Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Engadget notes that Dell's overly stereotyped "girl" marketing site "Della" has hit the trash heap. I heard about this on TwIT, but by the time I got around to looking, it was gone. When you try to market to caricatures of people, the people who notice usually end up laughing or irritated. Neither one really works as a way to attract sales :)

Technorati Tags: pr

Watch for a terminator near you:

"Petman will balance itself and move freely; walking, crawling and doing a variety of suit-stressing calisthenics during exposure to chemical warfare agents," the company promises. "Petman will also simulate human physiology within the protective suit by controlling temperature, humidity and sweating when necessary, all to provide realistic test conditions. "

When they give these things Austrian accents, it'll be time to build the bunker :)

ICE uses VisualWorks and GemStone to get stuff done - how well are they doing?

IntercontinentalExchange, Inc(R) (NYSE: ICE), the operator of regulated global futures exchanges, clearing houses and over-the-counter (OTC) markets has been named Exchange of the Year for 2009 by Energy Risk magazine.

You can use a mainstream language, and achieve mainstream results. Or, you can try something better....

This example comes from the music business, where Amazon is working with a smaller vendor to shove the big labels aside - but it's happening across the entire economy. People who previously added value by standing in the middle of transactions are being relentlessly kicked aside. This is a wave you want to get in front of, so that you don't get run over by it...

Tunecore will charge just $31 a year in upfront fees to handle a 10-track CD from pressing to delivery, passing all other costs through to the buyer. In other words, the service promises to remove nearly all of the risks of short-run CD manufacturing, which can cost musicians hundreds or even thousands of dollars for discs that rarely sell enough to cover expenses.

Those older costs supported a ton of people who happily shaved a few bucks of profit off the work of the artists - but that's coming to an end. It's not the only place, either. I rather suspect that the entire sales field is going to get massively shrunk in the next few years...

Technorati Tags: disintermediation, sales

Here's a cautionary tale for any company that has attracted detractors - and it doesn't really matter whether you think the detractors have a point or not. The point is, a supposedly finely honed message can be hijacked pretty easily. In the past, old missteps could be forgotten. Now? It kind of depends on how forgiving your audience is...

Technorati Tags: PR, advertising

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at some of the issues involved in deploying a Web Velocity application - specifically, this one, which allows ad-hoc searches across all audio and video content on our site. 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:

Deploying Web Velocity to a Server from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, web velocity, deployment, seaside

John McIntosh has gotten his Wiki Server app into the app store - it's a Pier based (Seaside) wiki server.

One of the things people have brought up is that individual podcasts, screencasts, and videos are somewhat hard to find - you need to trawl through various archives pages. To partially address that, I've put together a Web Velocity app that allows for ad hoc searching of our media content. You can check it out here.

Technorati Tags: seaside, web velocity, webvelocity

Today's Smalltalk Daily picks up from yesterday's screencast on Explain, and adds some more detail. 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:

More on Explain from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, explain, code browser

When business models change, a lot of the value propositions shift with them - and the people in the industry in question are often the last ones to see and accept the change. Richard Picard has an excellent piece exploring that idea with respect to reporting today in the CS Monitor:

Well-paying employment requires that workers possess unique skills, abilities, and knowledge. It also requires that the labor must be non-commoditized. Unfortunately, journalistic labor has become commoditized. Most journalists share the same skills sets and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask similar questions, and produce relatively similar stories. This interchangeability is one reason why salaries for average journalists are relatively low and why columnists, cartoonists, and journalists with special expertise (such as finance reporters) get higher wages.

This sort of thing is happening across other "news" businesses than media - consider the PR field. Up until fairly recently, corporate PR folks had the important task of getting the word out about their products to important sources in trade journals. Then two things happened with the rise of the net:

• General trade journals started to get beaten up, being replaced by niche publications working online (think of Engadget, for instance)
• The people responsible for creating technology got the ability to report on what they were doing themselves (blogs and social media)

Those changes not only cut the PR pro out of the loop, it eliminated the need for most of the people he was talking to as well. As Picard points out, that process has been happening across the media, and I'd argue that PR is pretty much a specialized media field. The net is relentlessly disintermediating things, and reporting is is just one example of that.

Technorati Tags: news, pr

The Yankees are looking good again - they made it 8 in a row. The pitching mostly held up as well - Rivera gave up a meaningless solo shot in the 9th, but only 3 other runs beyond that (and only 1 last night). Looks like this season could be a whole lot better than last :)

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

I hadn't thought about it much, but it turns out that DRM is used in a lot of places other than music and movies. For instance, I had no idea that it was being used in car diagnostic systems to lock small players out.

Great post by Benjamin Pollack, explaining what's so cool about Smalltalk:

I guess this is why, despite all of its faults, I have a lot of trouble giving up on Smalltalk. C#'s a good language, and .NET's a good framework; but I cannot help but feel that this isn't an issue of reinventing the wheel, as much as forgetting that we can provide programmers the tools to make their own types of locomotion.

Read the whole thing; he has some really good examples.

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at an old feature of the browser that is more useful than it used to be: the "Explain" menu pick. 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:

Using Explain in the Browser from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, browser, code browser

I'm just curious: Do MSI based installers always take a long time to "validate the installation", or am I seeing the picture below because I'm running Windows under a VM (Parallels)? I really don't know, but I'd love to find out :)

Not that this involves rocket science, but I've discovered that running WiFi and BlueTooth at the same time just chews through the battery like a hot knife through butter. Not surprising really, but it's easy to forget and leave WiFi on and put the headset on... and then have no power left :)

Technorati Tags: iPhone, bluetooth

This Thursday (May 21) Carl Gundel will be presenting RunBasic (his Seaside based web implementation of Liberty Basic) in NYC:

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 VisualWork’s Seaside implementation.

The meeting starts at 6:30 PM - hit this link for directions to Suite LLC's offices.

Technorati Tags: basic, runbasic, nyc

Personally, I like the idea of having WiFi available in flight - and never mind the nay-saying below:

But there are handicaps, including the lack of electrical outlets in most coach cabins (so usage is limited by battery life), and the question of how much demand there actually is for an Internet hookup at the prices being contemplated. AirTran, for example, is charging $9.95 for flights under three hours and $12.95 for those over three hours.

So far, said Joe Brancatelli, publisher of the business travel Web site Joesentme.com, "there is zero proof" that a significant number of passengers are willing to pay for in-flight Wi-Fi service on domestic routes. (The Aircell service depends on land-based cellular towers and cannot be used on overseas flights.)

Mr. Brancatelli needs to get out more. In particular, he should wander through a terminal sometime, and ponder the number of people paying for a few hours (or a whole day) of WiFi for an hour or two of wait time. if people will pay in the terminal, I'll bet they'll pay in the air, too. The larger questions are:

• Can't we have a system that works on really long trans-oceanic flights?
• Will there be enough available bandwidth to make the purchase worthwhile?

I suspect that raw demand won't be a problem, but crappy service could kill it.

Technorati Tags: wifi

I'm kidding, but seriously, this is something we would have called "out there" scifi 20 years ago:

Ronald Arkin, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, is in the first stages of developing an "ethical governor," a package of software and hardware that tells robots when and what to fire. His book on the subject, "Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots," comes out this month.

I hope he doesn't start using T- as part of his version numbers :)

Here's the video for Georg's talk at our Minneapolis event - I released the audio as last week's podcast. 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:

Yes, We Can from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, minneapolis

I've received complaints about the last few "Smalltalk Daily" screencasts being quiet, and I just figured out why (after Randal made a suggestion in the IRC) - the upgrade to OS X 10.5.7 pushed the input volume for the USB mic I use down to the minimum. No idea why it would do that, but there it is. Things should go back to normal now, and I'll redo those three screencasts as some point...

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at custom control structures in Smalltalk - specifically, building a case statement. 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:

Custom Control Structures from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, case statement

Last year's innovation awards were full of cool apps - here's your chance to have people see yours:

You are invited to submit your nice Smalltalk based software to the 6th ESUG Innovation Technology Awards. The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, 500 Euros, 300 Euros and 200 Euros during an awards ceremony at the 17th International Smalltalk Joint Conference 2009 in Brest, France. No constraints are put on the software except that it should be Smalltalk-based or Smalltalk-related and all flavours of Smalltalk are accepted.

To submit your app, go here.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, innovation awards

Travis explains floating point numbers in Smalltalk by exploring them in the inspector. This is one of the coolest things about Smalltalk - the exploratory learning that the system enables.

Technorati Tags: floating point

I think the idea of value added services makes more sense than advertising, but I'm still skeptical about this idea for Twitter:

Stone said on Monday that Twitter would remain free for consumers and businesses, and that the company's main focus at the moment is developing new features for commercial users, such as "lightweight analytics" and a directory of commercial accounts that would verify that businesses on Twitter are legitimate.

The problem is that there's a precedent out there: Google Analytics, which are pretty good, and free. For Twitter to be able to charge, they would really have to add value. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Technorati Tags: social media, twitter

The Duke Nukem saga just gets weirder. From Joystiq:

It's become clear as of late that Duke Nukem Forever has become a topic that we can't ignore. Today is no exception, with 3D Realms releasing its first public statement since the dissolving of the game's development team and saying that it's "not closed and is not closing."

Joystiq has more - but the story simply isn't that clear. Sounds like the only winners will be the lawyers :)

John McIntosh's Squeak/iPhone work is paying off - his first app has hit the App Store.

Technorati Tags: squeak, iPhone, app store

We bought an exercise cycle back on mother's day - the good part was, there was no shipping cost, no sales tax, and a 10 percent discount - we got the thing for almost $300 less than it would have cost at a local sporting goods store. The bad news? I got the box delivered to my foyer, and had to get it up the stairs:

That box, with the bike in it, was about 150 pounds. No one else was home, and my wife can't really help anyway, what with her knee problems - the recumbent bike is largely to help her exercise when going to the gym to swim isn't possible (t-storms, other bad weather). So I turned around, put my back into it, and shoved it up. Fortunately, it didn't fall on me :)

The good news is, assembly was easy - they even included all the tools I needed. It went together quickly, and a quick test shows that it works fine:

I think I'll try it out this afternoon.

Technorati Tags: exercise

Don't miss us in Cologne, Germany on Tuesday, June 2. This one-day conference is designed to reveal ways that Smalltalk enables you to respond to the most pressing issues in today's economy. The agenda includes Smalltalk experts who will share how Smalltalk's green approach to application development can help you convert your balance sheet to a solid shade of black. Experience such topics as: Making Hard Problems Simple, by James Robertson, Cincom's Smalltalk Product Evangelist; Increasing Productivity with Limited Resources, by Dirk Verleysen, Lead Engineer for Cincom's ObjectStudio®; and Smalltalk - Yes We Can, by Georg Heeg, Executive Director for the Smalltalk Industry Council (STIC).

You can register (free) for the event here - once you register, we'll send you details on the venue, and the updated agenda when it's finalized. To get more information on the seminar series in general, go here. See you there!

Technorati Tags: cologne, germany, objectstudio, visualworks, web velocity

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at compressing an image (i.e., the Smalltalk image, not a graphic 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:

Compressing a Smalltalk Image from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, compression

Here's Georg Heeg, of his eponymous company, at the Minneapolis one day Smalltalk event on April 29, 2009. Georg spoke as the STIC director, borrowing President Obama's "Yes We Can" slogan and using it in the context of Smalltalk development. The talk was well received, and highly entertaining - I'll have video available next week. You can grab Georg's slides here; download the audio here.

You can see our photo gallery from the event 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: smalltalk, minneapolis

I'm waiting on one bit of audio that belongs in the podcast, and it should arrive this afternoon. So you can expect Industry Misinterpretations 136 by this evening at the latest. Stay tuned :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

I'm not sure if I've ever seen so much stupid all in one place - the Washington Post op-ed page has just outdone itself today. What are they calling for? They want the new business protected from the "predations" of search engines. There are a bunch of bad ideas in this mess, but this one is special:

Now that many news aggregator sites have taken "linksploitation" to a commercial level by selling ads wrapped around the links they post, Congress has the incentive it needs to pass a federal law protecting hot news. Such a law would give publishers an additional source of legal leverage outside of copyright to demand fair compensation for the content they create.

So what are they asking for here, a cut of the ad revenue? A block on the links themselves? The basic problem is very different from what they think it is. Back when the newspapers and local tv/radio had a monopoly on news, selling ads was a high value proposition. Now? There are tons of places an ad can go, which has driven the price for ads down tremendously. Unless they get an artificial boost, there's simply no going back to the old system - and even with a boost, there's really no way back. If any site wants out of Google's index, it's easy - use robots.txt to block them. Google honors that, and it would stop the "stealing" of content immediately. Of course, it would also stop the flow of traffic immediately, something they would rather we not hear about. Maybe Google should just switch to opt in up front, and see how well the media outfits like it.

The shape of the media environment has changed, just as the music business has. The people who wrote that piece are looking at the world backwards, like the RIAA has been doing. To use an old quote, you can't go home again...

Technorati Tags: news

I always get a chuckle out of the rail advocacy that pops up from time to time. Here's another example, a lamentation of the decline of passenger rail since the 1920's:

But the most striking aspect of these antiquated documents is found in the tiny agate columns of arrivals and destinations. It is here that one sees the wheels of progress actually running backward. The aforementioned Montreal Limited, for example, circa 1942, would pull out of New York's Grand Central Station at 11:15 p.m., arriving at Montreal's (now defunct) Windsor Station at 8:25 a.m., a little more than nine hours later. To make that journey today, from New York's Penn Station on the Adirondack, requires a nearly 12-hour ride. The trip from Chicago to Minneapolis via the Olympian Hiawatha in the 1950s took about four and a half hours; today, via Amtrak's Empire Builder, the journey is more than eight hours.

That sounds sad, until you peruse a flight schedule. NYC to Montreal is less than 90 minutes (I've got an expedia page open in front of me as I write this). What would possess me to take a 9 hour (or even a 4 hour on some imagined high speed rail) trip when I can do it in less than 2 hours by air?

That's not an idle question for me; while I don't travel as much as I once did, I still fly a fair amount. From here to Dayton (where I fly when I go to corporate HQ) is under 2 hours, followed by a 1 hour car ride to get to the Cincom building. That building isn't in any city center, so no train ride would shave that final hour, and a train ride from here to Ohio would - even with 1920's trains - take hours out of my life. Would I rather spend those hours at home with my family, or on a train? That's the question the rail advocates really need to ask themselves.

This doesn't mean I'm anti-rail - on some intercity routes, it makes a lot of sense, and it would be sensible to upgrade the railbeds to support faster trains. The northeast corridor comes to mind. The upper midwest might make sense too, but given the industrial collapse of the cities there, it's a far more open question. In general, rail makes sense if the distances are short, maybe up to around 400 miles. Past that, air travel is simply easier, and given the expense of installing the upgraded railbeds (don't forget all the NIMBY lawsuits that would happen), a whole lot more affordable. Rail travel has been allowed to fade for a simple reason: it's been technologically surpassed. There's no market for a 12-14 hour ride to Chicago from NYC when the plane does it in under 2...

Technorati Tags: trains, rail, air travel

I saw a post just now about how Java is supposedly more productive than Ruby on Rails at building web apps. After I stopped chuckling, I read the post and noted that "easier" in this sense meant using a model driven approach with a framework that generates the HTML views for you based on your models. Hmm - been there, done that with VisualWave. It works great right up to the point where you want to start customizing things - at which point the code generation framework starts hurling walls in your way.

So what's behind door number three then? Well, there's Seaside with Web Velocity. First, let's define the database. First, I tell the system I'm using PostgreSQL and give it my login credentials. Then I give it these two methods:

tableForCATEGORIES: aTable

	(aTable createFieldNamed: 'id' type: platform serial) bePrimaryKey.
	aTable createFieldNamed: 'name' type: (platform varchar: 200).

tableForRECIPES: aTable

	| category_id |
	(aTable createFieldNamed: 'id' type: platform serial) bePrimaryKey.
	aTable createFieldNamed: 'title' type: (platform varchar: 200).
	aTable createFieldNamed: 'date' type: platform timestamp.
	aTable createFieldNamed: 'description' type: (platform varchar: 200).
	aTable createFieldNamed: 'instructions' type: platform text.
	category_id := aTable createFieldNamed: 'category_id' type: platform integer.
	aTable addForeignKeyFrom: category_id to: ((self tableNamed: 'CATEGORIES') fieldNamed: 'id').

At that point, I had a database (I did have to click the link for creating tables), basic viewers for the recipes and categories (and I used that basic app to add some categories and recipes). Here's a screenshot of the basic recipe viewer:

It's not showing us stuff exactly as we'd like, but it works - we can add recipes and categories. Here's what it looks like after a few customizations in the code, making the scaffolding framework display what we want it to:

And the viewer for an individual recipe:

Now, what did I have to do to get that? Simple. In my List viewer for recipes, I added a couple of methods:

shouldRenderInstructions
	^false

renderObjectCategory: object value: value on: html
	
	html anchor
		callback: [self call: (CategoryViewUI on: object category)];
		withOverflowSafeText: object category name

renderObjectDate: object value: value on: html
	html text: value asDate printString

The first tells the class not to render that named field (you can do that for any of them in specific viewers, and an equivalent thing can be done for editors). The next two tell the viewer how to render two specific fields - with the one for Category telling it to provide a link to the category viewer. I provided some niceties in the category list view as well:

shouldRenderRecipes
	^false

Which has it list just the category names, with links to each recipe. Then there's the modification to the viewer for a recipe, to have it display HTML instead of text for the instructions:

renderValueInstructions: value on: html
	html html: value

That has the Instructions field render as html instead of as text. That's pretty much it - There's a lot more that can be done, but the cool thing is this: it's all done with your models and views, with a nice clean separation between them, and complete control over how everything displays. If you don't care for the default scaffolding, you can override it completely (by implementing #renderContentOn: yourself), or just for the main content area, by overriding #renderDetailsOn: ). As I showed above, you can change things on a more fine grained basis easily as well. I'll take complete control via code over a naked object style approach any day. And oh by the way - while I used the ActiveRecord pattern which Velocity provides here, there's a full ORM - the open source Glorp framework - behind it.

Technorati Tags: java, ruby on rails, web, development, seaside

It looks like Google can rest easier - WolframAlpha is online, and it's not doing the same sort of thing as Google (or other traditional search engines) at all. It's actually more in the Mahalo space, except that it's algorithm powered rather than people powered. Some examples:

Search for "What is Java"

How about "What is Smalltalk":

A search for RSS turns up the same sort of thing. It does really well on things that can be easily disambiguated; less well on things that can't be. I find it interesting that it knows that COBOL is a programming language, has no clue what Smalltalk is, and for Java, finds the island first :)

Update: As usual, Dare Obasanjo has a very thoughtful roundup on this, and makes some very sensible points about the entire search field, and how it's evolving.

We really enjoyed the new "Star Trek" movie. Abrams reset the series, the actors all fit into their roles, and the action was intense. The best part? 100 Percent less Rick Berman.

Technorati Tags: star trek

PCWorld spots a huge mistake in the Times:

The The New York Times makes a doozy of a goof, telling readers to throw out their anti-virus software.

This is why I don't really trust general reporters trying to cover complex topics - it's a bit like expecting the gym teacher to cover AP Physics...

This is from a survey out of the UK, but I suspect that the numbers are similar here in the US. The audience is Marcom people, being asked about workplace usage of social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc):

Around half said their IT departments blocked access such sites, however -- stopping them from monitoring what's happening with their brands.

That indicates a serious disconnect between the marketing and IT groups in question, and it needs to be fixed where it happens. I have a bunch of search feeds monitoring Twitter for various search terms, so that I can jump on top of things that mention the topics I care about. If you can't do that, you can't operate fully in today's media environment...

Technorati Tags: social media

Today's Smalltalk Daily shows you how to add a file to an HTTP upload as a multi-part mime attachment. 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:

Upload a File using HTTP from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, http, mime

Looks liek "Smalltalk Daily" isn't the only video learning site for Smalltyalk anymore: Chris Cunnington has set up "Smalltalk Television" (looks like Squeak is the focus).

Technorati Tags: screencast, video

The ESUG 2009 conference is approaching, and it will be the biggest Smalltalk event of the year:

The registration to 17th edition of the ESUG Conference. So, you can already register and benefit from the early bird fees. Note that if your company is a gold or platinum sponsor, you have a discount (10% or 20%). More online

The ESUG yearly event is the premier forum for meeting other Smalltalk practitioners from both industry and academia. You can contribute to the event by giving a talk during the developers sessions, presenting a research paper during the workshop or demoing your software during the Innovation Technology Awards. Developers can meet and contribute to free software projects during a camp.

Remember that by attending ESUG event, you support ESUG (a non-profit organization) and its actions for promoting Smalltalk.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, events