malvasia bianca

I spent the day at this month’s Bay Area Go Players Association tournament. It was my first tournament in recent memory playing as a 1 dan; I had a record of 1 win and 3 losses and got the impression that 1 dan is a more accurate rating for me than 1 kyu, but that […]

In response to a tweet and tumblr post from Brian Marick: According to the speaker in a talk I went to several years ago, it was the case until some time last century that educated Chinese people would have memorized hundreds of books going back as far as thousands of years. And these books wove […]

The Gold Mine is a business novel about lean. It’s clearly inspired by The Goal; it isn’t nearly as good as the latter, but it does have some real virtues. The Goal did, in my opinion, a remarkable job of pulling the reader along in the journey of discovery: you could really believe that the […]

The introduction to Pimps and Ferrets: Copyright and Culture in the United States, 1831–1891, by Eric Anderson, leads off with a quote from an 1888 issue of Scientific American lamenting that all postmasters and customs officers throughout the United States are constituted pimps and ferrets for these foreigners in regard to a proposed copyright law. […]

I read Good Calories, Bad Calories about a month ago, and it’s thrown me for a bit of a loop. I’ve had reasonably high cholesterol for a while, and one of my grandfathers died from a heart attack at a younger age than I’d prefer to die, so I’ve been vaguely curious about the subject […]

Untangle, a flash game about representing graphs as planar with straight edges. (Hmm, are there planar graphs that can’t be drawn with straight edges? Not clear to me.) I linked to another game like this before, but this one’s better. TypeRacer, if you’re curious how fast you type. (I’m usually in the 95-100 wpm range, […]

I was very sad to learn that Erik Ray died on May 14, after being hit by a car while riding his bicycle. He was more of a friend-of-a-friend than a direct friend, but I certainly enjoyed the time I spent with him when we were both living in the Boston area. For those of […]

(Mostly an e-mail to the leandevelopment group, but I figured I might as well stick it here, too.) I just finished reading The Toyota Way, by Jeffrey Liker. Which I highly recommend: it may actually now be my favorite (non-software-specific) lean book. A clear presentation of a good set of principles; I saw a lot […]

As I have, perhaps, alluded to previously, we spent the second half of April in Paris. Notes: It’s the most wonderful place in the world, but I’m actually not feeling particularly compelled to visit it again any time soon. Some of this has to do with the fact that I’ve been there eight times; some […]

My bookshelves have been getting tight, so I just wandered through the house, and found about a hundred books to give away. Given the frequency with which I’m using the library these days, that should give me a good couple of years more space on the shelves, I hope. I would seem to be ready […]

I went back and reread the GTD book to see what I’d forgotten from my first read-through a year or two ago. Quite a lot, it turns out (in fact, almost everything except for the definition of a next action), about which more later, but one of the concepts that struck me the most was […]

Since I felt compelled to type out a long quote for use on a mailing list, I might as well stick it up here, too. This is from Deming’s Out of the Crisis, pp. 128–129, in its chapter on “Diseases and Obstacles”; the blockquote sections are indented in the original. Search for Examples. Improvement of […]

I read Seth Godin’s The Dip last week, and I found it unexpectedly frustrating. It’s a short book, with a very simple premise: you (or your company, or what have you) should pick a niche, and try to be the best in the world at that niche; doing so is alleged to be surprisingly within […]

A bit video-heavy today. The power of continuous improvement. A cool-looking physics “game”: (Via BitWorking.) Zefrank on complicated stuff: Falco PA! (Via Game|Life, which also links to a Guitar Hero version.) An fun variant on presenting minigames. Time to add The Muppet Show to my Netflix queue. (Via Cosmic Variance.) Brian Dettmer book autopsies. (Via […]

I finished reading The Art of Agile Development, by James Shore and Shane Warden a few weeks ago. It’s a quite good book: if you’re looking for a well-written, prescriptive guide for how to do XP, this is what I would recommend. Though I won’t go into the book in general any more than that. […]

I’ve been going through some changes recently in my Japanese study. I finished the Manga-based grammar I’d been reading sporadically, and finished going through the characters in Read Japanese Today. Which I recommend (both of them, but I’m thinking particularly of the latter here): in my experience, you need as many methods as possible to […]

I’m not the only person in the house who likes Love Hina: Liesl liked them, too, and Miranda is halfway through the series now and is finding them highly entertaining. Glad it’s not just me…

Beautiful libraries. (I think I linked to a similar gallery before, but this one’s better.) From Pink Tentacle: the chopsticks bra and two bathroom–related entries. Remarkable underground temples. (Via tecosystems.) If video game systems start doing head-tracking, watch out: (Via Games Are Art 2.0; the good stuff starts at around 2:30.) A fun word-association game. […]

They’re reprinting Zot!. Well, most if it: they’re only reprinting the black-and-white strips. (Found via Andrew Wheeler.) This is somewhat old news; I wanted to reread the series first, in particular the color issues, before lamenting the partial reprint. After all, we’ve been through reprinting three–quarters of the series before! I’m glad that they’re reprinting […]

From Kent Beck’s Implementation Patterns (p. 20): Once a set of implementation patterns has become habitual, I program faster and with fewer distracting thoughts. When I began writing my first set of implementation patterns (The Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, Prentice Hall 1996) I thought I was a proficient programmer. To encourage myself to focus on […]