Books A Million

Sitting in a Denny's is the closest modern day equivalent to being in a diner from the 50s. Those diners days preceded the notion of multiculturalism, of PC, of even the civil rights movement. Decked in leather jackets for guys and skirts and pigtails for girls, the greasy spoon was a symbol of the car generation of a bygone era.

I was munching away at a Grand Slam, the price a far cry from what was likely a dollar meal 50 years ago, if even that. This was more like five dollars, and the cheapest meal on the menu by a few dollars. This Denny's was a few blocks from the Portland Convention Center where I had missed getting off the "Max", the local light rail.

The "Max" is nearly a cross between a train and a bus. Its interior, with tan poles, purple seats, accordion hinged connections, and narrow aisles resemble the trains in New York more than the Metro I'm familiar with in DC. The Metro is more of a proper train, its tracks far away from the footsteps of casual pedestrians. The Max, on the other hand, crisscrosses through streets. The windows peer out into store front shops rather than the impersonal concrete lit by florescent that is typical of the the DC Metro.

To encourage downtown traveling, the Max is free within the confines, much like the bus system in parts of Seattle. The DC Metro makes smarter use of its labels. At any stop, you can see what stops the train is headed to next on columns thblaat are color coded. On the other hand, once you're on the Metro itself, you have to stare at the maps and listen to the indistinct mumbles of the conductor, who occasionally remembers to say what the next destination is, as well as print it on a poor excuse of a banner.

The Max, in that respect, is far superior. Its yellow dots form letters indicating the next stop. But it lacks the stylized map of DC to indicate where anything is, so carrying a map is vital. Fortunately, in downtown Portland, everything seems close to everything else.

My first destination, after settling in the Holiday Inn, which is trying to outgrow its rather bland roots, much like JC Penney tried to convince us that it's an up and coming Macy's is pleasant enough, is the bookstore of Portland, Powell's, so big that it's really at least two stores (the main and a technical books store) at different locations and possibly a third.

You'd imagine a grand bookstore might try to look particularly fancy, perhaps an Apple Store like decor. But then Powell's has been around forever. It's done enough so that its environ doesn't look decrepit, like looking at an old photograph of a bookstore from the 50s, where the fonts on the signs give away the decade.

Powell's bookcases are made of a tan wood, with books sprawled around. There's much more of a sense that these are second-hand books even if many books are actually new. It doesn't have the Barnes and Noble sense with dark wood that is both modern and seemingly old and, well, noble. The bookstore's sections resemble arms of a color coded octopus, with red rooms and gold rooms and purple rooms, upstairs and downstairs, and a chatty blond fellow recommending this dessert or that cookie along with serving coffee.

The staff seem knowledgeable and young, like modern day bohemians working part-time while studying at the local college in some major that won't quite be enough to make a living.

I want to stay a bit, but I also want dinner, and alas, like much of the country, 10 PM is the time when things shut down. I don't even know where to go eat, not having checked out the online city paper or the "best of" guides. I pick up a book on Oregon, some travel ditty. Unlike sister city, Seattle, which boasts several books just about the city itself, Portland is lumped with the state of Oregon, so it gets mentioned with Eugene, and various places to hike. Portland must wonder why it's the ugly stepsister to Seattle.

I also want to get a fiction book to read. But what?

I had been reading some short stories by Asimov, and he strikes me as a particularly clever guy, which is probably why he had longevity as an SF writer. I've heard of the Foundation series, now five in length, and decide I'll start off with the first book. I'm sure I've read parts of one of the books at some point, perhaps long ago. But it's long enough that it's worth starting again, so I give the cashier my credit card, not the Amazon one, lest they get a little indignant about the cast paying for an Internet business that cuts on their margins.

I then backtrack on the Max, finding the connection one street over from where I was dropped off, and use the map to see where I should be. Alas, I should have gotten off one stop sooner than I had, because the yellow line meanders off in some direction that isn't the Convention Center. I stop at the Rose Center, which is, I suppose the stadium that the Trailblazers play? Or some important center as such. The good news is the convention center has two spires that reach the sky for no particular reason but make for a particularly good visual beacon to regain bearings.

I walked in that direction, which turned out to only be a few blocks away, and began tracing my steps backwards, past the Red Lion, past the Denny's. Well, the Denny's. That's open late. I think I'll get something there, perhaps corned beef hash, if they have it. Surely, they must.

I head out 20 minutes later. It's 10:30 or so, and dinner at the Holiday Inn is no longer an option. I get to my room, open the laptop, wishing that they cared about getting real high-speed Internet. The signal only registers one bar, which is adequate, though not the kind of screaming signal I est at home. Hotels can be cheap in that way, and possibly ignorant, figuring any old signal will do. They aren't trying to encourage bit torrent style downloads. Checking some email here and here, thank you sir and ma'am.

Well, it's just past midnight here, and really, past 3 AM on the East Coast. I should be exhausted, but I had a nap in the evening. The early parts of the conference start at 7 AM. I'll see how I feel around then. The first day is tutorials, and I've only signed up for one. I'll have to see if it's worth signing up for the second.

Maybe I'll head over to Powell's Technical Books, which unlike its big brother, closes at 9 PM, instead of staying open two more hours.

I had been hoping to install Rails this evening, but I think I should sleep some first, and hope the Convention Center has better wireless than this place. With several hundred attendees, it might be useless too, so I shouldn't place my hopes too high.

Mmm...Typhoon

I've always been somewhat ambivalent about Thai food. I've generally found their Tom Yum (I believe this is their lemongrass soup) a bit too sour and not hot enough. The dishes are decent, but not great. Even Pad Thai, the national dish is all right. I'll eat Thai food, enjoy it, but generally not be wow'ed by it like I am with Indian or even Korean from time to time.

That changed yesterday. I was visiting Chadd who lives in the Portland area and teaches at a university nearby. Laura, who also graduated from Maryland with a Ph.D., also came out to this area some years before. She now lives in Portland and recommended a Thai place. We tried a place called Typhoon.

Let me say that it was fantastic. I started off with a lemongrass clam chowder, which is a bit of a fusion thing, and that was quite a good combination of the ordinary (clam chowder) with a twist of really different (the lemongrass).

Then, we ordered three dishes, none of which are really typical Thai dishes. One was called Death by Asparagus which was spicy chicken with asparagus. They claim it took top prize in some asparagus competition. I can't really begin to fathom who the competitors were, and who thought this contest was worth setting up. And, of the three dishes, it was the weakest, but still pretty good.

Then, we had something called Curry Roma which sounds like a fusion thing too, some combination of Italy and Thailand. Indeed, it was basically a ravioli like wrapper with shrimp and stuff inside, with a light green curry on top. Wonderful!

Finally, we wanted to get a noodle dish and opted for the King's Noodle dish. Though not spicy, it had a fantastic flavor. Now, I don't know how authentic any of it is, but even if it's not, I certainly liked everything a lot. Indeed, the appetizers were kinda the weak point and they were tasty too.

Thank goodness they decided not to go for the more punny Thaiphoon which is something other Thai restaurants have done.

On top of that, I had Mirror Pond beer, a local Portland (or Oregon) brew. I am told Portlanders like their beer and wine. It was decently good, as beer goes.

So next time you are in Portland, give it a taste. You won't regret it!

Classical Gas

Too funny!

An Indian Wedding in America

I went to a Hindu wedding on Saturday. Most Indians, almost down to the person, prefer having the wedding held in India. There are many reasons for this. The biggest reason, I'd say, is the number of relatives that show up to a wedding is far greater in India than in the US. A wedding might be considered big if it reaches 150 people. In India, that would be a small wedding. A big wedding might be several hundred people.

One advantage is the huge difference in salary from rich to poor, which makes cheap labor quite cheap, which means many tasks which you wouldn't even consider can be handled by people. And presumably, even the most exotic of weddings is far more affordable in India. Think of a feeding several hundred people in the US. For the same amount of money, you could feed 3-4 times that many people in India. You can hire musicians, and so forth cheaply.

Weddings in India can be lengthy affairs. An American wedding held in a Christian church (and since the bride is Christian, part of the wedding, held earlier in the week, was held in a church) was quick. A ceremony typically lasts between 30 minutes and an hour. Indian ceremonies can last for many hours.

Now, I know what you're thinking. How does that happen? I mean, people are starting to fuss and fidget when a wedding lasts more than 30 minutes. How can anyone stand to watch several hours of ceremony. The answer is simple.

They don't.

You see, while a church has row after row of pews, which compel the people to sit and listen to a mini-sermon, participants in an Indian wedding can be doing all sorts of other things. They don't have to pay attention to the ceremony. Indeed, people eat, chat with people they haven't seen in a while, and then, every once in a while, they pay attention to what's going on. There are some key events, and perhaps the participants will make sure they attend those parts, but even then, there's nothing really compelling them to actually attend it.

And that, in my opinion, makes all the difference. When you can sit and chat without it seeming like some solemn ceremony, then it's far less stressful and boring.

Now, I get the feeling, due to a variety of circumstances, none the least of which was the quick notice which the wedding was set up, the number of participants was small. It seems there were maybe 100 participants, if even that. This would be a pretty shabby wedding were it held in India, but it was fine for the circumstances.

A co-worker, an Indian, noted that while American weddings are centered around the bride. Her dress is the most made up (indeed, it's considered so much part of the ceremony, that you can't really wear the dress in any other occasion, without people asking "Why are you wearing that? Are you getting married?" where a groom can wear a tuxedo to other events requiring formality in dance). She's the one that comes up, and all eyes are on her.

In India, he remarked, the ceremony focuses around the man, and how the man is the one getting married.

One of the interesting aspects of India is that it's such a venerable country that there are many different languages spoken throughout. The groom's mother would chant something in Gujarati, which meant only a handful of others understood what was being said. The bride doesn't speak Gujarati (much). Indeed, the common language between the two is likely to be English (perhaps Hindi).

The marriage was interesting in another way. She's Christian. He's Hindu. While marrying across religion isn't unheard of, it's also not that common, and would be even less common if parents were arranging the marriage. Indeed, as you go to more conservative parts of India, marrying outside the caste is looked down upon.

But, both bride and groom seemed as happy as they could be, as were the proud parents.

And in the end, that's what matters, isn't it?

Deal With It

Many people have heard of the game show, Deal or No Deal, but it seems few have seen it from beginning to end. It stars Howie Mandel, who was a comedian in the distant past, and often acted like this little kid. Since then, he's shaved his head, and gotten extremely paranoid about people touching him. Either he's over it, or he's particularly masochistic by being a game show host.

I've probably blogged about it, but I'll just spend this entry on the rules, which seems to defeat folks. I figure this might help me explain it again if I have to.

First, there are 20 briefcases. Inside, there is a label (think of it as a card, if you like) with an amount from say 5 dollars up to 1 million dollars. You are the contestant, and you're goal is to win as much money as possible. Your goal is to pick the suitcase with a million dollars in it (it's not really your goal, but we'll get to the actual goal in a moment).

At this point, you pick out one briefcase. Admittedly, you only have one chance in 20 to guess correctly. Furthermore, although you have selected it, you don't get to open it.

Next step. There are 19 women, each standing by the remaining 19 briefcases (the women are somewhat incidental to the show--the idea, presumably, is the show is actually pretty dull, and so pretty women help spice it up). You will go through several rounds.

In each round, you pick some number of briefcases. To make it easy, each briefcase has a number from 1 to 20. Note: you have one of the twenty with you.

Thus, in the first round, you are told to pick 5 cases. Here's the key. Those 5 cases are eliminated from the game. That's usually the confusing part. People don't expect the selection to be eliminated.

For each case you pick, the case is opened up, so you see what amount is inside, and therefore, what amount has been eliminated. Thus, if you see $100, it's been eliminated. There's a huge board showing which amounts have not been eliminated and which have. Contestants typically want eliminate the smallest amounts.

So far, the game seems silly. You are eliminating cases, but to what end?

This is the part that makes it interesting. Each time you eliminate some cases, there is a banker who bids an amount. That amount is typically much smaller than the largest amount on the board. Indeed, it typically is less than the average amount of all remaining amounts you could possibly win. Say, there is 10, 50, and 100 dollars still remaining. The banker is likely to bid less than about 50 dollars, which is the average of the three.

Notice you still have a chance to win 50 or 100 dollars. So the question is, do you take the amount the banker is offering, or do you continue to eliminate more cases, hoping the smaller amounts disappear, and the banker will make a higher bid.

The rules are a bit fuzzy when it comes down to the case you are holding. Since the odds are pretty small that you have picked the million dollar case, the contestant almost never waits until they get to their case at the end. They almost always accept the bid of the banker, especially after they've made a mistake and the bid has gone down because they have picked a case with large amounts and eliminated it.

My guess is that if it ever came down to two cases: one by a woman, and the one you picked, they would make you decide whether to take the banker's bid or to open the case by the woman (thus eliminating and picking your own case). I had thought maybe you could pick the other case's amount, but that wouldn't be so consistent with the rules.

The reason people with math backgrounds find it silly is because the contestants clearly don't know how to compute the odds or the expected value, so they simply run on gut feeling, and often go on far beyond what they should.

My rule of thumb is that if you ever reach 200,000, stop. You're good. Even low 100,000 is pretty good. Of course, you can look at odds and such, but it's amazing how many people want to go for half a million, even though only two cases have at least that amount.

Anyway, those are the rules of the game.

Myongdong

For a while, I didn't particularly care for Korean cuisine. I thought it had a hot, but not particularly flavorful taste. Or I had a bowl of dumplings that were a little greasy, but nothing particularly special.

After a while, though, I began to warm up to Korean food. Each Asian cuisine has its own taste. Chinese is the best known and ranges from flavorful spicy to non-spicy. Japanese is blander, but focuses more on visual appearance and texture, thus sushi. They have some lightly fried stuff like tempura. There is an emphasis on seafood. Thai cuisine can be fairly spicy, and is something of a cross between Indian and Chinese, as is Burmese cooking.

Korean cooking is spicier than most Asian cuisine, probably somewhere in the league of Thai cooking. What I love about Korean cooking is not bulgogi, the marinated beef--Koreans prefer beef over all other meats, but Korean stews, and right now, above all, I like sundubu jigae.

This dish looks fiery red, mostly, I'm sure due to gochujang, the equivalent of Japanese miso (fermented soy beans) hopped up on chilies. Despite its intense red color, the taste is more bark, than bite. While it is spicy, it's not painfully spicy. Hot enough to make you sweat some, but still tasty enough that it isn't an exercise in pain.

The stew consists of soft tofu, so delicate that it falls apart when you grasp it. Koreans prefer to use a very long spoon for their stews, plus chopsticks. The stews almost always come with a metal bowl filled with sticky rice. This is almost always preceded by the usual assortment of Korean appetizers, the most notable being kimchee, which is fermented cabbage.

I had had sundubu in a variety of places, including Seattle, on the "Ave". They don't serve it at Sam Woo in Rockville, though I've ordered it there, and it is a pale imitation of really good sundubu. I've had it Yijo, which is a Korean restaurant in a Day's Inn very close to where I live. However, I decided to give Myongdong a try.

While this Korean restaurant has been nearby to where I live for a few years, I had never known it was around. Apparently, in its old location, there was a problem with parking. It was very close to the road. Then, they tore the small shopping complex down, and Myongdong went away for a year. Then, a new complex was built nearby, with the shops further recessed back from the road, near a CVS, so that there was reasonable parking, and Myongdong opened its doors again after a hiatus.

The place is brightly lit, from flourescent lights. Like many Korean places, the restaurant opens late--til 11 PM (other places open well past midnight).

I have to say, in this area, it's the best sundubu I've had. That's due, I suspect, to the assortment of seafood in it, from squid, to clams, to a mussel, each lending its flavor to the reddish gochujang beef broth at its centerpiece. When presented, it was boiling furiously in a metal pot.

Much like Indian restaurants, Koreans favor metal as serving instruments, from metal bowls for their stews, to thin metal bowls of rice.

Myongdong appears to have a wide assortment of other stews, so I'm eager to give them a try sometime in the future.

For some reason, they were playing music of the 80s and 70s. I was listening to some Phil Collins tune that was popular in the 80s, and it made me reminisce about college. It's a weird thought to have, at a restaurant I had never been to, eating among the best sundubu I've ever had.

Bill Nye, the Atheist Guy?

This is Al. Indeed, he claims he is Al Sweigart despite looking awfully Asian to my eyes. He's another in perhaps a long line of happy, contented atheists. Most of his videos seem to use this jump cut technique, so it would be cool if he could mix it up some more.

But it made me wonder what it would be like were some unsuspecting TV producer to make a show on atheism.

Ron and Mike

A few weeks ago, no one would have heard of Ron Paul, nor Mike Gravel (pronounced, "gruh-vell", rather than the way you think it would be pronounced). Both are, respectively, candidates for President for the Republican and Democratic party. Ron Paul's name has been out a little more, for some reason, but really, Gravel was no one anyone gave any attention to until a recent Democratic debate.

Now, most people rarely watch these early debates. Most people start to care when each party has figured out which candidate they want to back, that is, when the choices have winnowed down to two candidates, with an occasional outsider like Nader or Perot.

But with sites like Digg and Reddit and the combination of sites like YouTube, passionate people can make others aware of smaller (in support) candidates. This means these candidates can take advantage by taking strong stances during the debates, something front-runners can't afford to do, for fear of making missteps that might derail a campaign that is just about to start.

On the other hand, Paul and Gravel have little to lose. They can afford to be passionate during the debate, taking stances that might otherwise seem loony. And people tired of candidates that play it safe like this eagerness.

Whether this translates to votes, I don't know. Recall the Democratic primaries that put John Kerry as the Democratic candidate. How many people might have grudgingly accepted Al Sharpton were he not otherwise considered unelectable, being tarred with the Sharpton-Jackson brush, as two guys who are only heard during issues of race (and that, only when it affects African Americans). Sharpton's stature probably raised a fair bit, much of which has been brought back down after the Imus flap.

The point is many people didn't particularly care for John Kerry, but he was the candidate because he had experience, he had been in Vietnam where Bush hadn't. This is why many states jockeyed to move their primaries up front. People don't vote in a state primary in a vacuum. It's very much like betting on a long horse race, where voters can see how the horses are doing 1/10 of the way, then 2/10 of the way, and so forth. As Kerry was building momentum, people voted for him based on "electability".

And that may really set the tone for Paul and Gravel. Gravel, for my money, is a bit too white, a throwback to 50s style politicians. But once he gets a few interviews (as he has with Wolf Blitzer), he may not sound quite like the blowhard he did during the debates. Paul is caught in a particularly good position. Republicans are trying to decide whether they support the war or not, with McCain hanging his hat on as ardent Bush supporter. It's a precarious position, and a complete about-face from his stance eight years ago, when he suffered a Bush hatchet-job, that lead him to quietly support Bush in 2004.

Paul can be the guy who opposes the war, who is trying to steer Republicans away from Bush's policies, a stance that many Republicans may warm too. With no outstanding candidates, Paul might make up some ground. McCain and Giuliani are leading, but the rest of the candidates are hardly known. The Democrats, on the other hand, put out three candidates--Barack, Hillary, and John Edwards--that are already quite well-known. Even the other candidates: Biden, Dodd, Kucinich, and Richardson, are not complete unknowns. Heck, Al Gore could come back in the race, and he may seem more palatable than anyone already in the race. Fred Thompson is likely the only guy who's not in the Republican race that might have some recognition.

The question is whether party backing is still the ultimate arbiter for who wins. We know the YouTube generation doesn't have power to move things yet, but it's growing. Consider Snakes on a Plane who used Internet advertising to push a rather blah movie through the stratosphere. Well, at least among the Interneterati. The rest of the public gave this movie a lukewarm response.

But people may look back at this election, years from now, and see the seeds of a new way to campaign, and that being a safe campaigner may not always be the answer.

Not Ron Paul nor Mike Gravel

He's running for Tokyo mayor.

Sorta.

I figured Justin would find this amusing.

Google Tech Talks, Scrum, and Jeremy

If I have time, I like to watch the Google TechTalks at Google's video website. The problem is usually time. Most talks last an hour. The good news is that most of the talks are pretty good so the hour doesn't seem so bad. The bad news is, it still takes an hour.

Lately, I've been seeing Jeremy (Manson), who got his Ph.D. at Maryland on the Java Memory Model, host these talks. Since he is a programming languages kind-of guy, he hosts programming languages kinds of talks. For the novice, that doesn't mean he invites guests who tell you how to program in language X. This is Google, and most people could figure that out there.

Instead, the talks are sometimes about stuff that's underneath the hood (how the basic implementation of a language is done) or some software ideas or sometimes it is a new language. The talks are generally far more pragmatic than in an academic setting. There's not likely to be talks on type theory and proofs in type theory soon.

Anyway, the most recent talk I heard was titled Scrum Tuning: Lessons Learned at Google by Jeff Sutherland, who apparently invented Scrum.

Let me quickly overview what Scrum is, then tell you the problems I had with the talk. Scrum is one of several competing ideas in agile planning. Agile planning is basically being able to plan in a lightweight manner. The goal is to get people to communicate and to fix problems as quickly as they show up. Since it's somewhat introspective by nature, problems in the process can be fixed as people involved notice it.

Two keys to Scrum. One is the daily meeting. Most people usually meet once a week. Scrum claims this causes problems, which are made worse with bright people. In particular, meeting once a week causes people to discover that one person depends on another too much, or that two people are overlapping on work, etc. With a daily meeting, you spot problems sooner.

Why do people avoid daily meetings? Of course, people hate meetings. If you're meeting, you're not working (well, technically, you are). Engineers typically hate meetings because there's a forced linear structure, where each person speaks one at a time. If someone stands on a soapbox, the meetings can drag without end while they deal with something only a small subset cares about.

Scrum tries to handle this by restricting the time of the meetings. The meetings should be kept to a minute a person or so. The goal is to find out what was done the previous day, and what will be done today, and what problems have occurred. There is a "Scrum" master who organizes the meetings, and tries to force it to be short. The master then decides how to adjust resources based on that meeting.

The other aspect of Scrum is task allocation and assignment. Typically, there is a brainstorming session where a bunch of tasks are determined, and then, estimates for each task is made. Any task taking more than a few days must be further broken down into tasks that only take a few days. The idea is that huge tasks are badly estimated. Short tasks are estimated much better.

Then, there is the Sprint. The Sprint is a period of time allotted to complete the tasks. These sprints typically last one month. Within the month, certain tasks are expected to be done. The daily meetings help assess whether things are going well.

Now to the talk.

Google is famous for running their organization without much hierarchy. Even so, because of the number of people involved, they sometimes run into issues when more organization is required. Jeff Sutherland talks about how Adsense had this project, whose project leader estimated would take 3 weeks to complete. They had identified 40 tasks.

In the first week, 8 were completed. In the next, 7.5. After two weeks, the manager said he thought they would be done in another week, as planned. There were still over 20 tasks left! Needless to say, it didn't get done the next week, when 9 additional tasks were completed. While they seemed to make good progress, the following weeks saw productivity go down. They had 4-5 tasks done per week towards week 5 and 6. Eventually, it took 7 weeks to complete what they said would be done in 3.

They were using some techniques of Scrum, but the question arised "what went wrong". Obviously, it seems silly to say it will take three weeks when 1/3 of the tasks were not being completed each week. But the point was, why did productivity decrease towards the end.

Jeff points out that while 80% of the tasks were done at some point, only 20% of the features were ready. He felt that was a bad mismatch. Features are important, and if you are 80% done, you need to have closer to 80% features done. But the problem with most features is that they have dependencies. It's easier to get partly done and make progress than to complete a feature until it's really done.

I'd imagine that Googlers would find this talk rather difficult and yet intriguing. Basically, the guy essentially promises that Scrum solves all problems, and he has numbers to back it up. That's it. He's an evangelist almost of the worst kind, but because he is talking about software development and has "numbers", it makes people interested.

What would be better is to track the same team, before and after Scrum, and see what things were causing problems before and after, and how things were handled better. In particular, track what each person is doing each day, and why Scrum seems to make that better (if it does). Numbers are fine. Productivity is fine. The question is why does it work, at its most fundamental?

Again, I love hearing about agile talks, and the ideas behind them. But it's so incredibly anecdotal. One thing I did read that was good was that initially daily meetings were very long, because it was new, but eventually, got much shorter.

And, you have to worry when a guy like Sutherland, who seems kinda very touchy-feely, begins to bandy terms like "infinitely scalable". He understands that certain terms have a certain ring to it. Thus, Scrum, Spring, burndown, and so forth. These terms are meant to have positive connotations, or at least, not be wrapped up in some jargon.

So basically, interesting to listen to, but awful as a whole. It piques interest without really providing good answers.

How Arranged Marriages Lead to Family Values

I was thinking about something.

If you ever visit India, you find that families play a huge role in Indian society. People visit relatives all the time. Weddings are huge affairs, and people are offended if they are not invited. A typical wedding may be several times as large as the corresponding American wedding.

India (and the other countries in the subcontinent) are the last vestiges of arranged marriages. Countries like China used to have arranged marriages too.

I think the two are interrelated. In an arranged marriage, the parents are the ones to arrange their children's marriage. This means the kids are dependent on their parents to find them husbands or wives. With a society that values marriage and also feels shame, then it's shameful not to get married (obviously, people can get over this feeling of shame).

Furthermore, parents don't want boys and girls associating with each other in romantic ways, so boys/girls keep a polite distance, now associated with junior high school kids in the US just getting to know one another. It harkens to an era in the US when teens would go to get a burger and shake, and it would be (in theory) as innocent as that.

Given that most teenage guys and girls have a difficult time being brave enough to accost the opposite sex, and given that parents don't want them to go out dating on their own, and given that parents will find an appropriate spouse, then there is a strong incentive to get along with your parents. They control an important societal value, which is marriage.

Think about what happens when arranged marriages are no longer necessary. Then, boys and girls go seek the opposite sex and work at dating. They begin to distrust their parent's opinions on such matters. Because they see their friends doing it, they try it out too, and I suspect this leads to downward pressure of boys to go out with girls.

Once women gain sufficient independence so they can support themselves, marriage itself becomes unnecessary, and people can postpone it until much later.

So, the combination of the importance of marriage, the shame of not being married, the disapproval (generally) of kids looking for their own girlfriends or boyfriends, parents arranging marriages, and even all the celebration around weddings, and cultural shame when you choose to buck the tradition, leads to a society where family is valued highly.

Just a theory.

Idol Train

With so many contestants in American Idol, there's a trend for different groups to say they had something to do with the singers.

Two examples. The Seattle area got to claim Blake Lewis, Jordin Sparks, and Sanjaya Malakar, who were top 12 finalists (in fact, two are still in it), all of whom tried out in Seattle.

The Gospel Music Association also had singers that were involved with them: Phil Stacey, who just got voted off, and Jordin Sparks.

It was once said that Indian call centers were voting for Sanjaya, except that, until very late in the competition, most Indians were unaware of the competition.

I suppose anyone who has some bit of fame always has someone who wants to say they share something in common with them.

American Idol with Bon Jovi

American Idol has been going on for how long? This is its sixth season. I haven't really watched any of the previous seasons, mostly because I don't watch that much television. I watched it for two reasons this season. First, Tony Kornheiser keeps talking about the show week after week. Even so, I didn't watch it for several weeks.

All I recall was the slamming of Sanjaya. Now, the name didn't strike me in any particular way. However, I discovered he's Indian-American, Bengali to be specific (well, on one side--his mother is allegedly Italian-American). For some reason, perhaps because I went to India recently, this piqued my interest.

Now, I still barely catch Idol on TV. Instead, I see it through YouTube. I'm sure the sponsors hate that, but I like watching all the performances in like ten minutes. I prefer skipping over the lead-up and the judging and just listening to the performances.

Last night, there were six performances. Basically, I agreed with Tony, which means that I am too easily influenced by others on judging performances. Basically, I only thought there was one awful performance and that was Jordin. She sounded horridly out of tune, to the point that I almost thought she couldn't sing. I could hardly believe people thought it was "all right".

I agreed that Melinda is so versatile, singing Have a Nice Day with appropriate attitude, and yes, it also reminded me of Tina Turner. LaKisha sang quite well too without yelling her song too much which she's done in past weeks. Both Chris and Phil were decently good. Blake did something very interesting. First, he took a Sanjaya lesson, and dyed his hair dark, which made him look a bit like Kurt Russell. Second, he took a popular Bon Jovi song, You Give Love a Bad Name, and did a beatbox spin on it. To his credit, he sang the main melody, so he could show off his beatboxing as well as his vocal qualities.

Is Blake the best singer? I dunno. Phil's decent too. Blake's voice is a touch high, a touch nasally. But, he's pretty creative, and that comes from, I suspect, his beatboxing. He thinks of music like a composer, and so I think that enhances his creativity. Personally, I like the fact he tries out a couple of ideas. Usually, in the preview, he's smart enough to make it seem like he's going overboard with beatboxing, but in the actual performance, he holds back.

Tony Kornheiser doesn't think much of Bon Jovi, but he was pretty big in his day, and it's interesting, that in the two weeks you'd think people would struggle (country week, and Bon Jovi's limited set of good songs), that it helped key performances. In particular, country week became a breakout week for both Phil and Jordin. Rock week with Bon Jovi was very good for Lakisha who had been seen as slipping up to now.

They eliminated two singers this week, which was Chris and Phil, and that's perhaps no surprise. While Jordin was unlistenable this week, the vote was combined from last week, which was huge (70 million votes, which is about twice what it normally is), which was one of Jordin's best performances. Blake becomes the last guy standing, and he may go next week, though I'm sure they would like one guy to hang around, and if voting is done by gender preferences, Blake is likely to hang out til the last week.

My guess is Lakisha is the next to go, though it will depend greatly on whether Jordin can recover. Most everyone feels that even on a bad night, Melinda is too talented to mess up. Blake is usually decently good each week, and the only way I see him getting eliminated is if the other three are lights out, and he pales by comparison. He's made some smart choices, and not any dumb choices. Admittedly, Imagine wasn't particularly strong, but he's usually consistent. His main problem is that he occasionally moves his microphone away from his mouth, and he hear vocal gaps as the mike no longer picks up his voice.

We'll see how it turns out. If it came down to one girl and one guy, well, since Blake is the only guy left, it'd be him, I suspect it's Melinda, though I'm sure Jordin is more marketable. For consistency though, Melinda's been consistently good week after week, without any of the kind of lapses that Jordan or Lakisha have had, but then, voting is not based on consistency, but on a given performance.

I wonder if the guys get more passionate voters than the women. None of the remaining women are particularly "hot" for lack of a better word. Blake, on the other hand, does have charisma and is reasonably good looking that he should have a contingent.

Amusingly enough, this kind of guessing is much like Oscar guessing. Who will win what award? However, it's far more engaging than the Oscars because, as I've mentioned before, the singers are not uniformly excellent. You can hear vocal flaws, and so you know they aren't as good as professional singers (who can sound very polished because of studio wizardry).

Well, we're down to four, so I suppose that's three more weeks to find a winner.

No Fluff in Reston

Lollapalooza is a travelling tour of singers of alternative, punk, and assorted indie music. It's been around nearly twenty years, and has given rise to imitators in other musical genres.

The closest thing I'm aware of in the software industry is No Fluff, Just Stuff (or NFJS, for short), where a band of speakers, typically consultants and technical book writers, discuss the software topics of the day. This may sound deadly dull, but it's for software developers, it's quite interesting.

Where does the strange name come from? It almost has a porn flavor to it, which ought to make it the "butt" of jokes. It is a reactionary title, suggesting many similar conferences are merely there for big software firms to sell something to attendees. They avoid such direct selling, though certainly, there's indirect selling as the speakers can present themselves as consultants, even as they don't talk about it themselves. And, they can kinda push their own books or books from friends.

This "tour" grew out of Jay Zimmerman's JUG (Java User's Group) somewhere in Colorado, so there's going to be some bias. In particular, NFJS doesn't do Microsoft. There's no C#. There's no ASP. It's not that the speakers are entirely against the idea, indeed, some do C# consulting. However, it's not exactly Java either.

The list of topics are typically: Java, Hibernate, Spring, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Groovy, agile methodology. Agile methodology breaks down into Scrum and XP, leaning more to Scrum, but also encourages unit testing and TDD (test driven development).

The event lasts three days, a Friday afternoon and early evening, followed by 9-5 on Saturday and Sunday. The strange schedule means attendees typically give up a weekend, but it tends to work out better as more companies are willing to have their employees miss half a day, rather than miss three days.

Because speakers are kept around based on how the attendees like them (they fill out surveys and such), the talks are typically uniformly very good. I've attended three NFJS, and I do it, even though it rarely covers technical topics that affect me directly. I do it partly because I want to see what the rest of the software world is doing and thinking. To be fair, NFJS is at the bleeding edge, and part of their efforts is to direct the way Java server side code is done. They, I feel certain, did as much to popularize Ruby on Rails as anyone, especially with dynamic speakers like Dave Thomas.

Having been to three of them, I have some criteria that I use to decide how good a talk is. First, the speaker is engaging. It helps to like a speaker and to have a speaker with energy. Perhaps the two guys that best fit the bill are Scott Davis and Venkat Subramaniam. It's not a must. For example, Neal Ford is still quite good without having the same energy. Dave Thomas is funny, and while he seems to be somewhat less personable, he is nonetheless an engaging speaker.

The second criteria is that the speaker knows their subject, and some are outstandingly good at this, especially Neal Ford. He seems to know a ton about a lot of things, and it's really difficult to stump him. The guys are generally quite well prepared (the downside is there are no women speakers on tour, and few women attendees). The third criteria is a certain "wow" factor, and by that, I mean, you get something out of the talk that you wouldn't if you read a book or the Internet. The speaker has some insight or does something particularly cool.

I'll give you an example. I once attended a talk on Java myths about the garbage collector, and it's just the kind of talk you can't find elsewhere. It may seem like the dryest topic ever, and yet, a Java developer has to deal with the garbage collector.

He said that many people try to create objects outside of loops, because they feel the garbage collector will kick in, and slow things down. He said while this used to be true, using objects for a short amount of time, say, the time in a loop, is almost free. Java reclaims such objects very quickly. Indeed, the longer you hold an object, the longer it takes for Java to reclaim it (really, the JVM). It's optimized to get rid of short-lived objects quickly.

Or, Java objects with finalizers are not garbage collected unless it absolutely has to. The problem, apparently, is that a finalizer can resurrect the object, and the JVM doesn't want to deal with it. This can kill performance.

You can hardly get this kind of information anywhere else, and yet it feels highly relevant.

I ignore some topics completely, like Spring, Hibernate, and Tapestry. I favor language talks and agile talks. This year, the emphasis was on Groovy, a scripting language for Java. Unlike, say, JRuby or Jython (which no one seems to work on anymore), Groovy was built with Java in mind, so it does things that the JVM can handle. It runs slower than Java since it uses a bit of reflection, but is not held down trying to be faithful to an existing dynamic language like Ruby or Python. Scott Davis gave two good talks on Groovy, then Grails, which is the Groovy version of Rails.

I also like listening to agile talks, but they almost always fail on one additional criteria I have for talks, which, interestingly enough, comes from Dave Thomas (a regular NFJS speaker). One of Dave Thomas's best talk is non-technical, at least, from a software POV. In particular, he talks about different levels of expertise from novice to expert. A novice needs to be told very precise things to do. The example given is a cookbook recipe. How much is a pinch of salt? Is it half a teaspoon? A quarter? A beginner won't know, and wants details to the last step.

A good talk of the sort NFJS should do this, even if the talk is about agility.

I'll give you an example of one kind of talk I've seen several times which drives me completely nuts. Because there are plenty of agile speakers, there's a huge emphasis on unit testing even to the extreme of test driven development (TDD). Each speaker I've heard (at least two), tells you how wonderful unit testing is, why you absolutely have to have it, how it saves you time, how you can convince people to use it, and so forth.

But have they ever, ever demonstrated how to download JUnit? I know, it should be easy! We're all "experts", aren't we? Well, no. This is why we attend NFJS. First thing, tell us the website to download JUnit. Tell us how to install in Eclipse. Tell us how to run it command line. Then, come up with something to do TDD.

And pick something with, say, a database. Something real. Most people eventually have issues such as "I'm not just manipulating plain old objects--I have a webpage, or a database, etc". Code that up.

There are some extremely practical issues. For example, how do I get cruise control to run the unit test automatically? Where do I place the unit tests?

The advice reminds me of those people who say "don't prematurely optimize". Profile, baby, profile! And then what? And then they don't profile. Download a profiler. Run it. Tell us how to interpret the results. Tell us how to make intelligent decisions from the profiler. If we're novices, we can't even profile!

Or, running a Scrum. I sat through a talk which had good ideas. The speaker was pretty good, even. He talked about user stories, but didn't demonstrate actual user stories, which, to my mind, is a bit of a deal breaker. It's like going on a vacation and talking about it, but not having any pictures to show. In the end, when you hear high level details, you don't get a sense of where things go wrong and why.

And there's one thing that bothers me about agile talks. It would be nice to figure out whether it really works. Do people meet deadlines? Do you actually schedule things differently? How important is it to hire an agile coach to tell you what to do? This is the part that treads between what NFJS does and what it wants to do. It wants to avoid overt selling. That's fair. But if agile coaches feel they are necessary to make that transition, maybe they should say so. I understand how self-serving that is.

Let me run through some of the talks I liked. I sat through a lot more of Neal Ford's talks, and they're uniformly good. He covers a gamut of topics from JRuby to Groovy to tools that help you be more productive as a programmer. Now, I recall who he reminds me of (looks-wise). Bobby Riggs. Anyway, excellent speaker.

Also liked Scott Davis. Scott does a few things pretty well. First, he always seems really happy. Then, he always says how wonderful your question is. Even if it's not, you tend to feel good about asking questions, and that seems like a good goal for a speaker. He also manages to do a few things that are beyond the trivially basic stuff so you feel you're getting value listening to his talks.

I liked both David Hussman and Nathaniel Schutta as speakers, but the quality of the talks weren't as good because neither had much takeaway. Hussman, for example, didn't walk through an actual agile session from story cards to schedule planning. True, the talk was about agile requirements, but he didn't come up with any requirements either. This is where you can shine as a speaker. Invest the time to find an example that isn't too arcane (maybe requirements for keeping track of various tasks done by a development team) so everyone can understand it (so no Hibernate or specific technologies like that), so that people have some sense of how to apply it in the real world.

Similarly, Schutta gave compelling reasons to test, but there are plenty of practical steps needed to add unit testing to one's life, from downloading and installing JUnit, to deciding how to organize the test code from the real code. I've seen similar talks by Jared Richardson, and this step is also missing from his talk. That's one more step someone has to take to figure stuff out, and that's one step that a speaker could do for you.

Ideally, if there was an Internet connection (I'm surprised there isn't even Ethernet wired to the place), they could download and demonstrate how to do the installation.

I kinda wish Jared would be given a talk that has more code in it. He tends to give the agile talks, and I feel the agile talks tend to be weak as a group, partly because it takes more work to demonstrate the principles as I'd like to see them. He's written some stuff related to Ruby or some such, so I'd get a better sense of how Jared covers material that involves examples if he covered talks with them. Alas, he's told what to talk about (not surprisingly).

Here are some suggestions I'd make. For agile development, I think it might be worth trying to run a one-day (well, 8 hour) session with desktops or laptops set up (the logistics would be admittedly horrid) and going through an agile development compressed into a single day. "Scripts", i.e., giving people lines to say so they can play-act would be helpful.

I'd like to see some talks given to real basics, like database technology, as well as talks on pie-in-the-sky ideas like Haskell or O'Caml.

I had thought Blogger had killed this post, and was made, because it is supposed to be automatically archiving it as I type. It turned out that it did archive it, but I couldn't see it right away. They still need to fix that.

Anyway, as negative as I sound, the weekend is always great because it gets me to think about ideas, even if I don't always take the steps of doing it myself.

Ironic Parody

A few years ago, Alanis Morissette wrote a song called Ironic, which was criticized for lacking irony, even though, there is some in the song.

She recently did a video based on the Black Eye Peas song My Humps, which isn't likely to win any awards for its lyrics. The song, as far as I can tell, is about a woman who has abundant physical traits, and uses it to her advantage, getting guys to waste their money and time on her.

Alanis's video was a parody, or so she says. Alanis has picked another word that's hard to grasp. When I saw parody, I expected it to be funny. Wikipedia says parodies don't have to be funny. They can ridicule as well.

To be honest, I didn't find Alanis's video all that funny. And that was because I set myself up thinking it would be funny. Now, she is poking fun at someone, which is herself. She's rewritten the song as if she had written it, and made a song which is crass, into one that is a bit about pathos, as if she's trying to win men's affections, but at the same time, can't deal with it either. Where as Fergie (as I gather is the name of the female singer in Black Eye Peas) is trying to be crass, Alanis is an angsty woman. She wants love. She doesn't want it. And in a sense, she pokes fun at herself, while wringing how pathetic the character is.

But just to show she's not taking it that seriously, she laughs at the end, realizing that maybe people don't really want to see a downbeat performer telling you how awful their life is, and maybe it is all a show.

It's pretty heady stuff for something termed a parody, and really, makes more fun of herself, while bringing a level of enlightenment that the song originally didn't have.

It's perhaps no surprise the video has been seen by many. And I'm beginning to see some of its appeal.

But was she really on You Can't Do That on Television?

Wii Bit Desperate

Many of us will never achieve that nirvana of masculinity: being Chow Yun Fat cool. Even if recent events have placed a damper on dual gun action, we have to admit that Chow Yun Fat is da bomb.

But since this is too much to wish for, most of us are content with not looking too foolish.

In November or so, Nintendo did something very smart. They released the Wii shortly on the heels of Sony releasing the PS3. The PS3 was long awaited. It was expected to hit shelves much sooner than it actually did. Indeed, Xbox was able to release its 360 nearly a year earlier.

And pretty much the PS3 came DOA. Oh, sure, it boasted gaudy graphics, and its HD Bluray built in, and promised ultra-realistic games. Did I care? I'm not a gaming person. Never have been. No PS2. No Gamecube. Not even a Colecovision or an Intellivision, which is pretty old school, if you can remember them. Videos games? Piffle!

And with a price tag of 600 dollars or more, I was not interested, not that I would have been even had it been half the price. Turns out, no one else cared either, except the most rabid fans. Even though supplies were limited, you could get one easily.

The Wii? It cost 250 dollars, less than half the price. You could buy two of them and still had money left over compared to the amount it would take to buy a PS3. Even so, I wasn't sure I really wanted a Wii, not being a gamer.

But then I got a chance to play the Wii, and I said wow, even a video game idiot like me can play this. It was both fun, and exercise. Video games outside of DDR are synonymous with couch potato geekiness. But the Wii seemed pretty cool, even if it lacked high quality graphics.

I had my chance to get it a few months ago, when I went to Best Buy to get a replacement hands-free set (which, by the way, didn't work). They had one Wii left. I declined. At that point, I hadn't played with the Wii, and thought it wasn't for me.

In March, once I had given it a try, I decided to start looking for one.

Bad idea.

Throughout March and April, I think the Wii only shipped once. I wasn't so hooked in to know when it would come out. Web sites are notoriously bad at this information. I relied on an old-fashioned technique. I called the stores. I wasn't about to hang out at stores 6 am every Sunday (when they came out) hoping they'd have a shipment. I'd rather make sure by calling.

And even if I had some idea they might have it, I didn't want to wake up early, or earlier than I would for work. As it turns out, March was a bad time to look. Stores just weren't getting shipments.

After two or three weeks of trying, I stopped heading to Best Buys on Sundays.

I decided on a lazier strategy. I'd call in, see if any were coming in. I was even lazy about that strategy, basically, calling in when I could remember.

Finally, it paid off. I knew, this past Sunday, it would come. I didn't know how many. I also didn't care to wait in line more than an hour or so. I woke up at 7:30 to go to Target, which opens at 8, hoping I could get it, and not wait.

Once I discovered Target had no supply, I ate breakfast, relaxed, then went to Toys 'R Us where there was a long line, but not terribly insane. I had called them earlier, and they had promised a supply.

For some reason, I like lines. You wait in line, hoping to get something. You look forward and wondered how long those poor suckers sat up at front. I felt that, at worst, I'd stand 30-40 minutes, and I'd know whether I'd get in or not. Surprisingly, there were people trying to get in line merely 5 minutes before opening. They still got one too.

I mean, no one really expects Toys 'R Us to carry video games, right? I mean, they do, of course, but you're first thought is Best Buy or Circuit City or some place suitably geeky.

I can't even recall that last time I went to Toys 'R Us. The teen in line, with the long hair, said he hadn't been in the store since he was ten. Ten? When was that? Last year?

But it's fun hanging out in line. I realized, of course, that I wasn't the key demographic for most console games. I was in the group Nintendo hoped to woo. The non-gamer wanting to give video games a try. The other people in line? They were more typical. They played PS2 or Gamecube or one of the handhelds. These were pros, but not so much that they had a Wii already. One guy said he was buying it for a nephew. Nice guy.

When you stand in line, you get to talk to people you'd never see again. I'd want to take their names and pictures and chat some, but well, you know, tis weird. So I had to simply enjoy the fleeting moment of the company. It did seem odd, that the thought I had about the Asian guy in Maryland sweats was "does this guy have a gun?". Even though I know--I know!--that the shootings were an aberration, that you couldn't generalize, heck, I'm Asian! But still the thought ran through my head.

I figured anyone getting a Wii couldn't be that bad, right? Actually, I thought they were all pretty sociable, something Mr. Hui was not, and the thought passed. I noticed the blond kid in the Duke sweatshirt. Ah, Duke. I suppose I would have mentioned the lacrosse thing or asked if he went (he probably had a brother that went or a sister or was just home on a random weekend), but it honestly didn't cross my mind. I just thought that he had Duke, and two other guys wore Maryland (and me as well, but it was a yellow shirt, not red), and there was no riot.

When I got my Wii, at around 10:30, I figured I'd only spent maybe an hour or so of my time at this store, but maybe 3 hours over all since I woke up. Maybe that was desperate, but it didn't feel that way.

Oddly enough, I just wanted a drink, and headed to Applebee's to get one. I really wanted to sleep, though, and the drink was meant to facilitate that. I didn't even want to open the Wii right then. Indeed, I'm sure it will sit a few days before I decide to open it and set it up.

I have to say that I can now saw Wii without laughing.

At least, not too much.

The Little Piggy Went Wii Wii Wii

This morning, around 7:30, I woke up and realized that I should head to Target, which opens at 8 AM to see if they sold the Wii. I had called Toys 'R Us and Best Buy, both of whom said they would have Wiis, even though it was likely to be crowded.

But Toys opened at 10, and Best Buy at 11. It made some sense to try Target first.

I had planned to go to the one in Greenbelt. It's close by. But then I wasn't sure they would get a supply. It's not exactly the premier shopping area. So I decided I'd head all the way up to Gaithersburg, near where I work, figuring if any place would get it, they would get it.

I got there just after 8 AM, and there were like 3 people standing intently in line. I sorta figured it was my lucky day, but it did seem awfully short. Then, they started buying some Pokemon thing. I realized that they didn't have any Wiis.

So I headed to the office nearby to lookup the location of Toys 'R Us. I had called them earlier in the week, and they said they would get a shipment. But since they weren't open til 10, and it wasn't even 9, I decided to get breakfast.

I really wanted breakfast food, but didn't know where I'd get it. Then, I realized that the hotel next door served a decent breakfast buffet, so I headed over there to get some breakfast. At first, I didn't plan on getting a buffet, but places like this are evil. They charge only a dollar more for buffet than anything else. So you might as well get the buffet. So I did.

After getting creamed chipped beef and a biscuit and eggs and hash browns (twice over), and a waffle, which I didn't complete, I drove to Toys 'R Us, the one in Gaitherburg or Germantown, not the one in Rockville, which I figured would be more crowded.

The line was pretty long and it didn't seem good. An African American fellow standing just ahead said he'd counted about 30 groups ahead of us, so as long as they had 40 or more Wiis, we were good. Someone had heard they had 70 Wiis, so we thought maybe that was good news.

At ten minutes before opening (that is, 9:50 AM), they began to hand out tickets to each of us, and alas, there were enough for everyone in line. Then, they slowly let people into the store. I stood in line with this long-haired guy wearing a "Red Hot Chili Peppers" shirt. He had called his dad saying that he had found the Wii, and there was no need for him to hang out at Best Buy. Another Asian guy was in line with a Maryland t-shirt. A guy in his 40s or so was also in line wearing a Maryland National Champs shirt. A blond kid who seemed like he was in high school, but coulda been in college, was wearing an oversized Duke sweatshirt, despite the warm weather.

We went in, and the line was moving slowly. I was number 39. They were showing the end scenes of The Little Mermaid, which isn't nearly as well drawn as I had recalled, on the small TVs. It took nearly 40 minutes to get there. I bought the extended warranty. I know. It's usually a rip off. Places like that make their money on extended warranties.

I got another Wiimote and another Wiichuck. I decided not to buy a game. And the three or so people I hung out in line who I'll probably not bump into again were getting themselves a Wii as well.

I headed back to College Park, wanted to get a margarita at Applebee's before napping some, but discovered, to my dismay, that they don't serve alcohol before noon. So I went back to my place to get some alcohol on my own, and decided to sleep.

So I got my Wii. Perhaps I'll put it together soon, and play some.

My first game console, ever.

Clown, Part 2

OK, now that I have the initial review King and the Clown out of my system, I'll comment on it, again.

Much like Brokeback Mountain, King and the Clown has a few stories going on. Although most reviews are going to point to its gay themes, which are just hinted at--there's no sex, no nudity. Indeed, the sensuality boils down to one rather brief kiss. The raunchiness, as it were, is left to either the skits that the jesters do, or to the king and his queen.

King reminds me of a bunch of other films, from Kurosawa period pieces, to soap operas, to period dramas like Amadeus, especially, the relationship of the king and queen. It's not nearly as serious as films like Ran or other Kurosawa films. It draws more from, say, soap operas, making the action more intimate.

The film also raises class issues, but as much by paying attention to the minstrels as the courtesans. In Ran, there is the clown jester, but all you get from the jester is that he is a jester, loyal to the warlord that has been booted out. You know he is of a lower class, but there's not much made of him. In many ways, he's similar to the many women that throw their bodies at arrows to protect their masters, non-descript.

King pays more attention to the minstrels, who seem much more of a family, then the dysfunctional monarchy (most monarchies set in the past seem to have this issue, with people willing to kill their own spouses, next of kin, whoever). There are Shakespearean elements where the king is going somewhat mad, unable to live to the expectations of his deceased father, who was highly respected. This plays out in a key scene where he has a father son shadow puppet scene, which you realize, rather quickly, is his relation with his own father.

For a long time, Gong-gil, the effiminate male that seems the source of interest for both the leader of the troupe, and the king, is not much of a character. Jang-sang, the leader, is much more interesting. You can see him pout, even as it's not fully established right away, his affection for Gong-gil. Indeed, it's tough to say how well they connect, but it may have to do with the delicate topic of gay romance in Korean films. Gong-gil's role is a bit underdeveloped, which is too bad, because it might establish a reason for why either character is interested in him, other than he makes a genuinely convincing looking woman.

The queen is also a weak character, mainly being jealous of Gong-gil. She has a kind of maternal relationship to the king, who is seen as someone that is trying to be his own man, but has troubles. The queen mainly looks irritated and wonders why the king is so enamored of this guy.

The character actors, who play smaller roles, seem vaguely familiar. At least one of them, I'm pretty sure, is in The Host (well, I can't really find evidence of this).

King keeps its focus on the love story, even as there is a side story of the overthrow of the king. The resolution isn't so simple mostly because Gong gil eventually realizes he is in love with Jang-sang. Eventually, both are content that they are minstrels, even as they've spent a brief time living among royalty.

I liked the film, but can't quite say it is as gripping as The Host. Certainly, the attitudes toward gay themes are a bit naive, but each culture goes through its own stages trying to address this topic. For example, the issue, I think, hasn't been addressed in mainstream Indian films. It has been dealt with, somewhat, in arty films, like Fire by Deepa Mehta (dealing with lesbians).

Well, there you have it. Decent, but not great.

Women in Computer Science

Having been in academic computer science for a number of years, I can say, at least anecdotally, I know something about the topic.

In particular, a recent NY Times article laments the number of women in computer science. Informally, a colleague and I did some checks and found that there was maybe 20% women in computer science, which is smaller than engineering or mathematics. There's a a book that covers research done on this topic.

Most guys I know would be thrilled if more women were interested in computer science. But there are plenty of things that seem to favor men in the field. First, it takes someone who's a bit obsessive compulsive to be good at computer programming. It's not surprising many CS majors are geeks, who are more accustomed to studying on their own, then interacting with others.

To be good at programming, you need to pay attention to a lot of detail, and be patient enough to spend gads of time trying to debug stuff. Once, I met an undergrad taking his first programming course. He complained he had spent twenty minutes looking for a bug! I almost had to laugh. People can spend days looking for a bug. This kind of fastidiousness is tedious, but some people enjoy the challenge. Still, it's not for everyone.

The real problem with getting good at programming is that it takes times, and lots of it. You make stupid error, then again, then again. Many CS majors recall spending, ten, twenty, thirty, even a hundred hours on a project. Real world projects may take thousands of hours to complete.

Now think of that. Most classes expect you to spend maybe 10-15 hours tops out of class. But programming is best learned if you spend 20-25 hours, and with that kind of number, it begins to interfere with other courses, and it really begins to interfere with sleep. This kind of obsessiveness is mostly associated with video games. More on that later.

Oddly enough, if you look at most CS departments, you find women are from groups you wouldn't entirely expect. Asians. Many women are Chinese, Korean, Indian. Heck, you're more likely to find an African woman than an African-American woman in computer science.

Do you need to be good at video games to be good at programming? Not exactly, no, but the skills to be a good programmer has some similarities to being good at video games. In particular, those who like video games play it for hours. And for some reason, there are more guys willing to do this than girls. Second, many video games have a puzzle like aspect to it, and being able to figure out what's going on with little information is like programming too.

My guess is that guys are more disposed to be obsessive-compulsive than women. Add to the fact that geeky guys aren't highly desirable by women, and that geeky girls aren't (necessarily) highly desired by men (though geeky men are likely to find geeky girls pretty darn cool).

Indeed, many of the women I knew in computer science tended to gravitate to areas like human computer interaction or artificial intelligence. Many fewer women were interested in the heavy math or heavy coding areas like systems programming or programming languages. Oddly enough, more mathy areas, like algorithms are likely to attract more women.

I found that of the few white women I met in computer science, at least at the undergrad level, many of them were math-inclined. Most of the women were coders, usually were Asian. I don't necessarily think Asian women have that much of an advantage over white American women. I do think, oddly enough, the pragmatic attitudes of Asians living in the US (don't major in English! major in science or engineering) overcomes traditional dislikes of math/science.

What this suggests is that white American parents are more likely to tell their daughters they can major in anything, but tell their sons they should be doctors, engineers, etc. There's some social pressure to this end too.

There are other theories too. Geeks can be sometimes insular, shunning women, even as they later complain they can't meet women, or boys who dominate the use of computers. I've noticed women are more careful programmers, and guys more cavalier about errors. It tends to help, as a programmer, to be somewhat reckless, to code it up even if it goes wrong, and be fearless about finding errors.

Part of our problem, really, is that we simply don't teach programming very well. We know how to teach syntax, but not the thinking process of debugging, looking up stuff on the Internet, and simply thinking about what's going on. It's going to take a while before we can re-think how to teach programming so that it may have greater impact on women as well as men.

Also, it's intriguing how people focus on women in computer science, instead of, more generally, minorities in computer science. There may be some stereotypes involved in that as well, that the field is predominantly Asian and white, and that going for traditionally disadvantaged minorities might be less successful, and that, comparatively speaking, there should be no reason why women, who grow up in similar social economic upbringing as men shouldn't be as successful.

Of course, there are things like "women simply aren't good at computer science" that drive women's groups crazy, but may have some physiological basis. I don't know if that's so or not, but certainly, it's harder getting women interested or any good at computer science. It happens, but numbers aren't where most people would like it to be.

Much Ado About Wii

I've been, on and off, looking for the Wii for nearly a month, perhaps longer. It was completely scarce in March and most of April. It's supposed to be available Sunday. But you know what? It being so scarce, there are plenty of others looking for it too. I'm told that people are camping out the night just to get an opportunity to buy it tomorrow.

I suppose I should have known better. You would have thought that most people who wanted it would already have it.

Hardly. So, my guess is that I'll struggle to find it tomorrow. But at least the chances are non-zero, rather than zero.