jducoeur

This morning, I decided to do my once-every-six-month trawl through LinkedIn's "Do You Know These People?" recommendations of connections. (Mainly because someone has, once again, endorsed my skills. Which is appreciated, but I do wish the system was better at getting endorsements for things I am actually current in and enjoy, like Scala, as opposed to words people recognize, like Java.)

As usual, it's a pretty good list of connection suggestions, and I can see how they came up with most of them -- I don't actually accept most recommendations, but that's because my LinkedIn flist is restricted to people who I know well enough either personally or professionally that I can recommend them for a job. (About 75% of their suggestions are people I know, but in most cases by now, don't know quite that well -- or sometimes, wouldn't recommend.)

But in the middle of the list, it suggested Lynne Stockman. How the bloody *blazes* did it recommend Lynne Stockman?

Lynne's my realtor, the one selling my house. She's reasonably good at her job -- she and her husband Phil sold our previous place in three days flat, and while I'm disappointed in how slow the process is going this time, I have to be realistic that that's mostly because the market is still fairly wobbly.

But that's my only relationship with her. She's only a third-degree connection in LinkedIn, which is practically the other end of the world socially. Not only is there nothing in my personal information that would point to her, she's not even related in any sensible graph-theory way.

I can only assume that LinkedIn is hoovering up vast amounts of public information, and hooking it together behind the scenes, to find that she is the realtor for the house that I am selling. Either that, or (creepier still, but seems unlikely) they have some deal with Google, to spy on the social graph inherent in emails, which is our one significant online relationship. Either way, it's pretty bloody disconcerting...

For those interested, I just posted an initial set of ideas about how conversations will work inside Querki -- particularly how pervasive they should be in the system, and who should be allowed to comment.

I suspect that it'll be a bit controversial, and I'm specifically interested in opinions either way, so I encourage folks who care about online conversation tech to wander over to the querki_project development journal and chime in...

I just noticed -- ever since the emergency maintenance started a day or two ago, I don't seem to be receiving email notifications of comments. Y'all might want to pay attention to that yourselves. And please email me directly if you have anything important to comment on. Thanks...

For those following the JonMon debacle, I commend to you this letter from Ron Newman's attorney to JonMon's lawyers. It is *not* short, but it's magnificently detailed, and kind of a fun education in various aspects of legal theory.

It's much too polite to come out and actually say, "What the *fuck* are you people thinking?", but goes through the matter point-by-point, detailing why it's essentially nonsense from a legal perspective -- frequently mis-applying the laws in questions, often outright lying, sometimes just not even making sense. (With a particular emphasis on the way that JonMon is essentially attempting to sue Ron for everything bad anybody has ever said about him online, ever.)

And it finishes with the point that this whole thing has been handled so abysmally, it probably opens JonMon (and maybe his counsel) to a much better-supported countersuit. One especially interesting detail is that JonMon's threating letters, demanding that comments be taken down, can be constituted as suborning spoilation of evidence, which I gather the courts frown upon.

It goes into particular detail about a point that's been gradually emerging: that JonMon's new *business* is about identifying people without going through the usual processes, and this whole thing may have been an incredibly poorly-thought-out publicity stunt. He's been making a big point of finding the real-world info about all of his targets, apparently without any court orders, and handing them legally-threatening letters. The business idea might actually have been a bit clever, but it's hard to think of a more idiotic way to demonstrate it.

Anyway -- it's long and dense, but rather a fun read. Recommend for those interested in the realities of the laws concerning defamation, online conversation and the like, or simply if you enjoy a well-executed smackdown...

... although the latest is one that I'm sure will succeed: Studio Foglio is doing a Kickstarter to print Girl Genius Volume 12. I suspect a lot of folks will want to support this one, especially since it opens the window of opportunity to buy the hardcover edition.

For those who might not have read it yet, the comic is highly recommended -- one of my all-time favorites, and coming from me that's saying a lot. GG was influential in the rise of steampunk, and is a lovely blend of melodrama, comedy and Weird Science. (I wrote a big Girl Genius LARP as the headline game for Intercon G: I am a *very* serious fan of this book.)

You can read the entire comic for free online (although you need to start this one from the beginning -- jumping into the middle makes *no* sense whatsoever), but personally I think it reads better in dead-tree form, and the paper copies are how the creators make most of their living. So I commend the Kickstarter campaign to y'all, and I'm looking forward to the results.

As the Zen Master said, "Project Management is like Quantum Mechanics".

You have three primary variables: Precision of Prediction, Time Scale and Speed. On the small Time Scale, you can achieve considerable Precision -- it's fairly easy to say what will get done tomorrow, if things are well-managed. On larger Scales, Precision goes down -- it is harder to be precise about what will happen next month, and much more difficult than most managers would like to believe about next year.

You *can* improve Precision on larger Time Scales, but there is a cost: Speed. Specifically, the act of observing a project closely enough to improve Precision will slow it down. This happens in a lot of ways -- more meetings, more precise specification upfront, more bureaucracy and checkoffs -- but they all wind up costing Speed. Large organizations often choose to make this tradeoff, because they value Precision more highly than Speed.

This tradeoff is, as far as I can tell, inescapable. To me, the heart of Agile Development is the choice to put Speed above Precision. That is *not* the only way to interpret Agile -- but it is pretty much where it started, and IMO that choice is what makes Agile valuable. Doing Agile right does *not* mean sacrificing Quality: that is a common confusion, and sadly there are too many people who think they are being "Agile" when they are actually just being lazy. But it absolutely does mean sacrificing the illusion that you can go fast and still have long-term Precision of Prediction. Instead, you focus on being precise only in the short term, and acknowledge that the further out the Time Scale, the less precise you will be about the outcome. Agile works if and only if everybody (*especially* upper management, but also the engineers) accepts that deep down, and are willing to let go of control freakery about the future.

---

Okay, yes -- the metaphor here is imprecise, and arguably it's exactly wrong. In real quantum mechanics, the act of observing something's position more and more precisely means you have less and less idea about its velocity. Here, observing the future ever more precisely makes it *more* predictable -- in that the project will go slower and slower. But the fact that observation so strongly affects the outcome kind of begged for the comparison.

This post started with my thinking about the fact that, at this point, I just outright refuse to work anywhere that is *not* practicing Agile; it is no accident that at my last two companies, I wound up teaching project management to the managers, largely in self-defense. When I asked myself why, I realized that I am, at heart, a bit impatient, and refuse to sacrifice too much speed in the name of precision. Which is why I will probably always work for small companies: startups are, by and large, much more willing to accept the uncertainty of the future, in the name of getting stuff done...

As you may have heard, Kate and I are getting married this summer! The fancy formal wedding (which will be small and family-heavy) isn't until September, but we wanted to have a big party for our friends sooner than that. So...



This is deliberately semi-open -- we're being rather loose about invitations, so please pass this along to any other friends of ours who might want to be there.

This is not going to be a fancy affair -- the dress code is "best jeans, nice sundresses, good shorts" and like that. Families and SOs are welcome. If the weather cooperates, we hope that much of the party will be outdoors, so feel free to bring family-friendly outdoor games like bocce.

We're starting out with a potluck lunch -- we'll provide some basic entrees, but ask that, if possible, you bring something to eat if you're coming much before 2pm. (If not possible, don't worry about it.)

If you can attend, please RSVP here, so we have some idea of how many people are coming. We'd also love it if you can give us an idea what category of food you're thinking of bringing. (So that we can catch the "75 side dishes and no dessert" problem before it happens.) Thanks!

Schedule

Noon -- Potluck lunch
~2pm -- Ceremony (light and simple, but there will be some ceremony)
2:30 - 5pm -- Dancing, gaming and hanging out with friends
5pm -- Cleanup (help would be greatly appreciated, so we can leave the place tidy)


How to Get There

The party is happening at Camelot Cohousing, in Berlin, MA (along route 495). It's a 30-45 minutes drive from Boston and the inner suburbs, just off route 62. Here is a link to the location in Google Maps, suitable for generating directions; if you are using a GPS, the address of the complex is technically 46 Sawyer Hill Road, Berlin, MA.

When you get to Camelot, you'll find yourself on Village Lane / Village Court. Please park on the side of that road. Do *not* park in the parking lots -- those are resident spaces, and are mostly reserved.

The party is happening in and around the Camelot Common House, which is at the end of Village Court.


We hope you can join us, for what should be a fun (and hopefully sunny) day!

In the course of unpacking, I just came across the mink stole. What the heck am I going to do with this?

Mind, it isn't subtle. It quite vividly crosses the line from "fur" to "a bunch of dead animals".

I suspect that the logic is kind of like why a bow tie is supposed to be a bit messy: if it's imperfect, that shows that it's real and you tied it yourself, instead of being one of those pre-made ones. In this case, the stole is four minks (sort of like particularly furry weasels) that have been taxidermied and sewn together foot-to-mouth. And yes, it has both feet and mouths.

It was probably quite the fashion statement in its day. And I *think* it belonged to Gramdma Supnik, so it's kind of a family heirloom, and I can't just get rid of it. (It's possible that it came down through Jane's family, although it's showier than I'm used to from them.) But I'm honestly unsure whether it's possible to wear it in public nowadays...

Mentioned this on FB yesterday, but since it's getting down to the wire: Suzie Brown ("Dr. Suzie", to those who know her through unicornpearlz) is fundraising to produce a new album. (On PledgeMusic, which seems to be approximately a music-centric version of Kickstarter.)

She's quite good, and I'm hoping that the project happens. It is *horribly* close: 93% there, but only three days left. So I'd encourage folks to check it out, and if you like her stuff, you may want to support the new album. It's the typical crowd-funding deal, and a $10 pledge gets you a download of the album when it's done...

I'm finally getting around to reading the latest Technology Quarterly in the Economist, which includes this gem about the SPUDS project at Boeing -- which gives new meaning to the idea of the couch potato. Short and amusing bit of lateral thinking in science...

On the topic of people abusing the legal process: one friend of mine wrote to me, even more mystified than I about the JonMon lawsuit, pointing out that it seemed hopeless from a legal viewpoint, so clearly it couldn't accomplish anything. I had to point out the key thing about such suits -- they're often not *trying* to win, they're trying to get you to settle for somewhat less money than the cost of mounting an adequate defense.

This was driven home by this fine article in Ars Technica yesterday, about the Prenda Porn Trolls. Basically, Prenda is a law firm that set about conducting exactly this sort of behaviour on an industrial scale. They've been much in the tech news for the past year or two, and now that I think about it, JonMon's tactics sound a bit reminiscent.

Prenda would find some porn film that was getting Bittorrented online. They would sue *everybody* who might possibly have downloaded it (supposedly on behalf of the copyright holder, although I always got the sense that Prenda was really in charge), based simply on IP addresses. They would get the court to issue broad-based orders so that they could get contact info for all those IP addresses, and then they would serve scary court documents to everybody who turned up. (Never mind that going from a cable IP address to an individual is a pretty shaky chain of reasoning.) They would offer to settle for a few thousand dollars, while meanwhile scaring the snot out of people by pointing out how insanely high the fines for copyright violation can get nowadays. I don't think any of those cases ever got to court -- indeed, I gather that if someone *did* mount a defense, Prenda would quietly dismiss the case and fade into the night.

They made *millions* doing this.

They finally got slapped down, hard, by a judge this week, and are now at the sharp end of some criminal complaints themselves. But it's an interesting reminder of how the law can be used as a weapon of extortion, and how, sometimes, winning the case is in no way the point of the exercise...

A quick signal boost: folks have set up the beginnings of a fund to deal with the JonMon lawsuit that I mentioned yesterday. Details can be found over on the davis_square LJ. (Note additional details down in the comments -- in particular, since some folks don't care for PayPal, they've set up an alternative or two.)

If you care about the issues here, and have the means to do so, I would recommend that you consider contributing -- even if they line up a pro bono lawyer, there will probably be some significant expenses here. Thank you.

Casting my net a little wider than the querki_project community for this one, since I'm looking for brainstorming.

Querki is trying (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) to avoid conventional programming jargon -- both because my concepts tend not to quite match the usual words, and simply to *sound* less like programming.

So I've got this concept that I call "Model". It's kinda-sorta like a "class" in object-oriented programming, although it's really more like a "prototype" in languages like Javascript. It's the basis we're using for a kind of Thing. Models are stuff like "Person", "Email Message", "Blog Entry" -- the abstract structures that you fill in to get something real.

What do we call those "something real"s, though? That is, what is the term for something that specifically *isn't* a Model, but is based on one? It's not "Thing" -- everything is a Thing, including Models. The technical term is "instance", but that *sounds* technical to my ear, and I would like to see if we can find an alternative. The only other idea I've had so far is "item", but that's a tad wishy-washy, and can get confused with list elements.

So -- anyone have suggestions? This is about to become real, since I'm about to add the method that is "all the non-Model instances that derive from this Model", and I'm trying to figure out what that is named...

ETA, so I don't lose track of it: over on Facebook, 'hannes mentioned the word "entity", which isn't half-bad. It has the right connotations of concreteness, and we're not doing anything else with the term...

... the immediate case being "JonMon" (warning: this link appears to be full of intentional hyperbole), AKA Jon Monsarrat. Who apparently was a co-founder of Turbine Games, as he brags about at *considerable* length from what I can find online, including some weirdly inappropriate places. However, Turbine itself seems to mention him relatively little.

Until last week, I'd had no idea who this guy was -- and then he went and sued a considerable fraction of the davis_square community (including several folks I know, and some mutual friends of people here), apparently because he believes that he was slandered by them. (ETA: Links to gists get auto-embedded in LJ? When did that happen?) This despite the fact that the "offense" appears to have consisted largely of reposting and linking to publicly-available news, and commenting in the resulting threads -- in many cases, comments that said little or nothing about him personally.

I am *totally* not a lawyer, but the lawsuit seems rather specious to me, and I don't like the smell of it. This is a man who one presumes is rather wealthy (from having founded a major game publisher), suing a large number of people who are not, on what appear to be weak grounds. In my personal opinion, that feels like bullying. But of course, the direct effect of this suit (especially its preposterous breadth) is that many people like me now know far more about the background and history than we ever wanted to, having now been motivated to look into it. I wouldn't have paid any attention to him if he hadn't started suing friends of mine. The sheer apparent irrationality of the suit surprises me.

I always like to ask questions to foment conversation, so: does this lawsuit seem to you to have merit? Would you be inclined to contribute to the legal defense fund that I hope will be set up to contest it? How much is it probably going to wind up costing him, per-defendant? (And what is the fact of his filing this suit likely to do to his reputation?) Is he likely to keep suing everyone who mentions him online? Would it be appropriate to start an Internet Meme of mentioning him and pointing back to his lawsuit? (Which is, after all, a public document, so it is hard to see how he could sue over that.) I confess some curiosity about how this mindset works.

And yes, I'm curious about whether he will decide to sue me over this post of personal impression of his public actions. It says something about the chilling effects of blanket lawsuits like this that I did have to think carefully about whether to even post my personal thoughts. But I have the resources to defend myself, I'm a founding member of the EFF (and I have a deep dislike of all forms of bullying), so it doesn't seem like I should be intimidated by him...

The previous entry left me wondering whether the scripts for the Laurel Seamchecker plays were available online -- fortunately, it appears that the Internet, as usual, has preserved it all for posterity.

For those who haven't ever seen them: the Our Kind trilogy were a set of plays put on by the Golden Stag Players 20-some years ago. They're roughly contemporaneous with the beginnings of I Sebastiani, and are Commedia-flavored, but with actual scripts and with SCA-based characters such as Mistress Laurel Seamchecker, Cupcake Gaolbait, Queen Lowbodice, and Don Swishpiffle. They are frequently quite funny, sometimes just a tad rude, and full of SCA culture. (And pretty much *every* SCA stereotype as characters.)

The Golden Stag Players' website has admirably detailed information -- if you click on "The Plays" link, you'll get info on all of their plays. The Our Kind plays are numbers 1-3, down at the bottom. Those pages include full details, including pointers to recordings of the plays on YouTube, but here are the quick pointers to the scripts, with their descriptions from the website:

• "Our Kind is simply the tale of a new member of the SCA finding out what it's all about, from some very stero-typical characters. The character names tell you all you need to know about most of them. The fun of this is the stereotyped characters -- you can almost see someone you know in every character. The dialog is fun, but it's obviously a first play ..."


• "Mistress Laurel Seamchecker Explains It All At You is basically about Mistress Laurel Seamchecker (introduced in the first play) coming out and talking to the audience, with frequent interruptions by various stereo-typical characters. As you might guess, she's rather opinionated on the 'correct' way the SCA should be played. At the end, she is "given the bird" by the Queen in court for her service ..."


• A Nightmare on Laurel Street "is based very loosely on Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Mistress Laurel is visited by her old mentor, Mistress Mentor, who is now dead, and a ghost (wearing rags), and given the usual spiel about how Mistress Laurel will be visited by three spirits. Well, she sees herself in the past as a newbie at her first event, in a horrible outfit, etc. She sees herself in the present bowing to Queen Cupcake!, and in the future, she's a Duchess, and has her own costume police (at this point she's the oldest living Laurel)."

I only saw the third one performed -- honestly not sure where. (I had thought it was at TFYC, but that appears to predate the writing of the play.) I will admit that the line "At wong wast, we have combined civiwization with manwiness" has stuck with me ever since.

Anyway, they're delightful scripts, and well worth reading if you enjoy poking fun at the club. Things have changed a bit since they were written, but most of the jokes hold up well...

No, not the person -- the award itself.

Today is the 21st anniversary of my induction into the Order. Thinking about that kind of makes my head hurt, in a "*man*, I've been playing this game for a long time" kind of way. Other birthdays are rounder, but the concept that my Laurel is now an adult is just kind of weird.

But it does lead to an on-and-off conversation that Kate and I have had in recent months: so what *does* a Laurel drink, now that it's legal? I'm having trouble coming up with a decent-sounding cocktail that involves bay leaves. (Which would, I suppose, be subversively cannibalistic.) Or would it be something painfully period, in a Mistress Laurel Seamchecker kind of way? (Do folks nowadays even remember the Seamchecker plays?)

Suggestions welcomed...

Over the past few years, I've wound up in a fair number of conversations with folks from out-Barony, who were having trouble grasping the apparent Carolingian mentality, and in particular the way we respond to authority -- by turns quite lawful and yet quite contrary.

It just occurred to me that this post about Bostonians, from my friend siderea last week, actually provides a pretty nice summation of how, typically, we tick. It's well worth reading, especially if Carolingians (or for that matter, Bostonians) seem weird to you. (As always, you can learn an awful lot about an SCA branch by understanding the mundane world around it.) And it goes a long ways to explaining why we tend to be so helpful towards some royalty, and such an unspeakable pain in the butt to others...

Folks in the SCA games community will probably appreciate this bit. I just stumbled across this page:

http://superfluidity.tumblr.com/post/1120590241/a-godly-game-which-rewardeth-forbearence-and-punisheth

While it doesn't call it by name, it's clearly talking about the invention of Tablero de Jesus. Seems to fit the facts as previously established, and it sounds like the author of the game (apparently named Peter Swift, from the links) had nothing to do with the SCA. That's comforting.

Context, for those coming newly into this: Tablero de Jesus is one of the most popular games in the SCA; the drinking-game variation, Tablero da Gucci, is often called the national game of An Tir. We always believed it was period, but some years back, in a conversation with Thierry Depaulis, I was thoroughly disabused of that notion -- the documentation turned out to be utter nonsense if you actually dug into it. (The moral of the story is that just because something is documented doesn't mean it is *true*. Documentation has to be substantiated.) Our conclusion was that the game pretty much had to be a deliberate hoax.

Ever since then I've been wondering who came up with the hoax, so it's good to finally get a *little* closure on that. I was just reading the story of When Dickens Met Dostoevsky, which is a tale of truly *epic* hoaxing and sock-puppetry (long, but worth the read), and was reminded to try a little surfing, and came across this little confession. (And yes, I've made a copy of the article for posterity, in case the author of the blog follows through with his threat to take the story down...)

Today's LinkedIn news trawl turned up one article that's well worth my while to remember, on Cognitive Overhead.

The heart of the point is that everybody *talks* about simplicity in product design nowadays, but we often don't understand what that means. There's often a focus on smaller, faster, with fewer controls, but that's not really the important part. The essence of true simplicity is how easy it is for somebody to *grok* your product: to understand what they can and should be doing with it, and how to make it do what it's supposed to.

This is going to be Querki's biggest challenge. I know what Querki is supposed to do, and I'm reasonably sure that I can build it. But getting to the point where the typical Internet user can pick it up and start doing things with it -- *that* is going to be an epic project, and I suspect it'll take several years to get to the point where it's adequate. I've got a lot of ideas in various directions, ranging from how naive users will get into the system in the first place (one of the many reasons to focus on App development), to how we build a UI that makes sense to folks, to simply how we *describe* the tool to the public. But I expect all of those are going to need tons of tweaking and tuning (and often throwing out and starting again) to get it right...

Oh, right. I may enjoy the elliptical machine, but bicycling has always, by far, been my favorite form of exercise. How had I forgotten that?

Zipping along the bike path. Leaning into the curves and getting the visceral thrill of pushing through them -- like driving a sports car, but more real and honest. Enjoying a day that would be just a *little* warm for running, but which is fabulous with a self-inflicted breeze in my face. Getting to watch the people -- from the runners (oblivious to everything except their iPods) to the endless variety of dogs being walked, to the families teaching their children how to bicycle, all of them apologizing unnecessarily for the four-year-olds on the wrong side of the path.

My heart working and my breathing heavy, but never difficult. Getting to speed up here and coast there as I feel like it, but still *moving* throughout. Afterwards, definitely sweaty and bone-tired -- but it's an honest and happy sweat, with nothing that really *hurts*.

And really, there's nothing quite like satisfaction of starting in Ball Square, Somerville, saying, "I think I'll get a little exercise" -- and the next stop is an iced tea break in Arlington Center, seemingly no time later. Knowing that, with a little more time, I could fairly casually jaunt out to Lexington and beyond is just *neat*.

I already liked our house, but now I am *seriously* appreciating our location. Being just a few blocks from the effective end of the Minuteman Bike Path (and its extension through Somerville) is *really* lovely...