Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Here's a great story about the JP Morgan Kapital application - Smalltalk is what powers it:

The story begins in the early 1990s, when JPMorgan first developed Kapital using the object-oriented language Smalltalk and a compatible database from GemStone Systems. "While the basics can be picked up in a couple of weeks, the system is rich and multifunctional," says Verdier. "And users really like its flexibility. The ease with which we can reuse components to model complex instruments ensures a rapid time to market."

Using Smalltalk enables developers to focus on the business problems, so technologists can later adopt different strategies for component implementation without changing the remaining source code, he says. Such flexibility and virtualization are essential since the business constantly needs to innovate. Pricing and risk models are increasingly sophisticated and therefore compute-intensive and some existing products will need to be processed for decades.

A large part of their success is simple: while their rivals wasted time and effort rewriting applications in order to be buzzword compliant, JPM kept producing results on proven technology.

Technorati Tags: success story

Scoble rips MS - and Ballmer in particular - a new one. I've quoted his summation, butc go read the rest - it demonstrates something I've been saying about MS for a long while: they've turned into a big, dumb, faceless company:

Will Microsoft get a clue before Facebook gets an entrenched advertising platform going? Ballmer proved with Google and with these quotes today: no.

None of this means that they won't continue to make money; heck, IBM hit the wall back in the 80's, and while they aren't the industry leader they once were, they still rake in plenty of cash. That's likely the future for MS: the new IBM.

Technorati Tags: marketing, PR, web2.0

I've seen a lot of stupid ideas float past, but this one from the EU's Globalization Institute makes it into the top 5 - only the existence of the RIAA and the MPAA prevent a complete victory for these morons:

Microsoft has had plenty of trouble with the European Union in recent days and now, if the Globalization Institute think tank has anything to say about it, PCs sold within the EU will be sold without an operating system.

The think tank recommended to the EU that all computers be sold without an operating system and sees no reason "why computer operating systems could not follow the same model as computer hard drives and processors."

Yes, installing an OS from scratch is exactly what most buyers long to do - it's such a productive use of their time. Imagine the fun dialog at home after this policy is enacted:

"Dad, I need to do my homework"

"Sorry son, but it looks like I have to download another 20 drivers first..."

Maybe next they'll recommend a return to "do it yourself" auto kits.

Dare Obasanjo believes that disconnected desktop software is dead (as do I) - which is likely a painful reality for Microsoft - they make a ton of cash from Office right now. Dare refers to a number of announcements about online application suites, ending with Microsoft's "Office Live" - which he doesn't seem to think much of:

As you can see one of these four announcements is not like the others. Since it isn’t fair to pick on the stupid, I’ll let you figure out which company is jumping on a dying paradigm while the rest of the industry has already moved towards the next generation.  The Web is no longer the future of computing, computing is now about the Web.

Forget the "rich user experience" offered by desktop UIs. People have moved on to the 80% solution that is the web UI, because the other advantages outweigh that loss of "richness".

A common thing to want on a website is a list of "live" links taken from one or more syndication (RSS/Atom) feeds. On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at how to approach that problem in Smalltalk.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, RSS, Atom

I've just updated the STIC website - the top of the page now has a small set of links from recent Smalltalk related posts. The posts are being aggregated from Planet Smalltalk and the STIC Director's blog. It was a pretty simple update to the Smalltalk server, and getting it to look nicer than it does now is a matter of getting better CSS around it.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Engadget notes that everyone likes the Wii - here in the US, in Japan, everywhere:

According to reports that looked at movement from April through September, the Wii outsold the PlayStation 3 "by more than four to one in Japan," which is admittedly better than the "six to one" differential it's faced before. Reportedly, Nintendo moved nearly 1.6 million units in the homeland while Sony garnered just over 385,000 new PS3 customers in the same period

The interesting thing now will be the next gen consoles. The PS3 and 360 have the high end graphics, but they are just prettier revs of the older devices from a game play perspective - the Wii broke the model. Let's see what Microsoft and/or Sony come up with to counter that.

Technorati Tags: games, wii

Ed Foster notices something that has been at the fringe of my consciousness for a couple of months: you can't easily log out of some of the big e-commerce sites:

"Over the last few months it has become very difficult to sign out of a session from sites like Amazon and PayPal," the reader wrote. "The 'Sign Out' or equivalent link that for years was at the top of nearly every page is now missing from nearly all pages of those sites. Even the most obvious page where a sign out link should be -- the page acknowledging completion of an order -- offers no way to log out. Amazon and PayPal have turned things upside down and instead of closing a session, they now want us to remain logged in after leaving their site. Why would they do that? What good does it do Amazon and PayPal when their customers minimize the browser or surf to another site while signed in?"

This is somewhat of a concern on a machine at home, but it's a huge problem on any shared (work, library, etc) device. I think the safest answer is simply to not shop online using a device that may be used by other people - not that anyone will follow that advice...

I still think Radiohead needs to get over themselves, and allow iTunes to sell individual tracks - but they have the right kind of idea here (via TechDirt):

That's because Radiohead is doing two smart things. It's telling fans they can name their own price for digital downloads. You just pay the band however much you think the downloads are worth and they'll be happy. But that's not all (though, that's what most folks are focused on). Rather than just offering up the content, they're also trying to give people a reason to actually buy something else. In this case, it's a "discbox," which will include the new album on both CD and vinyl, as well as an additional CD of seven extra songs and photos, artwork and lyrics.

With any luck, the labels and other artists are paying attention.

I think Scoble has run off into a niche, and doesn't realize it yet. Witness this:

But there’s a bigger trend I’m seeing: people who used to enjoy blogging their lives are now moving to Twitter. Andrew Parker punctuates that trend with a post “Twitter is ruining my blogging.” I find that to be the case too and when I talked about this on Twitter a raft of people chimed in and agreed that they are blogging a lot less now that Twitter is here.

It really depends on what your intent is. If all you are doing is keeping up with friends/family/peers, then sure - things like Twitter are probably good enough. If you aren't conveying a lot of real information, then 140 words will do it. If, on the other hand, you're trying to reach an audience (without regard to the size of said audience) with involved communication, then tweets just aren't going to cut it.

To take a simple example: look at the kind of thing Tim Bray posts, especially his recent exploratory series on various languages. Would that be useful in tiny 140 word chunks? I think not. It's also going to a narrowcast audience of software developers - and only a subset of those to boot. Those posts are highly interesting to that audience, but not outside it. What Scoble has done is to fall into the forest of "cool kid A-listers", and he's missing the many, many trees that are outside of his clearing.

There are tons of things going on outside of all of our interest spaces - that doesn't make them less relevant. Just because 140 characters does it for the "hip crowd" doesn't mean that it does it for the rest of us :)

Technorati Tags: web, social media

I thought this was mildly amusing:

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we hit the GData API from ObjectStudio 8 - and look at the small code fix required to OS 8 in order to get that wrking.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, ObjectStudio, Google API

It's a bit late, but the September Digest is online now. Be sure to take this month's survey - we are asking about Seaside and Cincom Smalltalk.

Technorati Tags: cincom, cincom smalltalk

I was a lot more interested in the Adobe acquisition of Buzzword before I saw the list of limitations in the product:

Buzzword’s drawbacks are that it is still slower than a full-fledged desktop application (not so much when typing, but when doing things like cutting and pasting); it doesn’t support hyperlinks (unconscionable for a Web-based app, though this is on Treitman’s to-do list); and there is no easy way to export a document to a blog or other Web publishing system other than cut-and-paste.

Still, with Adobe ownership and funding - and with the planned port to Air - the office suite space is looking more interesting, and Microsoft will have to awake from their long term slumber there. They aren't really awake yet - their current response reeks of "preservation of the existing business model at all costs":

Office Live Workspace is, in Microsoft’s words, “a new web-based feature of Microsoft Office which lets people access their documents online and share their work with others.” It’s aimed at consumers and small-business users, not corporations who are interested in being able to access their documents anywhere -- from any computer and any browser. In other words, Microsoft isn’t playing up Office Live Workspace as a head-to-head competitor with Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE). Microsoft is positioning its Microsoft-hosted SharePoint, Exchange and Office Communications Services (which it has now rebranded with as its family of “Office Online” services) as its GAPE competitors.

Thus far, there's not a truly compelling reason to switch from Word to (insert a web app here). However, that day looks like it's coming. The ironic thing is, it looks like Microsoft will be caught just as flat footed as its old rivals were when things switched from DOS to Windows.

Technorati Tags: documents

If you have been following the "SmallSpotlight" project in the public store repository, you should be aware that we just renamed it to "Searchlight" - the first name was way too much like the Apple search tool on the Mac :)

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk

On this week's Industry Misinterpretations, Michael, Arden, and I spoke to Tamara Kogan and Martin Kobetic, who work on the distribution and network protocols side of Cincom Smalltalk. The audio quality isn't as good as I'd like - we recorded in a conference room at Cincom HQ, and the air handlers were too noisy. It was a good conversation though - we covered the Opentalk HTTP layer, and the basic network support in the product.

As usual, send feedback to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or head over to iTunes, Podcast Alley, or the Industry Misinterpretations group at Facebook.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, opentalk, seaside

What could be better - the weather was beautiful, the Yankees won 10-4, my daughter and her friend Abby had a great time.

On to the playoffs - here's hoping I lose lots of sleep :)

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

Well, today's ballgame in Baltimore won't be as exciting as it could have been - the Yanks didn't catch the Sox, and have to settle for the wild card slot. Still - it's been a long while since I've been to a ballgame, and my daughter has never been to one. We'll be out all afternoon, which means that the podcast I'm almost ready to release (just waiting on one piece of additional audio) won't be out until this evening.

Mets and Phillies fans still have some nail biting to do - those teams are tied, and the loser is not assured a wild card slot - the second team in the NL west currently has a better record (by one game) then either of them.

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

Seaside on the road:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Doc Searls highlights the rather onerous terms of service from AT&T (Verizon seems to have similar ones):

AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries. Termination or suspension by AT&T of Service also constitutes termination or suspension (as applicable) of your license to use any Software. AT&T may also terminate or suspend your Service if you provide false or inaccurate information that is required for the provision of Service or is necessary to allow AT&T to bill you for Service.

I added the highlighting - to point out the over-broadness. What that says is amazing - if you have AT&T as an ISP, and you then say anything negative about them in an email, a blog post, a forum comment, (etc) - they can cut off your service. Someone should call their PR department and ask a few pointed questions.

Technorati Tags: stupidity

We have three great podcasts coming up, all focusing on Seaside. A bunch of us were at an internal "Camp Seaside" meeting last week in Cincinnati, and we took the opportunity to talk about Seaside. Here's what will be coming out over the next three weeks:

• Opentalk, Network Protocols, and how they relate to Seaside. Michael, Arden, and I talked to Martin Kobetic and Tamara Kogan about the underlying infrastructure in Cincom Smalltalk that supports Seaside
• Seaside support in Cincom Smalltalk, with Michael, Alan Knight, Michel Bany, and Arden Thomas. We talked about where the CST support for Seaside originated, and where it's headed.
• GLASS (Gemstone's Seaside support) with Michael, Dave Buck, and the entire Gemstone Seaside crew. This was a great conversation

So if Seaside floats your boat, be sure to grab these three episodes.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

Joe Wilcox lists a lot of reasons for Vista's "thud" arrival, and tries to explain how they don't imply failure. Based on how MS wanted this OS to roll out, I'm not sure what else you could call it - it's simply not a positive sign that OEMs have asked for (and gotten permission for) the ability to ship XP on new hardware sales.

Technorati Tags: PR

Here's what we needed to wind up our planning meeting: a fire drill:

See how excited Andreas looked to be heading back into the building :)

When you lose evangelists like Chris Pirillo from the Windows camp, it's a bad sign:

Do I recommend Windows Vista? Not a snowball’s chance in………..I’m waiting on Apple to release Mac OS X Leopard. As far as I’m concerned at this point, Microsoft is taking a huge hit. The future of Windows, in my opinion, is inside a Virtual Machine or BootCamp on a Mac.

Sure, there are going to be a lot of people running Windows for a very long time - but the "bleeding edge" crowd isn't part of that crowd anymore. Microsoft Windows is now part of the background - commonplace, but not terribly interesting.

Hat tip Rob Fahrni. - and don't miss what he says about the appropriate choice for your non-technical friends/family who need a new machine:

The most obvious choice is Macintosh, period. If your parents already have a Windows box and $600.00 they can score a Mac mini and hook it up to their existing monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Apple pays very close attention to the user experience, everything just works.

Could not have said it better myself.

It's an interesting juxtaposition between the Yankees and the Mets - the Yankees have spent the last two months roaring back into contention - they have the wild card, and put a real scare into Boston for the AL East. Meanwhile in Queens, the Mets have been doing a 1978 Red Sox imitation - the Phillies are now tied for first place with two days left in the season - and there's no guarantee that the loser will make the playoffs, because the NL West teams are vying for the wild card, too. The Yankees are set - the Mets are in nail biting mode.

Technorati Tags: baseball

Today's Smalltalk Daily comes courtesy of Andres Valloud, who's part of our engineering staff. The topic: hashing in Smalltalk, which is one of his passions.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, hashing

We had a pretty good day of Seaside based meetings - we wrapped up at dinner after 2 podcasts:

It's been a good week :)

I love this notion that having manifest type information tells you anything of value. Here's Cedric Beust on the matter:

This "continuous tax" is defined by the fact that when you need to maintain or use an API that was written in a language such as Ruby or Python, you have very little information available to you, and even if you eventually figure it out by looking at the sources of the tests (does anyone ever do that?), this knowledge you gain is ephemereal, and you will have to go through that same exercise if you need to modify this same portion of code a year later.

I have no idea why it helps me to know that an arbitrary variable is of type int or char. When confronted with an API like this:

this.startServer();

and some list of arguments, I'm helped a whole lot less than I am by something like this:

self startServerOnPort:

In the latter example, the name of the method describes the argument(s). In Smalltalk, you get method names that describe their arguments right in the method name - in languages like Java, you get long lists of easily interchanged variables, forcing you to look in secondary sources for the correct incantation.

Yes, there's a continuous tax, all right - but Cedric Beust is the one paying it, not me :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, dynamic languages

This is interesting - Yahoo is shuttering it's Podcast search/index site. I guess I can stop pushing out the Yahoo media tags :)

Technorati Tags: news, media

Boy, this is exactly the kind of thing I want floating around in my neighborhood - especially after the local hackers get at it :)

Urballoon -- an "urban media space" wherein a balloon hovers three stories in the air, equipped with a projector and a wireless connection. The balloon / projector is used to "broadcast" images or text sent to it via a website onto the ground below. Anyone can hop on the page and create a message for the balloon, so we'll assume they have very good profanity filters.

I have enough stuff I don't want in my inbox - I don't need it outdoors, too :)

Ramon Leon gives us a simple Wiki example in Seaside - the funny thing about this is, here at our interal "Camp Seaside" this week, we used a Wiki as a small example to build yesterday. Needless to say, Ramon's example is better than what we did yesterday :)

Caveat: as Ramon points out, use Pier if you want a production Wiki - this is a tutorial scale example.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, wiki

You can read about the extremely cool work that Antony Blakey is doing on his new blog - subscribe here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Michael Lucas-Smith explains what's going on with the Seaside work in Cincom Smalltalk.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Sitting here and looking at how forms work in Seaside, it hit me just how much simpler Seaside really is. I've done planty of SSP and Servlet style form handling; it's not complicated, and sure, there are frameworks that do nice things like pull data out of forms and stuff them in specific instance variables of an object. However, you still have to create the form and the servlet. Consider the Seaside equivalent of a form:

renderContentOn: html
	html form:
		[html heading: 'Get the Field Set' level: 2.
		html text: 'Field'.
		html textInput callback: [:input | field := input].
		html break.
		html submitButton callback: [self save]].

Yes, that's missing style information, and it's a trivial form - but just look at what's there - you can tell exactly what's happening in the form by looking at the code. That's a far cry from the way things work over in the servlet world.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, web

Patrick Logan asks a good question:

Pier may be the best extension of Ward Cunningham's "wiki" concept. And it is built on Magritte, which may be the best self-describing meta application system on... well, on earth.

And Cincom Smalltalk may be the best OO dynamic language system, probably the best such commercial system, and has all the openness that Smalltalk systems have had going back to the early 1980s. In fact CST's lineage goes all the way back. (Why would you use Ruby when you could use Smalltalk???)

Seaside works out of the box now, and we'll be supporting it as of January.

Today should be good - I'm here in Cincinnati, and we'll be going over Seaside basics (internal training). The good news is, that ought to mean some Seaside screencasts next week that are more involved than what I've done before.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cst