Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Spotted in Engadget:

Microsoft's newly-announced layoffs and declining profits aren't the only bad news in Redmond -- according to the company's quarterly statements, Zune platform revenue decreased $100 million, or 54 percent compared to the same quarter last year, due to falling device sales.

It's too early for this to be due to the year end lockup issue; I guess it's just not picking up any traction at all. Not a huge surprise; the iPod continues to be a great combo with iTunes, and the iPhone and Touch have sucked all the oxygen out of the space. I'm sure they'll stick with the device, but it looks like they have their work cut out for them.

Technorati Tags: ipod, zune, mp3 player

I've brought up the iTunes links for the three shows we syndicate recently, but I forgot to make a simple request: please add a review on iTunes. It helps raise the visibility of the shows, and that visibility is good for Smalltalk in general. Here are the links again - thanks!

• Industry Misinterpretations - the weekly Smalltalk podcast (audio)
• Smalltalk Daily - the daily Smalltalk screencast
• Smalltalk on the Tubes - Smalltalk videos, primarily from conferences and events

Now Listening to: After The Gold Rush by Natalie Merchant from: Live In Concert

I've just made it easier to get your question answered. Over on the left sidebar there's a "Chat" widget, which is linked to my GoogleTalk account - it shows my live status, and - if I'm here at my Mac, I'll answer when you ping. You don't need a Google account yourself; it will run a client out of your browser for you.

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at the command line arguments that are understood by the Smalltalk Image. To watch, click on the image below:

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Image Level Command Line Arguments from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: command line, smalltalk

The best form of advertising today? Make it easy to get access to what you offer, and people will buy it if you make that possible. The two are related - you not only have to make your product accessible, you really have to make it buyable, too. Witness the Monty Python experience:

And you know what? Despite the entertainment industry's constant cries about how bad they're doing, it works. As we wrote yesterday, Monty Python's DVDs climbed to No. 2 on Amazon's Movies & TV bestsellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent.

Your product is the advertising. "Clever" writing, social media - those are all things you use to make people aware of your product. In the end, either it can sell itself or it can't.

If you have a slow net connection, and have been deterred from trying out Cincom Smalltalk because of that - keep German Arduino in mind:

Some days ago, when I downloaded the NC version of VisualWorks, I found also this page, with the possibility of request a CD of VWNC to Cincom. Then, I completed the form and forgot the question.

Today, very very few days after such request, I received on my home, on Sunchales, Argentina a box containing a software box, coming from Cincinnati!.

All you need to do is head on over here, fill out the form, and check the box requesting a CD. We'll do the rest.

Technorati Tags: cincom smalltalk

There are now a number of ways you can follow the daily screencasts we do here at Cincom:

iTunes:

Vimeo:

YouTube:

Facebook:

I have to admit, I never really thought that client side Linux would go anywhere. And, in the traditional PC/laptop market, it hasn't. However, it is being used extensively in the growing NetBook segment, and it's starting to do damage to Microsoft's bottom line:

Client revenue declined 8 percent as a result of PC market weakness and a continued shift to lower priced netbooks.

That's an astonishing admission. It means that people are forgoing higher-priced laptops, and instead buying netbooks -- and many of those netbooks are powered by Linux. So Microsoft loses out not only on sales of Windows, but also sales of Microsoft Office as well. Estimates are that 30 percent of all netbooks ship with Linux.

The two big cash cows for MS are Windows and Office. On the luxury end, Apple is doing some damage with the MacBook and MacBook Pro. The surprising part (to me, at least) - is how much damage is being done at the other end of the segment by the low end offerings. I'm not sure whether Windows 7 will really make much of a difference here - while all reports are that it's a stable, solid OS, it's not really targeted down at that end. Microsoft suddenly has a two front war to fight - Apple on one end, and the low cost vendors who are making a go of it with Linux on the other.

On an anecdotal note, when I go out and give talks (like the one I recently gave in Dallas), I'm seeing lots of Macs, but also a rising number of netbooks - some with very small footprints. I'm seeing fewer and fewer Windows boxes amongst the audiences I speak to.

Technorati Tags: windows, linux, os x, netbook

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at the command line options that can be sent to the VM - including the debug VM. To watch, click on the image below:

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

VM Command line arguments from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Time Machine is normally reliable, but if it gets into trouble your off in the weeds pretty quickly. Over on my iMac this morning, I noticed that backups were failing. Sure enough, my old friend, an "inProgress" directory was there. This one isn't doing a network backup though; I'm not really sure what caused the hiccup.

Either way, the stupid directory wouldn't delete - not with sudo in a shell, not via the Finder, nothing. Looking around the internet, I found a suggestion: you not only have to turn Time Machine off, you might need to reboot to get the system to believe that no one is using the file. Sigh. Reboot the Mac.

When it came back up (blissfully quickly), I selected the file in Finder, and it immediately prompted me for permission (which it wasn't doing before I rebooted). That tossed it in the trash, and from there I was able to empty the trash without any problem. That's a bug, and something that I'm sure drives people who run into it nuts.

Oh, and per the thought I had last time something like this happened, I tried renaming the directory. No dice there either, at least not before a reboot.

Now Listening to: Wonder by Natalie Merchant from: Live In Concert

Technorati Tags: backups

Honestly, this would be a hard transition to make:

The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software.

Sounds like the White House is one of the places that decided not to make the switch to Vista - which hearkens back to MS' failure to win the branding war for the new OS.

Now Listening to: Long Distance by The Kinks from: Come Dancing With The Kinks - The Best Of The Kinks [UK]

You could have the same guy for introductory computer science that this poor guy has.

Here's the audio only for Eliot Miranda's Cog presentation at ESUG 2008. Click on the image below to listen:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, squeak, cog, esug08

Eliot presented his Cog VM work at ESUG 2008 -- Cog is a new, JIT'd VM for Squeak. It's still under development - watch the video for details, both on the VM work, and on how to get involved. You can follow Eliot's work on his blog; click on the image below to watch the video:

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Eliot Miranda Presents Cog from James Robertson on Vimeo.

I'm not sure this is the ideal way to go about it, but this contest (not being run by Twitter, I should add) is certainly interesting:

Following the rousing success of our Fix Digg's Miserable Business contest, we are hereby officially announcing the Create A Twitter Revenue Model contest.

After we decide on a winner, we'll post their plan and resume on Alley Insider as well as email both to Twitter cofounder Evan Williams. We'll post some finalist entries on Alley Insider, too.

That should be fun to watch :)

Now Listening to: Wild Child by Heart from: Rock The House Live

It's useful to recall that social media sites - things like Facebook and Twitter - exist to enable user defined interaction between people. In a business context, that probably means trying to get out useful information that your community would be interested in. What it doesn't mean is an echo chamber consisting of self proclaimed "social media experts" patting each other on the back all day. Michael Pinto:

The zombies then seek each other: You'll always notice that of the 5,000 followers that a social media expert has that all 5,000 of them are also social media "experts". Their only form of conversation is to quote each other and live tweet conferences where they gather. Like any good Ponzi scheme the lead zombies can make a good living feeding the hopes and aspirations of the worker level drones who parrot their every blog entry.

You see a lot of this kind of thing on Twitter - there are tons of people who chatter all day long amongst themselves about their own brilliance in this new arena. It's one thing for consultants selling that sort of expertise to do this; it's something else again to watch their fawning acolytes from product oriented companies engaging in it - what's the point?

I make use of Twitter (the vast majority of my tweets are auto-posts from this blog). I'm also on Facebook, where I cross-post the "Smalltalk Daily" videos. I like to think that broadens the potential reach of those videos. The thing is, I'm trying to use social media sites in support of my basic mission: spread Smalltalk knowledge generally, and Cincom Smalltalk knowledge specifically.

So what's the bottom line here? Social Media is a means, not an end. If you're going to jump in, you need to have a goal in mind. That goal could be personal, like "find old friends from high school". It could be a corporate goal, like "make it easier to find information about our product(s)". If it's instead something like "broadcast my brilliance in the social media environment", then there's a new catchphrase that defines what you're doing:

Fail

Technorati Tags: social media, twitter, facebook

Travis explains a cool extension to the "Clone" capability in the browser:

There's also a new special form of Clone that shows up in the class menu only when you have a class and its superclass selected. It's called Blend. What it will do is create a clone of the two classes, collapsed into a single class. I spent some time playing with this at OOPSLA, and came to the conclusion (with agreement for the Master Refactorers, Don Roberts and John Brant), that you can't do this as a strict in place refactoring. So it's done as a clone.

See Travis' post for an explanation - it's a nifty way to clean up deep hierarchies that you no longer need.

Now Listening to: Born In The U.S.A. by Bruce Springsteen from: Live 1975-85 [Disc 2]

Today's Smalltalk Daily wraps up our look at Code Critc, by explaining the two types of checks that it supports. To watch, click on the image below:

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Understanding Code Critic Checks from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Arden Thomas will be in NYC tonight, at the local Smalltalk User's Group:

"Leveraging Multicore CPU's with Cincom Smalltalk"

This presentation will discuss potential ways to leverage cpu's with multiple cores for concurrency, and some of Cincom's research, experiments and results.

This follows on from a series of posts over on Arden's blog. If you're in the area, check it out.

Technorati Tags: multi-core, multi-cpu

You can follow this blog on Twitter - every post gets linked over there. Just follow me, and you'll get all the updates. There's also a FriendFeed room - lots of stuff gets aggregated there. There's more than one Facebook group, but the "Smalltalkers" group seems to be the primary - you can also just friend me there. Finally, there's a Ning group, a Vimeo Video group, and a YouTube playlist.

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: social media, web2.0

I've been looking for a solid way to have a full backup of any podcast recording I do, and SkypeCap might be just the thing:

SkypeCap records audio conversations you have using the Skype Voice over IP (VoIP) service to MP4 audio file. You can save sessions for later use and playback

It's OS X software, which is what I need. Right now, I record my end of the call, and Michael records his - and then I mix it all together at the end. If Audacity crashes though, I have a mess (and that happened to me a few weeks back). I might have to give this a look.

Technorati Tags: audio, recording, skype

I guess it's time to start really scrutinizing the old credit card statements - from PC World:

A payment processor responsible for handling about 100 million credit card transactions every month disclosed today that thieves had used malicious software in its network in 2008 to steal an unknown number of credit card numbers.

It's not that theft is more common with electronic transactions than it is with old fashioned physical ones; it's that any electronic theft has the potential to be much, much larger.

By all accounts, Microsoft has stepped up to the plate with Windows 7 - here's PC World on it:

There's no question about it: Microsoft has a hit on its hands with Windows 7. Even in beta form, the company's new desktop OS is garnering accolades from all corners of the blogosphere. By most accounts, the product seems faster and more stable than even Vista with Service Pack 1. And veteran Windows users everywhere are singing the praises of "new" features like the more refined User Account Control (UAC) mechanism and funky, Mac OS X Dock-like Task Bar.

I've heard from friends (and podcasts that I listen to as well) that the beta runs fine in things like VMWare and Parallels, and that it uses existing Vista drivers just fine. That's good news for MS - it means that 7 will hit the ground running. The only thing left is the branding exercise, which they muffed for Vista. I don't really expect a repeat of that - say what you will about Microsoft, but they rarely make the same mistake repeatedly.

There's a good news for Smalltalkers in this, too: We'll have to go through the process again, but our Vista Certified Smalltalk - ObjectStudio - should run smoothly under Windows 7. We've done some basic testing, and not noticed any issues. Which is not to say it's supported on Windows 7 - the OS is only in beta, after all. What it does mean is that we don't expect any real hurdles to supporting it quickly once MS goes to release.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, objectstudio, cincom smalltalk

Via Rogers Cadenhead, I see that the White House is using Atom as their feed format of choice. I still use RSS 2.0, mainly out of sheer inertia, but if I were starting from scratch, would I? Somehow I doubt it.

I find this interesting:

The Obama administration will be using Google Mail accounts in the first few hours of the new administration because it will take time to set up their new official email accounts.

I don't think Google could have paid for better PR than that.

After years of being told how cool it is, I finally registered for Pandora this morning, and I'm giving it a try. While iTunes is very cool, I would like to find new music that I'm not already listening to. We'll see how well that works out.

Update: Ok, I like Pandora. After giving it a sample artist, it's created a playlist that includes a lot of stuff I like - some of it I have, some of it I don't. The only downside? I suspect that Pandora is going to cost me money (i.e., extra trips to the iTunes/Amazon store).

Don't tell the RIAA though - they're convinced that Pandora costs them money. Idiots.

Technorati Tags: internet music, internet radio

There are more rumors about a Google drive (GDrive) coming out this year:

Gdrive is basically a cloud-based storage that should have two faces: A desktop client that keeps local and online files and folders in two-directional sync via a web interface for accessing your desktop files anywhere and anytime, using any network-enabled computer. In addition, it will come tightly integrated with other Google services to enable editing of supported document types, like spreadsheets and presentations via Google Docs, email via Gmail, images via Picasa Web Albums, etc.

I tried using S3 as a backup solution 3 years ago, but it was way, way too slow. Now that I have FIOS, maybe things are different. The thing I'll be watching for? What the pricing model for this service will be. I understand Amazon's model; how is Google going to do it?

Technorati Tags: cloud computing

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we create a new Code Critic check and add it to the tool. To watch, click on the image below:

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Creating your own Code Critic Checks from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at the implementation details for the Code Critic - the user level details, not so much the sorts of things that a maintainer would want to know. Specifically, we look at how to surface some of the deprecated checks that were in the previous release, but have been removed from this one. Using that information, tomorrow's screencast will create a new check. To watch, click on the image below:

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

The Code Critic - where things are implemented from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Today was my father in law's 86th birthday, so Smalltalk Daily is late. I have a topic and the material all set - I just have to record it after I handle one more errand.

This week James and Michael discussed the Code Critic (which I posted on recently, here). It's an interesting - if under-utilized and not well understood - tool, with a lot of potential. To listen, click on the image below:

There's some older, possibly out of date information on the Code Critic here.

Unless you're selling something that needs no explanation (like, say, socks), you have to pay attention to your value adds - something a lot of retailers seem to have forgotten. As Don Tennant of ComputerWorld points out:

What killed Circuit City is precisely the same thing that killed CompUSA a year ago: Its only real value-add -- knowledgeable sales and support staff with the expertise to explain the technology to customers -- was long gone. Specialty stores like Circuit City lost their appeal when they stopped investing in proper hiring practices and training programs. There was no longer any reason to venture out to Circuit City for electronics and computer gadgets and peripherals when you could get the same merchandise, probably at lower prices, while you were at Wal-Mart buying underwear and razor blades.

That nickle you save in the expertise department could cost you your business. If people expect expertise to come with your product, then they need to actually find expertise.

I really don't want to start sounding like a "get off my lawn" type, but plugging TV stuff in just seemed easier back when the options consisted of coax and/or RCA cables:

Technorati Tags: hdtv, cabling, tv

For most PR people, it used to be a 9 to 5 job - unless you worked for a truly large company (the kind that attracted network/cable news coverage), you could safely ignore the world from Friday evening to Monday morning. That's gone now - it hasn't been the case for a few years. This point is made pretty well in an article about the demise of print news:

In the meantime, public relations professionals need to recognize that the days of daily deadlines are also coming to an end. Sooner rather than later, virtually every publication will be deadline-free, because no journalist will ever have to say, "We're going to press at 7:00 P.M." This will change the playing field, giving public relations pros more time to respond to some stories, but less time to deal with breaking news, especially bad news.

Especially for bad news, there's no time lag anymore - you simply have to deal with it in real time. We now live in a world where things can go viral on blogs, on YouTube, on Twitter - the list is endless. At the same time, getting news out that puts you in a positive light is getting harder. The old world of a handful of trade press people you needed to deal with is gone - and the new outlets are doing at least national, and probably global, reporting.

TechCrunch has a bunch of emails (with identifying information pulled out) from people explaining why they left Google. There's nothing telling in there, but I did find this interesting - from one of the emails:

One last thing: Google also thinks inside a box (the browser). I felt this a lot, and was another reason I left. (too constrained) It'€™s no surprise that they push to extend what the browser can do. (Gears, Earth plugin)

I think every large company (and many smaller ones, for that matter) end up engaging in "in the box" thinking. It might start as outside thinking, but in the end, it results in a new box inside of which company culture lives. That's not necessarily a bad thing until the company gets so big that the box actively prevents new ideas (Microsoft may have reached this point, and the IBM of the early 80's was deeply in that state).

Short of a corporate crisis, this just seems to be the norm. Apple managed to escape that - the question being, was that a function of Steve Jobs alone? We'll find out over the next few months.

Technorati Tags: corporate culture

If you want an example of what not to do, here it is: don't pay people to post positive reviews of your product, whether they own it or not. For extra stupid points, don't pay people to mark as "not helpful" the bad reviews of your product. Unless, of course, you want to end up looking very, very stupid.

Update: Mathew Ingram explains just how this kind of thing backfires:

As I've often said when I talk to groups of marketing people about social media, this kind of strategy -- or even Wal-Mart's disastrous motor-home adventure -- seem like a great idea, right up until someone finds out about it and blows the whistle (and surely by now everyone knows that's going to happen eventually, the Internet being what it is). And when that happens, you will not only lose whatever goodwill you thought you were buying with your 65-cent reviews, but you will lose a bunch more besides. You will wind up in a hole, since people will now believe that even things you didn't pay for were either paid for or fraudulent in some way.

Technorati Tags: marketing, stupidity

I hadn't really noticed, but there were some changes to the code critic between VW 7.5 and 7.6. Here are two screenshots - the first being 7.5, the second being 7.6:

You'll notice that the "Miscellaneous" category is missing in 7.6, and, if you look through and compare, there's been a general reorganization. It's also the case that four checks have been deprecated, amongst them the "long method" check. I'm not claiming that these are great checks; for instance, the "long methods" check calls anything over 10 lines "long" - kind of a subjective thing.

Having said that, I recently received a question from a colleague, who was relaying a concern from an academic customer. For teaching purposes, he liked the "long methods" check. So the question arose, how do you bring those rules back into play? As it happens, it's not hard - you need to make two small changes

First, modify BasicLintRule class>>protocols to look like this:

protocols
	^ OrderedCollection new
		add: ( #Bugs << #browser >> 'Bugs' ) -> 'bugs';
		add: ( #PossibleBugs << #browser >> 'Possible bugs' ) -> 'possible bugs';
		add:
			( #UnnecessaryCode << #browser >> 'Unnecessary code' ) ->
					'unnecessary code';
		add:
			( #IntentionRevealing << #browser >> 'Intention revealing' ) ->
					'intention revealing';

		add: (#Miscellaneous << #browser >> 'Miscellaneous') -> 'miscellaneous';
		yourself

That's almost enough. Now you need to go to class BlockLintRule and rename the protocol category "deprecated" to "miscellaneous". Alternatively, you could just use the name "deprecated" in the #protocols method above and leave everything else alone. After doing that, you'll see this in 7.6:

In general, if you want to add new rules you can look in class BlockLintRule - the class methods are the rules, and the categories are the rule category names that show up in the Code Critic tab of the browser.

Technorati Tags: small lint, lint, code critic

PCWorld reports that our new President intends to hold onto his BlackBerry:

President-elect Barack Obama told CNN today he had a plan to "hang onto" his beloved BlackBerry, but did not explain how he would overcome legal and security concerns

I find this fascinating - Bush gave up email in 2001, due to concerns about private communications being caught up in the public records laws. It'll be interesting to see how modern communications technology interfaces with all of that.

On a side note - can you imagine how ecstatic the folks at RIM must be over this? You can't buy better publicity...

This is a great summary of one of the things that I think gets in the way of real innovation - from User Friendly:

Ideas by themselves aren't worth anything. It's their implementation that has value.

All you have to do is survey the field of patent trolls to get a sense for that.

PC World is reporting that VisualHub is being (kind of) resurrected in open source form. It sounds like it's a not terribly well connected set of pieces yet, but this is good news. VisualHub is a really, really nice little app.

Update: I should mention that I happily bought VisualHub a few years ago, and love the product.

The Cincom Smalltalk site has been updated - same old server, new look and feel. Let us know what you think!

Looks like Microsoft needed to give a tighter set of instructions to the ad agency that produced the web ad shown here; they are using a thinly veiled MacBook Pro instead of a recognizable PC. This is the kind of gaffe that any vendor needs to look out for.

Technorati Tags: windows, mac

On today's Smalltalk Daily, we finish up the small series on scripting a runtime image build. Instead of stripping down, we use a base image (provided by Cincom) to do a "build up" approach. You can find "base.im" in $VISUALWORKS/preview/packaging.

To watch, click on the image below:

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Scripting a Runtime Image Build, Part 3 from James Robertson on Vimeo.

or on YouTube:

No recession for Nintendo:

According to NPD Group statistics, Nintendo sold a record 10.17 million Wii consoles to US Americans in 2008. That trumps Nintendo's own record of 9.95 million consoles sold in the relatively healthy 2007 economic climate. Nintendo added to its money pile by hawking 9.95 million DS handhelds for the year compared to the 8.52 million sold in 2007. Those tallies represent 55% of all consoles and 72% of all handheld consoles sold in the US.

To really grasp how much Nintendo is winning, follow the link to see the pie chart. It's amazing.

Technorati Tags: games, nintendo

Here's the audio-only of Phillippe's talk at ESUG 2008 - you can go here to see the video from the talk. To listen, click on the image below:

Update: Presentation has been removed at the speaker's request

Zork returns, to a browser near you.