More exupery

In Bryce's documentation (see the bibliography that I wrote about in my last post), he mentions PICs but as far as I could see never expands that acronym, well, I think I know what it is after browsing the source code:
Polymorphic Inline Cache

Squeak - Exupery

Well, I've been on a squeak kick for a while now.... I've done some work getting seaside doing some displaying of pictures and now I'm really pumped about a project I just discovered called: Exupery: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3842
I've just read the articles in the bibliography section: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5792
and now I've downloaded the source code and got the image running. I'd like to see what Bryce Kampjes' has done here in this project.

What's cool about this project is that Bryce thinks that with a bit of work on a background compiler with some aggressive inlining of code and some SSA optimizations he can achieve C-level performance with squeak smalltalk! Solving one of the most persistent complaints about Smalltalk that it is slow (certainly no where as slow as MRI) Post a comment if you can tell me what MRI stands for.

Office Live Breakthrough day

Well, I've implemented all the hard stuff with OfficeLive... the authentication is happening without a graphical log on screen and I am displaying and updating "lists". A couple little tricks I discovered:
1. On OfficeLive: the WebBCM is the root for the Lists.asmx
2. Inserting a new item into a list happens via UpdateListItem with a blob of XML.

Dabble DB

On the Dabble DB site, they have this really cool demo:
http://dabbledb.com/explore/7minutedemo/

Open ID

A lot of buzz around Open ID has been generated. It seems it's an idea who's time has come. Basically OpenID is a distributed authentication system. Some of the major supporters of this are myopenid.com and idproxy.net . I've heard rumours that shopify is going to be supporting it.

Here's a bit of a confirmation: http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2006/12/28/Unobtrusive-OpenID

How does it work?
When you go to a web 2.0 site and it supports Open ID you just put your unique URL into the text box and the web 2.0 site goes to the authentication service say myopenid.com which in turn asks you if it's okay to authenticate with this service. Simply no more accounts to keep track of and no more accounts to subscribe to.

Delivering Software is hard

Software delivery is hard but not in the intellectual way as it's all about getting the myriad of details correct: where does this artifact go, do I need this configuration file in the release build, did all the latest files get checked into the source control system, has all the tests been done on the latest code base.

What do I do

After talking with my folks this weekend, it seems that a layperson explanation of what I do may be in order.

My current work involves coding up some back-end software for processing forms information. Now to unpack that statement: Forms are things that you fill in to say apply for a credit card or in order to get a drivers license. Often they include information like your name, address, telephone number. In my work these forms are electronic on a mobile device like a Cell Phone. This allows the persons collecting the information to be mobile themselves: such as in a mall or at a business meeting.

This information can be stored in a businesses database or on some websites. An example of a website that stores forms information is SalesForce.com. My last bit of work is getting this information integrated into these type of data stores.

Microsoft Office Live

Last week, I worked on Office Live from a server perspective. Office Live is a hosted solution from Microsoft for web sites and business management information like Sales leads, Time sheets, expenses, etc.

My company wanted to be able to programmatically add a new sales lead using the web services provided since Office Live is actually based on Microsoft SharePoint 3.0 that should be possible but alas as of Feb 23, 2007 the Live ID authentication is not supported on OfficeLive. After downloading the Live ID SDK, I was able to authenticate to Live ID but I wasnt' able to consume any of the services from Office Live.

Here's a little snippet that should be possible:
IdentityManager oIDMgr = IdentityManager.CreateInstance("Tailspin Toys;dan@tailspintoys.com;Tailspin Toys Application", "Windows Live ID Client Sample");
Identity oID=oIDMgr.CreateIdentity();
Discovery discoverySvc= new Discovery();
LiveIDSettings settings = discoverySvc.GetLiveIDSettings();
string ticket = identity.GetTicket(settings.SiteName, settings.Policy, false);
authModule = new WindowsLiveAuthenticationModule(ticket);
AuthenticationManager.Register(authModule);
string[] subscriptionIDs = discoverySvc.GetSubscriptions();

Tell me about your experiences...