Author: kjdyck

Last weekend I took a ski trip with some friends from work to Ellicottville, NY, home of the Holiday Valley ski resort.

We stayed in one of the Alpine Meadow chalets on the resort. As a group of 10 people, we filled it all its beds: two double beds in the loft, one king-size a main floor bedroom, and a double with single top bunk and another single. Though the sleeping arrangements were a little crowded, there was a large common room where we spent most of our waking hours in the chalet. With a full kitchen, sofa, and wood-burning stove, it had everything to make our stay enjoyable; everything, that is, except a second shower.

On Saturday morning, I was up before everybody else. I hit the slopes (trail map) before the rest had had their breakfast, giving me a chance to get a few runs in while it was still cold and relatively fast. There was a heavy, wet snow that morning and I was concerned that it might change to rain in the afternoon so I wanted to make the most of my day. I spent most of the morning on the lower side of Mardi Gras, enjoying the likes of Firecracker, Shadows, The Chute, and Champagne, all of which were steep enough to provide some challenge and fun. When I met up with my friends, we toured around the hill some more, hitting the runs serviced by the Little Spruce lift, with which I was generally unimpressed. They were typical beginner/intermediate runs with a constant gradual pitch, excellent for the typical beginner/intermediate, but quite dull for my tastes.

With all the heavy wet snow that morning, it was difficult to stay dry. In fact, the cheap gloves that I brought, figuring I didn’t need the warmth of my usual mitts in such mild weather, were soaked right through. To my relief, for lunch we returned to the chalet, where I could throw all my wet clothes in a drier while I nibbled on a roast beef sandwich.

In the afternoon, we toured around the hill some more, hitting the Eagle chair, with its steep, fun runs: Eagle, Raven, and Hoot Owl.

I was surpised at the number of quad lifts they have. Although most of them are not high speed lifts, they managed to service what little lines formed quite efficiently. I don’t think I waited more than five minutes for a lift all day; usually we skied right on to the lift.

Around 4 o’clock, we returned to the chalet for a dinner break with plans to return to the slopes later for some night skiing. Those plans soon disappated with talk of going out for dinner. We decided to go to the Ellicottville Brewing Company, a microbrewery with excellent food and mediocre beer according to those who had been there before. They were right on one count, anyway. For dinner I had their chicken quesadilla; with large chunks of chicken and a shell toasted to perfection, it was some of the best food I’ve had in a long time. The beer, on the other hand was far from mediocre, as my friends generously suggested. It was surprisingly bad. Among their several varieties, I sampled their stout, which I can best describle as a blend of the tastes of cigarette ash and fish. I sampled several other varieties, and after much deliberation about which was nearest to tolerable, I finally settled on scotch.

On Sunday morning, I toured the town of Ellicottville with some friends while some others skied for the two hours before we were required to vacate the chalet. We stopped in at several ski shops, an excellent chocolate shop (of which I sadly don’t remember the name), and a trinket & art gallery, which housed a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Orlando Bloom as Legolas from LOTR that I considered bringing home for Mandy but for its size and likelihood of damage in transit.

All-in-all it was an excellent trip, one that I would recommend to any cost-conscious Ontarian skier.

As promised, here’s an update to my problem with a mysterious message box that reads “fAIL”, generated by the media card reader software from Alcor Micro, shwicon2k.exe.

I was surprised and impressed to hear back from emachines the day after sending them my question. I was not so impressed with their response, which read:

Corrupted files or folders pertaining to your system may have caused this issue. File corruption is uncontrollable and can happen anytime. Some factors can affect this behavior such as, improper shutting down of your computer, disk or media failure, improper program installation, incompatibility with other programs and viruses as well.

With this regard, you may consider doing what is called a Restore to an Earlier Time. This process restores the entire registry, software and hardware settings back to a date (restore point) that you select. You do not lose any created documents or information. The only thing that might happen is if you have installed any software after the restore point that you select, you may need to reinstall the software. However, any files that you have created using the software will still be there.

Sounds like a sure-fire way to corrupt some other part of my system, if you ask me. No thanks.

I replied to their email, asking them to contact Alcor Micro on my behalf since they refuse to deal with me directly. I haven’t heard anything back since.

As a temporary solution, I have decided to remove the “Sunkist2k” registry entry in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun (with a value of c:Program FilesMultimedia Card Readershwicon2k.exe, for the record). This avoids running the software every time somebody logs on, while keeping the software on the system in case I ever find out what the real problem is and the proper way to solve it.

In the The Cathedral & the Bazaar, Raymond argued that the open source community is a gift culture where participants are motivated by reputation, writing:

There are reasons general to every gift culture why peer repute (prestige) is worth playing for:

First and most obviously, good reputation among one’s peers is a primary reward. We’re wired to experience it that way for evolutionary reasons touched on earlier. (Many people learn to redirect their drive for prestige into various sublimations that have no obvious connection to a visible peer group, such as “honor”, “ethical integrity”, “piety” etc.; this does not change the underlying mechanism.)

Secondly, prestige is a good way (and in a pure gift economy, the only way) to attract attention and cooperation from others. If one is well known for generosity, intelligence, fair dealing, leadership ability, or other good qualities, it becomes much easier to persuade other people that they will gain by association with you.

Thirdly, if your gift economy is in contact with or intertwined with an exchange economy or a command hierarchy, your reputation may spill over and earn you higher status there.

I had trouble with this explanation when I first read it. I never considered a good reputation an end in itself in the way that Raymond presents it here in his first point. The second and third points seemed plausible, but not compelling enough to explain why someone would choose to exchange their free time for repuation.

It wasn’t until I read Networking on the Network, that I started to learn the value of building a network, and with it a repuation. With the rise of open source software, the profession of software development is beginning to resemble that of research, of which Agre writes:

The truth is that the world is made of people. People out of communities are like fish out of water or plants out of soil. Research of all kinds depends critically on intensive and continually evolving communication among people engaged in related projects. Networking cannot substitute for good research, but good research cannot substitute for networking either. You can’t get a job or a grant or any recognition for your accomplishments unless you keep up to date with the people in your community.

Okay. So there’s some motivation to join the open source community. Look out world, here I come!

It occurred to me recently that the pursuit of enlightened self interest promoted by Rand in Atlas Shrugged is very similar to Covey’s habit of seeking win/win outcomes in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Though it has been a while since I read either book, I seem to recall that Rand argued that a fair trade, or exchange, is the ideal form of interaction between two persons because the self always benefits. She plays down the fact that both parties benefit. Covey reverses the emphasis, focusing on the benefit to both parties, and downplaying the benefit to the self, but I think he makes basically the same point: the most desirable outcome is one where both parties benefit. Rand stated it provocatively make for more interesting reading while Covey softened it to make it more acceptable.

Anyway, could it be that Rand’s enlightened self interest and Covey’s pursuit of win/win are one in the same?

Mandy, my wife, started a new blog, Mandy’s Minutes. Welcome to the blogsphere, honey!

I’ve been using Google’s Gmail service since late April. In that time I’ve come to really like it. [I have also accumulated 10 invitations to the service; contact me at kjdyck at gmail.com if you’d like one; first-come first-serve.] I like that I can keep all my messages forever. I like that I can search easily. I like the flat structure and the idea of tagging messages with labels. There is only one feature that I can imagine that would remarkably improve my experience with Gmail.

Perhaps I’m unusual in the way that I use email, but I am often lazy about tagging my messages with labels. I have a few rules set up to handle some of the braindead cases, but most of my messages arrive in my inbox without labels and remain untagged until my inbox grows so large that I feel compelled to archive its contents. Before I archive all these messages, though, I like to tag them so I can later view them with other messages in the same category. Depending on the number of messages in my inbox, this tagging step can take 10-30 minutes every other month, or so. If there were some way to automate this process, I could use this time for something more productive.

Since Graham wrote his Plan for Spam, Bayesian filtering has quickly become the standard method of classifying messages as spam or ham. The same technique could be used to determine whether or not to tag a message with a label. Voila! Intelligent automated tagging, the end of manual tagging.

This is such an obvious extension to Graham’s work that I’m somewhat surpised that it hasn’t already been done (at Google, or as a plug-in for popular email clients like Outlook or Notes). With all the smart people at Google, I would assume that somebody there has thought of automating tagging with bayesian classifiers. Perhaps it requires too much computation time or storage space. Perhaps there are user interface problems that I haven’t considered. Perhaps the differences in non-spam categories are too subtle for bayesian classification to do a good job. Whatever the reason, I look forward to the day where my email messages are classified automatically.

About a month ago, I came across Eric Sink’s Weblog, which contains some excellent articles for business-minded programmers, including several pieces collected under the heading Marketing for Geeks. I have also found his articles on the Business of Software to be enlightening, showing some of the hazards and pitfalls of starting and running a software product business.

I gave Mandy and myself a new computer for Christmas, an eMachines T3065. I’m reasonably happy with it so far — it sure beats the 300MHz Celeron that it replaced — but there have been some annoyances.

For starters, the machine comes preloaded with all sorts of useless cruft: software for getting started with AOL or Compuserve; AOL Instant Messenger; the Bigfix Patch Manager, a glorified version of the Windows Update service; and Norton Antivirus, which technically isn’t useless, but I prefer Grisoft’s free version of AVG. This in itself is not so annoying. One would expect to be able to repave the PC, installing only the software that one needs. The annoying part is that the people at eMachines don’t provide the software in separately installable disks. Instead, the software comes packaged as a Norton Ghost disk image, leaving people like me with an all-or-nothing proposition when repaving the machine.

One of my first tasks, when setting up the machine, was eliminating the cruft, which, in typical Windows fashion, involved many remove-reboot cycles. Once I acheived a reasonable value-to-cruft ratio, I ran the windows update service to fix up the OS, including the installation of SP2. After the associated install-reboot cycles, I also installed some essential software: vim, cygwin, and Firefox.

Finally, I created user accounts for Mandy and myself; limited accounts to minimize security risk. When I logged in with either of these accounts, I was greeted with an untitled message box, the text of which read “fAIL”. What a nusance!

For a while I couldn’t figure out the origin of this mysterious message box, probably a debugging aid for a developer who failed to test all the corner cases of his software. It wasn’t until I tried to log off while the message box was displayed that I found the clue that would help me determine its source. Thanks to the “This program is not responding” message box, I learned that the name of the application was Sunkist. With some searching through the registry, I soon discovered the culprit: the memory card reader software from Alcor Micro, shwicon2k.exe.

I still don’ know how to resolve the problem, but I have submitted a request to eMachines’ tech support. I’ll post when I have a solution.

A while ago I came across a news story about Dance Dance Revolution, a video game where players dance to music, following steps prescribed by the game on a dance pad, a game controller in the form of a mat, where buttons are activated completely by one’s feet. The story told how the DDR line of games is becoming a popular way, not only to have fun, but also to get fit and lose weight. I forwarded the the story to my wife, Mandy, and ever since she has been looking for the game.

She has been looking without success. It seems that Konami refuses to publish enough copies of the games to meet demand for reasons beyond my understanding. None of the regular retailers from whom somebody might expect to buy the game in Canada, such as Future Shop, Best Buy, or even Amazon, carry it. Even the big American retailers don’t have it.

Thankfully there is at least one retailer that I found through the Amazon Marketplace who can get new copies and is willing to ship them to Canada: gamesquest_direct. I ordered a copy of DDR Max 2: Dance Dance Revolution as a Christmas gift for Mandy.

I played it for the first time this morning. Having read the reviews on Amazon, I was expecting the game to offer a mild aerobic workout, but what I got was far from mild. It was intense! After a few minutes of play, I was sweating harder than I usually do at the gym. And this was at the beginner level!

For anybody looking for a relatively cheap and fun workout solution, compared to the likes of $1000 elliptical trainers and $40/month gym memberships, I can’t recommend DDR highly enough, if you can find it.

I recently finished reading John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. By Gray’s account, one of the most common problems that couples have is in recognizing and appreciating gender differences.

Men mistakenly expect women to think, communicate, and react the way men do; women mistakenly expect men to feel, communicate, and respond the way women do. We have forgotten that men and women are supposed to be different. As a result our relationships are filled with unnecessary friction and conflict.

I am reminded of an anecdote in Gerald Weinberg’s Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach where a husband and wife purchase a dual-section electric blanket in the hopes of keeping the wife, who is usually too cool, warmer and the husband, who is usually too warm, cool. After one night of use they are both completely dissatisfied with the blanket. The husband was too hot; the wife too cold. They return to the store the next day demanding a refund. The wise, old clerk at the store refuses to take it back, saying “I think I know what’s going on here: you had your controls crossed. You”, he said to the husband, “had the dial that controlled her side of the blanket, and you”, turning to the wife, “had the one for his. When you felt cool, you turned up your dial, causing his side of the blanket to get warmer. He naturally turned down his dial, causing your side of the blanket to become cooler. The cycle repeated until his side was as hot as possible and your side was as cool as possible.”

What’s the point? As I a child I was indoctrinated with the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In light of the preceding examples, I have to question its validity. In both examples, the participants are treating their counterpart as they would like to be treated, but with an undesirable end result. If nothing else, it shows that the Golden Rule is not universal. There are times that it fails. And according to Gray, it fails quite often.

The Golden Rule is broken. It fails to take into account the needs and wants of others. It assumes that everybody wants the same thing.

What can we do about it? Is there any way to fix it? Not that I can see. Instead, I propose a new rule to take its place: Understand what others need and want, and treat them accordingly.