malvasia bianca

I just turned on Akismet, for spam filtering. (And upgraded to 2.0.9, but that should be a minor change.) Let me know if you see any problems…

Back from vacation. 4 days in Berlin, 2 in Göttingen, 4 in Amsterdam, plus some travel days. Quite pleasant until Liesl came down with a rather nasty cold; I didn’t get as good a feel for Amsterdam as I would have liked, but such is life.

I apologise if I accidentally deleted any queued up comments that were left by humans; enough spam had accumulated that I had a hard time doing a thorough review of the backlog.

Another quote from The Toyota Product Development System (p. 102), in the section on checklists:

A company that cannot standardize will struggle to learn from experience and is not truly engaged in lean thinking. Indeed, any company that simply tries new things without standardizing along the way is “randomly wandering through a maze,” repeating the same errors, relying on little more than undocumented hearsay and a wide range of opinions among its employees only to eventually discover that “it has been here before.”

A little more context:

Though based on science, the real world practice of engineering is an art form that relies on tacit knowledge gained through experience and judgment in considering multiple variables that interact in complex ways. As a result, a best solution cannot necessarily be predicted in advance. It is learned over time through experience and is guided by the spirit of kaizen, which postulates that there is always an opportunity to learn more and that learning is an ongoing process. This spirit of engineering kaizen is driven by the never-ending pursuit of technical excellence that underlies consistent checklist utilization, validation, and improvement.

A company that cannot standardize will struggle to learn from experience and is not truly engaged in lean thinking. Indeed, any company that simply tries new things without standardizing along the way is “randomly wandering through a maze,” repeating the same errors, relying on little more than undocumented hearsay and a wide range of opinions among its employees only to eventually discover that “it has been here before.” Toyota uses a systematic and scientific approach to product development. It tests, evaluates, standardizes, improves, and retests, scrupulously following the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle that was introduced to the company decades ago by Deming. It then standardizes “today’s” best practice. As it accumulates new information and new experiences, these are used to modify current shared standards and reborn as a future “today’s” best practice.

Go experimentation, both trying it and taking the results seriously. We came to a similar conclusion at work last week; we’ll see how our experiment of experimenting turns out.

(I should read some Deming, shouldn’t I?)

A quote from Morgan and Liker’s The Toyota Product Development System:

Toyota does very little “information broadcasting” to the masses. Instead, it is up to the individual engineer to know what he or she is responsible for, to pull what is needed, and to know where to get it.

Here’s the full context (pp. 95-96; italics in original):

Pulling Knowledge Through the [Product Development] System

In lean manufacturing, pull production eliminates overproduction by having downstream activities signal their needs (demand) to upstream activities. Kanban cards usually signal (control) production in a pull system. In product development, knowledge and information are the materials that are required by the downstream activity. The speed at which technology delivers information in automotive product development is overwhelming. However, not all information is equal to all people. The lean [Product Development] System uses “pull” to sort through this mass of data to get the right information to the right engineer at the right time. Knowledge is the fundamental element (material) in product development.

Toyota does very little “information broadcasting” to the masses. Instead, it is up to the individual engineer to know what he or she is responsible for, to pull what is needed, and to know where to get it. Individual engineers are expected to locate and extract needed information, whether this be design data residing in the data collector, a product performance experience, or a perspective from a senior executive. This policy holds true for everyone, from the most junior design and release engineer to the chief engineer. The key underlying principle that makes this work is that everyone has access to both the design data and the [Chief Engineer].

For an example from the opposite end of the program hierarchy, all engineers are responsible for creating benchmarks for their respective components. They are expected to gather relevant information and understand the latest technological developments, industry trends, and supplier and competitor products that affect their designs. Once the execution phase begins, manufacturing engineers pull design data from data collectors as they need it to start working on die or fixture designs. All engineers pull requirements from checklists, which are updated at the end of each program.

The supplier mentioned earlier (a company that had an unacceptable management cycle time) illustrates how the [Product Development] system links processes. This seat maker through value stream mapping identified thaht they were batch dumping information onto the next process (design sent hundreds of drawings to purchasing and ordered hundreds of parts prototyping, to build the hundreds of different variations of prototype seats, etc.) After moving to a staggered release system where a subset of seat designs were released on a preplanned schedule, weekly reviews of progress were set up and the supplier set up status boards at each functional area within the value chain. A key purpose of the status boards (referred to as “pull boards”) was to signal the need for information from other functions. Once the status board was in place, it was easy to spot when key information was needed. When key information was delayed, it was identified within a week rather than months later. The example clearly shows that in a lean [Product Development] process, a key enabler for pull knowledge systems is reducing management cycle time.

At first, I was thinking of “don’t broadcast information” in terms of “I don’t like being lectured at”, which made me happy. But I do like a general low level of chatter among team members – e.g. at our daily standup this morning, two of us were talking about what we did yesterday, and another team member mentioned an old bug report that turned out to be relevant, quite possibly saving us a day of time. And if we hadn’t been broadcasting information, that wouldn’t have happened. Then again, some XP sources suggest that the need for a daily standup is a sign that your process isn’t working well enough, but then yet again that’s because they want information to radiate even more (by everybody working in a big, open room, constantly interacting). But that only works with teams below a certain size; eventually, you have to cut off universal chatter to save your sanity.

When I balance all that, I tend to think that I like broadcasting information within a group of a certain size. And I bet Toyota does, too, I just need to find the right section of the book. I could be wrong, though; it’s certainly something to think about. That’s the problem with reading books like this: I’m missing so much of the context, so many details, so much of the gestalt.

Moving along, we see that individuals are apparently able to pull the information they need at will. Which is certainly a problem that we have: we have various “data collectors” (especially our wiki), but they’re not well-organized, consistently maintained, and up to date.

One interesting thing about Toyota product development is apparently that, on the one hand, they’re quite good at consistently storing information, e.g. about results of experiments (whether positive or negative). But they also manage to do this in a terse, accessible form: I’m pretty sure they save the lab notebooks, but they also put their results on a standardized single piece of paper, the “A3 form”. I haven’t yet gotten to the section of the book where they talk about that in detail, but it sounds like it could be a really useful idea, and if done right a very useful antidote to wiki chaos.

A passage I occasionally reread when I get in a certain sort of discussion:

Among the ancient gods of Naucratis in Egypt there was one to whom the bird called the ibis is sacred. The name of that divinity was Theuth, and it was he who first discovered number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, as well as the games of checkers and dice, and, above all else, writing.

Now the king of all Egypt at that time was Thamus, who lived in the great city in the upper region that the Greeks call Egyptian Thebes; Thamus they call Ammon. Theuth came to exhibit his arts to him and urged him to disseminate them to all the Egyptians. Thamus asked him about the usefulness of each art, and while Theuth was explaining it, Thamus praised him for whatever he thought was right in his explanations and criticized him for whatever he thought was wrong.

The story goes that Thamus said much to Theuth, both for and against each art, which it would take too long to repeat. But when they came to writing, Theuth said: “O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom.” Thamus, however, replied: “O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”

From a translation by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. I’d forgotten that last sentence; Walter Hamilton renders it as “And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.” Yay!

I might as well comment comment on Jobs’ recent DRM is bad letter. At first, it was really exciting. But there’s a fair amount of intellectual dishonestly there, too:

Item: The statistics are bogus. You can’t just divide the number of songs sold on iTunes by the number of iPods sold and get anything meaningful. I don’t know if they count me as having bought 3 or 4 of them; I actually own 2 (I lost one, one I got replaced under warranty). Now, I haven’t bought any songs on iTunes, but if I had, I’d put them on all of my iPods. So, if I’m a typical user, his calculation of the number of songs per iPod is off by a factor of 3 or 4.

Item: He claims that licensing FairPlay would make it less secure. I have no reason to believe that; other recent commentariess have pointed to an example of licensed DRM that hasn’t been broken any more frequently than FairPlay, that music companies have been willing to license their music for.

Item: He says he’d be happy to sell MP3s, and invites record companies to begin doing so. The thing is, there are already people who want to sell MP3s on iTunes; Apple won’t let them. If Jobs thinks MP3s are so great, he can start selling them today.

Still, I’m optimistic. For one thing, it’s nice to see somebody important publicly acting as if he wants what’s good for users. Heck, maybe he even partly believes it. For another thing, there seem to be rumors suggesting that the record companies will start making their songs available as unencrypted MP3s; this removes one barrier to that.

Looking forward to how this all plays out.

• I didn’t realize it was possible to beatbox while playing the flute.
• Gyoza stadium sounds awesome.
• Star Wars in ASCII.
• I spent a pleasant hour last weekend watching Ben and Fitz’s poisonous people talk. (And then caught myself exhibiting one of those symptoms on a mailing list last week. Sigh…)
• I suppose you’ve already seen Peter Gutmann’s cost analysis of Vista content protection, but if not, give it a read.
• I didn’t really get Line Rider the first time I saw it, but now I’m starting to understand. Also a good example of why we don’t want copyright law to get in the way of mixups.
• Map of the internet.
• The Japanese Wii safety manual.
• A nice optical illusion page.
• Go Sun!

I’m going through my backlog of stored up links; this animation of cellular behavior deserves its own post. Just watch the video – in its own way, it’s the coolest thing that I’ve seen in, like, a decade. My favorite part is where this cellular machine walks up a rope dragging a big bubble of something behind it, but there’s a lot of neat DNA action (or something), and, well, click on the link already!

Random trivia from Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: when moving your eyes slowly from left to right, the left side of your brain is controlling the actions. Like when, say, reading English.

I don’t want to make too much of this: I assume it’s true, but exactly what to derive from this isn’t clear. For example, even if it has an effect on how your brain might be primed to process the words, does it mean that your left side will want to leap in (since it’s already doing something) or will want the right side to take over (since the left side is busy?) And it’s quite possible that it has no effect whatsoever on anything, and quite likely that whatever effect it has is very slight. Still, it does raise possibilities.

(Good book, by the way, though not earthshattering or anything.)

I just finished the latest Zelda. Summary: a good game, quite well done. But not a great game, for two reasons: the previous games in the series, and a certain other game in the genre that came out the same year and that is much much better.

The good: it’s a Zelda game, with all the solid design that implies. It took me about 50 hours to finish the game; I was never tempted to give up. Looks nice enough – maybe my standards will change when I get a more powerful console or a larger TV, but I’m happy on that score. The plot kept me going, the (many) dungeons were entertaining and appropriately challenging, ditto for the bosses, there were enough side tasks to keep me happy when I was in the mood for that sort of thing, without overwhelming me. I liked it a lot more than the previous game in the series.

The bad: the series hasn’t really progressed since the N64 days, and I’m not sure it hasn’t gone backwards. I’m pretty sure towns, dungeons, the overworld have gotten larger (I know the overworld has!), but that feels to me more like adding space than adding more areas of interest. It’s nice to have many large fields to ride your horse through (and, if you’re in the mood, fight monsters); it would be nicer if those fields contributed something more to the game, though. One of the many fine things that Okami did was to ditch the rigidity of the town/overworld/dungeon split: all three of these interpenetrate, making all of them richer. Not in Zelda, though.

Even the collecting has gone a bit downhill. In other Zelda games, your item screen has places for all the items you’ll get. So every time you’re in that menu, you’ll be reminded that there’s more stuff to collect, you’ll be wondering what will fill those empty slots. Not here: your item screen is a circle that grows as needed, with nary an empty hole. Even better, in Majora’s Mask, you have a list of favors you can accomplish for people, along with the times at which doing so might be possible. I loved that list: none of it was necessary for the plot, as I recall, and I lot of it wasn’t even particularly useful, but I cared about getting some of that done more than I cared about the main tasks in the game.

Which is something else that the current game lacks: a hook beyond the main plot. In Majora’s Mask, it was the list. In Ocarina of Time, it was the ocarina: I’m a sucker for music in video games, and I absolutely loved collecting songs and loved the fact that you could get stuff done by playing songs at certain times. Nothing like that in the current game: the plot is nice, the gameplay mechanics are solid, but nothing reached out and grabbed me.

And, while the plot is okay, the presentation of the plot is one place where the series is showing its age. There are cut scenes, people move their lips, but no sound emerges. Why no voice acting? Nintendo is strangely unwilling to take that step: they move up to the brink, to where it would clearly be appropriate, but shy away. I don’t understand why.

Other minor notes: I was a little worried about the whole light world / dark world dichotomy – but it turned out to be so shallowly done as to (largely) just turn into an alternate set of abilities that you can switch into at will. Which is okay (not great, but okay), and I actually like that better than other games that have taken that idea more seriously. The Wii controls were just fine: I liked aiming my bow by pointing, I liked doing a circle attack by shaking the nunchuck, and there wasn’t really anything I didn’t like. (Well, maybe shield attacks.) So the Wii controllers seem to work just fine for traditional game play. (As well as, of course, opening up a range of possibilities for untraditional game play.) The design on a few of the bosses was really quite impressive, until I realized that their size, majesty, and patches of fur reminded me of Shadow of the Colossus; then, I got depressed again.

Playing this has left me rather disappointed with the current state of Nintendo. I’m really glad that they’re experimenting, don’t get me wrong. But their great series were some of the best of all time, and they all seem to have stalled. Since the Nintendo 64, the only real advance I’ve seen in any of their series is when they brought Metroid to 3D, and my feelings there are probably somewhat colored by not having played the series in 2D. And new series haven’t been stepping into their place: Pikmin was pleasant enough but nothing really special, and while Animal Crossing really was something special, it launched in Japan on the N64, and hasn’t yet shown that it’s capable of developing further. It’s great that they can sell millions of copies of Brain Age and its sequels, but that’s not exactly what I’m looking for.

Or maybe I’m just in a down mood because I’m not that excited about games that are currently out that I haven’t played. I just started Elebits, which looks okay but nothing special. I got a trio of DS games to take on vacation, but I don’t have really high hopes for any of them. There are some other games out that I’m curious out, but nothing I’m really excited about. Maybe I’l go back and replay Blast Corps…

There would seem to be a vaccine company named AlphaVax. I guess they thought AlphaVaxPdp11 would be too confusing?

A couple of things that I’m a bit non-plussed by:

• I roll my eyes at the decision to have /bin/sh not be bash. It’s not like it was hard to update my shebangs, or to figure out what the problem was with my scripts, but I’m not sure what I’ve gained by doing so.
• Either I’m blind, or there’s no graphical firewall configuration tool; I have verified that there is no firewall in place. I’m behind a router doing NAT that only forwards SSH, so I’m not going to brush off my l33t iptables skillz, and of course it’s inconceivable that Linux could every have any security holes or that I could every inadvertently run a service in an insecure fashion. But really, isn’t a firewall just basic common sense these days?

I’m running Ubuntu now. My first experience was rather negative: I put in the install DVD, went to fiddle with partitions, and found it didn’t understand LVM. Sigh. After a bit of thinking, I decided to go with an ext3 root partition that only took up a quarter of the new drive: I was pretty sure I could get LVM support installed after booting, so I could retrieve my previous data from the second disk and use LVM on the rest of the first disk.

The lack of options in the installer was kind of refreshing. And it copied lots of stuff over, and then mysteriously failed when installing GRUB. Sigh.

For better or for worse, I tried again; this time it stalled a little earlier, with sounds making me think it was having a hard time reading the DVD. I had verified the media before installing, but there was one spot in the verification that took a while; maybe there’s one marginal area on the disk. Anyways, I didn’t feel like letting it retry over and over again when more problems were probably awaiting me, so I stopped the intsall, went downstairs, and downloaded Fedora Core 6.

While downloading that, I poked around a bit more on the Ubuntu site. This time, I found an “alternate install CD”. Which had two advantages: it’s a CD (and hence perhaps more likely to burn correctly?), and it knows about LVM. I wish they’d publicized that better – they’re quite haphazard about telling you what install options are available. (It seems to depend on which mirror you click on, or something.) So I decided to give that a try.

It was text-based, but that’s no big deal. It did know about LVM, but I still wasn’t impressed: it put swap outside of the LVM partition, and wouldn’t let me change sizes or names of logical volumes. So I think they have some catching up to do here – Fedora Core has used LVM by default for several releases, and it’s paid off for me. (Ubuntu doesn’t even seem to have a graphical administration tool for it – I still don’t know if I can resize the root volume group.) Also, while it recognized that I had existing LVM groups on the second drive, and that they were formatted as ext3, it didn’t give me any options for mounting them. After some frustrating clicking around (I think it lied to me when it said I could undo some stuff), I went ahead with the install.

This time, it worked fine; nice to have a functioning install on a single CD. (I assume it was grabbing more stuff over the network, but it was all fast and transparent.) At the end of this, I had a working system.

X looked a little funny – pixels were missing on the right side of the screen. So I spent several frustrating minutes poking around, looking for X configuration tools; after a bit of that, I noticed that there was blank space on the left side of the screen, hit the autosync button on my monitor, and it looked perfect. Which, actually, made me more impressed with Ubuntu: configuration tools are nice, having things work automatically is much better. After that, it was all pretty smooth. I was scared of it overwriting stuff if I told it to create a ‘carlton’ account (or, for that matter, of it not overwriting stuff, and being left with an old Gnome configuration I didn’t want), so I created a ‘carltontest’ account and played with that; I still have a little bit of cleanup to do, but I know have a ‘carlton’ account working with my old stuff but with appropriate Gnome configuration.

I had to spend some time installing packages by hand, but that’s okay, and I actually prefer that model to the model of clicking on packages during the initial install. I was used to rpm/yum instead of dpkg/apt-get/etc., but the transition was very easy. (One thing I didn’t like, though: it won’t grab all packages from the network, sometimes forcing me to insert my installation CD.) I don’t have much experience configuring MySQL or Apache, but getting all that working again was quite smooth. And it was nice to be able to install a Sun Java package instead of having to download it myself; I think ViewVC is the only tool I use that I didn’t see a package for.

In general, I’m fairly happy with the switch, but not yet completely convinced. Aside from the install weirdness at the start and immaturity of the LVM support, it’s also hung on me once; I really really hope that doesn’t happen again. The simplicity is good, the packaging is nice, and I like the presentation. I’ve created an account for Miranda; she’s done a bit of Tux Paint on it, and that’s gone well.

Miranda’s really nagging me about wanting to use my Linux computer. But, before letting her do that, I want to do two things: replace one of the drives (the original one, which I’ve been using for everything but backups) with a larger one, and install Ubuntu.

Following John’s suggestion, I’m moving /home and /usr/local to the second drive, to smooth the upgrade. Fortunately, there’s not much in /usr/local, since I’d have to recompile binaries, but I figure even the presence of unusable binaries will serve as a helpful reminder. And, actually, the only thing I care about is ViewVC, which I believe is pure Python.

But the second drive is currently devoted to a partition called /backup, and I don’t want to have my home directory live under that name! Fortunately, there’s a layer of indirection involved: the second drive is actually one LVM volume group, with a single volume under it. So I use a handy graphical tool to go to that volume and edit its properties (to be specific, I reduce the number of blocks it uses); all of a sudden (well, after about 10 minutes, but that’s okay, I have a book to read), the partition is smaller.

And then things flow smoothly: rename /home to /home-old, create another volume in the volume group on the second drive, mount it at /home, and mv the contents of /home-old into /home. (And yes, my first instinct is to use a tar pipeline instead, but mv has been working fine across filesystems for a decade and a half or so by now…) Repeat for /usr/local, and I’m all set. Really easy, that; I should move stuff around more often!

A bit more backing up to do, and I’m all set. I should save the contents of /ext (not sure what I care about there, but at least the apache configuration will be useful), and I should dump the MySQL databases. The only local Subversion repositories are in my home directory, for better or for worse, so that should be fine. I can’t think offhand of anything else I should backup; I’ll sleep on it tonight, and, if I find the time, take care of the upgrade tomorrow.

Which I might not: we are tentatively planning to do carpet cleaning tomorrow, and that takes a few hours. (But it’s never as long as I fear.) I downloaded the Ubuntu DVD image last night; I guess I’ll go burn that now.

Miranda’s reading rather more comfortably now than she was in the past; at least partly because of this, she’s noticeably expanded the range of her desired sphere of competence.

Examples:

• We’re finally letting her play Animal Crossing, because she’s reading well enough that she won’t constantly be nagging us to help her play. And she really loves it. She started on the DS version, but the GameCube version has been drawing her curiosity on the shelf for some time, so she started playing that, too. She prefers the latter, and, watching her play it, I’m surprised how much I agree – some of the gameplay changes are for the better, some are for the worse, but it’s just nice seeing the game on a full screen instead of a tiny one. I’ve even gone back and played a few times myself, if for no other reason than to answer letters that she’s sent me.
• She likes using computers, and wants to use both of them. So she’s quite frustrated that the mac is in for repairs (and taking longer than Apple had led me to believe) and that I’m still not letting her use the Linux box; my excuse for the latter is that I want to switch to Ubuntu first, and I have some things I need to do before doing that (rearrange filesystems, burn an Ubuntu DVD), and it would be easier to burn a DVD if my Mac were back. If it takes much longer, though, I’ll find another way: I do approve of Miranda using Linux, after all.
• She mainly uses the computer to draw, and Tux Paint will work fine on the Linux box. She’s also discovered browser games; there, the story isn’t so good, because Flash doesn’t work in 64-bit environments, and I don’t feel like going through the rigamarole of getting a 32 bit browser running there. (Java should work, though.)
• I let slip the fact that drawing tablets exist, which she’s quite curious about, but I’m going to wait a while before buying her one of those – she actually is fairly serious about her drawing, but I don’t think she’s come very close to exhausting the possibilities of analog methods, and I imagine a good tablet isn’t cheap enough to buy on a whim.
• She’d also like to have more software available. Which I’d be happy to get for her; I’m just not sure quite what she’d like the most. I just don’t have good info as to quality kids’ software. (Not that I’ve looked very hard.)
• She also is talking about how she wants to make her own games on the computer. (Her ultimate game is an improved version of Animal Crossing.) I’m happy to support that, and I’m not in a horribly bad position to help. Having said that, it’s not clear to me exactly what to start with – one simple question is, what language should she work in? Given the games she plays now, some obvious possibilities would be Java and Flash; I know nothing about the latter, though. Are its authoring tools free? I should do some research on that, and see if there are intro programming books that focus on game programming. (I would think that such a thing would exist somewhere – it must be one main reason why people become curious about programming.) Admittedly, I doubt that anything will come of this – I suspect that she’s much more interested in the fantasy of having written a game than the reality of programming, but who knows.
• She’s also getting more consistent about wanting to learn how to play an instrument. Not the piano, which is too bad; sometimes flute is the main possibility, sometimes violin. Her desires haven’t settled down enough for us to do anything about them yet, but I imagine we will at some point over the next year.

Other excellent daughter moment: we told her she could pick a DVD for Christmas (we knew she was already getting several others from relatives). At first, she wanted The Little Mermaid, but after thinking it over for a little while, she decided that she’d rather have the first volume of the anime of Hikaru no Go. She was also quite pleased with the manga of The Cat Returns, and read it through rather quickly.

We’re planning an upcoming vacation; we’ll be in Berlin for four days, then elsewhere in Germany for a few days, then in Amsterdam for a few days. Details will probably be worked out on the fly – we’ve bought the plane tickets and done a hotel reservation in Berlin, but no train tickets or non-Berlin hotels.

I’ve been various places in Germany, but never to Amsterdam; I hear it’s a neat place, though. (Which is why we’re going there.) Any recommendations for things to do there?

I’m in the middle of (very painfully – it’s been a while) attempting to compose a letter in German. I’ve had to refer to a bilingual dictionary several times over the course of the process; oddly enough, it turns out that the dictionary doesn’t list the words for either English or German (in either language). Admittedly, those words occur in various titles in the dictionary, and one would hope that somebody using the dictionary already know them, but it still seems like a strange omission…

When I mentioned my earlier post about questions I had about driving in traffic, Jordan pointed me at this article that claims that a single driver, by leaving a large amount of open space while entering a traffic jam, can actually (at times) break up the jam. Which is pretty amazing, if true. The author claims that he’s repeatedly seen the effects himself; some experimental verification on my commutes home (or that matter, to work) is clearly in order.

I should also spend some timing digging up animations of this effect. The author in question gives a nice start with this page showing how typical merge patterns are inefficient: both sides look pretty plausible to me, and if you count the cars per flashing arrow, the stop-and-go side has half the throughput of the smoothly flowing side. Of course, that’s somewhat tangential to the claim at hand: it’s nice to know that smoothly flowing traffic leads to higher throughput, but what I’d really like to see is an illustration of his claim that a single car can, at times, create a smoothly flowing merge situation. Lots of links left for me to follow; maybe I’ll find something else fun.

Right now, the 51st book on my Amazon recommendation list is Real Numbers: Management Accounting in a Lean Organization, while the 52nd is p-adic Numbers: An Introduction.

See, this is why Apple is so annoying. I don’t have a cell phone, I don’t want one. I don’t have a video iPod, I don’t want one. But the iPhone sounds awesome, despite being a jazzed up combination of those two. I’m not going to go out and buy one on release or anything, but it sounds amazingly well done. And I’m really really curious about the UI. (I’m watching the video of the keynote while typing this.)

When this sort of thing happens, I find it useful to remind myself why Apple is bad. Why, just yesterday I was on the phone with their support: the DVD drive in my laptop can’t write very well. Which wouldn’t be so bad – occasional defects happen – but apparently I’m not the only person with this problem. Fortunately, I’m within the warranty period, so I can send it in and get it replaced. (Which apparently they do rather speedily.) But, on the phone, I learn that I’ve committed the mortal sin of not signing up for their support plan, and they really don’t want to repair my computer without my having done that, even though it’s under the warranty. After a few go-arounds, the person I talk to admits that she can send me a link to a troubleshooting article; if I do what it says, they’ll be willing to provide me with warranty support. So I hang up, a few minutes later I get the link to the troubleshooting article. Gee, I should check to see if my computer has a recordable DVD drive! I never would have thought of that on my own – clearly I should pay $350 for AppleCare to tell me that. Sheesh.

And my replacement nano freezes just like the first one did. I’m not impressed by all of their recent software changes, either.

It’s not all bad – I quite like this computer, I’m still amazed at the effects that my iPods have had on my life. And they’re not the only computer out there with the occasional support or quality problem. What I’m more seriously concerned about is their attempts to lock down their technology and use their monopoly power however possible. Right near the start of the phone section of the keynote, Steve Jobs emphasized the patents that they had for it, and how they were planning to wield their patent power, and he emphasized this again at the end. (And the assholes in the audience applauded loudly in response.) He also talked about three revolutionary interface mechanisms that Apple has been instrumental in promoting: the mouse, the click wheel, and the iPhone’s new UI. Thank god that Apple didn’t invent the mouse: it would have been disastrous had they had a monopoly over the device. (As it was, they did their best to threaten others with interface patents at the time.) I can’t see how it’s a good thing that they do have patents over the click wheel; I really really hope there’s enough prior art to let others comfortably imitate the new UI.

And then there’s their attempt at getting a music monopoly with the iTunes store and its single-vendor DRM. (Not that I’m the biggest fan of multi-vendor DRM, either.) I’m happy that iPods have succeeded, I hope the iPhone does, but I’ve never bought anything from the iTunes store, and I don’t plan to ever do so. Earlier in the keynote Jobs said that the iTunes store is the fourth largest music retailer in the country; this is not good.

Or maybe I’ll lapse into hopeless optimism for a moment and imagine that this speculation might be accurate: maybe the record labels are scared enough of Apple’s dominance that they’re finally starting to think that unencrypted MP3s are their only hope. That would be quite a silver lining. But I am not holding my breath…