Blogging has been on my mind lately, as I’ve just set up an en­gi­neer­ing blog at work.

I gave a speech about blogging earlier tonight to my club, Freely Speaking Toast­mas­ters. I no longer write speeches be­fore­hand; I ex­tem­po­rized my speech from a mindmap that I had prepared yesterday. This post is a more coherent and expanded rendition of my points.

As Toast­mas­ters, we give speeches about topics that interest us, when we want to share or inform or entertain. A live, in-person speech reaches a direct audience at one point in time. A written blog post can reach a much larger audience. Toast­mas­ters have something to say, whether in person or in print.

A blog can …continue.

[Pre­vi­ous­ly published at the now defunct MetaBrite Dev Blog.]

At MetaBrite, we believe in the power of pair pro­gram­ming. We find that pairing helps for col­lab­o­ra­tion on difficult tasks, for exploring new areas, for knowledge transfer, and for spurring each other to better solutions. I find it to be fun, though it can also be exhausting. It’s not ideal for all our work—there’s no value in tying up two developers on some rote task that both know well.

Last week, I rebuilt our primary pairing work­sta­tion. In its previous in­car­na­tion, we had an account for each developer. Each of us had set up some personal pref­er­ences in our own user …continue.

I’m doing some Python profiling and I wanted to use the Run­SnakeRun utility to view the profile data. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, that’s not straight­for­ward on Mac OS X if you use a virtualenv, and it’s even less easy if you’re using the Python installed by the Homebrew (brew) package manager.

There are several problems:

• Installing wxPython on OS X 10.10. This is the cross-platform GUI API toolkit used by Run­SnakeRun.
• Getting wxPython installed in a virtualenv
• Running wxPython apps in a virtualenv on the Mac.

Joe Kurtz is marked for death after the events of Hardcase. And a concert violinist is convinced that he just saw the man who murdered his teenaged daughter 20 years earlier, who was thought dead. More mayhem.

As I announced a couple of weeks ago, we’re off to Berlin for June and July. We leave the house at 4:30am tomorrow to catch a 6:45am flight to Chicago and thence via Dublin, arriving in Berlin at 10:30am on Tuesday.

There’s nothing like a deadline to focus the mind and make things happen. We’ve been spring cleaning furiously for several weeks. Frankly, it was long overdue. The bedrooms and the offices were all badly in need of being re­or­ga­nized. My office used to scare me, it was such a mess. It’s still far from perfect, but it’s much cleaner, you can use the desk, and the remaining clutter is stacked into …continue.

It’s 1999, the "Glimmering" is destroying the ozone layer, the seas are rising, and the world is falling apart.

I thought this was well written and the two main characters were well-drawn, but I didn’t enjoy this book.

Mary Russell—Sherlock Holmes’ much younger wife—in­ves­ti­gates the odd goings on in a British silent film company that’s making a pirate film on location in Lisbon and Morocco in 1924. The filmmakers get more than they bargained for, as the rogues they cast as pirates seem to be real pirates.

A decent entry in this series.

In 1942, Ernest Hemingway ran a counter-espionage ring and submarine-seeking operation from Cuba. Staffed by amateurs, it was approved by the American ambassador. The narrator, Joe Lucas, is sent by J. Edgar Hoover to infiltrate Hemingway’s op. There seems to be a lot of espionage going on in Cuba and it looks like Hemingway is being set up for something.

Based loosely on true events, this is en­ter­tain­ing, if a tad longwinded and confusing.

Joe Kurtz is a hardboiled ex-PI who just spent eleven years in Attica for killing the men who killed his partner. He’s out now, in­ves­ti­gat­ing the dis­ap­pear­ance of a mob accountant, and he quickly makes new enemies. Mayhem ensues.

A woman calls at a Yorkshire police station to talk to her friend, Detective Inspector Alan Banks, about the gun she found in her daughter’s bedroom. Banks is out of the country, however. An un­reg­is­tered gun is a serious offence under British law and the police take it very seriously. The daughter’s friend—Banks’ own daughter, Tracy—goes to warn the owner, and he goes on the run with Tracy. She’s willing at first then realizes that she’s in way over her head with this bad boy.

Another good entry in Robinson’s long-running series …continue.