I talked to my mother this afternoon. She's still in Dublin, helping Michelle out with Harry. My father went back to Cape Town in mid-January to enjoy the golf and the South African summer. My parents spend several months a year there.

They have a small cottage in Hout Bay, in a residential complex. The buildings are terraced together. The other night, the cottage two doors down caught fire and the woman inside died. My father slept through the whole commotion forty feet from his bedroom, and knew nothing about it until the next day.

We knew he was a sound sleeper—and a heavy snorer—but this tops everything.

It's time to start thinking about this year's reading of Ulysses for the Wild Geese Players of Seattle. The next chapter to be tackled is Circe, the nightmare scene in the brothel.

Most chapters require a lot of work to tease apart into a staged reading, to make sense of the different threads of Bloom's inner monologue, or to attribute fragments of conversation to different characters, for example. This chapter is written in the form of a play; attribution is easy.

But Circe is also enormously long: some 60,000 words. For comparison, many novels are in the range 80–100,000 words. Last year's chapter was 20,000 words and I cut 5,000 words off. It took us the best part of two hours to read those 15,000 words. Clearly, we cannot read the whole chapter. Even if we had the stamina to read for six or seven hours, no audience would put up with it.

My task for this weekend, then, is to re-read the chapter and see whether it makes more sense to simply cut the hell out of it, so that we can complete Circe this year, or to divide it into two or three pieces, which will have to be read at different times.

There's a flamefest going on at the moment between Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin and Joel Spolsky over the value of Test-Driven Design and the SOLID principles. I find TDD valuable and I'm reading Martin's Clean Code at present.

Poking around in the links led me to Uncle Bob's Bowling Game Kata, a Powerpoint deck demonstrating using TDD to score a bowling game.

Ron Jeffries has a very ugly OO implementation and a cleaner procedural version of the Bowling Game. Digging around in the archives of his XP Magazine turns up many other ruminations on the Bowling Game

At Atlas, I was loaned to one group that used the Bowling Game for a pair-programming interview. I found it to be a valuable exercise. It showed us whether the candidate could actually code or not and it gave us a feel for what it would be like to work with them. It gave the candidate a taste of Agile work practices like TDD and pair programming. Of course, in a real pair-programming exercise, I would have been actively making suggestions instead of holding back.

We interviewed four candidates while I was on that team. Two passed, were hired, and worked out. One failed, failed other interviews, and was eliminated. The fourth candidate was very experienced, gave great whiteboard while talking through the exercise at the beginning, and turned out to be completely horrible. He floundered badly and wrote ugly, buggy code. That eliminated him, even though he had done well on the other rounds.

For a long time, I disliked Facebook. It seemed to consist entirely of annoying acquaintances attacking me with vampires or sending me pointless “gifts”.

I've used Facebook more in the last month and it's been less annoying than I remembered it. I check it once or twice a day and see updates from people I know. More entertaining than exasperating.

Twitter, though, has not clicked for me. Brevity is good, but Twitter is too minimalist. Stream-of-consciousness ejaculations. Opaque URLs disdaining explanation. Feh.

Scott Hanselman has a different take on Twitter.

Maybe I need to “follow” a better class of people.

I'll go and yell at those damn kids to get off my lawn now.

Title: The Outlaw Demon Wails

Author: Kim Harrison

Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: Eos Books

Copyright: 2008

ISBN: 0061149829

Pages: 496

Keywords: urban fantasy

Reading period: 28 January–3 February, 2009

Sequel to For a Few Demons More. Best read in sequence.

Rachel Morgan: witch and private investigator. An unknown enemy is summoning a demon every night to kill her. She learns some surprising things about her past and her place in the world.

Previous books were heavy on the action; here it kicks in very late and the book is very talky.

Moderately entertaining but weaker than earlier books in the series.

Frank Rich in Sunday's paper on the Republicans who've run out of ideas:

The crisis is at least as grave as the one that confronted us — and, for a time, united us — after 9/11. Which is why the antics among Republicans on Capitol Hill seem so surreal. These are the same politicians who only yesterday smeared the patriotism of any dissenters from Bush’s “war on terror.” Where is their own patriotism now that economic terror is inflicting far more harm on their constituents than Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent W.M.D.?

…

The current G.O.P. acts as if it — and we — have all the time in the world. It kept hoping in vain that the fast-waning Blago sideshow would somehow impale Obama or Rahm Emanuel. It has come perilously close to wishing aloud that a terrorist attack will materialize to discredit Obama’s reversals of Bush policy on torture, military tribunals and Gitmo. The party’s sole consistent ambition is to play petty politics to gum up the works.

David Leonhardt discusses ideas in The Big Fix in the NYT Magazine:

Rahm’s Doctrine[:] “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Emanuel said. “What I mean by that is that it’s an opportunity to do things you could not do before.”

…

Germany and Japan, on the other hand, were forced to rebuild their economies and political systems after the war. Their interest groups were wiped away by the defeat. “In a crisis, there is an opportunity to rearrange things, because the status quo is blown up,” Frank Levy, an M.I.T. economist and an Olson admirer, told me recently. If a country slowly glides down toward irrelevance, he said, the constituency for reform won’t take shape. [Mancur] Olson’s insight was that the defeated countries of World War II didn’t rise in spite of crisis. They rose because of it.

…

ONE GOOD WAY TO UNDERSTAND the current growth slowdown is to think of the debt-fueled consumer-spending spree of the past 20 years as a symbol of an even larger problem. As a country we have been spending too much on the present and not enough on the future. We have been consuming rather than investing. We’re suffering from investment-deficit disorder.

…

WASHINGTON’S CHALLENGE on energy policy is to rewrite the rules so that the private sector can start building one of tomorrow’s big industries. On health care, the challenge is keeping one of tomorrow’s industries from growing too large.

…

In Orszag’s final months on Capitol Hill, he specifically argued that health care reform should not wait until the financial system has been fixed. “One of the blessings in the current environment is that we have significant capacity to expand and sell Treasury debt,”

…

Goldin’s and Katz’s thesis is that the 20th century was the American century in large part because this country led the world in education. The last 30 years, when educational gains slowed markedly, have been years of slower growth and rising inequality.

On the 9th or 10th of January 1989, I flew from Dublin to New York. That was the last day that I ever lived in Ireland.

I came to the U.S. on a tourist visa. It was no lie. I had a round-the-world ticket and I would go on to Australia in early March. In June, I left Australia and traveled to Bangkok and Hong Kong. Sometime in July, I landed back in Ireland to settle up my affairs. I fit in a trip to the South of France with some old friends.

In August, I would return to America to attend graduate school. I have lived in the U.S. ever since.

I graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1987 with a B.A. in Computer Science. The Celtic Tiger was not yet on the horizon. Unemployment was high, as it had been for years. There were some software development jobs to be had in Ireland, but the pickings were slim.

After a couple of months, with some help from my former academic advisor, I got a job at InterContinental PhotoComposition (ICPC), a small scientific typesetting company on the northside of Dublin. It didn't pay much, but I got to write a text editor from scratch—unfortunately, in Vax Pascal.

My father urged me to go the United States and get a Master's degree, arguing that it would open more doors for me. He was willing to fund it so I was willing to go.

I knew very little about American universities at the time. The World Wide Web had yet to be invented. I had managed to wangle Usenet access for myself sometime in '86 or '87 on the Maths department computer at Trinity. (The Maths department had a student-run PDP with Usenet access via UUCP. The CS department only let its undergraduates use an unconnected Vax.) From reading the technical newsgroups, I began to notice that certain universities were well represented. This, essentially, was how I decided where to apply.

The first step was to arrange to take the Computer Science GRE. This wasn't held very often in Ireland, but I think I took it in Dublin in the autumn of 1988.

I applied to six colleges. I presume that I had the GRE results back by then, but I can't remember. I recall applying to Brown, Georgia Tech, UC Davis, and Harvey Mudd. I believe the fifth was CMU. I think the sixth might have been MIT or Yale.

More to come.

[Eric holding forth on BuildBot]

Eric and I attended Northwest Python Day 2009 today at the University of Washington. There were about 50 people present, with a few out-of-town visitors from Portland and Vancouver BC.

It was a mixed bag. I found the afternoon sessions more interesting than the morning ones.

The morning talks started with a set of five-minute lightning talks, including:

• ctypes being used to crack open a raw binary file with arbitrary bit alignment.
• Werkzeug: a set of WSGI utilities. Debugger sounds particularly useful.
• BuildBot: Eric talked about using it for Continuous Integration and how easy it was to configure and extend, compared to CruiseControl.NET.

Browser Interface, Local Server: creating a desktop app that contains, in one process, both a browser app and a local HTTP server, running on separate threads. The browser app can also be used to connect to a remote web server. Used wxPython to host an HTML control for the browser part.

The afternoon lightning talks included:

• Sphinx: a documentation generator built on top of reStructuredText.
• NodeBox: a Mac app for creating 2D visuals.
• vmshell: a not-yet-released toolkit for manipulating virtual machines using libvirt.

Sage is an impressive open-source package for doing mathematics, and a potential alternative to expensive commercial products like Mathematica and Matlab. Browse the Sage Notebook to get a feel for what it can do. Talk a look at today's Sage talk.

Google App Engine is good for a narrow class of apps: HTTP, request+response, time-limited, sandboxed. There are many quotas, known and unknown. The non-relational data store has restricted queries: no joins, only complete entities, limited comparisons.

Cython is a Python to C compiler that seems promising. It requires slight modifications to the classes and functions that will be compiled to C: declare them with the cdef keyword. It offers significant speedups for hotspot code and it's heavily used in Sage.

Ted Leung closed the day by talking about Python at Sun. All of the dynamic languages have been trending upwards in the last few years, hence Sun's (and Microsoft's) interest in dynamic languages. Jython, after years of struggling along, is alive and well. I really have to check out DTrace on Mac or OpenSolaris soon. One way to win mindshare for Python is better tools: NBPython will provide Python support for the NetBeans IDE: code completion, debugger, etc.

There were a handful of other talks that I didn't write up.

My thanks to the organizers for putting together a successful free conference.

What a month!

It opened well, when my nephew Harry was born. Frank died a day later. A cold dragged me down for over a week.

Last week's Obama inauguration cheered me up. He's off to a strong start. My story about attending the Bush Sr. inauguration omitted noting that 20 years ago this month, I emigrated from Ireland. More on that in some future posts.

Then there were the layoffs. Emma lost her contract job last week, primarily from having missed a lot of work due to ill health. And on Monday, some other friends were laid off, as were tens of thousands all around the country.

And my gout has flared up, though in a mild way.

There's a little-known special election coming up on February 3rd for the new elective position of Director of Elections for King County.

I recommend that you vote for Sherril Huff, and so do the Seattle Times and the Stranger. Everyone else in the race is unqualified.

Title: Paul of Dune

Author: Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson

Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: Tor

Copyright: 2008

ISBN: 0765312948

Pages: 512

Keywords: science fiction

Reading period: 14–27 January, 2009

Another novel in the Dune franchise. Paul of Dune is an interquel, largely taking place in the decade between the events of Dune and of Dune Messiah.

Paul Atreides has become the Emperor of the known galaxy. A vicious jihad has burst across the empire in his name. His prescience tells him that it's absolutely necessary so that mankind can break out of the course that leads to stagnation and destruction. But billions have died and many more are yet to die. He is feared and hated. A rebellion has broken out and must be suppressed. Attempts are made upon his life.

The main story is woven with extended flashbacks to Paul's first formative, experience of war, a few years before Dune. The War of Assassins took a toll on Paul's father, Duke Leto, but showed Paul what it is to lead.

The last book written by BH & KJA, Sandworms of Dune, was a sequel to the entire series. It was greatly weakened by multiple deus ex machina endings. Here, they are constrained by having to fit in between two previous books. This book works better.

I mentioned recently that the #39 route is closing, which would leave me without a direct connection to downtown Seattle. The new #50 route would run along 15th Ave S, two blocks from my house, to the Lander St Light Rail station in SoDo.

We attended the Metro Open House at the Jefferson Community Center this evening.

My concerns are slightly assuaged. The new #50 should run every 15 minutes and run until about 11pm. That's better than the #39 which runs every 30 minutes until 7pm, then hourly until 9pm.

In addition, the #60, which also travels along 15th and goes past the Beacon Hill Light Rail station, would run later and longer, giving me another route to downtown.

But neither of these alternatives gets me to downtown without a transfer.

I also asked about routing the #36 along 15th all the time, but it's a trolley bus before 7pm and changing the route would require stringing overhead wires.

The closure of the #39 is not yet certain. Keep those letters coming.

The Pope has reinstated four excommunicated bishops:

Pope Benedict XVI, reaching out to the far-right of the Roman Catholic Church, revoked the excommunications of four schismatic bishops on Saturday, including one whose comments denying the Holocaust have provoked outrage.

Pam has more. Newsweek has context.

Last month, the Pope said:

that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour was just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction.

Shit like this reminds me of why I am no longer a Catholic.

I was raised Catholic in Ireland and spent eleven years at a priest-run school. It didn't take; I had lost my faith by my mid-teens.

But even if I still believed in God, I'd have a hard time being Catholic. I don't have anything Catholics per se, and I've known individual Catholic priests that I respected, but I can't stand the Catholic Hierarchy.

James Joyce said of the Irish, “we are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be”. It's no longer quite true—many Irish people only see the inside of a church now for “hatches, matches, and dispatches” (baptisms, weddings, and funerals). But it was certainly true in the Seventies and Eighties when I was growing up.

The Catholic Church had a stranglehold on life in the Republic of Ireland. Contraception was illegal until the Eighties, and, when first introduced, was available only to married couples with a prescription. Divorce only became legal about a decade ago. Homosexuality was decriminalized not long before that. Most of the national (public) schools were controlled by parish priests, and most private schools were run by religious orders. (Still largely true today, I believe.) Until 1970, no Catholic could attend the traditionally Protestant Trinity College Dublin without a dispensation from a bishop.

Education, the modern world, the European Union, out-of-wedlock births, declining vocations: all of these have loosened the Church's grasp in Ireland. The Bishop Casey affair (he had a son and embezzled for nearly 20 years to support the boy), the Irish pedophile priest coverups, and other scandals shook many people's faith.

In the larger picture, Popes John Paul II and Benedict have spent the last 30 years trying to roll back the liberalizing effects of Vatican II. They've stacked the hierarchy with conservative bishops and cardinals, ensuring their influence will last for decades after their own deaths.

The Catholic Church is becoming increasingly irrelevant, and I welcome it.

I made royal icing last night for the Christmas Cake to put over the marzipan. A very tedious half hour with an electric handheld mixer to beat the egg whites until they were stiff, and then beat in the powdered sugar.

The recipe that I used from an old Joy of Cooking called for the juice of 1 lemon. I used ReaLemon which says that 3 tablespoons = 1 lemon. I added two tablespoons, which was quite lemony. The recipe that I've linked to calls for two teaspoons, which seems like a better choice.

I had drizzled whiskey over the cake several times to keep it moist. That was a mistake. The cake turned out to be quite damp.

Before baking the cake in November, I had also thoroughly soaked the dried fruit for a couple of days in hot water and whiskey. The fruit was very plump, but with hindsight, I think I should have thoroughly drained the soaked fruit for some hours.

Still, it tastes good, but it could be better.

I mentioned Copilot a while back as a way of helping someone by connecting remotely to their desktop.

CrossLoop is another such service. If you want to charge someone for helping them out, CrossLoop will take a cut. Otherwise, unlike Copilot, it's completely free. Unfortunately, it's Windows only: there's no Mac or Linux clients.

I've used it a couple of times to connect to my parents' computers in Dublin and Cape Town. It works well, though it's still painfully slow.

This morning's problem: My father was no longer seeing images in his Yahoo mail. Somehow, he had managed in Firefox to block images on his Yahoo mail server, and only on his Yahoo mail server.

Salumi's has the best selection of charcuterie in Seattle. The range and quality of their cured meats is truly impressive. The flavor, excellent. Their counter staff, friendly and family-like. The line goes out the door.

But. But. But.

Their service is wretched. That line moves at a glacial pace. I've never taken less than 20 minutes to get a sandwich; sometimes twice that. The staff are slow and inefficient. Their stations are badly laid out and they have to fumble around each other in their pokey little store.

Every time I watch them at work—and I always have plenty of time to watch them work—I want to drag them over to Jimmy John's or Bakeman's. Jimmy John's is fast, efficient, and cheerful. Bakeman's is fast, brusque, and serves up a side of attitude. But, by God, you get a sandwich in five minutes or less.

Salumi's could double their speed and still be Salumi's. I wish they would.

I made my Christmas Cake back in November, but am only now getting around to putting on the icing. I've kept it moist with several applications of whiskey.

Last year, I made marzipan from scratch. Never again! It was a huge amount of work to blanch the almonds and the stiff mixture of sugar and almonds caused the food processor to seize up more than once.

I didn't use up all the marzipan that I made that time. I put the remainder into a sealed container, placed it in the fridge, and forgot all about it. When I took it out of the fridge yesterday, it was still good. Oh, the top half-inch had hardened and the rest was a tad dry, but it was good enough to use. I rolled it out and draped it over the cake.

I'll add a layer of royal icing at the weekend and let it harden overnight.

And then I'm going to eat it.

For several years, Firefox has been my default browser. Firefox's extensions have always been its paramount feature for me, but its performance and developer tools came close. I'm very happy with it, for the most part.

The one thing that makes me unhappy is Firefox 3's CPU consumption. Time and again, I find it running at close to full utilization of one CPU core on my MacBook Pro. The tipoff is usually the warmth of the metal case. Killing the Gmail tab tends to help, but not enough. In Firefox 2, the worst problem was the memory leaks. Within hours, it would have chewed up several hundred megabytes. Memory usage is better in FF3, but I still have to shut it down too often for my liking, especially after using Firebug for a while.

In the last couple of months, I've been trying other browsers on my MacBook at home. Camino and Safari have had their chances, but they run too hot over time. I'll be sure to give Chrome a shot when it's released for the Mac—I quite like it on Windows.

Opera is what I've been using for the last few weeks. It runs the coolest of any of the browsers that I've tried. It's snappy enough. The JavaScript debugger is decent, and far better than Chrome's or Safari's. I'd prefer better integration with Google Reader, as I have no intention of switching RSS readers.