Sportswriter Lee Jenkins writes in Friday's Times:

How the A’s keep shedding million-dollar salaries and collecting division titles remains baseball’s ultimate mystery. —New York Times

Well, I guess that if you never read Moneyball, the detailed account by Michael Lewis of how the A's, under general manager Billy Beane and his protégés, have sought undervalued talent by using statistics and critical thinking to measure players more accurately than traditional baseball techniques, which rely on appearances, rules of thumb, and "the way it's always been done", then yes, that would remain an ultimate mystery.

Moneyball was published in 2003, and both it and the backlash against it has been one of, probably, the top five stories in baseball since then. The biggest baseball story since 2003 was the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2004 (for the first time in 86 years), and their general manager was Theo Epstein, who worked for Beane in Oakland, was the source of some of Beane's unconventional strategies, and was mentioned repeatedly in the book.

So it's unlikely Jenkins has never heard of Moneyball, sabermetrics, on-base-percentage, or other new-fangled notions. The obvious conclusion is that he read Moneyball (or a summary of it), rejected its contents out of hand, and will remain mystified until the end of his days. Very sad, but deliberate, willful ignorance does seem to be a prerequisite for sportswriters.

New York Times columnist John Tierney (center-right, pro-Establishment) is usually somewhere between pointless and wrong, but he had a very nice uptick recently. Excerts from two recent columns:

"We're on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront," Bush said last week, "and we'll accept nothing less than complete victory."

When you define victory that way, when you treat one attack from a disorganized band of fanatics as a menace to civilization, you've doomed yourself to defeat and caused more damage than they could. You can't completely stop terrorism, but you can scare people into giving up liberties, wasting huge sums of money and sacrificing more lives than would be lost in a terrorist attack.

Take it from bin Laden, who bragged in 2004 that it was "easy to provoke and bait this administration."

"All that we have to do," he said, "is to send two mujahedeen to the farthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written Al Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses." And then Al Qaeda, no matter what losses it has suffered, will come off once again looking like the strong horse.

(12 Sep 2006)

and

Compared with past threats -- like Communist sociopaths with nuclear arsenals -- Al Qaeda's terrorists are a minor problem. They certainly don't justify the hyperbolic warnings that America's ''existence'' or ''way of life'' is in jeopardy, or that America must transform the Middle East in order to survive.

There undoubtedly will be more terrorist attacks, either from Al Qaeda or others, just as there were before 2001. Terrorists might strike Monday. There will always be homicidal zealots like Mohamed Atta or Timothy McVeigh, and some of them will succeed, terribly. But this is not a new era. The terrorist threat is still small. It's the terrorism industry that got big.

(9 Sep 2006)

Unfortunately he seemed to run out of ideas after that burst, and so followed up with "ripped-from-the-headlines" (or, more likely, "based-on-a-press-release") columns about for-profit philanthropy and a mathematical equation to predict how long celebrity couples will stay married. Here's my advice: just keep writing more columns spelling out, in your somber but serviceable prose, with a bit of detail and a few quotes per column, that the emperor has no clothes. You won't run out of material for years.

Here are a few facts that don't seem to be well-publicized on the internet. Had I known these facts three days ago, before I started trying to upgrade someone's Macintosh, I would have saved myself a number of hours.

First: If you see in the documentation for OS X Tiger (that's Mactinosh operating system number 10.4) that there is a disc that comes with Tiger that includes the old System 9, you are being lied to. Such a disc may well have come with Leopard and Panther (10.3 and 10.2), but I can attest that there is no such disk in the Tiger DVD retail box. You will need your old System 9 cds if you plan to use any System 9 programs.

Second: if you install System 9.1 within Tiger as instructed, and try to start Classic mode, it will hang forever (tested for values of forever <= 1 hr) at the part where it says "Welcome to Mac OS". What you need to do is upgrade it to System 9.2.1 or 9.2.2 and you can download the upgrade files from Apple (if you want 9.2.2, you must first upgrade to 9.2.1, then upgrade again to 9.2.2). However, the upgrade files are themselves System 9 programs, which of course you can't run if you have a DOA (dead on arrival) System 9.1 inside of OS X. The solution is to set the whole thing up as dual boot, boot into 9, upgrade, then boot back into X. From that point, you can run some System 9 programs in OS X (but not Final Cut Pro).

Third: if you partition a drive using the OS X tools, you must use the "IncludeOS9Drivers" option or else the entire hard drive will be invisible to any System 9 tools (like the install CD), even though OS X tools will see it fine. This item actually is documented in the fine print, and I saw it, but forgot to do it the first time.

So, if you have a Mac that didn't come with OS X, and you want to put OS X on it, here is one method that works:

• Buy an external hard drive. Firewire is good.
• Copy everything to that hard drive
• Reboot with the OS X DVD in the drive (hold down C during boot to force it to boot from the disc)
• Start Terminal from the boot disc, and use this command line to repartition the hard drive:

  disktool partitionDisk disc0 2 OS9Drivers HFS+ "System 9 Partition" 5G "Journaled HFS+" "OS X Partition" 20G

  This will give you a 5G System 9 partition and an OS X partition that will take up the rest of the hard drive. It will wipe everything on the disk.
• Proceed to install OS X in its designated partition.
• When complete (including reboots, etc), put in the System 9 disk and reboot to that (with the "C" trick)
• Install System 9 in its partition.
• Take out the disc and reboot back to System 9. To do that, hold down "D" immediately after the startup sound. This will make it boot to the first partition, which is the System 9 partition.
• Upgrade System 9 to 9.2.2
• Boot back into OS X (every time you boot, it will automatically go to X unless you hold down "D" for System 9 or "C" for the disc).
• Classic will now work normally.

(David Pogue's "Mac OS X Tiger Missing Manual" was very helpful for the rebooting part above, and seems generally to offer a "good pages of useful info"/dollar paid ratio.)

After the years I put in as Release Manager for OpenACS, a predominantly volunteer effort, I experience no small amount of schadenfreude to see such a fancy, polished Design Legend as Apple make such rudimentary mistakes as updating the 10.3 documentation to 10.4 by changing the numbers without re-checking the content, and producing upgrades that must be run one at a time, in sequence.

The tagline of PMI's magazine, PM Network, is "Making project management indispensible for business results.®". Let's leave off the meaningless "business results" verbiage and focus on the really egregious part of this: "making project management indispensible."

My objection isn't the indispensible part. I wholly believe that management, like politics, is a basic element of all human endeavors. And in fact, management is even more pervasive than politics: you can escape politics if you are a team of one, but you'll still have management needs. It's true that many projects don't have project managers, and still succeed, but that doesn't mean they didn't have management. If you are going to get groceries, you will (in America) go to your car, drive to the store, collect groceries, pay for the groceries, come home, and put the groceries away. If you do those tasks out of order, you will have problems. Even in the routine task of getting groceries, de facto project management is occurring.

My point is that project management already is indispensible. A tagline of "pointing out that project management is indispensible and that employing a qualified project manager is, in many circumstances, going to help you out a lot" would be (if only it fit on the maganize) a great tagline. But to state that we have to make our skills indispensible is awful for two reasons:

First, it suggests that project management is not already indispensible.

Second, and far worse, it says that Project Managers are people who, even though you don't need them right now, are damned well going to make you need them whether you like it or not. It's a marketing tagline in the worst way - it's about creating demand for our services, regardless of whether that demand is genuine or not. Yuck and double-yuck.

To the Editor:

"At 2-Year Colleges, Students Eager but Unprepared" (front page, Sept. 2) could have been written about me. I hope that those struggling students take some heart from my experience.

I graduated from high school with a combined verbal and math SAT score of less than 800. Enrolling in junior college, I had to enroll in arithmetic and to relearn addition, subtraction and fractions. Although I took college-level English courses, I still had to go to the study skills center to keep up with the class.

Ultimately, I got through calculus with a grade of B and a tutor. I went on to complete two master’s degrees, and have held a well-paying job with the Florida Legislature for the last 20 years.

My advice to those students is to take heart and keep trying. Junior colleges work!

Linda Vaughn

Tallahassee, Fla., Sept. 6, 2006

—New York Times Letters to the Editor

Here is a short list of computer programs that think they are operating systems, but would better serve all concerned if they knocked it off:

• Oracle
• Java
• emacs

... the bottom line is that there are three and a half platforms (C#, Java, PHP, and a half Python) that are all equally likely to make you successful, an infinity of platforms where you're pretty much guaranteed to fail spectacularly when it's too late to change anything (Lisp, ISAPI DLLs written in C, Perl), and a handful of platforms where The Jury Is Not In, So Why Take The Risk When Your Job Is On The Line? (Ruby on Rails). —Joel Spolsky

Spolsky's advice exactly matches my experience. The platform I've spent the most time in over the last five years, OpenACS, falls somewhere between "guaranteed to fail spectacularly when it's too late to change anything" and also-ran. I tried Ruby on Rails, and my personal jury is in: it's an arrogant language by arrogant people: the opening music for the Ruby on Rails podcast is Building a Religion; David Heinemeier Hannson's response to Spolsky's post is a defensive broadside rather than a serious reply. Spolsky writes with a forcefulness that can come off as arrogance, but I don't think it actually is. Consider this piece on marketing:

We have lots of FogBugz customers who have high-priced Remedy, Rational, or Mercury products sitting on the shelves after investments of well over $100,000, because that software isn't good enough to actually use. Then they buy a couple of thousand dollars worth of FogBugz and that's the product they really use. The Rational salesperson is laughing at me, because I have $2000 in the bank and he has $100,000. But I have far more customers than he does, and they're all using my product, and evangelizing it, and spreading it, while Rational customers either (a) don't use it or (b) use it and can't stand it. But he's still laughing at me from his 40 foot yacht while I play with rubber duckies in the bathtub.

...

The more you learn about pricing, the less you seem to know.

I've been nattering on about this topic for well over 5000 words and I don't really feel like we're getting anywhere, you and I.

Some days it seems like it would be easier to be a taxi driver, with prices set by law. Or to be selling sugar. Plain ol' sugar. Yep. That would be sweet.

Take my advice, offered about 20 pages back: charge $0.05 for your software. Unless it does bug tracking, in which case the correct price is $30,000,000. Thank you for your time, and I apologize for leaving you even less able to price software than you were when you started reading this.

Many programmers exhibit tribalism: they identify with the specific technologies that they use, and criticism of the technology becomes a personal attack, which is therefore Manichaean, and therefore completely wrong, and therefore deserving of retaliation in kind. These instincts are seductively comfortable, but they do the industry a disservice. Spolsky puts his arguments forward strongly, but he doesn't seem to wear Manichaean blinders. DHH, and Ruby on Rails and its followers, do seem more partisan and more close-minded.

"I'm really excited about Dungeon Siege, the Uwe Boll movie you're in."