Fortunately, we still have power - probably because the lines are underground here. Here's a shot I just took of my grill:
And here's my patio furniture:
This is probably too deep for the smallish snow blower a bunch of us in the neighborhood went in on. Tomorrow is going to be a heck of a day, especially since it's supposed to just keep snowing...
When I headed up to bed at 1:30 AM last night, I measured 15 inches of snow on my back step. About 30 minutes ago, I measured 25 - and the snow hasn't slacked off. Here's a short video and a few photos, showing how huge an event this is:
The snowstorm finally ended - I think we got about 30 inches. I have a few more photos - I'm now exhausted, after helping clear four driveways. The blower was only able to help once we cut the snow down, and then it ran into a problem after the third driveway. Tiring!
Update: The official measurement for my area just came in - 33.8 inches. No wonder I'm so tired :)
I chipped some more snow off my driveway - I could actually get my car out now if I had to. Of course, I'd have to climb in the passenger side, angle it around, and then shovel the mess up - but that's progress :)
My Car
My Driveway
Mailbox
Buried Footpath
Unplowed Street
Unplowed Street
My Walkway
Ramp Off MD 32
Most of the sidestreets in the neighborhood haven't been plowed at all, not even once - which means that no one living down there is getting out at all...
If you live on a side street, you're still waiting. My friend Mike posted this picture, with the caption - "Our driveway leads nowhere! Howard County, where are the plows? "
This week's podcast is the audio for a presentation I gave to the Toronto Smalltalk User's Group last month, on January 26th - it's an overview of the products we released in 2009:
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!
More video from the Pharocast folks - they're on a roll. The real fun starts a year or so in, when you start noticing that the older screencasts need to be updated :)
Well, it was a lot of work - but the car is finally free. Here's where things stood after we got the bottom of the driveway clear - my neighbor's blower was back online after some small repairs:
There's just no way I could get that "attachment" cleared, so I climbed in via the passenger door, and moved the car down the newly cleared driveway. Oh, and this picture shows the huge mound that I had to chip down some before we could even use the snowblower :) Anyway - the car:
Then I got the rest of the snow off, shoveled up the mess where the car had been, and pulled it back:
Good thing I lost weight a few years ago - there's very little space to squeeze into there :) At least I can get out in either car if I need to, and the streets are clear up to the exit from the neighborhood - unlike the poor folks who live on side streets here - their streets look like my patio:
For instance, the battery inside an already-padded box for a new notebook PC might need to be packaged in an additional fiberboard box along with extra shipping documents, he said. I
t could also mean untold numbers of workers overseas and in the U.S. will have to get "fully-regulated hazmat" training to simply handle a box with an iPod or HP laptop inside, Kerchner said.
That would be just about the stupidest outcome I can imagine. Just how stupid are the people who dream this stuff up, anyway?
A WINTER STORM WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM TUESDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON.
* PRECIPITATION TYPE... SNOW.
* ACCUMULATIONS... POTENTIAL FOR 5 OR MORE INCHES OF SNOW.
* TIMING... MID TO LATE TUESDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON.
Just what we need :)
Update: Oh boy, the latest forecast is telling me that this has the potential to be a serious storm, and all they're saying right now is "several inches". Hope that blower holds together :)
There are lots of side streets that still aren't plowed - but there's progress near me - that's a sidewalk that was partly cleared yesterday:
... with a gap for sledding:
Finally, one of the streets that was unplowed yesterday has finally seen a plow. No salt or other treatment yet, but at least the people living there can get out now:
Meanwhile, my wife was trying to get ahead of the next storm with a grocery order - but Peapod called this morning, cancelling. Their trucks can't get here :/
Well, we can get out, but parking is an adventure. At all the store plazas, there are still (pretty large) remnants of the December storm, never mind the mountains we added over the weekend. Here are a few examples - first, I had to hit the gas station, because one of my wiper blades snapped off when I turned it on:
This is an example of the sort of mounds there are in the parking lots - this is from the local grocery store lot:
And another view - see these towering over the cars:
Finally, the swell stuff storms leave behind with the helpful traffic calming devices:
I took a short trip to get a couple thing I forgot at the store, and snapped a few more photos while I was out. Here's an on ramp into the shopping plaza being cleared:
The next three shots show the sheer brilliance behind "random shapes in the road traffic calming" in an area that gets snow:
I rather suspect that if my county executive lived on this street (see above), those idiotic shapes would be gone soon. Yes, I'm talking about you, Ken Ulman. I dare you to come stand at this corner and justify this nonsense.
I think the dominance of the iPhone in terms of developer mindshare - as opposed to actual deployment statistics - tells me that having a well known and well understood deployment environment drives things quite a bit. Dare Obasanjo links to these smartphone sales stats:
Nokia: 39%
RIM: 20% (Blackberry)
Apple 15%
HTC: 5%
Other: 21% (Samsung is expected to make a major jump this year)
The more interesting piece of information is this:
According to these stats, the iPhone OS is actually the major source of traffic for the mobile web in most continents except for Africa and Asia.
Which tells you why there's so much focus on the iPhone - for good or ill, that's where the eyeballs are...
While I really like the Xbox, I just got an object lesson in why the Zune is going nowhere fast. I submitted "Industry Misinterpretations" to the Zune marketplace to be listed with their podcasts sometime last summer. I just received this in email:
Did you know that your podcast is now featured on Zune.net, available to hundreds of thousands of visitors? We are pleased to include your content in our catalog.
Every time I've submitted a feed to Apple, it's taken 2 days or so to get an approval. For all the complaints about Apple's approval process, for a podcast publisher, it seems to be way, way better than Microsoft's....
As if the snow hasn't been enough fun, we're getting ice now - and probably more snow on top. Awesome. The first photo is of the snowbanks around my front walk; the second is of the road out front.
Most of the local areas aren't even plowing right now - it's cold, the snow is coming down hard, and the low pressure system off the coast is bringing winds at near hurricane intensity to the area. How much snow are we getting? Well:
I live in that 15 inches + band :) bear in mind, the county hadn't cleared al of the roads from last weekend's storm yet. The back way out of the neighborhood was only notionally clear, and up by the local hospital there were still piles in the center of the road, over the double yellow. This part of Maryland simply isn't equipped for this level of snow (and based on averages, why would it be?).
Lots more to come before this is over - who knows when we'll be dug out...
Conditions are not improving - heck, since I got back to the house, the wind has picked up - there are points where we can barely see the houses across the street. I shot some video a little over an hour ago, about a mile from my house at the intersection with Maryland 32 - which is a major state artery:
While I was walking up to that intersection, I took a bunch of photos as well:
I just got back in from (hopefully) my last snow clearing of the day - it should be someone else's turn at the snow blower next. It's been a heck of a day, between snowfall and wind - I took four more photos before I came in:
This is why I was never all that worried about Microsoft as a "dangerous monoploy":
Getting back to Dick Brass's criticism of Microsoft, I find it fascinating that top Microsoft executives were aware almost immediately of the threat the iTunes Music Store posed to the whole Windows Media ecosystem, but Microsoft was still unable to stop it. This matches what I've seen time and time again in my last 10 years following the company.
The problem is simple: companies as big and diverse as Microsoft tend to generate self destructive internal politics - and that eventually brings them to a near standstill. It happened to IBM back in the 80's, and now MS has hit the same wall. I expect that MS will be healthier and nimbler in a few years - but it'll be painful for them to get from here to there.
Jason Calacanis believes that Google Buzz is the next big thing, and has cut the value of Facebook in half. Umm, right - just like Wave. Here's his theory:
Google Buzz is way faster than the sluggish Facebook -- this is a HUGE advantage.
Google Buzz puts relies and updates into your GMAIL as threads -- this is BRILLIANT and a HUGE advantage.
Right, because what most of us want is more stuff in our inbox. Sure Jason. You and the other three people who actually want more email can jump on the Buzz bandwagon - the rest of us will give it all the attention we gave Wave.
As to the whole "people don't trust Facebook because of privacy concerns" thing - the sad reality is that this is one of the few things that Scott McNealy got right - no one cares
His next theory is even crazier:
This really is game over for Facebook because you know Microsoft and
Aol are going to copy Google Buzz as quick as they can. In fact, Aol
would have a HUGE renaissance if they simply knocked off Google Buzz's
exact feature set. You would than have a reason to keep your @aol
email address.
Umm, yeah - because Microsoft has shown such an awesome ability to execute, and AOL has been the nimblest business around. And Google has shown such amazing staying power with any of their new things - Wave, anyone (crickets)?
I just got done reading Kent Beck's "The Balkanization of Smalltalk" piece. While he makes some good points, I simply don't see an organized effort getting us to the place he wants things to go:
The thing about a Nash Equilibrium is that what is rational from within the game can be absurd from an outside perspective. I'm calling bullshit on the state of Smalltalk. Vendors, you're acting crazy. Have the tiniest possible core defined in terms of test cases. Build a shared library on top of that, implemented in terms of the core. Include numbers, collections, meta-objects, code structure, and code loading. None of this parcel/bundle/package/pundle/category nonsense. Compete on VMs, graphics libraries, and enterprise-y tools.
Let me draw a small analogy here - this argument reminds me of various wishes I read from people who dislike the suburbs. "If only people would all live in small towns and cities, then we could have working mass transit..." etc, etc, etc. The trouble isn't with the vision - it's with the reality of the built environment we have. Getting from here to the desired nirvana of such people is a less than trivial task, regardless of what you think of the desire.
And so it is with Smalltalk. Had ParcPlace set itself up like Sun back in the late 80s, instead of letting anyone run wild with Smalltalk anyway they wanted to, things might be different. But they aren't - we not only have commercial distros, we have lots of free ones as well (listen to our recent "State of Smalltalk" podcast for an idea of how big the field is)
But let's say you limited your scope to just a few players, on the assumption (possibly flawed) that the rest would follow. Cincom is heavily committed to Store (as are her customers) - Instantiations is even more heavily committed to Envy (as are her customers). How do you get from here to the core loader Kent speaks of? What's the incentive to build that? What paying customer would rather have that than, say, compliance with (insert your favorite spec here)?
If any such standardization is to come about, I suspect it'll happen via a mechanism Kent touched on. He spoke about Grease, a portability layer that Seaside uses. Every Smalltalk implementation that supports Seaside also supports Grease. There's your starting point. As Pharo gains traction (especially commercial traction), I suspect that the commercial vendors will start to feel pressure to comply with "the emrging standard". That's the way this will play out, if it plays out at all. I just don't see a new standards effort getting a whole lot of formal traction.
It's the day after our second big storm within a week - dig out time. I took a short walk this morning and shot a few photos; I'll have another short video up later:
This morning I went for a short walk through the neighborhood with my video camera, and shot a few segments as I ran across things of interest. So - here's what things looked like a bit after 9 AM this morning:
Some of the people using Buzz in the last 24 hours have discovered that, in an attempt to be helpful, it exposes the list of people with whom you regularly exchange e-mail. As the Silicon Valley Insider said, "Imagine a boss discovers a subordinate emails with executives at a competitor."
There's nothing in the Buzz UI that tells you, loudly and clearly, about the visibility of the followers list that it auto-generates from your frequent active e-mail correspondents. To make a bad situation worse, even if you learn about this problem, it's hard to fix it.
Replace "executive" with "recruiter". Or plug in your own set of embarrassing revelations on a personal level. I wonder whether Calacanis has figured this out, since he's proclaimed this to be a real Facebook killer?
Michael and I will be live in about 10-15 minutes - you can listen on the justin.tv stream. We'll be discussing the "Balkanizaton" of Smalltalk (something Kent Beck wrote about this morning). For more context, I have thoughts on that here.
Microsoft has finally relented, and will ship Outlook as part of the Mac Office site in 2011. What does this mean? It means that many of the petty incompatibilities Entourage had go away, and Outlook junkies can freely move to the mac and bring their tools along for the ride.
Mark Bernstein writes about something I noticed yesterday, but was too tired (more driveway clearance) to comment on: the way an awful lot of people use the web:
The comments of this page are now filled with users who, one after the other, googled “facebook login” in order to log into Facebook. That’s how they use the Web; the Google and assume that the first listing is what they want. When they see this article, they don’t say,
Oops! This is an article about logging into Facebook! I’m in the wrong place!
No indeed. They assume that this is some strange new Facebook design, and they don't like it one bit.
It's easy to sit back, as someone who knows his way around the net (and pretty much only associates with other people of similar knowledge bases) and think "everyone knows what an url is". Then you run into something like what Mark commented on, and you really have to sit back and consider things. When I first ran through the comments, I was sure that the "where's my login" thing was a few people having fun. But then the comments kept going, and going... until it became clear that no, for a lot of people, Google is the net. Things haven't progressed as far past the old days of the AOL walled garden as I might of thought - for a lot of people, the net consists only of what Google turns up in the first page, or even just the first few results. The rest of it may as well not exist.
Hodges revealed that season four "will be starting a year later [from the end of season three]. All the cast you know will reappear, but they won't all necessarily reappear straightaway or for the whole season. However, we will be giving satisfying answers to all those cliffhangers."
One thing the writers of "Heroes" could learn from this show: having the main characters in actual peril (a bunch of the main characters have either died or been written out) helps the show.
I've been puttering with the Silt codebase (which powers this, and my Cincom blog). There's some cruft in there, but one place I haven't spent much time until recently was in the "how do I set it up" region. The blog creation UI now works properly in 7.7 (under the tools menu), but that's not really sufficient. What I really need is a simple base image, with a listener already running, and a simple "set up a blog for me" tool. I'll have a look at that over the next few days, maybe it'll be worth a screencast :)
For now, grab VW 7.7 NC, connect to the public store (a connection is built into the NC image), and load Silt. Then pull down the tools menu, and try "Blog Manager". Hit the "New" button, add an email address for "maintainer", and you should be good to go with a localhost setup.
Opera unleashed a beta version of its browser this morning, and 10.5 claims the lead over Google Chrome and Apple's Safari in the Javascript stakes. The speed improvement is down to a new Carakan ECMAScript engine.
With faster performance across the browser spectrum, browser apps are only going to get more ambitious.
Roland Emmerich, the writer/director/producer behind Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 is planning to adapt Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. The plans include using technology developed for Avatar including 3D and motion capture technology. When asked about using this technology Emmerich responded: 'It has to be done all CG because I would not know how to shoot this thing in real.'
Umm, excuse me? Has Emmerich actually read the "Foundation" books? There's a ton of dialogue, and the action sequences mostly involve scenes no more complex than the ones in "Star Wars", and mostly way less complex. What on earth is there in this series of books that requires more than a trivial amount of CG, much less "all CG"?
I think they need to find a guy who's read - and actually understood - the books. Clearly, Emmerich isn't that guy.
I have recieved a few questions about Silt recently, so I cleaned up the blog creation tool some (it could still use some work), and I added some basic documentation to the bundle comment. If you want to try the system out, here's what you do:
Load the Silt bundle from the public repository. When it prompts you to save files, select all and hit "ok"
To Create a new blog, use Tools>>Blog Manager, then the "New" button. All you need to add is an email address for the "maintainer" field.
You can change the css references in View.ssp to use any of the CSS templates that come down with the installation; you could derive a new one based on them as well, using the same API that View.ssp uses. Alternatively, you can set things up any way you want using the API in class BlogSaver. For example:
blog := BlogSaver named: 'blog'.
"get all recent posts"
recentPosts := blog fetchAllRecentPosts.
"get all recent posts for a category"
recentInCategory := blog fetchBlogsbySearchCategory: someCategory
"get the most recent N posts in a category"
recentInCategory := blog fetchBlogs: howMany bySearchCategory: someCategory
"get a specific post by entry ID"
blogPost := blog entryFor: entryID
"get most recent post"
lastPost := blog blog fetchAllRecentPosts first.
To learn more about the API, look at class BlogSaver, specifically, the api categories
The server also manages "static" pages; you can create one using the administration pages. It will land in a directory named 'blog/content', where 'blog' is the name you used when you set the site up. If you edit the resulting file by hand, you'll need to tell the server that it's been changed (if you edit with the tools, it'll get handled for you). To reset by hand:
blog (Blog.BlogSaver named: 'blog') cache clearHTMLCaches.
Finally, if you want WYSIWYG online editing, you need to install TinyMCE. Download that here, and install it on your server. Edit the file editor.inc to reflect the proper location.
If you'd like to be added as developer, please send Andreas your Google Account email address so that he can add you to the project. But, he warns that unless you know how to deal with both the Android SDK and NDK, Java, JNI, and the Squeak VM it will be a very steep learning curve .
Sounds like you'll be able to do Smalltalk on the mobile devices of choice - it'll be Squeak (or maybe Pharo) for now. You can find project information here.
When Google rolled out Buzz, I doubt that they figured on stalker management as one of the issues they would have to deal with. BusinessInsider points out that they were wrong about that...
Update: As is quite often the case, Dare Obasanjo hits on a great example of the less dangerous - but far more common - issues involved here:
Ignoring some of the privacy issues of the people you email with becoming a public friends listthere is still the question of whether the feature is good for users in isolation. Here s a story; my wife is divorced and has kids from her previous marriage. This means she exchanges a lot of email with her ex-husband and his new wife around kid visiting schedules, vacations, etc. Do you think my wife would consider it a great feature if one day she started getting status updates on how her ex-husband and his new wife spend their days due to introduction of social networking features in her email client?
The "auto-follow" idea seems like just the thing that a young 20-something might come up with as a great idea - but that someone with a few more years under their belt would have had 2nd and 3rd thoughts about...
I've been wary of the Oracle installer tools - especially on Linux - for years, ever since the adventures I had installing on RedHat back in the early 2000's. I would have thought it would be better by now, but I just saw this go by in the Smalltalk IRC channel:
recently I had a problem reading lots of records from PostgreSQL, because the VW driver did not support streaming. So I tried to install Oracle on Ubuntu 9 today.... turned out that implementing streaming was far easier than installing Oracle
Normally, when the forecast calls for a "clipper" storm, it means a fast moving storm from the west that brings light snow - a dusting to maybe an inch or two. So what does a "Healthy Clipper" mean, then?
That's a DC area station, so the temps here in Columbia will be a bit lower, too. We are seriously getting to the "nowhere to plow the snow to" stage here :)