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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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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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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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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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posted by James Robertson

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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:

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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smalltalk

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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smalltalk

Summer of Smalltalk Code

May 25, 2010 6:24:08.321

Coding has gotten underway for the six Smalltalk projects that are part of the Google summer of code.

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posted by James Robertson

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advertising

Twitter's Vague Ad Model

May 25, 2010 6:58:29.041

Twitter has decided on (shocker), an ad model for revenues. The fun part is their terms of service, where they want to shutdown anyone else doing something similar on Twitter:

In cases where Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) of the advertising sale, we require you to compensate us (recoupable against any fees payable to Twitter for data licensing).

But what does that even mean? You could classify my Smalltalk posting as advertising for Cincom, and I do a lot of that (take the daily screencasts as the prime example). I post them here, the posts get auto-tweeted, and then the tweets find their way into the Facebook news stream. How does that get classified by Twitter?

What about the book reviews I do, where I put in an Amazon affiliate link? I don't get paid for those reviews (and the affiliate links don't pay either), but it could be called advertising. What if I actually reach the monthly minimum at some point and get a check from Amazon? Does that count?

The theoretical answer is "no" - they only want to go after bigger players. The vagueness leaves a huge hole for paranoia though, and I'm not the only one asking these questions...

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smalltalk

Seaside Tutorial (10) - Video

May 25, 2010 9:30:48.274

Today's Smalltalk Daily is part 10 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 how Seaside supports resource urls and File Libraries. If you're picking things up here, grab the work in progress to this point, and the download the domain model being used. Today's screencast looks at adding external resources (images, css, etc) to your application, either directly via a static url, or with Seaside file libraries. 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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games

The Second Run Through

May 25, 2010 10:31:42.000

One thing I've noticed about the newer plot driven video games - you really need to run through them at least twice. Two cases in point - Fallout 3 and Dragon Age: Origins . I played both games extensively after I first got them, but I missed tons of stuff - not just side quests, but lots of things that could help with the main plot (in fact, I never did finish the first character I created in DAO). With Fallout, I finished the main plot, but left the rest of the world largely unexplored.

On the subsequent plays, I took a lot more time - heck, I maxed my character to level 30 (I have the Game of the Year edition) in Fallout before I even started the main plot. By that time, I had enough custom weapons that I was taking Raider attacks as boring events that my dog could mostly handle on his own :)

This is quite different from most movies (at least for me). There are some movies I like watching again - LOTR comes to mind. For the most part though, it's one and done. First person shooters are mostly like that for me. The plots are linear, and you just run down the track. What I really like are the larger games. I'm running through Mass Effect now, and will play ME 2 once I finish that.

On a humorous side note, I'm getting a lot more play time since I got a toe injury that makes jogging painful. I'm behind on my podcast listening, but the funny thing is, I get a lot more exercise. An hour passes very easily on the exercise bike while I'm playing a game :)

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smalltalk

Smalltalk in London

May 25, 2010 16:10:07.858

There's a Seaside sprint/Camp Smalltalk happening in London this July - the 16th - 18th:

The UK Smalltalk User Group would like to invite everyone to attend Camp Smalltalk London this July 16-18. The Pharo team will be holding one of their regular coding sprints and, in true Camp Smalltalk spirit, other Smalltalkers will be gathering together to do some productive work on their projects. In addition, we want to welcome those who just want to learn more about Smalltalk, so we'll be holding an introductory tutorial on the first morning. We'll have you writing Smalltalk by lunch! If there's interest, we'll follow up with a Seaside tutorial the next day.

Sounds like fun - and Cincom is hosting a dinner at the event. Follow the link for details.

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management

An Opening for Sony

May 25, 2010 19:20:18.000

With the loss of key people from the MS entertainment division, I'd have to say that Sony now has a real chance to play catch up in the console space:

Robbie Bach and J Allard, founding fathers of Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices Division, are leaving the company as part of a broader restructuring that will give CEO Steve Ballmer more direct oversight of consumer businesses including Microsoft's struggling mobile unit.

Especially with Ballmer running things. He's like a one man morale destruction machine...

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science

Electric Cars?

May 25, 2010 21:15:26.960

With how little I drive, an electric car might actually be worthwhile for me - assuming that it could be recharged in a reasonable time period. That's where this article about "faster" charging made me wonder. Consider:

Most Level 3 stations are considered “fast chargers,” but they don’t have to be. The conventional wisdom is that if an average EV battery can be charged to full in about a half hour, then it is a fast charge.

Which tells me that electric cars, at least with the technology available now, are useful for... maybe people like me. Now, how many drivers fit that profile? I don't know, but even for light commuters (my wife drives around 15 miles one way), it's simply useless. Why? Right now, a car trip doesn't have to be plotted out. If you notice you need gas, you pop into a station, and you leave 5 minutes later. With electric cars? Well, you better plan on staying wherever you are for awhile when you charge (the "fast" chargers are still awaiting standards, and the next level is an 8 hour wait).

I just don't see that working out very well for most use cases. Sure, you could use it for short trips - but heck, for less money, a hybrid or regular car will do the same short trips and also let you go as far as you want.

So... what's the market segment for this? I'm not seeing it.

Update: Popular Mechanics sketches out a scenario for 2020, when EVs have become somewhat widespread. The thing that popped out at me is how much more power generatio capability we'll need for that, never mind the time issues I outlined above...

Update 2: In the comments, it was proposed that instead of recharging stations, we simply have battery exchange stations. Well. There are two problems with that:

  • At least at present, there are no standards in this area - a Tesla battery won't work in a Leaf, or vice versa
  • The Leaf battery is 600 pounds. That's not a simple drop in/replace operation. Never mind the storage requirements for the supposed exchange station - any station about the size of a current gas station will run out of space quickly.

I pulled the weight from this article

Bottom line - electric cars are not practical for most real world uses...

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general

Book List Updated

May 26, 2010 8:51:48.884

I updated my book review page recently - there's still a lot to do there, as I've been doing short reviews since the early 2000's :)

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smalltalk

Seaside Tutorial (11) - Video

May 26, 2010 9:12:55.648

Today's Smalltalk Daily is part 11 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 static (bookmarkable) urls for your Seaside application. If you're picking things up here, grab the work in progress to this point, and the download the domain model being used. Today's screencast looks at creating static urls for the parts of your application that need bookmarkable entry points. 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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itNews

Fast, But Expensive

May 26, 2010 11:37:30.000

Engadget reports that Comcast is starting to rollout 105/10 service. That's interesting, but expensive - they have a mandatory $250 installation charge, followed by a $200/month bill. Meanwhile, my mid tier FIOS service is 25/25 - and it looks like Verizon also has a 50/20 service for $140/month. I'm not sure that's worth it to me yet, but if they start offering faster service, maybe it will be. At least there's some level of competition in my area.

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social media

Identifying the Error

May 26, 2010 14:46:40.000

It's easy to blame Facebook for a lack of sufficient privacy controls, as Bruce Nussbaum's students apparently do - but seriously - if you post lurid details about yourself on a website you don't control, you shouldn't be shocked when other people find out:

Then Gen Y grew up and their culture and needs changed. My senior students started looking for jobs and watched, horrified, as corporations went on their Facebook pages to check them out. What was once a private, gated community of trusted friends became an increasingly open, public commons of curious strangers. The few, original, loose tools of network control on Facebook no longer proved sufficient. The Gen Yers wanted better, more precise privacy controls that allowed them to secure their existing private social lives and separate them from their new public working lives.

To some extent, that's like keeping a highly personal diary, and then storing it on your front porch. Sure, the porch is your property - but it's not exactly private. I sure don't have any illusions about how private something I put on Facebook (or any site I don't control) is - I run with a default assumption that "anyone can see it".

Acting otherwise is simply naive. Nussbaum's students have been smacked by reality. They may not like it, but they need to get used to it.

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open source

The App Store and the GPL

May 26, 2010 21:13:06.303

Here's an interesting app store issue:

An iPhone port of GNU Go is currently being distributed through Apple's App Store. However, this distribution is not in compliance with the GNU GPL. The primary problem is that Apple imposes numerous legal restrictions on use and distribution of GNU Go through the iTunes Store Terms of Service, which is forbidden by section 6 of GPLv2. So today we have written to Apple and asked them to come into compliance.

That's from the FSF. They go on to say that they expect Apple to drop the app from the store rather than comply; that's how I'd bet. I also wouldn't be surprised to see the SDK development rules updated to forbid GPL code....

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gadgets

Is Steve Jobs Right about Flash?

May 27, 2010 5:55:25.000

Watch the video and see - as PCWorld says:

For all this expensive posturing the one thing we still don't have is a version of Flash for smartphones that doesn't leech performance and battery life.

Thus far, it seems that having Flash on the phone is a problem. Admittedly, it's a beta, but - watch and make your own call.

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itNews

Microsoft to the WWDC?

May 27, 2010 6:49:59.364

If this rumor is true (and mind you, it's a nothing but a single sourced rumor right now) it would sure be a visible turn around. Remember the giant projection of Bill Gates at an Apple event back in 1997? At that time, Apple was barely afloat, and Microsoft desperately needed to keep some competition around. Well, it's 13 years later, and things have certainly changed. Apple's market cap now exceeds Microsoft's, and there's this rumor:

Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with tiny Global Equities Research, contends that 7 minutes of the June 7 keynote by Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been blocked off for a presentation by Microsoft to talk about Visual Studio 2010, the company’s suite of development tools. Chowdhry says the new version of VS will allow developers to write native applications for the iPhone, iPad and Mac OS. And here’s the kicker: he thinks Microsoft’s presentation could be given by none other than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

If that's true, it would be a very visible turn about. Even if it's not true, you have to consider where Apple is in the most relevant space (mobile) compared to MS right now. Apple is in the lead, and MS is busy rearranging the deck chairs.

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posted by James Robertson

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media

The Great Invisibility Experiment

May 27, 2010 7:06:52.556

People have been telling Ruper Murdoch to put up or shut up for awhile - meaning, if he really thinks that "Google is stealing his content", he should just use robots.txt to cut off access to his news sites. Well - it seems that he's going to try that experiment:

The papers, which plan to start charging users for access to their newly redesigned Web sites in late June, will prevent Google and other search engines from linking to their stories. Although they are not the first papers to erect pay barriers around their content, the papers are going a step further by making most of their site invisible to Google's Web crawler. Except for their homepages, no stories will show up on Google.

I have no idea how they expect anyone to find their material after that. It's not like the old days, when you would walk out, get the paper off the driveway and browse - now you find things via:

  • Search
  • Friend referrals (Twitter, Facebook, etc)
  • Automated Search (Google News, Yahoo News, etc)
  • RSS/Atom (not the mainstream, but a lot of influencers)

Notice what's not on that list - directly visiting the site. Oh sure, there are people who go to media sites directly (I'll go to the NY Times for baseball coverage, for instance). But I don't think it's the primary way it happens. Within a month, I expect that traffic will drop off precipitously at these outlets, and Murdoch will end up executing a painful climb down from his idiotic "Google is stealing from me" mindset. It won't just be painful though; it will be costly. Whatever rates he's getting for ads now will plummet with the traffic levels.

When you look up the phrase "bad plan" in the future, you'll run across an item about this as the prime example...

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Seaside Tutorial (12) - Video

May 27, 2010 9:03:51.342

Today's Smalltalk Daily is part 11 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. Today we wrap up the tutorial by showing you how to save your work. In the screencast, I mention using Store as the best way to save your work; to get more information on setting up and using Store, try these tutorials:

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

Barnes and Noble Goes to the iPad

May 27, 2010 11:03:05.601

Like Amazon, B&N has apparently decided that the Nook is not a core item to be protected - the book business is the key thing:

Unlike Apple and Amazon, bookselling behemoth Barnes & Noble didn't have an e-reading app available for the iPad on day one. But it's just released an iPad version of its eReader

My wife was happy to hear that - it opens up another catalog of books for the iPad. While there are some luddites around claiming that print is better, I don't think that's the issue. This is an additional channel for reading, not a replacement. It will work better for some kinds of reading, and less well for others (I'm thinking textbooks in which you might want to annotate or highlight). Bear in mind though, most of us stop using textbooks after the age of 21 or so, so trumpeting that lack as a key problem is kind of narrow-minded...

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posted by James Robertson

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gadgets

Grab that Phone Data

May 27, 2010 12:58:06.000

Engadget reports that the iPhone is pretty much "wide open", so far as accessing data goes:

Bernd and fellow security guru Jim Herbeck have discovered that plugging even a fully up-to-date, non-jailbroken iPhone 3GS into a computer running Ubuntu Lucid Linux allows nearly full read access to the phone's storage -- even when it's locked

This is why the meme about Macs being secure, while Windows is insecure has been so flawed. I do believe that Unix is a better basis for security than Windows, but - Apple has mostly gotten by on a "security via obscurity" model - Macs are still rare enough (in percentage terms) that it's simply not worth bothering with them. There are so many Windows boxes that it's just better target environment for bad actors.

However, over in mobile-land, things are different. iPhones are very common, so having this kind of vulnerability is the sort of thing that could end up giving Apple some real PR issues.

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posted by James Robertson

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tv

A Lost Epilogue?

May 27, 2010 15:37:26.000

Michael Emerson (Lost's Benjamin Linus) says that the Lost DVD set will include an epilogue:

It turns out that when the complete Lost series is released on DVD, the set will include what Emerson calls an "epilogue" that will focus on Ben and Hurley protecting the Island in the post-Jack era.
"It's 12 or 14 minutes that opens a window onto that gap of unknown time between Hurley becoming number one and the end of the series," Emerson told host Kevin Pereira. "It's self-contained, although it's a rich period in the show's mythology that has never been explored."

So... the flash sideways was the post life before they could move on, but the island story was real. It's all very confusing :)

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posted by James Robertson

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