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development

Y-2010

January 6, 2010 21:32:05.537

When I read stories like this, I end up feeling a whole lot better about my own code. An astonishing number of systems had trouble with the changeover from 2009 to 2010:

Chips used in bank cards to identify account numbers could not read the year 2010 properly, making it impossible for ATMs and point of sale machines in Germany to read debit cards of 30 million people since New Year's Day, according to published reports. The workaround is to reprogram the machines so the chips don't have to deal with the number.

To get that, you would have to have your software assume the first three digits of the year and just add the last one - apparently, some developer just assumed "of course this won't be running in 2010". The hilarious part is that this happened so soon after the whole "just assume the leading 19" thing from the last century's software...

posted by James Robertson

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gadgets

Pandora Versus Satellite Radio

January 6, 2010 21:10:25.387

I listen to Pandora in the car - use the iPhone app, plug a cable into the Aux jack of the stereo, and off we go. That's a pretty simple solution, but it looks like Pandora is working with Pioneer on a wireless solution that could go into either factory installed or aftermarket systems:

Pioneer will sell a device that will detect users' Pandora settings on their Apple iPhones. The internet radio service claims about 42 million users, which could mean substantial revenue for Pioneer, even if just a fraction pay the $1,200 to buy the Pandora connection system.

That price point is ridiculous, but the idea seems good. Getting internet radio in the car could put a hammer to satellite radio - but only if the price comes down to reasonable levels. Right now, only an idiot would pay $1200. You could sell this for a small markup over the cost of an aux cable - so, maybe $20, tops. $1200? You have to wonder what they've been smoking...

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posted by James Robertson

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general

New Seats

January 6, 2010 17:25:16.961

Our old loveseat has had a good run, but it was time to replace it. Since my wife has knee issues, we decided to get a pair of recliners:

They are pretty darn comfortable, but this changes my standard "sit in a high back chair with a table" arrangement with the laptop. So I headed to Amazon and ordered a lap desk. I should have that Friday; I'll write up a review after I see how well that works out.

posted by James Robertson

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advertising

Fun with Browsers

January 6, 2010 14:00:12.421

I still can't settle on a browser. Yesterday, Firefox started being unable to successfully upload to Vimeo. Chrome worked, but I have other irritations with Chrome. Meanwhile, on Windows, I was trying to browse an intranet site at Cincom, and getting a 500. Call Helpdesk, ask other people, no one else has the problem. I fire up Windows in a VM, try it there - works fine. So apparently, IE got a transient 500 response at some point , and then helpfully cached it for me.

These tools all stink, just differently :)

posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Smalltalk in Toronto

January 6, 2010 11:45:39.244

On January 26th, there will be two Cincom Smalltalk events in Toronto, Ontario:

The evening event is at a new location, so if you've been to a TSUG meeting before, this is not in the same place.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Enhancing the Smalltalk Editor

January 6, 2010 8:31:27.116

The code editor in Cincom Smalltalk can be a bit basic - there are some loadable packages available that enhance it. Today we'll take a look at oe of them, and show you where to find others.

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

Smalltalk in Ottawa

January 6, 2010 7:03:16.762

The Ottawa STUG has Dave Buck on January 13:

Over the years, there have been several attempts to build a reporting framework in Smalltalk. It's difficult, though, to build a framework that has the power to produce the kind of reports expected in modern systems. David will talk about various approaches he's used in the past along with his current favorite of using Apace FOP.

Follow the link for the location and contact info. Dave is one of the best Smalltalkers I know; if you're near Ottawa then, make a point to check it out.

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posted by James Robertson

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weather

No Quips About the Warm Weather This Week

January 6, 2010 6:59:31.589

My dad has been silent about the nicer weather in Florida this week - he often likes to tell me how he's about to hit the golf course. Well... this week there's been less of that:

Honestly, that's really odd weather for the part of Florida he and my mom live in (the Space Coast region). Especially since it's predicted to hang around for nearly a week...

posted by James Robertson

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development

Hard Coding

January 6, 2010 6:53:24.509

I should know better by now - when I hacked in support to my client posting tool for automated tweeting, I hardcoded the blog that the tweet was assumed to be coming from. Well, here I am, with a new blog, and said assumption blew up on me :) Hat tip chaetal for getting on me about it :)

posted by James Robertson

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movies

Hobbits are Coming

January 6, 2010 6:30:07.229

Spotted in SCI FI Wire:

Looks like Guillermo del Toro's Hobbit movies are moving ahead as planned: Production Weekly now reports that they will begin a 14-month production schedule in June.

That's good news - there's been a lot of talk about issues with this production, and I'm really looking forward to it...

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posted by James Robertson

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podcasting

Back to our Regular Program

January 5, 2010 22:38:15.697

We'll be getting back to the regular podcast this weekend - Michael and I will be talking about Smalltalk implementations. When I have a more definite time, I'll get that posted so you can listen live on justin.tv.

posted by James Robertson

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management

Enterprisey Versus Productive

January 5, 2010 14:19:21.159

I think Tim Bray hits this one on the head, talking about the difference between typical small shop/open source efforts and their enterprise cousins:

It's like this: The time between having an idea and its public launch is measured in days not months, weeks not years. Same for each subsequent release cycle. Teams are small. Progress is iterative. No oceans are boiled, no monster requirements documents written.

I've seen this up close with website launches. I watched a project take over 2 years to go from initial concept to deployment once. Ten days ago, I decided to launch this blog and just did it. Now, this blog is hardly akin to an enterprise system, but, take it back to when I launched my Cincom blog in 2002 - that was 4 classes sitting on an underpowered server. The output was pretty ugly, and it didn't scale worth a darn, but - and here's the crucial point - it was live.

I didn't ask for (or get) permission, I just went ahead and ran. Over time, I had to make changes, but I did those iteratively as they were needed. I'm still doing that; I patched a bug in this blog and the corporate one just this morning. The key, I think, is to take the Nike line seriously: just do it.

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posted by James Robertson

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games

I'll Never See my Daughter Again

January 5, 2010 13:46:02.676

She's already obsessed with Dragon Age Origins; with an expansion planned for March, she'll never come up for air :)

posted by James Robertson

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weather

The Joys of Cold Weather

January 5, 2010 10:14:00.356

It's cold enough here in Maryland, but I took a look at the part of Florida where my parents live - it's 43 there now. I imagine that's screwing up my Dad's golf league :)

Meanwhile, I see where Orlando hit 21 F overnight, and that it'll go down to 28 tonight. I was in Disney on vacation in 1982, the last time that happened. I stayed a week over with my sister (we were both in college then, so had more time than my parents did) - every garden in Disney had been cleaned out and replanting was starting. I expect they'll have to do that again. That's got to be a huge pile of money....

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posted by James Robertson

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gadgets

Too Little, Too Late

January 5, 2010 9:44:57.614

Like Blu-Ray, I think this effort at a standard download format for online video is a day late and a dollar short? Why? Well, there's recognition even from the advocates:

"The market desperately needs this, but in some senses it is already moving past it toward rental of content over ownership," said Danielle Levitas, an analyst at IDC. Ms. Levitas also said DECE's progress had been slower than she expected: "I wanted to see devices in the market already announced by C.E.S."

We just picked up an XBox this fall, and I signed up for Netflix not long after that - for a flat monthly fee, I can stream a whole bunch of content whenever I feel like it. Apple just bought a streaming outfit (LaLa), so it seem slike they know where things are headed, too.

There are a small number of movies/TV shows that I want to own persistently - video simply isn't like music; most things I watch, I have no interest in seeing them again. Even for the things I do want to see again, streaming mostly solves that problem. Maybe if these guys had a standard right now, and a slew of hardware supporting it, this would have a chance of catching on - but I have my doubts even then. Blu-Ray seems to be very slow to pick up, because DVD's are good enough, everyone has a player, and streaming is coming online. Where does this initiative fit, exactly?

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Missing Source Code

January 5, 2010 8:54:47.611

What do you do if you start up VisualWorks and all you see is decompiled code? This video shows you what's probably wrong, and how to fix it.

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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marketing

The New Marketing Battle Cry

January 5, 2010 7:48:58.509

I'm starting to see that marketing is a lot like teaching - periodically, new fads sweep through the field, and a lot of people get swept up in the new idea - whether what they were doing before worked or not. Take this David Meerman Scott Video from Eloqua Experience, for instance, where the catch phrase is "No one cares about your product".

From this, the take away is that you should promote something other than your product - success stories (real or imagined), problems your product solves (channeling the late 90's "solution, not software" thing), and so on. There's something to that; people do want to hear more about the problems you can solve than about a dry list of features and functions.

But.... a lot depends on what kind of product you are promoting, too. Take development tools in general, and, for me, Smalltalk in particular. Back in the early and mid 90's, there was a lot of top down selling happening in this field - I remember being involved in plenty of "bake offs", where I'd go in as a Smalltalk SE (sales engineer) and do a competitive demo against a guy promoting a competing product (typically some 4GL toolset). That simply doesn't happen anymore; tools in this segment move bottom up now. Developers read blogs, news sources reporting on the IT sector, and they talk to friends about what they use/see. When something catches their eye, they download it, and - so long as the installation and getting started process doesn't immediately disqualify it, they might try and build something small.

That process right there is where product marketing plays a role in the development environment space. It's correct that developers, like everyone else, want to know what problem your product solves, but for them, the problems in question are development ones. If your tool is aimed at a particular niche - Ruby on Rails and Web Velocity are specifically web development things, for instance - you aren't going to promote the building of Windows client side customer care apps. So what kind of information is the developer looking for as he/she evaluates the tool? Yes, the boring old "features and functions" stuff. Spiffed up for the modern era, that means simple tutorial pages and short videos rather than large piles of doc, but still: the developer is interested in the basics.

None of that contradicts the basics of David's thesis, but it does mean that you can't just take the glib 30,000 foot view and decree that "features and fuctions" is of no interest to anyone. It all depends on who the audience is. For instance, let's say that the developer evaluating your tools likes what he sees, and decides "hey, I'd like to get me some of that". At that point, they'll go talk to a manager about using the tool. That conversation won't revolve around low level details; the manager will mostly assume that his staff has done that work for him. The manager will go on a hunt for other information:

  • Does anyone else use this stuff (answer: success stories)
  • What does it cost (answer: information on the website)

The roadblocks at the management level can be political, of course - you could have an IT manager who has decided that "this shop uses technology X, period", where X is usually some safe sounding mainstream thing. Barring that, all the roadblocks are back at the vendor end: can the manager find the information he's looking for? If not, you lost a prospect very early in the process.

In summary, you need to take what David's saying and apply it to the field you're in. What information your target audience wants and needs from you depends on who that target audience is. You simply can't apply a blanket rule.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Video from Smalltalks 2009

January 5, 2010 7:11:36.989

Looks like the Gemstone folks have split video from their presentation at Smalltalks 2009 into multiple parts, and have released the first part.

Gemstone has released part 2

Gemstone has released part 3

Gemstone has released part 4

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Smalltalk Conferences

January 5, 2010 6:32:26.388

The Cincom Smalltalk team be coming to see you later this month:

  • January 21: Seattle, Washington
  • January 26: Toronto, Ontario
  • January 28: Baltimore/Washinton, Maryland

Attendance is free; you can register here. We're prepared to show you what's new and exciting in the product suite - VW 7.7 and OS 8.2 have just been released, and Web Velocity 1.0 has only been out for a little while. So... here's a question: if you plan to attend one of these events, what would you like to see? What topics would you like to see covered? Drop a comment, or send me email.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Cincom Smalltalk NC: Closer

January 4, 2010 20:41:16.217

We're closer to the NC release at Cincom - the shipments of the commercial product are just starting to go out (after the holiday break), and we thought it would bad form to get the NC in people's hands before paying customers saw the bits :)

There are also a few loose ends being wrapped up technically on the NC installlers, but we think all of this stuff is close. You should expect to see VW 7.7 and OS 8.2 NC available within a week or two (fingers crossed)

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Smalltalk Beyond the Environment

January 4, 2010 18:07:12.010

Ok, this is an interesting little trend - James Ladd has been working on a Smalltalk implementation that would run on the JVM (part of his motivation is the widespread installation of the JVM, part is the widespread usage of tools like Eclipse). Now I see that there's some work to make it possible to develop Gemstone/S on Eclipse:

GemDev is (highly) experimental implementation of Eclipse-based IDE for GemStone Smalltalk, with intention to bring mainstream tools to Smalltalk. IDE provides features like Smalltalk Browser, code editor or object inspector. Basic navigation functionality (searching for references/implementors/senders) is available together with syntax coloring, hyperlinking, on the fly syntax error checking and code warnings.

Meanwhile, the Web Velocity team has been working to make Smalltalk available in a completely new environment - native web browser based tools. One thing is for sure - there's a lot of interesting "break the traditional metaphors" work going on, which is good - stagnation is death :)

posted by James Robertson

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gadgets

All Eyes Turn to Apple

January 4, 2010 17:22:02.259

The Apple Tablet rumors are reaching a crescendo - PCWorld is reporting that Apple will be making a major product announcement in January:

Sources in a position to know tell me Apple is indeed planning a media event later this month at which the company will announce a major new product. The gathering is to be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, a space Apple often uses for media events like this. According to other sources, it will occur on Wednesday, Jan. 27, not Tuesday, Jan. 26, as had been rumored.

Now, it could be the tablet - or, it could be something along the lines of a real product where the AppleTV device lives. Based on some recent activity Apple's been involved in, I wonder if that's the real play here? It would be a lot like Apple to let the Tablet flames rise, and then come out with something completely different.

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posted by James Robertson

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open source

In Which an OSS Advocate Fails to Learn

January 4, 2010 12:48:56.082

I love this "call to action" from Michael Widenius amusing - here he decries Oracle acquiring MySQL:

It's not in the Internet users interest that one key piece of the net would be owned by an entity that has more to gain by severely limiting and in the long run even killing it as an open source product than by keeping it alive. If Oracle were allowed to acquire MySQL, we would be looking at less competition among databases, which will mean higher license and support prices. In the end it's always the consumers and the small businesses that have to pay the bills, in this case to Oracle.

Simple question for Mr. Widenius: just who sold MySQL to Sun in the first place? Once you did that (and took the huge payday, I might add) - what did you expect was going to happen? A future filled with happy Unicorns?

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

When Flexibility Backfires: Video from ESUG 2009

January 4, 2010 11:59:11.469

Here's Yann Monclair at ESUG 2009, talking about some of the downsides of flexibility in Smalltalk. To get a copy of his slides, click here. To watch, click on the viewer below:

If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smaltalk Videos"?

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Smalltalk on the XO

January 4, 2010 8:28:53.515

The XO is another name for the OLPC - and it looks like some interesting Smalltalk (Squeak) work is going on to more fully integrate Smalltalk into the environment on that system - check out Milan Zimmerman's work to get Smalltalk hooked up to the activity system - meaning, making it possible to build apps that:

  • Are developed in Etoys (perhaps more precisely, in the underlying Squeak Smalltalk environment).
  • Run in Sugar, allowing interaction with the Datastore.
  • Participates in the Sugar environment, that is, can be saved/resumed in the Sugar Journal, can copy/paste onto a Journal.

Sounds pretty cool.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Condensing the Changes File

January 4, 2010 8:08:30.635

There's an option under the System menu in VisualWorks (available in ObjectStudio 8 using the VW launcher) to Condense Changes. Today's video covers what that menu item does, why you might want to use it, and - more importantly - what it actually does.

If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smaltalk Daily"?

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posted by James Robertson

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itNews

It's not about Needing a Tablet

January 4, 2010 6:20:03.930

While I agree with Scoble's latest post about tablet computers - I do think that they'll go pretty mainstream if Apple releases one (whether Apple does so is still up in the air, regardless of how "solid" the rumors seem to be).

However - coming from Scoble, who's been hailing the coming tablet computing era for years, this has the sound of "even a stopped clock is right twice a day" about it. See this post from back in 2007, for instance :)

Having said that, I have to agree that Joe Wilcox's world weary "we don't need a tablet" post is just small minded:

Apple's rumored tablet computer cannot live up to the hype, which has reached almost ridiculous levels of rumor, speculation and anticipation. The rumored tablet will fall short of expectations, because they are simply too unrealistic. What surprises me most about the excitement and early analyst sales projections: No one is talking about addressable market.

I think all of that was being said about the iPhone before it appeared as well, and it pretty much reset the entire smart phone space. If Apple does bring out a tablet, I expect to see a full repeat of that play out.

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posted by James Robertson

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advertising

A Few Ads

January 3, 2010 22:14:43.603

Since this is a site I put up myself, using a paid VPS service, I decided it made sense to run some ads. Readers of my Cincom blog have noticed that I read a lot; the links to future book reviews I put up will likely use Amazon affiliate links. That's not a huge change; I've been using Amazon images and links for those books anyway; this just helps me defray some of the cost of renting the VPS.

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posted by James Robertson

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sports

Giants End on a Low

January 3, 2010 16:17:28.036

Boy, the Giants sure know how to end a season down. After a 5-0 start, they went 3-8 to end the year - and celebrated that collapse with a fine 44-7 whimper today. I put the game on while I was exercising, and quickly switched over to the Pittsburgh/Miami game, which was at least a contest.

The Giants have some of the parts of a good team, but not enough. It seems to me that the defense in particular needs work - they got crushed way, way too many times this year.

How soon is spring training again?

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posted by James Robertson

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development

There's Always a Bug

January 3, 2010 11:44:14.303

Sometimes the bugs make no sense, at least not to anyone who isn't looking at the code. Take this one, reported from Australia this week:

BOQ's Eftpos machines skipped ahead six years when the clock ticked over to January 1 and started date stamping January 2016.

I can't really laugh that loud, because the archive bug I used as a launch point for this post earlier in the week was pretty stupid, and - to anyone but me, who wasn't looking at the code, inexplicable - archive links worked for any non-2010 date :)

Sometimes, developers toss in code "that's good enough for now" - leaving a grenade that explodes in someone else's face later. I'd bet good money that the BOQ bug is like that.

posted by James Robertson

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audio

Industry Misinterpretations 169: When Flexibility Backfires

January 3, 2010 11:13:24.133

Here's more audio from ESUG 2009 - Yann Monclair talking about the downsides to Smalltalk's flexibility. You can get a copy of Yann's slides here (PDF).

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!

If you are looking for the audio enclosure, that's over on my Cincom Blog.

posted by James Robertson

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web

Side Effects

January 3, 2010 0:13:22.051

While it's great that non-Latin characters will be usable for domain names starting this year (why should Arabic users, for instance, have to use the Latin alphabet?), there are some interesting scam/phishing opportunities that will crop up.

Mashable explains:

this international progress also has some potentially disastrous opportunities for scammers and phishing sites. This is because of the characters that render the same way (despite different meanings) in different scripts. For instance, Cyrillic scripts, which is the basis for the Russian language, shares some of the same letterforms as the Latin alphabet. What this means is that potential evil-doers could register a domain using non-Latin characters that appears to spell out a Latin word.

They include this image to demonstrate:

Looks like we'll all have to pay really close attention to links for awhile...

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posted by James Robertson

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humor

Take a Quick Trip to the Past

January 2, 2010 22:46:43.602

Fire up Netscape Navigator and head back to 1995 - that's about where the advice you'll find here comes from :)

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posted by James Robertson

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management

The Coming Death of Corporate Data Centers

January 2, 2010 14:22:30.316

Now that I'm running with a VPS setup, I'm wondering: why should a company run its own servers? Unless you're in the hosting business, there's really no point. Look at the prices for services like Slicehost or ArpNetworks, for instance - there's no way that running your own hardware is cheaper than that, when you count in all of the costs (labor, machine acquisition, backups, etc). Just point your domain at the VPS level of service you need and go - over the next few years, the companies that do that are going to save a ton of money compared to the ones that don't.

If you're running your own data center now, and you aren't in the hosting business, you're probably wasting money...

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posted by James Robertson

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blog

This SIte's Rationale

January 2, 2010 11:18:03.611

I've had a few people ask me why I set up this blog when I have the well established one over at Cincom - So I figure an explanation is in order. The main reason is simple: over time, I've branched my topics well beyond Smalltalk. In some of those cases (copyright, for example), it could be said that I've stretched the bounds of what should be discussed on a corporate sponsored site.

The more I thought about that, the more sense it made to me to set up a new blog. That would give me the freedom to discuss topics that might not be appropriate there, but that I wanted to explore in public. Now, don't expect to see my going political here - I'm under no illusions that anyone really cares what I think about politics :) Unlike so many people (celebrities, for instance), I know that my readers come here for a few topics (primarily Smalltalk), and politics isn't one of them.

So what can you expect to see? Well, the Cincom site will have all of the Smalltalk content it's always had, but the rest of the stuff will live over here. I'll be talking Smalltalk here, too - there will be a fair bit of overlap there. You can consider this site to be a superset of the other one.

posted by James Robertson

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general

When it Rains, it Pours, Home Edition

January 2, 2010 10:53:04.387

Yesterday, I was exchanging New Year's Greetings with Arden, and walking in my kitchen when I saw a big piece of siding in the back yard. Thinking "that can't be good", I went and got it, saw it was my house's color, and started looking up at the house. Sure enough:

So, that's a bad thing. I'll have to hire somone to repair that, and see about the state of the siding in general. We seem to get a lot of high winds here; I guess this is what happens.

posted by James Robertson

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tv

The Mess that is TV Viewing

January 2, 2010 10:03:37.607

Tim Bray wrote up an excellent summary of the options for watching TV shows on your schedule (as opposed to the network's ideas) - it's applicable across the world, but especially outside the US. Here in the US, if I miss a show and haven't picked it up via one of the DVRs, we have plenty of options: Hulu, iTunes, Netflix - it's probably available somewhere legally.

I spent 2 weeks sharing Tim Bray's pain last year in France - as a traveler a DVR wasn't in the cards, and everything else (save iTunes, and even there, show availability is based on physical borders) just stops working.

This is just insane. It's a legacy of the old system, where shows came over the air on limited bandwidth, and you watched what they had and liked it. Now? With an IP based system, any show that's been released should be available for a fair price - the way it's set up now, the content providers are just driving the technically skilled to consider things like BitTorrent. As Tim wraps it up:

Speaking of functioning markets, watching episodes of a TV series (in the case of Lost, the most expensive ever produced), with no ads, for a low single-digit number of dollars seems like a good deal to me, even though I have in principle bought the right to watch these shows via my monthly TV bill. So that's my choice, given the choice. But if there's nobody who wants to take my money

That's the way a lot of the content/copyright business works right now. You stand there, wallet open, ready to pay someone - only they have everything locked up behind a wall of badly maintained spikes, and keep muttering unintelligible things - none of which involve a way to pay for the content you want access to...

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posted by James Robertson

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humor

How Not To Demolish a Building

January 1, 2010 23:45:38.412

"You're Doing it Wrong" really does capture this :)

posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Smalltalk in Small Places

January 1, 2010 19:05:42.966

Interesting:

The other day, I downloaded the source code for Squeak and compiled it in my Scratchbox on my Linux laptop. It compiled cleanly, and I moved it over to my N900. It ran fine there, with the exception of the screen being so small that it was hard to get much of anything done.

The trick, of course, to anything useful is to have a UI set that works on the screen in question. John Mcintosh did that for his Squeak port to the iPhone/Touch - for this to be more than a "I did it" exercise, it sounds like the same work would have to be done...

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posted by James Robertson

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humor

Spotted on Facebook

January 1, 2010 18:54:21.663

I found this (links to Facebook) to be terribly amusing:

There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.

posted by James Robertson

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development

Golang?

January 1, 2010 17:18:23.871

I see someone in comp.lang.smalltalk asked what Smalltalkers think about Google's Golang. As it happens, I discussed that on my Cincom blog awhile ago :)

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posted by James Robertson

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standards

Is OAuth Dead?

January 1, 2010 15:32:42.469

I love standards - there are always so many to choose from :) Awhile back, I was interested in building an OAuth implementation for Smalltalk, so that my Twitter interface would work with it. Well: in reading this post from Dave Winer, I may have discovered why my code wasn't working with Twitter, even though I was (I think, anyway) following the spec. I built a Digest Auth implementation from the spec once, and I've dealt with Facebook, so I'm not completely green at this stuff.

A bit more digging, and what appears but this, from the same site that has the OAuth tutorials I was following:

A few weeks ago at IIW, Dick Hardt of Microsoft, Brian Eaton of Google, and Allen Tom of Yahoo! presented WRAP, a competing specification to OAuth. WRAP is a smart specification that includes a lot of good and useful ideas. If it was presented as a white paper on how OAuth could be made better, I would be singing a very different tune. It is a very good protocol draft which has clearly learned many lessons from two years of hands-on OAuth experience. I encourage anyone working in this space to read and study WRAP.

It sounds like OAuth is dying before it so much as saw the light of real usage. It also sounds like (read further into that article) a 2.0 spec will get put together, but it'll be more like a "from scratch" than a 2.0. I guess that means that Twitter will be keeping that Basic Auth interface around :)

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posted by James Robertson

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The Joys of Patch in Place

January 1, 2010 12:47:45.862

Smalltalk One of the things I really like about Smalltalk is the "living" nature of it - you make a change, and your environment notices it right away: no recompile, no taking your app down and up, no "have to rerun to that point"... it just takes the change and runs with it.

This morning I noticed a small bug in the archive links, for instance. Looking at my test server (on a Linux box here in the house), the problem was obvious enough; it was a stupid little bug. The part I like is how I addressed that in the running server (both here and over at my Cincom blog):

  • Had VisualWorks drop out a change set (all the changes I had made) as source code
  • Transferred the code to both servers, here and over at Cincom
  • Transferred the new version of the component in question, so the changes would be there if the server was restarted
  • Went to a small control panel I have in the app server and had it load the change

The last part is just a simple file-in - the Smalltalk image loads and compiles the code, and keeps going along its merry way. Even if that change involved shape changes to existing objects (i.e., redfining their class), things would be ok: the image modifies every such object that exists in the image. This change was simpler than that, but it's a really nice thing to have - it means that there's almost never a reason to take an Smalltalk server down. It can be patched in place, while it's serving requests.

I just think that's cool, and it makes a Smalltalk developer just a little more productive.

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posted by James Robertson

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games

Gears of War 2

January 1, 2010 11:10:52.679

I just finished "Gears of War 2", and it was pretty cool - I have to say, riding the Brumak through the Locust horde at the end was pretty fun, using the chain gun and rockets to lay waste to everything in the way :)

If you get the game, leave the credits rolling - there's a small hint as to where the next game in the series will be going.

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posted by James Robertson

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general

2010? Isn't that the Future?

January 1, 2010 10:21:29.595

I spotted this on Rich's Comix Blog, and boy, does it capture my feelings:

In the meantime, 2010! Can you believe it? Still sounds like the distant future to me.

So where's my flying car :)

posted by James Robertson

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general

Set Up a Server and...

December 31, 2009 19:03:12.917

Watch the hack attempts. The logs show attempts at hacking php (sorry, not in use), and MySQL (sorry, not installed). It's not that I believe Smalltalk is unhackable, but it should be a lot harder just based on how many of the black hats are out there have any Smalltalk knowledge (I'm guessing that's a small number)

With that said, it's the end of 2009, and 2010 is 5 hours away - So Happy New Year to all!

posted by James Robertson

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Ten Years On....

December 31, 2009 13:35:32.509

And still no one has a name for the decade. "The Zeros" doesn't quite cut it - and it seems that my favorite, "The Aughts", never caught on. So during the teens, what the heck are we going to call the last decade?

posted by James Robertson

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books

A Song of Ice and Fire

December 31, 2009 12:59:40.356

My friend Mike gave me the first two books of George Martin's " A Game of Thrones" for my birthday last month, and I've found them very engrossing - book three should be on its way from Amazon now. It's a huge story, with more characters than you can shake a stick at, and - unlike the cardboard ones you'll find in your typical political thriller, these characters are fleshed out. Having said that, if you decide to read these books, don't get too atached to any particular character - a number of "he can't kill so and so, can he?" moments have come and gone already (bear in mind that I'm only in book 2!), and plenty of those characters have been killed off.

Heck, I like the books well enough that they are modifying the way I exercise. More than once, instead of heading out to jog, I've gotten on the stationary bike so that I can read a few chapters :) Highly recommended series - it's not your run of the mill "swords and sorcery" fare by any means.

Oh, and yes - I am looking forward to the HBO series :)

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posted by James Robertson

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How to Clone a Smalltalk Class

December 31, 2009 12:09:33.216

Ever had a situation where you needed to "clone" a class? The typical procedure looks like this:

  • File out your class
  • Open your favorite editor up and do a copy/replace operation
  • File the new class in

Admittedly, you don't need to clone a class that often, but if you've had to, you probably thought someting like "why isn't there a better way?" Well, it turns out that there is:

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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general

TV Inanity

December 31, 2009 10:48:35.093

My wife likes (or rather, liked) the show Eastwick, which not only met a cancellation, but did so in a very odd fashion:

So, in a turn of complete idiocy, ABC skipped an episode of Eastwick. A really important one where we were supposed to find out what happened to Jamie and Darryl. They skipped it, apparently, to cut down on the remaining episodes they had to air before winter hiatus is over. I, for one, am extremely upset about this and I hope that someone at ABC reads this and can feel my ire through the computer screen. Imagine me right now, I am glowering at you, execs.

You know, the most fanatical fans have DVRs. Would it hurt ABC (et. al.) to air shows like this at, say, 2 AM, when they aren't showing anything useful anyway, and at least let those fans with DVRs have closure?

posted by James Robertson

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weather

More Snow

December 31, 2009 10:28:23.293

This is hardly Snowmageddon, but we still have more snow that you usually see in December around here:

Snow Dec. 31

Snow Dec. 31

Now, off to borrow the snow blower...

posted by James Robertson

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Get Ready for VW 7.7 and OS 8.2 Non-Commercial

December 31, 2009 0:24:13.159

Cincom Smalltalk

Cincom will be posting the new non-commercial downloads soon - VW 7.7 and OS 8.2 - you'll want to pay attention my corporate blog for the latest updates on that. There was a bit of packaging left to do when the holiday season came in, so you'll have to wait for the new year. It should be worth it though - lots of good stuff in both products, as I mentioned here earlier.

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posted by James Robertson

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games

XBox Fun

December 30, 2009 23:50:50.304

I've spent a lot of time this week playing "Gears of War 2", after having gone through the "Modern Warfare 2" campaign twice (on different hardness levels). Gears of War is a longer game, and some of the segments require you to get something "just right" to get past - I was stuck flying the Reavers against Skorge for quite awhile before I moved on, for instance.

The big thing you need to adapt to as you change shooters is the minor controller variations - there's a fair bit of difference between MW2, Gears of War, and Halo, for things as simple as throwing/evading grenades. Speaking of Halo, I haven't gotten very far in Halo 3, but then again, that's probably related to all the time I've put into Gears of War 2 :)

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posted by James Robertson

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The Insanity of Traffic Calming

December 30, 2009 21:33:42.080

One of my pet peeves in the neighborhood I live in is traffic calming - which, as practiced in this part of Maryland, seems to equate to "drop random shapes we made with playdo into the street and see what happens". Consider these, on one of the two routes out of our neighborhood:

Traffic Calming

Traffic Calming

With that first one, see how the car parked in the street (and that happens a lot there) effectively blocks access in one direction? With the second, see how one end of the device has been chipped off? That was a snow plow 4 years ago. Every day, school buses have the devil's own time navigating these, and I have no idea what a Fire Truck would do.

In the hall of bad ideas, these are really bad. I have a hot tip for the rocket scientists who come up with this stupidity: Just Narrow the Whole Road! It'll slow down traffic, and cause fewer ancillary problems.

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posted by James Robertson

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Getting this Server Running

December 30, 2009 19:02:41.898

Smalltalk

One thing that a few people have expressed interest in already is this: what did I need to do to get this server running Smalltalk? Well, the first step involved some basic investigation: where could I find affordable VPS hosting? After looking around, I settled on slicehost for that (click here to sign up) - they have decent rates, the reviews I found looked positive (at least one of the inexpensive alternatives, which will remain nameless, had horrid reviews).

Before I go further, I should explain why I had to look into VPS (Virtual Private Server) or a Dedicated root server. If you run typical web software, it fires off a new instance every time a request is made; Smalltalk isn't like that. You have your Smalltalk image running all the time, listening on a port. So if you pick a hosting service that charges for CPU time, you'll get hit on that.

Anyway, I asked around about domain registrars, and got referred to GoDaddy - that was simple, although boy oh boy - do they ever want to upsell you on things :) Once I got that and slicehost set up, I needed to set the DNS records up - this post walked me through that easily. With that out of the way, a few things remained:

  • Getting Smalltalk onto the slicehost server
  • Getting the specific packages for my blog server onto the slicehost server
  • Setting up the Apache configuration (installing Apache first)

The first two were simple: I used a combination of wget and scp to transfer files up to my server, and then copied them into the directories I wanted them in. I set up a non-root user to run the Smalltalk server, and gave that user ownership of the appropriate directories, so that I didn't need to operate as root. Then I edited my files for the new setup, and started the server on a specific port. At this point, my Smalltalk server wouldn't start, telling me that the file (VM) didn't exist. This seemed strange; then I realized that I had a 32 bit VM and a 64 bit server. So, off to install the 32 bit libs:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

A minute or so later, the VM started fine, and doing this (not the port I'm using, btw) worked:

http://www.myNewDomain.com:12345/blog/blogView

Now I wanted to get rid of the port number in that url. With some help from Steve Rees, I did the following two things:

set up symlinks for the necessary mod-proxy load files in:

  • /etc/apache2/mods-available in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
  • copied proxy.conf up out of the mods-available dir and into /etc/apache2
  • Edited that file:


 ProxyRequests On

        <Proxy *>
                AddDefaultCharset off
                Order deny,allow
                Deny from all
                Allow from .myNewDomain.com
        </Proxy>

Then, in httpd.conf (same directory), I added the following:


<Location /blog>
ProxyPass http://127.0.0.1:12345/blog
ProxyPassReverse http://127.0.0.1:12345/blog
</Location>

At which point, the base url, http://www.jarober.com/blog/blogView worked. And that was it - other than getting some files that I forgot to copy over the first time, it all worked fine.

So the bottom line? Getting a Smalltalk based server running on the net is pretty simple now, and not at all expensive. Over the next few years, I expect the price for VPS to drop even more, so it's only going to get easier. So if you're a Smalltalker and want to get your app running out on the net - just go do it :)

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posted by James Robertson

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Launching A New Site

December 30, 2009 17:38:08.471

I've decided to set up a new blog, outside of Cincom - it makes sense to me to start posting most of the non-Cincom related stuff here, with the Cincom blog concentrating mostly on Smalltalk. My plan for the short term is to link from the established blog over to this one, giving short summaries of what I'm writing about - thus letting my readers know what I'm up to.

Getting a Smalltalk server running here (slicehost) was pretty easy (other than the trouble I had with Apache, but that's my own limited expertise at play there). I got the basics working fast though - domain registration with GoDaddy, discount code from one of the many podcasts I listen to, slicehost account set up, stuff uploaded, and now it all seems to work. We'll see how it goes :)

posted by James Robertson

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