Since my last update on the Great Sushi Race, Ebi has left the country at last!  In it’s race home to Auburn it has travelled 1200 miles in … well … pretty much the wrong direction.  Meanwhile Futo-maki has made a beeline to England, over 5000 miles, with a mere 100 miles left to go. 

Maybe there’s an alternate prize for most tortuous route home.  I know - the winner of that prize has to buy the other a sushi dinner (wait, did that come out right?)

As of yesterday, we have a couple of new family members, a little black Barbados lamb (a twin on the losing end of sibling rivalry for milk), and another little guy to keep her company.  They currently live in our shower at night while this cold snap lasts, and in their new paddock during the day.  Kids are loving the regular bottle feeding necessary to build their strength up.  And just like the rhyme, the lambs now follow them wherever they go…

Welcome to the ranch Samurai Jack and Lotus!

Photos here.

Last week I spent three days chaperoning the Sierra Montessori Academy Field Trip.  This interval it was about Science and Technology, with tours of Stanford and the Stanford Linear Accelerator, programs at the San Jose Technology Museum and The San Jose Museum of Art, and stops at the Intel Museum and the Computer History Museum.  Belated posting of the resulting set of photos on Flickr (mostly restricted).

Spending time with the kids was really rewarding, especially the final stop at the Computer History Museum where I gave a short presentation tying together the early computers used by the defense department (linked by a network), up through the semiconductor revolution spurred by Intel, from the early microprocessors like the Rockwell AIM and the first Apple II, where I could show the kids some of the ancient hardware we learned on, relating all this up to the development of the Internet and the Web, playing up the SLAC-Cern connection and the contribution of Tim Berners-Lee.

I’ve known my work has always been abstract to my kids, since the day in 2nd grade my daughter came home with stories of the Dad who visited the class in his work uniform - the flight suit he wears when flying U2s over Yugoslavia or Afghanistan or who knows were. After she finished telling me all about it she said "and what do you do again, Daddy?”

But this time, by the end of my short presentation, Gen said "Gee Dad, you know a lot about this stuff."  You should have seen my smile!

An interesting tidbit came across my desktop with the words "design by committee" in it.  Well written.  Gotta share it!

Apparently a small team desired some UI changes to the GNOME open source project, so they went ahead and did them and are now presenting them back to the community.  The community is a bit shocked to be presented with something with a fairly complete design rather than a set of requirements.  (Web Service folks - this sound rather familiar?)  The designers defend their decision quite eloquently:

…

Although the changes aren’t nearly as radical as the original mockups, they are a big change from the current GNOME panel menu. If we had proposed the changes on the mailing lists, it would have started a huge discussion about what people hated about the design ("you can’t make the panel menu depend on beagle!!!") and how it should be different. And then we could have either (a) completely ignored everyone and done it ourselves anyway, or (b) had a long conversation about the merits of the design and then not actually finished the code in time for NLD10. So we did it ourselves, and now either GNOME will like what we did, in which case, yay, free code for GNOME, or GNOME won’t like what we did, in which case, no harm no foul for GNOME, and yay, brand differentiation for Novell. (And anyone who yells "fork" deserves to get one stuck in them.) An equivalent answer to the question is "because you can’t do design by committee". Everything good in GNOME is good because one person or a small number of people working closely together made it good. Much of what is bad in GNOME is bad because lots of people have contributed without having a single vision of what the end result is supposed to be. …

This is just another aspect of the UI "simplicity" thing. We like UIs that try to do the right thing (metacity, epiphany/firefox, evince) rather than UIs that try to make every possible user happy (enlightenment, mozilla, gpdf/acroread). If you try to design something by committee, you either have to end up with the latter sort of messy does-everything UI, or you ignore and hence piss off a large chunk of the committee.

And that’s where we are with NLD. There is no way that everyone in the GNOME community is going to like the changes we wanted to make. But we did the user testing, and we believe in it, and we want to make the changes anyway. So we’re doing it. Maybe it will turn out good, and maybe it will turn out bad. Either way, the GNOME community learns from it. Think of it like this: wouldn’t it have been cool if we could have tried out spatialus on our users, found out that they hated it, and then reverted back to browserlus, without ever having to actually piss off our users? This is essentially what is going to happen with NLD10. If Novell’s customers like the NLD changes, then GNOME can adopt them. If Novell’s customers don’t like the changes, then GNOME can stand off to the side and say "yeah well, we never liked that UI anyway. Not at all like how we would have done it."

But some people will still say "But couldn’t you have discussed it with the community before doing it?" No, we couldn’t. If we had, it would either not have happened, or it would have sucked. It’s inevitable. It’s not a problem with the GNOME community, it’s a problem with communities in general. The wisdom of crowds [4] only works in situations where there are clear right and wrong answers. If you try to apply it to a design problem, where there are many entirely different right answers, then you end up with a wrong answer. Always [5].

So to sum up: design by committee is bad, endless debates that result in code not actually being written are bad, design by very small teams is good, software with a unified vision is good, trying out cool new UI ideas is good, free code at least doesn’t suck, and of course, for Novell, not shipping NLD10 is bad. I don’t think there’s anything we could have done to get more of the good without also getting more of the bad.

[4] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385721706/102-7630748-5396113
[5] http://www.diacenter.org/km/usa/most.html

Especially check out the last link ;-).

Recently discovered the amazing flavor of Taaza Spicy Garlic Chutney.  I’ve been enjoying Taaza brands of Tamarind and Cilantro chutneys for a while, and picked this one up somewhere (Seattle?  Folsom?).

We smeared a little of this elixir on tonight’s homemade paratha and - wow!  A must for garlic naan and baked garlic lovers - true distilled essence of garlickiness right from the bottle!

P.S. The meal also included a Saag Dal and acorn squash in a sauce borrowed from my favorite Kofta recipe - yum!

Big Brother is trying to pull another one over on us.

The administration, in cahoots with Fox and other propaganda outlets, is trying to give the formerly covert domestic warrantless wiretapping program a new name - the "terrorist surveillance program."  If this terminology gets adopted, the issue is as good as dead.  Who can stand and say "I’m against terrorist surveillance!"  The debate is lost before it’s started, just as "tax relief" was.  The terminology shifts the debate from "warrantless" which is what the real issue is, to "terrorist", which it is not.

You can see how misleading the terminology is by following the logic through.  If it’s a "terrorist surveillance program" then it only "surveills" terrorists, right?  By definition anyone who’s under surveillance must be known by the government to be a terrorist.

If that’s the case, Mr. Bush, why aren’t these known terrorists in jail?  Why are they free to roam our streets making cell-phone calls to their co-conspirators?  You’re the one who labeled them terrorists, and if you haven’t arrested them then I can only conclude that you must be soft on terrorism.

What’s that?  I’ve gone to far?  They aren’t known conclusively to be terrorists?  You might watch a suspect that isn’t a terrorist?  Just someone who might cause harm to the US?  If "harm to the US" is the standard you use, the program seems destined for some exponential growth, starting with those who brought this important issue to our attention:

“The fact that somebody leaked this program causes great harm to the United States.” [MSNBC]

Terrorist, suspect, leaker, political opponent: if these terms aren’t distinct, we’re in grave danger.  Refuse to swallow terminology that is manipulative, inaccurate, and prevents the meaningful democratic discourse (in this case on the role of warrants in legitimate surveillance activities) upon which our freedom from government tyranny relies.

Just read an interesting draft TAG finding called The Principle of Least Power. I find the idea very appealing that one should use the simplest possible tool for the job - in many cases using declarative languages rather than procedural, or data rather than objects.

This is a primary issue we’ve faced in the design of XML and especially XSLT.  There was a lot of customer pressure to add more power, especially recursive processing of the output.  Now that XSLT is being baked into hardware, we’ll find out if we went too far.

I’ve always felt frustrated when forced to use a tool too powerful for the job (like JavaScript to apply a different XSLT in the browser), and thanks to the TAG I can now name (with a URI no less my frustration.

Pictures from the Auburn Discovery Montessori field trip earlier this week are now posted on Flickr as the Fort Ross set.

Fort Ross was a trading post of the Russian Hudson Bay Company, occupied from 1799 to about 1840, occupied by Russian traders and militia and Aleut Indians who were experts at otter hunting.  Our field trip was an overnight to live in the fort as the residents would have (sort of — we had dish soap and sleeping bags :-).  We dressed in costume and were assigned a role which included a Russian name and a workgroup - cooks, hunters, militia, gardeners, artisans.

We were cooks, so many of my pictures are in and around the kitchen fires.  But we also danced, hiked, explored the beach, fired the cannon, and learned a lot about how the traders lived back then.  Turned out to be a great way to spend time with the children!

P.S. Many of the 109 photos are of the children and are marked as private.  If you wish to see them ask me to add you as a Flickr contact.