U.S. Go Congress 2010 Report

At the beginning of August, I attended my first U.S. Go Congress. After a few years of telling people that "I'd like to go" and "I can never quite seem to make it happen", I realized that I simply wasn't trying hard enough. So, I did what I needed to do to make it to the Go Congress this year.

Background

If you don't know what Go is, check out the American Go Association's description of Go. I also highly recommend The Interactive Way to Go, which will teach you about the rules and basics of the game, and give you simple puzzles to test yourself.

This year the 28th annual U.S. Go Congress was held in Colorado Springs. The Congress is a week-long convention where people from all over the United States (and in some cases other nearby countries like Canada or Mexico) come together to play, talk about, and study Go. Professional players come from all over the United States, as well as Japan, China, and Korea, to teach and to play.

Eight Days of Go, not Nine

Back when I got my plane tickets for the Congress, I made a rookie mistake: I scheduled myself to fly back home on Sunday night, figuring I wouldn't miss anything that way. Well, it turns out that after the banquet and awards ceremony on Saturday night, there's basically nothing else to do. People fly out the same night, or the next morning. When I mentioned this to people at the Congress, I found this is actually a fairly common mistake. This year's Congress went from Saturday, July 31st, through Saturday, August 7th.

The Main Event: The U.S. Open

The main event at the U.S. Go Congress is the U.S. Open. This week-long tournament runs from Sunday through Saturday, and consists of six games with a day off on Wednesday. The time limit is one and a half hours per side (2 hours per side in the upper dan divisions), with 5 30-second byo yomi periods. That's twice the typical time limit in a Go tournament! I wasn't sure if I could handle the longer game, but I actually used up all of my time in the first two games of the tournament, and hardly noticed that the time limit was so much longer.

Professional Game Reviews

In the afternoons, there are a lot of opportunities to attend scheduled game review sessions, where professional players would go over your game with you and help you to understand how to improve your game. I found this extremely helpful, and sometimes when a professional would point out the best move, it turned out to be the next move I played. Other times, the response would be "I played that later". In fact, it seemed to become kind of a running joke, with players admitting "I played that later" as opposed to as the next move in the game. Still, it's good to feel that we were finding the right moves, even if the timing wasn't perfect.

I attended game reviews by Jennie Shen, Mingjiu Jiang, and Xuefen Lin. In fact, I was lucky enough to attend a review by Xuefen Lin with only one other person, and it turned into something more like a private lesson, a game review where we had enough time to go over the entire games and lots of variations. She also shared a favorite tesuji from a recent professional game that she had studied. It was really a rare opportunity to get to know a professional player a little bit better.

Other Tournaments

There are a number of other tournaments that take place at the Congress, including 9x9 and 13x13 tournaments, the Die Hard Tournament (a 1-day tournament that takes place on the day off from the U.S. Open), the Redmond Cup (a youth tournament named for Michael Redmond, the only non-Asian in history to achieve the professional rank of 9 dan), and the Ing Masters Tournament (attended both by professionals and strong amateur players).

The Lectures

I attended lectures by several professionals, including Ryo Maeda, whose series of lectures has been very popular among kyu players for the last 10 years, Yilun Yang, and Mingjiu Jiang. I walked away from all of the lectures with valuable lessons about how to approach my game, and in my recent games I'm still applying the principles I learned.

Other Events

There are other presentations at the Congress that gave me a chance to learn about events going on in the world of Go. This is another area where the Congress materials could be a little bit clearer! Before the Congress, I was wondering if there was room to do discussions about community projects, but it was hard to find anything about this on the Congress site. There were presentations from GoGoD, GoClubsOnline, and there was one scheduled for IgoLocal.net, but unfortunately Chuck Thomas couldn't make it to the Congress. If you're not familiar with IgoLocal.net, it's basically the same service as the PromoteGo.org project that I've been working on, on and off, for the last couple of years. I'll talk a little more about that in a future post.

Next Year

I had a great time at the U.S. Go Congress this year! It definitely made me a stronger player, and it really inspired me to work on my game again. I also met some great people in the U.S. Go community, and made some new friends. I really wish I had gone to some of the previous Congresses now.

Next year's U.S. Go Congress will be taking place in Santa Barbara! Santa Barbara is one of my favorite vacation spots. Hopefully this beautiful city will inspire a lot of Go players to come, and to bring their families. We need lots of volunteers, from Saturday-only registration volunteers (which doesn't interfere with the Congress at all...there's not much that happens on Saturday) to Treasurer and Tournament Director positions, which require a much larger commitment. If you're interested, please see the list of available U.S. Go Congress Volunteer Positions.

Bilski, Software Patents, and Patent Reform

In the last month, I've been hearing more about software patents. I've always thought software patents were stupid since I first discovered that someone had managed to get a patent on "backing store", the notion that windowing systems could save a copy of the pixels that have been obscured by a graphical window in order to display them back more quickly once the window was moved away again. Anyway, it turns out that the Supreme Court is about to rule on In re Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw, which stands to be a landmark ruling of the SCOTUS. The patent claim has been rejected by the court of appeals, and it's expected that sometime in the month of June, the Supreme Court will rule on the Bilski patent application.

It's largely expected that the Supreme Court will uphold the decision of the lower court, and it's possible that the Supreme Court will decide that business methods cannot be patented. Since business methods are very similar to software algorithms, it seems possible that the Court will decide that software is also not patentable, but however hopeful I am that this may happen, that seems unlikely.

So, I'm continuing my self-education about software patents. It seems that there is plenty of innovation in software, and that patents are not necessary to promote innovation. The software industry moves so fast that even a 1-year head start can be a huge boon for a company, so maybe that's a reform to consider: reduce the patent lifetime for a software patent down to 1 year. That would be a step in the right direction!

For a great summary of how software patents got to the state they're in today, watch the Patent Absurdity video. There's also a lot going on over at End Software Patents, and I also found out where you can donate to the FSF's Fund to End Software Patents. Are you involved in software patent reform? Have some good resources? Post them here!

Keeping up with all those habits

At the beginning of the year, I announced on this blog that I would average a blog entry per month, and two Facebook updates per week. The idea is that there are a lot of things that I would like to be in the habit of doing regularly, and starting a new habit for a new year has worked well for me in the past.

I'm happy to say that I'm doing reasonably well with those two habits, but thinking about those habits and all the other things I'd like to be doing regularly got me to thinking: Wouldn't it be great to have a tool to help track all those habits? So, being a web developer, I started writing exactly such a tool. It's helped to remind me when I'm overdue for updating this blog, and when it's time to take the dog for a walk, when it's time to check the oil in the car, do the bills, take out the trash, etc. I even have a habit set up to remind me when it's time to work on the app itself!

Well, it's very much a work in progress. There's not yet a way to keep track of accounts, so at the moment it's only good for one user, but I plan on adding user accounts soon. Let me know if you're interested in beta testing it!

Life with Nexus One, part II

I still love my Nexus One! I just wanted to comment on a couple of things:

1. Battery life
2. Swype beta
3. QR Codes

Battery life

Regarding battery life...I was at a LARubyConf a couple of weeks ago, and my battery drained like crazy all day both days, even though I wasn't really using it all that much. My theory? 3G signals were weak but present, so the phone was constantly trying to connect to a 3G network. Solution? Turn off 3G, problem solved!

Seriously, do we really need 3G anyway? I mean, it's nice to have faster networking, but that's why God invented WiFi, right? I'd much rather have WiFi than some proprietary cell network.

Swype beta

I joined the Swype beta this morning. So far I haven't used it much, but it really is a lot faster than typing on a touch keyboard. You basically just drag your finger from letter to letter and the predictive text system does the rest. Check out this smackdown video and prepare to be impressed!

QR Codes

I really love the QR codes that often go along with reviews of Android apps. It's so easy to just scan the QR code off the screen and go right to the download for the app. It's really sweet.

Life with the Nexus One, part I

I bought a Nexus One directly from Google for full price, the week after it came out. I had been waiting for an Android phone for most of 2009, and the Nexus One looked like the phone for me.

A phone that doesn't suck too much

My primary goal for getting an Android phone was to find a phone that doesn't suck significantly more than the iPhone. I mean, let's face it: walled gardens suck. Also, you can't use it on any network besides AT&T without jailbreaking your phone. The way I see it, smart phones are computers, plain and simple. I wouldn't dream of buying a computer that wouldn't let me run whatever I want to run on it.

So the iPhone sucks, but then so do most Android phones. Look at how ugly and clunky the G1 and MyTouch are. And the screens are so small. And don't forget, you have to buy them from T-Mobile!

The Nexus One is the first of the current generation of smart phones that you can buy without a contract. It's an open platform. And nobody is trying to tell me what I can or can't run on it. The touchscreen is actually the same size as the iPhone, and the touch buttons directly beneath the touch screen give you some good contextual actions that you can take, so most apps are able to make better use of the screen real estate than the iPhone allows.

Don't get me wrong, the Nexus One still sucks. The battery life isn't what I would want. There's also a slight design flaw with the location of the speaker pointing towards the back of the phone. In loud environments, I find myself wanting to point the screen away from me so I can hear the speaker. Pretty annoying.

The Camera

The Nexus One comes with a 5 megapixel camera. I've had trouble sometimes with the automatic white balance making pictures more yellow than they should be, but overall it takes really great pictures, and the autofocus lets it take really close pictures, really sharp.

Autofocus combined with the 5MP camera leads to really fast decoding of bar codes and QR codes.

The Apps

As a Go enthusiast, I'm a little bit disappointed by the number of Go applications on the Android market. I haven't yet found a great app for recording Go games, although an open source app called "gobandroid" appears to be making some really great progress.

There are tons of both free and for-pay apps in the Android Market. I don't see any shortage of applications really.

Battery Life

The battery doesn't seem to last as long as the battery in my iPhone 3G did. I'm not sure what the reason for this is, but it could be due to a number of factors, not least of which is the fact that I'm always messing around with the phone. Background processing may account for some of that, but I don't really know.

Email

One of the things I really hated about the iPhone is the fact that it took me so many steps to check email:

1. Unlock the phone
2. Run the "Mail" app
3. Select the correct email account
4. Select the inbox
5. Wait for the client to connect to the mail server

On my Nexus One, there's only one step, thanks to background processing and a helpful status bar:

1. Press the "standby" button
2. There is no step 2

The Verdict Thus Far

So far, I really love my Nexus one. I'm still discovering new apps and new things about the phone, but I really use it a lot more than I ever used my iPhone.

New Year's resolutions, 2009 and 2010

Ok, wow. I made a New Year's resolution last year to write a blog entry every week. After falling hopelessly behind in February, I gave up on blogging entirely. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Actually, I made two resolutions on this blog last year:

1. Tweet at least once a day
2. Post at least one blog entry a week on one of my blogs

How did I do with my other resolution? Pretty good, actually. Well, sort of. I certainly didn't tweet every single day, but that wasn't really the point. I was going for the daily average. According to TweetStats, I tweeted 587 times last year.

So one for two? Not bad. But what went wrong with that resolution that I missed on? I think it's pretty simple:

1. Make a resolution you can stick to.
2. Renegotiate your resolutions if you need to.

So yeah, a blog post every week is way too much for me, with all the other things I have going. And when I realized I couldn't keep up the pace, I should have simply changed my resolution to something attainable.

This year, I'm going to stick to a similar theme. It's about forming habits. And it's about social networking:

1. One blog entry per month.
2. Two facebook updates per week.

These are both things I can easily stick to, and can definitely overshoot if I try. But the resolution is about forming a habit, not so much about meeting a goal.

Oh yeah, and this post doesn't count towards the 12 blog posts I'm resolving to write this year!

Branching after committing locally in git

Today I found out that one of my co-workers had a local commit that he wanted to undo, so that he could work on another task that he actually wanted his earlier commit to come after. His question was: How do I undo a commit but keep the files? The answer to that is simple: simply use git reset HEAD^ to point master to the commit before the current HEAD. By default, this leaves the checked out code alone, and it remains as uncommitted changes locally. git reset --hard will check out the previous changes and blow your commit away completely.

On the other hand, branches in git are essentially just pointers to nodes in the repository tree. So, consider doing this instead:

1. git checkout master
2. git branch new_branch
3. git reset --hard HEAD^

What does this do? It creates a new branch that points to the HEAD of the current master, then resets master to point to the previous commit from HEAD. Once that's done, you can continue working in the branch, or make further commits to HEAD. Then, when you're ready to continue work in new_branch, you can rebase it against master and continue on your way as usual!