I just finished reading Freedom - the second (and final, I think) part of the story Daniel Suarez started with Daemon. I spent most of the first book debating which "side" to root for; by the end of the second book, it became apparent that the answer to that was not terribly simple.
Suarez did set the libertarian-ish techno-elite up as the sympathetic side, but with plentiful "be careful what you wish for" warnings. It was a very fast moving pair of books; I consumed the two stories in days (it would have been less time were I not still obsessed with Dragon Age: Origins :)
The main complaint I have with the story is the prominent place that Suarez assigns mainstream (especially cable tv) news sources. There's the "Darknet" set up by the deceased protagonist, and then there's the media - it's as if the entire internet that we know now doesn't exist. That's a pretty big hole to ignore, but the story is entertaining if you can get beyond that. I'd love to see the autheor asked about that in an interview though :)
There's been a new post to the Google "Gears Blog", explaining why they haven't said much about Gears of late. The main reason? HTML5 seems to be on track to provide the same features natively:
If you've wondered why there haven't been many Gears releases or posts on the Gears blog lately, it's because we've shifted our effort towards bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5. We're not there yet, but we are getting closer.
It would be pretty nice to get rid of the hacks that exist for video, if nothing else.
I've run into the iPhone download limit myself - Civ Revolution for the iPhone is just over 10 MB, for instance. So it's welcome news that they are upping the (3G based) cap to 20 MB - but that's not going to help much with full shows. An hour long TV show, at compression rates that give you a decent viewing experience, is still in the hundreds of megabyte range. And that's stadard def - HD is a whole other kettle of fish.
This whole capped bandwidth model is going to have to change if mobile devices are going to be used to consume streaming video, or even just "not on wifi" video...
As listeners to the podcast know, there's been a project underway to create a new streams framework - Xtreams. It would be nice to see this catch on across Smalltalk using the same codebase - allowing modifications and improvements to come from anywhere. So:
So....
That's right - the project is under the MIT license. That means that you can take it to any Smalltalk (or even non-Smalltalk) implementation free from worry. If this code has value, let's see it spread. To get started, try the Google Code project page.
Eastman Kodak claims that Apple Computers and Research in Motion are guilty of infringement of patents. Kodak has taken the step to request the U.S. International Trade Commission prevent both companies from importing their smart phones into the United States. Nokia filed a similar complaint in December 2009.
What patents, and why?
Kodak's complaint says the iPhone and BlackBerry infringe on the patent approved in 2001 regarding the ability to preview images. Kodak made more than $622 million on intellectual property last year and expects to receive more than $450 million in royalty this year from Samsung. It is seeking a similar agreement with Apple and Research in Motion.
How hard would it be to change the system by just this tiny amount: in order to bring a patent infringement suit, you would have to actually be providing a competing product in the space that you are complaining about - thus showing that there's actual harm? I know, it's just crazy talk. How would that keep legions of lawyers employed?
Ideas are worthless without execution, and as it is, the practice of patent trolling completely subverts the intended economic incentive behind patents. I’m amazed that corporate America hasn’t thrown their collective weight at Congress and forced reform. I suspect that the attitude is an intellectual property Cold War the large patent-holders are building a system of mutually assured destruction and regard the patent terrorists as a manageable cost of doing business.
Read the rest of his post - he makes some great points.
Live by the meme, die by the meme: As a commenter points out, this is a two year old story that I posted on without noticing that rather salient fact. Well, that's what corrections are for - nothing to see here, move along :)
We're hearing this from multiple sources: After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and start from scratch with PHP or Java (another solution is to stick with the Ruby language and move away from the Rails framework).
The problem is this: swicthing languages/frameworks is a very "enterprisey manager" type decision. Down in the development trenches, it means multiple man years of the following:
Standing still while the new system is built from the ground up.
Faults in the existing codebase will go largely unaddressed, as all the effort will be focused elsewhere
Competitors will have a lot more room to steal users, as it'll be obvious that Twitter is standing still
This isn't a solution; it's a way to circle the drain while others feed off their carcass The worst part is, the management team that made this call (if it has been made - it's rumor now) will walk away clean, blaming "developers" for the failure...
It illegalises the purchase of any game not carrying a PEGI age rating and requires stricter rules on the requirements of ID, although both of these measures had previously been voluntarily introduced by retailers late last year. However, more worrying is a second resolution that was passed — albeit with a split vote of nine-to-three — that could lead to an outright ban of violent and adult titles in the country.
No more "Modern Warfare" or "Dragon Age" for you, I guess. While they're at it, will they also ban mature books and movies?
The war against common sense ownership rights continues:
Echoing the controversial measures announced by Ubisoft last month, Sony has revealed that users of SOCOM: US Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 3 will need to register their game online before they are able to access the multiplayer component of the title.
It gets worse:
Furthermore, in a nod to recent plans implemented by EA, anyone buying a pre-owned copy of the game will be forced to cough up $20 to obtain a code to play online.
I brought up books in the title because e-books could run into the same kind of "no sharing" buzzsaw - which would be very different from the centuries long practice of passing books around we have now (Jasper Fforde touched on this in "The Well of Lost Plots", actually - you have to read it to see how, because explaining it would give away too much of the story).
Anyway, on games - we trade games back and forth with friends (once a game is done, it's usually done). The industry apparently wants that practice to stop. Like book sharing, I don't think it's costing anyone real money, but, like DRM for music, it's a bad idea that lots of industry types have gone "all in" on. Great.
I'm happy to announce that I have accepted a full-time position with Cincom in the UK. As a result, I will be laying down my consulting hat for a while, and heading to London at the end of the month. I'll be doing Pre-Sales Consulting (or Sales Engineering, as some call it) for their Smalltalk products in Europe
I look forward to working with Julian - he's seemed like a great guy every time I've met hm!
2K Games announced today that they will be releasing Civilization V in the fall. For the first time in the series, the square tiles will be changed to hexes, which 2K Games says provides 'deeper strategy' and 'more realistic gameplay.' Civilization V will also include a new graphics engine, new combat system including ranged bombardment, multiplayer and good support for the modding community. 'Each new version of Civilization presents exciting challenges for our team. Thankfully, ideas on how to bring new and fun experiences to Civ players never seem to stop flowing. From fully animated leaders and realistic landscapes, new combat tactics, expanded diplomacy and shared mods, we're excited for players to see the new vision our team at Firaxis has brought to the series,' Sid Meier said. In addition to Civilization V, the Facebook-based Civilization Network will also be released during 2010.
Well, I never really mastered Civ IV, so what the heck - I can get another game to act as a countervailing time sink to "Dragon Age Origins" (and the expansion they are putting out soon). I wonder when I'll find time to come up for air :)
I'll be speaking to the NYC Smalltalkers tonight, about the interfaces I've built to various social media systems (and a few related topics, like building to a network API). Should be fun - it all starts at 6:30 PM here.
I'll be doing demos and talking about the code - see you there!
Citing data from Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks.
A slightly different way to view it is this: Microsoft has seen the future, and it has 64 bits, not 32. Do we "need" 64 bits? Well heck, you could have asked "do we need 32 bits?" a decade or so ago, too. Microsoft would like to have Windows 7 push new hardware sales, and I think they'd be even happier if those sales were at least 64 bit ready, if not actively running 64 bit.
Unfortunately, as PleaseRobMe points out, updating Foursquare on where you are implicitly updates Foursquare on where you're not -- at home.
On the other hand, with so many people doing this kind of thing, you have what amounts to an information flood. If you're already at risk (being stalked, for instance), I can see the immediate danger. Otherwise? It's never been that hard to figure out that a house is empty.
As is quite often the case, I'm reading two books right now:
The Well of Lost Plots is the third book in the Thursday Next series. While it's hardly heavy reading, it's an enjoyable set of books - the intertwining of the real world with the book world (characters can jump in and out of books; some fictional characters die and have to be replaced by generics who stand in for them) is quite interesting. The idea of "oral tradition" story characters (think nursery rhymes) going on strike for better working conditions was pretty amusing. I don't want to give awy too much - this is, after all, the third book in the series. However, I can say this: it's a fun set of books to read, and I recommend them
Daemon is a much more involved book, and harder to read in parts - there's at least one character involved in some pretty unsavory things, and it's not clear yet whether he ends up on the "good" team yet - because the sides are unclear to me halfway in.
The protagonist is a rich game developer who set off a series of events after his death, via sophisticated, distributed software systems (and people he has the software recruit as real world actors). I'm still not sure what his goals are, or whether his goals serve a good or bad end yet - which is one of the things I like about the book - at the midway point, it's not clear. This is the first book in a series (and only the second is out) - so if you don't want to get sucked in, there's your warning. I like the book, even though parts of it were hard to get through (from the standpoint of the things going on, not from a writing standpoint).
Well, the reality is that he would have fried instantly, and any other Starfleet travelers such as Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise would have perished had they really attempted to travel at faster-than-light speeds.
There are two issues with this:
It's sciene fiction, not science
Science fiction typically (and most certainly in this case) assumes some sort of scientific discovery that makes the seemingly impossible, possible.
It's been a week since the second storm, and 11 days since the first - but because the brilliant thinkers in Howard County traffic control think that the "random shapes in the road" approach to slowing traffic is a good idea, we have this to put up with:
Many of us in the neighborhood have been wondering how plows would deal with those areas after a major snow storm for years; this year, we discovered that the answer is mostly "they don't". That was pretty clear to everyone but the advanced thinkers in the local government. I rather suspect that none of the traffic design folks have atrocities like this near them...
It's been a good news/bad news kind of Supernatural day. The Good: Supernatural got an early season-six pickup for next season. The Bad: Creator Eric Kripke is planning to step down as co-showrunner, along with his current co-showrunner, Robert Singer.
This is mostly bad news, IMHO. This year's villain for the Winchester boys is Lucifer himself; like Buffy after season 5, I'm not exactly sure what's left to fight that could be bigger. Sometimes, a story just needs to end; this is one of them.
Today's screencast walks through the installation process for ObjectStudio 8.2 NC - from initial download to initial startup. All on Windows 7. To watch, click on the viewer below:
You can download the video directly here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?
On Wednesday, Microsoft is releasing a "beta" test version of the Outlook Social Connector. The add-on software, which was first discussed last November, adds a new pane to the main e-mail reading screen on Outlook. When a user clicks to read an e-mail message, the new pane fills up with the sender's most recent social-networking activities. Those could include the addition of a professional contact on LinkedIn or a "what I'm doing now" status update from Facebook.
The interesting thing from further down in the article is that there's no "push" capability - i.e., no way to update those streams from Outlook. Heck, I can do that from BottomFeeder, so it's not that hard. I understand the idea, but I have no idea why they would leave it half done...
Industry Misinterpretations will be live on February 17th (tomorrow) on justin.tv - we'll be talking with Brian Rice about Slate - a Smalltalk derived language.
The next version of WebVelocity is still in development, but the focus is on cloud development: both in terms of how it works (no GUI console), and what it'll hook to (interfaces to things like the Amazon cloud). There's a lot going on, and I'll be doing screencasts on it soon. Here's a screenshot of the in development admin screen:
Just say NO to squeezing your buyers, I say. When you give away valuable content with no registration, you are adding to your brand bank account, making your brand more valuable.
There are a virtually infinite number of messages coming at all of us, all the time. If someone comes to your site, interested in your product, why do you want to make it harder? Getting people's attention is hard; forcing someone who's been attracted to you to jump through hoops is just a bad idea. Registration forms for things like video, white papers (etc) - those are hoops. Putting them up just means less attention. Is that what you really want?
So it wasn't enough that I laundered my passport - my daughter is taking a trip later this year, and her passport is set to expire right in the middle of it. We had all the docs ready, but then the big snows hit - we're finally set to hit the post office today. Fortunately, there are months between now and her trip, so things should be ok.
Here's another video from ESUG 2009 - Gabriel Honore talking about his Innovation Award winning app, RetrObjects. To watch, click on the viewer below. You can also listen to a podcast we did with Gabriel last year.
Twelve of the world's biggest phone networks — including AT&T, Orange and Telefonica — will announce their rival technology tomorrow to Apple's App Store. The combined audience for the app platform will be 2 billion customers. Phone manufacturers Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson are also part of the alliance.
If it's going to be "cross phone", does that mean that these are going to be browser based apps? Because I can't see what else would cross the multiple physical architectures involved. I'm also not sure how you would install these apps, at least on the iPhone. For an android device, an alternative store is simple, but for the iPhone? This bears watching.
And about that Seaside course— there isn't one yet. But it is on my TODO list for future courses at CCSF. For the time being, as part of my own Smalltalk education, I'll take this opportunity to complete the class project using Seaside. Since Smalltalk and Seaside are new to me, I'll be starting on the same page as my PHP and Ruby students. This will be fun. I'll be doing this project with Cincom Visualworks Non-Commercial which is free for non-commercial use on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Sounds like a fun project, with some useful comparisons (read the whole thing - he and his students are going to compare how much code was needed for each of the projects - PHP, Ruby, and Smalltalk).
I just saw this from our local PTA - it's on Facebook, so I've reproduced part of it here:
As many of you may have already heard, schools have now closed for Tuesday. I recently spoke with Dr. Sydney Cousin, the Superintendent of Education, offering the PTA's help in reopening schools. He graciously accepted our offer, and explained that schools have been closed on Tuesday to allow adequate time for clearing of bus loops, walkways at the school, and parking lots. Providing a storm projected to move through the area tomorrow and Tuesday doesn't bring much new snow, it's Dr. Cousin's intent to open schools on Wednesday.
As I said earlier, it's more than walkways. There are still huge problems due to the utterly incompetent plow job that Howard County did.
It's been over a week since the first big storm now, and nearly a week since the second. And schools are closed tomorrow anyway (today is a holiday). Why? Well, driving through the neighborhoods, the roads are really narrow - there are turns I don't know that a bus can make - like this older shot of some traffic calming (and there's still snow/ice in the middle of it now):
The sides of that segment are clear now, but there's still a thick line of snow and ice in the center - and it's just too narrow for a bus anyway; in good weather, they need to drive over the center median (which currently has over a foot of snow on it). Here's what it looks like in good weather, from the other end:
At the far end, the strip is like the foreground one, but without the stakes. Buses usually drive over the edge, given the room they have - but with the snow on the sides and median, that's not really possible. I have real doubts about school opening on Wednesday - because scenes like this are duplicated across the county...
I ran across (via Twitter) this PR response from Southwest to Kevin Smith (of Silent Bob fame). It sounded kind of defensive, but to get "the rest of the story", you need to read back through Kevin Smith's Twitter feed (going back about 15 hours ago from now). To say that his story differs just a bit from Southwest's is an understatement.
Now, many celebrities have something of an entitlement problem, so this would be easy to ignore - but c'mon, he was flying Southwest, not first class on (insert upscale carrier here). It really does sound like Southwest screwed the pooch, and then ran a complete hack out to make a pseudo-apology.
It's like they got the memo about responding quickly, but lost the part about being genuine...
Envy and Store are not viable candidates. Monticello is
a light-weight solution compared to Store and Envy. If you can
afford to port Seaside, then you can afford to port
Monticello.
And in fact, the people doing
Seaside (and WebVelocity)
here at Cincom have ported Monticello (in fact, I did a
screencaston that last summer).
Now, I like Store well enough, and I've worked with Envy. But
yeah - both are too tightly wound into vendor specific solutions
(Cincom, Instantiations), and both are pretty heavy. This really
hit home for me when I thought about the process of loading some
library (say,
Silt, which I've been writing about recently). To do this with
VW or ObjectStudio, you need to:
Load Store (the NC download does have it loaded for you)
Create a login for the repository (again, the NC provides a
read-only one)
Connect to the repository
List the available packages
Going alphabetically, find Silt (the bundle, fortunately I did
not create a matching package name)
Load it
Contrast that with something from "
Talking Meta" this morning, talking about loading up some new
filesystem code for Pharo:
Gofer new
wiresong: 'mc';
package: 'Filesystem';
load.
Gofer seems to be a small tool Lukas built on top of Monticello
to make loading (etc) easier. Now sure, you can script easy
solutions for Store and Envy, too - but porting either one to
another Smalltalk dialect would be a pretty big task (yes, Envy did
that once. No, it won't be doing it again). Monticello though? It's
pretty small, seems easy enough to port, and, being file based, can
work pretty easily via http, ftp, (insert your favorite network
protocol here). Neither Store nor Envy do that part. And while
again, a client could be built to deal with that, it's highly
unlikely to happen.
Now that Seaside is a common web framework, it seems like having
a common version control system would be a good next step. I think
perhaps Monticello
couldbe that system - but I haven't personally done any
work with it, so I could be wrong. Thoughts?
This Ted talk makes a point that David Meerman Scott has made any number of times: marketing no longer controls the narrative, and attempts to do so are futile. The good thing is, it's ok - you just need to pay attention and be engaged in the ongoing conversation.
It makes it clear to me that the XBox was a loss leader for eons, and is only now starting to show a (small) profit. In the grand scheme of things though, it makes me wonder - just how much does that division matter to Microsoft? When things start getting hairy for them (as I expect they will) - what will they decide? If I had to guess, if and when that time comes, it'll be a group that might be spun right out of Microsoft...
This week Michael and I ran across Kent Beck's "Welcome to the Balkans" post - which says in part:
The thing about a Nash Equilibrium is that what is rational from within the game can be absurd from an outside perspective. I'm calling bulls*** on the state of Smalltalk. Vendors, you're acting crazy. Have the tiniest possible core defined in terms of test cases. Build a shared library on top of that, implemented in terms of the core. Include numbers, collections, meta-objects, code structure, and code loading. None of this parcel/bundle/package/pundle/category nonsense. Compete on VMs, graphics libraries, and enterprise-y tools.
I responded to that here, and that's what we spent a lot of time talking about - how things got to that place, and how they might change over time. We're welcome to any and all feedback - you can send audio or text feedback to Smalltalk Podcasts, and we'll put them on in a future episode.
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Normally, when the forecast calls for a "clipper" storm, it means a fast moving storm from the west that brings light snow - a dusting to maybe an inch or two. So what does a "Healthy Clipper" mean, then?
That's a DC area station, so the temps here in Columbia will be a bit lower, too. We are seriously getting to the "nowhere to plow the snow to" stage here :)
I've been wary of the Oracle installer tools - especially on Linux - for years, ever since the adventures I had installing on RedHat back in the early 2000's. I would have thought it would be better by now, but I just saw this go by in the Smalltalk IRC channel:
recently I had a problem reading lots of records from PostgreSQL, because the VW driver did not support streaming. So I tried to install Oracle on Ubuntu 9 today.... turned out that implementing streaming was far easier than installing Oracle
When Google rolled out Buzz, I doubt that they figured on stalker management as one of the issues they would have to deal with. BusinessInsider points out that they were wrong about that...
Update: As is quite often the case, Dare Obasanjo hits on a great example of the less dangerous - but far more common - issues involved here:
Ignoring some of the privacy issues of the people you email with becoming a public friends listthere is still the question of whether the feature is good for users in isolation. Here s a story; my wife is divorced and has kids from her previous marriage. This means she exchanges a lot of email with her ex-husband and his new wife around kid visiting schedules, vacations, etc. Do you think my wife would consider it a great feature if one day she started getting status updates on how her ex-husband and his new wife spend their days due to introduction of social networking features in her email client?
The "auto-follow" idea seems like just the thing that a young 20-something might come up with as a great idea - but that someone with a few more years under their belt would have had 2nd and 3rd thoughts about...
If you'd like to be added as developer, please send Andreas your Google Account email address so that he can add you to the project. But, he warns that unless you know how to deal with both the Android SDK and NDK, Java, JNI, and the Squeak VM it will be a very steep learning curve .
Sounds like you'll be able to do Smalltalk on the mobile devices of choice - it'll be Squeak (or maybe Pharo) for now. You can find project information here.
. I spent most of the first book debating which "side" to root for; by the end of the second book, it became apparent that the answer to that was not terribly simple.
:)
", actually - you have to read it to see how, because explaining it would give away too much of the story).
