Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

The Cincom Star team will be traveling to Cologne, Germany this weekend for the Tuesday (June 2nd) one day Conference - you can join us there by registering (free), or just walking in - we'll be at the Marriott:

Marriott Cologne
Johannisstrasse 76-80
50668 Cologne
Germany

Phone: 49 221 942220

Here's the Agenda for the event:

9:00 --10:00 Continental Breakfast & Registration

10:00 --10:15 Welcome
Speaker: Suzanne Fortman, Smalltalk Program Director, Cincom Systems, Inc. A friendly greeting by the Smalltalk Program Director for Cincom, Suzanne Fortman.

10:15 --10:55 Smalltalk --Yes We Can
Speaker: Georg Heeg, Smalltalk Industry Council Executive Director
For more than 30 years, Smalltalk has been alive and powerful, agile and stable, modern and solid, flexible and fast, and adaptable to any new requirement. When someone walks up to a Smalltalker with a 130-year-long unsolved problem, the Smalltalker's answer is "yes, we can." In this exciting session, learn the amazing history and current successes of Cincom Smalltalk from Georg Heeg, the Executive Director of the Smalltalk Industry Council.

10:55 --11:35 Making Hard Problems Simple
Speaker: James Robertson, Smalltalk Product Evangelist, Cincom Systems, Inc.
In a down economy, the rules for business are changing. In this introduction to Cincom Smalltalk, James Robertson, the Smalltalk Product Evangelist, will discuss how Smalltalk is ideally suited for users who need to build custom applications that support complex, rapidly changing business requirements.

11:35 --11:50 Break

11:50 --12:40 Increasing Productivity with Limited Resources
Speaker: Dirk Verleysen, Senior Software Engineer, Cincom Systems, Inc.
The faster an application can get to market, the less time and money is wasted in development, resulting in a quicker return on your investment. Dirk Verleysen, a Senior Software Engineer for Cincom Smalltalk, explains how to accomplish this by simplifying the development process.

12:40 --1:30 Better, Faster, Cheaper --Attainable Goals in Software Development
Speaker: Arden Thomas, Smalltalk Product Manager, Cincom Systems, Inc.
With efficiency becoming the battle cry for most companies these days, everyone is being squeezed for faster work on a tighter budget. In this informative talk, Arden Thomas, the Smalltalk Product Manager, will demonstrate how Cincom's VisualWorks can help you attain these seemingly impossible goals.

1:30 --2:30 Lunch

2:30 --3:10 Agile Web Programming
Speaker: Arden Thomas, Smalltalk Product Manager, Cincom Systems, Inc.
In this compelling preview, Arden Thomas, the Smalltalk Product Manager, will introduce the blazing fast web development speed of Cincom's latest Smalltalk product release --Web Velocity

3:15 --3:30 Next Steps
Speaker: Smalltalk STAR Team
Open discussions, Q & A, Surveys.

Technorati Tags: cologne, conference

Copyright isn't dead; it's resting:

The Conference Board of Canada has just announced that it is recalling all three IP reports that it issued last week. It says that "an internal review has determined that these reports did not follow the high quality research standards of The Conference Board of Canada."

Update: Jesse Brown interviewed Anne Golden, CEO of the Conference Board of Canada. Golden admits that the digital economy report was plagiarized.

I'd make a snarky comment, but it seems superfluous....

Spotted in Engadget:

During Palm's D7 keynote today in Carlsbad, Paul Cousino showed attendees that non-DRM music and videos could be synced with the Pre via iTunes (on Mac and Windows, naturally). In his words: "It shows up in iTunes just like a regular device."

I think this means that Apple is taking the new Zune HD - along with its tie ins with the Zune marketplace and the popular XBox - seriously. Now they can toss the "lock in" bomb across the way, which is kind of an odd place for the Apple/MS rivalry to be :)

Technorati Tags: apple, microsoft, palm pre, itunes

There was a famous description of conservative ideology as a "man standing athwart history, shouting stop!" Well, that would make a fine description of this gathering of newspaper moguls:

There's no mention on its website but the Newspaper Association of America, the industry trade group, has assembled top executives of the New York Times, Gannett, E. W. Scripps, Advance Publications, McClatchy, Hearst Newspapers, MediaNews Group, the Associated Press, Philadelphia Media Holdings, Lee Enterprises and Freedom Communication Inc., among more than two dozen in all. A longtime industry chum, consultant Barbara Cohen, "will facilitate the meeting."

The problem is pretty well described by Doc Searls - these guys are trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again - sort of like the RIAA tried, and the MPAA is still trying, to do. It won't work out any better for them.

Today's Smalltalk Daily takes a look at some of the smaller - but useful - graphical updates to the tools that are coming in the summer 2009 release. 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:

Look Updates from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: UI, graphics

I love it when the technically illiterate opine on things they barely understand - like the supposed ease of taxing email. From the NY Times' "Idea of the Day":

Such a tax is feasible, he says, since e-mail addresses are easily identifiable by Internet service providers and they could pass on the levy in their monthly bills to users.

So... does my ISP (Verizon) monitor my HTTP traffic and charge me for usage of GMail? How about my VPN for when I use corporate mail? Or does that get kicked back to the providers, who then have to somehow figure out how to pass that cost on to end users?

How about a spam email that originates from a location outside the US? Given the current email protocols, how does an email system tell whether the sender paid the tax or not? Assuming you find a way around that problem, how does that system tell whether the credentials that claim the tax was paid are valid or not? Does the author assume that those can't be faked either?

The funny thing is, my daughter's generation is already routing around this entire problem. Between things like SMS and Facebook, they avoid spam entirely - by avoiding email.

Technorati Tags: email, spam

Spotted in SCI FI Wire:

"The Next Doctor," the series' Christmas special, will air at 9 p.m. June 27, and the next special, "Planet of the Dead," is set for July. Dates and times for the final three shows are to be determined, but the next incarnation of the show is already in the works, with Steven Moffat taking over from Russell T. Davies as show runner and Matt Smith replacing David Tennant as the Doctor.

The two episodes discussed above aired in the UK at Christmas and Easter, respectively. Now they're airing in the US starting in late June. The problem with this is simple: fans of the show find out through this internet thing when the shows aired, and want to see them Did the BBC make it available via:

• Simultaneous air dates?
• iTunes?
• Streaming Media?
• Anything at all?

Nope. Like a lot of media people, it's still the 1980's in their heads, and having widely separated air dates around the world makes perfect sense. The amusing thing is watching this sort of person complain about piracy later. Heck, they might as well have erected a huge sign saying "please steal these programs".

I'm sure this is what newspaper - and other traditional media - owners want to hear, but I don't think it's the case. This is Sergey Brin responding to a newspaper reporter's question:

Newspapers, he said, still deliver valuable content to the world. If newspapers take the time during the transition, to figure out what the next model might be, they can have a "strong sustainable form of revenue" for the future.

The value of printed news content is diminishing all the time. News is now a 24 hour, instant on thing - newspapers rely on the pace of a daily cycle. I think that means there's really no place for a printed daily news account. I'd suggest deeper analysis, but the weekly news journals have already tried that, without a lot of success. The problem is this: Not enough people want to pay anything for news or analysis in printed form anymore. I'm not sure what business model addresses that basic problem...

Technorati Tags: newspapers, news

One of the classic complaints about VisualWorks has been the emulated UI. I've gone back and forth on how relevant that is, but I'm starting to think that it's becoming less relevant all the time. Why? Have a look at this from O'Reilly Radar - it covers a raft of web technology coming downstream to the browser - simple video embedding, full canvas for graphics - you can "go native" in the browser, and have a powerful back end in Smalltalk, making it easier to write the business logic. It looks to me like the future is going to be browser based, with the most productive thing you can find for the far end. In that world, Smalltalk plays pretty well.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, javascript, html5

Earlier today I decided that it would be useful to have some simple query access to the Media Search application I posted recently; the following urls will now show useful results:

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/MediaSearch/MediaSearch.html?q=cloud

That will do a keyword search (across titles and content) for the audio and video content on our site. This one:

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/MediaSearch/MediaSearch.html?tag=cloud

will do a tag search (like clicking on a tag within the app)

As it happens, adding those kinds of public urls for a Web Velocity (Seaside) app is an easy thing. In my component, I added this method:

initialRequest: aRequest
	super initialRequest: aRequest.
	aRequest at: 'q' ifPresent: [:searchString |
		self setupSearchQueryFor: searchString].
	aRequest at: 'tag' ifPresent: [:tagString |
		self setupTagSearchFor: tagString]

And that makes those urls public - which means that you can use them easily in any non-Seaside app - for instance, you can hook up a stock search field using a servlet to hit those urls.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, webvelocity

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at Glare, a library for enabling communication between Flex/Air front ends and Smalltalk backends. 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:

Smalltalk and Air from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: flex, air, glare, smalltalk, cloud

Being a celebrity certainly doesn't mean having an ego deficit:

Ashton Kutcher -- Twitter's top tweeter -- warned he may pull the plug on his tweeting if the micro-blogging service partners on a reality TV show.

In other news, the sun reportedly rose in the east - although we have no way of confirming that without Kutcher on the case...

Technorati Tags: twitter, social media, celebrities

Supposedly, the high today will be in the 70s - but yesterday, the high was where we're at now:

Normally, I'd like the cooler weather, because it would make jogging more pleasant. However, I'm still giving the stress fracture time before I go back to pavement pounding...

Earlier, I pointed to this post about Glare (Flex backend for Smalltalk), and said I'd be taking a look at the little example. Thus began my fun little foray into tools of minimal help :)

First, I downloaded Eclipse. That installed ok, although I must say - the colorful introductory screen with a bunch of icons isn't all that helpful. I created a new project and it dove into project view, which, while not terribly like Smalltalk, was at least understandable. I quit Eclipse, and downloaded the eval of Adobe's Flex UI tools. THose installed easily enough, although - like most installers - it stayed on the "nearly done" part of the progress bar forever. With that out of the way, I started Eclipse back up.

First check - it wasn't that clear to me how to start the plugin, but it was just an option when I created a new project. Ok, easy enough. That's when the nightmare of trivial errors began :)

Flex development takes place using XML. I'm sure that some developer somewhere thought this was a good idea - but he needs to be taken out behind the woodshed, stat. leading whitespace in your source file from a copy/replace operation while looking at a tutorial? Enter inexplicable error #1:

Configuration error encountered on line 1, column 8: 
'The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed.'

Googling was the only way to figure out that I had a leading whitespace in one of my XML files; the error message certainly didn't inform me of that. There were a couple more issues I ran across, but those were related to the examples on the Glare page being partially incomplete - you really need to go to the source page (which is linked from the article) to get the full source for the Flex code (there were missing imports - something I'm sure an experienced Air developer would pick up).

Anyway - at that point, it started working: I had a back end Smalltalk service feeding a little Air app:

Technorati Tags: flex, eclipse, air, flex, glare

Ernest Micklei has put up a nice little "how to" on building an AIR GUI that talks to a Smalltalk back end (VW in this case). Looks cool; I think I'll try it out

Technorati Tags: flex, air, glare

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at the Cloudfork project - an interface to Amazon's AWS services (S3, SimpleDB, and EC2) for Smalltalk. We look at accessing S3 in today's screencast. 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 Cloudfork: S3 from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Or on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, s3, amazon, aws, cloudfork

I've taken another look at the Cloudfork work that's been going on - it works nicely in VW - I'll be doing a brief screencast on hitting S3 buckets with it later this morning. Good stuff, and it should be enormously helpful to the Smalltalk development community - it works across VW, Squeak, and VA (possibly others, but that's what I know about). Great work by Ernest Micklei and the rest of the people working on it!

Technorati Tags: aws, cloudfork

I like the idea of a new Buffy-verse movie, but this?

A new incarnation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is being developed for the big screen, but don't get too excited, Buffy fans: This version wouldn't involve series creator Joss Whedon, would have no connection to the beloved TV show and wouldn't make use of such characters as Angel, Willow, Xander or Spike.

Yes, I realize Star Trek was just relaunched successfully, but that was decades after the original series, and many of the original actors aren't even alive anymore. Relaunching Buffy from scratch would be a much harder task, I think...

Technorati Tags: buffy, whedon

Memorial Day goes back to the Post Civil War era:

Here's another talk from our Minneapolis one day Smalltalk event - this is me talking about Smalltalk productivity with some examples. It's kind of a "lightning talk". You can download my slides (PDF) here. 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:

The Smalltalk Way from James Robertson on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, minneapolis, seaside

Maybe not, if you plan to use it mostly for corporate purposes :)

Technorati Tags: marketing

"Terminator Salvation" pretty much delivers the goods, at least so far as this franchise goes. The new movie hearkens back to the first one a lot, and runs in overdrive - as the first one did - pretty much the whole way. That's why I liked it, because it was relentless in the same way that the original was. While it may not be a great piece of movie-making, it's a great addition to the series, and worth seeing.

Technorati Tags: terminator

Dave Buck points out that the International Ray Tracing Competition' website has been updated, and it's built with Seaside.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

This week we spoke to a long time "tire kicker" of Smalltalk, Sean McGinty. He's been looking at Smalltalk on and off for over a decade, so we thought it might be useful to find out:

• Why he keeps coming back to Smalltalk
• What prevents him from moving past tire kicking to real usage

That led to a discussion of the pros and cons of Smalltalk, what things we (as a community) could do better, and what things we do pretty well already. 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: smalltalk, im, tire kicker

Back on May 1st, Travis announced on the vw-dev mailing list that listbox selection behavior was changing (this will be visible to a wider audience once we go to release later in the summer. I'll just repeat what Travis posted on the mailing list:

A couple of builds ago, we finally got around to making our lists semi-modern in their interaction model. This means that you don't toggle off in a list without using a modifier key to do so. Also, we now use the apple/command key on Apple (tho the ctrl works as well), so Mac users can finally multi select in lists the same way the rest of their apps do. Also, on a button-2 click (to raise the menu), we now select. Which is also standard behavior.

It has some interesting affects on long time users of VW tools. New/younger users are just happy that it now feels more like what they're used to. But for the rest of us... we've gotten used to two side affects of the old behavior, which may take a bit of memory-muscle therapy to get used to, but it's not too bad, I got over it in a couple of days of occasional giggles at myself. One is the "pull back scope" thing in the browser, which Georg describes. You learn to use the modifier key or just select the item above and back on. It was interesting that I *naturally* do that in column view mode of the Apple Finder (which is kinda like the 4 list browser layout). But didn't naturally do so for VW. The human brain is a cool thing.

The other thing is that we're used to the pattern of selecting an item in a list, and then *anywhere* in the list, right clicking for a menu to operate on the item we just selected, even tho the mouse may be somewhere else in the list now. What will happen with the new behavior is that you'll end up selecting the item you've moved to. So the first memory-muscle that gets therapy (at least along my path to recovery) is that you start making sure where you menu-click at. You learn to left-click -> right click in the same spot. The second, is that you begin to realize, "I don't need the left click, I can just optimize that out of the loop now." This is standard behavior. And once I got used to it, I find I do like it better. Not just for the consistency aspect.

It's consistent with standard platform behavior, but something of a change for long-time VW users - I'm still getting used to it, especially with the right click behavior. The important thing is, it works the way any newcomer to the tools would expect it to work now.

Andres Valloud will be presenting to the PDX Smalltalk group next week:

Next Tuesday, I will give a new presentation at the Portland Smalltalk User Group. The talk is entitled The Laws of Form and Computer Programming, and it shows how two extremely simple principles govern what we do when we write software. The meeting begins on Tuesday May 26th at 6:30pm. The presentation will probably start at about 7:00pm ish. The location is the Fourth Avenue PSU building, at SW Fourth and Harrison, room FAB86-01.

There have been so many homers at the new Yankee stadium that everyone has a theory. Even the weather guys are weighing in now :)

Technorati Tags: baseball, yankees

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