Pulling Guard from Standing Position

Pulling guard from a standing position is very easy and felt very natural to me.  We fell into an open guard and then had the option of closing it from there.

1. From a tie up, put your foot on the same side as your lapel grabbing hand on your opponents hip.
2. Fall flat on your back while maintaining grip on their sleeve and lapel.
3. While falling throw your other leg behind their back.  With the foot that you have put on their hip, bend your knee and try to keep it on the inside of your arms.  This will put their shoulder on your shin.
4. Pull them tight and straighten you leg to close your guard, or just keep them tight for open guard

One good thing to keep in mind if you attempt to pull guard in a tournament situation is that you can’t let them be grabbing for your leg when you do this or they will get points for a takedown.  Make sure you have ample space and there is no way the judges can give your opponent credit for a takedown.

Open Guard to Sweep

From the open guard with your knee inside above there are a ton of moves that are available. Here is a sweep which can turn into an armbar, or if it fails segues nicely into a kimura.

1. From Open Guard, you control their lapel and arm with your knee inside their arm (see-above)
2. Tighten your knees to control their arm that was on your lapel.  Move your free hand to their sleeve that is on your chest.
3. Move your outside arm down to their other sleeve.  You should have control of both sleeves at this point, one leg around their back, one leg bent and on their armpit.
4. Shoot your leg that was around their back straight to sink it deeper and throw it over their arm that is pinned to your chest nestling it in the same armpit as your bent leg.  Maintain control of both of their sleeves while you do this.
5. From this position you can stall pretty much indefinitely if so long as you control both of their sleeves.  You can use your legs to control their spacing from you and they will tire themselves out trying to get an escape.

I really liked this position.  It is really easy to attain and one you have it, very easy to maintain.  Just keep hand control throughout to prevent them from pulling away and use your legs to keep from getting smothered.

To complete the sweep:

1. Pull hard on their arm that is pinned to your chest.  Extend it and go for a cheap armbar against your own thigh.
2. The armbar will almost assuredly not work because they will bend their arm, so rock them up on your body and crank their arm to the floor.  This alone may roll them over.
3. If you can’t roll them over because they have a good base, use your arm that was controlling their arm NOT on you chest and grab their leg.  Pull it up toward your head and control it.  That should be enough to get them into a position where you an roll them.

Sweep to Armbar

This arm-bar felt very tight for me and came very naturally from the sweep.  I feel like this may be on the few arm bars I can pull off.

1. As you execute the above sweep and roll your opponent to their side, control their arm that was on your chest.
2. When they hit the ground immediately move your butt toward them.  This is to get their elbow above your pelvis.
3. Once you have done this you are already in armbar position.  Just control their sleeve and fall back in to the armbar.
4. When extended make sure that you pull the arm toward their pinky and keep your legs pinched together.

Open Guard to Kimura

This was a very slick move and also something I think that I could pull off when rolling.  I loved this class because I actually felt like all of these things we do-able for me right away in live action.

1. Attain the open guard described above all the way to the point where you are about to execute the sweep.
2. When your opponent relaxes, maintain control of their sleeves and take your leg that was bent in their armpit, kick it out and snap it back (like kickstarting a motorcycle).  This puts your knee on the other side of their arm and begins the Kimura.
3. Take your other leg and make sure it is high and lateral across their back.  Maintain control of their sleeve on the arm you are attacking.  Keep everything very tight, slowly switch hands and finish the kimura.

We didn’t roll today, but I rolled briefly before class.  I beat my guy with a rear naked choke (he was a white belt about my size).  Greg left me with a few good takeaways today:

• Proper grip of the gi is done with by wrapping one finger in the gi and curling the hand up under it.  This forces them to pull your index finger through the rest of your others to get free, rather than just pulling the gi out.
• Always finish arm bars but moving the arm toward its pinky finger.
• Always pinch your legs when attacking arms.  If they can’t wiggle then you control where they move.

This day (and the next couple weeks apparently) was devoted to “bad positions”. So we worked a counter to a hip throw and how to work out of a failed shot.

Hip-Throw Counter

This technique was supposed to be used if your opponent attempts to hip throw you from a standing position.

1. Start in a standing tie-up, one hand on lapel, the other on the elbow.  Your opponent steps in, shoots his hand around your back as if about to throw you.
2. Counter by immediately clamping down your arm around the arm he shoots in with.  This is very similar to a wizzer, except instead of cranking down, keep your head tight and grab your own lapel with the wizzering arm.
3. Grab their lapel (the other one) with your other hand.  Then transition your hand on your lapel to your other bicep.  You should end up with a figure-four around their arm holding their lapel.
4. Take your far leg and put it behind their knee as your fall to your back.  Use your leg and your arms to roll them over you.  You should end up in side control.

While this move is a little hard to describe it felt very natural.  Just falling was enough to get my partner (about my size) to roll over me even when he resisted.  The hand transitions can be done pretty slowly if you lock down tight, use your head and create friction between the gis.

Failed Shot

Sprawl reversal

This was the first of 3 techniques that you might use from a failed shot.  When you shoot and fail, the first thing you want to do is control an arm to prevent them from taking your back.  This technique assumes that you have control of an arm.

1. Start with your opponent sprawling on you, you’re on your knees.
2. Grab control of one of their arms and pull it tight underneath you.  You want to put your shoulder into the middle of their bicep, this is important to prevent the guillotine.
3. Drive hard into this arm, post up the opposite leg and use it to roll your opponent (think russian arm drag for how to use their arm).  This will roll your opponent when you get the angle correct.
4. As soon as your opponent rolls, control his near leg.  Always control the near leg to prevent them from taking (re-taking) guard.  Then plow them until they are on their back.  You should have their arm and near leg and side control when you are done.

Opponent takes your back

This technique is done if you cannot take control of their arm and they take your back (referee’s position).  This is very similar to the chicken wing in wrestling.

1. Hook whichever arm is below your shoulders.  Keep it very tight.  Your opponent cannot choke you with just one arm, so keep control of one of them.
2. Grab your opponents pant leg with your other arm (behind you)
3. Roll over your partner on the shoulder of the arm that you control.  This is very important, otherwise you roll right into a choke.  Roll over your clear shoulder.  Use their pant leg and your arm control to prvent them from basing out.
4. Keep control of both limbs and plow into them to roll them flat.  You know have side control or scarf hold, etc.

Opponent has one hook in

If you oppoenent takes your back and manages to get one hook in you are in trouble.  This technique is another roll that attempts to clear you out of that.

1. Control an arm and try to get it under your own.  Hook behind their elbow if you can and keep it tight as in the above technique.  If possible control the arm opposite the hook so you can grab the pant leg of the leg hooking you, but this is not necessary.
2. Roll on the shoulder of the arm that you are controlling.  Control your opponents leg with your other arm.
3. Work your way out of the hook while controlling your opponents leg and then roll over guard, side-control, mount, etc.

This technique felt very similar to how you escape from 2 hooks, except its way easier to base out and using a hand if you can spare one makes it easier to shed the hooks.

We didn’t roll at all during this class, but thats ok, I was pretty gassed.  Greg talked a lot at the end of the class and it was really helpful, a few takeaways that I had:

• Always control your opponents near leg when you are in side control, they really can pull guard then.  Straighten your arm if possible.
• Always turn toward the legs in a scramble.  This is where positions are made or lost.
• Your opponent can’t choke you with one arm, just control one solidly.
• Gi action is much slower.  Just try to win inches.  Inches add up, so if you can gain an inch and hold, gain an inch and hold you will end up in a good position.
• Always be deliberate.  This is a very very important one for me.   I think that is why I have been having a tough time improving (aside from lack of practice ).  I need to always know what the outcome of my next move will be.  Stop creating scrambles.  I like to create scrambles because I am fast and strong enough that I generally end up in a good position when the dust settles, but that is keeping me from improving.  If I always know exactly what I think the result of each technique will be I can do a few things:
  • If the technique succeeds then I can become more strategic and hone the array of moves I use, when I use them, etc.
  • If it fails I can figure out why.  Was I in the wrong position?  Bad technique?  Too weak?  Knowing the answer to this is how you get better.

All in all, I really enjoyed it.  It was fun to work with Greg again and I think the advice about being deliberate will really help me going forward.

In short the gem monitors the queries that your server is making and notifies you as to whether or not you are encountering any N+1 scenarios.  It also notifies you as to whether or not you have unused eager loads.  It can be configured to notify you via javascript alerts, growl notifications, firebug notifications, or just log the instances.

Thus far it has been invaluable in finding instances where an eager load would help.  It can (and should) be configured to run only in Development mode and will sit in the background until it has something to notify you about, so you can just turn it on, keep coding, and as you browse around your local instance, get notified as to potential areas for optimization.

While it is definitely worth installing a few things to note:

1. You still need to use your judgement as to what is the right call, this just points out areas to investigate (though it does tell you what models to include)
2. It has some bugs still.  There are instances where it correctly insists that you should include something, and then incorrectly tells you that you have an unused eager load once you include it

If you have your development.rb file in source control and shared among developers, one slight modification to the code on the github site that removes the gem dependency from your fellow developers is as follows:

config.after_initialize do
  begin
    require 'bullet'
    Bullet.enable = false
    Bullet.alert = false
    Bullet.bullet_logger = true
    Bullet.console = true
    Bullet.rails_logger = true
    Bullet.disable_browser_cache = true
    begin
      require 'ruby-growl'
      Bullet.growl = true
    rescue MissingSourceFile
    end
  rescue MissingSourceFile
  end
end

Side Control to Knee Mount

We started by working Side Control to Knee Mount combinations.  The transition was very simple

1. From side control (your opponent’s left side), transition your hand at their head to get a firm grip on their far side collar.
2. Your hand that was controlling their leg moves to their belt (or pants) and hold firm.
3. Do a pushup and put your left knee on their stomach, stretch your right leg out far behind you.  Stretching the leg is important both for base and so that they can not hook it with their arm and roll you.
4. In a tournament, posture up to show control and you have earned your points (MMAA rain down shots)

This transition felt really smooth for me and I can see it being very effective as I end up in side control a lot.

Knee Mount to Arm Bar

From knee mount we then showed a simple arm bar counter that you can use when your opponent tries to push you off.

1. Obtain Knee Mount as described above
2. Your opponent reaches across their body to try to push your knee of of their stomach creating some space between their torso and arm
3. Reach cross body (left arm) into the space that they have created and grab their triceps.  Reaching deeper helps put the arm in the right position as you engage the arm bar.
4. Swing your extended leg around their head and put your toes into/under to their ribcage (Japanese arm bar style).  Grab their pants leg with your free hand.
5. Finish the arm bar by pinning their head and extending your hips, controlling the pant leg and their wrist

Knee Mount to Collar Choke

This move was a follow up to the knee mount to arm bar combo and should be used when they attempt to push off your knee but do not create enough space for you to reach through and grab their triceps.

1. Obtain Knee Mount as described above
2. Your opponent reaches across their body to try to push your knee of of their stomach but does not created any space to grab their tricep
3. Shoot your free hand down grab their collar behind their head.  You should attempt to shoot pretty deep, keep it on the inside of your other hand but get them close.
4. You now have two hands grabbing their collar, behind their head.  Take your first hand (furthest away from you) and without letting go of the collar, rotate it around their head.  You now should have your arms crossed, scissoring their neck.  Apply the choke by tightening your arms.  Lean forward and post on your head to finish.

Rolling

We rolled for the last 30 minutes of class.  It went well, I didn’t get tapped out by anybody and tapped out around 80% of my guys.  I was truly exhausted though, with a lot of stalling then a flurry of action.  A few notes about this gym vs. Demon:  Much better shape, not as technical, very poor takedowns.  It was weird to feel like one of the more technical guys in the room, I don’t normally feel that way (keep in mind we were all white belts… but still).  It was good in that I was in the worst shape of everybody but was having some success, so its just another example of why good technique is essential and I should stop relying on physicality (when I am in shape).  Looking forward to some no-gi once my foot heals (stepped on some glass last night )

IDE

For an IDE I am using EasyEclipse for LAMP which is a nice little package.  It uses Eclipse as its base IDE but integrates plugins for PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails (not that good), Subclipse and others.  Just download the latest build and install it.

XAMPP

To run locally you can install WAMP (I used to use this, it was good) or XAMPP.  I am trying XAMPP for now because it is integrated nicely into Eclipse.  Out of the box you will get MySQL, Apache, FileZilla and Mercury up and running if you install this.

At this point you can import directly from you subversion repository into the xampp\htdocs directory and you should have a working enlistment deployed (make sure Apache is started) to http://localhost/your_enlistment

There are a few more things that you might want to install, including PEAR and Memcached.

PEAR

To install PEAR for XAMPP, open a command prompt (cmd.exe) as an Administrator (Vista only).

Then navigate the your xampp\php\PEAR\PEAR and execute the go-pear.phar script (its PHP) via:

php go-pear.phar

You should be able to use the default settings (unless you’ve tweaked your XAMPP installation).  When prompted as to whether you would like to update your php.ini file, say Yes.

At this point you should be done and can now reference PEAR libraries in your PHP scripts.

Memcached

If you need memcached you can get this up and running in a variety of ways.  If you want to build from source you can find it here.  Otherwise search for a pre-compiled windows32 version.  Copy the binaries to some place on your development machine and then you will need to start and install the service.

To install the service open a command prompt as an administrator and navigate to the directory with memcached.exe.  Install the service by typing: memcached -d install

To start the service type: memcached -d start

Note that the default reserved cache size for memcached is only 64MB, so if you would like it to be larger, launch the service and append a -m followed by the number of megabytes as an integer.  So to launch and reserve a half gig you would launch it as: memcached -d start -m 512

Now that the service is running, you will need to let php know that it is.  Make sure that you have the correct extension (php_memcache.dll) in the php\ext folder in your xampp directory.  After you have verified that this is there, you should update the php.ini file and uncomment (remove the preceding “;”) the following line:

extension=php_memcache.dll

Make sure that this is the php.ini file associated with apache if you want to test this on your local pc (i.e. the one in your apache folder), otherwise you will just have access to this via the CLI version of PHP.  Restart Apache and you should be good to go.  If you are having issues make sure that there is a Memcache section in your phpinfo() output to verify that the extension is being loaded.

Hope this helps, leave any questions in the comments and I’ll try to help.

First lets start by looking at the Windows Clipboard in general. The clipboard, as we all know, stores blobs that the user has copied or cut from windows applications for future use. It stores this data in a variety of formats (if writing a windows application you can use the formats specified by the DataFormats class.) It is a convenient way to transport data between applications in windows. A simple example of writing to the clipboard in c# would then look like:

// For this example, the data to be placed on the clipboard is a simple
// string.
string textData = "I want to put this string on the clipboard.";
 
// After this call, the data (string) is placed on the clipboard and tagged
// with a data format of "Text".
Clipboard.SetData(DataFormats.Text, (Object)textData);

Doing this on in a windows app is great, and easy, because that is really what the api’s were designed for… but what if we want to do this in a web app? Why would we do this you ask, well one argument is that as web apps and client apps converge, users are starting to expect more and more of the familiar windows UI concepts to be available to them on the web. Yeah, we’ll say that is the reason.

In a web app, there are primarily 3 ways that we are going to run code that will interact with our user: javascript, flash, and silverlight. We’ll take a look at each of these and see what is possible.

Javascript

So what can we do with javascript and the clipboard? It depends on the browser and on the interaction that you want. Lets start with the simplest, and potentially cross browser action: execCommand. The execCommand method can perform a variety of operations, but the ones we care about are ‘copy’, ‘cut’, and ‘paste’. Because execCommand was built with enabling javascript based wysiwyg editors in mind, it operates on the selected areas of a web page. That is, text that has been highlighted or where there is an active cursor (e.g. in a text box). So how can we use execCommand? If you want to simply copy the selection to the clipboard, then it is trivial and you can just:

document.execCommand("Copy");

This copies the user’s selection to the clipboard.

What is good about the execCommand copy approach? It is potentially cross browser (not with default security settings in FF) and simple to implement. So long as they have javascript enabled you can use it. What is bad? In modern browsers the user will be prompted the first time that you attempt to do this and warned that you are trying to access their clipboard, which is a bad UX but necessary for security reasons.

Furthermore, you may only copy text that the user has selected in the browser.

For more examples of execCommand clipboard stuff, see this Geekpedia tutorial or this excellent JS WYSIWYG Editor tutorial.

The IE only alternative

An option, if for some strange reason you would like to build an application that only works in IE, is to take advantage of the clipboardData object. Using this, you can write and read directly from the clipboard and the user prompt is ignored when using the default security settings. Using this you can only take advantage of two ‘types’ on the clipboard: ‘text’ and ‘url’

To write text to the clipboard, you could then do the following:

var textToCopy = "This is some text for the clipboard";
window.clipboardData.setData("Text", textToCopy);

One nice thing about this, is that you can write arbitrary text to the clipboard (no user selection needed). But remember, this is Internet Explorer only. Mozilla does have a solution, but it is FF only. So if you want to use the clipboard in all browsers and not change security settings what can we do?

Flash

The best answer so far is flash. The idea (originally credited to Mark O’Sullivan) is to use the Flash setClipboard method to write to the clipboard. Why is this better than the javascript solutions? Because, the good people at Adobe did all the cross browser work for us. Now the only requirement is that the browser has a flash plugin, which given the penetration of flash is a fair bet. What we can then do is, when we want to copy something to the clipboard, we pass (via javascript) the the text to our flash object and let it do the clipboard dirty work.

Jeffothy Keyings has a good example of how to do this, and links to the open source flash object (_clipboard.swf) by O’Sullivan.

Silverlight

I looked and looked, and to the best of my knowledge Silverlight does not yet expose a method for accessing the clipboard. Alas.

Conclusions

So where does that leave us?

1. If you want cross browser clipboard access you will need to use flash.
2. If you do not want a dependency on flash, then you only have a good solution for IE

One last thing…

One more thing that is worth noting is that you can only write to and read from the clipboard from within the browser using the TEXT format. Why is that important? Because if you want to put images, or rich text on the clipboard you can’t. If you go into your browser and highlight some text with styles and then paste it into Microsoft Word, you see that the styles are preserved. That is because this is written to the Clipboard and read from it as RTF. Not only that, but if you paste it into Microsoft OneNote, you’ll find that you can see the original source of the clip. That is because as rich client apps, IE (or FF), Word and OneNote are not sandboxed in the same way that flash and javascript are. To see this more clearly try downloading Clipboard Inspector and looking at the format of items that you copy to the clipboard.

When clipping from a web browser you get the HTML option and there is header information showing source, etc:

When you write via javascript or flash you are forced to write out text, so when applications access the clipboard, even if you have valid HTML on there they will html encode the characters thinking they they are text, and thus not render them correctly. There are numerous reasons why this makes sense from a security perspective, but it is a pain and something that web developers need to be aware of nonetheless.

Lets look at a simple example.

Say you have 2 cars, a Honda Sedan which gets 30mpg and a Ford SUV which gets 15mpg. You put an equal number of miles on both cars and can’t get rid of the SUV because you need it for hauling SUV sized things.

Now you are proud of your eco-friendliness, you recycle your cans and buy only organic, free-range, local food, so you want to figure out what you can do to use less gas. You realize that you have enough money to upgrade one of your cars. You can replace the Sedan with a Hybrid that gets 55mpg or you can replace the SUV with a Hybrid that gets 22mpg. Which would you choose?

According to Larrick most people would replace the Sedan. Why? Because 50mpg sounds like a great thing! A gain of 25 mpg sounds far more Green Peacey than a gain of 7mpg.

Now, lets look at the math.

Lets say that you drive 1000 miles a month, evenly split between the two vehicles. That means that pre-upgrade we are burning:

500/30 + 500/15 = ~50.0 gallons of gas (16.6 for the Sedan, 33.3 for the SUV)

If we upgrade the Sedan, we get:

500/55 + 500/15 = ~42.4 gallons of gas (9.1 for the Sedan, 33.3 for the SUV)

If we upgrade the SUV, we get:

500/30 + 500/22 = ~39.3 gallons of gas (16.6 for the Sedan, 22.7 for the SUV)

So by upgrading the SUV, even though you only boost it by 7mpg you are actually burning less gas overall! Why is this? Because we are holding the number of miles driven fixed, thus the more important statistic is how many gallons per mile your car gets. Miles per gallon is useful when figuring out how far you can go on a tank of gas but less so, when you have a fixed distance to travel and are looking to figure out how much gas you’ll need.

Larrick’s paper concludes that people looking to save gas (or trees) should figure out the gallons per mile for their vehicles when considering upgrades. For our above examples we can see that the cars got (in units of gallons per 10 miles):

Sedan + SUV = 0.333 + 0.666 = 1 gallons/10 miles
Hybrid Sedan + SUV = 0.182 + 0.666 = 0.848 gallons/10 miles
Sedan + Hybrid SUV = 0.333 + 0.456 = 0.789 gallons/10 miles

Something to consider next time you get a car, and yet another feather in the behavioral decision theorists’ caps.

Could your shower curtain be harming your health?

An environmental group claims in a new study of vinyl shower curtains that some of them may release into the air toxic chemicals which could cause asthma, eye irritation or even cancer.

“We have a clear-cut case that these products release elevated levels of harmful chemicals,” said report co-author Mike Schade, PVC campaign coordinator for the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. “Our research builds on a growing body of evidence that shows that the government fails to protect us from the growing number of toxic chemicals in products.”

But some health experts are paying scant attention to those behind the curtain study. And perhaps with good reason.

Skeptics pointed out what they call a glaring error in the study’s methodology. The group tested a total of five shower curtains, of which only one shower curtain — not one brand; one curtain — was subjected to complete testing for chemicals in its composition, as well as those it released into the air — a phenomenon known as “off-gassing.”

Further testing was not performed “to avoid potential instrument damage,” according to the report.

The study found the one curtain which was tested for off-gassing may have released, over the course of the first few hours after it was opened, chemicals that could be toxic if swallowed or inhaled only in quantities thousands of times greater than those found.

Critics said that the testing was not verified by an independent lab and didn’t account for real-world conditions such as temperature or humidity in a shower stall.

The study also included estimated results for some of the chemical amounts it reported, and most of the off-gassed chemicals found initially were not detectable after a few days.

In short, it is a piece of shower curtain research that some experts said just doesn’t hold water.

They tested FIVE CURTAINS? Thats it?! Not only that but only one was fully tested and it emmitted for a short times toxic gasses that are 1/1000 of the toxic dose? While the rest of the article continues to backtrack and talk slightly more rationally, if you acknowledge these facts in your article, then how in the world can you lead with “Could your shower curtain be harming your health?”?! Furthermore, lets not understate the case, the last line should read “it is a piece of shower curtain research that any and all scientists that have the right to use the title said just doesn’t hold water.”

Jesus, I need to just watch the news for 30 seconds to remind myself why I don’t make a habit of it. I take solace in hoping that everyone involved in this scare mongering really believes what they said and is trying to figure out how to get by without a plastic shower curtain.

For the most part I intend to study the Behavioral Economics literature and keep my notes here. Given that I will also be writing about technology and the person who cares about both of these two topics is rare, I suggest to the would be reader that they subscribe to one of my topic feeds (programming, econ, etc) to help filter the noise.