Support for command line scripting is something we've been thinking about here at Cincom - and you can take a look at our (very early) thoughts on the matter below:
When the support for this is more stable, I'll do a screencast on it
Troy points out something I'm sure many people know, but - like me - he wasn't aware of before:
A quick little item I thought I should share since I wasn't aware of it, but you can run JavaScript files from cmd.exe in Windows. I assume this is even easier in the Windows Power Shell, but for me it's pretty easy to type in "wcript" and away it goes.
Phil Windley reminds us that things like queues and asynchronous processing were not invented for software development. He also links to this oldie but goodie: why Starbucks doesn't use a two-phase commit
Technorati Tags: computer science
Sony is learning the hard way that games are about more than higher end graphics - they are being outsold 5-1 in Japan by the Wii:
Sony sold 45,321 units of the PS3 in May, compared with 251,794 units of the Wii. In April, the ratio was four to one in favor of the Wii, according to Japanese game magazine publisher Enterbrain.
That's got to hurt - and it has in terms of revenue losses: they lost $1.91 billion last year in the games division. That's not really a sustainable level of loss - bear in mind that their direct competition is for "hard core" gamers, and Microsoft can afford to burn a lot more cash on that battle. Meanwhile, Nintendo actually makes money on each console sold, and they're mostly hitting a different game demographic anyway. Depending on how the other parts of Sony do over the next year or two, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Sony exit the game console business completely.
Technorati Tags: management
In today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at loading parcels into a runtime - and what kinds of exceptions you need to catch when doing that (and why).
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
Dare Obasanjo asks some good questions about Google Gears, and how much it really helps the average developer:
I don't consider myself some sort of expert on data synchronization protocols but it seems to me that there is a lot more to figuring out a data synchronization strategy than whether it should be done based on user action or automatically in the background without user intervention. It seems that there would be all sorts of decisions around consistency models and single vs. multi-master designs that developers would have to make as well. And that's just for a fairly straightforward application like Google Reader . Can you imagine what it would be like to use Google Gears to replicate the functionality of Outlook in the offline mode of Gmail or to make Google Docs & Spreadsheets behave properly when presented with conflicting versions of a document or spreadsheet because the user updated it from the Web and in offline mode?
I hadn't really given Gears much thought, but Dare's right - Google has tossed a database API at us and called online/offline synchronization solved. Hmm - by that logic, I can take Seaside, note that Smalltalk database APIs exist, and call Seaside persistence "solved".
I suspect that most people would spot the flaw in any such claim I tried to make for my product; maybe Dare's post will make people do the same for Gears.
Technorati Tags: Google Gears, data synchronization
I missed this post (it's from early May), but in it, Phil Toland explores the "conventional wisdom" that you need native threads in order to scale. He gets to the Erlang thread model of green, "shared nothing" fairly quickly, and notes that using that approach - with multiple VMs and message passing - is a whole lot simpler.
The thing is, if you write a multi-threaded application in a single memory space, it's up to you to deal with all the state issues. If one of your native threads goes bats, it can hose the whole system. With green threads and multiple VMs, you have something that's a whole lot easier to understand, follow, and debug. Those multi-core systems are getting more common and less expensive - ask yourself whether the developers you have writing code for them are getting any cheaper.
Technorati Tags: threads, concurrency, scaling
I've taken the FeedLists out (if you load a feedlist, the directory structure will simply be added to your subscriptions). I've also eliminated the separate "Searches" folder - you can organize search feeds into whatever folder you think they belong in now. I also fixed a bug that's been plaguing me for awhile, and the answer came to me in the debugger.
Say you try to add a feed like Steve Rubel's from the auto-discovery: 'http://www.micropersuasion.com/rss.xml'
That 's actually a redirect to a FeedBurner feed, but the base VW handling of that was not mentally prepared for a redirect to a different host. So, I've patched that, filed a bug report with engineering, and loaded the patch for download (Package Http-Overrides in the update list). Enjoy!
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
CBS has had problems with fans of the series "Jericho" - they ended the season on a cliffhanger, and then cancelled it. Now, there's talk of a short season in order to "wrap up" the story arc. This is exactly why Joss Whedon always ended story arcs for "Buffy" with each season close - and why I wish the writers for "Veronica Mars" had followed that idea...
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at customizing a UI - we add a toolbar to a subcanvas. I use BottomFeeder as an example.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
For those of you waiting for stability in the 7.5 based (currently dev) version of BottomFeeder, I've now switched to it myself - so I'm enjoying my own dog food :)
Scoble accidentally remarked on an old news item, because his reader saw old content on the Google Blog as new stuff:
this post originally appeared in 2005 (I didn’t remember it from back then). Turns out that RSS kicked out a new version of this post. Both Bloglines and Google Reader users saw it again (that’s where I saw it).
Over the last two days, I've seen a ton of old stuff show up as unread in BottomFeeder. I've seen this kind of thing before, and it usually means a change in the content management system (and thus, all new GUIDs).
What the heck are the 2012 Olympic organizers thinking with this logo:
I like my wife's take on this - it looks like someone stepped on a commemorative mug, and the logo is a depiction of the resulting mess. All we need to complete that is some brown color for the spilled coffee.
In between a bunch of conference calls today, I got BottomFeeder into a better state. First, the development build that's up there now can be updated. Second, I've simplified the UI more and gotten look policy switching to work again (it had been broken in the 7.5 builds). So - if you want to try it out, download the dev build, apply updates, and restart.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
I've updated the BottomFeeder dev build again - the UI has been worked over a bit - here are some screen shots. Click through for full images - first, the main UI:
Next, the menu that pops up for the item list:
And finally, the menu that pops up in the HTML pane:
The general theme is simplicity - I've moved common items from the menus to an item level toolbar, and simplified the application level toolbar. The context menus in the main application area have been made much, much simler. Feedback? Send it here.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk, rss, atom, aggregator
Jon Udell noted an odd statement in a podcast he listened to on social innovation:
I looked at Microsoft and Gates, and thought, this man has changed AIDS like nobody else has on the planet. He has brought more money than has ever been brought to the issue. He's brought the focus of somebody who knows how to grow a business. And he said We're going to change it.' But actually if you really wanted to change AIDS or poverty in the world, what you would do is give away Microsoft free as an open platform for people to share information.
Hmm - here's a question for the Nic Frances, the guy who said that: where does he think the money that Gates is giving to charity came from?
PC World reports that the PTO is re-opening the Eolas patent claim against MS - you remember, the one that any non-lawyer in the software industry could tell was bogus? It seems that they might finally be having second thoughts. Good for them. There are only a bazillion more stupid patents they should toss after that one...
Technorati Tags: patent
I've taken a hard look at the BottomFeeder UI, and I've decided that some changes are in order. Here's what the upcoming 4.4 release will look like (click through for a larger image):
The menus in the lower pane and the item pane have been pared way back, and I've added an item specific toolbar above the items list. It's coming along; I'll be doing another development build soon.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
The mainstream media - owners and reporters - would do well to read this post. They could learn a lot
It's time for the weekly look at the logs again: Looks like BottomFeeder downloads are holding up, and 177/day. The platform details:
| Platform | BottomFeeder Downloads |
| Windows | 542 |
| Update | 190 |
| Linux x86 | 114 |
| Mac X | 93 |
| Solaris | 57 |
| CE ARM | 48 |
| Mac 8/9 | 42 |
| HPUX | 34 |
| Linux Sparc | 32 |
| AIX | 18 |
| Linux PPC | 17 |
| SGI | 14 |
| Windows98/ME | 12 |
| Sources | 8 |
| CE x86 | 8 |
| ADUX | 7 |
It's good to see the old Windows98/ME downloads dropping. On to the HTML page accesses:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Mozilla | 46.3% |
| Internet Explorer | 42.2% |
| MSN Bot | 5.5% |
| Other | 3.6% |
| Opera | 2.4% |
Looks about the same as always - off to the syndication numbers:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Internet Explorer | 33.8% |
| Mozilla | 21.1% |
| BottomFeeder | 11.7% |
| Google Feed Fetcher | 3.9% |
| Net News Wire | 3.7% |
| Other | 3.4% |
| Vienna | 3.2% |
| FeedOnFeeds | 2.9% |
| BlogLines | 2.7% |
| Akregator | 2.4% |
| Safari RSS | 2.2% |
| NewsGator | 1.8% |
| Liferea | 1.5% |
| XML-FeedPP | 1.4% |
| Python | 1.2% |
| mioNews | 1.1% |
| News Fire | 1% |
| Jakarta | 1% |
Looks like IE7 continues to build momentum there.
This afternoon we had an interesting talk about some of the meta-system in Smalltalk. We ranged over a wide variety of topics, through #perform, MessageNotUnderstood, and a whole raft of related things.
At the beginning of the podcast, I've added a new feature - each week, David Buck will be giving a "Simberon Design Minute", covering some topic in software design.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
Enclosures:
[http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/audio/2007/industry_misinterpretations-06-03-07.mp3 ( Size: 13375083 )]
Cees de Groot protests too much:
I can be long and short about this, but Google trampling privacy laws by publishing recognizable pictures of people with its new Street View feature means that my doubts about their “do no evil” PR slogan have vanished - it’s indeed just a PR slogan, not something they actually believe in and adhere to.
I’m a photographer, and this is a clear-cut case: if you want to publish pictures of people, you need a model release . Period. Google’s lawyers know that, but in their “we’re the king of the hill” arrogance, they simply don’t care.
If that were actually true, then no newspaper could ever publish pictures that include people. Likewise, the evening news would never have street scenes. If you're in a public place, how much privacy do you expect? There are webcams all over the public sphere now - on the morning news, I regularly see coverage of highway traffic during the morning rush hour reports.
If Google is invading privacy with their street pictures, then every news organization on the planet has been invading privacy since the invention of the camera. Cees (and everyone else who seems to have jumped to wild conclusions on this) needs to take a few deep breaths and relax.
There were problems with the parcel (update) load code - I had managed to include an outdated component in my build directory. So... Another dev build is up. As usual, please send bug reports here.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
It's stories like the "Collapsing Colony Disorder" thing with bees that make me wonder about the supposedly "professional" media. I ran across this column today by an expert in the field of entomology, and it sounds like this phenomenon isn't as worrying as it's been played up - it's not new, either. It's when I got to this paragraph that I realized I had run across another batch of endless hype:
Sixth, it's never a good idea to trust what the media are telling you. At least once in the present case the media got something completely wrong and created a huge mess: The story about cell phones was basically a misrepresentation of what one pair of reporters wrote about a study that they misinterpreted. In a nutshell, the original research didn't involve cell phones, and the researchers never said their research was related to honey bee colony die-offs. Even details like the alleged Einstein quote are dubious. No one has yet found proof that Einstein said anything about bees dying off the earliest documented appearance of the "quote" is 1994 and, yes, Albert was dead at the time.
This goes back to something I've said before - whenever mainstream media reports on a field I know something about, the errors are usually large and obvious. This makes me wonder about the fields I know little or nothing about, and leads me to believe that most reporters don't even qualify as generalists. The exceptions tend to be in narrow fields where you get truly passionate people - sports and movie/theater reviews, for instance.
What's happening with the web right now is that the minimal generalists of the media are being disintermediated as our sole sources of information - we can now hear from actual experts who can give us their opinions without "joe reporter" as the middle man. For obvious reasons, reporters dislike this trend, but that's the way it is. The carnage that's happening in the US newspaper business is the leading edge of that change-over, and it can't happen soon enough as far as I'm concerned.
Technorati Tags: newspapers, reporting
I've posted a new development build of BottomFeeder - there was a problem with the update system, so to get the new code, you'll have to download the updated baseapp*.zip file. As usual, report bugs to me.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
This isn't the perfect test of average computer use, but it's very telling that an old Mac Plus mostly beats a new dual core system on tasks like loading a document or spreadsheet. Just as software has moved into the land of utter baroqueness with Java and C#, operating systems have done the same.
SciFi Wire reports that Olmos was right a couple months ago: Battlestar Galactica is ending after the next season:
The producers of SCI FI Channel's Battlestar Galactica confirmed that the upcoming fourth season will be the show's last. Executive producers Ronald Moore and David Eick said that it was a creative decision to end the acclaimed series with the upcoming 22-episode season.
Technorati Tags: scifi
Must be that time of year - my wife wants plants for the gardens, and I wanted a simpler toolbar for BottomFeeder. I've just published some changes that clear some clutter out of the toolbar and the main system menu.
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we go back to yesterday's polymorphism example - but we create the shared API dynamically as we test the code in the debugger.
Bob Westergaard shows off some nifty pragma tricks, and wraps up with a screencast of some work in progress classic game porting to Cincom Smalltalk.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
Looks like Major League Baseball is joining the "our current business plan uber alles" space that's already crowded by the clue-free minions of the RIAA and MPAA - they are calling Slingbox bad when it's used to watch a baseball game:
"...if a league can't protect the rights they (sell), that doesn't bode well for future contracts when they want to resell the rights at higher margins," says George Kliavkoff, who was vp business development at MLBAM before becoming chief digital officer at NBC.
At least he's upfront about what this is all about: preservation of current high margins. However - is he under some delusion that the sports watching public is going to start traveling extensively, and then - already jet-lagged - stay up to watch baseball games? This is a trivially small audience we're talking about here. Do they think people are going to invite the masses to their hotel rooms in order to watch out of region games?
Technorati Tags: copyright, baseball, broadcasting
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at Ad-Hoc Polymorphism - how arbitrary Smalltalk objects can be made to conform to an API.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk, polymorphism
Wow - today marks the fifth year for this blog. I can hardly believe that I've been at it this long; here's a link back to the first post - back then I had no idea what I was going to do with the blog, and I didn't have a feed. At first, I had this multi-person blog idea in my head, so if you look back at early June 2002, you'll see a couple of posts from other people.
Here's to another five years of fun on this site!
I think this little cluster**** demonstrates that MS has gotten so large that its constituent parts have no idea what the rest of the company is up to. First, they give the guy behind NUnit MVP status - then, they sic lawyers on him for some unspecified (and from the looks of it, utterly bogus) EULA violations.
I have to say, this kind of behavior would make me think twice about working on their platform...
Technorati Tags: marketing, management
The Toronto STUG is meeting on June 4th:
The next Toronto Smalltalk User Group meeting is Monday, June 4. These meetings are open topic workshops. We'll probably review Smalltalk Solutions and GemStone's Seaside offering. Internet and power outlets are available, so bring your laptop. We also have a LCD projector to demo individual work.
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I'm reading a nice little book on the last
surge into Europe attempted by the Ottoman Empire -
"The Siege of Vienna". The most interesting aspect of this to me is how many things were going on in Europe at the time - Charles II died, was succeeded by James II - and that precipitated "The Glorious Revolution". Louis XIV was on the throne of France, and his machinations were part of what caught the Habsburgs so off guard with respect to the Ottoman attack (1683). And of course, European colonial expansion was just starting to explode at the time. It really was an amazing time period in world history. |
Technorati Tags: history
So here's my next question about Google Gears: Why doesn't Google calendar work with it? Sure, it's early, but you would think that they would have gotten the obvious applications integrated immediately. Is Google getting so big that the left hand has no idea what the right hand is up to?
It's been a quick trip down for the Yankees - I just spotted a headline that reads "Yankees Win!" with this subtitle:
No, you're not seeing things.
This season has just been disturbing. It's like I'm watching Horace Clark and his crew take the field...
Technorati Tags: baseball
Amidst all of the hype about Google Gears, something occurred to me - the thing that makes this possible is the explosion of storage space. Not so very long ago, getting more than a few gigabytes of storage was very expensive. Now? Between inexpensive USB drives and cloud storage, there are no real limits anymore. A quick count of the USB drives in my office shows just under a terabyte of storage, for instance.
Technorati Tags: web2.0
Hmm - I see that Jason Calacanis is pumping Mahalo:
Mahalo is the world's first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven't yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.
How is this different from something like dmoz?
The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.
The difference seems to be that Mahalo's editors are paid, whereas dmoz' are volunteers. I guess we'll see over the next couple of years whether that makes a difference or not - the problem with non-automated search is that results tend to get stale fast.
Can someone explain the concept of testing to Bobby Woolf? I thought he'd get that kind of thing, but not so much:
Declared interfaces, like clean air and clean underwear, are easy to take for granted until you don't have them. I used to do my OO programming in Smalltalk, which is a great language; but one deficiency I always felt (and this is heresy for a Smalltalker to say, but I'm saying it anyway) is the runtime binding -- what I came to think of as extremely weak typing. Smalltalk variables had no declared type/class, so practically any code with correct syntax would compile. It wasn't until runtime, when a client invoked a message on an object, that the environment determined the variable's object's class and looked at the class to see if it implemented a method with that signature. So you didn't really know if your code worked until you ran it, and you got lots of runtime errors that finally uncovered your simple programming mistakes.
That's perhaps the most uninformed paragraph I've read in a long while. Since you can run Smalltalk code at any time, not testing it takes effort - even if you don't have unit tests, ad-hoc testing gets done all the time (I do it with my blog server and with BottomFeeder all the time). That class of error is what static typing advocates are certain Smalltalk must suffer from - but in practice, we just don't see many errors of that sort in a sealed application (and we can deal with the ones that do happen).
Along those lines, there's a kind of testing that's much, much simpler to do in Smalltalk than in the languages Bobby seems to favor now - live testing. Say you are trying to hook up some client tool to your server using a poorly specified API like MetaWebLog API - it's common for person A to interpret the spec one way, while person B interprets it another. What I've done is have someone hit my test server with a client, and had the inbound message break in a debugger - and then I've fixed my code to match the client while it was waiting for a response.
You can have all the declared interfaces you want, but they don't always help in the real world, when you are hooking up disparate pieces that were implemented by different people reading the same spec differently. Maybe in Bobby's ideal world, that doesn't happen:
XML does for data what Java interfaces do for code: It strongly types the data by declaring its schema (much like the DDL for a relational database schema). XML data has to be well formed to be parsed. It can also be valid, meaning that it fits the agreed-upon data structure. That structure is declared in an XML schema which the XML data is validated against. So when the consumer of some XML data can't consume it successfully, the development teams have a much more objective and less political means to determine where the problem is: a validating parser. Either the XML data validates against the schema--in which case the consumer has a bug--or it doesn't--in which case the generator has a bug (or the data validates yet the consumer finds flaws in it, in which case the schema needs to be improved).
*Cough* MetaWebLog API *Cough*. Or RSS. Two widely used XML Specs that demonstrate just how deep the rabbit hole goes - and how far off in WS* fantasy-land Bobby has travelled. Come on back to Smalltalk, Bobby - the water's fine, and we can handle specs that make your Java code pitch fits.
It's refreshing to see that the software industry isn't the only place where Gartner has no clue - listen to them on the Wii:
The newly published article cites Van Baker of analyst firm Gartner suggesting of the Wii: "Its appeal is primarily to casual gamers, and there's a serious question about how long casual gamers will stay engaged with the platform... It wouldn't be surprising to see them lose interest after a relatively short amount of time."
I suspect that Baker has never used a Wii, or attended a party where one is around. The Wii gets everyone engaged - serious game players and casual audiences. The Xbox and PS3 pretty much hit one demographic: the hard core.
The last time I looked, the hard core gaming crowd wasn't as big as the casual one, but hey - that's a complicated thing for a Gartner guy to wrap his head around - he might have to engage with the real world, or something.
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we go back to blocks, and use a couple of examples suggested to me by Travis Griggs.
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Cincom is pleased to announce a set of seminars on the upcoming (August 2007) ObjectStudio 8 product in June. We have the following dates and locations scheduled: |
Want more information? Head over here.
Technorati Tags: ObjectStudio 8, ost, smalltalk
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