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law

Patents and Copyrights Jump the Shark

March 13, 2012 22:16:07.052

I think it's time to seriously consider ending copyrights and patents completely. Ask yourself - could a complete free for all be worse than what we have now?

While most of the tech world was partying at South by Southwest in Austin yesterday, Yahoo announced it was filing a lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly infringing on 10 patents from their 1,000+ patent warehouse.

As if all of that crap Yahoo claims as their work wasn't already done on some BBS system back in the early 90's. Seriously - wipe the slate clean, and just start over.

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posted by James Robertson

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js4u

JS 4U 139: JQuery Grep 1

March 13, 2012 11:11:00.675

Javascript 4 U

Today's Javascript 4 You looks at the grep() function in JQuery. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube.

Join the Facebook Group to discuss the tutorials. You can view the archives here.

To watch now, click on the image below:

grep()

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

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posted by James Robertson

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smalltalk

Gemstone in the Cloud

March 12, 2012 19:22:32.113

More good cloud stuff from Gemstone:

In our previous post we used Chef to install GemStone/S 64 Bit into Cloud Foundry. Now we add code so that GemStone is recognized as a service offered by Cloud Foundry.

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posted by James Robertson

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st4u

ST 4U 205: A Pharo Launcher

March 12, 2012 11:26:33.454

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at the Pharo Launcher in Pharo - it works somewhat like the project launcher for VisualWorks, but it's specific to the Mac (and OS X Lion at that). You can find it in the app store. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

Pharo Launcher

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

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posted by James Robertson

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podcastAAC

IM 69: Component Studio at ESUG 2011 (AAC)

March 11, 2012 23:34:34.859

Welcome to episode 69 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson and David Buck.

This weekwe have another ESUG 2011 presentation - here's the abstract on the talk from Georg Heeg - this is part 1, which you can watch here if you would rather see the video.

Georg Heeg AG purchased assets of CS Component Studio GmbH including the software and rights of CS Component Set. CS Component set is a toolbox of ERP components for small and mid-size companies. It has been developed over more than a decade and is in daily use in successful companies throughout Germany. The basic idea has been to have an ERP system which has many standard components for any business and is adaptable to specific needs of special businesses and individual companies. Georg Heeg AG plans to fully support existing customers and to bring the software to an up-to-date level and to implement new and innovative applications.

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.

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.

If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Troublemaker for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!

If you have feedback, send it to jarober@gmail.com - or visit us on Facebook - you can subscribe in iTunes using this iTunes enabled feed.. 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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podcast

IM 69: Component Studio at ESUG 2011

March 11, 2012 23:34:01.909

Welcome to episode 69 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson and David Buck.

This weekwe have another ESUG 2011 presentation - here's the abstract on the talk from Georg Heeg - this is part 1, which you can watch here if you would rather see the video.

Georg Heeg AG purchased assets of CS Component Studio GmbH including the software and rights of CS Component Set. CS Component set is a toolbox of ERP components for small and mid-size companies. It has been developed over more than a decade and is in daily use in successful companies throughout Germany. The basic idea has been to have an ERP system which has many standard components for any business and is adaptable to specific needs of special businesses and individual companies. Georg Heeg AG plans to fully support existing customers and to bring the software to an up-to-date level and to implement new and innovative applications.

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.

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.

If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Troublemaker for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!

If you have feedback, send it to jarober@gmail.com - or visit us on Facebook - you can subscribe in iTunes using this iTunes enabled feed.. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!

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[im69.mp3 ( Size: 7371784 )]

posted by James Robertson

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copyright

Money Grab

March 9, 2012 16:01:24.000

The insanity of this "search engines should pay" approach should be obvious:

Germany’s government wants search engines and news aggregators to pay news publishers for using pieces of their material.

What they want is to be paid by the people who make it easier to find their material. IMHO, Google (et. al.) should just remove all covered organizations from their search results, and see how well they like that outcome.

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posted by James Robertson

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st4u

ST 4U 204: Changing the Fonts in VA Smalltalk

March 9, 2012 10:34:52.267

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at changing the font used across the tools in VA Smalltalk. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

Fonts.

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:


Today we'll look at changing the default font used across all VA Smalltalk tools. To start, notice the little Aa icon at the far right of the toolbar:

Fonts

Open that, and you'll get a chooser tool for fonts. Select something you would prefer - here we are picking the Impact font. Not because it's a great choice for this, but because the change will be obvious:

Fonts

After you accept the change, all the tools update. Open a few:

New Font

All of your tools now use this font.

Need more help? There's a screencast for other topics like this which you may want to watch. Questions? Try the "Chat with James" Google gadget over in the sidebar.

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posted by James Robertson

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js4u

JS 4U 138: The focus() Function

March 8, 2012 8:20:12.322

Javascript 4 U

Today's Javascript 4 You looks at the focus() function in JQuery. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube.

Join the Facebook Group to discuss the tutorials. You can view the archives here.

To watch now, click on the image below:

find()

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

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posted by James Robertson

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gadgets

Google Plus Ate My iPhone

March 7, 2012 13:00:00.000

Last week, my phone (an iPhone 4) started losing charge rapidly - it would go from fulll to red within 2 hours, just sitting idle on my desk. It was also warm to the touch, indicating that background jobs were obviously chewing up the CPU and battery. But what?

As it happens, I have lots of things providing me notifications - facebook, Twitter, Drudge, you name it. I started turning notifications off, but that wasn't helping. I finally sat back and replayed when this started happening, and came up with it: a friend used the Google "hangout" feature earlier in the week, and I responded to it. Since then, the problem was rampant. I turned off all notifications for Google Plus, and bam - problem solved.

I'm not sure what Google did wrong, but it sure was using up my phone's useful life. I'd be curious to know whether or not anyone else has seen this....

posted by James Robertson

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Macintosh

Apple Breaks Their Tools

March 7, 2012 11:40:37.258

I had a fairly dismaying time with Lion this morning; one of the changes Apple made has really impacted my workflow in a negative way. The change is pretty stupid, too. Consider how I would deal with an image in Snow Leopard:

 

  • Export a .pct image from a video using QuickTime Pro (the old version; the new version still stinks)
  • Open the image in Preview
  • Crop, resize, save, all in the same session

 

Now ponder the *cough* improved *cough* workflow:

 

  • Export a .pct from a video using QuickTime Pro (the old version; the new version still stinks)
  • Open in Preview
  • Export to a PDF
  • Open the PDF, export to a JPG (or PNG, etc)
  • Open the new file, crop, resize, export yet again

 

What the heck was wrong with Save As? Why do I have to walk through PDF, when it's clear that Preview still handles all the image formats? Who at Apple thought all of these extra steps served a purpose? Who at Apple is going to fix the problem?  And who decided that eliminating Save As across all the stock tools and replacing it with Export was helpful?  I understand the versioning idea, but heck - that's not how every other blasted tool on the planet works.  Give me back my old workflow - if I wanted to have a crappy time working, I'd use Office with the idiotic ribbon....

posted by James Robertson

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st4u

ST 4U 203: Scratch Editions in Envy

March 7, 2012 9:18:28.076

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at "scratch" editions in VA Smalltalk. If you just grab an application and start coding, it's what you get - and today we'll look at what that means. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

ENVY.

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:


Today we'll look at what a "scratch" edition in VA Smalltalk means. Recall that ENVY tracks every change you make in VA; that means that a version of your code always lands in the repository. So if you don't create a new edition, one gets created for you. Make a small change in some application:

Scratched

You'll get prompted about creating a scratch edition. That's simply a new edition you haven't named. Go ahead and do so; you'll see this:

Scratched

Now all you need to do is tell ENVY to make that a new edition:

New Edition

And you'll have a new "clean" edition to work with.

Need more help? There's a screencast for other topics like this which you may want to watch. Questions? Try the "Chat with James" Google gadget over in the sidebar.

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posted by James Robertson

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js4u

JS 4U 137: JQuery Find Part 3

March 6, 2012 8:11:48.423

Javascript 4 U

Today's Javascript 4 You wraps up our look at the JQuery find() function. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube.

Join the Facebook Group to discuss the tutorials. You can view the archives here.

To watch now, click on the image below:

find()

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

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posted by James Robertson

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