Code. Money. Literature.

Recovering slowly, I’m still in first place, only down 4.52% on the year. The current status:

Berkshire Hatha Class B Ord Shs	-9.82%
Mindray Medical International Ltd	-18.97%
PowerShares Water Resource Portfolio	-2.29%
Buffalo Wild Wings Inc	12.19%
Mueller Water Products Series A Ord Shs	-15.13%
Central European Distribution Corp	6.06%
Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp	-8.10%
Grant Prideco Inc	3.39%

Overall, the combined portfolio is still down 10.87% on the year. For most of the first three months of the year, only a couple of stocks in the 39 combined family picks were up; today six are. The three above, plus RIMM, CVS Caremark and Costco Wholesale.

These two links have no correlation other than I found them both today, and found them worth noting.

The Inspirational

First, the inspirational: Roger Ehrenberg on future generations looking back on this time as the halcyon days of entrepreneurship. Combined with the non-stop morphine drip of posts on 37signals' Signal vs. Noise blog, and it starts to seem as though someone has called together a massive, decentralized, grassroots flash mob recruiting campaign for the entrepreneurial life.

The Hilarious

Next up, the hilarious: via crummy.com, a link to literal translations of Atari 2600 game cover art. Brilliant. My personal favorite would have to be “Backgammon for Friendless People”, or perhaps “Obligatory Educational ‘Game’”.

Lately, coinciding with my own nostalgic forays into the history of personal computing, there seems to be a renewed interest in old-timey computing kitsch, perhaps best exemplified by Jeff Atwood’s graphic description of the horror of programming in Basic on the Atari 2600.

Even the meager search engine traffic I manage confirms this trend—most of my traffic this month has come from people either looking for Tuesday Night Football (circa 1980), or for people looking for Mattel’s Talking Football (circa 1972).

I’ve had an uptick in people looking for more information on the classic Apple II game Tuesday Night Football based on search hits for my original post. Today, I spent a bit more time trying to get a running version of it going…no luck on that front, but I did come across the source code, which was my main goal from the start.

Stay tuned…I’m on the trail and will document everything fully as soon as I have something interesting to discuss.

For what it’s worth: TNF was written in 1980, and consists of 834 lines of Applesoft Basic. I’m considering doing a Ruby port (for my own edification) since I seem to be having no luck getting the original program to run in one of the many OS X emulators. I’m thinking that a literal port of it will be much fewer than 834 lines (although the Basic source contains many compound lines), but that the size could be greatly reduced after refactoring.

This week, while reading Karsten Wagner’s latest piece on psychology as it relates to preferences between static vs dynamic typing, a curious question nagged me: which side of the debate would a great mind of the past have supported?

Ralph Waldo Emerson immediately came to mind. The 19th-century essayist/philosopher and Transcendentalist wrote often about the intellectual life of the individual, and of the virtues of independent thought and Self-Reliance over the weakness of rote conformity in thought and action.

While he preached self-reliance and ideas originating from within, Emerson remained a man of the world, not drawing inward like his tenant Henry David Thoreau, whom he thought a misanthrope. Emerson writes, “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Retain your ideals in the world, but let the the neck-beard-wearing idealists be the ones to go into seclusion in their shacks.

The Case Against Emerson Liking Java

“Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.” —Self-Relianace

Reading Emerson, it’s hard to see him embracing the constraints of Java at its most enterprisey. He wouldn’t survive in the typical corporate development shop, where compliance with the standards necessary to steer such a massive ship would produce deep dissatisfaction. But this is just rejection by association; while we can safely say Emerson wouldn’t last at a company such as SAP, where a single four-year project has 2500 developers coding away, this only indirectly condemns him to distrust of strong typing. Conventional wisdom holds that shops running four-year projects involving 2500 coders by necessity must embrace not only more rigid statically typed languages, but a byzantine set of internal standards and expectations of conformity as well. SAP’s future relies not on the will of any individual, but of the collective of 2500 wills to produce great work that conforms. The success comes down to the individual(s) who set the expectations for conformance; if they falter (by, say, following the convention wisdom Emerson distrusts) or fail to subjugate enough of the individuals into alignment, the iceberg-like mass of 10,000 developer-years will not save them from the upstart innovation arising from collections of individual intellects working in harmony.

The Case Against Emerson Digging Design Patterns

Emerson looks not to the past for guidance, but within, and it is hard to imagine him looking at the Gang of Four’s Design Patterns book with anything other than scorn. Emerson would develop his own patterns, no doubt, and his own style, but would routinely reject the old way for the better way. In fact, much of his writing is calling for the rejection of patterns by shredding the patterns of the past with layers of anti-patterns. The only pattern he aspires to is the rejection of received patterns. (Or as the Boomtown Rats put similar words in the mouth of God: “I’ll let you in on my big secret Ray/The final truth is there is no truth.”)

The Case for Emerson Being Refactoring Junky

“Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” —Self-Reliance

Emerson valued a very rational, fresh look at problems. He wouldn’t grow attached to a particular design, fall in love and fight against changing it. The code and facts would speak and he would adjust as necessary. Junky might be too strong of a word; his refactoring wouldn’t be endless for the sake of ever-increasing clarity, but would be pragmatic, for the sake of solving the problem as better understood today.

The Case for Emerson Being into Functional Programming

“Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you.” —Compensation

What Language Would Emerson Use?

Before reading Self-Reliance and Compensation again, I pegged Emerson as a Ruby guy. He’s too idealistic to go with PHP; too unconventional to go with Java or C#. Despite the functional quote, I don’t see him going down that route. In reading his essays again, I came away with the distinct sense that Emerson’s sweet spot would be something pragmatic, yet baroque in an unconventional way, and not lending itself to patterns other than those that come from the programmer himself. It would have to be a language that let him live in the world, and reflect the sense of an entrepreneurial landlord rather than the idealistic tenant.

In short, Emerson would have hacked Perl.

The brutal first quarter, worst in the stock market in five years, comes to a close and I retain my lead in the family stock picking contest, only down 10.38%. The combined portfolio of all participants is now down 15.8% for the year. The only saving grace is that I’m beating the NASDAQ as well as all the European and Asian indices.

Berkshire Hatha Class B Ord Shs	-5.56%
Mindray Medical International Ltd	-32.65%
PowerShares Water Resource Portfolio	-10.09%
Buffalo Wild Wings Inc	5.51%
Mueller Water Products Series A Ord Shs	-14.08%
Central European Distribution Corp	0.19%
Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp	-15.06%
Grant Prideco Inc	-11.33%

Interestingly, one of the most popular searches leading to my site is people searching for info on Berkshire Hathaway. My contention has always been that historically, BRK.B trails in a bull market and does better than the averages in a bear market, and therefore is a relatively safe place in stormy weather; BRK.B is essentially an index fund with no recurring expense fees chipping away at the return.

Best stocks in the cumulative family picks: Buffalo Wild Wings (BWLD), up 5.51%, CVS Caremark (CVS), up 1.91% and Intuitive Surgical, Inc, () up 0.42%.

Worst pick YTD? Suntech Power Holdings ADR, off 50.73%.

Saw the movie 21 this weekend. The movie is loosely based on Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, a great book that no fewer than 6 people ranging from friends to relatives to two separate people working the counter at a bookstore (I bought the book as a gift after reading it) either heartily recommended or thoroughly enjoyed.

On the scale of a movie adaptation’s quality relative to the source material, the book clearly wins out in this case. Mezrich’s book has an immediacy and reality that screenwriters Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb failed to capture. Steinfeld and Loeb didn’t have an easy task—blackjack doesn’t possess the same dramatic possibilities of poker. The uncertainty of Mezrich’s ending didn’t dissatisfy; non-fiction is like that, and not everything is wrapped up cleanly in real life. Geeks and geek culture are hard to capture without falling into stereotype (even harder on screen than in print), and almost nothing on the screen gets it right (save the occasional show like Freaks and Geeks, a series which nailed it but sadly proved not to be a commercial hit.)

Knowing the basic outline of the real-life story, for me the arc of the screenplay plodded woodenly and inevitably, although had I known nothing about the book, the shallowness of the development still would have left me even hungry for something more. Within the framework the actors are given to work, they perform well—the movie’s problems begin and end with the screenplay.

The movie trudges along methodically, the highs not particularly high, the lows not overwhelmingly low, until it starts a dive around three-quarters of the way through the movie, a dive that bottoms out with a jarring thud when a down-and-out Ben Campbell (played by Jim Sturgess) shows up on Jill’s (Kate Bosworth) doorstep in a scene that could only be called emotionally hollow and cringe-worthy.

Hollowness, in fact, captures the tone of whole movie. After clipping the treetops with this nearly fatal plummet, Steinfeld and Loeb resort to a tacked-on set piece of Hollywood twists in an attempt to salvage the screenplay, but these don’t quite sit right either. Throughout the movie we never feel anything really is at stake. There’s almost no inner emotional life to these characters and what motivations that are presented are thinly developed. Ben Campbell, genius in the counting of cards and the creative use of strippers as vehicles for money laundering, is implausibly dumb when it comes to securing his own winnings. When he tilts, there’s no logical explanation established nor retroactively given. Even Fisher’s flame-out is explained after the fact as jealousy but we are given no set-up for this. All the characterizations are notable only in how incredibly flat they are.

In the end, the movie serves as a passable adaptation, if only to get people to read the book, yet the troublesome screenplay has the feel of mercenary work outsourced to the lowest bidder. As gambling movies go, it’s no Rounders; Damon’s voice overs gave Rounders a depth and closeness that 21 lacks. As capers go, it’s no House of Games (and Spacey, in this role, is no Joe Mantegna). As Vegas flicks go, this is no Casino; we get the Hard Rock and Planet Hollywood, and maybe this is unfair as the Vegas of Casino was of a grittier time than the antiseptic sheen of Vegas today. As adaptations go, it’s no Searching for Bobby Fischer, a movie that amplified and completely captured the spirit of Fred Waitzkin’s book. Look at Laurence Fishburne’s performance and character in Fischer compared to his role in 21, and you have a hint of the opportunities missed here.

Read the book first; wait for the rental.

One of the greatest data resources I’ve come across in a long time is Sean Forman’s Baseball-DataBank.org. On his site he makes available a mySQL database dump of comprehensive Major League Baseball statistics from 1871 through the 2007 season. (Another source, perhaps the primary one, is Sean Lahman’s Baseball Archive.)

Playing around with a slightly older version of the database containing data through the 2005 season, I’ve come up with The 2005 Edition of Firebones All-Time Leet Hall of Fame. To qualify, a player must have one major statistical category that meets the definition of leet; namely, a statistical category for which their career total is 1337.

The Starting Lineup

Roberto Kelly (CF) (1337 Games Played)
Ivan DeJesus (SS) (1337 Games in the field)
Dave Magadan (3B) (1337 Games in the field)
Johnny Mize (1B) (1337 RBI)
Ed Coleman (RF) (1337 AB)
Fred Manrique (2B) (1337 AB)
Domingo Cedeno (LF) (1337 PA)
Mario Mendoza (C) (1337 AB)
Bobo Newsom (P) (1337 AB)

Bullpen and the Rest of the Rotation

Hank Gastright (R) (1337 Hits Allowed—in the freakin 19th century!)
Dave Mlicki (R) (1337 Hits Allowed)

Discussion of the Leet Lineup

Okay, I had to fudge a little. Dave Magadan only appears due to a glitch in the fielding data collected over the years from different sources. When this error was reconciled in later releases of the database, Magadan no longer has 1337 fielding games. But I needed a 3B, and the premise is stats through 2005, so cut me some slack.

Most of these guys turn out to be banjo-hitting middle infielders, so I have to take some liberties and press the ever-flexible Mario Mendoza (of Mendoza Line fame) into service as a catcher. No slackers need apply; Mendoza must justify his place in this august group. Mendoza also serves as our closer—he once finished a game in 1977 pitching 2 innings and ending his career with a 13.50 ERA, which is as close to a leet ERA as you can get if you have exactly 2.0 innings pitched. And because we are obligated to do all we can to stem global warming by increasing the ever-dwindling number of Pirates.

Ivan DeJesus wins the SS position because I watched too much WGN on basic cable and Harry Caray made me. If worst comes to worst, we can trade him to the Phillies again for Larry Bowa and Ryne Sandberg.

I moved Domingo Cedeno to LF based on his single game and lone putout in that position in 1994.

Johnny Mize gets first base because, well, he’s Hall of Famer Johny Mize.

For pitching: we have to go with the three-man rotation for now with our ace, Bobo Newsom (most similar player statistically: Charlie Hough) eating innings for us. I mean, the dude played 20 seasons over 24 years, lost 20 games three times, played during WWII AND the Great Depression, won 20 games three times, completed more games (246) than Mendoza’s OBP (.245), was a four-time All Star, and as a pitcher still had one more career RBI than Mario Mendoza.

A couple of active players just missed the cut by unfortunately extending their careers beyond the realm of their leet counterparts. Rondell White had 1337 games batting at the end of 2005; Tom Glavine had walked 1337 batters at the end of 2005. Sadly, by refusing to promptly end their careers with leet membership securely in hand, they forgo membership.

There are no managers meeting leet status; the best we can do is former Yankee skipper Joe McCarthy, whose 1333 losses comes the closest to the magic 1337. (And 7 World Series titles and 9 pennants aren’t too bad either.)

After yet another wild week, I’m pulling ahead in the family stock contest. Translation: I suck less than my family members.

Me	$87,694.07	-12.31%
Niece-in-law-to-be	$85,331.46	-14.67%
Little Firebones	$84,163.55	-15.84%
Mrs Firebones	$82,892.81	-17.11%
Nephew	$70,340.52	-29.66%

Of the stocks selected, the only winners are my pick of Buffalo Wild Wings (BWLD: up 5.6%) and my wife’s pick of CVS Caremark (CVS: up 0.25%).

In terms of indices, I’m beating the following indices:

• NASDAQ Composite
• NASDAQ 100 Stock
• Russell 2000
• CAC 40 (France)
• DAX (XETRA) (Germany)
• Nikkei 225 (Japan)
• ASX All Ordinaries (Australia)
• Korea Composite

The “wisdom of the crowd” theory is not holding up well; the combined portfolio is down 17.92%, which ends up being closest in YTD performance to the NASDAQ 100 Stock index (which is down 17.71% YTD).