Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Om Malik notes that some countries are getting much higher levels of bandwidth than we do here (I just tested mine - I get 16 mbps down, 1 mbps up). Here's how he starts off:

Swedish grannies are connecting to the net at 40 gigabits per second life; 100 megabit per seconds are becoming common place in Japan and Korea; and even French are dreaming of an ultra-fast fiber future. And yet, in the US we are all stuck in the slow lane, settling for speeds between 768 kbps to 8 megabits per second. I have often wondered what it would be like to have a 100 megabits per second, and what I would do with that much bandwidth.

Hmm. The Sweden story is a one off experiment. So what about Japan? Well, according to this site, Japan's population was about 78% urban in 1995 (and it would be higher now). South Korea? From this site, as of 1998, almost 85% of the population was urban - and again, that would be higher now (projections have it at 92% by 2015).

So what about the US? Well, the stats from Wikipedia say that almost 81% of Americans live in cities, but that's when you have to whip out maps of the US, South Korea, and Japan. In the latter two nations, there are fewer (and larger) metropolitan areas, and wiring them handles the bulk of the population. In the US, there's just tons more land, and tons more space to be covered. This isn't that hard to figure out, but the a-list pundits like Malik and CNet's "Buzz Out Loud" crew seem to be continually mystified by the concept.

Do we have lousy broadband competition here? Sure, and that's part of the problem. However, the "last mile" in the US is a much bigger "last mile" than it is in, say, South Korea.

Technorati Tags: bandwidth

This week, we talked to Wayne Beaton of the Eclipse Foundation for Industry Misinterpretations. It was a fun chat - I'll have the audio up later today, or possibly tomorrow depending on when I get all the extra bits that need to be mixed in

Phil Ryu translates from Zuckerman-ese to English for us, and learns that to speak this yourself, all you really need to do is strike yourself in the head repeatedly with a ballpeen hammer. Yes, it looks like NBC has selected for stupidity and customer unease of use.

Technorati Tags: iTunes, Apple, NBC

Julian Lombard has posted a new demo video of Croquet - looks very cool.

Technorati Tags: squeak, croquet

Mathew Ingram points to a fascinating deal Gogle has pulled off with the major wire services:

As I understand it, the arrangement between Google and Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, the British Press Association and Canadian Press will see the content from those wire services appear on Google News with the logo of the wire service prominently displayed, and Google has agreed to give the wires’ version of a story prominence over the thousands of versions of that story that appear on the websites of the various newspapers that are members of AP, AFP, etc.

Now, open up an arbitrary newspaper - notice how many stories are just AP/Reuters (etc) copy/paste jobs? What about Op/Ed, you say? Well, if the blogosphere is anything at all, it's a reputation based op/ed system. What does that leave newspapers? Well, I've been saying that they are going to have to go deeply local for awhile now - and that probably means that they are going to have to get a lot smaller - their stringers are going to be the local bloggers who actually want to attend local school board meetings, high school sports - the things that the big wire services aren't going to cover.

Welcome to the new world of media - it's going to look an awful lot like the 18th and 19th century versions, I think.

Technorati Tags: news, newspapers

We tried a new game this evening: Thebes. The game's theme: you're aspiring archeologists in 1900, ready to go find riches across the ancient world. Before you can do that though, you have the scour the major cities of Europe for whatever information you can find. It looks like this:

There's some luck involved, and it takes only a few minutes to explain - we were done in under 2 hours. Recommended!

I think Pournelle cuts SFWA way, way too much slack over their lame DMCA takedown methodology. It's one thing to properly complain about infringing use; it's another thing entirely to run a keyword matcher and decide that any hits imply infringing material - which is what these guys seem to have done. From Ars Technica:

What appears to have happened is that the group ran a Scribd search for certain author names and then issued takedown notices for all the results - Doctorow's book makes a reference to Isaac Asimov, for instance, and Senger's reading list is populated with the names of great sci-fi authors. This, it hardly needs to be said, is a less than foolproof way to police copyrights.

This kind of bozo methodology would have my blog infringing based on a variety of book reviews I've posted, since I typically mention the author's name.

I understand where Pournelle is coming from - he wants his copyrights honored, and that's as it should be. What shouldn't be excused is the collateral damage from a really stupid way of trying to protect authors like Pournelle. According to Ars technica, bogus takedown notices can be actionable, so it may well go beyond stupid.

Technorati Tags: law, stupidity

It was quiet by the burned down house today - boarded up, with a red sign on it. Here's what the damage looks like in daylight:

As you can see, the left front and roof are shot. I expect that the whole house is a dead loss.

Technorati Tags: fire

Another week - it's September already! For the week, BottomFeeder downloads chugged along a rate of 122/day. The details:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Update	220
Windows	177
Mac X	119
Linux x86	109
CE ARM	44
Mac 8/9	36
Solaris	33
Windows98/ME	33
HPUX	26
Linux Sparc	20
AIX	10
SGI	9
Linux PPC	8
CE x86	4
Sources	2
ADUX	1

Off to the HTML Tools distribution:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	53.3%
Internet Explorer	32.8%
MSN Bot	8%
Other	2.7%
Ocelli	1.6%
Opera	1.6%

And finally, the tool usage for Syndication access:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	20.9%
BottomFeeder	16.2%
Internet Explorer	11.4%
Net News Wire	6.8%
Google Feed Fetcher	6.2%
Safari RSS	4.5%
Other	4.5%
Vienna	4.4%
BlogLines	4%
FeedOnFeeds	4%
JetBrains	3.8%
NewsGator	3.2%
Python	1.5%
iTunes	1.3%
News Fire	1.2%
Akregator	1.1%
Java	1%
RSS Bandit	1%
Jakarta	1%
SharpReader	1%
MSN Bot	1%

Bob Westergaard has another screencast of VW running the DOOM startup sequence.

We came home to some excitement - there were fire trucks on our street, lined up all the way down to a street 2 down from us:

It turned out that a house two streets over (maybe a quarter mile from here) caught fire. The family living there have a handicapped child, so they were putting in a large addition with an elevator - the speculation is that there was some kind of electrical fault due to that. The good news? Apparently, they aren't living there during the renovation. Which was fortunate, as the fire destroyed a lot. I'll see if I can get photos tomorrow during the day - it's hard to see much in these:

That's smoke rising from the top, and at the very top, siding peeled away by the flames. It's not obvious in the first pic above, but the rook has multiple holes. While I was watching, they were punching out windows - I asked, and that was to ventilate the house - lots and lots of smoke. It's a good thing nothing else was hapening in Howard County this evening - we must have had 20 trucks and at least 50 firemen here. Below is a better view of the side of the house, after the firemen set up some lights:

Technorati Tags: fire

This is bizarre:

1. Guy makes "Star Wars" spoof video, puts it online
2. Viacom shows the video on the air, as part of a "best of the web" kind of thing"
3. Guy thinks "hey, that's cool", and posts some of the Viacom bit on YouTube
4. Viacom issues a takedown notice to YouTube

Now, I'm not a lawyer, but maybe one of Viacom's smart guys could explain the steps between 1 and 2 above that make it all ok?

Technorati Tags: stupidity

We are pleased to announce that ObjectStudio 8 has been released - if you are a Cincom Smalltalk customer, you can expect the installation media sometime in the next few weeks. Our first customer of the new release has already taken electronic delivery, and has been working closely with us on the development - they are in the process of deploying an application on ObjectStudio 8 this month. I am not exaggerating when I say that we could not have done this without them - they have been very helpful and very patient!

So what's new? Well, this white paper (PDF) explains a lot of what ObjectStudio 8 is about. What we've done is port ObjectStudio Smalltalk into a VisualWorks namespace, so that it can run on the VisualWorks VM. This has given ObjectStudio better performance, and has also opened up doors for all of our customers:

• ObjectStudio 8 developers now have direct access to all the VW libraries that have been built up over the last few years - such as Web Services, Security, Web Toolkit.
• VisualWorks developers now have access to a native UI toolset on the Windows platform
• ObjectStudio and VisualWorks developers have a unified set of tools to work from (browser, debugger), enabling cross-product learning to happen much faster

You can head over to the ObjectStudio blog to find out what the ObjectStudio team is up to. Enjoy the release, and feel free to send any comments my way. We will be updating the non-commercial download area to include OS 8 soon.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom+smalltalk, objectstudio

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we start looking at a useful contributed package - Windows Goodies. This package adds a number of nice Windows native capabilities, and today we look at file association.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, windows

With only one month to go, I hope the 3 game sweep of the Sox indicates the direction things are headed. The AL East is still a longshot:

But things are looking up in the wild card standings:

If the Yankees can keep it close, the 3 games in Boston in mid September will be interesting...

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

Engadget imagines the way negotiations (now broken down) between Apple and NBC went over iTunes :)

With iTunes and the iPod sucb huge presences, I'm not sure how much leverage NBC actually has here...

Update: Chris Petrilli explains things for the slower Universal execs:

So what I’m saying to you, and Universal is this: you’ve removed the “no hassle” legal way to acquire your content and will likely make the legal option substantially more difficult than me driving to a friends house to watch it. You sure that’s what you wanted?

The Yankees have swept the Sox, and set themselves up for a shot at the division and the wild card. 5 games back is still a ways at this point, but it's possible - a sweep in the other direction would have been lights out.

Here's what really encourages me - weird stuff happened to the Red Sox:

Boston manager Terry Francona, already miffed at the commissioner's office for sending a security official into his dugout a night earlier to check whether he was wearing his uniform shirt, got hot again, and this time it had nothing to do with the style police.

Francona was ejected in the seventh inning after umpires reversed a call and ruled Kevin Youkilis out for running out of the basepaths to elude a tag by third baseman Alex Rodriguez on J.D. Drew's sharp grounder. Boston trailed 2-0 at the time, and the decision gave the Yankees a key double play. The Red Sox never recovered.

Heh. I love it when stuff like that happens to the Red Sox :)

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees, red sox

If you read the site through a browser, you'll notice that I've cleaned up the navigation on the link bar (probably on the left, but it could be on the right, depending on the style sheet in use). The idea was to make it simpler and more organized; with luck, I've managed to do that :)

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at using the Windows Tray from Cincom Smalltalk. Specifically, we send an application window there, and then restore it.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, windows

Suzanne Fortman sent along more photos from ESUG '07 - you can see the updated gallery here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Bill Williams likes RunBasic, which is powered by Cincom Smalltalk. Carl Gundel has done some great work with this - you can hear about it in this chat we had with him earlier this year on Industry Misinterpretations.

Update: David Cope is keeping an eye on it, too.

Technorati Tags: seaside, basic

The Yankees are driving me nuts. They crawled within 4 games of Boston, and then squandered two weeks, falling 8 back. Now, they've just taken the first 2 games of a 3 game set with Boston - and they are tied for the wild card. Had they been able to stay within 4, we'd have a live pennant race. On the other hand, if they can win tomorrow, it's only 5 games with a month left. Nail biting time...

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

This should be interesting to watch: the Macintosh is leaving the niche and becoming much more mainstream:

On the desktop, part of the slip may stem from the fact that Apple is grabbing customers from other computer makers. Mac sales alone have grown at three times the rate of the overall computer industry this year, with the one-time niche computer retailer now selling one out of 20 personal computers in the U.S. "Some of those switchers are coming over, and it's like learning a new language to a certain extent," says Jim Gillespie of the Napa Macintosh Users Group.

The fact that Parallels let's you run Windows seamlessly helps a lot - the switchover cost is now pretty light - and you get a much nicer machine (unless games are what you're after - but even there, you can use Bootcamp). MS was already having size problems, and now they face some real competition - whether you like Apple or not, that's a good thing.

Technorati Tags: Apple

Cincom Smalltalk projects took the first two spots, and 5 of the first nine at the ESUG 2007 Innovation Awards. Very cool.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take note of the fact that Processes - like everything else in Smalltalk - are just objects.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Take one presentation by Travis at ESUG, add in Comic Life (Michael did the work there), and presto:

Thanks to Adriaan van Os, we have a nice set of photos from the conference.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

InfoWorld misses the point about Apple: they aren't targeting Enterprise shops:

From a business buyer's perspective, however, I've got to give it a C-. It passes, but with limited third-party software support and a company that seems to care so little for me as a customer, I simply wouldn't feel comfortable making those kinds of purchases.

That rating probably leases Apple, because it's not who they are after. The answer slides by earlier in the column, when InfoWorld notes that Apple devotes a lot of resource to iTunes. Exactly - they are aiming at the consumer/prosumer market, not the stolid business user market. The guy looking to save a few pennies off his purchase of 500 boxes isn't who they're after.

Technorati Tags: enterprise

Scoble has a video conversation with Plaxo up (why isn't this available as audio only?) - it's about some tools that Plaxo will be releasing today:

Plaxo, sometime in the next few hours will ship an online identity consolidator (that’s what they call it) based on microformats. What does that do? Lets you keep track of your identity from a group of online social networks.

They say that they'll allow aggregation between things like Twitter, Jaiku (and a bunch of other things). Sounds like they are scraping data that is available from these tools via RSS and other microformats (like the XML format Twitter uses, I guess). The question: how many terms of service agreements does this violate? I understand that this solves a problem that needs solving, but that may not be enough.

Technorati Tags: social media

It's a long way from the clean world of Smalltalk to the buzzword compliant, enterprisey world of SOA - but Bobby Woolf has made the jump. I'd call it a jump in the wrong direction, but hey - at least his Bingo Card is always full :)

Travis has filed a report from the first ay or so of ESUG 2007

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at interrupting a running Smalltalk process, in order to have it execute some other code.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

As recently as 8 days ago, there was a race in the AL East - then thE Yankees decided to do an instant replay of April and May. At this point, they would have to sweep the Sox, and have the Sox collapse to win the AL East. At least the wild card is still in play - but not if games like last night's 16-0 drubbing keep happening...

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

You would think that a group advocating for stronger copyright controls would make sure that they had legal permission to use images before posting them on a website; you would be wrong, though:

In short, they want to protect science by locking it up under copyright. They want to restrict access to publicly-funded research results by requiring that everyone pay a fee to see it. There are plenty of reasons why PRISM's logic falls apart (see here for a thorough bashing), but I wanted to point out just one: they're hypocritical. While their entire web site advocates strict enforcement of copyright laws, the images they've used on their front page are a violation of copyright law.

Have we reached the "farce" stage of copyright battles yet?

I haven't posted much on this, but I have to figure that AT&T is royally torqued by the unlocking of the iPhone - there goes their 5 year exclusive, burnt to ashes in about a month. Business Week sums up:

Apple (AAPL) and AT&T (T), the sole authorized supplier of the iPhone in the U.S., are doing what they can to make sure that legal clearance never comes. The two companies have put their lawyers on the case, applying pressure on hackers involved in unlocking iPhones to try to get them to stop. Much is at stake. AT&T has been hoping that as the exclusive provider of the iPhone, it will see a surge in new customers and monthly service charges of at least $60 from each one. Apple is supposed to get a cut of the revenues. If iPhones are unlocked, they can be used on the wireless networks of rivals like T-Mobile USA - and AT&T gets zippo. AT&T wouldn't comment for this story, while Apple didn't return a request for comment.

They might as well tilt against windmills. This is like the RIAA and MPAA using DRM - it mostly upsets paying customers, does nothing to stop piracy, and - most importantly - cannot be blocked. Apple and AT&T can get as many legal rulings as they want, and software hacks will be available on servers beyond the reach of the US legal system anyway.

It took something as interesting as the iPhone to make unlocked phones interesting in the US - I don't think that genie is about to go back into the bottle. You know what AT&T's best recourse would be at this point? Offer better service than the competition. Give people a reason to stay, rather than trying to barricade them in.

Of course, given their corporate history, I won't hold my breath for that to happen.

Update: CNet makes a point I had thought of, and agree with completely:

Unlocking a cell phone is neither illegal nor in any direct violation of laws. Apple can't stop anyone from unlocking a cell phone, and to be honest, I don't think it really cares. Apple is playing this recent iPhone unlocking news perfectly. If it overreacted and stopped the hack, it could stymie its future revenue gains, but if it endorses such a maneuver, it effectively leaves AT&T out to dry. Isn't it ironic that AT&T lawyers went knocking on the doors of the hackers while Apple lawyers sipped tea at home?

Yeah, I think that demonstrates the depths of Apple's concern nicely.

Technorati Tags: iPhone

There was a huge blog storm over the last few days - Robert Scoble did a video and post on Facebook/Mahalo (et.al.) being a better long term answer than Google, and the flood gates just opened. Jason Calacanis has a short summary of links here;

I talked about this briefly yesterday, but this morning I was reading Danny Sullivan's tirade against Robert (and a tirade it was; he made some good points, but needed to sit on his post another couple of hours to cool down). In all of that, this popped out at me, as I've had the same thought:

Mahalo comes up next and how by using a small number of human editors, it can be harder to spam. Sure. So's the Yahoo Directory. You remember the Yahoo Directory, right? It used, um, a small number of human editors to categorize the web. Advances in crawler-based search engines meant you could get really good relevancy and be spam resistant, which caused the Yahoo Directory to effectively be abandoned by Yahoo. Mahalo's approach to custom-tailor the most popular searches is interesting -- but despite heaps and heaps of publicity the new service has had showered upon it, it still hasn't gained any real traction among searchers. Mahalo Launches With Human-Crafted Search Results from me in May describes the service in more depth.

That was pretty much my thought about Mahalo when it launched - this has been tried before, by an outfit with a lot more resources - and abandoned. I could be wrong though - the real answer will make itself known soon enough - either people will start using Mahalo or they won't. Thus far, I haven't been motivated to do so - Google is still the default for me in Firefox's search box in the upper right corner. That has more to do with inertia than with any positive choice on my part, but inertia may well be the determining factor here.

Technorati Tags: seo

It's coming up on a year, both for the podcast and for the screencast - I'm putting together a short set of funny bits from all the episodes, and I'll be running that as part of episode 52 in 2 weeks.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, audio, video

I guess Sony wasn't happy getting scads of bad publicity from their Rootkit CD adventure - they've expanded the rootkit game to one of their USB stick products. From f-secure:

We received a report that our F-Secure DeepGuard HIPS system was warning about a USB stick software driver. The USB stick in question has a built-in fingerprint reader. The case seemed unusual so we ordered a couple of USB sticks with fingerprint authentication. We installed the software on a test machine and were quite surprised to see that after installation our F-Secure BlackLight rootkit detector was reporting hidden files on the system.

...

This USB stick with rootkit-like behavior is closely related to the Sony BMG case. First of all, it is another case where rootkit-like cloaking is ill advisedly used in commercial software. Also, the USB sticks we ordered are products of the same company -- Sony Corporation.

This isn't ordinary stupidity at work here - after the previous incident, this is deep, deep stupidity.

Technorati Tags: PR, malware

Looks like there's some posting from ESUG 2007 - and it looks like you can grab near real-time downloads from the sessions over here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, events

Dare Obasanjo notes that Google faces a real threat from facebook (et. al.) - first, he quotes Jason Kottke:

Think of it this way. Facebook is an intranet for you and your friends that just happens to be accessible without a VPN. If you're not a Facebook user, you can't do anything with the site...nearly everything published by their users is private.

I can definitely see this happening in Facebook groups that get (and stay) active - the only potential problem I see getting in the way is spammers joining groups and defacing the Walls in them - and I suspect that Facbook will respond to that. In any event, if this stays big, Google has a problem - as dare sums up:

The way you get disrupted is by focusing on competitors who are just like you instead of actually watching the marketplace. I wonder how Google will react when they eventually realize how deep this problem runs?

And there's the challenge for Google - not from someone else getting search better, but from someone bypassing the entire problem. If you trust your network to get you a large enough percentage of the answers you need, then the value of Google ads will drop accordingly. That's a big if, of course...

Technorati Tags: facebook

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at class SharedQueue, and how you use it to pass objects between two Smalltalk Processes. Here's the script I used in the screencast:

queue := SharedQueue new. 
one := [[true] whileTrue: [| nextItem |
						nextItem := queue next.
						Transcript show: '--- (one) Received: ', nextItem printString; cr]].
one forkAt: Processor userBackgroundPriority.

two := [1 to: 10 do: [:index |
		Transcript show: '(two) Sending: ', index printString; cr.
		queue nextPut: index.
		(Delay forMilliseconds: 500) wait]].
two fork.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, processes, messaging

Dare Obasanjo slags Mark Cuban's vision of the web, and notes that he's not the first guy to make a bad bet on the way things will play out:

Unfortunately, Mark Cuban's vision of distributing high definition video over the Internet has two problems. The first is the fact that it is that distributing high quality video of the Web is too expensive and the bandwidth of the average Web user is insufficient to make the user experience pleasant. The second is that people on the Web have already spoken and content trumps media quality any day of the week. Remember when pundits used to claim that consumers wouldn't choose lossy, compressed audio on the Web over lossless music formats? I guess no one brings that up anymore given the success of the MP3 format and the iPod. Mark Cuban is repeating the same mistake with his HDNet misadventure.  User generated, poor quality video on sites like YouTube and larger library of content on sites like Netflix: Instant Viewing is going to trump the limited line up on services like HDNet regardless of how much higher definition the video quality gets.

Dare is right in his summation, where he compares Cuban to a newspaper owner - he's raging at the future while he holds an increasingly irrelevant piece of the past. The broadcast model assumes a limited number of channels, which in turn makes it hard for anyone other than professionals to get on the air. The net simply isn't like that.

It's hard to get regular op/ed space in a newspaper - there are a limited number of slots, and the well known writers get first dibs on them. It's childs play to toss up blog though, and your words can become as prominent as those of any pundit. The same thing is happening with audio and video. This hardly means that professional quality content will wither away; it does mean that it suddenly has a lot more competition.

Technorati Tags: media

This week, we talked about object databases and relational databases, and how working with them differs. Along the way we touched on various other aspects of database technology

If you have feedback, please send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or head on over to iTunes and leave a review, or over to Podcast Alley and cast a vote. You can also join the Facebook Group "Industry Misinterpretations", and leave your comments on the wall there.

Technorati Tags: OODBMS, RDBMS, smalltalk

Lukas Renggli notes that ESUG has begun. I wish I was there this year, but we had a rash of "too many things at once" around here :)

Ted Leung quotes Sam Ruby, who bursts a few bubbles for the "native threads are the answer" crowd:

Next, to dispel a few myths. Slashdot is written in Perl, seems to handle the load, and also seems to stay up. While there are a number of BitTorrent implementations, the original and (to the best of my knowledge) the most pervasive version is written in Python. Yahoo is a mix, but a good portion of it is written in PHP, with critical functions written in C. Twitter is written in Ruby, had early scalability issues, but seems to be past them. These are all examples of massively scalable applications.

...

So, while Joe Gregorio sees a future for databases without joins or transactions, I see a future in lightweight threads without locks or semaphores.

I think I've been saying that about Smalltalk and scaling for quite some time now.

Technorati Tags: scaling, threading

Andres Valloud expresses astonishment at what passes for college level coursework these days. To be fair, the grade school level math he noticed was not coursework, but review - for the high school level math that was coursework.

A few years back, this might have surprised me, but my uncle has been teaching that level of remedial math at a university near him since retiring as a high school teacher. Some of the stories he tells about the students he gets are amazing, in the "how did they get to college" sense of amazing.

The problem seems to be an excess of compassion that is not linked to common sense. It is no favor to pass a kid through school when they continually fail basic subjects, and it continues to be no favor to them to send them to a college where they are certain to fail. Without basic standards being enforced, all this compassion yields is tragedy. Better to fail kids early, when there's a chance they'll learn something from it, than to feed a sense of entitlement.

Technorati Tags: schools