malvasia bianca

We went to a (quite nice) party yesterday. Hosted by friends of ours, lots of people around our age present, most of which were couples with kids.

I’m pretty sure that Miranda was the oldest kid there; in fact, she may have been two years older than any of the other kids. Which is pretty weird – I wasn’t the oldest adult there, and in fact I suspect I was younger than the median.

So it would seem that, in the social circles I travel in, having a kid a year after finishing grad school is somewhat unusual. I guess I’d started to realize this – most of my friends have kids now, but frequently that’s a recent development. I just hadn’t had the point driven home so forcefully before.

Anybody have a favorite C++ XML parser? We might need to add an XML/HTTP interface next to an existing CORBA interface soon at work, and I’m not too familiar with the options out there. It’s a very simple interface – a few simple short requests, a few simple, short responses plus one simple, long response. TinyXml seems like it should have all the functionality I need, so I’m leaning that way, but I don’t realy have an informed opinion on the matter.

A month and a half ago, I was toying with the idea that maybe signing up for Amazon prime would actually save me money. I still don’t really believe that, but the general idea of not buying books until right before I’m going to actually read them seems sound to me. I’m going on a trip soon, and will want a car adapter for my iPod; that seemed as good an excuse as any to sign up for the service. It comes free for the first three months; we’ll see how I like it.

It’s kind of scary, actually: now, whenever I visit any page on Amazon, there’s this button on the page, and if I click on the button, the item will appear on my doorstep in a couple of days. I’m really not sure what to think about that – I’m much more in the habit of building up a little shopping cart full of stuff, thinking about it for a while. Which I can still do if I want to, but I don’t think I will want to.

While I was there, I ordered a CD. (Taverner’s Lament for Jerusalem, which I learned about from the Naxos podcast. I suspect that podcast is going to turn into a very effective way for them to advertise to me.) And I successfully resisted the urge to order two CD’s: when I finish that one, maybe I’ll order another. (Would Amazon make money if I ordered one CD a week with two-day shipping? Hmm.)

I almost resisted the urge to buy any books. But then I saw that I could pre-order the seventh volume of Hikaru No Go, and I couldn’t resist that, either. In general, I don’t approve of pre-orders, but I’m completely sure that I’ll want to read that book, and in fact will be happy to drop whatever other book I’m in the middle of reading for the thirty minutes or so that it will take me to read it.

Speaking of books, anybody know of any good TCL books? At work, we write our acceptance tests in TCL, and most of us are far from TCL experts; I certainly feel that my lack of TCL knowledge makes me inappropriately frightened of the larguage, and hurts my refactoring. I’m reading the Ruby book right now, but I should probably put some sort of TCL book next on my work reading list.

(Random coment: I just clicked on my current Amazon book recommendations, and they seem to have changed drastically – All Quiet on the Western Front is number two on the list, because I own The Communist Manifesto. Weird for a few reasons.)

I had hopes for France, but not much seems to be coming of that. But now Norway is stepping up to the plate, and is demanding action fast.

Aside from the DRM issues, I like that they’re complaining that Apple “reserves the right to change unilaterally consumers’ rights to access material already purchased.” Yes, that sounds like bad behavior to me. And “that iTunes has tried to impose English law on the contract” – hardly unreasonable for Norway to be nonplussed by that.

Doctor Fun has ended its run. The last remnant on my bookmarks page of the early days of the web…

These sound to me like desirable characteristics for open source decision makers.

I finally got around to putting up pictures of us (well, mostly pictures of Miranda) from last summer.

My dbcdb pages now can have a list of external links attached to them. This is a feature that I’d been wanting to add for a while – until now, the links from within these blog entries probably served as more of an annoyance to my readers than anything else, since the information on those pages was unlikely to be of interest to you. (Except maybe the hidden Amazon link, about which more later.) But now they can potentially serve as a way to make my blog a bit richer – if I refer to, say, a book from within a blog post, then they provide an easy way to find other blog posts where I talk about that book in more detail. (At least once I go and add more links into my dbcdb database.)

The issue of how to handle related posts is, I think, not an uncommon problem for bloggers to run against; c.f. Tim Bray on a variant of the problem.  There are lots of solutions, each suited for different manifestations of the problem, but I like this idea of adding an extra layer of indirection by sticking a mediating web page (my dbcdb pages) in the middle.

Once I decided to take that approach, though, there were two different implementation strategies: I could either add links manually to the database every time I posted about a book/game/whatever, or I could let a search engine find all blog entries that refer to that book/game/whatever. I decided that the latter wasn’t completely satisfactory: not all posts that refer to a given book are created equal. For example, half of my dbcdb blog entries link to the page for The Arcades Project not because they have anything to say about that book but because I’m using that as a default example. Also, one main argument for search, namely that manual indexing isn’t scalable, doesn’t apply here: manual indexing should scale just fine in this case.

Having said that, search also has its value for this: you might (or might not!) be interested in all blog entries where I, say, make an offhand mention of a certain video game, one that I might not choose to put in the index. So my next story will be to add an automatic “search my blog for references to this” link to all entities. With luck, that will give me the best of both worlds. Also, while I’m adding links, I’ll get rid of the ISBN/ASIN fields and replace them with an explicit Amazon link.

Before I started doing this, I realized that, if I didn’t first get rid of MemoryCollection in favor of SqlCollection, I’d have to do a tiny bit more useless typing to implement this. Since I’d been planning to do that soon anyways, I figured this was the time; it turned out to be quite pleasant, using (the classes that implement) the CLI tool’s interface. Yay. And, in doing so, it increased my appreciation for dynamic typing; I might go on about that later, but if nothing else it emphasized that I really do need to spend some time soon playing around with a dynamically typed language.

One thing I wanted to learn when I started reading about lean: given that Toyota is supposed to be so great at everything, why is it that, when I last shopped for a car, fully intending to buy one of their models, the experience was so bad that it (or rather they, I tried two dealerships) drove me to one of their competitors? (Saturn, in this case.) They could have made money off of me if they’d just acted like decent people, instead of making it clear that all they cared about was ripping me off. Admittedly, I did get a certain pleasure from one of the salespeople putting a lit cigarette into his shirt pocket, but I didn’t see any sort of exciting “lean sales” practice, any leveraging of their apparent ability to nimbly respond to conditions, any recognition that inventory should be considered waste. It seemed pretty much the same as standard practice in this country, maybe a bit worse.

It would seem, however, that sales practice in Japan really is quite different than in the US. Kind of creepy, actually – apparently, once you’ve bought a car, that sales person will then contact you quite frequently, even stopping by your house (most Japanese car sales don’t/didn’t take place in dealerships), checking in on how things are going, sizing up your future car-buying plans, or when you’re not about to buy a car at least improving their feel for the moods of the populace, to help Toyota’s strategic planning.

I wouldn’t like that, either. I want to talk to a dealer when I’m interested in buying a car, and I’m happy to continue in a relationship with a dealer after that (e.g. bringing it to them for maintenance), as long as I don’t feel they’re actively working against me. But I want to be the one in control of the relationship, not them. Still, it does seem a less actively adversarial relationship than a traditional American car sales relationship, which is certainly a plus.

Apparently they even take responsibility for fixing their cars whether or not they remain under warranty, in order to keep customers loyal. If only Saturn had done the same thing, we’d probably stay with them indefinitely; alas, our older car had to have its engine replaced because of a design flaw that (in our case) didn’t manifest itself until after the warranty expired. So if having to spend several thousand of our dollars because of their design flaws is what we have to expect from Saturn in the future, then no more Saturn. Maybe Honda will prove a nice mix of reliable cars plus a non-asshole sales force? (To be clear, we’re not shopping for a car now, nor are we planning to any time soon.)

Despite my misgivings about it (which are apparently growing more common in Japan, too: at-home car sales are declining, or at least were at the time the book was written), I can see how Toyota’s Japanese sales philosophy fits into their lean mindset. Lean likes to generate and feed off of high-quality information, so get that from your customers, too. An ability to easily customize means that you can encourage your sales force to meet with customers to pick the options on the car that best suits their needs and moods instead of forcing the customer to take whatever’s on the lot. As I already said, no lot means no inventory, which lean loves. Maybe the less adversarial sales/customer relationship is similar to their less adversarial manager/worker relationship. (About which I’ll write later; both relationships are uncomfortably constricting from my point of view, too.) And an ability to produce high-quality cars means that they can affort to fix defects that escape into the wild.

It does seem to be an aspect of lean that hasn’t made it to this country, though; and while I obviously don’t think that the standard American car sales model has much to recommend it, this sales model seems rather off as well. In an environment where customers have increasing access to choice and high-quality information, then treating them well will probably pay off more and more; acting like a (nice) stalker, not so much.

Maybe Toyota’s already changed their practices in Japan in the intervening decade and a half; I should look into that. The section in Lean Software Development on contracts might give some clues, too – after all, those are customer relationships, just of a slightly different nature.

We got back the results of Yosha’s blood work; it would seem that his kidneys aren’t functioning at full capacity. Which might even explain the vision problems: kidney problems can lead to high blood pressure can lead to vision problems. We’ll see; we’ve gotten bags of special “easy on the kidneys” dog food, and hopefully various matters will improve.

Certainly he peed a lot less today than he had been doing in previous days. A good sign, though it’s rather too early to declare victory: there was poop all over the carpets, so probably not enough stuff was making it into his blood in the first place to really tax his kidneys. I’m not particularly worried about the poop; this sort of thing happens when changing from one kind of dog food to another. That should settle down in a few days, after which we’ll have a better idea of the new food’s affects.

Apparently there was only one AIDS death in Santa Clara county in 2004. A ways to go still, but that’s real progress.

We just finished watching the version of Angels in America that HBO did a couple of years ago; fabulous.

I wasn’t expecting to like How Buildings Learn nearly as much as I did. I learned about it from the XP book‘s bibliography, and certainly you wouldn’t have to look very far in the book to find inspiration for your programming. But I was surprised at how interested I was in the actual topic of the book. (Not too strange in restrospect – being a homeowner does change one’s views on such matters.)

Lots of groups of pictures of one house over the years: additions to the house, changes in the styling of the house, the occasional removal of a previous addition. We don’t have have any plans to add onto our house: we don’t have any plans even to remodel, though I can conceive of how we could, say, improve the kitchen. But looking around the house with addition eyes, I can imagine how we could this house could grow over time: enlarge the den by going out into the back yard, then add a similar addition to the guest room above it, then move out the kitchen next to it, and so forth. Though, to be sure, we couldn’t actually do that: we live in a townhouse complex, and there are rules against that sort of thing.

Even if there weren’t rules, we probably wouldn’t want to expand – there’s only so much space in our backyard, after all, and neighboring buildings are uncomfortably close. But a lot of standalone buildings these days are in developments with CCR’s of their own; I can’t see how that’s a good thing. I wouldn’t necessarily support giving up all housing-related rules, or even all non-safety-related rules, but enforcing a sterile uniformity for the putative reason of improving your neighbors’ property values seems pretty crazy to me. Much better to adapt your house to changing events, instead of being forced to change houses entirely.

There were also good thoughts on the idea that there shouldn’t be this sudden changeover when a building is finished: you only know how it will actually work when people are living in there, so the conversation with the architect/builder/whatever should continue at that point instead of end there. Some random tidbits from the book: drawings from a book on Malaysian house-building, showing various traditional expansion sequences for Malaysian dwellings. Discussion of some Japanese building firms that take responsibility for all of the design and construction, engaging with the resident throughout the whole process, continuing that engagement after the resident moves in. It’s hard to say what the future will bring, and I don’t particularly foresee ever having a house custom-built for us, but if we were to do so, that sounds like a good way to go.

And discussions of older architecture versus newer architecture. In lots of areas, I tend to reflexively support the new against the defenders of the old, but reading this book and Christopher Alexander have rather turned me the other way when it comes to architecture. A lot of screwed up ideas on that score in the last century. (Hmm, maybe my opinions shouldn’t surprise me so much: I’d already been convinced of that when it comes to urban planning.)

Among other things, modern houses apparently aren’t built to last so long. And one symptom of the lack of an ongoing conversation between builders and dwellers is the general lack of ongoing maintenance. Certainly I wish that I knew somebody whom I trusted whom I could talk to about the state of our house, what should be done about it in what order, and who could help arrange for stuff to get done. We’re managing to chip away at this somewhat (and actually the HOA / management company can be very helpful in this regard, for stuff that’s their responsibility to pay for / arrange), but not as quickly as I’d like, and there are definitely some areas where I could use some good, informed, unbiased advice. (E.g. about our floor.)

Of course, part of the issue there is scheduling – it’s the whole “important but not urgent” problem, made worse by the fact that I don’t in fact really know how important and/or urgent it is.

A problem I’ve been dealing with at work recently, too. I think we’re making some progress – my team in particular has been very helpful in informing me that, no, we shouldn’t put off fixing certain bugs, they’re causing problems now. XP and lean seem to have a good approach here: they have useful concrete criteria for telling whether or not something is important, and once they’ve decided it is important, they immediately elevate its urgency. (A defective part just went by – stop the whole assembly line until we can figure out what went wrong!) Not clear how to apply that to home maintenance, though, or even whether it’s a good idea to apply that to home maintenance. I guess there’s probably another way in which lean deals with important-but-not-urgent events – there must be periodic checkup sessions, which then lead to recommendations of fixes that are more urgent to implement. So the analogy here is to periodically give the house a check-up, and then to immediately fix the problems that you find. Assuming that I’m not just making up that last sentence about lean! Even if I am, the application to houses sounds like a good idea.

I’ve just upgraded from WordPress 2.0.2 to WordPress 2.0.3. Let me know if you see any problems.

God of War is a quite well done beat-em-up. Basically, you wander through a mostly linear, pseudo-ancient-Greek world, beating the crap out of tons of monsters that appear in your past, occasionally taking a break to either solve a bit of a puzzle or fight a boss monster.

I’m not sure that there are any stunning advances here, and I don’t understand the “game of the year” support that it’s gotten, but I had fun playing it. The difficulty level is well-balanced – I basically never got frustrated, and they’ve learned the recent lesson that, if a player is having trouble at a spot, maybe they should offer to make the game a bit easier for you instead of having you give up on the game. (Which I was happy to take advantage of in the final boss fight, or rather trio of fights – while I enjoyed the game, I didn’t feel like putting in hours to finish the very last part.) Good level design, nice texturing to the challenges, boss fights that I didn’t mind and even rather enjoyed at times.

The plot could have been decent (for the genre – this isn’t an RPG, after all) were it not for its blatant disregard of any actual Greek mythology. You play as a Spartan warrior who has been chosen by Ares but who has subsequently turned against him. So you end up trekking through a desert to find a Titan wandering around with a labyrinth chained on his back, hidden in the middle of which is Pandora’s box, which will give you superhuman powers. Sigh. If they’re going to do that, why not give up on the Greek theme entirely, and just invent a fictional ancient world to set it in?

Quite violent – you even have special finishing QTE-ish sequences to add to the gore of killing monsters. (And to provide an extra gameplay mechanic in boss fights.) Also, it’s the first video game that I can recall playing with bare breasts. I wonder why that is? I guess video game publishers are afraid that parents will freak out if their kids are playing games where you can see breasts, but in this game they figure the parents will freak out at the violence anyways, so they might as well go full-out for the slightly older male audience. The nudity disappears after the first third of the game or so, though; it was never very well-integrated into the plot, anyways. (Or maybe it’s that the plot attenuates after the first third or so, too.)

A slightly interesting leveling-up system: vaguely hidden (not really, any more than blocks in a Super Mario game are hidden) chests lying around. Many of these contain some amount of red orbs, which you can use to power up your spells and weapons. But some contain “Gorgon’s eyes” and “Phoenix feathers” to increase your health bar or magic bar. (I forget which does which.) Both of the latter max out after a certain point, however. And either I’m a stunningly good chest-finder or they’ve over-provisioned the eyes/feathers in chests, so if you find a chest that would have an eye or a feather after you’re already maxed out those bars, you get a lot of red orbs instead.

The result is that, if you’re at all inquisitive, you’ll have maxed out your bars by the end of the game. And the result of being extra inquisitive is that you’ll have maxed out every spell instead of most of them. It’s not at all important to max out every spell, while maxing out the bars is quite useful; the result is a system that gives you a linear world (so you can’t go back to earlier regions to search), and rewards you for doing extra searching, while not actually diminishing the gameplay for people who aren’t obsessive searchers (or who aren’t following a guide showing the location of every chest). A nice compromise.

Next in the “violent game” series: Halo. Which may or may not be too violent for Miranda to watch; I have no idea. I’m not sure, and it happens to be next on my list of games to play. One advantage – probably the only advantage, actually – of summer game doldrums is that it gives me time to play important games that I never got around to playing when they first came out. Speaking of which, if anybody has recommendations, I’m all ears – I don’t quite know what I’ll play after I’ve finished Halo or Guitar Hero.

Hey, Jonathan’s blogging about Thumper. Neat.

I am still looking for music recommendations. Several of the bloggers that I read occasionally recommend either individual artists or podcasts; since I seem to agree with said bloggers’ tastes in other matters, I usually give them a try. Alas, all such experiments have proved unsatisfactory. Fortunately, the artists that they recommend have sample songs available on their web pages, so I can discover that they are not to my taste before spending money on them. Progress, I suppose.

I’m somewhat embarrassed (or at least surprised) to find out that basically the only music podcast that I continue to listen to is Next Big Hit, which I found through the top 100 list on iTunes rather than more informal methods. A grab bag of pop, not particularly the sort of thing that I’m looking for, but I usually don’t mind most of it, and every week or two there’s a song that I rather like. And it’s in an AAC feed with chapter markings, so if there’s a song I particularly dislike, I can just hit the ‘next’ button.

Not a crisis, I suppose – I have enough music lying around the house that I don’t mind going through my CDs over and over again. (I’m just finishing a Mahler symphony run right now. Somewhat to my surprise, I’m finding that, though I basically like all of them, the first and second continue to stick in my head to a much greater extent than the others. Is that because of the symphonies themselves, or because I listened to those two over and over again before I bought recordings of the other ones? Maybe I should try, say, listening to just the sixth several times in a row.) And I have enough to listen to on my iPod; when I run low on my regular podcasts, I can always learn Japanese. Hmm – maybe I’m making a strategic error by looking for pop podcasts, and should try looking for classical music podcasts instead – judging from my non-podcast musical experiences, I’m probably more likely to find matches that way. Or if I’m going to branch out more, maybe jazz is a better place to go than pop. I shall experiment.

I was just looking at the front material of a book and saw that its “SBN” was 671-21320-2. I didn’t know that there was a pre-international version of the ISBN.

And here’s some information if you’re curious about the 13-digit ISBNs that have been appearing recently.

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

The next time I’m looking for a job, I should keep my eye out for one where I’ll be able to play go over lunch.

• Translators, beware.
• Banana phone!
• Just in time for the primaries.
• No, we don’t need webcasting rights.
• Fun with flash.
• Um. Well.

Our beloved Alyosha is fourteen years old. He’s been showing his age for a little while now – aside from slowing down in general, he started getting excessively grumpy three or four years ago. At a vet visit not too soon after that happened, the doctor said his thyroid levels were low; he went on thyroid meds, and his mood improved enormously.

He’s also started peeing a lot. Which may or may not be a side effect of the meds; we should get an answer to that soon. Recently, though, a couple of things have gotten worse. For a while, he’d had a hard time seeing the steps up into bed right after we turned off the light – it took his night vision a while to adjust. Recently, however, he’s been unable to get up into bed at all in the middle of the night – he seems to have very little night vision at all these days. Also, while it’s been a while since he wanted to take long walks, these days he’s loath to venture even as far as the end of the townhouse complex. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on there – he’s happy to shadow me when I walk around the house, including going up and down stairs, so I don’t think his legs can be aching too much. Hard to say. He’s gotten rather heavier, too, which may be a result of the decreased exercise.

Anyways, the other night we heard him falling down the stairs. I do hope that hadn’t been a regular feature of his nights; if so, it might be an explanation of why he doesn’t want to go on much of a walk in the morning, since he may be a bit bruised. So real night vision problems, and he hasn’t figured out quite where the stairs are. Once we realized he was doing that, we started leaving the stair lights on at night. Unfortunately, the stairs are near our bedroom, but we found that, if we unscrewed the light bulb at the top of the stairs, then we could still get to sleep just fine, and I think the light at the bottom is enough for him to see. Liesl was also talking about installing a dimmer switch; we might give that a try if the current solution doesn’t work.

Ultimately, though, we should take him to a doctor fairly soon. My tentative hypothesis is that he has cataracts: his eyes have been somewhat milky for years, so I hadn’t been worrying about that too much, but if it’s causing problems, we should do something about it. And googling suggests that cataracts can lead to poor night vision. Liesl’s parents had a dog who responded well to cataract surgery; maybe Yosha will get to go through that, too.

Or maybe it’s something else. Fortunately, the house is small and we have no plans to move any time soon (or any time not soon!), so if they can’t fix his vision, I’m sure he’ll adapt. But he is a sweet darling wonderful dog, so we’d like to make his remaining years as pleasant as possible.