OneMind

Well, not too long ago, I “finished’ my assessment of Smalltalk/Squeak vs. Python as my next development environment for Web apps and settled on Squeak by a whisker.

Since then, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Squeak and the Web app framework called Seaside written in it. Unfortunately, I’ve had to change my thinking. Seaside is powerful and impressive, even amazing (as I said at the time). But it is also not suited to my development style, difficult to decode at various points, and just too outside-the-pale for me to use effectively. So it was back to the drawing board.

Another two days of work and I’m convinced (at least for the moment) that Python will suit me better and I’ve decided to focus on Django and TurboGears as possible Web app frameworks.

If you care about my reasons for this decision, read on.

First, Smalltalk/Squeak has been sitting in my unused-language bin just long enough that I was finding myself spending far too many cycles trying to understand what was going on in the code Seaside generated, let alone in the Seaside core itself.

Second, I really want to do a good bit of Ajax stuff in my new sites and while it’s certainly possible to do Ajax and other JavaScript stuff in Seaside, implementing it wasn’t easy and did not appear to lend itself to a clean break between user experience and business logic. I kept running into situations where my graphic designer and I would either have to code side by side and do trial-and-error layout or we’d have to layer in a whole abstraction to support our interactive design style.

Third, the Squeak world seems to be in turmoil. Again. Leadership issues kept appearing. Discussions about how to proceed with various important sub-projects kept flaring up.

Fourth, when I asked questions about how to do certain things, the answer I too often received seemed to be saying, “The Squeak community isn’t that interested in business applications, so if you want to do this stuff, you probably want to do it differently.”

Finally, database support seems very weak and unenthusiastic at best. Squeak looks at the world as containing objects, not tables of rows and records. Couldn’t agree more, but the fact is a lot of available stuff out there — code, tutorials, books, etc. — relies on relational database models and I’m comfortable with them. While I’m sure a purely OO approach to the data model would be beneficial in many ways, it would constitute one more level of lock-in that I’m just not comfortable with.

So Python comes back to the fore, at least for the moment. I’ll keep you posted.

I just caught a glimpse of a headline that said, “Bush Holdout Could be Prolonged” and I was sorta hoping the President had decided to go on strike for more money or something. No such luck. It’s Reggie Bush who’s holding out for more money from the New Orleans Saints.

Ungrateful whelp. He’s talking about a possible season-long holdout if the Saints don’t meet his demands. He apparently wants more than $26 million guaranteed on a six-year deal worth in excess of $60 million total. He’s likely to get the guarantee but hassling over the total value of the deal and what the Heisman Trophy winner has to do to earn the additional bucks may continue for a while yet.

Hey, I’ll play a lot cheaper!

LATE UPDATE: Bush has apparently agreed to a six-year deal.

President Bush signed an extension of the Voting Rights Act in a big ceremony designed to make voters think he really cares about our right to vote. In doing so, he said, “The right of ordinary men and women to determine their own political future lies at the heart of the American experiment.”

Maybe he can take a few minutes to explain why it is that he and his party have become illegal office-holders and vote-stealers in their otherwise failed attempt to get and hold power. The 2000 election was a joke, a coup d’etat by any reasonable standard. The 2004 election smelled less badly only because the GOP got better at disguising what it was doing. How does this kind of unethical and cynical manipulation of the election process reinforce that right of ordinary men and women of which you speak, Mr. Bush?

Thought so.

I’m sure not 100% of all scientists versed on the topic agree with Al Gore on global warming. It’s probably only about 99% or so. But why is it that so often when we do hear a critic of the position that global warming is a major, human-caused problem for Planet Earth, he or she turns out to be on some vested interest’s payroll?

Take the case of Pat Michaels, Virginia’s state climatologist, a University of Virginia professor and senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, who has been unabashedly been raising funds from utility companies, according to wire service reports.

He cried about not having enough money to do a proper job of throwing bad science at respected climatologists’ work, so the industry raised a quick $150k to enable him to pay his staff and continue his efforts.

And they wonder why we don’t listen.

The Bush Administration is digging in its heels and refusing to provide Congress a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, despite the fact that the most current one is more than two years old.

Salon.com reports that John Negroponte, Bush’s intelligence czar, is loath to order a new analysis that will inevitably make his boss look even worse, if that’s possible, than his already-basement-level poll numbers indicate.

The Democrats calling for a new NIE ask some damn good questions that the nation deserves to hear answered. Not that it’s likely to happen, but sometimes a silence can be more revealing than a report.

(Read all the way to the end and hear our oh-so-articulate and insightful SecDef answer questions about an Iraq civil war.)

I thought it was just me, or just a few sites, but I’m starting to pick up a lot of anecdotal evidence that the Internet, or at least a huge swath of it, has slowed to a relative crawl in the past few days. Are you noticing that as well?

Google’s gmail is sluggish to the point where timeouts happen two to four times a day. Yahoo and Salon are also dreadfully slow and occasionally timing out. I signed up for a new account on jotspot.com and have had such a terrible experience with its performance and reliability that I can’t believe the knowledgeable experts who recommended it to me weren’t smoking funny stuff or on the take.

I’ve done all the usual things on my end: reset routers, restarted hubs, relaunched systems. But then I started hearing from quite a few of my colleagues and online friends that they’re experiencing the same thing.

I wonder if this is somehow related to outages around the country caused by the heat wave that’s gripped the U.S. for the past week or so. And I wonder why nobody’s writing about it in the major media if in fact this is real and not just a misperception.

Most of the United States has been in the grip of a massive heat wave the past 10 days or so. Most of California has been hard-hit, with 34 deaths and hundreds of thousands of power outages. (My beloved Monterey has been hotter than usual, but still never higher than the mid-80′s so I am not complaining!)

This morning’s San Jose Mercury News had a piece explaining most of those power outages. It seems the transformers that PG&E (Pacific Gouge & Extort, according to one of my friends) uses rely on overnight cooling through their metal enclosures to keep them from frying. But as evenings have not cooled, these puppies have been giving out and exploding in flames with frightening regularity. PG&E and other smaller utilities are now considering whether they ought to spend tens of millions of dollars to replace those antiquated transformers with newer models that are far less prone to failure due to heat and other predictable causes.

Ya think? Yeesh. With global warming promising more and more of these prolonged severe hot periods, the utility companies would be well advised to stop studying and discussing the issue and begin the replacement program. They’ve got the money. There’s no excuse for a utility that has an effective monopoly on providing an essential service not keeping its equipment up to date except the obvious one: as a monopoly, it doesn’t have to do so.

I remember a few years ago there was a humorous bit floating around the then-serene Internet comparing cars to computers and suggesting that if automobiles were manufactured like the PC, we’d have cars that got great mileage, cost 50 cents and crashed into walls every few miles. There was more but you get the idea.

Well, these days I’m coming down on the side of re-tooling how we design operating systems and application software and manufacture the hardware on which they run. I am up to here with the regular crashes, freezes and other misbehavior I experience on all of the computers I use or support. I used to be convinced that Windows machines were more prone to such problems than my beloved Mac. No more (if it ever was). My OS X box freezes almost daily now, mostly when it is sitting on my desk doing nothing while I’m off to breakfast or lunch or a meeting. Just freezes solid. I have to restart, just like I used to have to restart Windows every day two or three times.

Can’t anyone figure out how to do this right? If any other product in our lives had a mean time betwen failure measured in hours or days, we’d toss it in the trash and find something else to use or do or buy. I’d do that in a hearbeat with my computers — all of them. If only I weren’t addicted.

The University of California (Berkeley) Bears have begun cranking up their PR blitz machine in a long-shot attempt to get their admittedly outstanding tailback, Marshawn Lynch, the Heisman Trophy in December. Good luck, guys.

Over the last 25 years of the Heisman’s existence, players from schools that we could unanimously agree are perennial football powerhouses have won all but three times. In 1984, a guy named Doug Flutie from Boston College pulled it off. Andre Ware (Houston, 1989) and Rashan Salaam (Colorado, 1994) were the other two and I’m not so sure we would get unanimity on the question of whether the Buffaloes were not also a perennial powerhouse.

Since 1994, the winners have been from Ohio State, Florida, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, Florida State, Nebraska, USC, Oklahoma, USC and USC. Cal is hardly in the same category with those teams even though it plays in a league that has teams that are.

I like Lynch. He’s exciting to watch. He’s nearly as good as Reggie Bush was last year in his Heisman season. It may well be that the Cal boosters are really touting Lynch this year in the hopes that by his senior season he has enough momentum to pull off the trophy.

The San Francisco Giants wasted little time in picking up Toronto Blue Jays bad boy Shea Hillenbrand yesterday in a trade designed to bolster their hitting. Hillenbrand is, by all accounts, a world-class jerk, though he has his defenders, including G-Man Steve Finley.

But here’s what we know. Hillenbrand, a .301 hitter this season with the Jays, was released by the club after several incidents that can only be called grandstanding egomaniacal acts. He wrote on a team bulletin board that the Jays were a sinking ship, told his fellow players to play for themselves because the team was essentially dead, and earned a challenge to “take this outside” from his manager in a team meeting. Great. Two days later, he’s going to enter the Giants’ locker room. Ought to be interesting.

There is, of course, a lot of precedent for a team fighting for a playoff spot as the Giants incredibly continue to be against long odds, picking up a troubled player for the stretch run. And if Hillenbrand can help the Giants get to the playoffs without destroying the clubhouse, that’s fine with me. I just have my doubts about the guy’s long-term viability as a team player. He’s leaving a lot of bitterness behind in Toronto.

Color me skeptical.