malvasia bianca

I didn’t actually watch or listen to the Alito hearings, but I liked Johanna Rothman’s take on the subject. Compare it to her other post her hiring blog that day.

One of the most interesting entries for me on the Agile Toolkit podcast is the one on promiscuous pairing and the least qualified implementor. What the interviewee proposes is that, when starting on a card, the person who knows the least about it should work on the card, pairing with somebody who knows more about the topic at hand. The group should change pairs every two hours; each time, the expert works on a different card, while the former novice takes up the expert role (since he now knows more about the task at hand), and pairs with the person in the group who now knows the least about the task. So there’s no one owner for the card: instead, different people in the group work on it for four hours, in the novice role for two hours and in the expert role for two hours.

He has data to back this up, too. His team has measured its velocity using different pairing strategies and lengths, and, for example, has a significantly higher velocity when rotating pairs every two hours than when using a longer pairing duration. Hearing about these was a warning sign for me: until a few months ago, points in our group corresponded to actual time spent rather than a given story difficulty, which meant that it was impossible to measure velocity improvements (since actual time spent didn’t change). To be honest, right now it’s not clear to me how stable our point estimates are, but at least it’s conceivable that we could measure velocity differences, which makes the scientist in me happy.

Anyways, I mentioned it to my team, but got a lukewarm response; their attitude was that if I felt strongly about this, then we could give it a try, but they didn’t seem too excited. And I didn’t feel too strongly about it, so we let it slide. It did leave one idea, though: before, at each weekly planning session, we’d divided up the cards so every card had an owner. But this podcast suggested that doing so wasn’t essential. What we ended up trying was having each person pick one card that they owned, but leaving the extra cards unowned; then, when somebody finished a card, they could pick a card from the unowned stack. (Or just pair with somebody else for a while, of course.) Cards can also change owners; that’s somewhat rare, but I did hand my card off to another team member yesterday, since I was busy yesterday afternoon (and will be in manager training next week; we’ll see what I learn there!) and he had just finished his card.

The first few weeks were a little chaotic, but our velocity has actually been rising since we made that change. To be sure, I have no reason to believe that this change was the trigger for the velocity improvement: we might have been in a period of abnormally low velocity before the change. That was a month where we were working on several new areas of the code, and we had underestimated the learning curve necessary; we made this change at around the time that we started to get a handle on the new areas. Still, at least it’s evidence that not dividing up all the cards at the start doesn’t hurt our velocity! And I personally prefer the new way of working: focus on a card, get it done, and take stock of the whole team’s status once you’re done with that card, to see how your efforts could best be directed at that point. This ‘limiting your focus’ idea shows up all over the place in agile work, to good effect.

So I was just ordering a book for my dad’s birthday. (Cartographica Extraordinaire; I haven’t looked at it, but it’s recommended here.) Amazon was incorrectly claming that it hadn’t been published, and the publisher’s web site was a little strange, so I didn’t feel like ordering from either of them.

After a few days of checking on Amazon, I remembered that other online bookstores exist, so I went to order through Barnes and Noble. It claimed that they could ship it within 24 hours, so I went ahead with ordering it there. After a bit, I got to the place where I had to enter my Dad’s current mailing address; I was pretty sure I knew it, but I wanted to double-check.

So I was about to go and get my address book out of my backback, when I realized there was a faster way: I went over to Amazon’s web site and got it off of my list of shipping addresses there. Yay.

This probably says something (about me, about the web), but I’m not sure quite what. Among other things, it says that I use computers, but am not in the habit of storing certain kinds of information on them that many other people are; call me Mr. Backwards. But I happily give all my information away to Amazon. Or not so happily in some cases, which is one of the motivators for my dbcdb project, but in this particular instance it was useful.

I recently bought a 3-CD set of Beethoven’s late string quartets. (Performed by the Takacs quartet; quite good.) On my way into a meeting yesterday, I put in the third CD; before doing so, being somewhat geeky, I looked at the timings on the first few tracks; happily, the first four tracks, comprising the first quartet on the CD, would take about 20 minutes, which is about how long I expected the drive to take.

So I was kind of surprised when, pulling into the parking space, I was 13 minutes into the second track: the second track was only supposed to be 6 minutes long! Looking at the notes, the second track on the first CD was supposed to take 13 minutes and 28 seconds, which was just how long this track took. Did I accidentally put in the first CD? No, the first and second were in the jewel case. Did I get two copies of the first CD in the case? Ejecting the CD, it sure didn’t seem that way. So maybe there was a printing error in the book. (I didn’t know the quartets in question well enough to be sure which one I was listening to.)

I had to go to a meeting, but on the drive home, I fast-forwarded to the tenth track, which should have been the Grosse Fuge, which I would recognize; it wasn’t. So, when I got home, I compared the first few seconds of the first and third CD’s; identical. The label printed on the front of the third CD was simply incorrect.

A manufacturing glitch I hadn’t seen before. I’m not sure why I find it amusing, but I do.

A week ago, we finally finished all the cards that we’d planned for the week. I am hugely embarrassed that it’s taken so long, given that we’ve been trying to do the planning game for about ten months. But we’d been getting it pretty seriously wrong for a long time – reading through that post, all I can say is that I was really ignorant and must have been wearing some seriously rose-colored glasses. For the last couple months or so, though, we’ve been doing it better.

Not enough better, though, one might claim, given that we never managed to finish all the cards planned for a week. We frequently finished almost all of them as well as some unplanned cards, so our velocity hadn’t been going down, but there was always one card that we couldn’t do for external reasons. There was one partner integration test that took forever to do while cleverly stringing us along, thinking that we were always one answer from our partner away from getting it working. So we kept planning that card every week, thinking that this would be the week we’d finish it. And we kept on not finishing it, for week after week; I think it kept us going for two months solid. And then once we had that done, there was another card with external dependencies that strung as along for a few weeks as well. Eventually, we realized that we just had to wait for the external dependencies to be satisfied, so we left that card off the schedule for a few weeks, giving us our opening.

When I noted in our weekly meeting that this was the first week where we’d finished all the planned cards, one of my team members said “it’s because all the cards were 1-point and 1/2-point”, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that as well. We can deal with 2-point cards, but they give us less margin of error; smaller cards are much easier. (Unfortunately, we have a lot of 2-point cards for the rest of this month; I’ll try to avoid that in the future.) One way in which we aren’t doing strict XP is that not all of our cards make independent business sense: we’re not always clever enough to be able to come up with small cards that do make independent business sense, and given the tradeoff between small cards and independent business sense, we’re chosing the former. (Quite correctly, I think.) Perhaps playing into this is the fact that the person playing the Customer role is more technical than ideal, so we have less pressure on that front than some teams would. Though, actually when we do the monthly release planning (he’s not involved in the weekly planning unless some sort of surprise or prioritization judgment call comes up), he frequently doesn’t look at the individual cards: he plans things more a feature at a time. Which is nice: our monthly releases are pretty coherent, which is where it matters. And they’re starting to get quite predictable, which is great.

The dogs, or at least Yosha, have not been happy recently. First, they were kenneled over the holiday break – we didn’t go anywhere, but we didn’t realize that we weren’t traveling until after we had to drop them off. (Just as well: we really needed sleep for a few days there, and weren’t in much shape to look after them.)

And last Saturday, five days after we picked them up from the kennel, they got haircuts; Yosha apparently was not at all well behaved during his. And then we went out to dinner that evening (Cafe Brioche), and on Sunday we went out for lunch (dim sum at Bamboo Garden) and combined grocery shopping with some other stores.

The result was that I looked over at Yosha on Sunday and he was quivering (shaking, really). A little of that may have been being cold because of the haircut, but mostly it was just nerves. And he was doing it again yesterday. Poor guy.

In the future, we will remember to not schedule haircuts a week after trips.

The new Apple laptops look great; I’m pretty sure we’re going to get one. The CPUs should be plenty powerful enough, they have more than enough hard drive to keep me happy, the graphics card is better than I expected (I think; I have to look into its details).

I’ll probably wait three or so months, to give the chip switch a little bit of time to settle down. And I’m still planning to pair it with an Ultra 20; I should ask around at work to see if we’re planning a speed bump on those soon, since they have been out for a while now.

Another very easy Indian recipe, basically a vegetable curry on a bun. Some of the quantities may be a bit off: this recipe I’ve modified (much) more than most.

(I like eating ethnic food on buns. Go tortas!)

Pao Bhaji, from Pat Chapman’s Curry Club cookbook.

1 onion, chopped
5 cloves garlic, minced
vegetable oil
1 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 Tbsp mild curry paste
14oz can mixed vegetables
14oz can corn
8 oz tomato sauce
2 tsp garam masala
salt to taste
6-8 buns

Heat oil in skillet; fry onion and garlic until soft. Add curry paste and spices, and cook for another thirty seconds. Drain vegetables and corn; add them and the tomato sauce to the skillet. Cook for a few more minutes, to reduce the liquid a bit. Add garam masala and salt; serve on toasted buns.

Looks like there’s a new version of WordPress out. The features look neat, too. I guess I should consider upgrading soon, even though it’s only been a few weeks since the last time I upgraded…

One thing I forgot to mention about Broadway Melody of 1940: I liked the way they showed the differences in ability between Johnny (Fred Astaire’s character) and King (George Murphy’s character).

Right at the start, they’re dancing together; to my untrained eye, there weren’t obvious differences in the quality of their dancing. (I’ll watch it a bit more closely next time.) But later in the movie, you see them differ in two important ways:

• Johnny is always coming up with ways to improve the choreography of the dancing.
• King engages in misguided behavior, sometimes seeming actively self-destructive.

About the first of these: dancing isn’t choreography, so one could imagine that they’re both equally skilled dancers, but Johnny simply happens to be a better choreographer. And that’s probably some of what’s going on. I actually have no idea to what extend dancers are, or should, be thought of as choreographers; Johnny’s explanation of why one of his suggestions was an improvement seemed to make sense, though, and suggested to me that good dancers should, at the least, understand the benefits of local elements of choreography and be able to refine them, even if their grasp of global elements might not be so hot.

But the other thing that’s clear from this is that Johnny thinks about dancing all the time, in a way that King doesn’t. Which is very important: if you want to get good at something, being obsessed with it is a big help. I just finished reading Musashi (quite good, by the way), and there, too, we see Musashi following his art with single-minded determination, constantly trying to improve his art, and applying lessons from all aspects of life to his art.

This is something that I am both good and bad at. I am a fairly obsessive reader, so, for example, I’m the only person in my software group at work who is reading books about programming or managing whenever I go to the bathroom. (Incidentally, I’m kind of running out of good books to read on those subjects. Though I do have books that I’d like to re-read, to be sure. But I also am in a bit of a rut, and should be spending more time broadening my programming, I suspect.) Which is, of course, hardly the only way to improve your skills, but reading definitely helps me.

The flip side, though, is that I will read all sorts of random stuff, and flit from topic to topic. Which can be useful for future career growth (not that one’s career is the measurement of one’s success, to be sure), but it also means that I’m quite unlikely to develop the level of skill that either Fred Astaire or Miyamoto Musashi had in their respective areas of interest. Not that they were necessarily narrow-minded; while Musashi was doubtless a better swordsman than artist, his paintings are lovely. (I wish I could find some good links to show you.)

Anyways, back to the movie: another difference between Johnny and King is that King makes a lot more mistakes, often engaging in what seems like actively self-destructive behavior. I make a lot of mistakes, too; some of them are simply areas that are hard to master, or areas where an expert could show me what I’m doing wrong and, with more or less effort, I could do the right thing. E.g. it took me a while to be able to successfully put the planning game into practice; I think I’m getting there now, but if I had a good XP coach, it probably wouldn’t have taken me nearly as long.

But I’m sure that I also could be seen as engaging in self-destructive behavior; for example, I’m sure that people could point out ways in which my actions while I was trying to be an academic were actively counterproductive. The interesting thing there, though, is that my actions may well have been quite productive/constructive at a higher level – academia wasn’t a good fit for me, so actions that look counter-productive in the context of me getting another academic job may have been ways in which my subconscious was acting productively to get me steered to a better path.

Or maybe not; maybe I just got lucky. (And I’m still very curious to what extent my current job is a good fit for me, and what I’ll be doing ten years from now.) There’s a similar ambiguity in the movie: at some level, it seems like being a dance star perhaps isn’t the best fit or King, so maybe it’s best if he gets out of that now.

I’m glad to see my local paper writing about the risks journalists face, but perhaps the article should have mentioned the risks that Al Jazeera journalists face. It bothers me a lot to see my government doing stuff like that. (Along with a lot of other things my government does these days, of course.)

Some nice rants. (Links from Rob Bray.)

Interesting article by Richard Gabriel. Something to add to my list of things to do when I have more free time. Or my list of things to consider creating time to do; maybe if I just tried to write one haiku a day, I could work it into my current schedule…

We did indeed make a new batch of curry paste last weekend; joy joy joy. Here’s a recipe you can use it in; extremely easy, though it wants to marinade from one hour to one day. So it’s not a bad strategy to take 5 minutes to prepare the marinade after dinner some evening, for use the next day.

Jeera Chicken, from Pat Chapman’s Curry Club cookbook.

1 1/2 lb boneless skinless chicken breast
1 tsp turmeric
1 Tbsp mild curry paste
1/2 cup water
1 tsp salt
2 oz salted butter
2 Tbsp cumin seeds

Cut the chicken breasts into bite-size chunks. Mix turmeric, curry paste, water, and salt; marinade the chicken in this mixture for 1-24 hours.

Melt butter in skillet, add half the cumin seeds and the chicken (with its marinade). Stir-fry until cooked; towards the end of the cooking time, toast the remaining cumin seeds in another skillet, and add them to the chicken when done.

I was listening to the radio part of the way home; something I normally try to avoid, but I’d done more driving than normal today, and my glove compartment had run out of CD’s. Anyways, I caught part of a segment about recent Supreme Count confirmation hearings, and part of the gist of the segment was that it’s tactically a good move for nominees to refuse to talk about possible cases that might come before the court, on the grounds that doing so would be improper.

I don’t know if that is tactially good or not (and don’t really care), but why on earth am I supposed to believe that it’s even a good idea for nominees to avoid giving their views on upcoming cases, let alone improper? Is this some standard nicety of legal ethics, or something that supreme court nominees have just made up? On the surface, it seems really weird: if you’re hiring somebody for a job, you want to do everything you can to get an idea of how that person would perform in the job; with a job as important as Supreme Court justice, wouldn’t that go double? Do other professions do this in their job interviews? Do doctors refuse to speculate on how they would treat future patients, referring questioners to their previous work instead?

To be sure, people change their views on things all the time, and any decent Supreme Court justice would admit as much. And one would hope that, in evaluating the quality of a potential justice, senators would look for more than whether or not he (or she, but probably he) would vote in the ways that the senator would prefer, looking in addition (or even instead) to see what reasoning the potential justice used to come to opinions. But that’s no reason to not try to get all the information you can about a candidate!

Maybe it’s just senators wishing that they didn’t have to answer questions when they were running for election about how they would vote. Democracy would be so much neater if we didn’t have to deal with such rude inquiries, after all…

A bit clunkier than I expected, but I’m sure they’ll fix that in a future revision of the hardware. Anyways, interesting differences between the DS and previous Gameboys:

• Two screens.
• Bottom screen is touch sensitive.
• Microphone.
• Wireless.

Wireless is obviously a good idea; ever since the Pokemon games, Gameboys have been about communication, so we might as well make it as easy as possible. I don’t have much of an opinion about the microphone; it’s probably really cheap for them to add, and maybe there are good uses lurking there somewhere. (Blowing into the mike to get Mario Kart powerups does not, I think, qualify.)

The touch sensitive screen turns out to be an unexpectedly great idea, though. In my limited experience, touch-only games can be fun, but have a bit of a gimmicky taint to them. Most games these days involve you moving around some sort of avatar of yourself; you can make that work with a touch screen, but it’s not particularly natural. But it can be a quite natural way to manipulate other parts of your environment; in Animal Crossing, for example, the touch screen is great for managing your inventory, and is essential for writing letters.

Of course, the problem that arises is that, in most games, you want to both move your avatar and manipulate your environment. You can find ways to do this either only using the touchpad or entirely avoiding the touchpad, but it usually feels like an unpleasant compromise. Animal Crossing is a good example here; Liesl uses the touchpad exclusively (with the stylus), while I use the D-pad and buttons for normal movement, use the touchpad with my fingers for inventory management, and use the stylus for writing letters. Either Liesl’s choice or mine works well enough; both are somewhat ungainly.

I’ll be very curious to see how the Revolution controller works. Clearly, in retrospect, the DS is a testing ground for Revolution mechanics; but you’ll have both hands free to control things, so maybe some of these problems won’t arise. I can imagine that moving with a joystick in the left hand while pointing at objects with your right hand will feel very natural, for example.

And then there’s the two screens. Total gimmick, as far as I’m concerned; it doesn’t play a major role in any of the games that I have, and in most of them I’m completely unaware that the top screen exists while playing it. There’s a reason why media is moving widescreen, and it’s not solely because of legacy influences from movies: your visual field is wider than it is tall. I actually am perfectly happy with a 4:3 screen ratio, but I see no reason to double the height. There’s very little that can be usefully done with the second screen that couldn’t be done just as well by making the original screen a little wider, and using some of the screen traditionally and some of it for the extra purpose.

The one natural model that I could think of for a vertical form factor is paper; an interesting example, given the possibilities that the touch screen opens up. Even there, though, you have a workaround: if you’re going to be doing a lot of writing in a game, then it doesn’t rely on traditional controls, which means that you can turn the whole unit sideways. Which, apparently one of the most popular games in Japan does.

Incidentally, I’m not completely sold on the widescreen form factor, either; I don’t own a PSP, so I don’t know for sure, but that thing looks too wide to me. I’m curious what the DS would be like if the top screen were wide, taking up the whole unit, and was also a touch screen; that seems to me like it might have potential. Hard to say without playing such a beast, though.

I’m definitely glad I picked up a DS, and Liesl is using it all the time. I wish the game library were a bit richer, but it’s getting there, and the touchscreen is a great idea.

A while ago, I went looking for Cole Porter DVD’s; unfortunately, there wasn’t much available. (For all I know, not that many of his musicals ever made it on film.) I ended up with a five-movie box set, which sounded good until I started actually watching them.

High Society is actually pretty good; I should watch it again. Kiss Me Kate is a wonderful musical; I might enjoy the movie version if I weren’t aware that it’s horribly gutted. (Fortunately, this version is available.) Neither Silk Stockings not Les Girls did much for me.

I put off watching Broadway Melody of 1940 for a long time; I’m suspicious of any movie whose title makes me think that they churn out one every year. But we finally got around to it yesterday, and it’s a lot of fun! Classic Fred Astaire black and white dancing. I’d heard almost all the songs before, but there’s a reason for that. (Though I don’t understand the popularity of Begin the Beguine.) Eleanor Powell is pleasant enough. I’ve seen better stories before, certainly, but I’ve seen worse as well.

Fortunately, there’s more Fred Astaire available on DVD now; I should work through that boxed set next…

(I should insert a rant here about how all stage performances of all time, or at least going forward, should be available for viewing, but I’m not up for it right now.)

Hey, this is cool. Makes me wish I were still teaching. Well, not really, but still.

I’m starting to really miss good food. I’m not up for going out to eat right now, I’m not up for grocery shopping, I’m not up for cooking, and my body is only just now up for eating. But I was watching Iron Chef last night, and my taste buds let me know that they were feeling underused, and that in particular the chef’s choice chirashi sushi from Sushi Tomi would be just fine right now, thank you very much. And today I’ve been feeling like Indian food.

There is a problem with the latter, though, totally aside from my condition: the Indian food that I feel like is from the Curry Club cookbook, and it depends on their excellent mild curry paste. Which we are currenty out of. I think that I’ll be up for spice shopping and paste making by the end of this week, though, at which point some Redang Degang, Pao Bhaji, and Jeera Chicken will be in order.

Here’s the spice paste; recipes for dishes to follow.

Mild Curry Paste, from Pat Chapman’s Curry Club cookbook.

60g coriander seeds
30g cumin seeds
20g fenugreek seeds
25g gram flour (a.k.a. besan)
20g garlic powder
20g turmeric
20g garam masala
5g dried curry leaves
5g asafetida
5g ginger powder
5g cayenne pepper
5g mustard powder
5g black pepper
175-250ml vinegar
175-250ml vegetable oil

Roast and grind the coriander seeds, cumin seeds, fenugreek seeds, and curry leaves. Mix together with the rest of the spices as well as the vinegar, adding water if necessary to make a creamy paste. Heat oil in a skillet; add paste, stir-fry until water is cooked out. Store in fridge and use as necessary.

After sleeping for about 14 hours each of the last two days, my flu seems to be getting under control. I’m not healthy yet, but I’m pretty sure I’m on the mend.

Anyways: when I was a kid, I read a lot. Miranda, however, hasn’t shown any real interest in reading yet. She has lots of books, and very much enjoys being read to, but for whatever reason she doesn’t feel compelled to do it herself. Which bothered me for a little while, but I’m used to it by now.

Over the last three or so months, though, she’s gotten very into writing. She has stories she wants to tell; they get carefully sounded out and written down. One of my favorite recent examples:

Once upon a time, a little girl went out into the woods. She went until she was tired. The next day she saw a ball. Luckily she had a gown and a pair of high heels, so she went inside. She danced with the prince for a long time. It was fun. [Something I can’t read omitted.] He decided to be a good pirate. So he filled out a form and got a boat.

(You can tell I’d been playing Sid Meier’s Pirates! when she wrote this.)

At least that’s the way I’d write the story; she spells it more like this:

Wos opm o tm a littl grll wit at in to the wos she wit in til she was tiyrbe.

Which is probably a bit hard for some people to read, but for those of us used to her writing, it’s pretty clear. I imagine her spelling will improve dramatically once she starts reading, though.

I don’t know how much her desire to write instead of read is just the way she is and how much of it comes from the fact that she’s been doing so much kid writing at school over the last year and a half. Either way, it’s a lot of fun to be around.