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smalltalk

Seaside in the Cloud

August 29, 2010 16:33:53.000

There's a new Ubuntui AMI (Amazon ec2 instance) set up with a Pharo based Seaside image installed. There's also an Amazon instance out there for the Cincom Smalltalk WebVelocity eval - the image id for the latter is ami-871ef5ee

Update: Jan van de Sandt has a post up explaining how to get started with the instance

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posted by James Robertson

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Build Tools for Smalltalk

August 29, 2010 15:24:05.000

Looks like Build tools for Smalltalk are finally starting to catch up. The Squeak/Pharo world has Gofer, the engineering team at Cincom has just released a project tool as part of the summer release (with more work in that direction to come), and Ernest Micklei pushed out a build tool for VA Smalltalk earlier this summer:

Melissa is a simple tool that can help in building development and runtime images in a continous integration environment. It is being used extensively to create daily builds for Smalltalk images. This post describes the steps to use Melissa for VA Smalltalk 8+

A lot of people yawn at these kinds of tools, but they are essential in order to reliably build applications. It's good to see activity here.

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posted by James Robertson

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Smalltalks 2010 Submissions Date Change

August 29, 2010 11:39:03.000

The deadline for submitting a paper/talk for Smalltalks 2010 has been extended to September 25th. The conference takes place in Buenos Aires (Argentina) November 11-13.

If you're submitting a paper, they want you to use EasyChair.

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posted by James Robertson

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audio

Industry Misinterpretations 203: ObjectStudio at ESUG 2009

August 29, 2010 10:04:44.350

This week's podcast is from ESUG 2009: Dirk Verleysen talking about the past, present, and future of ObjectStudio. With the recent release of ObjectStudio 8.2.1 (along with VW 7.7.1 and WV 1.1), this talk about what was coming up in the product is timely.

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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news

Paging Roland Emmerich

August 29, 2010 9:53:05.293

Looks like we'll need some 'splosions' in 2012:

Astronomers are predicting that a massive solar storm, much bigger in potential than the one that caused spectacular light shows on Earth earlier this month, is to strike our planet in 2012 with a force of 100 million hydrogen bombs

Now all we need is a few people with "The End is Nigh" signs :)

posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Pharo Documentation Grows

August 29, 2010 8:26:00.766

The online book, "Pharo By Example" continues to grow - a new draft chapter on the OmniBrowser (PDF) has been added.

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posted by James Robertson

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tutorial

A Look at the Comparison Tool

August 28, 2010 14:16:11.000

The Comparison tool - used to compare versions of code in Cincom Smalltalk - is new in VisualWorks 7.7.1, and there's been a bunch of talk about it on the mailing lists lately. I thought it might be useful to take a look at one of the common use paths you might take through it. To start, I connected to the public store repository, and selected part of my Silt blog server package:

What I was doing above was selecting the package I wanted (Blog), and then, using the menu, comparing it with another version. That prompted a selection dialog - so I could select which version to compare to:

After selecting the package, the following window comes up - and this is where you start to see the new UI:

On the left side is the version I selected to compare against - on the right is what's loaded in the image. Notice the expansion symbol in the lower part of the UI; you click that to expand out and see the differences:

Notice how the green line runs from the left to the right, showing the changed/added/removed (in this case, added) text? That's how you can spot the changes quickly. When there are multiple changes, you can expand/collapse them individually. Now, if you do what I do, and patch a running system with diffs, you'll want the next option - right click at the top to summon an action menu:

And there's a menu on the left hand side at the top as well:

That wraps up the brief tour of the new Comparison tool - I'll be doing a screencast on it soon.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Smalltalk MPEG Player

August 28, 2010 9:49:46.000

This is pretty cool - Chris Cunnington (the guy behind Smalltalk TV) has pulled the MPEG player out of Sophie and made it a standalone Squeak project.

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posted by James Robertson

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itNews

Java Lawsuit Fallout

August 28, 2010 9:04:41.597

Oracle's suit against Google has had one huge side effect: Google is pulling out of Java One:

Citing concerns about Oracle's lawsuit against it, Google said Friday it cannot participate in the upcoming JavaOne conference. The Oracle-sponsored JavaOne conference, formerly a Sun Microsystems event, is being held in San Francisco the week of September 19.

This whole think could lead to exactly the sort of fragmentation in Java that Oracle claims it doesn't want to see. It should be interesting to watch from the outside.

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posted by James Robertson

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Smalltalk and the Tiobe Rankings

August 28, 2010 7:41:25.000

I noticed that Smalltalk fell out of the top 50 in the Tiobe rankings; I think it's not just the niche status of Smalltalk at work here, but also the nature of Smalltalk code. What do I mean by that?

Well, consider what happens when you search for the more mainstream (file based) languages - you get code listings. When you search for Smalltalk, on the other hand, you'll get links to things like the "One Click Image" for Seaside. The image based nature of Smalltalk, and the fact that Smalltalk developers don't work in flat text files, impacts your ability to find Smalltalk code references.

Before the rise of search engines this was not terribly relevant, but now - it makes the community look much, much smaller than it really is. I don't have an answer to this problem - the Smalltalk image is unlikely to disappear (and personally, I'm a fan of it). It's just something we have to factor into these kinds of discussions.

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posted by James Robertson

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law

Trolls

August 27, 2010 22:24:37.000

Looks like Paul Allen has gone to the dark side - he's decided to sue companies that - unlike the ones he was involved with - actually brought useful technology to market. And no, I don't mean Microsoft - I give Gates most of the credit for that.

Billionaire Paul Allen has made major forays into cable television and sports teams since leaving Microsoft Corp. more than two decades ago. Now he's adding another pursuit: patent litigation.

Patent litigation is the last refuge of the incompetent, IMHO. Along with copyright, I think patents have become more of a hindrance than a help.

posted by James Robertson

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jobs

Need a Smalltalker?

August 27, 2010 20:19:54.227

Craig Latta is looking for work - check out his resume.

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posted by James Robertson

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social media

The World Yawns

August 27, 2010 18:43:17.000

The main reasons that I don't think that Diaspora will impact Facebook much?

  • Outside the technorati, privacy issues just don't seem to get much traction
  • The sheer inertial weight of Facebook - the fact that "everyone" is there already - is a huge barrier to entry

posted by James Robertson

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music

Have They Heard of Pandora?

August 27, 2010 15:26:13.000

The way music execs blame everything on file sharing, you would think that they had never heard of legal streaming services like Pandora. I think sites like that explain the chart (follow the link) that shows a huge decline in album sales much, much better than file sharing:

Music industry execs blame the dropping sales numbers on illegal downloads. Exactly what percent of music downloads are illegal is difficult to calculate, but estimates range as high as 20 illegal downloads for every legal download. As for the total cost of illegal downloads, it depends on who you ask.

I was driving from Orlando to my parent's house yesterday, and I had Pandora on the whole time. Not iTunes; not FM radio; not talk radio. That's what's killing sales. You can create a playlist that keys off a song (or band, or genre...) you like, and then just have the music play. No need to save anything, or buy anything, or worry about anything.

As I've said before on this blog - No one is entitled to a business model....

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

New Cincom Smalltalk Digest Posted

August 27, 2010 13:03:32.944

The latest Cincom Smalltalk Digest is up!

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posted by James Robertson

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holiday

Golf Outing in Melbourne Beach

August 27, 2010 12:48:36.777

I hit the links with my dad this morning - drove the ball pretty well, and had a decent enough outing. Lousy putting, but some nice drives and chip shots. Beautiful day though:

posted by James Robertson

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management

Disruption

August 27, 2010 11:58:22.000

Spotted in Engadget:

It's not official, but rumor that Blockbuster is preparing to file for bankruptcy in September is certainly believable. Expected even. According to several sources speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Blockbuster chief executive Jim Keyes along with representation from Blockbuster's senior debt holders met last week with the six major movie studios to announce the company's intention to enter a mid-September bankruptcy.

Blockbuster should have pursued its own streaming deals with the studios years ago - instead, they got clobbered vy Netflix, iTunes, Hulu (et. al.). There's a lesson there for any business that is dependent on an older business model, and is being challenged by upstarts....

posted by James Robertson

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itNews

H.264 Opens Up

August 27, 2010 8:56:54.000

Spotted in Engadget:

The H.264 codec that makes a good deal of digital video possible has actually been free to use (under certain conditions) for many years, but following recent controversies over the future of web video, rightholders have agreed to extend that freedom in perpetuity. Whereas originally standards organization MPEG-LA had said it wouldn't collect royalties from those freely distributing AVC/H.264 video until 2016, the limitless new timeframe may mean that content providers banking on WebM and HTML5 video won't have an expensive surprise in the years to come.

That's great news - it means that anyone (like me!) who uploads H.264 video that they (or the company they work for) owns, there's no problem. There's a huge monkey off the back of HTML5.

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posted by James Robertson

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itNews

GMail and Voice

August 26, 2010 22:44:12.126

Looks like the launch of Google Voice into GMail has worked out well:

It looks like Gmail users are already taking advantage of the cheap calling that Google launched yesterday. The company announced via Twitter that there were 1 million calls placed from Gmail in 24 hours.

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posted by James Robertson

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games

End of the DAO Story Line DLC

August 26, 2010 11:43:26.000

Looks like BioWare is ready to wrap up the story line from DAO, and start getting ready for DAO 2 - September 7 will bring us Witch Hunt, a reunion with Morrigan:

Dubbed Witch Hunt, the content takes place nearly a year since the fall of Archdemon. Players will finally confront the sorceress Morrigan and find out her true motives. You can import your character from Origins and Awakening or create a whole new one if you so please.

I guess we'll find out what kind of entity the "ritual" with Morrigan created - assuming your character took her loophole, that is :)

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Seaside at Ruby|Web

August 26, 2010 8:26:00.000

Pat Maddox is talking up Seaside at Ruby|Web:

Okay as for what's so interesting to me about Seaside... it's 50% the framework and 50% the Pharo environment. Seaside itself represents a step forward in web development similar to how Rails did. Rails takes care of a lot of the plumbing for you - you don't have to parse query params, set up response headers, manage the session (unless you want to of course). Seaside does all that of course but also manages application state for you. So you don't have to worry about putting stuff into a database, then pulling it back out and operating on it. I can't do it justice in a few sentences, but that's why I'll be showing lots of examples at the conference! :) At any rate, that same feeling you get when you code Rails for the first time and see how much easier things are, you get that same feeling with Seaside.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Seaside works across all the Smalltalk dialects - so you can move your application to another Smalltalk if you want/need to - for instance, you might want to consider Cincom Smalltalk if you want full commercial support :)

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posted by James Robertson

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news

Bubble in Game Development Costs?

August 25, 2010 17:34:27.000

There's been (or still is) a bubble in everything else - housing, education, US treasuries - why not game development costs? Over the last few years, there's been something akin to an arms race between vendors in order to create the most impressive graphics for games. Now EA thinks things are cooling off:

"I think budgets for games have actually peaked and are starting to move in the reverse direction again," said David DeMartini in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz [registration required]. He's VP and group general manager of EA Partners, the publisher's third-party distribution arm.

Personally, I'm not so sure. Movie costs have never really dropped, and the closest parallel in entertainment I can think of to games is movies. I guess we'll see over the next year or two.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Smalltalk Open Source Stuff

August 25, 2010 15:28:09.000

Andreas Raab talks about how Squeak, Pharo, Cuis, and EToys are helping grow the Smalltalk community - and moving towards cooperation on the core stuff.

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posted by James Robertson

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copyright

No One is Entitled to a Business Model

August 25, 2010 11:30:00.000

The draconian DMCA and absurdly long copyright periods aren't enough - the RIAA wants more:

"The DMCA isn't working for content people at all," he said at the Technology Policy Institute's Aspen Forum here. "You cannot monitor all the infringements on the Internet. It's simply not possible. We don't have the ability to search all the places infringing content appears, such as cyberlockers like [file-hosting firm] RapidShare."

What they want to see is safe harbor removed - which would make the birth of anything akin to YouTube impossible. The RIAA needs to die, yesterday.

posted by James Robertson

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games

Dragon Age 2

August 25, 2010 8:30:52.000

How did I miss the new trailer for Dragon Age 2? March 8th can't come soon enough :)

posted by James Robertson

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news

Traffic Jam From Hell

August 24, 2010 23:43:13.344

I've been in nasty traffic jams, but nothing like one near Beijing:

As the jam on the highway, also known as National Highway 110, passed the 10-day mark Tuesday, local authorities dispatched hundreds of police to keep order and to reroute cars and trucks carrying essential supplies, such as food or flammables, around the main bottleneck. There, vehicles were inching along little more than a third of a mile a day. Zhang Minghai, director of Zhangjiakou city's Traffic Management Bureau general office, said in a telephone interview he didn't expect the situation to return to normal until around Sept. 17 when road construction is scheduled to be finished and traffic lanes will open up.

I guess China doesn't do anything small...

posted by James Robertson

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itNews

Time is Hard

August 24, 2010 16:26:28.000

Keeping track of time in software sounds simle until you actually start looking into it - to take a trivial example, does a Timestamp include a TimeZone? Then there are the harder issues:

Sparking a fresh round of debate over an ongoing issue in time-keeping circles, the International Telecommunications Union is considering eliminating leap seconds from the time scale used by most computer systems, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Since their introduction in 1971, leap seconds have proved problematic for at least a few software programs. The leap second added on to the end of 2008, for instance, caused Oracle cluster software to reboot unexpectedly in some cases.

posted by James Robertson

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games

No Steam for Linux

August 24, 2010 10:42:43.000

This doesn't surprise me: no Steam for Linux, despite rumors:

Question: Final question, and one I’m sure you’re not super-keen to answer, but I promised one of our tech guys I’d ask it. What truth is there to rumours that you’re also working on a Linux version of Steam?
Doug Lombardi: There’s no Linux version that we’re working on right now.

In terms of client gaming, Windows is the 800 pound gorilla, and I think the only reason that the Mac got Steam is the dominance of Mac notebooks at the high end of the market. Desktop Linux is just a much, much smaller market, full of people who are far less likely to buy a gaming subscription.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Smalltalk in Frankfurt

August 24, 2010 10:15:16.498

The next Smalltalk User Group in Frankfurt, Germany takes place on September 21, with Alan Knight and Arden Thomas:

We are happy to invite you to our next meeting on Tuesday September 21st.
Alan Knight, Engineering Manager Cincom Smalltalk and lead developer of GLORP, will talk about the internals and optimization of GLORP. GLORP (Generic Lightweight Object-Relational Persistence) is an open-source cross-dialect OO-R mapping framework available for VisualWorks, ObjectStudio, VASmalltalk, Dolphin Smalltalk, Smalltalk/X, Pharo and Squeak.
Arden Thomas, Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager, will be attending too. He will certainly be open to answer your questions and listen to your suggestions about the further development of Cincom Smalltalk.
We welcome you at 18:30 on Tuesday September 21st in the offices of ITS-People GmbH, Frankfurt/Main, Lyoner Str. 44-48.

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posted by James Robertson

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copyright

Copyright Considered Harmful?

August 24, 2010 8:32:57.000

There's some research into how Germany advanced so quickly - especially compared to the rest of Europe - in the 19th century. One possibility: lack of strong copyright law:

In Germany during the same period, publishers had plagiarizers -- who could reprint each new publication and sell it cheaply without fear of punishment -- breathing down their necks. Successful publishers were the ones who took a sophisticated approach in reaction to these copycats and devised a form of publication still common today, issuing fancy editions for their wealthy customers and low-priced paperbacks for the masses.

I'm pretty well convinced that copyrights, as we apply them in the US at least, are a net negative. They tie material up for ridiculous amounts of time, and they benefit big businesses (Disney comes to mind) far more than they benefit individual authors. I think it's well past time for a change.

posted by James Robertson

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books

More Book Reviews Coming

August 23, 2010 12:35:02.000

Ever since I started reading on my iPad, I've been tearing through books like a knife through warm butter - and I've fallen way, way behind on the reviews I normally post here. Sometime in the next week or two, I intend to catch up, but here's a list of what I've been reading:

I guess I've been in the mood for "things stink, and they will get worse" lately :)

posted by James Robertson

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news

Looking for Pennies in the Seat Cushions

August 23, 2010 10:22:34.000

This is pretty ridiculous, although with the budget issues that so many cities and counties are facing, I guess it's the sort of desperation play one should expect:

She’s not alone. After dutifully reporting even the smallest profits on their tax filings this year, a number — though no one knows exactly what that number is — of Philadelphia bloggers were dispatched letters informing them that they owe $300 for a privilege license, plus taxes on any profits they made.

So, what the heck is a "privilege license", and why the heck would a blogger making pennies from AdSense need one?

posted by James Robertson

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humor

Just About Right

August 23, 2010 8:13:50.000

I had to laugh - first, there was Leo Laporte's "social media sucks" thing. Then Joy of Tech pretty much nailed that subject. Finally, I saw this float by in an IRC channel I hang out on:

"[user] predicts he'll be all over the next new shiny within a month at the outside"

heh.

posted by James Robertson

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audio

Industry Misinterpretations 202: Instantiations at ESUG 2009

August 22, 2010 19:35:09.197

This week's podcast was recorded on the last day of ESUG 2009, last summer. With all the news from Instantiations recently, I thought John O'Keefe's presentation would still be timely - and I realized that I had not posted it yet..

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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social media

Own Your Content

August 22, 2010 15:08:49.552

This is why I have my blog auto-post ton Twitter (and from there, on to Facebook) - otherwise, all that content is owned by someone else, and - if the service(s) in question die off, you're left with nothing. As Leo Laporte just realized:

It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing.

I use (or used, when they still existed) many of those - but I've always kept my blog (first the corporate one, and now, this one) front and center. That way, I have control over my own web history.

posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Smalltalk Daily - One Week Hiatus

August 22, 2010 11:25:11.608

I'll be on vacation next week, so there won't be any new Smalltalk Daily screencasts until a week from Monday. In the meantime, just check the archives, and feel free to send me suggestions for things you would like to see covered!

posted by James Robertson

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tv

Apple iTV - The Next Step

August 22, 2010 10:39:48.901

While I like NetFlix and Hulu, setting them up on the TV is still something of a chore - you have to hook up a Mac or PC, and then navigate the "not built for a TV screen" interface. So if Apple ships the next generation Apple TV based on what they've learned from the iPhone and iPad?

Expect to see an iPhone/Pad like marketplace for television applications. Video sharing/streaming/recording apps, interactive news apps, and of course games.

That's Kevin Rose speculating on what it could mean. If Apple makes that move, they'll get a real foothold, I think - people hate their cable boxes. The DVR features are sub-optimal, the controls for streaming from on demand are terrible - and there's a monthly charge for each of the crappy boxes.

Give people the ability to easily synch everything they have on their iPads and their TVs, along with casual gaming ad streaming - and an interface that doesn't get in the way - and I think you'll have a hit. I'll be looking at this with interest...

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posted by James Robertson

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