malvasia bianca

From the preface to the revised edition of How Children Fail, by John Holt: After this book came out, people used to say to me, “When are you going to write abook about how teachers fail?” My answer was, “But that’s what this book is about.” But if it is a book about a teacher […]

I’m in the middle of reading A New Theory of Urban Design. Not one of Alexander’s best (though it’s interesting enough); it’s hurt by problem that, as he comments, part of the theory that he’s discussing “remains unpublished. It will appear in a later volume of this series, “The Nature of Order”. Which turned into […]

In regards to my last post: the bibliography to the XP book doesn’t seem to mention The Production of Houses, but it has this to say about The Timeless Way of Building: Outlines Christopher Alexander’s view of architecture and construction. The relationship described between designers/builders and the users of buildings is much the same as […]

Some quotes from the chapter on “The Architect Builder” in Christopher Alexander’s The Production of Houses: This requires, then, that decisions about design can be made, individually, house by house, and that they can even be made while construction is under way. (p. 69) It requires a system of communication in which the building is […]

About a year ago, I was browsing a local comic book store, and decided to pick up the first volume of Kabuki. Pleasant enough – I’m as happy to read comic books about attractive women beating the crap out of people as the next person – but flawed in its own ways, too. Still, I […]

A month and a half ago, I was toying with the idea that maybe signing up for Amazon prime would actually save me money. I still don’t really believe that, but the general idea of not buying books until right before I’m going to actually read them seems sound to me. I’m going on a […]

One thing I wanted to learn when I started reading about lean: given that Toyota is supposed to be so great at everything, why is it that, when I last shopped for a car, fully intending to buy one of their models, the experience was so bad that it (or rather they, I tried two […]

I wasn’t expecting to like How Buildings Learn nearly as much as I did. I learned about it from the XP book‘s bibliography, and certainly you wouldn’t have to look very far in the book to find inspiration for your programming. But I was surprised at how interested I was in the actual topic of […]

I was just looking at the front material of a book and saw that its “SBN” was 671-21320-2. I didn’t know that there was a pre-international version of the ISBN. And here’s some information if you’re curious about the 13-digit ISBNs that have been appearing recently.

I think I made the right decision to give up playing go: I just don’t want to spend one evening a week doing that. But I was just looking at a picture of a game in Hikaru No Go (nine moves into the Ota vs. Akira game), and memories came back. It can be a […]

Driven by my recent mania for all thing lean, I just finished Lean Software Development, by Mary and Tom Poppendieck; I wish I’d read it a few years ago. I’d been aware of it for some time, but I passed it over when doing my initial tour of the agile literature. I had assumed that […]

Today’s book: The Rise of the Creative Class, by Richard Florida. Or rather, the book of a couple of months ago; I really need to start blogging right after I finish something. The book claims that something called the creative class has become hugely important over the last few decades, now outstripping the working class […]

I was thinking about ways in which production might be building up between stages of pipelines that I’m involved in, and I realized: I have forty or so books sitting on my “recently”-bought-but-not-yet-read shelf. That’s several months of inventory – probably well over half a year, actually, given my depressingly low current reading rate and […]

I’ve been really curious about lean manufacturing (which basically means the way Toyota does things) for a couple of months now. I was aware that people had made some analogies between it and agile software development, but my interest got more concrete when I started reading Silk and Spinach: that’s a blog that spends a […]

And now Jane Jacobs is dead. Sigh. Go out and read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, everybody. I really like this picture of her.

I’m in the middle of reading some Christopher Alexander, which of course gets me thinking about how our house works. And my conclusion is that I quite like it, but that Miranda can take almost sole credit for that. The downstairs has one largish L-shaped room, a small kitchen, and a small den. The upstairs […]

Antibubbles. More IP insanity. I wish I could get more info about this, but I haven’t yet been able to find German sources. Links to pretty bug pictures I could watch this for hours. How to tell if your methods are too long. Another Octavia Butler tribute.

I haven’t been all that excited about the upcoming baseball season so far, but here it is. Kicking off with an Indians / White Sox game; I can support that. I picked up the new Baseball Prospectus yesterday. Some nice tweaks to PECOTA (their player forecasting system), and the articles on the Indians and A’s […]

Every time I read My Name is Asher Lev, it makes me want to spend hours hanging out in art museums. Or even start drawing or painting, but I always come to the conclusion that I don’t want to take that up only to drop it before I get even vaguely competent, and I never […]

I planned to say more about First, Break All the Rules, but I seeem to have gotten excessively sidetracked on computer and programming geekery, and worse yet geekery of relatively limited interest. For which I apologize: I’ll try not to let it happen again to quite that extent. Anyways, one last thing that I liked […]