Title: The Boy-Bishop's Glovemaker
Author: Michael Jecks
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Headline
Copyright: 2000
ISBN: 0747266115
Pages: 331
Keywords: mystery, historical
Reading period: 20-22 December, 2007

Days before Christmas 1321, a glovemaker is murdered in the cathedral town of Exeter. Sir Baldwin and his friend, Simon Puttock, are asked to investigate by the Dean of the Cathedral.

Jecks juggles a complex plot with a large cast of characters, and manages to keep them distinct and interesting, while describing the intersection of cathedral and town life and Christmas rituals in medieval England.

Title: Unnatural Selection
Author: Aaron Elkins
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Berkley
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0425216055
Pages: 264
Keywords: crime
Reading period: 17-19 December, 2007

Gideon Oliver, the forensic anthropologist saddled with the unfortunate nickname of the "Skeleton Detective" by the press, is on vacation in the Scilly Isles, with his wife Julie. She's participating in a small biennial colloquium organized by an eccentric Russian millionaire.

Naturally, he happens upon a bone fragment, which leads him to a dismembered corpse, who turns out to be an attendee of the previous colloquium.

The main characters are likeable and, despite the somewhat gruesome descriptions of skeletons and postmortems, it's an enjoyable, well-plotted whodunnit.

Title: The Fourth Bear
Author: Jasper Fforde
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Viking Penguin
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0670037729
Pages: 382
Keywords: humor, crime
Reading period: 16-17 December, 2007

DCI Jack Spratt runs the Nursery Crimes Division of the Reading, Berks police. Investigative reporter Goldilocks is found dead, after last being seen at the three bears' house. The Gingerbreadman, a 7-foot psychopathic cake, is rampaging around, randomly killing people. Punch and Judy have moved in next door: when they're not beating each other up, they're very good marriage counsellors. And enormous cucumbers are exploding under mysterious circumstances.

An extremely bizarre story, replete with puns, nursery rhymes, literary allusions, and shaggy dog stories.

Entertaining, if silly.

Title: Triggerfish Twist
Author: Tim Dorsey
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Harper Torch
Copyright: 2002
ISBN: 0061031550
Pages: 372
Keywords: humor, crime
Reading period: 16 December, 2007

Another book featuring Serge A. Storms, the almost-likable serial killer and amateur historian of Florida.

Serge, his coke-addict, stripper girlfriend, Sharon, and his stoner sidekick, Coleman, rent a house on Triggerfish Lane, Tampa. Their landlord is trying to drive out the few remaining homeowners on the block, so that he can bulldoze it for condos.

It's quite the neighborhood. a former millionaire who likes to test-drive expensive cars; the psychotic Little League coach with a pit bull; the student party house; the South American death squad guy in hiding; and Jim Davenport, a business consultant who gets fired by the new management for being too honest.

Add Serge and his coterie, various bad guys, random acts of stupidity and caprice, and stir, then watch the mayhem.

Entertaining and more coherent than the last book that I read by Dorsey.

Title: The Best American Crime Writing 2005
Author: Otto Penzler (editor), Thomas H. Cook (editor)
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Copyright: 2005
ISBN: 0060815515
Pages: 384
Keywords: non-fiction, crime
Reading period: 9-16 December, 2007

Female sex slaves, Ukrainian oligarchs, an obsessive silver thief, white-collar criminals facing jail time, virus writers, self-destructive surgeons, and the Madrid bombers, are just some of the stories in this collection of non-fiction writing on crime and criminals, published in various magazines in 2005.

The book is bracketed by two pieces by James Ellroy. In the foreword, he argues that "true-crime writing offers a less kineticized and more sobering set of thrills [than crime fiction]—chiefly couched in human revelation". In the concluding essay, he pays homage to Joseph Wambaugh, whose writing inspired him to become a writer himself.

The other pieces are gripping articles, ranging from the picayune—human trackers following a tiny fraction of the illegal immigrants crossing a remote stretch of the Rio Grande—to billion-dollar Ponzi schemes.

Recommended.

Title: The Naming of the Dead
Author: Ian Rankin
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0316057576
Pages: 464
Keywords: crime, fiction
Reading period: 8-9 December, 2007

The G8 conference is about to open in Gleneagles, Scotland, during the first week of July 2005. Hundreds of thousands of anti-globalization activists are heading to Edinburgh to protest.

Edinburgh cop, DI John Rebus, is about the only police officer in Britain who's not on G8 duty. He's been sidelined because of his propensity for pissing off his superiors. Instead, he gets involved in two different investigations.

A Labour MP plunged to his death from the walls of Edinburgh Castle. Suicide or murder? Why does Rebus keep getting the runaround from Special Branch? A serial killer has murdered three convicted rapists: cases that were not previously tied together because the police thought the dead men got what they deserved.

Rebus and his partner, DS Siobhan Clarke, are prickly, stubborn cops, morally compromised by the tacit agreements they make with men with power, and struggling to wipe away the stains by fighting on behalf of the dead. The background of the G8 leads to an extraordinary week in Edinburgh. The disparities between the powerful and the powerless are acutely apparent.

A strong novel, but weakened by the conclusion, where the two cases are implausibly tied together.

Title: Skeletons
Author: Kate Wilhelm
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Mira
Copyright: 2002
ISBN: 1551667495
Pages: 378
Keywords: thriller
Reading period: 8 December, 2007

Lee Donne agrees to housesit for her absent-minded grandfather. Soon, someone is trying to scare her out of the house in Eugene, Oregon. Buried deep in the house, she discovers why: old photos of young men lynching a black man. One of those men is now running for President as a third-party candidate.

Lee goes on the run and takes her story to a newspaper. She decides to hide in plain sight, à la The Purloined Letter, and heads to New Orleans, posing as a newspaper photographer.

Fairly entertaining and intelligent thriller.

Title: Hogfather
Author: Terry Pratchett
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: 1996
ISBN: 0061059056
Pages: 384
Keywords: humor, fantasy
Reading period: 2-7 December, 2007

Last week, we watched the TV adaptation of Hogfather, which got me to re-read the book. The book is a lot funnier. Pratchett's written descriptions don't translate very well to the screen.

The Hogfather is the Discworld's equivalent of Santa Claus: a large, jolly fat man who delivers presents to children on the longest night of the year. The Auditors, celestial bureaucrats who take a dim view of the messiness of human existence, decide to have the Hogfather killed. Death takes it upon himself to deliver the presents to children instead, while setting his granddaughter Susan on the trail of the assassin responsible for the chaos.

One of the better Discworld novels. Pratchett entertains us with his characteristic humor, while ruminating on the human condition, notably the nature of belief.

Recommended.

Title: The Historian
Author: Elizabeth Kostova
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Copyright: 2005
ISBN: 0316154547
Pages: 642
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 25 November-2 December, 2007

For centuries, carefully selected historians have mysteriously received a book that contains only a picture of a dragon holding a placard that says, Drakulya. Three generations of one family have followed the trail of those books: the narrator as a teenager in the 1970s, her graduate student parents in the 1950s, and her mother's father in the 1930s.

The trail has led them from the Pyrenees to the Balkans and Istanbul, from libraries to monasteries to remote mountain villages. The narrative moves back and forth across the three generations, as each retraces their predecessors' footsteps. Each of them find fragments of evidence that show that Vlad the Impaler, prince of Wallachia and scourge of the invading Ottomans, never died but lives on.

The author weaves a historical mystery against a backdrop of Cold War Eastern Europe and the late Middle Ages, and the never-ending clash between Christianity and Islam. The tension builds as each generation makes its inevitable way towards a confrontation with Dracula late in the book.

Well-written and attention-holding.

Title: Coyote Dreams
Author: C.E. Murphy
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Luna
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 0373802722
Pages: 408
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 25 November, 2007

Third in the Walker Papers series of urban fantasies.

Joanne Walker discovered six months ago that she's a powerful shaman, and she's not happy about it. She's an officer in the Seattle Police Department and a former mechanic, and being a woo-woo shaman does not fit with her self image. She's contrary and stubborn and her determination not to accept her new state leads to big problems.

The people that she's close to are going into comas. In her blundering ignorance when she first came into her powers, she unwittingly awakened an ancient power that wants to bring the world to an end. Joanne has to start accepting her shamanism if she's ever going to save her friends.

Meanwhile, the new boyfriend who seems too good to be true is too good to be true. And her love-hate relationship with her boss, Captain Morrison, becomes even more complicated.

Entertaining.

Title: Folly
Author: Laurie R. King
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: HarperCollins
Copyright: 2001
ISBN: 0007111347
Pages: 400
Keywords: fiction, suspense
Reading period: 22-24 November, 2007

Rae Newborn has struggled with depression for decades. The death a year ago of her second husband and their young daughter drove her to attempt suicide. Now she's moved to Folly, a small island in the San Juans that she inherited from Desmond Newborn, her grandfather's brother.

Desmond went off to the First World War and came back broken by shell shock. He bought Folly in the 1920s and built a house with his own hands, then disappeared after the house burned down.

All alone on Folly, Rae starts rebuilding the house and finds herself retracing the events of Desmond's life. The parallels become stronger when she finds his skeleton in a cave and reads his journal.

As we learn her story, we find that she has reason to be fearful. It's not just in her head; there really is someone out to hurt her. The construction is therapeutic: as she rebuilds the house, she begins to rebuild her life. She starts to repair the relationship with her long-estranged elder daughter and draws closer to her beloved granddaughter.

The ending was a little too neat and pat for my liking, but otherwise I greatly enjoyed this book.

Title: Wilt in Nowhere
Author: Tom Sharpe
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Arrow
Copyright: 2004
ISBN: 0099481731
Pages: 278
Keywords: humor, satire
Reading period: 19-21 November, 2007

In the Seventies and Eighties, Tom Sharpe was a bestselling author in Britain, pumping out a dozen hilarious satires, marked by their savagery. His particular targets were apartheid, the British class system, and political correctness. Then he dried up, producing only three books in the last twenty years.

Wilt in Nowhere is his fourth book about Henry Wilt, a lecturer at a third-rate community college, married to the formidable Eva and father of four ghastly quadruplets. Eva takes the girls to America to stay with her rich uncle in Tennessee. Henry goes on a walking tour of England. He inadvertently gets caught up in a case of arson, while she somehow becomes the focus of a narcotics investigation.

This is fairly funny, but nowhere near as good as I remember his earlier books.

Title: 1634: The Baltic War
Author: David Weber, Eric Flint
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 141652102X
Pages: 728
Keywords: alternate history
Reading period: 18 November, 2007

The latest book from the 1632 series; this one is the long awaited sequel to 1633. The premise of the series is that through some mysterious alien event, a small West Virginian town is sent back to Germany in 1631, in the middle of the Thirty Years' War, utterly changing the course of history. The Americans ally themselves with King Gustav Adolf of Sweden, forming the United States of Europe.

The authors adeptly juggle a series of plots that were set in motion in the earlier book. The town of Luebeck is besieged by the French and the Danes. A diplomatic party has to be broken out of the Tower of London. The American-built "ironside" battle ships have to float down the Elbe and sail into the Baltic. The power of the Spanish in the Netherlands has to be broken.

One of the better books in the series. The authors have fun exploring the ramifications of such a world-changing event as the effects continue to ripple through Early Modern Europe.

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.