Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

My friend Mike took this shot while I was making my way around the ice, periodically annoying his children :)

In the "small world" category, behind me is my friend Mark, who I met back in 7th grade in NY State.

My daughter had to rush from one skating rink to another today - a lesson followed by a birthday party. At the latter event, I decided to put on a pair of skates myself, and see how well I remembered the whole thing - I think I've been on skates 2-3 times since I was a kid.

Well, it's apparently like riding a bike - the muscle memory all came back (except for the stopping bit - a little girl who insisted on flying back and forth in front of people, including me, tripped me up at one point) - watch out for the old guy on skates :)

All in all, it was pretty enjoyable - I might actually skate at some of the open sessions my daughter attends. Victoria took the picture above while she skated backwards in front of me - showoff :)

I just finished "The Ghost Map", a book that covers a Cholera outbreak in 1854 London - and more importantly, the forensic footwork by Dr. John Snow and Rev. Henry Whitehead that traced the outbreak to a contaminated pump on Broad Street.

There's an interesting little epilogue as well, that catalogs the rise of urbanization in the world. Right now, roughly 50% of the world's population lives in urban areas, and if current trends continue, that will likely be 80% by the middle of this century. That's an unabashedly good thing, so far as the author is concerned, based on the fact that urban areas make many problems (transit, public health, sewage, etc) easier to deal with. He also lays out a few possible threats to that trend - a new plague of 1918 (or greater) proportions, nuclear terrorism - things of that nature. The epilogue is probably worthy of a whole separate book. In any case, I'd highly recommend this book - if nothing else, you'll learn how far urban health has come in the last century and a half.

This is too funny:

Register Hardware reader Matt Kyte sent us a pic he took of a PC World catalogue page. On offer, a Packard Bell desktop and a Toshiba notebook. Both machines' screens clearly shown with Mac OS X browser Safari - ironically being used to display Microsoft's Windows Vista website.

Of course, it's understandable :)

Sean McGinty has posted step by step instructions for using the X11 VM in order to run VWNC on an intel Mac - something I probably should have done eons ago. Thanks Sean!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Updated numbers for BottomFeeder downloads: I had a typo in my date scan range, so the numbers are normal, as opposed to what I pushed up earlier. It was still a very respectable 284 per day, which is above average:

Off to the HTML Page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	45%
Internet Explorer	38.9%
MSN Bot	6.9%
Planet Smalltalk	4.9%
Other	2.4%
Opera	1.9%

The raw traffic numbers are about the same as always, but the totals for IE have gained relative to Firefox. Also - why am I getting so much traffic from the MSN and Planet Smalltalk Bots? Off to the RSS page access

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	22.7%
Planet Smalltalk	20.3%
Mozilla	14.7%
BottomFeeder	11.3%
Other	5.8%
BlogLines	5.4%
Net News Wire	4.6%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.4%
Safari RSS	2.5%
Vienna	1.6%
NewsGator	1.5%
Akregator	1.2%
Python	1%
News Fire	1%
RSS Bandit	1%
SharpReader	1%
JetBrains	1%

Planet Smalltalk is still being a bad robot...

Doc Searls links to a guy arguing that internet broadcasters should just use pod-safe music (and cut themselves off from the RIAA's madness). That madness is detailed here, in Doc's Linux Journal column:

In a move that recalls the Vogons' decision to destroy Earth to clear the way for a highway bypass through space (a thankfully fictional premise of Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), the judges comprising the Copyright Royalty Board have decided to destroy the Internet radio industry so the Recording Industry won't be inconvenienced by something it doesn't know, like or understand.

This whole thing is amazingly stupid. The recording industry clearly doesn't understand the internet; it doesn't stop at the waterline. This is going to go the same way the spammers went (and it wouldn't surprise me to see the same people involved): overseas, to low regulation areas. The music industry has two choices: they can charge the money they want (but won't ever collect), or they can charge a reasonable rate based on the changed market. Not having a close relationship with reality, they are trying the first path.

Technorati Tags: RIAA, stupidity

Last week, while I was in Cincinnati, I recorded a podcast with Alan Knight and Michael Lucas-Smith on GLORP. We had a good conversation about the technology, and about O/R mapping in general.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, GLORP

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