Smalltalk with James Robertson

The New York Times' new paywall just doesn't make much sense. Not the overall concept, just the specific implementation. Here's what they supposedly plan to do:

The person familiar with the matter said the Times has considered charging around $20 a month for the digital bundle and less than half that for the Web-only offering

But there's a problem with that approach, as Felix Salmon notes:

This strikes me as peculiar. The idea seems to be that if you want to use the NYT iPad app at all, that’ll cost you a hefty $240 per year, over and above the cost of the iPad itself. But if you want to read the nytimes.com website on your iPad, that’s probably free — and even if you’re in the minority of power users, it’ll still be less than half the price of the app. Essentially, the NYT is doing everything it can to drive its iPad-owning readers away from the app and towards the built-in browser.

Exactly - what would possess me to try their iPad app under this deal? Why not just stick with the website? If they want to attract me to a pay model (where the website is free until I cross a threshold), then they need to make it more attractive, not less.

This looks like the result of an internal political battle that the iPad backers at the Times lost. They get their app, but in a "guaranteed to lose" fashion. The website side will then point and laugh, and not lose any of their budget.

You find a lot of quirks when you try to automate your Smalltalk builds. Some of them are related to your project, and others are in the system itself. With the way VisualWorks is built now, it's easy (in theory) to unload packages you don't need at runtime. For instance, here's the code I use to pull the entire Debugger bundle:

[(Store.Registry pundleNamed: 'Tools-Debugger') ifNotNil: [:pundle |
      pundle leafItems do: [:each | each markNotModified].
      [pundle markNotModified; unloadFromImage] on: Warning do: [:ex | ex resume: true]].

Seems easy enough, right? Do the same for the rest of the tools, including the UIPainter, and you get a smaller runtime where you know exactly what got pulled out and why (as opposed to the somewhat arcane process that the RTP uses). This is where I ran into some problems though - in package Debugger-UI, there's a postUnloadBlock:

[
        Notifier beDevelopment]

I think that's an artifact from when VW had its own debugger, and the PDP was an add on - unload it, and it restored the base behavior. Now, when you try to unload the debugger, that fires and immediately blows up. It seems like something that could be easily fixed; I tossed this code into my build script:

(Store.Registry pundleNamed: 'DebuggerUI') properties at: #postUnloadBlock put: [:pkg | ].

That worked, but the Debugger-UI Parcel still had that block. So I tried this:

(Parcel parcelNamed: 'Debugger-UI') properties at: #postUnloadBlock put: [:pcl | ].

And... no effect. I scratched my head over that one for a bit, then finally decided it was easier to just dynamically recompile the offending method (Notifier>>beDevelopment) than it was to keep pounding sand. That's a problem with the base system (VW 7.6). Then there are issues at the project level.

As part of the system here, there are two overrides to classes in UIPainter. Ideally, they would be in a development package instead of the master bundle, but right now, that's not my call. I'd still like to be able to unload UIPainter, so how do I get there? Simple - yank the overrides in the script, then remove the painter. I had to debug my way through the browser doing an override removal to find this code:

overrides := (Store.Registry pundleNamed: 'UIPainter') overrides select: [:each | each class = OverridenClass].
overrides do: [:each | each reinstall.
			Override removeOverride: each].

That restores the base behavior, removing the overrides from the master bundle (which are only needed during development) - and thus allowing UIPainter to be cleanly removed. That was almost all the interesting issues, but I ran across one more.

Yesterday, I did a test build with a colleague. The runtime looked good, but it threw an MNU - something that surprised me - the whole point of avoiding the RTP was to get more predictability, right? Well, it turns out that the RTP scan can cause you grief, but it's also smart enough to spot things you might miss. In this case, I missed this: we use HotDraw, which happens to live in the Refactory namespace. Where is that namespace defined? In the RB bundle. What's one of the things I'm removing? The RB. The fix is pretty simple here. Instead of yanking the entire RB bundle, I just yank all of the packages in the bundle except for the one that defines the needed namespace.

Looks like the Cincom Smalltalk website is down this morning. If you're on the VWNC mailing list, people have been posting about it there.

Update: - it came back while I was at lunch

I've been doing (yet another) playthrough of "Fallout: New Vegas", which was inspired by my first (basically failed) crack at the "Dead Money" DLC. I went in with a level 30 character, but I had the wrong skills for the DLC:

• Low Sneak (not upped at all)
• Low Unarmed (not upped at all)
• Low Melee (not upped at all)
• Low Survival (not upped at all)

I was able to get through the Villas with difficulty - my character had high science, speech, guns, and lockpick - none of which were terribly useful out there. There are virtually no guns or energy weapons (the HoloRifle has very little ammo available), so you really, really need to go with unarmed or melee. So.... I started over.

That's been something of a revelation for me. So many encounters have been so much easier with high sneak - even with mediocre weapon skills, I can get close enough to line up and kill without ever using VATS. I expect that I'll get through the DLC much better this time (although I'll have to wait for the PC edition or get my work schedule to support some remote work - no XBox in the hotel). Even with that, it's been a lot of fun to play this way - it's almost like a new game.

There's a code retreat (not entirely certain what that is - something like a BarCamp, sounds like, but my French is spotty) in Grenoble, January 21.