(A not-quite twitterable bug report for @Netflixhelps:) Setting family controls on the XBox 360 (system-level preference) to G correctly causes unrated content or content rated higher than G to display the locked-out icon. In the previous version, navigating to one of them and pressing A would prompt for the family password, then unlock all the covers. You'd have to enter the family code again to watch. In this version, if you navigate to a locked folder and press A, you get the family code entry, but upon successful entry you immediately begin watching the selected video. There appears to be no way to unlock the covers. Combined with the new delay before showing the name of the video at the bottom of the screen and it has become very frustrating to navigate.

When I was younger, I thought leadership was oversold, and what really mattered were the people on the team.

I have recanted this belief.

I still don't entirely understand why leadership is so important, but the experience I've collected over the years is pretty clear on the matter. My best guesses are that it is some combination of the following:

1. It is true that the performance of a team is bounded on top by both the quality of the team and the quality of the leadership, but people tend to badly underestimate how much quality and talent there is in the world. The average person is above average in some significant way. I would agree world-class results require a world-class team, but for a given team, it's a rare time when the biggest problem the team has is a true lack of talent. I'm sure it happens, but I've never witnessed it in 15 years, whereas I've witnessed many teams failing to live up to their obvious potential because of bad leadership. So, in a sense it is true that neither leadership nor team talent is more important, but in practice, since team talent is generally a given the leadership will be the most important determining factor between failure and success.
2. It is true the team is who provides the day-to-day progress on a problem, but it's generally the leadership making a lot of little decisions that add up over time; little words that affect morale, small key decisions that affect efficiency by a few percent, that little bit of vision-from-experience that avoids blowing a few days on a bad path, the careful selection of problems to personally take on. It adds up to a lot, and especially when the leadership is blowing these little calls consistently, no team is good enough to undo the damage... especially when the leadership actively prevents the repairs!

I do agree that it's important not to fetishize leadership and never to forget the team gets credit too, but over the years my estimation of the importance of true leadership has been going consistently up, not down.

It's time for gas stations to drop that nine tenths of a cent off their signs.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! (A Beginner's Guide) by Miran Lipovača, published by No Starch Press (2011). No Starch was kind enough to send me an advance copy for review.

Haskell books for "real programmers" are still thin on the ground, being limited at the moment to Real World Haskell (2008) and possibly Programming in Haskell (2007). As its introduction states, this book is aimed at existing programmers who are currently fluent in something like Java, C++, or Python, and would like to learn Haskell.

I put my take on the traditional discussion of why you should consider learning Haskell in another blog post, so we can get on with the review here.

The hardest thing about learning Haskell with no previous functional experience is bootstrapping the strong foundation that you've long since taken for granted in your imperative language. If you don't have this strong grasp of the fundamentals, then every line of code is an invitation to get stuck on some subtle issue, and you'll never have the fluency that great work requires until you have that foundation.

This book is the best way I know to obtain the Haskell foundation you need for fluency.

jerf.org is a website where I partition off the part of my life that makes for boring real-life conversation. In real life, you can go a very long time without hearing me ramble about politics or the other things I go on about on this website. Going on about those things is the entire purpose of this website, whereas my music, TV, work life, and family life are saved for real life.

No Starch Press asked me to write a review of the new Haskell book, Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!. I started to write a section about myself and my view of Haskell for context, and realized that it really needed to be its own post as it grew to a length where it was self-indulgent to make it part of the review. But it fits as its own post nicely.

I have always had a romantic attraction to the "could have been"s, the aesthetics that die early or fail to become popular but feel like in an alternate universe just next door they could have been wildly successful. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has always struck me like this; even as the Classical music period gave way into the Romantic period and harmonies get ever wilder until they run entirely off the rails in the twentieth century, it always felt to me like the Ninth could have been the foundation of a different aesthetic than the one we actually got. (A matter of opinion, of course.) It's a fully-formed masterpiece from the could-have-been.

I like to watch the "How the Movie Was Made" documentaries for movies from the Star Wars era up to the late ninties, because I love to see all the dead special effects techniques; the wonderful models, the animatronics, all the clever tricks they play, all interesting in exactly the same way that watching the documentaries for a 2010 movie are very uninteresting, seeing as how they all boil down to "And then we used a computer". I wonder what movies we'd be seeing if somehow computers were impractical for special effects and these techniques continued to be refined and honed.

And there's a smattering of other such things I enjoy. In the movie domain, many of them end up becoming what we call "cult classics", movies that may be awesome or may be fundamentally terrible but are above all else different. Buckaroo Bonzai, the David Lynch version of Dune, and, as telegraphed by my title, Tron.

A little hobby of mine has been quickly scanning over the spam that gets past my filter for random names that coincidentally managed to be someone I recognize. Sometimes I even scan the spam folder itself. I've read many thousands of names over the past few months, but today I have what may be my first hit: Sgt. George Lucas is in desperate need of assistance during his Iraq deployment, presumably something that involves large sums of money being transferred out of my bank account.

Every decade around this time, we get pedants who point out that since there was no Year 0, decades/centuries/millenniums start on 1.

I observe that the Gregorian Calendar we use started in 1582, so not only was there no year 0, there was no year 1, year 2, year 3, ..., or year 1581. Therefore, true pendants should be insisting that decades start on twos, and centuries start on 82s, and millennia start on 582s!

Dear Democratic Supporters of the health care bills:

You do realize you're supporting putting Republicans in charge of health care, right?

Oh, sure, not this year or next. But it's only a matter of time until Republicans can pass bills again. Whether 2011, 2013, or 2017 or beyond, sooner or later it's going to be the Republicans in control of at least one house, the Presidency, and in pretty good shape in the other house. The wheel turns, the pendulum swings. It is not a question of "if", it's a question of "when". And when that happens, the Republicans will be in charge of your health care.