Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

It's always about Dave:

I'm at a cocktail party, but I've been drinking water because I'm being taped in every conversation I have. One guy is even live-broadcasting it to god knows who. I feel like a presidential candidate. What if I say something which, taken out of context, sounds like I have a belief that's politically incorrect. Think that's crazy? In 2003 if you said the war in Iraq wasn't patriotic, and that Bush wasn't a visionary, people in some contexts, people looked at you like you're strange. I don't have to imagine living in a totalitarian state, we've been there, maybe we're still there. But I really would like to be at a party with friends and have a chance to relax and enjoy myself without having to worry whether what I say there makes sense when viewed in a completely different context by people who weren't there.

Wow, so now getting funny looks for opinions is enough to proclaim a tyranny? Wow - all of us Smalltalkers have been living under a totalitarian programming regime for 20 years now - who knew? It's great that Winer was able to explain that to me - it all makes sense now.

Smalltalk Solutions 2008 has been announced by Georg Heeg, director of STIC

I am proud to announce that Smalltalk Solutions 2008 will be held from Wednesday June 18th to Saturday June 21st, 2008 in the Grand Sierra Resort and Casino, 2500 East Second Street, Reno, NV  89595. The conditions look excellent: The room rate is 79 $.

I can speak to the readiness of the website; it should be up as soon as I can FTP the bits to the new server, and the appropriate Apache redirects have been set up. Stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Sometimes in an application, you have an expensive calculation to do, and you would like it to run in the background. However, it's often much nicer to just be able to write a simple method and return a value:

myExpensiveMethod

	| expensiveAnswer |

	expensiveAnswer := self doExpensiveThing here.
	^expensiveAnswer.

Well, you need a background process, but then it needs to pause the one in the foreground, right? And you need to run this in the background so that it doesn't consume all available CPU (especially important in server apps). That's the topic of today's Smalltalk Daily - using class Promise.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, process model

There's an interesting PR angle to the Beauchamp/TNR thing - and no, I'm not going into the war in Iraq, or the politics surrounding it :) For those unfamiliar with the story, start with this Google search - the piece that got my attention from a PR perspective is this one, from PajamasMedia. The short summary: a story has blown up in the faces of TNR, and - at least thus far - they haven't been willing to come forward and admit to being taken. For a magazine that was taken for a ride by Stephen Glass, this is not a good thing:

Perhaps a cone of silence has descended. A longtime New Republic editor told me that she was not sure that she was allowed to discuss the Beauchamp affair, citing the magazine’s lawyers.

If the magazine had provided a full and immediate accounting of the incident, the story might look very different, full of mitigating factors and useful distinctions. It is a pity that the editors did not provide it.

And there's the problem - "citing the magazine's lawyers". This is standard PR failure #1 in the new world of media. When you have sharks circling you, the worst thing you can do is clam up and cite "lawyers" as a reason to stay silent. Lawyers make for lousy PR; the public doesn't trust the legal profession much, and doing this just makes things worse - a lot worse.

In this kind of case, it's best to be completely open about what your position is, early and often. More transparency is the only thing that can save your bacon when a media/blog buzz-storm blows your way. Sadly for TNR, they chose the old "batten down the hatches; it will blow over" approach. I don't think it's working out for them, and I suspect that both Glenn Reynolds and David Meerman Scott could have explained why it isn't working, if TNR's editors had read either of their recent books.

Technorati Tags: marketing, authority

Well, there was a daily "Pep Rally" at Disney Hollywood Studios, and my daughter and her friends are positively obsessed. Here's a NY Times story that shows that it could be the biggest basic cable event ever.

We have a pennant race on our hands:

And things are even tighter in the wild card stakes:

Looks like it's going to be a nail biter right up to the end...

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

There have been a few patches since I released version 4.4, so I rolled all of those up into a new build - if you have 4.4 already, just grab the appropriate (by platform) baseapp*.zip file. Otherwise, grab the full build. Visit the download page here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Dvorak makes a lot of sense in this post about "old" media: they aren't doing what they need to do given the onslaught from the web. Just as movie theaters have been going with bigger screens and better sound systems (and now, more IMAX) in order to pull us from the home theater, print needs to offer something that the web can't, or can't as well. Here's how, according to Dvorak:

People in the variously attacked media must understand why their medium is special. Then they have to optimize for that specialness. For example, newspapers allow people to scan vast amounts of information quickly and efficiently. No online mechanism can do this, but newspapers often choose to simplify content delivery, copying the way other mechanisms work. Thus, newspapers are trying to be more Internet-like. Have you ever seen newspapers from the 1950s? They were packed with stories and not filled with features and fluff. Newspapers were practically all news items that readers could scan visually.

That's part of it, but the type of content matters, too. print simply can't do breaking news anymore, and they need to internalize that message. What they can do is get more analytical, and offer longer pieces. I'm far more willing to read a long piece in print than I am to read the same thing online - I'm not even sure why that is, but once a web piece reaches a certain size, I either skip it or print it.

Print needs to adapt to this changing reality, and pronto. A lot of print outlets are probably going to sink as they refuse to deal with it.

Technorati Tags: print, newspaper, magazine

I wouldn't call it light summer reading, but I read a great book while I was away: "The First Total War", by David A. Bell. It's a survey of the intellectual changes in perception wrought by the French Revolution - in particular, the changes in view it brought to thinking about war.

Bell's premise is that Europeans (and the book is limited to that region) had been moving away from total war after the wars of religion. While warfare was nearly constant throughout the 18th century, it tended to be limited in both size and scope. The French Revolution changed that - it brought back the "all against all" sort of war that had been fought earlier, but with larger armies and more modern weapons.

Additionally, Bell posits that the eliminationist rhetoric used by the revolution (and eventually by its enemies) has passed down through time (obviously during the 20th century wars, and through to today). It's a thought provoking read, and while I have a few nits with some of his conclusions, I can highly recommend the book. If you want a better view of where modern thinking on war originated, you can't go wrong with this book.

Technorati Tags: history

I had a very relaxing time while I was in Florida - played a few rounds of golf over the last few days, and managed to figure out my long game - I was driving the ball 260 yards off the tee on many holes, which is a real achievement for my game. I'm back home now, but I have two photos my daughter took with my phone after our last game - these are of the sunset, over the club house:

She's really a much better photographer than I am :)

This is just weird. I brought my iPod on vacation with me, and I used it while jogging in Orlando. We went from there to my parent's house in Melbourne Beach, which is right on the Atlantic coast. The iPod crashed after a couple of minutes outside. It worked fine in the house, worked fine in the car - but would not stay on outside. While I was down there, I was wondering if it was the humidity, but heck - it was humid in Orlando, too.

Salt ar, maybe? That makes no sense to me, but I'm no mechanical whiz either. If it works fine here at home (likely test: tomorrow, as it's raining today), then I'll have to chalk it up to high humidity and salty air. Very weird. It's an older iPod mini (i.e., with a hard drive) if that rings any bells.

Technorati Tags: iPod

This is fascinating - Walter Reed is using the Wii in physical therapy sessions with injured veterans. Unsuprisingly, the patients find the games more enjoyable than the repetitive motion exercises more commonly used:

"Wii games like tennis or boxing can help increase range of motion, and patients enjoy them much more than doing ten repetitions of an exercise," says Lieutenant Colonel Stephanie Daugherty, chief of occupational therapy at Walter Reed. "We also have an Xbox for finger range of motion, and Dance Dance Revolution, which helps with balance and sequencing."

Console games: they're not just for parties anymore.

David Buck is teaching an intro to VW course in Ottawa next month:

Simberon has scheduled an Introduction to VisualWorks Smalltalk open-enrollment course for the week of Sept 17th to Sept 21st.

Follow the link for registration details.

Technorati Tags: education

It's posts like this one from Jim Louderback (who just stepped down as editor in chief of PC-Magazine) that explain why I use XP in Parallels rather than Vista. He goes through a litany of issues with networking and sleep/hibernation modes, and sums up thusly:

I could go on and on about the lack of drivers, the bizarre wake-up rituals, the strange and nonreproducible system quirks, and more. But I won't bore you with the details. The upshot is that even after nine months, Vista just ain't cutting it. I definitely gave Microsoft too much of a free pass on this operating system: I expected it to get the kinks worked out more quickly. Boy, was I fooled! If Microsoft can't get Vista working, I might just do the unthinkable: I might move to Linux.

To which I'd say - nah, buy a Mac, put XP under Parallels, and be happy :)

Update: Phillip Greenspun adds more Vista woes to the list.

I don't really like class actiona lawsuits, but since nothing else seems to get the attention of the RIAA, maybe this one will do some good. From the Consumerist:

Remember Tanya Anderson? After the RIAA's case against the 42 year-old single mother for downloading gangsta rap was dismissed with prejudice, Tanya turned around and sued the RIAA for fraud, racketeering, and malicious prosecution. Now, her lawyers have filed papers in federal court asking to grant her suit class action status.

What I'd like to know is, why does the RIAA think that preying on their customers is a good business practice?

Technorati Tags: RIAA, DRM

I swear, do outages time themselves for when I'm out of pocket? First, there was a power outage at home that was just long enough to blow through my UPS - which stopped the DVRs from recording things while I was away. When did that happen? On my way out of town.

Next? The blog server had some kind of problem while I was in the air (on the way back home) today - it's back online now. Sigh.

Time to look at the logs again - BottomFeeder downloads went at a rate of 147/day last week. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	387
Update	163
Mac X	105
Linux x86	96
Mac 8/9	51
CE ARM	49
Solaris	48
HPUX	39
Windows98/ME	28
AIX	19
Linux Sparc	13
SGI	10
Sources	10
Linux PPC	6
CE x86	3
ADUX	2

So on to the HTML page accesses:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	61%
Internet Explorer	28.4%
MSN Bot	4.7%
Other	3.7%
Opera	2.2%

And finally, the syndication breakdown:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	22.5%
BottomFeeder	14.9%
Internet Explorer	10.4%
BlogLines	6.3%
Other	6.1%
Google Feed Fetcher	5.9%
Vienna	5.9%
Net News Wire	5.5%
Safari RSS	3.5%
FeedOnFeeds	4.1%
JetBrains	3.2%
NewsGator	2.9%
Python	1.5%
News Fire	1.2%
TVTonic	1.1%
iTunes	1%
Java	1%
Liferea	1%
Jakarta	1%
SharpReader	1%

Here's part three of our three part series on version control tools and Smalltalk - we wrapped up the conversation with some recommendations for future directions. This was a fun conversation - it actually all took place back on August 5th - it was just long enough that we split it out. If you haven't listened to the previous tow episodes, you can get part 1 here, and part 2 here.

As usual, if you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - if you have a rant about anything we've said, send it as an mp3 attachment (zipped - Cincom's mail filters may block it otherwise!) and we'll play it on the air.

Also, you can leave a review at iTunes, or cast a vote for us over at Podcast Alley.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, version control, development

Dare Obasanjo goes deep on the Facebook API - if you are thinking of building something for Facebook, you should definitely check out his post.

Technorati Tags: social media

David Meerman Scott has written something similar to what Doc Searls has been saying for a long time now - marketing is about personal communications, and the "mass media" model is a recent thing. What the web is doing now is returning the old style to prominence:

Instead of making everything "new," the Web has brought communications back full circle to where we were 60 years ago. On the Web you can finally communicate again in the way that people respond to. What people respond to, and the way they make purchase decisions, really hasn’t changed at all.

Technorati Tags: advertising, PR

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we wrap up our look at the package ComplexConditions (from the public store repository) - with a tour of the APIs.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I wonder whether the skype team has heard of the "rollback" concept. You know - you roll out new code, it doesn't work - so you roll back to the old version? As of this morning, I'm still not connected to skype (nor are any of the people I normally talk to via skype). There's a client update available, but it doesn't help. This long an outage is a really, really bad thing for them - I'm going to have to start looking for alternatives for the podcast at this rate.

Update: Well - skype finally signed in at 9:40 AM. I only see 2 people online, and I know one of them did the update - so I presume that the client update is mandatory.

Update: Well, that was short-lived. As of 9:50 AM, it's back to "connecting". Looks like skype's troubles are far from over.

Andres Valloud will be giving a presentation at the next LASTUG meeting, Monday August 20th.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Chris Petrilli shows how software developers end up talking right past each other due to ingrained assumptions. Chris points out that what looks hard to one person may only be hard due to blinders they don't even know they are wearing...

Technorati Tags: object oriented, concurrency

This seems pretty big - a lot of people rely on skype pretty heavily - I know I use it for a lot of voice calls, chat, and the podcasts. But it's offline today:

Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience. Additionally, downloads of Skype have been temporarily disabled. We will make downloads available again as quickly as possible.

12-24 hours is a huge outage - imagine the outcry if your local phone service dropped that way, and it wasn't due to a weather emergency that took out the lines. VOIP systems aren't (yet) ready to replace copper, it seems.

Technorati Tags: voip, skype

I can't announce the location and timing quite yet - there are a few loose ends to wrap up first. However, plans are well in hand for the 2008 show, and an announcement is imminent. Stay tuned :)

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we pick up where we left off yesterday, and look at some more of the APIs in the ComplexConditions package.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Chris Petrilli has nothing good to say about Make or AutoMake; having seen what our VM team has to deal with, I have to agree with Chris.

It was a beautiful day here in Florida - we went to the beach earlier - my daughter and her cousins had a good time:

We had two boogie boards to fool around with, too:

Later, I went for a bike ride down A1A - one thing about riding here: no hills, so there's no coasting. There are nice views of the Indian River though:

Arden Thomas ponders what Smalltalk might have looked like sans MVC:

Don’t get me wrong I’m not disparaging MVC; it is a framework that is widely used and there are many derivatives of it out there it is an attractive idea.  But I am wondering how the less-is-more approach would have worked out.  Would it have been quicker for folks to “spin-up” using Smalltalk with this simpler approach?   Would it be better/simpler/faster to use in some circumstances?

Technorati Tags: design

One of the things that could be improved in Smalltalk is complex boolean expressions - in typical code, any complex boolean expression ends up being a long mess of #and:, #or:, and parenthesis. Well - on today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at how to simplify all that.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Good thing I wasn't drinking a beverage when I read this; I would have been snorting it out my nose. The phrase "piece of work" comes to mind...

There was some talk on the IRC channel this evening about how we needed a concise set of "how to find information" links for Cincom Smalltalk. Well, here's a stab at such a page. Have a suggestion for something that ought to be added? Send me an email.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I grew up listening to Phil Rizzuto announcing the Yankee games, on WPIX out of NYC. To a very large extent, his voice was the Yankees for me back when I was a kid. Rest in Peace, Scooter.

Technorati Tags: yankees, scooter

Nick Carr has an article up that enterprisey types ought to read - who knows, they might even learn something.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at ADvance - the design and modeling tool that ships with VisualWorks.

Technorati Tags: design, modeling

With the outcry over Dolphin's death, it would be easy to miss the newest Smalltalk - Smalltalk YX. It looks like it's targeted at the scripting space, and it's portable.

Niall Ross has sent along his extremely complete write up from 3 events over the last year:

• Cincom Smalltalk User Conference
• StS 2007
• VA Smalltalk User Group Meeting

You can grab the report (PDF) here.

Technorati Tags: StS2007, user conference

Finally, after much exasperation, I found one at a Wal-Mart:

And there was much rejoicing :)

Technorati Tags: Wii, game console

The ValleyWag/Scoble thing (Scoble's comments are over here) illustrate something basic: people love to gossip, and - for reasons I'm not entirely sure I understand - get all excited about real or imagined death watches.

For instance - Dolphin gave up the ghost last week, and amongst the messages flying around were a few "my theories of Smalltalk's Death are correct" gloats wafted by. Never mind the fact that there are still more Smalltalk vendors and dialects than there were in 1995, and never mind the fact that Cincom Smalltalk has higher revenues and profits than ever before. Some people love a good train wreck, and that's all there is to it - even when the train in question is on the tracks and in no danger of being derailed.

Technorati Tags: social media

On today's Smalltalk Daily we take a look at the API of class HeadlessImage - which is your entry point to dealing with a server image that runs without a GUI.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Now we're talking!

A few more days like this and May will be forgotten :)

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees