Tim Bray has moved to Google, and has some thoughts on the Android/iPhone competition:
The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet's future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It's a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord's pleasure and fear his anger.
I hate it.
While I like the idea of wide open competition better than I like the idea of a walled garden, people seem to be choosing walled gardens in droves - Apple products and Facebook being the prime examples. A lot of people think this will be a replay of the rise of Windows, where the open platform (in the sense that anyone can write for it) will win out.
I'm not so sure. In that earlier game, the primary users skewed towards the technical. Now, the user base is broader; it's not just geeks. Apple brings tremendous ease of use and predictability to the party, while Google brings the rough edges and openness. Geeks love the latter; everyone else loves the former.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple's more closed play win, for the simple reason that it's easy, and the mainstream market isn't interested in tinkering or rough edges. We'll see how that plays out.
Like a zombie that just won't drop no matter how many bullets get fired into it, the government keeps pushing ACTA. The good news is that the EU has shot this atrocity down, so maybe - just maybe - some sanity will prevail in this space. So long as the RIAA and MPAA have money to pass around, I rather doubt it, but one can hope.
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 Georg Heeg, talking about Smalltalk's past, present, and future. To watch, click on the viewer below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. This post wraps up all the video we have from this series of events, but there's more Smalltalk video being posted all the time - just stay subscribed to the video feed.
Also, if you would like to see a similar event near you - drop the STAR team a line. While we can't guarantee anything, we do take Smalltalker interest seriously.
Here's something that young adults are going to need to pay attention to:
Maximum PC (April 2010, page 10), of all places, reported on a study by Microsoft which found that 70%-yes 70% of HR professionals turned down a job candidate based upon their online reputation.
More specifically, what does reputation mean here? Well, the sorts of things too many people do on Facebook (etc):
The top three reasons cited for rejecting a candidate were concerns about lifestyle, inappropriate comments, and unsuitable photos and videos.
This may change over time as hiring managers are drawn from the net generation, but then again, it may not - and I suspect that a lot of young people are in for a rude awakening
Here's another ESUG 2009 video - Mariano Martinez Peck talking about SqueakDBX, a database layer (cross platform) for Squeak. To watch, click on the viewer below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly.
I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of Dragon Age: Origins Awakening, the expansion pack to Dragon Age: Origins
. I've been playing that game since Christmas, although I moved on to Fallout 3
this week, after my third run through of DAO. Now, I'll have to ponder which game I really want to spend time with :)
I figured other people may well have suggestions on this that I haven't thought of - what conferences do you think it would make sense to submit a Smalltalk oriented talk to? For that matter, what sort of talk do you think would be of interest and have a good chance of being accepted? Leave a comment, or drop me a line. Thanks!
Squeak just hit an interesting milestone - earlier this month the Squeak website posted the following:
The Squeak Oversight Board plans to finalize the multi-year effort of re-licensing Squeak. Squeak 4.0 is scheduled to be released on Monday, March 15th, 2010 and will be licensed under the MIT License with some original parts remaining under the Apache License.
Then a few minutes ago, Randal Schwartz let me know that 4.0 was out, and downloadable. So the long awaited Squeak with a clean license release has arrived. It's a great time for Smalltalk!
It's the middle of the workday, so the only person who really gets to look at the game now is my daughter - who is camped in front of the TV as I write this. Me? I'll have a shot at the expansion this evening.
The next Toronto Smalltalk User Group meeting is on March 22. We'll take a look at the state of Seaside 3.0. Feel free to bring material to present, or questions to ask. We start at 6:30, Ryerson University, room ENG288 245 Church Street (at the SE corner of Gould, just north of Dundas).
This morning I did a screencast on using Excel with VisualWorks; I thought a simple walkthrough might be handy as well. The first thing you need to do after starting VW is pull up the Parcel Manager, select "OS-Windows" on the left, and "COM-All" on the right. Right click and load:
Next, close that window, and in a workspace, add this little script. Once you try it out, you can experiment on your own - and use the "Browse Automation Classes" option under the COM menu in the Launcher to explore the interfaces available to you:
That code creates a dispatch driver, and then calls various COM APIs exposed by Excel. You'll see a few dialogs like this pop up as you execute that, as the message sends are going to COM, not Smalltalk - and thus, they don't exist in the image:
Just use the "proceed" button to dismiss those. Once you've executed all the code, you should see something like this:
Which should be Excel with the data you entered highlighted, and the copied data sitting in the Transcript, where we printed it. That's it - you're now working with Excel from VW. Go ahead and use the automation browser to explore the full API set.
First, you'll need to load the required support. Using File>>Load Application in the launcher menu, select "OLE" and load:
Once you have that loaded, open a workspace (from the Tools menu) and add the following script - you can start exploring the COM APIs from here and tweak the script as needed:
| ole excel wb range value |
"get the dispatcher for Excel"
ole := OLEObject newProgId: 'Excel.Application'.
excel := ole dispatcher.
"open Excel and get a worksheet"
excel call: 'Visible' params: (Array with: true).
wb := excel call: 'Workbooks' params: #().
wb call: 'Add' params: #().
"Now add some data"
range := excel call: 'Range' params: (Array with: 'A1').
range at: 'Value' put: 'Fred'.
range := excel call: 'Range' params: (Array with: 'A2').
range at: 'Value' put: 'Flintstone'.
"make the range bold"
range := excel call: 'Range' params: (Array with: 'A1:A2').
(range at: 'Font') at: 'Bold' put: (Array with: true).
"Now read a cell back"
range := excel call: 'Range' params: (Array with: 'A1').
value := range at: 'Value'.
^value
Unlike VisualWorks, you don't need to highlight that code - simply pull down the Smalltalk menu in the workspace and try "Insert" (which will print the results into the workspace) - you should end up with Excel opened up, with "Fred" in A1 and "Flintstone" in A2, and "Fred" in your workspace at the bottom - like this:
That's pretty much it - you can explore the available COM APIs and work from there - but this should get you started.
We'll be doing a podcast with Bruce Badger tomorrow at 2 PM EDT - we had been planning for today, but Michael's internet connection went down. So - tomorrow it is!
The scuffling for position in the e-book space continues, with Apple's entry (the iPad) making Amazon nervous:
Amazon appears to be responding to the Apple threat by waging a publisher-by-publisher battle, trying to keep as many books as possible out of Apple's hands, while preserving as much flexibility as it can to set its own prices.
The competition should make things better for all of us, but in the short term, it will likely mean more stunts like Amazon's brief removal of Macmillan from the store.
If Amazon is smart, they'll push out a Kindle for iPad app (one would think that the iPhone app should work, given Apple's staements about apps). The app for the Mac is a nice "complete the stack" thing, but not the end game. Amazon needs to remember that their core business is not, in fact, selling hardware - the Kindle is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.
The Open Video Alliance, which includes Mozilla, Kaltura, Miro, and Yale Law School, are joining forces to bring video to Wikipedia -- Flash-free.
So consider - Google (and YouTube) are going with non-Flash solutions, Apple has already ditched Flash (and because they won't support it on the iPhone/iTouch/iPad, they are forcing change). Now Wikipedia is planning to move off Flash. I think I'm glad I went with H.264 for the daily screencasts awhile back :)
Are we gazing onto the cusp of a new horizon, one where our Xbox 360 storage needs aren't shackled to overpriced proprietary hard drives? Probably not quite. Our best friends at Joystiq have managed to obtain documents (corroborated with multiple sources) showing that the folks in Redmond are mulling over an option to enable USB mass storage support for its game machine.
We already know that game vendors would like to move to downloadable content, if only to stop outlets like Gamestop from selling used games. That tells me that this report is probably true
You have to love the copyright suit between Viacom and Google - especially now that this response from Google has been made public:
"Viacom alone has uploaded thousands of videos to YouTube to market hundreds of its programs and movies, including many that are works in suit," Google wrote. "Given the broad scope of marketing, YouTube could not be charged with knowledge of infringement (.pdf) merely because it came across a video that was clearly from a professionally produced television show or movie."
Peronally, I thought the whole safe harbor thing was enough of a defense, but lawyers do like to add layers and layers of complexity to an otherwise simple situation - otherwise, how would they collect enormous hourly fees?
Meanwhile, I find it highly amusing that Viacom's marketing department was busy undermining the coporate case because they actually understood something about promotion :)
You have to love this: Valve hasn't added the latest Ubisoft games to their UK store (although they have arrived on the US side) - supposedly due to the "always connected" requirement of Ubisoft's latest games. The amusing part of that is that Steam requires either a constant connection or unsafe credentials handling in order to play - makes me wonder whether the combined DRM schemes are somehow causing grief.
In any event, this is the perfect example of where DRM gets you - problems for customers, service issues for the vendor, and unforseen complications due to unplanned software interactions. Awesome, isn't it?
For those of us who grew up in a world where famines were political events, this story about wheat rust is truly frightening:
Indeed, 90 percent of the world's wheat has little or no protection against the Ug99 race of P. graminis. If nothing is done to slow the pathogen, famines could soon become the norm — from the Red Sea to the Mongolian steppe — as Ug99 annihilates a crop that provides a third of our calories. China and India, the world's biggest wheat consumers, will once again face the threat of mass starvation, especially among their rural poor. The situation will be particularly grim in Pakistan and Afghanistan, two nations that rely heavily on wheat for sustenance and are in no position to bear added woe.
This week's podcast was a lot of fun, and I want to thank Bruce Badger for coming on. We spoke about his (many) Smalltalk projects, including th ePostgreSQL driver, a PDF library, and some work he's started on an LDAP adaptor. We also talked about licenses - which ones he uses and why. It was a lot of fun - check the Industry Misinterpretations site tomorrow to download it.
The episode, set to air during a Glee-themed week of musical programming in May, will have the regular cast—including, no doubt, Anna Torv and Joshua Jackson—breaking into song and dance.
I just can't see this idea fitting in with the show - it has the earmarks of the animated episode of "Farscape", after which it was all downhill....
This week Michael and I spoke to Bruce Badger - long time open source contributor to the Smalltalk community. He's the author of the widely used PostgreSQL database driver and of the PDF document library. If you listen to the podcast, you'll also learn what other projects Bruce has up his sleeve.
We spoke a bit about the OpenSkills project, and about open source licensing - what license Bruce uses for his code and why. We also covered Sport - Bruce's cross dialect portability library, and what Bruce would like to see happen in that direction. It was a fun talk, and we'd love to get Bruce back on the podcast again.
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!
Last week I read a short book by Johannes Bhakdi - "Web 3.0 - User Generated Business". I was skeptical of the book when I first opened it - it's short, and lots of the book is done in Powerpoint stick-man style presentation graphics. However, I was pleasantly surprised by it. While it is a "campaign book" for Johannes' business, it also makes some good points about how you should establish your brand (corporate or personal).
While services like YouTube, Facebook (et. al.) can be critical, you should always point those back to a central "home" for your content. A decade ago that was harder to do - now, with services like Slicehost (the place I host this blog), it's far easier and more affordable. That's related to one of the key points Johannes makes in the book - he believes (and I agree with him) that it's still too hard for the average web user to set up shop and start pushing out content - on two levels:
Setting up your own site - one that can manage audio, video, and text, is not only hard, but, in the case of "heavier" content, still expensive
Getting paid for content production is next to impossible
The latter topic is one that Johannes spends a fair amount of time on. He's certainly following his own advice; the book is self published, and his outfit (klatcher.com) is in the business of providing the sorts of tools he's advocating. I have no idea how well those tools work; obviously, I'm living in the "roll your own" reality here :) )
There are a few downsides - self publishing doesn't obviate the need for an editor, and this book needs a once over. There are some distracting spelling issues (personally, I hate seeing "loose" when "lose" is called for). I was way more distracted by the construction "The Web 3.0" than I should have been, but I just don't like how that flows.
Those are nits, but they were distracting. It's not a book you'll spen a lot of time reading, but I think it ties some useful ideas about how to proceed with a web-based business together. If Johannes has the book re-edited, I'd recommend it.
Amazon announces Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers (including Kindle for iPad), a rather polished e-reader application that both makes the Kindle itself look rather old-fashioned and explains why last week’s Mac version was so unfinished: The Amazon developers have clearly been spending all their time on this instead.
I'd say that the Kindle's rationale worked - it helped create the e-reader market. Now, Amazon can focus on selling into it, without regard to the device. To many businesses get focused on the small stuff, or points of pride. Thus far, it looks like Amazon hasn't fallen into that trap.
This week's ESUG video is Jorge Silva's "How to be Rich with Smalltalk" (ppt) presentation - a talk on some work to integrate Smalltalk and Adobe Air (separate from the Glare code) that Jorge had been working on. To watch, click on the viewer below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you like this video, why not subscribe to Smalltalk Videos?
This question about an "Iron Smalltalk" (no momentum in a few years) made me consider the oft stated (and never really fulfilled) desire for "Smalltalk on the JVM", or "Smalltalk on .NET" - I came up with the following:
The reason these "Smalltalk for .NET" and "Smalltalk for the JVM" projects never seem to come off is simple - Smalltalk isn't just flat text in an editor. Smalltalk is the entire interactive environment. It would be fairly simple to get a syntax parser, but it wouldn't be Smalltalk. It would be Ruby or Python with Smalltalk syntax. Somewhat useful perhaps, but not really Smalltalk.
If you really built Smalltalk in one of these other systems, you would have to invest a pretty large effort - and then end up with a system that ran slower than any of the currently extant commercial Smalltalk systems. Given that, it's kind of hard to see the point.
, the expansion pack to 
. I've been playing that game since Christmas, although I moved on to 
this week, after my third run through of DAO. Now, I'll have to ponder which game I really want to spend time with :)
