iLightning: my first iPhone app

I went to check my e-mail this morning, and was thrilled to see a message from "iTunes", notifying me that iLightning was ready for sale! Wheee! I've been checking my e-mail every few hours for a couple of days now.

Interestingly, the app is already available through the iTunes store. I was wondering whether I would get a chance for final confirmation, first, to allow me to upload the iLightning web page. Apparently not, although this could be because of my release date settings. I see that 3 people bought the app overnight, while my web-page was still a place-holder. Ah well, that's done now, and you can access it here.

So, this is a very simple app. It does one thing, and one thing well (I hope).

A buddy of mine had introduced me to the infamous Youtube Lightning Bolt Ogre Battle video. For a few weeks, whenever we were in a silly mood, we'd mime casting lightning bolts at each other, doing our own sound effects. Then, one Friday, we were doing it, and someone half-jokingly said "you should make an iPhone app out of that." We just looked at each other for a beat, then did some frantic web-searching. He did the art, and I did the coding, and a few days later iLightning was born!

Fooled By Randomness

Occasionally, friends or co-workers ask me to recommend investing books. I used to suggest a list of reading, but now I'm going to change this standard advice.

If you can only read one book about investing, read Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness. If you can read more than one book, read it first, anyway, to put the other stuff in context.

This book has much wider applications than finance. He makes convincing arguments about the limits of predictions that are based on (a narrow interpretation of) historical data.

For instance the common complaint: "this has never happened before! It's a rare event! We could not have foreseen it!" Well, history is full of things that had never happened before happening. So the lesson is that time-series can't really be used to predict the future. You somehow have to consider how well you would do across all possible futures. If there's a high variance, then maybe your success is not due to anything you actually did, but rather to random events.

He also makes a convincing case that many practitioners of risk-management are working on fundamentally wrong assumptions.

I see some of the same patterns in software engineering and management. If a project succeeds in spite of gross mis-management, its leaders are praised as visionaries and risk-takers. Never mind that if they tried the same process 10 times, they'd fail most of the time. If a more thoughtful group follows a (meta) process that would work most of the time, but fails in a particular instance (due to random events), then they're easy targets for finger-pointing. Why were they so conservative?

I.e. if someone's playing Russian roulette for no good reason (or worse, doesn't realize that they are), we rightly call them foolish. However, in practice, for more complicated scenarios, we typically reward success that is often the result of random factors, not the actions of the agents we praise.

Now, Taleb is fairly arrogant, and makes sweeping generalizations, at times. If you're an MBA, just put on your flame-retardant underwear -- there's useful information here.

My wife pointed out that some of his statements about medical research are plainly wrong. For instance, that statisticians don't work closely with doctors. This makes me wonder about his other generalizations. The way I read it, he's a ranter who has been surrounded by arrogant people who talk the talk, but understand little. He's a product of that environment.

Custom On-Demand Clothing

Can one do for clothing design and manufacturing what lulu.com has done for publishing?

How does Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) design and manufacture its clothing?

It looks like someone's tried to do this already, but the site doesn't seem fresh. What's the story?

Motivation: I've got a hoodie that is a bit more dressy, and less sporty than others. I have a drafty house and use it in winter. The monk-like cowl is part of the appeal. I'd like something similar that's more like a 3/4 length tunic, with a sash. Maybe a lighter one for indoor wear, and a heavier one for outdoor wear.

If I could design it, where could I manufacture it? How can I give my designer friends the ability to do low-volume production cost-effectively?

I've bought shirts from Threadless, and there are companies that do corporate-logo stuff, but I'm talking about being able to actually submit designs for stuff other than tees and shirts. What software and interchange formats do people use for this?

If this is silly, it would be useful to understand why.

Painter: Ilya Repin

A friend just introduced me to the turn-of-the (last) century Ukrainian painter Ilya Repin. His realistic works are incredibly lit and detailed. I love this stuff.

Comparing period costumes to even extremely carefully designed fantasy costumes (for instance, in the Lord of the Rings movies) just shows the amazing detail and crazy variety of real costumes. Even the simplest cloak or tunic in these paintings looks much better than the clothing in a typical computer game. Lush.

Check out the Gallery on Wikipedia's bio page.

Some of my favourites:

Orson Scott Card and Morality

This is old news, but I just read John Kessel's essay, Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality.

It's a thoughtful and thorough criticism of the Sci-Fi novels Ender's Game, and Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card. It also touches on issues of victimization that seem to explain the novels' appeal to adolescents.

Kessel writes:

       Card has spoken in interviews about his tropism for the story of the person who sacrifices himself for the community.  This is the story, he tells us, that he has been drawn to tell again and again.  For example, in justification of the scenes of violence in his fiction, Card told Publisher’s Weekly in 1990 that, “In every single case, cruelty was a voluntary sacrifice. The person being subjected to the torture was suffering for the sake of the community.  I find this statement astonishingly revealing.  By “The person being subjected to the torture,” Card is not referring here to Stilson, Bonzo, or the buggers, who may well be sacrificed, but whose sacrifices are certainly not “voluntary.”  Their deaths are not the voluntary sacrifices that draw Card’s concern. No, in these situations, according to Card the person being tortured is Ender, and even though he walks away from every battle, the sacrifice is his.  In every situation where Ender wields violence against someone, the focus of the narrative’s sympathy is always and invariably on Ender, not on the objects of Ender’s violence.  It is Ender who is offering up the voluntary sacrifice, and that sacrifice is the emotional price he must pay for physically destroying someone else. All the force of such passages is on the price paid by the destroyer, not on the price paid by the destroyed. “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” might well be the slogan of Ender’s Game.

       If, therefore, intention alone determines guilt or innocence, and the dead are dead because of misunderstanding or because they bring destruction on themselves, and the true sacrifice is the suffering of the killer rather than the killed—then Ender’s feeling of guilt is gratuitous. Yet despite the fact that he is fundamentally innocent, he takes “the sins of the world” onto his shoulders and bears the opprobrium that properly belongs to the people who made him into their instrument of genocide.  He is the murderer as scapegoat. The genocide as savior. Hitler as Christ the redeemer.

Though less scholarly, Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat, by Roger Williams, provides some interesting context.

Williams writes:

I tended (and still tend) to agree with this, but if the Hitler Hypothesis offends you I'm afraid I'm about to do her one better. You see, I'm not very convinced that Card even wrote the books.

On the phone and in his incoherent published reply, Card repeatedly shows ignorance of what he himself purportedly wrote. I simply cannot imagine how you could write such a stunningly well crafted piece of work (inasmuch as it is wildly popular and deeply affects people) without being aware of every fibre and splinter of its composition. About the third or fourth time I heard Card say something wasn't in his book that I knew was, I began to suspect that it was more of a committee effort.

Interesting stuff. Fascism and righteous revenge are as seductive as ever. Never mind the bodies, I meant well. Really, this hurts me more than it hurts you.

Programming Witticisms

You have to code for use before you can code for re-use.

Code reuse through incest: having to derive a new class to create a new style of button.

Office Smash

I took part in the Toronto Indie Game Jam again, this May, with some friends. We had 2.5 days to create a small game. We decided to use the Unity engine, and actually managed a fun demo, with breaks for Mother's Day, and prior obligations.

Office Smash is up on the TOJam site, here. You can play it from your browser, as long as you download the Unity plug-in (like Flash/Shockwave).

Here's a Youtube video:

Madrid

We spent a day in Madrid, before connecting to Asturias. Since we didn't have a place to stay, and since it was 36 degrees C, we decided to camp out on the city tour buses. Here are the pics.