I miscued on this one, thinking the single responsibility meant that multiple organs had the same responsibility, but in fact, the point is that some organs have multiple responsibilities. I assume that this is to do with evolution tending to find resourse-lite "solutions".
And amen to this: "The problem with BigDesignUpFront is that it relies too much on the intelligence of the designers." The designers are intelligent that this sort of behaviour impreses the boss!!
Via the European Smalltalk User Group:Moose
Works for Smalltalk, C/C++, Java, Ada apparently. Will be giving it a try later .....
Living just up the road from Southampton ( and it being the home of the nearest Premier League club), Simon Phipp's revelation was of great interest:Southampton-Brazil Football Link
And now we re-import Brazilian Soccer Skills Classes for our children!!
Prof. Tanenbaum delivers more damaging blows:Rebuttal to Ken Brown
The sponsors of the book should demand their money back.
brianstorms weblog: An Offer I Couldn't Refuse. Brian gets his blog published in a newspaper.
My Aunt lives in San Diego - time to ask her to snag a copy.
An excellent, comprehensive view of how to use wxPython:The Farm: The Tucows Developers' Hangout :: Exploring wxPython: The stdout/stderr Window and MessageDialogs
This really is (for its scope) the best resource I have seen; the table showing the eresults of various options is great.
ONLamp.com: Inside Mitch Kapor's World [Jun. 03, 2004]
Many intetresting comments, including: The dual-licensing model that's been used successfully by a number of open source projects such as MySQL and Sleepycat for their implementation of Berkeley DB is gaining a huge amount of currency and popularity. We identified that from the very outset as being promising.
Not a new article: Being Popular
Found it via: O'Reilly ONLamp:Paul Graham on Hacking
LJBook (Turn your blog into a PDF Book)
Not that mine is worth printing, but a Blogger version, please ?
Groklaw doesn't like Schwartz statement, like ESR's rebuttal, and wonders if the bad mouthing of Red Hat[ammended]Open Source is part of Sun's settlement with Microsoft:GROKLAW
On the other hand Simon Phipps says that this is not based on any new interview with Schwartz, that ESR was fed a provocative line by eWeek and hence he came out fighting (as only he can):Webmink's take
So there is probably an element of the tech. press stoking things up during a slow news day. But there were enough ambiguous/worrying statements in the first eWeek interview to make Sun vulnerable to this sort of thing.
I think a reasonable response to ESR by Sun, plus any clarifications they wish to make with hindsight would be a good move here.
I think most people realise that we have a software community using a variety of business models - the bold (therefore newsworthy) but unhelpful arguments like all "Open Source is bad/communist/starving my children/blahblah" or "I'm more Open Source than you" doesn't help anyone.
AMMENDMENT: As Simon points out in the comments, the Sun's questions about Red Hat weren't criticisms of Open Source. I'd really love to know what they all really meant though!
In addition to publishing a note from someone who did some background research on Linux source vs Unix ( and found no correlation, Eric Raymond and Newsforge are winding in some heavy hits.
If someone did pay for this book to be written, they'll be asking for their money back.
I see what he is saying, but I think it is wrong. Maybe I am too wedded to the idea of "do onto others, as you would have them do unto you" - and yes it applies across religions.
Is going in front of a judge first, somehow sanitising what follows ? What verifiable facts could be presented to such a judge? When a judge of a foreign country has a similar power over coalition captives ?
This is indeed a slippery moral slope, and we are accelerating.....
Now it is gathering momentum:Slashdot | Oracle To Finish Linux Makeover This Year
They might beat IBM to it ; weren't they aiming for end of 2005 ?
TheJacksonChannel.com - News - Sen. Lott Sounds Off On Iraqi Prisoner Abuse Photos
Where to start on this one ?
Poor leadership.
Sean McGrarth makes the following point: E-BUSINESS IN THE ENTERPRISE - When modelling business processes, upside down is the right way up:
"In this model, the programmer drives the business process onward, dictating the tempo which applications must follow. There are numerous terms used to describe this approach but my favorite is 'temporally coupled'. Applications must work in lock-step with each other for business process to function as they should.
This is a point solution. Why? Because it only works well when all the applications underfoot are under your control and (preferably) on the same physical network. Under those conditions, temporal coupling is manageable. Costly but manageable. The more general case of course is where not all the applications are under your control and not all on your local network. Web Services on an Extranet or the Internet for example.
To handle the general case of Web Services owned and hosted by other organizations, with the varying quality of service that that entails, programmers need to take a different approach to pan-application business process modelling. Instead of driving business processes programmatically, they need to deal with the fact that they are no longer completely in control. Web Services respond at different rates, they may not be up all the time, they will produce garbled data because somebody changes something without telling you and so on."
This seems natural to me; the ability to centrally model a process, even within a single company, is often an exercise in wishful thinking. Better to describe interconnecting patterns of behaviour and synthesise a view of how the parts work together.
Unless I misinterpret, it seems to me that UML Activity diagrams with Events can be used to model and view the results; what is the best mix of technologies underneath ? And can we generate these (or parts of these) from the UML diagrams?
Steps Toward Inner Peace by Peace Pilgrim via Crossroads Dispatches
I have only had a chance to skim the "booklet" but this paragraph hit home in our present circumstances:
MAGIC FORMULAS: There is a magic formula for resolving conflicts. It is this: Have as your objective the resolving of the conflict, not the gaining of advantage. There is a magic formula for avoiding conflicts. It is this: Be concerned that you do not offend, not that you are not offended.
Must return for another look.......
This is good stuff: great for being open about mistakes, fantastic that it could be aired on a blog, mature response from his colleagues:Anil Dash: Moving Forward.
Well done.
I'm disappointed if this is true:Amazon's Bezos: He omitted a crucial piece of data -- they weren't his to give up.
A very interesting article:Some notes on the "Who wrote Linux" Kerfuffle
Well worth the read.
Looks like a good kickoff:Python workshop
I'll be interested in seeing if this starts a trend for other mobile manufacturers.
Maybe Python on Pocket PC will be updated
The less advertising this sort of nonsense gets the better:Proof that Girls are evil
Well done, Suw:Chocolate and Vodka :: Cruel and unusual punishment
But perhaps a target is needed to increase motivation ?
This weekend I got out for a lovely bike ride, and did 20 miles in preparation for our London to Brighton cycle ride , due on 20th June. Suw is welcome to join us for this event!!
And everyone is free to sponsor me !!
Keith's BHF Sponsorship Page (only just created - may not work yet)
Ted Leung on the air : Code, community and money
Well, I don't know whether Mark is "starting " to get this! Anyway I would re-order Ted's heading as Community, Code, Money! Perhaps Ideas should be in their ahead of Code.
Congratulations to Dave and Userland on a bold decision. My interpretation of Dave's blog has been that it is very much against Open Source, along the lines of "how do I survive/eat/prosper/do new things?"
Still, here we see, courtesy of a blog , some of the rationale for their decision. And it makes sense to me ( so it must be a good idea). "This is no longer core to us, but could be useful to others, so let it free!!"
(Reminds me of "Master and Commander" when they have to leave the carefully gathered samples behind to get back to their ship quickly - "Open the cages!")
So, when else does it make sense to open source things?
Read this:Freedom 0 [dive into mark]
It is difficult to highlight a few points as there are so many good ones.
Once again the moral is - know what you really(, really) want from you software.
Dan Bricklin emphasisies a really good point here:
The thing to learn here is that the choice of how you differentiate between users for pricing is a key element in a product's feature-set. You had better be pretty clear about the philosophy behind that differentiation and change it at your peril. Reactions to the new Movable Type licensing scheme
Never used it myself, but many peole do. My main interest is that somehow people look at this situation and draw conclusions about Open Source software. Which is odd because I don't think MT is open source!
Here is what I regard as a well resoned look at the siruation for MT:
Brad Choate: Movable Type 3.0
His take seems to be that people who want to continue to use MT free ( including the new version) can do with pretty much the same restrictions as before. Maybe those who had to pay now have to pay more? Not sure: MT for use by more than one person and more than 3 blogs have to pay, any commercial activities ditto. Sure sounds like they should pay for something.
I have seen some talk about people who have contributed add-ons to MT being a bit sore about the situation. This is more understandable, but unfortunately, read the license !!
Anyway , folks , please don't infer any Open Source generalisations from this episode.
Two problems:
"The question now becomes, will that commoditization result in innovation?", from
Ted Leung : Will IT matter more after it's commoditized?
Seen via GT:Making America Our Own Again - A speech I'd like to hear: David Weinberger
A couple of things strike me: "Gosh, couldn't see a Brit saying that". But perhaps some did in the 18th/19th centuries?
Similarly, was there a period in Republican Rome when its citizen's thought they could improve the world?
The route from "Let us help you", via "We know best", to "We're better than you" is short and easy
I applaud David for what he has written, and I hope that his vision of a better world comes to pass, though I think it would be better if a growing team of nations lead this improvement.
Davtri.com :: Elizabethan Insulter
Very educational for students of Elisabethan history !!
I frequent #joiito, #python, #deryni_destinations, and no one has tried to sell me anything !! I'm missing out.
Fortunately others are taking a more serious line!! Mighty English/Welsh prose. Great stuff ; that'll show 'em!!
SAS workers won when greed lost
So, according to this article, SAS were very fortunate ( by luck or judgment) not to go public at the height of the dot.com boom. Now, however:
Yet now Goodnight is in something of a jam. SAS is in terrific shape to take off in a resurgent tech industry — but to really soar and reach its potential, SAS should go public, industry observers say.
And here is one of those industry observers:"True greatness requires a grand plan fueled with equal amounts of paranoia and greed",.......The demands of Wall Street would drive Goodnight and SAS harder and would give SAS the cash and stock to pay for expansion. "He can and should set his sights much higher,"
And although the article ends by saying lets see what happens this time, the whole tone is that of the conventional Wall Street inspired view that all companies need large buckets of cash and the continual threat of takeover to stretch themselves.
I challenge this view: why can't a firm grow organically? Why can't it reward and motivate its best people without gross dot.com sums of money? Is it only greed and fear which motivate companies to try really hard (too hard)? Or do private companies just bumble along being dumb, fat and happy ? Or do they do well with enlightened leadership and staff who feel they are working in a great environment.
I think that across the world there are plenty of companies run privately and run well. And no I'm not saying that is right for every company - but let's not brainlessly accept the Wall Street view of life.
Now I have a working Gentoo system, it is time to improve it ( or break it)!
Thanks to some advice on the forums I reset some flags to better describe the procesor I have (Duron on this system). Then , recompiled the system - truly amazing to watch it grind thru so many packages. Took a long time, and have yet to confirm any speed improvements, but it is geeky cool nonetheless!!
Also, tweaked the XF86Config - just like old times. But this worked really well - the resulution has improved, and the text is sharper than my old Linux system and my Windows XP system.
Just got to get sound working!!!!
I am in training for a charity bike ride from London to Brighton on June 20th. My neighbour and I went for a ride on (Bank Holiday) Monday. The day was grey and cool, but that is fine. But after 5 miles a light drizzle of rain started. After 12 mile it started to rain hard, but we pushed on for a while. Then we decided that this was needless, and so started back. We got colder, and tired, and made an error of judegement by taking the most direct route home - this , of course, proved to be an extremely hilly road.
We got home, but only just. I think we went beyond our current level of fitness. It really was the most miserable cycle I have ever done !!
Got home, showered, had lunch; in the afternoon the sun came out, and it was a beautiful spring day !!
After a lot of time, I have got Gentoo working on my Duron system. Back to the old days of laborious setup (XF86 etc.) but the spped seems a lot better and the Internet performance is great!
Not sure I will do any of my other machines with it. Still plenty of things to play with - if they give any further speed improvements, perhaps I will!!
I know this has been discused before, but this pulls a lot of strands together:Thinking about software licensing for a small ISV and the issue of open source
I work for a big company, but aspire to work/own a small one.
As always, applying this thinking internally to a BigCo is also worth some thought.
Classpaths are a pain - not sure I would argue Python is better just becouse of that !
Keith Devens .com - Weblog: Why Python is better than Java - April 26, 2004
There are other reasons. Buth then python has its import statement.....
imports were always the thing I got wrong when I was learning Python - also when I go back to Python after a break!
Victor Ng's Weblog: python's import is broken
Given how nice most of Python is in terms of ease of use, this sticks out like a sore thumb
I have to say I have not seen this sight: You don't see that every day. Even though I live 12 minutes walk from that very spot !
Maybe there are enough folks for a Winchester Mini-blogcon ?
This makes somber reading:Miguel de Icaza
I think that Miguel is correct that the combinations of technlogies, with dominant position, distribution etc. are what makes this dangerous.
I think it is all too easy to be over impressed by these strategies however. Linux and the ilk have been successful by doing the basics well. The big strategies often don't deliver the benefits that are touted.
I think this is an advance on a notion that Tim O'Reily espoused about the Linux killer apps:Three Species of Operating Systems
Rather the current OS is just part of a much larger OS.
Ben Hyde provides this analysis:Ascription is an anathema to any enthusiasm: Optimistic Concurrency
Here is a good quote:
I've convinced myself that open systems and optomistic[sic] concurrency are very similar ideas. Open systems make a choice to be optomistic[sic] about the coordination problem. They assume that the system will rarely suffer from rivalry or conflict. Open systems presume that when it does arise, the conflict can be resolved after the fact
I think this is true. I also believe comments about an open systems reaction to a problem ( making it less open) is also true ; I think the reactions of governments (esp. US and UK) to introduce new legislation at the expense of democratic principles is an example.
Ditch smalltalk already, ok? had a disconcerting tone to it, and the comments are a bit tetchy.
It is almost certainly true that J2ME has more market share than Mobile Smalltalk. Does it have momentum ? Does Smalltalk have a sustainable and marketable advantage ? Is Sun's financial health a factor?
Only time will tell, but let us not be too complacent 'cos we are out in front .....allegedly
Open-Source Developers Form Group To Push Zope in the UK
I enjoyed setting up a Zope site; the Squishdot tool was great, for instance.
There was some churn around templates at that time, I seem to recall, and adding Python code seemed to be a lot more difficult. In other words, I hit a bit of a wall and stopped.
Time to take another look ?
Added a Creative Commons license tag!
Also a BlogRoll - thanks to BlogRolling
And thanks to
Suw
for this one.
We were thinking of a new MPV; this could be it !
"I have recently begun learning and coding in Python. This is a wonderful language with a lot of killer features. It's object oriented from the ground up, easily extendable, massively usable and runs fast. The Python tag line is "Batteries Included", which is very true. Coming from a pretty broad background, which includes languages such as Perl, C, Java, PHP, ASP, Visual Basic, Cold Fusion, Tcl and Objective C, I am flat out amazed by what this language is capable of doing."
Wish I could use it at work !
WebMink: my heart certainly goes out to Simon and his family. He accurately describes the kinds of fears that go through parents' minds.
It occured to me that I was glad that my chidren were a biy older, so that cot death was no longer an issue. But then Simon's relation was beyond that age, and only yesterday I found myself checking on our 15 year-old son after he returned from a party: was he really that tired or... ( He was that tired !)
I realise the truth of what my mother said a few years ago: " I worry about my grandchildren - actually I still worry about you as well". So we will never be totally free of this worry - and that is a good thing. We must make the most of life - we are certainly luckier than other ages, and other parts of the world today, where long life is a luxury.
Don't think this is April Fools
Good to see a new issue. Even more intersting to read the interviews with Steffan O'Sullivan and Ann Dupuis. Fudge going OGL is certainly intersting, and Ann seems to be very enthusiastic about it, whereas Steffan appeared to be focussed elsewhere.
Just hope the Deryni Fudge rules come out soon!
Now this looks interesting:Resilient: Making Embedded Systems Serviceable at Smalltalk Solutions 2004.
A group of people with a deep Java background have rejected a JVM for the embedded market, and instead gone with a Smalltalk based one. There are some charts on the web, but no detailed rationale. Will keep an eye on this one.
Interesting topic for debate Do we want choices? over at the Smalltalk Tidbits blog.
Having recently taken a look at Cincom Smalltalk, I was definitely left rather overwhelmed by what seemed to be a lot of overlapping concepts. I think there are several different cases:
I can't find the reference now, but I am pretty sure that the Cincom Smalltalk documentation warns folks away from one concept - could be an idication that it is in the 1st category.
Documentation such as turorials can help with the 2nd and 3rd categories, but obviously tool support is invaluable; many tools have a normal and advanced set of menus, though this can be rather unsophisticated.
Another day, another gadget.
Got the Ink Link working, both with PC and iPAQ. Great for capturing sketches, doodles, written notes etc. With the iPAQ it is also meant to recognise handwriting - will try that later.
It is also meant to change ink color, on the screen, not the paper. But doesn't do that for me yet.
I can think of all sorts of useful things that Seiko could add to this, but I got this as an end-of-line, bargain. Will this live on ?
I am still in love with my new gadget - the iPAQ 5550.
Still finding plenty of good softare:
In our neighbourhood has very weak TV reception, and some of the channels require a wideband aerial for digital tv. A couple of weeks ago, I phoned around for a new aerial and was aghast at the prices.
Well, doing nothing turned out to be the right thing to do - the local transmitter is now broadcasting in the frequncy band for our aerial.
So, somethings do come to he who waits!!
I have to say I found getting the VW environment to work on my iPAQ 5550 very cool. It is not a usable development environment, at least on my resolution, but it is just mind blowing that it runs at all!
I assume this is meant to be a platform for applications, rather than app. development, at least for now.
Very cool!
The weather was a lovely spring day; I was able to work at home, so whilst I couldn't fully enjoy it, at least I could wander round the garden when todays deadline for administrivia threatened to overwhelm me. Able to watch my wife weeding the flower bed.
Broadband will be installed next week, so that will spur me to get Wi-Fi going too. Surfing the web on the patio is getting closer.
Took #2 son swimming - after a slow start he is coming along well..
Objection handling is a standard part of sales preparation. Can it be applied to Smalltalk ?
Here is the start of a list of possible objections to using Smalltalk and some answers. The idea is for the Smalltalk community to provide the answers, pointers to examples etc.:
[I'll be looking at the Cincom Web Tutorial on this
See examples ...
See examples ....
There is much debate about this topic in language circles thse days, and many would cite the lack of stong type checking at all times as a benefit. Many of the benefits of strong typing can be countered by "test-first" strategies.
After over a decade away I decided to see whre Smalltalk had got to in that time.
I originally thought that there would be little activity, but in fact there is quite a lot going on. VisualWorks ( and others) are still going and there is a Blog community here:
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs
The following post:
Smalltalk and Productivity
got me thinking about why so many people have reservations about Smalltalk and what the Smalltalk community could do about it.
To be continued ......
When Democracy starts to break down ......
This worries me a lot these days, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Glenn Vanderburg's fortieth ( Happy Birthday) sounds wonderful.
I'll just say that mine wasn't like that.
