Title: The Last Light of the Sun

Author: Guy Gavriel Kay

Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Copyright: 2004

ISBN: 0451459857

Pages: 499

Keywords: fantasy

Reading period: 18–22 May, 2009

The Last Light of the Sun takes place in the Dark Ages of a parallel world. The Erlings (Vikings) raid the Cyngael (Welsh) and Anglcyn (Anglo-Saxon). A young Erling flees indentured servitude and becomes a raider, following in the footsteps of his estranged father. A Cyngael prince dies in an Erling raid and is taken by the Queen of the Fairies; his brother is drawn to another fairy; he will enter into a reluctant compact with the Anglcyn when they are raided by the Erling.

Kay is an elegant and subtle writer. The principal characters are well-drawn and complex, struggling with their intersecting destinies.

Highly recommended.

Nine years ago, the Ryan Commission was set up to produce a report on physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children in Catholic Church–run reformatories in Ireland. This week, they released a 2600-page report detailing abuse to tens of thousands of children from the 1930s to the 1990s. The abuse and violence were systemic and institutionalized, if not universal, and they were hushed up and overlooked for decades. The stories of the abused, in their own words, make for horrifying reading. It's a national disgrace.

The Christian Brothers come off the worst of the many religious orders who are implicated. Even in their day schools, they long had a reputation as brutal and thuggish. Most of the religious orders are still trying to evade responsibility and show little appetite for serious reform.

By no means every priest, nun, or brother was a paedophile or a sadist, but there were so many of them for so long with so little done to stop them, that it's clear that there's something rotten in the Catholic Church. Part of it is surely the chastity requirement—the Protestant churches have fewer paedophiles.

Fie on them.

I updated the Win64 binaries of Vim at vim-win3264 from Vim 7.2.000 to 7.2.182.

I'm amazed that the original binaries were downloaded over 11,000 times since last August.

I initially learned to drive on the left in Ireland, but have spent the last 20 years driving on the right in the States. I personally never had any difficulty switching from one side to the other—except when extremely jetlagged—but I know several people who find it enormously stressful. I find it easy enough to orient myself so that the lane divider is at the correct position.

When I was a kid, my father often brought his Irish car over to mainland Europe on the car ferries. A right-hand drive car driving on the right is doubly tricky. It didn't seem to bother him too much, but I don't think my mother ever tried it. I've never had the opportunity to try it myself.

For many years, I ignored the freeway sign for the Rhododendron Garden at exit 143 on I-5. Five or six years ago, I visited the Rhody Garden and I've gone back every spring since.

It's worth visiting at any time of year, but from March to May or June, it's in bloom. Twenty-two acres of rhododendrons, azaleas, ferns, and other flowers, near the Weyerhauser headquarters in Federal Way, Washington. There's a bonsai garden next door—unfortunately now closed to the public. As you stroll along the shaded hilly paths, you can almost make believe that the constant traffic noise from the nearby freeway is running water.

Rhodies come in all shapes, colors, and sizes, from low bushes to 30-foot trees. They are native to North America, Europe, and Asia, and thrive in the Pacific Northwest.

Emma and I brought Lyn there last Saturday. It was surprisingly empty for such a fine day, though they said they had been overrun the previous weekend for Mother's Day.

I put the best photos up at Flickr. Enjoy!

Title: The Circle

Author: Peter Lovesey

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Soho Crime

Copyright: 2005

ISBN: 156947432X

Pages: 358

Keywords: mystery

Reading period: 17–18 May, 2009

A conman publisher visits a writing circle in Chichester and gets their hopes up. Soon, he is burned to death in his cottage. Other arson-murders follow.

In the first half of the book, the story is primarily told from the viewpoint of the newest member of the writers' circle, Bob Naylor, who starts investigating, egged on by some of the others. In the second half, it becomes a police procedural, as seen by Detective Chief Inspector Henrietta Mallin, who takes over the case.

The Circle is a whodunnit in the classic vein, with interfering amateur detectives and a large cast of suspects. The characters are well-drawn, often quirky, and quite distinct. It's more real than, say, Agatha Christie's mysteries: people do get hurt; it's not just a game.

I mentioned CrossLoop before, as a tool for remotely helping someone out. It uses VNC to share desktops.

The last time I looked, it was Windows only. Now there's a Mac client too.

I had to use it to help my father out in Dublin. Somehow he had managed to delete both Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash—I haven't figured out how.

It was painful, painful, painful. The connection was dropped repeatedly and the link couldn't begin to keep up with the amount of graphical data being transferred. Even though CrossLoop reduces the color depth, actions like switching tabs in Firefox cause huge amounts of data to be sent. I couldn't tell why the connection was being dropped. There are so many places where things could go wrong: my client, my connection, the CrossLoop server, his connection, his client, some random router.

All in all, it took about 90 minutes, but it would likely have been even longer and more confusing without a shared desktop.

Title: Scapegoat

Author: Poul Ørum

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Pantheon

Copyright: 1975

ISBN: 039449055X

Pages: 256

Keywords: mystery

Reading period: 12–15 May, 2009

The district nurse is murdered in a Danish seaside resort. The police arrest the local peeping tom, a dimwitted young man. Detective-Inspector Jonas Morck has his doubts. Morck and his partner, Einarsen, are locked in a permanent good cop–bad cop routine. Eventually, Morck in his quiet, methodical, yet insightful way, will find the real killer.

I tried Safari 4 on my MacBook back in February when it first came out in beta. It crashed immediately, every time, so I uninstalled it.

I upgraded to OS X 10.5.7 earlier in the week and new Safari bits were available, so it seemed like a good time to retry it. After all, it had been faster than any other browser on my Vista box at work.

Again, it crashed immediately. This time, however, I took a closer look at the details of the error report that was being sent to Apple. A little Googling suggested that the Glims plugin was at fault. Indeed it was. I replaced beta 8 from September 2008 with the new beta 16, and it's working again. Glims adds search engines, thumbnails in search results, favicons in tabs, etc., so it's useful.

I haven't used Safari 4 much yet on the Mac, but it seems like an improvement.

As promised yesterday, I'm posting the poster for the Circe reading. It's a fine painting by Ellen Coyle. The shrunken image here doesn't do it justice. You can download an 11"x14" PDF (6MB) to see it in its full glory.

We're rehearsing most Wednesdays for our reading of the first half of the Circe chapter of Ulysses next month. It's going well. We need some more rehearsal, but it now sounds like we know what we're doing. Tonight we read the entire piece through from beginning to end, for the first time. Now we know that it takes two-and-a-quarter hours.

We also got the poster tonight. It looks great! I'd post it, but I need to get the painting scanned first.

I serve as tech support to my parents, Frank and Lyndol, and a handful of others. I was at Lyn's tonight to find out why he no longer had an Internet connection. I told him when I arrived, "This will take a minute or an hour." Either it was going to be something that I'd spot in a moment or I'd be fighting with it for a while.

I immediately noticed that the network hub was unplugged—and dared to hope that it might be just that simple. It wasn't, of course: the hub had been unplugged during Lyn's own fruitless troubleshooting. I quickly pinpointed that the DSL modem was not connecting and no amount of power-cycling would convince it otherwise. His ISP's support line had closed down for the evening. I left him with a few suggestions on what to tell them. It occurs to me in retrospect that I didn't verify that all cables were correctly plugged in, but I think the real reason is that the modem is configured with Frank's user ID. We transferred the billing to Lyn after Frank died. It seems plausible that the DSL modem needs to be reconfigured with Lyn's credentials.

Title: The Steep Approach to Garbadale

Author: Iain Banks

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Abacus

Copyright: 2007

ISBN: 0349119287

Pages: 390

Keywords: fiction

Reading period: 10–11 May, 2009

Alban McGill has a strained relationship with his extended family, the Wopulds, maker of Empire, one of the world's bestselling games for more than a century. They are being drawn together at their remote Scottish estate, Garbadale, to decide whether to sell the company to a large American company. His cousin Sophie will be there, the one he's loved from afar for twenty years, since their affair was forcibly broken up.

Banks weaves together multiple strands of Alban's life, the torrid adolescent love affair, his mother's early death, the renunciation of his career as a globetrotting family executive, the odd relationship with his current girlfriend, and the strain of the big reunion. Alban is a likeable if confused protagonist.

Enjoyable.

Title: The Revolution Business

Author: Charles Stross

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Tor

Copyright: 2009

ISBN: 0765316722

Pages: 320

Keywords: fantasy

Reading period: 6–9 May, 2009

Book #5 in the Merchant Princes series, sequel to The Merchants' War.

The U.S. Government have become really pissed off with the world-walking Clan, and send a small nuke into the Gruinmarkt. It misses the clan but takes care of the new king who was waging war on them. Miriam is pregnant with a royal child and manages to parlay that into being crowned queen-widow. The conservative faction in the Clan view the nuke as a deadly insult and want revenge.

This is another heady mixture of feudal intrigue, U.S. spycraft, politics and economics. Stross is very good at taking ideas and extrapolating them in interesting ways. Most of the Clan were only slightly more forward-thinking than the rest of their feudal world. Miriam's arrival and the discovery of new worlds they can walk to has overturned many long-held assumptions about their unique way of life. Matters are coming to a boil and will be resolved in the sixth book of the series.

We came up to Vancouver, BC for the weekend. This morning, we visited the Van Dusen Botanical Garden for the first time. In a relatively small area, they've put together many specialized gardens: rhododendrons, a maze, heathers, redwoods, roses, gingkos, and more. In Seattle terms, it has elements of the Arboretum and the Rhododendron Garden. Well worth a visit, especially on a beautiful May morning.

This afternoon, we drove down to Ladner to visit my great-uncle Dick and his wife Margaret. They moved into a retirement home in March. Dick has visibly failed since we last saw him in September. Margaret remains remarkably spry and fit, but is nearly blind.

Tonight we are off to a party, the proximate excuse for our trip.

Title: Wyatt's Hurricane

Author: Desmond Bagley

Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: Fontana

Copyright: 1966

ISBN: 0006128300

Pages: 254

Keywords: thriller

Reading period: 5–8 May, 2009

Wyatt is a meteorologist working with the U.S. Navy on the small Caribbean island of San Fernandez. He's convinced that Hurricane Mabel will change course and hit San Fernandez. Trouble is, he can't convince the local dictator, Serrurier, to evacuate the low-lying capital because the rebels have risen.

This is a fine early modern thriller by Bagley. Aside from the improbability of an insurrection and a major hurricane happening simultaneously, it's quite believable. The tension mounts as the weather worsens, people act in character, and no one has improbable talents. Wyatt is naive and idealistic and finds himself shocked by the realpolitik of the rebel leader, Favel.

Recommended.

I ported Vim to Win64 but I don't have a convenient Win64 system to test it on.

I decided to install the Win64 build of the Windows 7 RC on VirtualBox, which has supported 64-bit guest operating systems since version 2.0.

It worked without problems on my MacBook Pro. I used VirtualBox's Virtual Media Manager to mount the Windows 7 ISO and installed from that. See also the handy guide. (Why does Windows 7 offer a choice of upgrading from a previous version of Windows on a virgin disk?) After completing the installation of the operating system, I installed the Guest Additions for mouse pointer integration and other goodies.

As always with VirtualBox VMs on my MacBook, I had to fix the Network settings to work over WiFi. When the VM is turned off, go to Settings, choose the Network tab. Change “Attached to” from “NAT” to “Bridged Adapter” and “Name” from “en0: Ethernet” to “en1: AirPort”. Tip: to get a right-click without a mouse, place two fingers on the trackpad and click the trackpad button, or Shift+F10.

I tried installing the Win64 build of Win 7 on my Win32 Vista desktop box at work. The host system bluescreened within seconds of starting the installer! I filed ticket 3963.

I had inadvertently installed the Win32 build first on my work system. That worked fine. It also seemed to have snappy disk I/O. When I unzipped the Win64 Vim binaries (not having realized yet that I had the Win32 Win 7), it was slower than unzipping in the host operating system, but not unreasonably so. On my MacBook, the details pane from the Win 7 zip extractor said that it was running at a mere 260KB per second, which is pitiful. It certainly wasn't that slow when installing the OS onto the virtual disk.

A month ago, Vermont and Iowa passed gay marriage laws. Today, Maine and New Hampshire did the same. The Maine Governor has already signed it into law. The NH legislature passed a law, but it's possible their governor will veto it.

It's as if there were a pro-gay marriage backlash after the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 passed in California last year. Courts and legislatures are realizing the fundamental unfairness of denying the benefits of marriage to all committed couples. The sky didn't fall when Massachusetts legalized gay marriage five years ago.

There's no immediate prospect of a gay marriage law being enacted in Washington State. Last month, the state legislature passed a law extending all of the state-given benefits of being married to registered domestic partners. There was some talk amongst the Religious Right of a ballot initiative to repeal this DP benefits law, but there seems to be little appetite for it. 40–45% of Washington state voters favor gay marriage, while another 20–25% favor domestic partnerships.

In other news, today is the ninth anniversary of my wedding to Emma. Our marriage doesn't feel at all threatened by events in New England.