Title: What Came Before He Shot Her
Author: Elizabeth George
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0060545631
Pages: 722
Keywords: fiction, mystery
Reading period: 11-17 November, 2007

In Elizabeth George's previous book, With No One As Witness, a senior police officer's pregnant wife is gunned down in London by a 12-year-old boy in an apparently random act. This book tells the story of how that shooting came to happen.

The three Campbell children are abandoned on their aunt's doorstep by their feckless grandmother, months before the shooting. They are mixed-race children with deep-seated damage: their alcoholic father was killed in front of them a few years ago and their mother has long been in a mental hospital. Ness, 15, is deeply alienated and truant, and quickly becomes a drug dealer's girlfriend. Toby, 7, is mildly retarded and attracts bullies. Well-meaning, eleven-year-old Joel is his brother's protector. Their Aunt Kendra is wholly unprepared, emotionally or logistically, to become a mother to these troubled children.

Joel, Ness, and Kendra all proceed towards tragedy, through a combination of bad choices, poor options, inadequate coping skills, grevious miscommunication, and events that are beyond their control.

George paints an unsettling picture of a family at the edge. Each of the principals is strongly drawn, each one's actions makes sense of a sort, each one's demons compels them to fuck up. We know that ultimately Joel will kill a woman and we watch despairingly as he makes the choices that box him in to his destiny.

Not easy reading, but compelling.

Title: Paula Spencer
Author: Roddy Doyle
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Viking
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0670038164
Pages: 288
Keywords: fiction
Reading period: 2-11 November, 2007

Roddy Doyle has visited Paula Spencer twice before. First in The Family, a BBC TV serial; then in The Woman Who Walked into Doors. Ten years on from the last book, Paula is a recovering alcoholic who only recently crawled out of the bottle. The boom years of the Celtic Tiger have passed her by: Paula continues to clean Dublin offices and houses for a living. Her youngest two children are still at home. Jack is fine but Leanne is heading towards alcoholism herself. Her other son, John Paul, is estranged and a former heroin junkie, and her oldest, Nicola, worries about her.

Paula is pulling herself together, but it's not easy. She is emotionally volatile and insecure, afraid of being rejected by her children, and sometimes only a hairsbreadth away from taking another drink. But she hasn't lost her sense of humor. She's a sympathetic character, not a whinger.

This is vintage Roddy Doyle and it's both very funny and emotionally true, an unsparing but affectionate portrait of a flawed heroine.

Recommended.

Last week was the second anniversary of my brother Mark's wedding to Lizzy.

Next week will be the first anniversary of my sister Michelle's wedding to David.

The day after that, my parents will be flying to Egypt to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their first date.

And Emma and I just got back from a three-day weekend in Astoria, Oregon, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of our own first date.

Sheesh!

Title: Knights of the Black and White
Author: Jack Whyte
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Jove
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0515143332
Pages: 749
Keywords: historical
Reading period: 28 October-1 November, 2007

The first book in a trilogy that tells the fictional history of the Templars.

The Order of the Rebirth in Sion is a secret society whose roots go back to Jerusalem before the time of Christ, whose members are drawn from French noble families. When the Pope starts the First Crusade to seize Jerusalem back from the Muslims, a handful of the Order tag along in the hopes of discovering their order's secrets in the long-lost Temple of Solomon. Under the guise of warrior-monks protecting the bandit-infested roads, they dig deep beneath the Temple on the Mount and find the treasure they have been looking for.

A rather hokey potboiler. Occasionally entertaining, but much too long.

Title: The Monster of Florence
Author: Magdelen Nabb
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Arrow
Copyright: 1996
ISBN: 0099489899
Pages: 485
Keywords: mystery
Reading period: 22-27 October, 2007

Nabb's recurring character, Marshal Guarnaccia, is a non-commissioned officer in the carabinieri, the Italian military-style police, who is stationed in Florence. Guarnaccia is a slow, dogged plodder and a wallflower, who is largely overlooked by those who encounter him, but who nonetheless gets to the bottom of mysteries.

An old case, involving a series of double murders over a twenty-year period, has been reopened for political reasons. Several police officers, including the Marshal, have been seconded to a task force. The Marshal is troubled by what is clearly an attempt by the prosecutor to put an unsavory pedophile into the frame, in order to close the case quickly, and he starts digging around, finding evidence that had long been overlooked or never gathered.

Somewhat confusing. I had a hard time keeping track of Sergio and Silvano and Flavio and Fabio.

Title: The Clan Corporate
Author: Charles Stross
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0765348225
Pages: 300
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 20-21 October, 2007

The third book in the Merchant Princes series.

Miriam Beckstein, is a tech journalist in Boston, who discovered in the first book that she was born in a parallel world, and that she and some of her relatives hold a rare gene that allows them to step between worlds. In her feudal home world, her relatives have become merchant princes, wielding enormous power over the local economy.

Miriam, thoroughly American, doesn't fit in well in that other world, and resents becoming a pawn in her family's dynastic games. Meanwhile, back on our Earth, the U.S. government has become aware of the Family and considers them dangerous narco-terrorists.

Very entertaining, but best read in sequence after the first two books.

Title: Mr. Vertigo
Author: Paul Auster
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Penguin
Copyright: 1994
ISBN: 0140231900
Pages: 293
Keywords: fiction
Reading period: 14-20 October, 2007

Walt the Wonder Boy can walk on air. Really. He was a nine-year-old orphan pulled off the streets of 1920s St. Louis by Master Yehudi and taught in a long, grueling process to levitate and walk through the air. Walt becomes a huge hit and he and Master Yehudi travel around America, pulling in the crowds. It can't last of course and Walt loses his ability once puberty strikes. Master Yehudi dies and Walt settles into a second career as a small-time crook and club owner in 1930s Chicago. He goes through several more changes, which are dealt with briefly, before ending up as an old man in the 1990s.

Walt's a firecracker kid with a smart mouth and a product of his times. I could easily see him played by Mickey Rooney. Tragedy strikes him again and again, but he overcomes most of it.

This book is a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

Title: Bulletproof Web Design, second edition
Author: Dan Cederholm
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: New Riders
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 0321509021
Pages: 312
Keywords: css, web
Reading period: 10-29 October, 2007

Cederholm clearly explains the CSS techniques required to build a "bulletproof" website: one that is robust in the face of text resizing, window resizing, disabled images, etc, with minimal, semantically correct markup that works across all the major browsers.

Anyone who's serious about building a modern website should read this book.

Cederholm builds up his examples, one step at a time, in a clear manner. For the shorter examples, he tends to show the entire CSS or XHTML again and again, with the latest changes highlighted in orange. I would have preferred him to strip out the unneccessary repetitive material. Otherwise, great book.

I've grown fond of the JavaScript || idiom:

 function FrobImage(img) {
     var width  = img.width  || 400;
     var height = img.height || 300;
     // ...
 }

 FrobImage({height: 100, name: "example.png"});

If img.width exists and it's truthy, then width = img.width; otherwise, width = 400. Here, it will be 400 since the img hash has no width property. More than two alternatives may be used: x = a || b || c || ... || q;

A few weeks ago, while cleaning up the error handling in some batch files, I came across a similar idiom:

 foo.exe bar 123 "some stuff"  || goto :Error

Only if foo.exe fails (exit() returns a non-zero value), is the second clause executed.

Perl's die is typically used in a very similar idom:

 chdir '/usr/spool/news' || die "Can't cd to spool: $!\n"

though the or keyword seems to be preferred nowadays to ||.

This morning, I came across the ?? operator in C# 2.0, aka the null coalescing operator:

 Customer cust = getCustomer(id) ?? new Customer();

If getCustomer(id) is not null, then that's the value that cust gets; otherwise it's set to new Customer().

All of these idioms are syntactic sugar and all of them are in my toolbox.

Picture this.

An external USB hard drive plugged in to a machine running Win64. The OS has virtualized the underlying transport so that it's essentially indistinguishable from an internal IDE, SCSi, or SATA drive. Call the machine, Boss, and the USB drive, L:.

Boss is running Virtual PC, which is hosting a 32-bit virtual machine on top of Boss's 64-bit OS. Let's call the 32-bit VM, Sidekick.

Sidekick is not only a VM, but a virtual network host. Boss is bridging connections to Sidekick, and Sidekick and Boss both appear on the LAN as separate network hosts.

The USB drive has several ISO images, which Sidekick wants to use. Sidekick connects to \\Master\L$ over the virtual network, and uses a tool like VcdTool to mount the remote ISO on a virtual CD drive.

Amazingly enough, it all just worked for me last night.

I'm trying to set up an environment where I can build Vim with various 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft compilers and, more importantly, run the Win64 binary. I have a set of VM images with distinct flavors of MSVC, which was necessary to update INSTALLpc.txt and to keep Make_mvc.mak building.

In previous iterations, I got Remote Desktop access to a colleague's Win64 machine, but that was at Atlas, so it's no longer an option. I bought a new AMD64 desktop system a few months ago and over the weekend set it up to dual boot.

Title: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
Author: C.S. Lewis
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Harper Collins
Copyright: 1950
ISBN: 0060764899
Pages: 256
Keywords: fantasy, children
Reading period: 13-14 October, 2007

We saw the movie last week and I remarked that I had never read any of the Chronicles of Narnia books, so Emma dug out her copies.

The book is old-fashioned and innocent. It reminds of some of the British books that I read in my childhood, such as the Famous Five.

By way of an enchanted wardrobe, four plucky human children fall into a parallel world, where they are acclaimed as saviors, fulfilling a prophecy. They quickly fall afoul of the evil tyrant, the White Witch, but make their way to Aslan, the noble lion, who eventually saves the day after a noble sacrifice.

Indeed a classic children's tale.

Title: At End of Day
Author: George V. Higgins
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Harcourt
Copyright: 2000
ISBN: 0151003580
Pages: 383
Keywords: crime fiction
Reading period: 30 September-7 October, 2007

At End of Day is Higgins' last novel, published after his death. McKeach and Cistaro are crime bosses who have avoided arrest for more than 30 years. Partly because they're very smart, very competent, and quite paranoid. Partly because they have a secret deal with the local FBI office: they provide information in return for protection. All good things come to an end, of course.

Higgins' style is odd, conducted largely in monologue. His characters jaw and jaw. Boy, do they love the sounds of their own voices. It works, but it's tiring to read.

Higgins tells a complex tale: a slice of life of the FBI, the Massechusetts state police, and the crooks, both in the present and in flashback. No one is particularly likeable, but it's hard to look away.

Recommended.

I've been meaning to play around with Greasemonkey for a couple of years. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to the look and feel of third-party websites. For example, adding price comparisons to Amazon or thumbnail images to Google search results. UserScripts.org has a large repository of Greasemonkey scripts.

I finally built my first script the other day. We're putting together a new feature at Cozi that integrates partner websites with our site. Since the feature is not yet announced, I'll just say that partners will add a link to Cozi on many of their database-driven pages. That link has a complex, page-dependent querystring. Until the partners do the work to add the link to their sites, we were limited to testing and demoing with hand-modified pages.

I wrote a little Greasemonkey script that finds the right spot on the partner pages to place the link, scrapes some context to construct the querystring, and inserts the link. Now we can test against the real sites and show a compelling demo. Of course, it only works on Firefox and it requires you to install both Greasemonkey and this script. Our partners will have to make minor changes to their sites before ordinary users can take advantage of the feature.

Some gotchas with Greasemonkey. Inserting, say, <b>Click here</b> is as simple as document.getElementById('spot').innerHTML = <b>Click here</b>. However, inserting a <script> node requires:

 var scr = document.createElement('script');
 scr.type = 'text/javascript';
 scr.text = 'createLink(' + p1 + ', ' + p2 + ', ' + p3 + ');';
 document.getElementById('spot').appendChild(scr);

Greasemonkey will definitely become part of my repertoire.

Title: Pro JavaScript Techniques
Author: John Resig
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Apress
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 1590597273
Pages: 347
Keywords: programming, javascript
Reading period: 16 September-4 October, 2007

At Cozi.com, we use the jQuery JavaScript library to do all kinds of complex and wonderful DHTML and Ajax tricks in our web client. Extremely powerful, very elegant: I commend it to your attention.

John Resig is the lead developer on the jQuery team. This book is not about jQuery, though if you work your way through it, you'll be well equipped to understand the jQuery source code.

This book covers modern JavaScript techniques, in particular, object-oriented JavaScript, unobtrusive DOM manipulation, Ajax, and cross-browser warts. It covers a lot of ground and shows the underpinnings of many of the popular JavaScript libraries that power Web 2.0 sites, showing uses of jQuery, Scriptaculous, Dojo, Prototype, and more. His examples are clean and well-chosen.

It's a good book and I learned a great deal from it. It's not as good a book as it could have been. The editing is sloppy and there are too many typos. Resig fails to follow Strunk's dictum, omit needless words: the writing is clumsy and wordy. Inline <code> should be typeset in a distinct font in a programming book. Finally, no one should talk about consuming JSON without mentioning browser security.

My little brother, Mark Reilly aka the Alien Resident, successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on Tuesday and may now be addressed as "Dr. Reilly."

He studied part-time at the European Graduate School in New York City, while juggling several jobs. His doctorate is in Media and Communications and the topic was Propaganda of the Dead: Terrorism and Revolution, which he picked before 9/11.

He is only the second PhD in the family. My uncle Pat Deasy was the first.

Congratulations, Mark!

About a year ago, I posted a link to some silly cat pictures. I just found the motherlode.

Title: Smiley's People
Author: John le Carré
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Scribner
Copyright: 1979
ISBN: 0743455800
Pages: 439
Keywords: spy, thriller
Reading period: 23-29 September, 2007

Smiley's People is the last book in le Carré's Karla Trilogy, begun in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and continued in The Honourable Schoolboy.

George Smiley is called back from retirement when one of his former contacts, a Russian general turned emigré, is found murdered. Working alone and exercising his considerable tradecraft, Smiley discovers a fatal chink in the armor of his old adversary, Karla, the Russian spymaster. He gets the go-ahead to execute a sting, which will ultimately lead to Karla's defection.

Once again, le Carré crafts a subtle and compelling novel. Smiley may be drab and self-effacing, yet he has a keen insight into his "people" -- his former colleagues and agents -- when he calls upon them to help him uncover why the General was murdered. Smiley lives in a dark world of moral ambiguity, where blackmail and treachery are the norm. To force Karla's defection, Smiley must use Karla's despised methods, trading on Karla's love for his daughter. This leaves him with the taste of ashes in his mouth at the moment of his final victory.

Highly recommended.

I was just watching the Colbert Report and Sam Waterston was on, touting Unity08. Except that both he and Colbert kept pronouncing it as Unity-oh-Eight dot com, not Unity-zero-Eight dot com. I knew what they meant of course, but I decided to see what was at Unityo8. Naturally, they don't own the domain, despite having existed for more than a year. Such incompetence.

As for their third-way platform, I expect that they would act as a spoiler, most likely splitting the Democratic vote, as Nader (cursed be his name) did in 2000. Their list of sponsors is quite suspect too. Irregular Times lists a number of problems with Unity08.

Cozi is hiring. We have positions for Developers and Web Developers.

We're a small Web 2.0 startup, based in the Smith Tower in downtown Seattle. Our Cozi Central product is groupware for families: it helps parents manage their own and their kids' schedules, shopping lists, and reminders, from computers, PDAs, and mobile phones.

If you're interested, let me know.

Update: we have some non-developer positions too.

Title: Waxwings
Author: Jonathan Raban
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Pantheon
Copyright: 2003
ISBN: 0375410082
Pages: 282
Keywords: fiction
Reading period: 17-23 September, 2007

Tom Janeway lives in Seattle with his wife Beth and their four-year-old son, Finn. Tom is a middle-aged Englishman who teaches writing at the University of Washington; Beth, somewhat younger, is an editor at GetAShack.com. It's 1999 and the DotCom boom is raging. Chick is an illegal immigrant from China, with a raging entrepreneurial streak, who ends up wandering in and out of Tom's life.

Tom is perceptive enough to be an occasional commentator on NPR's All Things Considered, yet oblivious to the problems in his marriage, and he's flabbergasted when Beth leaves him. Worse still, through being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he becomes a person of interest in the abduction of a child, and he becomes a pariah when it's mentioned in a Stranger article.

Raban brings DotCom Seattle to life, against a backdrop of the WTO riots, the cancellation of the millenial New Year's celebration after the arrest of a bomber at Port Angeles, and other events that had slipped my mind.

Surprisingly few novels (to my knowledge) have attempted to capture the computer culture of Seattle. Only Douglas Coupland's Microserfs and Daniel Oran's so-so Ulterior Motive come to mind.

Tom is likeable and decent, yet exasperating in his obliviousness. Beth, Finn, and Chick are all strongly realized characters.

Entertaining and perceptive, and one of the better novels set in Seattle.

This year is the 21st anniversary of the Northwest AIDS Walk. A whole generation has passed. Twenty years ago, AIDS was a gay man's disease and a death sentence. The Reagan administration was just beginning to acknowledge the existence of AIDS, half a decade after it had first been recognized and thousands had died.

AIDS is still a serious problem, but the development of antiretroviral drugs a decade ago means that people with HIV are living longer, healthier lives than before. More than 1 million Americans are now living with HIV/AIDS: 9,000 of them in King County. 40,000 people are infected every year, and most new infections are among African-Americans. The U.S. is getting off relatively lightly: about one-quarter of the adults in southern Africa have HIV!

The Lifelong AIDS Alliance provides a variety of services to those living with HIV/AIDS in Washington State. LLAA cooks more than 100,000 fresh meals each year, provides case management for 946 people, assists 800 people with housing resources, packs 30,000 grocery bags, and distributes condoms and safe-sex information to high-risk populations.

I've walked in the AIDS Walk every year since 1992 and I've raised thousands of dollars for AIDS. Please help me raise money again for this year's walk on Saturday, September 29th. I aim to raise at least $1000.

You can sponsor me by going to http://www.georgevreilly.com/aidswalk.

I thank you, the Lifelong AIDS Alliance thanks you, and the people you'll be helping thank you.

Note: Emma and I are having a fundraising barbecue on Sunday 23rd September. Email me for more details.

Title: To the Power of Three
Author: Laura Lippman
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: William Morrow
Copyright: 2005
ISBN: 0060506725
Pages: 434
Keywords: mystery
Reading period: 16 September, 2007

Days before graduation, a shooting takes place in the girls' bathroom at a suburban Maryland high school. The popular, pretty Kat is dead; the athletic Josie was shot in the foot; and the drama star and shooter, Perri, is comatose after shooting herself in the head. The three girls had been inseparable since third grade, though Perri and Kat had fallen out the previous summer. What happened? What led Perri to such an act?

Lippman builds a compelling story, weaving together the aftermath and the events leading up to the shooting. She captures the grief and bemusement of the survivors, each with their own selfish perspective, as they struggle to find meaning in the shooting. Her grasp of the mores and currents within a contemporary high school seems pitch perfect to me.

I said in my review of No Good Deeds that I thought Lippman was losing her enthusiasm for her Tess Monaghan series. This book has no such failing.

Highly recommended.

Title: Club Dead
Author: Charlaine Harris
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Ace
Copyright: 2003
ISBN: 0441010512
Pages: 258
Keywords: mystery, vampire, romance
Reading period: 15 September, 2007

Sequel to Living Dead in Dallas.

Sookie's vampire boyfriend, Bill, has gone missing and seems to have had an affair with another vampire. To get him back -- and she's not sure she wants him back -- she must go undercover among the vampire glitterati of Jackson, Mississippi. She retrieves him eventually, but not without some physical battering, and emotional upheaval as she finds herself attracted to another vampire and a very nice werewolf.

Entertaining, often funny, occasionally touching. Harris offers an amusing and original explanation for why Elvis continues to be sighted.

Title: The Warmasters
Author: David Weber, Eric Flint, David Drake
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 2002
ISBN: 0743435346
Pages: 307
Keywords: science fiction, alternate history
Reading period: 15 September, 2007

Three short novels, extracted from longer stories published elsewhere.

Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington by David Weber is a prequel to the Honor Harrington novels. Harrington is a midshipwoman in the Royal Navy of Manticore, on her first tour of duty out in a pirate-infested area. She survives the hazing of a particularly brutal and stupid superior. When half the bridge is blown away by a privateer's attack, she manages to save the day.

Islands by Eric Flint is extracted from one of the later novels in the Belisarius series, which I read only a few weeks ago. A young wife sets off to India after her husband, a junior officer in Belisarius's army. Along the way, she manages to establish a sort of Veteran's Administration for the maimed veterans who are being sent back to sixth-century Constantinople.

Choosing Sides by David Drake is taken from the Hammer's Slammers series, about a regiment of mercenaries. A young officer survives an ambush and is posted back to HQ, where he learns that the ambush was triggered by an influential traitor in the civilian population that hired the Slammers. He deals with it.

Moderately entertaining. I hadn't read any of the Honor Harrington or Hammer's Slammers books before, so it gave me a feel for both series. I might read more of them.

Title: Lion's Blood
Author: Steven Barnes
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Aspect
Copyright: 2002
ISBN: 0446612219
Pages: 608
Keywords: alternate history
Reading period: 9-14 September, 2007

More than two thousand years ago, the balance of power shifted, Africa became the dominant continent, and Europe stayed a barbarian backwater. Muslim Africans sailed west and conquered America, using white slaves as a workforce.

Aidan O'Dere was kidnapped as a boy from an Irish fishing village, and sold to the Wakil, the governor of what would otherwise be Galveston. The Wakil's younger son, Kai, is the same age as Aidan. The Wakil and Kai are sensitive men, warriors with poets' souls, with misgivings about the institution of slavery. Their respective brothers, Malik and Ali, are fierce, unforgiving warriors.

Kai and Aidan form a bond of sorts across the master-slave boundary. Aidan falls in love with Sophia, Kai's cast-off concubine, and marries her. Later, Malik takes Sophia away to his own castle. Aidan takes part in an unsuccessful slave uprising. Eventually, he earns his freedom by fighting alongside Kai against the Aztecs.

Barnes has a little fun, inverting the cliches of slavery. The blacks look down on the white slaves as 'ghosts', deriding their primitive superstitions. On the whole, though, it's a serious examination of slavery, showing how the institution debases the master as well as ruining the lives of the slaves. He also tackles the horrors of war, healthy and frustrated love, religion and mysticism, and guilt.

Recommended.

Title: The Polished Hoe
Author: Austin Clarke
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Amistad
Copyright: 2003
ISBN: 0060557621
Pages: 462
Keywords: fiction
Reading period: 6-10 September, 2007

Mary-Mathilda has been the mistress of Bellfeels, a plantation owner in Bimshire (a lightly fictionalized Barbados), since her early teens. One night, she calls the police to confess a crime. Sargeant, who has silently loved her since they were children, takes her Statement over the course of a very long, discursive night. A night in which many ugly secrets bubble to the surface. Secrets about Mary-Mathilda's past, secrets about the English elite who ruled pre-War Bimshire, secrets about the plantation: secrets that Sargeant doesn't really want to hear.

An odd, meandering novel that moves slowly, but nonetheless held my attention.

Title: Something From the Nightside
Author: Simon R. Green
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Ace
Copyright: 2003
ISBN: 0441010652
Pages: 230
Keywords: fantasy, noir
Reading period: 9 September, 2007

The Nightside: the dark, mysterious, sleazy place under the city of London, where you can find anything or lose yourself. Monsters lurk there, demons slum there, John Taylor grew up there. Taylor has a gift. He can find anything in Nightside.

Taylor exiled himself five years ago. Now he's making a precarious living as a private eye in London. A distraught businesswoman hires him to find her teenage daughter, who was last seen heading for Nightside. Taylor finds the girl alright, and he finds plenty of trouble along the way.

Entertaining fantasy noir.

Title: RESTful Web Services
Author: Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: O'Reilly
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 0596529260
Pages: 419
Keywords: programming, web services, REST
Reading period: 22 August-8 September 2007

Anyone who has attempted to build a Web Service has come away scarred by the complexity of all the WS-* standards. Heavyweight standards that in many ways reinvent earlier distributed object technologies like CORBA and DCOM, providing Remote Procedure Calls over HTTP. The promised interoperability hasn't really happened: a web service built with one stack of tools may or may not be consumable by another stack.

A movement has arisen in the last few years, arguing for RESTful Web Services: lighterweight services built on top of the REST architectural style with simpler tools.

Big Web Services expose algorithms and method calls. ROA (REST-oriented architecture) web services expose data (resources) through the simple, uniform interface of HTTP.

I'm not going to try to explain REST or ROA here. Poke around the book site and the RESTwiki if you want more details.

I think this book is destined to be a minor classic. It explains the REST-oriented architecture very clearly. It works through several plausible examples, building services and clients in a variety of languages (most notably Ruby on Rails). It's not intimately tied to one software stack, which means that the book will still be useful five years from now. In part, that's because the tools support is fairly weak. As far as I can tell, you're reduced to rolling your own ROA web service from scratch in .NET, for example.

I haven't had to dig very deeply into WS-*, fortunately, but I haven't cared for what I've seen. The authors don't spend a lot of time critiquing what they see as the shortcomings of SOAP and the WS-* standards, but I'm not equipped to find fault in what they say. What they do say, sounds reasonable to me.

Recommended.

Title: The Merchant of Prato
Author: Iris Origo
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Penguin
Copyright: 1957
ISBN: 0140172181
Pages: 389
Keywords: history
Reading period: 1-7 September, 2007

Francesco di Marco Datini was born in Prato in 1335 and died there without an heir in 1410. Prato is a small town in Tuscany, about 10 miles from Florence. Then, as now, Prato was in Florence's shadow. At the age of fifteen with only a few florins to his name, Francesco apprenticed himself to a merchant in Avignon, then home of the Papal court. Thirty-three years later, he returned to Prato, a wealthy man.

Throughout his career, he was an inveterate letter writer, spending hours a day writing to his partners and subordinates throughout the Mediterranean. He left behind 150,000 documents -- letters and other records -- which were rediscovered in 1870 and now comprise the Datini Archives: a treasure trove of documentation for social historians and economists. He also wrote a great deal to his wife, Margherita, and his best friend, Ser Lapo Mazzei. The archives have not only many of the letters written by Francesco himself, but also the responses from his correspondents, as well as ledgers and other business materials.

The archives provide a wealth of raw material on the life and times of a successful merchant of the late Middle Ages. The book brings the personality of Francesco to life, setting him in the context of his times, showing the kind of life he led and the work he did.

Francesco is not a terribly likeable man. He nagged everyone incessantly and worried constantly. For decades, he obsessed about making money. In his old age, he finally took a care for his soul, after decades of entreaties from Ser Lapo, and became religious.

His marriage was rocky, in part because Margherita never gave him any children, though she raised his illegitimate daughter as her own. They married in Avignon when he was forty and she about sixteen. They spent much of their marriage living apart: he working in Florence, while she lived in Prato, a few hours' travel away. He was prickly and overbearing. She was feisty and not inclined to accept his edicts meekly.

All in all, a well-written portrait of daily life in a medieval Italian city.

Title: The Lion Returns
Author: John Dalmas
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 1999
ISBN: 0671578243
Pages: 460
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 5-6 September, 2007

Sequel to The Bavarian Gate. Again widowed, Macurdy returns to Yuulith from Earth. He meets up with Vulkan, a bodhisattva in the avatar of a wild boar, who is troubled by portents of trouble coming across the ocean. The voitar are invading the continent of Yuulith and Macurdy must pull together the disparate nations to fight back against the brutal voitar.

The series works better in a swords-and-sorcery milieu than in 20th century Earth, and this book is more enjoyable than its predecessor. Overall, the series is rather clumsily written. Emma said the books tell you stuff rather than showing you.

Title: The Bavarian Gate
Author: John Dalmas
Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 1997
ISBN: 067187764X
Pages: 342
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 4-5 September, 2007

A loose sequel to The Lion of Farside. The newly widowed Curtis Macurdy has returned to Earth in 1933. He heads west to a lumber town in Oregon where he becomes a sheriff's deputy. After Pearl Harbor, he enlists in the Army and quickly becomes a paratrooper. Despite showing great promise (and having been a general on Yuulith!), Macurdy refuses to be sent to Officer Training School. After some hair-raising adventures in North Africa that he only survives due to his Yuulith-trained magical abilities, he is recruited by the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA). The Nazi's Occult Bureau has established contact with aliens via a dimensional gate in Bavaria. Macurdy is sent in as a spy amongst the Nazis, and later returns to destroy the gate.

A strange, disjointed book. The section in Oregon seems wholly unneccessary. The paratrooper section seems mostly to have been thrown in as the author underwent airborne training later in the war. The alien voitar are from a distant part of Yuulith; otherwise this book has almost no ties to the previous book.

Title: The Lion of Farside
Author: John Dalmas
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 1995
ISBN: 0671876740
Pages: 441
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 3-4 September, 2007

Curtis Macurdy is a simple, Depression-era farmer married to the beautiful and exotic Varia. Varia is kidnapped and drawn back to her home in the parallel world of Yuulith. Macurdy follows her, but is immediately enslaved. After some training as a shaman, he shows promise as a fighter, and is sent to an elite regiment. He breaks out a few months later with two friends. Soon they fall in with outlaws and Macurdy quickly rises to the top, leading a successful rebellion.

Meanwhile, Varia is back with the Sisterhood, which she forswore long before. The Sisterhood are a sort of cut-rate Bene Gesserit order, with a long-range breeding plan. She escapes and is soon captured by a party of the ylvin and eventually falls in love with the leader.

Moderately entertaining swords-and-sorcery fantasy.

Title: Blood Bound
Author: Patricia Briggs
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Ace
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 978-0-441-01473-6
Pages: 292
Keywords: mystery, fantasy
Reading period: 31 August-1 September, 2007

Mercy Thompson, heroine of Moon Called, is back. Mercedes the Volkswagen mechanic is a shape-shifter living in the Tri-Cities of Eastern Washington.

A new vampire is in town, one who also happens to be a demon-possessed sorceror, and he's killing indiscriminately. The other vampires and the local werewolf pack need to shut him down before the general public catches on. In the end, Mercy's skills are needed to track him down and put an end to him. Along the way, she has two werewolves and a vampire paying court to her. Mercy is fiercely independent and less than thrilled at this.

Another enthralling urban fantasy from Patricia Briggs. Recommended.

Title: Giraffe
Author: J.M. Ledgard
Rating: 1.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Penguin
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 978-0-14-303896-2
Pages: 298
Keywords: fiction
Reading period: 29-31 August, 2007

This is a very strange novel, which I abandoned half way through. The last book that I abandoned was simply wretched in every way, but this one is beautifully written.

Giraffe is also utterly, maddeningly pointless. It tells the (apparently) true story of the slaughter of a large herd of captive giraffes at a Czechoslovakian zoo in 1973. The main narrator is a hemodynamicist escorting a newly captured herd of giraffes as they are transported by barge from Hamburg to the Czech zoo. He is a depressed-sounding young man with little liking for the Communist regime, mired in an existential ennui. The entire book reads like a dream sequence, based on the half that I read and the half that I flicked through, hoping against hope that it would finally repay the time that I had spent on it. Some reviewers clearly loved it, but it did nothing for me. Altogether a very odd book for a Scot born in 1968 to have written.