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sports

Don't Expand the Baseball Playoffs

September 24, 2010 21:57:06.299

It's not just the "purists" that Selig denigrates who oppose another expansion of the playoffs; it's those of us who don't look forward to a November World Series in horrible weather. If Selig wants to expand the playoffs, he should also do the following:

  • Revert to the 154 game schedule
  • Return to a reasonable number of double headers in that schedule
  • Have every round of the playoffs except the World Series be best of 5

Otherwise, we'll be looking at baseball under ridiculous weather conditions.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

New HTTP Framework for Smalltalk

September 24, 2010 16:31:55.000

There's an interesting looking new HTTP framework brewing for Smalltalk - Zinc:

Zinc HTTP Components is an open-source Smalltalk framework to deal with the HTTP networking protocol. This is a new project (started September 1st 2010) that is currently under heavy development. Our long term goals are very ambitious: we want to reach the level of functionality, scope, architectural clarity and maturity of the Apache HTTP Components library. Our short term goal is to offer working HTTP client functionality to support fundamental features in a Smalltalk image. For the time being, Pharo is our reference platform.

There are lots of details at the link, including info on how to get involved.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Smalltalk Link Dump

September 24, 2010 13:33:54.842

I post a lot of Smalltalk related links, so I thought that a monthly "link dump" page might be useful. I'm not including "Smalltalk Daily" posts; since I do one of those each day, including them would bury the rest of the links, I think. Anyway - you can get to the September dump here, and I'll be updating it when the month ends.

I was going to put that together by hand, but I decided that sounded like work - so I wrote a couple of methods, patched the server, and then ran this on the server:

BlogSaver
	dumpLinkFileFor: 'blog'
	to: 'linkDump.txt'
	start: (Timestamp readFrom: '9/1/10 0:00:00' readStream)
	end: (Timestamp readFrom: '10/1/10 0:00:00' readStream)
	forCategories: #('smalltalk' 'esug2010' 'audio').

Then I just renamed the output file and dropped it where it would get picked up. Pretty simple stuff, and the code I'm using above lets me run arbitrary category reports if I so choose.

posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Smalltalks 2010 Registration

September 24, 2010 12:44:52.000

You can register (free) for the Smalltalks 2010 conference, to be held November 11-13 in Argentina:

The Fundación Argentina de Smalltalk (FAST) invites you to the 4th Smalltalk Conference of Argentina, to be held on November 11, 12 and 13, 2010 at the Concepción del Uruguay site of the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. Everyone, including teachers, students, researchers, developers and entrepreneurs, are welcome as speakers or attendees. Registration is free and now open at http://www.fast.org.ar.

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posted by James Robertson

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esug2010

There In Spirit

September 24, 2010 10:33:26.436

I want to thank the ESUG 2010 folks for sending me a shirt:

I shrunk the picture down in size, so it may not be obvious, but that's one of the ESUG videos (Andreas Tonne's) playing in the browser behind the shirt. Thanks guys!

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posted by James Robertson

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gadgets

iPhone and Verizon - Not Soon

September 24, 2010 9:57:37.000

I didn't think Apple was going to put the iPhone on Verizon anytime soon, and Verizon's execs are putting that message out there:

Speaking to investors at a Goldman Sachs conference, Seidenberg said nothing about an iPhone for the company's current network, but said he hopes Apple Inc. will come around and allow Verizon to sell the phone for a new network it is building. The "4G" network hasn't yet opened for service and won't be complete next year.

Even once LTE is ready, there's still the whole issue of Verizon's VCast store and their relentless desire to put Verizon branding on all devices - things I simply can't see Apple being ok with...

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalkDaily

Smalltalk Daily 09/24/10: Hooking an OS UI to a Domain Model

September 24, 2010 9:00:43.660

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at creating an ObjectStudio UI for an existing domain model - the one we created in this screencast. If you can't see the embedded video directly, you can go directly to YouTube for it. To watch now, click on the viewer below:

You can follow the Smalltalk channel on YouTube for all the "Smalltalk Daily" videos. You can also check out the videos on Vimeo, where the quality is higher, or over on Facebook, if you are a member.

You can download the video directly here. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Namespaces for Pharo

September 24, 2010 6:33:18.000

James Foster pointed out some interesting work on Namespaces for Pharo:

Germán Leiva was accepted in Google Summer of Code 2010 and developed a Namespaces implementation for Pharo Smalltalk. This video is based on his presentation at ESUG in Barcelona, Spain in September 2010. You can get the code here.

The ESUG presentation will get posted to the ESUG 2010 video archive soon.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

ESUG 2010 Roundup

September 24, 2010 6:24:22.181

Squeak News has an excellent ESUG 2010 roundup. It has a link to the first video from the conference - you can check back at the archive pages for all the video that's available, and subscribe to Smalltalk Videos to get notified when a new one goes live.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

PDF Two Ways

September 23, 2010 18:30:35.283

Torsten reports on a new PDF wrapper for Squeak:

Marten Feldtmann is working on pdf creation using libHaru, he published a first, not ready code for a wrapper around libHaru.

and also mentions his own work from a lottle while ago:

But I already wrapped this small library for Pharo/Squeak two years ago with a more natural Smalltalk interface.

Follow the link to see his code example.

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posted by James Robertson

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esug2010

Smalltalk in Enterprise Class Applications

September 23, 2010 10:30:42.653

Here's another video from ESUG 2010, which was held in Barcelona, Spain, the week of September 13, 2010. In this presentation, Andreas Tonne talks about using Smalltalk in Enterprise Class applicatons. You can watch using the embedded player below, or follow the download links at the bottom of the post.

Smalltalk in Enterprise level applications from James Robertson on Vimeo.

You can follow the ESUG channel on Vimeo for all the videos from the conference.

You can download the video directly here. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Videos"?

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

More JQuery Widgets for Seaside

September 23, 2010 9:03:25.067

Spotted in Planet Squeak

The JQueryWidgetBox project is growing and we now have 32 interesting JQuery widgets wrapped for Seaside. Feel free to use them in your seaside app to enhance the user experience.

This is what's cool about having a growing community around Seaside - there's active interest and work going on to bring standard web stuff into Seaside, which makes it easier for "dumb web developers" (a category into which I include myself) to get things done.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalkDaily

Smalltalk Daily 09/23/10: Using SUnitToo

September 23, 2010 7:53:28.963

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at using SUnitToo to create a simple unit test - the test is for the code we created in yesterday's screencast. If you can't see the embedded video directly, you can go directly to YouTube for it. To watch now, click on the viewer below:

You can follow the Smalltalk channel on YouTube for all the "Smalltalk Daily" videos. You can also check out the videos on Vimeo, where the quality is higher, or over on Facebook, if you are a member.

You can download the video directly here. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?

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posted by James Robertson

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law

Can You Say Prior Art?

September 23, 2010 6:16:52.397

More evidence that the patent system is completely broken - Apple has been sued over iTunes being able to download video. The patent was granted in 2009, and according to a quick Google search, the company that filed the patent has only existed since about 2005. Wikipedia tells me that iTunes was launched in January of 2001, aqnd video support was added in May of 2005. So.... the timing at least is odd. Never mind pre-existing systems based on RSS enclosures.

Generally speaking, there are two issues with this suit so far as I can tell:

  • The PTO never should have granted the patent based on prior art
  • The company given the patent hasn't implemented anything based on it

That second aspect is what I find really stupid. If a software patent can be granted based on nothing more than an idea, then we're all doomed to a future of endless litigation and stupid patents.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

IOS and Smalltalk

September 22, 2010 22:30:18.145

We just wrapped up a podcast with John McIntosh about the status of Smalltalk and Scratch on IOS - we found out quite a bit about how things are evolving and what the interactions with Apple have been like. From what we heard, Smalltalk is punching above its weight in terms of driving change in this arena. Download it this Sunday to hear it all :)

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posted by James Robertson

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media

What About Revenues?

September 22, 2010 10:57:06.879

Jeff Jarvis only gives us part of the story on the "Times vs. WSJ" thing:

OK, but that’s half the story. It’s more like 10 percent of the story. For now shift to the future, the web, and comScore tells us that in July, The Times reached 43.6 million people online vs. the Journal’s 16.1 million. By the time you add in pass-around readers for the paper and de-dupe the same readers for print and online, those numbers might change, but the moral to the story doesn’t. The New York Times has roughly two and a half times more readers than the Journal. That translates to two and a half times more influence, two and a half times more relationships, a two-and-a-half-time bigger brand.

That's true, but - what are the revenue numbers? We know that the Times has been bleeding money and cutting staff; the online WSJ seems to be doing pretty well. I'm with jeff on the notion that print news is dead, and I like free stuff as well as the next guy - but my wife pays for an online subscription to the WSJ, as do a few other friends.

Those eyeballs might be nice for the NYT, but they don't end up paying the bills.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalkDaily

Smalltalk Daily 09/22/10: Hooking Up a UI and Domain Model

September 22, 2010 8:16:00.257

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at hooking up a domain model to a UI. You can follow along by downloading the code here. If you can't see the embedded video directly, you can go directly to YouTube for it. To watch now, click on the viewer below:

You can follow the Smalltalk channel on YouTube for all the "Smalltalk Daily" videos. You can also check out the videos on Vimeo, where the quality is higher, or over on Facebook, if you are a member.

You can download the video directly here. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?

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posted by James Robertson

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gadgets

Missing the Point

September 22, 2010 6:41:58.465

Paul Thurott gushes about the joys of Android based phones before noting two pretty glaring flaws:

Where the DROID X--Android, really--falls apart is on the services side. As with Apple and, soon, Microsoft, Google supports Android with an online marketplace, in this case the Android Market. It's horrible. And I don't just mean it's lacking in some vague way, I mean that it is an absolute disgrace.
...
This is perhaps less dramatic, but because Google doesn't (yet) have an online store to match Apple's iTunes Store, the Android experience for loading, syncing, finding, and playing media (music, movies, and other content) is truly second rate and, I suspect, must vary from phone to phone.

So.... finding apps is a chore, and getting media on the phone sucks a lot - and yet it's a "great" device. Sure Paul, sure. The bits many people would call core functionality suck, but it's a marvelous device.

Thurott goes on to say that this could be "easily fixed", but here's the thing: I doubt Google will do that. Why? Look at their hit or miss software development. It's all about throwing stuff against a wall and seeing whether it sticks (and, most of the time, it doesn't). Google doesn't really care about user experience - like the old Microsoft, they are an engineering led company. Sometimes that works (Gmail), but usually it doesn't (Wave).

Ultimately though, Thurott is looking at the wrong metric. Apple never looks at killer market share - they look at margins. A quick look here tells you everything you need to know about who's winning that battle. Beyond that, Google has major carrier problems that Apple really doesn't have. Android probably will end up with a larger share of the smartphone market than Apple, and analysts will call that a win. Meanwhile, Apple will be laughing all the way to the bank.

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posted by James Robertson

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games

Looking for More Immersiveness

September 21, 2010 17:21:34.000

I needed another immersive game, and Red Dead Redemption seems to have gotten a ton of good reviews - so I ordered it from Amazon. I'll see how I like it on Thursday, while everyone else I know plays Civ V. I'm waiting for a Mac native version; playing under Parallels led to more crashing than I was happy with (with Civ IV).

Anyway - I'm hoping this game captures my interest - I really need to play something new :)

posted by James Robertson

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security

Twitter Whoops

September 21, 2010 10:06:40.276

Oops:

The hack, which affects only Twitter.com and not third-party clients, works by putting a piece of JavaScript code ('onmouseover') into a URL in a tweet. This causes a pop-up message to emerge when someone hovers a cursor over that link. The loophole appears to work in both the redesigned Twitter web interface that was launched on Wednesday and the previous version

The problem has been dealt with, according to Twitter - but boy, that's an embarrassing launch "oops" for them.

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posted by James Robertson

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development

Avocado - Self in a Browser

September 21, 2010 8:36:41.000

The Lively Kernel has been used to produce a self-like language: Avocado:

Adam Spitz and Alex Ausch have incorporated the ideas of the Self language into the Lively Kernel code base. The result is Avocado: an in-browser JavaScript development platform and GUI.

Chris Cunnington did a screencast on it.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalkDaily

Smalltalk Daily 09/21/10: Modeling with ADvance

September 21, 2010 8:10:44.325

Today's Smalltalk Daily is an overview of the ADvance modeling tool that ships with VisualWorks. Specifically, we use it to produce HTML documentation of a package. If you can't see the embedded video directly, you can go directly to YouTube for it. To watch now, click on the viewer below:

You can follow the Smalltalk channel on YouTube for all the "Smalltalk Daily" videos. You can also check out the videos on Vimeo, where the quality is higher, or over on Facebook, if you are a member.

You can download the video directly here. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?

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posted by James Robertson

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development

Xerox PARC is 40

September 21, 2010 5:34:00.000

The birthplace of Smalltalk (and a ton of other innovations in software and hardware) turned 40:

PARC researchers devised the world's first WYSIWYG editor, the GUI, bitmapped display object-oriented programming methodology, and, yes, the first commercial mouse, all of which were quickly rolled into the Alto workstation - a recognizable modern PC. PARC's boffins also gave us Ethernet and laser printers.

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posted by James Robertson

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games

A Tale of Two DLCs

September 20, 2010 17:36:16.000

After leaving the latest Mass Effect 2 DLC aside for a few days (I ran into a glitch), I went back to it and the glitch didn't pop back up. Maybe I just needed a clean restart of the game. It was worth it; "Lair of the Shadow Broker" is a pretty nice little piece of DLC, and it's interesting how seamlessly it adds into the game.

The contrast between how DLC works in ME2 and in Dragon Age is kind of interesting, actually. Both are BioWare games, but they behave very differently in this realm. With ME2, the DLC drops into your existing game (like the early DLC for Dragon Age did, so it's clear that it's not a technical limitation). The latest DLC for Dragon Age requires you to import an existing character (or create a new high level one).

This wouldn't be a problem except for one issue (at least on the XBox) - there's a character save limit, so if you've played a few times, you need to blow away (or archive off to a USB drive) older characters.

Why? Saves are just big disk files; there just doesn't seem to be a good reason for this. If you enjoy DAO, you've probably invested serious time into your characters, and blowing them away is painful. Maybe ME2 has the same issue, but since the DLC hasn't forced me into imports, I haven't run into it. I really hope they deal with this for Dragon Age 2....

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posted by James Robertson

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esug2010

ESUG Retrospective

September 20, 2010 15:35:21.468

posted by James Robertson

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PR

Perilous Wisdom

September 20, 2010 14:12:52.000

You have to wonder at what passes for wisdom in the modern PR and marketing space. Consider this post, from David Meerman Scott - where he promotes the viral videos (and associated book) from Kevin Nalty.

Sure, the videos have been seen a lot, but here's the more interesting question: do they serve a useful marketing purpose? Do they help promote any product or service? Or do they just help promote the author of the videos?

The answer to that set of questions is pretty simple if you take the time to watch any of the videos. They're pretty well done, and they are pretty funny. Do they help attract any customers? Not really. Do they help make any product or service stand out? Not so much, no. So beyond promoting the author of the videos (and book), do they achieve any business purpose?

No, not really.

This is one of the things that drives me nuts about catch phrases like "no one cares about your product". It's true in one sense - prospective customers care about the problems your product can solve, not about the product per se. That doesn't mean that they don't want to hear about the product though - it means that they want to hear about how your product can help them solve their problems. Which gets me back to the whole viral video thing - how do any of the videos Scott linked to do that?

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Moose 4.1 Ships

September 20, 2010 12:47:27.769

Tudor Girba has announced Moose 4.1. What's New?

  • Significant speed improvements of Mondrian and Glamour
  • Improved Mondrian drawing of complex shapes
  • Improved Glamour engine to handle cyclic updates
  • New user interface look an feel
  • Improved set of Glamour widgets
  • Re-packaging to strengthen the naming convention
  • Re-organization of the code to break unwanted dependencies
  • Cleaning of FAMIX
  • New extensible design of the Moose Finder
  • New PetitParser-based parsers for MSE, Java, and MANIFEST.MF files
  • New browser for meta-models described in MSE files
  • Based on Pharo 1.1

Follow the link for download and installation instructions.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Browseable Doc for Pharo and Squeak

September 20, 2010 11:10:31.000

Spotted in Planet Squeak:

These HelpTopics can be nested (book structure) and displayed in a HelpBrowser. Since help text is extracted/stored in classes and methods you can use the usual tools to maintain and package help contents together with your code.

There's a new Pharocast showing you how it works.

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalkDaily

Smalltalk Daily 09/20/10 - Debugger Overview

September 20, 2010 8:03:45.402

Today's Smalltalk Daily is an overview of the debugger in VW 7.7.1 and ObjectStudio 8.2.1. In today's screencast, we take a look at the toolbar buttons, which is what you'll use most often when debugging. If you can't see the embedded video directly, you can go directly to YouTube for it. To watch now, click on the viewer below:

You can follow the Smalltalk channel on YouTube for all the "Smalltalk Daily" videos. You can also check out the videos on Vimeo, where the quality is higher, or over on Facebook, if you are a member.

You can download the video directly here. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?

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posted by James Robertson

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humor

Too Much Information

September 20, 2010 6:14:54.999

posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Krestianstvo SDK Video

September 20, 2010 6:07:42.219

A cool video showing off some Open Croquet work from Krestianstvo

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

InfoVis Wrapper for Smalltalk

September 19, 2010 18:00:44.984

Holger Kleinsorgen has published a wrapper for the InfoVis toolkit (for Seaside) - the VisualWorks package is in the public store, a bundle called "InfoVis". For Squeak, check SqueakSource. Some details (more at the first link):

I've published some wrapper packages for the InfoVis Toolkit (http://thejit.org/). InfoVis provides various data visualizations (various graphs and trees, charts etc.). The visualizations can be manipulated dynamically (re-layout, add/remove nodes, load new data with Ajax etc.).

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posted by James Robertson

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gadgets

Friending Your Phone

September 19, 2010 10:23:33.553

I'm skeptical, but here's what Michael Arrington is reporting:

Facebook is building a mobile phone, says a source who has knowledge of the project. Or rather, they’re building the software for the phone and working with a third party to actually build the hardware. Which is exactly what Apple and everyone else does, too.

Here's the thing though - I don't think this is a game they want to play. They would be much, much better off getting someone to work on their Facebook app for the iPhone (and, for that matter, releasing a native iPad app). I just can't see any upside to sinking money into this - unlike Apple, I doubt they'll get full control of the device, leaving them with the glorious diversity that Android suffers with.

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posted by James Robertson

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audio

Industry Misinterpretations 206: Smalltalk Focus, part 2

September 19, 2010 9:57:49.056

This week's podcast is part 2 of a 2 part interview with John O'Keefe, Principal Smalltalk Architect at Instantiations. With the recent news from them - Google buying the Java business, and Instantiations becoming a pure Smalltalk play - we thought a talk with them would be interesting. If you haven't heard part 1, we posted that 2 weeks ago - you can get that here.

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 - 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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gadgets

Are iPhones Effectively More Open?

September 18, 2010 19:32:18.000

TechCrunch talks about the theory - Android phones should be more open - and the sad reality brought to us by the carriers:

the last couple of Android phones I’ve gotten as demo units from Google: the EVO 4G and the Droid 2, have been loaded up with crapware installed by the carriers (Sprint and Verizon, respectively). Apple would never let this fly on the iPhone, but the openness of Android means Google has basically no say in the matter. Consumers will get the crapware and they’ll like it. Not only that, plenty of this junk can’t even be uninstalled. How’s that for “open”?

This looks a lot like the situation you have in the PC space - you can buy a Mac, and get a somewhat more limited selection of software, and higher prices. or you can buy a PC, save some money - and have a ton of crapware pre-installed for you. I wonder how soon we'll see a free for all in malware coming to the Android space - that would just complete the circle.

This article really, really makes me doubt that we'll see an iPhone on Verizon. Verizon wants the V-Cast store front and center, and Apple just has no interest in that. Google can't stop it, because Android is open for carrier customization. Another thing, and this harks back to someting Gruber said awhile back - the branding thing. Whenever you see a Verizon ad touting phone selection, look carefully: every single phone, regardless of the hardware vendor, has Verizon branding on it - prominently. You think Apple wants any part of that?

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posted by James Robertson

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browsers

Browser Comparisons

September 18, 2010 12:34:02.000

These browser tests are pretty interesting, and they point out two things to me right off:

  • Google is way ahead of the pack with Chrome
  • Microsoft really needed to get IE9 out there, because IE8 was way, way behind

To see what I mean, follow the link and just look at the charts. IE8 is a straggler on the slow end; IE9 is right in the pack - but Google leads the way impressively with Chrome.

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posted by James Robertson

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PR

Awkward

September 18, 2010 9:19:47.895

It's awkward when the CEO has no clue what's going on in a company. Consider Yahoo's Carol Bartz, talking about Apple's iAd platform:

“That’s going to fall apart for them,” she said to Reuters, apparently referring to reports that the perfection-obsessed tech giant would involve itself in the creative part of ads on its service. “Advertisers are not going to have that type of control over them. Apple wants total control over those ads.”

Why, it's so terrible that Yahoo has been buying ads on the service. Oops. I expect the Yahoo PR flacks to have a few extra bottles of wine on hand this weekend :)

posted by James Robertson

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games

Impossible DLC

September 17, 2010 16:43:12.000

Last night I tried to take my level 34 rogue character - the one I ran through Dragon Age: Origins, Awakening, and Witch Hunt - and take a crack at getting the achievement point for playing "Golems of Amgarrak" at the hard level.

Well. It's insane. Things went fine (my character is a tank) until I got to the green switch room with a bunch of golems in it. Without a mage, that room is pretty much impossible at that level. There are just too many of them, and they kill off everyone else in the party pretty quick. Even with a level 34 rogue who can drop into stealth to get away from things, it's just impossible - I just couldn't inflict enough damage to play the "whittle them down" strategy.

So I'm curious - has anyone done that dlc on hard without a mage? If so, how?

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posted by James Robertson

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open source

Who Owns What

September 17, 2010 10:26:23.847

Joachim Tuchel makes an interesting point about open source licenses and issues, in his retrospective post about ESUG 2010:

The open source licenses panel was interesting and shocking at the same time. In short: no matter what you do, if someone wants to sue you, they can sue you and nobody will be able to tell you upfront in what direction this might go in court. But that might just be my impression. Lots of things to look at, lots of pitfalls for all contributors, users and vendors. Were you aware that if you write some code in your spare time, chances are your employer owns the rights to it? I wonder how any joint effort like Squeak or Pharo or whatever can be sure they even have the right to declare code as being theirs and grant any licenses if the authors themselves cannot be sure about it. This whole stuff simply is a bloody mess in my (now at least almost a little informed) opinion.

It's complicated for sure, and even within companies, it's unclear. On the one hand, most vendors (mine included) take great advantage from open source code, like Seaside. On the other hand, there's the constant tension of "aren't we giving away too much?" - and I think the demise of Sun illustrates the far end of that continuum.

I'm not sure how much cleaner any of this will get, either. Like patents and copyrights, a lot of this stuff is an exercise in MAD between vendors....

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posted by James Robertson

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esug2010

Next Generation Event Planning in Seaside - ESUG 2010

September 17, 2010 8:40:01.593

Here's a video from ESUG 2010, which was held in Barcelona, Spain, the week of September 13, 2010. In this presentation, J. Brichau talks about his new startup company based in Brussels, and how they have built their first product using Seaside and Pharo - although their current plan is to start using Gemstone GLASS). You can watch using the embedded player below, or follow the download links at the bottom of the post.

Next Generation Event Planning System with Seaside from James Robertson on Vimeo.

You can follow the ESUG channel on Vimeo for all the videos from the conference.

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Smalltalk Daily 09/17/10: Getting Email with IMAP

September 17, 2010 7:21:00.256

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at retrieving email messages with IMAP from Cincom Smalltalk. The code used is below; to skip to the video, click here.


"login"
imap := IMAPClient host: cincom.
netuser := NetUser username: username password: password.
imap user: netuser.
imap connect; login.

"work with the mailbox"
data := imap examineMailbox: 'inbox'.
numMessages := data first value asNumber.
msgs := imap fetchMessages: (1 to: numMessages) asArray.

"delete from server"
imap markForDelete: (1 to: numMessages) asArray.
imap close.


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You can download the video directly here. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here. If you like this kind of video, why not subscribe to "Smalltalk Daily"?

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posted by James Robertson

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ESUG 2010 Ends

September 17, 2010 6:35:48.989

With the time difference, I got to see the tail end of Alan's talk about Store and the conference wrap up - next year's event might be in Edinburgh (not confirmed yet). I'll have the first video from ESUG 2010 online later today; right now, I'm downloading the videos from yesterday.

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NTLM for Squeak

September 17, 2010 6:17:29.319

Spotted in Planet Squeak

A post on the Squeak mailing list made me reevaluate how difficult it would be to add NTLM and SPNEGO support to WebClient. Since I had done this at work before (via a plugin interface to support both Windows and Mac transparently) I figured it would be straightforward to implement it using the Squeak FFI interface. And indeed it is. The code is pretty small and a reasonable example on how to use the FFI to access the Microsoft SSP interface.

Using code someone else is already maintaining is a good idea. I've done Digest Auth and the xAuth piece of OAuth myself, and let me tell you - specs are written in a strange language, even though all of the words are English :)

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posted by James Robertson

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