Well, this makes the next few weeks exciting. I was setting up my trip to London and Paris (for our next round of conferences), and I couldn't find my passport - it wasn't in the place I normally leave it. Finally, I opened the dryer, and sure enough: there it was.
Damaged beyond use, so I investigated the process. I couldn't find my birth certificate (with a damaged passport, you need proof of citizenship along with the damaged passport) - but fortunately, my mom still has a copy (and for safety, I ordered a new one from the state I was born in).
After that, I just need to run down to the local post office, pay a rather large fee, and wait. I'll have to expedite it, but that's just the way it goes...
Here's Roland Wagener of the Georg Heeg company, talking about a project he did to match printed graphic materials match up as closely as possible with a website. To watch, click on the viewer below:
Gilad Bracha sees the iPhone and the iPad, and has decided that they portend the end of the filesystem as we know it:
Which brings us to the programmer experience. File APIs will disappear from client platforms (as in the web browser). So programmers will become accustomed to working with persistent object stores as provided by HTML 5, Air etc. And as they do, they will get less attached to files as code representation as well.
Well, not so fast. What's actually happening is that the end user experience (apps manage the file system for you on an application specific basis) is diverging from the developer experience (writing the code to make that "magic" possible. Take iTunes or iPhoto - I never really look at the way either application manages things. From my end user standpoint, there are two folders I don't need to pay attention to (Music and Pictures). Underneath all of that is a mass of files (raw photos, XML metadata, edited photos, etc). All of that stuff is stored in... files.
Heck, even if you think everything will end up in the cloud that won't change. The end user will end up seeing application defined portals into their data, while the back end will be some combination of application specific file storage, databases (etc) - all in a filesystem somewhere.
As to developers moving away from files - well. Anyone who uses a source code control tool is moving in that direction already. It happens to be the case that the simplest artifact to go into these tools is usually the file, but those files are increasingly organized into some kind of package structure that is more meaningful.
Over the weekend, I demonstrated a RESTful JSON service using the WebToolkit. Today, I'm going to do the same thing using Seaside 3.0 in VisualWorks (the same code should work in ObjectStudio). If you want the code, here it is. First, load Seaside from the Parcel Manager - it's now under "Web Development":
The example I'm building uses JSON (although it could just as easily be XML or anything else) - so we'll connect to the public store and get the JSON code support:
Next, we'll create a subclass of WAComponent that will render the JSON for us. As I did over the weekend, I'll just create a simple dictionary for the example:
Next, we need to write some code. Add the following two class methods:
In a workspace, execute MyService initialize. At this point, you have a working service, it just doesn't do anything. Go to the launcher and pull down the Seaside menu and start the server. If you go to SvcPoint, you should get a blank page.
Now, you need to create the rendering code to respond with JSON. This is a bit different than it would have been in Seaside 2.8 - the session and request context code have changed.
Write the code above:
renderContentOn: html
" Render our object as generic json. "
self requestContext respond: [:response |
| json |
json := self data asJson.
response contentType: 'application/json'.
response nextPutAll: json ]
Now browse the entry point again - you should be prompted to download a file (or it'll just download, depending on the browser you're using):
Finally, if you open that response file in a text editor, you should see this:
And that's it! You now have a RESTful service implemented in Seaside. Here's the code in a zip file if you just want to load it and take a look.
Today's Screencast shows you how to create a RESTful Web Service in Seaside. You can get the code here; if you would rather see a text/image based walkthrough, go to my earlier post. To watch now, just click on the viewer below:
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I finished off George Martin's A Feast for Crows
yesterday, and now I'm ready for book five - which sadly isn't out yet. Book four focused almost entirely on the south, and there were plenty of surpises. Again, I'll note that martin - unlike the writers for "Heroes" - is entirely ok with killing off characters, including ones that you are utterly convinced are going to stick around. This is a good thing - with anyone at risk, you really want to keep turning the pages.
So now I'll be paying attention to the rumor mill on his progress - it's been nearly 5 years since book four, so let's have it!
Charles Stross explains the Amazon/MacMillan affair in the context of what's going on in publishing as a whole. It's easy (from the book consumer's standpoint) to see Amazon as "the good guiy" driving prices down, but it's useful to see where writers and publishers are coming from as well - the picture is way more complicated than Amazon would like us to think...
I had to drive my daughter somewhere the other day, and we got to talking about the somewhat artificial feeling that surrounds the place we live (Columbia, MD - created out of whole cloth 40 some odd years ago). There' wasn't any real economic driver for this place; there still isn't. Very few people living here are actually from here; it's a bedroom community, with most people commuting down to the DC suburbs where the local jobs are. The fact that I work out of the house makes me something of an outlier here, I guess.
Anyway - I often read people talking about the supposedly tighter community feeling in a city, but I don't think that has anything to do with it. What I think matters is what you might call local permanence: how many people have their roots in an area (meaning, their family ties to the immediate region go back more than a generation)? The higher that number is, the more a place is going to feel like home for kids born there. The lower it is, the less they'll feel that way. The famous theories about "suburban alienation" don't really have much to do with the suburbs, IMHO - they have to do with transience. I rather suspect that city neighborhoods with low levels of "permanence" have the same levels of alienation.
I don't know whether this actually leads me anywhere; it's just a set of thoughts that grew out of a conversation I had with my daughter. Food for thought though...
Nothing is hitting the ground here yet - but this weather map says it will be shortly:
With something like three inches on the way, I'm guessing that we'll have at least a school delay in the morning - if that happens, expect "Smalltalk Daily" to be a bit late, as I sleep in :)
Forrester makes the point that Yahoo and Technorati both headed downhill once they forgot their core businesses and started getting enthusiastic about being "content providers". Is Facebook in danger of going the same way? Well, they are adding RSS/Atom news reader capability to the news stream. Now, this could end here, and be the live "river of news" that Dave Winer always talks about... or it could go down the road to hell:
If there's any risk of the content provider tragedy happening again, someone in the PM team at Facebook needs to speak up now. Why do people use Facebook? To connect with friends. The applications are cute ways to connect with them in more ways than just posting and poking. Anything that interferes with that activity dilutes the core value of Facebook. (And news feeds aren't the only source of potential dilution, by the way.)
This isn't really Snowmageddon, but I bet it will get my daughter out of school tomorrow:
In terms of actual Snowmageddon, there's a possibility that a storm system tracking into the south will run up the coast this weekend and leave us with another 2 foot + event. Getting a second one of those in one winter would be pretty darn unusual for central Maryland :)
If you've registered for one of the Smalltalk events we have coming up (in Paris and London), you may well have gotten inaccurate information in the confirmation email. It looks like the times are off by 5 hours (London) and 6 hours (Paris). The events run from 9 AM - 1 PM local time in both locations.
The addresses you received are fine; just be careful about the times :)
The team behind MacHeist has just launched "DaringFireballWithComments.net" a website that mirrors Gruber's site with, you guessed it, comments.
There's also the possible branding infringement, although that would imply that Gruber applied for a trademark. Either way, it smells wrong to me. This is the same tactic that spammers use to build link farms. They could have accomplished the same thing with SideWiki...
According to the National Federation of the Blind, only 10 percent of blind children learn braille today, down from 50 percent in the 1950s, and only 10 percent of blind people in America read braille.
I'm not sure I have any opinion on whether it's good, bad, or indifferent - I'm not blind, and I don't know anyone who is. I do know that listening (podcasts) is different than reading - that's why I'm far more interested in e-readers (like the coming iPad) than I am in audiobooks. Is it the same for blind people? It seems they're "voting with their fingers".
Dave Buck relays news of Cincom customer Igor Dmytryk talking about the trading system at EDC at the next Ottawa STUG, on Feb 10:
The core trading platform used by the Treasury group at Export Development Canada is written in Smalltalk. The system has been under constant development for over 10 years. The talk will demo the system and cover aspects of our development methodology, testing and future plans.
Send email to Dave to RSVP; the talk starts at 6PM, here:
Amazon recently bought a small company that builds innovative touchscreen devices, leading to the thought that they might well have a next generation device on the way that would leapfrog the iPad:
Unlike traditional capacitive sensors, our patent-pending system can detect any object -- not just a finger -- and can determine how much pressure is being applied to every point on a sensor simultaneously. IFSR sensors are natively multitouch, use less power than capacitive sensors, and are much less expensive to produce, making them a highly disruptive technology with widespread market applications.
Now if they were able to add design sensibility to that tech...
Today's screencast demonstrates how to create a Document object and print it using the native print dialog on Windows (rather than the default printer, which is what will normally happen). ,You can download the code used in this screencast here.
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But all that is about to change. AT&T announced Thursday morning that it will now allow the SlingPlayer iPhone app to stream live over its 3G network.
What we really need now is for Apple to release streaming support for iTunes and the iPhone. Then add over the air updates instead of requiring the synch cable. Google has done that for their Android phones, and Apple needs to catch up.
First, after Apple's iPad announcement with no Flash, Adobe's Evangelist pulled out the pr0n card:
My friend Matt Drance, Apple's former iPhone evangelist, summed up what this means on Twitter:"Adobe has resorted to playing the porn card. It's over."
Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow made his little poster showing what a bunch of Flash-using web sites look like without Flash without actually looking to see how they render on MobileSafari. Ends up a bunch of them, including the porno site, already have iPhone-optimized versions with no blue boxes, and video that plays just fine as straight-up H.264. iPhone visitors to these sites have no idea they’re missing anything because, well, they’re not missing anything. For a few other of the sites Brimelow cited, like Disney and Spongebob Squarepants, there are dedicated native iPhone apps.
Finally, I came across this thoughtful piece on the problem, which explains that Adobe is actually stuck in C++ legacy-land, while Apple wants developers to work in Objective-C:
Can Adobe just port what they have into Objective-C or use Carbon. Unfortunately no, the Flash Player is written in C++ and going from C++ to Objective-C is not very practical. Objective-C is just another superset of C. It simply adds some OOP logic and a messaging and some of the syntax is similar to Smalltalk. You can compile any C program into Objective-C but that's not currently possible to do with a C++ program
Based on all of this, I've rethought my theory - I don't think Apple will need to reconsider Flash at all. I think Adobe is going to have to reconsider where they stand. Mind you, I've had it pointed out (via Rob Fahrni) that you can, in fact, compile C++ in an Objective-C environment. Based on his post, it still sounds like Adobe has a rather large mountain in front of it...
Everything I read about Microsoft lately sounds like a replay of IBM back in the 80s: years of coasting on a profitable business (Mainframes then, Office/Windows now) have led to a very inward looking company. The NY Times has an article from Dick Brass that makes an interesting point about Tablets and Office:
When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn't like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.
Rob Fahrni points out that the VP who pushed that POV was Steve Siofsky, who's now even more influential at MS. I think the next few years at Microsoft are going to play out a lot like the 80's did for IBM: a large decline (not death), with the possibility of a second (less influential) act - if they get a management team that can adapt to the new reality fast enough.
I lived in East Fishkill, NY when IBM started to run into trouble, and it really left a mark on that area - most jobs were either directly with IBM, or in businesses that served them or their staff. It took a long time before that area was able to diversify off being such a "company town" - I suspect Redmond is in for a lot of the same.
With this huge storm on the way, thank goodness I'm not traveling this weekend:
Now the forecast is calling for 18-25 inches of snow - should be a wild ride over the next couple of days. The local school system has already decided to let school out 3 hours early...
I find it interesting that Oracle feels it's necessary to put out a "Java isn't dying" video. What I find disturbing is the color scheme on that page. Seriously, I felt like I was back in the Deep Roads in Dragon Age Origins...
Next week I'll be redoing some of the Cairo screencasts - they are all outdated, simply due to the fact that you can load cairo much more easily now:
On Windows and OS X, you'll have the shared libraries installed as well (assuming you picked those when you ran the installer. If you didn't, re-run the installer and do so). For Linux or Unix platforms, you'll have to get Cairo installed yourself.
Once you have it loaded, try this as a simple "Is Cairo Working" test:
Fortunately, we still have power - probably because the lines are underground here. Here's a shot I just took of my grill:
And here's my patio furniture:
This is probably too deep for the smallish snow blower a bunch of us in the neighborhood went in on. Tomorrow is going to be a heck of a day, especially since it's supposed to just keep snowing...
When I headed up to bed at 1:30 AM last night, I measured 15 inches of snow on my back step. About 30 minutes ago, I measured 25 - and the snow hasn't slacked off. Here's a short video and a few photos, showing how huge an event this is:
The snowstorm finally ended - I think we got about 30 inches. I have a few more photos - I'm now exhausted, after helping clear four driveways. The blower was only able to help once we cut the snow down, and then it ran into a problem after the third driveway. Tiring!
Update: The official measurement for my area just came in - 33.8 inches. No wonder I'm so tired :)
I chipped some more snow off my driveway - I could actually get my car out now if I had to. Of course, I'd have to climb in the passenger side, angle it around, and then shovel the mess up - but that's progress :)
My Car
My Driveway
Mailbox
Buried Footpath
Unplowed Street
Unplowed Street
My Walkway
Ramp Off MD 32
Most of the sidestreets in the neighborhood haven't been plowed at all, not even once - which means that no one living down there is getting out at all...
If you live on a side street, you're still waiting. My friend Mike posted this picture, with the caption - "Our driveway leads nowhere! Howard County, where are the plows? "
This week's podcast is the audio for a presentation I gave to the Toronto Smalltalk User's Group last month, on January 26th - it's an overview of the products we released in 2009:
To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software.
To listen immediately, use the player below:
If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Effortless for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!
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!
More video from the Pharocast folks - they're on a roll. The real fun starts a year or so in, when you start noticing that the older screencasts need to be updated :)
Well, it was a lot of work - but the car is finally free. Here's where things stood after we got the bottom of the driveway clear - my neighbor's blower was back online after some small repairs:
There's just no way I could get that "attachment" cleared, so I climbed in via the passenger door, and moved the car down the newly cleared driveway. Oh, and this picture shows the huge mound that I had to chip down some before we could even use the snowblower :) Anyway - the car:
Then I got the rest of the snow off, shoveled up the mess where the car had been, and pulled it back:
Good thing I lost weight a few years ago - there's very little space to squeeze into there :) At least I can get out in either car if I need to, and the streets are clear up to the exit from the neighborhood - unlike the poor folks who live on side streets here - their streets look like my patio:
For instance, the battery inside an already-padded box for a new notebook PC might need to be packaged in an additional fiberboard box along with extra shipping documents, he said. I
t could also mean untold numbers of workers overseas and in the U.S. will have to get "fully-regulated hazmat" training to simply handle a box with an iPod or HP laptop inside, Kerchner said.
That would be just about the stupidest outcome I can imagine. Just how stupid are the people who dream this stuff up, anyway?
A WINTER STORM WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM TUESDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON.
* PRECIPITATION TYPE... SNOW.
* ACCUMULATIONS... POTENTIAL FOR 5 OR MORE INCHES OF SNOW.
* TIMING... MID TO LATE TUESDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON.
Just what we need :)
Update: Oh boy, the latest forecast is telling me that this has the potential to be a serious storm, and all they're saying right now is "several inches". Hope that blower holds together :)
There are lots of side streets that still aren't plowed - but there's progress near me - that's a sidewalk that was partly cleared yesterday:
... with a gap for sledding:
Finally, one of the streets that was unplowed yesterday has finally seen a plow. No salt or other treatment yet, but at least the people living there can get out now:
Meanwhile, my wife was trying to get ahead of the next storm with a grocery order - but Peapod called this morning, cancelling. Their trucks can't get here :/
Well, we can get out, but parking is an adventure. At all the store plazas, there are still (pretty large) remnants of the December storm, never mind the mountains we added over the weekend. Here are a few examples - first, I had to hit the gas station, because one of my wiper blades snapped off when I turned it on:
This is an example of the sort of mounds there are in the parking lots - this is from the local grocery store lot:
And another view - see these towering over the cars:
Finally, the swell stuff storms leave behind with the helpful traffic calming devices:
I took a short trip to get a couple thing I forgot at the store, and snapped a few more photos while I was out. Here's an on ramp into the shopping plaza being cleared:
The next three shots show the sheer brilliance behind "random shapes in the road traffic calming" in an area that gets snow:
I rather suspect that if my county executive lived on this street (see above), those idiotic shapes would be gone soon. Yes, I'm talking about you, Ken Ulman. I dare you to come stand at this corner and justify this nonsense.
