More corporate poop heads

Motherhood and Apple Pie [@lesscode.org]: "But the dead-end has long been reached and so these industry leaders have turned their attention to this new place, built on principles and values very different from their own, and have somehow reached the conclusion that this thriving ecosystem must be re-arranged such that they have somewhere to place their baggage. Instead of embracing the people, principals, and technologies that gave rise to this phenomenon they have chosen to subvert its history and to implant the ridiculous notion that it is “incapable of meeting the stringent demands of the business community.”"

Roses in the garden 

SLIME Flash

Vnc2swf Demo - SLIME: "Sorry for my poor English :)"

English is fine, demo is great (shame about the background hum!!)
Thanks!

Interesting that some oof Yusuke's intonation is very similar to Rainers

Yet Another Lisp Movie

Spotted in Planet Lisp

I really enjoyed Marco Baringer's first movie of UCW development. Now, he has created a new SLIME movie.

Mystifying argument: HTML vs Microformats

I can't help but feel that this debate is about tradeoffs, rather than absolutes. But here is an intersting argument:
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Using XML on the Web is Evil, Since When?:

" If everyone invents their own tags and attributes, pretty soon you get people calling the same thing by different names and different things by the same name. "

"Didn't the XML world solve this with XML namespaces like six or seven years ago?"

#

Didn't it solve one of those 2 problems?

Lisp goes to the media

After the sensation of Rainer Joswig's Lisp movie on Language Workbenches, it was only a matter of time before it happened again. This time Marco Baringer has one on his Uncommon Web which seems to be getting a lot of attention at present.

A great trend - I'm certainly learning from these, faster than reading! I'm slso impressed at how each of them has mastered their IDEs - their keystrokes are too fast to see the incantations, but it is an inspiration to learn more.

Dear Java,

Classic stuff: read it and the references:Ravi Mohan's Blog: Goodbye to Java: "And so dear Java , it's been nice knowing you . While you were never a stunning beauty like Lisp or smalltalk or C, your massive libraries endowed you with a certain charm for a while . But alas today you are fat and shapeless and you desperately need a deodorant ."

Getting the iPaq back: Pocket Mindmap

I alluded to the hard-reset and subsequent restore debacle on my 5550.

I also disovered tht I had lost some license keys. In the end, I foundold notes for them all except Pocket Mindmap.

They get todays Qudos Award for exceptional service: no quibble sending of the key ( by e-mail), within 15minutes of my request.

And it is a great product too!

BBC NEWS | UK | UK Muslims feel 'under suspicion':

"Lord Ahmed also said it was possible illegal immigrants would run if challenged by the police.

'We know that there are many thousands or hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants and if they're challenged by the police, they're not going to stand there and produce their ID, they obviously will try and run.

'And whilst we need to catch those illegal immigrants or asylum seekers, nevertheless we can't shoot them because they're not terrorists.'

Anyone with dark skin who was running for a bus or Tube could be thought to be about to detonate a bomb, he said."

I can't find the reference at present, but I saw a blog recently, discussing how one learned not to run for a bus in Northern Ireland ; this isn't about race or religion - this is about terror.

Idle Apple speculation

Spotted in Slashdot

Vicissidude writes "CNN/Money reports: 'Apple may be gearing up to unveil a new slate of mini-Macs and may also release updated versions of its popular iBook laptop computers as early as next Tuesday, according to unconfirmed reports on a Web site that tracks Apple.' The Web site Think Secret reported three new Mac mini and two new iBook part numbers have appeared in Apple's retail database, indicating that new models are imminent. Apple would neither confirm nor deny the reports. The new mini models will be priced at $499, $599 and $699, with new iBooks priced at $999 and $1,299, according to the original story at Think Secret."

Our dog Rory, from Picasa/Hello/Blogger 

Will someone else please pickup this tab?

James Governor's MonkChips:

"But I do want our politicians to stand firm with London. Tony Blair was once goaded into talking of a willingness to pay the blood price. Well its civilians, not just soldiers in Iraq, that are footing the bill."

Now that they are out of town they are the one group who won't have to pay.

Of course the cynic in me ( deep inside, hardly ever comes out, honest) says the security and ambulance services might prefer the MPs out of the way.

Joi Ito's Web: One venture capitalist's view on software patents:

"I personally believe that software patents are primarily the tool of large companies with portfolios of patents which they cross-license with each other. Generally, it serve to keep competition out of the market and allows those with patents to push those without patents around or cut them out of markets entirely."

More on HP vs. Kay : I wish I'd said this

HP Fires Father of OOP: "HP Invent ---- Isn't that hard without inventors ?"

HP like London busses?

I meant: first you wait for ages and then 3 come along all at once.

HP doesn't get many mentions on this blog but now there are three in a row. First Trademark, then Alan Kay and now .......

My iPaq hard resets itself for no apparent reason, and then my Sprite Backup totally fails to do its job , either from a PC backup or the local SD card backup.

Of course, we conspiracists know the real answer !!!

Alan Kay leaving HP: Good News for those not in HP

Good Morning Silicon Valley: HP converting storied garage into recycling center:

"A day after offering up a 'research will not be cut' declaration to its plans to trim its workforce by 14,500 employees ....... , HP did just that. In an e-mail sent to employees Wednesday morning, HP Labs Director Dick Lampman announced the cancellation of four of the company's research projects -- the Consumer Applications and Systems Laboratory, the Emerging Technologies Laboratory, the Cambridge Research Laboratory, which worked on health and wellness technology, and the Advanced Software Research team. In disbanding the last group, HP is bidding adieu to legendary Silicon Valley technologist Alan Kay....... Hard to believe HP's cutting him loose. But it is. According to the company, his research doesn't jibe with HP's new focus. 'I was surprised by [Alan] leaving,' said one HP Labs researcher who asked not to be identified. 'In the last year, he was kind of the poster child of the 'HP Invent' stuff, and now all of a sudden, he's not here anymore.'"

I'm sure Alan will find somewhere more suitable.

Nuts

HP stops Expansys importing non-Euro PDAs | Channel Register: "After hearing the case last month, Justice Laddie came down on the side of HP when he delivered his judgement last week.

HP claimed this meant that “HP has the right to prevent iPAQ products being imported into the EU without HP’s consent and that any iPAQ product on the market in the EU without HP’s consent is a trade mark infringement.'

In a statement, the PC giant claimed the judgement underlined the importance of sticking with its authorised channel and made it clear that resellers were playing with fire if they dabbled in the grey market.

HP said that as well as tightening business practices and controls and “improving education and training” it would take “appropriate action against resellers who violate terms of their authorized reseller agreements, including legal recourse if necessary.”"

This is a bad decision ( even if legally correct). And it won't do HP any good either.

Cheap Debian machine

Hacked $99 NAS gadget runs full Debian Linux:

"A Debian ARM hacker has published a detailed HOWTO on installing Debian Linux on Linksys's NSLU-2 NAS (network-attached storage) gadget. "

Quiet, low power ? sounds good.......

Lisp Tutorials

Spotted in Planet Lisp

It's come to my attention that it's hard to find good tutorials for Lisp programming using Google. I think it's time to rectify that situation by letting Google know about the good tutorials for Lisp, especially the good tutorials about Common Lisp, that are available. Won't you help me?

Sure sounds like a worthy effort: his suggestion of Practical Common Lisp is a good suggestion for an excellent Lisp tutorial. Others include:

• David B. Lamkins' Successful Lisp book.


• A meta-list CLiki Online Tutorials


• Rainer Joswig's Quicktime movie does a great job of showing an example of a development process, macros, Domain Specific Languages etc. (Look for the various mirrors which have sprung up.

Retro!!

The real problem is C# and Java are still languages from the middle of the pack of "the 60s" languages (e.g. Concurrent Pascal). Languages from the best of "the 60s" like Lisp and Smalltalk, have not had to change much and are able to move into new concurrency models with much less baggage.

Spotted in Smalltalk and my misinterpretations of life

So, dynamic type stuff until you suddenly find a need to static type things. Whether that be to solidify an API for an external party or to optimise some piece of code. But never before then.

There's more:
IBM poop heads say LAMP users need to "grow up": "Over the past two years, every enterprise developer on the planet has been scurrying to move away from this architecture. This can be witnessed most clearly in the Java community by observing the absolute failure of EJB and the rise of lightweight frameworks like Hibernate, Spring, Webwork, Struts, etc. This has been a bottom up movement by pissed off developers in retaliation to the crap that was pushed on them by the sophisticated tool vendors in the early century."

IBM poop heads say LAMP users need to "grow up": "Woodshed!

Let's do it:

According to Daniel Sabbah, general manager of IBM's Rational division, LAMP -- the popular Web development stack -- works well for basic applications but lacks the ability to scale.

Nope. We call bullshit. After wasting years of our lives trying to implement physical three tier architectures that 'scale' and failing miserably time after time, we're going with something that actually works.

If you look at the history of LAMP development, they're really primative tools ... the so-called good enough model. The type of businesses being created around those particular business models are essentially going to have to grow up at some point.

No. The LAMP stack is a properly constructed piece of software. Features are added when an actual person has an actual need that arises in the actual field, not when some group of highly qualified architecture astronauts and marketing splash-seekers get together to compete for who can come up with the most grown-up piece of useless new crap to throw in the product."

"The LAMP model works because it was built to work for and by people building real stuff. The big vendor / big tools model failed because it was built to work for Gartner, Forrester, and Upper Management whose idea of "work" turned out to be completely wrong."

Spotted in Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger

they're encouraging girls to choose a career path that, by every metric I've seen, is decreasing in both number of jobs and wages for those jobs.

James Governor's MonkChips: "So the first bomb went off this morning in Aldgate East. Then all hell broke loose.

My office is in... Aldate East.

I arrived at Liverpool Street station at a couple of minutes past 9 to find it closed. I am really happy i was 25 minutes or so late this morning..."

James Governor's MonkChips: On Lotus and the Advantages of Componentization: "Comparing MS and IBM's approaches: one major difference is that IBM seems to do evolutionary better. Longhorn will be a major revolution, and that's all good, but there's something to be said for IBM's slow and steady approach."

Before the deluge | ?Doc Searls' IT Garage: "The free and open Internet, a World of Ends built on an end-to-end, peer-to-peer architecture, is slowly being privatized and nationalized, one DRM file, one blocked port, one platform silo, one walled data garden, one legislative action, one regulatory decree, one Supreme Court decision and one national cyberwall after another."

Thin Air: "His thesis was that a good model provides the language that the team uses to communicate about the domain, and should be directly reflected in the code.

One of the points Eric made in his talk was that he preferred language rather than pictures for modelling, and as such, he preferred modelling in Smalltalk or Java rather than UML."

Spotted in Planet Lisp

But Chapter 22 "LOOP for Black Belts" of Peter Seibel's book Practical Common Lisp explains loop so well, that I feel much less need for iterate, at least in most cases, where extensibility is not required.

FToI: Bringing on the Clash of Civilizations: "Now I see his arguments to be close to the current reality of fundamentalist confrontation, which may have emerged with the failure of dialogue between and reform within civilizations."

Global Voices Online?Blog Archive ? Muslim Blogosphere Reacts to London Blast: "The time is now. We have to get this done. Otherwise we will be completely left behind and will suffer much more at the hands of these terrorists.

My heart and thoughts go to the people of the United Kingdom in this very difficult time."

Burningbird ? Stop: "Stop. Stop right now.

I won’t point to the sites, and I won’t repeat the exact words. But now is not the time to point to a ‘wiki’ setup to collect information about the bombs in London, and smugly say how much better it is at covering the news than the New York Times."

Spotted in Planet Lisp

I call this development style: 'putting parentheses around the specification and make it run'. It is only possible because Lisp development systems are giving you the combination of easy DSL integration (due to a programmable programming language), an interactive development system (with REPLs (Read Eval Print Loop) and incremental compilation) and robust error handling (with the condition system).

Spotted in Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

I don't think much of WS* myself, but our customers are asking for it.

Industry watchers like it - how do we get off this runaway engine?

The spirirt of the blitz

Random Acts Of Reality :: Main Page: "Once the shock had settled, I started to feel immense pride that the LAS, the other emergency services, the hospitals, and all the other support groups and organisations were all doing such an excellent job. To my eyes it seemed that the Major Incident planning was going smoothly, turning chaos into order. "

Watch out Edinburgh

BBC NEWS | UK | London bombings toll rises to 37: "The officer in charge of policing the G8 summit said many of the 1,500 Metropolitan Police officers in Scotland would be urgently redeployed to London"

Of course, could be a predicted and, therefore, planned for response

Spotted in Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

to the utter lack of common sense

Well, it is the House of Commons!

BBC NEWS | Education | How schools can get free software: "The UK government's school computing agency, Becta, has said schools could save costs by switching to what is known as open source software."

About time too.

Europe rejects patent proposal | CNET News.com: "The European Parliament has rejected a controversial measure that would have legalized software patents in the European Union."

Aha ! World domination will be ours!! Oh, if it weren't for the Common Agricultral Policy.

State: Wi-Fi cloaks a new breed of intruder: "Police say Benjamin Smith III, 41, used his Acer brand laptop to hack into Dinon's wireless Internet network."

Bet he didn't hack in at all - many wireless setups have no security by default. This is a classic piece of reporting:

But experts believe there are scores of incidents occurring undetected, sometimes to frightening effect. People have used the cloak of wireless to traffic in child pornography, steal credit card information and send death threats, according to authorities.

Any unprotected internet access will do , you know !

Spotted in Planet Lisp

Clearly even with a Lisp-based web server, we want to join the movement. Time for a little experiment: publishing podcasts for iTunes with CL-HTTP.

Bitwise Magazine :: serious computing: "Every programmer has heard of Smalltalk but not so many have used it. Find out what you've been missing by downloading a free Smalltalk and following the first part of our Smalltalk tutorial"

BBC SPORT | Other Sport... | Olympics 2012 | Why London won the Olympic race: "Why London won the Olympic race"

Well done !!

Especially welcome after Chirac's performance over the last month.

Spotted in The Register

But what is most disturbing about Gallagher's presentation, is how it endlessly refers to the president. The first slide has a picture of George Bush. The second begins "Thanks to the president's policies, America's economy is strong". The next slide is "The president's broadband vision". The next slide leads with a quote from Bush and two pictures of him. And on and on it goes. There is barely a single slide that doesn't quote from the president.