Smalltalk and Seaside at FISL 9.0

Randal Schwartz is in Brazil at FISL 9.0. He gave a Seaside talk...

...the biggest news is that based on the preliminary interest in Seaside because of my talk, the FISL conference organizers offered an entire room for next years conference (the full three days with 12 hours per day), as well as four or five main-track hour talks, if I could help organize the subconference details! This is quite a gift, because it will mean that we can expose the 7000 conference attendees to a variety of Smalltalk programs, without paying for rooms or badging or promotion. The conference asked if I could get some corporate sponsors on board, and I immediately fired off email to James at Cincom and Monty at GemStone, and thank goodness they read email on Saturday, because they offered their support quickly. Of course, we have many details to work out, but everyone agrees that we will move forward!

Brazil has been fairly active with Smalltalk over the years. And Randal is a great evangelist for Smalltalk and Seaside. Having talked with him a couple of times recently at Portland-area groups for Smalltalk and open source development, he comes across as an intelligent, enthusiastic evangelist for whatever he's interested in.

He's going to do wonders for Smalltalk and Seaside, just watch.

Covers

Peter Saint-Andre writes about some favorite cover songs. Here are some of mine that come to mind:

• Dave Mason's "All Along the Watchtower" is a cover of Hendrix's cover.
• Peter Frampton's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps".
• The Pretenders' "Needle and the Damage Done"
• The Pretenders again: "Angel of the Morning"

And my list goes on, but I'll end it for now with some cover albums (as opposed to album covers)...

• Not Fade Away (Remembering Buddy Holly) - various artists
• Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles - various country artists
• Influence - Shaw and Blades
• An Acoustic Tribute to Prince - various female artists, I found this on itunes.
• Run Devil Run - Paul McCartney covering artists who influenced him

And the list could go on further. Of course I'd include every cover the Beatles made of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins.

Most covered song on my ipod: "Sweet Jane" at seven different artists. I have almost as many covers (6) of "Within You Without You".

Clueless in Seattle

Ray Ozzie speaks, and he speaks about Open Source Software. I don't even know what to quote from his statement. They're just not in the right ballpark. The only thing Ozzie communicates here is that he just does not understand the open source community, which _is_ the community for building out the internets.

This comes from the guy who built Groove out of proprietary Microsoft bits and proprietary bits from his developers. By the time they were shipping Groove, those bits had rotted. COM this and that, custom proprietary object database foo.

Had the protocols and the bits within Groove been even somewhat open, they might have grown a community around it, and kept it alive. Maybe some of those bits are living inside some Microsoft product. Running COM this and that???

Microsoft's "groove" looks more like a rut and face it, they've flipped the bozo bit. What a long, slow, excrutiating slide into oblivion they're on unless they can figure out what's really happening on the internets these days.

Update: This is an example of what BobWarfield at SmoothSpan calls: "Microsoft's Expensive Rift with the Web."

Another update: James Robertson ties this into the Smalltalk community. Seaside seems to be taking Smalltalk to another level. Smalltalk is an interesting community re: open source. As with the Lisp community there's always been a significant "openness" to Smalltalk, predating the actual open source licensing of various implementations. However there's no way the various vendor's Smalltalk GUI's could ever have been unified into an open implementation, but Seaside is on its way toward that end.

Intuit's Flex-able Cloud

Catchy title, eh?

Bob Warfield has some interesting "pre-news" about a new cloud
computing platform...

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/intuits-radical-new-flex-quickbase-cloud-platform/

"Someone mentioned that the standard for Cloud Platforms was to bring
up an app that everyone in the audience can log into within 5 minutes
or less. No problems here. We had the good old "Hello, World" up and
running very quickly."

But he wonders about Microsoft's cloudiness (cloudlessness?)...

""
Doesn't the Big M have SQL Server Data Services:
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/dataservices/default.mspx

Please to be wanting Vista now!

OMFG

Vista: "Career Ending"

Joe Wilcox of Microsoft Watch notes...

"Poole's departure pretty much marks the end of an era. Nearly every
Microsoft executive associated with the Windows Vista launch has left
the company. Vista has proven to be a career-ending enterprise, in
stark contrast to bygone days when big promotions followed the release
of a new Windows version.

I wonder: Would Poole have stayed, if not for those e-mails released
as part of the Windows Vista Capable lawsuit? Vistagate isn't over
yet. "

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/corporate/poole_realizes_his_unlimited_potential_elsewhere.html?kc=MWRSS02129TX1K0000535