malvasia bianca

For the week of January 16 – January 22, eight of the ten bestselling video games in Japan were for the DS, an outcome I would not have believed half a year ago, let alone at launch. The only reason why the hardware chart for that month doesn’t show a similar skew is because Nintendo ran out of DS units to sell a few weeks ago. And Nintendo’s current market-broadening strategy is really paying off: two of the games, both of which are million-sellers, are in the Brain Training series, and there’s no way traditional gamers are buying all of those. Apparently Yawaraka Atamajuku, which has also sold a million copies, is a spin-off of sorts of that series; and while Animal Crossing and Tamagotchi (1.6 and .9 million units, respectively) are in a very different genre from the above, they’re also hardly targeted at traditional gamers.

The Brain Training games are about to be launched in the US; I’d be shocked if they had the same effect here, though. (Then again, I’ve been shocked before.) If Sony would just loosen up on the PSP and let other people treat it as the technically superb handheld platform that it is, who knows what would happen, because the geek crowd here is very enamored with that machine. But Sony’s current dual nature as electronics manufacturer and content provider (of movies and music, not just games) means that they’re unable to give up control to that extent. Too bad; I’d like to see what a good homebrew portable culture could come up with. I am enough of a Nintendo fanboy to be happy about Sony’s mistakes, though. But the genre broadening implications of their success are simply important for the development of new forms of art.

(While I’m on the subject, I should mention this Lost Garden post, too.)

A followup to an old post of mine: I was just reading the liner notes to the Davitt Moroney recording of The Art of the Fugue, and it seems that there is good historical evidence that the unfinished fugue was, indeed, intended to be part of the work. Which makes me happy: it would feel wrong to me for as stunning a fugue as that one to not be part of a larger work.

Hmm: I’m used to thinking of the Grosse Fuge as standing on its own, but it was originally the last movement of Beethoven’s Opus 130. Following the above reasoning, should I prefer the fugue in its original setting? That’s the way that the Takacs quartet does it, now that I finally have that CD. (On my third try: Amazon would seem to have gotten a batch of bad disks. Very well-done return policy, though.) I’ll listen to it a bit more when I have a chance.

I like the Moroney recording of The Art of the Fugue a lot more than the aforementioned Leonhardt one, though I’m still looking for further recommendations. The start of the recording is a bit disappointing to me: Moroney articulates notes less frequently than I would, so the relatively simple textures of the early fugues sound a bit plain. (Doubtless many people would think my way of playing it is overwrought; for that matter, maybe I wouldn’t articulate as much when actually playing as I think I might when listening to it.) But by the second disk, all such thoughts have disappeared; by the time I get to the pause in the final fugue as the BACH theme gets introduced, I’m in awe; I’m almost ready to cry when the fugue breaks off; then the canons provide a bit of a breather; and then Moroney ends with the final fugue, this time with a completion that he carried out that is everything that is eminently satisfying. I’ll still take the Gould Well-Tempered Clavier recordings for my ultimate fix, but the best moments of this recording are fully its match.

Amazon has a program called “Mechanical Turk” where people can sign up do to tasks that computers have trouble with (primarily image processing, as far as I can tell) at the request of computer programs. A clearinghouse of human labor for our robotic masters!

I don’t know if anybody cares, but here’s a longish John Lennon interview that I hadn’t seen before.

I’ve been celebrating my newfound freedom to listen to whatever the the hell I want by going through the oeuvre of Charming Hostess. At least most of their oeuvre; browsing through their website, it would seem that I am missing Thick and Grim. So maybe I’ll have a followup post next week.

Anyways: I first heard about them when I heard one of their members (I would say their leader, but I’m honestly not sure what sort of organizational structure they have; I’ll just say that she gets credited with music and lyrics fairly frequently), Jewlia Eisenberg, on a KPFA program about Walter Benjamin. (I guess radio is good for something.) Whom I hadn’t read at the time, but I’d been hearing about him from various trustworthy sources.

They played a couple of songs from her album Trilectic; I can’t remember what one of them was, but the other one, “Meister der Kultur”, was totally designed to push all my buttons. It’s in German, about Asja Lacis berating Benjamin about how, even though they all agree that capitalism is the pits, he can’t get wholeheartedly behind communism, either. It’s sung a capella, with beautiful modal harmonies.

So I got that album; really really good. (Aside from “Meister der Kultur”, I also particularly recommend “Eskimo Suit”.) And then two of their other albums, Eat and Punch. Both of which are a mix of folk songs (from various Jewish and central European communities) and pop with some nice funk aspects to it (if I have my genres down right). The former is pleasant enough, though not necessarily what I would seek out on my own; the latter is quite good, and while I’m a big fan of their a capella songs, there are some very nice bass lines and (if I recall correctly) horn playing on several of the latter tracks. Yay.

I was expecting to really like their most recent album, Sarajevo Blues, but I’m a bit nonplussed. Like Trilectic, the album is focusing on a theme that I would think I’d be interested in, but the execution isn’t so great. “Death is a Job” is quite good, but even it is marred by excessively obtrusive beatboxing, as are some of the other tracks. (Not that I’m against beatboxing – in fact, I’d been thinking that I should look for some good examples of it – but it doesn’t work for me here.) Still, I’d rather be in a world with ambitious failures than bland successes…

When I first moved out here (summer of 1998), I didn’t listen to music much. When I was at home, my media time was largely spent playing video games; sometimes I listened to CD’s in the car, but once Liesl learned to drive, I took the bus to work. (During which I read books. Which was great. But I digress.)

In the summer of 2003, I started working at Kealia. Which wasn’t easily accessible on the bus from our old apartment, so we turned my signing bonus into a car down payment. For no very good reason, I got a radio without a CD player, so I listened to the radio going to and from work. Which was fun for a little while, but it didn’t take too long for it to get old.

So in January 2004, I bought a CD player for the car. From the only car stereo store I could find which wasn’t actively offensive. (Which is also how we ended up with two Saturns: I was planning to buy a Toyota the second time, but man, those guys were incredible. I was amused when one of the sales people put a lighted cigarette into his shirt pocket, at least. Alas, our older Saturn’s engine died earlier than it should have, so no more Saturns for us in the future. Again, though, I digress.) I have a fair number of CD’s around (mostly bought during my undergrad years), so I decided to go through the entire collection.

This took a while; my commute is pretty short, so I could only listen to about 3 CD’s a week. My pace more or less doubled a year later when I got the iPod, fortunately: I was getting a bit tired of how long it was taking. Though I was surprised at how few of the CD’s I got rid of as a result of the tour; I guess my tastes in music haven’t changed all that much over the last decade and a half. (My tastes in pop music have changed more than my tastes in classical music.)

But now I am done. Which leaves me at a bit of a loss: I have to actually think about what music I am going to listen to next. (The Zero Patience soundtrack got the nod first: “Pop-A-Boner” is a great song, though I’m sure the fact that it was one of the first CD’s on the trek so I hadn’t listened to it for two years had something to do with the choice as well.) I am struggling through, however. My music listening does seem to be a bit pop-heavy as a result, but I think that’s a temporary thing: doubtless next month I’ll go on a Shostakovich kick or something.

What is a little more annoying is that I would like to go out and buy more music, but I don’t have any great sources of recommendations right now, and I’m pretty out of touch with the last decade of music. So if everybody who reads this post could leave a comment telling me of a CD to buy, I would appreciate it. (Seriously, I would.) I don’t have any friends whom I currently spend much time talking about music with. I don’t listen to radio enough to get a feel for what new music out there I’d be interested in; I’ve been trying to get some of that information from podcasts, but with limited success. One problem with that is that I rarely hear a new song more than once; that’s almost never enough to get me to want to buy a CD, unless the song is really distinctive. And I just haven’t shifted into the mode of buying individual songs instead of individual tracks, for various reasons. If I’d been thinking, I would have rated my entire CD collection while listening to it and let Amazon give me some suggestions; oh well.

The third recipe in my “curry paste” series, and the second recipe in my “chicken curry by country” series. I’m a bit dubious about this recipe’s authenticity, even before my alterations. But it’s yummy, which is what counts. Though admittedly not as stunning as the first installment in the latter; I can’t think of the another week where I’ve enjoyed leftovers so much.

Indonesian Chicken Curry, from Pat Chapman’s Curry Club Cookbook

vegetable oil
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 inch cube ginger, minced
1 onion, chopped
1/2 tsp turmeric
2 Tbsp mild curry paste
1 1/2 lb chicken, cut into bite-sized pieces
5 dried red chiles
14 oz can diced tomatoes, mostly drained
2 Tbsp peanut butter
4 Tbsp dried shredded coconut
1 Tbsp soy sauce
2 Tbsp lemon juice
salt to taste

Heat oil in a skillet; fry garlic, ginger, onion, and turmeric for 5 minutes. Add curry paste, fry for 3 minutes more. Add chicken, and cook for a few minutes until cooked on all sides. Add remaining ingredients, and cook for another 10-20 minutes.

I subscribe to the paper edition of CounterPunch, but I’d never seriously looked at their website before today; clearly I’ve been missing something. Some examples, all from stories appearing today or yesterday:

• This is just scary. It does make me happy that it’s a Reagan appointee and former WSJ editor who’s pointing it out: I’m sure there are many areas about which I would disagree with the author, but at least some of our core beliefs agree.
• Plain old good reporting. Dig into DoD budget numbers, try to figure out what they mean.
• Noam Chomsky being Noam Chomsky. If we’re going to propose standards of behavior, we should examine our own action in light of them.
• Yes, voting machines can be hacked. Who knows the extent to which they have been hacked in real elections (my guess is only in a few relatively unimportant ones), but this should be reason enough to ditch the things unless they get subjected to much more scrutiny and come with a paper trail.

If only they would add an RSS feed…

Just how many Iraqis have died because of our invasion and occupation? The press doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of answering (heck, asking) this question, and it seems to me like a fairly important one. After all, the only potentially legitimate reasons for the war that I can think of are:

1. It helps us.
2. It helps them.

The original claims for the invasion were based on the first reason; they haven’t held up very well. (To be sure, I still believe that the first reason is the main cause, for a value of “us” that I don’t particularly identify with.) So what about the second reason? It’s great when a dictator falls from power. But we haven’t exactly seen a flowering of freedom, choice, and democracy in the country, and I’m ashamed to say that I’m not at all convinced that our occupation is a qualitative improvement over life under Hussein.

Which leaves the possibility that at least it’s a quantitative improvement in Iraqis’ lives. Which is a lousy reason for a war and occupation, but let’s run with it: can we get some numbers here? Was Hussein killing more Iraqis, or were we, for example? Here’s one article that tries to answer this question; unfortunately, halfway down the article, I get this feeling that it’s slipped into crackpot mode. This is, alas, a problem with CounterPunch: they talk about subjects that are woefully undercovered, and some of their reporting can be quite good indeed, but the editors have an unfortunate sympathy for crackpot science.

To be sure, I’m not completely convinced that the math in that article is bad; maybe statisticians would agree with it, or maybe it’s exposing a genuine difference in the statistical community. Anybody know? My statistical background is embarrassingly weak.

I e-mailed the author of the blog I mentioned recently, and he was kind enough to put together a lean manufacturing reading list.

Here’s an idea about exceptions that I hadn’t seen before: catch them as early as possible, and then

To avoid strong coupling between parts of the system we shouldn’t inform the caller that we had a problem. Instead, the object that catches the exception should set its own state such that it will answer future messages in the light of the problem that occurred. (In particular, the NullObject or SpecialCase pattern is useful here.)

I actually like exceptions just fine, but it would be interesting to think about how this suggestion might work out in practice.

Various mentions I’ve seen recently make me think I should learn more about lean manufacturing. An interesting quote:

Kaizen activities in lean manufacturing often begin with red-tagging, in which all superfluous inventory, tools and rubbish are marked with a red tag and moved into one corner. At the end of a week, if any tagged items haven’t been used, they can safely be disposed of. Perhaps software projects and teams could begin the move to agile by red-tagging tools and code…

This entry from that blog is worth thinking about, too.

Tonight’s dinner. It takes a bit too long to make on a weekday: it’s not as complicated as the list of ingredients might make you think, but it does take a little while and requires you to juggle a few skillets. Nice if you’re looking for something a bit special to cook during the weekend; also, it is a rare guest in my experience who won’t be pleased by being served this.

It’s from The Elephant Walk Cookbook; I trust the restaurants continue to serve the populace of the Boston area well. I’ve modified the recipe lightly to reflect the way we actually cook it; the most significant difference is that the original recipe calls for a couple of pounds of whole chicken pieces. (I’m just not into large pieces of meat.) I did, however, leave all of the esoteric ingredients intact, despite the fact that we rarely or never use several of them; please don’t let their absence from your local supermarket dissuade you from cooking this recipe. We did use star anise once when cooking this, but I didn’t notice a difference; we’ve never used shrimp paste whith it, and while I imagine I probably would notice a difference there, our kitchen isn’t well enough ventilated to want to play around with the stuff. (Rotting fish; yum!)

Cambodian Chicken Curry, from The Elephant Walk Cookbook

Paste:
1/4 cup vegetable oil
4 stalks lemongrass, trimmed and sliced
3 dried New Mexico (or Anaheim) chiles, soaked, seeded, and deveined
5 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
1 large shallot, coarsely chopped
1/2 inch piece of ginger (or galangal, if you can find it)
1 1/2 cinnamon sticks, cracked
4 whole star anise
9 cardamom seeds
1 small Asian nutmeg
16 peppercorns
1/2 tsp coriander seeds
1/2 tsp fennel seeds

1 cup water
1/4 cup coarsely chopped fresh cilantro stems
1/4 tsp turmeric
2 1/2 tsp shrimp paste
1/2 cup plus 1 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 can unsweetened coconut milk
1 – 1 1/2 lb chicken breast
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
2 Tbsp fish sauce
4 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 – 1 1/2 lb potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/4 inch thick slices

First, make the paste: heat oil in skillet, and add the rest of the paste ingredients. Fry for about 5 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to move it to a blender, and combine with water, cilantro, turmeric, and shrimp paste; blend until smooth.

In a large, heavy pot, heat 1 Tbsp oil, add half the coconut milk, and cook for 2-3 minutes. And curry paste and cook for another 2 minutes. Add the chicken, onion, fish sauce, sugar, and salt, and cook for 5 minutes. Add rest of coconut milk, and continue to cook.

Meanwhile, heat 1/2 cup oil in a large skillet; fry potatoes until golden brown. Add them to the main pot when done; cook for a few more minutes to let the sauce pervade the potatoes.

The Microsoft FAT patent scares me. In the past, I didn’t like software patents because patenting algorithms didn’t make any sense to me as a mathematician. But patents that prevent reverse engineering are directly harmful, too: those are my pictures on my digital camera, and it’s none of Microsoft’s business if I want to upload them to my Linux box. And then there’s this Microsoft patent application, which really is ridiculous.

Sigh. Should we just throw out the whole idea of patents, or are they actually helpful anywhere? Software patents are bad, even evil. Pharmaceutical patents are definitely used for evil: people die because of those things, people live in poverty because of these things. Maybe those are the areas where patents are currently getting abused the most; I’m getting increasingly dubious about the whole idea, though.

And I’m pretty dubious about the idea of copyright, too. Let’s give the whole thing up and start again. At the very least, let’s try to make sure we’re allowing the fewest protections consistent with the notion that their purpose is

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Setting the whole prior art issue aside, does anybody seriously believe that patenting the idea of IM’ing smiley faces serves to promote the progress of science and useful arts? Or even useless arts?

This is really funny.

Despite my complaints a few days ago, I do think that the Mercury News is a decent paper by today’s standards, and this morning they reminded me why. They’ve been reviewing 700 appeals of local criminal cases; the results will appear in a five-part series that began with a special section of today’s paper, the main article of which can be found here. (The link may go stale after a week.)

Good stuff; it’s not serving advertisers or power interests, it’s just reporters putting in the time and effort to dig up facts, construct an intelligent narrative around them, and, with a bit of luck, help make the world a better place.

The last section of The Fifth Book of Peace talks about Thich Nhan Hanh a lot, so I decided to read one of his books next. One of his big themes is “mindful behavior”; as I understand it, this means that, when you do something, you should simply be doing that, not thinking about or working on many things at once. When you’re walking, you should simply be walking; when you’re sitting, you should simply be sitting. I’m quite bad at that: right now, for example, I am not mindfully writing a blog post, but am also looking up periodically at what’s on the TV. (The anglerfish battle on Iron Chef, which is really quite something: maybe I should be mindfully watching it instead of writing.)

Anyways, it seems to me that some of the XP processes could be thought of as enabling mindful programming. Take TDD, for example: rather than trying to simultaneously figure out what your code should do and writing code that implements that as well as possible, you’re instead either writing the next test, getting a test to pass however you can, or tidying up your code. So you’re always focused on one quite narrow task, trying to do it as well as possible. Pair programming helps with this, too: it enables the driver to narrowly focus on implementing what is closest at hand. It’s not clear to me that the navigator is working mindfully, however: the navigator has the jobs of writing down potential future tasks as they come to mind (so the driver doesn’t have to worry about them), doing low-level checking on the driver’s work (e.g. syntax checking), and paying attention to their direction at a high level.

I suspect that the customer/implementor split could be seen that way, too: you’re either picking what’s most important or implementing the chosen stories. (Or estimating stories; I’m not quite sure how to do that mindfully.) And I suspect a mindful attitude would make it easier to accept the pause in your work caused by the integration process, too.

I guess I’m pushing the analogy a bit far by that last paragraph, and I doubt it’s profitable to explain all XP practices in terms of mindfulness. But I’m pretty sure that there’s something to this at the TDD level: it’s much closer to what I would understand mindful programming to mean than almost anything else I can think of.

It’s fun having an excuse to interact interactively with a language, as I work through the Learning SQL examples and exercises; almost all of my interaction with languages since I was an undergraduate has been mediated through a compiler, and I’d forgotten what I was missing.

Hmm: I suppose I interact with bash all the time, but most of the time the interactions are so simple that it’s not really the same thing. Then again, interacting with SQL is hardly as rich as interacting with Scheme. And, now that I think of it, I do evaluate Emacs-Lisp expressions in the *scratch* buffer not infrequently, or redefine functions in my .emacs file (.xemacs/init.el, actually, but never mind that) and evaluate them without reloading the whole file. So I guess my life isn’t as barren as I thought when I started this post. The point that interactive interaction with a language can be quite pleasant still stands, though.

At our weekly meeting today, my team members had some interesting comments on what had gone wrong over the last week. Among other things, we had planned to work on two 2-point cards; we break up cards that are larger than that, and in the past even cards that size have been problematic. In this case, we didn’t finish (or even come particularly close) to finishing one of the cards, while we breezed through the other card.

In the case of the card that proceeded smoothly, we already had a very clear, eight-step list of the tasks involved in carrying out the card. Normally, one person owns a card from start to finish (frequently pairing with others while working on it, to be sure); in this case, however, the card was owned by three separate people, as our schedules changed. But, because of the clear task list, it was very easy to hand the card off: I was the first owner of the card, and my pair partner and I finished off the first task one morning; I was too busy with other work that afternoon to be able to continue working on it, and one of my team members had just finished his card, so I handed my card off to him. (And he later handed it off to somebody else, perhaps because the latter was working alone in the evening.) Also, while I don’t think we ended up working on tasks in parallel (I was out of the office in manager training most of the week), we would have been able to parallelize many (though not all) of them. This would have been really useful if, for example, we hadn’t gotten around to working on the card at all until the latter part of week: by then, we might not have had enough time to finish the card without parallelizing, but the task breakdown would have allowed us to deploy our resources more flexibly.

We made progress on the other card, but not nearly as much or as quickly. (To be sure, it may have actually been more complex than the first card, despite the fact that both were 2-point cards: the points are just estimates, after all.) Again, it would have been nice to have been able to hand off the card: the card’s owner had to work on something else (something came up that only he could do well: a sign that we still need a bit more knowledge transfer, but that’s another story, and one which we understand better), so it would have really helped if somebody else had been able to easily pick up the work. Unfortunately, the lack of a clear roadmap made that difficult to do. It also would have been nice if we’d been able to parallelize the work, as it became clear that it was a bit trickier than expected; again, doing so was impossible.

So we’ve renewed our agreement that, if possible, we should break up each card into tasks during our weekly planning meeting. And, if we don’t quite understand the details well enough to do so then, then the card owner’s first task should be to come up with an implementation plan which takes the form of a task list. I’m pretty sure this will help us going forward. So, even though we’re not shifting roles as frequently the people on the podcast I discussed last weekend, it does seem that behaving as if we wanted the capability to do so would have some real benefits.

I just got a piece of spam whose subject line was “functor moustache”; for some reason, this amuses me.