My partner Kirsten is a flute teacher, and has been thinking for a while she needs a web site. She wasn't exactly keen on editing the HTML manually, and has a Mac, so we started playing with Apple's iWeb. It worked out really well. It's quite limited - you get templates, and you can't even edit the templates, so each new page starts with the default header picture on it. But it does a really good job of looking like a WYSIWYG layout tool, hiding the horrors of HTML beneath the surface. The site requirements aren't complicated, but she was able to lay out the whole thing by herself, and she's very picky about things like layout and colours. She did notice that the published site has fonts and colors slightly off from what iWeb shows, even on a Mac in Safari. But it's pretty close. And she did things like overlapping pictures whose underlying HTML has got to be horrific.

Of course the real reason I'm blogging about this is that, even with the site having been up as a placeholder for a few days, our Google overlords don't seem to be aware of its existence. So perhaps putting an external link referring to the site will help with that.

Those of you who carefully watch these things may notice that I've changed the blog title, from "Glorp News" to "Cincom Smalltalk Stuff". This to reflect my new position, as Technical Architect for Cincom Smalltalk. In that position, I think it's appropriate for me to make more public commentary on the product as a whole, rather than focusing on my personal project. I'll also be trying to blog a little more regularly. And I even put up a little biographical entry.

As most people following these things already know, I'm sure, both Eliot Miranda and Vassili Bykov have recently left Cincom to join a project at Cadence with Gilad Bracha. Both of them will be very sorely missed. Eliot seems to me to have been with VisualWorks forever, but is actually more of a second-generation ParcPlacer. He's been extremely important in the history of the product, and served as almost the sole voice of engineering through some of its dark times. His passion and commitment to the product have always been an inspiration. Alas, while Cincom has brought a lot more stability, and a lot more voices, we're now losing one of our longest-serving voices to the charms of cool new projects. With his departure, John Sarkela will take over the role of virtual machine lead. John has done a great many things in his career, but among them he was a VM engineer at Digitalk. Most recently he's been leading a major overhaul of the VisualWorks Mac OSX VM. We're also bringing on a new person to the VM team, but I'm not sure if it's final, so I probably shouldn't say who it is yet.

Vassili Bykov is someone I've known and worked with for a very long time. He was with The Object People back in the old days. When they were bought by a combination of the now-defunct WebGain and BEA, I joined cincom, and so did Vassili and Martin Kobetic. Vassili has been the face of the tools group, and his brilliance in UI design and his thoughtful approach have led to very significant improvements in the VisualWorks toolset. He's someone who's always been a pleasure to work with, and it will be a shame not to have him with us.

With Vassili's departure, we now have an opening in the Smalltalk Tools team. It's been been posted on the Cincom site, although it seems a bit tricky to find. It's also gone through the HR process of adding peculiar requirements - like 6 years of SQL Server and Oracle experience, and a requirement to reside in the Southwest Ohio area. Ignore those, we'll get that changed in the posting shortly. And although we're primarily looking in the Tools area, we're always interested in high-quality candidates even if experience doesn't precisely match the area we're looking for. And we're a very geographically distributed team - being anywhere in North America is probably fine.

I also note that we have an opening for a Smalltalk support position in North America. Similar caveats apply about the geographic location and specific experience required.