Fugu Talk

As I rewatched Band of Brothers this weekend, once again I just couldn’t believe that just before the paratroopers took off for the D-Day invasion, they were given new 80-pound bags to strap on their legs that they had never trained with. A last-minute inspiration from HQ that would supposedly provide them with more equipment and weaponry when they landed. As you might expect from a last-minute untested idea, it didn’t work well – after lugging around that extra weight, much of it was lost during the jumps, anyway.

This can’t-leave-well-enough-alone is common in software projects, too, although of course with less drastic consequences. Software is just too easy to change, and most people view what programmers do as “magic”. Abracadabra! On many projects I’ve suggested or argued for a slowdown, in fact micromanagement, of changes as a product approaches release, but in practice that’s mostly resulted in a bunch of meetings before release in which every idea for a change was approved. One company that made a big deal about process (ISO 9000 and all that) was proud of having hardcopy change orders that needed sign-offs, but those changes involved whole feature sets! A manager at another company didn’t even bother to pretend to understand – everyone would cram in as many changes as possible into a milestone release, the publisher would receive something severely buggy or crashing, the manager would throw a fit about why people couldn’t be more careful, and then when I proposed a “freeze” before release, she’d complain, “but then we can’t change anything”. Duh. It’s called risk management. If you could really throw in stuff without testing and get away with it, we wouldn’t need all these alpha and beta releases, or a QA staff, for that matter.

The last-minute tweak. Just don’t do it.

I learned from Daniel Weinreb’s blog that 6.001 Structures and Interpretations of Computer Programming is retired from the MIT computer science curriculum. There are many MIT courses that I didn’t understand (and barely passed) and realized later were really useful. This is a course that I didn’t understand but learned to appreciate after the fact. Of course I didn’t have much cause to use Scheme in my career (although a surprising amount of Lisp), but as software professionals try to treat their practice more and more as manufacturing (which strikes me as squeezing a cube into a circular receptacle), 6.001 and it’s accompanying text was one of the few works that pushes for intellectual and esthetic appreciation of programming and was still cool to cite among bloggers (a few mentions by Joel On Software). Oh well, back to design patterns and agile development.

The lazy man’s blog – post links (not even an embedded video!)

First, the Hudson Institute Conference on A  look at the 200-Ship Navy is the most interesting thing I’ve seen on C-Span 2, and I say that without sarcasm. I missed the first part, but the presentation by former Secretary of the Navy Don Lehman (Reagan administration) kept me up til almost three in the morning. He was sharp, witty, and blunt, pointing out the perils of bureacracy of bureacracy and feature creep, but maintaining that strong leadership could overcome it and it was up to the Navy to get it’s act together, get control of feature creep and install competition in procurement, restore it’s credibility, and tell Congress and the President and the Secretary of Defense what it needed. That all sounds abstract, but his elaboration on the particulars were entertaining and engrossing. For example, he thought the Navy needed more ships, but he wouldn’t go to Congress right now and ask for more money because the way things are now, that money would go down the drain. He pointed out that the current “fly-off” competition for new systems are useless because then a single supplier is selected, and only in the world of the Pentagon is no competition considered a good thing. And he mad an interesting comment on China – first he said, regarding the current capability of the Navy, that he wasn’t sure in a conflict with China over Taiwan that our carriers would make it out of there intact. Later, he opined that there was no ideological or political reason to ever go to war with China, but when war colleges on both sides start hypothesizing and planning for these scenarios, they can be self-fulfilling prophecies, citing the build-up to war with Japan in World War II.

On the lighter side, here’s an article on rooster sauce.

After the giddiness of the recent earthquakes subsided, I realized the earthquake map I viewed is an excellent presentation in the mode of Edward Tufte,

Each square represents location, magnitude and the time span in which it occurred. That’s efficient!

Well, a fan page, anyway. Although since HyperBowl is running as a web player, a HyperBowl Facebook app remains a possibility. In the meantime, while I continue polishing the new version, here’s the fan page.

HyperBowl’s Facebook Page

Promote Your Page Too

I’m the number one fan!

Since I only have six working TV channels, one of which is the Huntington Beach city channel (HBTV), I’ve been catching snippets of 100 Years of Huntington Beach, basically a pleasant trip down memory lane including reminiscences of the city’s first beach concession, the introduction of surfing, yada yada. But I was appalled by the segment mentioning the internment of local Japanese-Americans (including citizens and whole families) during World War II. It came off as, the General had a tough decision to make, and he made it. Followed by a resident remembering a nice boy she wanted to date before he got sent off to the camp. Oh, well. Sucks to be them.

So I sent a semi-snippy suggestion to the city that they edit the film to remove that segment, if they couldn’t do the topic justice, and received this prompt, polite and not altogether satisfactory reply:

Thank you for your thoughtful comments regarding the history video. I know we tried to include it as part of the history of Huntington Beach. I will share your concerns with others in leadership in the community. The program is featured on our government channel, website and was shown on KOCE. We have also distributed hundreds of copies to individuals, middle schools and high schools. Yours is the first “negative” comment we have received and I can assure you people of all different backgrounds have viewed the video. Thanks again for your input.

No-one-else-complained-about-it is the type of reply I used to get from apartment landlords, and it’s pretty weak as an academic argument. We-already-distributed-it-to-a-bunch-of-students is just upsetting. I don’t remember getting any of this subject when I was in school – I hope there isn’t a whole generation of kids who are learning that sending American citizens to live behind barbed wire because of their race was a “difficult choice”. And aside from portraying it as a debatable decision (I thought we were beyond that, like the debatability of separate-but-equal and anti-miscegenation laws), the segment was light on facts, not mentioning that the governer and President supported it, that it only took place in California and not even Hawaii where Pearl Harbor happened, and that many had their land usurped by unscrupulous neighbors.

Finally, I can’t believe all the “different backgrounds” included anyone who’s family was affected by this, or, say, Arab/Muslim/Persian Americans who might consider this type of thing could happen to them. (If there’s ever a war with China, I guess I better get packing). The HB centennial program includes a couple of talks on the internment, one from the last baby born inside the camp, so surely some people in the city government know better.

Whoever’s in charge of that film could take a cue from Ken Burns, who adjusted his documentary The War after complaints that he failed to depict Latino-Americans. He said afterward that the film was just as good after the change (although in some odd logic he said that validated his original methods – c’mon, you’re a media guy, just admit you’re a product of culture just like everyone else. I grew up with 70′s television, and the only minorities I remember from then is Speedy Gonzales, Pat Morita speaking fake Chinese in Happy Days, various African-Americans on the wrong side of the law in cop movies, and Bill Cosby. And in this supposedly post-racial time, the situation isn’t a lot better – TV land is by default white).

The War also has extensive treatment of the internment and the Japanese-Americans who volunteered anyway to fight in Europe and suffered terrible losses there. If Ken Burns isn’t your cup of tea, you can listen to George Takei talk about it on this web site, or just google “Japanese internment” – there’s plenty of information.

My cat received a nice birthday ecard today from her vet.

Which makes me wonder 1) is my cat more popular than me? and 2) if the next frontier of Web 2.0 is for pets. (Web 2.5?) A google search turned up quite a few – I don’t know how good they are, but there are some snappy names:

PetZume

CuteAsHell

PetCrash

MyPetFriends

PetFiles

YouPet

Aaron Mark’s The Complete Guide to Game Audio is one of my favorite game industry books, even though I know squat about audio (well, maybe that’s one reason I like it). Much of the career advice is generally useful to game industry freelancers, including tips on marketing yourself. I’ve noticed one common-sense tip on direct email marketing usually goes unheeded – do some research, find the name of the contact, and personalize the message as much as possible. I get a lot of game audio solicitations (it’s a tough business – I’ve only been one one game project that has used more than one audio person), and nearly all look like form letters without even addressing the name of my company.

So I nearly fell off my chair when I received an email that started with my name and included the name of my company. Just from that, I wanted to give the sender, Adgio Hutchings, a contract (never mind that I’m a one-person company making tiny games). And bonus, the attached PDF portfolio mentioned work that I’d seen in On The Lot:

Dance With The Devil

I wish more solicitations were like this, but I don’t really hold it against game audio professionals – I receive worse from product marketing managers who should know better. One middleware company launching a new product sent me a form email asking for meeting at GDC, and then a week later the same email, but addressed to a contact at another company and BCC’d to me. Isn’t a facility with email programs a minimal requirement for marketing positions? Another product manager from a telcom inquired about deploying one of my cell phone games. I asked which one? He gave a general description. But which one in particular? You can just try them all on my web site within a web browser. He repeated the same vague requirements. It was like a Turing Test in which the human failed.