I've been very happy with my MacBook Pro. It's my primary home machine, sitting on the living room coffee table, and getting far more use than the desktop system in my office upstairs.

But it rarely leaves the house. It's big–a 17" screen–and it's heavy. I seldom carry it anywhere and I hardly ever bring it to a coffee shop.

I bought myself a netbook last month, an Asus Eee 1000H: 10" screen, 1024x600, 1.6GHz dual core Atom, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard disk, 3lbs, $479. Look at how much bigger the MacBook is in the photo! For reference, the Eee 1000H is the same size as a magazine. It's small enough and light enough that I take it with me every day, and it's been inside many a coffee shop.

The Eee came with Windows XP Home. I immediately repartitioned it and put Ubuntu Eee on the second partition. I don't think I've booted back into Windows after the first few days. All the devices (webcam, sound) and apps (Skype, Flash) work and I have all the Ubuntu goodness, optimized for this form factor, instead of a seven-year-old operating system.

The keyboard is adequate for my slender hands, though I would not care to do a lot of writing on it. The main problem that I continue to have with it is the placement of the right-hand Shift key, to the right of the Up-arrow key. My touch-typing fingers expect to find Shift beside the /, dammit.

The Elantech trackpad drove me nuts initially. Under both XP and Ubuntu Eee, it's configured with all kinds of multitouch gestures. Far too often, I inadvertently clicked or selected merely by hovering over the trackpad while typing. With some pain (especially on Ubuntu), I figured out how to turn all that crap off, so that it merely moves the mouse around and the right edge scrolls.

The screen is a little too small at 1024x600. The Netbook Remix interface replaces the GNOME desktop with a custom launcher. Each window runs maximized by default with minimal trimmings.

For a low-power machine, it's surprisingly fast. The Atom has two cores, so even if one is maxed out, the other one keeps the machine responsive. 1GB has been sufficient so far, but I'll probably get a 2GB stick because RAM is cheap.

I'm very pleased with the Eee. It nicely complements my MacBook.

By a serendipitous accident poking around on the TiVo a few weeks ago, we found that the Disney channel is broadcasting Shaun the Sheep. It's a series of seven-minute shorts spun off from Wallace and Gromit.

Shaun is the one smart sheep on a smallholding. His inquisitive nature leads to all kinds of mischief. The flock follow along; the sheepdog sometimes helps, sometimes hinders. All the while, the farmer is oblivious. No dialog, just slapstick. Highly recommended.

I learned today that a new 30-minute Wallace and Gromit, A Matter of Loaf and Death, premieres on BBC TV at Christmas. I'm not sure when it'll be shown in the US. We'll be in Dublin for two weeks then, so we'll be sure to watch it.

I hate composing anything longer than a couple of paragraphs in an online HTML editor. Specifically, I hate writing posts for this blog online. I'd much rather write in Vim and upload HTML. But I don't want to compose in raw HTML either.

I use reStructuredText (reST), an unobtrusive plaintext markup language popular in the Python world. reST can generate HTML, LaTeX, native PDF, ODF, and other formats. The picture at right shows a draft of this document in MacVim; reST is, as you can see, quite readable (though I work with a larger font). I use restview to preview the HTML locally and Pygments for syntax highlighting of code. Vim has its own syntax highlighting for reST and I've developed a set of keyboard macros for my own use.

The weak link in this scheme is posting to the blog. Right now, I have a little wrapper that generates HTML, extracts the body, and copies it to the pasteboard (clipboard). I then manually paste that into a raw HTML textarea in the blog's editor. Someday, I have to adapt mtsend or Firedrop2 to make this less painful. Or I could hack dasBlog to support reST in IronPython, or switch over to a blog that supports reST natively. Someday.

For a long time, I used VST (Vim reStructuredText) to generate HTML from reST. As I began using Python more and more, I realized that I was far better off with the real thing, which is well designed and quite fast. The VimL scripting language is not that good and VST pushes it to its limits.

As of the recent Python 2.6 release, all the official Python documentation is in reST format. Sphinx is a documentation build system that wraps a collection of reST documents into a larger navigable entity.

There are many other lightweight markup languages, such as Textile, Markdown, and AsciiDoc. No doubt they have their strengths, but I now have a significant investment in reST and it's well supported by the Python community.

Title: Field of Blood

Author: Denise Mina

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Copyright: 2005

ISBN: 031615458X

Pages: 424

Keywords: mystery

Reading period: 15–21 November, 2008

A new series from the author of Garnethill. 1981: Paddy Meehan is an 18-year-old Catholic, living at home in working-class Glasgow. She works as a copy boy at a newspaper and aspires to be a journalist. In what seems to be an open-and-shut case, a three-year-old boy is murdered by two unnamed ten-year-olds. One of them is her fiancé's cousin. She blurts that out in shock; the newspaper publishes it, causing her tight-knit community to shun her.

Paddy is forced to do a lot of growing up, while she investigates who led the ten-year-olds on. The shunning changes her. She realizes that she's not cut out to be the good little housewife expected by her family and fiancé, that she'd really rather be a journalist. Quick witted, she learns to give as good as she gets in the overwhelmingly male newsroom. Her duplicity causes one death and causes other havoc; the realizations will hit her hard.

Title: Quantum of Solace

Star: Daniel Craig

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Copyright: 2008

Daniel Craig once again plays James Bond in Quantum of Solace. Casino Royale rebooted the Bond franchise, going back to Bond's first 00 mission to recreate the character. The plot takes up where Casino Royale left off, as MI6 becomes aware of a hitherto secret organization, Quantum, a sort of latter-day SPECTRE.

Said plot makes as little sense as these plots normally do. Rich, evil mastermind wants to corner the market on <substance> as a stepping stone towards world domination; Bond follows villain and henchmen across several continents, blowing stuff up and killing people; sexy women are bedded along the way; nice suits, fast cars, and gadgets all get a workout.

Emotionally, Quantum is on a sounder footing. Bond still grieves for Vesper, who died at the end of Casino Royale. His need for revenge drives him, compounded by the treachery of a Quantum mole. This Bond is tough, but not impervious. Events have gotten under his skin. Under M's too: initially disdainful, she develops some trust for Bond.

The action is more than adequate. The first half hour is a blur of car and foot chases, bruising fights, and shootouts. A great deal more action will follow later.

Connery used to be my favorite Bond. If Craig keeps this up, he'll take the crown.

Title: Slumdog Millionaire

Director: Danny Boyle

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Copyright: 2008

Eric and I got advance screening tickets to Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle's new movie about a former Indian street kid who wins round after round on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. The show can't believe that he's not cheating, he's arrested, and the police beat the truth out of him. As Jamal tells his tale, we learn how an 18-year-old chai wallah in a call center came to know the answers.

Although there's little doubt about the ending, the journey is unpredictable. Jamal and his older brother Salim are orphaned at a young age. Latika, a girl, joins them, and they form the three musketeers. A Fagin takes them in thrall; the boys escape, Latika does not. They spend years scamming their way across India, before returning to Mumbai so that Jamal can look for her.

The teeming millions of the slums of India provide the backdrop for this movie. The brothers may be poor nobodies, but they have spirit and energy and a fierce camaraderie until they fall out.

Engrossing.

For decades, Detroit has fought a rearguard action against change—seatbelts, CAFE standards for increased fuel efficiency, metrication, renewable energy, building gas guzzling SUVs instead of hybrids, all come to mind.

Change is needed. The current management must go. The big three must build vehicles that make sense.

It's not often that I agree with Mitt Romney, but his op-ed piece, Let Detroit Go Bankrupt, in Wednesday's NYT lands in the vicinity of the mark.

He ignores one big reason for the higher costs of American cars, the cost of company-funded healthcare.

But another article in the same day's paper, Advantage of Corporate Bankruptcy Is Dwindling, points out:

Harsh as it is, a bankruptcy filing has always offered a glimmer of hope for a business hobbled by debt or a downturn. A company could slim down, negotiate manageable payments to workers and suppliers and keep going, preserving jobs.

...

So companies battling for survival have lost another lifeline. While they might have once gotten together with their creditors and worked out a plan in the common interest, they are avoiding bankruptcy court if at all possible because they know that without ready access to credit, the odds of emerging from legal proceedings are slim.

It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, I fear.

A week ago, I said that my technical blog somehow comes up as #1 technical blog on Google.

Several people pointed out that in my screenshot, I was logged in to Google. As you can see if you click on this screenshot, I can reproduce this result even when I'm not signed in.

I'm still confounded by that ranking. My content is good, but largely unremarkable—though I'm unduly fond of A Use for Octal; my style is understated; my traffic is uncongested; and my top billing is undeserved.

But none of the technical blogs listed on that first page are of the first order, except Mark Russinovich's.

If I thought it made sense, I'd be flattered. Alas, I cannot make it so.

My formerly trusty Casio Exilim EX-Z1000 camera went berserk one night in September. The zoom lens wedged open and nothing I did would persuade it to retract into the case or take more photos. The zoom had grown a little tempermental in the preceding month, but I didn't expect catastrophic failure.

The other hardware failure was far more upsetting.

From Christmas until August, I ripped most of our CD collection with Exact Audio Copy to FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). Since FLAC is lossless and open source, I figured I'd never need to rip the CDs again. I also wrote a Python script to convert the FLACs to MP3s with LAME, since MP3s are far smaller and all players handle MP3s. I stored the FLACs on a Maxtor OneTouch III drive, twin 750GB SATA drives configured as NTFS on mirrored RAID 1.

A few minutes changing CDs here and there; a few more minutes entering album metadata into Readerware AW. Over the months, it really added up: 775 albums, 250 GB of FLACs, 45GB of MP3s. The MP3s were replicated on several machines, but the FLACs and the Readerware AW database were stored only on the OneTouch's mirrored drives. This drive became my primary backup solution. When I had copied the latest data to it, I'd power it down and store it in the fire safe.

You can guess what's coming next. The OneTouch stopped working one day. Refused to do a damn thing on any machine that I connected it to. I was very unhappy.

I was going to return it to Maxtor, until I read the fine print. They'd replace it, but they'd send me back different drives and would make no attempt to get the data off the old drives.

Well, that was completely unacceptable! I found the Maxtor OneTouch III disassembly guide online, but didn't get around to doing anything about it until tonight. I bought two 3.5" external enclosures at Fry's yesterday. A couple of hours ago, I voided the warranty by prising the case off, extracting the drives, and putting them into the enclosures.

They worked! Both of them appear to be fine and the data is accessible. Until tonight, I wasn't completely sure that I would be able to get the data off the disks even if they were okay. I had visions of having to extract sectors and rebuild the files by hand.

Presumably it's the RAID controller or something else in the Maxtor case that died. I'm going to throw that piece of crap away. One of the drives is undergoing a full chkdsk; the other will get the same treatment tomorrow.

Not only that, but I also plugged the camera in for the first time since it had died. The battery had completely drained and I had to reset the clock. And now it's decided to work too. I'm not sure that I trust it, but should it die again, it's no great loss.

Via AmericaBlog, I see that Kos is ridiculing Nader and his diehard supporters.

I was mildly sympathetic to Nader in 2000, though I emphatically disagreed with him that Gore and Bush were Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Eric Alterman argues that Nader cost Gore the election.

I was pissed when Nader ran in 2004, after going dark for three years. He had built up a big movement in 2000. Nearly three million people voted for him. If he was remotely serious about the issues he was campaigning on in 2000, he would have done something in 2001–2003. God knows there was plenty of things that needed fighting. He could have made a difference. But he didn't. He didn't do a damn thing until he ran in 2004. After that, we didn't hear from him again until he ran in 2008.

Hypocritical, egotistical bastard.

Title: Quicksilver: The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1

Author: Neal Stephenson

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: William Morrow

Copyright: 2003

ISBN: 0380977427

Pages: 927

Keywords: historical fiction

Reading period: 20 October–15 November, 2008

Almost two years ago, I read Quicksilver, the first volume of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. It wasn't until two months ago, that I read The Confusion and The System of the World, the second and third volumes. By then it was clear that I had forgotten much of the first book, so I re-read it.

The books are sufficiently intertwined that it would have been better had I read all three in quick succession, rather than leaving such a long interval.

Quicksilver stands up well to re-reading. Plot points that had escaped my notice earlier stood out to me now. He foreshadows certain themes, such as economics and coinage, that will become important in later volumes. Daniel and Eliza's anachronistic attitudes bothered me less this time around.

Overall, I recommend the Baroque Cycle, though you'll need to set aside a good deal of time to read three such huge volumes. It's an ambitious work, well told. Stephenson sheds light on a remarkable few decades when the world opened up, going from an age of Kings to the Age of Enlightenment, when alchemy crumbled and the foundations of modern science were laid, when the basis of economys went from land to thoroughly modern-sounding financial instruments.

I mentioned the other day there were to be protest marches all over the country today against Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage amendment that passed last week in California.

Thousands marched in Seattle, from Volunteer Park to Westlake Center. The P-I and the Seattle Times say 3,000. The Stranger says 6,000. I was one of them. It was a lot. Westlake was jammed.

The crowd was in good spirits. Pissed off at the votes in California, Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas, but determined to keep on fighting. Certain that time and right are on our side, that we will in the end triumph.

Equal Rights Washington is coordinating the fight in this state. Give them your time and money.

I've slowly been working my way through Shakespeare's Kings (recommended), so when I realized that Henry IV was playing at the Seattle Shakespeare Company, I decided to go. It's an adaptation of Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2.

Henry IV usurped the crown from his cousin Richard II. The crown sits uneasily upon his head, rebellion is brewing, and his heir, Prince Hal (the future Henry V), is a wastrel who carouses with thieves like the fat rogue Falstaff. Hal, Falstaff, Henry IV, and Harry Hotspur (the rebel leader) are the central characters in this play. Hal's dissolution is compared unfavorably to Hotspur's chivalry. He must redeem himself in his father's eyes and cast off the influence of Falstaff, the "tutor and feeder of my riots".

This is an energetic production, with a good deal of sword fighting in the battle scenes in the second act. The larger than life Falstaff steals many of his scenes, while Hal must move nimbly between comedy and tragedy. Most of the cast adeptly juggle multiple roles.

Ends Sunday, November 16th. Recommended.

Emma and I moved in together in August 1998, and promptly started a tradition that we've maintained ever since: Games Night. On the second and fourth Thursday evening of every month, we invite our friends over to play board games.

For us, it's a low-effort way to stay in touch with our friends, and for our friends to see each other. Some people are regulars and make it almost every time. Others we see once or twice a year at Games Night, if that. Games are the excuse, but many people come by to chat.

We provide a space and a predictable time. We have drinks on hand and often a snack. Our guests will often bring a snack too; some bring their own games to augment our selection.

Tonight was typical. Kal and his daughter Robin came, and Louise dropped by for a while. We played Upwords, a sort of lightweight 3D Scrabble.

Angry about the passage of Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage amendment in California, and other anti-gay measures in Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas?

A nationwide protest is planned for 10:30am PST on Saturday, November 15th. The Seattle protest starts at Volunteer Park. Festivities begin at 10:30, the rally begins at noon, then we'll march down to Westlake, concluding with a rally there at 2:00.

The Stranger has more background.

I'll be there. Will you?

In the meantime, watch two moving videos from Keith Olbermann and Sam Harris.

A friend whom I haven't heard from in a few years googled for technical blog this evening, and my technical blog somehow came up as the very first hit!

I have no idea how I achieved such high page rank, nor how I eclipsed Mark Russinovich.