Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

This sounds encouraging:

Comcast Corp. Chief Executive Brian Roberts dazzled a cable industry audience Tuesday, showing off for the first time in public new technology that enabled a data download speed of 150 megabits per second, or roughly 25 times faster than today's standard cable modems.

Here's what I want to know: will they still be limiting the upstream bandwidth to single digits? Recently, Verizon came through our area and installed FIOS. I was interested, until they came by and offered me exactly the same service Comcast does, at exactly the same price. You want me to buy something new? Offer me value somewhere!

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we learn how to draw lines using Cairo.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, graphics, cairo

Bert Freudenberg points to an article in C'T magazine (German here, English here) which highlights EToys on the OLPC

Technorati Tags: squeak, olpc

It looks like justin.tv is paving the way for the next stage in reality tv - it's even got a catchy name now: Lifecasting:

Valleywag says that Natalie Portman is working on a “lifecast” of her personal and working life, a la Justin.tv’s 24-hour streaming EdTV experiment. Said news, apparently, was leaked via a Twitter message by someone whose firm had been approached to fund her new venture (allegedly Silicon Valley VC oufit Charles River Ventures). This wouldn’t be the only time that Silicon Valley has met Silicone Valley, of course, but it still seems a little far-fetched to me -- but then, so did Justin.tv.

Ingram is right to be skeptical of anything coming out of ValleyWag, but even if this story is a bust, I suspect the trend itself will start rolling.

It seems that Second Life is having problems with illicit materials being passed through their system - which is a direct result of Linden Labs deciding to allow complete anonymity (on the back end - anonymity within Second Life could be maintained) on the part of users.

I'm wary of demands for authentication, but it all depends on what you're trying to build. Based on the article I linked to, Linden Labs is going through some fairly extreme contortions due to that policy. It's not clear to me why they don't just return to a policy of demanding a real credit card linked to a real address - seems to me that such a demand is a gate mostly for people who are unwilling to pay anyway.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, second life

I think Richard Parsons might need a history lesson:

"The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux nation," Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Richard Parsons said, referring to the Civil War American general George Custer who was defeated by Native Americans in a battle dubbed "Custer's Last Stand".

"They will lose this war if they go to war," Parsons added, "The notion that the new kids on the block have taken over is a false notion."

Hmm - last time I looked, the Sioux didn't win that war. Parsons might want to reconsider his metaphors :)

Technorati Tags: stupidity, media

Arden has published the ValueInterface code that he talked about at Smalltalk Solutions.

What the MPAA says (via Matthew Ingram):

There have been other gestures as well. Studios and movie distributors have been lobbying to have Canada placed on a high-priority international piracy “watchlist” along with countries like China and Russia. And Twentieth Century Fox made some vague threats earlier this year to hold back some of its top movies from Canadian release, because the risk of piracy was reportedly so high. One Fox executive said in January that Canadian cam-corder copies were “like an out-of-control epidemic,” and that the country had become ”a leading source of worldwide Internet film piracy.” He said Canada accounted for close to 50 per cent of illegal camcorder copies.

What reality says:

Dr. Geist notes that one of the most recent studies of movie piracy found the majority of illegally copied movies  over 75 per cent -- come from review copies or early releases that are sent to movie industry insiders, including reviewers at newspapers and magazines. Piracy experts say that camcorder copies are really only in demand for that brief window between when a movie is released for preview screenings and when the DVD is released. Canada obviously has DVD copiers too, but no one is saying we are an international leader (at least not yet).

It would be nice if the MPAA and the RIAA at least visited reality occasionally.

Technorati Tags: mpaa

Check out the new Gemstone blog - subscribe here.

Nick Carr reports that Google is starting to "police" the web:

To address this problem and to protect users from being infected while browsing the web, we have started an effort to identify all web pages on the Internet that could potentially be malicious. Google already crawls billions of web pages on the Internet. We apply simple heuristics to the crawled pages repository to determine which pages attempt to exploit web browsers. The heuristics reduce the number of URLs we subject to further processing significantly. The pages classified as potentially malicious are used as input to instrumented browser instances running under virtual machines. Our goal is to observe the malware behavior when visiting malicious URLs and discover if malware binaries are being downloaded as a result of visiting a URL. Web sites that have been identified as malicious, using our verification procedure, are labeled as potentially harmful when returned as a search result. Marking pages with a label allows users to avoid exposure to such sites and results in fewer users being infected.

That will be mostly a good thing, but I wonder how high the false positive rate will be? And - what will be your recourse with Google if your site gets marked as malware?

Technorati Tags: security, bots

Normally, I'd call Disney a great marketing firm - but they fall into the same "screw the customer" bucket as everyone else when it comes to video:

Walt Disney's ABC and ESPN are expected to announce Tuesday a deal with cable operator Cox Communications to offer shows on demand, but there's a catch. Cox will have to disable its fast-forward feature that lets viewers skip ads, The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site Tuesday.

Next: Cox will start fielding lots of phone calls claiming that the remote is broken. This breaks expected behavior, and it's a fairly large UI error; the sort that really torques people off. This shouldn't be that hard, actually: cable companies can tell exactly which videos (owned by which entities) have been requested via Video on Demand. Some kind of subscription based revenue sharing plan would be pretty easy to do, and wouldn't piss off customers. But hey - media companies are now all about pissing off customers.

Technorati Tags: marketing

I'm sure that some presenter at JavaOne could have gotten a laugh by using this graphic in their presentation :)

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at using Pango for text rendering in Cincom Smalltalk

Technorati Tags: Pango, smalltalk

Matthew Ingram finds some encouraging numbers in the latest Pew internet survey (PDF) - he highlights the finding that 37% of people say they've blogged, commented, created a web page, or uploaded a photo (the proxy for "web 2.0 use"):

What’s not to like about a number like that? I was expecting the proportion to be much smaller -- along the lines of the emerging 1-9-90 rule of thumb for social media, where about one per cent of people create content, 9 or 10 per cent consume it and about 90 per cent couldn’t care less about it. I find the fact that almost 40 per cent of people blog, upload photos, post comments and so on cause for considerable optimism.

Well, I'd step back and wonder if that really does go against the 1-9-90 rule. The thing I'd like to know would be this: of that 37%, how many actively and regularly do any of those things?

Technorati Tags: web2.0, media

Here's the difference between good writing and annoying writing: with each episode of "Heroes", it always ends too soon. With each episode of "Lost", there's another plot twist that mostly serves to make the audience wonder "why am I still watching this?" In two weeks, "Heroes" will wrap the season and give us answers. Meanwhile, "Lost" will keep playing with our heads.

Just when I thought the RIAA couldn't possibly get stupider, I found this story on Ars Technica:

In Florida, Utah, and soon in Rhode Island and Wisconsin, selling your used CDs to the local record joint will be more scrutinized than then getting a driver's license in those states. For retailers in Florida, for instance, there's a "waiting period" statue that prohibits them from selling used CDs that they've acquired until 30 days have passed. Furthermore, the Florida law disallows stores from providing anything but store credit for used CDs. It looks like college students will need to stick to blood plasma donations for beer money.

That's right campers, the RIAA thinks that second hand CDs are dangerous weapons. Treating your customers like common criminals: it's bound to bring in new sales!

Technorati Tags: RIAA, music

The Minneapolis Star Tribune must be one of the stupidiest outfits around - they decided to re-assign Lileks from columns to straight news reporting. Lileks is one of the funniest writers around - I wish I could turn phrases like he does. But hey - don't listen to me - listen to Dave Barry:

James Lileks, a terrific writer and one of the best newspaper columnists in America, says on his blog today that his newspaper, the Minneapolis-St.Paul Star-Tribune, has decided to kill his column and have him write straight local news stories. This is like the Miami Heat deciding to relieve Dwyane Wade of his basketball-playing obligations so he can keep stats.

Technorati Tags: newspapers

If you head on over to the public store and load the latest rev of Tools-Refactoring Browser. You may get an exception while loading (this is development code) - just open the debugger on the exception and hit the "Run" button. It will load fine.

Then open a new browser, you'll see this:

Scroll down, and you'll see that the RB has entered the current century - links that will launch a browser:

It's not specific to the "Overview" pane - links in comments will also be clickable (etc). Hat tip to Travis and Michael, with help from Bob W!

After a week's hiatus for Smalltalk Solutions, it's time to get back to Smalltalk Daily. Today, we load the CairoGraphics package from the public repository, and get started with some simple graphics.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cairo, gtk

John Dvorak has some condensed wisdom for corporate lawyers: you're in PR now, whether you like it or not:

First of all, lawyers can be idiots and have no sense of public relations. According to the New York Times and others, this entire current fiasco was started by the too-common threatening letter.

When an attorney sends out threatening letters to people these days, especially to bloggers and other Internet mavens, these documents get scanned and published online to be widely distributed.

This is in relation to the HD-DVD key fiasco, but it could be just about any of the recent bone-headed moves by lawyers without a working knowledge of the new rules of the game. As recently as 10 years ago, a threatening letter sent out would have silenced most people - the raw fear of being sued put most of the power in the hands of the lawyers. Now? It's far more balanced, as "word of mouth" often carries beyond a small circle of friends. Any company that's considering legal action should check with their web-savvy PR people first.

Technorati Tags: marketing

I just picked up a fascinating little book that Joseph Pelrine mentioned during his Scrum talk at StS 2007: "A Geography of Time", by Robert Levine. It's a tour of time perceptions - both culturally (around the world), and individually (how we perceive the flow of time based on events). I'm finding a lot to like about the book - the anecdotes about the introduction of 4 standard time zones to the US in the late 19th century was worth the price all by itself - based on who I works for (Cincom, based in Cincinnati, Ohio) - I found this amusing:

Some of the most vocal objections came from the state of Ohio. The Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, whose local time was being put back 22 minutes, wrote: "The Proposition that we should put ourselves out of the way nearly half an hour from the facts so as to harmonize with an imaginary lines through Pittsburgh is simply preposterous... let the people of Cincinnati stick to the truth as it is written by the sun, moon, and stars." The Commercial Gazette, calling it a "great stupidity" to acommodate the railroad's needs, continued until 1890 to publish railroad timetables under the heading "This is Cincinnati Time. Twenty Two minutes faster than railroad time".

Heh. It's a fun little book.

This is good news: "Lost" now has a definite end date:

ABC has agreed to let the producers of Lost set an expiration date for the series: three years in the future, Variety reported. The series will wrap after the production of 48 additional episodes that will be divided into three, shortened 16-episode seasons.

It sounds like the writers were starting to hear the criticism:

Cuse and Lindelof wanted an end date in order to mollify critics of the show who worried producers were simply spinning their wheels as they worked through the show's layer upon layer of mystery.

When your pitching staff if giving up runs like a waterfall gives up water, the answer is not to hire another pitcher my age... Here's an idea - find some guys in their 20s!

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

Doc Searls reports that Time Magazine has made their archives available:

TIME Magazine exposes all their archive editorial, going back to 1923. For free. So, when Joe Klein writes an essay for the magazine, he doesn't have to worry that his writing goes down what writers at less enlightened publications call "the $2.50 hole", within which which all old "content" continues to be "monetized" until the end of time (no pun intended). Even if it never sells to a single reader.

This is an example other media ought to follow.

Andres is making the contest code available for your perusal.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I recorded my roadmap session at Smalltalk Solutions on Tuesday, May 1st. I had to replace the audience questions with my own paraphrasing; the noise levels on those were just too high. It was a fun talk, with a lot of good audience interaction - I'm hoping that most of that came through.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, roadmap, cincom smalltalk

The AACS control folks are just starting to figure out how much people hate copy-protection schemes:

Mr Ayers would not comment specifically on the AACS group’s plans, but said it would take “whatever action is appropriate. We hope the public respects our position and complies with applicable laws.”

He said that tracking down those who had published the key was a "resource-intensive exercise".

According to a Google search, almost 700,000 pages have published the key.

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of internet law at Harvard Law School, said that assuming the key could break a DVD, it's distribution would infringe the provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA).

Good luck getting all 700,000+ sites to take down the key - especially those outside the US, where the DMCA isn't law. Sure, some of the people involved in this are pirating DVDs - but that's not really the issue. There are perfectly valid reasons to want to copy a DVD (what if I want to watch LOTR, but not carry my DVDs with me when I travel?). These schemes just piss off law abiding people, and they don't throw up so much as a speed bump to the pirates. Assuming that all of your customers are crooks is not a great CRM strategy.

I made a couple of corrections to the build script I posted the other day; I had some case sensitivity issues, and also two parcel paths that assumed my specific system setup. I've tested the script out on my Mac (works fine), so you should be able to use it without trouble now.

It was a good week for BottomFeeder downloads: 455/day. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows98/ME	2099
Windows	363
Linux x86	145
Update	131
Mac X	87
CE ARM	70
Mac 8/9	59
Solaris	51
Sources	36
HPUX	32
Linux Sparc	31
SGI	29
AIX	21
Linux PPC	15
ADUX	10
CE x86	3

That's more Windows downloads than I normally get for a weekly total :) On to the HTML accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	51.5%
Internet Explorer	35.8%
MSN Bot	6.3%
MSRBOT	2.8%
Opera	2.1%
Other	1.5%

And finally, the Syndication numbers:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Internet Explorer	23.9%
Mozilla	18.6%
BottomFeeder	14.5%
Google Feed Fetcher	4.9%
Net News Wire	4.3%
Other	4%
BlogLines	3.9%
FeedOnFeeds	3.9%
Vienna	3.9%
Safari RSS	3.3%
Liferea	2.6%
NewsGator	1.8%
Akregator	1.2%
Python	1.1%
Strategic Board Bot	1.1%
Paricls	1%
iTunes	1%
JetBrains	1%
Jakarta	1%
RSS Bandit	1%
MSN Bot	1%
Opera	1%

The overall numbers are up again, too.

Seems the NY Post got a little "out in front" of the MS/Yahoo merger story - and some people are pretty mad about it:

The New York Post owes everyone a good follow-up story.

You can't just drop a bombshell that jerks around 80,000 Microsoft and Yahoo! employees, rocks Wall Street and then fizzles before the day is over.

The Post should investigate -- and report -- whether its anonymous investment banker sources made any money off the huge run in YHOO caused by its story.

If the Post doesn't do this, the SEC might. We don't need any more reporter subpoenas.

Here's a thought: what if the SEC did less oversight in general? How long does supposed insider information stay inside before it leaks out to the market in general? Maybe a system where we just let the chips fall, and shame over looking stupid be the medicine would work better.

David Buck took notes at Thomas Staltzer's Home Automation talk at StS 2007 - I was attending Niall's talk at the time.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

The AACS has a nasty problem on their hands - how to deal with the tidal wave of anger from their activist customers. Witness the bluster from the group over the AACS key thing on Digg:

Bloggers "crossed the line" when they posted a software key that could break the encryption on some HD-DVDs, the AACS copy protection body has said.

Thousands of websites published the key, which had been uncovered in a bid to circumvent digital rights management (DRM) technology on HD-DVD discs.

Many said they had done this as an exercise in free speech.

An AACS executive said it was looking at "legal and technical tools" to confront those who published the key.

Translation: "Whoa, we had no idea that thousands and thousands of sites would flash mob us. We're hoping that some angry sounding bluster will fix the problem".

I don't condone theft - I'm in the commercial software business, for gosh sakes. However, we don't lock our product up with idiot key mechanisms, and we manage to make money. If the movie and music business concentrated on making their customers happy instead of on torquing them off, they might get somewhere with that.

I've now got BottomFeeder into a state where you can do a simple build using VW 7.5. Here's the build script I'm using for my development image - the only change necessary will be in the name you use to access the public story repository - I've saved mine under the name "cincomsmalltalk". Anyway, here's the script. Use it with this command line:

visual visual.im -filein build-bf-dev.st

| profile |
#(
     '$(VISUALWORKS)\database\OracleThapiEXDI.pcl'
     '$(VISUALWORKS)\contributed\PostgreSQL\StoreForPostgreSQL.pcl'
     '$(VISUALWORKS)\store\StoreForOracle.pcl'
     '$(VISUALWORKS)\parcels\RBSUnitExtensions.pcl'
     '$(VISUALWORKS)\net\NetClients.pcl'
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\contributed\Heeg\GHSpeedUpXMLParser.pcl'
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\parcels\Model-Observables.pcl' 
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\parcels\CE.pcl'
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\preview\Unicode\AllEncodings.pcl'
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\preview\Unicode\UnicodeCharacterInput.pcl' 
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\dllcc\DLLCC.pcl'
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\parcels\XSL.pcl'
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\parcels\UIPainter.pcl'	
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\opentalk\Opentalk-STST.pcl'
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\webservices\UDDIInquire.pcl'
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\contributed\WindowsGoodies.pcl'
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\parcels\MacExtra.pcl'
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\packaging\RuntimePackager.pcl'
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\contributed\VRGoodies\VRFileReading.pcl'
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\contributed\CraftedMemoryPolicy\CraftedMemoryPolicy.pcl'
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\waveserver\Wave-Server-Base.pcl'
	  '$(VISUALWORKS)\waveserver\Wave-Server.pcl'
) do: [:each |
        Parcel loadParcelFrom: each].

"set space sizes to a bigger client state"
ObjectMemory sizesAtStartup: #(5.0 5.0 10.0 5.0 2.0 10.0 3.0).

"read in VW Settings - the next two sections assume that you have 
saved your settings for Store, and that you have a connection 
named cincomsmalltalk"
Store.RepositoryManager importRepositoriesFromXmlOn: 'repositories.xml' asFilename  readStream.

"load from Store - connect to public store first"
profile := Store.RepositoryManager repositories 
	detect: [:each | 'cincomsmalltalk' = each name] 
	ifNone: [nil].
profile ifNil: [^self].
Store.DbRegistry connectTo: profile.

"now load from store"
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'ImageConfig') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'TransparentWindows') loadSrc.
(Store.Bundle newestVersionWithName: 'SpellChecker') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'WinGDIPlusInterface') loadSrc.
(Store.Bundle newestVersionWithName: 'EpiWin32Folder') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'GIFSupport') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'Weaklings') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'Emote-Support') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'ExtraEmphases') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'ExtraActivity') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'VRCommonDialogs') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'XmlRpcClient') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'SubForkPreload') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'SubFork') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'Http-Overrides') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'NetResources') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'NetResourcesHTTP') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'NetResourcesHTML') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'LibTidy') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'Browsing-Assist') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'OSTimeZone') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'XML Configuration Files') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'PatchFileDelivery') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'Twoflower') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'TwoflowerHTMLParser') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'Win32TaskbarSupport') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'Windows TrayIcons') loadSrc.
(Store.Bundle newestVersionWithName: 'WS-Pollock') loadSrc. 
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'SandboxedSmalltalk') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'ScalingScreenGraphicsContext') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'RelativeURL') loadSrc.
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'File Repository') loadSrc.
(Store.Bundle newestVersionWithName: 'WSBundle') loadSrc. 
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'CommonTypeMappings') loadSrc. 
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'BtfNamespace') loadSrc. 


"now load BottomFeeder"
(Store.Package newestVersionWithName: 'BFSharedicons') loadSrc.
(Store.Bundle newestVersionWithName: 'Blog-Tools') loadSrc.
(Store.Bundle newestVersionWithName: 'BottomFeeder') loadSrc.


"disconnect"
Store.DbRegistry disconnect.

"save image"
ObjectMemory saveAs: 'btf-dev' thenQuit: false.

I've managed to get a version of WithStyle into the store repository, and now I can start working on Bf itself. Once I'm done with this, loading Bf from Store should be easily possible.

Forbes is reporting that MS wants to get back into talks with Yahoo:

Software maker Microsoft Corp. asked search engine operator Yahoo Inc. to re-enter formal negotiations for an acquisition that could be worth $50 billion, the New York Post reported on Friday.

I can almost see Google rubbing their hands, Brer Rabbit like, thinking "please, please don't throw us into that briar patch!". If MS does end up buying Yahoo, they'll end up paralyzed for the next few years as middle management on each side goes to war. Mergers of entities that large almost never go well.

Update: I love this phrasing from Matthew Ingram: "MSFT and Yahoo: two icebergs, roped together"

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Yahoo

I'm just getting started on migrating BottomFeeder up to VW 7.5. There are some interesting issues, due to the open sourcing of With Style (and the fact that parts of it rely on a legacy rev of Pollock). I'm working through that though, and I should have a version that is fully loadable from Store at the end of it

Hey look at what those innovative guys in Redmond have done now - they claim to have invented sudo. There's just the small problem of prior art to deal with, but hey - it's not as if the US PTO seems to care about that...

If you like the podcast, you need to head back over to Podcast Alley and vote again - they reset to zero at the beginning of each month. Thanks for listening!

In addition to failing "business model 101", the RIAA can't even manage to figure out who to sue for copyright infringement. That could be due to their "pick a name out of the phonebook" approach to the matter:

Lee Thao was sued in the Eastern District of Wisconsin by BMG Music and other record labels for allegedly sharing files over the Kazaa network. The RIAA based its case on information that the cable modem used to partake in file sharing was registered to Mr. Thao. However, both the ISP and the RIAA failed to recognize that Mr. Thao was not a subscriber to the ISP at the time of the alleged file-sharing, and therefore did not have possession of the suspect cable modem at that time. Daliah Saper of Saper Law Offices represented Mr. Thao and got the case dismissed after pointing out to the RIAA's attorneys that they had made another blunder in their investigations.

I'd call them morons, but I might be insulting an actual moron somewhere...

Technorati Tags: DRM, music, stupidity

I just found out that my daughter's been posting some of her photos on the deviantart site (which I had never heard of before today). I was curious as to why she wasn't using flickr, but the only reaction that drew was "ewww". Anyway...

Here's one of the photos she snapped in our garden today:

She's got some nice looking shots over there in the gallery.

Technorati Tags: photography

Sounds like the Squeak Booth at StS 2007 worked out well:

As most of you know, due to the fantastic work of Chris Cunnington, Squeak was able to acquire a booth at Smalltalk Solutions this year. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to volunteer to work the booth for the two days of the convention. We had a fabulous location and got a tremendous amount of traffic. The Smalltalk community, while small, is one of the most intelligent, kind, supportive, and fun communities I have ever been involved in. I would like to thank all Smalltalk Solution attendees for there kind words, Squeak cheerleading, and help with answering questions when the crowds got large.

Bert Freudenberg was kind enough to lend us a OLPC laptop. This was the major draw of non-Smalltalkers to our booth. Many of the people knew nothing of Smalltalk but had heard of the OPLC project. The etoys demo was beautiful and if gave us a real opportunity to explain a little about Squeak, Smalltalk, and etoys.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, squeak

Lukas Renggli is giving a Seaside presentation at a Linux meeting in Geneva, Switzerland on May 22nd. Follow the link for details.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

Michael recounts his latest travel problems - I'd call this worse than usual, actually...

LOL is exactly the right phrase for this. Hat tip to my friend Mike :)

I have another batch of pictures from StS 2007 - I only had my camera phone with me, and I couldn't send myself the pictures while we were in Canada. First, another shot of the OLPC, swiveled around - and then a picture of Dale Henrichs and James Foster, during their GLASS presentation:

Next, two from the Seaside BOF: Carl Gundel talking about the Run Basic site (implemented in Seaside on VW), and Boris Popov, speaking about their web app, also in Seaside on VW:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I have a few pictures from Smalltalk Solutions; I'll happily post anything else that gets sent to me. The one on the left is Thomas Gagne, from his OLTP Talk, the one on the right is Aik Siong Koh, with his 3D CAD talk:

Next, Michael Lucas-Smith talking about C Connectivity, and a picture of the OLPC:

I'll have more posted soon.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Apparently, I missed a huge kerfuffle yesterday over HDTV CSS codes and Digg; Mark Bernstein has all the details. I think the upshot of this is: it's virtually impossible to disappear things from the web today. Once it's out there, it's out there. There are both upsides and downsides to that; either way, it pays to be aware of that fact.

Last talk of the show: Arden Thomas is talking about Application Frameworks. He's been using a derivative of the old "Slam Dunk" stuff from way back in the day at PPS. Today, he's talking about that. He's also building a new rev of this for Widgetry (briefly discussed today).

Arden put the original framework to use at a Hedge Fund he worked for during the early 2000's. He adapted it over time, since his employer wanted regular, tangible results (i.e., no going "off into a cave" for months to create it). Arden sometimes discusses this stuff on his blog. The idea behind any good framework: make things simpler and easier to understand - and facilitate reuse.

Most importantly: A framework should not get in your way and put you in a box. Eventually, you'll need to go outside of the box, and that shouldn't be hard to do. The two frameworks that inspired Arden (for Wrapper):

• Tim Howard's DomainInterface (from his book)
• Steve Abell's ValueInterface (this was inspired by Roby's "SlamDunk")

The main idea: "one" domain, held in a value model. Both frameworks avoided littering ApplicationModel with instance variables (which are just copy of domain instance variables anyway). The main thing is this: it's a set of simple ideas, consistently applied. What ValueInterface did is to use the dependency mechanism to auto-hook a UI and a domain via ValueModels (typically, AspectAdaptors and/or BufferedValueHolders).

AspectAdaptors translate UI level messages into things the domain will understand (and you automate this via naming conventions). BufferedValueHolders are simply wrappers on an underlying ValueModel. All of this allows for a very simple set of messaging - sending #value and #value: gets everything done, and changes at the domain level are automatically signalled up.

Moving forward, Arden is building a Widgetry based version of this. The rest: a Demo. Both the Widgetry version and the older ValueInterface (for Wrapper) will be pushed to the public store repository by the end of next week - so check the RSS feed :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

This afternoon, Niall Ross is doing a talk on Extreme UI Testing. Heh: from 1999:

One of the great things about the web is that it's trained our users to not be so picky. They're now accustomed to seeing UIs that look like garbage and change without notice"

Niall is probably right in saying that Ajax (and Apollo, and Silverlight) are undermining this assumption. For UI testing, there are options: SilverMark's Test Mentor, Dave Buck's VWUnit. James Foster has extended WinRunner as well. Niall says that these tools are good for retrofitting an existing system. They don't really support "Test First" (i.e., you can't click an unpainted widget).

An approach: Method Wrappers. Easily possible in VW and Squeak, since you can subclass CompiledMethod and muck with the method dictionary. In VA, you have to do some additional work. Why use MethodWrappers? Niall's earliest attempts at getting at widgets as UI operations returned things made code unpredictable. Using MethodWrappers, you can:

• Wrap the #open method
• Have it not actually open, but instead just report "yes, I was about to open"

You can extend that approach to other actions the UI takes and install before/after handling/reporting. Wrappers are a way to achieve what other languages do with "policy" code.

The ideal test is like a use case test at the "top" of the model layer. Niall uses a strategy pattern to automatically wrap threads that get forked off by looking up the stack to see if the code is under test (and if it is, make sure to install a wrapper). He wraps processes, deferred messages, completion helpers, etc. In VW, there's some additional cleanup necessary to ensure that WindowManagers (for example) get "kicked". In VA, you have to drain the event queues.

Summary:

• MethodWrappers are good for UI tests
• The same tests can drive the model layer and the UI layer
• You can still do this in multi-process UIs.

A lot of thanks to various people: John Brant, Don Roberts, Michael Lucas-Smith, and Reinout Heeck.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, testing

After lunch - Boris Popov is giving a Seaside Experience Report. Boris is using Seaside on VW, and is giving a shout out to Michel Bany, who maintains the Seaside port for VisualWorks. Boris works for DeepCove Labs - 4 Smalltalk developers (they are a part of a much larger company). I did a podcast on their applications with Joerg Beekman recently.

They build a payment processing platform (Raven) - multiple currencies/countries, multiple types of transactions. They do nearly everything in Smalltalk, they do use C libraries where they need to (external device connectivity, databases, etc). They are on VW 7.4.1, and are getting ready to move to VW 7.5. They have their own homebrew (simple) O/R mapping to their SQL Server database.

The Seaside app is a portion of their web portal - payment initiation and reporting. The project started a year ago, after the StS 2006 Seaside/Ajax presentation given by Avi Bryant. This was Boris' first real exposure to Seaside, and he built a simple prototype while he was flying back home - three hours of work.

Why did he care? They were using WebDAV before this, and it was kind of awkward. They wanted a web front end sooner rather than later. They wanted to avoid Servlets and SSP - looked harder than necessary, and they only had a few in-house resources. Boris showed his prototype off when he got back to the office - it was "cheesy" (his description :) ), but he got management buy-in to go forward. They had an actual mockup done in eight days.

Visual Design Matters: make it look slick as early as possible. A professional appearance helps out a lot. The layout affects functionality in that way. Key take away: don't let the developers do the designer's job. Find the right person and let them help you. When working with the designer, express what you want, not how it should be done. If you can agree on a working model, future updates are mostly a matter of CSS file updates.

They really wanted two factor authentication - they went with RSA. RSA has a strong presence in the financial sector. Verisign wouldn't even return their calls ("too small").

HTML Generation: It's not magic - you have to get down and do it. It's not templated - you send messages to objects - which is what makes it more like standard UI creation. You end up reusing and refactoring, not copy/pasting. Callbacks (blocks) make actions work a lot like they do in a UI framework.

They use some Ajax, but take a "don't use it unless you need it" approach". Using Seaside, you can go a long way in Smalltalk, as Lukas Renggli has wrapped the scrit.aculo.us library quite heavily. You can jump in and add custom Seaside if you care.

Boris' message: Don't worry, you won't get it right the first time - but you can iterate to the right answer quickly. What about Deployment? They started with Apache+SSL and a headful Seaside image. They allowed all static resources served from Seaside initially. They ended up shifting all static resources over to Apache. They then added load balancing across multiple images (session affinity).

They finally shifted the static resources out to S3 (Amazon), which lightened their load quite a bit. They pay Amazon about 24 cents a month right now.

Builds: They have an automated build process once all the tests pass.

• Upload all resources to S3
• Trim all sample/config apps
• Configure the app for deployment (set various Seaside/HTTP parameters)
• Save a headless image

The rest of the time was a short demo.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

Gemstone has had the most interesting set of stories out of this year's conference - they announced a free (including commercial use) version of Gemstone/S on Monday night, and today they are introducing GLASS - which puts together Seaside with a persistence story. Ruby on Rails is a large part of the inspiration behind the nomenclature. Seaside does what it does better than Rails (in our opinion) - but it has had no persistence (database) story.

The nice thing about Seaside is that you write applications in a very natural fashion using Smalltalk - the development pattern is more like that for traditional "screen" apps than most web application frameworks. Seaside came out of some Ruby work Avi Bryant did, but then moved to Smalltalk due to the better set of libraries and tools.

Seaside is attractive because it makes it much easier to create stateful applications over HTTP. The way it does this is via continuations - served pages can be associated with continuations (the stack). James Foster is now going through the standard Counter example that comes with Seaside. To support Seaside, you need continuations. We now have that in VisualWorks, ObjectStudio 8, Dolphin, Squeak, and Gemstone. Gemstone has added support because they can jump in and add value immediately with persistence.

Gemstone can work with internal web servers (Swazoo, Hyper, and Kom), or external servers - Apache (via FastCGI), or Lightpd (also via FastCGI). The Gemstone port is pretty nifty - they built an interface to Monticello and support loading straight from there. Interesting side effect there - they now use _ as an assignment operator, since Squeak code uses that. They do require spaces before and after - and this is a change from earlier revs of Gemstone.

Looks like something you'll want to head on over to Gemstone's site to take a look at. Since you can run multiple Gemstone VMs (hitting the same back end data), you can scale pretty much linearly. From the tools level, you can use VisualWorks, VisualAge, or Squeak to browse/edit code. The VW and VA interfaces are richer and more feature-full. The link above is a public "sandbox" that you can set up an account in and try things out in.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

The hype over Silverlight is already so far over the top as to be astonishing. Dare Obasanjo has declared Ajax to be an endangered species. Scoble says it's a complete game changer. There are more stories on Digg than I can shake a stick at.

I think it's time to step back, and Patrick Logan provides the tonic:

I want to *develop* on other platforms than Windows. Not just deliver. (Moot point for silverspoon -- it neither delivers nor develops on Linux, apparently.)

Microsoft is trying to create the kind of walled garden they stumbled into on the desktop out on the net. The problem is, a lot of us would rather develop/deploy on Linux (because it's easier to manage a Linux server remotely). At present, Silverlight is completely uninteresting if that's where you are, and they aren't likely to change that. That doesn't mean that MS won't be successful, mind you - I suspect that an awful lot of intranet applications are going to end up being Silverlight based. At the same time, I'll be surprised if Silverlight ends up displacing more than a trivial number of public facing Ajax apps - because Ajax doesn't limit you in the same ways. Adobe's Apollo, on the other hand - it's going to end up inside and outside. It's the game to watch, IMHO.

Update: Mark Pilgrim adds some thoughts to the "the hype is way overboard" side of the equation. Here's a thought: try Seaside :)

Technorati Tags: Ajax, silverlight, apollo

Bert Freudenberg is talking to us (and showing us) the OLPC device this morning. I've been skeptical of the machine, but it is an interesting device. They've done a number of interesting things to keep the price of the screen down, and yet still give you something that's visible in daylight (as opposed to this Thinkpad I'm typing on :) ).

The system is using Linux (somewhat stripped down RedHat), X11, GTK+, Cairo, and D-Bus (messaging framework for inter-application comms). The UI is "Sugar", written in Python. There's an AbiWord based editor, and a Firefox based browser. There are also two educational apps:

• TamTam (music)
• EToys (Squeak)

EToys is a media-rich authoring environment (I've used it in a software class I did for 4th and 5th graders a few years ago). EToys was influenced by the original Smalltalk-80 work at PARC, by LOGO, by Apple's HyperCard, and by Self (comes out in Morphic).

EToys is based on Morphic. You have Players, Costumes, and Uni-classes. Scripting is implemented by having classes created on the fly for you, and making the environment be instance based.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk