The author of this blog, James Robertson, passed away in April 2014. This blog is being maintained by David Buck (david@simberon.com).
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.
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
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
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
You'll have to read Travis' post to see what that means :)
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
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 :)
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 :)
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"?
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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:
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.
I find this announcement fascinating - a mashup of MS Outlook and Google Docs, using the APIs from both products:
Effective today, Mainsoft is offering full-featured access to Google Docs documents directly from within Microsoft Outlook. Their belief is that e-mail and document collaboration sites need to work together seamlessly — so end users can be more productive. They're also planning to give away software that offers full-featured access to SharePoint document libraries, within Microsoft Outlook. So to reiterate — full use of Google docs within Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint — tools enterprise users are used to, with the significant benefits that the cloud brings.
The Mainsoft product is called Harmony and will be a free product and has been built using SharePoint Web Services interfaces and Google Docs open APIs, giving full-featured access to Google Docs or SharePoint documents from an Outlook sidebar.
I'd love to know what Microsoft thinks of that. On the one hand, it doesn't displace Outlook. On the other hand, if an outfit that wants to go with Google Docs finds that they pretty much only use Outlook from the Office Suite, that could cause some heartburn.
Not having used Google Docs, I can't really say anything about whether they would actually serve as a replacement for Word and Excel. I've been happy enough with Apple's iWork, so I haven't seen any reason to wander over that way.
Technorati Tags: MS Office, Google Docs
According to one analyst firm, the rumors of a looming iPad shortage are just that: rumors:
Apple is on track to build 5 million iPads in the first half of 2010, according to FBR Capital chip analyst Craig Berger. "We believe various news articles and competitor notes calling for a build delay were just false alarms," he writes. The company, of course, has now set an April 3 launch for Wi-Fi versions of the iPad, with 3G versions to ship toward the end of April.
I guess we'll find out soon enough; pre-orders start this week.
Hey look - Mr. "I collected a huge payoff for my great success at driving Sun into the ground" Schwartz has a new blog. Looks like he's trying to explain himself. What I'd like to know is this: does he still think that "give it all away for free, and then somehow make it up in volume" is a good business plan?
If so, he's got a great future with the underpants gnomes.
This is one of the funny things about the way patent infringement suits tend to go - you can aim it as well as you want, but you may get results you didn't expect. Consider Apple's auits against HTC, based on their multi-touch work. They seem to be aiming at Google, which could end up empowering... Microsoft:
Even before the lawsuit, handset makers were having second thoughts about Google, which with the Nexus One had become a direct competitor. Now their faith in Android as the easiest and cheapest way to counter the iPhone has been shaken, says Reiner. The unintended consequence, he suggests, is to send them into the arms of Microsoft (MSFT) and Win7 Mobile.
"Our checks," writes Reiner, "indicate that Microsoft has been quick to sniff out this burgeoning opportunity and has begun to aggressively promote the strength of its own IP portfolio, as well as its willingness to join battle with customers that come under IP attack."
I had been thinking that Microsoft was out of the handset running, but this Apple campaign could actually give them new life. Whether that's better for them than just trying to, you know, actually compete better, is an open question.
Today's screencast takes a look at the Registry package, a contributed piece that makes it easier to work with the Windows registry from Smalltalk .
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Since I don't run Windows every day - and i sometimes go a weeks between runs of my Windows 7 VM - the updates tend to pile up. I was about to look at doing some more VW/COM screencasts, when I discovered that 370 MB of updates had piled up. There goes the next little while :)
Tudor Girba is working on a Moose book:
This book offers an overview of the Moose platform for software and data analysis. More specifically it covers version 4.0.
Apparently, I've been living in the future since 1993: That's when I started woking out of my home office, using the net to stay in contact with the rest of the company. Back then it was dialup and email (pretty much only email) - now it's irc, various IM systems, and social networks. Either way though, I've been in the "virtual office" for a long time. Video chat one on one is now feasible (along with screen sharing) with tools like skype and iChat; I suspect that having multiple people on a video call will start being feasible without the expensive hookups soon.
What made me think about this? Dvorak writing about what print publishers should have done (and should still do):
With a single layer of editorial control, establish a virtual office environment with telecommuting, teleconferencing, and a VPN ring for the employees who can work from anywhere in the world.
That pretty much applies to anyone who's not doing collective manual labor, I think. More and more, work is going to get distributed. Management theory will have to do a lot of catching up.
Ever wanted to experience 1993 (at least the web part) again? Well, if you have a modern Linux distro, you can:
Github user Alan Dipert has posted the source code for NCSA Mosaic 2.7 on the code-hosting website. You can download it and run it on any modern Linux installation. It seems to run on Ubuntu just fine, though PNG support is a little wonky. The good news is that the folks on Github are actively submitting patches.
You'll have to ignore Google (or any modern search engine) to get the real feel, but there it is. It's hard to explain why those of us who were in that first wave of online users were so excited, given images like this:
Just seeing that "S" image brings back memories :)
Technorati Tags: history
So much for "I need a PC for Games":
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 Smalltalk events - 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" :)
Live Video streaming by Ustream
Technorati Tags: cincom, cincom smalltalk, events
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.
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Technorati Tags: sqllite, store, version control
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.
The commits to Squeak trunk (the new community development model) are now also visible in Twitter:
Technorati Tags: squeak, social media, twitter
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!
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: monticello, metacello, version control
You have to recognize what era you live in - and as much as it might be nice to hearken back to some presumed "golden age", it's just not coming back. Where am I going with this? To Mike Taylor's lament about the mundaneness of modern software development:
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.
I've got a short post on the topic over on my Cincom blog.
The Squeak/Pharo Community is getting ready for Google's Summer of Code:
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.
Technorati Tags: google, summer of code, open source
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.
Technorati Tags: patents
So not only is Viacom yanking "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" from Hulu, it's also threatening to sue anyone who posts clips:
"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...
PC World is now reporting that Steam is coming to OS X:
it seems the rumors are true and Steam will in fact see an OS X release.
Which means that the mac will stop being a second tier gaming platform. One less reason to require a Windows machine, it sounds like :)
Today's screencast looks at a small package of convenience methods I've used to deal with various network interfaces.
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
Technorati Tags: convenience
