Why attempt such a feat?

I'll admit I've thought about doing this since leaving the theatre after the first film. The opportunity presented itself this weekend because my wife Jayne was out of town.

How was it?

Still good but long. I did notice some reused footage between the films around Isngaurd that I hadn't noticed before.

Would I do it again?

Marathon movie watching is a young mans game. I think I'll hang up my clicker.

The site has lots of pictures of the people's two pet black bears, including the picture that accompanies this post of their bear Sybil in the snow. These folks don't just raise bears either; they have a silver fox, a cow, a bunch of dogs, Llamas and more.

Via Sylvain Galineau.

Leadership Defined

"Leadership is influencing people to get things done to a standard and quality above their norm. And doing it willingly."

As an element in social interaction, leadership is a complex activity involving:
1. a process of influence
2. actors who are both leaders and followers
3. a range of possible outcomes - the achievement of goals, but also the commitment of individuals to such goals, the enhancement of group cohesion and the reinforcement of change of organizational culture.

1. Support for scripting the WebSphere TraceService MBean
2. Automatic batch file generation for all utilities in the jar

If you're like me and need to administer the components of IBM Workplace and or WebSphere but don't enjoy working with TCL, the default scripting language, then perhaps you will find this foundation for building Java based Workplace and Websphere utilities helpful. Jadmin provides a simple mechanism for writing and invoking WebSphere and Workplace MBeans in Java.

The secret to Jadmin simplicity is that it uses Java interface proxies to map standard Java calls to the less direct MBean calls. Rather than being required to call the .invoke() method of the MBean and supply a method name and array of parameters, with Jadmin you work with a Java interface that reflects the MBean.

Jadmin 1.0 only provides direct support for the Workplace MailService MBean but can easily be extended to work with other MBeans. If you have an MBean you think should also be included please let me know and I can add the interface to the distribution. But remember the intention of Jadmin is to provide a foundation for creating custom administration scripts not to provide an extensive set of pre-built scripts

In the spirit of Lotusphere I've spent the past few nights writing a post on a technique I use to script WebSphere and the Workplace server with Java instead of wsadmin or lmadmin. I know it's departure for this non IBM related blog but Lotusphere put me in the mood. The post still needs a little work but it should be done later today or tomorrow.

- N.E. Patriot Tedy Bruschi approaching the line to the lyrics "...the team's loosing ground to the opposing defense"...
- Archie Manning hugging young Payton and Eli to the lyrics "...the young quarter back waits for the snap..."

Even though Bob passed away many years ago, I figured he must have some web presence and sure enough he does. You can buy his art instructional videos at bobross.com as well as other on-line art stores, you can read a pretty harsh critique of his paintings here and you can see people debate when and if his show, Joy of Painting, ever 'Jumped the Shark' here - I hate that expression.

...the original Tron was so ahead of its time that Klugman and Sternthal have a lot of work on their hands if they want to impress geeks they way they were impressed more than 20 years ago.

One convention he mentions that I've never encountered is that of the unsolvable problem. He lists a few as examples:

• How would you count the number of gas stations in the US?
• How would you measure the number of liters of water in Sydney Harbor?
• How would you move Mount Fuji?
• How long is a piece of string?

Interviewer: "How would you count the number of gas stations in the US?"
Pete: "long integers."

Interviewer: "How would you measure the number of liters of water in Sydney Harbor?"
Pete: "I would measure it in gallons first and then multiply the result by 3.79."

Interviewer: "How would you move Mount Fuji?"
Pete: "I would read it a poem."

Interviewer: "How long is a piece of string?"
Pete: "It depends on the font."

If you’re not already familiar with Counter-Strike, it is a multi-player modification of the Half-Life game engine that allows teams (Terrorist/Counter Terrorist) to battle across various maps with conflicting objectives: plant a bomb/defuse a bomb, rescue hostages/retain the hostages, etc.... In many ways it’s like virtual capture the flag but with weapons.

The first similarity to golf in game play is that an extended game is divided up into short rounds. In golf each hole is a battle to get a ball in the cup in as few shots as possible. In Counter-Strike you try and eliminate the enemy and achieve the objective. Just as golf, this is easier said than done but the real similarity is that each round is a fresh start. If you flub a shot in golf or get killed in Counter-Strike, in the next round all is forgiven. A second similarity in game play is that you have a range of tools to use to achieve the goals of the game. In golf you carry a bag of different clubs; in Counter-Strike you carry different weapons. Just as the swing needed to employ a putter is different from a driver, the skills needed to use the various weapons available in Counter-Strike are different. Attempting to master all the difference is part of the enjoyment of the game.

The second similarity I called out at the start of this essay was the beautiful surroundings. You’re probably thinking it’s a stretch to compare a walk on a nice sunny day with some time at the keyboard, but hear me out. My point wasn’t that the environments of these two games are the same; the point is that the environment of each is just as important to the game. If golf was played on concrete and artificial turf it wouldn’t be nearly as popular. In golf you spend a nice couple of hours in a lush green natural environment. It adds a lot to the game.

It’s my contention that the environment is just as important to Counter-Strike. The modelers who built this game have paid close attention to the details. On some maps there are the sounds of rain and birds chirping; on others you can hear music emanating from certain buildings, a church might have piano music playing from inside it while others may have middle-eastern music. The buildings are also nice to look at. The models are usually clever mazes of hallways and courtyards all decorated with tiny details like pictures and carts of fruit. Of course this is a action game with all the sights and sounds of combat added in. Each gun makes a different sound (I don’t know enough about guns to know if they are all accurate but you can certainly tell a shotgun sound from a riffle or a sub machine gun from a pistol), you can hear footsteps from the direction of other players and as expected all the blood and violence of being shot or hit by an explosions is rendered in detail.

While blood and bodies going limp like a rag doll after a shot to the head may be too graphic for many people, it’s this level of combat detail in conjunction with the bird noises and the church music that make the environment so impressive. It’s a world you want to be a part of. It makes you want to survive.

My last point of comparison between golf and Counter-Strike was the joys of success. I’m not a good golfer; in fact I’m quite bad. I’ve only shot under 100 for a round of 18 holes once or twice in my life and I’ve played off and on since I was a teenager. What keeps me coming back is that random pitch from 10 yards off the green that just rolls into the hole or that drive that just sails straight and true. They don’t happen often but the sudden feeling of mastery after all those moments of aggravation is priceless.

As bad as I am at golf I’m probably worse at Counter-Strike. I don't know if it's just that the typical player is some teenager with better reflexes and more twitch training than I or if there's a aiming gene I just wasn't born with. Either way, I stink at it. A reasonable person might question why I would continue to play. It's a question I’ve ask myself a lot over the couple of weeks I’ve played the game and I believe the answer is the same as for golf. It’s the small joys of victory. I may get killed in most rounds but the joy of finally getting the better of someone who has killed me repeatedly is great.

While golf and Counter-Strike are certainly very different and appeal to different parts of society, I hope I’ve shown how the games get their appeal in much the same way. Both are simple in concept yet hard to master; both rely on the environmental experience to add to the game play and finally both are epitomized by small glorious successes amid many small defeats.

...learning only the information that I think is important really is like the blind men describing the elephant.

Some searching turned up this funny poem that tells the source parable. Now that I've read the whole thing, I know I've heard it before. It's a good story and one very applicable to the issues of working on a team. Hopefully blogging about it will help me do a better job remembering it this time.

I too think Damien is a cowboy developer, but when I say that I say it with respect and admiration. Infact, all the best developers I’ve worked with have been cowboys. That's not to say they haven't been team players either, they all have been. Cowboys by their nature are team players.

What does a real cowboy do? They work on a team to shepherd a heard of cattle from one location to another. A cowboy knows their job on the team but can also think independently and be assertive because the heard is large and there may not be another cowboy in range when trouble strikes. A cowboy doesn’t need a lot of creature comforts either; they can sleep on the ground and live off beans and cornbread for weeks on end. Cowboys don’t always get along with city slickers and they don’t have much use for towns, except perhaps to visit the saloon, but put them in their element and they are king of the range.

In this context, a cowboy sounds a lot like a software developer to me. Code is a lot like a heard of cattle. Each cow - I mean piece of code - needs to be coerced to work in the direction of the entire project. Just like in herding, this often means moving from one area of the code to another to keep things moving along. To do this you need self motivated people with a variety of skills and a team and project perspective. And, just like real cowboys, a cowboy developer can do all this with a modest set of tools; just give them a good computer/horse and editor/saddle and they can get the job done. When working on an interesting project a cowboy developer will gladly work crazy hours and live off soda, candy bars and pizza for months. But also like cowboys, cowboy developers don’t like people who aren’t developers who try and tell them how to do their jobs. They work best with other developers and they willingly follow the lead of a developer who has demonstrably better skills than themselves.

As for the Oracle 10g article - I would take any article written by a marketing person on behest of corporation with a grain of salt. A statement early in the piece pretty much kills the credibility of the author as far as writing about software development.

"In the past, developers used local, four-CPU machines for development and testing," says Kumar. "But the number of tests has grown from 30,000 to more than 100,000, which is more than a desktop machine can handle." So, Oracle pooled the developers' individual computing power to create a server farm of more than 1,000 machines. This development grid represented a major breakthrough for Oracle, giving developers on-demand computing from any location. It also offered them far more horsepower than a single dedicated machine could provide. As a result, they could edit source code not only more safely and accurately but also more quickly.

I’d really like to understand how this grid helped the developers edit source code more safely, accurately and quickly. Perhaps the author was trying to indicate that grid helped developers regression test changes and get the code integrated into the build quicker, but that’s not what they said.

The whole article seems like management patting themselves on the back for their ‘brilliant’ plan. I would like to hear from some developer on the ground how things really were. Most of it sounds like standard enterprise development BS.

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Companies' spend a lot of money advertising to recruit users to their services. Why not turn the tables and use that money to reward consumers to try out their services? It's a win-win for both companies and consumers.