malvasia bianca

I hope that those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving had a nice one. We did; a congenial bunch of guests, a meal headed by cambodian chicken curry. Though there were other nice bits on the menu – in particular, Liesl made a very pleasant beef soup, also from The Elephant Walk Cookbook, and we made a very good (and easy!) chocolate cake from Bittersweet, which I continue to recommend highly. Zippy got bits from the soup as it was being prepared, and spent the entire meal asleep with a happily bulging stomach.

And I played several games of go today at KGS. I’d only played one other game in the last two or so years (other than the recent games against Miranda), and I hadn’t played online in more than a decade. But I had several quite pleasant games, people were very nice, I didn’t mind the online aspect as much as I’d feared (though I would hope I wouldn’t have lost one of the games in such a boneheaded fashion on a real board, but who knows), and I now have an official rating there. Of 6k, while information elsewhere suggests that, based on my AGA rating of 1k, my KGS rating should be about 4k. So, with luck, I should be able to bump it up a couple of stones.

My joseki knowledge has largely flown out the window. I should probably remedy that, but so far it doesn’t seem like a big deal – my other competitors’ joseki have also been a bit off, and they probably wouldn’t know how to punish my mistakes even if they did have joseki memorized. I’ve been surprised at how well I’ve been doing in the openings of games: that’s my traditional weakness, and even though I’ve probably been sandbagging a little, I wouldn have expected to come out of the openings more or less even at best.

We are, alas, moving to the main Menlo Park office – no more horses and beautiful scenery around. But maybe I’ll be able to occasionally get games against real players over my lunch break. I should see if there’s some Sun Menlo Park social mailing list where I can ask about that.

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.5; let me know if there are any problems.

Some people at work were talking about LinkedIn, so I decided to finally give it a try. I’d been a bit put off earlier by receiving an invitation that was trying to look like it was written by a human and failing badly (well, it was written by a human, but not the human who sent it to me), but I probably wouldn’t have signed up at the time anyways. But the site does look like it might be getting a critical mass of users, including a fair chunk of my coworkers, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

I’m still not sure what I think about this whole social networking thing. On the rare occasions that I end up on a MySpace page, I don’t go very far because they want me to sign up before showing me much. And the pages there are really ugly, too – you’d think that a half-billion dollars would be enough to pay for some web designers. I’m not exactly their target audience, though. But LinkedIn’s design appeals to me more, and they seem to have taken some pains to have muted some of the potentially unpleasant aspects of a site like that. (E.g. it’s hard to contact people too far away in your network, there’s a quota on introductions, etc.) And I can imagine that it will be a good way to learn what former coworkers are up to.

There are some things I think they could do better. For example, while they normalize schools (or rather, forces you to choose from a menu), they don’t seem to do the same for companies. Given that they ask for ticker symbols, you’d think they could work harder, at least for publicly held ones. And part of my background involves GDB hacking, which doesn’t fit into their templates since it wasn’t a formal job. (Except for when I was contracting, but even so it’s a bad match.) Their use of long drop-down menus for job categories was pretty annoying, if for no other reason than that it wasn’t searchable.

I had to think a while about what I should do with my Stanford math department history – I had two separate jobs there, plus a few months in between where I was a visiting scholar but wasn’t actually getting paid. I didn’t see the point of explaining all that – that level of detail is appropriate for a resume, but probably not here, so I just told them that I was in the position “Department of Mathematics” at Stanford for five years. That’s not their fault, though.

I do wonder how this will scale as it ages. I see people with hundreds of connections listed there; is that useful? How do you decide whom to accept as a connection and whom not to? What happens as your list of jobs grows? Will it actually be useful when I’m hiring (I’ll probably open a req soon) or when I dip a toe in the job market in a couple of years? I am curious how I’ll go out finding an interesting job the next time I’m looking for one, given my relative lack of connections in the industry, but I’m not convinced that a web site is the best way for me to solve that problem.

(And another reminder that I should keep my resume up to date, even though I’m not looking for a job.)

There’s this list of categories on the right side of my blog. And it’s starting to annoy me. I don’t post on baseball much these days; does it deserve its own category? Go started as a category, got deleted, got added back. In my last post, I started to think that I should add a category “lean”, but then I thought I should also add a category “agile”, but then I quailed at the thought at going back through my posts (hey, this one is post 501! Though that count probably includes a handful of deleted ones) to try to reclassify them correctly. And I’d just end up with tons of posts labeled as lean/agile/programming/managing.

And really, what’s the point? I suppose it’s vaguely possible that somebody will find a post of mine somehow, click on the front page, get dismayed the other random crap I write about, but persevere to at least read posts on her favorite topic; unlikely, though. Indeed, I’m not sure that humans are the intended users of the categories at all: it’s probably part of the whole “semantic web” idea. Which I don’t have particularly strong positive feelings towards, and I don’t think has played out too well in practice. Tagging is doubtless helpful if you’re, say, posting videos on YouTube; but I don’t see how it’s helpful for my blog. If non-regular readers are going to find random stuff here that they’re interested in, they’ll do so via search, not via my categories.

Still, I haven’t made up my mind completely: I don’t want to lightly throw away 500 posts worth of categorization. I’ll think about it for a while.

I should really catch up on my blogging; in the mean time, some random links:

• Will it blend? I know where I’m buying my next blender from.
• John Baez on the state of fundamental physics.
• Just the link for the panda fan in your family.
• A followup to a traffic experiments article that I mentioned before.
• An interesting discussion of options and their applications to software development.
• Gender, kids, careers, surprises.
• Botnets turn out to be kind of cool.
• Nice use of AJAX for commenting on public drafts.
• Yum?

It turns out that getting to my local Target at 6am wasn’t good enough to get me a Wii. Sigh.

I guess I’ll get a copy of Bully to tide myself over until I manage to find one.

It seems that I should have pushed my earlier gardening/programming analogy further. After all, we all know what happens when we rip out code with plans to rewrite it: rewriting always turns out to be harder than we thought, and it usually would have been better to improve matters in place.

In this particular instance, the HOA had earlier sent out a letter saying that they were responsible for repairing the arbors in the back of the complex; if owners had plants on their arbors, they could leave them in place, but the HOA wouldn’t do any repairs, owners would have to sign a document absolving them of any future responsibility as well, and owners would have to make subsequent buyers sign a document acknowledging this. We liked the plants, but we liked the idea of having the HOA be responsible for the arbors even more (if we’re going to pay HOA dues, we want to get our share of the benefits), and we certainly weren’t thrilled with the idea of having to get buyers to sign a waiver were we to sell the house. (Not that we have any plans to sell the house, but still.) So, as requested, we tore out the plants so they could inspect the arbor to get bids for inspections.

So fine, we removed the plants, so the HOA could inspect the arbor. The next step, however, was a rather unpleasant surprise: after soliciting bids and talking to a lawyer, the HOA decided that they weren’t responsible for the arbor repair at all!

I imagine that many people, at least ones with expensive arbor repair costs, were nonplussed by this news – it’s always nice to get other people to help pay for your repairs, if you can swing it – but the HOA does seem to have done a good job getting legal advice on this matter. But, in our particular case, this really sucks: if they hadn’t sent out the original, incorrect letter, there’s no way we would have removed the jasmine. (As far as I know, we’re the only people who removed plants in response to the letter; I guess we’re suckers, or something.)

So, the net result of (our believing) their earlier, incorrect letter:

• 20 years of growth of jasmine plants, gone.
• Somebody has to pay $6000 to rebuild the arbor.

If we hadn’t gotten rid of the jasmine, there’s no way we’d be rebuilding the arbor now – it wasn’t in particularly good shape, but it also wasn’t about to fall down or anything. As is, though, the HOA requires all non-plant-covered arbors to be repaired, and even if they weren’t, we’re pretty sure the wood is going to go to pot pretty fast after the winter rains without the jasmine covering it.

So we complained. They were very sorry; after a bit, they offered a couple hundred dollars of gardening to replace the jasmine. Which is all well and good (though I wouldn’t say that new plants exactly replace 20 years of growth), but there’s still this $6000 repair cost that has to be taken care of! They’ve upped the offer slightly since then, but not to one which is anywhere near what we consider fair.

And the interactions have been very strange indeed. We’re not dogmatic about the exact amount of a settlement – $300 is insulting, and on the flip side we’re not asking them to pay for all $6000 of repair costs, but there’s a pretty wide range of possible values in between. So we’ve tried sending e-mails explaining our position, suggesting some reasonable outcomes, and reiterating that we’re open to explanations of their point of view, and that perhaps mediation might be appropriate. But we don’t get explanations: we just get bare offers that completely avoid addressing what we see as the points at hand.

After their last offer, I even sent them an e-mail basically explaining to them how they could convince us (start by explaining their position!); no response. I don’t understand why they would avoid any sort of explanation – even having them say “repairs are your responsibility, tough luck if you followed our first instructions” would be a start, because at least I would know where they were coming from. But that hasn’t happened.

In a recent discussion (if you can call it that), one of the board members said that they’d like to avoid mediation, to save time and expense. Which was just bizarre to hear: I’ve already spent a good deal more time on this than mediation would have taken, and I suspect that the board members have spent even more time than I have. And Mountain View provides free mediation services, so expense isn’t an issue. So what’s wrong with getting together with a third party and talking things over? The head of the board is normally a very nice and approachable person, too, so I can’t figure out what’s going on here.

Maybe we’re just crazy. But if they really felt that we were, why wouldn’t they just say so?

I finished Okami at the end of last month. This left me with a three week gap to fill before the Wii release; what to do? I’d been thinking about Lego Star Wars II, but, for whatever reason, that wasn’t grabbing me at the moment. FFXII was tempting, but I’ve been thoroughly annoyed by Final Fantasy games in the past, initial reviews left me in two minds about the game, and there was no chance that I’d finish it before the Wii appeared, at which point I’d spend the next couple of months playing Zelda.

I’d been hearing various favorable mentions of Trauma Center over the last few months, enough that I was considering picking up the Wii version. But the Wii version is apparently a remake of the DS version, and I didn’t see any reason why the DS interface wouldn’t be better: a stylus is probably a more natural substitute for a scalpel than a remote control, after all. And its scale fit admirably in the time slot I had, and it would give me another chance to explore the opportunities that the DS’s interface opens up.

So I gave it a try. It’s a surgery game: there’s a bit of a story, but you spend most of your time operating on patients. You have a menu of tools that you can select, and you have to switch back and forth between them as necessary to accomplish tasks. In a simple case, you have to put antibiotic gel on where the initial incision will be, then cut the body open with a scalpel, then maybe drain some blood or suture some wounds, maybe cut out an infected area and take it out with tweezers, then sew up, put on antibiotic, and bandage.

As levels progress, they throw more stuff at you at once, and if you don’t act fast, the patient’s health declines. (There’s a magic thing you can inject to raise the patient’s health level, but it takes a fraction of a second to switch tools, and a bit of time to fill the syringe and do the injection.) Then you start running into lots of things that get worse if you don’t pay attention to them: the current stage that is annoying Liesl (because it’s much much harder than any previous stage) requires you dealing with five wounds at once, all of which need injections to be stabilized, trying to find time to actually completely fix one of them (inject lots of stuff, cut around the area, pick out an object with tweezers, use the tweezers to attach vessels, and put in a bit of a stitch, and woe unto you if you have to stop in the middle) while barely keeping the others from bursting.

Not deep, but fun. I have no complaints about the threadbare plot: the game play is what it’s about, and why try to hide that? Having said that, as the game went on, some warts started to show.

For one thing, the plot starts to revolve around organisms infecting people. Stopping them requires doing stuff like lasering moving targets, and for whatever reason I didn’t like that part of the gameplay as much as the more realistic (well, it’s still only a stylus on a screen, but at any rate less fantasy) aspects.

For another thing, after a couple of days of playing it, my body (especially my upper back) started to really hurt. I’ve had RSI problems since grad school, but they’re actually quite well under control, and video games don’t trigger them as long as I avoid six-hour marathons. Most DS games aren’t too bad, but this one really does a number on me – something about being really tense, tightly gripping a very skinny stylus, and being hunched over looking at the screen, did really bad things to my body. Once I realized that this was a problem, I started unrolling my back and stretching between attempts on a stage, and with that it does seem possible to play the game without killing yourself, but I wouldn’t recommend playing more than an hour or so at a time.

(It will be interesting to see how the Wii does in that regard. I’m cautiously optimistic that it will be relatively good on the RSI score: it should allow relatively broad movements, and the fact that your hands are separated means that you won’t have to bend your wrist if you don’t want to. We’ll see.)

So I haven’t quite finished the game, and while I might still finish it, the odds are low: I’m on the last wave of levels, they’re just harder versions of things I’ve seen before, and I’m not particularly in the mood to struggle with that right now. I probably would finish it if it weren’t for the RSI problems, though. It’s a quite short game – I’ve played it for 5 or 6 or so hours all-told, and have an hour or two left – but that’s appropriate given the game play. I’m certainly glad I bought it: I got exposed to something new, and it filled a gap.

Now, I just have to wait another 7 days and 11 hours…

I was going over some pro games last weekend; as always, I was conflicted about how to approach that. Some options:

• Just play the moves as fast as you can. Go over as many games as possible, trying to get the moves into your fingers, without worrying about understanding them.
• Try to understand the key points of the game.
• Go down every variation that the commentary gives you, trying to understand all the details.

That’s the continuum of how much time you spend reading the commentary. But there’s another continuum: how much time do you spend thinking about moves in advance? The endpoints:

• Just play “hunt the next move” in the book.
• Treat it like your own game: for each move, think until you have a comfortable notion of what your next move would be if you were playing, and only then look at the book.

In the first continuum, I’m normally in the middle. I tend to think that, most of the time, I’d benefit from ignoring the commentary even more: maybe I just haven’t seen the right commentaries, but I suspect I need to be exposed to high-quality game play more than explanations. In the second continuum, I learn towards the “hunt the move” style; while that’s probably appropriate some of the time (just getting lots of games through my fingers), I really should spend more time thinking in advance about what’s going on. (And I do mean “fingers”: I’ve never been able to learn anything from going over games on a computer.)

One of my big gaping holes is my lack of understanding of influence. So my opening is horrible, but not because of my lack of knowledge of joseki – until I took a break in that regard, I was no worse than normal players of my skill in that regard. It was just that my overall judgment was wrong, so I’d always spend the middle game trying to catch up. (But my tesuji, life-and-death, and endgame skills seem decent for a player of my level, so often I’d manage to catch up.) And game commentaries spend a fair amount of time talking about detailed points of reading; even when they talk about influence issues, having it explained after the fact is completely different from committing yourself to a choice and then being told why it is wrong. (Or even that it is wrong.)

Another choice:

• Play through games once.
• Memorize them.

Honestly, for me this is more of a matter of enjoyment than anything else – every few years, I go through a phase when I decide I should start memorizing something or other (usually in foreign languages, just to give myself an ego boost: MÄ“nin aeide, thea, PÄ“lÄ“iadeō AchilÄ“os, …; Vrddhir ād aic, …; etc.), and I’ve gone through that phase with go games. Still, from a didactic point of view, it strikes me as not entirely crazy: if you want to get moves in your fingers, then really get them in your fingers! It’s probably a good way to feel the ebb and flow of games; and if you’re going to memorize joseki anyways, then why not memorize them in the context of a game? (Other than the fact that it’s 20 times as many moves, and that you don’t learn about the negative variations.)

I guess the choices that I’m most comfortable with now are:

1. Don’t pay much attention to commentaries, but do try to guess moves in advance.
2. Memorize the games, without worrying much about commentaries or guessing in advance.
3. Play through lots of games really quickly.

All three seem to have their own distinct strengths. Not that I’ve actually done the first option much in the past…

I reread Le Petit Prince a month or two ago, for the first time in decades. I’d forgotten how completely, quietly charming that book is.

Also, while browsing through Amazon, I see that they’ve finally started translating the Le petit Nicolas series into English. An excellent series indeed; perhaps not in the “timeless classic” status as Le Petit Prince, but I reread it a lot more often; yay for kids. Apparently, some posthumous stories in the series have come out in France; I’ll have to think about getting them.

(Not that there aren’t good stories in English about kids and school: Down with Skool!. Le petit Nicolas is a bit broader, though.)

One thing that’s been bothering me at work recently: our response time to bugs is absurdly slow. Even bugs that are marked as high priority take a while to get worked on; bugs that aren’t marked as high priority may well never get worked on.

Now, some of this is a classification issue: maybe a bug was incorrectly marked as high priority, and there are a lot of bugs open that shouldn’t be there in the first place. But a lot of the bugs that are open really do need to get fixed, and, as the product gets deployed more, there will be times in the future when we’ll run into bugs that really need to get fixed quickly. We’re capable of doing that now (we showed that during a recent trial, for example), but, even so, shouldn’t we spend more time practicing responding quickly, to make sure those skills don’t atrophy?

So, I think, we should rethink our bug prioritization system: we should make sure that high priority really means high priority (i.e. somebody starts work on it immediately), and we should also make sure that there’s a meaningful definition of medium priority (maybe it doesn’t get fixed this week, but it should get fixed this month). That would be a good first start.

Once we’ve gotten that under control, though, and are disciplined enough that high priority bugs are a rare event, quickly solved, we should try to react quickly to a larger class of bugs. After all, from a value stream perspective, the time spent waiting before we start fixing a bug is pure waste. If we’re not sure whether or not it’s valuable to fix a bug, then fine: we should wait until we have more clarity. But if we are going to fix a bug, what are we gaining by waiting? Why not just fix it immediately? We’re not saving work overall by delaying the fix: all we’re doing by waiting is building more debt that we’ll either have to pay off before the next release (if we fix it in time) or after the next release (if it makes it out into the wild). Neither of those is productive in general.

Of course, there are more levels to this problem: in particular, we shouldn’t be inserting defects into our code in the first place. (We’re getting better at that, fortunately.) And we don’t want to use Bugzilla as a substitute for our product backlog: there should be some control over how features get scheduled for implementation. And it can be hard to maintain a steady implementation pace if you’re getting constantly interrupted by bug work. There are solutions to all these problems, however. (E.g. for the latter, a two-part strategy of not writing defects in the first place and allocating slack in your schedule in the second place.) For now, from my point of view, our most urgent issues are (first) reducing the defect backlog and (second) improving response time.

Fortunately, other people agree. Some of my team members have been nagging me for months (years?) to make sure we don’t work on features at the expense of bug fixing, and my boss is more concerned right now with making sure we don’t have problems in the wild than with getting more features added to the product. And metrics have improved over the last week: if we really devote effort to fixing bugs, they do go away. But we have needed to devote the effort: maintaining a constant low-level hum wasn’t good enough, we needed a medium- to high-level hum.

The real test will be once we’ve worked bugs down to an acceptable level. We’ve built up technical debt; once we’ve paid that off, will we switch to a high level of productivity without building up new debt, or will we backslide? I’m optimistic that we’ll do the former: we’re getting pretty sensitized to bugs, and we’re aware of the problems that bugs cause to our normal development activities. On a basic level, they mean we have to waste time each morning investigating red bars on acceptance tests; on a slightly less basic level, the presence of those nondeterministic red bars means that, if you’ve implemented a new feature, it’s hard to be confident that you haven’t made mistakes, because you don’t have a completely clear good/bad signal from the tests.

And once we get bugs down to an acceptable level (zero, say), we can try to still leave some (not all, just some) of the former bug-fixing time in our schedule as slack. Now that I’m convinced (or at least strongly suspect) that slack is a good idea, I want to give it a try, but not without some external signal to let us know when we should stop slacking off! And the presence of bugs sounds like a great external signal to me.

Fun stuff, all this.

Some random comments, after four weeks of Netflix membership:

• One movie at a time works if you’re sure you don’t want to watch more than one movie a week, and if you don’t mind missing occasional weeks due to shipping vagaries. Neither of those proved to be the case for us, so we’ve switched to two movies a week.
• The impetus for signing up was so that we could watch the rest of Haibane Renmei without paying full price. It turns out that that series is good enough that I’m sure we’ll want to watch it again, however.
• A couple of weeks after signing up, they sent me an e-mail asking if I could drop by Los Gatos. (As part of some sort of user-experience study.) I didn’t find the time, but it’s great that the company is doing studies like that. (And I suspect that even the act of asking customers helps build loyalty.)
• Their web design isn’t quite to my taste, for reasons that I’m having a hard time putting my finger on. Having said that, it’s pretty good, and the queue management page is nice.

This weekend’s DVD (we should have had two, but the other seems to have gotten delayed in the mail) was the first volume of the anime version of Hikaru no Go. Not as good as the manga version, but it was okay, and Miranda quite liked it. So she grabbed the first volume of the comic off the shelf, and started reading it. (In fact, she’s reading it right now.) And then she asked me to teach her how to play go. Which was fun, but quite different from teaching an adult how to play go: for one thing, adults are usually trying to figure out how to play as well as possible, while that didn’t particularly seem like an issue to her.

I don’t know if that’s good, bad, or neither. For whatever reason, I find it a little disconcerting (and it’s not the only time I’ve seen such behavior). But it’s a good idea for her to be focused on, say, actually enjoying herself. And one lesson I’ve taken from John Holt is that an important early stage in learning something is just messing around with it, getting your hands dirty with it. To that end, the less pressure there is to use it properly, the less pressure there is to do it well, the better: it increases the chances of the marvel of internal motivation taking hold, if nothing else. (And there are other benefits, too.) We’ll see if she wants to play again after the next DVD arrives…

And, as always happens in these situations, I was reminded that go is Teh Best Game Evar. Yesterday and a game with Karl Fogel a couple of weeks ago were the only times I’ve played go in the last two or three years. There was a reason for that decision – it’s hard for me to find time to regularly attend the local go club, and I find it easier to go cold turkey than to drop by the club once every few months.

But I still miss go. Maybe it’s time to start playing it online again. I think my hands will survive me doing that a little, and it happens fairly frequently these days that it’s 9:30 at night, I’ve finished my daily web browsing, I don’t feel like gracing the world with my words of wisdom, and I have half an hour or 45 minutes to kill. So maybe a go game would hit the spot then? I should look into online servers again, make sure that the world hasn’t changed too much, download clients if necessary. (Any blog readers feel like an online game?)

We’ll be moving to Sun’s main campus towards the end of the month. There must be enough go players there that I can find a game during lunch, surely? I don’t know of any formal go club; I’ll have to look.

Background: Miranda’s school recently changed its chorus time from lunch to after school. This means that Miranda won’t be able to participate in chorus this year, which makes all of us sad.

I was going to rant about this on the PACT mailing list, but I’ve gotten chastized recently for complaining there near the start of the school year, when there are so many new families around who still aren’t sure if they want to be in PACT or not. (Which is, I think, a sign of mild dysfunction in PACT: we should be constantly discussing things we like, things we don’t like, and ways for improvement. Go retrospectives, or something.) New PACT parents, if you’ve clicked on this link: PACT is super-tiptop-wonderful, and Castro’s actually a pretty nice place as well; neither of them are perfect, but That’s OK.

Anyways, since the point of having a blog is to be able to rant, I figured I would just move the venting part here. But I did want to warn my regular readers that they might be missing some of the context. The part of the message that I did post on the mailing list is a report of a discussion that I had with the principal on the matter. (I should emphasize that I’m quite impressed with the principal; I think she probably made the wrong choice here, but, well, that hardly makes her unique in the world.)

Context ends; rant begins:

The one thing that really bothered me about our discussion was her presenting this as a choice between curriculum versus convenience. The assumption underlying that statement is that chorus is not a natural part of the curriculum, and the only reason to hold it during school hours would be to save parents some driving. I’m not sure it’s a matter of mere convenience for parents, given the realities of work schedules, but setting that aside, I very much object to the notion that chorus should be considered a second-class member of the curriculum.

Certainly when I was growing up, chorus (and related activities, orchestra and band) were held during school hours. It’s possible my experiences were unusual, but I don’t believe they were too unusual at the time. One of the frequent laments triggered by the loss of school funding over the last decades is that arts/music programs are being pared to the bone; one of the reasons why it was supposed to be a good idea to close Slater was that it would free up more money to fund arts/music programs. So I don’t believe that I’m alone in believing that chorus (and related activities) have historically been part of school curricula, and rightly so.

I also see no reason why music should be considered so much less important than, say, reading/writing and math that we can’t spend a couple of hours a week of school time on it. I’m an ex-mathematician, so my experiences in that regard are very far on one side of the spectrum, but I nonetheless spend much more time in an average week listening to music than doing math, and I’m pretty sure that I spend more time creating music (singing, whistling, playing the piano) than doing math. Admittedly, I spend a good deal more time reading, or even writing, than either, but music is wired extremely deeply into our brains.

And, while I don’t have evidence one way or the other, I would be surprised (not shocked, but surprised) if it proved to be the case that students who participated in chorus (or other similar activities) did less well academically, or indeed didn’t do better academically, than students who didn’t participate in such activities. And, of course, our schools’ focus shouldn’t be solely on academics, but should be geared towards helping our children become the best people they can be in a broad sense.

So, from my point of view, this is not a choice between curriculum and convenience: it’s a choice between two different views of curriculum. And the wrong view won.

Then there’s the whole program improvement thing. (Context: Castro is a “program improvement” school, which means that our test scores didn’t pass muster by the powers that be.) I don’t really understand what pressures the Castro faculty are under because of this, but I’m sure they are considerable. This situation seems to me to exemplify one of the evils of our nation’s current zeal towards test-driven schooling: rich schools, where the kids do well on tests, are free to provide a broad curriculum for their students, while schools that are already less well-off have further pressures to narrow their curriculum beyond what funding constraints would force them to do.

So I can accept that, because of Castro’s PI status, some people might feel that the pragmatic thing to do would be to reschedule chorus and spend more time on the basics. But, if we’re going to do that, we should be clear what our reasons are for not holding chorus during the school day. Are we doing it because:

• We think that chorus shouldn’t be part of the school curriculum, irrespective of test-imposed pressues, or
• We think that chorus should be part of the school curriculum, but regretfully bow to external pressures?

If the former, then PI status is irrelevant, and it makes me sad that teachers at my daughter’s school feel that way. If the latter, then we should think hard about whether more courage would be appropriate here: do we really believe that chorus students do worse in school or in life, and what messages do we want to send our students?

One unfortunate aspect of the current situation is that either the decision makers haven’t consciously thought about whether the decision is made out of principle or as an accomodation; or, if they have, they haven’t communicated that to the rest of us. Or they have communicated it to the rest of us, and the communication is that they’re doing it on principle. Which I fear might be the case, as much as I would like to believe otherwise.

Another thing that bothers me: I think people should be able to choose their educational priorities whenever possible. So I’m quite happy to accept that music isn’t as important to other people as it is to me: those people may well prefer to have school time devoted to other matters. In which case, great: that’s why chorus is optional! Why not let parents vote with their feet in this matter: parents can choose to either send their child to chorus or to let their child have 25 or 40 minutes (depending on the grade) more of educational time each week? Instead, we have teachers and a principal telling us that such a choice is an inappropriate one.

(Admittedly, that argument has weak points (as of course do all my arguments): in particular, my preferred solution would make it impossible for parents to choose to get the extra instructional time and also get the chorus time by sending their child to chorus after school.)

At the end of last school year, all the schools’ choruses put on a performance. Some schools, including Slater (Miranda’s late, lamented school) had more than fifty students there (it might have been closer to a hundred than fifty). Almost all schools had at least a few dozen students there. And then there was Castro, which had a grand total of six students present at the concert, or approximately one percent of the student population. At the time, I thought that was a bit weird, but at least PACT’s presence at Castro would change that. Now, it looks to me like it wasn’t a fluke at all.

Okami is an amazing game. In some sense, it’s quite derivative: it’s working well within the Zelda genre (complete with sonic homages to its predecessor), so it’s not as novel as some recent games, but there’s more than enough new presentation in the game to keep me happy, combined with a thorough rethinking and improvement upon the genre’s conventions.

You play a wolf. You’re also a god, with powers derived from brush strokes. In Zelda terms, the brush strokes replace stuff like bombs or the hookshot; you can use them in the world to solve puzzles as well as in battle. They’ve also worked this into the art style, making the whole game look like it it was done as brush paintings. Which is really pretty, and the most interesting presentation twist that I’ve seen since Jet Grind Radio. Not that I want other games to start directly imitating it, but I do want other games to think more about how they could adopt a distinctive presentation style that works well in the context of the game.

Acquiring brush strokes is one way to level up; another is to increase your health, magic (number of times you can paint in a row without resting), etc. In Zelda, you improved those by acquiring specific objects. In Okami, however, you do that by making things happy. For example, one of your early brush strokes lets you bloom things; after that, when you see a withered plant, you can bloom it, and you’ll get some points. Or you’ll run into animals; you can feed them, and get points from that, too. And you can do errands for people to get points. Basically, you go around making the world a nicer place, in a much broader sense than traditional errand-based methods. (And, as you run through the world, grass and flowers temporarily appear in your footsteps!) Honestly, one of my favorite parts of the game is when, soon after entering a new area, I’ve removed the initial blight from the area (typically by finding my way to a big tree and blooming it); then I get to wander around blooming flowers, feeding animals, meeting people, and just getting to see what’s new. A very humane way to design a game.

(Maybe it’s too nice, actually: entering a new area is always lots of fun in any game like this, because of the inherent novelty. So maybe adding extra enjoyment on top of that is the wrong thing to do, in terms of making the game more enjoyable overall? I’ll have to think about that for a while; not clear to me how they could have spread out the pleasures more in this game. And new areas do take some time to unfold, so it’s not like you have one big high followed by a long letdown.)

And there are still more ways to level up – you can get new weapons (three different variants, each with different levels), learn new moves (my favorite one is when you learn to pee on your enemies; maybe if I’d earned enough money to learn Brown Rage, that would have been my new favorite). Nothing stunning, but I do like the range of leveling up mechanisms, along with the different rhythms at which they take place.

So that’s leveling up. Another genre convention: the town / overworld / dungeon split has been around at least since (early in) the Apple ][ days. (It was certaintly present in the original Ultima; any good examples from before 1981?) Which has its virtues – cities give you concentrated plot, dungeons give a rhythm of accomplishments to the game (typically coupled somehow with progessive unlocking), and the overworld ties it all together.

You can still see that in Okami, but the boundaries are very blurred indeed. You start off in a town. (Well, you start off in a miniscule mini-dungeon without any monsters, if you want to get picky, and then move to a town.) After a bit, you move to an overworld. (Except there’s another, slightly larger but still quite small, dungeon right near the start.) But, as overworlds go, it’s full of people – there’s a bomb guy, a potter, a dojo, a priest, a merchant. There are some monsters, but you can avoid them if you’re in the mood; it’s all relatively compact, so you’re not going through league after league of boring areas.) After doing some stuff, you go back to the village, take part in a festival, go to another part of the overworld. And there are several people there, too, along with a relatively classic dungeon. (But even the most classic dungeons are more about progressing through a relatively short sequence of areas and less about going through a long gauntlet of monsters.)

And then you get to another overworld area. It’s similar to the others; there’s also one classic town off of it, plus another smaller town. I could go on, but you probably have the idea by now: towns and overworld interpenetrate, overworlds are destinations rather than simply areas to traverse on your way from town to town or dungeon, and the extremes of dungeons are muted. (Side note: Jim and I were just having a conversation about how, in Japan, you don’t have the same sort of wilderness as in the US, and there’s been much longer continuous habitation in forest/mountain areas; I wonder if this game is perceived in Japan as trying to explicitly build a really Japanese game?) Some dungeons are very un-dungeon-like indeed: the most important dungeon in the first part of the game, in fact, is a monster’s castle that you sneak into with an amusingly bad disguise, and then have to do tasks for the head monster’s chef. So very little fighting, lots of problem solving, and in many ways it feels more like a town than a dungeon. (Just a town that happens to belong to the bad guys!)

So, just as the leveling up system proceeds according to a more complex, subtler rhythm than is the norm, your journey through the various areas also proceeds according to a more complex, subtler rhythm. Rest assured, however, the game has a strong plot. Not Square RPG all-dominating melodrama or anything, but it’s there. (Arguably, the variations in external rhythms actually increases the plot’s strength: the game can’t get away with leaning on typical game conventions to mask the paucity of the plot.) You care about the world, it gets threatened periodically, it is punctuated at pleasant intervals by higher-drama tasks.

Which brings me to another one of my traditional pet peeves – boss battles. (And game difficulty in general.) They are the traditional way to cap off a high-drama task; this game is no exception. (Though the traditional boss battle / dungeon link is weakened – not all dungeonish areas have boss battles, not all boss battles are in dungeons.) The boss monsters are pleasantly varied, and not particularly hard – you have to do a bit of thinking to figure out their weakness (which is almost always linked to your newest brush stroke), but you can almost always make it through boss battles without dying. And, if you do die, the next time you’ll have that boss’s info in your monster book, so you’ll have hints about its weaknesses. Over the years, I’ve gotten to like hard games less and less – difficulty is no substitute for solid game design – and I’m quite comfortable with this game’s difficulty level. (I wouldn’t have minded if I’d died a few more times, actually.)

Even games that get most bosses right can fall sorely flat on the final boss: I am thoroughly sick of final bosses that are much harder than any of their predecessors and that, the first two times you kill them, resurrect themselves in new, tougher forms. (With no save spots, of course; in the worst case, you can spend most of an hour just hacking back through to the place where you were killed last time.)

The final boss in Okami isn’t entirely divorced from that tradition. The final dungeon actually consists solely of boss fights: it starts by forcing you to fight five of the previous bosses. Which turns out to be surprisingly pleasant: the fights are well-enough designed, you’re powerful and knowledgeable enough to make them pretty fast and easy, and you can save between bosses (which also replenishes your health), should you so desire.

And then there’s the final boss. Who is intelligently multi-staged: you start off by losing all of your brush strokes, and over the course of fighting him, you regain your brush strokes; every four or so brush strokes, he (or she – the main character is female, and for all I know the final boss is as well) changes in order to be more suitable to fight with your current bag of techniques. One of my favorite fights of the game.

And then, after killing him, he resurrects in another form. Sigh – they were doing so well, and then blew it! Actually, it wasn’t so bad – the new form only had a single stage, and while I was glad I had a couple dozen medium bones around for healing purposes, I didn’t come close to dying. (Especially once I started paying attention to when he was most vulnerable.) So, as gratuitous extra bosses go, not so bad. And, actually, there was a quite nice plot reason for the extra boss: it gave them an excuse to have your companion marshal up support for you throughout the land, with lots of pictures of people cheering you on and praying to you. Really rather charming, and it would have been harder to work that in without the boss resurrection.

(Side note: the idea of mass support while fighting the final boss was, of course, used to fabulous effect in Space Channel 5; that final boss had one overly difficult moment, but if you made it past that, you had a cast of thousands dancing with you, chanting out “left right left right chu chu chu” or whatever it was. Honestly, one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in a video game. I suppose it’s been a few months since I’ve done my Dreamcast lament, so I will briefly revisit it here: the Dreamcast was Teh Best Console Evar, why can’t Sega make good games these days?, and I really really really wish they would make Shenmue III.)

So: if you own a PS2, go out and get a copy of Okami. If you don’t, well, buy one and reduce your situation to a previously solved problem. (Not the best console ever, but this isn’t the only great game the console has seen.) It’s not perfect, but the first half is pretty close – honestly, once I’d gotten that far, I was beginning to despair over the likelihood that the new Zelda, which will come out in a mere three weeks, will pale painfully in comparison. The second half doesn’t contain the same revelations as the first half does, but it’s still thoroughly enjoyable and solidly constructed.

What a year and a half Capcom has had. I can’t believe that they’ve always been this solidly good, but clearly I’d vastly underestimated them; I should delve further into their library.

I’m currently running Fedora Core 5 on my home machine. FC6 is out; following a sage reader suggestion, I’m going to reinstall the OS (in a larger drive) rather than do a simple upgrade.

Which means that I could almost as easily switch distros. So: stick to FC6, or switch to Ubuntu? I’m actually quite happy with Fedora Core, and I know where everything is. (Whereas I always have to poke around when I use a debian-based system.) But lots of people are really happy with Ubuntu, and it seems to have legs. (I’m willing to consider other distros, but I’d be shocked if I went with anything else.)

Background: the architecture is x86_64; it’s not a laptop, so I don’t care about wireless or sleep. (Well, I don’t care too much – I do occasionally run Linux on laptops, so I wouldn’t complain if that stuff worked.) My base criteria:

• I don’t want to switch distros for the next several years.
• I want regular new OS releases, no less frequent than, say, once a year.
• I want a constant stream of automatic updates. (Actually, if this could remove the need for new releases, so much the better, but I don’t think anybody’s there yet.)
• I want it to be painless to install new software by using yum or apt-get or their moral equivalent.

I’m not sure exactly what I want on top of the base criteria; it should look nice, it should be easy to use, there should be a sensible choice of default software available.

Recommendations?

Yesterday, I moved more items off of my list of web pages to regularly click on and onto Google reader. Which emphasizes: Google Reader has too much of my state these days. I don’t care so much about the list of what I’ve read and what I haven’t read, but I should at least make a habit of periodically backing up my subscription list. Not that I’m afraid that it’s going to suddenly disappear or anything, but entrusting information that I care about to other people makes me nervous…

A few days ago, I went to Amazon’s books page, and was greeted with Serre’s A Course in Arithmetic. Which kind of surprised me – I’m pretty sure that, in the past, I’d rated math books, but it had been a while since I’d seen any show up in their book recommendation list. (Do they weight your ratings lower over time?)

So I dutifully rated it, at which point no end of familiar math books appeared in my recommendations. Local Fields; sigh. Lots of new textbooks that have popped up in fields that I used to follow over the last few years; I’m sure some of them are good, but there seems to be a bit of a glut. (How many GTMs on a given subject does the world need? I guess Springer would know…)

I wonder: if I had more spare time, would I use some of it to read math books? I tentatively think that the answer is yes, but I’m not completely sure. (Another possibility would be to, say, wait a few more decades and then catch up with the state of the art somewhat.) If I were to read math books (or papers or …), what would I read? Textbooks don’t really strike my fancy, unless they’re really good. I don’t think I’d want to read cutting-edge papers, either. Probably the best (see the Serre examples above) would be well-written expository monographs by good mathematicians; unfortunately, there aren’t a ton of examples of that around. Or I could just read through Serre’s complete works, or volumes of SGA.

Other random notes on the topic:

• I was amused to see, in my recommendations list, Amazon list Problems in Algebraic Number Theory as being “by Jody Esmonde, et al.”
• Nice reviews.

I just finished Lean Thinking; it’s my current favorite lean book. One thing that made me jealous: they give several (to me) convincing examples of companies wanting to try out lean, and that brought in some people who really knew how lean worked. After doing what those people said, they immediately got some fairly impressive improvement. But they then managed to improve on this continually over the next few years.

Which, among other things, serves as a counterpoint to some thoughts I’ve been having, and that seem in the air in general. (See, for example, Martin Fowler on agile imposition.) It’s been clear to me for a while that my team’s agile adoption would have been vastly improved by bringing in an outside expert some time ago. (It would probably still be vastly improved by that.) But, among other things, doing so would be tantamount to my saying “we’re going to do XP, plain and simple”. People may hear me as saying that already, but I don’t intend to be saying that. What I would like to be saying is “here are some things that are really important to me” (high quality standards, sharing knowledge, responding quickly) and “I haven’t heard of anything that sounds as effective as XP to reach that goal”.

So one aspect is that I’m jealous of people who have built up the support where bringing in an outsider to show them what to do is effective. But another aspect is that I’m also jealous of people who have concrete touchstones that they can use to continually approve. This is something that, perhaps, XP isn’t so helpful at. The concreteness of the practices can be very useful if you need something specific to try. But they have a finality about them that (to me) makes it hard to use them as guideposts for continuous improvement. For example, we don’t pair program all the time. I’m willing to believe that we’d be more effective if we did, but I don’t have any great way to convince people (even to convince myself) that doing so would be a good idea, and taking it on faith will only go so far. In a current thread on the XP mailing list, Ron Jeffries proposed telling people to find a way to “deliver working software monthly”; a lot of people are willing to believe that that’s a noble goal, but getting from there to XP is a pretty big step.

So what are intermediate goals that can help you see ways to continually improve? (Through which you might end up at XP or might end up somewhere else; if we can continually improve, I really don’t care about anything else.) Here, I think lean manufacturing has a leg up on agile software development: they have goals at a similar level to agile goals (single piece flow or just in time / pull are probably at a similar level to incremental development and no bugs), but I get the feeling that they have more ways to see flaws and to translate those flaws into concrete improvements. (Categories of waste, or stop the line when you see a bug, combined with root cause analysis, for example.)

Or maybe agile is just as good at that; it could (in all honesty, I’m not being facetious) just be my lack of knowledge combined with my lack of skills in the appropriate areas.

Something to work on.

In response to a not-very-coherent question of mine on the lean development list, Tom Poppendieck posted an interesting response. From it:

Over a decade ago, when Jeff Sutherland invented Scrum, he was faced with a situation in which his product development process bottleneck was the capacity of skilled developers. He designed Scrum specifically to exploit the capacity of the bottleneck, to subordinate everything else to ensure maximum throughput through the software development process, and to elevate the capacity of the bottleneck by removing impediments.

I’d never really thought of Scrum in that sort of Theory of Constraints terms; hmm.

Results here not so good, alas.