manwith2brians

death of a blog

2008-01-19T17:33:00.000+11:00

It is with great sadness and a sizable lump in my throat that I must announce the closure of this blog.

It has proven too much of a chore to generate the amount of regular quality content and keep up to date with the multitude of comments and lively debate. My relationship with my family has been too significantly effected. The quality of my work has suffered. My normally supple and soft hands have become rough and calloused.

I regret that i'll be letting down the vibrant community that has evolved around this blog but the energy required to keep up this breakneck pace is just unsustainable.

(Only kidding - just jettisoning the previous inanity that comprised this blog - see blog.yieldself.net)

Perish the Thought

2007-08-05T11:39:00.000+10:00

This is an almost vaguely serious topic that I've been thinking about off and on.

It seems that we (well, perhaps just me and a few others) have an overwhelming desire to just accumulate stuff. Purging unnecessary cruft is not something we seem to feel naturally predisposed to do.

This applies to the work that I'm doing writing software. For me it has been something of a recent revelation how much more satisfying and liberating it is to delete code over just adding more. Creating code may add awesome new functionality that makes users weep with gratitude but always at the cost of increased complexity. Deleting code on the other hand just makes everyone's lives easier - users don't have to be confused by the presence of that button they never click (or if they do, technical support instructs them to never click it again after reinstalling their OS), developers don't have to worry that changes to that code is going to break something, project managers are happier because the numbers on various code metrics start to look better and stakeholders have increased confidance.

This also applies to stories. We do agile development because we believe it is the best way to ensure the greatest chance of successful delivery (as well the best opportunity to identify as early as possible the impossibility of successful delivery). What people may call requirements, features or use cases we prefer to call stories. They are called stories because they act as placeholders for a converstation with one of your stakeholders as opposed to reams of detailed documentation of functionality that will be better clarified when the time comes to actually implement it.

The stories have their relative complexity estimated and then wait until they are deemed important enough to get scheduled into an iteration. This complexity is estimated in 'story points' rather than expected duration because it is not sensible to pretend to be able to accurately predict actual time. Instead, the relationship between points and time becomes more predictable as the project proceeds. This relationship is called the team's 'velocity'.

These stories are best tracked using pieces of paper but can often also get tracked using software. It is very important that the stories can be moved around because their relative importance is likely to change in the course of the project. Deleting the story on completion is ok with software but even more satisifying to rip up an index card. Stories can sometimes accumulate (especially purely technical ones) however so the problem I have with all this is that nothing compels you to remove this sort of cruft.

Contrast this with my refrigerator. Once a partially consumed can of corn kernels gets ignored for long enough, it becomes increasingly urgent that action is taken. Unlike my parent's fridge which offers a fine collection of vintage jams and yogurts, my fridge is the one place in my life where nothing useless accumulates.

So you 've probably guessed this ground breaking concept already.

I think that velocity could be greatly enhanced by using perishable materials instead of index cards. A project could use pieces of bread for tracking stories (perhaps use vegemite to write on them). You can now not only rip up completed story cards but also eat them. If the team has a high velocity it should be possible to provide sandwiches for the team. Stories that just linger and no one cares about are going to become completely illegible and consequently eligible for composting.

A project with high risks might consider using raw meat (perhaps in addition to slices of eggplant and capsicum for vegetarians). I'm not sure what you could use to write on the meat - perhaps toothpaste. Unless the team maintains a good velocity some serious health and safety issues will arise. Otherwise, there's a team building barbecue every day.

Quixotic Dancer

2007-08-04T15:57:00.000+10:00

Considering it was written more than 400 hundred years ago, Don Quixote is surprisingly accessible and completely hilarious.

Who can possibly not empathise with the delusional romantic hero of the story and his imperturbable sidekick?

If that's what dementia is like then sign me up.

(Just trying to raise my profile - seem a bit more literary - ixnay onway ethay inanityway).

Flogging a dead CH

2007-07-18T21:30:00.000+10:00

This is the mother lode. This is why people write blogs and other people read them with bated breath.

Humour used to be a really complicated thing but now it can be churned out by some exploitative third world humourmongery under the euphemism of 'supporting a burgeoning economy'.

Here's a sample but be prepared to call an ambulance for when your viscera slurps out your sides:

Love and Marriage
Love and Marriage
Go Together like a clothes horse and carriage

The charge of the light clothes horsemen

A clothes horse, a clothes horse, my kingdom for a clothes horse

The twelve clothes horsemen of the apocalypse

The Clothes Horse Whisperer.

Now there's a cultural contribution.

Self Stalking

2007-07-14T19:12:00.000+10:00

This is a bit of a web 2.0 experiment for me. By that I mean the use of the various social networking web applications such as this, twitter, tumblr, facebook, myspace etc. as opposed to just the technical web 2.0 stuff like AJAX, prototype, script.aculo.us ruby on rails, etc.

Perhaps i'll just give it a 30 day time limit (Morgan Spurlock style) because frankly it's making me feel extremely self conscious and revoltingly narcissistic. I'm become a self stalker. No one reads this blog, my twittering or my tumbleblog because I haven't told anyone about them. So i'm alternating between living my life and then describing myself living my life. The description takes time so i'd more accurately describe my life by just describing the description.

What would philosophers like Bauldrillard and Derrida make of this technology (assuming they're not dead). Does it relate to their speculation about 'simulacra'?

It'll be obvious to most that the element i'm missing is the 'social' from social networking. I don't have any friends who know about my twittering or tumblr blogging. Very few know about this blog.

I'm graph consisting of one node and no arcs. Perhaps, even worse, a node with one arc. Maybe there are others like me. Perhaps there are many of us. Perhaps we are the majority. How would we ever know?

Disconnected people unite!

Unfortunately, that would annihilate the one thing we'd have in common.

Spectator Sport

2007-07-12T23:22:00.000+10:00

I don't understand the appeal of watching sport. Not any sport: car/motorcycle racing, cycling, athletics, football, golf, curling, swimming, diving. I've tried really hard but it seems something that'll just never understand.

Playing sport makes sense - it's fun, you can (and will) get seriously harmed and leads to fitness without the need to resort to something as soul destroying as running on the spot staring into a mirror while listening to awful commercial dance music.

The problems I see are:

sporting celebrities are usually the least eligible to become role models
part of the practice of enjoying sport is the memorisation of useless statistical information
conversations about sport mostly consist of the recitation of useless statistical information
conversations about sport often also involve some gratuitous racist or homophobic nonsense
sport is mostly appealing only to men
the appeal of racing sports (car, motorcyle, cycling) seems to mostly consist of schadenfreude as people crash at high speed into other people
the appeal of ball sports (football, soccer, tennis, netball) seems to mostly consist of schadenfreude as people express their frustration with the highly ambiguous and subjective rule systems with violence.

Having said all that, I should admit that i'm hopelessly uncoordinated and unfit. Perhaps i'd understand all this if i was capable of appreciating the effort and skill by virtue of having some skill myself and having ever gone to some effort.

Death to W

2007-07-07T19:54:00.000+10:00

I'm planning to take on all the big issues here, take no prisoners, pull no punches etc.

This is one that has really upset me for a while. I'm not sure what institution has the ultimate responsibility (OED perhaps) but it's something that requires immediate action. Essentially, we need to replace W. The main problems are:

It has a name that takes too long to say because it has three syllables (all other letter names consist of a single syllable).
It has a name that could equally describe uu
If anything, it looks more like double v.
It looks too much like an upside down M

It doesn't need to be elimated, just renamed. I have no problem with the pronunciation of W (even though that is not consistent). People called William and Wendy don't need to change their names or anything. We just need a new symbol and name.

There's possibly a minor logistical obstacle in arranging the replacement of all typewriter, computer keyboards as well as all printed materials featuring a W. The effort would pay for itself in relieving a great deal of needless anxiety.

The excellent work started in 1879 by the British Spelling Reform Association, then 1886 American Philological Association has not had any major victories over the last hundred years.

I admire the efforts by our young language pioneers to eliminate vowels entirely and replace whole syllables with numerals having similar phonetic characteristics. I just feel that these inchoate linguists will lose their momentum once they realise no one else has any idea what they are saying (what does 'gn' mean? does anyone really roll on the floor laughing?).

We need to take small cautious steps and select the lowest hanging fruit. W is just a disaster waiting to happen. The time to act is now.

No posts match your query.

2007-07-07T16:54:00.000+10:00

That's what people get when looking at an empty blog.

Bit of a slap in the face?

We use Lotus Notes where I work. We love it and spend considerable time talking about how vastly superior it is to all other email client alternatives. Regardless of the total gibberish you type in searching for a name in the address list, Notes will always return some results. That's just so you don't lose face. Notes never blames you for not understanding your question. It simply produces a number of random set of search results.

google on the other hand ... suddenly it's your fault that it hasn't crawled the least happening new blog off the blocks.