Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

This week David, Michael, and I spoke to Dan Heidinga of IBM about his work on Smalltalk on Eclipse - you can hear his full talk at Smalltalk Solutions; here's the abstract:

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

It was a fun talk - we also talked briefly about the discussion going on between Squeak developers and Debian folks about getting EToys into Debian.

If you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or visit us on Facebook, Podcast Alley, Ning, or iTunes.

Technorati Tags: Eclipse, smalltalk, black knight

Spotted in Engadget:

Samsung's just announced their first 256GB SSD. Not that you needed to know anything more than that to trigger salivation, but the MLC-flash SATA II drive has speeds of 200MBps read and 160MBps sequential write. Not like we'll be able to afford it or anything, but they'll be available come September, with a 1.8-inch version due in Q4.

Sure, it'll be expensive at first, but it will come down - and the size - my MacBok Pro has a 250 GB drive, but just imagine the battery life (and near silence) of one with a 256 GB flash drive.

Recently, this query came up in the Seaside mailing list:

Looking for advice on best way to handle following situation: same application running with different database on different images on different machines where application code is the same but some key configurations are different such as various locale items like number formatting, currency symbol and large scale text changes do to different languages being used.

Rather than give you the stock market-speak from me, the product evangelist, I'll let a customer (Boris Popov) answer from the same thread:

The VisualWorks version of Seaside supports per-session locales and message catalogs dealing with both formatting and language issues AFAIK. I was going to look at that closer in a week or two and could report back if you're interested.

Although, that should be broadened to Cincom Smalltalk - you get that kind of thing in VW and ObjectStudio.

Technorati Tags: seaside, locales

Via PVRBlog, I ran across a good article on using a Mac Mini as a DVR (as opposed to a Tivo, Cable Box, etc). I've got an EyeTV on my MacBook Pro, and it is pretty cool - it would definitely suffice on a dedicated device. The UI is way, way better than the crappy one on the Comcast DVR, that's for sure.

Technorati Tags: mac mini, eyeTV, DVR

Notwithstanding my fairly lackluster record in playing Civilization, I had a great time on the Polycast podcast this morning. Dan Quick was kind enough to invite me on (Michael has been a guest before), and it was a blast. The whole crowd on that cast is great - Dan Q, Cartimandua, and Makahlua. It was a lot of fun, and I want to thank Dan for inviting me.

Technorati Tags: polycast, civilization

So is this bozo allergic to radio, too? How about cell phone transmissions, or wireless phones? How about random RF from thunderstorms? Or is it just the specific frequency of WiFi?

A group in Santa Fe says the city is discriminating against them because they say that they're allergic to the wireless Internet signal. And now they want Wi-Fi banned from public buildings.

I think I'm about to sneeze based on a stupidity overload....

We had a party for a friend who just turned 40 last night, and here was the hit of the evening:

That's the friend code screen of the Wii, which was being used to get us connected for later. We spent a lot of time playing Mario Kart :)

IMHO, it's time for Microsoft to stop trying to compete in every possible market, and instead focus on software. They could start by creating a version of Windows with fewer problems :)

Where is that coming from, you ask? Well, I just saw where GameStop is no longer planning to stock Zunes, due to insufficient demand:

"We have decided to exit the Zune category because it just did not have the appeal we had anticipated," said a GameStop spokesperson. "It (also) did not fit with our product mix." GameStop made the decision about a month ago. GameStop said it will sell Zune players online until it clears out its inventory.

That's got to bruise a few egos in Redmond, but it could be a good thing - if they pay attention to the signal it's sending.

Technorati Tags: zune, microsoft, ipod

There's probably something good that could be said about the Windows registry, but I sure can't think of it. It looks like XP SP3 has been pushed out with a registry corrupting bug - interestingly enough, one that also cropped up for some people in SP2 (full dosclosure - I've never seen it). I think MS would be well advised to ditch the registry, and just let applications worry about keeping settings in any way that makes sense for them. It's not as if we have a disk space shortage at this point...

The ESUG 2008 Conference now has a Facebook Event site as well - you can RSVP there and let everyone know you plan to attend.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, esug

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at using POP3 from Cincom Smalltalk to get email.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, email, pop3

I saw this news from American Airlines, and I was taken aback - it's a seriously flawed policy from a branding perspective:

American Airlines said Wednesday that it would soon start charging passengers $15 to check their first bag each way, or $30 round-trip, if they are flying on a discounted fare.

Why do I say it's a branding problem? Well, consider what American Airlines is: not a discount carrier. When you fly an airline that is not a discount carrier, what are you (presumably) paying for? Some level of service. If you feel like you're getting nickle and dimed at every turn, then heck - why not fly an actual discount carrier and be done with it?

American is just confusing their brand. They would be better off, I think, to raise their fares instead, and not charge this "nickle and diming" fee. It'll just irritate people and send them off to a carrier that's already cheaper. Here's the clueless excuse from the execs there:

American Airlines executives said they had little choice but to impose such fees, given that the price of jet fuel is up more than 80 percent from a year ago.

"Our company and industry simply cannot afford to sit by hoping for industry and market conditions to improve," American's chief executive, Gerard J. Arpey, said Wednesday at a shareholder meeting.

So... they already charge (as most airlines do) for excess bags. I rather suspect that upping the fee for each ticket by $25 or $30 would have gone mostly unnoticed, and would have actually raised more revenue - not to mention the fact that it would have meshed with the brand better. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Update: This is a great comment from my friend Mike:

What I love about the whole stupid idea is that if you want to bring shampoo, toothpaste or any other hazardous health and beauty aid product with you, you're screwed. You can now check the stuff for $15 or spend the money when you arrive to buy the stuff, only the throw it away when you leave.

Now, I'm not a big fan of lawsuits, but given the current environment, I suspect that someone could make a viable claim that this rule is discriminatory towards women. There's no way to carry makeup and non-trivial amounts of lotion onboard, so you have to pay to check it. This makes it even more brilliant - the PR is awful, and it will likely generate lawsuits. Whether they end up being classified as frivolous or not, it will still cost American money to defend against them.

Technorati Tags: PR, branding, travel

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 Mark Petersen:

In today's complex, fast-paced business environment, users should not be bothered with manually submitting defect reports. Applications should automatically submit defect reports to a defect tracking application like ClearQuest or Bugzilla. This presentation showcases the development of Smalltalk web services to implement an SOA solution for integrating defect tracking and reporting in a distributed, multi-platform database application. We will discuss our approach to designing and implementing web services that can be easily invoked from any web service enabled application, including Smalltalk based applications. We will also discuss how these services allow issues to be quickly tracked, shared and routed across a large set of users, and how this methodology can easily be leveraged in many different application environments

Mark Petersen is a Senior Engineer at IBM's Semiconductor Research and Development Center, located in East Fishkill, NY. He has been using Smalltalk for over 10 years to support semiconductor characterization and testsite design.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, exception handling

Looks like Randal has lined up another Smalltalk luminary for FLOSS weekly - Dan Ingalls.

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