Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:

• Ann Althouse has come out in favor of blogola. The word, not the practice.
• Part II of CSI: MedBlogs—how did the young marathon runner die? is up at CodeBlueBlog.
• Dr. Demarche of Daily Demarche announces an intriguing new blog for those
  who don’t have blogs (but want to post occasionally): My Blog Is Your Blog.
• TangoMan has more on the new New Math over at Gene Expressions.
• There’s an interesting guest post from SoCal Lawyer over on Patterico
  condemning the practice of hiring jurors from a prior trial as consultants on a re-trial. I wonder
  what the philosophical issues at stake in this area might be. Why is giving jurors an opportunity
  to capitalize on their specialist knowledge worse than allowing attorneys the ability to capitalize
  on their specialist knowledge? Would it be okay if the jurors volunteered?
• N. Z. Bear asks for input on a technical problem with the Ecosystem:
  

  Here’s the latest on the performance problems I’ve been tracking. It turns out that it doesn’t appear to be directly related to the load of the status display. The following is the technical details of what’s going on: I’d very much welcome any Apache or PHP gurus’ input on how I might proceed to debug the problem.

  Spoons responds in the comments section:

  Have you tried reversing the polarity? Sometimes that works.

  You might check for a hairline crack in the dilithium crystals, too. Those are hard to spot, but can cause all sorts of anomalies.

  Have you seen any bearded evil Bears around? Because that could be an entirely different problem.

  Lawyers. Trekkies. Lawyers who are Trekkies. No good can come of this.

• Tigerhawk premieres a new feature: Carnival of the Commies (a periodic review of the best and most representative work from the left side of the blogosphere). I wonder how
  long it will take for turnabout to become fair play.

That’s the lot.

I’ve been meaning to post about this story since I first read about it . The FBI has a little development problem with a critical project they’ve contracted out:

A $170 million computer overhaul intended to give FBI agents and analysts an instantaneous and paperless way to manage criminal and terrorism cases is headed back to the drawing board, probably at a much steeper cost to taxpayers.

$170 million here and $170 million there and pretty soon you’re beginning to talk about real money. The problems that the FBI have identified with the system include actual inadequacies of the system, security problems, and what’s referred to as “obsolescence”.

The Los Angeles Times has more on the story:

WASHINGTON — A new FBI computer program designed to help agents share information to ward off terrorist attacks may have to be scrapped, the agency has concluded, forcing a further delay in a four-year, half-billion-dollar overhaul of its antiquated computer system.

The bureau is so convinced that the software, known as Virtual Case File, will not work as planned that it has taken steps to begin soliciting proposals from outside contractors for new software, officials said.

[…]

An outside computer analyst who has studied the FBI’s technology efforts said the agency’s problem is that its officials thought they could get it right the first time. “That never happens with anybody,” he said.

That outside computer analyst is right but I think there are even more serious issues than that and I plan to discuss them a little further on in this post.

The contractor on this project is Science Applications International Corp., a San Diego-based Fortune 500 company. As you might imagine they’re not amused by either the state of the project, its reception, or the bad press the company is getting:

Science Applications International Corp. today rejected criticism that it botched a $170 million IT upgrade project with the FBI, saying the company has performed well and that the FBI is partly to blame for problems.

[…]

“The FBI modernization effort involved a massive technological and cultural change agency-wide,” said Duane Andrews, SAIC’s chief operating officer. “Unfortunately, implementing this change on the Trilogy contract has been difficult to do without impacts to cost and schedule. To add to that complexity, in the time that SAIC has been working on the Trilogy project, the FBI has had four different CIOs and 14 different managers. Establishing and setting system requirements in this environment has been incredibly challenging.”

Federal Computing Week has more background:

Five years of development and $170 million in costs has produced for the FBI an incomplete electronic records management system that may be outdated before it can be fully implemented, an FBI official said Jan. 13.

Only about one-tenth of the planned capability of the Virtual Case File has been completed by contractor Science Applications International Corp., said the official, who gave a formal press briefing on an anonymous basis. Virtual Case File is part of the Trilogy program, the bureau’s modernization effort. The application was originally due December 2003.

Currently, only the automated workflow portion of the case file management system is operational, on a pilot test basis in the New Orleans field office and Washington, D.C. At full capacity, the system should enable electronic records management and evidence management, and allow for varying levels of access based on a user’s security clearance. Updating the agency’s Investigative Data Warehouse currently requires FBI workers to manually scan officially signed agent reports, a cumbersome process that would be eliminated with electronic records management, the official said. Reports pertaining to counterterrorism are added to the data warehouse nightly, the official said.

Work on the Virtual Case File began in 2000. Five years later, the technology world has changed and the way the system was developed makes updating it virtually impossible. For example, the Virtual Case File can’t create or transmit electronic signatures, nor could that capability be added. FBI officials also expanded the scope of the file’s mission and begun closer collaboration with the intelligence community following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the official said.

With all of the IT folks out there in the blogosphere I would have thought that there’d have been a lot more attention paid to this story. Kim du Toit’s take is pretty much on target:

$170 million spent, and nothing to show for it. What’s scary is that, as The Mrs. pointed out to me, $170 million isn’t that much of a fuckup: we know a couple of corporations who spent more than that just customizing an existing product for their own needs. Maybe the Feebs should have tried that avenue.

But that’s not the problem. The problem is that the prototype delivered wasn’t enough even to meet a partial list of needs.

Bithead doubts the project is a total loss:

Example (and let’s bring this home for the purpose of really showing you what I’m talking about) ; You decide you need a video camera for your PC. But you find that most if not all cameras you can get only run on XP… and you’re still running Windows 98. And in any event that old P-II/400 isn’t gonna cut it… not really. Well, you don’t complain much about the costs of the new computer and operating system, you simply replace it, since you really needed to do that anyway…and then get your camera.

Well, let’s extend this a bit further. Turns out the camera you’ve bought is a pile of crap. It doesn’t work. Do you call the hardware and software you bought a bust, or do you keep using it because it’s faster, and better than what you had? And in any event; anything else you buy for your computer’s gonna work better with the newer hardware and OS anyway, and many won’t work without it.

Well, that, I suppose to be the situation the FBI is finding itself in at the moment.

Trust me, gang… this is NOT a $171m loss.

I’d like to consider a few aspects of this story:

1. What does it all mean?
2. How did it happen?
3. How can this stuff be avoided in the future?
4. What’s going to happen?

What does it all mean?

Well, right off the bat we’ve spent 170 million dollars, let five years go by, and the FBI still doesn’t have the software it needs to function properly. From the standpoint of the federal budget—much as I hate to say it—$170 million is a drop in the bucket. But we can’t get those five years back. They are gone forever and it’s going to take even more time (and even more money) just to get where we should be right this moment. These would be bad enough but what really bugs me is the turnover in the CIO position. I’d say there are two likely alternatives: either the folks taking the job consider it merely a stepping-stone to a better job or it’s such a thankless job and the morale is so low that the CIO bails as soon as it’s humanly possible. Either way this is a ghastly situation to be in when we’re five years into a conflict that’s going to last much, much longer and which the FBI is right in the middle of. This just doesn’t reflect the attitude of an organization that’s taking the War on Terror seriously.

How did it happen?

As I commented over on Bithead’s blog, the development approach was fundamentally flawed. The sad truth is that in the current computer software development environment large monolithic projects of three years or more in length are doomed to failure. The world computing environment is evolving very, very fast.

Another problem is that in today’s computing environment one of two things is true: a project that takes longer than a Microsoft operating system development cycle to complete (and that is required to function on the Microsoft operating system du jour) may never be completed or it will be seen as hopelessly obsolete. That’s the computing environment we’ve got right now, folks.

But there’s another, even more fundamental problem. Automating a function within an organization by its very nature will change that organization’s needs. The very process of automating the function changes the organization so that the original specification is inadequate. Computer automation is not a project—it’s a process.

And the procurement requirements of government are such that they are very poorly adapted to handling processes. They’re project-oriented. In my opinion that’s why so many government IT operations are so old-fashioned and backward looking. They just can’t adapt fast enough.

How can this stuff be avoided in the future?

I think that when dealing with a large project (particularly for the government) it’s important to adopt a strategy whereby you minimize downside risk. It’s possible to design the idea of salvage into a project. Every milestone of a project should have a useable deliverable as-is. That requires a very, very different way of looking at a project. The project is likely to be designed differently and it will be implemented differently.

Adaptivization can be designed into projects. A project can be designed with the idea that it will change. This requires a different frame of reference for those putting together the functional specifications and it will affect the tools used in the design and development and the approaches used in the design and development.

Think small. Use low-tech open source tools and off-the-shelf solutions whenever you can.

What’s going to happen?

My guess is that they’re going to use exactly the same approaches that got them into this fix and get exactly the same results as they got this time around. It would take a major change of culture to do anything else and that would mean a major change in personnel. Our government just doesn’t work that way.

Did I mention that they’re offshore outsourcing the post-mortem on this debacle? I hope they have some method of controlling the security setup with their British contractors. And their subcontractors. And their subcontractors’ subcontractors.

What’s the difference between opera and light opera? Or grand opera for that matter? According to my Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians an opera is just a sung play. A comic opera or light opera is an opera that includes both spoken dialogue and set pieces like arias, duets, trios, and choruses. An opera buffa is an opera that relies on secco recitative, literally “dry recitation” for its dialogue. That’s a kind of sung dialogue you might be familiar with from Mozart or Rossini. Their recitative is frequently accompanied only by harpsichord. Grand opera is sung throughout—no spoken dialogue. Think Verdi or Wagner. So far so good.

Lyric’s world premiere production of A Wedding is based on Robert Altman’s movie of the same name and was directed by Altman. The music was composed by William Bolcom with a libretto by Arnold Weinstein and Robert Altman. We’d heard McTeague at Lyric back in 1992, it was created by this same team, and so we had a pretty good idea of what to expect. I’d also heard Bolcom and Weinstein’s A View from the Bridge (based on the Arthur Miller play) and was completely enthralled with it so I’d thought that this production had possibilities.

The production opened onto a pretty fair simulacrum of the famous Tiffany stained-glass window at First Presbyterian Church in Lake Forest and so, we thought, fair enough. That’s where the story is set. Sets and costuming were attractive and appropriate. Performances were competent, perhaps even strong with a mostly American cast. But A Wedding was dull.

In the mid-20th century operatic genre-bending may have been a way of breathing new life into the old forms. Intermingling the conventions of opera buffa, grand opera, folk song, jazz, and other forms was ground-breaking fifty years ago. But now operatic genre-bending is a form with static and, in my opinion, rather stale conventions of its own. I think there was a good concept lurking within A Wedding somewhere: let’s create a 21st century version of the opera buffa of the late 18th-early 19th century like Barber of Seville or The Marriage of Figaro. And A Wedding is at its strongest when it conforms most closely to the conventions of this form. The Second Act recitative and duet between Kathryn Harries as the socialist-socialite Aunt Bea and the always-enjoyable Timothy Nolen as the professional wedding guest William Williamson was fun and memorable. Anna Christy as Muffin’s Act II aria was also lovely. And the duet between Jerry Hadley as Luigi and Catherine Malfitano as Victoria was unquestionably the finest musical point of the opera. Of course. They’re two of the finest American opera performers.

But while I’m on the subject of Catherine Malfitano let me gripe. Ms. Malfitano is unquestionably one of the opera world’s gems. A truly great artist. Her performances as Butterfly twenty years ago were absolutely riveting. And she’s been at the very pinnacle of operatic success ever since. That’s her in the picture at the top of the post at the right in the blond wig standing next to Jerry Hadley who’s wearing a morning suit. Between the blond wig and the weight I didn’t recognize her until she opened her mouth. All well and good. We’re all getting older, now, aren’t we? But take a look at the picture on the right. That’s the portrait used in the programme. Why is it that even the greatest opera stars use their high school graduation photos as head shots? Who do they think they’re kidding? Jerry Hadley’s not one bit bolder. He’s using an ancient picture, too. C’mon, now. I’m not picking on Malfitano and Hadley. All of the performers except the very youngest are using photos that don’t actually resemble them much anymore.

But back to my subject. I don’t know why the creators of A Wedding didn’t stick more closely to the conventions that, as I say, worked pretty well in Act II in Act I as well. But they didn’t. It’s a modern no-melody sung-throughout mid-20th century operatic genre-bending work with a few popular songs and a little rock-and-roll thrown in (and Bolcom can’t write rock-and-roll and Weinstein can’t write lyrics for it). So the first act is deadly dull and perks up a bit in the second act but not enough to save the work.

Even by the low standards of Lyric the crowd scenes were unusually static. They were not unlike poorly-rehearsed tableaux. I know that Altman is considered one of our finest directors for both stage and screen. Couldn’t a little of that brilliance have been extended to something other than the principle players?

And that’s my take on A Wedding. It’ll never last.

The season so far (best to worst): Das Rheingold, The Cunning Little Vixen, Aida, Don Giovanni, A Wedding.

Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:

• Abu Aardvark has been posting synopses of responses from the Arabic language media to the
  Sumatran tsunami. See here and here
• Check out American Future’s précis of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Project report.
• Clayton Cramer posts about the new New Math.
• TMLutas of Flit(tm) has
  a good post on economic deformations and the reasons to tolerate them.
• FuturePundit writes on our energy future.
• My guilty pleasure, Go Fug Yourself,
  is taking it out on Paget Brewster. Again.
• You should read Dan Darling’s comments on a Norwegian anti-terrorism paper over on Winds of Change.

That’s the lot.

The latest Carnival of the Recipes is now available for your reading, cooking, and eating pleasure. This time around it’s being hosted by VW of One Happy Dog Speaks. There’s a kedgeree recipe! I happen to be very fond of kedgeree. It’s one of the several things I only make when my wife’s not around. She won’t touch the stuff.

It’s been my practice over the last several months that after rising, while I put on my boots before walking the dogs, I check quickly to see if anyone is trying to attract my attention by reading my email and checking for any new trackbacks to The Glittering Eye. This morning what to my wondering (if bleary) eyes did appear but a trackback to a formidable post from Nadezdha of chez Nadezhda over on the adjunct site Liberals Against Terrorism. Nadezdha’s post, in turn, took me to this post from the ubiquitous praktike. They are probably best read together.

Praktike’s post is a, shall we say, forcefully-worded condemnation of the war in Iraq, the Bush Administration’s conduct of the war, Norman Podhoretz, the idea of a jihad magnet, David Frum, and others. His rant is at least in part a reaction to this article by Dana Priest in the Washington Post. In the article Priest says:

In a major new study, the CIA’s National Intelligence Council says Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of “professionalized” terrorists, officials at the CIA director’s intelligence think-tank said today.

This stands to reason I think. One of the reasons that we have the finest, most effective military in the world (besides spending twice as much in relation to national income as anyone else and the advantages of scale) is that we’ve practiced. We’ve practiced in major live conflicts every ten or twenty years for the last century (World War I, World War II, the Korean War, Viet Nam, Gulf War I) and minor conflicts in between (interventions in Russia, Nicaragua, China, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Somalia, Kosovo, etc.). And we’ve learned a little more from each of these conflicts and applied what we’ve learned the next time around. Is there any reason to believe that actual live experience is less important for terrorists or jihadis? I don’t think so.

In fact that’s one of the reasons that although I opposed the invasion of Iraq I think it’s incumbent on us to eliminate the terrorists and jihadis there regardless of the cost or levels of force required. Otherwise we run the risk of cultivating a seasoned and trained terrorist and jihadi force who have acquired skills that have been found to be effective against us and allowing them to operate freely in Iraq, here at home, and elsewhere in the world.

Nadezhda’s post is significantly more temperate. For me the most significant part was the very end and I’ll quote it here:

So I encourage others to “take the pledge” with me.

• I will try to forego the “I told you sos.”
• I will try to keep my eye on the core objectives and the primary stratetgic dangers.
• I will hope to heaven that George Bush is successful in navigating this tragedy and putting the US posture in the broader Middle East onto a better footing for the years to come.
• I will criticize strongly those specific tactics I think are misguided or likely to be counterproductive. I will scream if the Bush Admin seems to be getting off track strategically.
• But I will support this president in finding a way to mitigate the horrors of the civil war that we helped launched. And I will support him in his efforts to find the “peace with honor” — regardless of how fabulous or ficticious it may be — that’s acceptable to the American public.

That’s pretty nearly where I’ve been since April of 2003. Except for the screaming part. I’m more likely to give sorrowful criticism (or bide my time). The one thing with which I’d take exception is that I think that the evidence that we’ve helped launch a civil war in Iraq is very slim. In my view Saddam had been suppressing an ongoing civil war in Iraq for nearly 30 years. Removing Saddam merely restored the status quo ante.

Nadezhda isn’t the only one who’s been writing lately about the likelihood of civil war in Iraq. Zenpundit, riffing on a post by Juan Cole, has a post on the possibility of a neo-Ba’athist coup in Iraq.

As I see it the only good alternatives we had with respect to Iraq were:

• Leave it alone.
• Remove Saddam and partition it.
• Remove Saddam, disarm the Iraqis, close the borders, and let the Iraqis work out the rest in relative peace.

Each of these alternatives would have had its own costs and consequences.

What we have done is remove Saddam, let the Iraqis stay armed, let jihadis come in from neighboring countries, and hope for the best. It may all work out. Who knows? We’ll have a much better notion in upcoming months. I sincerely hope so for the good people of Iraq and for us, as well.

But I do recommend you read both of the posts I’ve linked to above.

UPDATE: Submitted to the Beltway Traffic Jam.

For me this is real comfort food and I prepare it pretty frequently. Try it and you probably will, too. This must be one of the most misnamed recipes in all of cuisine. The name, székely gulyás, pronounced seh-key goo-yahsh (sort of) means “gypsy goulash” in Hungarian. Only it probably isn’t a gypsy recipe and it’s not a goulash. It’s technically a pork pörkölt with sauerkraut and sour cream. Even people who don’t like either pork or kraut will like this. Last weekend I prepared it for my brother-in-law who’s a Californian and certainly didn’t grow up with Central European food. After eying it suspiciously and tasting it gingerly he wolfed it down like he’d never seen food before.

Székely gulyás

Serves 4

1 lb. pork cutlets, cut into bite-sized pieces
1 medium onion, peeled and chopped
2 Tbsp. cooking oil
3 Tbsp. Hungarian paprika
½ tsp. salt
Black pepper
¼ tsp. ground marjoram
1 lb. fresh sauerkraut
½ cup sour cream

1. Saute the onion in the oil in a 4 quart saucepan over medium heat until the onions just start to brown.
2. Add the pork and saute until just browned.
3. Add the paprika, black pepper, marjoram, and salt and saute for about 30 seconds.
4. Add just enough water to cover the meat.
5. Reduce the heat, cover the pan, and simmer for a half hour (add water if it gets low—it shouldn’t get either dry or soupy).
6. Rinse and drain the sauerkraut thoroughly.
7. Add the sauerkraut to the pan, stir in thoroughly, bring up to heat, and simmer for another 20 minutes.
8. Add the sour cream to the pan, mix thoroughly, reduce the heat to low and simmer until it’s warmed completely—about 10 minutes.

Serve this with plain boiled potatoes and some good rye bread. If you want a salad, peeled sliced cucumbers with sour cream and dill would be good. A little strudel for dessert and you’ll be all set.

One final note: please, please use Hungarian paprika. Anything else is only good for coloring.

Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:

• Wretchard of Belmont Club has a series of posts discussing whether we have
  enough boots on the ground in Iraq see here, here, and here.
• More from praktike of chez Nadezhda on
  Rosenberg for DNC chair.
• CodeBlueBlog begins a new installment of CSI: MedBlogs. How did the young marathon runner die?
• Dean Esmay continues his series of skeptical posts on HIV as the cause of AIDS.
  You should also read the paper linked to in the post. Interesting stuff.
• Froggy of Froggy Ruminations
  gives us a good example (and a darned good story) of why we don’t need a SysAdmin force (we’ve already got one).
• Now this is what the Internet is fantastic at. Now you know. Hat tip: Natalie Solent

That’s the lot.

In the last hour here in Chicago we’ve had a thunderstorm with rain and sleet. In January. Now we’ve got thick fog. I guess that’s why a Chicago gig is like playing the Palace for a meteorologist.