Title: Rats, Bats, and Vats
Author: Dave Freer, Eric Flint
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 2000
ISBN: 0671318284
Pages: 448
Keywords: science fiction, humor
Reading period: 12-13 May, 2007

A bunch of grunts, trapped behind enemy lines, wreak havoc on the hive of the Magh invaders. No ordinary grunts these, they include a dozen uplifted rats and bats, a vat-grown human sous-chef turned conscript, and the rescued daughter of a very rich Shareholder. The rats revel in Shakespearean names and ribaldry. The bats have stage-Oirish personas, socialist leanings, and expertise with explosives.

Due to forceshield technology, they're fighting a World War I-style trench war on the planet Harmony and Reason, The generals, like the rest of the ruling Shareholder class, are effete and inept. Think Blackadder goes Forth.

A fairly amusing satire of human mores.

Title: Doomsday Book
Author: Connie Willis
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Bantam
Copyright: 1992
ISBN: 0553562738
Pages: 578
Keywords: science fiction
Reading period: 1-5 May, 2007

Kivrin is a student historian sent back in time to December 1320 to observe a medieval Christmas in an Oxfordshire village. Back in the Oxford of the mid-twentyfirst century, her tutor Dunworthy grows extremely worried, as the tech who sent her back collapsed into a coma, mumbling something about slippage.

The book alternates between Kivrin and Dunworthy. Kivrin falls sick just after she lands. She wakes in an isolated, snowbound country manor, being nursed by Lady Eliwys and her mother-in-law Lady Imeyne.

Dunworthy becomes ever more worried when Oxford and its environs are quarantined. The comatose tech has an unfamiliar virus, which starts spreading.

Kivrin becomes obsessed with finding her way back to the rendezvous point within the next two weeks, or she'll never go home. She ends up looking after Eliwys's two daughters, Rosemund and Agnes. At Christmas, people start falling sick and dying. She learns that she's actually in 1348, the middle of the Black Death.

Back in the future, people are dying all around Dunworthy, who now stands in loco parentis to twelve-year-old Colin. A plague is loose in Oxford too.

The details of time travel inform some of the plot, but Willis concentrates on weaving two parallel tales with eerie similarities. The future Oxonians are beleagured, but far better able to cope, emotionally and medically. Kivrin despairs as the Oxfordshire villagers die all around her. She understands the mechanics of the plague, but is helpless to address it without modern medicine.

Title: Saturday Author: Ian McEwen
Rating: 5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Anchor
Copyright: 2005
ISBN: 1400076196
Pages: 282
Keywords: fiction
Reading period: 22 April-5 May, 2007

Henry Perowne undergoes a long, stressful day on Saturday, February 15th, 2003–the day of the giant anti-Iraq war march in London. Perowne is a middle-aged neurosurgeon, happily married to Rosalind, a lawyer, and father of Theo, a rising blues musician, and Daisy, a newly published poet living in Paris.

His day begins very early when he sees a flaming plane in the sky (not an attack but an engine fire); a morning drive turns nasty when his car is sideswiped by a thug known as Baxter; his normally friendly squash match becomes a grudge match; his weekly visit to his senile mother and Theo's recital provide interludes; a family reunion with Daisy and his father-in-law is ruined when Baxter invades his home; and finally, he is called out to perform an emergency operation.

McEwen weaves together the trivial and weighty strands of Perowne's life, all against the backdrop of the peace march. Perowne himself has no direct contact with the march, and is ambivalent about it, having treated Iraqis who were tortured by Saddam, but not trusting the motives of those promoting the war.

Beautifully written, this is an acute psychological study. Thoughtful but not tortured, loved by his family, largely at peace with himself, Perowne is a decent man, coping with the stresses of an eventful day.

Highly recommended.

Via Digg, one heck of a Rube Goldberg contraption. The Digg page also led to The Bravery - Honest Mistake below.

Title: Living Dead in Dallas
Author: Charlaine Harris
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Ace
Copyright: 2002
ISBN: 0441009239
Pages: 262
Keywords: mystery, vampire
Reading period: 22 April, 2007

The second of Charlaine Harris's Dead series about Sookie Stackhouse, a waitress in small-town Louisiana. A telepathic waitress. With a vampire boyfriend.

Vampires were legalized two years ago and now live openly. Sookie is asked by the local vampire cabal to visit their counterparts in Dallas and use her talents to find a missing vampire. She finds that he is being held by the Fellowship of the Sun, a fundamentalist church that wants to take the un out of undead.

Harris portrays life in small Southern towns with a deft touch, and she breathes fresh life, er, undeath into vampire cliches.

Title: The Guards
Author: Ken Bruen
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur
Copyright: 2001
ISBN: 0312320272
Pages: 291
Keywords: mystery
Reading period: 21-22 April, 2007

A gritty noir set in the western Irish city of Galway. Jack Taylor used to be in the guards (police) as a young man, but nowadays he's usually found at the bottom of a bottle. He makes a little money by finding things. One day, a distraught mother asks him to prove that her teenaged daughter did not commit suicide. He is reluctant to take the case, fearing (rightly) that it will require too much of him. Jack struggles mightily with his alcoholism, and both the case and his drinking take a toll on him and his network of friends.

Terse and atmospheric, Bruen conjures up a Galway that is half gone, of old-fashioned pubs and dingy travelers' hotels threatened by the changes wrought by the Celtic Tiger.

Title: Hurricane Punch
Author: Tim Dorsey
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Harper Collins
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 9780060829674
Pages: NNN
Keywords: mystery, humor
Reading period: 19-21 April, 2007

A fast-paced comedy about an almost likable serial killer. Who'da thunk it?

There must be something about the coffee they serve in Florida newsrooms. Dave Barry, Carl Hiassen, and Tim Dorsey. All Florida-based newsmen now known for their funny writing.

This is the first book that I've read by Dorsey. According to Wikipedia, all of his books feature Serge A. Storms, said serial killer, though he's not always the prime character.

Serge spends much of the book racing around Florida, chasing hurricanes, with his stoner sidekick, Coleman. He's feeling put upon because there's another serial killer on the loose. Serge is hyperkinetic and full of enthusiasms, but easily distracted. He specializes in the imaginative murders of jerks who annoy him, such as the Hip-Hop Redneck who meets his end in a motel-room-sized amplifier and the storm profiteer who cooks to death in an ice chest.

Pretty funny, in a twisted way.

Title: The Shape Shifter
Author: Tony Hillerman
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Harper Collins
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0060563451
Pages: 276
Keywords: mystery
Reading period: 16-19 April, 2007

This is the latest in Tony Hillerman's long-running series of police procedurals featuring Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Sgt. Jim Chee of the Navajo tribal police.

Leaphorn has retired recently and misses the job. An old, old case of his comes to life when he is shown a recent picture of a priceless Navajo rug long thought to be destroyed in a fire that killed a man on the FBI's most-wanted list. The investigation leads him into finding what really happened to the rug and the long-dead killer.

Hillerman, as ever, is particularly good at depicting modern-day Indians, conflicted by the demands of modern life and trying to keep tribal ways alive. Hillerman weaves a slow-paced but satisfying tale. There's no great mystery here: the current identity of the killer is revealed halfway through the book. Hillerman concentrates on character and atmosphere, and painlessly includes a good deal of Navajo and Laotian (!) beliefs and creation stories.

Far too many modern mysteries and thrillers rely on improbably evil and capable sociopaths. There are certainly a lot of sociopaths, but few of them are as capable as Hollywood would have it. I've grown tired of this plot device, which is to say that Hillerman fell prey to it here. Too bad.

I would like to have seen more of the newly married Jim Chee in this book. He and Bernadette barely appear at all.

In response to the following letter:

Subject: Thurs 4/19: Impeachment in Olympia
Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 15:04:29 -0400
From: Democrats.com <activist@democrats.com>
Reply-To: activist@democrats.com

HELP WASHINGTON STATE IMPEACH BUSH AND CHENEY
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/wa

PLEASE JOIN US FOR AN HISTORIC DEBATE ABOUT IMPEACHMENT AND THE IRAQ WAR, ON THE FLOOR OF THE WASHINGTON STATE SENATE ON THURSDAY, APRIL 19TH, 11:00AM. RALLY 10:00 AM.

We have one more week to move SJM 8016 to a vote in the Washington State Senate. WE CANNOT LET DEMOCRACY QUIETLY SLIP AWAY. Democratic leadership can still move SJM 8016, Senator Oemig's bill to investigate President Bush and Vice President Cheney, to the floor for a vote, if they choose. Our intention in this campaign is to send our memorial to the US Congress, not to let our bill rot in committee. We need to send out a flood of calls and emails to members of the Washington State Senate, asking them to move SJM 8016 to a vote. It is not enough for our Senators to say that they will vote "if SJM 8016 makes it to the floor." We must urge them to actively advocate for a vote, and to lobby their colleagues in favor of SJM 8016 as well. We need your help this week, to convince leadership to move SJM 8016 to a vote. Here is how you can help:

1. Email or call State Senate leadership today. Urge them to provide leadership by moving SJM 8016 to the floor for a vote. Please tell them that we can't wait until the next legislative session to call the Bush Administration into account. With our current constitutional crisis, we must insist that our Senators exercise their power and influence to support and protect the US Constitution. Remind then that their sworn oath to defend the Constitution is their only oath of office, and their highest calling as a public official. The eyes of the country are upon them now. SJM 8016 may be the most important legislation they vote on in their entire career. The fate of our country deserves their dedicated efforts now. We want our Senators to go on record now with their votes. We need to send this message daily to all of leadership. Here are emails for leadership:

brown.lisa@leg.wa.gov
eide.tracey@leg.wa.gov
chopp.frank@leg.wa.gov
murray.edward@leg.wa.gov
spanel.harriet@leg.wa.gov
regala.debbie@leg.wa.gov
rockefeller.phil@leg.wa.gov

2. Contact Governor Christine Gregoire. Ask her to support SJM 8016 by letting Democratic leadership know that she wants them to move SJM 8016 to a vote. Ask her kindly to honor her own oath of office and to use her influence now to restore rule of law in this country. We ask her to protect us from the abuses of the Bush Administration. Governor Gregoire has not received enough communication on this issue. Let Governor Gregoire know that opposition to SJM 8016 would show she does not vigorously support the US Constitution. We want a vote on SJM 8016 so we know where our Legislators stand. Help us flood her office with calls and emails all week long:
(360) 902-4111
http://www.governor.wa.gov/contact

3. PLEASE COME TO THE STATE CAPITOL IN OLYMPIA TO ATTEND THE DEBATE ON APRIL 19TH AT 11:00.

We will gather to rally at 10:00 am (details TBA). Our March 1st rally in Olympia had 500 people. Let's make this one 1,000 and let the world know that democracy lives in Washington state. As the second state to call for impeachment through our state legislature, we are providing hope and leadership for the rest of the country. We must keep pushing ahead, and keep impeachment "on the table". Every day that we make our voices heard, we win another step toward restoring democracy.

Please arrange for transportation with people from your community. We are asking that people sitting in the Senate gallery wear something "Guantanamo orange." (Since signs are not allowed in the Senate gallery, we will alert our Senators to our presence by wearing orange.)

Thank you for your timely response to this call to action. Your commitment to the practice of Democracy has inspired me personally, and given me hope that the good people of this country will prevail.

Thank you,

Linda Boyd Washington For Impeachmentx

---

FORWARD THIS EMAIL

I just sent the following letter:

Senator Oemig's bill to investigate the Bush Administration is of vital importance, and I urge you to bring it to the floor of the Senate for a vote.

It seems clear that the Administration lied us into an unnecessary war of aggression against Iraq -- a war that has killed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis; a war that has hurt our national security; a war that has led us into torture and violating the Geneva Conventions; a war that has alienated us from our friends and allies; in short, a war that we cannot afford financially, morally, or militarily.

Surely this is enough to bring impeachment proceedings against the President and the Vice President. We must have a full investigation. The Oemig bill is one of the few avenues that can start this investigation, since our representatives in the other Washington are not minded to do so.

I believe that this is not a distraction, but the highest service that the Washington legislature can perform for the nation. The 2006 mid-term elections were a referendum on Iraq and on the President. He has repeatedly shown his contempt for the will of the people since then. In the remaining 21 months of his term, he may precipitate us into yet more wars, with Iran and Syria.

I urge you to bring Senator Oemig's bill to the floor, and to lobby your colleagues to make this happen.

Thank you.

George V. Reilly,
Seattle, WA 98108

Title: Shadowmarch
Author: Tad Williams
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Daw
Copyright: 2004
ISBN: 0756403596
Pages: 762
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 8-15 April, 2007

Centuries ago, the fairies were driven north, where they lurk behind the Shadowline. They want their lands back. The humans living in Southmarch are blithely unaware that the Shadowline is drifting purposefully southwards, being preoccupied with their own politics. The king is being held hostage by a treacherous southern neighbor. The oldest prince is murdered shortly after the book opens, leaving the teenage twins, Briony and Barrick, as the regents.

Briony manages to rise to the occasion, but her half-crippled brother starts cracking under the strain. The book follows several other characters, notably Chert, a hobbit-like creature who adopts a strange boy that he found wandering near the Shadowline, and Qinnitan, the newest wife in the harem of the Autarch, far to the south of Southmarch.

Williams juggles the various storylines fairly effectively, building a new world of fantasy. His characters have plausible motivations and problems. Perhaps he could have done it in fewer pages. This is the first book in a projected trilogy. Is there a law requiring fantasy books to be be huge?

Title: No Good Deeds
Author: Laura Lippman
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 9780060570736
Pages: 383
Keywords: mystery
Reading period: 5-7 April, 2007

Baltimore: home to Edgar Alan Poe, the Orioles, and P.I. Tess Monaghan, the subject of most of Laura Lippman's books.

Tess's live-in boyfriend Crow is a trusting soul, which both endears him to her and exasperates her. One cold night, he brings home a homeless teenager, Lloyd Jupiter. At first, she is annoyed. Then she realizes that Lloyd is unwittingly connected to the recent murder of a federal prosecutor.

As events develop, Crow and Lloyd go on the run, while Tess stonewalls against the feds, reluctant to betray Crow's trust.

Tess, like so many fictional PIs, has a stubborn streak and her mouth sometimes gets her into trouble. She is not a loner, however, having deep roots in Baltimore. Her loving family and friends are recurring characters, though most of them remain offscreen in this book.

Lippman is quite acute when she deals with liberal guilt and the hard life of homeless teenagers. I think she's losing some of her enthusiasm for this series, and several of her recent novels have been standalone books.

Title: Academ's Fury
Author: Jim Butcher
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Ace
Copyright: 2005
ISBN: 0441013406
Pages: 529
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 31 March-3 April, 2007

Jim Butcher is best known for The Dresden Files, a noirish urban fantasy series. Academ's Fury is the second book in his straight, high fantasy series, The Codex Alera, which is set in a world at the technological level of the Roman Empire. Many of the characters have Roman names and I expect that we'll learn in a future book that they are somehow descendants of marooned Romans. This is not Earth: there are several alien races. More importantly, every human can call upon one or more furies, elemental beings with varying levels of control over air, fire, water, wood, and metal.

Every human except one: Tavi, the teenaged hero, who cannot call upon any furies whatsoever. He is now a student at the elite Academy in the capital of the Realm. The story switches between Tavi, his aunt Isana, and her brother Bernard's lover, Amara: all of whom come to realize that their world is under attack by a hitherto unknown alien race, the vord.

This is an entertaining, fast-paced novel with plenty of swords and not a little sorcery, which contrives to leave almost every chapter hanging from a cliff.

I got myself a R.E.Load bag for my birthday. My previous bag, a so-called Large Cafe bag from Tom Bihn, wasn't large enough to accommodate a 17" MacBook Pro.

The R.E.Load bag turned out to be less than ideal. It is, if anything, too big, and it lacks dividers and smaller pockets. My laptop and other stuff was swimming around inside it. It's a messenger bag aimed at real bike messengers, not laptop-toting nerds.

Last weekend, I went down to Tom Bihn's showroom again and picked up a Super Ego bag, like the one pictured here. This bag is designed to tote laptops, and it's working out a lot better.

I still have the other bag for now. R.E.Load would only take it back for in-store credit, and I didn't see myself wanting another bag from them. I haven't decided if I'm going to hang on to it, or try to sell it on Craig's List.

It's a pity. I like the outside of the R.E.Load bag and the inside of the Tom Bihn bag.

Ignite Seattle is a series of geek nights in Seattle, hosted by O'Reilly Radar and Make magazine. The third one is coming up on Thursday, April 5th, at CHAC, the Capitol Hill Arts Center.

Could be interesting. I think I might go.

Title: Purity of Blood
Author: Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Plume
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0452287987
Pages: 267
Keywords: historical fiction
Reading period: 30-31 March, 2007

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

— Monty Python

They certainly do in the Madrid of 1623. The Spanish Empire is at its peak, ruling much of the Americas as well as the Low Countries. The Spanish Inquisition functions as an ecclesiastical secret police, defending the Faith against heretics—and Jews—and ensuring orthodoxy by keeping an iron grip on the hearts and minds of the Spanish people.

This book is the second in a series of novels about Captain Alatriste, a sword-for-hire. The novels are related in flashback by Íñigo, a 13-year-old at the time of this novel, but much older when he's finally telling the story. The novels have been adapted into a movie, Alatriste, not yet released in the U.S.

Pérez-Reverte is playing homage to the d'Artagnan Romances of Alexandre Dumas. It is a time of fiercely guarded honor, where men take offense at the merest slight. Alatriste, a 20-year veteran of the Flanders wars, is world-weary and far less idealistic and chivalrous than the young d'Artagnan of The Three Musketeers.

Alatriste is enlisted to rescue a novice from a corrupt convent, where well-connected priests are sexually abusing the nuns. She comes from a family of conversos or New Christians, Jews who have converted to Catholicism. The rescue is betrayed: Alatriste escapes, but Íñigo is captured and sent to the Spanish Inquisition.

Pérez-Reverte brings to life seventeenth-century Spain, against a backdrop of intrigue and swashbuckling action. He both glorifies and criticizes Spain, foreshadowing the long decline of her fortunes. He is deservedly harsh on the Inquisition, as he details Íñigo's suffering at their hands and the burning of heretics at an auto-da-fé.

Alatriste, who had grown isolated and alone, is forced to admit that Íñigo has found a chink in his armor, as he struggles to save his young protegé.

Title: Moon Called
Author: Patricia Briggs
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Ace
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0441013813
Pages: 288
Keywords: mystery, fantasy
Reading period: 28-29 March, 2007

A certain subgenre has grown up over the last few years. Call it "vampire mystery" or urban fantasy or "horror fiction" or "paranormal romance". Stories set in a world that looks a lot like ours, but witches, vampires, werewolves, and other creatures exist among us, sometimes openly, sometimes not. The creatures have complex personal lives, generally sticking together with their own kind and treating gingerly with the other paranormals. The hero (often, heroine) is not necessarily human and has close friends, lovers, and enemies who are vampires or werewolves or witches. In the best hardboiled tradition, the stubborn hero has a smarter mouth than is good for them.

Buffy is the best-known example on TV, but there are many books. Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series; Jim Butcher's Dresden Files; Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan books; C. E. Murphy's Walker Papers; and so on.

Add Patricia Briggs to that list. Mercedes Thompson is an auto mechanic living in the Tri-Cities of Eastern Washington. A shape-shifter who can transform herself into a coyote, she was raised by werewolves in Eastern Montana.

When the daughter of her neighbor, the Alpha of the local werewolf pack, is kidnapped, Mercy gets involved. A fast-paced, complicated, bloody plot laced with werewolf politics ensues, as Mercy tracks down the kidnappers.

Scott Hanselman wrote today about family backup plans and alerted me to MozBackup. MozBackup can backup all of your crucial Firefox and Thunderbird files to a single, consolidated PCV file, saving you the hassle of figuring out where all the crucial files live on your hard disk.

You still have to back that PCV file up to a CD or an external drive, but now you have one file to back up instead of several dozen, scattered across several different, deeply hidden directory trees with non-obvious names.

Speaking of backup plans, I need a better one for myself. I regularly do a manual backup of my crucial data to a rotating set of thumbdrives and move them by hand between my different computers. I'm not doing a good job of backing up my photos, only sporadically backing them up by hand to external USB drives.

I really need:

• a centralized server at home, so that all the other computers can do a network backup to it;

• automated backup on a regular basis;

• to take some of those backups offline — or better still, offsite;

• a private Subversion server on the Internet, so I can keep most of my crucial files under version control, obviating the need to move them by hand from computer to computer.

Paging through the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, I spotted the obituary for Tsai-Fan Yu, the physician who developed effective treatments for gout, including allopurinol and colchicine.

I take allopurinol every day, topping up with colchicine when I feel gouty, so I owe her a great debt of gratitude.

I blogged before about my gout. (Indeed, this is why I put up the mega repost yesterday of my old EraBlog posts, to make my gout post available before writing this one.)

Nothing has changed, for better or for worse, regarding my gout. I take allopurinol every day and expect to do so for the rest of my life, unless a cure for gout is found. Fortunately for me, it's quite manageable. In the old days, gout could be both crippling and agonizing. I have had some severe attacks, early in this decade, before my case was definitively diagnosed. One of my knees would swell up and become intensely painful. Even bending it slightly so that I could get into a car and be driven to a doctor to get painkillers would cause me to break out into a cold sweat. I'm damn glad I don't have to live with that kind of pain on a daily basis.

I came across Gout News while researching this post, an ongoing compendium of gout-related news stories..

Title: If I Were an Evil Overlord
Author: Martin H. Greenberg (editor), Russell Davis (editor)
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: DAW
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 0756403847
Pages: 320
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 25-27 March, 2007

It's so hard to find a good person of hench these days.

Nobody actually says that in this collection of 14 short stories, but it's not hard to imagine some of them doing so.

The cliches of evil overlordism and Bond villain have worked their way into the Zeitgeist. From Dr. Evil to Darth Vader, everyone knows how the heroes outwit the villain and save the day.

And so do the villains, as a rule. Some have read the Evil Overlord List. Most are aware of the dangers of monologing.

Many of the stories are humorous; some are tongue-in-cheek. A handful are serious.

The stories are generally enjoyable, but there are no standouts. I liked Tanya Huff's "A Woman's Work..." about a supremely efficient queen; Nina Kiriki Hoffman's "Art Therapy", regarding an intervention for a villain who's lost his edge; Donald J. Bingle's "Loser Takes All" about an obsessive computer gamer; and Fiona Patton's "The Sins of the Sons", where the villain is disappointed by his heirs.

Let me also throw in a link to Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Plot tricks, which I came across while writing this post.

In Blast from the Past I, I presented about half of the posts that I made on my original blog at EraBlog.

I'm reposting the remaining posts now.

2003/03/18: Red, White, and Green

2003/03/21: Rallying at the Seattle Federal Building

2003/03/21: The Unseen Gulf War

2003/03/24: When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History

2003/03/30: Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?

2003/04/22: Her Left Foot

2003/04/24: Sleep Apnea

2003/05/16: Naturalization

2003/06/11: Bloomsday

2003/06/12: Howard Dean for President

2003/07/07: Bloomsday Speech

2003/07/10: Ping-Pong Reloaded

2003/07/23: Iraqi Dead Parrot

2003/07/25: U.S. Citizen

2003/07/27: What Makes a Conservative?

2003/08/14: Spinning our Hearts and Minds

2003/10/07: Spolin Games

2003/10/11: Gout

2003/10/18: Bob Beckel

2003/12/02: Free Ruslan Sharipov

2004/02/11: Things you have to believe to be a Republican today

2004/02/11: Oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment

2004/06/25: Moved to weblogs.asp.net

2005/12/05: Moved to GeorgeVReilly.com/blog

There are a few old posts at weblogs.asp.net that I should repost here for completeness.

I use Clipboard.NET as a clipboard manager on Windows. It stores the last few entries sent to the clipboard.

There's one problem: the default hotkey is Ctrl+Comma, which also happens to be an important key for Outlook (previous message). I figured out a while ago how to change the hotkey, but my report doesn't show up when you search for it.

Net: using a key name from the ConsoleKey table, change the value of ShortcutKey in %ProgramFiles%\Tom Medhurst\Clipboard.NET\clipmon32.exe.config:

 <applicationSettings>
     <clipmon32.Properties.Settings>
           <setting name="ShortcutKey" serializeAs="String">
                   <value>OemComma</value>

The new hotkey will be Ctrl+keyname.

Title: Glasshouse
Author: Charles Stross
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Ace
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0441014038
Pages: 335
Keywords: science fiction
Reading period: 21-25 March, 2007

Robin wakes up in a 27th-century clinic missing most of his memories, apparently arranged by his earlier self. After a few weeks of recuperation, he agrees to take part in an experiment, the YFH polity, to recreate a microcosm of the 20th century, an era largely lost to historians.

Robin awakes in a female body called Reeve. (The post-Singularity society has advanced technology which can reassemble human bodies and replicate just about anything you can think of.) Forced to get along in the very conformist society that the experimenters are building, Reeve experiences a reverse Future Shock at life in the dark ages: gender roles, menstruation, biological food, pregnancy!

It gradually becomes apparent that the new world is not as it seems — and neither is Reeve/Robin, when deeply suppressed memories start surfacing.

Stross has put together a fascinating universe as the backdrop to this story, where humans can reassemble themselves at will, back themselves up and have multiple copies running around, and where a long, vicious war was fought against a mind-controlling virus which infected most of the assembler gates. He has fun satirizing some of the norms of 20th century society in the YFH polity. Most of all, he combines an exciting story with some big ideas, the hallmark of good science fiction.

Over the last few days, I've been adapting an existing native C++ library so that it can be called from managed code. I had written a large number of unit tests with CppUnit and I wanted to be able to call the tests from NUnit.

I suppose that I could have written a new CppUnit TestRunner so that I could call it from NUnit. Instead, I took the cheap-n-dirty route, playing with #define and include paths. It took less time to get working than it did to write this blog post.

Here's the original native CppUnit test code

 //-------------------------------
 // native\FooTest.h
 //-------------------------------

 #include <cppunit/extensions/HelperMacros.h>

 class FooTest : public CppUnit::TestFixture
 {
     CPPUNIT_TEST_SUITE( FooTest );
     CPPUNIT_TEST( testAlpha );
     CPPUNIT_TEST_SUITE_END();
 public:
     void testAlpha();
 };

 //-------------------------------
 // native\FooTest.cpp
 //-------------------------------

 #include "FooTest.h"

 // Registers the fixture into the test 'registry'
 CPPUNIT_TEST_SUITE_REGISTRATION( FooTest );

 void FooTest::testAlpha()
 {
     CPPUNIT_ASSERT( 4 == 2 + 2);
 }

And here's my managed NUnit-based wrapper.

 //-------------------------------
 // managed\FooTest.h
 //-------------------------------

 using namespace NUnit::Framework;

 // Gross hack. Define a completely different NUnit-compatible FooTest
 // test fixture and use #define's to make the CPPUnit-specific
 // stuff build.

 [TestFixture]
 public ref class FooTest
 {
 public:
     [Test] void testAlpha();
 };

 #define CPPUNIT_TEST_SUITE_REGISTRATION(x)
 #define CPPUNIT_ASSERT(x) Assert::IsTrue(x)

I had to make one change to native\FooTest.cpp, to #include <FooTest.h> (angle brackets). This picks up the first FooTest.h in the include path, so that the managed version of FooTest.cpp now picks up managed\FooTest.h, instead of the original.

Title: The Algebraist
Author: Iain M. Banks
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Copyright: 2004
ISBN: 1597800449
Pages: 434
Keywords: science fiction
Reading period: 13-20 March, 2007

The Algebraist is Iain M. Banks' most recent science-fiction novel. Most of his SF novels are set in the universe of the Culture. This one is assuredly not. Artificial Intelligences are hated and persecuted.

Fassin Taak is a human Slow Seer, a sort of anthropologist who studies the Dwellers, an extremely long-lived race who live on gas-giant planets scattered across the galaxy. He is recruited by his government to investigate rumors of a secret list of wormholes, which would yield new, high-speed routes across the galaxy. At the same time, news arrives of the invading fleet of the Starveling Cult, led by the Archimandrite Luseferous.

The Dwellers operate from fundamentally different principles than the `Quick' races like humans. Individuals live millions, occasionally billions, of years. They are supreme dilettantes, with boastful but unbelievable claims of superior technology. Taak comes to realize that there's more to the Dwellers than was previously known.

Exciting and entertaining. This book was nominated for a Hugo in 2005.

Title: 1635: The Cannon Law
Author: Eric Flint, Andrew Dennis
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 1416509380
Pages: 420
Keywords: alternate history
Reading period: 9-17 March, 2007

Another book from the 1632 series and a direct sequel to 1634: The Galileo Affair. Fortunately, this one is much better than Grantville Gazette III.

The Americans from the future have established an embassy in Rome, as well as a tavern catering to the revolutionary-minded elements. Cardinal Borja, head of the Spanish Inquisition, is enraged by the accommodation reached by Pope Urban, and he foments unrest leading to an attempt to overthrow the pope.

Fairly entertaining with a coherent plot and engaging characters. The first half moves slowly as the background is laid down; the pace picks up as unrest escalates into war.

Title: The Golden Compass
Author: Philip Pullman
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Del Rey
Copyright: 1995
ISBN: 0345413350
Pages: 351
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 28 February-2 March, 2007

Title: The Subtle Knife
Author: Philip Pullman
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Del Rey
Copyright: 1997
ISBN: 0345413369
Pages: 288
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 3 March, 2007

Title: The Amber Spyglass
Author: Philip Pullman
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Del Rey
Copyright: 2000
ISBN: 0345413377
Pages: 465
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 4-8 March, 2007

In The Golden Compass, Lyra Belacqua is a young girl living at Jordan College, Oxford. A ward of her distant uncle, Lord Asriel, she is rather absently looked after by the staff and scholars, but prefers to spend her time roughhousing with the local urchins. This is not our Oxford, but one in a parallel world, which seems to be a cross between steampunk and Gormenghast. One where everyone has a personal daemon, a shape-shifting spirit who never strays more than a few feet from its human.

Boys and girls are disappearing all around Britain, taken by the Gobblers, a shadowy Church-affiliated organization run by the evil Mrs. Coulter. The Church is obsessed with the mysterious Dust, which they believe to be the cause of Original Sin. When her best friend is snatched, Lyra goes on a quest to the Arctic in the company of the gyptians, where she finds armored bears and witches. The book ends when Lord Asriel tears a rift into another world, and Lyra stumbles through with her daemon, Pantalaimon.

The second book, The Subtle Knife, introduces a second lead character, Will Parry, a twelve-year-old boy from our world. He stumbles through a portal into the world of Cittàgazze, where he meets Lyra and becomes the bearer of a knife, which can cut through the barriers between worlds. Lord Asriel has launched a crusade to bring down the Authority, the ruler of Heaven. Renegade angels and other forces are trying to get Will and Lyra to bring the knife to Asriel.

The Amber Spyglass brings in a third major character, Dr. Mary Malone, a scientist from our Oxford who has fallen into another world, where she studies Dust. Lyra and Will travel to the land of the Dead to release ghosts from their captivity, and they fall in love. Asriel and his allies launch their attack on the Authority.

I got the first book from the library and I loved it so much that I went out and bought the entire trilogy. The series is marketed towards young adults, but is also popular among adults.

The Golden Compass is a first-rate story that was hard to put down. I was thorougly caught up in it. Lyra is not particularly bright, but she is brave, stubborn, and lucky, and you wish her well. Pullman builds fascinating worlds: the daemons are a novel invention.

I thought the second book was a little weaker. Pullman started telling the story from a number of viewpoints, a practice he exacerbated in the third book, which weakened his control of the story. Even so, he brings the trilogy to a powerful, bittersweet ending.

It's not apparent in the first book, but Pullman is retelling Milton's Paradise Lost and he's not on the side of God. Asriel is as proud as Lucifer, and the ruler of Heaven is unworthy. This is a theme sure to enrage many Christians and I'm surprised that I've heard so little about it, as the books have sold very well.

The Golden Compass has been made into a movie, which is to be released at Christmas.

More background material: His Dark Materials (Wikipedia), Srafopedia (HDM encyclopedia), and Bridge to the Stars (fan site).

The Ides of March rolls around again, and it's my birthday. I am now the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Emma gave me the messenger bag shown here. I picked it up from R.E.Load Baggage. The 17" MacBook Pro is too large for my previous shoulder bag.

The video clip below shows the Bugatti Veyron, the world's fastest and most expensive street-legal car attempting to hit its top speed of 253 mph. I guess I'm not getting one of these for my birthday.