The OpenSkills Sett

Wow - the new VMWare fusion 4.0 UI is such a load of rubbish

2011-10-09T11:59:00.007+01:00

VMWare is just about the only software product I pay for. Everything else is either open source or comes with a device.

Anyhow, I just upgraded my copy of VMWare fusion (the mac host package) from version 3.x to version 4.x and boy is the UI rubbish. VMWare have added all kinds of cool UI gizmos to their utility screens (the stuff used to manage VMs before you even start them) but in the process have made the UI painfully slow and clunky.

With version 3.x I could see all my VMs in a single window and click on any of them and see the configuration on a pane to the right. The configuration pane presented summary information including notes I left to myself about the intended use of the VM, and on that same pane I could drill down to specific details such as network, disk or memory configuration. All the VMs remained listed to the left.

With 4.0 a cool slidy single-pane UI opens showing a black rectangle for each VM (which could show a screen snapshot from a running VM - cool, but is useless to me because I only save my VMs in a shut down state). Only the short name of each VM is shown beneath each black rectangle. No sign of my comments nor a summary of the VM configuration. If I click on a rectangle the VM might start, or the rectangle might just be selected depending on where I click on the rectangle (the faint grey arrow in the middle is a control(!) not just part of the image). If the VM decides to start, my list of VMs is removed (I didn't ask for that!) and the VM boots in it's own window. To get back to the admin window I need to go to the VMWare application menu or recall a special three-key incantation. If the VM doesn't start I just get the name of the VM highlighted in blue and then I have to press a button elsewhere on the admin window to see the config summary, and even then I just get a (very flashily displayed) set of icons, again replacing my list of VMs, oh, and the window leaps to a different part of the screen for some reason. Only when I click on the 'General' icon do I see the comment I left for myself. Then, having found that I had not selected the VM I wanted I close the settings icon panel and ... just get a big black rectangle for that one VM. To get back to my list of VMs I need to use the three-finger incantation again *and* have to close the VM I didn't want because that now hangs around in a window of it's own.

In short (well, fairly short) the move from the 3.x admin UI to 4.0 means instead of one click to understand the nature of a VM and then one click to understand another VM I have: click to select a rectangle (careful not to click the middle!), then press a button in the top left of the UI, then press the General icon ... then to see the next VM I have to {shift}+{cmd}+L, close the window for the VM I'm not interested in and ... start all over again. Not only are there many, many more steps but each step is sloooowwwww.

The VMWare fusion 4.0 admin UI is a massive leap backwards in terms of usability. It's crap when compare to the 3.x admin UI. It's like a graphic artist or widget designer was let loose without an experienced UX person there to guide them.

Dear VMWare, for fusion 4.1 could you please throw away the rubbish cheap shiny 4.0 admin UI and go back to the 3.x model. The 3.x UI may not have been so cool, but it worked much, much, better. Thanks.

BBC News - Millions stroll in New York's 'park in the sky'

2011-10-08T22:29:00.002+01:00

It's great to see the people in New York enjoying being able to walk above the streets:

BBC News - Millions stroll in New York's 'park in the sky'

The high walks in the City of London provide a similar escape from the dirty traffic filled streets. It's unfortunate that here in London the high walks are being systematically closed and demolished at the hands of the City of London chief planning officer, Peter Rees. I attended a planning meeting where he seemed to take enormous pleasure in supporting a project which depletes the high walk even more. He joked about the people who use the high walks in a most demeaning way.

Perhaps he should have a look at how New York is recognising the value of pedestrian spaces away from traffic, and look to projects which improve rather than diminish the lived-in environment.

Who looks at Smalltalk?

2011-07-27T08:06:00.007+01:00

The C guys looked at Smalltalk and said they didn't need object orientation. They could structure their programs just fine.

The C++ guys looked at Smalltalk and thought, actually, the OO stuff is rather cool for building well structured code, but all the rest is just a performance hog, especially garbage collection.

The Java (and later C#) guys looked at Smalltalk and thought, you know, in most cases garbage collection is a really good thing as it saves programmers time and completely avoids common C/C++ malloc/free bugs, and anyway the performance cost is hardly noticeable in most applications, but all the rest of the stuff in Smalltalk is fluff, especially dynamic typing because it's obvious that static type checking will result in much less buggy programs, especially when you use JUnit as well.

The Python and Ruby guys looked at Smalltalk and realised that using dynamic types gave them much less brittle systems which could flexibly change and evolve over time. They liked JUnit too, but called theirs something else, and the ideas of refactoring (that was invented by the Java guys too, right?) were even more powerful in a dynamically typed world ... and if Smalltalk is so good why didn't the Smalltalk people think of something like JUnit and refactoring! All the other stuff in Smalltalk was just fluff, though. For example, who would want to have an image based development environment or have the development tools themselves visible and changeable in that same development environment?

Anyone?

Fix My Street

2011-07-16T18:57:00.001+01:00

The BBC have promoted a council run service for reporting street cleaning issues. All well and good, but FixMyStreet has been running for longer and is independent of the person reporting the problem and, critically, the council responsible for fixing the problem. There is very definitely a conflict of interests with the council running the site which is watching the council.

I really wish the council in the BBC story had put the money towards helping to improve FixMyStreet, or just promoting it ... or even just improving their response to issues raised through FixMyStreet.

Yes to AV?

2011-05-05T08:29:00.007+01:00

In the UK today we get to vote in a referendum on whenther AV should be adopted in place of first past the post in elections for MPs.

I thought of two situations where AV would be useful to me.

Where an incumbant MP I like is replaced by their party. If I still like the policies of the party I would wish to say that I'd rather keep the current MP, but if not then I'll go with the person the party now nominates. With AV I can do this.
Similar to the above, if I would like to see a person not aligned with a party to be the MP, but if that is not possible then have the party I feel is 'safe'. Again AV lets me do this.

They key is I can submit more information with my single vote using AV.

Some have suggested that AV is a poor compromise and that we should really be aiming to have PR, but I disagree strongly with that. I very much want to retain directly elected MPs who represent specific areas rather than moving to the PR model where I would choose a party and the party would pick the MP(s) who represent me.

As for the information-free mud slinging we have seen by the major parties leading up to this referendum, well, I think we'd be better off just ignoring that.

So, AV seems to let me say more in my single vote while still ending up with a single MP to represent my area in parliament. One person, one vote, one MP. I think I like that.

Flext9 asks too much>

2011-03-08T18:12:00.000Z

The Register think Flext9 is a great keyboard for an Andorid phone:

Nuance Flext9 • reghardware

It costs £3, which seems OK to me. What is not so OK is that this keyboard app wants to granted permission to "Read phone state and Identity" and have "Full Internet access".

I've taken to removing apps which ask for that combination unless they clearly need it. I don't understand why a keyboard app would need to pull my identity from the phone and then be able to send it over the Internet.

Three quid is fine, but I think they ask for too much else

Language Dynamics

2010-10-22T07:41:00.002+01:00

Apple drops Java
Microsoft drops Python and Ruby

Smalltalk portability: Sport and Grease

2010-07-18T14:15:00.021+01:00

There are many dialects of Smalltalk. The implementation of the language is very similar in them all (partly thanks to the ANSI standard), but it's not exactly the same. The differences mean that a library or application written using one Smalltalk dialect can not simply be loaded/compiled and run in another.

Let's say you developed an application using Visual Smalltalk and you now want to deploy it using Pharo. Most of the code will work fine in both Visual Smalltalk and Pharo, for example "OrderedCollection new" will do the same thing in both, but things like sockets, files, times and string parsing classes and methods are different in the two dialects. To get the application working in Pharo you'll need to go through all the code in the system checking for things which don't work the same way and fixing them. Changing code to run on another platform is called porting, and the result of a porting exercise is a second implementation of the subject system. A second body of code which will need to be maintained separately, so if you extend or fix a bug in the Pharo version you'll need to remember to make the same effective change (perhaps implemented a bit differently) in the Visual Smalltalk version. It is quite likely that such code bases will diverge over time. The cost of porting a system and then maintaing multiple versions of a system and them keeping then in step can be high; you may end up having to support them as distinct systems with separate lives.

Fear not. There is a better way.

Portability libraries are used to minimise the cost of porting an application. Portability libraries place the platform specific things behind a defined API. If a Smalltalk application is written to use only portability API(s) and 'standard' features it can be moved unaltered between Smalltalk dialects. Some applications have to use features which are peculiar to a platform, such as a GUI library, and such portions of a system must be ported and maintained the hard way, but many systems today can be, and are, written in such a way that they are completely portable between dialects using portability libraries.

Two such libraries are Sport and Grease. Both of these libraries emerged from the process of porting code between Smalltalk dialects, but each addresses a different segment of the differences between dialects, with surprisingly little overlap between them.

Sport was created during the development of OpenSkills applications such as the SkillsBase and Membership Management System. These applications are developed exclusively in VisualWorks and are deployed to run exclusively in GemStone. The work to get the applications to run in GemStone resulted in the creation of the OpenSkills portability library in early 2004, renamed to Sport (for Smalltalk Portability) in 2006.

Similarly, the Grease library came out of the desire to run the Seaside web application library on a variety of dialects. Initially the portability code was called simply Platform and was a part of the Seaside library from about 2005 triggered by the desire to run Seaside in VisualWorks. The Grease name was applied to the portability library in the latter part of 2009 when it became a shared library used by packages related to Seaside, such as Pier and Magritte.

Sport and Grease cover different areas with their portability APIs. Sport covers Sockets, Files, Time, Exception handling and utilities such as being able to explicitly test in which Smalltalk dialect code is being run in. Grease covers utilities for parsing, printing, encoding & decoding strings, delayed sends, common exceptions, utilities such as secure hash. There is some overlap, but not much. For example, Seaside expects the underlying HTTP server to deal with socket issues so Grease does not deal with sockets. Sport in turn does not have the extensive parsing and printing facilities found in Grease.

The longer term goals for both Sport and Grease are that they should go away to be replaced with standardised implementations of the various areas, e.g. sockets. But Julian Fitzell (the Grease maintainer) and I both expect that to take quite some time. Today, Sport and Grease together provide a mechanism where Smalltalk applications can be developed in a truly portable way.

To emphasise this, because it's quite a big deal, the exact same Smalltalk code for applications may run in many different Smalltalk dialects completely unaltered with the help of Sport and Grease.

For home DNS & DHCP, use dnsmasq

2010-02-28T11:08:00.008Z

I find that I have many devices in my home requiring IP addresses and names; laptops, netbooks, phones, nas, music player ... the list goes on.

While my current DSL modem/router will run DHCP and give each device on the LAN an IP address, if I want to refer to a device by name (e.g. 192.168.0.24 aka "nero") I have to add names and IP addresses to the hosts file on my workstation ... and (yawn) on every other computer I also want to see that device by name.

Adding to my woes, the DHCP server in the router is a bit free and easy with IP addresses, so if I restart a device it can get a different IP address which means that IP addresses move from device to device over time, which in turn means the names in my hosts files are all messed up. Darn ... and potentially harmful.

Of course all I really want to do it to write down once that *this* box should be given *this* IP address and made available with *this* name

... and the small utility dnsmasq lets me do just that. The following line says that the device with the MAC address 00:1b:62:01:e4:d5 is always to be given the IP address 192.168.0.24 and is always to be known as nero:

dhcp-host=00:1b:62:01:e4:d5,192.168.0.24,nero

This one line configures both a DHCP server and a DNS server (light-weight implementations internal to dnsmasq), so any machine on the LAN can now use the name "nero" in place of the IP address even if the IP address did change, which would only happen if the configuration line above were changed.

For the low-down on dnsmask see the project home page and the articles here and here.

A very brief how-to (assuming a Debian-like server) would go something like ...

1. Identify a machine on your LAN which runs 24/7 (I use a FitPC running Ubuntu) and install dnsmasq on it

2. Decide on a domain for your LAN, e.g. home.localdomain

3. Identify the devices on your network which will have static IP addresses. I have two, the DSL modem/router and the FitPC running dnsmasq. For these devices make entries in the /etc/hosts file of the machine running dnsmasq, e.g.:

192.168.0.1 gateway gateway.home.localdomain
192.168.0.100 server server.home.localdomain

4. Now work on the dnsmasq config file (/etc/dnsmasq.conf). First take a copy of the default file because it has lots of useful information in there. Then edit the file with details of your network and devices. You can see an example based on what I did for my home network below, but do refer to the docs and the original config file to understand the detail.

5. Stop any other DHCP server you may have running (e.g. the one in the DSL modem/router)

6. On the machine running dnsmasq: sudo /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart

7. Restart the network interfaces on your devices (or just reboot the computer, phone or whatever)

8. Test that everything is as you expect. e.g. does ping nero work? Does ping nero.home.localdomain work?

9. Done

The example file:

domain-needed
bogus-priv
expand-hosts
domain=home.localdomain
dhcp-range=192.168.1.100,192.168.1.150,1h

dhcp-host=00:1b:62:01:e4:d5,192.168.0.24,nero
dhcp-host=00:1c:f0:06:25:ca,192.168.0.25,see
dhcp-host=00:23:76:cd:a7:9a,192.168.0.26,rome
dhcp-host=00:14:a6:2d:a7:9a,192.168.0.27,burn

dhcp-option=option:router,192.168.0.1
dhcp-option=option:domain-name,home.localdomain

Microsoft wants to "help" with SVG

2010-01-06T20:54:00.006Z

So, Microsoft suddenly takes an interest in the SVG standard:

Slashdot Technology Story | Microsoft Wants To Participate In SVG Development

This feels horribly familiar.

Microsoft 'helped' the Oasis group with the ODF standard by submitting proposals (which mysteriously were never put forward by Microsoft to be actually voted upon) and delaying the completion of the ODF specification. Once it was obvious ODF would be an ISO standard Microsoft abandoned the Oasis ODF project and, surprise, out of the blue submitted their very own MOO-XML proposal on an express track to being a ISO standard which they pursued by corrupting the standards process itself. So we now have two ISO document format standards, the open ODF and the Microsoft MOO-XML and a discredited ISO. Brilliant.

Is this recent SVG move by Microsoft the first part of a similar campaign? Up until now Microsoft have ignored or tried to talk down SVG. Having failed to kill it with marketing muscle, are Microsoft moving into a more active SVG killing mode? I would not be at all surprised.

Of course, Microsoft could just start using and supporting valid SVG without trying to meddle with the specification. That would be a positive thing.

Lossless: Keeping your options open

2009-11-22T13:49:00.009Z

There have been a number of articles 'comparing the sound' of music encoded in a lossless way vs. a lossy way, for example, this one at Slashdot:

Slashdot News Story | Can We Really Tell Lossless From MP3?

I think this question misses a key point (though the original article does touch on it). If you have your content stored in a lossless form you can play it in a number of ways, including compressing music so it sounds as it would if it were being decoded from a lossy source, but you can't do it the other way around.

For example, if I start with a FLAC music file (at any given sample rate) I can convert it to MP3 and listen to the resulting stream with MP3 compression artefacts added (just as they do in the article), or I can listen to the music directly from the FLAC file through something like the Linn Klimax (also mentioned on the BBC, btw). It is not possible to start with an MP3 file and listen to the 'MP3 sound' and then somehow get the 'FLAC sound' from the MP3, because the MP3 has lost some information (hence lossy). The lost bits are just not available. Ever. Lost for good.

You don't need to use something as expensive as a Klimax to enjoy music encoded using FLAC. There are lots of free player programs for your computer (e.g. Play for the mac) and home music stystems (e.g. the Logitech Squeezebox). Yes, lossless formats do take up more space, but bulk storage is quite cheap today and getting cheaper, so this is no longer a really significant issue.

So, keep your valued music in FLAC format and keep your options open. You may not be able to afford a Klimax now, but who knows what the future might bring or how your ears might change.

And, of course, avoid DRM like the plague.

Candidates for hybrid vehicles

2009-11-21T11:52:00.007Z

We hired a Prius and went on a drive around Wales fairly recently. Wales was stunning, and we'll be making a return trip. The Prius was mostly a not particularly remarkable family car, but there were a couple of area where it really excelled.

The first one was in the quiet of the morning when leaving a B&B. There is a button which tells the Prius to avoid using the internal combustion engine for as long as possible. In this 'stealth mode' we pulled away from B&Bs with just a crunch of gravel, if that.

The other situation where the Prius excelled was in heavy traffic in London. When stopped in traffic, i.e. most of the time (or so it seemed), the car used minimal energy and was pumping no fumes into the air. However we still got to enjoy the noise and fumes from the thousands of other vehicles around us.

Given this experience I'd say hybrid technology is great for:

Early morning or late evening movements in residential areas. In the UK the all electric milk float has been around for ages, and increasingly we are seeing grocery delivery vehicles using either all electric or hybrid vehicles. Great stuff, but we need to see much more of this.

The London cab. This is a great vehicle. Tight turning circle, loads of room inside and driven by someone who actually knows where they are going. But, boy, are they noisy and polluting! Most of their life will be spent stood still in traffic jams or waiting for a fare with the engine running (to keep the driver warm). Hybrid technology (or some kind of all-electric) technology would be perfect for cabs in London and other large cities.

Waste collection vehicles. The nosiest of them all, with their mighty compactors on the back and the amazing range of loud noises they make as they whir, wheeze and rattle down the streets. These vehicle clearly need heaps of power to run the hydraulics for compacting, tipping and all that, but do they really need to run the big diesel engine and compressors while racing (oh, yes) from one set of rubbish bins to another? I think not. With Hybrid technology batteries could be charged while the engine was working to drive the hydraulics, and the engine could be off for the sprints between bins. The engine could kick in for longer runs, but for most of the stop-start small street stuff, the vehicle could be much quieter.

Buses in London are noisy beasts too. TfL are already looking at using Hybrid technology for those, but it seems to be taking a long time to put into practice. I saw the first hybrid double decker at the Lord Mayors show a few years ago, but even now I hardly ever see one actually in service.

If we can get these kinds of vehicles to be less polluting in terms of noise and exhaust it would significantly improve the environment in our modern cities, and hopefully set an example for other city road users.

Tube worker suspended over 'rant'

2009-10-16T22:05:00.003+01:00

Well, well. Someone has caught a member of Tfl staff bullying a member of the travelling public:

BBC NEWS | England | London | Tube worker suspended over rant

This is the kind of awful treatment which was dished out to Justina in an incident for which I, sadly, did not have a video and which the London transport bureaucracy buried with process.

A key quote from a Tfl spokesman about this recent incident is:

"We do not tolerate members of the public being abusive to our staff but neither will we tolerate members of our staff abusing members of the public."

Hmmm. Perhaps Tfl will at last update the posters they have at stations to reflect that, because at the moment they only tell customers it's not OK to abuse Tfl staff, not the other way around. Both are bad, of course.

To end on a happy note, friends of ours recently lost a wallet on the tube with quite a bit of cash in it. Well, the wallet was handed in and the staff at the Baker St. lost property office were really nice and helpful about the whole thing ... and all the money seems to be there. Most people really are good.

Who should contribute to the copyrights debate?

2009-09-10T18:29:00.005+01:00

The UK government have decided, persuaded by the unelected industry secretary Peter Mandelson, that it would be a good idea to make criminals of people who infringe copyright, thus clearly taking sides against the general public in what should be a purely civil matter.

It's OK, though. They did engage in consultations first, or so it is reported.

But who did they consult? The public? No. The creative individuals who made the works? No. ... they seem to have consulted only with lawyers and the "recording industry".

The public have voted largely with their feet, and here is a report on the position of creative individuals in The Register:

Pop stars tell labels to FOAD • The Register

Perhaps time for MPs to listen to the people who voted for them rather than non-voting corporate entities ... and then perhaps the government might even listen to the MPs?

Hope springs eternal.

What should be taught

2009-09-05T19:32:00.003+01:00

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity, and I agree.

The link is to a light-hearted but right-on-target talk he gave for TED.

In GemStone selectors >>true and >>false not allowed

2009-01-27T22:13:00.002Z

Lesson of the evening ...

While moving Slaps (the Smalltalk LDAP library) to GemStone I found that while VisualWorks is quite happy if methods have the selector >>true or the selector >>false, GemStone is not. Darn.

Oh, well. Easily fixed.

Adding UDP sockets to Sport

2009-01-14T07:50:00.003Z

I am looking at adding UDP socket support to Sport (the Smalltalk portability interface), specifically so I can run the Syslog library in Gemstone.

I have posted some initial proposals to comp.lang.smalltalk (cls), so if you are a Sport maintainer for a Smalltalk dialect or if you are just interested, please respond to my post there.

BTW, we use cls for Sport because cls is a forum for all Smalltalk dialects and Sport applies to all dialects. There you go.

Popeye the Sailor copyright free 70 years after Elzie Segar's death - Times Online

2009-01-04T21:16:00.003Z

Here's a rare thing. Something of value actually enters the public domain (in some parts of the world):

Popeye the Sailor copyright free 70 years after Elzie Segar's death - Times Online

... though I fear that Popeye will now be portrayed as a victim of 'weak' copyright protection legislation and used to encourage law makers to extend copyright terms yet again.

I hope, instead, that we see some excellent derivative Popeye works over the next year that show value in the economy, and that this strengthens the arguments for resisting copyright term extension, and perhaps even for shortening those terms to more useful levels for the wider economy.

New version of Hyper

2008-12-29T22:41:00.005Z

Hyper is a Smalltalk library available under the LGPL which implements RFC 2616 and friends aka HTTP. You can use Hyper to build a web server or a web client. As an example, you could use Hyper as an HTTP server underneath Seaside (a rather cool website content library).

The new version is 1 340 and can be found in the Cincom public Store repository. This version picks up a number of changes made by Dale Henrichs of GemStone. Thanks Dale!

There are no big changes here, but if you happen to want to run a robust HTTP server for Seaside from within your Gemstone database, then this is the version for you.

Have fun :-)

An interesting detour or three

2008-11-19T19:51:00.004Z

Well, I've had a very interesting second half of the year. Unfortunately 'interesting' has not included as much OpenSkills and open source coding as I would have liked, but it has included:

Home hunting
Home buying
A rather exciting trip around the Med' and through the Suez Canal to see Petra, Luxor and Cairo among other things
Getting the new place ready to live in
Moving into our new home
Dad's 8oth (happy birthday dad)
And some fun with my paid-for work as I'm engaged with a bank at the moment

But now we have the boxes unpacked in the new place. The Internet connection is good. So, no excuses. I must get on and do the things I have been promising myself and others. The list is long. ... but there are still some pictures to hang and shelves to put up ... ah, well.

PDF and Smalltalk

2008-10-04T23:15:00.003+01:00

PDF is a very handy way to deliver documents over http and there are a number of ways to do this from within Smalltalk. A write up of several techniques can be found here:

seaside.st: PDF in Seaside

I'm one of the main authors of the SPDF library, so it's nice to see it listed among the options. SPDF was developed for use in the insurance industry where 'forms' needed to be produced on the fly, sometimes including TIFF images. SPDF did it's job well enough for the problem at hand, but it's capabilities are rather, ah, narrow.

Having said that, the library is an implementation of the PDF spec, so the terminology of the spec is reflected in the Smalltalk implementation (e.g. data structures and class & method names) ... so it should not be too hard to implement more of the spec as and when needed.

As a case in point, on a recent project I used the SPDF library to produced documents that required automatic line breaking and breaking over pages, and even using the Frame classes to have text flow from a rectangle on one page to the same rectangle on the next page - which happens to addresses some of the weaknesses of SPDF (correctly) identified in the write up.

The current version of SPDF is available from the Cincom public Store repository.

Reasonable article, silly spin

2008-09-28T17:34:00.004+01:00

A recent Computing article looked at the dangers of using externally sourced software when 'selling' a software 'product'. They pointed out that the terms of licenses for the 3rd party software may be problematic when selling-on bundles, or even when selling a company which made money that way.

Absolutely. Think what might happen if a company did not comply with a license from Microsoft, Adobe or Oracle ... swarms of lawyers may well blacken the skies, or perhaps just the BSA.

But the unfortunate thing about this article is that it does not promote general diligence when it comes to software licenses, instead it takes a pot-shot at 'open source' software:

Open source's dark side by David Boutcher & Bob Stankey

Their silly stance rather dilutes an important message, i.e. make sre you understand the licenses of the software you depend upon.

EXDI fix for PostgreSQL in VisualWorks

2008-08-24T15:45:00.003+01:00

Here at ESUG I planned to work on my syslog code and presentation. Michael Prasse had other ideas. Michael uses the PostgreSQL library for his app at work, but there was a problem. For some kinds of nested queries the library lost the plot.

Well, a camp smalltalk session sorted things out nicely.

Michael is going to do a bit more work on this back at his work offices, and then it will be released along with the rest of the PostgreSQL library.

Thanks to Michael for an interesting debugging session. Now, back to syslog.

The Economist covers the Lisbon Treaty

2008-06-23T10:42:00.001+01:00

You'll have to buy a copy of The Economist for the details, but the cover of this week's edition captures The Economist (and my) view of the treaty:

Brilliant.

Petition to PM: No to the Lisbon Treaty.

2008-06-17T19:46:00.001+01:00

If the Lisbon treaty is something you would have liked to have the chance to vote against specifically, now you can on the PMs petitions wib site. As is often the case, the wording is less than perfect, but the sentiment is spot on:

Petition to: Respect the result of the Irish referendum and abandon the attempt to ratify the Lisbon Treaty.

Non-blocking sockets in VisualWorks - the problem

2008-06-08T23:01:00.002+01:00

I want to be able to know immediately when the other end of a socket connection closed the socket when using TCP sockets in VisualWorks. I need this for my work on Slaps, the smalltalk LDAP library.

Here is something you can try to see the issue. Run the following code and your image will wait for an inbound socket connection on port 12345. Use "telnet localhost 12345" to connect, enter a few characters and hit enter (whereupon telnet sends the characters over the socket to your server). Now you'll hit the first halt in the code. At this point close the telnet session (+] and then "quit" works for me). Now in the debugger, just press proceed and you'll get the next halt pop up - no exception indicating that the socket has closed by telnet. You can keep on reading from the socket for ever, getting zero bytes each time. So how can I get an exception when telnet (or the other end of any TCP socket) has closed unexpectedly? This post is already too long so I'll put what I've found in another post.


 | serverSocket connectionSocket |
 [|buffer octetsTransferred readOctets actuallyRead|
   serverSocket := SocketAccessor newTCPserverAtPort: 12345.
   serverSocket listenFor: 10.
   connectionSocket := serverSocket accept.
   buffer := ByteArray new: 100.
   octetsTransferred := connectionSocket
     readInto: buffer
     startingAt: 1
     for: 100.
   readOctets := buffer copyFrom: 1 to: octetsTransferred.
   readOctets halt: 'Now close the client connection'.
   octetsTransferred := connectionSocket
     readInto: buffer
     startingAt: 1
     for: 100.
   octetsTransferred halt: 'Any exception?  Nope.'.
   actuallyRead := connectionSocket writeFrom: readOctets.
   actuallyRead halt: 'Any exception? Nope.']
     ensure: [
       connectionSocket notNil ifTrue: [connectionSocket close].
       serverSocket notNil ifTrue: [serverSocket close]]

BBC NEWS: "ID cards 'could threaten privacy'"

2008-06-08T12:45:00.001+01:00

Good to see that some MPs are slowly working out that, far from reducing identity theft, ID cards will probably make identity theft a bigger problem:

BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | ID cards 'could threaten privacy'

The UK identity card system is a naive idea backed by the people who stand to make lots of money from supplying the support systems.

The mystery of the double emails

2008-04-20T19:06:00.005+01:00

Since the last upgrade, the OpenSkills membership management system (MMS) has been sending out double email messages to some people in some cases.

Here's why:

The objects that make the MMS tick are Actions. There are actions for checking email addresses, confirming OpenPGP keys, checking account status ... in short everything that needs doing in the background is done by an Action object. Each action, when completed, can be followed by one or more other actions and these are held by each Action in a Set called responseActions.

The start of the trouble was that for older version of the MMS I needed an implementation of the messages "=" and "hash" for Actions to help with using a relational database as the primary persistence mechanism when reading responseActions back in.

Now that the MMS runs in the GemStone OODB, the "=" and "hash" are no longer needed (because the database understands object identity) ... but the methods were still there. To add a little spice note that the "=" and "hash" methods were based on the external ID of the action and the identity of the class of the action (there are many many kinds of, and thus classes of, Action).

Now we move forward to the last MMS upgrade which involved a schema migration within GemStone. At the point in time that the upgrade was in progress there were two Action classes in existence, the old one and the new one.

... and through a mix up with a time machine, class versions, hash and = and a schema migration some actions ended up with duplicate actions in their responseActions.

To use one concrete example to explain what happens next: Each account review action adds itself as a responseAction (since reviews automatically happen). In the broken case each account review had two instances of itself in the responseActions Set (oh, yes). This meant that for those cases the same account review messages were sent out twice. Every time.

The fix was to make responseActions an IdentitySet, remove the "=" and the "hash" methods from Action and run a quick fix script to have every action rebuild it's response actions. All fixed now.

And sorry to those people who have suffered from the mysterious double emails.

Smalltalk PostgreSQL drivers

2008-04-17T12:45:00.002+01:00

The latest version (1.4 102) of my Smalltalk PostgrSQL driver library has just been submitted for the next release of VisualWorks Smalltalk. This is mainly just a bug fix version, but I do use some new non-blocking socket code hence bumping from 1.3 to 1.4.

This new version should work in any Smalltalk dialect for which there is an implementation of the Sport portability layer.

VisualWorks users can just wait for VisualWorks 7.7 to come out, or if you want to try the new driver version now you can pick up the parcels from SourceForge.

Oyster & Tfl: No action

2008-04-15T18:46:00.004+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I posted the response I received from TfL about the assault and detention of my wife at the Bank tube station by a member of TfL staff. I've discussed this response with people and thought about it. I'm sure TfL don't mind me taking a few weeks to respond to them, after all it took over a year for them to respond to us.

The problem with the TfLresponse is that it includes no action at all. It's all just words again. All kinds of claims are made, but there is no follow through. My sense is that because senior TfL management could not pin this on a minion, they are wishing the matter away.

This highlights the greater problem. There are systemic problems with TfL management, the main one being a complete inability to take responsibility and take action. Look at the wording of their response - it's empty of substance.

Here are some actions TfL can take today:

Put up posters that explain to everyone how to respond in the event of an assault by anyone, upon anyone. The current signs are all about protecting TfL staff with no help at all for the public.
Put the same information on the TfL, Oyster and LU websites.
Have the directors and managers responsible for an area take personal responsibility for problems in their area and take action to resolve those problems.

Real harm was done on that evening last March. It took TfL over one year to produce a coherent, if feeble, response. Very poor. Very poor indeed.

Lastly I feel I must comment on the barb directed our way at the end of the TfL letter. We have not sought financial compensation beyond what the broken Oyster system took when it should not have done. The childish gall in suggesting that we are gold diggers is astonishing, and just plain rude. If TfL feel the need to give to salve their conscience, let them give to a charity.

In Europe copyright infringement is naughty but not a crime

2008-04-11T19:19:00.005+01:00

Despite the headline, this BBC article has nothing to do with ships:

BBC NEWS | Technology | Europe rejects anti-piracy plans

Rather, we see that Europe has wisely refrained from criminalising copyright infringement. Infringing copyright in Europe is still unlawful of course, but it's not something the police will arrest you for. It's a civil matter.

For real news about piracy, see here.

MOOXML: sad day for ISO & world

2008-04-02T23:34:00.001+01:00

So, Microsoft have succeeded in undermining the ISO standards process to the degree that their half baked non-specification, the Microsoft Office Open XML (MOO-XML) format (which remains unimplemented by anyone anywhere, including Microsoft) has been dubbed a "standard" by the previously trusted standards body ISO:

Official: OOXML approved as international standard | The Register

Groklaw - And now the appeals and reactions while OOXML sits on hold

To paraphrase one of today's quotes: This outcome is a clear loss for the customers, technology providers and governments that want to choose the format that best meets their needs and have a voice in the evolution of truly open standards.

I hope that ISO has sufficient integrity and courage to undo this mess. If not, Microsoft have won a huge victory against their mortal enemy: open standards and an open market.

>1 year later, TfL respond

2008-03-24T10:11:00.002Z

At long last, TfL have made a serious attempt at addressing the issues raised by the incident, over a year ago, in which my wife was detained and assaulted by a member of TfL staff because a failure in the Oyster system meant her card didn't work correctly.

Sorry this is quite long, but since I have blogged for so long about this it seems only fair to show you all of what TfL have to say. Note, though, that this letter is not actually from TfL, it is from London Travel Watch who seem to be acting as editors ...

Dear Mr Badger,

Subject: Dissatisfaction with Oyster

Thank you for your recent email, TfL have now provided a response which was received on 14 March 2008. Tfl apologise for the delay in replying.

In order to answer the points raised, TfL have answered them one by one and I have set this out for you in the same format below; the bold text being your further questions.

TfL need to acknowledge that there are systemic problems with the Oyster system and the training of station staff regarding the Oyster system.

By and large, TfL say the Oyster system has proved to be a success. Its introduction has reduced congestion in ticket halls, as well as allowing station staff to be more flexible, out with the customers where they are needed. However, there are occasions when an error will occur on a card and they do sympathise, as this can be very frustrating. Fortunately, they say the majority of these problems can be resolved by their Station staff. That said, some more complicated issues will require the help of specialist Oyster staff. This is due to the significant scale of the Oyster system, as well as the complex mechanisms and procedures that govern its operation. We would agree with TfL that on the whole Oyster has been a success, but there have been issues and this could be put down to it being a new system.

In terms of the training of their staff, all London Underground station staff undergo an extensive three week initial training programme, before taking up their post within the station. During this course they are trained to effectively provide customers with support, advice and assistance in many areas including Oystercard protocol. This training is further consolidated by an additional two weeks of mentoring with a senior member of staff.

TfL say with the ongoing support of their training and development department, station staff continue to be trained, and develop the appropriate skills to ensure excellent customer service standards.

TfL need to explain what station staff should be expected to do in
situations such as the one we suffered.

If an error occurs on a customer's card, TfL say a Customer Service Assistant (CSA) should take them to the ticket office where a statement can be printed. If this does not resolve the issue, the CSA has access to further information from the staff Oyster helpline. London Underground Station staff are the public face of TfL. As such, they are expected to be courteous and respectful at all times. They are sorry that your experiences were contrary to this.

TfL need to explain what passengers should do in situations such as the one we suffered. (e.g. should we have immediately called the police?)

If a customer wishes to complain about an incident or a member of TfL staff, they can speak to the Station Supervisor. If this is still not sufficient, the supervisor should explain the complaints procedure, where matters can be investigated further. If the incident is a particularly serious one, the customer can demand that the British Transport Police are contacted.

Most of all, TfL need to take this matter seriously. Some of their words suggest they are taking this seriously. Their actions say very loudly and very clearly that they are not taking this seriously at all.

TfL say they are eager to resolve this matter to your satisfaction. In order to do this however, they require a detailed account of what happened (e.g. in what way was your wife assaulted), including a detailed description of the member of staff involved. Without this information, they say there is very little they can do to pursue this incident further.

If you would like to meet with an appropriate manager to discuss the matter, TfL say you should phone Cassius Powell, the Group Station Manager (GSM) at Bank station on 020 79189875.

TfL do not feel it would be appropriate to offer a further goodwill gesture, as they feel that the earlier cheque was sufficient. They also do not wish to give you the impression that they are simply giving you money in the hope that you will drop the matter. As already mentioned, TfL repeat they are very keen to resolve this incident to your satisfaction, and the emphasis they feel must be on that.

The offer of a meeting might prove helpful as face to face contact rather than correspondence can be beneficial. If you have any comments or questions on the above, please let me know. If you are dissatisfied and in order to see if we can progress this further with TfL, it might be helpful to state why and to do so in point format in response to their answers.

Yours sincerely

Patent Office loses software not a patent case | The Register

2008-03-19T18:18:00.002Z

Ugh

Patent Office loses software not a patent case | The Register

IMO the UK should not accept software idea patents at all but it seems that the EPO think that the UK patent office should grant even more of the ghastly things.

We really need the legislators to step into this and make it clear, again, that software really is not patentable.

An Oyster Anniversary

2008-03-16T18:06:00.003Z

It's a year ago today that my wife was detained and (verbally) assaulted by a member of TfL staff at the Bank tube station.

After a year TfL have essentially done nothing about this incident. They did give us a refund to cover the financial cost of the bug in the Oyster system, but have not done anything at all about the far more serious matter of the assault. So, what are we looking for out of this?

TfL need to acknowledge that there are systemic problems with the Oyster system and the training of station staff regarding the Oyster system. (e.g. staff don't know how to react when the Oyster system causes problems)
TfL need to explain what station staff should be expected to do in situations such as the one we suffered. The public should know what to expect.
TfL need to explain what passengers should do in situations such as the one we suffered. (e.g. should we have immediately called the police?)

Most of all, TfL need to take this and like matters seriously. Some of their words suggest they are taking this seriously, but their actions say very loudly and very clearly that they are not taking this assault seriously at all.

The TfL method for dealing with such serious matters appears to be to absorb them rather than to respond to them, they are a veritable tar baby. But if TfL are hoping that this matter will go away if they just ignore it for long enough, they are going to be sorely disappointed.

Bin liner sales to soar in London

2008-03-10T15:26:00.001Z

We use plastic shopping bags as bin liners, among other things. We even have a nice linen dispenser for them so newly acquired bags squish in the top and we pull them out of the bottom when needed.

But it seems that we will have to start buying plastic bin liners instead of using the shopping bags even though ...

Plastic bag campaign falls apart at the seams | The Register

... And the bin liners are not as good as the shopping bags because they don't have the handles we use to hang the nominated trash bag on the kitchen cupboard door.

As Private Eye might say - it's trebles all round for the bin liner manufacturers and the stores that will now sell lots more of them.

MOO-XML: not quite dead yet

2008-03-01T01:24:00.003Z

It looks like ISO are ridding themselves of the MOO-XML (Microsoft Office Open - XML) format embarrassment:

Groklaw - OOXML Fails to Get Majority Approval at BRM - Updated 2Xs

... but I think we can expect some last minute squirming and manipulation as Microsoft desparately try to salvage their attempt to undermine ODF with their proprietary format.

Microsoft dread having to compete on merit, but perhaps it would do them some good if they were forced to do so rather than continuing to abuse their monopoly position in the market.

Trust me not

2008-02-28T21:57:00.004Z

The biggest problem with the ID cards being proposed by the UK government is trust, and here is a great example of it being misplaced ...

The public have been trained to trust the "Chip and PIN" (C&P) system of card payment authorisation. The banks in the UK have sold the idea that C&P is totally safe and thus any misuse of a card and it's PIN is the responsibility of the card holder. Under a deluge of relentless marketing the public have indeed come to trust C&P. Of course the public should not have been so trusting, as is now clear.

If you have time, do watch the BBC Newsnight video on this subject. (BTW, Jane Badger is not a relative of mine, as far as I know).

... For every mention in the video of the term "Chip & PIN" replace the term "National Identity Card", and you have a flash forward to a sampling of the kinds of identity theft problems that any national ID card will cause.

It is not the technological weakness of such systems that cause the big problems, it's the trust we the public place in them.

And as an aside, I had a C&P transaction fail just last week in London. I immediately went to my bank and said I wanted a note on my file that something weird had happened at the particular store. The response from the bank staff member was initially that I should not worry because C&P is perfectly secure (in fact she was rather annoyed that I was bothering her with such a 'trivial' matter).

Trust them not.

UK ID card strong points

2008-02-28T03:29:00.003Z

The centralised UK identity card proposals are pretty stupid in every dimension. The strongest bits are probably the IT security measures:

Minister defends National ID Register security | The Register: "Meg Hillier"

... but IT security is the smallest part of the problem. Look at the recent security leaks and personal data losses and you'll see hardly any cracked systems. Mostly the problem is people being asked to look after highly valuable data and either being corrupted or making a stupid mistake.

So the fact that great care is being taken to make the IT parts of the proposed system secure just makes the most secure bit more secure (perhaps). The gaping holes are elsewhere.

If there is an ID card system (and I hope there is not) then it should be distributed to minimise the value of the data in any one place. All the personal data should be under the control of the individual subject (e.g. on the card itself) and this should be digitally signed so that if a duly authorised person wished to see the data they can ask the subject, get the data from the card and verify that the data is good.

Sydney STUG meeting on Tuesday 26th

2008-02-19T03:12:00.004Z

The Sydney Smalltalk User Group will be having one of it's irregular meetings on Tuesday 26th Feb at the James Squire Brewhouse at Kings St. Wharf in Sydney. The meeting will be in the Ward Room which is at the back of the pub and will start at 18:30.

Andrew McNeil has made the arrangements and as he says:

Speakers so far who have put there hands up -
Michael Lucas-Smith -- Seaside / Web Velocity
Myles Byrne -- a code browser written in squeak and seaside
Bruce Badger -- Slaps, the Smalltalk LDAP library and a summary of progress on the Smalltalk ANSI standard.

Cincom is even supplying a new nibbles to kick things off, so get there early.

To keep up with such events join the Sydney Smalltalk User Group mailing list.

Grunt

2008-02-17T22:44:00.004Z

In Australia, a car with lots of low end power is said to have "grunt".

For example, the taxi we just took from Sydney airport demonstrated enormous acceleration from 0 to about 20 KPH swiftly followed by a demonstration of heavy braking. This was repeated for the whole journey through heavy traffic to the CBD. This was grunt in action. It made me feel quite ill.

London black cabs have fairly small diesel engines which accelerate the cabs quite well, but compared to the Sydney cabs the acceleration is pathetic ... but, the passenger experience in a London cab is much smoother because the driver must nurse the momentum of the cab, so no violent acceleration and less heavy braking. Less scary too.

It also helps that London cabbies almost always know the way

In my lifetime

2008-02-15T16:31:00.002Z

More thoughts on the extension of copyright terms:

Copyright really is a deal with the public where the holder of the copyright gets a temporary monopoly and the public get to have the work in the public domain when the copyright expires.

I think that there should be a chance of seeing both ends of the deal. By that I mean that the tunes I heard when I was a kid should have entered the public domain during my lifetime (assuming three score years and ten).

The Register adds their view:

EU commissioner backs record biz on copyright extensions | The Register

So the big winners in any term extension will not be the starving artists, who will continue to starve anyway. The big winners will be the record companies and a small handful of super-stars.

I think a reduction to 25 years for all new copyrights would be a better move. This could be introduced over a long period to avoid any big bangs. While I may not see the music of my childhood in the public domain, it should be a goal to ensure that future generations do.

Copyright dilution

2008-02-14T17:43:00.003Z

Copyright is supposed to be an incentive for creativity. The current term of a copyright is so long that people have a reduced incentive to be creative if they have had one or two smash hits (whether music, literature or software). e.g. the oft cited, and rather wealthy, Sir Cliff Richard.

So, yes, change is needed. But not this:

BBC NEWS | Business | Bands set for longer music rights

Extending the term of copyright reduces the incentive to be creative and so dilutes the value of copyright to the public at large, the very same public that is supposed to be represented by people like Charlie McCreevy, the European Union's internal market commissioner.

The commissioner wants to extend copyright terms because, he claims, the moral rights of the performers are at stake, but what about the moral rights of EU citizens? So a few wealthy people want to get even more money from their existing body of work, but what about the other side of the coin - what do the public get out of this that they do not already have?

Just like home

2008-02-14T16:07:00.002Z

I think my namesakes keep a tidier home than I do! ...

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Secret lives of badgers revealed

... though we have less fighting and we do tend to use electric lights at night.

Study protocols with bridges

2008-02-14T09:55:00.010Z

While working on the Slaps LDAP library I wanted to study the messages exchanged by current implementations of the LDAP protocol, capturing LDAP messages and adding them to the Slaps SUnit test suite before building a Slaps instance to directly respond to the client. I have done this using a couple of bridges that can sit between any client and server and capture messages. One is the octet bridge and the other is a parsing bridge.

The octet bridge does not try to understand the messages flowing back and forth between the client and server but looks out for bursts of traffic. These bursts are then logged using the OpenSkills logging library. Here is an example of a captured burst between the ldapsearch LDAP client and the OpenLDAP server:

<OSkByteArrayLogEntry>
<t>Thu, 31 Jan 2008 05:52:38 GMT</t>
<x>303E020101633904000A01000A01000201000201</x>0....c9.............
<x>00010100870B6F626A656374636C617373301904</x>......objectclass0..
<x>17737570706F727465645341534C4D656368616E</x>.supportedSASLMechan
<x>69736D73</x>isms
</OSkByteArrayLogEntry>

This sample can then be added to SUnit tests for the Slaps parser. Once we have captured the messages for an exchange we are interested in, perhaps a client logging into a PostgreSQL database and PostgreSQL then issuing an LDAP request to see if that client can indeed login, we can set up the SUnit tests and make sure the Slaps parser can handle the various messages in the flow.

Now we can use the parsing bridge instead of the octet bridge. Instead of looking out for bursts, the parsing bridge relies on the Slaps parser to know when a complete message has been received. The parsed message is then re-encoded by the Slaps library and sent on it's way. Once we have the entire exchange passing to and frow through the parsing bridge without any problems we know we can reasonably handle the messages in this kind of request.

The last step is to use the Slaps library to respond to the LDAP messages directly. For example, in the case of OpenSkills we want to manage access our internal Store repository. With Slaps we can refer to the objects that make up the membership system to answer an LDAP authentication request from a PostgreSQL server.

Using bridges and SUnit testing to build up support for a protocol is not limited to LDAP and Slaps, and could be used for any streaming protocol. These techniques are not new, of course, but it is nice to have this all working smoothly in my Smalltalk development environment. It certainly makes working on Slaps much easier.

Another crook magnet

2008-02-13T17:37:00.004Z

Here we go again. This time the UK government want to create a valuable concentration of personal information about school children:

Government wants every English child on 'secure' database | The Register

This will be yet another valuable source of identity information for the villains of the world. A really bad idea.

How about this instead: For each subject (initially a child student) there is a digital file. The subject (once 18, or their guardians before that) may have a copy of this file and the current places of learning may have a copy of this file. Nobody else. As the subject progresses through their education, records may be added to the file by the people teaching them. Each record is signed using OpenPGP. Each person who may sign such a record must have their key signed by an approving authority and their key must be on a public key server.

When the subject moves from learning to working they may wish to submit some of the records to a potential employer (for example records of recognised qualifications but perhaps not the results of a spelling test taken when they were 12). The employer can verify the education record by confirming that each record was signed by someone who, at the time, was authorised to do so.

Once the subject leaves education and becomes an adult the file must not be retained in any form by any party without the authorisation of the subject.

Clearly, the subject should be very careful indeed to make sure that their file of education records is safely backed up since if they asked for every copy to be destroyed, and they then lost their own copy, the file would be irretrievably lost.

But I think such a distributed system would be much better than another centralised government system and crook magnet.

London Congestion Charge improved?

2008-02-12T19:25:00.000Z

Ken Livingston, the Mayor of London, has announced changes to the so-called "congestion charge" for central london:

London Congestion Charge becomes CO2 tax | The Register

This has been a very confused programme. It certainly has not prevented congestion in the City of London where I live and work, and many people think the charge is just a ruse to raise more tax.

I'm comfortable with the idea of a charge to reduce the impact of traffic on the City, and this new change seems to be an improvement. We will see.

... but I would prefer to see a scheme where the overall polution impact of a vehicle was assessed in terms of:

Air pollution (which is what this new change does)
Sound pollution (Harleys pay more than BMWs)
Size (Hummers pay more than Minis)

The new CO2 based system must have some way of working out what charge applies to each vehicle, perhaps by make & model, and this same catalogue could hold size and noise data.

Lastly, the scale should be sliding. By that I mean that over time the tolerance for air pollution, noise and large vehicles should be reduced.

But Ken's CO2 move is a step in the right direction, I think.

Microsoft & email protocols

2008-02-11T09:43:00.000Z

Few things have existed on the Internet for longer than email. Standard protocols such as SMTP and POP have been with us forever it seems, and even the relatively new IMAP is widely used. Email interoperability has been working pretty well for a long time.

Microsoft bought HotMail, who at the time were using BSD and were conforming to the expected email standards. Microsoft have changed that:

Hotmail vs Live accounts � FastMail.FM Weblog

So much for bleating about their desire for interoperability. Once again, Microsoft's actions speak much more loudly than their words.

So, what could we expect if Microsoft were allowed to buy Yahoo!? More warm words about interoperability no doubt, but much more chilling action pulling in exactly the opposite direction, if history is any judge.

Fix My Street and more

2008-02-06T10:52:00.000Z

A group called My Society have put together a number of really useful sites to help people interact with all levels of government in the UK.

A pedestrian crossing close to where I live has a broken request button. What to do? Who to call? It's Fix My Street to the rescue! I just enter my post code, click on a map to set a flag pointing to the offending crossing, briefly describe the problem ... and Fix My Street sends a report to the appropriate body (the City of London in my case). Brilliant! The system lets the council respond to the problem by, for example, saying when and how the problem was fixed.

Another application from My Society is Write to Them. Again I start with my post code and in this case I get a list of all my representatives including local aldermen, MP, MEPs etc. I click on one of these and a letter template pops up with the correct form of address in place. I just need to enter the essential text of my message. After confirming that I really want to send the message (by sending me an email message), Write to Them send off the message to the representative. After a couple of weeks Write to Them sends me another email message asking if I heard back from my representative, adding my response to a database which records who is good at responding to the people they represent and who isn't.

My Society has other systems too, and what they all have in common is providing a very easy to use wrapper around public services that should be easy to use anyway, but often are not.

Oyster vs. Nat West

2008-02-05T08:48:00.001Z

I got an email message from the Oyster card system this morning. It seems that the "auto top-up" failed. No information about why. I followed the link in the message and was simply asked to reconfirm that I really did want the payment to go from the card I had nominated (the one they said had "failed", remember?). I clicked on the "yes I really did mean that card" button and was told that all was now well, except ... there is still a "payment failed" message showing on the screen.

To the phones. TfL have one of those for-profit phone numbers that mean that they earn more money when they force their customers to call them, and also by keeping them on the line as long as possible. After jousting with the options for a while, I went for the one I knew would work right away; the "I want to buy something from you" option. Sure enough, a real person answered. This person was very nice and said that everything looked fine on the card, but she was unable to tell me what the problem was with the payment, for that I had to speak to another department. I managed to persuade this person to just put me through rather than go through the monster phone system again. And she did.

And so I sat in a queue waiting to talk to another person. I waited several minutes (with the Reassuring Messages and the Calming Music) because this is not a "let me give you money" number. In the end I speak to someone who tells me that everything is just fine, and that I have no need to worry. But wait a minute, I say, what was the problem that caused the payment to fail? No idea, he says. The only people who could answer that are a department that will not talk to customers (I kid you not).

At this point I am taken by surprise as the operator tells me that they will walk over to the hidden department and ask them what the problem with my payment was, and he will then call me back with an answer in just a few minutes. Gosh. Sounds good!

... and he called back! Holy moley. It seems that my bank refused the payment because of some kind of anomaly with my address. I need to sort this out with my bank. OK, I say, so what is the reference number of the payment that the bank rejected so I can call them and ask about it? I don't know, he said, ... but I'll go and ask and call you back again. Knock me over with a feather.

... and he called back again! I was not surprised at all to hear that there was no reference number for the payment request (well, of course there is, but I was not surprised to be told there isn't one) and that I'd just have to call the bank and mention TfL and the date. So, top marks for Derek (for it is he) for being the best customer service representative I have dealt with for many years. Big pat on the back there. However, no brownie points for TfL whose systems should have saved me from having to bother Derek in the first place by giving me a reference number I can use to call my bank.

At this point I should be able to go via an on-line banking system and see exactly what the problem was by entering the id of the failed transaction, but no, no such system exists, even if I did have a reference number. And so to the bank and yet another for-profit phone number. The bank spends ages digging through their systems while I am on the phone. I get bulletins every few minutes as they look through one system after another. In the end, they can't see any problem, can't see any rejected transactions. No idea. What should I do? Call Oyster because they will know exactly what the problem was at their end. Can I get Nat West to talk direct TfL to sort this out? Not a chance.

In the end I just have to be happy that both my bank and Oyster think that my accounts are in a good state. Nobody knows what the problem was, and only I care.

So, what can we learn from this mess? First that good customer service is important and apreciated (thanks again Derek). Second that if a customer is presented with a problem there must be a way to understand what the problem actually is (or was) so that there is confidence that the problem will not re-occur. Lastly that bouncing a customer back and forth is not nice. One or other of the organisations should have offered to call the other and get to the bottom of the problem.

BTW, the other matter with Oyster/TfL is still outstanding. Very poor show indeed.

One last thing: standards. If there was a standard for exchanging financial information it could include a reference number which would be valid regardless of whether the transaction was accepted or not. In cases where a transaction fails I could receive the exact data structure that (in this case) Oyster tried to send to my bank. That would be a big help.

Slaps speaks

2008-02-01T14:45:00.000Z

Slaps is a Smalltalk LDAP library that can be used to implement either LDAP clients or LDAP servers. Slaps talks directly via sockets to other LDAP clients and servers.

Today I have Slaps talking nicely with the command line ldapsearch and OpenLDAP. Woohoo!

There is still more to do, but from here on it should be a matter of extending a working library rather than nutting out fundamental problems.

Microsoft: real competition is unfair

2008-01-30T21:32:00.000Z

Microsoft love to throw their monopoly-backed weight around, but when technical weakness finally leads to a failure in the market, it's not their fault for making poor products, it's someone else. IBM this time:

Microsoft: IBM masterminded OOXML failure - ZDNet UK

But what is funny in this specific situation is that Microsoft blamed Sun as being the sole supporter of the ODF standard not so long ago, and now they blame IBM for the same thing. This smacks of lashing out in panic.

With any luck we are starting to see the market become selective again. That would be good news all around, even for Microsoft because it might give them the incentive to start producing competitive software again, something they have not done for over a decade now.

"Forward!" they cried from the rear ...

2008-01-27T16:29:00.000Z

One group of people have not been exposed to the recent losses of personal data by HMRC. "Important" people including our glorious "leaders":

BBC NEWS | UK | 'Double standard' on data safety

How about leading from the front, guys?

UK ID card scheme close to collapse?

2008-01-24T13:04:00.000Z

The endless procession of government data loss incidents has woken people up to the dangerous reality of a centralised identity system. The government have been stretching out the time scales so that adult ID cards would only be mandated after the next election. But even so the government have plugged on with this lemon.

But is the scheme starting to fall apart by itself? ...

Accenture and BAE pull out of ID card project | Channel Register

I hope so

Groklaw on the BBC's iPlayer

2008-01-21T08:36:00.000Z

Groklaw do a great job of bringing all the threads together. Here is their write-up following the recent grilling given to the BBC by UK MPs ...

Groklaw - The BBC's iPlayer Goes to Parliament, by Sean Daly

British Gas come through!

2008-01-15T16:40:00.000Z

I wrote about some problems I was having with British Gas.

It turns out that I was not alone in raising the issue that a formal report listed a gas safety problem that an engineer said, verbally only, that we should not worry about.

The very nice people I spoke to in the end said that from now on they would include a letter with the report explaining that when a device was listed as being defective that meant only that it did not meet the standards required of new installations, but was perfectly fine and safe for existing ones. I now have a copy of that letter to file away with the report I must keep for two years.

So that's OK, then. And thanks to the very nice people at British Gas.

Internet Explorer: really part of the OS?

2008-01-15T16:14:00.000Z

The EU is going after Microsoft for market abuse again. This time the EU are thinking about tackling interfaces to office and .Net (among other things) and also the bundling of Internet Explorer.

In response to the latter I have seen a couple of people write that, really, IE is part of the operating system and trying to remove it would be, to quote one person, a "calamity".

I suspect that this is largely a word game. Internet Explorer is whatever Microsoft say it is since "Internet Explorer" is just a brand name. Certainly there is a web browser in there somewhere which one may (currently forlornly) hope would render documents made up of W3C standard elements like HTML, CSS etc.. Lets call that web browser IEWB.

So while "Internet Explorer" (whatever that might be defined as today) may indeed be an inseparable part of Microsoft's operating systems, I see no sane reason why IEWB should be.

I do hope that the EU pick up on this bundling abuse and help Microsoft to take another step towards being a competitor in an open market place rather than the creator and sole custodian of a closed one.

iPlayer - BBC grilled, but not enough

2008-01-14T17:39:00.000Z

The high and mighty of the BBC attended a Public Accounts Committee meeting at the Houses of Parliament last week at which the closed nature of the iPlayer came up.

The most pointed questions on the subject came from Dr. John Pugh MP. His questions were about platform support, and the answers are pretty much what I would have expected, e.g. (taken from a Register article on the meeting):

John Pugh asked: "At what stage will you be able to download and stream to a Mac or a Linux computer?"
Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC replied "You can do that now,"

Well, the Director General was incorrect. You can't do that now. You can stream in YouTube style with the right plug-ins, but you can't download a programme to view later using iPlayer unless you have Microsoft Windows Vista or Microsoft Windows XP and use Microsoft Internet Explorer too.

You can see the entire meeting on Parliament Live for the next couple of weeks. The questions put by John Pugh start at ~12 minutes in. In there we hear that other platforms will be supported some time in the next two years. I'll believe it when I see it.

The meeting video is in .wmv format, unfortunately, and this is the area in which Dr. Pugh did not ask the questions I would have loved to hear answered, for example:

What UK or international standards body(s) control the file and streaming formats used by the BBC iPlayer?

The answer is none, of course. All the key formats are owned and controlled by US corporations.

Oyster: no progress

2008-01-14T08:02:00.000Z

In March of last year we had a very unpleasant experience while travelling on the London Underground. My wife's Oyster card failed (the Oyster system double dipped in error and made the card go into the red) and my wife could not get through an exit gate. She asked for help and was taken aside and verbally assaulted by a member of TFL staff. The member of staff made no attempt whatever to examine the card or to understand the problem. All his energy was directed at shouting and berating. After a few minutes of sport, he let my wife go.

TFL have sent us a cheque for a small amount of money which covered the erroneous double dipping by the Oyster system, but the more serious matter of the detention and assault (for that is what it was) has not been resolved. TFL have made no attempt at all to contact us to ask what happened. Through London Travel Watch we have received messages that TFL take this kind of thing very seriously, but that's it. No action.

While trying to get TFL to deal with this matter other people have told me that they have been in just the same situation themselves. The assault and detention of my wife was not an isolated incident.

Given our experience, and the reaction (or total lack of it) of TFL I suggest the following:

If you are detained and assaulted (verbally or otherwise) by a member of TFL staff it seems that your only option is to call the police right away. No internal TFL process will help you at all, so don't try to deal with TFL. Get an external party involved, i.e. the police.

That way there will be a record of exactly what happened and when, and details of the member of staff involved will be also recorded. This is important because the technique TFL use in resolving such matters, if left to themselves, is to drag the thing out so that all memory of the event is eventually lost.

Or so they hope.

OLPC: Intel's Duty of Care?

2008-01-09T08:35:00.000Z

Being on the board of an organisation is not to be taken lightly. Directors have a duty of care towards the organisation and failing in that duty can have serious repercussions, such as being banned as a director.

So looking at this article:

BBC NEWS | Technology | Intel 'undermined' laptop project

We see :

The head of Intel Paul Otellini said an accusation that the firm had failed to deliver on promises was "hogwash".
"I don't want to get into specifics but we met every obligation that we were committed to," he said.

What about the duty of care towards OLPC, Mr. Otellini? It seems to me that Intel failed in that duty and perhaps questions need to be asked about whether the people on the respective boards should be banned as directors.

Defective?

2008-01-07T17:11:00.000Z

Ah, the fun one has with the big corporations in the UK. British Gas this time.

I subscribe to the British Gas "Home Care" scheme which includes an annual "Safety and Maintenance Inspection" of the central heating system. In August last year (2007) the engineer visited and told us that everything was fine. He handed over a big wad of paper to prove it, which I didn't bother to read until last month when I was doing my end of year filing.

The front page of the tome is a "Landlord's Gas Safety Record" which is a document that I am required to keep for a minimum of two years (or else, no doubt).

Right there, on that front page, the engineer had noted a "defective flue". A dodgy flue can kill people, so this is not something to be taken lightly. But why did the engineer tell us that everything was OK if the flue was defective? Eeeep!

We got in touch with the engineer who said, in essence: Oh, it's OK. Don't worry about it. Hmmm.

I called British Gas HQ and explained the situation and asked for advice. I was told that they would schedule an engineer to visit the flat and carry out another inspection from which I would get a new report. Super duper.

Today I got a message to say that the engineer had cancelled the visit since he felt that the original report was fine. Again it was: Ignore that flue defect in the report. Don't worry, be happy.

Back to British Gas HQ to whom I gave an update. I put it to them that either the report needs to be redone or I need a letter from them saying, in black and white, that they felt everything was OK and that there was indeed no need to worry. After some back and forth with some more experienced people I was told that if it's on the "Landlord's Gas Safety Record" then I *should* worry and that it was my responsibility to get have things sorted out!

I put it to British Gas that they were being somewhat inconsistent with something that could cause harm to people. I was told that the more experienced people would call me right back to discuss the matter and work out what needed to happen next.

And of course no call came. Pretty defective, I'd say.

Intel does the dirty to OLPC

2008-01-06T18:40:00.000Z

Last week we heard that Intel were so very sad, but were forced to reluctantly leave the OLPC board. They had tried to work for the good, but had been done down by OLPC politics.

But that's not how it was.

What happened was that Intel were on the the board of OLPC (a non-profit organisation) whilst at the same time trying to undermine done deals made by OLPC:

Intel Quits Effort to Get Computers to Children - New York Times

It seems fairly clear that Intel were on the OLPC board on a "know your enemy" basis in much the same way that Microsoft were on the Oasis board putting together the, now ISO standard, Open Document Format. Both Intel and Microsoft only bailed when their position became too obviously untenable.

If you are a shareholder of corporations that pull such dirty tricks you may wish to applaud. If you are a potential partner of such corporations you may wish to tread very carefully indeed.

The W3 Validator

2008-01-04T10:51:00.000Z

I am surprised that so few people know about, and use, the W3C validator service. Even people who claim to be professionals in the field.

Using valid HTML makes it easier for browsers to render a page, and thus makes it more likely that a page will be rendered consistently across all browsers. A valid page also make life easier for accessibility tools, such as screen readers for the visually impaired.

So if you are creating HTML, just take the extra little bit of time to run it through the W3C validator. People viewing the resulting pages will thank you for it.

RTF and MOO-XML

2008-01-03T17:20:00.000Z

Rob Weir sees many similarities between the tactics Microsoft is using to lock people into MOO-XML and the tactics they have used in the past, particularly with RTF:

An Antic Disposition: Those who forget Santayana...

Actually talking about Smalltalk

2008-01-02T22:16:00.000Z

In a remarkable turn of events, we actually spent some time talking about Smalltalk at the London Smalltalk gathering. We even had a presentation:

Here we see Bryce giving forth about Exupery (an optimising Smalltalk compiler).

London Smalltalk gathering tonight

2008-01-02T09:28:00.000Z

The first London Smalltalk gathering of 2008 will be happening this evening (2nd Jan) at our regular venue, the Counting House, starting from 18:00.

If you are interested in wide ranging conversation that sometimes even touches on Smalltalk, please do come along.

These gatherings happen every month on the first Wednesday of the month. The announcements are usually made on the "uksmalltalk" mailing list.

NHS start work on moutain of gold

2007-12-31T09:54:00.000Z

Today I read that the NHS (UK National Health Service) have started to build their national database of personal health records. What a tempting target!

Today I also read that data theft is "soaring to an all time high".

Put these two together and you have a happy future for identity thieves and a miserable time for the general public.

Microsoft demonstrate total control over MOO-XML

2007-12-29T11:18:00.000Z

Microsoft are pushing their latest document format as a "standard" in the form of MOO-XML (Microsoft Office Open - XML).

One of the key things about real standards is that they are formed through a consensus. The mechanism for reaching consensus is defined by a standards body and allows the involvement of any interested party.

Microsoft does not want to play that way:

Slashdot | Microsoft Deprecating Some OOXML Functionality

In this Slashdot article we see Microsoft squirming to quell to the many concerns raised about MOO-XML as it is rammed through the ISO process, and in so doing Microsoft demonstrate that they alone say what this format will look like.

MOO-XML is not a standard (it's not even a specification!) and the format is not being defined in anything like an open fashion. Instead it is a very cynical attempt by Microsoft to derail an existing open standard - ODF (the Open Document Format). In the process of pursuing it's monopolistic goals Microsoft has not only muddied the standards waters, but has harmed the standardisation process itself.

The EU recently compelled Microsoft to behave itself in one sphere of it's operations. Perhaps the EU could step in and help preserve the world of open standards against the anti-competitive onslaught of Microsoft.

One can hope.

NHS dive down the ID card rabbit hole

2007-12-24T08:15:00.000Z

The NHS have joined in the data loss fun with the rest of the UK government, and this morning the head of the NHS, David Nicholson, was on the BBC Today programme. The presenter asked the head of the NHS: "Can we trust you with our personal medical data?"

Head of the NHS: "Yes, absolutely"

Given the, just admitted, loss of over 160,000 records this response demonstrates astonishing naivety. This same naivety which is holding open the door for the national ID card system is leading the NHS to create a centralised (physically distributed but logically whole) repository of medical records for everyone in the UK.

Mr. Nicholson went on and on about the technical protection measures that would be put in place, but failed to address the greatest current and future problem - people. Almost all of the recent data losses were down to either mistakes, manipulation or malice on the part of individuals.

Of course, blindly trusting in technology is pretty daft too, but I bet the IT companies that stand to make billions from the NHS can give David a nice warm fuzzy feeling about that.

Samba Team Gets Microsoft Protocol Docs

2007-12-20T21:42:00.000Z

Microsoft preach interoperability but seem to fairly consistently practice just the opposite. It took the might of the EU and many years of effort on the part of many people to force Microsoft to grant (all be it limited) access to the specifications of their resource sharing protocols, but it finally did happen:

Groklaw - Samba Team Receives Microsoft Protocol Documentation

Have a look at the "Settlements" section in the above. Microsoft paid out over 3.5 billion USD to companies that were working with the EU on the case, and those companies duly walked away, seriously weakening the EU position. Thanks to the continued efforts the EU, and with help from the Samba team, the good guys won in the end, but Microsoft very nearly ended up being able to continue abusing the market.

Look again at the amount of money Microsoft paid out: over 3.5 billion USD. This is a huge sum of money. Enough to even sway governments, perhaps?

Now look at the shenanigans within ISO related to the Microsoft Office Open XML (MOO-XML) document format. Do we see another example of an international body being manipulated by the might Microsoft wallet. I think perhaps we do.

ANSI Smalltalk - brief video intro

2007-12-17T14:44:00.000Z

Here is a video I put together for presentation at the Smalltalks 07 conference which happened in Buenos Aires last week:

YouTube - ANSI Smalltalk Introduction

... I think it covers the essentials of what we are trying to do with the ANSI Smalltalk work.

BBC's iPlayer - disgusting

2007-12-12T08:33:00.000Z

The BBC have ignored and are ignoring their responsibility as spelled out in their charter.

BBC's iPlayer launches Christmas Day | The Register

This is one of those cases where a thing is worse than useless. It would be better if iPlayer did not exist at all than in this current form. The iPlayer as proposed will entrench a closed proprietary media format owned and controlled by a single company. The iPlayer project should be halted because to do otherwise is throwing good money after bad.

Microsoft owe the BBC and the British licence paying public a billion pound thank you for this mess. Ka-ching.

Disgusting.

Really.

UK ID card: it gets worse

2007-11-28T22:04:00.000Z

Not only are the UK government pressing ahead with their identity card project, despite the recent blunders in which personal identity information for millions of people were lost, but they seem to be planning to share the identity information around:

Tories: Europeans could get access to UK ID database | The Register

A centralised identity card system is a bad idea because:

Hugely valuable data (in monetary terms) would be concentrated in one place.
Technical failure is inevitable. Such a system will be cracked and/or spoofed.
Social failure is inevitable. People granted access to the data as part of their job will either "lose" the data (as happened recently with the HMRC losing 25 million records) or will take the data for personal gain. The Stork system described in the above article makes this risk many times higher.

The only winners in this mess will be those selling the components of the proposed system to the government. They stand to make billions.

UK ID card data just as safe?

2007-11-20T22:05:00.000Z

The UK government have "lost in the post" sensitive information about tens of millions of people:

BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Tories tell Darling 'get a grip'

A national ID card system would be worse than useless even if the people safeguarding the data could be trusted, but this most recent cock up is a clear indication that having sensitive personal details for everyone in the UK in the ID card system would be far too risky.

Oh, and now we have an attempt to secure the stable door after the horse has bolted:

BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | UK's families put on fraud alert

Remarkable

Slaps talk in Sydney tomorrow

2007-11-19T01:12:00.000Z

If you are interested in LDAP or in Smalltalk or want to see both in action together with a walk through of ASN.1 and how to monitor TCP/IP traffic using a Smalltalk bridge ...

I will be giving a talk about Slaps for the Australian Computer Society (ACS) tomorrow evening. Details are on the ACS website.

Should be fun :-)

May I have a patent on top of that copyright please?

2007-11-13T18:32:00.000Z

Here is an example of why EU legislators need to clearly restate that software ideas may not be patented:

Court date for challenge to 'new' patent rules | The Register

The EU legislators said that software ideas may not be patented, but the EPO blundered and let through (granted a patent on) some firmware a few years ago. This has opened the flood gates to companies like those in the article that want to have patent protection for their software ideas as well as copyright protection for the implementation of those ideas. The EPO blunder is touted as "patent law" (case law) by those who want to be able to patent software ideas, as we see from the lawyer in the article:

"A lot of people think there is no problem here because disks and downloads are protected by copyright," noted Nicholas Fox of Beresford & Co, the lawyer working for the four firms. "That is just not true. Copyright protection only protects code against copying. In contrast, patent protection enables a company to monopolise an invention even if competitors independently come up with the same idea."

Right. "A lot of people" here includes the people who wrote the statute law to exclude software from being patented.

For now I hope that the UK courts are able to stick with the original intent of the legislation and that this challenge is thrown out.

Smalltalk ANSI gets rolling - join in!

2007-11-13T09:53:00.000Z

Work is now well under way to get the Smalltalk ANSI standardization process restarted. We have a mail list up and running and Paolo Bonzini has set up a wiki for the project.

We already have the Smalltalk vendor companies involved, and that is very important. What we also need are people who use Smalltalk as an application programming language. If you are on a project that uses Smalltalk then I suggest that you have a member of that project sign up to the ANSI Smalltalk list. If you want Smalltalk to do what *you* need in the future then you need to get involved now.

One of the valuable things that ANSI provides is a structured way of forming a consensus. While we can (and do!) have very illuminating discussions on our mailing lists and on comp.lang.smalltalk, it is hard to turn the resulting ideas into something that everyone can use. The ANSI process lets us do that.

It will be free to participate in the debates and in informal voting. Formal voting will require formal membership of the ANSI INCITS project and that is not free. Perhaps your company could support a member of your team on the formal committee?

Australian Elections: Who's who?

2007-11-06T10:25:00.000Z

I will be voting in the upcoming federal elections in Australia and I would like to know something about the candidates in my Sydney area, but I'm living in London so what can I do?

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) have a website showing the name, occupation and party allegiance of each candidate, but nothing there helps me to find out what the individual is actually standing for. Not even any contact details.

I wrote to the AEC asking how I could get contact details for the candidates in my division and got the following:

The information you require is available on the AEC website. All contact details of the candidates has been posted on the website.

Really? I wrote back including a link to the page listing the candidates in my state and also cut and pasted the section for my division. Where, I asked, is this contact information? The AEC responded:

Contact details for candidates are not available to the Australian Electoral Office. You will need to contact the party concerned for contact details. sorry for any inconvenience.

Ooops.

But apart from giving me bad information in the first place, just how am I supposed to make an informed choice in this election if the electoral officials can not, or will not, allow voters to know more than the name, job and party of the candidates? What about independent candidates?

I certainly hope it is not true that the "Contact details for candidates are not available to the Australian Electoral Office". I mean, how would they tell a candidate if they happened to win?

This nonsense does rather seem to favour the position that as a voter you are not really voting for an individual representative, rather you are voting for a party. After all, why would you care which party minion gets the seat in your division?

Well I do care, and I think that the AEC are letting the electorate down very badly in this regard.

More Microsoft "interoperability". Beware.

2007-11-01T12:39:00.000Z

Having demonstrated over the years their disdain for standards and the standards process, Microsoft are embarking on another "helpful" exercise. This time they want to make ECMAScript (aka JavaScript) work consistently on all browsers:

Microsoft to search browsers for JavaScript compatibility | Reg Developer

And rather than move their product to fit the standard, they want to extend the standard to meet their product.

It's like Deja Vu all over again.

In a hole? Stop digging.

2007-10-29T18:10:00.000Z

The EC want to tackle problems with "IP", by which I assume they mean copyrights, trademarks, patents etc. Good. There are plenty of problems in this area, not least the fact that the EPO ignores legislation which says that software ideas may not be patented. But anyway, the EU solution is not to fix the problems but rather to create an entirely new layer in which we can have all kinds of new problems:

European Commission asks for new IP protection layer | The Register

Good grief.

Even if it takes longer, and even if it is painful, the correct solution is multilateral agreements through the WTO. Bilateral agreements are a lawyers delight and will just have to be dismantled again (to the further delight of lawyers) when multilateral agreements are finally in place.

Someone take that shovel from the EU before we all get buried.

How to break a standards process

2007-10-17T09:45:00.000+01:00

In their desperation to get their MOO-XML file format approved as a standard, Microsoft loaded various standards committees with people who would vote for it. Microsoft's efforts failed, but at least in the case of the ISO/IEC committee the battle appears to have caused significant longer term harm:

Slashdot | Format Standards Committee "Grinds To a Halt"

Thanks, Microsoft.

ANSI Smalltalk

2007-10-16T13:56:00.000+01:00

In 1998 the first version of the ANSI standard for the Smalltalk programming language was released under the auspices of INCITS. It has the cosy name "ANSI INCITS 319-1998".

Since 1998 Smalltalk has moved on, with more implementations of Smalltalk (dialects) and most dialects trending towards ANSI standard, as well of lots of cool things like Seaside and Croquet. The ANSI process for Smalltalk has not moved on and the committee that put together the standard no longer even exists.

Today, even though much of the ANSI standard is implemented in most dialects, it is hard to write a Smalltalk program that will run unaltered in more than one dialect. This is something that the Sport (Smalltalk Portability) library helps to address, but the very existence of a kludge like Sport points to the need for greater inherent consistency among Smalltalk dialects.

I have been promoting the idea that getting the ASNI process restarted for Smalltalk would be a win for all Smalltalkers; vendors, tool-smiths and application developers alike. In my view the ANSI process should be on-going, producing a new version of the standard regularly (say every 18 months or 2 years) and looking to the community for priorities.

Recently I spoke with INCITS about what it would take to restart the process and it seems fairly straight forward. We need to put together a proposal for starting the project. If the proposal is accepted a committee is formed and the committee gets to work.

I will be posting more details to comp.lang.smalltalk since that is the primary all-dialect discussion forum for Smalltalk.

I think we can get the Smalltalk ANSI standardization process going again and I think we should, and there is no time like the present.

BBC iPlayer - some progress

2007-10-16T10:35:00.000+01:00

The BBC iPlayer is still a Microsoft Windows only service that uses a Microsoft protocol to transfer content. Fixing this was left to the BBC Trust who are to review the matter every six months.

But what will the BBC Trust review? What progress has been made towards making BBC content available via open protocols on any platform that supports those protocols? No concrete progress so far it seems, but the BBC are starting to talk about alternatives to the Microsoft only iPlayer program and the Microsoft protocols, all be it wrapped up with an announcement promoting the use of those very same Microsoft programs and protocols:

BBC NEWS | Technology | BBC online to go free over wi-fi

I think we need to see the BBC move from talk to action so that the BBC Trust has something concrete to review at it's first 6 monthly meeting following the launch of the Microsoft only iPlayer. Using the Adobe Flash player and the Adobe protocols is an improvement over the Microsoft-only approach as it does work on many platforms, but it is just locking BBC content into the products of yet another corporation, Adobe this time.

Adopting an open protocol would be an even better fit with the BBC charter and would open the content for use with software written by anyone, even Microsoft or Adobe if they chose to write such software. I hope this very point comes up at the next BBC Trust review.

I hope that the trust of the UK government in the BBC Trust was not misplaced.

Software Idea Patents vs FOSS

2007-10-12T08:34:00.000+01:00

Here we go, an example of why Software Idea Patents are bad news for the IT industry but great news for patent lawyers:

Groklaw - Patent Infringement Lawsuit Filed Against Red Hat & Novell - Just Like Ballmer Predicted

... and I'm sure there will be more.

Leopard in October?

2007-10-11T18:24:00.000+01:00

There have been a number of articles suggesting that the new version of Apple OS X (10.5Leopard) is due out real soon now, as if they have uncovered some deep secret. Then there are more articles suggesting that it won't be released for ages.

... but I took the easy approach and looked here:

Apple (UK and Ireland) - Mac OS X Leopard

October it is, then :-)

Not that I'll be upgrading for a while. I suspect that there will be some worthwhile patches out in the new year, so perhaps then.

UK-wide WiFi from FON & BT?

2007-10-04T10:18:00.000+01:00

I have run a FON hotspot here in London for a while now. In theory this should mean that I can get WiFi access to the Internet in many places around Europe and a few cities outside Europe too, at no additional cost to me. In practice the FON hotspots have never quite coincided with where I happened to be.

It looks like my chances of getting a connection have just got dramatically better in the UK:

Introducing the BT FON Community, Wi-Fi everywhere in the U.K. | FON Blog

I am still not really clear on how this will work (e.g. will every BT hotspot now also announce itself as a FON hotspot that I can use for no additional cost?), but it sounds like it should be a good thing.

Ah, more news on this from CNN.

... and a site for the project: BT FON

MS shoots self in foot. Wins award.

2007-10-02T09:01:00.000+01:00

FFII have identified the organisation that has done the most to save the world from being undermined by the MOO-XML (Microsoft Open Office XML) document file format.

It's Microsoft!

Microsoft "Best Campaigner against OOXML Standardization"

By so aggressively destabilising the standards process Microsoft have created a pervasive negative view of MOO-XML.

Well done! Keep up the good work.

Oyster matter rumbles on

2007-10-02T07:38:00.000+01:00

The matter of the detention and assault of my wife at the hands of a TfL employee rumbles on with no resolution in sight. The good news is that TfL now say that they are taking this seriously. All we need now are for their actions to start matching their words.

I heard the latest news from London Travel Watch who are taking on TfL on our behalf. Remarkably the TfL response suggested that in order to make any progress they really need more detail, such as the exact time of the incident ... which of course a different part of TfL already know. This after they claimed to be sorry for internal TfL communication inefficiencies which they have now addressed - yeah, right.

At this point we are looking for some fairly simple things from TfL, though I suspect TfL may view these as being very hard ...

TfL need to acknowledge that there are systemic problems with the Oyster system and the training of station staff regarding the Oyster system. (Then they need to do something about it!)
TfL need to explain what station staff should be expected to do in situations such as the one we suffered. (e.g. perhaps staff should have access to a reader that will let them see activity on an Oyster card).
TfL need to explain what passengers should do in situations such as the one we suffered. (e.g. should we have immediately called the police?)

I'm still not holding my breath.

London Smalltalk gathering goes regular

2007-09-11T15:04:00.000+01:00

There was a small gathering of Smalltalkers in London last night and there was much interesting conversation, as usual. One of the things that came up was the gathering itself, and it was proposed that we should meet on a regular basis, so ...

On the first Monday of the month Smalltalkers are invited to the Counting House for a beer, something to eat and some Smalltalk small talk. The next gathering will be on 1st Oct and people tend to start rolling in at about 18:00.

If you want to discuss the gathering, join the uksmalltalk mailing list.

SCO - Even deader

2007-09-08T11:04:00.000+01:00

SCO's last hope in their case against Novell (and therefore, largely, their last hope in the IBM case too) was being able to bamboozle a jury. Now there is no Jury to perform to, only the judge:

Groklaw - Judge Kimball rules: There will be no jury in SCO v. Novell

At last we will have a forum in which SCO must come clean and explain exactly where they stand or, more likely, fall.

UK PM & the BBC iPlayer

2007-09-06T16:31:00.000+01:00

Well, we have a Prime Ministerial response to the iPlayer petition:

iplayer - epetition response

Sadly the biggest issue, that of the use of a proprietary format for encoding the content for the iPlayer, was not addressed in the petition. I doubt the response would have been any different though.

In summary, the PM says "Not my problem. See the BBC trust.". Well, fair enough if the Trust were doing a good job, but in this case, they are not. A review of "supported" platforms in a few months time is a waste of time when the underlying content is encoded using a closed proprietary format and the use of this format is not going to be reviewed at all.

The BBC are handing Microsoft a big slab of lock-on on a silver platter. A higher authority than the BBC needs to point out that this is not in the public interest.

A Sport run-in with Wikipedia

2007-09-06T07:39:00.000+01:00

Fresh back from ESUG 2007 in Lugano, I have been working on various Sport related issues. We have new ports of Sport to VisualAge Smalltalk and Visual Smalltalk. At ESUG Sport was often the subject of discussion. The Visual Smalltalk port happened during Camp Smalltalk, a talk on Swazoo covered the use of Sport as did the GemStone Glass people whose port of Seaside to GemStone relies on Sport and of course my Slaps talk referred to Sport too.

Back at home, while updating the Sport wiki page on the OpenSkills wiki, I thought it would make more sense, given the now wider use of Sport, to have the "what is Sport" text be in Wikipedia rather than just in the OpenSkills wiki. So that's what I did. I noted on the Seaside page that some ports of Seaside relied on Sport (I don't know for sure if they all do) and used that link to make a Wikipedia Sport page.

I had barely got started on the page when a box was added to the top saying that the new Sport page infringed copyright. The copyright that was being infringed upon? My own work from the OpenSkills wiki! The box said to post a comment on the discussion page to counter the accusation, so I did, saying what I just said here. Not good enough. I had to add something to the OpenSkills wiki noting that it was OK for my text to be in Wikipedia, so I did. Still not good enough and the page now has a big "Possible Copyright Infringement" in place of the information about Sport. The most amazing thing about this was the speed! The copyright accusation popped up within one hour of my starting work on the page.

Shortly after the copyright thing popped up on the page another box popped up threatening the page with deletion and pointing me to a discussion page on the subject. The Wikipedia people use wiki pages to discuss things rather than any kind of messaging system. If you want to track a conversation you have to keep visiting the page. It's worse than using a bulletin board. Add to that the fact that the messages from the Wikipedia people come over using these pseudo-legalistic terms and I ended up having a hard time keeping up!

Then *another* box popped up on the page. This one said that the page lacked "notability". It makes sense that entries in the Wikipedia are of interest to a reasonable number of people rather than being a individual thing, so in support of "notability" I linked to the ESUG conference and to the Sourceforge project. Then I made my big mistake. In trying to meet this "notability" requirement I asked for help on comp.lang.smalltalk. It seems that asking for help sends the Wikipedia people into a rage. I got a note (on *another* wiki page - this one attached to my account) saying that the use of "meatpuppets" was unacceptable behaviour on my part. Wow. Meatpuppets.

I have tried to respond to this flurry of accusation with English explanations on the deletion discussion page (as opposed to the Sport page talk page or my personal account talk page etc etc.) Other people, sorry "meatpuppets", tried to support the argument. The wikipedia people screeched that this "was not a vote!". Well, I knew that and was trying to have a discussion as were the other Smalltalkers who contributed. But to no avail.

If I had taken the time I used responding to the wikipedia people and used it to update the Sport page I think it would be in a good state now - even the Wikipedia people may have found it acceptable. As it is, I give up. I just don't have the time. I'm sure Sport will end up with an entry in Wikipeda at some point, but I certainly won't be jousting directly with the Wikipeda people again.

Now, lest you think after all this I have a downer on Wikipedia I want you to know that I don't. I think the Wikipedia is a great source of information and I will continue to read it, to link to it and to recommend it to others as about the best source of a first approximation available on the web today. It is a Very Good Thing that the Wikipedia has guardians who care for it and work to make sure that the content is up to scratch and I thank them for their efforts.

In the case of the Sport page, though, I think the Wikipedia police have ended up suppressing useful information by being, ah, overzealous.

ISO say no to MOO-XML

2007-09-04T15:04:00.000+01:00

The Microsoft Office file format which Microsoft fought (in a very dirty fashion) to fast track to ISO standard status has been rejected:

Groklaw - The results of the ISO voting: Office Open XML is Disapproved

... but only for now. It seems Microsoft are confident that they can sufficiently influence the next committee in the chain to give their proprietary format "standard" status.

The standards process has taken an awful toll in all this. I am sure that many national standards bodies will be asking themselves how they can avoid being manipulated by companies like Microsoft in the future.

I hope ISO as a whole are now on guard for more ballot stuffing and other dirty tactics as Microsoft desperately try to keep their office product as the lock-in cash cow it is today. MOO-XML indeed.

>>flush vs. >>commit

2007-08-30T15:27:00.000+01:00

I just learned that, in VisualWorks Smalltalk at least, if you send the message flush to an external stream (file, socket etc) this does not in fact flush unwritten content to the disk/socket. Rather it flushes unwritten content from the image down into the Smalltalk virtual machine.

If you really want to flush unwritten content, use commit instead.

Clear?

Yet more MOOXML madness

2007-08-28T22:46:00.000+01:00

Slashdot | Microsoft Bought Sweden's ISO Vote on OOXML?

I think the level 5 comments to this Slashdot article hit on all the key points is this sorry saga.

MOO XML: Even MS don't implement it

2007-08-26T22:04:00.000+01:00

The MOO-XML* (Microsoft Open Office XML) definition is not followed even by Microsoft applications:

OOXML is defective by design

One point from the article: Excel crashes when opening well-formed and valid spreadsheet document files. There are many other problems also clearly explained in the article.

If ECMA fast track this half-baked format of Microsoft's after so many serious problems in it have been pointed out, it will seriously damage the reputation of the ECMA standards process. That would be another victory for Microsoft.

* I picked up "MOO-XML" from a post in Slashdot. It is a much better label for the Microsoft document format as it reduces name confusion with the vastly superior Open Document Format (ODF). Also, IMO, the Microsoft document does have a bovine side to it, and the name MOO-XML brings that out too.

OODB vs RDB

2007-08-25T07:59:00.000+01:00

It seems that whenever there is a discussion about using Object databases the debate veers towards whether to use an OODB *or* an RDB.

There are often many factors affecting DBMS choice in specific situations but most OO applications require persistence to disk and good query performance. OODBs minimise the pain of persisting an object model. RDBs tend to be much better at arbitrary querying.

I now tend to suggest the use of both and OODB and an RDB. Object persistence all happens to the OODB and the OODB is the operational repository for the system. The RDB is used to hold a flattened summary of the data in the operational repository. The problem of writing a summary to an RDB is much simpler than the problem of persisting objects with the former being much more like writing a report or producing a web page than saving a complex object structure in a way that can re retrieved and reanimated. The schema of the OODB is simply the object model of the application. The schema of the RDB would include the things that need to be searched upon and no more.

This OODB *and* RDB approach is an idealised model that may not work out in all cases, but I think it could well be a practical solution in many cases.

Slaps at ESUG

2007-08-23T08:05:00.000+01:00

I will be attending ESUG next week and giving a talk on Slaps, the Smalltalk LDAP server. The talk will be on Friday 31st Just before lunch.

Slaps is not just an interface to an external LDAP server (such as OpenLDAP), it is a stand alone LDAP server in it's own right completely written in Smalltalk. Slaps might be described as an "Application LDAP server" because it lets an application provide access to it's object model directly through the LDAP protocol, which is quite nifty for all kinds of reasons. Come to the talk to find out why.

See you at ESUG.

BTW, I'll be at the Hotel Zurigo from Friday (24th Aug) evening. If you fancy a beer, let me know :-)

Hull Trains

2007-08-19T20:03:00.000+01:00

My parents live in Hull so I visit the city quite often. Of late I have been taking the train, traveling with Hull Trains.

Hull Trains offer fast comfortable trains, reserved seats with mains power right at the seat and very efficient staff on the phone to take your booking. Great price too if you book a few days in advance.

In my experience so far; brilliant. The best train service I have used in the UK.

Microsoft rejects SVG (and more)

2007-08-19T10:39:00.000+01:00

The following paper is another analysis of the Microsoft OOXML format and it asks a valid question:

Microsoft and Open Standards: Can Other Vendors Implement Microsoft's Office Open XML?

I doubt you will be too surprised to hear that the answer is: at best, not without risk.

In this paper I read that OOXML is not only attacking ODF, it is also attacking the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) standard. I am sure that the standards committee responsible for SVG would welcome the input of Microsoft, if they have anything constructive to say. The same for the ODF committee. As has been reported many times by others, there is no record of any suggestions by Microsoft being rejected by the original Oasis committee (the one that created ODF) while Microsoft were part of that committee (and I rather suspect that Microsoft were only on that committee in the first place to slow it down).

Nobody is saying that ODF is perfect. For example, you can read here that the way that SVG gets used in ODF is not perfect. But at least the ODF people are *trying* to use existing open standards rather than continually inventing new formats. One of the reasons ODF is "only" 760 pages long is that it makes reference to many external standards such as SVG. The Microsoft format is 6000+ pages long because it re-invents so many wheels and because it includes many quirks which accommodate the foibles of legacy Microsoft software (e.g. "lineWrapLikeWord6"). How in any sane world can things like "lineWrapLikeWord6" form part of an open standard?

SVG is not standing alone in the cross-hairs of OOXML. Another example is the ISO 8601 standard for dates, which Microsoft actually used for a while (Office 2000) and then moved away from (to enhance interoperability perhaps?). The Microsoft OOXML format looks like an attempt to smother lots of open standards in one go. If the Microsoft format is fast tracked, so are the Microsoft devised component formats.

If only Microsoft put this much energy into writing good standards-compliant software.