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Burning Man in Pictures 2015 X: Build Day Two (Evening Edition)!

June 2, 2016Things We've Built, Traveladmin

In our last post, we had just stopped construction for supper[1]. As we had much more to do, we went back to the Charnival grounds to build in the evening.

(We had also heard rumors of an impending windstorm the following day, so we also went out to batten down all of the hatches.)

We had also started to receive our first explorers, and our intrepid build crew was happy to bask in their adulation:

Our intrepid build crew receives their first admirers.

Here are some pictures to try to capture the calm before the storm. First, the calmness of the grounds, with the Man in the distance:

Night two, with the Man in the distance.

Here’s a side view of Mirror Blaze, complete with some wind bracing:

Mirror Blaze, night two, complete with some wind bracing.

Here’s Riskee Ball, the backside of the Charnival entrance and barker station, and Fire Tetris (note the rather intense Fire Tetris wind bracing):

Riskee Ball, Charnival entrance and barker station, and Fire Tetris, night two.

We were visited by an interesting arachnid-nose car:

The 'Nasal Arachnid', one of the lesser known species. — The ‘Nasal Arachnid’, one of the lesser known species.

Here’s our feisty build team for night two:

Construction night two build team! (r-l Evan, Kosta, S, Dug)

We then took a few minutes to explore some glowing unicorns we found before calling it a night:

Evan looks on as the unicorns claim fresh victims.

[1]And a ‘unique experience‘…

Planning a Novel I: Basic Components

June 1, 2016Fiction, Rollick, Writingadmin

Those who have been following this blog for a while may be aware that I’ve been[1] putting together pieces of a novel.

So far, we know that the story mostly seems to be being told from the perspective of ‘Rollick’, a mostly retired ‘corp investigator’. The other main character (so far) seems to be a mysterious woman who Rollick knows from previous investigations. They seem to be on the trail of the ‘White Rose’, a mysterious killer or thief who leaves a parsnip carved into the shape of a rose at the scene of the crime.

It seems that some sort of bracer had been stolen, but the larger issue is likely econo-political, with the possible building of a direct rail link from Japan to the mainland.

Rollick’s motivations are pretty clear. He wants to get to the bottom of this case. He may suspect (or have been told off-screen) that his ‘corp investigator’ background would come in handy.

The mysterious woman seems to enjoy puzzles, which makes sense given her career as an investigator of note.

The ‘White Rose’ is a bit of an enigma. Motivation unknown at this time.

Genre is kind of futuristic ‘film noir’. Location is Rollick’s office and Japan (so far). ‘Transparent Plas-crete’ and ‘shaped charges’ are an indication of the technology level, but may be restricted to government usage.

Known power groups seem to be Japan, France, and the ‘Eastern Bloc’. (Rollick was a corp investigator for the Bloc, it is unknown whether that is the ‘Eastern Bloc’, but seems likely.)

Protagonist seems to be Rollick, Antagonist the ‘White Rose’.

Of the ‘Everyman/Anti-hero/Hero’ scale, Rollick seems to be (in the tradition of hard-boiled film noir) a hero verging on anti-hero. There’s no specific evidence of bravery or selflessness, but his special power is likely investigations[2].

Next up, I’ll be looking at (also from Ty Templeton):

What is normal?

What changes?

What is the result?

[1]Veeery sloooowly…

[2]We had the privilege of taking Ty Templeton’s ‘Comic Book Boot Camp: Introduction to Comics’ a few years ago, and Ty talked about the various types of heroes. I believe you can find some of this here: https://neverendinggaming.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/fanexpo-2013-ty-templeton-how-to-plot-a-story-in-under-an-hour/

Adventures in Mobile Phone Resurrection

May 31, 2016Administrivia, Programmingadmin

My day, in a nutshell:

[Background:]

0) See that your phone may be having issues. No time to spend the week fixing it. Tape[1] it up and take it to Burning Man. Wait 10 months for the issues to become serious. Go on vacation. Drop it in the airport on the way there. Nursemaid it through the vacation, trying to read through the horizontal lines of ‘VGA cable is partially detached’. Drop it on the plane on the way home.

0.5) Take it in to the store. They say they’ll replace the phone for $100, but the data won’t be transferred over. I buy a new phone and go home to check my backup situation. (All my photos and videos are fine, it’s my notes and TTD lists that I’m most concerned about.)

0.7) Get home and find out my last full backup sufficient for a ‘Restore’ is about 10 months old. For some reason the ‘Sync’ doesn’t actually sync any useful amount of data, and there are no useful ways to gain finer control of this (I’m assuming) without jailbreaking the device.

0.8) Restore the device using the old backup. It’s really odd to see your last messages with someone that are 10 months old. Resolve to transfer over the rest of the data somehow…

[Next Day]

1) Start backing up the old phone. Discover that your phone needs some number of tens of gigs to do a full backup, and your computer only has 11GB free.

2) Rummage through your hard drive, using suggestions from helpful sites, finding another 15GB.

3) Figure out that 25GB is again not enough. Start taking a closer look at that 40GB backup from 10 months ago. Look at the directory, noticing that it contains about 40k files, each named with a 40 character hex hash. Try uploading it to back it up. After about half an hour, calculate that it will take 15-20 hours. Try tar -czvf to reduce the number of files. this doesn’t significantly help the upload time.

4) Decide to bite the bullet and delete the old backup. As there are too many files in the directory for ‘rm *’ to work, start with ‘rm 1*’, through to ‘rm f*'[2].

5) Start the backup of the old phone again, it finishes, and I start the restore to the new phone.

6) After waiting for a while, the phone has reset, and it gives me the option to ‘restore from backup’. More waiting. ‘The backup was corrupt or not compatible with this device or device version.’

7) Try again. More waiting. Once again having the new phone factory reset to start the restore. Once again: ‘The backup was corrupt or not compatible with this device or device version.’

8) Look in the directory to see if there’s something obviously corrupt. Wait a second…Some of those files starting with ‘0’ are from 2015…

9) Move all of the old remaining files to a new folder. Try the restore again. ‘The backup was corrupt or not compatible with this device or device version.'[3] Realizing that I had missed other files (not starting with 0-f), or that some of the 0-starting files had made their way into the list of files for the new backup, I delete all of the files in the directory this time.

10) Full backup. Full restore. Full day.

[1]Duct tape, of course. My little friend was suffering from an ‘expanded battery’, which eventually became bad enough that the screen became separated from whatever was feeding the screen data. Two drops later, it was unfixable, thankfully still okay enough on the inside to back up.

[2]You may notice something here.

[3]Interestingly, (from behaviour, not from looking in the files), the backup program (iTunes) blindly adds new files to the list of hashed files, and probably adds them to a list somewhere in that directory. It apparently doesn’t do much checking of the backup until it tries to restore it somewhere.

Burning Man in Pictures 2015 IX: Build Day Two!

May 29, 2016Photos, Things We've Built, Traveladmin

As you may recall, we started the day like this:

Our beautiful triangle at the start of day 2 of building.

A large project like this would not be possible without Our intrepid building crew, hard at work!

S supervises while Dug attaches oh-so-important wind bracing and Matt reflects. Steph sorts things out in the background. — S supervises while Dug builds and Matt reflects. Steph sorts things out in the background.

And here’s another pic of some more of our crew, trimuphant during their second full day of building:

Building crew triumphant! (l-r: S, Kosta, Steph, Matt, Evan).

By midday on the second day, we had put up 5 of the 21 segments, 6 of the 23 posts, 6 of the 32 pieces of acrylic. Didn’t feel like an auspicious start, and we were more than a little tense.

Various things contributed to this. We had made the design decision early on that each mirror would be married to two specific posts, and that any wiggle room would be provided by the mirrors’ ability to bend and the hinges. What this meant was that each of the mirrors had to be precisely fit to the posts to be bolted on. This involved a lot of heavy lifting and struggling. (We had only assembled 7 segments for demo day, at the burn was the first time we were going to assemble the whole thing.) This design decision was because we weren’t confident in our ability to precisely fabricate parts such that they would all be interchangeable (attaching hinges to posts is imprecise, drilling is imprecise, and acrylic can really only be drilled once or twice before it starts thinking about shattering.[1])

Another major contributor to this was our decision to avoid guy wires for wind and tipping stabilization of Mirror Blaze. Guy wires are a terrible tripping hazard, and they also look terrible. For many applications (like staking down a tent or yurt) they are basically essential, but we wanted to avoid them if at all possible.

We ended up drilling one foot deep holes in the base of each post, and using 2′ or 3′ rebar to stake them into the ground. As long as the wind didn’t lift the entire structure off the ground by a foot, we would be okay.

The last reason it took a long time to build was a decision I inadvertently made to start at one end of the outer wall. Had we gone both directions from the middle of the outer wall, we could have built two panels at once for much more of the build process.

But let none of this fool you. We were working with amazing people, building something, and enjoying ourselves in a way that’s difficult to describe:

S also took a moment for reflection[2]:

During our break for supper, we got to watch ‘A Unique Experience'[3] meet the guy with a capsaicin molecule tattooed to his arm:

Next up: Dancing with the builders in the pale moonlight!

[1]I learned this the hard way with my first drilling of holes in acrylic, but that was a half-thickness test piece, which I think contributed.

[2]No, I don’t think this will ever get old.

[3]M is known for offering ‘a unique experience’ which is usually tequila flavoured with some type of super-strong peppers that he’s grown. From the reactions of people who have tried it, it lives up to its name.

Burning Man in Pictures 2015 VIII: Night Falls, a New Day Dawns, we Map Out Some Trenching

May 28, 2016Photos, Things We've Built, Traveladmin

Yesterday, we had just built our first Mirror Blaze triangle:

You may or may not be aware that this involved precisely hammering 3′ rebar into the playa, then threading the 8′ 4×4 posts one at a time, attaching the mirrors, making sure all the way through that the geometry worked properly.[1]

While we were doing this, many of the other installations were springing up around us, including the scary scaffolding, springing up-per:

The scary scaffolding from the first night, now higher than before?

And Riskee Ball, after the first day, metal frame assembled!:

Rikee Ball, 1st day, metal frame assembled!

So, we had built the first triangle, and put flamey (our flame effect) inside, waiting for propane to be fed to it. This required some planning to properly place the fuel depot, as the fuel depot would need to be away from the perimeter fence, and would also be servicing FaIRE Hockey. Earlier, I had sat down with my book and some friendly triangles, and worked out some geometry:

Construction Day 1 Very Exacting Trenching Diagram (now with even friendlier triangles!).

A new day dawns! We head to the portapotties to take care of essentials, and we notice that someone has kindly updated the signs for road ‘C’:

We started the build day by surveying the scene, starting with our beautiful first triangle:

One of our 4’x8′ ply sheets got a little tired and had to take a breather:

One of our 4'x8' ply sheets had to take a breather. — One of our 4’x8′ ply sheets had to take a breather.

We also surveyed the rest of the Charnival. Riskee Ball was looking nice and safe:

Francis was looking Fantastic:

And Pyrokinesis (foreground) looked like it wanted to burn the scary scaffolding to the ground:

Pyrokinesis (foreground) looking like it wants to burn the scary scaffolding.

Next: Day 2 of building!

[1]There are a lot of details here. Details of how we built will be a separate post, or several.

Burning Man in Pictures 2015 VII: A Chorus of Anvil

May 27, 2016Photos, Things We've Built, Traveladmin

Yesterday, we started construction, and then ended up investigating a traveling variable forklift chased by bicycles[1]:

A variable forklift? Complete with chase group?

Following the variable forklift, we came upon a large group of people involved in a strange ritual:

For some reason, it seemed to involve firing of an anvil into the air, and multiple cars up on variable forklifts:

Here you can see the aftermath of the ritual, none of which really made any sense:

The aftermath of the ritual. None of this really made any sense.

Bewildered, we continued on our original quest, which was to commune with the Man:

Arriving back at camp, we were reminded of an experience earlier in the day, where we experienced one of those sublime moments, where you see a person totally focused on what they’re doing, and there’s almost a type of music:

The music of focus and solitude.

Arriving back at the Charnival, we saw that construction had progressed on Francis:

Francis the Fantastic construction continues! Mirror Blaze parts in the foreground.

We went around the front for a better look:

As night fell on the Charnival, we finally nailed down placement, and started to build:

Pausing only for a moment to see our first art car of the season:

Construction pauses as our plucky heroine catches a glimpse of her first art car of the season.

Success! We’ve built the first triangular section!:

With a successful day of acclimation and construction, we retire to our yurt with our number one fan:

Tomorrow: How’s the rest of the Charnival going, and Heavy Construction!

[1]If this seems a little Mad Max-esque, that’s because much of it is.

Burning Man in Pictures 2015 VI: First Day of Construction and a Slight Case of Sideways

May 26, 2016Photos, Puns, Things We've Built, Traveladmin

After arriving the previous evening, it was time to start construction on Mirror Blaze!

Looking around our campsite, you can see all the empty space, soon to be filled by campers, art, and activities. Note that we were camped on the ‘Esplanade’ this year, the main ring road. This is the layout of our camp[0], which may help in understanding the next couple of pics:

'The Hive' placement plan, giving you an idea of how much pre-planning goes into building even a small part of this city. — ‘The Hive’ placement plan, giving you an idea of how much pre-planning goes into building even a small part of this city.

All the space you see in this picture will be filled, even moreso than the rest of the festival:

Empty Campsites...but not for long... — Empty Campsites…but not for long…

You can also see the beginnings of (I think)[1] the metal and cloth ‘Kaos Maze’ being put together by our neighbours:

The beginnings of a metal-and-cloth maze put up by our neighbours.

Here in the foreground, you can see part of the space which will become Mirror Blaze, in the background, you can see an example of the ‘anti-logo’ art prevalent here. (One of the ten principles is ‘de-commodification’, implemented here by covering or otherwise altering all visible logos on-site.):

In the foreground, some of the space which will become Mirror Blaze. In the background, an example of the ‘anti-logo’ art prevalent here.

As we were still waiting for other members of the Charnival to assemble so we could finalize the overall layout, we decided to assemble the lifeguard chair[2] from the parts that Rob had kindly built for us. To do so, we consulted the picture that I had taken during construction and testing:

To construct a lifeguard chair, you must first invent the photograph.

However, during construction, we noticed that even though we had assembled all of the pieces in order (including our intrepid heroine!), we had somehow developed a severe case of sideways:

We gathered some of our best experts to try to debug the slight case of sideways:

While pondering this problem, we were looking around the Charnival grounds, and saw the Man in the distance:

The Man, in the distance, as seen from the Charnival grounds.

Thinking that visiting and communing might help us solve the problem, we decided to venture forth:

We bravely venture forth, in search of answers to sideways... — We bravely venture forth, in search of answers to sideways…

Along the way, we saw a variable forklift, and decided (using the Dirk Gently Navigation Method) that we should follow them:

What happened next? Tune in tomorrow!

[0]Would you believe it wasn’t until after the event, when I was looking at this picture that I finally put together ‘The Hive’ and ‘Full of Bees’?

[1]Sadly, we never fully investigated it, being too busy doing setup and running our installation.

[2]It sits outside Mirror Blaze so we can sit up top and see inside to make sure everyone is okay.

What do Numerical Software Development Estimates Actually Mean?

May 25, 2016Agile, Organizing Systems, Software Developmentadmin

What do numerical software development estimates actually mean?

What do they mean for you?

(I’m talking especially about team-based estimation, such as that in ‘planning poker‘, but I’m guessing whatever conclusions we may have would hold for other methodologies.)

I see the general objective here as coming up with a number for each task, and a number for how much your team can typically do in an amount of time, such that these numbers are reasonably fungible.

Traditionally, estimates would be given in ‘programmer days’, or ‘wall clock time’, depending on whether you had read ‘The Mythical Man-Month‘ or not[1].

More recently, there has been a back-and-forth between ‘amounts of time’ and some sort of dimensionless unit called ‘complexity points’.

Various teams that I had been a part of struggled with ‘complexity points’. In their strictest definition, something which was simple and repetitive would be worth few ‘complexity points’, even though it would take many hours of some attention or nursemaiding to finish the task.

Strict ‘amounts of time’ are no better, because each person does each task at a different rate.

We had the most success with ‘relative complexity’, or taking some small and large tasks, assigning them numbers, then rating each of the other tasks with respect to these goalposts.

Even this has its limitiations, though. Fundamentally, they question you’re asking when you’re deciding to put something into a sprint is ‘can we still accomplish everything if we include this?’. Because of limiting reagents (specific people who are bottlenecks for many tasks) and interdependence between tasks, this can be problematic. The standard way of getting around this is to insist that all tasks are independent and small.

This worked reasonably well, it’s just that sometimes you need to rewrite or refactor an entire application.

What are your experiences? How have you dealt with this question? How many points would it be worth to research and present on this topic?

(This post came out of a fb conversation with D about what estimation numbers mean, and have meant at various times.)

[1]One of the upshots of this is an observation made by someone at work (I think F) which was that Gantt Charts are excellent for deriving dependencies, but terrible for estimation.

New Divisions of Five Management Roles

May 24, 2016Agile, Idle Speculation, Organizing Systems, Software Developmentadmin

Yesterday, we talked about five management roles:

Performance Manager (Worker Evaluation)
Estimatrix (Estimator)
Product Owner (Prioritization)
Scrum Master (Removing Obstacles)
(People) Development Manager (Development Conversations)

In a traditional corporate structure, these five roles are combined in one person (your boss).

However, there are many ways to divide these roles, and many reasons to do so (the simplest being that different people are good at different things).

Valve famously has an incredibly flat structure, where each person has a set of peers (the rest of the company) who handle performance management, and all of the rest of the roles are performed by each person themselves. As they say, occasionally teams will form with people splitting off into roles, but that’s all dynamically allocated by the people involved.

Your standard ‘Scrum‘ Agile shop will tend to put the ‘Performance Management’ and ‘Development Management’ into a ‘People Manager’. ‘Estimation’ is done by the team as a whole, the ‘Scrum Master’ or ‘Obstacle Remover’ is traditionally not the people manager, but is a separate role. The ‘Product Owner’ can be the ‘People Manager’, or someone else, sometimes an external product or project manager, but is generally not the same person as the ‘Scrum Master’.

I would argue that this tension between prioritization and removing obstacles is one of the reasons the system works better than many.

There seems to be a growing trend to separate Performance from Development[1], with some companies having separate reviews in different parts of the year for each of these. This can be especially helpful as many people are unlikely to be relaxed enough to think about how to take beneficial risks in the future when they’re tied up in knots about whether their boss wants to fire them.

I think it might make sense to push this to its logical conclusion, and have separate people for these separate roles in a company. The ‘Development’ role feels almost like a traditional HR thing, but I feel like to best serve employees, it would really need to be a separate department, called ’employee growth’ or something similar.

What do you think? What have you heard about how different organizations split these roles? How do you think they should be split?

[1]Development as in ‘where is your career going?’

How do You Think Before You Speak?

May 23, 2016Engineering, Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Politics, Puns, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughtsadmin

I’ve talked a lot about the speed involved and possibly required for retorts and humour, but not all conversation is retorts and counter-retorts[1].

For example, you’re giving a speech or lesson, and someone asks you a question. Many of the same tactics are helpful. It’s helpful to know your audience, to have an idea of their background(s), which types of words will work best for explaining things, and to have an idea of what they perceive the relative level of hierarchy is between you and them.

But once you have an idea of these things, what do you do?

This trigger for this post was an article reporting on Jon Stewart talking about how Hillary Clinton pauses for a few seconds between a question and when she answers[2]:

”
…“It’s — look, there are politicians who are either rendering their inauthenticity in real enough time to appear authentic, and then their are politicians who render their inauthenticity through — it’s like, when your computer … if you have a Mac and you want to play a Microsoft game on it …”

AXELROD: Yes, yes.

STEWART: … and there’s that weird lag.

AXELROD: Yes. No, I mean …

STEWART: That’s Hillary Clinton.

AXELROD: … that’s a big problem. There’s like a seven-second delay and all the words come out in a perfectly …

STEWART: Right.

AXELROD: … politically calibrated sentence.

STEWART: Right. Now, what gives me hope in that is that there’s a delay, which means she’s somehow fighting something. I’ve seen politicians who don’t have that delay and render their inauthenticity in real time, and that’s when you go, ‘That’s a sociopath.’
”

So, when you’re answering a difficult question, do you pause? Why? For how long?

For me, it depends on the type of question. For emotionally difficult questions, some of it is finding a neutral[3] perspective from which to address the question, to speak to the person(s) asking the question in a positive and useful way. Sometimes it’s choosing the appropriate emotional outlet[4] for whatever I’m feeling at the time.

For technically difficult questions, it feels much more like assembling a mental model in my head, or choosing between different visualizations/places to start. Parts of this can feel similar to emotionally difficult questions (perspectives vs. visualizations), but to me they feel quite different[5].

So, how does this work for you?

[1]No matter how much bash.org would want you to think so. (Note that outside that page, bash.org is quite unfiltered internet. You have been warned.)

[2] Article is here. In a footnote because the editorializing in the article is outside the scope of this post.

[3]In the emotional perspective sense.

[4]This is often laughter for later when I’m alone. I mean, really, we’re just ape-like creatures who don’t know the first thing about ourselves. Why are we getting all angry about minutiae? This can only be funny.

[5]Now that I say this, I’ll have to watch next time. But something getting my back[6] up really feels different from trying to focus and assemble a visualization. Maybe being able to relax for all types of questions would make them more similar.

[6]Back hackles?

Sometimes Egregious, Always Gregarious

Sometimes a letter can make a word of difference