Wooden Ships & Iron Men

Most board games are designed to engage an otherwise unsocial group of acquaintances in a social manner. This is interesting, but not always challenging. My rule of thumb with a board game is this, if I think that it would make a great drinking game then I generally don't like it. 99.9% of board games sold today would make great drinking games.

There are exceptions to all rules though and when it comes to board games I've found something really unique and challenging in Wooden Ships & Iron Men. The thing about Wooden Ships & Iron Men by Avalon Hill is that it requires sobriety. If you're drunk when you play, you'll lose every time. WS&IM replicates twenty-seven different battles from the age of fighting sail. These include the Battle of Trafalgar, Battle of the Nile, Lake Erie, and others of the 1776-1815 era. It accomplishes this through a myriad of complex rules that lay out a believable game experience. I've studied the era, I myself live on a sailboat and I feel that this game simulates in no small part the reality of such battles. Ships of the line and frigates are commissioned for each player and then placed on the board. The game can accommodate up to four players at a time. With two players, the setup alone was complex enough to require a full hour. This is a game I could get into.

The one failing of WS&IM is the constant consultation of the rule book as you cycle through up to ten steps for each turn. From cannon loading to melee, from sail preparation to movement each step of of the way requires a healthy amount of strategic thought and then an equal amount of delving into the rule book. No one, save the idiot savant or the odd person with photographic memory, could ever hope to understand the entire rule book by heart. Its simply that complex.

Clearly this game is ripe for automation. A computer version of WS&IM would be brilliant. But, its been done. More than once. Not one implementation of the game on the computer really caught on with the core WS&IM fan base. Why not? Well, the first version of the game arrived during the early days of computer graphics. It tried to do 3D stuff way before it was really a good idea to do 3D stuff. The game was lost in a mess of poor graphics and odd sounds. The other implementation I've run across was written in Java and I believe had the right approach. It tried to simulate the game play of the board game, not improve upon it. Its my belief that a computer version of WS&IM really exists to reduce the game down to the strategy elements, to eliminate the annoying rule book consultations. The Java VASSAL Game Engine is setup to do just this. This looked like the right thing, until I tried to play it. The GUI was horrible and made the game in essence unplayable.

So this leaves open the opportunity for someone to come along and build a very nice, true to the game, software version of WS&IM. The GUI will be key, offline operation will be a requirement but the most interesting avenue is in online gaming. Not online live, up to the second gaming. More like online email chess. This game begs to be played slowly, over months. Any online system should facilitate a slow managed game between any number of participants.

I have no time to build such a system. I'd love to do it, or better yet to help direct someone out there who has the time to do it. I've registered wsim.org and I plan to set it up to become the intermediary for a WS&IM community. I can see it all now. It will be amazing, if I ever get the time. In the mean time, its back to the cardboard pieces and the rule book.

Air bags and seat belts

Dear sir or madam, thank you for inventing the seat belt and the air bag. Also, the notion of a crumple zone was a damn fine idea. For that matter, here's to all of you out there who work on automobile safety. You're my new best friends.

My mother survived a rather nasty car accident last night. She was returning home from a cooking class. She sat in the turning lane waiting for the left green arrow to indicate that it was her turn to enter the intersection. When that happened she entered the intersection and made the left turn only to find an oncoming car speeding through the now very red light. When I say red, I mean red. Not yellow. Not yellow/red. Not even just-red. Red. The oncoming driver was clearly not paying attention to the light and as a result slammed her car head long into the front on my mother's car at or above the speed limit for that street, 35MPH.

My mother is no spring chicken. She's 64. She's an amputee. She's survived many things, yet to date she'd never been in a car accident. Not one. She's one of those "good drivers" you read about in mythology. She was in her Ford Windstar Minivan and thank God or her good sense that day, she had her seat belt on. The other vehicle was piloted by a young woman, it was a small truck.

Head on collisions are the generally the most survivable. If mom had not made the complete left turn, or had reacted to the oncoming traffic and swerved its likely that I'd be writing a very different story. Both cars were totaled. Both drivers essentially okay. Not uninjured, but not severely hurt either. Truly a miracle of modern engineering and divine providence.

But wait there's more. See, I was in Philadelphia visiting a friend. Upon arrival last night at the train station he picks me up and starts telling me about his wife's car accident that happened just an hour earlier. This was six hours before my mom would experience her head on collision. My friend's wife had their two children in the car, 3 and 4 years old. She is 9 months pregnant, due any day now. They are all fine. Children's car seats, quick thinking and crumple zones saved the day. They have a car in need of repair, but luckily no one was injured. Just a little scared.

So, my mom is okay, but somewhat physically bruised by the impact. The effects of the seat belt and the air bags, which went off in slow motion as she describes it, are apparent. She's a 64 year old woman who's appears to have just been beaten up in a prize fight. Battered and bruised, but okay. Mentally things are more complicated. You see, my father died in a car accident making a left hand turn in December of 1988.

My dad was hit during the turn. It wasn't head on, it was into the driver's door. He was in a Nissan 300Z, the young and very drunk man who hit him was in a small size jacked up late model pickup truck with beefy custom bumpers. My dad likely never saw it coming, or so I like to think. Mom told me of the horror she experienced last night watching the two cars merge, the last seconds before impact she saw the oncoming truck and felt as though that would be her last experience on Earth. Then the air bag inflated, this was not her time. My dad was making his left turn, then wham. The drunk asshole behind the wheel of the truck planted the front bumper squarely into his head.

So, the take home points are:

• Wear your seat belts.
• Buy a car with air bags.
• Buy a car with a high safety rating.
• Keep that passenger side airbag on unless you're carting around small children.
• Don't run the yellow.

One final lesson. Tell your parents you love them every time you speak to them. You never know what awaits you at the next left turn.

Hydrogen powered sailboats

HaveBlue.com is onto something great. Sailboats started off as the the most environmentally sound method of transportation, but over time they have become polluters. Boats spill the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez into the oceans every year as they refuel, leak or otherwise interact with fossil fuels. HaveBlue will have a commercially available complete hydrogen based system for propulsion for boats by 2006. Bravo. My favorite aspect of the system they've come up with is that it is designed such that it can refuel itself using water purification techniques and available natural power (wind, solar, etc). It is essentially a perpetual energy source. My next sailboat will be, silent, self-refueling, and completely fossil fuel free. Maybe next someone could adapt this for use in a sailboat so I can be nearly pollution free.

Underwater Vacation

When this opens up to the public and if it isn't insanely expensive, I'm going to book a week. I love the water and the oceans and even if I don't see a single example of marine life through my room's windows, just living underwater for a while would be worth it.

The rescue fire

I use it, you should too. After a prolonged and contentious development period its wonderful to see the Mozilla guys have such a roaring success. 25,000,000 copies downloaded in only 99 days has got to be second only to the original Netscape browsers. Thunderbird and Sunbird are coming along nicely as well. I hope that this trio of applications will someday rival Microsoft's Exchange and Outlook combination. The proper application of open standards and intelligent engineering seem to be making a comeback. For all you developers of web sites, listen up. Ignore Firefox users at your own peril. Design your site to work with the two most popular browsers out there - Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox. This is also a good time for everyone to remember the roots of the web and its first web browser.

You've been warned

Who's more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?

– Kenobi, Obi-Wan (Ben)

I find the stock markets to be fascinating. Enough so to risk some very small amount of money on the perceived value of some of my favorite companies. Sometimes perception is reality, the stock market is living proof of that. In the footer to my blog page you'll find a link to my stock recommendation list on ClearStation. I'll let you know right now that I'm no good at picking stocks. I have no background in the field, I have a terrible track record, and I make bets based on my gut not the fundamentals. Notice I said bets. I find that my investing style is no better than my ability to play Craps, ask any of my friends how bad I am at that and you'll get the picture. The only way I manage to stay at a table more than five minutes before loosing my shirt is by sticking to Oscar's Grind. Now, if after all that, you have an interest in following my investing advise go right ahead. Consider yourself warned.

Horoscopes

SCORPIO (Oct. 24-Nov. 21): It's not your imagination. No one really understands you, but who cares? They all adore you. Rock stars, super models and Scorpios all share the same problem – under that tough-as-nails exterior beats the heart of a sensualist.

I couldn't have made that up if I tried, and in fact I didn't. I have the newspaper trimming to prove it. If I owned a scanner I'd have scanned it in and posted the image. I found this in the Boston Herald while having a beer at the Sail Loft a month or two ago and I've been carrying it around in my wallet for amusement sake since then. It popped out today when I went for my credit card at a store and that's what prompted this entry.

I'm a Scorpio, born October 27th, 1971. Its been my experience that one's astrological sign has absolutely nothing to do with who you are or what you do. In fact, it goes against my basic beliefs to believe that there is any correlation at all. Then along came this humdinger.

Today, when I found this clipping in my wallet, I laughed and then I was concerned. Why had I clipped this? I never clip anything from the paper. I relish a skinny wallet, to place even a clipping into it is no small thing. But there it was, taking up space in my wallet and my mind. Why did it rate so high? A horoscope of all things.

I must have related to it on some deep level the day I read it. I can remember that day at the Loft, I remember cutting it out while laughing to myself, and I remember placing it in my wallet. Do I want to believe that I'm a sensualist? That somehow I share traits with rock stars? Am I in fact misunderstood, and if so do I like that? Do I secretly wish I had adoring fans?

Then it struck me. This horoscope, like all the others I'd casually read and left behind, was an example of creative writing. Nothing more, nothing less. It was designed to resonate with the majority of the readership and hook them into reading the next one. For all the associated mysticism, horoscopes in newspapers are a sales tool. Everyone of them tries to trick you into believing that it was written specifically about you.

On that day, I needed a boost. Hence my lunch of a burger and a beer at the Loft, something I don't often do (burger - fatty, beer - not good during the work day). This horoscope helped too. I did feel better after reading it. Good enough to go back and face whatever it was that was keeping me down that day. Well, the beer helped too.

What is my responsibility to you, the reader of this blog?

I value impartiality above all else in my news sources. NPR, the BBC, and other news agencies that continue to value this are my choices for news. FOXNews, Rush Limbauch and the like are examples of what I consider agenda-news and I avoid it like the plague. I used to work at a news paper, I worked as a photojournalist before I appreciated this distinction. One of my jobs was spot news photography. In that role I'd listen to the police scanner and wait for a shooting, fire, school bus accident or some other news worthy or attention grabbing event and then I'd speed off and take the most poignant (read: gory) pictures possible. There came a day when I put two and two together and discovered that I was fueling, in a small part, a media system geared toward the lowest common denominator, making a profit not informing the public. This was a hard lesson for me, but a good one and I'm glad I learned it first hand.

Side note: Before I continue I'd like to state for the record that "making a profit" is a good thing in a capitalistic society. In fact, its a necessary thing. I have no problem with for-profit companies or working in such a way as to increase profits. If the consumer demanded a quality, unbiased report of the world that is what every news organization would eventually tailor itself to deliver. So, my beef isn't with the profiteering, its with those who don't value or can't recognize impartial and informative news.

Now I find myself not behind a camera, but instead seated at a keyboad. It would be egotistical of me to assume that my words posted to this blog reach more than a baker's dozen of you out there yet it is also undeniable that this medium has potential to reach a large portion of the population, a much larger audience than my pictures were ever afforded. So what is my responsibility to you, the reader?

It has been said that blogs are the newest form of reporting. That bloggers are in some way a new form of journalist, and that blogs are very different in many respects from other methods of publication. Some say that bloggers revel in their ability to publish opinionated, unfounded and, in some cases, inaccurate content. Does the lack of an editor, a publisher, a common credo, or any of the other traditional journalistic checks and balances disqualify blogger's content outright? When a blogger libels someone, should they be held accountable in the same manner as a print journalist?

Interestingly, blogs normally don't stand alone. They are an interconnected network of information. Links contained in a blog entry are part of the message. In fact, rarely does a blog entry stand on its own. Many connected blogs taken together might present a complete picture, but ultimately it is up to the reader to understand that they are reading biased information. Readers then must remember to wade through many different sources and follow the connections bloggers routinely sprinkle in their posts if they hope to have a complete picture. Reader beware. All of this is well understood, and now that I am a blogger I contend with these issues.

The earlier question still stands, what is my responsibility to you? Given my preference for unbiased media, am I a hypocrite because I have the power to publish biased, opinionated, uncorroborated drivel? I don't believe I am, and I don't believe I owe you, the reader, anything. What I write and publish to this blog is at my leisure. I don't get paid (outside the miniscule amount of money I may someday receive for including the advertising links) for what I do. I am not a professional writer and this blog is not a professional news outlet. It is my personal outlet. That you read it is amazing and gratifying but it in no way forms a contract between you and me. I have no obligation to you as the reader at all. Having said that, I consider myself an honorable person. I hold myself to a higher standard. But that is my choice. You will benefit from that choice as the information presented here is likely to be more balanced or explicitly labeled as biased (as I did with my recent posting about the 2004 US Presidential Election). There is no binding contract between you and I but in my mind I operate as if there were a gentlemen's agreement. Its up to you to assign meaning to that, as it is for all things that I post here.

However, for those who use blogs as a medium for their journalistic careers, either self-published or employed by some organization, I personally believe that they should be held to a different and higher standard. A professional blogger, be they topical or not, in my thinking should be bound by all the laws on the books today regarding other published material. If a professional blogger, someone (or some organization), publishes libelous content then they should be held accountable for breaking any applicable laws. I realize that the line between professional and amateur blogger is fuzzy, and I know that will be an ongoing issue as the medium evolves, but that is no excuse to ignore the simple fact that publication of a blog is still publication. I also realize that because the internet has no boundaries jurisdiction in such cases will also be a nightmare. If a blogger in China posts to a sever in Chicago libelous statements about a man in Russia what court does the Russian go to when filing a claim? I have no idea. I didn't say I had the answers, just opinions.

Stonehenge Aotearoa

The more I learn about New Zealand and its people, the more I like it. Those cleaver Kiwis decided that they'd like to know more about the workings of Stonehenge, so they built their own just outside of Wellington. Brilliant.

Apple's all time high is just the beginning.

Go into any Apple store, you'll find enthusiastic people lining up to buy an iShuffle or some other iPod. You'll find shelves of third party software, some with the Microsoft logo. You'll find third party devices like printers, cameras and other gadgets that simply work and work simply. You'll also find a bunch of computers directly connected to the net, none of which is plagued by viruses or annoying pop-up advertising windows. In short, you'll see a healthy computer maker meeting, and in most cases exceeding expectations of its customer base. A customer base that is expanding every day. The BYOKDM (bring your own keyboard, display and mouse) mantra is brilliance and the Mac Mini is an unqualified success. This company is like a well tuned V12 engine running on grain alcohol and nitrous oxide.

Its the interface stupid. If the tool doesn't work, its not a tool anymore. The iPod, iTunes and the iTunes Music Store introduce millions of music lovers daily to something called usability. This trifecta of elegant and purposeful engineering - software, hardware and services working together - is a powerful drug to the masses of unsuspecting PC users that have been trained by Microsoft Windows to expect frustration and accept defeat. This experience of "something different" motivates those new to Apple to seek out the store, to ask more questions ("You mean you don't have to worry about constant security patches and anti-virus problems?!") and become infected with something pleasant, a sense of satisfaction and value for the money they've spent.

So, if you haven't been to an Apple Store, go. They don't sell AAPL stock in the store, but I'm betting that you'll join the crowd and buy some when you get home and start up your new Mac. It won't take but five minutes and you're likely to have fun. Yes, AAPL is at an all time high, but so was Microsoft over and over as its stock continued to defy gravity. AAPL is next.

DISCLOSURE: I've worked with computers made by Apple since the Apple ][ era. I was an employee at NeXT Computer in the Developer Support Group when I turned 21. I currently own (a small amount of) AAPL stock. I use a PowerBook G4 Macintosh to do all my work and I always run the latest Mac OS/X operating system. I'm a bit of a zealot when it comes to Apple, and yes, I miss the Newton.

TheServerSide.com, built tough with Tapestry

Its very good to see good technologies take hold. TheServerSide.com now runs on Tapestry. Howard Lewis Ship authored Tapestry as well as the article on TSS's conversion to Tapestry. He also wrote a great book on Tapestry. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here getting into the dynamic web page wars, you say 'vi', I say 'emacs'. Its a good thing to keep more than one screwdriver in a toolbox and its important to evaluate and understand more than one method for page generation. Google shows us that when it comes to browser tricks, its important to use the right tool for the job and not be afraid of a diverse approach to problem solving.

What I will say is this. I am happy to have helped in a small way with the genesis of Tapestry. Had it not been for a long standing friendship with my boss at the time, Tim Dion, and his trust in me and Howard its likely that Howard wouldn't have had the time complete Tapestry 1.0 while working for Primix Solutions. I also happy to still count Howard and Tim as friends.

Keep your enemies close, HIV repurposed to fight Cancer.

"The virus travelled through the bloodstream and homed straight to the cancer cells."

– Researcher Dr Irvin Chen

Cancer has touched my life in many ways. My mother is a two time survivor. Bone cancer at the age of 25 in her left leg led to an above the knee amputation and an artificial leg. Recently, breast cancer was found early enough to result in a successful lumpectomy. She's the strongest person I know. Cancer slowly killed my step-father. Cancer has impacted many others in my indirect family and I bet that most everyone you talk to will have some direct experience with cancer.

Sometimes your enemies can be confused into fighting each other, this is a common tactic of warfare. Another tenet holds that one should, "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer." It seems that these lessons of war have application in saving lives as well.

To the researchers who were creative enough to take one killer, HIV, and turn it against another killer, cancer, I salute you. What a brilliant insight. I hope that your work leads to a real, practical solution to this scourge. Even if it does not, your creative insight is an inspiration.

The spectacle is appalling.

"I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believed in (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings), nor is humanity itself believ'd in. What penetrating eye does not everwhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout."

– Walt Whitman
Democratic Vistas, 1871

Its as true today as it was in 1871. I'm a democrat, from Massachusetts who purchased Kerry garb and went to Kerry rallies. I joined MoveOn.org. I even liked Dean and I believe his downfall, the "Dean Scream", is a symptom of a larger problem but not with any political party. With the system and the society that feeds it. In other words, you and I.

Understand that I am not whining about losing the election, President Bush won the popular vote and the electoral college and although the margin of his victory does not warrant a mandate it was decisive enough not to argue.

No, this time around I don't blame the Democratic candidate, the electoral college, the management of the election process, the hanging chads or the fouled electronic voting machines. This time around I'm honestly disappointed in the voting majority. You have been fooled, yet you don't seem to mind. In fact you seem to be celebrating your ignorance. You have been led by the nose to false conclusions by blatant lies. You are afraid of false and manufactured threats. You are coerced and sold out by your religious leadership. Your claim to the moral high ground on issues of sexuality, women's rights and the definition of family is bankrupt. I'm ashamed of you, of us, of our country for the first time in my life.

Walt Whitman captures the depth of my despair and I am not alone in it. I don't know what will wake up, what I hope to be, the true majority. I have to believe that the turnout for this election was in some way biased as I can't believe that the America I know is this ignorant and blind to the truth.

As I said earlier I am not blameless in this travesty. My sin was sloth. I didn't help out nearly enough. I didn't donate enough time or money. I wasn't passionate enough in conversations. I didn't understand the depth to which the opposition would go to win this war. I underestimated many things, and now I feel out of touch with my neighbor and somewhat estranged in my native country.

the Land of the Long White Cloud

New Zealand's real name was given to it by the Māori, the first inhabitants of the South Pacific islands. It was called Aoteraoa meaning the land of the long white cloud. A Dutch explorer for the Dutch East Indies Company named Abel Tasman came along in 1642 to find that the island reminded him of one in the Baltic Sea south-west of Holland called Zeeland, or see-land, an important chamber of the Dutch East India Company. First Zelandia, then Nova Zeelandia or Nieuw Zeeland and finally the anglified New Zealand. 1642 was a good year for sailors and renaming. Columbus sailed to North America that year, found a place and started naming places like Plymouth. In both cases native cultures in harmony with their surrounds, communal in nature, were introduced to the wonders of the european man. Smallpox, dysentery, individualism, capitalism, gun powder and original sin all imports. I can't help but wonder what the world would be like if one isolated place like New Zealand had survived unspoiled by the marauding European explorer. If Captain Cook and the others like him had not been so successful, what would the world look like? Better yet, might we have an example of human society not based on the individual?

The privateering provisions of the Elizabethan era were the mosquito carrying the European way of life around the globe infecting every corner of the globe. Privateering is essentially pirating with style and a royal mandate. Go forth and plunder the world in the name of the Crown. And they did. The explorers we hail as brave and important men in most European history books are all essentially crooks. But the most valuable asset stolen in their marauding was not gold, it was their way of life.

The next wave of invaders from Europe were headquartered in Rome. The Pope and his Ministers of the Christian faith were dispatched to every newly discovered land and they had a mission. Infect the culture with the Christian belief system, grow the church. Spread the word of God. Money, in the form of monarchies, and faith were the twin pinnacles of power and they worked together to mold the world into something that would worship them together. For the unsuspecting, the subversion was subtle. The results were devastating, and the legacy is evident today.

A common tongue, a common faith, a common fear and a common goal. English, a Christian God, original sin and money are the legacy of Europe. The individualism that falls naturally from these values erased the communal way of life the Māori and the Native American Indian tribes as well as many other indigenous peoples around the world.

It took much longer for these values to take over the Asian world. The Japanese and Chinese had deeper roots, a more developed culture, a better immune system. They were able to fight off total infection for much longer than the less well organized and younger cultures of the world.

We live with the legacy of this single mindedness today. The massive extinction of cultures has left us with few working models from which to draw on as examples. This in turn limits our creativity, it is hard to see beyond what is in front of us. We are egotistical animals, we believe that we have the answers, but in fact we are limited. A homogenized world complicates the creative process. It takes more energy to get further away from what you already know.

As proof of the value of diversity observe how Asian cultures, religions and medicines have been celebrated in recent years. From Yoga to green tea western practitioners are slowly admitting that they are not the sole purveyors of the truth. The impact of having an differing view of the world is clear. People routinely combine western and eastern ideas and find solutions to intractable issues.

Humanity needs diversity to survive. We need it at a chemical, a biological, an intellectual and a cultural level. Chemical and biological diversity are in fine shape. Intellectual and cultural diversity are in much more dire straits. Globalization is not the problem. Homogenization is.

AdSense

I'm going to be rich! Well, not really. To be honest it didn't even cross my mind when I added Google's AdSense context sensitive advertisements to this blog. I have two reasons.

First off, I'm curious to see what exactly they believe is contextually appropriate to what I've written. Call it a thought experiment. Google wants to be the definitive index for all of human knowledge. I'd like to see what part of that vast database I stir up with each of my posts.

Secondly, I've always been impressed by the AdSense model. Having a central benevolent provider of context sensitive advertisements just makes sense. I remember Google when it was still running in a college dorm room, when it was really in beta. I had no idea that they would, seemingly on a regular basis, change the rules. Just consider what they've done to each of the areas of the internet they've touched on so far. In every case, they've broken new ground. Even areas that are not online, such as hiring practices. The aptitude test that was strategically placed in geek magazines and the billboard math problems are examples of genius. The day when Google introduces something that isn't earth shatteringly new and completely cleaver will be the day I sell my (one share of) GOOG stock. At a large profit I'm sure.

Fleet to draw into a Line of Battle, one Ship a-head of another.

I find myself fascinated with British Royal Naval warfare in the Napoleonic era. Ships of the Line called such because of the standard tactics of the day. In 1775 the publication of
Sailing and Fighting Instructions for His Majesty's Fleet
revolutionized war at sea. Fight in a line, one ship a-head of another rather than simply in an uncoordinated melee. The Dutch, French and Spanish would all soon learn from bloody experience that the ground rules had changed.

Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. A famous truism, often forgotten. When the ground rules change there are two possibilities. Either you changed them, so move quickly and assert the new high ground afforded to you as a first mover. Or you discovered them after the fact. You find that something once well understood is now completely new. Change quickly, adapt or die. That's the rule of thumb. Every generation in history faces this challenge. Its in our nature and we thrive on such challenges. They make us grow.

So, where have the rules changed in your life? Or better yet, what rules will you rewrite today? If you are aware of this condition, you're less likely to be caught off guard. If you're aware of the possibilities, you're more likely to look forward to change.

Feedburner

There are many things I like about Feedburner, but first a plug. I use them to convert the Atom feed for this blog into RSS 2.0. Why Blogger doesn't offer this is beyond me, but hey its free so I'm not complaining. Speaking of free, so is Feedburner. But that's not the only reasons I like it. Just look at the site. Simple, clean, and elegant use of fonts, colors, spacing, pictures, everything. Most websites look the same and follow the same bad design patterns. Its so rare to run across something unique effective, and efficient. Matt Shobe is the Chief Design Officer of Feedburner so I'm assuming the credit goes to him. Keep it up.

For Sale: One very nice sailboat.

I've decided that its time I move back onto land. To that end I've placed my sailboat on the market.

She is a 1986 Hans Christian 38 Traditional Cutter Rig Sloop with the Telstar keel, and she is a beauty. She has been a dream to sail, clearly built to transit the open ocean while remaining a wonderful live and work aboard space. Its rare to find something of such fine craftsmanship, purposeful design, style and grace. I'll miss her.

UPDATE - Kachina has been sold. She was claimed by her new owner in April of 2005. I wish her well as she makes her way on the world's waterways. May she carry all those aboard safely into port.

Bleeping the code

I've worked at Sun, I've seen Solaris code (circa Solaris 7). Its a thing of beauty, really. Good stuff. One of the overlooked aspects of OpenSolaris demonstrates why Microsoft won't be following suit any time soon, not even with small parts of its software library. Patents aren't the only liability to be addressed when placing code (or any written product) into the public lime light. Source code and bug reports are commonly littered with less than flattering comments about the code, the company or even the customers. That's not to say open source code is spotless in this regard, but in my experience it is cleaner line for line than proprietary code. Opening Solaris will benefit Sun and the community at large, the effort is worth it.

Wasted space and dark tubes

Televisions dominate households. Look around. How much space in each room do you allocate to your viewing habit? How many square feet are lost to this obsession? The next generation of this tiny device could be hidden all over the house. Imagine the space savings. I've always thought that people would watch half as much TV if it weren't such a visible part of our lives. Just seeing the dark tube off in the corner causes most to feel compelled to turn it on if only for background noise. This device and the hidden plasma concept (either as a faux painting or Jay Leno style) could reverse this trend and help us all reclaim that lost square footage. Television isn't bad, its a social addiction. As long as its always in front of us, we'll never break the habit.

Benchmarking

Benchmarks are commonly used as marketing vehicles rather than fair and unbiased comparisons. Companies routinely tout their product as better in some way than another product and use some worthless benchmark to back up their assertion. Frequently the benchmark, although done by some outside firm, was sponsored in part or whole by the company making the assertion. Undue influence is one way to categorize that, there are others.

That's why I'm always happy to see things like this. A benchmark performed by someone really interested in determining the relative strength of a set of products. Bravo, and thanks.

Acoustic Fingerprinting

iEatBrainz is a god send. I ripped a lot of my CD collection before the advent of the CDDB. I hated having to type in all the song, artist, album etc information for a CD and so I did a poor job. Today I have a mess and that screws up fun features in iTunes like album art. You can't find the artwork for a misspelled artist. Enter iEatBrainz. This program analyzes the song, produces an acoustic fingerprint, matches it against a central database and returns the proper ID3 tag information for the track. Brilliant. I've found it to be around 98% accurate. It does make mistakes and sometimes it doesn't make any match, but for the most part it does a great job of matching. The matching engine is a commercial product, and I'm sure that the application is simply and advertising vehicle.

My one, rather large, gripe is that although the matching is amazing the application is not written to manage 5000 songs at once. It sucks up all the CPU during analysis and becomes completely unresponsive. After two months (!!!) of constant uptime (on my PowerBook G4 800 with 2GB of RAM) it finished matching the tracks. Then it couldn't manage the list of 5000 songs in its GUI. It took four days of work to scrub out the 2% of errors the matcher had made. When I had the data ready to update iTunes I pressed the magic "Update iTunes" button with a sense of satisfaction. For about an hour it proceeded to update a track by messaging iTunes via AppleScript and then it stopped. Some script error. No amount of restarting, jiggering or praying helped. This was a great disappointment after a significant investment of time on my part.

The good news is that the source code for the app (not the MusicBrainz matching library) is available for download. The bad news is that I have no time to fix it. The price for the app and the service is exactly $0, so I got much more than I paid for, but still it'd be nice if it worked. To Jay Tuley, the author of iEatBrainz, I say, "Thank you, this is very cool. Would you please fix it?" as I put a tip into his tip jar.

CalorieKing.com Diet Diary

Most Americans overeat. As a result, most are, according to the body mass index (BMI) calculation, overweight or even obese. As it turns out, this isn't hard to achieve. Last November I discovered my BMI was 32, or obese. Okay, that's rough to take. Obese is a strong word. I had to fix this.

First the facts. I'm 33 years old and last November I weighted 275 lbs. I'm 6'4" tall. Today I'm still 33, 6'4" but I'm now 242 lbs on my way to 210, my ideal weight.

My weight loss program is simple. Eat less and exercise more. To do that I needed a tool to track both exercise and food intake. I also needed an understanding of how much energy I needed daily to survive and how much energy is contained in a pound of fat.

The tool I use is called CalorieKing.com Diet Diary. That's about the dumbest name I've run across for a program. Okay, I've seen worse, but it ranks in the top 10%. Sadly, it seems to do the trick so I'm stuck with it. Using the program I can record what I eat in detail and keep to a calorie budget. At the same time I can track the calories burnt by exercise. I have a daily view into my net calories, exactly what I need to keep on a steady weight loss program.

Fat, it turns out, is about 3500 calories per pound. To lose one pound a week you need only be in deficit 500 calories a day. To lose two pounds a week, be 1000 calories in deficit every day. Two pounds a week is about the maximum healthy rate, and at that rate you're better off if you exercise regularly so that you lose body fat and not muscle mass.

So, to be in deficit requites that you know how many calories you're burning in a day. Everyone burns calories just staying alive. That is your basal metabolic rate (BMR). Mine is about 2500 calories a day. There are calculations to roughly estimate your BMR or you can have a nutritionist determine it (some gyms have equipment to measure this too). Actually, my BRM is about 2200, but that's the amount of calories I'd burn in a day if I stayed in bed. I don't (stay in bed), so I have to add in for the activity level I maintain throughout the day. I work online. I don't move much (outside typing), so I don't get much help there. If your a dock worker or a mailman, you get a bunch more for all that daily work. So, without exercise I burn 2500 calories a day. I want to lose 2 lbs a week, so my daily budget is 1500 calories. If I want to eat more than that in a single day, I must exercise. I should be exercising anyway due to the rate I want to sustain.

Swimming laps is hard work. Its good for your lungs, your heart and for general muscle tone. Its been my sport since I was 6 years old. So, I'm back in the pool. Daily I swim 45 minutes which burns about 1000 calories. I walk 30 minutes at a 3mph pace round trip to the gym and I lift weights three days a week. I might also start yoga once or twice a week too. Its nice to shake out the joints and regain flexibility.

At 242 lbs I'm not 'obese' anymore, simply 'overweight'. At 210 I'll be in the healthy weight range for my age, size, build and gender.

So, why bother? Well besides cheaper life insurance rates, I feel better. Maybe its all in my head, but that's where I live.

del.icio.us

Yes, I know I'm way behind the times on this one, I'll never use browser based bookmarks again.

Quoth the raven

Press releases are part of business as usual and a necessary instrument of marketing. Recently the first press release with my name in it was put out on "the wire". Nifty. I'm official. Now, did you know that quotes in press releases are hardly ever direct quotes? They are almost always written by marketing and approved by the referenced person. This case was no different. That's not to say that I don't agree with the content of the quote, I do. I'm simply fascinated by the process of corporate communications.

Peet's Coffee, Sadie's Salsa

What does coffee have to do with salsa? Nothing, unless you're going to have huevos rancheros for breakfast. But that's how my brain works sometimes. I'll be sitting around drinking my morning coffee and suddenly random things connect with some very odd meaning. In this case I was considering how my coffee today, Starbucks, was woefully inadequate. It simply doesn't compare to Peet's. Its simply no where near as rich and there is a distinct burnt flavor with Starbucks causing it to be flat. At least to my tastes. I happen to live in a city (Boston) that has local Peet's stores, if you don't you can order coffee from their store.

In considering the store and the excellent coffee I wondered if there was another similar food that I'd recommend purchasing online. Sadie's is one of Albuquerque New Mexico's best Southwestern Mexican food restaurants. I grew up in Albuquerque so I should know. It started off as the restaurant inside a bowling alley. The line out the door was people waiting to eat at Sadie's, not bowl. Now they have a cavernous place next door to the bowling alley. I make it a point to visit every time I return to Albuquerque. In between trips home I order from their store. The salsa is hot. No really. But hot with taste rather than hot for hot sake. There are other things hotter, but this is tasty and hot. A hard to find combination. Its due to the Hatch green chili, one of natures finest fruits. Don't forget the cookbook.

X-Plane

There is exactly one flight simulator written by a nerd/pilot for nerd/pilots. X-Plane is it. All other simulators pale in comparison. Yes, even Microsoft Flight Simulator (what ever they call the latest version). The reason is simple, X-Plane actually simulates flight by analysis of the airframe within the given environment. Other simulators estimate the flight characteristics given a set of inputs. There is a difference. With X-Plane I can author a new air foil and test it on Earth (or Mars) and determine if it could fly. With any other simulator you'd start with a 3D model and an assumption that it will fly according to some characteristic equation that you'd input. The difference is vast and quite important for real flight enthusiasts. The other reason X-Plane is hands down the best flight simulator is because the author is a total nerd and completely unabashed about his interaction with his adoring public. He cares about one thing, writing the best simulator. Well, that and fast cars and his plane. But you get the idea. A five man team has a simulator that rivals any other out there and only costs about $50(USD). Bravo, and thanks.

Alan Kay

Alan Kay is one of my heros. His comparison of Smalltalk to a Gothic cathedral is apt. He always has something interesting to say. I tend to agree with his contention that language design has become more about ego and less about new and interesting techniques to further the art of programming. Exceptions to that are IO and Erlang. Erlang is of particular interest to me given the arrival of the Cell processor and the dawning of the multi-core era. I'm still looking for a good language that incorporates a notion of transactions.

And now for something entirely similar to everything else...

With both feet I enter the blogosphere and help it grow. For better or worse I'll publish bits I find entertaining or useful sometimes simply so I won't forget them myself. That is all. Carry on.