Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

New Mexico might override the astronomers :)

New Mexico's legislature expands its jurisdiction, mulling whether to return the slighted celestial body to its planetary status every time it passes overhead.

We've had some issues getting the stic.org domain online - so in the meantime, you can head on over here - http://www.smalltalkindustrycouncil.org/. You can buy individual and corporate memberships there right now.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

One of our internal PR guys placed a column I wrote on how blogs (et. al.) have changed the nature of PR - you can see it here.

Technorati Tags: marketing

Precision Systems has sent along their weekly jobs report:

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:

Ontario, Canada Smalltalk Developer (12+ month contract)

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

Omaha, NE Smalltalk Developer (permanent or contract)

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

Ohio – multiple projects Smalltalk Developer (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

973-467-5879

Smalltalk Staffing Group – Precision Systems

RecruitVR@PrecisionSystems.com

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

So our week of Product Planning is coming to a close - we think we have some good momentum going forward, and I'll be publishing a revised roadmap shortly. Here we all are, gathered together to wrap it up:

After lunch, we had cake - it's Andreas Hiltner's birthday - he's the guy in the center here, talking to Pete Hatch and Andres Valloud.

Lukas Renggli announced his talk in Cracow awhile ago, but this morning brings more interesting news: you can watch the talk live, in the comfort of your own home or office:

I just learned that the Seaside presentation I am giving tomorrow will also be streamed live. Check it out ( UDP, TCP ) if you happen to be online between 18:10 and 19:40 GMT+1.

I'll have to see if I have time to watch it - but I sure hope it can be downloaded afterwards. I've just spent a week here in Cincinnati, so I probably won't jump into my office to isolate myself further :)

Technorati Tags: seaside

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we go back to ListBoxes - but learn how to handle events when you make them multi-select instead of single select.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Here's a topic that doesn't come up much, but can be pretty important - how do you mark things as deprecated in a way that not only makes sense, but allows end users of the system to know that they are using code that has been deprecated? That includes tools that help out there, and that's what we are discussing right now. Here's Travis leading that discussion:

This is what debugging the VM looks like:

Later: This is what a VM level heisenbug looks like :)

I love Microsoft trying to defend software patents:

Obviously, we disagree. Protection for software patents and other intellectual property is essential to maintaining the incentives that encourage and underwrite technological breakthroughs. In every industry, patents provide the legal foundation for innovation. The ensuing legal disputes may be messy, but protection is no less necessary, even so.

This from the outfit that thought they invented code inspectors. When Microsoft can spell prior art, maybe I'll count their opinion as something I need to pay attention to.

Technorati Tags: stupidity

One of our biggest issues in Cincom Smalltalk is C connectivity - it's harder than it should be to connect to C libraries. This morning, we continued our planning sessions with a conversation on how to deal with that issue:

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at how to handle events from a VW ListBox widget - in particular, change (selection) and double click events.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

The meetings plow forward - this afternoon we are talking about the future of the CST GUI:

Later: We had to move to a bigger room, since this conversation included a lot of people:

Here's a nice post on choosing dynamic languages that some of the enterprisey architect types ought to read:

"We have a wonderful ability here to choose the right tool for the job. We have components that are written in Java, in C++, in Python, and Ruby and Perl. [Python is] definitely viewed internally here by some of the best computer scientists in the world, people from MIT's AI [artificial intelligence] and CS [computer science] labs, as enterprise worthy," he said.

The summary from Bill Barr is also worth pondering:

There is also a great quote about line-coders vs. problem solvers, but I'll leave it up to readers to find that gem. I also have to add that from personal experience, it's a whole lot easier to teach a bunch of mainframe and COBOL programmers Python than it is Java or C#. In fact, it was really just a matter of pointing them in the direction of Python, asking them to use pyUnit and let them run wild. On the other hand, teaching them Java drained tens of thousands of dollars from my operating budget!

Swap Smalltalk in for Python, and it's the same thing - I'll toot my own horn a bit and point beginners to my screencast series as a good place to get started.

Technorati Tags: dynamic, enterprisey

Spotted in Learning Seaside:

The Sophie Project had officially gone live. Sophie is an open multimedia authoring tool written in Squeak. The Sophie Server is a Seaside application

Technorati Tags: seaside

I did a podcast with Alan Knight and Michael Lucas-Smith today - we talked about GLORP, a project Alan's been working on for awhile now. Michael asked most of the questions - I spend most of my time avoiding databases :)

I plan to post this over the weekend. I'll be doing at least one other session here in Cincinnati - I'll be talking to the ObjectStudio 8 team sometime before Friday - and I'll likely hold that one for release after the one we did today.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom, cst

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we script the process of adding a resource method to the image - i.e., reading in an image file, and creating a matching resource method.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

After a full day of going through requirements, we sat down to listen to Andres Valloud tell us about how one of our customers manages source code (the process more than the tools) under a fairly tight regulatory regime. Andres just joined us, so having a fresh perspective from the field is a great thing to hear:

Well, maybe not - but at the very least, there aren't any readers of this blog in Africa (and very few in South America, for that matter):

Looks like that PDF I mentioned - the one where the US Dept. of Transportation had announced "Ixnay on the istaVay" - is holding up. I missed this item from March 2nd, where the DOT is looking into switching to OS X and/or Linux:

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) has banned Windows Vista, Office 2007, and Internet Explorer 2007 from its offices, and is considering switching its operations to Macs and PCs running Novell's SuSe Linux. The DOT enacted the ban in mid-January, according to one blogger, because certain applications essential to the agency's function can't run on Windows Vista.

Sooner than most people think, Microsoft is going to find the same nasty wall that IBM ran into back in the late 80's and early 90's. They've been hiring people like crazy of late - and that's going to switch to mass layoffs at some point. I grew up in "IBM country" in New York State, and they (IBM) were building like crazy and hiring in bunches when I was in high school and college. By the time I had started working, they mass layoffs had arrived.

Technorati Tags: Vista

It's now just before lunch, and we're doing tools talk - specifically, the way forward for tools using the new GUI framework (Pollock), and how we plan to prioritize the way forward. Here are a few pictures:

Makes for hungry work; fortunately, lunch is on the way :)

Here's a picture of our core VM team, plotting out the Smalltalk engine's future:

From the lower left, that's Andres Valloud, Sean Glazier, Pete Hatch, and John Sarkela.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we import a graphic from outside the Smalltalk system for use inside Smalltalk (in this case, as a toolbar icon). We import it and save it off as a class side resource.

So I'm in Cincinnati this week, working with the engineers on the future of Cincom Smalltalk. I snapped a few photos while I was in the ObjectStudio 8 session - here's Andreas Hiltner, explaining how it's going to go down:

And here's part of the team, taking it all in:

The abstract for Chad Fowler's "Rails for Smalltalkers" tutorial at StS 2007 is online - check the DabbleDB page for details.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

The RIAA is still desperately trying to hold on to the radio broadcast model - have a look at the royalty rates they want to impose on streaming music:

A "performance" is defined as the streaming of one song to one listener; thus a station that has an average audience of 500 listeners racks up 500 "performances" for each song it plays.

The minimum fee is $500 per channel per year. There is no clear definition of what a 'channel' is for services that make up individualized playlists for listeners.

Their detachment from reality is nearly complete; there's simply no way to run a web streaming business on that basis unless it's on the scale of a radio broadcast business - and that's just not the way the web works.

OOPSLA 2007 is having a dynamic languages symposium again this year:

Dynamic Languages Symposium 2007

at ooPSLA 2007

Montreal, Quebec, Canada, October 22, 2007

http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/dls07/

---

Important dates:

• Submission of papers: June 1, 2007 *hard deadline*
• Author notification: June 30, 2007
• Final versions due: July 7, 2007
• DLS 2007:   October 22, 2007
• OOPSLA 2007:   October 21-25, 2007

Scope:

The Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) at OOPSLA 2007 in Montreal, Canada, is a forum for discussion of dynamic languages, their implementation and application. While mature dynamic languages including Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, Self, and Prolog continue to grow and inspire new converts, a new generation of dynamic scripting languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript are successful in a wide range of applications. DLS provides a place for researchers and practitioners to come together and share their knowledge, experience, and ideas for future research and development.

DLS 2007 invites high quality papers reporting original research, innovative contributions or experience related to dynamic languages, their implementation and application. Accepted Papers will be published in the OOPSLA conference companion and the ACM Digital Library.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

• Innovative language features and implementation techniques
• Development and platform support, tools
• Interesting applications
• Domain-oriented programming
• Very late binding, dynamic composition, and runtime adaptation
• Reflection and meta-programming
• Software evolution
• Language symbiosis and multi-paradigm languages
• Dynamic optimization
• Hardware support
• Experience reports and case studies
• Educational approaches and perspectives
• Object-oriented, aspect-oriented, and context-oriented programming

Submissions and proceedings

We invite original contributions that neither have been published previously nor are under review by other refereed events or publications. Research papers should describe work that advances the current state of the art. Experience papers should be of broad interest and should describe insights gained from substantive practical applications. The program committee will evaluate each contributed paper based on its relevance, significance, clarity, and originality.

Papers are to be submitted electronically at http://www.dcl.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/dls2007/ in PDF format. Submissions must not exceed 12 pages and need to use the ACM format, templates for which can be found at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html .

Program chairs:

• Pascal Costanza, Programming Technology Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
• Robert Hirschfeld, Hasso-Plattner-Institut, University of Potsdam, Germany

Program committee:

• Gilad Bracha, Cadence Design Systems, USA
• Johan Brichau, Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
• William Clinger, Northeastern University, USA
• William Cook, University of Texas at Austin, USA
• Pascal Costanza, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
• Stephane Ducasse, Universite de Savoie, France
• Brian Foote, Industrial Logic, USA
• Robert Hirschfeld, Hasso-Plattner-Institut Potsdam, Germany
• Jeremy Hylton, Google, USA
• Shriram Krishnamurthi, Brown University, USA
• Michele Lanza, University of Lugano, Switzerland
• Michael Leuschel, Universitaet Duesseldorf, Germany
• Henry Lieberman, MIT Media Laboratory, USA
• Martin von Loewis, Hasso-Plattner-Institut Potsdam, Germany
• Philippe Mougin, OCTO Technology, France
• Oscar Nierstrasz, University of Berne, Switzerland
• Kent Pitman, PTC, USA
• Ian Piumarta, Viewpoints Research Institute, USA
• Nathanael Schaerli, Google, Switzerland
• Anton van Straaten, AppSolutions.com, USA
• Dave Thomas, Bedarra Research Labs, Canada
• Dave Ungar, USA
• Allen Wirfs-Brock, Microsoft, USA
• Roel Wuyts, IMEC & Unversite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

In today's Smalltalk Daily, we learn how to add a toolbar to a UI.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Well - I've arrived - I'm back at the Staybridge, the hotel of choice for us Cincomers. It should be a full week of conversation and engineering planning - I should have a revised product roadmap to push out after we're done.

I'm headed to corporate in a few hours - we have a round of planning meetings set up this week. Posting may well be light until the evening hours during the week, but I do have a set of Smalltalk Daily screencasts queued up, ready to post.

This week, David Buck and I spoke with Joerg Beekman of DeepCove Labs (full disclosure: David is consulting there). DeepCove Labs is in the financial services sector, where they automate check processing between various entities (both large and small, across and within international borders). It was a fun conversation, and they use Cincom Smalltalk for just about everything they do.

As always, if you have feedback of any kind, please send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com. Also - if you enjoy these podcasts, please consider giving us a vote over on PodcastAlley.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, checks, financial services

This post from Dave Winer illustrates how a single instance of bad customer service can lead to a "word of mouth" PR problem. Something a lot of companies haven't really internalized yet is that any of the people they deal with might have a megaphone.

Via Brad Wilson: apparently, my ability to bloviate has some value:

Heh.

Time for the weekly look at the logs - BottomFeeder downloads proceeded at a rate of 142/day last week (plus the 25/day or so I get from CNet). The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	334
Update	163
Linux x86	114
Mac X	84
CE ARM	59
Mac 8/9	51
Solaris	41
Windows98/ME	30
HPUX	28
AIX	24
Linux Sparc	19
Sources	18
Linux PPC	14
SGI	13
ADUX	6
CE x86	2

On to the HTML page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	43.1%
Internet Explorer	40.5%
MSN Bot	6.9%
Planet Smalltalk	5.3%
Other	2.7%
Opera	1.5%

And finally, the syndication numbers:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Planet Smalltalk	23.4%
Internet Explorer	20.1%
Mozilla	13.3%
BottomFeeder	12.3%
Other	3%
BlogLines	5.2%
Net News Wire	4.1%
Vienna	3.4%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.3%
Safari RSS	2.3%
NewsGator	1.4%
Akregator	1.1%
Strategic Board Bot	1.1%
RSS Bandit	1%
MSN Bot	1%
Python	1%
News Fire	1%
SharpReader	1%
JetBrains	1%

Other than the continued misbehavior of the Planet Smalltalk Bot, the big story is the jump in IE stats - which is actually multiple tools, given the agent string usage issue there. Even so - it's a big change in these stats.

James McGovern asks what most people think is a complicated question: how to measure developer productivity:

I have blogged on the need for metrics here and here and have even received wonderful insights from Todd Biske on other aspects that EAs should noodle. Awhile back, James Robertson commented without providing an answer. May I be so bold as to ask him what metrics would he use to measure developer productivity?

There's really only one metric that matters: are you getting software delivered to you that works well enough to accomplish the actual business that your company does? If the answer is yes, then you can stop gathering statistics right there. If the answer is no, then you have a problem. Too many people get bogged down in spreadsheets and bogus numbers - this really isn't that hard. Either the software you use gets in your way, or it doesn't.

Where Smalltalk helps is in the simplicity of the language - it stays out of the way of working on business problems. However: if your development process sucks, using Smalltalk won't help you - and from what McGovern writes, it sounds like process is a huge problem where he works.

Looks like Vista is landing with a thud within the federal government, too. Cringely reports:

It seems that the DOT has put the kibosh on all upgrades to Vista, Office 2007, or IE7 for at least another six months. The document’s money sentence: “There appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products.” No problems with Washingtonian double-speak there.

Cringely's record of reporting isn't spotless, but this is consistent with what other people are saying about Vista.

Technorati Tags: Vista

Avi has produced another screencast showing off DabbleDB - this one covering maps and charts.

Technorati Tags: dabbleDB

Precision Systems has sent along their latest batch of Smalltalk job postings:

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

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I spent some time at Borders last night, while my wife and daughter looked at fabric. I found one book I've been thinking of picking up, and another that just looked interesting. The first:

"Storm of Steel" by Ernst Jünger - a memoir of WWI from a frontline German soldier. The reviews for this book have been universally good; I'm looking forward to reading it.

"Stalin's Folly" , by Constantine Pleshakov, was written by a Russian born professor - a man whose mother lived through the war. It sounds compelling, and the first chapter or so was pretty spellbinding - it's partly informed by the Soviet archives, which only opened up after the collapse of the USSR. Another book I'm looking forward to.

Technorati Tags: history

Doc Searls has a modest proposal for what to do with Anna Nicole Smithy's remains:

Well, since Dr. Perper has already conducted a complete autopsy, requiring the admitedly temporary reassembly of Ms. Smith's remains, why not divvy them up like the relics of a saint? Perhaps bits of the pop culture goddess could repose in reliquaries at CNN , Playboy and other shrines, sparing members of her faith long trips to the Bahamas, Texas or wherever.

My wife's cynical theory is that some of these stories get play so that media folks can arrange a pleasant vacation - and there sure seemed to be a lot more "on location" reporting about Natalie Holloway than there was about anyone who disappeared in, say, Fargo.

ESUG has put out a call for contributions for this summer's conference - due to be held in Lugano, Switzerland.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we wrap up this week's topic of ciphers and encryption with a file validation using MD5 hashing.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I usually like Mike Arrington's posts, but yesterday, he fell into a classic forest/trees trap with the Digg imbroglio:

But my bigger problem is that Wired isn’t simply reporting news about Digg. They’re making the news. And they’re going negative. In the first example, they make a prediction that Digg will fall, comparing it to Friendster. No news was reported - it was just an out of the blue roundhouse punch at Digg. In the second example the reporter actually creates the story she writes about, and willfully violated the Digg terms of use in the process. And this was done for commercial gain - the Wired story describing this has received a ton of traffic (and is actually the number 1 story on Digg right now).

This is in reference to Annalee Newitz' "let's try to game Digg - yep, it can be gamed" experiment. Arrington attacks Wired for going after Digg and creating news. I have news of my own for Mike: Annalee simply publicized something that's happening - and that is news. Calling her reporting invalid because Wired's parent company also owns Reddit is willfully starting at the trees, all the while ignoring the forest.

Digg is being gamed massively in the political sphere (see Charles Johnson's site for info on that - and no, I'm not commenting on his, or anyone else's politics here). Politics attracts crowds, but I'd bet good money that Digg is being gamed in other areas, too.

Bottom line: you can push your head into the sand, like Arrington, and decide to ignore the problem based on who's talking about it. Or - you could actually pay attention to the problem itself.