The Year of Seaside?

I'm a few weeks late, but I just finished listening to James Robertson and Michael Lukas Smith doing the year in review on the Industry Misinterpretations podcast. I was amused to hear them use the phrase "the year of Seaside" (a reference to Randal Schwartz's predication for Smalltalk this year). There did seem to be a lot of Seaside-related news.

But now that 2008 is over, was it the year of Smalltalk (or Seaside)? Sure, there's a lot of Smalltalk code being written, but that's been true for as long as I've been involved in the community. We made some progress with Gartner; attendance at Smalltalk conferences was high (though it sounds like there are fears it could be low again next year); Randal's predication generated a buzz in the community; and certainly there has been a notable effort to generate publicity outside the community. But is it working?

Have people seen an increase in the size of the community? An increase in Smalltalk-related business? What are our metrics? Was 2008 The Year of Smalltalk?

The Socratic Method

While cleaning out my browser's bookmarks (yes, I'm obsessive enough to do this once and a while), I stumbled across an article I had read by Rick Garlikov about teaching children using the Socratic Method. The Socratic Method, used extensively in the portrayal of Socrates in Plato's writings, is a form of philosophical exploration using questions to stimulate discussion and insight.

In this context, Garlikov is attempting to teach a third grade class about binary arithmetic by asking only questions and allowing the children to work out the answers themselves. A major part of the article is a transcript of this class, which lasted only 25 minutes and apparently resulted in 19 out of 22 students having "fully and excitedly participated and absorbed the entire material".

The article is a quick and inspiring read and I suggest you take a look. I sometimes think it would be nice to volunteer to work with a group of school children (eToys maybe?) and this would be an interesting approach to play with.

There is also a letter to his daughter with further details on Plato and the Socratic Method. If you are at all interested in pedagogy or philosophy, you might also want to check out some of his other articles. I seem to recall finding the article about mistakes made when teaching math interesting.

First Sprint of 2009

This weekend, we completed another very successful Seaside sprint here in Konstanz. We polished off all but a few of our targeted issues and made real progress towards the next alpha release.

Among other things, we added the ability to configure the new session cache, removed our dependency on MessageSend, standardized on the ANSI exception handling protocol and made sure we were signaling meaningful errors.

We also got a shiny new Control Panel implemented in OmniBrowser (see image to the right). There will be more features coming in this area.

Lukas was cleaning up the FileLibrary code on the train on the way here but lost most of it when his image suddenly crashed and ended up only 4MB in size.

I still need to look at some package dependency issues and Philippe and Lukas are working on the ability to add cookies during the callback phase and related bugs.

All in all, a very productive two days!

Object Initialization

Making sure your Smalltalk objects are initialized once and only once can be tricky.

(if you'd rather skip the discussion and go straight to the details, here are Seaside's object initialization conventions)

For starters, some Smalltalks implement #new on Object to call #initialize and some don't. But it gets more complicated than that. For example:

• What should you call a new parameterized initialization method?
• How should a subclass with one of those make sure its superclass is initialized?
• How should class-side instance creation methods work?
• How do you make sure inherited instance creation methods don't result in partially initialized objects?
• What if someone else has made subclasses of yours and is already overriding your superclass' initialization method?

These are just a handful of the possible issues.

For much of the code you write, you can probably avoid worrying about this too much. You were probably using and testing the code as you wrote it, so you know it works. You probably don't have that many levels of subclasses and you (or at least someone on your team) probably knows (or can trace) all the users and subclasses of each class. In many cases, it probably isn't even the end of the world if an object is initialized twice and you're bound to notice pretty quickly if an object is never initialized. All this breaks down as your project and team get bigger, of course.

As a framework, though, I believe Seaside needs to hold its developers to the very highest possible standards of code quality. Seaside is used in Smalltalk images of various platforms all over the world and there is no way that any developer will ever be aware of all the subclasses and users that are out there. Some of our users will implement classes where it does matter if they're initialized twice and when it breaks it will be them not us who notices the problem. This means that we need to be unambiguous, clear, concise, consistent, and portable (and yes, documented... sigh), as well as vigilant in thinking about how developers will subclass, extend, and use our code.

For Seaside, Avi and I worked out a loose convention for this from day one and it has been fairly consistently applied. Some recent discussion on the mailing list, however, has prompted me to formalize and document our conventions. Our requirements are something like:

1. Each object must be initialized once and only once.
2. During initialization, all initialization methods must be called in a predictable order. If my subclass has already overridden my superclass' initialization method, it should still be called. (This means a method should never call super with a selector other than its own).
3. All inherited instance creation methods must result in a completely initialized object.
4. The conventions must be consistently applicable in all cases.
5. It should be very clear to users of the class what parameters are required for initialization.
6. It is more important to minimize the complexity and effort for users of the framework than for developers of the framework.
7. Without sacrificing the above points, we should not have to write or override more code than necessary (we don't want to have to override every instance creation method each time we subclass, for example).

So here are the conventions we use in Seaside. Let me know what you think.

Seaside 2.9: Exception Handling

Ok, I promised well over a month ago to start documenting some of the new bells and whistles in the Seaside 2.9 Alpha series. I thought I'd start things off with a discussion of the new exception handling mechanism.

Have you ever wanted to customize the look of Seaside's error pages? Want to send yourself an email whenever an exception is raised? Maybe save a copy of the image on errors so you can look at the stack later? It has been possible for ages to implement a custom error handling class for your Seaside application but the process was not necessarily obvious and you were limited to catching subclasses of Warning and Error. In the upcoming Seaside release, we have cleaned up the exception handling code to really simplify the error handlers that come with Seaside and to make your custom handlers simpler and more flexible.

Basic Usage

To create your own exception handler, the first question is what class to use as your superclass. If you are just interested in customizing the appearance of error pages or performing some additional action when an error occurs, you probably want to subclass WAErrorHandler. If your requirements are more complex, you may want to subclass WAExceptionHandler directly (see Advanced Usage below).

Subclassing WAErrorHandler

WAErrorHandler is already configured to handle Error and Warning and is a good starting point if you don't need to drastically change the error handling behaviour. In your custom subclass, you can implement #handleError: and #handleWarning: to define the behaviour you want in each case. The methods take the exception (either an Error or Warning respectively) as a parameter and should ultimately either resume the exception or return an instance of WAResponse. By default, both methods call #handleDefault: so you can provide common implementation there.

For example, assuming you had defined a routine to notify yourself of errors by email, you could provide an implementation like this:

handleError: anError
self notifyMeOfError: anError.
 ^ WAResponse new
  internalError;
  contentType: WAMimeType textPlain;
  nextPutAll: 'Eek! An error occurred but I have been notified.';
  yourself

Returning an HTML Response

You could of course provide an HTML response but you would want to make sure your HTML is valid (and that means a head, a title, a body, etc.):

handleError: anError
 ^ WAResponse new
  internalError;
  nextPutAll: '<html>
<head><title>Error!</title></head>
<body><p>An error occurred</p></body>
</html>';
  yourself

If you want to use the Canvas API, you can subclass WAHtmlErrorHandler instead. Just implement #titleForException: and #contentForException:on: (it gets passed the exception and a canvas) and you're done.

Using Your Exception Handler

Once you have written your exception handler, you need to configure your application to use it. Open your web browser and navigate to the Seaside configuration page for your application. There you will find a preference called 'Exception Handler' and you should be able to choose your new class from the list.

Alternatively, from a workspace, execute something like:

(WAAdmin defaultDispatcher entryPointAt: 'myapp')
 preferenceAt: #exceptionHandler put: MyHandlerClass

Advanced Usage

If your needs are more complex than the above, you may want to subclass WAExceptionHandler directly. An exception handler needs to do two things:

1. choose which exceptions to handle
2. define how to handle them

Selecting Exceptions

The easiest way to select which exceptions to handle is to implement #exceptionSelector on the class-side of your new handler (note: in Seaside 2.9a1 this method is named #exceptionsToCatch). Your #exceptionSelector method should return either an ExceptionSet or a subclass of Exception. You probably want to continue handling the exceptions handled by your superclass so your implementation might look like:

exceptionSelector
 ^ super exceptionSelector, MyCustomError

If your needs are somehow more complex, look at implementing #handles: and #, yourself on either the class- or instance-side, as appropriate (note: these two methods do not exist in Seaside 2.9a1).

Handling Exceptions

When an exception is signaled and your handler indicates (via #handles:) that it wishes to handle the exception, #handleException: is called and passed the signaled exception. To define your exception handling behaviour, simply implement #handleException: on the instance-side of your handler. Note that the same handler instance is used throughout a single HTTP request even if multiple exceptions are signaled.

The #handleException: method is expected to return a WAResponse object. It may also choose to resume the exception, cause the Request Context stored in its requestContext instance variable to return a response (by using #redirectTo: for example), or otherwise avoid returning at all; but if it returns, it should return a response.

Internal Errors

WAExceptionHandler also provides a class-side method called #internalError:context:. This method creates a new instance of the handler and calls #internalError:, which should generate a very simple error message. This method is used whenever the exception handling mechanism itself signals an error as well as any other place in the system where we cannot be certain that a more complex error handler will succeed. This method should not do anything that has potential to raise further errors.

Setting Up an Exception Handler

Exception handling for Seaside applications is set up by WAExceptionFilter (more information on filters in a later post) and you do not need to do anything else if you are using WAApplication and WASession. If you are implementing your own request handler, however, and want to use the exception handling mechanism, you will need to set up an exception handler yourself.

Although you could do everything yourself, the easiest thing is to call #handleExceptionsDuring:context: on your handler class, passing it the block you want wrapped in the exception handler and the current WARequestContext object. You can look at RRRssHandler for an example.

Examples

The Seaside distribution includes a few exception handlers that you can look at for examples of usage. Beware of WADebugErrorHandler and WAWalkbackErrorHandler, though, as they do crazy things to get debugging to work the way we want in Squeak; although they are well commented and may be interesting to look at, they are probably not good examples of general usage. The Seaside-Squeak-Email package includes WAEmailErrorHandler, an abstract class that can be subclassed and used to send an email whenever an error occurs.

Christmas giving

I just stumbled across this site: http://www.nochristmasgiftsthisyear.com/

As it happens, I've been reducing my Christmas gift giving over the past few years anyway, agreeing with more and more people just to forgo the exercise. I love giving gifts (really) but have been finding searching them out, selecting them, and buying them increasingly stressful. At the same time, when people ask me what I want or need, I have a hard time coming up with anything much and the same seems to hold true for everyone else. In order to perpetuate mass consumerism, this situation seems to have brought about the proliferation of gift cards. I don't have a problem with gift cards per se (they've been around in the form of gift certificates for ever), but the fact that I can now buy gift cards for a hundred different stores at the Safeway checkout counter makes me feel like things have gone too far.

Sure, I remember many childhood years, waking up with eager anticipation of gifts to come–at least one of them usually big and/or expensive. There were even a couple of years there, not too long ago, when Christmas seemed to have lost its luster and I just couldn't eke much enjoyment out of it.

But things have mellowed again and Christmas has been reborn. Now it's about cooking "Christmas" dinner (weeks in advance to fit everyone's schedule) with friends. It's about brisk walks down brightly-decorated streets and the smell of a wood fire (where still permitted by law). It's about spending time with family. And sure, sometimes it's still about giving gifts but the joy is back (on both sides) because it's now about an occasional gift that you didn't even expect. One of the most meaningful gifts I received was an album of family recipes and baby photos. In fact, I think that's when I realized that my perception of Christmas had changed.

I don't know if it's just the result of aging or if society is actually start to push back against consumerism-for-its-own-sake but it feels good. And if you still feel you need to get me a gift, try something consumable: wine, herbs, spices, oils. It's so nice to get a bottle of wine I've never tried and would never have bought. And if I don't like it, at least it's gone instead of staring at me for the rest of time from a dusty shelf or the back of a closet.

The will of the people

Steven had a post about the recent Canadian political events wherein he concludes:

So best I can tell, when the Governor General does allow the opposition to take power without an election there is noise, controversy and eventually change so it cannot happen again. And when the Governor General does not give power to the opposition then history seems to just continue along. I guess I must have missed McArthur's convention.

Perhaps this is nitpicking, but we're not talking about the Governor General giving power to the opposition; we're talking about the Governor General giving power to a new coalition, one with the support of the majority of parliament.

Now I agree that the Governor General has this option but certainly no obligation to choose it. On the other hand, I still can't fathom why we would want another election right now: Canadians elected 308 MPs to represent them and if the majority of them want a change in parliament then that is the will of the people, particularly this soon after an election. The incessant cries of Canadians who seem to think they live in an the US and therefore elected the Prime Minister are driving me nuts.

I also disagree that the Governor General has lost her authority to act against the will of the Prime Minister. By convention, she normally follows the advice of the Prime Minister, but, at least as far as I'm concerned, this is only in his role as the head of parliament. The Prime Minister in Canada is not a political office; he does not have any special privileges and should not; the Governor General is bowing to the will of the people (as represented by their elected MPs in parliament), not to the Prime Minister.

The Governor General has a tenuous position in that being seen to oppose the will of the people would likely result in a swift call to remove what has become a largely ceremonial position. However, I also think we have a history of intelligent, reasonable, and competent Governor Generals and I'm glad the position is still not technically powerless. In this case, I think calling a timeout is a reasonable decision, allowing both sides a chance to back down. If the non-confidence vote goes ahead in the new year, though, I'd hope she won't waste our time and money with another election.

One, Two, cha-cha-cha

We just got back from our first dance class: Cha-Cha and Waltz. It was lots of fun, ours shoes don't look too stepped on, and we definitely weren't the worst couple in the class. What more could you ask for?

I've been wanting to take ballroom lessons for years (at least since my first friend got married). We just need to practice enough to let muscle memory kick in; I think there's some worry from my better half that I'll be scheduling nightly drills so I'll have to control myself.

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.

Teaching a nation how to wave (part 2)

Ok, so it's been rather a long time since I ended Teaching a nation how to wave (part 1) with a "to be continued..." China already feels so far away that I barely remember where I wanted to go with that series but here we go anyway...

The Beijing Olympic Games were not the party I was hoping for. This is not to say it wasn't interesting (it was), nor that it was the fault of the security measures (it wasn't) or the Chinese organizers (not sure). For all I know, the Olympics are never as much of a party as you would expect. When Vancouverites put down our own Olympic bid as a waste of money, though, I countered that it was like throwing a house party: of course you'd rather go to somebody else's house party and avoid the costs and cleanup but eventually it comes your turn to step up and host one of your own.

And yet, while there were more people on the subways, more accreditation-pass-sporting foreigners on the bar streets, and Olympic sponsor booths scattered here and there, on the whole, life outside the sports venues seemed to be largely business as usual. The athletes (and those who could afford to drop $400 on a one-night admission) could seek out one of the many national houses or embassy-sponsored functions. But the rest of us were left to the usual collection of bars and restaurants, now lined with flat-screen televisions and sporting 15% surcharges to cover "the increased costs of food and labour" during the Olympics. I can't help thinking that if each country opened their national houses and threw a big party (much as the Dutch Heineken house did nightly) even just once during the event the atmosphere might have been a lot more festive.

That said, the atmosphere at the sporting venues was often electric. Because of the large number of individual competitions combined into a single ticketed session, many people either arrive late or leave early rather than sitting on hard bleachers for 6 or even 8 hours (way, way, way too much tennis for one go). But when the Chinese athletes were competing you could count on a pretty full house. I imagine that for many of the spectators, attending a major sporting event would have been a novel experience and the Beijing Organizing Committee had been circulating instructions on how to perform various "suggested" cheers. There were also cheering squads with bright yellow shirts scattered throughout the stadiums to provide guidance. The main cheer, quickly adopted (and adapted) by foreigners from all countries was a rhythmical four-beat chanting of zhongguo jiayou!, which means, basically, "Go China!".

At one particular basketball session, the stadium quite full of Chinese fans awaiting an upcoming game, a rowdy group of Russians behind us was trying to initiate a Mexican Wave (first time I've heard it called that) in support of their team. A few tentative participants at first. Then a few more. Maybe a section now. A few sections. Finally, after 8 or 9 attempts, the first wave trickles around the stadium, picks up a few more people, builds a little momentum and completes several more rotations before petering out. The slightly surprised but enthusiastic looks on the faces of people around me are contagious...

Several more attempts were made with limited success. These attempts are (and I have never seen anything quite like it) best described as "square waves". Each section seemed to stand up en masse, cheer, and sit down. Only then would next section do the same. The result is a sort of pulsing roar that is really quite off-putting. By the end of the Olympics, however, the stadiums full of fans were waving, clapping, and stomping their feet to "We Will Rock You" like they had been attending NHL hockey games since before they could walk. And when the Wave got started, not only could you see and hear it, but you could feel its energy passing over you: the roar would come barreling towards you and almost literally pick you up out of your seat. Teaching a nation of 1.3 billion people how to wave? I'd call that mission accomplished for the Olympics.

ESUG 2008 Presentation

I'm in Amsterdam and just finished my ESUG 2008 presentation on the evolution of Seaside this morning. The gist of the talk was that Seaside has evolved through Experimentation, Stabilization, and Optimization and is enjoying a bit of an Adoption phase which should be encouraged. Sort of a call to arms.

I also took the opportunity to try to communicate the architecture and key metaphor of Seaside through illustrations. Finally, I rounded it all out with a few examples of less obvious (read badly documented) places people might consider extending the framework.

I think it went pretty well overall. I had a few people come up afterwards saying either that it had helped them understand some part of Seaside, that the historical perspective was interesting, or that they agreed with the need for documentation and advocacy.

I imagine James Robertson will post video on his blog at some point as he was filming all the talks. In the meantime he's posted a quick summary (wrong title and name spelled wrong, though! :) ). I'm guessing the slides will be available on the ESUG website sometime soon but I'll post them if not.

Update: Slides are available here.

Teaching a nation how to wave (part 1)

Friday was a national holiday, declared only days in advance in recognition of the Olympic opening ceremonies. My poorly judged trip to Tiananmen Square that day revealed more people than I have ever seen in one place in China. Flags, stickers, and headbands were being sold, purchased, and worn everywhere I looked. The Olympic excitement seemed to have finally hit.

Trying to get home, I eventually give up on taking the subway after finding stations closed and streets blocked off at every turn. With the heat finally getting to me, I fall into a taxi (the best 30 quai I ever spent!) and head for home. All of a sudden, the driver is trying to talk to me. We manage to communicate that I come from Canada and he from Beijing. He pats my leg and says jianada a few times with a big grin on his face. I try out jianada yo shan yo shui (Canada is beautiful, literally: there are mountains and there is water), messing up the pronunciation but earning a smiling correction from him instead of a disinterested grunt. Finally, he rests his hand on my arm, rubbing my arm hair between his index finger and thumb. As I'm beginning to find this creepy, he starts miming shaving his face. Now I get the joke! I mime back that it may be stinking hot in China but in Canada I need this fuzzy layer.

Heading to a bar to watch the opening ceremonies, I carefully write out the chinese address, copying it character by character from a book. I hop in a taxi and the driver studiously examines my scrawled lines, picking out the characters he recognizes and piecing it together. Finally, he gets it. He turns to me and mimes, "Did you write this?" Yes, I laugh. Hen hao, he smiles (very good) and gives me a thumbs up.

It seems the city is suddenly filled with high spirits and friendly good will. The drive to the bar is the quickest I've ever experienced, despite two of the four lanes being set aside for Olympic vehicles; apparently residents were asked to keep off the roads. The street is lined with police officers and vehicles and, at every intersection, bus stop, on-ramp, off-ramp, and pedestrian overpass, a soldier in dress uniform stands at careful attention. Beijing is about to throw a party and everything seems to be ready.

(to be continued)

Random Thoughts

I'm not quite sure what to write today so it will be a bit of a stream of consciousness.

I saw a man on a subway platform today repeatedly slapping a woman (presumably wife or girlfriend) in the face. It was truly horrifying. I thought we were all supposed to be desensitized by violence in movies, games, and the news but the sheer brutality of it was absolutely shocking. I mean this is something I have literally never seen before in my life. Hours later, it still makes my blood flash boil thinking about it. All I could think to do was to start screaming at this guy in a language he didn't understand, indicating by gestures that he could try it on someone else, but the subway doors had closed and all I could do was grimace and talk myself out of taking the next subway back. Apparently domestic violence is a big problem in China.

Only three weeks to go before my departure from China and (much like my last job) I don't really want to stay but the departure is still sad. I won't miss the slow, spotty Internet. I won't miss ordering bottled water. I definitely won't miss the pollution or the heat. I won't miss the one channel of English propaganda on television, or the staring, or the spitting, or the manually controlled traffic lights that don't give pedestrians enough time to get across the road, even if you get a head start before they go green.

What will I miss? I don't exactly know. I'll miss the cheap taxis and cheap beer. I'll miss the variety of food choices (at least compared to where I'm going next!). I'll regret not having got the most out of the country (no travel!) and not having learned enough of the language to even have a basic conversation with the taxi drivers. I'll miss the way something noticeable has changed every single time I go outside. But these all seem insignificant and I think there's something more to it. Or could it be just sentimentality because it was "home" for a while? It may take some time for me to figure this one out... and I think I may be back sometime to see a bit more of the country (maybe they'll have fixed the traffic lights!).

One final observation: I seem to be getting restless. It's been 5 or 6 months since I went on leave and this appears to be a pattern. When I returned from Europe in July of 2002, it was just after Christmas that I started working at UBC. When I returned from Australia, it was about 5 months before I started working at Emily Carr. And I became restless in Australia after about five and a half months of being there. It seems that's about as long as I can stand being unfocused (at least in one place). Julia commented that for her it would be more like a few hours but it's good to know what my limit is.

It's raining, it's pouring...

... the Old man is... yeah well it's really raining here again this morning. This is serious heavy rain (and I come from Vancouver, so I know whereof I speak). And the thunder and lightning is setting off car alarms again. It's really cool to live somewhere where storms are accompanied by huge rolling thunder crashes and the tremendous, powerful cracks of lightning bolts.

With the exception of the tropics, I have never been anywhere where it rains so much during the Summer. For a month or more now, we have been saying we should follow everybody else and buy umbrellas to hide away in a pocket or a bag. But it always feels like we're about to leave and the rain has to stop... sometime. It doesn't seem like it's going to.

On the bright side, it does seem to help keep the ground and the air clean. I wonder how much of it is caused by meteorologists seeding the clouds (they also apparently have technology in place to reduce the chance of rain for the opening ceremonies if necessary). The western media is acting like they've only just been made aware of the air quality problem in Beijing and its potential impact on the Olympic games. All construction in the city is slated to stop this Sunday so we'll see if that makes any difference. Sadly, as a result, streams of migrant workers are packing their few possessions and returning to their home provinces for the duration of the games. I say "as a result" but of course it is equally as a result of the desire to maintain "security" and a "clean" city for the games.

On a related note, I heard a news story on the World at Six on CBC saying that spectators would be searched for banners, flags, and noisemakers and that they would be confiscated. "No flags?", thought I, "That's kind of lame." After allowing this misconception to carry on for the length of the story, they added the extra detail that only flags smaller than 1m by 2m would be allowed. Who the heck needs a flag bigger than that?! Imagine you are sitting behind the guy with a flag bigger than that! Sheesh... Apparently umbrellas will be allowed, which seems like it may be a good thing.

It feels like the anticipation in the city has, if anything, declined over the past few weeks. I really felt like it has been growing since I arrived (maybe it was just my anticipation) but, as the last details get sorted out, I just don't feel any excitement. Oh, sure, there are a few more banners, the signs for the Olympic traffic lanes are going up, and workers are setting up venues around the city with big televisions for people to watch the events. People even lined up for hours at the bank to receive newly-printed 10 RMB notes with the Olympic stadium on them. But I just don't sense the excitement. I'm guessing it will turn on by decree.