Mike has what seems to me to be a very cool job and yet it can get very morbid. I first met Mike the Spring before 911 when he and his wife moved in upstairs. Mike works for a DNA lab/consulting outfit and it was his firm that ran the mammoth job of trying to identify via DNA the remains of all the poor souls that lost their lives on that horrible day. Well, that took what seemed forever to me but the gory truth is that there were a lot of samples to identify. Then the Tsunami hit which dwarfed the death toll of 911 and yes Mike was sent to Thailand to help with that. A different problem though the DNA was really spread out and most of it at sea.

I bumped into Mike yesterday as I was taking off my shoes before going into the house after throwing the ball at the park with my Rhodesian Ridgeback. I said to him , “ I noticed you all took a little vacation last week.” “Oh no” he replied , “I was sent to London to work on the bombings” . “What is this with you following death” , he smiled “death follows me”.

And yet I would love to build an app to help with this. Ever since I read about Watson and Crick’s work I have been fascinated with anything related to DNA.

As far as Mike I wonder if he has nightmares or is he now just jaded?

These storms are getting to be a real drag. It is really annoying to have to call my family in Florida just to ask if they are swimming in their living rooms. This all reminds that I forgot to mention one very important app used by FPL in their dealings with these storms. FGMS (Facilities Graphics Management System) is/was (have not checked) a Smalltalk application that combined Smalltalk, Gemstone (Smalltalk OODMS) and I believe ArcInfo to provide FPL with up to date knowledge of the state of their electric grid. This has to be one of the pioneer Smalltalk apps i.e. at least used by a large corporation. The app was built somewhere around 1988. That sounds crazy. Smalltalk was certainly around. I recall that it was a collaboration between FPL and the University of Florida. Somehow, Gemstone got in the mix. BTW, guess when FPL rolls out their meat and potatoes apps into production? It is not in the Fall :). Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke comes to mind.

Yesterday, I commemorated the half way point in my life or possibly the 2/3 rd point , my family runs that spectrum. I feel like I am rushing to a finish line in a race that I should not want to finish. Life is just flying by. It was only yesterday that I was looking for a day job. Yesterday, I brought home my fourth guitar. A guitar which I have been waiting an agonizing 4 months for. The guitar is an Ovation 1769 – AD5 the Al Di Meola signature model. It’s a beautfiful thing, I got the blond natural finish. Yes, I wanted to be a musician, probably not terribly unique. So I looked and looked for that day job that would approximate the feedback that I got from guitar playing and especially from improvising. I almost gave up when I was shown mercy and was recruited from college by Florida Power & Light to do Smalltalk development. Now, I am not going claim that I can get that “immediacy” that I get from playing the guitar from coding in Smalltalk but it is as close as it gets and by far the closest any development tool , language gets, that I have encountered. The rapidity in Smalltalk of understanding one’s environment, of causing change in the environment and thus reacting to change, of conceiving and subsequently mapping those ideas to implementation is so immediate that it does remind me of playing an instrument. The power to create and change are really at one’s fingertips. Other environments that I have used always have hurdles, noise, contraptions that get in the way, they tire me. Yes, I am talking about the coding in the debugger experience, the lack of typing and the implications of that, the simplicity of the language, its readability, the “liveliness” of the environment and most definitely powerful IDE’s such as VisualWorks that out produce any other IDE I have used and that includes Eclipse, JBuilder etc. I know this has been discussed ad nauseum (sp?) but getting my guitar reminded me that I did find my day job after all. Now, I have to do something about getting that night gig :). The other nice thing about Smalltalk is that by the end of the day you are not so exhausted that one can’t put another 1.5 hours into practice.

Just yesterday I received an email that from a Smalltalker out at a utility in the midwest. A utility which I never had heard of before using Smalltalk. He told me that after seeing my post in c.l.s regarding FPL and its Smalltalk systems and that he contacted a colleague over there and was told that the system was still in Smalltalk but that apparently there was a multi-year plan (mind you not project) to move over to Java. That came to no surprise to me. I was told as much at least 4 years ago. The fact of the matter is that FPL is a “Big Blue” shop. Big Blue exerts an incredible influence over many in IT at FPL. I was once told by a senior manager while I was working there that there was a saying in IT that basically said that “one will never get fired if they go with Big Blue”. Big Blue is what FPLers call IBM. I’m sure that they did not invent the nickname. IBM actually has offices smack in the middle of at least the Miami office. Their influence is truly great. It was not long after IBM got into the Smalltalk game that at least the Juno office starting porting their Smalltalk apps to VisualAge for Smalltalk and it was not because they had a better can opener. When IBM changed their game to Java they began exerting great pressure to port those apps to Websphere, A lot of the pressure comes from IBM’s insinuated threat to dropping support for VAST. Keep in mind that IBM has been at this for awhile and yet, as far as I have been told none of the apps have been actually ported. One app was wholesale replaced by a package. I am not trying to debate whether FPL is a Smalltalk shop or a Websphere shop. However, the Smalltalk apps have so far survived very powerful forces and they have done so because they work, they work quite well, and because most business units don’t want to burn their money for at best very expensive replacement functionality. Again, I do take satisfaction in knowing that applications that I helped build over eight years ago are still out there helping FPL better service their customers. As far as the port goes, we shall see. First of all, what the Juno offices do is not necessarily what the Miami offices will do. As as I recall all the apps in Miami are VisualWorks and were not ported to VAST which gives me some hope that next hurricane season I may once again blog about how happy I am that those apps survived yet another year.

Here I go again, this is my second blog entry but this time I am blogging via James’s BottomFeeder which supposedly guarantees safe passage, we shall see.

Hurricane Frances was of special concern to me since I have family in both Miami and Ft. Lauderdale and know first hand from Hurricane Andrew how destructive these things can be. Additionally, it was of interest to me because Florida Power and Light is my alma mater. It was in those halls that I was introduced to Smalltalk. I imagine that every utility company in the country must have a trouble management system but I think that we can all agree that when FPL prepares for trouble that they are living at an entirely different level than most other utilities. Trouble management usually entails at least two systems. A call center customer service system and a specific trouble management system. Both of these systems were partially to entirely written in Smalltalk. The Call Center systems was a modernization of a “green’ screen system. It was interesting because it was generic framework that provided for CICS output to be streamed out to the client where it was marshalled into objects. It provided value because data associated with the respective screens was aggregated reducing user navigation, etc. I was one of the principal developers of the Smalltalk client piece. The trouble management system was largely written in Smalltalk and it employed Gemstone as its database. Gemstone for those not familiar with it is , a cross between an app server and an OODMS. Rather, it basically does both.

This past May, a colleague from my FPL days stopped by to visit me on his way to his cousin’s wedding. I was pleased to know that the call center systems I had helped build were still standing and so was the trouble call management system among others. I am glad that so far those systems have weathered the Java marketing hype hurricane