Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

I've been working on a small Web Velocity application - both as a demo of what WV can do, and as a useful little application for finding podcast/Smalltalk Daily content from the website. I'm hoping to have a small bug fixed by the WV development team next build, so I can get it online. In the meantime, here's a screenshot:

You can search by tag or keyword, and filter by type (audio or video). It's ajax driven, so the queries update only the results field. It's small, but a nice, simple example.

Technorati Tags: web velocity, seaside, glorp, ajax

Michael has been working on an interface to Monticello, since we need to stay in synch with the core Seaside work:

We now have better (read only) support for working with Monticello http repositories.

You can watch a video Michael put together on this - it sounds like we'll be getting the ability to publish to Monticello as well, but I can't really speak to any kind of timelines on that. This will make it easier to work with the Squeakers, that's for sure.

Technorati Tags: version control, store, monticello

You have to love the clueless way the entertainment industry stumbles along. Real Networks is trying sell - yes, sell - software that would allow you to rip DVDs to your HD. The entertainment industry objects, of course:

The case is ostensibly about RealDVD, a $30 software program that allows users to save digital copies of Hollywood DVDs to their computers — a capability the movie industry strenuously objects to, worrying that it will stimulate piracy and undermine the budding market for digital downloads.

Right. How does making it legal for me to rip a DVD I already own cut into digital sales? Do they actually think people are going to swap DVDs around in large numbers? Do they actually think people are going to buy a digital copy of a movie they already own because they have a long trip ahead of them, and they'd rather not cart a box of discs around?

Do they simply not know that Handbrake is around, and already lets you do this? Last year, I was headed overseas to a conference, and I wanted to watch the new Stargate DVD we had just bought while I was on the plane. I didn't want to cart the disc with me - why would I? I had already paid for the movie, but in the parallel reality inhabited by the MPAA, I should have paid again, to get the bits onto my HD.

Idiots.

Technorati Tags: movies, stupidity, copyright

Today's Smalltalk Daily picks up with our simple Notes example, and adds Ajax to the search functionality. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Glorp and ActiveRecord from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: database, active record, glorp

Just because your busy digging a hole doesn't mean you should get a bigger tool to make it deeper. What am I on about? This truly dumb idea:

Let me step back into my M&A shoes for a second, and humbly suggest: the New York Times should acquire Twitter, instead of just professing love for it.

Umm, sure. The NY Times is busy bleeding money. Twitter has no revenue model and is burning through the venture capital they have left. What do you have if you combine the two? A huge rock thrown through the window, with the remaining assets attached.

To be fair, Umair Haque does have a bunch of revenue ideas for Twitter:

Where's the business model? Everywhere. Here's one: charge companies for the right to talk back to people on Twitter enriched by NYT content. Here's another: charge other content providers for the right to distribute via Twitter. Here's yet another: charge advertisers for the right to discuss products and services with people via Twitter. The point is that the NYT could experiment with literally hundreds

Right.... How you're going to charge people for product mentions when they sign up as individuals is an interesting problem all by itself. Take me: A decent proportion of my tweets (which go from my blog to Twitter) are about Cincom Smalltalk. So I should be paying, right? But... I signed up under my name, using a private email address. So have tons of other people. How does Twitter go about pulling that apart and charge? I have no idea, and neither does Haque. Or Twitter.

The Time has enough problems without buying itself a money sink.

Technorati Tags: stupidity

No more lame GeoCities web pages for you; Yahoo is shuttering the service.

Technorati Tags: yahoo, geocities

The May 21st meeting of the NYC STUG sounds interesting:

Carl Gundel , developer of LibertyBasic , a development environment for Basic written in VisualWorks, will be presenting at NYC Smalltalk on Thursday, May 21st, 2009. He will update us on the evolution of his Liberty Basc IDE and its implementation as a Web based IDE based on VisualWorks' Seaside implementation.

You can get directions at the link; it all starts at 6:30 pm. You can see what Carl's done at his runbasic site; We spoke to Carl on the podcast here (part 1) and here (part 2).

Technorati Tags: seaside, basic, liberty basic

Via Rob Fahrni, I ran across this link from Mini_Microsoft:

"And you know, speaking of The Commons: I trekked over there today (meh, not the sunniest day) and I have to say it's an impressive space. I walked around admiring the scope of the project, thinking "This is what Windows built. This is what Office built." I then reflected on the irony that it's Mr. Robbie Bach's Entertainment and Devices moving into the new campus with The Commons. Windows and Office funded this extravagant place for the folks who managed to burn through $8,000,000,000USD+ on the Xbox, be shown how it's done right from Nintendo with the Wii, dash the Zune against the juggernaut iPod, and have the iPhone drop-kick WinMobile to Mars."

In any large organization, there's always a lot of weird stuff going on. Sounds like MS has its share :)

Technorati Tags: microsoft

Today's Smalltalk Daily walks through a small example application, focusing on the scaffolding customizations you can make easily. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Web Velocity Application Overview: Scaffolding from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, web velocity, seaside

Ernest Micklei has been putting together Cloudfork, an interface to the Amazon cloud services - on Squeak, VisualWorks, and VA Smalltalk. To do that, he's needed to move code between the three, and that's an interesting problem. As it happens, we've created a set of tools import/export to Monticello files as part of our Seaside porting/Web Velocity work. The core Seaside work is all done in Squeak, so having tools like this allow us to report bugs and send proposed changes back to the Squeak team in a format they can use.

Technorati Tags: interop, squeak, portability

I'll be talking to the NYC Ruby group on May 12th at 7pm - mostly about Seaside. If you would like to come, get directions from here - the address is 568 Broadway suite 404, New York, NY (between prince and Houston streets).

I'll have NC CD's to hand out, so everyone can give Seaside and Smalltalk a try. It should be a lot of fun; see you there!

Technorati Tags: nyc, seaside, ruby

There have been a number of things of interest happening lately, especially around Seaside:

• Seaside 2.9 Alpha 3 is out
• Gemstone has been working on some Seaside Tutorials
• We've (Cincom) been releasing a steady stream of Web Velocity videos (Web Velocity is built on Seaside)
• We've begun working on getting Seaside 2.9 into VW and ObjectStudio (and ultimately, Web Velocity)
• Instantiations has released support for Seaside, and announced that they'll be supporting Glorp in VA ST.

Randal's right - Seaside should be your next web framework. And speaking of Randal, you can hear him talk about Seaside and Smalltalk next week in Minneapolis. Why not register for the seminar now (it's free)?

Technorati Tags: seaside, minneapolis

Web Velocity isn't available yet, but it's getting close. In fact, I should have a demonstration application up within a few days. If you're interested in learning more, we've set up a Google group - feel free to join that to discuss, share information, and give us feedback.

Technorati Tags: web velocity, seaside

Wow, just wow:

We all know that Apple is closing in on a billion app downloads in the App Store. Currently, the counter on the main Apple.com claims it's about 10 million away from the major number. But, Apple apparently already knows when the billion mark is going to be passed, because the billion celebration page is ready to go and can easily be accessed, right now. And we know the exact time Apple is predicting when it will cross the mark -- at least, right now (more below): 1:24:06 AM PST on April 23

I'd say the pre will have to be pretty amazing to make people turn away from the iPhone at this point. It's no longer just about the hardware; it's the entire eco-system.

Technorati Tags: iPhone

I just saw this pass by on Twitter, and I've seen a bunch of variations on it over the last few days:

I will follow all new followers today. This new follower limit twitter has is slowing me down.

The limit is 1000. How can a limit of 1000 people a day as new people to follow slow you down? I can see automated systems that might want to follow more signals than that, but actual people?

Technorati Tags: twitter, social media

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at finding arbitrary text in the body of methods in your image. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Finding Arbitrary Strings in Methods from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: string search, smalltalk

I think Jonathan's Schwartz' email to Sun's employees needs a translation. He writes:

"That's their highest priority - creating an inviting and compelling environment in which our brightest minds can continue to invent and deliver the future,"; Schwartz writes.

What that really means: "My contract guarantees a huge payoff, even though I've helped drive this company into the ground. What, you mean your contract doesn't?"

Technorati Tags: sun, oracle

It's kind of interesting to watch DRM play out across every field of intellectual property - it's as if each successive field that tries it has learned nothing from what happened with music, and is in the process of happening with video. Today's looming IP battle - fonts. I ran across this post (warning - explicit language after the link):

And maybe, just maybe, they'll stumble across Jeffrey Zeldman's excellent interview with highly talented David Berlow and think, "Wow, this guy has over 300 fonts! That's awesome! Where can I download them?" And boy, won't they be surprised to learn that those 300 fonts can only be used offline. Epic fail.

It seems that the foundries are trying to come up with a protection scheme for web usage. You can see what kinds of ideas they have in mind in this Jeffrey Zeldman interview with David Berlow. Zeldman asks him how designer fonts will make it to the browser, and gets this:

The next step is for those who control the font format(s) to define and document a permissions table to be added with all due haste to the OpenType, CoolType, TrueType, and FreeType formats, so that font tool makers can make tools to create, modify and produce this table in fonts. With such a table in place, existing and new fonts can be permitted for the wide variety of today’s requirements, and leave a place for future requirements. In conjunction with this table and treating all current fonts as unlinkable, the modern user agreement, and a robust market should take care of some of the rest.

Epic Fail is right. Who the heck wants to deal with DRM before using a font? The only question is how long it will take to bleed this idea out of the type people. Down in the comments, a Mozilla developer points out that the web would have been crippled had the kind if approach being advocated for fonts been taken with images. Exactly. Like musc, this is about recognizing reality and dealing with it, rather than trying to reshape reality to keep things the way you think they ought to be...

This gave me an early chuckle :)

Michael has an update for us on the state of Seaside support in Cincom Smalltalk:

Two things we intend to do immediately upon releasing WV 1.0 is to upgrade from VisualWorks 7.6 to VisualWorks 7.7 as our base. There have been numerous improvements to Store that we desperately want to pick up, as well as general improvements to the product all-round.

The second thing we intend to do is upgrade from Seaside 2.8 to Seaside 2.9. Since the code freeze has been working reasonably well, I thought I'd take a break from doing example apps and start doing this port now.

It sounds like the Seaside team has been making life easier for the vendors as well:

Huge props to the Seaside development team - the testing framework they've put together makes this process very measurable! This afternoon I imported Seaside-Platform and Seaside-Tests-Platform and used it to start building Seaside-VisualWorks-Platform. I'm down to 8 failures and 8 errors of the 165 tests in this suite.

That's pretty amazing, compared to how previous ports of Seaside have gone. Sounds like things are going well on multiple fronts.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, visualworks, web velocity

I'm happy to see Comcast rolling out better service, even though I'm now using Verizon's FIOS. It used to be the case that Comcast was the only local choice, and the service was pretty poor. While two choices isn't a lot, it's better than one...

Technorati Tags: broadband

Here's a funny send-up of how a modern committee might view Smalltalk if it were seeing it for the first time today :)

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at the quick store access that is available through the launcher's status bar. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Quick Store Access from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, store, vw

I'm sure that Oracle's purchase of Sun is mostly about MySQL - they now own all the pieces of the database (they had previously bought the most commonly used storage engine, InnoDB).

Control is an interesting idea with a GPL'd product though, and I think Matt Mullenweg's comments about MySQL (in the context of how WordPress uses it) illustrate the problem quite well:

Today our servers are running various versions of MySQL, tomorrow they'll be running the same thing, and if need be ten years from now they can run the exact some software. Because of the GPL every WordPress user in the world is protected -- we're not beholden to any one company, only to what works best for us. Today that's MySQL, tomorrow that's MySQL, a year from now we'll see.

Later on he mentions how large the third party maket for MySQL support and add ons is. Combine that fact with the GPL license, and you find that Oracle now "owns".... well, nothing much. Anyone can grab the bits, fork a new version, and stay on the GPL. So if the user community starts getting antsy about Oracle, they can go their own way.

This is why I thought Sun's purchase of the db was dumb, and it's why I think Oracle's purchase is dumb. They could have achieved the same thing by offering stupid amounts of money to the top, say, 10 MySQL core developers. It would be costing them in the low tens of millions to do that...

Technorati Tags: sun, oracle, mysql

This is probably related to the recent uptick of failure notices I've been seeing from Twitter:

For some time, we've limited the number of accounts that a single person can follow in a day to 1000. A few days ago, we found that this limit was not being consistently applied and we started enforcing it for all users.

That's almost 42 per hour, so it's not a real limit for real people. It'll be interesting to see who raises a stink about it; maybe it's a "premium account" sort of thing Twitter could charge for :)

Technorati Tags: twitter, social media

Scientific American explains - it's all about your inner ear and eyes disagreeing:

Consider the situation when one is reading in the back seat of a car. Your eyes, fixed on the book with the peripheral vision seeing the interior of the car, say that you are still. But as the car goes over bumps, turns, or changes its velocity, your ears disagree. This is why motion sickness is common in this situation. If you have this sort of reaction it is usually helpful to stop reading and look out the window.

Of course, understanding that won't make my daughter feel any better when she tries to read in the car :)

Today's Smalltalk Daily picks up with our simple Notes example, and customizes the query to include a user defined search parameter. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Customizing a Query for Web Velocity from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalkseaside, smalltalk

Looks like Sun is setting as an independent company - Oracle is buying them out at $9.50 a share:

Oracle and Sun announced Monday that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. That puts the value of the transaction at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt.

Oracle isn't a hardware company, and hasn't ever been a hardware company - so it should be interesting to see what happens in that regard. Sun's been getting killed as intel commodity hardware has moved relentlessly up stack, so it wouldn't surprise me to see most of Sun's hardware disappear.

Oracle also hasn't been that big a player in the OSS space, so it's unclear to me what will happen there. I expect to see MySQL become more compatible with the eponymous Oracle database, in order to make upsells more possible for large scale users of MySQL.

Finally, I'd say this adds a lot of question marks on Java as well. Does Oracle take the IBM route, and create a Java foundation? Or do they suck it back into the more closed Oracle world? Anyone want to guess how long Schwartz stays on in any capacity?

Technorati Tags: sun, oracle

The Cincom Smalltalk one day seminar in Minneapolis is coming up fast - we'll be there a week from Wednesday (April 29). We have a full day scheduled, including a keynote from Randal Schwartz. Want to know how Smalltalk can help you get to market faster with lower staffing requirements than the other solutions out there? Come see how we do it.

You can register (free) for the seminar here. We have more details on the seminar here.

Technorati Tags: seminar, minneapolis

I hadn't realized that the military was using the iPod Touch as a field tool for soldiers - but it makes a lot of sense. From Newsweek:

Using a commercial product for such a crucial military role is a break from the past. Compared with devices built to military specifications, iPods are cheap. Apple, after all, has already done the research and manufacturing without taxpayer money. The iPod Touch retails for under $230, whereas a device made specifically for the military can cost far more. (The iPhone offers more functionality than the iPod Touch, but at $600 or $700 each, is much more expensive.) Typically sheathed in protective casing, iPods have proved rugged enough for military life. And according to an Army official in Baghdad, the devices have yet to be successfully hacked. (The Pentagon won't say how many Apple devices are deployed, and Apple Computer declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Technorati Tags: iPod

You can always tell when a social trend is irritating the elites - you start seeing stuff like this in the Time style pages or the magazine section:

"Connectivity is poverty" was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling's bold theme. Only the poor - defined broadly as those without better options - are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl - original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.

Loosely translated - "How dare the non-rich engage in anytime communications. That used to be the preserve of the wealthy!"

Virginia Heffernan needs to get over herself....

Technorati Tags: social media, twitter

Heh

Here's a quick demonstration of a simple Web Velocity Application, using one of the "out of the box" themes, a few UI customizations for display, and some ajaxified database searches. If you look carefully, you'll see that there are no full page submits at all. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

Here's the code that renders the javascript enabled widgets; it's using the Gadgets package:

renderActionsOn: html

	self renderBasicSearchOn: html.
	html space.
	self renderCheckBoxesOn: html

renderBasicSearchOn: html
	html text: 'Search: '.
	html space.
	html input changeCallback: [:renderer :newValue | searchVal := newValue].
	html space.
	html button
		onClick: (html refresh: [:renderer | self setupSearchQuery. self renderDetailsOn: renderer]);
		onClick: 'return false';
		with: 'Search'.
	html space.
	html button
		onClick: (html refresh: [:renderer | self resetDefaultQuery.  self renderDetailsOn: renderer]);
		onClick: 'return false';
		with: 'All'.

renderCheckBoxesOn: html
	| group |
	html text: 'Search for Video Only: '.
	html space.
	html input beCheckbox 
		changeCallback: [:renderer :newValue | searchByVideo := newValue.						].
	html space.
	html text: 'Search for Audio Only: '.
	html input beCheckbox
		changeCallback: [:renderer :newValue | searchByAudio := newValue]

The code behind the button sets up the database query, and then re-renders the lower display area based on the search results.

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

A Simple Web Velocity Application from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside, web velocity

Today's podcast with Dave Buck is a chat with Cincom's code management team - Sam Shuster and David Caster. They now manage the progress of all aspects of code management in Cincom Smalltalk - parcels, packages, and bundles, and Smalltalk Archives.

There's a bit of missing audio from the beginning, due to a brain cramp on my part - I didn't start the recording properly. I filled in what was missed myself, which was basically a background question on where Store came from. To listen now, click 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!

Technorati Tags: source code control, code management, store, smalltalk

I think today's User Friendly captures the reality of DRM nicely - as opposed to the wild fantasies held by the RIAA, MPAA (et. al.):

Technorati Tags: drm

If you live in the UK, BT has a message for you:

BT chief executive Ian Livingstone defended his firm's limited plans for faster broadband today, arguing there is not enough demand for fibre to the home to justify its cost.

"Of course a Ferrari is faster than a Ford," Livingstone said. "But most people are happy with a Ford."

I guess this answers one question I had: it is actually possible to have fewer clues than the larger US ISPs...

Technorati Tags: fiber, broadband

The topic of namespaces in Cincom Smalltalk (this now applies to both VisualWorks and ObjectStudio) has come up again. A new blog popped up recently, about the alleged faults of Seaside. Now, I'm not going to claim that Seaside is a perfect web framework - no large body of work is ever perfect, and Seaside, like any such work, has warts. Overall, I think it's a great system, which is why I pushed to have Cincom start supporting it in our Smalltalk products. When you follow the link through though, be aware - while you'll find a few good suggestions, it's hard to keep them in mind given the general level of anger and obnoxiousness on display.

Anyway

A few days ago, this post was made on namespaces in VW, with this assertion:

In VisualWorks accessing classes by their namespaces bindings is very slow!

Certainly that used to be the case; if you go back to the 5i releases, and I think the early 7.x releases, resolving dotted namespaces could be slow. That hasn't been the case for awhile though. Here's a small test I put together, with two classes:

Smalltalk.MySpace defineClass: #MyTester
	superclass: #{Core.Object}
	indexedType: #none
	private: false
	instanceVariableNames: 'value '
	classInstanceVariableNames: ''
	imports: ''
	category: ''


Smalltalk defineClass: #MyTester2
	superclass: #{Core.Object}
	indexedType: #none
	private: false
	instanceVariableNames: 'value '
	classInstanceVariableNames: ''
	imports: ''
	category: ''

I gave them both the same "doWork" method, which takes awhile to run:

value := 10000 factorial

Then, I used another class (in the Smalltalk namespace) to run this test:

	| val1 val2 |
	MySpace.MyTester new doWork.
	MyTester2 new doWork.
	val1 := Time millisecondsToRun: [100 timesRepeat: [MySpace.MyTester new doWork]].
	val2 := Time millisecondsToRun: [100 timesRepeat: [MyTester2 new doWork]].

	Transcript show: 'With namespace: ', val1 printString; cr.
	Transcript show: 'Without namespace: ', val2 printString; cr.

What were the results? The time to run the test using the dotted namespace notation (in milliseconds): 54535. Running the same test without the dotted lookup: 54643.

That's a small enough difference that I can't draw any conclusion beyond this: dotted namespace lookups aren't actually slow, and it makes a lot of sense to use namespaces when working in a Smalltalk dialect that has them - it makes for simpler naming conventions.

This shouldn't be construed as meaning that I want to see the Seaside core team push for namespaces in Squeak and start using them; that's up to them, and I don't really have an opinion on that. My sole point here is to knock down the assertion that namespace lookups in VisualWorks (or ObjectStudio) are slow. They aren't.

Technorati Tags: namespaces, visualworks, objectstudio

I'm working on a catalogue application for all of the podcasts and videos we've got online - there's a lot. We have nearly 200 podcasts (including conference material), and over 500 of the daily screencasts. That latter number is actually low; as time has gone by, many of the older screencasts have been updated - which means that there are actually over 600 of them on the server.

Anyway, it's a lot :) I'm getting all of it categorized and entered into a database, so that it can all be searched more easily.

Technorati Tags: podcast, video, media

This is awesome news - Hulu is coming to the iPhone:

Hulu is in the process of developing an app for Apple's (AAPL) iPhone and iPod touch, we have learned from a plugged-in industry executive. The app is coming soon (within a few months) and is "badass" -- as excellent as Hulu's Web site. Video will work over both wi-fi and 3G, we're told.

Yes, I still have issues with the idiosynchratic nature of video availability, especially the couple of days wait before a show gets there. For what they have, it's a great service though, and I can definitely see it coming in handy when I have to wait somewhere.

Technorati Tags: hulu, video

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at some functionality of Trippy (the inspector) that you might not be aware of - things you can do with drag/drop. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly

You can also watch it on Vimeo:

Trippy and Object Exploration from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

I'm kind of amused that the "big news" being touted by Twitter (and its many acolytes) is Oprah's nascent use of it from her set today.

Technorati Tags: twitter, social media