malvasia bianca

I can report that Animaniacs holds up quite well. Miranda approves, too.

Miranda’s daycare occasionally goes on bowling trips, and the local bowling alley also handed out cards entitling kids to one free game a day (plus free shoe rental) over the summer, so she’s been asking me if I could take her bowling some time. Which I finally got around to doing today.

Fun. First time I’d been bowling in a while; I was in a league (and even bought my own ball) in, I think, 1999, but basically haven’t bowled since. And I’m still not entirely comfortable with a 15 pound ball; this all meant that, basically, I had no idea where the ball would go and what it would feel like the first few frames.

And I did actually slip and fall a bit releasing the ball; oops. Where the ball would go, however, proved not to be a particular problem. I still seem to be capable of sending the ball straight down the lane to within a half-pin of accuracy most of the time, and to within a pin of accuracy the rest of the time; hurray for muscle memory. Or hurray for turning my arm into a pendulum with a big weight at the end of it. Or something. Not enough to turn me into a really good bowler, but enough to produce 135 and 148 games.

After the end of which my fingers ached, I was a bit sweaty, and I imagine my play would have gone rather downhill if I’d tried a third game.

Nice to do every once in a while; I’ll be happy to go bowling as frequently as Miranda wants. On the other hand, my skill has been at a plateau of around 130 for almost two decades, and (unless my free time drastically increases somehow) I can’t see myself either taking the time to improve that or wanting to play in a league without improving that.

As previously threatened, I asked my team members if any of them would like to take charge of retrospectives. To which I got the response “but that’s not the way to do things: we try to share knowledge and skills wherever possible.” Oh, right – I’m glad somebody remembers that sort of thing, since obviously I’m not up to the task!

Anyways, after a bit of discussion, we decided that it didn’t make sense for us all to go off and read the book right now. So one of us volunteered to read the book, run one retrospective, and rope the rest of us into running subsequent retrospectives, while sharing an overview of the ideas from the book and being available to suggest techniques from the book. In other words, taking ownership of the task without unduly linking that to carrying out the work (or hogging the knowledge). Yay.

I spent this morning hanging out in open space. The first discussion was a followup to last year’s talk by Arlo Belshee on promiscuous pairing. It turns out that a couple of experience reports were presented here on teams’ experiments with the practice. The good news: both teams saw similar productivity/quality/etc. boosts to the team from the original experiment. The bad news: both teams gave up the practice in spite of those boosts, one after about a month and the other after about three months. (The original team had been doing it for 18 months, with no plans to stop, by the way.)

I don’t remember the details of why one team stopped after one month; something about thinking that it’s too hard, or not enjoying it. So it would seem that the practice can, for some groups, bump up against Sustainable Pace. (I got the impression that the original team had a higher tolerance on that front than the norm.)

The story behind the team that gave up after three months is apparently that they’d run into a few team issues after a month or so, which they’d solved, and some bigger team issues after three months, which they might have been able to resolve but were hindered from doing so by management shuffles. Arlo said that his team had also seen big issues surface at around that time, as well; they’d managed to deal with them successfully, and doing so improved their performance.

This is a phenomenon that shows up more generally in lean discussions: once you reduce buffers / cycle times in various ways, problems start to turn up that you hadn’t seen before. It’s not that the problems weren’t there before: they were always there, hindering your progress, but you just hadn’t been forced to deal with them. Which manifests itself in other ways in agile processes, of course – e.g. continuous integration makes breaking the build a much more serious problem than it would be in other environments, but that’s not a problem with continuous integration, it’s a problem with breaking the build! This particular manifestation of the problem does seem scarier, though: in particular, it suggests that a team that wants to try it should probably be comfortable with introspection and retrospection.

After that, I participated in a discussion on what agile might have to learn from open source. About which I don’t have much to report.

I spent the afternoon at a tutorial on retrospectives, run by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen. Retrospectives are one of my current sore spots: I’m bad at running them, but I hear over and over again how important they are. And I believe that, too – I very much want my team to continue improving, and to do so in a collective fashion.

And I’m glad I attended the tutorial: we got some hands-on practice, we got some ideas of other things we could try, and I picked up a copy of their book to get more ideas. So I’m rather more confident now that I can get this to work – if nothing else, I can try format after format and topic after topic to shuffle things around, and I’m pretty sure that something will click with us. (And will then get stale after a few months, after which we’ll be able to shuffle again.)

On the other hand, I still don’t feel that it’s an area where I’m particularly skilled. So now I’m thinking that I should ask my team members if any of them wants to volunteer to design and run retrospectives. If none of them do, fine, I’ll do it myself; if one of them does, that will move more decisions down and there’s a good chance that one of them is more talented in this area than I am. And I’ve got a book full of suggestions for whoever volunteers for that.

Back to work tomorrow. I’m glad I came; certainly useful for me, and I hope it will prove useful for my employer. No revelations, nothing that’s going to have a huge concrete effect on my work, but I learned about and got practice with some useful techniques, and learned a few things about myself. And if, for example, higher-quality retrospectives can cause my team to gain just one extra week’s worth of work over the next year, then that will pay for the conference a couple of times over. Also, being at a conference made it much easier for me to concentrate on the subject: I left the hotel a grand total of twice during the conference, and spent the vast majority of time during the five days thinking about what I wanted to learn, going to talks, thinking about what I’d learned at those talks, and blogging here to get some of those thoughts out. I’ve spent some time keeping up with other tasks or doing reading on other topics, but it has allowed me to be much more focused than I normally am. I wouldn’t want to spend all my time doing this sort of thing (Sustainable Pace again), but doing it occasionally is refreshing.

Thanks to Mark and Marissa, I can report that the warehouse district seems rather more interesting than the blocks of downtown Minneapolis between the light rail stop and my hotel. Certainly more places where I’d want to eat.

I spent this morning at a talk by Mary Poppendieck on lean. It was billed as a tutorial, but there were too many people for that, so it ended up as just a talk. As far as I can tell, the main thing that I missed from its not being hands-on was a chance to do my own value stream mapping; too bad, because I think that’s a useful tool and I’ve never tried it out, but I don’t see it as being directly applicable to my situation.

Pleasant enough talk, but pretty familiar, given that I’d read the Poppendiecks’ excellent book. One thought that it did bring to mind: she brought up the fact that 3M and Google both encourage their engineers to spend a fair amount of time exploring whatever suits their fancy, and gave a queuing-theory justification for this. So: should we institute such a policy at work? What would be the effects, both positive and negative? Does the queuing theory justification really hold up; if so, does it hold up for reasons that are applicable to us?

One concrete situation where I think we might benefit is that one of my coworkers recently posted a list of gripes about our house coding practices on our wiki. I think there’s a lot to most of his points, but it’s hard to find time fixing them; if we had a bit of slack, though, perhaps both he and I would spend a bit of time tackling the issues that bugged us the most, which might help our morale and increase general productivity going forward. Hard to say, though, and I don’t think that’s the sort of benefit that Google and 3M get.

The afternoon talk was a workshop by Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson on “Crushing Fear under the Iron Heel of Action”. The first time they’d given the workshop; an interesting experiment. The core of the workshop involved breaking up into groups where we each talked about some sort of fear we had, and dug deeper into it and talked about specific actions we could take to address the fear. Then we talked about what each of the groups had produced, and talked about common tactics (and, to be honest, had a bit of a therapy session): fail early and often, test your fears, hold retrospectives to address your fears, some people skills issues, many other things that I’m forgetting.

Fears are certainly a bit of a theme for me during this conference; I hope that I’m starting to get better about acknowledging and confronting them in productive ways (though I feel a bit too lazy / other to talk about details of that right now), but it was heartening to see all of us come together, address fears, and come up with concrete productive actions to deal with them. It gives me hope that I’ll be able to do so in the future.

(Don’t get me wrong: there aren’t any crushing worries that I’m laboring under or anything.)

The first session I went to this morning was on systems thinking / causal loop diagrams. They had us go through an exercise throwing balls around, talked about states of the system, and showed diagrams that explained the different states (why performance increased, then leveled off, then went down).

Pretty good; I’d seen the ideas before in Quality Software Management, but never put them to use. And I suppose that talk will increase the chance that I’ll give them a try. The problem is finding the right time – like other forms of root cause analysis (e.g. five whys), I’m afraid that I’ll be too clouded by my biases, so I’ll end up just uncovering what I already “knew” was the problem instead of really figuring out what’s going on. So I should give them a try in a situation where I’m genuinely confused, I suppose.

Then I went to the open space to talk about lessons from waterfall. Nobody came other than Arlo Belshee (the convener) and myself, but I enjoyed spending an hour chatting with him. He talked a little about what lessons he thought we could learn from waterfall (risk management, configuration management, one or two other things I’ve forgotten), I talked a little bit about pain points in my current project that could probably be mitigated by these techniques; a pleasant way to spend an hour.

I spent all afternoon in a tutorial on coaching; really good, and I really wish I’d attended such a training a year or two ago. Actually, to be honest, I wish I’d managed to pull in an external coach a year or two ago, because I neither had sufficient agile skills nor coaching skills to bring off a successful transition. Or, for that matter, skills in retrospectives, which is still an issue and which I’m hoping to remedy on Thursday; and I made several mistakes related to not having the courage of my convictions (most noticeably my not pairing enough, which I think had strong concrete negative effects on the team), which perhaps yesterday’s leadership talk will help with in the future. So there does seem to be a coherent theme to my choice of sessions to attend – it would be nice if it were fighting the next war instead of fighting the last war, but there are worse themes than the latter.

The core of the tutorial involved going through four role-playing coach/other sessions (where “other” was sometimes a (project) manager type and sometimes a developer). We did this in groups of four (two of whom were roleplaying and two of whom were observing at any given time), plus somebody with coaching experience. We went through each scenario once, then talked about it, then went through it again. Very helpful hands-on experience, and I learned a lot each time, whether role-playing either side or just watching. (I apologize to the coach roleplayer for my excessive recalcitrance when roleplaying a PM.)

One nice thing was the way it reinforced some of the stuff I’d gotten out of manager training at Sun: let the other people speak, empathize, don’t try to solve problems directly, don’t even approach the idea of solving problems until they’ve had time to vent first. The more they can recognize problems and suggest solutions, the better. I felt a lot more comfortable role playing this time than I did during manager training; I guess I should spend more time putting these techniques into use.

The guest coach at our table was James Shore, who was very pleasant to talk to, had many useful comments, and did a nice job modeling acting as a coach on a meta level. If people are looking for coaches to bring into their organization for training, I suspect he’d be a very good choice.

I also drew my first mind map today. The presenters from the first session I attended yesterday were trying to get the notion of mind maps to spread virally – handing us out stickers, and encouraging us to teach mind maps to other people, who would then get a sticker on their badge, plus some stickers to give to other people as they in turn spread the teaching. Which mostly annoyed me – I don’t particularly care if some people can successfully spread a concept virally throughout a conference – but I actually did want to learn how to do a mind map. (The fact that the presenters didn’t actually teach us how to draw mind maps was actually the one aspect of the viral spread that I did like.) James had a sticker, so I asked him to show me how to draw a mind map, and he got me to draw one; yay. I’m still not sure how widely useful I’ll find them, but I’ll give them a try a few more tries.

I believe there’s supposed to be a get-together tonight for people who participate in the various mailing lists; it will be nice to put faces to names.

A follow-up to my zombie sighting from Saturday evening: it turns out that the price they paid for livening up downtown was to spend two nights in jail. The police should be ashamed of themselves: any claims of “simulated weapons of mass destruction” or “intimidat[ing] passersby” are ridiculous.

And now day 2 is over. Better than day 1: I enjoyed all four talks that I went to, and hopefully got something out of them.

One of the problems that I have is figuring out which talks to go to. I have enough agile experience that I’ve been avoiding the beginners’ tutorials. The main basic practice where I feel lacking is in customer (or Customer) interaction; I’m not sure that my problems in that regard would be best solved by going to a tutorial on the subject. On the other hand, I’m hardly a grizzled veteran – maybe I don’t know my own ignorance, so maybe there’s really important stuff that I would learn from tutorials (on that or other subjects) if ony I went to them.

Still, that’s one way to narrow down the options, which is important given the large number of sessions to choose from. (And then there’s the open space stuff which is getting organized ad hoc, and which past attendees say can be the most rewarding part of the conference.) But it would be nice if I had a more positive approach toward selection: is there something that I really feel that I’m missing, and need to learn about? I don’t have a great answer there, either.

So, in retrospect, I should have approached the planning in a bit more TDD-ish fashion, with some idea of acceptance tests before starting the conference. Oops. Most of the sessions look interesting; if several all look approximately equally most interesting, my first coin flip is how easily I could imagine using it at Sun – they’re sending me here, so they should benefit. But if something is much more interesting but less directly applicable, I’ll go to it instead – I know from experience that I’m much more productive when working on things I’m interested on, and that it’s hard for me to predict what actually will end up being useful in my future life.

If any of my coworkers are reading this while the conference is going on, feel free to go to the conference web site and suggest sessions that I should attend. Or any of my other loyal readers, for that matter.

Anyways, enough blathering. In general, the theme for sessions that I attended today was bringing about change. I don’t think I have too much concrete to talk about what I learned, but it was interesting hearing reports on the subject from several fronts. And I got some good book recommendations out of it. Not clear directly how this will apply at work – it’s not even clear to me in what circumstances at work it’s appropriate for me to be an advocate for change – but I hope it’s not completely irrelevant.

The talk by Christopher Avery on leadership was worth mentioning, if for no other reason than that it was an interesting counterpoint to an earlier blog post. Like Holt, Avery makes the point that responsibility is important and doesn’t mean wallowing in guilt and blame. And like many consultants, he has a list of stages; his is “Denial, Lay Blame, Justify, Shame, Obligation, Responsibility”. In any given situation you typically proceed through these steps, frequently getting stuck at one; you may also go to a special stage “Quit” at any step of the process.

The interesting thing here is the stages “Shame” and “Obligation”. Saying “yes, I screwed up, that’s my fault” would frequently be called taking responsibility; and, indeed, it’s much more responsible than the earlier stages of blaming other people or explaning away the results. But it’s ultimately lacking: it’s all well and good to accept blame for something, but if you just leave it at that, you haven’t done anything to improve the situation, so it’s still a way of avoiding responsibility. Similarly, doing something because you feel obligated to even though you really don’t want to do it is better than flaking out; but it still isn’t a way to constructively move forward, because there’s probably a problem somewhere that should be dealt with but isn’t.

Not entirely clear what I’ll do tomorrow. There’s a tutorial on systems thinking; I could learn something from that. I think I’ll go to an open space discussion lead by the promiscuous pairing guy on lessons we could learn from waterfall. That will cover the morning; the afternoon is less clear to me. Also, somebody is giving a tutorial on C++ unit testing in the morning; I don’t want to attend, but I should probably track down the speaker after the talk to pick his brain.

The first day of Agile 2006 is now more or less over. It was just a half-day, really: only afternoon talks, and I don’t think quite everybody is here.

I went to a couple of presentations. The first wasn’t too good: it was billed as talking about how agile had changed since the manifesto, but ended up having people talk/fill out cards about various aspects of their experience, with minimal analysis/insight, and overrunning its time box to boot. (I though agilists were supposed to be good about that?) The second was rather better: Scott Ambler talking about data he’d gathered about the penetration and effects of agile practices. Nice that somebody’s trying to gather data, and apparently doing a decent job (though it wouldn’t be too hard to find places to doubt the methodology); also nice that almost nobody thinks they’ve been hurt by adopting agile practices and most people think they’ve been helped.

There was an icebreaker. With some DDR pads; you’d think that, in a room full of geeks, some people would be drawn to video games, but that turns out to be the case. I don’t know how much of that is fear of dancing and how much of that is age. I also talked to Mary Poppendieck for half an hour or so, pumping her for information about lean. Most kind of her to spend the time; that’s the high part of my day.

The wifi in the areas where the conference is actually taking place is free; I’m using that now.

I also finally got around to making tar files of my unit test framework; the latest version should now always be available at http://unittest.red-bean.com/tar/unittest-latest.tar.gz. Yay.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Whisper of the Heart. It’s a Studio Ghibli film, which is obviously a big plus. On the other hand, it’s not by Miyazaki or Takahata, and it somehow sort of shares a character or two with The Cat Returns, which isn’t the biggest recommendation. All in all, I didn’t have high hopes.

And for the first twenty or thirty minutes, the low hopes seemed on track. Middle school girls confused about boys and life; whee. It could be worse – they were treated humanely enough – but it could be a lot better, too. But then it started pushing my buttons; I’ve always been a big bildungsroman fan, and I like kids who start figuring out what they want to do and pursue that instead of more conventional paths. (Somewhat ironic, given that I’m thirty-five years old and don’t know what I want to do with my life, but I suppose that’s a topic for another blog post.) And I rather choked up during the chamber music scene.

So a quite pleasant movie, when all is said and done. And with it, I’ve seen all the Studio Ghibli movies except for Only Yesterday (which Disney apparently has no plans to release, grr) and Tales from Earthsea (which only just came out in Japan; actually, apparently it’s not coming out until a week from now). Amazing studio, that, and I don’t think it’s just my pro-animation and pro-Japanese bias showing. (Let’s test the latter – would I like, say, animated movies about self-directed girls as much if Disney made them? It’s hard to tell, isn’t it, given the almost complete lack of such movies! But Beauty and the Beast is fantastic.)

While Miyazaki gets more press in this country, I’m not at all sure that I don’t like Takahata’s movies just as much. Don’t get me wrong, Miyazaki’s movies are wonderful. But the visionary intensity of his environmentalist movies can be a bit much for me, Porco Rosso is decent but not great, I don’t like Totoro as much as some (sorry, Jim), and Howl didn’t do a lot for me. They are all rather better than your average fare, and I really like Kiki and think I probably really like Spirited Away (I haven’t seen it enough), but I like Pom Poko a good deal more than most of Miyazaki’s movies (and in particular I prefer its less mystical treatment of environmentalist themes). I’ve only seen Grave of the Fireflies once, maybe three years ago; I should really watch it again, if I think I’m up for it, but my recollection is that it was quite good. And I’ve also only seen My Neighbors the Yamadas once, but it was rather charming. Hard to say; I guess the next thing to do is to track down a Japanese copy of Only Yesterday (the Japanese DVD apparently does come with English subtitles).

I’m here now. Getting on the light rail and taking it to the Nicollet Mall stop was easy enough. Then I got off, looked around for my hotel, and didn’t see it. Or any useful street signs, or anything like that. Most people were walking in one direction, so I followed them; after a bit, I discovered that the street that I was walking along was, in fact, Nicollet Mall. (Until then, it hadn’t been clear to me that Nicollet Mall was, in fact a street name; maybe next time I travel to an unknown city, I should bring along a map?) And that my hotel was about 10 blocks away.

A bit depressing, really – this is a city downtown at around 7pm, yet the streets are relatively empty and the stores are closed? The one bright sign was a group of people carrying some sort of boombox, with a banner of some sort; when I got closer, it turned out that the banner read “Brains”, and as far as I could tell they were wearing some sort of zombie makeup. Pleasantly bizarre. As I got closer to the hotel, things picked up a bit, and in fact there were quite a bit of people in some areas (and restaurants with reasonably full outdoor seating). Still, I remain unimpressed – so far, downtown Mountain View wins over downtown Minneapolis hands-down. But doubtless other areas of the city are more interesting.

Aftter a bit (short blocks, yay), I made it to the hotel. Whose exterior is pretty ugly. Got to my room reasonably promptly; looked pleasant enough. Having my priorities in order, I look for the promised “high-speed internet”. No jacks apparent, so I turn on the computer: a “Hyatt” wi-fi connection appears. Yay. So I try to ssh home, which seems to take a while. While that’s going on, I open up my web browser and click on a link; up pops a screen asking me to pay ten bucks. Gee, guys, maybe you should have mentioned that aspect on your website? Or am I just naive? (Rhetorical question, I know the answer.)

On my way out, I notice something with a description of their services. And it does mention “Wireless high-speed internet service”, at $10/day, followed by “This is not your typical hotel story. This is the Hyatt Touch.” Personally, I would just as soon not have hotels touch me in that particular way. Next to it were one-liter bottles of water for four dollars; another aspect of the Hyatt Touch, I suppose. (The tap water tastes fine to me; I trust they won’t bill me for drinking that.)

I did give in and pay; adding insult to injury, the connection speeds are crap. Oh well; at least it exists. When I was in Stratford last month, the bed and breakfast didn’t have an internet connection at all. But they were a ton friendlier, and I spent a lot less than ten bucks at the local coffee shop which did have one. Which may end up being the solution I ultimately adopt here; we shall see.

I’m off to Agile 2006 tomorrow. Should be interesting; many thanks to the powers that be at work for sending me there.

I wasn’t sure what I thought about this article on removing warning signs when I first saw it, and I’m equally confused by this one. On a basic level: does this really work? I’ve never driven in Europe, I’ve never been to Italy at all, so I don’t have much context for many of the examples. If it does work there, would it work in an American city? (Doubtless better in some than in others.) Would it work in the more suburban area where I currently live? It’s hard for me to imagine techniques that would naturally cause cars to want to travel under 20mph here. And then there’s Green Streets…

The second mentioned article is the one I’ve been thinking about more, because of my current lean obsession. I’ve been on a bit of a slow driving kick for a couple of years, so I actually do frequently come to a complete stop at stop signs, but I would tend to agree that doing so doesn’t make my driving any safer – it just slows me (and potentially other people) down. (And wastes gas, too.) To be sure, my slow driving has flow benefits as well – if I see a red light ahead of me, I just coast, which has the benefit that I’m more likely not to have to come to a complete stop at the light, giving me a speed advantage. (And saving gas in two ways.) Go production leveling! Of course, you have to be a bit careful: if you cut the timing on the light too close, you can get killed by somebody running a red light. But in general asking the question “is holding down the gas pedal going to improve my total time, or is something else the bottleneck?” has had pleasing affects on my driving.

But what I’m really confused about is this: on the one hand, we have the idea that adding explicit safety (or quality) warnings is actually less safe than encouraging people to pay attention to natural environmental signals. Which I think I’ve seen in other lean sources, though I’m not completely sure that it’s canon; I’m also not completely sure I believe it, but it’s plausible enough. On the other hand, lean also heavily promotes certain kinds of quality signals, so you can tell when something has gone wrong as quickly and as immediately as possible. So: how do I tell the good sorts of quality warnings from the bad sorts?

I would like to say that I know it when I see it, but a bit of testing shows that that isn’t the case. Is pair programming a good sort of quality signal, encouraging a constant flow of dialogue about the process and hence heightening awareness? Or is it a bad, rigid, rule that’s a detriment to flow and encourages people not to pay attention to what’s going on because surely their partner will catch the problems? Or is it orthogonal to the issues raised by these traffic articles? I tend to think that pairing is more good than bad, but it’s not at all clear to me how to derive that from general principles. (And maybe this is a sign that we’re doing the right thing at work by not pairing all the time.) TDD raises similar questions to me – good, bad, excessively rigid, creating an informative environment, something else entirely? Again, hard for me to analyze, though here I’m rather more confident that it’s almost universally a good idea – you’ll pry my unit tests out of my cold, dead hands, and red, green, refactor is a wonderful way to work. (But perhaps those wonders, especially the design benefits, are orthogonal to these issues.)

Always more to learn.

The previous owner of our house was quite a gardener. One of the things I liked about the place: out the back door, there’s a patio with a table and chairs, covered by a sort of trellis with jasmine growing over it (creating a nice, cool space). In the yard proper, many flowers, large, colorful and (to my eye) frequently exotic. And various little knicknacks (including colorful fishes and a mirror on one of the fences).

Unfortunately, we are not gardeners. The result has been that half the plants have died in the intervening two and a half years, and the other half of the plants are hugely overgrown. Perhaps attacking the house in the process, almost certainly attacking the fences in the process, with the result that on one side a section of the fence has fallen down while the fence on the opposite side is sagging. We really should talk to our neighbors and do something on it; it’s probably second on the list of house priority stuff.

As you can probably guess from the above, we haven’t spent much time in the garden. Miranda heads out there every once in a while to pick flowers. Liesl’s done a little bit of hacking at the worst of the climbing vines. The dogs do their business (and Zippy actually wanders around some); some opposums in the neighborhood have been seen there. I mostly ignore it.

We’ve talked a bit about improving it. Probably getting rid of some of the stuff there, and adding a bit of a vegetable garden. But nothing concrete has come of that, and nothing concrete will come of it this year.

Right now, the townhouse complex is in the process of painting and repairing the trim in all of the units. Part of this includes the trellis in the back. So they sent us a letter: either clear plants off of the trellis or they’ll leave it alone and we’ll sign a waiver saying that the trellis is our responsibility to look after, not the HOA’s.

So: what to do? On the one hand, I like the effect the jasmine on the lattice creates on the space beneath it. On the other hand, we’re not sure what’s going to ultimately happen in the yard, and if the jasmine turns out not to be part of the solution, we’ll want the HOA to be responsible for that part of the maintenance, not us.

This is a situation I’ve seen before. Speculative implementation of a feature, causing a maintenance burden, with no plan to use the feature any time soon. Seen in that light, I know my answer: remove the offending code to improve maintenance.

So I spent three or four hours today hacking away at the honeysuckle climbing up the side of the house and the jasmine that was all over the lattice. The honeysuckle was easy to deal with: snip through vines at the ground, and pull, and two stories of honeysuckle come tumbling down. The jasmine, however, was another story: many of the vines were more like branches, and they’d been growing on the trellis for years with no interference. (I was impressed by the way it had integrated itself with a neighboring tree, too.) So I was hacking away largely at random for the first hour and a half. By the end of two hours, I’d cleared off the trellis near the area where the vine originated, so I could see that the end was in sight; after lunch, though, it took another hour and a half before the rest was cleared off. And I was filthy, with leaves and flowers all over my hair and beard (quite the dryad look, actually, or whatever the male equivalent is), with hands starting to feel raw.

The results were as my software experience would lead me to expect. Once I’d removed the mess, there was more of a mess underneath: if the HOA is really going to repair the trellis, they’ll probably have to end up replacing it entirely. And I feel much more in control of the backyard – previously, for example, I’d been happy to let Liesl go out every year or so to hack at the worst of it, but now I’d be happy to go out for ten minutes every month or two to fight the honeysuckle. (And the jasmine, if it comes back every month or two; I really don’t know what to expect there.) I don’t like the area under the trellis quite as much as I did before, but it’s not as bad as I’d feared. I understand the effects of plants on fences much better than I did before.

Of course, now I have jasmine debris covering the back yard, and I’d feel guilty filling the dumpster with it. I guess I’ll go out every Tuesday night for the next couple of months and see how much room there is in the dumpsters, and add some more of the jasmine. (Trash pickup is on Wednesdays.) It’ll get taken care of eventually, and having an excuse to think about the garden every week is probably a good thing.

I had not realized until recently that carpaccio only dates back to around 1950.

Quite a launch today. The Galaxy launch had its moments, too – it got people ready to treat Sun seriously as an x86 systems vendor, and the machines were quite nice. But, at the end of the day, they were 1U and 2U Opteron servers, and those aren’t exactly hard to find.

Today’s launch, however, is quite a different story: three significantly different products all landing at once, and all quite different from anything that you can get from other vendors. Galaxy 4 (a.k.a Sun Fire x4600) is, I suppose, the most straightforward of them: 8 Opteron sockets in a 4U box. Dual core now; when quad core comes out, you’ll be able to slide out the two-core CPU modules and slide in the four-core modules. 64GB of memory now, 128GB later. If you need a lot of compute power, it should do the trick; we sold a bunch of prerelease units (plus some Thumpers) to Tokyo Tech, and now it’s the fastest supercomputer in Asia.

The one that I understand the least is Andromeda (Sun Blade 8000). I’ve simply never worked in the sort of data center environment where blades’ virtues are at a premium, so I can’t say I entirely understand the pros (and cons, I suppose, but I don’t really know what they might be, other than perhaps its 19U height) of this versus our competitors’ designs. As a good object oriented programmer, though, the separation of I/O and processing elements sounds pretty interesting, with both sides independently replaceable and manageable. And they’ve done a lot of work towards increasing the lifespan of the chassis and various design elements, so it shouldn’t go obsolete on you soon: it should live up to the blade promise of simplified management combined with ease of growth. And once we, say, release Niagara blades for it (I haven’t heard any details about that, but it’s got to be coming), the ecosystem will get even richer. (And all you fan fetishists will enjoy standing behind it and feeling the wind blow through your hair.)

But by far my favorite is Thumper. (Sun Fire x4500.) I’ve been using prototype versions of the hardware for the last two years, and I still love to take off the cover and look at all those disks. (Jonathan put up a picture.) 24TB of storage in a 4U box; to put it another way, if you take four racks full of Thumpers, you have a petabyte of data. That is a lot of storage in not very much space.

And you also get a couple of dual-core Opterons in each box. (Or: you have 160 quite powerful cores to comb through your petabyte of data.) Next to Galaxy 4’s 8 sockets, a mere two-socket server doesn’t sound like so much, but let me assure you that it’s quite a lot of compute power to manage, mine, and process that data. I’m not creative enough to envision all the uses that the world will find for that, but early reports are already surprising me with their ideas, and we’ve certainly had a lot of fun playing with them.

My first computer was an Apple ][+. I can’t remember exactly when we got it; some time around fifth grade (1982), I suppose. I used it through the time I graduated from high school (1989); I got a Mac (SE/30, woo-hoo!) when I went to college.

I have very fond memories of (among other things) many games for the Apple ][+. Some of my favorites were various Infocom games (with their glorious packaging!) and Ultimas 1-4 (with their glorious packaging!) But there were many others that I enjoyed. (A piece of trivia: in Temple of Apshai (I think that’s the right game), the levels were generator from a random level generator with fixed seeds, because that used less disk space than storing the levels whole.)

I didn’t have a lot of money to buy games – mowing laws helped, but I couldn’t just go down to the local video game store whenever I got bored with my current game, like I do now. (Not that video game stores really existed back then, but never mind that.) Fortunately, my mom was willing to buy games for me if they somehow qualified as educational. Including games that were in French; fortunately, there was a publisher out there that took others’ games and translated them into French.

And it turns out that some of the games that have stuck most in my mind fell into that educational category. One was The Prisoner, a rather bizarre graphics/text adventure game. I originally played it in French, and my French wasn’t quite good enough to make it all the way through it – conversational skills and reading skills are somewhat different from the skills necessary to convince a primitive computer parser to do your bidding, especially in as surreal a game as that one. But what I played of it has stuck with me through the years. Another was Robot Odyssey, a graphical adventure game (English-language) to teach you about circuit design; I’m not an electrical engineer, and circuit design wasn’t really my thing, but that game was awesome. (I never finished it either, alas – I couldn’t get through a puzzle at the start of the last level, and this was before the days of GameFAQs.)

Some time last year I looked into playing these, but I couldn’t get any Apple ][ emulators to work under Linux. (Incidentally, why doesn’t Apple just release the system rom images for those machines? It’s not like they’re making any money out of them any more.) But I took note that several seemed to be available for the mac; I’ve just downloaded OSXII, and I am now a happy person.

It actually turns out that somebody has reimplemented Robot Odyssey in Java, and even added a bit: see Droid Quest. Maybe I’ll play that version, or maybe I’ll play the original; I’m not sure yet. And I’m also not sure if I’ll play the original Prisoner or its reimplementation Prisoner 2. Either way, I should be able to nicely make it through the summer game lull…

(Or, as has happened more frequently in my recent experience, I’ll discover that old games don’t hold up so well in reality as in my imagination. We shall see.)

I’m mostly done with Brain Age now: I’ve unlocked everything, and while I think I’ll finish all the sudoku and might still do a few more rounds of some of the other exercises, I’m starting to get bored of it. (But I still want to try to get 12 on Low to High, or get all 30 on Word Memory!)

Fun, and Liesl’s been playing it as much as I have. Not your standard console game – it and its sequels are a big reason why the DS has been reaching an unusually old demographic in Japan. It’s made up of various puzzles, some “training” and some “brain age tests”, plus a decent sudoku interface. You hold the DS on its side, so it opens up like a notebook; you write on the right side (or sometimes speak into the microphone), with information on the left side.

Some of the puzzles, are pretty good, some of them so-so, some of them boring. (Speed reading is bad enough, but counting out loud from 1 to 120?) The handwriting recognition works well enough (but by no means perfectly); the voice recognition is adequate, but didn’t add anything to the game.

The most pleasant surprises were the little bits thrown in aside from the game play. For example, the second time I played the game, it asked me to draw a koala, a kangaroo, and the continent of Australia, all from memory. It then showed me pictures of the three of them; pretty interesting what I’d forgotten and what I remembered. And then, the next time Liesl played, it asked her to draw the same thing, and both of us got to look at each other’s drawings. Fun; we turn out to both be approximately equally bad at that sort of thing.

I’m glad I bought it; I was happy to spend 15-30 minutes a day on it for a month or so. I’ll probably by the next game in the series; it helps that they’re only 20 bucks. It wasn’t exactly a revelation, and there are ways in which it could be improved, but it’s fine for what it is.

Vacation’s over now; back to work tomorrow. Some random notes:

• Miranda managed to last through all five plays we went to. She fell asleep during one; I, on the other hand, dozed a bit during two. All good, but our consensus favorite was London Assurance, which we’d never heard of before.
• It turns out that High Society wasn’t originally a stage musical: the film was the original form, and its stage adaptation is only a few years old. (With more songs thrown in, from elsewhere in the Cole Porter canon, to make it into a real musical.)
• Stratford is a pleasant place; I’d be happy to go to the the festival again some future year.
• It’s my first vacation where I’ve brought along the laptop and sought out internet connections regularly; that worked well.
• I did my first programming on a Mac. (Or at least my first in a decade and a half.) Which worked well enough; a decent set of tools available. A weird mixture of Gnu and non-Gnu environments – I was pleased to not only find autoconf installed, but even its info pages. (Good thing, since I’d never used it before!) But then when I had a make question, its info pages weren’t installed, even though it was Gnu make. (Fortunately, my brain managed to dredge up the answer I wanted.)
• It’s the first time I’ve done longish driving in the last several years. Surprisingly pleasant.
• We bought a radio adapter for the iPod – surely it won’t be hard to find unused frequencies in the wilds of Ohio and Ontario? Actually, though, the spectrum is pretty well filled; in fact, it was easier to find stations near Toledo and Detroit than in more rural regions. Fortunately, it was easy enough to find decent radio stations in Ontario. I might try using it at home; it depends if I start finding more podcasts that I want to listen to, or run out of CDs that I want to listen to. (I certainly don’t plan to start listening to the radio here regularly.)
• My range of (self-provided) vacation entertainment has broadened – I used to just bring along a ton of books, but this time I had several books, several magazines, the iPods, the DS, and the computer. I’m happy with the new mix: I managed to nicely work down the magazine and podcast backlogs, while still getting a half-dozen books read.
• I still don’t take as many pictures as I probably should, though the digital camera is helping.
• Yosha apparently went on a bit of a hunger strike again at the kennel – he’s noticeably skinner than he was when we left. And his hind legs seem to be weakening a bit. But the kidney dog food seems to be working well, so hopefully he’ll have a few more years ahead of him; we just might have to get used to carrying him up and down the stairs at times.