Eric S. Raymond's Blog, page 58

Ground-truth documents

Sometimes good terminology, by making a distinction that wasn’t easily articulated before, can be very clarifying. I was in an IRC conversation about software engineering with A&D regular HedgeMage earlier today and found myself inventing a term that I think may be useful: the ground-truth document.

The context was this: HedgeMage has observed a lot of haphazard practices at software shops that have to deal with hardware interfaces. Very often these interfaces are poorly documented by the hardware vendor, with serious gaps and ambiguities in what little description they give you.

To cope with this, S.O.P. for most shops is what HedgeMage described as “observe what it’s doing, then throw inputs at it and observe what you get back, and try to puzzle out what the patterns are”. Which is OK, except that it’s also normal to go through this process while trying to write production code.

And that is a bad, bad mistake. The result is often code that sort of worked, once, but is buggy and unmaintainable because nobody actually remembers what their assumptions were at the time it was written. They’re baked into code in cryptic ways, and trying to fix problems is terrifying because it’s so hard to tell when a change will break an undocumented assumption.

There is way to avoid this kind of mess. It’s to write down your assumptions before you write code, and treat that document as the authority of which the code is an implementation.

Later in the IRC thread, HedgeMage explained this to someone else by saying “So given the example of the hearing device from my interview question, [the document] would show all the control codes we’ve been able to pass to the device and what the device does in response to those codes, but would leave out the three that the company insists are there but that the device doesn’t actually respond to.” I added “It would list those as ‘documented, but no response’”.

At the earlier point in the discussion when I first advocated writing one, I was referring to this thing as a “design document”. But then I realized, and said, that calling it a “design document” is a problem. Programmers often associate that term with waterfall-model practices in which they’re expected to implement a bloated specification that’s wildly out of contact with reality. The point of the kind of document I was trying to describe is that it’s totally in contact with reality and not trying to describe or mandate anything else.

Here is an example: AIVDM/AIVDO protocol decoding. It describes the behavior of Marine AIS radios; I wrote it as preparation for coding the GPSD project’s AIS driver. It isn’t exactly or completely a hardware-interface specification, and some of its claims are derived from standards documents and not yet tested – but the point is that it tells you which claims have been tested and which have not. It also tells you where the observed behavior of AIS doesn’t match the standards.

Casting about semi-consciously for a way to distinguish this from a “design document”, I found one. What this is, is a “ground-truth document”.

The thing about ground-truth documents is that they don’t make promises, don’t erect requirements, and don’t talk about the future. They’re just the facts, ma’am. They describe what is, warts and all. Mine evolved into the best single reference on the AIS protocols anywhere, and has since been used as a spec by at least three decoder projects other than GPSD itself.

The practice that goes with this term is simple: always put your ground-truth document together before you start on production code (test tools to reverse-engineer the device are not production code). Maintain it with the code, treat it as the authority for how the code should behave, and when the code doesn’t behave that way treat the divergence as a bug. When your knowledge about how the device behaves changes, change the code second; change the ground-truth document first. (Of course you have it under verson control, so you also have a history of your knowledge of the device.)

This a form of knowledge capture that will save you immense amounts of pain, hassle, and rework over the entire life cycle of your project. For even greater gains, write your ground-truth document in a form that can be machine-parsed and then generate as much code as you can directly from the specification tables. (Yes, GPSD does this. So does the X windows project).

The other thing not to do (besides starting on production code too soon) is to entangle the process of writing the ground-truth document with the process of writing the specifications for your software. Wishes, plans, and hopes don’t belong in this thing.

Ground-truth documents can also have other, more political uses besides knowledge capture. Having one can help you hold a balky vendor’s feet to the fire, or short-stop an attempt to pass the buck back to your team when it belongs elsewhere. “Yeah? You say that transfer should run at 30MB/s? Well, here’s exactly what happened when we shipped it the control code for high-speed mode.”

For best effect in this kind of situation you hand the vendor your test-jig software along with the ground-truth document in which you recorded the results of running them. (Yes, this is another reason to write your test tools well before you start on the production code.)

In extreme cases (and yes, I’ve seen this happen) you can wind up documenting things about the hardware that the vendor’s engineers as a group once knew but have partly or totally forgotten. This is good. It’s great negotiating leverage.

I broadcast this term and concept so that software development teams can use it to rethink their processes and do better work. Have fun with it, and stay safe out there!

Shopping for a martial-arts school: the adventure continues

A few days ago I posted “A martial-arts trilemma” about Cathy’s and my search for a new school to train with following the demise of our MMA program. We’ve since gotten one nice surprise and struck two alternatives off our list. And thereby hangs a tale.

Tonight we went back to Iron Circle for a Tang Soo Do class. And, OK. the last 10 minutes of hapkido joint locks were interesting. But the previous 50…not good. We’d been prepared for the possibility that the Tang Soo Do techniques would be enough like our old times in TKD that they wouldn’t be very interesting to do again, but it was actually worse than that. Because we’ve changed. We discovered that the style of teaching they use chafes the hell out of us now.

What I’m talking about is the whole scene of unison drills, chanted responses, belts and uniforms, and heavy padding on people who can barely deliver any power. It all felt like going back to kindergarten. Stifling. Stupid. And they couldn’t fight – we had to just watch the sparring because we hadn’t brought the requisite silly amounts of padding with us, but: even though Cathy tends to be uncertain and self-deprecating about her fighting skills, she couldn’t help but notice that either of us would have gone through most of that crowd like a laser through candyfloss. The way she put it – quite well I thought – was that there wasn’t any intention in their fighting.

That lack, at least, I don’t consider the school’s fault. Master Maybroda is a very capable instructor and good with the kids, but the difference between people who’ve been training for twenty months and people like Cathy and myself who’ve been at it for twenty years is major and not easily bridged. We just don’t fit in a setting designed for beginners any more, and this class rubbed our noses in that fact pretty hard.

It didn’t help that the only actual challenge in the Tang Soo Do part of the class was purely physical, mainly the old familar problem that Eric can’t kick for shit because of the palsy. So I was both physically miserable and bored – worst possible combination. I handle physical challenge much better when my mind has something to chew on, but until the last bit of hapkido I wasn’t getting any of that.

I think Master Maybroda was reading my mind. He actually spent a couple minutes at the end of class explaining that there aren’t any pure hapkido schools in the U.S. because the training is physically punishing on the joints at a level Americans aren’t willing to handle. He didn’t add “And Eric, that’s why you can’t just do the bits I saw you come alive for” out loud, but I heard it plainly nevertheless.

Bummer. Scratch Iron Circle – we like the people, but we won’t go back to kindergarten for that.

But there has been good news. Checking out the Systema school turned out to be a big, big win. Instructor very good, and clearly happy to be teaching advanced students with a multi-style background. Class size all of three, so we got individual attention. And the techniques, fascinating.

Systema originated as a military form (the house style of Russian spec-ops troops) and mixes modern weapons with empty-hand. As an example, one of the drills was forward-rolling while maintaining control of a pistol (my rolling predictably sucked, but by Goddess I never lost full control of the weapon). Several of the others involved knife attacks or knife threats to a protectee.

One exercise I particularly enjoyed was this: slow-strike your partner to light contact, then do two more strikes without rechambering, for a continuous flow of three. Partner is to respond to the strike as if it were combat-speed, folding over on a gut punch and that sort of thing. Any hand or elbow strike allowed, no rules except don’t actually damage your partner, freeform variation in striking patterns not only permitted but encouraged. I collect exotic hand strikes because I think they’re fun, and I can meter the amount of power I deliver with my hands and arms very precisely – so this was great playtime for me.

Systema, I was told, does a lot of training at slow speed. Their theory is that if you can do it slow, fast is easy. And this certainly does seem to improve kinesthetic awareness; during the three-strikes drill I was aware of fine details of my striking motions that I would have missed at speed.

All in all, a very good experience. From reports, I had expected to find the style to my liking; the surprise was that Cathy really liked it. She was grinning ear-to-ear when we left.

Our search process is having an interesting effect on Cathy. I noted previously that she has tended to be uncertain and self-deprecating about her skills. But visiting different schools in an analytical frame of mind is teaching her important lessons about how very much she has actually learned. It’s an affirming experience to walk into a strange school, do a first class, and discover that you can do a good percentage of the techniques better than most of the established students – and it’s one Cathy has been having repeatedly over the last couple of weeks. She’s walking a little taller now, showing some pride that she has well earned. It’s a good thing to see.

I have reluctantly given up on the Shaolin studio in Berwyn. The style attracted me a lot, but I just can’t get past the fact that they don’t normally spar to contact. I’d love to study it with an all-adult class targeted more to experienced martial artists and with contact sparring and more emphasis on combat drills, but that’s not what I can get there. Cathy was never as excited by the whole Kwai-Chang Caine vibe as me, so it was less difficult for her to give this up.

So. Remaining in contention are Mr. Stuart’s and the Systema school. We’ve learned of a Northern Shaolin school about 20 minutes north of here and we’re going to investigate. If that turns out to be Shaolin for adults it too may be a serious contender.

Defense Distributed

I suppose it was inevitable, in a good way. Some friends of freedom have begun a project dedicated to developing and sharing open-source designs for firearms that can be manufactured with a 3D printer. Read about it here at Defense Distributed.

I approve, of course. I approve of any development that makes it more difficult for governments and criminals to monopolize the use of force. As 3D printers become less expensive and more ubiquitous, this could be a major step in the right direction.

ciabot for git version 3.5 is released

I shipped an updated version of the ciabot hook scripts for git to the git maintainers this morning.

The cool new thing in this release is that the script no longer needs to be modified for installation as a hook. You can install one copy where any number of git repositories can see it; when it’s run it will collect the information it needs either by autoconfiguring or by looking at variables set in each project’s .git/config file.

How To Choose A Martial-Arts School

The responses to my progress report on searching for a new martial-arts school made it clear that many people are interested in advice on this topic. The problem is especially difficult for new students choosing a first school, as they have yet to develop the kind of trained eye that can evaluate technique.

I have been training in empty-hand combat and contact weapons since 1982; more or less continuously since 1990. I have studied shotokan, tae kwon do, aikido, wing chun kung fu, and Mixed Martial Arts at five different schools and trained in sword-centered Western Martial Arts at two more. Along the way I’ve picked up bits and pieces of iaido, kenjutsu, escrima stick fighting, penjak silat, shaolin kung fu, Greco-Roman wrestling, Okinawan karate, naginata-do, and lua. I hold a black belt in tae kwon do and have been an instructor in multiple styles. I report these things to establish that my experience of styles and schools is very broad, equipping me to give useful advice on how to choose one.

This how-to will be aimed mainly at people new to the martial arts trying to chose a first school, but the questions I suggest can usefully be asked even if you are a much more experienced student.

The first thing you need to do is decide what you actually want.

Different schools and styles answer to different purposes. When speaking of these, martial artists commonly describe three categories: combative (practical self-defense), sport (competitive fighting), and do (self-control and self-improvement; this may just mean physical fitness, but in some arts shades into meditation and mysticism, most often of a Buddhist or Taoist variety).

The very first thing you should do is to figure out the relative importance of these paths to you, so you can judge each style and school on whether the priorities of the school match your own. Styles vary on this, and individual schools within any given style vary among themselves.

Suppose, for example, you’re like me (strong interest in the combative aspect, secondary interest in the self-improvement end, no interest in sport competition). A wall of trophies and ribbons at the school suggests that the art will have artificial technique restructions to make it safer for tournament fighting. This may be a bad sign; sumi-e paintings or Buddhist imagery on the walls would be better.

But in our internetted age, the first active step in your search (especially if you’re a newbie) is probably going to be a web search for schools near you. That’s OK, just bear in mind that the marketing glitz (or absence of same) conveyed by a school’s web presence is not at all correlated with the quality of the school. Start by shortlisting three or four that are conveniently located near you.

The next thing about choosing a school is that you must do it hands- and eyeballs-on. Visit each candidate school and least watch a class; if the school will allow it (and they usually will) participate in a class. Call to schedule this so you can be a guest in one that is suited to your skill level. You may need to sign a liability waiver; do not be over-concerned, as serious injuries are very rare (more rare than in, for example, golf).

The first and most important thing to watch for is quality of instruction. A style that is otherwise not a great match for you can be worth pursuing if the teaching is exceptionally good; conversely a style can be an excellent match for you but its school a poor choice if the instruction is inferior.

Evaluating the quality of teaching is especially important for newbies, who don’t yet have the eye to evaluate things like quality of motion. Here are some things to look for:

Do the instructors attend to individual students and solve problems, or are they running canned drills with little feedback?

Do the students look focused and attentive? (Bad sign if adults don’t, but don’t mark the school down if children look a bit scattered.)

Are senior instructors on the floor teaching, or have they delegated the grunt work to less-capable junior instructors?

Do you see the students helping each other? (This is generally a good sign, but if you don’t see it, it may only be that the school is strict about who can give instruction.)

Closely related to these are questions are about the general atmosphere of the school. Trust your gut about this; if something looks or feels particularly wrong – or particularly right – you may well be picking up on important information unconsciously.

Do the students treat their instructors and each other respectfully? Are they smiling when they start class, and when they leave? Is the school clean? Does it smell good? (Don’t discount this; humans emit different pheromones when they’re under negative stress than they do when they’re happily adrenalized, and your nose can tell that difference.)

Is the median age close to yours? This matters because physical capabilities change significantly as we age, and the instructor will be teaching to the median. Mixing preadolescent children with adults doesn’t work at all well; while you won’t see that often, less extreme age differences can create some issues if you happen to be among the outliers.

If it’s a striking art, do the students spar to contact – that is, are they actually touching each other when they strike? I think this is quite important. Without regular contact sparring, developing precise force control and the ability to deliver power is difficult. Some schools avoid this either for liability reasons or because students (or the parents of students) find it too intimidating. I think you should avoid such schools.

If it’s a grappling art, the analogous question is: are people actually throwing each other around? Without this, throwers don’t learn how to do it right and throwees don’t learn how to fall properly (that is, dissipating the force so the fall doesn’t hurt them).

Beginners often think that choosing the right style is extremely important. Relax about this, if only because empty-hand arts tend to converge with each other at their high ends – style defines where you start, not so much where you finish. And, overall, quality of instruction is the most important metric.

That said, you may need to be careful about style choice if you have an actual physical handicap. (I, for example, have a mild case of cerebral palsy that gives me range-of-motion issues in my legs and hips. This makes me a poor fit for a style that involves a lot of high kicking.) If you have a handicap, don’t try to struggle with it by choosing a style that relies on motions difficult for you; trust me, you’ll eventually get quite enough challenge advancing in an art you’re equipped to do well.

There are several qualities of martial-arts styles that can help you decide how well they will fit you. One important one is how well a style fits your build and the distribution of your strength. You should get a read on this by watching or (better) participating in a class and learning whether the movements are comfortable for you; but here are some principles:

If your strength is mostly in your arms and shoulders, you are likely to be served best by a striking art such as karate or boxing or kung fu. If your strength is more in your legs, a style with a lot of kicking (tae kwon do, muy thai, savate) may suit you better. If you have a lot of core (hip and torso) strength, a grappling style (ju jitsu, judo, aikido) may be for you.

Psychology is important, too. Do you like to fight at range or close in? Are you naturally aggressive, or does the idea of flowing like water and using the opponent’s force against him/her appeal more? Do you like using your strength, or prefer to move with precision and delicacy and apply minimum force for maximum result? There are styles that match every combination of these. If you can’t read where a style falls on these axes by seeing it done, ask a practitioner.

For example: If you’re aggressive, like to use strength, and like to fight close, the tiger form of Five Animals kung fu probably fits you. If you like to fight close but prefer to flow and use minimum force, on the other hand, aikido or judo will probably suit you. If you like to fight at more distance but are aggressive, tae kwon do or kyokushinkai karate may be the right sort of thing.

Yet another important variable (especially if your focus is combative) is how long it takes to achieve practical combat proficiency in the style. This is difficult to quantify because it depends in part on how frequently you train. But some styles have a reputation for fast takeoff to proficiency – krav maga and wing chun, for example, are often said to get a reasonably diligent student to combat proficiency in less than 18 months; at the other extreme, aikido and Shaolin and others among the more elaborate kung fu varieties are notoriously “10-year” styles. Most styles are intermediate, with combat proficiency developing at 3 to 6 years in.

So, why would you study a long-takeoff style at all? Mainly because the short-takeoff styles also top out sooner; they get you to proficiency faster by focusing on a handful of techniques, sacrificing breadth and finesse. Long-takeoff styles will often give you a bigger toolkit and more tactical options.

So far I’ve been mainly speaking of Asian martial arts. But there is a western martial arts tradition, too: boxing, wrestling, and various weapons arts centered on European medieval and Renaissance swordsmanship. Do not discount these as potentially interesting styles; they are increasingly cross-pollinating with Asian arts in interesting ways. Mixed Martial Arts combines Western boxing with Asian grappling. I train at a school of Western sword that combines Western historical sources with Asian-derived hand-to-hand and awards Asian-style belts. This sort of thing may be available to you; all the same considerations in choosing a school apply.

Now I’ll get into some areas of controversy. All schools insist that their practice is safe, and generally speaking this is true – serious injuries are very rare. But there is an unavoidable opposition between complete safety and learning to be combat-effective. I expressed one aspect of this when I noted that some schools won’t routinely spar to contact or do actual throws, and recommended they be avoided.

A related controvery is over how much safety equipment should be worn when you spar in a striking art. The advantage of wearing a lot of padding is that you’ll probably never get a bruise, and it makes the dojo’s insurance company happy. I, on the other hand, consider the right amount to be very little – maybe a groin cup, maybe a mouthpiece, maybe light gloves, but I frown on body or head padding – because I think that if I don’t at least occasionally take or give a hit that hurts, I’m not actually learning anything but dancing. And neither is my partner.

I think (and I’m speaking as a fairly experienced instructor, here) that this applies even to white belts. Good force control – delivering exactly the power you want to to exactly the place you want – is something you should be learning from the beginning. Taking hits and throws, and learning to tell pain that’s just pain from pain that means you have taken damage and should stop doing that, is also something you should be learning from the beginning. I think sparring ‘bare’ or with minimal protective gear promotes both objectives. But plenty of people disagree with me on this – though I also suspect that for many the ‘disagreement’ is largely a pretense that’s a form of appeasement to the liability insurers.

If you choose a striking art, one of the things you need to decide – and choose your school for – is whether you’re willing to take a few lumps to actually learn how to fight. If so, you’re closer to my philosophy and are going to want to find a school that goes light on the padding, or is at least willing to look the other way when more advanced students spar without it. If you’re not willing to take lumps, schools that will pad you up enough that you can barely move lurk in every other strip mall.

There is controversy of a completely different kind about martial arts “traditions”. I’m not going to get into all of the complicated reasons that martial arts erect elabrate mythologies around their own history, but I will say this: if a school you’re evaluating makes a big deal about being the One True and Only Traditional Lineage of the Foo Bar Style…ignore that. You might want to even give the school minus in your evaluation points for trying to flimflam you; you’ll be right about that far more often than you’ll be wrong.

A note about chain and franchise schools. They’re not all bad – I’m considering one now – but you’ll generally get better instruction at a standalone school where the founding master is in residence.

Finally: the days when having a round-eye as an instructor in an Asian art automatically meant you were getting second-best were already nearing their end when I first dipped my toe in these waters, thirty years ago. By the time I started steady training in 1990 those days had ended. Today many “Asian” arts are in better shape here in the U.S., with more students and more capable instructors, than they are in their home countries. (I have seen evidence for this first-hand in Asia – I think it’s related to the larger size of the U.S. market and the higher average wealth level here, which means we can support more specialists than they can.)

This doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of junk out there, but your instructor’s ethicity no longer correlates with junkiness in any significant way. That’s one less thing to worry about when you’re evaluating a school.

UPDATE: Some worthwhile suggestions for women.

The Smartphone Wars: The Limits of Lawfare

It’s beginning to look like Apple’s legal offensive against Android might backfire on it big-time. Comes the news that Judge Koh has declined to suppress evidence that Apple may have copied crucial elements of the iPad design from prototypes developed by Knight-Ridder and the University of Missouri in the mid-1990s.

Those of us aware enough of computing history to be aware of early work by XEROX PARC and others have always been aware that Apple’s claims of originality were highly dubious. Apple’s history is one of adroit marketing and a facility for stealing adapting ideas from others, wrapping them in admittedly excellent industrial design, and then pretending that all of it originated de novo from the Cupertino campus.

The pretense has always galled a little, especially when Apple’s marketing created a myth that, footling technical details aside, the whole package somehow sprang like Athena from Steve Jobs’s forehead. But it didn’t become intolerable until Apple began using lawfare to suppress its competition.

The trouble with this is that there’s actually a lot of prior art out there. I myself saw and handled a Sharp tablet anticipating important iPhone/iPad design tropes two years before the uPhone launch, back in 2005; the Danger hiptop (aka T-Mobile Sidekick) anticipated the iPhone’s leveraging of what we’d now call “cloud services” in 2002-2003; and of course there’s the the Sony design study from 2006, described by one of Apple’s own designers as an important influence.

If only Apple were honest about what it owed others…but that cannot be, because the company’s strategy has come to depend on using junk patents in attempts to lock competitors out of its markets.

On one level this is understandable. The iPhone’s global market share has been plummeting – hammered nearly everywhere but the U.S. by Android, and apparently sustained in the U.S. only by carrier subsidies that at least one carrier (AT&T) has has wearied of paying. The Google Nexus 7 has recently taken off fast enough to pose a real threat to the iPad’s tablet dominance, and that problem will only become worse as other Android vendors meet or exceed the price-performance benchmark that it sets.

But lawfare is a brittle counter-strategy. Patents are more effective as threats than if you have to invoke them in court. In the presence of prior art, every patent lawsuit carries a risk that your weapon will blow up in your face. This happened to Oracle in its attempt to extract rent from Android; their case was found to be sufficiently without merit that the main argument left in play is now over how much of Google’s legal fees they’ll have to reimburse.

Apple may well be headed for a similar bruising – the fact that an amiable-looking professor is going to be able to show the jury two-decade-old mockups that remarkably resemble an iPad is certainly not a good sign for them.

The underlying problem, of course, is that the U.S. patent system is hideously broken. Despite some recent signs of sanity (in re Bilski) it is still far too easy for well-lawyered-up companies to cartelize markets, stifling innovation and suppressing consumer choice. It’s too much to hope that this will be fixed soon, but if Apple’s junk “design patents” are taken away from it, at least one great wrong perpetrated on Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart and the other pioneers who actually invented the “Apple Interface” will have been partly righted.

A martial-arts trilemma

So, nine days ago the Mixed Martial Arts program my wife and I had been training in was canceled, and we’ve been shopping for a new school in our area. We’re serious students, twenty years deep in empty-hand and weapons, so the general run of strip-mall karate and TKD joints just isn’t going to do it for us. We require a school with high-quality instruction that can teach us stuff we haven’t seen before.

Fortunately, the area where we live (Chester County in southeastern Pennsylvania) an affluent section of the Boswash metroplex and thus probably nearly as good as it gets in the U.S. for choice. Internet searches turned up two strong possibilities, in addition to the third which is to stick with our current dojo and switch to Tang Soo Do.

We’ve now been to do evaluation classes at both. This is an after-action report likely to be of interest to martial artists of any description, and I’m hoping that the process of writing will help me clarify my thoughts about an interesting trilemma.

A bit of digging with Google actually turned up three possibilities that looked interesting. One place called “Mr. Stuart’s Martial Arts” in West Chester, about 15 munutes from here, teaching MMA and boxing and a system called Haganah F.I.G.H.T that appears to be a variant or close relative of Krav Maga. Another: a local branch of “Steve DeMasco’s Shaolin Studios” 15 minutes in the opposite direction. A third was a location in West Pikeland, about 20 minutes away, teaching Systema.

Alas, the Systema teacher is probably out as a place for steady training. Small school, one class a week on Tuesday nights, conflicts with Cathy’s twice-monthly Borough Council meetings. We’re going to go audit one class, though, in case he schedules more time slots. Haven’t been there yet.

We went to Mr. Stuart’s first to check out Haganah F.I.G.H.T. The place is a converted garage in the poorest end of West Chester – actually, the bit just north of it is a rougher neighborhood than I knew the town even had before I went there. (West Chester is both the county seat and a college town, prosperous and tidy and middle-class – full of red-brick Federal architecture and shade trees.) Inside the place has something of the atmosphere of an old-time boxing gym, including a regulation sized platform ring and a lot of hard-used punching bags.

The students are an interesting mix. A large contingent of college kids and twentysomething white-collar workers (good number of these female), a slightly smaller contingent of shaven-headed would-be hard guys with a lot of ‘tude who aren’t nearly as intimidating as they’d probably like to think they are, and a smallish group with no ‘tude at all who you can spot as the serious martial artists by the way they move and their complete disinterest in looking obviously badass.

Mr. Stuart himself turned out to look like one of the tattooed would-be hard guys, but in his case I don’t think that’s writing any check he can’t cash. Likes to loudly simulate being an asshole, but there’s a twinkle in his eye and all his students are in on the joke. Cathy and I both liked him instantly; I suspect he has that effect on a lot of people.

The training was interesting. Certainly matched the descriptions I’ve read of Krav Maga; close fighting with a lot of brutal soft-tissue strikes (crotch kicks, fingernail rakes, ear smashes, eye gouges). No kicks above waist level (good news for me; with my palsy issues I suck at high-kicking). The style rewards aggression and upper-body power, making it a good match for me both physically and psychologically.

Whether by chance or design, I ended up paired for combat drills with three assistant instructors and a woman who’s obviously a long-term student. All four were impressively capable – smooth moves, excellent physical control, excellent awareness and analytical eye (all four quickly made me as someone who’d been around the track a few times). The three I had opportunity to make the request of cheerfully honored my wish to spar to light contact, and showed no hesitation at all about taking light strikes from me (even the woman mixed it up with me at breath-on-the-cheek range and seemed to enjoy same). An excellent time was had by all.

Cathy and I left feeling like we’d be respected and welcomed by the core group there. Reasonably so, as they probably don’t get walk-ins with our experience level very often; still, it was a nice feeling. And it says a lot about Mr. Stuart, all of it good, that his assistant instructors are so capable.

Nor did I mind having Mr. Stuart publicly tease me about my Asian stances and guard reflexes (“You’ve been studying way too much martial arts – that shit’ll get you killed.”). I got the point; for various functional reasons, fighters in this style guard more like Western boxers, and don’t want to do anything that telegraphs them as martial artists until they actually have to go in and take out an opponent. I actually think a boxing-style close guard is a gloves-induced adaptation that’s a mistake when fighting bare-knuckled, but my first class in a new style isn’t the right time to have that argument with anybody.

Overall, I like the style. It suits me, I think I suit it. I think I’d pick it up quickly and effectively, and it may well be the most brutally practical art I’ve ever seen. The only detail I can complain about is that the place has no changing rooms, which will complicate our logistics a bit if we continue there.

Our second visit was to the Shaolin studio, on Route 30 in Berwyn, which means too upscale to have strip malls; the builing looked like a converted dance studio.

It appears they teach very traditional five-animal-style kung fu – again, nothing surprising to me; I’ve seen a lot of the moves before though not done them. Dan Simmons the instructor made a point of telling us he doesn’t teach in the traditional hard-ass style, though, and it was pretty obvious why; the students are mostly suburban upper-middle-class kids who’d be yanked by their parents in a heartbeat if anybody went all old-school on them. Less…gritty…than the crowd at Mr. Stuart’s; I couldn’t imagine any of the would-be hard boys from West Chester walking in here, or even wanting to. Perhaps the most serious knock on the place is that they don’t spar to contact in regular classes – you have to go to the Saturday sparring class for that.

Still, these people weren’t just dancing. Shaolin is a beautiful art that is obviously lethal in the hands of a skilled practitioner – more obviously than, say, wing chun (which I’ve trained in before). You could see some of that deadly elegance starting to manifest in the more advanced students.

I learned a new move, the “crane strike” – same body dynamics as a tae kwon do ridge hand, but hitting with the forearm bone. I also noticed that the moves I found most natural were tiger form – palm hand and rake, especially. I’m pretty sure that’s going to turn out to be “my” animal if I work this style.

The drills include a fair amount of kicking (often well above the waist) which is unfortunate for me. And I’m dubious about the style being as practical as Krav Maga. The instructor asserts confidently that it is, but such claims always need to be taken with several grains of salt. Still…what fun it would be!

I mean, if what you want to do is your classic impressive-as-hell chop-sockey moves with nifty exotic names, Shaolin has got your satisfaction right here. Pure crack for anybody who digs on wuxia movies and has been harboring a sneaking desire to be Kwai-Chang Caine since, like, 1972, Which category, I blushingly admit, includes me.

Not as much depth on the instructor bench as Mr. Stuart’s, which is a consideration (this is a smaller and younger school). Also, there’s a changing room, but just one, and it’s barely bigger than a phone booth. Which creates certain problems at beginning and end of class, though the students are cheerful about it. I’m beginning to think maybe I’ve been unaware of a certain degree of luxury at my previous schools.

Our third alternative is to stay where we are at Iron Circle, a convenient seven minutes from home (with changing rooms!) and do Tang Soo Do. We know and trust Master George Maybroda (the chief of school there) and the other instructors; we’ve seen enough of those classes to know what we’d be getting.

And that’s the problem, really. Cathy and I earned tae kwon do black belts at a school that was pretty good – enough so that the two times I went to Korea and sought out martial-arts demonstrations I didn’t see many people at all who were trained up to our standard. And tang soo do is not very different – a bit softer and more circular, maybe, emphasizing speed a bit more and power a bit less.

We could do Tang Soo Do. I asked, and the chief instructor (who knows us quite well and likes us) agrees that starting us at white belts would bore the crap out of us and waste everybody’s time. Likely we’d test in at some mid-belt level and then, alas, I fear we’d squeeze the available juice out of the style in eighteen months to two years. I’d like to be wrong about this, but the structure and the people to take us much past first dan just don’t seem to be in place here.

Thus our trilemma. Each of the choices available to us maximizes something; what we need to do is decide what we want. If it’s just to maintain the skills we already have and stay fit in a setting that is maximally convenient, Iron Circle. For practical combat training, Mr. Stuart’s probably has the edge. For nifty exotic variations and mad-fun wuxia badassery, neither of the other places could touch the Shaolin studio.

I’m a bit amused with myself, really. My head says “Go do Haganah F.I.G.H.T.”, because my personal threat model still includes a way-outside chance of Iranian assassins, and being able to take out a crazed jihadi hand-to-hand is more or less exactly what that style was designed for. My heart says “Fool, that’s why you carry a gun. Go act out your wuxia fantasies at that Shaolin place. You know you want to.” Then some other random organ whispers that Iron Circle is so conveeenient…

Cathy’s having trouble with this too. She’s less drawn by the Shaolin studio than I (though obviously willing to do it if I really want to) and perhaps a bit more swayed by the advantages of not having to change schools and drive further. But she liked Mr. Stuart’s, a lot, too.

How to choose? This will take some meditation.

Shopping for a new martial-arts school

For some months now my wife Cathy and myself had been the only regulars showing up for the MMA classes at our local dojo, Iron Circle. While this meant we got a lot of quality instructor time, I did wonder how the school could afford to run classes fotr two students.

Well, it turns out they can’t. Two days ago, Master Maybroda emailed us to tell us the MMA program was being canceled. Too many people, it seems, show up expecting it to be like what they see on UFC and bail when it isn’t. “You two outlasted all the wannabes” he wrote.

This leaves us with a problem. Where and how shall we train? We wouldn’t even consider just stopping. We’re martial artists – and, though my wife denies that this has become part of her self-identification in the way it is for me, she is no readier to give it up than I am.

Looking over the local Yelp listings for martial arts, and discarding schools we’ve trained at before but left for various reasons, we seem to be down to three alternatives…

Stay at Iron Circle and switch to the Tang Soo Do program. I considered moving us over to the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu track, but Master Maybroda doubts that would be a good fit because of the cereberal-palsy-induced range-of-motion issues in my legs and hips, and – sadly – he’s probably right.

Tang Soo Do would be a pretty easy road for us, as we already have black belts in Tae Kwon Do (which is closely related). I think all we’d have to do do to make black belt there is learn a handful of relatively simple forms. Indeed, the biggest issue with Tang Soo Do is that it might not be challenging enough to be interesting.

On the other hand, the instructors already know us and have a pretty good idea of our capabilities. We like and respect the head of school, and he likes and respects us. And the place is an easy 5-minute drive from here. These are not advantages lightly to be dismissed.

Another alternative is a place called (oddly) “Mr. Stuart’s” in West Chester, about fifteen minutes away. That’s where we’ll go, probably, if we decide our priority is to continue with MMA. They teach a mix of MMA, boxing, and an Israeli fighting system called “Haganah” which appears to be somebody’s branded variant of Krav Maga.

That’s interesting; I’ve had my eye on Krav Maga as a possible next style for a while now. It’s an aggressive, upper-body-focused power style with a lot of emphasis on improvised weapons and creative use of the tactical environment. A very good fit for my build and combat psychology, I think.

Our third possibility is a Shaolin kung-fu school in Berwyn, again about fifteen minutes away. I’m interested in this because my previous experience with Chinese kung fu (in wing chun style) was very positive; I’d like to get deeper into that.

We’re going to take time and audit a couple classes before committing to anything.

An open letter to The Economist

In “Who’s Afraid of Huawei?” you point out the need for the telecoms industry to adopt transparency guidelines to head off risks from kill switches, spyware, and back doors covertly installed in their equipment.

One minimum necessary condition of such transparency is that all software and firmware in these devices must be open source, with customers permitted to install their own software images from published source code and development toolchains that can be audited by third parties.

While open-source software cannot completely head off the possibility of Trojan horses embedded deep in telecoms hardware, it at least reduces the management of aggregate security risks to a tractable problem. No lesser measure is or can be even remotely as effective, even in principle.

Telecoms customers should insist on open source – and, as any competent counter-espionage agency would do, should consider vendors’ insistence on information asymmetry to be indicative of an unacceptable security risk.

doclifter 2.9 is released

I’ve released doclifter 2.9, and as part of that process I’ve been testing it on the entire collection of manual pages on my system again. Because doclifter does mechanical translation of troff-based markups to DocBook-XML, one of the side effects of testing it is that I find lots of broken markup. I’ll ship over 700 fix patches back to maintainers this time, though maybe not until after I get back from World Boardgaming Chapionships next week.

Release here, report on markup bugs found is here. Over 700 this time, but that’s actually a drop from previous passes.

My last rampage through the man-page universe with fire and sword was in 2007. Most (I’d say about 85%) of the patches I shipped then were accepted. One particularly noticeable change is that in 2007, only a handful of pages identifiably had DocBook masters and could thus be skipped; in 2012 fully 7% of the entire corpus is like that.

Which is good news – why, at that rate, we’ll be fully converted before the end of this century. :-)

(For any of those who are wondering what the practical consequence is, think Web availability. DocBook renders into HTML much more cleanly than conventional manual-page markup does.)