malvasia bianca

There’s been a lot of discussion of clean code over the last few weeks in mailing lists and blogs that I read: see e.g. this post by Ron Jeffries. Which set up an interesting resonance with this paragraph that I ran across today in David Allen’s latest GTD book: Can you be too organized? Not […]

Another quote from Latour’s Politics of Nature (pp. 208–209, emphasis in original): If we borrow Lévi-Strauss’s powerful definition and use the term “barbarians” to designate those who believe that they are being assailed by barbarians, conversely, we can call “civilized” those whose collective is surrounded by enemies*. In one case we have contamination by barbarianism, […]

I was amused by the synchronicity of my going straight from a discussion of YAGNI on the XP mailing list to reading the following in Politics of Nature (pp. 195–196; emphasis in original): As soon as we agree to differentiate the past from the future no longer through detachment but through reattachment, political ecology begins […]

From Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, p. 102: Cna yuo raed tihs? Aoccdrnig to rscheearch, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are; the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses, and you can sitll raed it […]

Game | Life on the death of next gen consoles in Japan. The Gallery of Fluid Motion. I like the second one too, though it takes a while to get going. Arlo Belshee on planning without estimating. As with his earlier promiscuous pairing experiments, there’s a lot to think about here… Interesting way to think […]

I claimed that my last post was going to be my last Christopher Alexander post for a while, but I lied. I spend some time today reading Richard Gabriel’s Patterns of Software, the first part of which talks about Alexander’s work (up through the carpets book, which isn’t discussed nearly enough; Gabriel’s book dates from […]

One more Christopher Alexander Nature of Order post, and then I’ll take a break. This is a counterpart to my earlier post about living code (I even repeat some of the examples): this time, I’m focusing on the agile processes that might produce that code. Again, thanks to the Agile Open California participants who helped […]

I wouldn’t have thought that anything could get me more excited today than learning that Harmonix had gotten the rights to make a Beatles game, but then I learned that Google now has the right to sell copies of out-of-print but in-copyright books. I am extraordinarily surprised, amazed, pleased by this. Books have been very […]

Today’s Nature of Order experiment: see what the characteristics of living structures might look like when applied to software. Many thanks to the Agile Open California participants who helped me think through this; I’ll have a later blog post that talks about agile and living processes. Levels of Scale This is certainly present in the […]

When I finished playing Shadow of the Colossus, I was impressed by it, but no more than by several other games from around the same time. Then at some point, perhaps a year and a half later, I was browsing the web and came across a picture of the game. And I gasped, I shuddered. […]

I was making my way through The Process of Creating Life last night, and was rather surprised to see Christopher Alexander mention XP! Here’s the quote (p. 198); emphasis and ellipses in the original. This chapter was first composed as a lecture to the computer science department at Stanford University. After the lecture, I had […]

I’m only a sixth or so of the way through The Process of Creating Life, but the ideas there are really getting my brain racing today for some reason. He gives these beautiful little examples of evolving living structures step by step: looking at those, you (or at least I) say: What a great paradigm […]

Achilles’ Phat Lewtz, on the Iliad and MMORPGs; huge amounts of fun from Roger Travis. Jordan on David Foster Wallace. My heart sank when I saw that Retronauts episode 49 was almost 3 hours long. But it’s all about the Dreamcast, including a great segment with Tycho, the best three hours of podcast listening I’ve […]

I was reading Delany’s About Writing recently when I ran across the following (pp. 408–409): Excitement, Drama, Suspense, Surprise, Violence Each of these five nouns names a very different effect. What makes so much popular narrative (especially in films and TV) seem so mindless is that someone, usually a producer, has mistaken one for the […]

A while back, I mentioned that the book Good Calories, Bad Calories had gotten me curious about low-carb diets; here’s an update. On the reading front, I figured I’d take a look at the Atkins book, since he has the most experience with diets of this sort. And, frankly, I wasn’t too impressed: if I’d […]

If any of you are a fan of books with experimental presentation and/or books as physical objects, I recommend And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, by Nicola Griffith. It’s a memoir of her early life, leading to when she was starting to become a published author; it’s rather well done as such, […]

Miranda does her violin practice in the library/guest room; while she’s getting things ready, I spend some amount of time looking around at the shelves. Most of my books up there are nonfiction, and in particular I have a bunch of math books up there. In order to keep my books under control, I have […]

The latest Brainy Gamer podcast is up, and it’s an interview with N’Gai Croal. The whole thing’s great, go listen to it, but in particular one thing that he talked about is something that’s been on my mind: the way that enthusiast press coverage of videogames is heavily weighted towards the preview period. I’ve talked […]

I’m rereading The Phenomenon of Life, by Christopher Alexander, in preparation for reading the other books in the series. And, again, I’m blown away by it: if the book contained nothing but the pictures in it, it would be worth it. But, of course, there’s a lot more to the book than pretty (beautiful, profound) […]

I read a book on neuro-linguistic programming recently. It’s basically a way to reprogram your brain (e.g. to strengthen motivations or weaken phobias), using techniques like visualizing the trigger in question, then changing the way you visualize the scene. (Moving the trigger object farther away from you or closer to you, adding colors, adding theme […]