TV Spot Check

As of tonight, we’re pretty much done with the season premieres, so I thought that it would be a good time to do a spot check of how the shows are doing…

How I Met Your Mother:  The show’s settled in to its rhythm.  They seem to have abandoned the premise of a guy meeting his future wife for more of a typical “Friends” style show.  This could be the “new Raymond”.

The Class:  This show’s gotten better than its really poor start.  While disguised as a typical sitcom, its got a really twisted sense of humor.  If it finds its stride and fixes its flaws, this could become something really good.

Two and a Half Men:  This is the current “new Raymond”.  The show’s gotten a bit boring.  Like I said earlier, they need to spend more time with Rose and Jake.  Those parts continue to be hilarious.

Adventures of Old Christine:  So, this is what an Emmy awarded show looks like.  I have to admit its the best sitcom in the CBS Monday lineup.

CSI Miami:  We need more Emily Proctor!  She’s really come into her own in this show.

Heroes:  This show is supposed to be a hit.  So far, its a yawner to me.  I’m hoping it gets better.

Studio 60:  There’s been a lot of talk lateley about how this show’s not doing that well in the ratings.  On the other hand, this is easily the best written show on TV now.  Okay, its a little too “inside” right now.  Aaron Sorkin needs to recapture the West Wing magic.  At its height, West Wing was like a little weekly civics lesson on how government works.  Sorkin needs to do the same thing with Studio 60.  I hope he does; this is one of the few shows that I can watch over and over again.

Vanished:  This show’s been surprisingly entertaining.  Unfortunatley, its also not doing well in the ratings, and Fox is moving it to Friday nights.  That’s actually good news for me, since there’s less competition for my DVR’s Friday.

Help Me Help You:  A typical sitcom.  nothing good, nothing bad.  Some of the patients on the show are mildly interesting.

Boston Legal:  Another show that gives us more of what we got last year.  This year, they’re getting more self-referential and make periodic references to the show.  I’m still enjoying it:  William Shatner and James Spader remain terrific in this show.

NCIS:  Anither tried and true show, in its stride.  Predictable and still entertaining.

The Unit:  This show took over for the E-Ring last season, and quickly became the show that the E-Ring should have been.  The show continues to be high-testosterone; the best action show on the TV schedule.

Smith:  Gone, and not missed.

Law and Order CI:  Yet another show giving us what we expect.  So far, I don’t particularly like Julianne Nicholson as Logan’s new partner.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved her last season in Conviction.  But, here, she’s just taking up space.  This show’s all about the characters, and so far she isn’t one.  Also, I miss Jamey Sheridan.

Standoff:  This show’s turned out to be better than I expected.  I still don’t like the “relationship” subplot between the two leads; it distracts from the show.

Jericho:  This is supposed to be a “Lost” knockoff.  In my opinion, they do a better job than Lost does.  The show’s a bit of an anachronism since the end of the Cold War.  I’m waiting to see how they explain the nuclear attacks.  In the meantime, its a lot of soapy fun.

Criminal Minds:  This has to be the most violent show on TV.  I’m amazed to remember that the original Starsky and Hutch series was blasted for too much violence.  Compared to Criminal Minds, it was Sesame Street.  I love the psychological aspect of the show, but hate the violent undercurrent.  I wish they’d do something about that.  Because of that, it remains in danger of falling off my list.

CSI NY:  This one is less soapy than Miami, but definitely soapier than the original.  It’s a good hour of quality TV.

Bones:  They’re upping the relationship factor of the show, which is a big help.  It was pretty good last season, its getting better this season.

Justice:  Not a great show, but not as bad as its pilot (which was awful).  Fox hasn’t given up on it yet, so I’m not either.

Ugly Betty:  This show isn’t living up to its hype.  I’m hoping hard for an upturn.

Grey’s Anatomy:  This was the top show last week, and deserves it. I love this show!

Six Degrees:  Weird soap show.  Off my list.

Survivor:  The show’s gotten long in the tooth.  The race based tribes was actually interesting, but that’s over now and its just more of the same.  They need to bring back Rob and Amber

CSI:  I didn’t like the season starter.  They need to get back to what they do best: investigations.

Shark:  Not a bad court drama.  James Woods is delightfully cartoony.  They need to work on his relationship with his daughter though; it was better in the pilot than since.

My Name is Earl:  The best comedy on TV.  Hey, where’s the Emmy???

The Office:  Still an acquired taste.  Of course, I’ve acquired it.

‘Til Death:  Oh, I wish this show were better; Brad Garrett deserves better.

Happy Hour:  Another show I wish was better than it is.  It might be gone now.  That’s too bad, but expected.

Men in Trees:  Off the list.  Thank goodness.

Close to Home:  I hated that they killed off Annabeth’s husband.  There’s way too many single moms on TV as it is, and this was just mean.  Also the new DA, James Conlon, gets on my nerves.  They need to get back to what the show was about last season.

Numb3rs:  I like this show a lot, even though the premise is incredibly silly (math crime fighter, sheesh). But! Charlie and Amita need to kick it into gear.  It’s got to be the most frustating (and least entertaining) relationship on TV.

Desperate Housewives:  They’re going “back to basics”, and it shows.  This season’s already a marked improvement over last season.

Amazing Race:  Still the 2nd best reality show on TV (Project Runway’s the best, no matter what the Emmys say).

Simpsons, American Dad, Family Guy, War at Home:  The four dads.  Good home town comedy. I”m amazed that the Simpsons continue to please.

This just in:

30 Rock:  This show has its moments.  Alec Baldwin is a comedic genius (who knew?).  Tina Fey is a good writer, but she has to learn that her role here is as the “straight man”, and stay away from the jokes.

20 Good Years:  I’ve only watched 5 minutes of this show, and I already know that its a stinker. Please, please please go away.

Well, that’s what I’m watching.  So far, a better season start than in quite a while, but it could get better. Here’s hoping.

10/11/2006 9:01:54 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

How do you know you're "doing agile"?

Steve Yegge’s piece continues to bother me (see my previous post)…

I’ve been sorely tempted to write some long essay rebutting Steve’s piece, but I don’t have that kind of time available (I’m censoring out the “snippy” thing I was going to say here).  Instead, here’s some quick thoughts that came to me while stewing over the whole issue.  Who knows, maybe sometime in the future I’ll edit the whole mess together and create that essay after all.  That seems to work for Joel Spolsky .

The first thing that occurred to me was that there really isn’t an “Agile Methodology”.  I know this term gets thrown around a lot now; I’ve done it myself.  I think that the term “Agile Development” is probably more accurate.  I’m working on changing my own vocabulary to use this term.  Methodologies do, in fact, scream “consultant” or “evangelist”.  I understand Steve’s objection to this:  it’s the tail wagging the dog.  It should be all about “what people do”, not “what people define”.

Given that there’s no “magic formula” for “doing Agile”, how do you do it?  Lets say your boss comes up to you one day and says “I’ve been reading a lot about this Agile stuff.  I think all of our projects should do this from now on”. What do you do?  Just how do you know you’re “doing Agile”?

Here’s my recommendations:

1. Read.  Start with “Practices of an Agile Developer” (ISBN 097451408X).  Then, try “Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices ” (ISBN 0135974445) or “Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#” (ISBN 0131857258), depending on your language preference.
2. Then, read some more.  Read the Agile Manifesto.  This is the fundamental philosophy of agile development.
3. Get a “process person”.  Either hire a contract “mentor” or bring someone in who knows how to do Agile Development.  If you bring a contractor in, top priority should be to train an in-house person to take over once they’re trained.

The bottom line is that Agile Development is not a silver bullet that allows a company to take relatively inexperienced developers and have them produce high quality work as if they had years of experience.  Instead, its an approach to software development that results in high quality software produced on time and under budget.

10/4/2006 11:30:21 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development

What the heck is going on here???
I just read from Microsoft Watch that Microsoft has released a “follow-on” to the RC1 for Vista.  Back in the old days, release candidates were supposed to be just about ready for complete release.  Now Microsoft isn’t just doing multiple candidates, they’re shipping “bug fixes” for their release candidates!  Boy, these guys are in serious trouble…
10/2/2006 11:48:28 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology

Software Religion

Today, Joel Spolsky pointed to an essay by Steve Yegge talking about Good vs. Bad Agile.  Apparently, Steve had previously poo-poo’ed Agile development.  This was his opportunity to say that he was only 90% right (sigh).  The only thing his essay convinced me of was that he didn’t know what he was talking about.  Apparently, his idea of “Good Agile” is to schedule meetings in the middle of the day and let people work on whatever they want to.

I’m getting really tired of the software “religious wars”. You know what I mean:  where people get up on their soapbox and shoot off their metaphoric mouths about stuff that they don’t understand.  In fact, their main criticism seems to be that whatever they’re against is wrong because they don’t understand it.

By the way, if I didn’t make myself clear, Steve’s essay falls into this category. 

9/29/2006 12:27:12 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development

Runway Serendipity

This past weekend, I found myself sitting at a table of my cousins (it was my sister’s and brother-in-law’s 25th wedding anniversary).  It turns out that we’re all Runway fans.  What are the odds?

9/27/2006 8:56:55 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV | general

Representing Reality

John Dvorak has an article on “Photography and the Truth” today.  This got me thinking.  Before there was photography, no one considered pictures as accurate representations of reality.  Even a painting of a person was accepted as an artist’s interpretation of that person.

Thanks to living in a world of photographs, we presume that pictures somehow represent “reality” now.  Here’s the clincher: we also assume that pictures done before photography also represent reality.  This leads people to think that our ancestors must have been incredibly delusional to think some of what they painted was real.  Frankly, I think those ancestors would be amazed at how easily we accept photographs as “real” today, and using a program like Photoshop to “change” a picture would probably seem perfectly reasonable to them.

9/19/2006 4:06:43 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [1]  general

Premiere Week starts

While the days of a single “premiere week” for network television are long gone, this week comes closest.  After the drought of the summer, we have new shows starting this week right and left, mostly on CBS.  Here’s last night’s recap, based upon what I watched:

CBS Comedies:  CBS has pretty much taken over the first two hours of Monday night with comedies.  This year, we have three returnees and one newbee.

The Class:  This is the only new show on CBS’s Monday schedule.  A bunch of third-grade classmates get re-acquainted.  The show’s been described as a “Friends-style” show, and it has a lot in common with that one, including a really bad start (for those that don’t remember, Friends was pretty solidly panned when it started as a “Sienfeld rip-off”).  The show has some potential.  We’ll see where it goes.

How I Met Your Mother:  It’s pretty obvious by now, that the “mother” isn’t going to be making an entrance into this show anytime soon.  The title of the show should be more like “What my friends and I did before your mother met me and straightened me out”.  It remains an okay show, but nowhere near as funny as the critics would like you to think.

Two and a Half Men:  Here we go, series re-start. Last season ended with Alan (the nebbish brother) getting married to his girlfriend, Kandi.  So, of course, this season Charlie has gone back to his partying ways (the likes of which we never saw before), and (like clockwork) Alan gets dumped by Kandi. Yawn.  As an aside, I’m going to miss Kandi. I thought she was a great character.  However, I’m hoping this season we’ll see more of Rose, the next door neighbor stalker with the psych degree (another great character).  Also, more of Jake, Alan’s son.  You know, the show is definitely best when Charlie and Alan play straight man to the rest of the cast.  Here’s hoping.

The New Adventures of Old Christine:  I continue to have mixed feelings about this show (Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Emmy notwithstanding).  Her character is amazingly funny and way more non-PC than is usually allowed on network television, but the plots of the show are incredibly tedious and boring.  I hear that Wanda Sykes will have a bigger part this season.  That should liven things up a bit.

No shining start in the CBS comedy lineup.  But, on to the big fish on the new Monday lineup:  Studio 60!

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip:  This show’s gotten a lot of hype, thanks to the identities of the producers:  Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme.  They’re the creative force behind Sports Night (for those that remember) and West Wing. Likewise, I’ve been looking forward to this show, since I’m a big Aaron Sorkin fan.  The show turned out to be a bit of a surprise, mostly pleasant.  It’s a lot darker than Aaron’s previous two shows.  There’s a definite “sinister” quality to the show; most of the sets are downright dark.  The scenes of the show seemed to say “dramedy”, a la Ally McBeal or Boston Legal.  The reality (at least from the pilot) is that this show is much more serious than even West Wing was.  Yes, there are funny parts (Matthew Perry plays a comedy writer after all), but it comes across as more “comedy relief” than part of the main plot.  I thought that it was also interesting that, while the show has an ensemble cast, it seems to center around Matthew’s and Bradley Whitford’s characters.  I expected this. What I didn’t expect was that Matthew’s character would be the “lead” between the two.  In West Wing, there was originally a similar arrangement with Bradley Whitford (Josh Lyman) and Rob Lowe (Sam Seaborn), but it was Bradley that ended up being the main guy there, with Rob playing “straight man”.  Somehow, I expected the same in Studio 60.  Instead, its Matthew who takes the lead.  And, by the way, this is terrific.  I think Matthew Perry will be showing us just how good a dramatic actor he can be. He was probably the best in the pilot, followed closely by Sarah Paulson.  Also, its great to see Amanda Peet back on television.  I was a big Jack and Jill fan, and have loved her various screen parts.  Steven Weber is also terrific as the slimy executive responsible for much of the trouble on the show that Matthew and Bradley have stepped in to save.  All in all, if Aaron and company can keep the quality as high as the pilot, this will be the Emmy winner for best drama next year.

9/19/2006 10:04:48 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV

Thoughts on scripting languages vs. compiled languages

Back in my salad days, I used to write programs for the Wang minicomputer.  The majority of what I wrote was in COBOL (yes, I know).  However, the Wang had a built-in scripting language called “Procedure” that served the same purpose as JCL did on the mainframe IBM’s.  Procedure was powerful enough that you could use it as a batch language, and build applications by gluing together utility programs, similar to what we do with BAT files on the PC.

While Procedure was very simple to use, and made getting certain applications up and running quickly, it had a big drawback: it was dog slow.  So, if it looked like my quick and dirty utility written Procedure was going to be used for a while, I rewrote it in COBOL.  The second writing took a lot longer than the first, but since I’d already proved that the application had significant usefulness, it made sense to rewrite it.

It seems to me that this is a good rule of thumb for modern scripting languages vs. their compiled siblings: Use the scripting languages to try stuff out and come up with something that’s useful. If it looks like the app will be used often, take the time to rewrite it in Java or C# (please, oh please don’t even try to write it in C++).  As I discovered 20 years ago, this approach gets the value you need when you need it.

9/18/2006 8:58:53 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development

The fog starts to clear: Amazon Unboxed and the "Fast Forward" problem.

I was using my Media Center (where I ran into the Unboxed issue I talked about earlier) and discovered a couple of things:  Amazon does, indeed, use Microsoft technology for their videos:  The Mythbusters video I bought automatically appeared in my Media Center Videos list; the file is actually a WMV file.  The Fast Forward / Seek problem that I had with it also happens with Media Center.

After a quick Google search, it turns out that FF/Seek only works on indexed files. So:
1. This is not an “Amazon Player” problem per se, since all WMV’s exhibit the same behavior
2. The video player in Media Center is different than Windows Media Player: When I ran a video with WMP outside of the Media Center software, it acted like it had never been run before.
3. The Media Center video player can’t FF/Seek indexed videos (that seek fine in Real Player or Divx Player).

My conclusions:
1. Amazon is sitll not off the hook, because:  There were a lot of problems other than the lack of seek support; if they’d just indexed the file, Seek would have been supported with other players.
2. The Media Center video player also needs work.  FF/Seek works fine for recorded TV shows; it should work for pre-recorded shows as well (at least those with the necessary indexing).

Amazon, Microsoft, get with the program! I just might have to try out the new ReplayTV software after all…

9/17/2006 10:17:39 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | technology