Eager gamers have no doubt already seen the teasers, but Valve has now finally confirmed that its Steam game distribution service and Source engine will at long last be headed to the Mac. According to Valve, the company's current line-up of games (including the Half-Life and Left 4 Dead series) will be available to Mac users in April, while Portal 2 will represent the company's first simultaneous release for PC and Mac later this year.
This is awesome news. While I've come to prefer the XBox and Wii for games, I can't take those on the road :)
We've wrapped up the current round of Cincom Smalltalkevents - if we schedule more, it'll be announced over on my Cincom Blog. In the meantime, you can check out our video wrapups from 4 of the 5 events (I neglected to hit the "record" button in London) on uStream - I've embedded the player below. I'll have video for the talks themselves up in the next few days - I have initial processing, editing, and post production ahead of me on that - and some of the steps are all about "hurry up and wait" :)
Today's screencast looks at setting up a SQLLite database as a personal Store repository. It's quick, easy, and probably the fastest way to get started with Store as your version control system.
Click to Play
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Sometimes an act of stupidity wanders all the way over to just plain idiotic - a woman's father dies, so she's in the process of cleaning various estate things up, and gets to disconnecting the phone service. She goes so far as to send a copy of the death certificate to Verizon, and gets this reaction:
It seems Lacy did not have her father's PIN (personal identification number) to access the account. So the representative refused to help her.
...
"Well, there's nothing else I can do for you," the representative said before laughing and hanging up the phone.
This is what you get when you've elevated process above everything else. Fear of making a mistake leads to acts of mindless stupidity instead.
This week's podcast is an interview we did with Dale Henrichs of Gemstone about the Metacello project - a configuration management add on for Monticello (version control for Squeak and Pharo). We'd like to thank Dale for taking the time to talk to us - it was a lot of fun!
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!
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Today, I mostly paste libraries together. So do you, most likely, if you work in software. Doesn't that seem anticlimactic? We did all those courses on LR grammars and concurrent software and referentially transparent functional languages. We messed about with Prolog, Lisp and APL. We studied invariants and formal preconditions and operating system theory. Now how much of that do we use? A huge part of my job these days seems to be impedence-matching between big opaque chunks of library software that sort of do most of what my program is meant to achieve, but don't quite work right together so I have to, I don't know, translate USMARC records into Dublin Core or something. Is that programming? Really?
I rather suspect that as cars moved from being mostly mechanical to being highly dependent on software the same kind of lament went up amongst car enthusiasts. There's really no going back though; just as I have no real interest in gapping my own spark plugs, I have no real interest in writing my own version of malloc(). Even if I did, outside of being a harmless hobby, who the heck (outside of a handful of OS developers) would pay me to do it?
The world turns, and life moves on. The time for building every little library by hand is gone, and it's not coming back. Personally, I'm happy about that; I just never got a thrill out of low level grunt work :)
Having said that, I can tell you where that level of creation is still going on: game development.
Mariano Martinez Peck will administrate the joint application supported by Janko Mivšek. They need to supply Google with information about ESUG as a mentoring organisation and a list of ideas/projects, each with a description and a nominated mentor. If their submission get selected by Google they will be told how many projects Google will sponsor — the mentor receives $500 and the student who volunteers to work on the projects will receive $4500.
The deadline to get projects included is March 12; follow the link for full details.
Word from Apple is out -- so get your credit cards ready. The iPad will be launching on Saturday April 3rd (and on the shelves, er... display tables at Apple retail stores), but you'll be able to plunk down cold, hard cash for it in just a week. Pre-orders will begin on March 12th for the US version (non-3G) for that April street date, with the 3G version coming in late April
I suspect we'll be in that pre-order queue - my wife has expressed a pretty keen interest in this device :)
I agree with Alain Reynaud that seventeen years is way, way too long a time period for a software patent, but I think seven years (his proposed interval) is also too long:
The problem, you see, is their length. Seventeen years of monopoly is an eternity in Internet time. Instead, software patents should only be valid for seven years.
Seven Years ago we didn't have Twitter or Facebook - which means that a patent (like the newsfeed one Facebook wants) would still be around (if granted today) in 2016 - still an eternity in internet terms.
No, I have a more radical notion: no software patents, period. Let competition take care of the problem. Big companies won't "rull the roost" under such a system; as happens right now, they'll still mostly go the M&A route to innovate. What would disappear is patent trolls.
"Yes, we intend to do so," PR rep Tony Fox told THR. "My feeling is if (websites) are making money on our copyrighted content, then that is a problem."
Right.... because a couple of minutes of either show is likely to discourage viewing. By that logic, they should stop running ads, since they're only likely to discourage viewing, too. Morons.
The network announced today that it has ordered a 10th season of the young Superman series.
The entire Kandor thread makes no sense, Luthor is out of focus, and by now, the name "Superman" would never get used - "The Blur" would be what happened. The writers don't know when to stop...
Travel day tomorrow - walk to the train station, 40 minutes to CDG, hop to London, take a plane from there to NY, then wait a few hours, fly to Baltimore. Then get a cab. So it truly will be a day of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles :)
We've had a good event so far (Georg is finishing his talk as I write this) - here are a few snapshots from the day - but first, if you want to hear our wrapup from the event, we'll be on ustream at 7:30 AM EST talking about it. The pics:
I guess you could lose an iPhone or Touch the same way - cheap wifi finders can be used to track down an active device - PCWorld reports:
A statement by the mobile security software vendor highlighted a recent warning from a security specialist at University of Technology, in Jamaica. He said that it appeared crooks running a lottery scam on the island were using stolen laptops to do so. They tracked down the often out-of-sight computers using Wi-Fi radio detectors.
And the cost for such trackers is $50 or less, so it's not like there's a high bar to entry. Sobering...
Today's event in Paris is going well except for one small thing - it's 37 (f) outside, and there's no heat in the room we are in. Thank goodness for the heat emissions from the laptops :)
Today's screencast is a brief overview of the steps involved in setting up a Cincom Smalltalk based blog server using Silt, a web toolkit based application server that has been in production for over 7 years.
Click to Play
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
In a completely boneheaded move, the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) announced that they want to set up a system to charge people who tweet any part of song lyric.
Why yes, 140 characters promoting music is just bad. I'd ask if the music industry could get stupider, but I'm kind of afraid to find out...
It's official: HBO has given a green light to a 10-episode series based on George R.R. Martin's fantasy series Game of Thrones and released the first image from the show
The big question though: will book five ever appear?
We're in London today, and we'll be in Paris on Thursday - you can register for the event, or just come to the Mercure Paris Terminus Nord - our event will run from 9 AM to 1 PM (local time), but we'll be there with breakfast out by 8 AM. We have a full program for you - come on out!
Here's an interesting side effect of the recent tragedy in Chile - the day just got shorter:
The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second)," Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. "The axis about which the Earth"s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).
So if you're a little too tired at your next meeting...
A Mac mini with HDMI. Makes sense, right? Well, it hasn't to Apple so far, but it looks like it just might be ready to change its tune. That's according to AppleInsider, at least, which has it from "two people familiar with the matter" that prototypes of a Mac mini with an HDMI port have been seen making the rounds in the usual inner circles.
If that's more than a rumor, then the next generation mini might well make sense as a digital hub.