Smalltalk with James Robertson

TechDirt runs the numbers, and demonstrates exactly why the RIAA is so desperate. Like SCO, all they think they have left is lawsuits.

Technorati Tags: riaa, drm

There were parts of Mass Effect 2 I didn't really enjoy - the planet scanning being the main thing. It also took me a mission or two to get beyond how the controls had changed since Mass Effect - but the story was really immersive, and the choices you make during the game impact what kinds of options are open to you later - for instance, if you don't get the loyalty of a character, then the upgrades they have on offer for the ship/weapons/armore just aren't available, period. In my first game, I got everyone's loyalty except Jack - during the confrontation between her and Miranda, I made the mistake of siding with Miranda. Since I had everyone else locked in, that didn't end up matter much - I still finished without losing anyone.

The end game sets up ME 3 though, and it looks like that's going to be a hell of a tough one. Overall, I think BioWare really has the plot driven RPG thing down. Between the Mass Effect franchise and DAO, they'll keep me happily killing bad guys for a long time. Not only that - I find these games so much more interesting than TV, too. While I love a good story, I like an immersive one I can drive even better.

Technorati Tags: bioware, rpg, me2

One of the things I always liked about Windows was the way that mnemonic keys were obvious - there's a little underline. Well, you can tell from that statement that I went straight from XP to Windows 7 (I use a VM under Parallels when I need Windows) - because the default now is to hide the underscores.

Seriously? What complete moron at Microsoft thought that was a good idea?

They normally only show up when you press the "alt" key, which at least makes them visible (if harder to notice). If you want the correct settings, you have to open control panel and follow this path:

Control Panel
Ease of Access
Ease of Access Center
Make the keyboard easier to use

Then, check the box labeled "Underline keyboard shortcuts and access keys". Jeebus. Am I supposed to know what the accelerator keys are through a mind meld with the designer, or what? And yes, this is something that, IMHO, the Mac gets wrong. Show me the damn shortcut keys.

Technorati Tags: accelerator keys, keyboard shortcut

Nick Carr's thesis that Google, or the net in general, is making us stupid is, well, stupid. Steven Pinker makes a point that I made awhile back:

And to encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.

Put another way, there never was a golden age of mass reflection. Newspapers were a "wuick hit" of information compared to personally delivered news, and radio and TV even more so. It's not as if distraction is a new thing.

Ultimately, I think Carr is looking for an excuse for his own limitations.

Technorati Tags: media

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at how to customize an object's string display, both for a UI and for an inspector. You can download the code used in the screencast here.. You can watch it on YouTube right now, or follow this link to the video.

You can follow the Smalltalk channel on YouTube for all the "Smalltalk Daily" videos. You can also check out the videos on Vimeo, where the quality is higher, or over on Facebook, if you are a member.

You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, displayString, visualworks, UI, domain object

When I hear about hiring plans like this one:

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said Thursday that his company has about 200 employees and expects this number would double this year.

It usually means a management team that's gone into empire building mode, and lost touch with reality. Some companies survive that kind of rapid influx of employees, but most don't. The style of management has to change dramatically - you need to move from ad-hoc, go with the flow style to having actual procedures and processes.

Nothing I've seen from Twitter tells me that they have the capability to do that :)

Technorati Tags: management, twitter

The new iPhone, along with the iPad, is set to put AT&T's network into a bad place:

Pity AT&T and their troubled data network. While previous iPhones' data usage was largely confined to static webpages, simple apps and maybe the occasional song streamed through Pandora, the just-announced iPhone 4's (available June 24) hunger can best be described in one word: video. In other words: If you thought the iPhone was a data-hog before, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

There's going to be an obvious disconnect between what you can do on the phone (stream HD from Netflix), and what AT&T is prepared to allow you to do. If Verizon didn't have motivation to get LTE rolled out before, they sure do now.

Technorati Tags: apple, att, iPhone, iPad, 3g

We made the beta of WebVelocity 1.1 available last week; to get access to it, just join the mailing list - we post download instructions there

We also have an Amazon instance you can test - again, join the Google group linked above to get access to that :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, seaside

This is the kind of technology merger that never seems to go well - Twitter just bought DabbleDB:

Obviously this represents a new chapter in the life of Dabble DB, both for us as a team, and for the product itself. We’d like to assure you that, for now, we will continue to provide our software and technical support to current Dabble DB customers. However, we will be disabling new account signups effective immediately.

What the disablement means is that Twitter doesn't care about DabbleDB as a business; they bought technology and staff. However, that's where I get skeptical. DabbleDB is built on Squeak/Seaside, while Twitter is built on Ruby and Scala (apparently less Rails than it used to be). I have a hard time seeing the Twitter folks adopting Squeak; the typical pattern in these acquisitions is something like this:

• Those guys have great technology; let's buy it
• Their tech isn't built the same as ours; we'll take the ideas and rewrite it
• .... years pass
• ... original technology dies, completely new project that is less based on the acquisition than you might like to think appears

From the link above, it's clear that the purchase was all about the Trendly analytics stuff - which makes any future for DabbleDB itself even more murky, IMHO. This is obviously a nice exit for the DabbleDB folks, and that's great for them.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, twitter, trendly, analytics

As you might imagine, Google is less than please by the new terms for ad analytics on Apple devices:

Ad analytics collection is prohibited unless it is "provided to an independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving mobile ads," Apple's revised terms read. "For example, an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple would not qualify as independent."

It's not entirely clear how broad that ends up being, but it sure tilts the playing field Apple's way. While I'm not a huge fan of government anti-trust actions, I have to wonder how smart this action is for Apple, given the fact that the DOJ is already sniffing around. Also, given how much further the Europeans were willing to go with Microsoft, it hardly ends with the DOJ.

Seems to me that Apple is asking to be smacked around.

Technorati Tags: google, apple, iAd

Radio Head's frontman, Thom Yorke, believes that the major record labels are going down, and soon:

Yorke has now issued a warning to upcoming artists, urging them not to sign traditional record deals because they would be tying themselves to "the sinking ship."

I'm not sure whether his timeframe is right, but heck - he's in a better position to know than I am. Even if he's off in his timing, I think he's right in the broad sense. There's really no place for the labels any longer. They serve as a middleman in a market that has been disintermediating for years now.

Technorati Tags: record labels, music, copyright

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at using the ThreePaneSelectors tool for browsing senders/implementors. You should certainly look at Searchlight, which is a more up to date take on this functionality. You can watch it on YouTube right now, or follow this link to the video.

You can follow the Smalltalk channel on YouTube for all the "Smalltalk Daily" videos. You can also check out the videos on Vimeo, where the quality is higher, or over on Facebook, if you are a member.

You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?

My heart bleeds for poor Zed Shaw:

They have no idea who wrote the web framework they use. They've never met the guy. They could care less about why he designed it one way or another. It doesn't matter because once the programmer was done he wasn't useful. Following his life is pointless because he's poured his life into the software and now they get to keep it. You've stolen his soul like an old sepia tone photo of a Cherokee warrior.

Welcome to reality, dude. Do you know who the designer of your car was? Who designed the LCD screen you watch? I seriously doubt it. Should programmers get more attention? Maybe, but the reality is, outside of the the arts, sports, and politics, there are very, very few "stars" out there. Even in business - beyond Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, only the technorati know who the "tech business stars" are.

Most people labor in obscurity. It's always been that way, and it likely always will be. Put another way: get over yourself.

The podcast I listed on the events page as happening at noon is happening at 3, because I'm apparently too stupid to figure out timezone differences :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at recovering lost code using the Change List tool. You can watch it on YouTube right now, or follow this link to the video.

You can follow the Smalltalk channel on YouTube for all the "Smalltalk Daily" videos. You can also check out the videos on Vimeo, where the quality is higher, or over on Facebook, if you are a member.

You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, code recovery, lost code, change tools

I'm giving Safari 5 a shot as my default browser, and I have to say, the new "reader" functionality is interesting. IT's also going to infuriate a lot of media people. Consider a typical article in the NYTImes, without using reader (but note the icon in the address field):

And now consider the page in the reader view:

Ads and graphics gone, crisp, clear text left to read. I like it - but I suspect that website that rely heavily on ads won't. Still -it's nothing that couldn't be done with client side Javascript added via something like Greasemonkey.

Technorati Tags: safari

This is a written companion piece to this morning's screencast - I'm going to cover how to add a custom tab to the browser. The example I'm using is simple - every class understands the method #printHierarchy, which gives you a textual hierarchy diagram. At one time, that was a view possibility in the browser (circa 5i). Today, we'll add that back in a tab. To start, create a new package:

With that package created, we need a UI for the tab. It's a simple one, with a text widget filling the canvas. Using the UIPainter, create something like this:

Once that's created, install it as a subclass of Refactory.Browser.CodeTool. Select the "other" drop down option in the install tool and enter that in:

With that installed, we need to write some code - in this case, three instance side methods:

isActive
	^self classOrNameSpace notNil

#isActive is sent to determine whether or not the tab should be visible. In this example, it should only be there if a class or namespace is selected. You an examine the methods in class CodeTool to see what's easily possible. Next, the tab needs a name:

tabName
	^'Print Hierarchy'

Finally, something needs to actually happen when the tab is selected; we'll add a #postBuildWith: method to fill our text widget with the text for the "diagram"

postBuildWith: bldr
	| classOrNamespace |
	super postBuildWith: bldr.

	classOrNamespace := codeModel classOrNameSpace.
	self printText value: classOrNamespace printHierarchy

That's almost enough. What we need to do now is tell the browser that our new extension exists. To do that, we'll extend class CodeModel

Go to the class side, and add this method:

browserPrintHierarchyToolClass
	<tool>

	^RBPrintHierarchyTool

The part in brackets is a pragma. The code simply tells the browser what class to throw into our tab. That's it; open a new browser, and select a class:

Now, select a class, and watch your new tab in action:

You can download the code here, or just head over to the Public Store Repository and load the RBPrintHierarchyTool package

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, refactoring+browser

Today must be the day for piles of stupid. I see that the RIAA expects Limewire to cough up - wait for it - $1.5T $150B

Now it looks as though one Kelly M. Klaus (right) of Munger, Tolles & Olson, yet another RIAA posse, wants Wood to order LimeWire owner Mark Gorton to pay $1,500,000,000,000 [ed: $150B] for 200,000,000 alleged downloads, at $750 per.

Where does a dumb figure like $750 per song come from? never mind the obvious - most trading of music doesn't cost anyone money, because the people engaged in large amounts of file sharing weren't going to pay under any circumstances. The rest (the vast majority) who grab a handful of songs probably end up buying more after figuring out whether they like an artist or not.

But never mind all that - the going price for songs on the net ranges from $0.79 - $1.29. Where the heck does $750 come from? I'm afraid it comes from somewhere the sun never shines...

Technorati Tags: riaa, stupidity

Oh, this is just awesome. The NY Times claims that the Pulse News Aggregator (iPod/iPad) "infringes" because it allows people to read their RSS feeds:

But by the afternoon, that flush of entrepreneurial success had turned sour, after Apple informed the two that Pulse was being pulled from the App Store after it received a written notice from the New York Times Company (NYT) declaring that “The New York Times Company believes your application named ‘Pulse News Reader’ infringes The New York Times Company’s rights.” In an unusual coincidence, the Times Web site was on prominent display on a huge screenshot of the iPad during Jobs’s speech.

It's hard to begin to criticize this, because there's so much stupid. First, the Times chose to make their RSS feeds available. Second, it's easily possible to configure access to an endoint based on the inbound request source - sure, that can be scammed, but most people don't know that. The bigger issue is the first one though - the Times made these feeds available, so it's not possible for an app that reads them to be infringing. It's sort of like putting a huge rolling sign with headlines in your window, and then yelling at any passerby who has the temerity to pause to read it.

The lawyer for the Times has a pretty stupid take on it:

“The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use*. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use.”

If that's true, then Safari needs to be yanked, since it can see RSS feeds as well. As does the Atom browser, and any other RSS reader in the app store - and when I searched just now, there were pages of them. When will the Times and this moron of a lawyer go after those, and Safari?

Update: Seems Apple has a clue. They reversed course, and put the app back. If and when they explain why to the Times, I hope they use small words.

Technorati Tags: media, rss

This is interesting to me - the short video lectures on a wide range of subjects that Salman Khan has put together. On a very narrow topic (Cincom Smalltalk), I've been doing something similar since 2006 - short videos to cover a small topic area. The contrast between typical education and this approach is stark:

Watching his videos highlights how little the Web has changed higher education. Many online courses at traditional colleges simply replicate the in-person model—often in ways that are not as effective. And what happens in most classrooms varies little from 50 years ago (or more). Which is why Mr. Khan's videos come as a surprise, with their informal style, bite-sized units, and simple but effective use of multimedia.

It takes a motivated person to learn via self paced instruction, but I wonder - how much do unmotivated people learn in a University setting? A lot of the people I went to school with spent much of their time partying - they could have done that on their own dime, instead on mom and dad, or a student loan. Maybe it's time to really examine how useful the standard lecture approach to education is.

BarCamps are blowing up the traditional conference; maybe it's time something blew up the traditional school the same way...

Technorati Tags: learning, college

Are they kidding me? Making DragonAge into an Anime movie?

Which part of the word "genre" do they not get?

Technorati Tags: dao, anime

It doesn't really matter that Android supports Flash, or whether Android based tablets do - Apple's major market share in the mobile space is driving change. Here's one developer's story, about why they are ditching Flash for their site:

Why? Because many of our employees and customers use iPhones. As it stood, the several Flash components on our home page either showed up as blank spaces on iPhones, or didn't provide the content we really wanted to deliver. We also anticipated a time when customers, the media, industry analysts and others would be viewing our pages on iPads -- perhaps even more so than on iPhones. In other words, we had to future-proof our site by removing Flash.

This is why I'm happy that I moved away from Wink (which uses Flash to drive the final screencast) back in 2008 - I managed to accidentally future-proof "Smalltalk Daily".

This is a decision I expect to see more of. Having two or more video formats is just too expensive (in terms of time, if not money). It's simpler to just drop out something that's HTML5 ready, like H.264.

Technorati Tags: flash, adobe, web development

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at extending the Smalltalk Browser by adding custom tabs. You can watch it on YouTube right now, or follow this link to the video.

You can download the code here, or just load the package RBPrintHierarchyTool from the Public Repository in order to see how it all works.

You can follow the Smalltalk channel on YouTube for all the "Smalltalk Daily" videos. You can also check out the videos on Vimeo, where the quality is higher, or over on Facebook, if you are a member.

You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, browser, browser extensions

JNIPort is now available for both VisualWorks and Pharo. What's JNIPort?

JNIPort is a Smalltalk library which allows Java code to be invoked from Smalltalk. It acts as a bridge between the world of Smalltalk objects and a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) where Java code is executing.

That makes the (huge) set of Java libraries accessible to Smalltalk developers. It looks like cross dialect Smalltalk works is expanding nicely.

Technorati Tags: java, jni, pharo, visualworks

ESUG 2010 is approaching, and they are asking for contributors:

18th International Smalltalk Joint Conference - Call for Contributions Where: Barcelona, Spain When: September 13 - 17, 2010; Camp Smalltalk September 11-12 Information

This call includes:

• Developer program
• Free ESUG tickets
• Business day 16th of September (sponsored by Cincom Smalltalk)
• International Workshop
• Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies
• Student Volunteer Program
• Camp Smalltalk 11-12 September 2010

I'll be at the event with my camera, as per usual - with luck, I won't have my hard drive die on me this year :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, esug, barcelona, spain

I'll be at the Camp Smalltalk event in London next month - July 16-18. I'll have the video camera along to record the event - and i intend to pigeonhole a few people for the podcast. See you there!

Technorati Tags: london

We still need to diagnose what happened, but the server is running and serving pages again.

If only my local carriers would do the same:

Yellow Pages Group Co. said last week that it would no longer deliver residential phone books in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa-Gatineau, Montreal and Quebec City, except to customers who request them. A Yellow Pages spokesperson said Winnipeg could soon join that list.

Every year the residential listings go straight from my driveway into the recycling bin. I can't remember the last time I looked up a non-business number in a printed phone book...

Technorati Tags: phone book, yellow pages

Fernando Olivera has announced Gaucho, a direct manipulation framework for Pharo:

Gaucho is a direct manipulation environment for software, targeted at programmers who firmly believe that programming is modeling.

There are screencasts on the site, so check those out.

Technorati Tags: gaucho, modeling

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at a few more tricks in the VisualWorks inspector - adding attributes and editing code. You can watch it on YouTube right now, or follow this link to the video.

You can follow the Smalltalk channel on YouTube for all the "Smalltalk Daily" videos. You can also check out the videos on Vimeo, where the quality is higher, or over on Facebook, if you are a member.

Technorati Tags: visualworks, inspector, smalltalk

It seems that the outage isn't simple - there's a hardware problem on our server, probably the hard drive. I'm working with the IT group at Cincom to get that resolved, but it's going to take a bit - if the HD needs replacing, we'll have to do that and restore from our backups. I'll keep you posted on our progress, but in the meantime, you can still access all of our media, if not in quite as organized a fashion as we have in the archives.

• Industry Misinterpretations Podcast: Check out the Mevio site, which should have all of the podcasts.
• Smalltalk Daily: Check out our YouTube channel, which has everything going back to mid 2008. There may be higher quality video on the Vimeo site.

For general Smalltalk news, or my take on whatever I'm thinking about, you can just follow this blog :)

Technorati Tags: smalltalk

Julian Fitzell wil be presenting Seaside at Epicenter on JUne 10th:

Find out why Seaside is driving a new generation of developers to pick up a powerful and productive language called Smalltalk. Long a secret weapon in the finance, manufacturing, and transportation sectors, Smalltalk is now being used by more and more businesses to develop complex applications faster and more cheaply than their competition. Shared Nothing, REST, HTML templates: these all have their place. But leave your conventional wisdom at the door and see if you can't discover a better way to develop your next online application

There's also the evangelist evening, which Julian will be participating in.

Technorati Tags: seaside, epicenter

The server that runs the Cincom Smalltalk websites is having some kind of issue this morning; I'm exploring that with the IT group. When it comes back to life, I'll post an update.

Technorati Tags: cincom

I've been playing Mass Effect 2 for a few days now - it took me a bit to get used to the changed interface from Mass Effect. The game is much bigger than the initial game, and mostly better. I really only have a few complaints: The new planet scanning thing. Adds nothing to the game, it takes a fair amount of time, and you can't really avoid it. That should be streamlined The whole running out of fuel thing is realism at the expense of game play. Chuck it; It's like narrating a sound sleep in a book.

That makes me sound more down on the game than I am. It's very immersive - much more so than the first game. That's part of why the annoying aspects are so annoying - they take time away from an otherwise enjoyable game. I hope BioWare cleans those two things up for the third iteration.

Technorati Tags: mass effect, bioware, xbox

Julian Fitzell reports from Product Camp Berlin.

Technorati Tags: berlin, priduct management

This week's podcast features our Product Manager, Arden Thomas. This is part 2 of two; if you didn't listen to part 1, you might want to grab that episode first. In this podcast, Arden discusses three things with us:

• The upcoming release of ObjectStudio 8.2.1
• The upcoming release of VisualWorks 7.7.1
• The roadmap going forward

We didn't discuss WebVelocity 1.1, since we covered that on a recent podcast. Arden is anxious to hear what your needs are in Cincom Smalltalk - if you like what you hear this week (and next; this is part 1 of a 2 part podcast), let him know. And if you think there's something else we should be doing - let him know about that, too!

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. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.

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: objectstudio, visualworks, cincom, roadmap

I just finished reading The Accidental Time Machine, by Joe Haldeman. I haven't read a lot of his stuff since his classic The Forever War, but I like his writing style. The characters in this book are mostly good, although "Martha" from the immediate future ends up being a little stiff. The main character, Matt, is better drawn, but is mostly along for the ride. I found the first half of the book to be very compelling, but - as with the H.G. Wells story with which is shares an awful lot, how things got to be the way they are whenever Matt lands is never explained. Maybe it's my love of alternate history, but I really wanted to know how the throwback Massachusetts (a primitive religious culture guarded by obnoxious AIs) got to be the way it is. Never mind though; it's off to the next stop.

The rest of the book tied things up too tightly, I thought. The more or less magical beings who work with Matt to get him to somewhere better just don't make a lot of sense, and by the end of the story, I felt like I did at the end of The Stand - a great opening had been rushed to a conclusion, with a fair amount of stuff in the middle that we didn't really need. I liked the book, but I can't give it a ringing endorsement. If you like Haldeman, you'll like the book. Otherwise, it's a quick read, but not a great one.

Technorati Tags: scifi, reading

The mercy rule (if a team is winning by "too much", the game is just called as a victory for them) makes some sense in youth sports - sometimes one team is just so clearly overmatched that it's painful to watch more. But this?

In yet another nod to the protection of fledgling self-esteem, an Ottawa children’s soccer league has introduced a rule that says any team that wins a game by more than five points will lose by default.

That's just stupid. In sports, it's easy to let your guard drop and be suddenly surprised. Trying to artificially keep games close is bad for all parties involved. The team getting beaten knows that they are being let off easy, and the winning team will end up being filled with rage that their victory has been stolen from them. I can hardly think of a more counter-productive move in sports.

Carlos Crosetti has been busy - creating an interface from Pharo for Open Social.

Technorati Tags: social media

I hadn't thought of Apple's mobile space this way, but mp3newswire has an interesting set of numbers:

In 1959 5,749,000 television sets were sold in the US, bringing the cumulative total of sets sold since 1950 to 63,542,128 units.

As of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. Add to that figure 2 million iPads and counting. By the end of the year Apple should have about 90 million smart mobile devices in the wild.

Now, combine that with the announced iAd platform, and you have a new media empire rising - and it's one for which Apple doesn't have to share the revenues as much as the networks had to...

Technorati Tags: apple, iAd

You have to love the sheer cluelessness of this Apple demo site - they are trying to show off how Safari supports standards such as HTML5, which is fair. But, if you try a different browser, you get this:

It would be a lot more effective if you could use the site to compare and contrast with Safari. Found via this Guardian story.

I noticed an interesting feature for the upcoming Safari 5 - one that, if replicated in Chrome, FF, and IE, will make web designers a little less relevant:

Safari Reader: Click on the new Reader icon to view articles on the web in a single, clutter free page

Most sites have a header, footer, sidebars, and, with ads, all manner of annoying tactics to get your attention. If this catches on, it could do for typical web advertising what the web did to classifieds...

Technorati Tags: browser, advertising

The beta release of WebVelocity 1.1 is ready for evaluation - I've sent a note out to the mailing list for the product. If you're interested, check out the discussion group we set up.

Scott Adams is more right than he knows...

David Buck tells us that the Ottawa STUG will be talking about debugging in June:

Smalltalkers user the debugger all the time to see what a program is doing and to help familiarize themselves with new parts of the system. Most developers, however aren't familiar with some of the more advanced features of the debugger. In this talk, David will present some of the more obscure areas of the debugger including various options for stepping, breakpoints, one shot breakpoints, watchpoints, variable watches, class watches and more.

Follow the link for location details - it's on June 9th at 6 PM

Technorati Tags: ottawa