Lincoln’s War

FDR, long praised as the man with the right courage, strength or whatever, to right the ailing ship of capitalism in the 1930s, of course did not nothing of the kind. Austrian economists have always known this was a great lie. Now, it looks like the rest of the economic world is catching on, even if they don’t attribute prior research.

A co-worker showed me this quote by Joseph Story:

Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them.

Now, more than ever, we can see the banishment of the wise and the destruction of wisdom. How much longer can it last?

I’ve been delaying this for far too long. I’ve re-opened all the pages of notes on Lincoln’s War. The previous, Python based effort was a good project. This time, I’m going to try Ruby (without Rails) as my too. I’m exited to see how using RSpec and RCov work for a non-Rails project.

I also believe that by writing this down I’m placing pressure on myself to keep going during the moments I want to give up.

For those of you who like you elves to be multi-classed and your coins to weight 1oz each, you probably are already playing Chris Gonnerman’s homage to Tom Moldvay and the “red box” D&D game, the Basic Fantasy RPG.

My friend Pete wanted to generate lots of “Morgan Ironwolf” PCs for this game. I went to work and a few days later I have created the Basic Fantasy RPG Character Generator!

Chet Hendrickson also said:

Ron sums up the situation very accurately. Let me add a little
background. The XP C3 project was the fourth attempt to replace the
legacy payroll system. At least two prior projects were defeated by
political/nontechnical forces.

A project to implement a package solution had been previously killed
by a manager who had been involved in the creation of the legacy
system. Among other things, he had imposed the requirement that the
package be adapted to only accept unit-record input and not allow any
direct input from the user interface.

This fellow rotated back to run payroll and subsequently helped
terminate C3. The Peoplesoft effort only began in earnest after his
retirement.

My understanding is that the Peoplesoft payroll effort will complete
its roll out to the salaried population this month. Or, approximately
seven years after the C3 team was poised to do so.

Critics use the “failure” of a Chrysler payroll software initiative “C3″ as evidence that eXtreme Programming is flawed and not of serious value. Was it really a failure? Ron Jeffries says:

From the beginning of the project to the end, the C3 project
delivered exactly what they said they could, iteration in and
iteration out. The code worked with higher accuracy than the
existing program and was deployed against one large target
population and one or two smaller ones.

At the time the project was terminated, the system was correctly
calculating the payroll for the next target population, and
performance was good enough but only barely. Things had certainly
taken longer than people wanted … but also exactly as long as the
team’s velocity and Release Plans predicted.

At the time of project termination, all of the projects original
sponsors had moved on. There was no one involved other than the
technical team, including the XP customer, who had been part of the
original thinking or sponsorship.

The termination of the project brought no approbation of any kind on
any member of either the technical side nor the business side of the
project. It was an economic decision made primarily because the
project had been internally funded, and IT was under pressure to
find “synergy savings”.

It is interesting to note that since then, DC has spent many
millions of dollars trying to adapt PeopleSoft payroll to do the
things that C3 already did.

So, was the project a success, or a failure? It is hard to say.
Certainly it didn’t last as long or deploy as widely as one would
have liked. On the other hand, it delivered working software on an
incredibly predictable basis. A business decision was made to
terminate it, for business reasons.

C3 showed, for those who care to pay attention, that the XP
practices can work, and produce highly reliable software on a very
predictable schedule. XP is not the only way to do that. It is,
however, the best way I have seen in nearly a half century of doing
software.

Reliable production of software that solves the problem it was intended for, within budget and under control of the customer - these elements are all elusive to even the best software development teams around the world. I would not call that a failure.

My current employer decided to “try” Agile development for all software groups. My group joined the company as part of a purchase in December 2006. My coworkers resist XP/Agile with a great deal of energy. In one assessment, the group bristled at identification as people who cannot improve measurably by any means, including adopting, at any scale, Agile methods.

There is a difference between adopting a way of doing things and merely following orders to go through the motions. It’s very close to malicious compliance. No one really wants to get better, just left alone so they can do “real” work.

A rough draft of the barbarian invasion scenario is now up. Obviously, both scenarios need playtesting.

Rather than use the standard Triplanetary planet positions, which are static, there are variants that allow for orbital motion. Of course, since each turn is a day in the standard rules, the movement is not drastic.

Rather that use the same orientation for the planets, I found a useful solar system mapping tool. Now, we can really see what the solar system will look like when the barbarians begin their coreward invasion!

New Hampshire is poised to reject a proposed national ID system. Not that our Dear Leaders will pay any attention to such arrogant display of free thinking.

It appears that the Free State movement had a hand in this:

The bill had several co-sponsors in both major parties; among them was Rep. Winters, himself a Free-Stater! New Hampshire’s bill appears to be the strongest among the states that have passed similar legislation. It flatly refuses Real-ID. No amount of Federal dollars will fix the problem. Moreover, New Hampshire will not comply with any national identification card, period.

Will we see Federal troops sent into New Hampshire to enforce Federal law?

I’ve completed a rough draft of the first of 2 scenarios I want to play on the MegaPlanetary map.