We are looking for another support engineer to work with the Smalltalk team here at Cincom:
You will provide technical support services to Cincom Smalltalk customers, channels partners, and to other internal and external stake-holders. You will have extensive technical knowledge of the Smalltalk programming environment. You must truly enjoy working with customers and end-users as well as with globally-distributed engineers and software development teams to resolve complex technical issues.
So it sounds like the old analog TV transmissions are going to get extended past February 17:
Echoing concerns from consumer groups, Mr. Podesta said that the Obama transition staff has found major difficulties in the transition, which was authorized by Congress in 2005. On Feb. 17, stations are scheduled to cease their analog transmissions and broadcast only in digital form, requiring consumers without a digital-ready TV who rely on over-the-air signals to install converter boxes.
How many people actually rely on over the air analog transmissions these days? The high end estimate puts it at 6-7 million households. That's about as close to universal penetration as you're going to see short of some kind of coercion. The old analog cell system was turned off with minimal problems recently; they should just let this go.
At ESUG 2008, Georg Heeg gave a fascinating presentation on the Smalltalk and Seaside work they did in pursuit of the location of the Bach House in Koethen - a task that historians had been quibbling over for centuries. Download the slides here - Watch the presentation to see how they solved the problem:
I took a little break from posting ESUG audio and video over the holiday break, but I'm getting back to it today - I'll have another one of the talks online within an hour or so. I'll be returning to a 1-2 talks per week posting schedule as well, so expect to see them start showing up in iTunes again.
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at using Xml-Rpc services from Cincom Smalltalk (i.e., using Smalltalk as the client to the service). To watch, click on the image below:
Microsoft announced Wednesday that a beta version of Windows 7 will be available for the general public to download and try out on Friday. At the same time, it provided a list of the minimum system requirements it recommends for people who run the beta.
They call for a 1GHz processor (32- or 64-bit), 1GB of main memory, 16GB of available disk space, support for DX9 graphics with 128MB of memory (for the Aero interface), and a DVD-R/W drive.
Those system requirements are similiar to the Vista ones - but seeing as how Windows 7 will be out three years or so after Vista, it means that they are effectively lower. Early reports are that Vista runs pretty well, and that the driver issues that Vista suffered from are gone (since Windows 7 can use Vista device drivers).
The big question for me is this: Will MS continue to cede the PR space to Apple? A lot of Vista's reputation issues linger due to MS allowing Apple to define the OS, well after the early problems had been solved. The Windows 7 launch won't work for them if they let the same thing happen.
Sitting on my flight back home, I'm pondering how the presentation to the Dallas Ruby group was received. The first thing to come to mind is this: as I've visited various Ruby groups, it's clear that Smalltalk has some nascent mindshare. Everyone tells me that Smalltalk comes up in conversation a lot, but they just don't hear much about it (leading them to believe that there's not much going on with it). Clearly, this means that we (Cincom) need to do a better job of promoting what we do. Here are a few things that anyone interested in Smalltalk should know about:
Industry Misinterpretations - our weekly podcast. You can subscribe with iTunes. We have fresh ideas about Smalltalk and interviews with notable people in the Smalltalk (and dynamic language) community regularly
Smalltalk Daily - our daily screencast demonstrating "how to" do various things with ObjectStudio and VisualWorks. There are over 500 of these now, and a new one appears every weekday. You can subscribe in iTunes
Smalltalk Videos - we post videos from trade shows, various presentations, and longer form screencasts. As with evreything else, you can subscribe in iTunes
With that out of the way, some more observations - the ability to debug web applications (especially in the browser with Web Velocity) really impresses people - jaws regularly drop when I demonstrate that. The entire environment impresses people, but the debugger (and even the workspace) especially. Want to impress a non-Smalltalker? Just do a demo that shows coding in the debugger!
The reality is that while DRM may be a big hobbyhorse for geeks, it isn’t really a big concern for most iTunes shoppers. The vast majority of buyers are happy to buy songs from Apple regardless of what format they come in - provided they can play them on an iPod. Anyone looking for DRM-free music can already find it pretty easily.
Yes and no. On the one hand, Apple's sales make it clear that there's some truth to this assertion. However, I need to go back to a conversation I overheard at the gym a couple of weeks back: two older gentlemen were discussing music, and they mentioned (before I got involved) how irritating the 5 computer limit was. That limit is part of Apple's DRM scheme. Thus far, people have put up with Apple's DRM because the ease of use of the iPod and iTunes has trumped the irritation. Had MS partnered with Amazon and come up with an equally easy to use DRM-free store, I think the Zune might welll be powering ahead of the iPod right now.
Fortunately for Apple, Microsoft is no longer an innovative enough company to try something like that.
I just got back from the Dallas Ruby group, where the Seaside/Web Velocity presentation went pretty well - I'd like to thank Adam Keys, who was kind enough to let me present to the group. Here I am presenting:
James Savidge, who's a local here, came out and helped me record the event (and he helped answer questions as well):
As you've you probably noticed in the liveblog, Apple just made this very much official, and announced that some 8 million songs from all the major labels will indeed be DRM free, with a full ten million planned by the end of the quarter. As if that wasn't enough, it's also announced a new pricing structure for tracks, including a new $0.69 tier and a $1.29 one, which music companies will apparently be able to use at their own discretion.
Looks like the magic combo was that Jobs had to give on flat pricing, and the labels gave on DRM. I'd call that a win for the rest of us - time to upgrade the tracks I have with DRM...
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at the recent changes to the Web Velocity beta candidate. If you're interested in getting involved in the beta, send me an email. In the meantime, click on the image below:
I'm in the air as I write this, and it's not one of the flights with WiFi on board. No travel hitches; I'll be at the Dallas Ruby meeting this evening. I'll have Cincom Smalltalk non-commercial CD's with me as well - hope to see a good crowd!
This evening James Savidge and I made sure that we can do screen sharing through Google's Jabber system, and it worked fine. So - if the weather keeps me in Baltimore tomorrow, we have a contingency plan (assuming sufficient bandwidth):
James will be at the meeting anyway, as he's a local in the Dallas area
We'll share screens, and I'll do the presentation from my office
Not ideal, and I sure hope I get down to Dallas tomorrow - but we have a plan just in case :)
Weather permitting, I'll be in Dallas at the local Ruby group tomorrow night - presenting Seaside and Web Velocity. Here's where I'll be, starting at 7 PM:
With all the comparisons made between Ruby and Smalltalk and the excitement over the MagLev Ruby VM you might be wanting to know more about Smalltalk. Come and learn more about Smalltalk from James Robertson.
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we load database support (ODBC) into ObjectStudio 8, and get some initial connectivity set up. To watch, click on the image below:
The elevation of the caldera is 35 inches higher than when measurement began in 1923, and it has been moving upward since mid-2004 at a rate of up to three inches a year - more than three times faster than has ever been measured previously.
An explosion matching the last Yellowstone eruption, which released 60 million times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb, would most certainly result in millions or even billions of deaths worldwide, both directly and indirectly.
In geologic time terms, the odds of it exploding in my (or any given) lifetime are small. Still pretty sobering.
On Monday, for example, the Korean television maker LG Electronics plans to announce a new line of high-definition televisions that connect directly to the Internet with no set-top box required. The televisions will be able to play movies and television shows from online video-on-demand services, including Netflix.
My friend Mike was showing me the streaming capabilities of Netflix via his XBox the other day, and it looked pretty compelling. Why buy another player and a bunch of disks when you can just stream?
Jan van de Sandt has announced Cloudfork, an interface to the various Amazon services:
Cloudfront AWS is a new open source project that provides easy access from Smalltalk to the Amazon Web Services that are related to cloud computing.
They are starting with Squeak, but intend to cover other Smalltalks. I think I might lend a hand and see if I can get the CST port rolling. Sounds like a great idea!
Twitter is my shared notepad. If I want to remember something and I don't mind if everyone else knows it, I just post it here.
I've used my blog that way, but I'm not sure Twitter works as well. For one thing, Google doesn't seem to index tweets, while they do index my blog. Also, if I need to remember something, it's rare that I can boild it down to 140 characters and keep it meaningful.
Here's the Industry Misinterpretations year in review - a look back at all things Smalltalk (and a few things beyond Smalltalk) from 2008. You can download the podcast here.
If you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or visit us on Facebook or Ning - you can vote for the Podcast Alley, and subscribe on iTunes. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!
Whenever a story about music appears - like the one I just commented onbelow - an RIAA troll is sure to follow. In the comments, I found this:
DRM has never prevented people from paying for music. DRM does prevent people from illegally turning one purchased item into dozens of free give-away items. DRM does have the potential to discourage people who intend to illegally distribute protected music from buying protected music.
The commenter must know 2, maybe 3 people. There's a lot of music I haven't purchased due to DRM. There are tons of issues with it, too - just witness the problems surrounding the abandonment of DRM schemes by MS and Wal-Mart. Suddenly, unless you have the time to rip it all to CD, your music is unplayable. Heck, even with Apple's less onerous DRM there are problems.
When we first bought the Mac Mini (years ago now), the HD died on us. There went all the music. I had two options: call Apple (as it happened, they did allow us to re-download, with a warning that they might not in the future), or rip the music off the iPod using "illegal" software. The latter wasn't a full answer; the iPod had my music, but not my daughter's. Then there's the "five computer" limit, which the RIAA thinks is too generous. We went over that limit, even after telling a couple of machines to de-authorize. Now I have to de-authorize every machine except the main host and start over.
So yeah, DRM never stopped anyone. Except average people - and I don't mean me. Last week, I was at the gym with my wife. It's the gym with the therapy pool, so it's heavy on retired people. As I'm changing in the locker room, I overhear 2 older gentlemen lamenting the fact that their iTunes music is limited to 5 machines. They didn't know much about DRM, but they knew they hated it - and they were glad to hear about the DRM-free Amazon store that integrates nicely with iTunes. I may not be an average music listener, but these older guys were - and the RIAA has no idea how much they've ticked people off...
In 2008, 1.88 million vinyl albums were purchased, more than in any other year since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking LP sales in 1991. The previous record was in 2000, when 1.5 million LP albums were sold. More than two out of every three vinyl albums bought in 2008 were purchased at an independent music store, according to SoundScan.
I don't think this will go very far though. Most people aren't audiophiles, and the convenience of an iPod trumps whatever quality hit you may (or may not) be able to perceive. What we are seeing, IMHO, is another instance of narrowcasting. There aren't that many audiophiles in any one place (compared to MP3 buyers), but there is a market if you aggregate them all together - and the net has made that possible.
The oddball outcome of that might be this: vinyl may outlive the CD, because the CD doesn't offer much over the MP3 (especially with DRM-free outlets like Amazon around).
Michael and I were recording our year end wrap up last night when, 27 minutes in, Audacity crashed on me. Fortunately, it saves all the audio in segments as it records. Unfortunately, I wasn't on the 1.3 rev, so it couldn't recover. I wrote a quick bit of Smalltalk to just slam the files together, but that resulted in a nasty click sound at the end of each segment (as did a command line "cat" command).
Fortunately, other people have had this problem, and I found a nice little recovery tool. Worked like a charm, and all I'm left with is the task of putting the bits back together in a way that sounds continuous :)
Ed Bott thinks that the changes in Windows 7 (he's reviewing the beta) are worthwhile, but notes that people moving directly from XP will have to relearn a bunch of stuff:
Yes, there's a learning curve. And if you insist on using those techniques you learned back in the last millennium with software that was designed differently, you will be frustrated. But I believe that an open-minded XP user who actually takes a few minutes to learn how the new UI works will be more productive very quickly. The secret is breaking old habits and developing new ones.
I understand the problem - every time we make a change to the system browser or the inspectors in Cincom Smalltalk, long time users complain - even when the changes are pretty clearly an improvement. People get used to what they use, and change is hard. For Microsoft, you have to multiply that by a huge number (the installed base of XP) - and then factor in the opposition PR that will paint change as a problem.
I think Microsoft's biggest challenge with Windows 7 will be taking control of the usability meme. Apple grabbed that for Vista, and MS never got it back. They can't let that happen to them again.
Now Listening to: Hideaway by Ivy from: Long Distance
You can't be on Twitter or FriendFeed and not be inundated with comments from and about Scoble. I don't know how he does it, but it's really annoying. I find myself relaxing when he takes a break from Twitter, for example to fly from Europe to the US. Finally I can speak without having everything one-upped by Scoble. Whatever it is, he's done it better, or bigger, or with more important people. It's irritating because I don't believe it. I'd really like it if he just turned down the volume. Or if there were a way to segment the Twittersphere, I'd like to be in the part where Scoble isn't the main topic of conversation 24-by-7
Apparently, "unfollow" is just way, way too complicated for Dave. I understand - pressing the button I copied an image of here:
does look hard. I mean consider - you have to move the mouse and press the left button. It's a real chore...
I've heard from reliable sources that Apple will offer a significant update to iMovie at next week's Macworld. It will largely focus on Internet video in the Cloud for the YouTube generation.
Never mind all that; what we really need is the timeline editor from iMovie '06 resurrected. I find '08 to be completely unusable without it.
It turns out that Zune owners did have to wait for the year to tick over, and then force a reboot - either by removing the battery or by waiting for the power to rundown. There's an infinite loop in the clock code dealing with leap years:
The unfortunate part is that there isn't anything that can be done to fix this besides somehow changing what the clock is set to (which is exactly what the battery disconnection trick ends up doing). On the other hand, it shows that Microsoft is correct: tomorrow, everyone's Zunes will operate normally again.
There is the intense embarrassment for whoever wrote that code - I sure wouldn't want to be him or her right now...
