Notebook Shopping

So I'm in the market for a new laptop. This kind of annoys me because I don't actually want a laptop. Expensive, barely upgradeable, tiny keyboards, and (worst of the all) the temptation to sit awkwardly in front of the television with the thing precariously balanced on your knee, cooking and radiating your organs and destroying your body through poor ergonomics. But I'm traveling a fair bit, doing consulting, and there are occasions where a laptop is, if not essential, at least very very useful.

So here I am looking around at the options and, while I've been telling friends and colleagues for years to buy Mac laptops if they can afford them, I now find myself unsure. I was intending to get a MacBook Pro in September in order to get the free iPod Touch but decided to wait for the new Macs to be announced. I was underwhelmed: there's really not much new there despite the heavy sales pitch and I don't like the new look. Even with the education discount, the cheapest MacBook Pro would cost me over $2400 after tax.

The problem is that I really like Mac OS X and I really like that the freeware people write for it actually looks good (unlike for Linux or Windows, at least in general). I discovered over the last 9 months that, for the things I do, I can manage fine with Windows. And as a major plus, I don't spend hours endlessly "tweaking" my system like I do with Linux. Sure, every time Apple releases a software update, Mac owners everywhere cower in fear wondering what will be broken, but I'm still happier in OS X than in any other operating system.

I'm looking around at Dells and Compaqs and I can get a laptop that would probably serve my needs just fine for $700 or so plus tax. That makes the MacBook Pro something like three times as expensive! If Apple would sell me a copy of OS X to run on a PC, I would buy it in a flash but $1500 is a hefty tax to pay for it. Even refurbished old-model MacBook Pros are selling for $1449 plus tax but that's still double.

Now I just read Jeff Atwood's post about netbooks. Netbooks are an emerging category of small ultra-portable computers basically designed for running a web browser, checking email, and maybe doing some word processing. Their specs seem to be in the range of 1.5GHz processor, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, and a 7"-9" screen. Aside from the screen, that's better than the computer I'm writing this post on. And the price? Under $500. Jeff says:

They still have a way to go, of course, but the $299 or $199 no-compromises, go-anywhere, zero-monthly-contract-fees web browser in the palm of your hand -- with the requisite 9" or larger screen -- is almost upon us. I guess I hadn't been paying enough attention, because that's a shocker to me.

And that's exactly how I feel. I've heard people talking about Netbooks for a while but hadn't really realized how far they'd come. I'm still considering this new laptop my primary machine so I can't handle the small screen but if I had a desktop computer I would seriously consider getting one of these (with an external keyboard) to cover those "useful-to-have-a-laptop" situations.

The social pressure to display an Apple logo is intense (do you have any idea what percentage of people at computer conferences have Macs?) and I would probably spend $200 or $300 more for the privelege. If I can find something with a comparably beautiful screen, though, I think I may have to make do without the metallic finish.

Framing

After reading this article, I ordered a copy of George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant. The book examines the use of language to "frame" arguments to your advantage. Take, for example, the phrase "tax relief". If there is relief to be had, tax is obviously a burden. How can anybody expect to succeed in arguing against something called "tax relief"? If you enter into the debate without reframing the issue, you lose.

Lakoff draws his examples largely from the context of the US political system and he makes no effort to conceal his Democratic leanings. Certainly not unbiased, the book is in fact a call to arms for Democrats, who Lakoff claims are decades behind Republicans in their understanding of these issues. All this means I take his words with a grain of salt.

Nonetheless, the discussion of mental framing and its effects fits with my observations of the world and seems broadly relevant. His analysis of the progressive and conservative movements themselves and their origins was also intriguing: I have no idea how accurate these theories are but I was able to look at conservative policy in a new light.

I was annoyed throughout by his repetition, both within and between chapters. In a few cases, I discovered several-paragraph-long sections that were taken almost verbatim from an earlier chapter. I discovered part way through that the book is a collection of essays and I have the impression they were thrown together quickly to get the book published in time for the last US election. This is partly to blame for the repetition but I think Lakoff is also overapplying one of his own messages: that mental frames are adopted through repetition.

That said, the book is short (100-and-some pages), cheap ($8 on Amazon), interesting, and a quick read so I recommend picking up a copy even if you only make it through the first two chapters.

Don't toss that margarine!

I grew up with butter. As a result, margarine just always seemed weird, even before the trans-fat scare (which, apparently, is no longer an issue with margarine).

Well, as of a couple of weeks ago, I have a reason to keep margarine in my fridge again: it takes tree sap out of clothing! Really. Rub margarine thoroughly into the clothing and use dish detergent to wash it out (no need to let it sit). Then run the clothes through the washing machine and you should have nothing but a pine-fresh scent remaining. It worked for me.

Graph Theory

I'm not sure what happened. I don't remember finding graph theory particularly interesting in university but over the past month I've had two occasions of simple pleasure while figuring out (pretty basic) directed graph algorithms.

The first was at our last Seaside sprint, where Lukas and I were working out how to modify his Package Dependency tool to mark cycles on Seaside 2.9's dependency graph in red, so we could immediately spot problems. It's not like there aren't already algorithms for this but it was fun just trying to work one out for ourselves.

The other was this Tuesday. I woke up wondering whether I couldn't make the graph a little easier to look at by removing direct edges when we have another indirect path to the same node. In other words, if package A depends on B and package B depends on C, we could omit a dependency from package A to package C because that dependency is already implied through transitivity anyway. I pictured this as the opposite of a Transitive Closure.

It turns out that this operation is called a Transitive Reduction and there are algorithms for it but they don't seem to be very well documented online. I ended up just working something out myself using depth-first searching and path-length tracking to prune shorter paths to objects. I don't know if there's a faster way but it doesn't really need to be that fast in this context anyway. I currently abort if the graph is cyclic but I'm pretty sure you could do something like pick an arbitrary root for the cycle, treat everything within the cycle as being distance zero from each other, and you would get a reasonable (albeit non-deterministic) answer. In our case, we don't want cycles in our graph so, realistically, you would fix the cycle and rerun the dependency checker anyway. Here's the result.

This got me thinking... is there a good implementation of graph theory algorithms in Smalltalk? I would love to be able to create a Graph of my model objects (maybe implement #edges on each one or something) and then call: "graph isCyclic", "graph transitiveReduction", or "graph topologicalSortFrom: aNode". So many things can map to directed graphs and, if you could work out domain-specific solutions by really easily layering generic graphing algorithms, that would be really cool.

Sometimes solving simple problems with definable right answers is so satisfying.

Gartner on Seaside

Well... praise for Seaside from a Gartner analyst:

If you are BIG fan of dynamics languages (closures, meta programming, and all that cool stuff) then consider giving Smalltalk a look. You might like what you see. Its like Ruby but with bigger muscles. You think Rails is cool? Check out seaside.

His general comments about Smalltalk are in line with Gartner's changing position but the specific reference to Seaside adds another touch of legitimacy when selling a Seaside project to those who hold the purse strings. Very nice.

Vancouver Olympic Tickets on Sale

For those who haven't heard, tickets for Vancouver 2010 are on sale to Canadian residents.

For Round 1, you have until November 7 to put in a request for tickets. After that, events with too much demand will have a draw to determine who gets tickets.

Seaside History

There are a lot of questions around the origins and evolution of Seaside, particularly after Avi and I gave up our old domain and the old Seaside and Seaside 2 websites with it.

A couple of months ago, I began (but never finished) a history page for the Seaside website to provide some background information for those who are interested. I had to dust off some of those notes to prepare my ESUG presentation on the past and future evolution of the framework and figured I might as well dust off the history page as well. So here's the story as best as I can recall it (and by "recall", I mean "find in Google" because Google seems to hold the majority of my memories these days).

[Update: now posted at seaside.st/about/History]

Introduction

Seaside made its public debut (version 0.9) in an announcement to the squeak-dev list on February 21, 2002. Avi Bryant and I developed Seaside to support our web application development consulting, specifically the development of a web-based theatre boxoffice sales system.

Seaside took heavy inspiration from Avi's Iowa framework (now here), which was written in Ruby and was itself inspired by NeXT's (and then Apple's) WebObjects. This first release of Seaside provided action callbacks for links and forms, session state management with support for call/return and the back button, and a component system with templates.

Experimentation

Almost immediately after the release of 0.9, we began work on Seaside 2.x (codenamed Borges, a reference to Jorge Luis Borges' short story The Garden of Forking Paths and an allusion to Seaside's support for forking session states). Seaside 2.0 was essentially a complete rewrite with a layered architecture: a Kernel layer providing a continuation-based HTTP request/response response loop and state (back-)tracking; a Views layer providing action callbacks and a rendering API for generating HTML; and a Component layer providing call/return semantics, embedding, and development tools.

Seaside 2.0 was released in October, 2003 with the templating system conspicuously absent. This was an experiment to see whether the development of the HTML rendering API and the wider acceptance of CSS had reduced or eliminated the need for templates. The new layered architecture made it easy for others to experiment with developing their own template engines. Seaside was also ported by Eric Hodel to Ruby, where it kept the name Borges.

Several versions followed in quick succession with major refactorings to the session state tracking and backtracking mechanisms. Seaside 2.3 (mid-2003) also introduced an even more layered architecture that tried to make some of the internals clearer and more accessibly to the project's growing number of users and contributors. It also confirmed that Seaside would not have built-in templates in the near future. Seaside became increasingly well-known around this time with a presentation at ESUG 2002 by Lukas Renggli and Adrian Lienhard and a hands-on development workshop at Smalltalk Solutions in 2003 by myself and Avi.

Stabilization

Seaside 2.4 and 2.5 addressed some growing pains in some of the core parts of the system: the Renderer API, collapsing under the weight of combinatorial explosion, was replaced by the now-familiar Canvas API; and some of the internal workings of the Session object were reified to make its application main-loop metaphor more obvious. Version 2.5 also saw the introduction of Component Decorations, Halos, and response streaming.

As first I and then Avi began to work full time developing applications using Seaside, the community began to carry more of the development load, with the release of Seaside 2.7 being  entirely (and very successfully) managed by the community, with Lukas, Philippe Marschall, and Michel Bany leading the effort. This release focused heavily on cleaning up the code base by fixing, deprecating, refactoring, and removing code.