Ok, I just got something out of Facebook that I probably would not have gotten another way: I connected with someone I used to hang with back in high school, who I had not seen since the early 1980's - he must have found me via the high school class lookup. I have to admit, that was kind of cool.
Technorati Tags: social software, web 2.0
I've reorganized the index page for Smalltalk Daily - the Seaside screencasts were on the general web development page; now there's a Seaside specific page.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk daily
How can you tell when a vendor doesn't have to care about their customers? When they do things the Comcast way:
Last month Dave Winer noted that Comcast's installation procedures require the use of Internet Explorer. Another Comcast user makes the same complaint. "They helpfully provide you with a CD that has a custom Comcast-branded version of IE5 for the Mac, because Apple hasn't shipped a Mac in quite a few years that has IE5 on it by default."
Even Comcast's web page shows an apparent bias against Mac users — or anyone not using Internet Explorer. When you click the page's "Games" hyperlink, an error message pops up, warning that the site "is not optimized for Firefox browsers or Macs."
If they had to compete for customers, instead of being the only (or, at worst, one of two) choice, would they act this way? I really doubt it
Well, this is good news: The RIAA has been ordered to pay the legal fees for one of the innocent people they decided to extort sue:
In what appears to be the first known case of its kind, the RIAA has been ordered to pay a defendant nearly $70,000 in attorney fees and costs after unsuccessfully suing for copyright infringement.
More of that wuld be a good thing.
Technorati Tags: RIAA
If you like irreverant and snarky takedowns of the "web 2.0 elite", then have a look at the Uncov blog. This week seems to "throw rocks at Steve Rubel" week over there.
Technorati Tags: web 2.0
About a week ago, we had some phishing files uploaded to the Wiki - which caused us a bit of grief. Today, I see that the Italian police have found the people behind the scam:
The Guardia di Finanza (Military Financial Police) cuffed 18 Italian citizens and eight Eastern Europeans as part of "Phish and Chip", an operation aimed at dismantling a gang targeting users of Poste Italiane's home banking services.
I'll have to keep monitoring the Wiki though - it's not like these are the only bad actors out there.
Technorati Tags: phishing
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we continue our look at some of the other APIs in class Dialog - confirm dialogs, warnings, etc.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
You have to love this - I'm in Dayton, waiting for Arden to arrive, and I decided to refresh my Facebook page. Here's what I got:
That's "Web Marshal", which has apparently classified Facebook at Porn. It also calls a bunch of blogs I read that way. All I can say is... lol.
Update: Click through for a larger image
Dare Obasanjo points out an issue with static typing when it runs into dynamic services:
While I was driving to the office I noticed another email from one of the services that integrates with ours via a SOAP-based XML Web Service. As part of the design to handle a news scenario we added a new type that was going to be returned by one of our methods (e.g. imagine that there was a GetFruit() method which used to return apples and oranges which now returns apples, oranges and bananas) . This change was crashing the applications that were invoking our service because they weren’t expecting us to return bananas.
However, the insidious thing is that the failure wasn’t because their application was improperly coded to fail if it saw a fruit it didn’t know, it was because the platform they built on was statically typed. Specifically, the Web Services platform automatically converted the XML to objects by looking at our WSDL file (i.e. the interface definition language which stated up front which types are returned by our service) . So this meant that any time new types were added to our service, our WSDL file would be updated and any application invoking our service which was built on a Web services platform that performed such XML<->object mapping and was statically typed would need to be recompiled. Yes, recompiled.
And yet, this sort of thing makes some people feel safe.
Technorati Tags: static typing, dynamic typing
Thinking about Facebook this morning, a friend of mine said "I'm concerned that having a face in a place and not being active there is worse than not having a face.". Which is probably true - it's like having a blog you stop posting to, or an email address you ignore.
So - I went ahead and set up a "Smalltalkers" group on Facebook, to give us Smalltalk people more presence. I'll have to see how that goes, and whether I end up keeping up with it - I already have various projects (plus my real job) to deal with :)
Old media is getting beaten up everywhere - newspapers are just one of the more visible victims. In the tech world, the "old" tech journals are getting ripped. Forbes notes the decline here - you can also see it in things like ComputerWorld. Just this week, they flipped from the tabloid format to the smaller magazine form.
That's not the biggest problem though. As Forbes notes, if your journal exists to break tech news, how can you possibly survive against the 24x7 nature of sites like ValleyWag and Engadget? News analysis is one possibility, but you can get that online, too. As the ad dollars for these pubs decline, I expect the free distribution (I get tons of free journals) to start drying up fast.
Technorati Tags: newspapers, journals
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at the API for File Dialogs.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
Well, let's see how this plays out - I've joined Facebook - we'll see how it works out :)
Technorati Tags: Facebook
Looking around the blogs I read, the buzz for the last few weeks has been all Facebook, all the time. Before that, it was all Twitter. There's also a bit of Pownce buzz going around. I joined Twitter and Pownce, although I can't really say that I've seen a lot of value in either one; there's tiny bits of information conveyed in both, and the people I really need to talk to I deal with via IRC and IM. Sure, if I had a gazillion people to track, I'm sure IM would get out of hand. Then again, I couldn't possibly keep up with that many people, either.
So anyway - that leads me to today's ponder point: should I be using Facebook? I can tell from Scoble's posts on it that it can suck down time if you let it; on the other hand, it might well be a useful way to make and keep contacts - see Dare Obasanjo's post today, for instance, on some of the high profile users.
So I'll toss the question out for feedback: would using Facebook pay me back enough dividends to make up for whatever time I would have to sink into it?
Technorati Tags: web 2.0, facebook, social media
It's been one of those days where I've felt busy the whole day, but it's hard to remember exactly what I was busy with. I did have a bunch of conference calls, and those chew up time :)
Anyway, I'm headed to Cincinnati for a few days tomorrow - but never fear, I've got "Smalltalk Daily" episodes queued up right through Thursday.
Technorati Tags: travel
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at the Settings framework in Cincom Smalltalk - and how you can use it to provide your own application settings tool.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
This week we talked about Application Development in Smalltalk - using our experience with BottomFeeder (James), ElastoLab (Dave), and WithStyle (Michael). We ended up talking about graphics, process models, and C interfacing as they relate to building real apps in the real world.
It was a wide ranging conversation, and we had a lot of fun doing it.
Technorati Tags: application development, smalltalk
Enclosures:
[http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/audio/2007/industry_misinterpretations-07-16-07.mp3 ( Size: 13482133 )]
Sci Fi Wire reports that Farscape might come back as an echo:
SCI FI Channel will revive its popular original show Farscape as a Web-based series of short films on SCIFI.COM's SCI FI Pulse broadband network, part of a slate of new original online programming.
Before the last season, this would have been of more interest to me. It got really, really stupid during that last season.
Worse than Failure explains how blogging works at your larger enterprises :)
It's getting to the point where every single time I see a news story on something I know, it's deeply flawed. Other people are noticing the same thing - see Duncan Riley on the WSJ's "10 years of blogging" column. How hard can it be to use Google?
Technorati Tags: fact checking
Scoble answered my earlier query about Facebook, but I find his answer interestingly contradictory:
Heck, last night I was trying to use Anagram to see if I could easily save contact info from Facebook into Outlook. It wasn’t working. Turns out that it’s very hard to get data OUT of Facebook. (Anagram is a cool utility to grab emails, Web addresses, and other info off of emails and Web pages and add them to Outlook’s contact manager).
First, he notes that Facebook isn't terribly open - data goes in, and it doesn't come back out. You're left with the screen scraping kind of access that Jon Udell has written about so often. He then goes on to still call it open:
Look at how that cool new Google Reader app works inside Facebook. Data comes in, but it doesn’t leave.
That leads me to why Facebook is cool and AOL wasn’t. Facebook is somewhat open where AOL wasn’t open at all. Facebook is evolving rapidly because they opened up to third-party developers where AOL didn’t open up to third-party developers.
By that token, any proprietary application is "open" if third parties can write software for it. I think I'm still confused :)
Add that component to your own Facebook Profile and hook it up to YOUR OWN Google Reader shared page (I call it a link blog, but Google calls them “Shared Items.”). If you do, you’ll see a page that lets you see your shared items, your friends’ shared items, and top shared items. Wait a second, top shared items? Yeah! But only from other Facebookers. It shows you top items for the past 12 hours, or 24 hours, or 48 hours, or the past week. And it shows how many times each item was shared.
Here's the part I find fascinating: 10 years ago, there were walled gardens like Facebook that had a lot of members - AOL (and its pre-internet brethren) that had made the jump to the web. There were even primitive social software applications - recall that AIM was initially an AOL only thing.
The nascent "web community" did nothing but talk smack about it. Yet here we are, a decade later - and Facebook is more or less "AOL 2.0". Sure, it's opened itself up to application developers more, but that has more to do with current "fashion" than with anything else.
So here's my question: why was AOL looked down on, and Facebook is admired? Is it as simple as "all the cool kids like Facebook" ?
Well, I stayed up late playing Civ IV, and there in my mailbox when I finished was a Pownce invite. I have a few left, so if you're curious about it, send me a request and I'll drop an invite. It's a lot like Twitter, but without an API (yet - supposedly one is coming). Until then, it's more or less a semi-closed beta.
Still - I'll keep my eyes on it and see what develops.
This looks like a satire page, but real or fake, the Hide-A-Pod is hilarious :)
I could go extra negative on Vista, but it's useful to remember that XP wasn't fully "baked" until service pack 2. Vista has only been out for 6 months - so the sorts of driver issues mentioned in the linked article really aren't much of a surprise.
Update: I'm promoting this from the comments, as I've said things very much like this about Vista before. It's no accident that I'm running XP in Parallels on this Mac :)
I think that when Vista went back for a rewrite, they canceled anything new and concentrated on pleasing the media companies. They should have concentrated on pleasing the user and owner of the computer instead.
Time for my weekly look at the logs - BottomFeeder downloads went at a rate of 227/day, which isn't bad. The details:
| Platform | BottomFeeder Downloads |
| Windows | 504 |
| Mac X | 218 |
| Linux x86 | 215 |
| Update | 157 |
| Solaris | 81 |
| Mac 8/9 | 70 |
| HPUX | 69 |
| Windows98/ME | 63 |
| CE ARM | 58 |
| AIX | 42 |
| Linux Sparc | 30 |
| Linux PPC | 30 |
| SGI | 23 |
| Sources | 18 |
| CE x86 | 10 |
| ADUX | 4 |
Next, the HTML stats - Mozilla still rules those, and my raw traffic bounced back after the holiday week:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Mozilla | 53% |
| Internet Explorer | 39% |
| MSN Bot | 4% |
| Other | 2.6% |
| Opera | 1.4% |
The syndication usage continues to rise, and IE access to it is staying high:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Internet Explorer | 32.9% |
| Mozilla | 22.3% |
| BottomFeeder | 11.5% |
| Net News Wire | 4.5% |
| Other | 4.1% |
| Google Feed Fetcher | 3.8% |
| Vienna | 3% |
| Safari RSS | 2.9% |
| FeedOnFeeds | 2.7% |
| BlogLines | 1.9% |
| NewsGator | 1.9% |
| Akregator | 1.5% |
| JetBrains | 1.4% |
| Liferea | 1.3% |
| XML-FeedPP | 1.3% |
| Python | 1% |
| News Fire | 1% |
| Jakarta | 1% |
There's only one day left to get early bird registration prices for the ESUG Conference in Lugano this August.
If you like Harry Potter and Dr. Who, then pay attention to tonight's episode - there's a Potter reference in a very appropriate spot :)
I see it's Continental Airlines turn to play "let's create a stupidity driven PR event". Here's what seems to have happened: a long delayed (weather) flight finally taxis for takeoff, and a toddler sees a plane out the window - and starts saying "Bye Bye Plane" - over and over again.
Yeah sure - after the 20th time or so, I'm sure that got annoying. However, it didn't justify what one of the flight attendants did - ask the mom to shut the kid up, and then, when the mother refused to give the kid something to knock him out, claimed that the woman had threatened her as a way of getting the Captain to turn the plane around:
"She put her hand on her hip and informed everyone that it was her plane and she was not going to listen to it. And she then went to the flight attendant station, was there for a few minutes, came back and informed the cabin that we were turning around. And she looked at me and said, 'You and your baby are getting off the plane.' And we did, we turned around and security came and escorted my child and me off the plane."
That was bad enough, but a prompt apology from management would have put this to rest. But no - management pulled the stupid pills out, and issued this statement:
A spokeswoman for Express Jet Airlines told 11Alive News that due to potential litigation over the incident, the company would have no comment other than this statement: "We received Ms. Penland's letter expressing her concerns and intend to investigate its contents."
I'll say it again: pushing lawyers out to do PR work is a really, really stupid idea. This makes the airline look like a set of callous idiots, and ensures that the matter will roll forward towards a lawsuit. An apology would almost certainly have ended the matter. Sure - the pet theory is that an apology is an opening to legal damage, but this kind of response is an invitation to ridicule - and it does nothing to stop the possibility of a lawsuit anyway.
Instead of looking at everything through the lens of legal risk, it's long past time for companies to look at things through the "how would I want to be treated" lens.
Technorati Tags: marketing, management
Readers of this blog know that I read a lot of history, so imagine my astonishment at this news: Britain is dropping a bunch of prominent figures as required parts of the curriculum:
Britain's World War II prime minister Winston Churchill has been cut from a list of key historical figures recommended for teaching in English secondary schools, a government agency says.
It doesn't stop there:
But although Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Stalin and Martin Luther King have also been dropped from the detailed guidance accompanying the curriculum, Sir Winston's exclusion is likely to leave traditionalists aghast.
This is fairly stupid. I can't even tell why they think this is a good idea. They claim to be giving teachers "more flexibility" in covering history; how do you propose to cover the 1930-1950 era without mentioning those people?
Wired has today's "too simple to believe" criminal story:
A Pennsylvania thief uses a default master passcode to get extra cash from a grocery store ATM machine. Police are baffled but Threat Level readers have an idea.
You'll love this: the passcode was "123456", and the manual detailing that fact is on the web.
Matthew Yglesias has a nice comparison on computers "back in the day" and now:
it seems that back in 1982, James Fallows paid $4,000 for his computer featuring 64k of RAM plus another $800 for a floppy disk drive. According to the handy CPI calculator on the BLS website, $4,800 in 1982 is equivalent to a bit over $10,000 in today's money.
And today?
Naturally, I had no choice but to scroll over to the Apple Store and see how much computer I could get for $10,000. Well, I got myself a Mac Pro with two 3.0 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processors, 8 gigs of RAM, four 750 gig hard drives, two Super Drives capable of reading and writing CDs and DVDs, a 30 inch Apple HD Cinema Display, a wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse. That comes to $9,449.
I remember spending $3000 on a 386 DOS box with a 40 MB HD back in the late 80's. In this realm, there's no denying that things have improved a lot.
The Wii is enough of a sensation that you can buy nifty stuff like this for it: The Wii Party Station:
What more do you need for your next party? This would have gotten a thumbs up at our party last week :)
Technorati Tags: Wii
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we wrap up the section on Memory Settings by looking at what you can do straight from the settings panel.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk, memory policy
The updated roadmap is online now.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside, cincom smalltalk
SCI FI Wire has an interesting window into the thought process of the movie industry:
Looking for the next Harry Potter-like franchise, Warner Brothers on July 11 announced that it has acquired the film rights to Septimus Heap, a seven-book series filled with wizards and spells, while Relativity Media unveiled its acquisition of Tunnels, another British children's fantasy series, Variety reported.
You can almost see the gears turning: "7 books, magic, written by a British author: we can't miss!". The same kind of herd following happens in software - why do you think that there's always a "mainstream" set of development languages, and everything else is a niche operation, for instance?
The thing is, just because someone had success with X - a storyline, a software tool, a business plan - doesn't mean that you'll be able to succeed with something that's a close match to it. For one thing, the circumstances that led to the initial success probably aren't the same, even if all the superficial tools are.
Technorati Tags: movies
I should have a few more details for the roadmap posted in the next few days - reflecting our Seaside story. Stay tuned.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom smalltalk
Scoble is calling for the same thing on Facebook that I've seen lots of marketers yearn for: ads that are more tightly tied to the specific person or thing you're looking at:
Imagine if advertisers could “buy people.” I just clicked on Ryan’s profile, hes into Running and Golf. Why don’t ads for running and golf gear get put onto his profile? Wouldn’t that make sense? He’s also a software developer. Where’s the Visual Studio advertisement? He’s into video games. Where’s the Halo 3 advertisement? Translation: Facebook needs an advertising platform and it needs one in the worst way. I’m not going to even look at the ads until the ads are tied to the people on Facebook. Facebook knows what we’re into, put ads for those things onto our profiles and messages.
There are some obvious issues (like the periodically hilarious contextual ads you get from Google), but there's a deeper one as well: make this suggestion in a group full of non-developers and non-marketers. Now, watch the reaction and you'll see what I'm on about.
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we wrap up the segment on memory policy by looking at installing a new policy.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk
If stupid has an address, it's at RIAA HQ. They are letting the copyright board go forward with the new internet charge rates, which will simply kill most of internet radio. Via CNET:
Barring a last-minute industry compromise on changes, new royalty rates that Internet radio operators argue could cripple their services are slated to kick in Sunday.
This s one of those fascinating disconnects between fantasy and reality. The RIAA apparently believes that (insert huge amount of money here) is available for the taking from internet radio. What they don't realize is that the actual amount of money available is (insert much smaller value here), and that the effect of these rules will be something like (insert zero here).
I guess they skipped the section of elementary school math where they explained magnitude.
No day starts well when you have a surprise phone conference at 8 AM. Through some glitch of our email system, I got the message about it at 4 AM (amazing - I wasn't awake for it :) ). So there I was, getting coffee and breakfast (and getting ready to take my daughter to drama camp) with my phone ringing. The first time, I figured "let it go to voice mail". The second time, I was still groggy, so I had the same thought.
Then it switched to my cell phone, so I figured I'd pick up. One groggy conversation later, and I was on a conference call with a customer. I hope I sounded more awake than I felt. t didn't help that Windows updated itself last night, so I had to wait for it to start up before I could access an email with crucial information.
Man, I need more coffee :)
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at the configurability of MemoryPolicy in Cincom Smalltalk.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk, memory policy
I just got back from the latest Potter flick - "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phenix". I loved it - good pacing, and the story line with the Ministry of Magic's "head in the sand" reaction was perfect. My wife and daughter both that the woman who played "The Trunchbull" in "Mathilda" would have made a better weasel than the actress who played that role, but I thought she was quite good.
Anyway - well worth seeing.
I'll be offline for a bit, as I'm headed out to see the new Potter flick with the family. I'll have more to say after I see it :)
Looks like Microsoft understands that Nintendo has hit the sweet spot with the Wii - check out their stance at E3:
As Microsoft executives played down the impact of an extensive repair program for defective Xbox 360 game machines, they announced several efforts to broaden the appeal of their machine to families.
As I posted last week, it sounds to me like they're on top of the defect problem. With this, it sounds like they know where they have to go to broaden their appeal: which means that the next generation XBox will probably be a very interesting piece of equipment.
Scoble explains why he stopped using ICQ:
Why? Everytime I start it up I get a flurry of messages. Unlike Twitter IM has an expectation that you’ll answer it sometime soon. But that’s my problem and I’m an outlier. So why did everyone else stop using ICQ? It got too cluttered and stopped being developed. In 1996 it seemed like there was a new feature every few days. At some point after 2001 it stopped seeing radical improvements.
That really wasn't my problem. My problem was a lot simpler: spam requests for chat. As I recall things, ICQ got flooded with that kind of thing - I'd bring up the client, and I'd get tons of pr0n messages fired at me. I get one or two a month like that on skype, and virtually none on AIM. That's the thing that drove me off ICQ.
Technorati Tags: IM, instant messaging
Lukas Renggli has announced the new Seaside website. Looks pretty good.
Technorati Tags: seaside
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