Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

I think this is great advice for del Toro and Jackson - "The Hobbit" should try to aim for it, especially the bit about making Smaug a classic movie villain.

We have some good information on traveling to Reno up on the STIC site; here's a very important thing I wanted to highlight:

Please Note: The resort's lowest rate is $49 per night. This will not give you one of the nicer, recently updated rooms. If you ask for the conference rate of $79, you'll get one of the upgraded rooms.

See you there!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, smalltalk solutions

If you liked the jet powered port-a-potty, you'll love this :)

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at a piece of preview (beta) code - Threaded COM

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, COM

Smalltalk Solutions 2008 is coming up fast - the schedule of events is here, and registration is here. There are a ton of great talks, like this one from Dale Henrichs:

Seaside has been characterized as a "heretical" framework because it breaks many of the widely-accepted "best practices" for web applications, including "share as little state as possible." With GLASS (GemStone/S, Linux, Apache, Seaside, Smalltalk) GemStone takes this heresy to the next level where "everything is shared" - transparently and persistently.

GemStone/S is a Smalltalk-based object server that provides a platform for developing, deploying and managing scalable, persistent, high-performance, distributed applications. GemStone customers have distributed systems running on 100's of CPUs, high-performance systems where transaction rates exceed thousands of transactions per second, and large systems running with thousands of concurrent users.

In this talk, you'll learn how GLASS makes it possible for you to "share everything" in your Seaside application without having to "learn everything" about GemStone/S. In particular you will learn about the extensions that were made to the Seaside framework to make "transparent persistence" possible. You will also learn how to take advantage of these extensions to add "transparent persistence" to your own Seaside application.

Dale has been working with computers since 1975. Smalltalk discovered him while he was at Tektronix in the 1980s and he hasn't looked back. He is currently a Principal Engineer at GemStone Systems, Inc., where he is the primary engineer working on Seaside. His blog, http://gemstonesoup.wordpress.com is about using Seaside and GemStone/S.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, gemstone, glass, smalltalk solutions

Michael has posted a new Web-Velocity demonstration video.

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk, seaside, web velocity

I've been on Twitter for awhile now, but I've been paying more attention recently. If you want to follow me there, my ID is jarober

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at CoolImage, an improved image editor that ships as a contributed piece of the product.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom smalltalk, image editor

Dare Obasanjo gives a great example of the difference between the classic "early adopters" and the general market - and notes that many, many things that are crucial to a small set of people are of no interest to the vast majority:

I've lost track of all of the this is the year RSS goes mainstream articles I've read over the past few years. Although RSS has turned out to be a key technology which powers a number of interesting functionality behind the scenes (e.g. podcasting) actually subscribing and reading news feeds in an RSS reader has not become a mainstream activity of Web users. When you think about it, it is kind of obvious. The problem an RSS reader solves is "I read so many blogs and news sites on daily basis, I need a tool to help me keep them all straight". How many people who aren't enthusiastic early adopters (i) have this problem and (ii) think they need a tool to deal with it?

That's very true, and ought to be more obvious. It's true of a lot of other things as well, including things completely outside the technology realm). I'm glad to see Dare posting again - while I don't always agree with him, he adds a lot of common sense to an awful lot of topics.

Technorati Tags: PR, common sense

I want to thank Nathaniel Talbott for the opportunity to speak to the Raleigh Ruby group - and to the large crowd that turned out in a driving rainstorm to see the presentation. Special thanks to the fellow who loaned me a Mac DVI-VGA converter - mine was in another bag from my last trip - doh!

Anyway, the talk went pretty well, I think - lots of questions, which I always take as a good sign. I walked through some basic Seaside stuff, and did a brief Web Velocity demo. That had bugs, but it's early days yet. By Smalltalk Solutions, things should be a lot cleaner.

Great group of people in raleigh, and I'm happy to have been there.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, ruby, ruby on rails

Smalltalk Solutions 2008 is coming up fast - the schedule of events is here, and registration is here. There are a ton of great talks, like this one from Daniel Heidinga:

Eclipse had its start as a re-implementation of the VisualAge IDE so it's fitting that we bring Smalltalk to Eclipse in the form of the Smalltalk Development Tools (STDT). Based on VisualAge for Smalltalk (aka ENVY/Smalltalk), STDT seeks to bring a Smalltalk runtime into Eclipse.

This talk will provide an overview of the effort to bring Smalltalk to Eclipse, our goals and aspirations, and the current status of the Smalltalk Development Tools. We will present our future plans for STDT, including a discussion of some of the challenges in implementing a Smalltalk IDE in a Java-based platform.

"Imagine, putting source code in files! How quaint." -- Kent Beck

Dan was introduced to Smalltalk during a coop term at IBM, formerly OTI, and he's been hooked ever since. Currently, he can be found at IBM working on the J9 Java VM team. Along with his VM responsibilities, he helps lead tool development and is quickly becoming a Smalltalk expert.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, smalltalk solutions, eclipse

Spotted in SCI FI Wire:

Christian Bale is to play rebel leader John Connor in three sequels to the Terminator franchise, BBC News reported.

I think Bale is the right guy to pull the role off, but boy - I wonder whether they'll be able to keep the current "Sarah Connor Chronicles" story line in any kind of synch with the planned movies.

On today's Smalltalk Daily we take a look at subsystems - using an example that runs some specific code at system startup time.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, subsystem

Smalltalk Solutions 2008 is coming up fast - the schedule of events is here, and registration is here. There are a ton of great talks, like this one from Michael Lucas-Smith:

WebVelocity is a new Smalltalk Development Environment that is oriented around Seaside for Web Development and Glorp for Object/Relational Mapping. Come and see how WebVelocity re-targets the Smalltalk development experience into the Web Browser and simplifies the challenge of learning a new environment for newcomers. We'll even build an entire application using Active Record and Scaffolding during the presentation with minimal programming. If you're a fan of Ruby on Rails, you must come and see this presentation.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, smalltalk+solutions

Anyone developing products - either desktop or net - needs to take Apple into account. Why?

Consider this: Apple's retail market share is 14 percent, and two-thirds for PCs costing $1,000 or more.

To make it short, nearly the entire demographic of computer users willing to spend non-trivial amounts of money are buying Macs. This is why I'm starting to see announcements of games being ported to the Mac, I think.

Couple that with the huge market share for Macs in universities, and you begin to understand why the Vista flop is a serious problem.

Cringely asks the question about IT analysts that more people ought to ask: why?

So Gartner and, by association, Gartner's competitors help customers make better IT decisions. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. But why do governments and big companies NEED help making IT decisions? Don't most companies hire IT professionals to make those decisions in the first place? Do they really need to spend more than $2 billion per year between these consulting companies just to make better IT decisions?

It's a broader topic that goes far beyond analyst firms though. Consider the following all too common scenario (which I've seen from both ends):

• Your company has a problem. Many of the internal staff understand the problem, and have recommended a solution
• The executives are baffled by the problem, and don't know what to do
• An outside consultant is brought in to make a recommendation
• The consultant recommends a solution - the same one that the staff has been agitating for
• Now that said solution has been blessed by an "expert", it's ok to try it

Lots of companies develop an interesting mindset towards their own staff, seeing them as no better than errant children. Gobs of money end up being wasted on outside firms (analysts and consultants) who do no more than recommend what your own staff already knows. Only when the "outside expert" made the case was it a safe decision though.

Ultimately, what this says is that the old adage tends to be very true: a fish rots from the top.

Technorati Tags: analysts

I'm heading to Raleigh to tomorrow to speak to the Ruby Brigade about Seaside - if you want to come, just go here. I'll be arriving at RDU just before 2, and the talk is at 7 PM - if anyone wants to meetup for coffee and/or Seaside chatter before then, let me know.

Technorati Tags: ruby, seaside

Randal Schwartz keeps spreading the word about Seaside:

What makes this slightly amusing is that I'm here because I was hired to teach a 3-day Perl class last week, but happened to have an extra layover day.  I started talking about Seaside to my contacts here, and they encouraged me to present my talk.  When I got to the part where I said that the teenagers sold Auctomatic for $5 million, one of them said "man, what am I doing here?".  Oops.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at a simple package that lets you hook the TimeZone in Smalltalk to the system clock. Sure, that's how it should work, but it's not that way by default :/

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, cincom smalltalk

Scoble is reporting that MS will first buy Yahoo search (which will kill it), and will then buy Facebook (killing that).

I suppose it's a great time to be competing with Microsoft - they'll be busy with two huge cases of indigestion if Scoble is right.

Smalltalk Solutions 2008 is coming up fast - the schedule of events is here, and registration is here. There are a ton of great talks, like this one from Thomas Hawker:

Porting an application in one version of VisualWorks to a newer version is usually straightforward - provided the versions are close relatives. The OOCL principle enterprise application, however, is written in VW5i, uses ENVY for its source code management, and involves packages no longer supported for GemStone server code management, display widgets, and testing. This talk will explore the migration path taken, the obstacles encountered, and the solutions developed to move the application to VW7 using Store.

See you there!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, smalltalk solutions

More words of wisdom from Beust:

What will keep preventing dynamically typed languages from displacing statically typed ones in large scale software is not performance, it's the simple fact that it's impossible to make sense of a giant ball of typeless source files, which causes automatic refactorings to be unreliable, hence hardly applicable, which in turn makes developers scared of refactoring. And it's all downhill from there. Hello bit rot.

I hate giving anecdotal evidence to support my points, but that won't stop me from telling a short story that happened to me just two weeks ago: I found myself in this very predicament when trying to improve a Ruby program that 1) I just wrote a few days before and 2) is 200 lines long. I was staring at an object, trying to remember what it does, failing, searching manually in emacs where it was declared, found it as a "Hash", and then realized I still had no idea what the darn thing is. You see my point..

To be brutal, if you put down a tiny program for two days, come back to it, and can't make sense of it? Please, please, stop writing code. To be brutal about it, you simply don't have what it takes.

I see Cedric Beust has responded to Steve Yegge's post on languages - and you can tell he's basically lost for points, because he starts this way:

I sent him a reaction email shortly after he posted his article, and he encouraged me to make it public in an attempt to document our two opposing viewpoint publicly.

I'm happy to be the Luke Skywalker to his Darth Vader. Evil shall not prevail.

Yeah Cedric, that moves the conversation forward. When you graduate from the 5th grade, just let the rest of know, ok? And while you're at it, learn something about refactoring tools in dynamic languages....

Technorati Tags: dynamic language, static language, types

Spotted in Engadget:

"In light of developments since the withdrawal of the Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business. Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo! an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo! but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo!"

The thinking seems to be that MS wants the search business from Yahoo. That would be a smaller value of stupid than buying all of Yahoo, but still a problem. Why? Well, look at the infrastructure: Microsoft uses Windows based everything, Yahoo tends to be a Linux/Unix shop using a variety of other things. MS' entire track record of acquisition involves rewriting the acquired stuff in MS technology and rehosting on Windows - along with relocating everyone involved to Redmond.

Now, let's assume that MS doesn't actually do any of those things this time around - does it matter? Not really, because all of the acquired Yahoo employees will assume that's what's in store, and the good ones - the ones MS would really like to keep - will start bailing in huge numbers. The remaining staff will end up in a (losing) knife fight with the MS employees who already work in the search area.

The result? A smaller net search business than Yahoo or MS have individually right now. Why will they try to do the merger, given that all of this is obvious? Because most executives have been "out of the trenches" for so long that none of this registers. To them, technology A and technology B are interchangeable, as are the developers who work on them. That's why they end up positively stunned when the supposed synergy fails to arrive.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, yahoo, search

Steve Rubel notes that there's a "digital divide" of sorts within the community of well connected (internet) segment of the population:

The first piece of research from Parks Associates (via Dwight Silverman and CNET) reveals that one-fifth of all U.S. heads-of-household have never used e-mail. Based on the conversations I had in Europe this past week, this is even more pronounced outside the US. High mobile penetration outside the US, however, make things a bit more complicated to track.

Meanwhile, a separate white paper from IDC/Nortel (via Jackie Huba) - this one spanning 17 countries - found that 16% of the information workforce is already "Hyperconnected" and that another 36% will be joining us soon. Definitely download the PDF. It's an interesting read.

Steve concludes that traditional media's (and advertising's) half life is longer than some people might think - but I've got a different question about this: what's the age breakdown look like? Anecdotally, there's a fairly sharp divide at my age: there are those of us in our forties who have latched onto the net, and then there are those of the same generation who simply haven't. As you increase the age cohort, the number of "not really connected" grows larger and larger.

However, if you go in the other direction, it's the opposite: very, very few people (at least in the income brackets I'm familiar with) in their 20's and younger aren't online constantly. In my teenage daughter's cohort, I would be astonished to find someone who didn't use a mobile, a social network (probably Facebook), and IM.

I rather suspect that the divide Steve Rubel spots now will be more or less gone in 20 years.

Technorati Tags: digital divide, internet

Maybe I'm easily amused, but I find this radar map interesting:

I live in that corridor between the two areas of precipitation. I suppose that gives me a window for jogging :)

Nintendo Wii fans will get a kick out of this cartoon :)

Is this Seaside Envy :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, ruby, seaside

On this week's podcast we were happy to have Georg Heeg, founder of his eponymous company in Germany, and Executive Director of STIC, on as a guest. We chatted about the upcoming Smalltalk Solutions show, which starts on June 18 in Reno, Nevada.

We each brought up a few talks that we thought would be interesting - which is not to say that we did an exhaustive review of the sessions (we didn't). It should be a good way to get an idea of what's coming though, and you can check the entire schedule here.

If you have feedback, please send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or visit us on Facebook, Ning, iTunes, or Podcast Alley. See you at the show!

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, smalltalk solutions

I ran across this interesting tidbit from ObjectWave:

Now in a beta release, Swan enables simpler connectivity between AJAX interfaces and server-side code based on Java, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), and Smalltalk. .Net support is planned for a future offering. Developers do not need to write the code for this linkage; JavaScript is binded to server-side components.

Sounds interesting - I'll have to see what that's about.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

ESUG has anounced this year's innovation awards - follow the link for full details:

The European Smalltalk Users Group (ESUG) is proud to announce its 5th Innovation Technology Awards. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, 500 Euros, 300 Euros and 200 Euros during an awards ceremony at the 16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference 2008. Developers of any Smalltalk-based software are welcome to compete.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Dare Obasanjo makes a very good point about giving offline capabilities to online apps:

Once you decide to "go offline", your Web application is no longer "zero install" so it isn't much different from a desktop application.

True enough, but I'm still not as down on the idea as he is. Part of why I like iWork better than MS office is that it's so much lighter weight. I don't have any interest or need in all the features. I've tried Google docs, and they probably satisfy my basic needs for that kind of app as well.

Bottom line, I think the ugly reality is that most people neither want nor need the "rich experience" that Dare is on about. Sure, there are plenty of exceptions - but there's also a huge unmet need for vastly simpler apps.

I just snagged an invite to the beta of DropBox, and it is very, very cool. Rather than have me extoll its virtues and explain it, go watch this video now.

Michael has been looking at MooTools for Seaside, and demonstrates the power of community while he's at it:

The first and foremost of these is the Mocha GUI components. Here is a screenshot from a collaboration Boris and I did to get Mocha working in Seaside with Seaside-Mootools. The package is in public store as Seaside-Mootools-Mocha. Without Boris's interest and work, this wouldn't have happened so quickly.

Smalltalk: it's not about being on the island anymore :)

If you're thinking about attending Smalltalk Solutions in June, then the next few podcasts should be interesting. We spoke to Georg Heeg today - he's the founder of his eponymous company in Germany, and also the executive director of STIC. I should have the podcast out over the weekend - we covered a lot of ground about the conference.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, smalltalk solutions

Squeak pops up everywhere - including wifi controllable bots

I don't need one (My Pro is still great), but this news might convince me to buy a new one for my wife, and have her existing one pass down to my daughter. Decisions, decisions....

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at something that's sometimes useful, even though it's often the wrong approach: cloning a class. Typicaly, if you need a class just like one you already have, but with small variations, you should either look at the existing class again, or subclass. However, it's sometimes better to create a parallel class. With that thought in mind, today we look at a small add on that makes that a menu pick in the browser.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Smalltalk Solutions 2008 is coming up fast - the schedule of events is here, and registration is here. There are a ton of great talks, like this one from Georg Heeg:

Johann Sebastian Bach lived in Koethen from 1717 to 1723. He worked for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Koethen and composed well-known music. But where did he live? This question has been open for 130+ years. The EU, the state of Anhalt-Saxony, Koethen County, and the City of Koethen sponsored a project to find out. Georg Heeg eK won the bidding and started the digging. After almost two years using VisualWorks, COM-Connect, GemStone/S and Seaside all known data (both text and tax figures) could be viewed in a semantic network. Bibliometry was used to evaluate statements of historians. Finally a process of elimination showed: Bach lived in Schalaunische Str. 44 until he moved to Wallstr. 25/26 in 1719. He always had the same landlord Johann Andreas Lautsch. In early phase existing software packages were evaluated, before agile software development process inside the agile research project was started to get insight in the history of Koethen.

Georg Heeg learned about Smalltalk in 1983 at Dortmund University. In 1987 he founded the now oldest 100% Smalltalk enterprise located in Dortmund, Koethen and Zurich. His organization supports Smalltalk customers world-wide. He is co-founder of ESUG and since 2007 he is Executive Director of STIC Smalltalk Industry Council.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, smalltalk solutions

Scoble:

But it does it in a way that Facebook will never be able to block. Why? Because it’s your browser that scrapes all your friend’s info into Minggl'€™s browser bar. That bar then uploads all that information back up to Minggl. There’s no way that Facebook will be able to block Minggl. If Google wants to push the issue they should do exactly what Minggl is doing. Privacy is dead.

Anyone who puts anything on a computer screen that they want hidden from public view should think again.

So, does that include your bank account numbers? What about your credit card numbers? Perhaps your passport number, too? Social Security number? All phone numbers, including ones you would prefer to be for family and close friends only?

Via Patrick Logan, I ran across this data on April console sales:

The PS3 might be catching up to the XBox, but the Wii is still way, way ahead. That's amazing given how long the Wii has been out. I'll tell you, even though battle mode on Mario Kart is sub-par, the Grand Prix mode is very, very cool. The Wii is just fun.

Technorati Tags: game console, wii, ps2, xbox

I just finished a book about sales that I liked quite a bit: "The Contrarian Effect: Why it pays (Big) to take typical sales advice and do the opposite". The book is short, and filled with useful examples of how typical "close now!" tactics work against the interests of your company. Sure, you might get a revenue spike from a forced sale now - but what's the cost in terms of customer loyalty and future revenue? Not to mention something else the authors (Michael Port and Elizabeth Marshall) bring up: word of mouth is no longer limited to the water cooler. Pick almost any company name and try to search for "XXXX sucks". You'll be amazed at what you turn up.

The question is, do you want to be the next company listed there? Probably not, and that's one of the primary reasons to listen to these authors. They advise something pretty simple:

• Listen to the people you want to sell to
• Expand your pool by sharing your network of contacts with them, so as to grow your common interests
• In any conversation you have with interested parties, offer something of value - advice, a place worth visiting on your website, etc.
• Work with partners - a lot
• Don't force sales through typical "closing questions" - ever

The last one is crucial - people have too many choices in terms of products and services - if you get pushy, they will go somewhere else. Ask yourself this: Do you like dealing with the car salesman who tries to make the sale today, when all you want to do is test drive? If not, what makes you think your customers and prospects enjoy talking to your sales staff?

It's a quick read, but highly useful. Well worth recommending to decision makers in your company, so that you can start making headway towards the right kinds of changes now.

Technorati Tags: sales, sales tactics

One thing a lot of people like to do with editors is create little macros - the ability to type shortcuts for commonly used text, hit a command key, and have it expand. Today's Smalltalk Daily shows you how to get that capability into your Cincom Smalltalk environment.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I understand the idea of CBS buying CNet, but for $1.8 Billion???

CBS will pay $11.50 a share for CNET. The all-cash deal represents a premium of 44% above the $7.95 CNET closed at yesterday.

As AlleyInsider notes, CNet hasn't traded above $10 in years. This isn't as much of an over-payment as Schwartz made for MySQL, but - then again - it takes real work to land in the same "waste money like an idiot" league that he lives in.

On the positive side, CBS just bought a ton of good podcast knowledge. The question is, are the managers there in the Zucker "customers are thieves" mindset, or do they understand the way things are changing?

Technorati Tags: cnet, cbs, tv

Looks like Zucker's brand of stupidity is everywhere at NBC - they started using the broadcast flag on Monday:

Handfuls of Windows Vista Media Center users found themselves blocked from making recordings of their favorite TV shows this week when a broadcast flag triggered the software's built-in copy protection measures. The flag affected users trying to record prime-time NBC shows on Monday evening, using both over-the-air broadcasts and cable. Although the problem is being "looked into" by both NBC and Microsoft, the incident serves as another reminder that DRM gives content providers full control, even if by accident.

Yet another reason not to go to Vista; MS crawled into bed with all the DRM cheerleaders. Never mind that, though - just what does NBC think they are achieving with this? If I'm recording a show weekly, and then I discover that NBC stopped me from doing so, do they seriously think I'm going to rearrange my schedule to be in front of the TV at the time they want to run the show?

Earth to NBC: there are too many other choices available, and your content simply isn't good enough to warrant that.

Technorati Tags: tv, stupidity, nbc

Smalltalk Solutions 2008 is coming up fast - the schedule of events is here, and registration is here. There are a ton of great talks, like this one from Arden Thomas:

This presentation discusses what is in Cincom Smalltalk s just released products, as well as plans for future releases. Products discussed are VisualWorks, ObjectStudio8, and ObjectStudio Classic.

Arden Thomas got started with Smalltalk in 1986, looking for better ways to do software development (he found it). He is now the product manager for Cincom Smalltalk, and previously worked as a senior field application engineer for Cincom working to help Cincom's Smalltalk customers, and help move Smalltalk forward. He worked for ParcPlace for many years as a trainer, sales engineer, and consultant, and recently did extensive software development at Forest Investment management, which included choosing and using an application framework.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, smalltalk solutions