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Gadgets and Plugins

May 17, 2010 6:51:47.792

posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Seaside Tutorial (4) - Video

May 17, 2010 8:55:23.789

Today's Smalltalk Daily is part 4 of our updated Seaside tutorial, for VW 7.7/OS 8.2 and Seaside 3.0. The tutorial home page is here. Today we look at rendering some content in Seaside. If you're picking things up here, grab the work in progress to this point, and the download the domain model being used. Today we add a menu to our UI. Click on the viewer below to watch it now:

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

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posted by James Robertson

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stupidity

Focusing on the Trivial

May 17, 2010 9:27:46.042

You have to love the deep minds at the MPAA. While other people discuss the actual issues behind US troops being in a war, the MPAA is worried about.... piracy:

Less known are the movie industry’s efforts to clamp down on copyright infringers who are defending their country’s interests on foreign soil. Because the availability of legal movies and TV-shows is limited in countries such as Iraq, soldiers sometimes use BitTorrent to get their fix, or buy pirated DVDs from local sellers. The MPAA is not happy with these defiant soldiers. A declassified document from the United States Central Command shows that, a few years ago, the MPAA asked the military what they do to prevent soldiers from accessing pirated DVDs in Iraq.

Because that's clearly the most relevant issue there - whether some soldier managed to get an illicit copy of "Iron Man".

Every time I think the MPAA can't get stupider, I end up having to expand the definition of "stupider"...

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posted by James Robertson

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social media

Non-Shocker - Facebook's Problems Limited to A-Listers

May 17, 2010 13:30:42.332

This doesn't surprise me a bit - Facebook is still growing, and the "backlash" over privacy is limited to a handful of overly self important A-Listers:

Facebook has had a net gain of 10 million active users since it announced a series of new features at f8, the company's April 21st developer conference. A few high profile tech bloggers may have quit the site, but not many other people have. The number of deactivations, according to a Facebook spokesperson, is about the same as it's been all along.

Outside of the upper reaches of the blogosphere, I haven't heard anyone talking about Facebook having a problem. Here's the bottom line: no else one cares. People seem to have a pretty good grasp of what Facebook is useful for, and they use it for those things. Here's a question: if you aren't a celebrity, how the heck else are you going to regain contact with people you went to school with for a reunion? Back when people tended to live where they grew up, this was a non-issue. Now?

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posted by James Robertson

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general

Annals of Printing

May 17, 2010 14:41:36.178

Ok, this is from an ancient Windows XP box, but still: a windows update rolled by last week, and didn't auto-reboot the machine. It did leave it unable to print to anything though. So I rebooted it, brought up Excel, and tried to print an expense report. Here's what came out on take one:

4 pages of that later, the top part of the spreadsheet came out. Things worked fine when I printed again, but what the heck was that???

posted by James Robertson

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BottomFeeder

New BottomFeeder Development Build

May 17, 2010 19:07:25.356

I've posted a new development build of BottomFeeder - check it out, and let me know if you hit any roadblocks. I'm hoping to do a release of 4.7 shortly.

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posted by James Robertson

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gadgets

No More Plug Hunting?

May 18, 2010 6:45:45.138

While I haven't been paying much attention, battery life for notebooks and netbooks has been creeping up:

The 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo refresh with NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics and longer 10-hour battery life (up from 7 hours) is sitting up, nice and pretty on Apple's very own store in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Germany, and a few other sites.

Whenever I go to a conference, I hunt for the seat with power access - my 2007 era MBP chews through battery like nobody's business. It looks like things have been improving on that front...

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Seaside Tutorial (5) - Video

May 18, 2010 8:52:07.966

Today's Smalltalk Daily is part 5 of our updated Seaside tutorial, for VW 7.7/OS 8.2 and Seaside 3.0. The tutorial home page is here. Today we look at creating and using a custom session. If you're picking things up here, grab the work in progress to this point, and the download the domain model being used. Today we add a menu to our UI. Click on the viewer below to watch it now:

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

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posted by James Robertson

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copyright

The Copyright Wars

May 18, 2010 9:10:55.000

Pirating is a lot more complex than the folks at the RIAA and MPAA would have you believe. Sometimes, it's about getting around the idiotic region restrictions. Sometimes it's about getting convenient access to something you already own in a somewhat inaccessible form. Heck, sometimes it's about getting your own stuff. Read what Peter Serafinowicz has to say on the subject - it's pretty interesting, and makes it clear that these issues are anything but simple.

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posted by James Robertson

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games

Darkspawn Chronicles

May 18, 2010 17:25:59.842

I downloaded the latest DLC for DAO this morning, and then took a crack at it while I exercised. It's short; I finished it during my stint on the exercise bike.

It's the final battle for Denerim, but with two changes:

  • You play a Darkspawn Vanguard - the archdemon sends you messages for your goals, and you take other darkspawn as thralls (killing them to replace as needed)
  • It's an alternate reality where "your" gray warden never existed.

It's fun, but it's short. I haven't tried another Origins or Awakening run to see the new weapon that gets unlocked yet, but I'll plow into that after I finish Fallout 3 :)

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posted by James Robertson

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copyright

Copyright Suits Drop

May 18, 2010 20:59:03.095

Seems that after the RIAA decided to stop shooting itself in the face repeatedly, suits dropped back down to more normal levels:

New federal copyright infringement lawsuits plummeted to a six-year low in 2009, the year after the Recording Industry Association of America abandoned its litigation campaign against file sharers, court records show

With luck, the RIAA will just shrivel up and die...

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posted by James Robertson

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development

Wish I was at SPA 2010

May 18, 2010 23:02:41.000

This event sounds fascinating, and is exactly the kind of session I love at SPA conferences.

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posted by James Robertson

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gadgets

iPhone Tethering at Last?

May 19, 2010 6:45:38.000

Gizmodo reports that the latest iPhone OS 4 beta has... tethering!

That will be nice. Now if only ATT would have enabled that a year ago...

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posted by James Robertson

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law

Patents Gone Wild

May 19, 2010 7:00:58.451

I see that Microsoft is suing Salesforce - get a load out of two of the supposed infringements:

The patents cover a variety of back-end and user interface features, ranging from one covering a "system and method for providing and displaying a Web page having an embedded menu" to another that covers a "method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display."

The real question in cases like this is simple: what complete idiot at the US PTO granted those patents? I think it's high time that the entire concept of software patents just went away. Their only use seems to be as weapons.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Seaside Tutorial (6) - Video

May 19, 2010 10:47:54.324

Today's Smalltalk Daily is part 6 of our updated Seaside tutorial, for VW 7.7/OS 8.2 and Seaside 3.0. The tutorial home page is here. Today we look at creating and using a custom session. If you're picking things up here, grab the work in progress to this point, and the download the domain model being used. Today we hook up a posting UI to the menu we added yesterday. Click on the viewer below to watch it now:

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

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posted by James Robertson

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spam

EC2 and Spam

May 19, 2010 11:11:56.000

Here's a problem I didn't know existed - apparently, the various blacklisters have decided that domains residing in the EC2 IP range are spam (mail) pools, and have marked them accordingly. Reddit just ran into this problem:

We've also discovered that a lot of the verification emails we've been sending out haven't been going through. It seems that the mail server admins at some popular domains (e.g., comcast.net, rr.com, adelphia.net, and me.com) have their servers configured to consider all mail from reddit to be spam. This is because Trend Micro has marked Amazon's entire EC2 network as a "dial-up pool", and the aforementioned domains subscribe to Trend Micro's list and block all mail from anyone on said list. We've written to Trend Micro explaining that we're actually neither a spammer nor an individual end user, but rather an honest website that's kind of a big deal, and they sent us a form letter explaining how to configure Outlook Express and encouraging us to ask our ISP for further information. We'll try to figure something out as soon as time allows.

Note the truly useful form mail they got back, too :) I guess if you host on Amazon, you have to make arrangements to do something else for mail - maybe work with Google? This sort of blacklisting is a pretty broadbrush way to attack the problem, it seems to me...

posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Smalltalk FTW

May 19, 2010 13:45:30.969

Here's an interesting experiment from SPA 2010, where we find out just how fast Smalltalk lets you get started.

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posted by James Robertson

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development

The Search for Simplicity

May 19, 2010 14:44:41.000

Dave Winer hits on something interesting here - in a post about the ongoing move past XML:

This is why I find the arguments of the JSON-only proponents either lazy or dishonest. I don't know which it is. They say that XML is too complicated, but that's wrong. Just ignore everything but elements, attributes and namespaces.

You need to read the whole thing to get the context, but - to summarize - Dave laments the way XML has been deemed as "too complex", and uses XMPP as an example of that. I thought about doing something with XMPP once, but after looking at it, decided against. I wanted to leave some time in my life for other pursuits, like eating and sleeping :)

Here's the thing though - over time, the architecture astronauts grab all emergent technologies. They got their hands on XML, and ended up getting lost in the weeds (I still subscribe to the Atom mailing list - you should see what level of minutiae gets discussed there these days).

Fear not though - JSON may be simple now, but once the astronauts are done with it, someone will have to invent yet another simple text transport scheme. It seems to be the way things happen in this industry.

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posted by James Robertson

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humor

What if Star Wars was a 50's Flick?

May 19, 2010 16:19:21.544

SCI FI Wire asks "what if "The Empire Strikes Back" had been made during the 50's?

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posted by James Robertson

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itNews

Torrent-Like Flash?

May 19, 2010 16:31:17.000

Looks like Adobe is adding a cool feature to Flash Player 10.1 - torrent like P2P capability in order to take load off central services:

For broadcasters and video services, Stratus has the capacity to eliminate a significant amount of bandwidth costs. Instead of serving the media from a central server, users will provide the necessary bandwidth. Adobe’s Stratus system serves as an intermediary in this process, managing the communications between Flash players much like a BitTorrent tracker does for BitTorrent transfers

That's a pretty compelling feature (for high bandwidth sites), and one that I'm sure will cause a bit of heartburn for Apple in their war against Adobe. HTML5 can be as standards compliant as it likes, but most people care about cost a whole lot more. If this works and catches on, Apple will have an issue.

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posted by James Robertson

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marketing

Must Olympic Mascots Look Awful?

May 19, 2010 19:43:48.876

Did every marketing person in the UK leave the country, or go on strike? Were they forced to hire someone who once saw the Teletubbies through the bottom of a full glass of water?

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posted by James Robertson

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gadgets

Green Screens for the Rest of Us

May 20, 2010 6:39:34.893

Ed Driscoll explains how easy it is to get decent green screen effects with inexpensive equipment.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Seaside Tutorial (7) - Video

May 20, 2010 8:41:31.892

Today's Smalltalk Daily is part 7 of our updated Seaside tutorial, for VW 7.7/OS 8.2 and Seaside 3.0. The tutorial home page is here. Today we reuse the editor for new posts to allow for editing of existing posts. If you're picking things up here, grab the work in progress to this point, and the download the domain model being used. Click on the viewer below to watch it now:

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

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posted by James Robertson

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books

Smalltalk by Example

May 20, 2010 8:59:45.000

The online "Pharo by Example" book continues to grow - a new draft chapter was just added. Hat tip Torsten Bergmann

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posted by James Robertson

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tv

Overstaying Your Welcome

May 20, 2010 12:04:19.000

I thought in retrospect that "Buffy" should have ended with season 5 - Buffy defeated the god "Glory" and sacrificed herself to save the world. When season 6 (and later, 7) came along, it was all anti-climactic. Sure, there were fun bits (the "bored now" sequence with Willow, for instance) - but overall, the show was done, and just hung on.

Now, "Supernatural" seems poised to do the same thing. This season's battle was with Lucifer. I'd ask where the heck you can go after that, and sure enough, it sounds a lot like Buffy season 6:

Heaven and Hell have been left in complete disarray since the apocalyptic events of season five. And now, monsters, angels and demons roam across a lawless and chaotic landscape. And so Dean Winchester, who has retired from hunting and sworn never to return, finds himself being pulled back into his old life - pulled back by none other than Sam Winchester, who has escaped from Hell.

And it's on after "Smallville", which is still on the air for reasons no one understands. By this time, Clark should be Superman, but no - based on how far from canon they've strayed, he'd never be called that - instead, he'd be "The Blur".

These are stories - that should have a beginning, a middle, and - most importantly - an end.

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posted by James Robertson

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stupidity

Living in 1975

May 20, 2010 14:11:55.380

How can a modern person be able to say this?

Said [Senator] Nelson: "I've never used an ATM, so I don't know what the fees are. It's true, I don't know how to use one."

That was in the context of a debate about ATM fees. Never mind the issue itself; I'm just gobsmacked by the idea that we have a person in the Senate who's never used an ATM. Sadly, I doubt he's alone in that regard....

posted by James Robertson

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gadgets

Consumer Devices Will Sell More

May 20, 2010 15:05:01.000

This news about iPad sales doesn't surprise me:

Apple is selling more than 200,000 iPads per week. Which means, according to RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky, that sales of the company’s new device have outpaced those of the Mac in the United States and are closing in on those of the iPhone 3GS.

While PCs (which includes Macs) are common household devices now, they aren't really consumer gadgets - they take work. The iPad moves away from that space, and into the general "easy to use" gadget space - like a TV, you turn it on and you're ready to go. Any such device, if successful, will outsell a tech gadget like a PC or Mac.

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posted by James Robertson

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music

Google Jumping Ahead in Music?

May 20, 2010 16:17:55.989

Google is making music acquisition easier than Apple is - not only are they doing device based music downloads (Apple does that) - they also synch your computer and device over the net (Apple still requires tethering). If Android gets a bit easier to use, Apple will have to start playing catch up fast...

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

The Road Ahead

May 20, 2010 16:22:42.709

Tune in next Friday (May 28) at 2 PM EDT to hear us talk with Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager (Arden Thomas) about the soon to be released VW 7.7.1 and OS 8.2. We'll also talk about the roadmap going forward.

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posted by James Robertson

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gadgets

Ask and Ye Shall Receive

May 20, 2010 19:42:28.000

My wife asked me to get the A/V output cables for her iPad - and it looks like this was timed to coincide :)

If you've used the Netflix iPad app, you've probably thought how cool it would be if you could connect your iPad to a TV to watch what's streaming to the app. Someone at Netflix must have read your mind, because the company on Wednesday updated its iPad app to support video output via Apple's optional VGA, component, or composite dock connector cables.

When she has to rest her knees, this will be nice thing for her to have.

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posted by James Robertson

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social media

Things You Already Knew

May 21, 2010 6:52:12.446

I might get worked up over something like this - but it's pretty much how I assumed things worked anyway:

Bear in mind that we’re not talking 5 years ago. We’re talking last week, and even still today. Right now, as you click on advertising within a number of social network sites, the code behind them is sending your personal information (including your name and/or user ID) to the advertiser.

Cue the all too typical outrage. I just have a hard time caring anymore. Seriously - what's an advertiser going to do? My inbox is already overflowing.

Update: Ok, it's even dumber than that. The "personal data" being sent is... wait for it... the referring url. Oh, the horror.....

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posted by James Robertson

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science

No Cambrian Mass Extinction?

May 21, 2010 11:07:31.525

This is an interesting story - a new fossil find in Morocco has turned up specimens descended from what science calls the "Cambrian Explosion". It's entirely possible that the lack of life found after that era is a gap in the fossil record, not an extinction event:

The international team of scientists who discovered the 1,500 fossils said their find shows that the dark stretch in the fossil record more probably reflects an absence of preservation of fossils over the previous 25 million years.

It's not that big a surprise that there are data gaps in stuff this old - nothing on the planet stays static.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Seaside Tutorial (8) - Video

May 21, 2010 11:20:10.445

Today's Smalltalk Daily is part 8 of our updated Seaside tutorial, for VW 7.7/OS 8.2 and Seaside 3.0. The tutorial home page is here. Today we ajaxify the filtering of posts - we're using Scriptaculous, but you should be aware that Seaside 3.0 also has JQuery support. If you're picking things up here, grab the work in progress to this point, and the download the domain model being used. Also, a tip of the hat to Julian Fitzell, who got me over a small hurdle I was having with the Scriptaculous updater code. Click on the viewer below to watch it now:

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

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posted by James Robertson

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development

Amazon Gets More Cloud Competition

May 21, 2010 13:44:09.000

Google has added a cloud storage service that is plug compatible with Amazon's S3:

Google Storage is interoperable with a large number of cloud storage tools and libraries that work with services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Eucalyptus Systems, Inc. To use these tools and libraries, all you have to do is change the request endpoint (URI) that the tool or library uses so it points to the Google Storage URI, and configure the tool or library to use your Google Storage developer keys.

That's pretty cool; it means that developers can flip back and forth pretty easily based on price and performance. The pricing looks competitive as well.

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posted by James Robertson

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social media

Mourning a Long Gone Thing

May 21, 2010 17:47:12.000

Sometimes I think Nick Carr is unaware of what year it is:

Imagine, Lanier said, a young Zimmerman trying to turn himself into Dylan today. Forget it. He would be trailing his online identity - his "one identity" - all the way from Hibbing to Manhattan. "There's that goofy Zimmerman kid from Minnesota," would be the recurring word on the street in Greenwich Village. The caterpillar Zimmerman, locked into his early identity by myriad indelible photos, messages, profiles, friends, and "likes" plastered across the Web, would remain the caterpillar Zimmerman. Forever.

This is in the context of Facebook (and social media in general) having a persistent impact on your identity. What Carr fails to notice is this: it's been less and less possible to "shed your identity" for eons now. Facebook is the least of it - there's your whole credit history, something that Dyland didn't have to worry that much about "back in the day".

It's not just Facebook, either. If you're the least bit prominent online, you have Google footprints. Good luck getting rid of those :)

posted by James Robertson

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tv

Lost Worldwide

May 22, 2010 6:31:47.000

The "Lost" finale is going to be like a huge sports event - the Superbowl or World Cup:

Well, we know Lost's upcoming series finale is big, but this big? Countries around the world are planning to simulcast the airing of ABC's Lost 2-1/2 hour series finale, "The End," at the same time as the U.S. West Coast broadcast

That's something you don't see every day :) Still - that leaves the east coast ahead by three hours, so there's still the chance for spoilers.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Seaside For Speed

May 22, 2010 11:13:24.076

While I haven't played this type of caching game with Seaside, I've done very similiar things with my blog server (which is an SSP/Servlet type of thing):

my point is that I needed some simple caching of a method's results to help a page load a little faster in Seaside. All I did was add a new instance variable to my model instance that lazy-loaded the result of the calculation. I then added a few more places where this "cache" gets invalidated from other method calls, and I'm done. I didn't have to install gems, configure a new server like memcache, read docs on a gem's interface to memcache, etc. I simply leveraged the tools available in Smalltalk, and built a simple thing that just works. I don't have to worry about persisting it as its lazy-loaded. Which really is how memcache is usually used with Rails, as a place to temporarily store the results of an expensive computation

Yeah, adding a caching scheme to a Smalltalk web app is pretty simple. It's one more way that having an image makes things easier - and not just at development time.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Scratch Day at Mit

May 22, 2010 16:37:10.337

Looks like it's a scratch sort of day at MIT

posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

A WebVelocity Use Scenario: Podcast

May 23, 2010 10:12:24.498

World Tour This week's podcast features our Product Manager, Arden Thomas, at one of this year's world tour events. In this podcast, Arden sketches out a WebVelocity use scenario. As I mentioned last week, the 1.1 beta is coming soon - if you're interested in taking a look at the beta when it's ready, send me an email.

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!

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posted by James Robertson

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books

The Design of Design

May 23, 2010 14:37:56.486

I wrote a bit about Fred Brooks' fine book earlier, but now I've finished it.

While the essays in the early part of the book were quite good (and I touched on that in my earlier post), the case studies were perhaps the most illustrative things. Why? Partly because Brooks does what far too few of us are willing to do - ponder oversights and mistakes made during the design process and how they impacted later use. That came up both in discussions of his beach house (which he was a co-designer), and of the IBM System/360.

After any major deliverable, I think it's worth taking stock of what happened and why. As well, these words from Brooks (in the context of the 360) make a ton of sense for any real system:

Allow plenty of time for design. It makes the product much better and useful longer, and it might even make delivery sooner by reducing rework

Two large examples from the history of VisualWorks come to mind: VW 2.0 and VW 5i.0. In the first case, what came to be known as the ObjectLens (and O/R mapping framework) was brought in from the outside by marketing, and then an additional year of development work was done in order to make it minimally deliverable. No on at PPS (or the successor owners) was ever happy with Lens - in fact, the original developer of the code had left engineering, and been allowed to take the code with him - partly because no one in engineering had much faith in it. That code has been problematic ever since, and is only now being replaced with something better (Glorp).

VW 5i.0 was rushed for management reasons - there were bad numbers about to come out, and management wanted a release "to soften the blow". 5i.0 was not even vaguely ready for release; Store was unstable, and the (then new) namespace system still had kinks in it. It took two releases from the new owner (Cincom) before the 5i line was minimally usable, and, to some extent, things didn't really stabilize until the 7.x release line.

Those were both management failures as well as design failures, but - a willingness to spend more time on design, and less on "quick fixes" would have been better for everyone. That's one of the major lessons of the case studies, at least for me. Overall, I liked the book - it's accessible to anyone who's associated even loosely with design, and makes high level points without going off into the weeds on any of the examples. I highly recommend it.

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smalltalk

Curl in Seaside

May 23, 2010 15:14:45.731

Robert Shiplett explains his latest adventures in getting Seaside to push out Curl:

Seaside is an immensely flexible web framework when used for HTML + JavaScript + CSS + JSON + JQuery so it was only natural to want to use it simply as Seaside + Curl.

Using VW 7.7 and Seaside 3.0. There are a few hurdles; read his post for the details.

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posted by James Robertson

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tv

Lost Ends

May 24, 2010 3:05:16.000

With the end of the series, it's time to figure out what the ending meant. From the final conversation between Jack and his father, one possible interpretation is that they were all dead, and this - it was like the final scene from Saint Elsewhere . So let's look at that notion.

The last scene - where Jack is stumbling in the jungle, and falls down - that was right after the crash (in 2004), where Jack has survived, but not for long. Then the camera pans over the crash scene (no remnants of a settlement). So... combine all that, and you get the following:

  • They all died in the original crash
  • Somehow, the people who were brought together in the church at the end had a "shared consciousness" thing going, where they constructed the entire reality
  • Desmond bringing them to the church at the end represented all of them finally coming to terms with their deaths
  • In that sense, the "alternate reality" was simply another escape from what had really happened to them

So... you can go all Matrix on that. There was no boat, there was no magic island, there was no man in black or Jacob. There was just a crash, followed by a collective refusal to accept death - and the series was that set of people living out a different reality than death, with the final episode bringng them to acceptance.

I'm not sure that's how I wouldve gone about ending it, but that's how it went. It was all a dream.

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gadgets

How is this Better than Skype?

May 24, 2010 7:01:51.144

I'm curious as to what Cisco plans to offer for $500 (or more) that will be better than skype:

The company gave a sneak preview of the new Telepresence terminals at its Cisco Networkers event in Cannes in February. The system will retail at around $500, a far cry from the six-figure sum that businesses expect to pay but probably higher than was expected.

For $500, you won't be getting a life sized video wall. If I want a video chat on my TV, all I really need is a cable. So... I have no idea what Cisco will be offering that will deliver more value than what I have already.

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smalltalk

Seaside Tutorial (9) - Video

May 24, 2010 8:02:23.658

Today's Smalltalk Daily is part 7 of our updated Seaside tutorial, for VW 7.7/OS 8.2 and Seaside 3.0. The tutorial home page is here. Today we add some style (CSS) to the application. If you're picking things up here, grab the work in progress to this point, and the download the domain model being used. Click on the viewer below to watch it now:

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posted by James Robertson

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Simplicity = Productivity

May 24, 2010 15:32:00.660

A few simple concepts, along with consistent application, goes further than tons of "features":

Smalltalk seems like a good environment for learning better OO design, but it makes you wish Java or whatever you’re using were as fast, easy and simple. Apart from the libraries, there isn’t much difference in capability, yet the one is so much simpler and more expressive. It also makes me hate Gosling a little bit more. If the only thing he took from Lisp was garbage collection, and he took the single-inheritance idea from Smalltalk, he’s an a******because Smalltalk also has garbage collection. It’s like saying you have a dish that incorporates Thai and Greek cuisines, and that the Thai aspect was using chicken.

Heh - I like the way he described that. Read the whole thing :)

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posted by James Robertson

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