The author of this blog, James Robertson, passed away in April 2014. This blog is being maintained by David Buck (david@simberon.com).
Looks like Energizer needs to spiff up their internal procedures:
If you've bought the Energizer DUO USB battery charger, you might want to uninstall the software immediately. Why? Because it comes pre-loaded with a backdoor that can let someone remotely access your computer.
This is the scariest kind of security problem, because you tend to default to trusting software that comes from a reputable vendor.
It's been a month since Snowmageddon, and my front yard still has a fair amount of snow on it - even after a couple weeks of temps above 40:
Today's screencast looks at setting up a personal Store Repository on Windows using MS Access.
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Technorati Tags: scm, version control, store, MS Access
The Cincom Smalltalk team recently completed a five city tour - Seattle, Toronto, Baltimore, London, and Paris. We filmed the presentations we gave at each of the one day events, and now I'm releasing the highest quality iterations. Today's video is of Andreas Hiltner, talking about the Modeling and Mapping tools, and how they can aid enterprise Windows development using ObjectStudio 8. To watch, click on the viewer below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. Stay tuned - there's more to come from this series of events!
Technorati Tags: enterprise, objectstudio
I like this article by Dare Obasanjo on the relational DB/NoSQL divide - and his summary makes a great point, I think:
For these reasons I expect we'll see more large scale websites decide that instead of treating a SQL database as a denormalized key-value pair store that they would rather use a NoSQL database. However I also suspect that a lot of services who already have a sharded relational database + in-memory cache solution can get a lot of mileage from more judicious usage of in-memory caches before switching. This is especially true given that you still caches in front of your NoSQL databases anyway. There's also the question of whether traditional relational database vendors will add features to address the shortcomings highlighted by the NoSQL movement? Given that the sort of companies adopting NoSQL are doing so because they want to save costs on software, hardware and operations I somehow doubt that there is a lucrative market here for database vendors versus adding more features that the banks, insurance companies and telcos of the world find interesting.
I have to agree there - the needs of the enterprise seem to be diverging from the needs of the large scale website rapidly. Mind you, most websites are not large scale things - for every Digg or Twitter, there are tons of sites that get in the hundreds or low thousands of pageviews a day, and scale just fine with databases or even flat files. I think it remains to be seen whether the NoSQL movement will get much attention beyond the huge scale sites.
I only just released a podcast with Dale Henrichs on Metacello, and here's Adrian Lienhard using it in anger for his OS X Pharo build process. Hat tip Torsten.
Civ V sounds like a pretty big break from previous CIv iterations - no stacks of units, conquest rules are different, the map will be hexes instead of squares, and it sounds like combat will involve a whole lot more tactical level attention. Get the full scoop over at GameSpot.
Technorati Tags: civ V, civilization
Way back when data was stored on floppy disks (and then hard drives measured in tens of megabytes), a decision was made on formatting - creating 512k blocks for data storage. Fast forward to today, and that seems ridiculous - but the standard is still there (especially for Windows users), and it's about to cause a bit of grief for people still using XP - hardware vendors are moving to 4k blocks to eliminate some of the wasted space issues:
To help Windows XP cope, advanced format drives will be able to pretend they still use sectors 512 bytes in size. When reading data from a drive this emulation will go unnoticed. However, said Mr Burks, in some situations writing data could hit performance.
Never mind whether you should move from XP to Windows 7; what this really points out to me is just how persistent some early decisions end up being. A mostly arbitrary choice in how data is formatted on a storage medium back in the early days of the PC is still with us. Legacy hierarchical databases are still with us. Choices being made now about how to communicate data over HTTP (like JSON) will still be with us twenty years from now too - because lots and lots of stuff will be written to those APIs.
When you sit back and think about it, it looks like a lot more thought should go into this stuff :)
Technorati Tags: legacy
Today's screencast looks at some useful features of the refactoring browser that you might have missed.
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Technorati Tags: refactoring browser, code browser
I just finished reading two books - Robert Conroy's Red Inferno: 1945:
The Berryman book suffered on two counts - first, if it was edited at all, I'd fire the editor. Second, the premise of a massive Chinese "lebensraum" style war is something I just don't buy, based on the historical behavior of the "Middle Kingdom". Had the text not suffered from such bad editing - spelling issues, poor grammar, you name it - it might have been an enjoyable yarn. As it is, it reads more like an early draft that's in need of major work. I just can't recommend it.
Conroy's book, on the other hand, was a great read, and I found the premise entirely plausible - Truman sends a small force towards Berlin to ensure that the western allies get their promised share of Berlin, Stalin goes paranoid, and boom - Zhukov keeps going west. It's a fast read, and I think Conroy's writing is getting better. I've read some of his earlier stuff, and I can say that I look forward to whatever he does next.
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Technorati Tags: alternate+history
The Cincom Smalltalk team recently completed a five city tour - Seattle, Toronto, Baltimore, London, and Paris. We filmed the presentations we gave at each of the one day events, and now I'm releasing the highest quality iterations. Today's video is of Arden Thomas and me, talking about the solving problems with VisualWorks. Arden handles the slides, while I did a demo involving VW and ActiveX controls in Windows. To watch, click on the viewer below
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Videos"?
Chris Thorgrimmsen has put up a really nice post on his usage of Cairo and Pango for some really nice graphics and text effects - follow the link to see just how nice :)
I need to go back further in my blog archives, but I've put together a partial list of the books I've reviewed - either here or on my Cincom blog. Check it out :)
Travis Griggs explains a possible way forward that doesn't involve another whole raft of UI look subclasses - complete with a screencast.
Technorati Tags: UI, visualworks
You'll have to read Travis' post to see what that means :)
I think life is only going to get harder for the wire services like Reuters. Bear in mind that until the internet era, wire services were Twitter-like - they were the first place that news showed up. Now?
Last night, Reuters released their social media policy, which includes instructing journalists to avoid exposing bias online and tells them specifically not to "scoop the wire" by breaking stories on Twitter.
I understand their point, but am not at all sure how they'll accomplish this. When a huge story (like the Chilean earthquake) breaks now, where does the early news flow from? Twitter, uStream, and other similar services. The wire services are in the same position that newspapers were in when the wire services popped up - and they eventually chose to work with the wires.
It'll be harder for the wire services, because they can't work with Twitter (et. al.) exclusively, as the papers were able to do. IMHO, this just heralds more disintermediation.
Technorati Tags: social media, wire services
Today's screencast looks at generating standard UUIDs using a small library shipped with Cincom Smalltalk.
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Technorati Tags: uuid, unique identifier
The Cincom Smalltalk team recently completed a five city tour - Seattle, Toronto, Baltimore, London, and Paris. We filmed the presentations we gave at each of the one day events, and now I'm releasing the highest quality iterations. Today's video is of Arden Thomas, talking about WebVelocity - the best way to get database driven website implemented and deployed quickly. To watch, click on the viewer below:
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Videos"?
Technorati Tags: seaside, WebVelocity, cincom, video, web development
If you didn't get a chance to attend any of the recent Cincom Smalltalk technology events, you can still see what was presented - there's video of everything. You can subscribe to the video feed to have them downloaded directly with your favorite podcatching software, or head on over to the video page for the events.
I plowed through a few more links for the books page I put up; there's still a whole bunch more to go through though :)
I'm not even sure I know what to say about malware that comes with copyright protection:
The latest version of the Zeus do-it-yourself crimeware kit goes to great lengths to thwart would-be pirates by introducing a hardware-based product activation scheme similar to what's found in Microsoft Windows. The newest version with bare-bones capabilities starts at $4,000 and additional features can fetch as much as $10,000. The new feature is designed to prevent what Microsoft refers to as "casual copying" by ensuring that only one computer can run a licensed version of the program. After it is installed, users must obtain a key that's good for just that one machine.
Just when I think things can't get weirder, I run across stuff like this.
Technorati Tags: drm
Awhile back, I started seeing an endless stream of spammers joining the Smalltalkers group at Ning. I changed the group from "open" to "managed" - now requests come to me, and I just reject the obviously bozo ones.
How do I know the bozo ones? Well, they are all using gmail address of the form "name5641@gmail.com" Fortunately, the mass suspension option under the management tab is easy to use :)
Looks like the iPad is off to a roaring start:
"Apple has been able to generate over $75 million in revenue in one day on a product that 99.9% of purchasers haven't touched or for that matter, even seen in person," said Victor Castroll, an analyst with Valcent Financial Group. "And, we're still three weeks away. That is amazing."
Interestingly enough, they've sold about equal numbers of the 16, 32, and 64 GB models. I put in an order this morning - my wife has been interested in the device as an e-reader. We'll see how well that works in 3 weeks, I guess :)
The entire entertainment industry is shifting, with movies no longer being the biggest draw. Games are starting to be the biggest draw, and I think it's largely because they are becoming so immersive. Rather than two hours of staring at a story, you can now get many, many hours of becoming involved in a story.
Take two games I've been playing recently - Dragon Age: Origins Awakening
Technorati Tags: xbox
Obviously, I like the idea of screencasts - I've been doing them every day for 3 1/2 years now :) Well, the Pharo crew is heading down the same path, and the latest one they've released looks like a great topic item: how to submit and publicize bug fixes to the Pharo team.
We've mentioned BottomFeeder numerous times on the podcast, but this week it occurred to us that we've never actually covered it in depth on the podcast. So, this week we turned things around a bit, and Michael interviewed me about the application. Where it came from, what kinds of things went into it, who helped out on it, and where it might be headed. We also talked about a few related projects, like the blog server, and some of the social media stuff I've been working on.
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!
Technorati Tags: podcast, bottomfeeder, rss, atom, aggregator
Tim Bray has moved to Google, and has some thoughts on the Android/iPhone competition:
The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet's future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It's a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord's pleasure and fear his anger.
I hate it.
While I like the idea of wide open competition better than I like the idea of a walled garden, people seem to be choosing walled gardens in droves - Apple products and Facebook being the prime examples. A lot of people think this will be a replay of the rise of Windows, where the open platform (in the sense that anyone can write for it) will win out.
I'm not so sure. In that earlier game, the primary users skewed towards the technical. Now, the user base is broader; it's not just geeks. Apple brings tremendous ease of use and predictability to the party, while Google brings the rough edges and openness. Geeks love the latter; everyone else loves the former.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple's more closed play win, for the simple reason that it's easy, and the mainstream market isn't interested in tinkering or rough edges. We'll see how that plays out.
Like a zombie that just won't drop no matter how many bullets get fired into it, the government keeps pushing ACTA. The good news is that the EU has shot this atrocity down, so maybe - just maybe - some sanity will prevail in this space. So long as the RIAA and MPAA have money to pass around, I rather doubt it, but one can hope.
The Cincom Smalltalk team recently completed a five city tour - Seattle, Toronto, Baltimore, London, and Paris. We filmed the presentations we gave at each of the one day events, and now I'm releasing the highest quality iterations. Today's video is of Georg Heeg, talking about Smalltalk's past, present, and future. To watch, click on the viewer below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. This post wraps up all the video we have from this series of events, but there's more Smalltalk video being posted all the time - just stay subscribed to the video feed.
Technorati Tags: visualworks, objectstudio, webvelocity, video
Today's screencast looks at how you acquire a new public store repository account.
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Technorati Tags: store, scm, public store
If you missed the recent Cincom Smalltalk worldwide tour, you can still see the entire thing:
Also, if you would like to see a similar event near you - drop the STAR team a line. While we can't guarantee anything, we do take Smalltalker interest seriously.
Here's something that young adults are going to need to pay attention to:
Maximum PC (April 2010, page 10), of all places, reported on a study by Microsoft which found that 70%-yes 70% of HR professionals turned down a job candidate based upon their online reputation.
More specifically, what does reputation mean here? Well, the sorts of things too many people do on Facebook (etc):
The top three reasons cited for rejecting a candidate were concerns about lifestyle, inappropriate comments, and unsuitable photos and videos.
This may change over time as hiring managers are drawn from the net generation, but then again, it may not - and I suspect that a lot of young people are in for a rude awakening
Technorati Tags: social media
Here's another ESUG 2009 video - Mariano Martinez Peck talking about SqueakDBX, a database layer (cross platform) for Squeak. 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:
SqueakDBX from James Robertson on Vimeo.
If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Videos"?
I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of Dragon Age: Origins Awakening
Technorati Tags: dao
The UK Smalltalk group is meeting on March 29th at the Counting House.
Today's screencast looks at working with Excel from Smalltalk. Here's the workspace I used in the screencast:
"Excel Demonstration" excel := COMDispatchDriver createObject: 'Excel.Application'. "Open Excel" excel setVisible: true. excel getWorkbooks Add. sheet := excel getActiveSheet. "Write some data" (excel getRange: 'A1') setValue: 'Name'. (excel getRange: 'A2') setValue: 'Fred Flintstone'. (excel getRange: 'A1:A2') getFont setBold: true. "Read a cell" (excel getRange: 'A1') getValue. "Copy Cells" (excel getRange: 'A1:A2') Select. excel setCutCopyMode: false. excel getSelection Copy. Transcript show: Screen default getExternalSelection.
To watch, click on the viewer below:
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Technorati Tags: visualworks, excel, windows, com
I figured other people may well have suggestions on this that I haven't thought of - what conferences do you think it would make sense to submit a Smalltalk oriented talk to? For that matter, what sort of talk do you think would be of interest and have a good chance of being accepted? Leave a comment, or drop me a line. Thanks!
The website hasn't been updated yet (as of this writing, anyway) - but Serge Stinckwich has posted a link to 1.0 RC3
Technorati Tags: pharo
Squeak just hit an interesting milestone - earlier this month the Squeak website posted the following:
The Squeak Oversight Board plans to finalize the multi-year effort of re-licensing Squeak. Squeak 4.0 is scheduled to be released on Monday, March 15th, 2010 and will be licensed under the MIT License with some original parts remaining under the Apache License.
Then a few minutes ago, Randal Schwartz let me know that 4.0 was out, and downloadable. So the long awaited Squeak with a clean license release has arrived. It's a great time for Smalltalk!
Technorati Tags: squeak, clean license
The Toronto STUG is meeting on March 22:
The next Toronto Smalltalk User Group meeting is on March 22. We'll take a look at the state of Seaside 3.0. Feel free to bring material to present, or questions to ask. We start at 6:30, Ryerson University, room ENG288 245 Church Street (at the SE corner of Gould, just north of Dundas).
This morning I did a screencast on using Excel with VisualWorks; I thought a simple walkthrough might be handy as well. The first thing you need to do after starting VW is pull up the Parcel Manager, select "OS-Windows" on the left, and "COM-All" on the right. Right click and load:
Next, close that window, and in a workspace, add this little script. Once you try it out, you can experiment on your own - and use the "Browse Automation Classes" option under the COM menu in the Launcher to explore the interfaces available to you:
"Start Excel, get dispatch driver" excel := COMDispatchDriver createObject: 'Excel.Application'. "Open Excel visibly" excel setVisible: true. excel getWorkbooks Add. sheet := excel getActiveSheet. "Write some data" (excel getRange: 'A1') setValue: 'Name'. (excel getRange: 'A2') setValue: 'Fred Flintstone'. (excel getRange: 'A1:A2') getFont setBold: true. "Read a cell" (excel getRange: 'A1') getValue. "Copy Cells" (excel getRange: 'A1:A2') Select. excel setCutCopyMode: false. excel getSelection Copy. Transcript show: Screen default getExternalSelection.
That code creates a dispatch driver, and then calls various COM APIs exposed by Excel. You'll see a few dialogs like this pop up as you execute that, as the message sends are going to COM, not Smalltalk - and thus, they don't exist in the image:
Just use the "proceed" button to dismiss those. Once you've executed all the code, you should see something like this:
Which should be Excel with the data you entered highlighted, and the copied data sitting in the Transcript, where we printed it. That's it - you're now working with Excel from VW. Go ahead and use the automation browser to explore the full API set.
Technorati Tags: visualworks, excel, com
Vint Cerf gave a good, thoughtful answer to the question "do smart phones make us dumb" - which is more than I can say for the glibness that people like Nick Carr usually have for this kind of question. It all goes back to critical thinking, as Cerf said.
Today's screencast looks at using Excel from ObjectStudio via COM.
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Technorati Tags: objectstudio, excel, com, windows
Yesterday, I pushed up a short walkthrough on using Excel from VisualWorks; this morning I did a screencast on using Excel from ObjectStudio. Here's the walkthrough for that piece.
First, you'll need to load the required support. Using File>>Load Application in the launcher menu, select "OLE" and load:
Once you have that loaded, open a workspace (from the Tools menu) and add the following script - you can start exploring the COM APIs from here and tweak the script as needed:
| ole excel wb range value | "get the dispatcher for Excel" ole := OLEObject newProgId: 'Excel.Application'. excel := ole dispatcher. "open Excel and get a worksheet" excel call: 'Visible' params: (Array with: true). wb := excel call: 'Workbooks' params: #(). wb call: 'Add' params: #(). "Now add some data" range := excel call: 'Range' params: (Array with: 'A1'). range at: 'Value' put: 'Fred'. range := excel call: 'Range' params: (Array with: 'A2'). range at: 'Value' put: 'Flintstone'. "make the range bold" range := excel call: 'Range' params: (Array with: 'A1:A2'). (range at: 'Font') at: 'Bold' put: (Array with: true). "Now read a cell back" range := excel call: 'Range' params: (Array with: 'A1'). value := range at: 'Value'. ^value
Unlike VisualWorks, you don't need to highlight that code - simply pull down the Smalltalk menu in the workspace and try "Insert" (which will print the results into the workspace) - you should end up with Excel opened up, with "Fred" in A1 and "Flintstone" in A2, and "Fred" in your workspace at the bottom - like this:
That's pretty much it - you can explore the available COM APIs and work from there - but this should get you started.
Technorati Tags: smalltalk, excel, com, objectstudio
We'll be doing a podcast with Bruce Badger tomorrow at 2 PM EDT - we had been planning for today, but Michael's internet connection went down. So - tomorrow it is!
To listen lice, just head on over to our justin.tv page at 2.
ESUG luminary Stephanne Ducasse was just interviewed - good stuff, and this is perhaps the most interesting tidbit:
"30% of the worldwide market of shipping containers is controlled by Smalltalk systems"
That would be VisualWorks, btw :)
Technorati Tags: esug
