Match-maker, match-maker, make me a match!

This blog post has been a long time coming. I couldn't write it due to a long running practical joke which finally came to a conclusion last week. A large segment of my friend base believed that I came back engaged after my trip back to Sri Lanka due to a story dreamed up by one of my best friends. Of course I decided to fan the flames of that story (all the while dropping hints) in order to see who would smell the rat and who would stay gullible. 

The best lies are the ones which are half true and now dear reader, I can divulge what actually happened on my trip away in Sri Lanka.

Whilst overseas, my dad decided to take me to my uncle's home for a 'catch up' with the family and 'some close family friends'. I've known for a while that my folks have been searching for partners for me, but this was six days into the holiday and without any smell of a setup, I had gotten complacent. By the time dinner was done the 'family friends' had come over and with a daughter in tow, I knew it was a setup**. I was furious, but couldn't make a scene in front of two families so I put on a smiling face and greeted the family and the girl.

The unfortunate thing was, she was one hell of a catch. She was very forward, played sports, had an active social life, was a wonderful pianist (my dad requested her to play) and she was pretty. It was unfortunate because being the moron that I was, I decided to be somewhere between civil and friendly instead of going all out to make an positive impression. Whilst still annoyed at being in the dark about all this, I still kicked myself for botching it up. Especially since my family had gone to a lot of effort already, I decided to give this entire process a fair go and went ahead to the various setups my parents had filtered.

Girl 2: Worked in IT as a tester. I was utterly charming and she made for decent conversation. On paper it made for a reasonable match, but in reality, there was a significant lack of chemistry from my side. There simply wasn't the spark there was with the first girl.

Girl 3: Was in the middle of NOWHERE. It was a 3 hour drive through god-knows-where to get there. By the time I got there, my back was killing me from the driving and I was hardly in the mood to be charming. Luckily enough, she really wasn't my type. Way too timid for someone with an personality like mine and she just couldn't make conversation.

Girl 4: Utterly disillusioned by this point, I spent most of this one playing with my 6 year old cousin whilst my dad did the interrogation. She looked as disinterested in being there as I was, so luckily this ended quickly.

The idea is the next time I return that I have another look, but this is giving me good incentive to avoid going back for a while.

So the irony here is that I put some really high artificial barriers to entry when I'm interacting with the ladies in SL, but over here I'm knocked over by the first pretty face which is nice to me. It is an awful double standard. So, with not much happening here and no real wish to go back and continue the Sri Lankan match making process, I'm stuck.

In order to get out of my current rut, Cat told me to get myself on RSVP, which initially seems like an extreme measure until you strip away the emotional aspects. This is a classic Long Tail situation. Think about it this way. A lot of hookups and lot of incredibly good looking people appear in bars and pubs. But that said, your typical bar/pub only appeals to about 5-10% of the population you could date. Distribution is difficult because it usually requires a significant amount of courage to present yourself to another person. Filtering is impossible, because even if you could hear over the awful music, people don't tell you enough about them to make a informed decision (well unless you just want a shag, in which case the looks are enough data).

Enter the Internet.

Places like RSVP, Lava and the myriad other sites represent the long tail of the dating market. 

There are thousands of people available on these sites, and whilst they don't currently represent everyone, they would probably cover another 40% of the potential market.

Distribution is easy, everyone places information about themselves onto the website, filling out what they are like. Anyone with access to a computer can do it, you don't need to argue with bouncers and its for the most part free! 

Of course with this many people on the net, it makes it even more difficult to find someone you like. Luckily there are filtering mechanisms. Being able to filter out on age, race, pets, preferences towards Star Trek vs Star Wars, almost anything, gives unbelievable ability to find someone who you might be compatible with. The 'relative' anonymity of the process also improves chances of personalities being correctly portrayed rather than the usual mask people wear in public. Unfortunately you also miss 60% of the conversation due to the lack of body language. 

It would be funny if there was a rating system for people as well, in the same vein as Amazon. "I dated James for two years, it was awesome. Highly recommended" - 5 Stars. It would highly flawed since the biggest problem is that breakups nearly always result in 1 star ratings of each other regardless of how '5 star' you were in the 'honeymoon' stage. But I digress.

So with this many great reasons to be listed, why am I not? I don't know, but I suspect its the same naive reason every other single person uses. We're all waiting for our Princess Charming to come along and whisk us away to somewhere beautiful.

** For those who are unaware of Sri Lankan custom, matchmaking is a fairly common occurrence even today. Both boy and girl have full control over the process and the family who does the match making simply act like a dating service, except with pre-approval from the parents already granted (since they helped set you up remember). After you find someone you like you conduct a normal courtship and if that fails, you start again. My cousin went through 89 girls before he found the right girl for him (and he's still happily married with several beautiful kids). In general the program has a incredibly high success rate.

Board games and you: A guide to a true nerd sport.

My friends pointed out, moderately bitterly, that I have an affinity to economic board games. And looking back over the past, I've noticed a tendency to win significantly above average. Which is ironic considering my real-life financial situation, but I suspect board games reward the type of behaviour which would otherwise back-fire in real life. So I figured I'd share some of these thoughts as in the hope it will lead to some more intense games in the future, rather than a grimace of "Not again".

I originally wrote this blog with specific problems and examples from each board game, but I deliberately made it generic and applicable across multiple games, for as Drucker said in the Effective Executive, 'most problems are generic and can only be solved through a decision which establish a rule or principle'. This is also partly to help anyone outside of my work group who will not understand the specialized language of the games being discussed.

* Early investment. No.1 rule is anything that provides continuous and preferably exponential investment HAS to be done early. Example 1: In Peurto Rico, an early cheap investment in a 'Small market' accelerates your money making and allows you to get a 'Large market' quickly which accelerates your funding again. Example 2: In Acquire, Forcing an early merge allows you to get substantial cash infusion which you can invest into other hotels, allowing you to become majority share owner in them as well.

* Understand your resources by themselves and with respect to the environment. Each resource has different uses in each phase of the game and you need to understand how to best utilize them. For example: Puerto rico, there is only one good you can sell at a time, so generating a tonne of coffee or tobacco is generally useless. Having one coffee available at all times is plenty.

The second point is just as important. Each resource is has different value based on what people have done. Arms races will on the other hand will kill both players. Playing contranian often works in your favour. E.g. Settlers, if everyone shoots for brick and wood, there will a flood of these resources and you, the contrarian who owns the only sheep suddenly has a lot of power. Alhambra is a prime example. Those who do an arms race to own all the "valuable" 'Purple' buildings might end up having to share points, whilst he who notices this and moves into the "cheap" 'Blue' buildings might get to keep all of those points.

* Over-diversification is a bad idea. Just like real-life, over diversification hurts more then it helps. In nearly every game, you will end up highly overstretched. In Settlers, having access to every resource-type square probably means you have a lot of settlements and no cities to accelerate cash. In Acquire, having a stake in every hotel means you'll likely not get Majority OR Minority shareholder bonuses. In Puerto rico, having more than 2 types of production means you're wasting money on production plants which should have gone to support buildings.

* Strengthening your own hand is always preferable to damaging another's. Don't try to hurt a particular person, even if they seem to be in the lead, if by doing so you sacrifice a better play for yourself. The only exception to this is if you can screw everyone else at once. Example: In Puerto rico, 'Trading' to make more cash to buy that building you always wanted is generally the best move. However if by 'Captain'ing you can force everyone else to dump heavily goods whilst allowing you to have some minor benefit, then this may be a better choice.

* Communication on and outside of your round is vital. As a general rule, you want to steer people towards making a decision that benefits you. The only way to make that succeed honourably is to help them make a decision that benefits the both of you, but screws someone else. Staying quiet can help if someone else is propositioning a decision which fits into your plans.

* Medium-term planning is your friend. As a general rule, people will make decisions (or randomness will) which will make long term planning exceptionally difficult, if not outright impossible. Medium term prediction is reasonable and advised however. E.g. In Acquire, if you have two pieces which will make a hotel, but they are far away from any merging, holding them in reserve until there are hotels closer to that location is advised. E.g. In Puerto rico, you can think in terms of up to 3 rounds in advance since with the small number of 'roles' that can be played, the role you need played before it gets to your turn has a high chance of being played in each round.

One fantastic skill that I would also recommend is keeping a good idea of what resources others have got. It's one I'm generally utterly poor at with my short-term memory, but it makes decision making a lot easier.

That is all I've come up with so far. Hopefully it gives some insights into how I play.

Etiquette on the use of the 'L' word

And no, I don't mean Lesbian, I mean the other 'L' word. The Love word. The great tactical nuke of words. The word that if packaged into a box would have both a 'FRAGILE' sign and a 'DANGER' sticker plastered on.

People use the 'L' word for lots of things. Drunk people use it quite regularly. Heck even I've done the "I love you man!" in big group hugs. As bizarre as it may seem, as a general rule I will be free to use the L word around guys, but not around girls. You can say almost anything from one guy to another guy when you are drunk because you know you're just being silly. But when you cross genders, you have to be careful, because you don't know when someone will take it wrong.

For some people, the 'L' word can be bandied about with not a care. Unfortunately there is a large group of people like myself who take that word seriously. It took me 5 months of dating to use the 'L' word seriously with my high-school ex , and I believe it took another month for her to do the same. It has so much weight behind it that its dangerous to use it lightly.

So do you want to know what happens when you use it wrong? You cause someone to blog at 2am in the morning about using it wrong!

I went out with some friends and whilst I was leaving, a drunken friend hugged me and then dropped the L word. This is fine. Unfortunately right afterwards she reaffirmed it and then explained why she did. And of course being stunned, I immediately just mumbled a thank you and sort of shuffled off. And subsequently I have been pondering whether this was normal drunken crap, or is this someone expressing their true feelings after alcohol removed the inhibitor circuit. So now these thoughts are just spinning around and around. Maybe I should clarify it another day in a sort of side conversation, but will that be too embarrassing to bring up? Do I ignore it? Do I ask her friends what she really thinks?

See the ample amount of damage done by simply not following etiquette? It is really simple:
1. Feel free to use the L word for anyone or anything, but unless you really mean it:
2. If its cross gender, never reaffirm that you do.
3. Never explain why you do.
4. If you HAVE screwed up, playfully and visually tell others around them, the same thing so the person in question realizes its just the alcohol talking.

Would certainly help me sleep better!

Don't pass the buck.

Interesting chapter in the book I'm currently reading (By the way, great book - 1st Break all the rules). You should avoid saying the lines "I think this is a crazy idea, but the corporate insists". What you've just done there is demotivate everyone around you. I've done this plenty of times on my current project. I hear and see something reasonably mad and I report it back to the team and after a while you end up doing two things. One you foster a "Us vs Them" attitude which is never healthy. Secondly you give people excuses to be less than the best they can be and reduces the overall effectiveness of the organization.

So I'm thinking of doing the following:

1. If someone is doing something stupid that doesn't affect my team, just don't report it unless someone asks.
2. If someone asks something stupid of your team, make sure you have all the information and go to the team with it. If the team thinks its stupid, don't make promises of trying to change it.
3. If they insist on it, get the reasoning. It's very rare the reasoning is just plain mad, it is usually a compromise. Find a middle ground and justify the decision to your team as to why you accepted, rather than you didn't have a choice. People are generally mature enough to handle this. By passing the buck, you reduce the trust in the upper organization and you reduce the team's trust in you as a manager.

(This isn't the most well thought out blog post, but I've had a number of people complain I haven't updated in a while, so I figured why not ease myself back into it.)

WYD2008 Super Thursday

Today was 'Super-Thursday' of World Youth Day (week) in Sydney and it was an amazing spectacle. The Sydney CBD was packed with thousands of people attired in the firey orange and yellow WYD 2008 signature outfits. Flags of numerous nations were proudly on display as people marched onto Barangaroo. Unfortunately, since I wasn't a registered pilgrim, I couldn't join them in the main area of Barangaroo. Luckily I did find a great vantage point from where I could observe all of Barangaroo. And boy were there a lot of them. The entire ex-shipping yard was covered with people, with estimates of around 130,000 pilgrims packed into that area.

Even though hordes of people were being herded like cattle, there was lots of singing and dancing in the crowd. The "Free Hugs" girls and guys in my photos really captured the feel of the event in my mind. The entire feeling of giving love for the sake of giving without caring about race, gender or age. The concept is not at all new, but it was lovely to see it at this event.

I was expecting to see some activists complaining about condom use, abortion or other controversial religious decisions. Yet I didn't see even one and I was all over the place from Barangaroo to the Domain. I was originally annoyed that these folk would try to ruin the event (though they do have the right to free speech), but after being there, I would feel sorry for any person who tried to push that kind of ideology against the crowd that was there tonight. They would have been politely ignored at best or ridiculed by the more militant religious ones. You'd have to be quite ballsy to try it.

Of course the Pope did arrive and that was pretty cool. He seems like a nice guy and maybe over time people will grow to respect him the same way we did JP2. The motorcade was funny since they drove past at around 40km/h so it is very quick. Despite one guy going, 'wow, was that it?', in general the crowd was elated and had that 'Wow, I saw the Pope!' excitment in their eyes.

Some come for the celebrity, some come for faith, some come to find meaning and others just to be part of the event. Organized religion may be dying, but its not dead yet.

Slipping task management.

They say someone who is successful is someone who has screwed up a lot and learnt from it. So I'm hoping this project will help me to do that. There was a project manager at my work who was ruthless (in a good way) at tracking tasks that were slipping. Those who worked with her found it annoying in some sense, but everyone acknowledged she also provided perspective and butt protection. At some point, people stepped back and reassessed where they were with the task and re-planned. This is good for the developer, the project and the project manager.

So say you have a task that is slipping by a developer. You need to analyze the task and determine what kind of slippage it is. Is it slipping because its not clear what work it is. Maybe you need to break up the task into more manageable bits.

If it is dangerously slipping you might need to not deliver the entire thing. Understand what is the real dependency or feature that has to be delivered. Can you get away with perhaps releasing the interfaces even if there isn't an implementation. Can you deliver where the configuration is via a configuration file even if there isn't a GUI component requirement. It is a case of being creative and understanding your requirements.

If a person has missed a deadline several times, then you need to keep that in mind when dealing with them again. They could be bad at estimation, or their loading needs to be really low. Note you may have an opportunity for improvement with a person if their productivity is really low*.

When even that fails, you need to start micro-managing. This is where you break the task down with them, ask them daily how they are going with the task, and tracking very carefully. Its funny how quickly a task that is carefully scrutinized ends up being delivered.

Going back to my earlier point on idiosyncrasies of each team, it is really important to understand the motivations of each team member. I've heard people say 'everyone is out to do a good job and spend the right amount of time on it', and this is not always true. As a general rule, it is true, but you need to understand both extremes in the project too. There is the person who will work 12 hour days, rip through tasks, burn out and quit. You also have the 9-5 institutionalized person is waiting for their LSL to kick in and say things will be done 'when its done'. Whilst you can help, often those folk need to sort out their priorities in life outside of the project. You need to realize both are a risk to the project and the tasks and allocate accordingly.

*The funky thing about matrix organizations is that the closest person to the employee in question can't suggest those improvements. They need to tell the coach instead. Unnecessary layer of communication there.

Workhorses and Show Ponies

It has been an painful week. There has been lots of dealing with people a lot more senior than I am over screw-ups that I had very little control over. In addition I got my first chewing out by a tech manager for letting the schedule slip, but ironically (or maybe not so ironically, for you learn more from your mistakes then from praises) it was the most beneficial coaching session I've had for a while.

The project has slipped for a number of reasons, but one of the main reasons is due to the way I allocated tasks to people. The difference between a good project manager and a great project manager is that a great PM can work with the idiosyncracies of their team. And within each team are what my tech manager called 'Show Ponies' and 'Workhorses'. And this is how he explained how they work.

Workhorses are easy enough to understand. They are the people who do the hard painful labour. They will sow the fields, write the big modules of your code, put up your walls. They rarely complain, they don't make excuses for being late and they are happy with just doing the work. They are the backbone of your team and losing too many of them will break the project.

Show ponies are the ones that prance from one activity to another. They like to know more stuff and strut their stuff to others. They are excellent for communicating with others, solving puzzles, creating designs but you wouldn't use them for heavy lifting, because its they don't roll like that. They are smart enough to do the work, but they aren't motivated enough by grunt labour to do it. Without them, you won't win any prizes and you probably won't innovate, but you should be able to get the project done regardless.

So when composing a group, you do need a good mix of the two if its possible, though it isn't very often that you get a choice about who you get to pick. Grads make for excellent workhorses, which is why any growing business needs a reasonable number of them. They need to be paired with good senior staff. This is because often senior staff don't believe in the organization, but they do believe in looking after their young proteges. Senior staff are more difficult to split into work horses and show ponies as they seem to eveningly split into both types and often show characteristics of both.

So what I did was allocate work the wrong way around and now I've screwed my schedule and made the other team member very annoyed. Ideally I should have allocated smaller tasks to the pony and made them more free for design/reviews and so on, and given the grunt work to the work horse which would mean it would be closer to being done on time.

It is kind of disconcerting seeing this kind of comparison of your peers to farm animals, being made by a manager, but it doesn't make it wrong, and this kind of simplification helps to guide future decision making.

Why Guild Wars is Technologically Awesome

I like Guild wars. And not just because it combines the best bits of the OCD-driven grinding/levelling/item gathering tendencies of a MMO AND the 'what happens next' eagerness of a story-driven game. It is not even because it has a number of game play elements that make it easy to pick up, challenging to master and continually entertaining to play. It is because from a technical perspective it's one of the more impressive games I've seen for a while. Here is a washing list of the things I find fascinating from a technology perspective.

Online updates - Guild wars is at its heart an example of a Software-As-A-Service (SAAS) which companies have been touting for a while. Whilst you need to install the initial application, the rest of the game is purely updates. And its not small updates either, as new campaigns, new cut scenes, new enemies are all downloaded on the fly. This said, all it needs to download is graphical presentation and input layers only. The original install is apparently just a 90kb 'thin' client and most of the logic in the game is kept on the server. As it gets to a new area, it compares what it needs with what it has and downloads any additional content. This makes it easy for developers to add more content, fix exploits and respond to customer demands.

Instance Network reconnect - The single worst part of RTS games is typically playing a game for 30mins, and be at the climax of a good battle, and then have either the game crash on you OR you get a network disconnect. In Guild wars, each explorable area is a private instance that is just made for you and your party of friends. So if one of you got disconnected for any reason, it would ruin the game for everyone if it wasn't for Guild War's ability to detect disconnects and allow the user to reconnect straight back to the session, allowing the party to continue adventuring.

A Well-Made UI - A common mistake is to have an amazing back end infrastructure and to spend no money on the user interface technology. Guild wars doesn't fall into this trap by having a user experience that is both gorgeous (even after 5yrs, the architecture and scenery in GW is breath-taking) and completely functional (user widgets are adjustable, contains all the information you need, have appropriate short cuts etc). It helps add to the gaming experience instead of detracting as some gaming UIs tend to. To top it off, much of the UI is customizable. You can in fact skin the client, since it doesn't affect any other player. This includes changing some of the graphics or sounds or whatever. This does have some impact in PvP however since you can mod certain classes to be more visible (everyone loves to kill the healers).

I've heard some friends say there isn't anything technologically innovative about Guild wars and it is true. All the above have been done in games before. Guild wars happens to execute many of these things well and this really helps you appreciate the technology behind this game.

Further Resources about the technology behind Guild Wars:
- http://au.pc.ign.com/articles/534/534454p1.html
- http://www.monashreport.com/2007/06/09/technology-of-guild-wars/
- http://www.dbms2.com/2007/06/09/the-database-technology-of-guild-wars/
- http://www.dbms2.com/2007/06/12/thoughts-on-database-management-in-role-playing-games/

Birthday LAN '08

Yet another year's Birthday LAN party is in the bag. And another record breaking year it was. Much of it was the same as last year. And of course, to follow PMI process, we can't close off the event without having a retrospective.

So what went well?
- Record attendance: 15 gamers and 15 non-gamers for a 30 person turn out and 7 girls for an amazing 1:4 ratio.
- New games were introduced which worked well. Call of Duty 4, World in Conflict and Aliens vs Predator 2 were added to the fray. Old classics like Dawn of War and Trackmania (Forever edition) also kept people entertained.
- The food was much better this year after we outsourced to a different provider (Flavour of Ceylon in Parramatta).
- The inclusion of a web-camera doing time lapsed photos was great as it gave a source of entertainment during the party as well as an riveting video after.
- The private bit torrent tracker BTNT was used for distributing games and this worked excellently to make for an efficient and quick distribution of games.
- The network and power allotment layout worked beautifully with almost no outages (the one outage being at 7am in the morning which appeared to be outside our control).

What didn't go so well?
- Fewer different types games were played. Previous years saw more variety.
- Player Participation per Game (PPG) was more erratic then previous years. Whilst some games like Trackmania and AvP had close to 90% participation, other games splintered with less than 50%.
- I pussyed out on the "No external access" rule which meant some people defaulted to playing Eve Online or WoW or Age of Conan at a LAN. Given a lack of consensus for the next game to play, this is a fairly normal default action for those who are addicted to MMOs.
- A record number of people stayed over (nearly all 15 gamers). This overloaded the sleeping accommodation which meant some people didn't sleep. This contributed to people leaving earlier (2:30pm) on the next day compared to previous years.
- Yet again forgot to FRAPs the battles during the games so I could have highlight reels from the individual games.

Otherwise interesting highlights included:
- Several people doing Tequila shots at 1am in the morning.
- People wracking their brains playing BridgeIt (A civil engineering bridge building simulator) till the whee hours of the morning.
- My set of non-gamer friends sat in our outdoors entertaining area for ages just chatting amongst ourselves despite the fact it was freezing.

Whilst it was a great and fun LAN, from my original set of goals, it was a mixed affair. Which is good, because it gives me something to perfect for next year's LAN. My general approach to these things are to let people run it and just help them with their objective of having fun (even if my brain is telling me to micromanage), My parents as usual brought up making this party the last LAN. And I can understand why. With the catering and electricity and hiring costs alone, it cost well in excess of $600 to run, ignoring the huge amount of time it consumes. I'm generally okay with it because each year it's fun to setup and run, I learn a few things and I get to show my friends a good time to show that I appreciate them. All those things balance the cost to my time and money. So here is to next year's more spectacular gaming event!

The Ghost who Walks, I mean Sings.

So I decided to throw off the thongs and the beer stubbies and get myself an dose of culture by seeing the Phantom of the Opera at the Lyric Theatre on Saturday. Considering it cost me $90.00 to see it, I had fairly high expectations of an enjoyable experience. And yes, my requirements were fulfilled. I'm not a total uncultured buffoon as I've seen musicals before at London's West End when I was travelling, so it has to be reasonably good for me to appreciate it.

Not everyone can afford this kind of experience and I'd like to compare and contrast this with the Phantom of the Opera movie (which you can buy for far far less, or rent for almost nothing).

Whats great about both:
- The music: The Phantom has some AMAZING songs. Things like Angel of Music, and Music of the Night and of course who doesn't know the amazing starting of the title song. I don't think I can remember the words, but the music flows still through my head.
- The story: It is a moving, tragic story which you really only appreciate in Act 2. In Act 1 you kind of feel that the Phantom is, as Sunny might say, a bit of a douche bag. But in Act 2, you really do feel sorry for him. And Christine Daae is a beautiful character regardless of whether she is played by Julie Goodwin at the show or Emmy Rossum in the movie.

Why the movie over the theatre:
- cost: self explanatory. $90 vs free.
- convenience: both in getting and watching the film. No crowds or parking to deal with.
- more-absorbing: This may slightly contradict a later point, but a movie is a continuous piece of fiction, whilst a play has intermissions and set pieces and people stopping to clap which totally ruins your ability to disconnect from this world and go to that world.

Why the theatre over the movie:
- There is so much passion and depth in real life sound that digital conversion just robs. The theatre is also built for acoustics so that when you hear it at the theatre, it moves you on emotional level.
- Visually its a trade off. Some scenes (like the Phantom throwing fireballs) are kind of stupid looking in the theatre because you don't have access to CGI/special effects. But you cannot deny that seeing things in 3D makes you feel like you are a fly in the wall watching the story unfold. Well up to the point where it changes scene anyway (as mentioned above)
- Theatrics: Okay this maybe just me, but I enjoy seeing the various things they do on a stage. Being treated to certain 'special effects' without CGI such as the Phantom taking Christine on 'the boat' on stage is pretty darn neat.

In short, if you know its going to be a quality production, its worth considering seeing the theatre version of a story, but unlike a movie, the cost of guessing wrong is way more expensive than just the time wasted. In the Phantom's case, its Quality with a Q, so go with my blessing.

My Media Center... It lives, It lives!

So I finally got out of my work-induced state of apathy and did something that I've been meaning to do for ages. I made a media center for our living room so that the folks can have access to all the videos I watch and so we have readily available music for parties.

My plan was to spend absolutely nothing on this PC and outside of a $20 hard drive I succeeded by scavenging two dead PCs to make one workable PC. The following components are sufficient for a media center PC (faster is always better, but below is quite workable).
My Media Center PC consists of:

• Athlon 0.9GHz (yes <1GHz)
  
• 256MB ram
• Geforce4 MX with TV-Out
  
• 350W ye-olde Power supply (I need to replace this since its SO old)
• Network card
  
• 80GB HDD (probably a bit small, but got it for cheap!)

I love Ubuntu, but I need something as lightweight as possible so I chose Xubuntu so that I start off with the minimal set and Xfce lightweight desktop. I actually ended up installing Xubuntu twice because I can't read the difference between 8.04 and 6.06 (it was late, give me a break). I did notice that 6.06 was quite smooth compared to 8.04 which I'm assuming is the usual effect of feature bloat, but I can still live comfortably with it.

I got my TV-Out to work using the following work instructions: ... Sort of
I still had to run to do some fairly confused apt-get and /etc/X11/xorg.conf editing black magic, but in the end it all works. I'd write what I did, but it seemed to be various runs of sudo nvidia-settings, xorg.conf editing and sudo nvidia-xconfig.

The biggest decision was which Media Center application to use. My original choice was Elisa, but there is actually a number of other solutions that are available. I went in the end with the XBox Media Center or XBMC. This is a direct to linux port of the media centre application that is on the XBox. It did all I wanted and the interface was sufficiently slick and intuitive that I was okay with using it. It does music, video, photos and for no really apparent reason, the Weather. After all, I want to know how much sun and blue skys I'm missing out on by being indoors watching movies... Anyway I will definitely revisit Elisa in the next few months as it does look like its growing at a faster rate than XBMC.

Installation of XBMC was trivial once you realized that there is a Ubuntu package and you don't need to build it from source. Building from source reminds me why I used to hate Linux as its a needlessly painful procedure which made me nearly give up on XBMC. This site helped me a lot with setting up XBMC, though make sure you use the latest XBMC for Hardy Heron. You also don't need to do much of it outside of updating the sources.list and doing the apt-get. Once installed and launched, if you notice that you get a lot of mouse slowdown, this means your Nvidia drivers are probably out of date.

Video is well handled in XBMC in terms of how the overlay of GUI elements work with the running movie. It is hard to describe without showing it so have a look at this youtube video. Music is somewhat confusing to use, but it is possibly because I haven't enabled 'Library mode' properly yet so I reserve judgement. Photos is fairly awful however due to slow rendering speeds and an slideshow that doesn't appear to allow controls. But I'm pretty much only here for music, movies and that kick-ass style so it has got most of what I need.

I have a few problems that I still have to solve:

• I need to somehow reduce the noise output of this machine. Currently I buried it behind the amplifier and then covered all but the fan output with a sheet to muffle as much sound as possible. I can still hear it clearly enough. I suspect a new CPU fan and PSU fan are required.

• I have no network access in the living room and running cables on the ground everywhere is not an acceptable solution. It means most likely that I need a wireless card which I can then link to my WAP/Router. Whilst more painful, it certainly gives me a chance to learn about wireless in Linux which is a new area for me.

Frets on Fire server on Ubuntu

I've been having a blast lately playing Frets on Fire, the el-cheapo PC Guitar Hero clone. My ex pointed out that it has a Frets on Fire server as well which allows us to upload our top scores so we can verse each other to see who plays better over time. The Frets on Fire server has all these following pre-requisites:

• Python 2.4 or newer
• Django 0.96 or newer
• MySQL Server 4.0 or newer
• Apache web server (or any other web server)
• Apache mod_python
• Python Imaging
• Python MySQLdb
  

So I put aside most of saturday afternoon & evening to install all this on my computer and get the server running. Remembering the 'fun' I had installing the LAMP stack on my old Fedora box back two years ago, I knew this would easily take a long time.

Two hours later I had finally managed to get 5 stars on Kaiser chief's Ruby and blew away my old score. Hang on, what happened to installing the FoF server? Yeah, I did that already. That took me less than 30mins. Yes you heard me right, I installed that entire stack and the FoF server in 30mins and most of that was the download and waiting for install.

In fact, its as simple as this:

• sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache-mod-python
• sudo apt-get install mysql-server python-mysqldb
• sudo apt-get install python-imaging
• sudo apt-get install python-django
• Follow some very basic commands in the FoF server read-me such as copying and filling in the blanks in files.

It was so easy, it was so simple to get the application to do what I wanted to achieve, rather than just fiddle with install and configuring. It was so quick and easy that it didn't feel like I was working in Linux at all. It was so easy it could have been Windows for all I knew.

What happened to Linux? What happened to the days of mind-bogglingly painful installs? Of rpm-dependency hell. Of dredging web forums trying to understand what a particular error code meant? Of the little victories as you get each component to recognize the other component.

Of course, this was one small app, theres still plenty of other horrifying applications we can try installing, but even that is getting easier by the day. Its clear that Open Source programmers are realizing that making things easier for noobies is the best way to convert us over. We like to spend more time working with the application, rather than knowing all the intricate configurations.

Anyway, I need to get back to some Killing In the Name of...

The Plus One Club

I had my first +1 club experience this Saturday. What's +1 club you say? That's exactly what I asked (OK fine, I actually mistook it for something D&D and asked if the club was Vorpal).

The +1 club is a term coined by my friend Julian and it refers to bringing an random friend along to a party as extra. The only rule of being in the club for a guy is that you don't make an ass of the primary invitee. It is an excellent concept because it benefits both the random along with the primary invitee. The primary invitee gets to inject some new blood into conversations and also gets shortlisted to be added as a +1 in other parties whilst the random gets a chance to meet some new friends.

The party was an birthday party for an ex-worker, Dylan, who I never met before. The party was at the Dome club within Crown Hotel in Surry Hills. Considering how very ordinary and pub-like the downstairs is, the upstairs "Dome" component is very trendy. It has a reasonably sized bar area, the crowd is mostly middle aged so there were a lot fewer posers and the surroundings felt sophisticated.

I've never really noticed Julian's abilities at parties before and after Saturday night he is my new hero. He has this remarkable ability to just converse with people and engage them with funny stories or quirky questions. There were many fantastic looking guys and ladies (I'd be interested if I was 30 anyway), who Julian easily chatted to with no pretension or ulterior motive (well that I know about) and I was thinking, I want to be that confident one day! Being able to be witty on demand, to engage multiple people and keep thinking on one's feet is a fantastic skill which I'd love to master one day.

Well it's either all the above, or it could be due to the fact he managed smuggle out some tasty birthday cake from the sealed 'superheroes' 30th party which happened to be running in a function room at the bar.

Enough with the Julian worship; on a side note it is amazing how small a world it is in some ways. I met two other people who used to work for us, AND who also worked with Mr R. And I met someone who worked with someone else whose boss was Cat from work's ex-husband whilst they were in Guildford. Then we met someone who used to work with Jane before she came to work with us. Then again, the Australian IT community is small enough that the degrees of separation are likely to be small.

One habit that I have formed of late is to keep in my personal wiki, a list of people I meet and a few notes about each of them for future reference. When I went to write up those who I met Saturday night I realized by accident I had been a +1 at over 4 different parties in the last two months. I wouldn't have believed it without counting it, but I've been introduced to over 40 new people! Considering how boring my social life is, this is kind of amazing. I envy those who are regularly meeting lots of new people, sort of like Julian. Ahh I think I'm going to stop blogging before this becomes a Julian fan site.

What Dead or Alive can teach us about Talent Management Time

I watched the much derided game to movie adaptation Dead or Alive today. And guess what? I really enjoyed it! No, this isn't because I'm a masochist and it's not because I have extremely low standards in my movies. It's not even because I had such low expectations for this movie that I would enjoy 80 minutes of static. It is because I set my expectations of what to expect from this movie accordingly before I watched it. I was told the movie would contain fantastic action sequences, beautiful locales and incredibly sexy women and it delivered on all those accounts.

It is mid-year review at my workplace and everyone has to take some time during their fortnight to document what they did in the last 6 months and how they are in relation to their objectives. This is commonly known as "doing PMP crap", by the majority of people. Note in this post, I will refer to it as talent management, not the "Performance Management Platform" since being of project management persuasion, associating the PM Professional qualification with PMP is just too confusing. It may be obvious why it is called 'PMP crap', but lets elaborate for those not at my work.
Software engineers are a difficult lot to measure and for the most part it is impossible to create any discrete scale of performance. There are those who have done something 'really good' and those who are 'really bad' and there is the bulk of us which make up the 70% who make the business work, but not necessarily make it much better. Regardless of what we write up, it is usually clear which bucket we fall into from the start and hence promotions and salary are generally considered somewhat disconnected from Talent Management system.

And here is the problem. I think people have an expectation that the Talent Management System is about writing up why you deserve more money. This is like saying you watch DoA for a storyline. Yes, there is a storyline, but it won't satisfy you and if you expect it to, then you'll be disappointed. This was my problem for a while. I expected pay rises to get me in line with my graduating peers. Whilst I got great pay rises compared to my colleagues, I'm still significantly below my graduating peers and this was "disappointing"(read infuriating) until I came to epiphany about what the game was about. What you get paid extra in bonus or salary merit is reasonably random, regardless of the tripe they give about 'calibrating' your rank with what is in your talent management write ups.

So what should you be expecting out of Talent Management Time (TMT) about in my opinion? My expectations are for it to be an opportunity to do a personal retrospective and to conduct a marketing exercise.

Imagine if you were told you had company-allotted time every 6 months to spend time thinking about how you went? During this time, your peers and supervisors will also give you feedback on how you went, and how you can become better! Wow! Time flies really quickly when you are working and it's easy to lose track of what you have done unless you sit down and document it. The key to getting better is feedback via introspection and from those around you. Use this time to figure out what you did well, how you provided value to the company and most importantly how you are tracking against your own personal goals (you DO have these right?..right?). So I should EXPECT to get good feedback and I should EXPECT to have time to think about this properly.

The second part of talent management is a marketing exercise from both an internal and external perspective. Internally you are trying to sell yourself for better roles, more recognition and of course, better pay. What people fail to see is that there is an external marketing opportunity here. Every 6 months is a perfect time to update your CV. It is a good time to examine the market to see if recruiters are looking for the talents which you have been using. Using this information, you need to practise selling yourself, even if it is to a mirror. The only person who can market you is... you! And what you are selling is your RIGHT to that sexy new project, that interesting new role or hell maybe even a pay rise (This assumes your company has money...).

So remember to treat talent management accordingly and you will not be disappointed. When end of year comes around, you may be disappointed if the reward doesn't match your efforts, but you've already set expectations, right about TMT? And because you've been updating your CV and examining the market, you're in an excellent position to conduct your exit strategy* if you feel it's appropriate.

So on that note, please excuse me dear friends as I must leave you to go do some Talent Management write ups.

* Quick side note: Exiting is a GOOD thing if you ever feel like you are going nowhere, but you don't necessarily have to exit your current workplace. For example, each time I was on the verge of activating my company exit strategy, I've been offered new interesting roles and I got 'suckered' into yet another year of growth. Remember, new role, new place or new company are all exit strategies and the order of preference is an personal thing.

My Blog! Now with less categories per serving. Guaranteed!

For those using various news-feed readers might have noticed that a lot of older posts have got reanimated. Relax, its not a zombie-post Armageddon, but rather me going through my entire post collection (admittedly not that large) and creating new tag categories. I wanted to narrow my list of tags to something slightly more manageable. So the new short list at the moment should be on the right hand side and on further study, its reflects a lot about who I am as a person with its focus on love, friends, work and technology.

The main categories are:

• The.Wonder.Of.Life - Mostly the wonder of MY life that doesn't fit into the below categories
• Fools.In.Love - My various ill-fated yet occasionally successful attempts with the opposite sex.
• With.Friends.Like.This - for all the fun things I get up to with friends.
• Office.Space - related to my office, the work I do and friends I have with the office.
• Techa.licio.us - Related to technology in some way.
• Self-Enlightenment - Usually related to random bits of insight.
• The-Colour-Of-Game - Anything related to my other passion, gaming.
  

There are some other minor categories which for the most part I wanted to merge into the above categories, but I can see their use currently. I'll either be expanding them or killing them later.

James ShortHoof of Hobbits Alley.

My friends dislike the way I play pre-3rd Edition D&D due to the way I focus my attribute statistics on the class that I'm playing rather than 'role playing' and putting my stats the way I would be as a character. There is a reason for that. Its because I'd be utterly CRAP at EVERYTHING as a D&D character. I like to consider myself a well-rounded person, which could also be interpreted as I'm very average at a lot of things.

My friend Chris linked a site where you fill out 129 questions and it tells you what type of D&D character you are. . Yes this isn't the first, nor the last site that has done this quiz, but I suspect it'll be the same regardless of where I do it. So without further ado, let me introduce you to our friendly neighbourhood mage James ShortHoof of Hobbits Alley.

I Am A: Neutral Good Halfling Wizard/Sorcerer (2nd/1st Level)

Ability Scores:
* Strength-12
* Dexterity-13
* Constitution-14
* Intelligence-14
* Wisdom-13
* Charisma-14

Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Halflings are clever, capable and resourceful survivors. They are notoriously curious and show a daring that many larger people can't match. They can be lured by wealth but tend to spend rather than hoard. They prefer practical clothing and would rather wear a comfortable shirt than jewelry. Halflings stand about 3 feet tall and commonly live to see 150.

Primary Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard's strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.

Secondary Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.

Need Hot Sexy Singles? Facebook will show you how!

So apparently Facebook reckons I'm a desperate single loser. Why else would it be consistently showing me ads that say "Find hot singles now!" or "Do you want a relationship? Find people at blah" or "Meet Aussie Babes" around the clock whenever I login. Clearly having my relationship status as 'Single' was a big mistake. Now I cannot get rid of these ads!

Maybe I should start a relationship just to get rid of these ads. But who knows what ELSE it might start promoting. Maybe it'll start selecting places to buy expensive diamond rings, and worse yet maybe tell my partner "Get your partner to buy this gold necklace from Tiffanys for only $5k". Is there no end to what Facebook can get upto?

Anyway I did remove the relationship information in my facebook profile and consequently had 10 people ask me, 'oooo how come you're not listed as single anymore?'. It was somewhat depressing telling them that I had simply just removed it to try and rid of ads (which didn't work by the way).

You never love study... until its gone.

I'm back! Yes dear readers I've been away for a long time, but I have an good excuse! A new project at work took a large chunk of my time and that's another blog post for this week, but the other thing which took my time was studying for the CAPM exam, which I successfully completed on Monday.

So what is the CAPM all about then? The Certified Associate In Project Management is the light-weight version of the Project Management Professional(PMP) certification. It is designed for those people (like myself) who are keen to get into project management, but don't have the necessary hours to get the real PMP accredition.

The exam was criminally easy and made me slightly annoyed considering the many hours I sunk into self-study for this test. The time spent in understanding the project management processes is not a waste, but the waste is memorising PMI specific things, which aren't reflective of real life.
This has got to partly explain why there has been a lot of criticism about the PMI and how they are milking the certification process for all its worth. The amount of money you have to pay for what they give you is silly and the industry that's spawned around helping you pass the PMP test is easily making millions from this. All of this is true, but the fundamental core of what the course teaches you is still incredibly valuable information for project managers. Like any other certification, the PMP shows two things. One is you have the perseverance to go and get accredited and secondly that you have a solid understanding of the fundamentals. This won't make you a great project manager, but the chances of you being truly AWFUL are minimized and from a manager's point of view, this is tops.

I'm hoping that over time I can start using this information in projects I'm already on and hopefully I can use this certification as leverage into a real project management role either within or outside of Avaya in the next year.

That said, now that I've finished studying, I'm a little lost as to what to do with all this spare time. Anyone got any ideas of what I could do next?

Welcome to 2008!!

Happy New Year to everyone who reads this blog!

I know the last post was somewhat ominous, especially followed up with a long period of silence during all of December. This was mainly because December was very much action packed with little time for blogging. Nearly half the month went to travelling in both exotic Thailand and rustic outback Mudgee. I've got blog articles to write on both of these things, but I've been holding off from doing that whilst I concentrated on other things.

Whilst 2006 was a shambles due to so many personal, professional and financial disasters, 2007 represented clawing myself out of the pit I fell into and 2008 will be hopefully be the year it all turns around. New years resolutions never work without planning and this year I've actually got organized plans.

Firstly, I'm looking after my health. Its an easy one to forget, it requires constant attention, but if you neglect it, the consequences are worse than financial or professional ruin. Previously I've attempted to improve health but always gave it up within a few days due to no planning, tracking or controlling. In the weeks leading up to this year, I bought myself a pedometer and drew up an exercise goals list and I've actually kept to it for two weeks so far! My steps per day went from an average 5k to around 8k. Still haven't managed the 10k average that you are meant to do, but its getting there! By planning what I wanted to do and daily tracking it in Excel, it motivates me to keep trying.

Secondly, I'm trying to improve my finances and start building a real asset base. I've been reading "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki, and whilst there is a lot of obvious fluff in there, it does raise some good points that we easily forget. As my previous tech-lead used to say, its important to start investing young, keep your expenses & liabilities down and have a strong asset base. The ASX website has this great section on learning to invest that is well worth reading through. A visit to a reputable non-bank financial advisor is probably worth your while too. For my younger readers, its worth taking your parents along since their money is essentially your money so devising an combined plan is in your best interest. Of course remember, typically financial advisors get commission based on what they sell you, so make sure you have a clear idea of what you want from them and don't necessarily take what they are offering. So it will take time (and a lot of it), but do your own research. Thats what I'm trying to do and I'm certainly eager to get advice from those in the game.

If you're thinking this is a lot of extra time, you're right. Most likely I'll be scaling back my gaming time and my out-of-office work hours to fit this in. The real problem is that during work, often you are so tired after work that there is little drive to exercise, or study. I've got 4 days to figure out how to solve this problem before I fall into that rut again! If anyone has any suggestions on how they manage work and their personal goals, I'd be glad to hear it.