Aston Martin announced the new DBS

Isn't that a neat car?

Aston Martin announced the new DBS which allready could be seen at the last James Bond film. Now they will show it on the IAA in Frankfurt starting at September, 13th. Take a look at the web presentation.

Vacation is over

It's over now, our three weeks of vacation. *sigh* But it have been very good three weeks, even if we stayed at home this year. Instead we made several day trips to the beach, to the Universum Science Center in Bremen, to the Heide-Park Soltau where I've had the opportunity to take a ride on the world largest and steepest (61°) wooden roller coaster *yeah*, to the Oceanis in Wilhelmshaven, to the Stoppelmarkt in Vechta, to the jet model air show in Alhorn, and playing miniature golf. Beside that we've done some visitings of our relatives. You see, no boredom, but lots of recreation.

I havn't been very busy writing for my blog. But I've finished the work for my next magazine article, this time regarding alternatives to fixed-price contracts. Additionally I continued my port of my Smalltalk frameworks from VisualWorks to Squeak. This work is almost finished but it has been stopped through an unexpected encounter: I've discoverd Erlang and it really fascinates me. I'll write about it in an extra entry.

Progress in SOS migration

The migration of the Smalltalk Object Store, my ODBMS, to Squeak has made a large progress. Almost all unit tests for the in-memory strategy with lazy writing are working, there's only one known error. So the next strategy, the file system strategy, needs only few changes, most are allready made. I hope we can provide the betas for download soon.

During the migration there have been two obstacles I've underestimated. The first one has been selfmade. The classes providing a runtime environment and application configuration have been a bit tricky, using the VisualWorks process environments and dynamic method invocation inside doesNotUnterstand:. It worked, but it has been platform specific and also not very maintainable. I decided to change the mechansm, but that has had a deep impact on the Lightweight Application Server and even more on the Smalltalk Object Store. The positive result are now better handable frameworks.

But the second one that bothered me more are the incompatabilities between the different Smalltalk dialects. OK, it's acceptable that different producer - commercial as free - try to provide unique selling points. But those should focus special high-end frameworks, like container for server components, libraries for distributed computing, or for user interfaces. But I would like a living standard, like actually in Scheme the R5RS and the discussion for the R6RS, for a class library containing all base types with a powerful string handling, the chronological classes, all containers, file handling, and the basic network protocols as server and client. The latest ANSI standard is now almost 10 years old. It would be really nice if the Smalltalk community would demonstrate their vitality through a new standardization process.

The Pareto principle and self-made problems

Most of us know the Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, where 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This applies to many areas of the daily life. Economics, effort in software development, and pain caused by problems. Let's take a look especially on the last point. I'll not examine the volume of problems and pain. But I'll review the source of those problems. I'm now on earth since 42 years - by the way the answer to life, the univeerse, and everything *smile* - not enough to be called a wise man, but old enough for many observations.

One of those observations is about two groups of people. The first one attracts attention through their life without - obvious - problems. They reach their goals, how near or far those may be, and resolve obstacles as if they don't exist. Thus, their general tenor is optimistic. But there's also the second, more pessimistic, group. The people belonging to it often have problems and communicate them to their environment. But do they really have more problems, do they really have a migraine where others have a headache, an influenza where others have a small cold, or allways one of thosse expensive car repairs? If you take a closer look you'll see that it isn't so. Both groups have almost similar problems, but the second one tells more about it. And they allways act very clumsy and doubtful.

So where's the link to the Pareto principle? It's not direct. But I think that 80% of their troubles are caused by themselves and only 20% are from outside. The problem ratio is linear, but 20% of those 80% self-caused troubles produce 80% of the pain. Aaaargh, arithmetics while talking about problems. *smile* What I meant to say is that the concentration on the right self-made troubles, about 15%, could evade a large amount, about 65%, of the effects. And reducing two-thirds of the pain should be a worthwhile goal for everyone.

Finally holidays

Ah, this has been my last working day until August, 27th. Three weeks of regeneration, doing sight seeing and visiting parks with my family, looking for furniture, escpecially kitchens, for our renovation, developing and writing a bit, or just relax. Yeah.