Mathew Ingram notes that the Times has moved into modern aggregation - as he says, newspapers have always been aggregators, and this is just the latest iteration:
When you click, you go to BlogRunner.com, which is a blog aggregator/headline engine that the New York Times acquired last year. I wasn’t initially that impressed with it when I first saw it (before the Times bought it), but I’ve been back several times since and I think it does a pretty good job. As Erick Schonfeld notes at TechCrunch, the Times is also building content aggregated by BlogRunner into other parts of its site, including at the bottom of news stories (the same way I use Sphere on my posts).
The Times has taken a couple of smart steps recently - they opened up their archives, they got rid of TimesSelect - now this. A lot of newspapers don't look like they'll manage the transition to digital real well - but the Times is starting to figure it out.
I guess we'll find out whether open APIs matter to people - Google has announced that everyone but Facebook is onboard with their new "Open Social" system. Via TechCrunch:
MySpace and Six Apart will announce that they are joining Google’s OpenSocial initiative. Silicon Alley Insider reported the MySpace rumor earlier today. We’ve confirmed that from an independent source, as well as the fact that Six Apart is joining. Per the update below, Google has also confirmed Bebo is joining.
That's fairly big, because it means that one API now gives you "widget" access to multiple systems. Facebook had all the momentum right through yesterday, but I have to think that this takes some of the wind out of their sails. On the other hand, I don't know that I'm about to move the Industry Misinterpretations Group off Facebook - and the various widgets on these systems are mostly useless. The big thing is "where the people are" - so the question is, will this drive any movement off Facebook? If it does, they'll look back wistfully at that Yahoo offer they turned down.
Mathew Ingram notes that Apple is not immune to upgrade problems - the fanboys notwithstanding:
The growing number of reports about problems with Leopard, the new Mac OS, show that there is a lot more to it than that. I just heard from a friend -- a relatively recent convert to Apple PCs -- who said that the upgrade didn’t just present him with a blue screen (something that until now had been associated exclusively with Windows machines), but actually wiped out most of his data and a substantial number of applications as well. I don’t know whether his problems were a result of using the third-party Application Enhancer software or not, as some have reported.
I had decided to wait on Leopard, and it looks like it was a good idea. I'll give it a few months to sort out.
I've been pondering the post from Steve Jones that I commented on the other day; it was while looking over the comments that I had a small epiphany - would Jones accept the "well, you can't expect much from the masses" theory in a home improvement project? Would he accept shoddy work from a contractor as quickly as he seems willing to accept it from a developer?
In general, how happy would he be if his attitude toward accepting mediocrity extended to every service he paid for? Does he just shrug his shoulders when a repair guy comes out and botches a job?
The tragedy is, a lot of people are going to cheer Brendan Eich on in his response to Microsoft's Chris Wilson - simply because it's the "good guys" against the "bad guys". However, I had a bunch of red flags go off when I read this:
The pattern of general assertions about small being beautiful and sufficient for web application developers' needs, met by specific arguments listing use-cases where JS does not scale in time or space, or lacks basic data integrity, type safety, and programming in the large support, in turn met by absolutely zero specific counter-arguments -- this is a pattern we have seen over and over in TG1 this year.
If things go that way, I expect to see a larger, more baroque, harder to understand Javascript come out the other end. I've seen this movie before - it's what happened to Java when they added generics. I suspect that the best thing possible for the wider community would be a nasty fight at the standards board that prevented any "progress".
For the curious people who asked me about the restaurant I mentioned here, I found the name - "Bardia's Orleans Cafe". It's well worth visiting. Here's a Washington Post review of the place - it's at 2412 18th street in the District.
Dare Obasanjo has some good insight on what Google will likely accomplish with their entry into the social media API space: they'll force a standard.
If enough momentum gains around OpenSocial, then three things will happen
Widget developers will start to favor coding to OpenSocial because it supports multiple sites as well as targeting the Facebook platform
Eventually Facebook platform developers will start asking Zuckerburg and company to support OpenSocial so they only need to worry about one code base (kinda, it won’t be that easy)
Other companies with proprietary widget platforms or plans to create one will bow down to the tide and adopt OpenSocial
That sounds about right to me - it will be interesting to watch two things over the next little while:
Supposedly, DirectX 10 was one of the reasons that gaming on Vista was going to be better than gaming on XP. Well... maybe not so much. Have a look at this post on ExtremeTech - it sounds like this is yet another reason to stay on XP.
I was fairly appalled when I read this "enterpirse" piece from Steve Jones - the fact that he's in charge of any project at all is pretty depressing. Not because he's actively opposed to dynamic languages - that's just a symptom. No, it's this kind of attitude:
This is the reason I am against dynamic languages and all of the fan-boy parts of IT. IT is no-longer a hackers paradise populated only by people with a background in Computer Science, it is a discipline for the masses and as such the IT technologies and standards that we adopt should recognise that stopping the majority doing something stupid is the goal, because the smart guys can always cope.
If you are willing to put up with bad developers and poor practices, I guess you'll come out the other end believing this sort of thing. In Jones' world, the best you can do is fight against the mediocrity. Gosh forbid you do any selective hiring, or train the staff you have - or even hold them to high expectations. No, better to expect nothing and get nothing.
That thinking combines pretty well with this NY Times piece I read yesterday - on why Enterprise applications tend to be hard to use. I'll go so far as to say that they'll keep being hard to use until the kind of thinking illustrated by Jones leaves IT.
We took my wife's relatives to the Naval Academy today - we had a tour of the place at 11 AM. It was a beautiful day, with temps in the low 60's and no clouds. All I had with me was my phone camera, but I took two nice shots of the Navy Chapel:
Later, we watched the cadets form up and march in to lunch:
The campus is gorgeous - well worth visiting. The Officers Club serves a great burger, too :)
Arden has announced the name of our Seaside product: Web Velocity:
Web Velocity is the synergistic combination of Cincom Smalltalk, Seaside, Glorp (Object relational mapping software) and tools along with examples and documentation. This product will be targeted at folks wanting a development product to do leading edge database-to-web applications. On one hand you could compare Web Velocity functionality to Ruby-on-Rails (RoR), and we should certainly be able to compete in that market. On the other hand, we hope that the combination of products and tools make it easy for newcomers to use, and help grow the community.
Two days ago, we picked my wife's relatives up in DC after a full day of touring, and decided to head down to the 18th and U street area for dinner - we found a nice little Cajun place to eat at. The Creole and Jambalaya were quite good - if it was easier to get in and out, I'd likely go back. As it was, we got lost coming back out, which turned a 45 minute drive home into a 90 minute set of circles :)
Anyway, it was a lot of fun:
They comped us on a nice dessert of Beignets, which motivated a sizeable tip. Tiny little place, too - I was standing at the entrance when I took this shot.
In lieu of more flexibility on pricing, NBC U sought a cut of Apple's hardware sales. "Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content, and made a lot of money," Zucker said. "They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing."
I have a question for Zucker then - he's made millions off of advertising, which only pays because of people like me who watch the ads. So - you deserve a cut of Apple's hardware sales in the same way that I deserve a cut of your ad revenues.
I see that Nick Carr thinks that blogging will drive more navel gazing, and obsession with popularity and comments will chew up useful time.
Hmm - does that mean that before the internet, all newspaper op/ed writers were simply navel gazing egotists? Has it occurred to Carr that the medium (TV/Newpaper/Net) is less relevant than the personality of the people involved? I think Carr has become over-invested in his "IT doesn't matter/the net is filled with crap" thesis, and is now trying to make everything he sees fit it. Kind of like the way Heinlein got obsessed with linking all of his stories toward the end...
Arden explains what's coming from Cincom with Seaside support. We are also working on Glorp integration - but that looks like it will come along a bit later.
Suzanne Fortman sent me a few photos from OOPSLA - here are two that show some Cincom folks. First, Alan Knight with Jim Haungs (our new engineering manager):
I've been reading about Hulu this morning - the joint venture between Fox and NBC. They've launched in beta, and are allowing their various partners to start distributing content. There are a number of positive reviews around, but TechCrunch zeroes in on the big mistake they are making: they are still trapped in the TV scheduling mentality:
Just when particular videos will be available through Hulu - and how long we can expect them to stay on Hulu - will vary from video to video. However, as a general rule TV shows will be available on Hulu by midnight Hawaii time after they debut on normal television. As another general rule, Hulu will keep distributing TV shows until five weeks of newer episodes have passed, at which point older shows will presumably just disappear from the site.
That expiration thing is just stupid. I have plenty of friends who have gotten into shows well after they have been on the air - and they expect to be able to watch the older stuff to catch up. That might mean DVDs, it might mean iTunes - it could mean Hulu, if the people who made this scheduling decision weren't being dumb.
I caught up on "Buffy" that way, actually - I started watching during season 5, and F/X was broadcasting two episodes of the older shows every morning. I had my ReplayTV catch them, and after a couple of months, I was caught up. Hulu could offer the same thing, but it looks like a failure of imagination.
Does this mean they'll fail? No, but it does mean that they are limiting their potential success.
I finally finished reading "Empire Express" last week. It was a good look at the building of the transcontinental railroad here in the US - the author did fairly exhaustive research, as he had a lot of personal details for the principle players at the Central Pacific RR and the Union Pacific RR.
The last segment went over the Congressional hearings on the scandals surrounding the build out - the bribery, the extra, useless track that was laid - forgetting the specific subject for a moment, anyone who has ever watched a Congressional hearing (pick your favorite scandal) would feel right at home - the 19th century ones seem to have been the same as the modern ones :)
Seaside 2.8 has been released - the official page is here. Once we ship the next release of Cincom Smalltalk in January, the load instructions will be extremely simple: load the Seaside parcel. In the meantime, you can track the 2.8 ports in the public store repository.
Here's part II of last week's talk with Stephen Travis Pope - and this week, I've included music produced with Siren as part of the podcast. We continued our talk about Siren and Smalltalk history, including some interesting bits about the early development of the current VW UI framework.
My cousin's wife just had a baby boy, and we have relatives in town from Australia - so I'll be away from the keyboard most of the day. The podcast will be out as soon as I can get it out.
Vorlath takes hundreds of words to not understand something very, very basic - in software development, even the best advances are stymied by human factors. Mediocre developers trump technology; bad management trumps good developers; changing market conditions can kill good software. What he tries to do is "prove" that Brooks was wrong - all the while failing to understand what Brooks was actually getting at:
This topic still comes up today even though people should know better. I will discuss the topics in the No Silver Bullet paper and point out why they are incorrect. Only minimal critical thinking is required. My annoyance is simply how pervasive this paper has become and how people believe it without analysing what is actually said.
Most of us know perfectly well what Brooks was saying - and it didn't really involve formal logic.
Just in case you think I've completely gone to the Apple kool-aid, I did find a negative Leopard review that has me wondering. I haven't upgraded yet - I figured I'd give it a few weeks to sort itself out, and give it a shot once the initial set of patches have come out.
My wife has relatives from Australia coming in today, so I expect posting will be light. However, part two of the podcast is almost ready - as soon as I get the last piece of extra audio. I should have that out today or tomorrow.
Next week's podcast should be interesting - we don't have the guest completely nailed down, but if it comes through, it should be a lot of fun.
Slowly but surely, our applications are moving to a world where they persist state automatically, and can skip over a crash as a normal event. Not just because the application crashes, but because laptops live an unstable life. Continuous Autosave should not just be a feature of things like IntelliJ idea or server-side documents.
Yeah, like a Smalltalk image :) Hat tip Patrick Logan
I've decided to put together a short video series on the Cincom Smalltalk browser - for people who aren't familiar with Smalltalk, downloading the non-commercial environment can lead to a "what now?" kind of reaction. With this series, I hope to plow through some of that. The mp4 for the video is here; I've also uploaded it to YouTube.
This is a very basic introduction - in this segment, I explain what the various panes of the browser are for.
James Governor passes on some real wisdom from David Stewart (via the Australian Daily Telegraph) - who had something of an epiphany about shutting off access to social media at work:
“It got closed down because there was this fear in the market that it was going to destroy the whole world. Yet, they let people talk on their phones, and let them go out and have a cigarette and talk on their mobile phones, but they closed down what is a fundamental communication tool to probably more than half of our workforce.”
Contrast that with the attitude James quotes from one of his colleague's blog, that social media, web mail, IM (etc) are distractions that workers don't need. This is a fairly common attitude, and one that James rightly throws cold water on. His point is made via people who went to college recently, but heck - some of the rest of us use tools like IM, IRC, and social media to stay connected as well. Here at Cincom, a large proportion of our Smalltalk group (across development and beyond it) uses an IRC channel to stay connected - both internally and externally. Many of us also use various IM clients for individual conversations - there's often more than one "back channel" going when there are group conference calls.
If you want forward progress, you have to trust the people you hire. That doesn't mean you should be blind to mistakes (or worse) - but it does mean that you need to respond to problems rather than trying to completely prevent them - cast the block widely enough, and you block productivity - and end up with a set of employees that looks at the corporate network as more of a jail than anything else. Sure, there are places where such blocks are appropriate - national defense sector stuff, for instance - but elsewhere? Not so much. If your company is blocking such access, you have to wonder just how engaged the decision makers are.
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at #subclassResponsibility and #shouldNotImplement - using examples that demonstrate how they are used to specify behaviors that subclasses should (or should not) implement.
I ran across an argument against the "all objects, all the time" theory that Smalltalk uses - Reg Braithwaite tries to make an argument against complexity, using Magnitudes to illustrate - say you want to add a new Magnitude subclass to the system. He argues:
Well, there is a huge problem with this arrangement: Addition is commutative. 1.0 + 2 must give the same result as 2 + 1.0. Using a simple message to implement addition means that you must be excruciatingly careful to handle all of the possible cases so that you do not accidentally violate this property. Now of course, the designers of system classes like Integer and Float went to this trouble. But if you want to add another magnitude class—say CurrencytwoPlaceDecimal—you have to open up all of the system classes and modify them so that 1 + ThirtyCents gives the same result as ThirtyCents + 1.
You're going to have to pay for that complexity somewhere. You can pay for it the Smalltalk way, by adding new methods to each Magnitude subclass, or you can pay for it his way. The funny thing is, his solution for Java-like languages is to build a double dispatching Visitor (I find this amusing because the Smalltalk solution for Magnitudes is double dispatch). Hmm - this results in harder to understand code (and lots of it). I think his quest for purity in what an object understands has led him down the path to harder to read code.
Arden pointed out that many of the OOPSLA sessions are available as podcasts - you can subscribe to the podcast feed here. Looks like I have a full set of audio for the next week's worth of exercise :)
Update: As noted in the comments, the feed is botched. The items don't have all the necessary iTunes tag information, so iTunes doesn't see them. The enclosures are in the feed though - BottomFeeder finds them just fine :)
I was talking to Arden yesterday, and he suggested that I redo some of the introductory screencasts I did last year as full motion videos, as opposed to the screen grab technique. I've done the first one now - which tries to answer the "what now?" question that many people have when they first install Cincom Smalltalk non-commercial and start it up. I'll be doing a few of these videos over the next few days and weeks - my plan is to keep them in the 2-5 minute timeframe.
Comcast Corp (NasdaqGS:CMCSA - News), the largest U.S. cable TV operator, posted on Thursday a 2 percent rise in quarterly profit excluding one-time items but lost more basic video subscribers than analysts had expected.
I'm shocked, shocked. As soon as Verizon has the 20/20 service locally, I'll likely skip on Comcast as well.
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at MessageNotUnderstood - and how to intercept it without exception handling. As I say in the screencast, implementing #doesNotUnderstand: in your own class is not something to be done lightly - but it's worth knowing about.
This (from Michael Geist) is the kind of thing I find worrisome: A Canadian website offering public domain music has been shutdown due to a complaint that some of the stuff available there is not public domain everywhere the site can be accessed. If this became the norm, imagine the consequences: speech as free as the least open place on the planet, copyrights as long as the longest on the planet - the list of damage goes on and on. Ultimately, this kind of thing promotes a race to the bottom where the craziest man in the room wins.
