Something Big is a Brewing

I think NC ALTA has really started a powerful ball rolling by creating a common focus on which a number of industries and research disciplines are beginning to converge. To demonstrate this let me list areas represented by the some of the people I encountered at the conference:

• Game engine developers
• Serious game developers
• Developers of virtual worlds including frameworks like Second Life or Croquet. This also includes the corporate facet aimed at facilitating remote work and collaboration via a virtualized workplace.
• Researchers dealing with immersive visualizations and virtual experiences. This includes some of the cool immersive environments hosted by RENCI.
• Second (or third?) generation of e-learning companies and their interest in assessment, monitoring, and integration into larger learning management systems.
• Educators interested in getting these technologies out in the schools and in the hands of students. As well as educators interested in seeing proper learning theory incorporated into program design.

Now imagine the intersection of all (or some) of these groups.

Parallel Tinkering and Research

I attended one birds-of-a-feather discussion that dealt with educational games and simulations in higher ed. I was surprised at the number of professors and students who have already begun building, deploying, and testing their educational games within their universities. Some folks met up after the round table and shared war stories, common hang-ups, and I think even identified some future collaborations. Exciting stuff!

One thing that came up a number of times during that session was the fact that we did have a number of independent development efforts going on. Essentially, each project required the development of a slew of management frameworks, authentication, integration with LMSs, middleware, etc. Everyone needed these same components and so everyone wrote their own.

Libby Evans of UNC and several others identified the need for some common, modular solutions to these problems. Establishing a framework of common solutions would allow researchers to focus on the interesting problems and it would encourage compatibility and collaboration. So it seems like a nice next step would be to look at the number of developed solutions and start distilling out some design patterns.

The Efficacy of Games in Education

Do games actually work in education? can they be used as a tool to teach or explore? I am particularly interested in this topic and have begun looking at this in terms of math games. Marrilea Mayo of the Kauffman Foundation was kind enough to share a tremendous amount of her own findings from reviewing the disparate literature.

Many of us have heard a number of positive anecdotal (or underpowered, small n) successes, positive pilots, but few full-blown psychometric studies on the efficacy of games in learning. In fact, I have not found any commercially available shrink-wrapped math games with associated efficacy studies. I have seen products claiming they are “scientifically-based”, because the product is designed around a number of accepted practices not that their actual efficacies were tested.

While I have personally been focused on the efficacy in K-12 and higher ed, there were also a number of discussions dealing with the same concepts in corporate space. How do we measure the success of our corporate training programs? ROI? So, it seems like efficacy and the ability to measure and monitor success is a common theme and something we need to start incorporating into our designs. Luckily, I think this is solvable once we begin embedding the means to track psychometrically-valid metrics.

So, I walked away from the ALT Summit pretty excited that we had begun a conversation that I think will develop into something revolutionary down the road. I encourage you to keep tuned in and check out NC ALTA.

In its prime Gentoo’s portage system was awesome: it picked up sprawling webs of dependencies and cleaned up after itself like a champ. And the packages were optimized for my hardware; I know I squeezed every last drop of compute power out of those machines. I experienced XEyes as it was meant to be run. Need to upgrade KDE? just emerge it and take a walk trip. Want to upgrade KDE and use your processor for something else? No problem, just configure distcc and distribute your build across your cluster. Ahh, those were the days.

Today when I use the portage system I am guaranteed to find packages that block my upgrade. Then I’m off to forums to find out what went wrong. Block. Block. Curse. Block. Now granted, I generally unmask many packages so I’ve strayed from the safe and stable path, but those are rarely the source of the blocks. I guess these days I just want to use my computer without having to tinker every step of the way.

Gentoo’s community is great. The forums are very helpful and the website is packed with tons of well-formatted, easy-to-follow HOWTOs and docs. I sometimes even refer to Gentoo’s HOWTOs when trying to get things to work in another distro. I have always walked away impressed by Gentoo’s ability to provide quality documentation, great consistency, and damn good branding.

Gentoo was the first distro I loved enough to buy supporting paraphernalia. One Gentoo t-shirt worn with geek pride to let the world know they had another choice. These days I do really enjoy Ubuntu. I may even love using it, but I don’t think I’m ready to wear an Ubuntu-emblazoned t-shirt yet.

So after much backing up, at 1:27am EST I pulled the plug on my last Gentoo box. So long Gentoo…

-Kurt

The Digital Game Expo (DGXPO) is a local game development conference hosted by Wake Tech. This is not a massive industry conference with a convention center filled with vendors and game dev shops passing out tsatskes. One of DGXPO’s goals is to give aspiring developers and developers from other industries a peek into the game industry.

Registration for the expo just opened this week over at http://www.dgxpo.com . It doesn’t look like the sessions are posted yet, but there is a list of speakers.

Student Work

The conference is hosted by Wake Tech and their game development and simulation program. This gives Wake Tech’s students a chance to show off their handiwork. Last year, students from Wake Tech (and I believe a couple other schools) had a room setup with playable demos of games they had worked on for a variety of platforms. Of course right next to all their class projects, the local Virtual Heroes had a popular demo of America’s Army running complete with realistic training rifle.

Industry

Last year I briefly spoke with Robert Rice from Neogence Studios about his new MMO Immortal Destiny. He couldn’t go into too much detail at that time, but his take on the role of social dynamics and AI sounded like it will be a refreshing twist on the state of MMOs. This year he is going to be a speaker at the Expo. I’m looking forward to his session and any sneak peeks we might get.

I intend to register again this year and see what others in the area are up to.

the class

One big take away for me was that clutter and the sense of being overwhelmed by data is not an attribute of too much information, but rather a consequence of poor design. How many times have you looked at an information dashboard or a chart in a meeting only to get a headache from trying to grasp what was trying to be communicated? But yet we are capable of navigating and internalizing large amount of information if it is properly displayed and explained; those are the truly elegant presentational designs.

The class covers the basic principles you would want to follow to present your data in such a way to tell a story — a persuasive one. Things like how we can layout and present data to facilitate the basic intellectual process that one goes through when considering and weighing a proposal or story. I went into the class thinking I would learn some better ways to visualize and display complex datasets. I think I have some better ideas in this area, but only as a result of the bigger insight I walked away with on how to make a better presentation.

The other majorly cool bonus was being less than a foot away from a 1st edition Galileo printing. This along with an early printing of Euclid’s helped demonstrate the power of “breaking out of flatspace” by bringing something physical into a meeting.

bringing it home

So after all this excitement I went home and tried to look for ways to integrate Tufte’s design principles into my own presentations and reports. Edward Tufte’s website has a rich forum called Ask E.T., which contains information about presentation in a number of areas including project management. One Ask E.T. thread lead me to a project on Google Code that contains a Tufte-inspired LaTeX layout.

I expect to play around with some of these designs and see how I might better polish my own reports.

On-Demand Beowulf

I had heard some chatter about Peter Skomoroch’s ElasticWulf and found myself walking through his series on creating an on-demand beowulf cluster using Amazon’s EC2. You can find his very helpful posts here and here (with another on the way). ElasticWulf is a package of Python tools and machine images that allow you to create and manage a beowulf cluster on Amazon’s EC2 service. Peter has done the heavy lifting for you: the machine images come loaded with your essential computational Python packages like SciPy as well as cluster middleware so you can get up and running with minor configuration.

The Results

After running through Amazon’s EC2 Getting Started Guide, and Peter’s posts I was up and running with a new beowulf cluster in well under an hour. I pushed up and distributed some tests and it seems to work. Now, it’s not fast compared to even a low-end contemporary HPC, but it is cheap and able to scale up to 20 nodes with only a few simple calls. That’s nothing to sneeze at and I don’t have to convince the wife or the office to allocate more space to house 20 nodes.

I don’t currently have any hard numbers to back up my ephemeral cluster’s performance, but it is something I am curious about. How much can these virtualized Opteron 250s dish out? It looks like Peter’s third installment will address benchmarking performance, which is something that I will look forward to. In the meantime I might just push up High Performance Linpack (HPL) and see how it stacks up (in the abstract) against my existing clusters.

Now that I’m finally up and running a cluster on EC2, I plan on immersing myself in more data. It will also be a nice place to experiment with other cluster technologies I have been meaning to investigate like Hadoop; in fact there are already public Amazon Machine Images for Hadoop nodes.

Exciting stuff…

It was not until a couple of weeks ago that I actually set up a trial account. I signed up and began configuring FogBugz to manage a small project that would likely run its full course over three to four 2 week iterations. Let me start by saying that FogBugz has been a pleasure to work with.

Simple and Intuitive

The folks over at Fog Creek have done a good job minimizing the amount of clicks required to accomplish some basic tasks like creating new cases/features/bugs. Lists of bugs and features can be viewed by various characteristics through filters or by easily accessible reports. It might seem like these features would be difficult to get excited about in a world filled with things like Django and Rails, but FogBugz managed to get its factors right making the process “flow” really well.

Oh, The Integration

Wiki, bug tracker, project management/prioritization view, customer email (support), and source control all talking to one another… Again, while other applications might offer these same tools and integrate some subset of them, FogBugz goes a step further. The integration is tight and using these utilities feels like you are just dealing with another dimension of the same data as opposed to using two independent applications that are similarly branded and share some ability to markup references.

That being said, I still have not yet figured out how to integrate source control. You can download a plugin for Visual Studio if that’s your tool of choice, but my experiments have been taking place in a Linux environment. There are a pair of shell scripts available for download that should solve my problem, but it was not immediately clear to me how to use them. That’s my next mission.

Evidence-based Planning

I am a huge proponent of evidence-based planning and it looks like they’ve done a good job bringing this capability to those who might not be familiar with the process. The gist of it is that by capturing both project estimates (at the feature level) and actual time taken you can build a model of your estimate accuracy, development velocity and then in turn generate release forecasts based on historical data. So with a click of a button (and disciplined engineers who enter their estimates and elapsed times) you can have nice reports and charts showing when you are most likely to deliver your releases and with what features — all based on historical data. It is a powerful concept and well executed here.

FogBugz goes as far as to model the estimation error of individual developers. This sounds great and is a good story, but I wonder how useful this actually is in reality where developers learn from past experiences and self-correct; without some Bayesian filtering I could see these values become noninformative fairly quickly.

I am also still playing around with the best way of capturing my existing process where we use team-based story point estimation. It seems like it will be straightforward, but I am waiting for a few gotchyas lurking in the darkness.

Things That Make Me Go “Hmmm”

I have struggled a bit to fit my Scrum-based backlog management mindset into FogBugz. The bugtracker allows features and bugs to be prioritized. Those priority levels are totally configurable and could be defined for whatever level of detail you need. One thing I am missing is the ability to deal with micro sprint-level priorities (i.e. what order should this set of features be implemented in to minimize overall project risk?). I realize I could define as many priority levels as I need, but it would start getting a bit tedious defining that many sublevels. Fortunately, the project I am currently using FogBugz for is small enough that I can manage without that functionality. It does however become important when you start increasing the team size and dealing with projects where you really do have a rank ordering of feature priorities. It could be that ScrumWorks by Danube Technologies has just spoiled me with their Scrum-based backlog system.

Another thing that has detracted from my experience is its response latency, but let me say that it is not bad. I think it might be the case that the application’s simplicity and overall experience allows me to forget that it is a remotely hosted application. I wonder how responsive the server license version is, where you host the code and the server is just working with your projects and perhaps on-site. Maybe I will find out one day.

Conclusion

My preliminary run through FogBugz has been overwhelmingly positive. It is a powerfully usable application that offers tight integration amongst core tools used in not only the development, but also the support of software applications. Check out the official highlighted feature list.
If you are looking around for some project management software then definitely check FogBugz out and see how it fits with your current process. I am still waiting to see how FogBugz will fit into our overall process once it has had a chance to run the full cycle — so far, it is looking good.

I love my craft, from mucking around with new languages and APIs to exploring the processes and practices we use to build and deliver products. The entire nature of software engineering and how we define our professionalism are of interest to me, which I hope we can discuss.

The other major focus of this blog is entrepreneurship and its intersection with technology. I happen to live (and work) in North Carolina near Research Triangle Park (RTP). It’s no Silicon Valley, but it is a burgeoning technology center with a number of existing players. The area is filled to the brim with entrepreneurial spirit — something I have found quite exciting. I intend to discuss some of the goings-on and available resources in the RTP area.

So, that is the range of topics you might expect to see here with assorted geekery thrown in for good measure. Feedback and comments are always welcome and even requested.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you enjoy,

Kurt