I Don't Get Prisons; or, Rehabilitating our Penal System

The topic of prisons, punishment, determent, and rehabilitation has been getting to me lately, and an NPR broadcast about Angola Prison really drove me to try to put my thoughts into words. The way I look at it, our criminal justice system looks sort of like this:

Crimes are actions that we as a society have deemed illegal because they cause harm to other people. Murder, burglary, and libel are pretty obvious examples of crimes that do harm to others. Self-inflicted crimes (most notably, drug use) have secondary negative effects on society. 

As a society, we decide that people who commit crimes should suffer some consequences with the idea of reducing the number of criminal acts. For most crimes, the sentence is prison time. As I see it, the justification for prison time serves three purposes:

• Determent: If people know they are going to jail if they do illegal things, they will be less likely to do them.
• Rehabilitation: Criminals serving time may become rehabilitated and not want to commit crimes again either by a change of morals/outlook or by the fear of being imprisoned again).
• Punishment: Society demands that people who hurt them are in turn hurt (the old Babylonian "eye for an eye" morals). 

It seems pretty clear that determent doesn't work for a large portion of society. People who have been driven to commit crimes (either by extenuating circumstances or by a weak moral compass) usually seem to just try harder to not get caught. People who wouldn't commit crimes in the first place because of a strong moral compass (e.g. me) are less likely to do the illegal activities even if they were not illegal*.

* I'm well aware there is a huge amount of sociological and psychological research in the fields of motivation and morality. 

Punishment seems to make sense, except when you think about the longer sentences. According to Louisiana's data on Angola, 73% of the inmates in 2010 were serving life sentences (there is some math at play here; lifers only leave when they die, whereas other inmates can finish their term or be paroled). What's the point of locking someone up for their entire life? Seems like a waste of a life.

Rehabilitation seems like the most valuable thing we can attempt with our criminals*. My wife once worked in a batterers intervention group, where she worked with convicted domestic abusers. After a once-a-week-for-40-weeks program, the recidivism rate was far lower than those who went to jail (granted, it is likely that this data is somewhat self-selecting; the judge could sentence intervention instead of jail time, and likely chose the more repentant men for intervention). I bet you many more criminals could be rehabilitated rather than just thrown in a snake pit with other criminals.

* I fully acknowledge that some people cannot be rehabilitated, and that life in prison or capital punishment are the only reasonable options for society.


I don't know where I'm going with this, other than to say it seems clear that our penal system could really use some work. Prison inmates are a drag on society, producing nothing, consuming goods and services, while (generally) falling behind in job skills. It's the 21st century; can't we do this better?

resharper - surround with

I recently discovered a really useful Resharper command for Visual Studio: "Surround With". Simply hit "Ctrl+Alt+j" and you get a nifty menu with a list of common things your would surround code with. This feature makes programming simple: write the code, then add the hardening later. Booya!

Visual Overload

I reached my record of running five concurrent instances of Visual Studio (four 2010, one 2008) recently. Seems like there should/could be a better way to have multiple solutions open at once, especially since each VS took about 500MB of memory each (with 8GB memory total, this wasn't really a problem, but it could be if I also had other high-memory programs open). Maybe one VS can have multiple solution-spaces open, like tabs, but at a higher level than the tabs for open files? Not sure, but it seems like a better answer is waiting for someone to discover it.

On Troubleshooting

I think troubleshooting is a distinct skill that is technology independent. For example, Annie just called me in to the living room because the TV was displaying "No Signal", despite the fact that we were successfully watching TV earlier in the day. I don't really know anything about TVs and DVRs and tuners beyond "you plug the cables in where they fit", so I was slightly concerned. However, all my years of troubleshooting software bugs came through. Here was my process:

1. Sanity check: make sure all cables are plugged into the right ports and the TV is set to the right setting. Still not working.
2. Sanity check: turn off and on DVR and TV. Still not working.
3. Move HDMI cable from port 1 to port 2 on TV, then port 3. Still not working.
4. Get new HDMI cable from basement and test DVR and TV. Still not working.
5. Test laptop HDMI into ports 1, 2, and 3 on TV. Laptop output to TV not working. 
6. Unplug power from TV, wait 10 seconds, plug back in. Eureka! It's working!

The trick is to continually isolate a single factor and remove that factor from consideration. If I had not tried the laptop, I doubt I ever would have figured out the problem. But I needed to test with an input other than the DVR to isolate the DVR and TV from each other to determine which was the problem. I'm just glad I was able to fix the TV so easily. 

Derail

So the 30 day meditation challenge did not go so well. It turns out that if you leave the house at 7AM and don't get home until 10PM (welcome to my Mondays and Wednesdays), it's hard to find any time in a quiet place, and when I do find that time, I fall asleep. Off the bat, I lost the challenge on the first Monday, but then the next day I had too much schoolwork to do, so I had no time that day... and so on.

A more realistic goal for myself would be to meditate three times a week. That way, I can make plans to meditate on certain days, and if the plan doesn't work out, I have time to make it up. Good idea, Ed, let's do it!

The lesson I'm taking away from this is that it is unrealistic for me to attempt to force myself into a difficult arbitrary structure simply will not work. I'm too much of a "seat of my pants" kind of guy (on the MBTI scale, I'm definitely a perceiver).

Next Stop, Meditation Station!

I've been meaning to try meditation for a long time. I read a fair bit about it (starting with The Relaxation Response and moving to the Internet), and after talking with a few people, decided now would be the best time for me to try it.

So I challenged myself. 30 days, every day, meditating. Just 20 minutes (with a few minutes on each side) a day, I can do this, right?

Well, it took me about a week from when I said that to when I first meditated. But that first meditation was yesterday! So that's good. What about today?

I decided the best way to help me continue to meet this personal challenge would be to post it online and give daily updates. This would both A) get me blogging again, and B) provide me with extra incentive. After all, I can't let my (two or three) readers down, can I?

Nitpicking a House of Cards

I love the movie The Mummy. It's just a fun movie, and I'm not alone in liking it. The combination of horror and action and comedy (and even zombies!). But there are several bits of it that always piss me off.

• In the beginning scenes with Ardeth and the Medjai, there are like hundreds of Medjai. But once Ardeth and Dr. Bey confront Rick, Evelyn, and Jonathan about awaking Imhotep, all the other Medjai disappear, off doing who-knows-what. It should would've been useful to have even a dozen scimitar- and rifle-wielding warriors helping out. (At least in The Mummy Returns, they mentioned the other Medjai had to get ready to fight the Army of Anubis.)
• After Imhotep has "absorbed" three of the Americans, leaving only Mr. Daniels, the party is driving in car to get away from Imhotep's zombies. They know they need to protect Mr. Daniels to prevent Imhotep from getting fully regenerated (another case when more Medjai would have been nice). So why do they leave him unprotected at the back of the car? Dumb.
• And then after the zombies pull Mr. Daniels off of the car, the party keeps driving on, knowing full well that they are letting Imhotep get fully regenerated. Sure, there were plenty of zombies, but Ardeth, Rick, and Dr. Bey were all pretty badass fighters. You'd think they could've held off the zombies while Mr. Daniels got back in the car.

But this whole blog post is a waste of bytes. It just bugs me every time, probably because I enjoy the movie so much. 

Oh, By The Way, New Baby!

Yeah, so my lack of posts recently was first a result of pregnancy (Pregnancy: not just for expectant mothers!) and now a result of our firstborn, Mia MacKenzie!

You can find more photos of our beautiful daughter at Flickr. Mia is more important than just about anything I've ever done, but I will attempt to get back to posting a little.

What is a TypeLoadExceptionHolder and What Should I Do If I Have One?

Recently at work I was creating a new branch in Subversion for one of our projects when I ran into a little error on one an integration test called "Should_Send_Data_From_File_To_Server":

Object of type 'System.Runtime.Serialization.TypeLoadExceptionHolder' cannot be converted to type 'System.Collections.Generic.List<companyname.framework.persistableobject>'

TypeLoadExceptionHolder? What the crap is that? I tried Binging it, and after pouring through results, found this post by Michael Freidgeim:

Binary deserialization doesn't throw exceptions, but just replace some members(in my case it was enum, that was moved from one namespace to another) with this undocumented TypeLoadExceptionHolder class.

OK, so why was my binary deserialization failing? I wrote up a quick integration test to simply serialize and deserialize a file and it worked fine. But the sample serialized file just wouldn't deserialize in this branch, even though this exact code worked fine in the source branch.

I was nearing my wits end when I realized Michael had already nailed it for me: namespaces. One of the reference assemblies, "companyname.framework", had changed names in this release branch. It used to be "companyname.framework.core". And so the sample serialized file had the old namespace and couldn't properly be deserialized. The mystery is solved.

The moral of the story is Never trust canned data in your integration tests. Always suspect it when sometime goes wrong.

Force Feeding You Change

Google loves to just drop new features in your lap. I remember when I first noticed Google Talk; I came back to my computer and Graham had dropped me a line, "yo fezzik, whats shakin bro?" (of course, Eric was the second person to send me a chat). I was all "WTF is this? Get out of my inbox!" But I got over it.

It reminds me of the way Blizzard would work their betas. For the Warcraft 3 expansion beta, when they added a new unit, they would make that unit overpowered so that everyone would use it (When they added "fragmentation shards" to the mortar teams, they made the effects so loud and big that they were impossible to ignore). That way Blizzard could see how people reacted to it, how they used it, etc. They would use that data to find the right balance.

That's just like what Google has done with Talk and Buzz. They just throw it right at you, in your face, in Gmail. You have no choice but to deal with it (yeah, sure, you can disable them both, but how long did it take you to find that little link?). And so now everyone is talking about Buzz, using Buzz, and Google can use all this feedback to flesh it out properly. Nicely done, Google.

Google Buzz: The Facebook-ization of Google

Google surprised me when they suddenly launched their latest endeavor into the social networking world, Buzz. After one look and their introduction video, it seems clear they are targeting one competitor: Facebook. Sure, Buzz includes features from Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, and others, but those aren’t the main targets.

Think about it. Facebook is working on a new email feature. Facebook’s goal is to have you on their website for as much time as possible. I know plenty of people who would almost never leave Facebook if they could get their email there. Sure, there would still be users like me who actually post content into Facebook via Twitter linking outside content. But for probably 80-90% of users, Facebook becomes the Internet.

Google doesn’t like that future. Google’s business model is predicated on having users, well, use Google. They want users to experience all the web has to offer, and to find it all through Google Search. There are two parts to that strategy: pushing the openness of the web and empowering users, and then showing them relevant advertisements. Google cannot do all the cool stuff it does without the huge revenue base it has, but more importantly, all these cool things are there to keep you on Google and learn about you so they can keep showing you relevant advertisements.

So what is Buzz? It’s a reason for people who use GMail a lot to stay on Google servers. It’s an attempt to keep users from, once they’ve read their mail, leaving the site and going to Facebook. Will it work? I don’t know. I only have access to Buzz on my Android, in the Maps program, so I can’t say how useful it is. I agree with Eric that the technology involved is cool, but that goes back to part one of the strategy: pushing openness and decentralization. (Think about Google pushing decentralization. If everything isn’t in one place, how do you find it?) But the takeaway of this is that Google is reacting to the Facebook-ization of the Internet, and it seems to be a pretty cool reaction.

Building Integration Tests With Workflow Components

A lot of blood, sweat, and tears have been shed over the use and design of unit tests, but what about the red-headed stepchild of automated testing, integration tests? They have fallen out of vogue lately in popular discussion, but they can be just as useful as unit tests. Just search for unit test best practices and integration test best practices; the unit test search has almost twice the results.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks I have found with integration tests is internal dependencies (external ones, like databases and webservices, are also a pain, but you’re on your own for them). If you have to test an “Approve” action, you probably first need to “Create” the object before you can approve it. You’ve written your “Create” integration tests, so do you make your “Approve” tests inherit from the “Create” tests? That seems kind of ugly. But you don’t want to have duplicate code, even if it’s just in the tests.

A better solution is to split your integration tests into “workflow” classes. Each workflow class represents an action you want to test, “Create” in this case.

public class CreateResults   
{
  //data to return    
}    

public class CreateWorkflow    
{    
  public CreateResults DoAction()    
  {    
    //Do the action, return the results    
  }    
}

You can use this code for your “Create” tests, but even cooler, your “Approve” workflow can consume the “CreateResults” object:

public class ApproveResults 
{
  //data to return  
}  

public class ApproveWorkflow  
{  
  public ApproveResults DoAction(CreateResults results)  
  {  
    //Do the action, using the data from the create test, return the results  
  }  
}

How cool is that?

Well, what if you want to have a workflow with various options? We can do that:

public class CreateOptions   
{    
  //inputs to the workflow
  
public class CreateWorkflow   
{    
  public CreateResults DoAction(CreateOptions options)    
  {    
    //Do the action using the provided options, return the results    
  }    
}

You can experiment with using the “Options” and “Results” objects in different ways. YMMV. This may not solve all the problems with integration tests (and it’s not revolutionary, and someone else probably already did it), but it can make for some pretty modular tests and make your life easier.

Unexpected Benefit

My sense of smell has always been somewhat lackluster, which has led me to on occasion eat spoiled meat and drink spoiled milk (explains a lot, right?). Fun times. But one of the pregnancy "symptoms" Annie is experiencing is an enhanced sense of smell. I've been able to use this to my advantage :)

"Hey honey, is this milk bad?"

"Babe, can you smell this deli meat? It looks a little... funky."

Alternatively, if I cook something good, to her the whole house will smell like it for a while, so it's in my best interest to cook as much deliciously-smelling stuff as I can. Look out world, here comes Chef Ed!

Get Busy Living, or Get Busy Setting Up Your Workspace

For a long time now, I’ve been trying to make my work-from-home setup more usable. Or, more accurately, I’ve been complaining that my work-from-home setup is inadequate and then not doing anything about it. See, I have a desk in the basement, but it’s not really a computer user’s desk. Sure, it has a keyboard drawer, but there is no room on that drawer for a mouse, so my mouse-hand always ends up in an awkward position. Couple that with the fact that my desktop PC just croaked and I have no USB keyboards to plug into my laptop, and the desk became darn-near unusable. I tried using my laptop on the couch, but I either end up nearly burning my lap or hunched over the coffee table.

With the bare minimum in mind, I set out to Staples (just about the only tech retailer within walking distance of my job) to get a USB wireless keyboard. I figured $35, maybe $40, and my desk would be back in action AND I could use the laptop just about anywhere in the house.

I managed to get lucky; Staples was having a sale on the Microsoft Wireless Desktop 3000 (keyboard and mouse combo). $50 seemed like a good price for both devices.

Well, the keyboard is great, though nothing special compared to other keyboards (well, it’s no Microsoft Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000). It just works. The mouse is the real winner. The bundled mouse is the Microsoft Wireless Mouse 5000, and it comes with “BlueTrack” technology. I don’t know what that means, but I do know I can use the mouse on just about any surface. Anything. I just flopped it down on the fleece that’s piled right next to me and it worked perfectly. I’m not sold on the location of the “forward” button, but I rarely use that anyway, so it’s not a big deal.

This is coming off like a shill review, so I’ll stop talking about the devices themselves (I have no relevant experience with wireless keyboards or mice to compare these to anyway). I’m sure Logitech’s offerings are awesome too (their MX500 mouse has been my faithful companion for years).

The point is that now I’ve got a very comfortable working environment at my desk OR on the couch. The nice side benefit is that using a wireless keyboard just makes me feel like a badass hacker too.

You Should Listen to Me: I Placed First in a Private Make-Believe World

So all my waiver-wiring and managing risk and whatnot landed me a league title in one of the two leagues I cared about (and I came in second in the other one). Booya!

Mostly though, I'm excited that fantasy baseball season is over so I can focus on (fantasy) football, as well as the baseball playoffs. Fantasy sports really enhance my spectator experience, but it's also nice to watch a game and not worry about every at-bat and how it will affect me. Here's hoping the Yankees go deep into October baseball!

Not Even a Magician

"I don't know. I'm not a magic person. I just play second base."

It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over

Fantasy Baseball has been good to me this year. In the two leagues I actually pay attention to, I'm in first place, one team by 4 games, the other by 19. And it's not that I draft well; I know I'm pretty bad at that sorta thing, and this year was no different (1 of the 10 guys I drafted in the last 5 rounds of these 2 leagues is still on my roster). No, it was all thanks to free agent pickups and waiver claims.

Grey of Razzball.com says it best:

You don’t want to be Cowboy Jon praying Matt Wieters comes up in June while you sit in 8th place not even needing a catcher.   Or are you holding your waiver claim because you’re afraid someone is going to drop Prince Fielder?  Who are you, John Q. Law?  This is your job, why?  Wait, even better.  If you’re in a league with a guy who wears fancy dungarees and who would drop Prince Fielder, you shouldn’t be in that league.   If you need a guy for your roster, then claim him.  While your leaguemates are waiting for someone they deem worthy of a pickup, you’ll be grabbing all kinds of other players that are immediately useful.

That advice goes for free agents too. And better yet, free agents don't cost you anything other than the worst player on your roster.

Key players that I picked up off free agency/waivers this year:

• Ben Zobrist
• Mark Reynolds
• Jon Lester (an impatient owner dropped him)
• Andrew Bailey
• Jordan Zimmerman (traded to get Casey McGehee)
• Jake Fox (traded to get Leo Nunez)

I'm 19 games up in one league pretty much solely on the shoulders of Zobrist and Reynolds. Drafting is super important, as the basis of your team is formed in those first hours of the fantasy season. But even if your draft doesn't go according to plan (like drafting Garrett Atkins in the 4th round), you can still recover if you keep an eye on the game. 

Did Anyone Else Hear That?

I'm watching the Yankees @ Tigers game tonight on ESPN, and these commentaors have got to be the worst I've ever heard. They just seriously suggested that the 1-2 2 out pitch the ump called a ball was a good call because other umpires might've phoned it in and called it a strike just to get out of the inning. Seriously? Seriously. 

Love-Hate Relationship

Look At the Time Stamp

Seriously, just look at when I posted this. Not doctored at all.

I just finished a daily merge for work. Yes, I took time off when I got home to eat dinner and watch a little TV. I still spent a whole day + some on a single daily merge. 

Sometimes, I just hate source control.