorati Tags: ISP, broadband

Apparently, some licenses are more equal than others. For instance - the license attached to a movie on a DVD is absolutely sacrosanct, and you're a filthy rotten pirate if you copy it (even for your own use - like, say, to a Laptop HD for a trip). If you're the MPAA and want some software though? Pish Tosh - licenses are for other people.

Technorati Tags: DRM, stiupidity

Another week has gone by, so it's time to look at the logs. BottomFeeder downloads continued at a good clip: 199/day:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	674
Update	235
Mac X	134
Linux x86	91
CE ARM	76
Mac 8/9	51
Solaris	33
HPUX	25
Sources	17
Linux Sparc	13
AIX	13
Windows98/ME	11
SGI	9
Linux PPC	9
ADUX	3
CE x86	1

On to the HTML page accesses:

1.8%

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	43.3%
Internet Explorer	37.8%
MSN Bot	7.2%
Planet Smalltalk	5.9%
Other	4%
Opera

It looks like my audience is back to the "regulars" - the Mozilla/IE numbers are at their normal distro for my site. Finally, the syndication numbers:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Planet Smalltalk	26.7%
Internet Explorer	19.2%
Mozilla	13.1%
BottomFeeder	10.2%
Other	3.9%
Net News Wire	4.9%
BlogLines	3.7%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.4%
Vienna	3.1%
Safari RSS	2.6%
NewsGator	1.3%
MSN Bot	1%
Python	1%
RSS Bandit	1%
News Fire	1%
Liferea	1%
SharpReader	1%
JetBrains	1%
Akregator	1%

There is something really weird going on with Planet Smalltalk - it's just slamming the site with requests.

ESUG is making a call for projects for SummerTalk 2007:

ESUG is proud to announce the Summertalk 2007 Call for Projects

Stef and Serge Stinckwich (on the behalf of ESUG)

Here is a description

This program is here to help students work on open-source Smalltalk projects. The European Smalltalk User Group will fund students during the summer.

Each of student supporting organization or student will receive 1500 euros. Each student will work under the guidance of a mentor accredited by ESUG. The money will be distributed in 3 steps: start, middle and end of the project.

The selection process done by ESUG will take into account whether the student will be supervised, if there is an infrastructure to help him as well as a the relevance of the topic for the community and the trust in the mentor.

The code developed during this program has to be released under the MIT Licence.

---

When and Process

Running from June 15th, 2007 through December 15th, 2007.
By 10 of April ESUG should have received project proposals following the template:

Name of the student :
Mentor :
Description of the work :
Benefits for the community :

Send an email to the ESUG board : stephane.ducasse@free.fr and Serge.Stinckwich@info.unicaen.fr with [SummerTalk-Proposal]

Sponsoring:
If you are a company and would like to help sponsor this event, send an email to the ESUG Board : stephane.ducasse@free.fr and Serge.Stinckwich@info.unicaen.fr with [SummerTalk-Sponsor]

Once the projects will have been accepted, If you are a student, just apply for the program by sending an email to the ESUG Board : stephane.ducasse@free.fr and Serge.Stinckwich@info.unicaen.fr with [SummerTalk-Student] and contact the mentor of the project.

Go Smalltalk
http://www.esug.org/

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Earlier this week, I spoke with Joseph Pelrine, who's well known in both the Smalltalk and agile development communities. Joseph was in Canberra, so he and Michael happened to be in the same place for this podcast. We spoke about the process of software development, and some of the issues that tend to come up.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, agile, scrum, development

Today's Smalltalk Daily is late, but that's better than the last couple of days, where I ran out of time completely. In today's screencast, I cover ExtraEmphasis, a nice little environmental enhancement put together by Travis.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Precision Systems has sent along their latest batch of open Smalltalk positions:

Precision Systems currently has Smalltalk positions open across the United States. Please contact me at RecruitVR@PrecisionSystems.com if you’re interested in any of the following positions:

Northern New Jersey – multiple projects, various cities
Senior Smalltalk Developer (permanent, 6 month contract-to-hire and 12+ month contract)

New York, NY – multiple projects
Smalltalk Developer, Smalltalk Team Lead, and Smalltalk/Java Developer (contract and permanent)

Ohio – multiple projects
Smalltalk Developer (permanent)

Southern California
Smalltalk Developer (permanent or contract-to-hire)

Florida
Software Engineering Manager (permanent)

Texas – multiple projects in different cities
Smalltalk Developer (contract or 6 month contract-to-hire)
Smalltalk Developer (permanent)
.Net Developer, Smalltalk a plus (permanent)

Milwaukee, WI
Senior Smalltalk Developer and Junior Programmer/Analyst (permanent)

Don’t forget to pass along your co-workers and friends; for any new and successful referral to Precision we will pay you $1,000!

I look forward to speaking with you!

Vicki Ross
973-377-7500
Smalltalk Staffing Group – Precision Systems
RecruitVR@PrecisionSystems.com

Good luck with your job hunting!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

ACM has an interview with Alan Kay up - it's from 2005, but I only just ran across it. I like this comment about the state of software development:

SF So Smalltalk is to Shakespeare as Excel is to car crashes in the TV culture?

AK No, if you look at it really historically, Smalltalk counts as a minor Greek play that was miles ahead of what most other cultures were doing, but nowhere near what Shakespeare was able to do.

If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

SF The analogy is even better because there are the hidden chambers that nobody can understand.

AK I would compare the Smalltalk stuff that we did in the ’70s with something like a Gothic cathedral. We had two ideas, really. One of them we got from Lisp: late binding. The other one was the idea of objects. Those gave us something a little bit like the arch, so we were able to make complex, seemingly large structures out of very little material, but I wouldn’t put us much past the engineering of 1,000 years ago.

There's more there, and it's worth reading. The thing I take away from this - Smalltalk is hardly perfect, but it encapsulates a lot of ideas that should be driving the industry. At present, the things driving the industry are more like a sledgehammer than they are like precision tools.

Technorati Tags: development

Bill Clementson explains :)

I'm always encouraged when stupidity rears its head outside the halls of the RIAA - at least I know that the problem is diffuse. What am I on about? Well, I've never been a huge fan of the OLPC project, and reading about the remote kill switch (via TechDirt) doesn't make me any fonder of the project:

Bender [OLPC president of software and content] says the laptops can be remotely shut down to prevent them being sold in black markets.

Like TechDirt, I'll ask the obvious question: if a struggling family in the third world decides to sell their PC in order to buy something they value more highly, who the heck is Bender to try and stand in their way? Second, are the OLPC guys as stupid as the DRM backers at the RIAA? Who do they think this technology will stop? Are they under some delusion that black marketeers won't be able to figure it out?

The more I hear about this project, the more I wonder why they are bothering.

Technorati Tags: OLPC

An early release of Sophie has been announced:

Sophie is a program for creating digital multimedia books. Sophie will let you make books that are impossible in print, with video and audio tracks, automatic actions, and shared feedback.

Sophie is written in Squeak, by a bunch of pretty smart people. I'll have to try and schedule a podcast with one or more of them :)

Change is hard for any business, not just the music industry. Part of why the labels are fighting so hard over DRM is the raw panic being induced by the sheer speed of change - something Raghav Gupta wrote about this morning. We are simultaneously seeing two things: rising demand for music on the consumer side, and declining revenues from the model in use on the label side. That's part of why the industry cries "piracy" so loud - yes, there's piracy, but there's also the fear of a new, not well understood business that is being built while they try to cling to the old one. Consider:

Of most concern is the removal of shelf space devoted to music products at retail stores. Tower’s bankruptcy removed millions of square feet and property owners will look askance at music retailers looking for space. The last decade saw the rise of discount retailers, Target, Wal-Mart and Best Buy being the big 3, use cheaply priced CDs as a loss leader to drive foot traffic. This has been a successful strategy, however the question is how long these discount stores will continue to sustain this strategy. If they start devoting the space to other products -- games, DVDs or even iPod and related accessories, it will hasten the demise of the CD-driven business model. As one executive at a major told me, ‘if Wal-Mart removes just 8 less square feet per store to CDs, it’s like losing 300 stores.’ This will be a major story to watch in 2007.

That changeover has been a rolling shock to the system. It's kind of like the change from animal driven traffic to machine driven traffic - there are lots and lots of little niches that make a living off the old model, and it's obvious that the new one doesn't need the same level of "middle men". Sure, there will still be middle men - but fewer, and in different roles. All of that is terrifying to people who've built their careers on the Album/CD model. It's also scary for the artists - there may well be fewer album driven mega-stars, and more traveling roadshows.

It all represents change, and it's no easier for the music industry than it is for anyone else - it's just that the amount of $$ involved is pretty big, and it's playing out in mass media.

Technorati Tags: DRM

SCI FI Wire reports that "Lost" has lost some viewers:

Lost crashed in the ratings this week, hitting an all-time low for a new episode, the Associated Press reported. ABC's drama about plane crash survivors stranded on a mysterious island drew an estimated 12.8 million viewers on Feb. 14.

Here's my question: Is it the break the network took to eliminate re-runs? I'd like to know what the numbers are like for other shows that took a similar break ("Jericho", for instance). Take a long enough break, and your viewers find other things to do...

Technorati Tags: scifi

Scoble chimed in on the weight challenge thrown his way by Jason Calacanis:

Yeah, Jason Calacanis just called me fat and challenged me to lose weight in a program titled “fat bloggers.” Ahh, I just ate a piece of Swiss chocolate. How am I gonna lose weight with the Swiss stuff around? Anyway, I weigh 214 pounds and would like to get down to 190.

Well, here's where I've traveled on that road - last June, I weighed 207. Today, I'm 182. How and why did that happen? I had a checkup, and learned that I had bad cholesterol and triglyceride numbers - and asked about my acid reflux problem. I changed my diet (cutting down on starch/bread/pasta stuff), and three things happened:

• My acid reflux went away
• My weight started to drop
• I am able to exercise longer and harder

The thing is, I wasn't really trying to lose weight - mainly, I wanted the acid reflux to go away, and I wanted better numbers on those blood tests - the weight loss has been a pleasant side effect.

So what kind of dietary changes am I talking about? I stopped getting fries with meals - I ask for vegetables. I always order a salad at restaurants. For lunch, I have a burger or cold cuts, with fruit instead of chips. At most restaurants, I only eat half of what I get, and take the rest home for another day. For snacking, I eat salted nuts instead of chips. That's pretty much it, and it's worked out. Would it work for anyone else? I have no idea. It works for me though :)

Technorati Tags: health, weight

I've started an occasional series of podcasts, talking to people in other parts of Cincom. Earlier today, I spoke to Randy Saunders, the marketing manager for the Cincom Synchrony call center product. We had a good conversation about Synchrony and the call center space in general - and head on over to the Synchrony website for more information. They've got white papers, success stories, and more.

Technorati Tags: cincom, synchrony, call center

Jason Calacanis shows Wikipedia the doorway that leads to fewer "we might run out of money" crises in the future. Will they be smart enough to walk through, or are they waiting in the confident expectation of a miracle?

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, money, advertising

I've had a busy few days, what with the ice storm and the one car thing (I love being the universal chauffeur). Things should start getting back to normal this afternoon, or tomorrow.

If Insanity is trying the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result, then the RIAA is certifiable:

Says analyst Mark Mulligan: "Despite everything that has been happening the record labels are not about to drop DRM, even though all they are doing is making themselves look even less compelling by using it." Execs do seem to think DRM needs to be more interoperable, with 70% thinking that downloads need to play in as many players as possible in the future, but 40% think it's going to take concerted government and consumer action to make this happen -- not quite a rosy picture.

Yeah, there's a plan for making consumers happy with your product - coerce them with a mass of regulations that they know are BS. They simply live in a different reality from the rest of us.

Technorati Tags: RIAA, music

Vista, the most secure operating system ever:

The hole registers high on the irony scale: The flaw was in a "malware protection engine" that helps several Microsoft security products _ including "Windows Defender" for Vista _ guard against online threats. The problem could let an outsider "take complete control" of a victim's computer, according to Microsoft's security advisory.

The irony is just too much here. I think the source of the problem is simple: Vista is too big a ball of mud for anyone to know what's going on inside.

Technorati Tags: windows, security

This kind of silliness is being introduced by the man who described the internet "as a series of tubes":

Early in January, Stevens introduced Senate bill 49, which among other things, would require that any school or library that gets federal Internet subsidies would have to block access to interactive Web sites, including social networking sites, and possibly blogs as well. It appears that the definition of those sites is so vague that it could include sites such as Wikipedia, according to commentators. It would certainly ban MySpace.

Heck, it might well ban any site that allowed comments, and made it possible to leave your name attached to a comment. Would it be too hard to find Senators - or at least senatorial staff - who had so much as used a web browser?

Andres Valloud was going to talk about JP Morgan's Kapital application at SDSU (San Diego State University) on the 16th (of Februrary) - then he ran into the twin walls of weather and corporate policy. The details are over on his site; he has rescheduled his talk, which should now take place on the 23rd (of February). Here's the topic he plans to cover; the rest of the abstract is over at his blog.

The pattern describes a way to make explicit a model by which one can explain how the interaction between observers and their environments occurs. The pattern applies to a complex system, or information manifold, under observation and a player interacting with it. A game is an example of such an information manifold. A program playing the game is an example of a player. An adaptive compiler (player) observing the execution of a program (information manifold) to modify the performance of the program is another example.

Runar Jordahl explains why Smalltalk is the simpler, more maintainable choice:

For large projects where developers come and go, you can have little hope of always getting people that know all the details of the language used. There is for example no hope that universities will manage to fully teach students about complex type systems , iterators, generics, casting, etc. If you can choose a simpler language a lot of trouble will be avoided.

Follow the link for his example.

Technorati Tags: development

Michael and I recorded a conversation with Joseph Pelrine this morning - I'll be posting it at the end of the week. It was a good talk - we covered a lot of ground on agile, scrum, and team development.

Technorati Tags: agile, development, scrum

I think my back - and my daughter's back - will never be the same again. Lifting that much ice off the driveway was very painful:

It doesn't look like a lot, but it was heavy, and had to be chipped off...

Here's a shot taken out my front door - that's about 2 inches, nearly all ice. Boy, that'll be fun to clear off the driveway.

Doc Searls picked a bad day to travel into the DC area. I live in Columbia, MD, and here's what I'm looking at:

Yep - that's all ice over top of me. Lovely :)

Dare Obasanjo asks whether we prefer a Vista ad, or an OS X ad (follow the link for the ads). Here's the thing - the OS X ad is funny. The Vista ad? It demonstrates that Microsoft has no idea what they are selling. Vista might be a lot of things, but it sure isn't landing with the kind of "wow" that the early space launches did. The fact that MS thinks it does shows just how deep in the unreality zone they are.

Technorati Tags: advertising

Awhile back, Jason Calacanis said a number of things that need to be said about the SEO guys (and I might be less charitable than he is - I don't much care for the so-called "white hat" SEO guys, either). Recently, one of the less honorable types (is that an oxymoron?) has been putting invisible links on the UIUC VW Wiki - they look like this:

<u style="display: none">
<a href="Insert stupid SEO link here">Stupid SEO text</a>

<a href="Insert stupid SEO link here">Stupid SEO text</a>

<a href="Insert stupid SEO link here">Stupid SEO text</a></u>

The links went to some SEO "how high can I push these keywords" contest. Wonderful - just the stuff I want on a tech wiki discussing Smalltalk. All you guys who claim to be "white hat" SEO marketers? Grow a conscience and find honest work.

Technorati Tags: search, SEO

Whoa - so much for the security refresh in Vista - it's broken by design - installers run with admin privileges, even if the account they are running from doesn't have them.

"[When] you try to run such a program, you get a UAC prompt and you have only two choices: either to agree to run this application as administrator or to disallow running it at all. That means that if you downloaded some freeware Tetris game, you will have to run its installer as administrator, giving it not only full access to all your file system and registry, but also allowing it to load kernel drivers! Why should a Tetris installer be allowed to load kernel drivers?," Rutkowska asked in a post on her Invisible Things blog.

So that's just astonishing - I can disallow an installer, or I can pray that it does nothing wrong - but I can't run it in limited access mode. That's just stupid, and it makes the rest of Vista's security fixes fairly worthless. If I'm happy with a "trust the source" method of security, I may as well let my browser run anything, on the theory that I won't visit untrusted sources.

Technorati Tags: Windows, Vista, stupidity

SciFi Wire reports that Battlestar Galactica is coming back for a fourth season:

SCI FI Channel has ordered a fourth season of Battlestar Galactica, with 13 new episodes. It resumes production in summer with an eye to a January 2008 return.

And there was much rejoicing!

Technorati Tags: scifi, BSG, cylon

So the question is, if a newspaper in Belgium publishes an invisible story, does it make any noise? I understand the newspaper's position; they want the ad revenues that come from people visiting their site. On the other hand, if they disappear from search results, I guarantee you that their visitor count will plummet. I think this is a victory that will make the publishers unhappy in the long run. Here's the impact:

Google, the owner of the world's most-used search engine, must pay 25,000 euros ($32,500) a day until it removes all Belgian news content, the Brussels Court of First Instance ruled today. There's ``no exception'' for Google in copyright law, the court said. The Mountain View, California-based company said it has already removed the content and will appeal the ruling.

Yeah, being completely invisible will sure help. I don't know what the best outcome for all concerned is, but this isn't it.

Technorati Tags: news

Ken Treis explains how he came full circle back to Smalltalk. Read the whole thing; it's a good summary from a guy who's been around the block with various web technologies.

Technorati Tags: Seaside, Rails, PHP

Are these the first steps towards the death of DRM'd music?

Major label EMI -- home of Coldplay and Norah Jones -- is in discussions with online music stores about selling its music without copy protection, or digital rights management (DRM), according to two sources with direct knowledge of the talks who would not speak for attribution because discussions are ongoing.

Heh. The beauty of this would be seeing Microsoft caught utterly flat-footed with PVP-OPM as reality starts to set in elsewhere. It's only a first move though - I expect a whole lot of crying, yelling, and fusspotting before this is over. Recall that the movie industry was convinced that the VCR meant the death of movies.

Engadget reports that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD DRM has been cracked, simply by finding the processing key in memory:

Let's break this down for what it is: instead of needing individual keys for each and every high-definition film -- of which there are many -- the processing key can be used to unlock, decrypt, and backup every HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc film released so far . As arnezami points out, "nothing was actually hacked, cracked or even reverse engineered." All he had to do was keep an eye on his memory, watch what changed, and voila... the processing key appeared.

Of course, the tools over at the MPAA will see this as a reason to hate general purpose PC's - and work to force the kind of DRM crapware that Vista implements on everything.

Technorati Tags: MPAA, movies

On this morning's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at two enhancements to the Cincom Smalltalk environment that work together: RB_Tabs and ThreePaneSelectors. Both are available from the Parcel Manager.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, tools

I see that Walter Cronkite has a frail grasp on historical reality:

In a keynote address at Columbia University, Cronkite said today's journalists face greater challenges than those from his generation. No longer could journalists count on their employers to provide the necessary resources, he said, "to expose truths that powerful politicians and special interests often did not want exposed."

Instead, he said, "they face rounds and rounds of job cuts and cost cuts that require them to do ever more with ever less."

Oh please. When was there ever a "golden age" of journalism that wasn't concerned with making money? Cronkite confuses the pre-cable, pre-internet era of virtually guaranteed profit for a small number of media outlets with history. Not to mention that during the "golden age of radio" the Fatty Arbuckle case generated print the same way Anna Nicole Smith now generates film.

Technorati Tags: news

I see where researchers are predicting an internet collapse in the event of a flu pandemic, as people work at home and overwhelm the network:

"We assumed total absentees of 30% to 60% trying to work from home, which would have overwhelmed the Internet," said participant Bill Thoet, vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton. "We did not assume that the backbone would be gone, but that the edge of the network, where everyone was trying to access their office from home, would be overwhelmed. The absence of maintenance was also a factor. The person who brought up the problem was himself a CEO of an Internet service provider.

Hmm - I thought on-demand video was going to be the end of the internet, sometime this year or next. My first reaction to this story was "as if that would be the biggest problem". My second was "someone is predicting the end of the net every week". Pass the coffee.

Now this is a fascinating book - "The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, The First Marines, And The Secret Mission Of 1805". It's kind of the conventional wisdom that "plausible deniability" is a modern concept in covert action; take a read of this, and see how it goes back to Jefferson in US history. I'm enjoying the book a lot, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in American history.

Technorati Tags: history

The DRM in Vista sucks not just because it could hinder you when you watch legally owned content, but because it's wasting CPU cycles all the time, just in case you might. Here's Bruce Schneier:

The details are pretty geeky, but basically Microsoft has reworked a lot of the core operating system to add copy protection technology for new media formats like HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks. Certain high-quality output paths--audio and video--are reserved for protected peripheral devices. Sometimes output quality is artificially degraded; sometimes output is prevented entirely. And Vista continuously spends CPU time monitoring itself, trying to figure out if you're doing something that it thinks you shouldn't. If it does, it limits functionality and in extreme cases restarts just the video subsystem. We still don't know the exact details of all this, and how far-reaching it is, but it doesn't look good.

Of course, MS says they "had" to do this, or else Hollywood would go elsewhere. Excuse me? Where else would they go? Last time I looked, MS had well over 90% of the client platforms. Does anyone think Hollywood would actually just take their ball and go home?

It's all complete nonsense. Microsoft could have easily told the entertainment industry that it was not going to deliberately cripple its operating system, take it or leave it. With 95% of the operating system market, where else would Hollywood go? Sure, Big Media has been pushing DRM, but recently some--Sony after their 2005 debacle and now EMI Group--are having second thoughts.

The only question left is this: Is MS at the beck and call of Hollywood, are they just stupid, or are they trying to do an end-around on Apple and own the next generation iTunes-type setup? I'd guess the third, but at this point, I wouldn't rule stupidity out of the mix.

Technorati Tags: PVP-OPM, Vista, Windows

Speaking of cars, we are down to one at the moment. On the way back from Snow Tubing, the van developed an oil pressure problem - so it's in the shop. That turns me into the all purpose shuttler of women around here - either my daughter to her various activities, or my wife to work and back. I also need to run a few pre-storm errands after that, so I'll be away from the keyboard for a few hours.

I see Wired is touting yet another attempt at the fabled electric car concept:

Detroit is going on a green offensive with electric plug-in models that can run emissions-free for up to 40 miles -- at about a quarter the cost of gas -- on batteries that draw their juice directly from the grid.

40 miles is less than you think - and much, much less for anyone who commutes. Heck, I work at home, mostly drive to the grocery store and my daughter's school - and this car would be impractical for me. My existing car (a 1989 Mirage) has a range of 360+ miles on a tank of gas, and it's only got a 12 gallon tank. This electric car has a whopping range of 40 miles - which is just ridiculous. Cue the excitement though:

"Once plug-in hybrids appear, I don't know why 'mere' hybrids would be appealing," said Philip Reed, the Fuel Economy Guide editor for Edmunds. "Plug-in hybrids do everything that hybrids can do but at a lower cost to consumers."

Umm, sure. Let me think: Car I need to remember to plug in, or car I can just park and forget? Heck, I often forget to plug in my cell phone, for gosh sakes. The pure electric car doesn't even work for a light driver like me, and the hybrid just sounds like something that would be a pain in my neck. Thanks, but no thanks.

Technorati Tags: car

I'll be in the UK this March, giving a 6 hour tutorial on Smalltalk at SPA 2007 (my talk is on Sunday). Here's the link to my session.

Steve Yegge has a long post up on the topic of "the next big programming language". The title of this post comes from this assertion:

Rule #1: C-like syntax

C(++)-like syntax is the standard. Your language's popularity will fall off as a direct function of how far you deviate from it.

There's plenty of wiggle room in the way you define classes and other OOP constructs, but you'll need to stick fairly closely to the basic control-flow constructs, arithmetic expressions and operators, and the use of curly-braces for delimiting blocks and function bodies.

Probably true, regardless of how much I think that cripples a language. For instance: C style syntax pretty much guarantees that you won't have named arguments. Instead of something readable like this:

 

webServer
     startOnPort: 80
     maximumNumberOfInstances: 10
     usingHostName: 'www.somehosthere.com'.

No, instead you'll see this:

 

web_server.start (80, 10, "somehosthere.com");

Which is a sad commentary on the industry, but that's the way it is. Meanwhile, at least things are iterating in the direction of the trail Smalltalk blazed decades ago.

Technorati Tags: programming, dynamic, syntax, smalltalk

This week, Michael Lucas-Smith and I spoke with Carl Gundel, co-author of Liberty Basic - and also the co-founder of the new RunBasic website. RunBasic is powered by Seaside running on Cincom Smalltalk - it's a pretty cool online version of Liberty Basic. We spoke for a bit over a half an hour about Liberty Basic and the website - hope you enjoy it. As usual, if you have comments, please send them along to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, basic, programming, seaside, runbasic

Well - Microsoft says that "Vienna", the successor to Vista, will be ready in 2009. I'd start an over/under pool on that, but would anyone take the under?

Hmm - Scoble says that the Wikipedia "3-4 months could be it" quote is out of context. He reference's Laurent Haug's blog, where Laurent clarifies. So here's Scoble:

Laurent, last night, went back and looked at the video tape and gave her exact quote and the context in which it was said . He did that because people were reporting that Florence said Wikipedia would shut down in three months if it didn’t get more cash. That is NOT true, based on the transcripts of what she actually said.

And here's the clarification from Laurent, based on the conversation he had with Florence Devouard of Wikipedia:

Me: “When we prepared this speech, Florence told me that Wikipedia has enough cash to pay for its server for the next…”
Florence Devouard: “Three months. Roughly.”
Me: “and if we don’t do something, Wikipedia won’t be here in three or four months. That’s a radical idea, it’s not going to happen but…”.
FD: ”...three months is a bit negative. [...] We have somebody making plans for two years in the future, I think we will survive in the next three months”.

He goes on to say that Florence is very confident that Wikipedia will solve the problem - which means that there still is a problem. Making two year plans when cash flow is tight does not mean that there's no problem. Sure, Wikipedia may solve the problem - but thee's no need for a correction here, because there was no misquoting or taking out of context.

Technorati Tags: OSS, Wikipedia

Another week of log data - looks like BottomFeeder downloads went at a rate of 173/day:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Update	330
Windows	296
Mac X	121
Linux x86	102
Mac 8/9	59
CE ARM	59
Sources	54
HPUX	33
Solaris	31
AIX	29
SGI	23
Linux Sparc	21
Windows98/ME	19
Linux PPC	18
ADUX	15
CE x86	4

Off to the HTML page accesses by Tool:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	45%
Internet Explorer	34.9%
MSN Bot	8.7%
Planet Smalltalk	5.8%
Other	3.9%
Opera	1.7%

Finally, the report for syndication file access:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Planet Smalltalk	30%
Mozilla	15.1%
BottomFeeder	14%
Other	8.1%
BlogLines	5.1%
Internet Explorer	5.1%
Net News Wire	5.1%
Vienna	4.2%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.7%
Safari RSS	2.6%
NewsGator	1.7%
Akregator	1.3%
Strategic Board Bot	1.1%
Python	1%
MSN Bot	1%
RSS Bandit	1%
Liferea	1%
News Fire	1%
SharpReader	1%
JetBrains	1%
RSS 2 Email	1%

Looks like WikiPedia is showing the limits of unfunded Open Source projects - eventually, the rubber meets the road, and bills need to be paid.

At this point, Wikipedia has the financial ressources to run its servers for about 3 to 4 months. If we do not find additional funding, it is not impossible that Wikipedia might disappear

Looks like maybe Jason Calacanis' suggestion that they accept text ads shouldn't have been disregarded.

Technorati Tags: OSS

Found on Google Video: The original 1983 Intro to Smalltalk-80.

Tomasz Węgrzanowski approaches programming language criticism from an interesting angle - rather than explaining what he dislikes about various languages, he mentions the positive aspects of each (and by inference, the relative lacks of each compared to the others). It's a good read.