I did a clean install of OS X 10.10 on my home laptop a week ago. I tried to launch PyCharm 4.0.4 on it today. It im­me­di­ate­ly failed. Every time.

When I looked in the System Console, I saw:

1/25/15 7:46:00.557 PM pycharm[1160]: No matching VM found.
1/25/15 7:46:00.711 PM com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.jetbrains.pycharm.58252[1160]) Service exited with abnormal code: 1

The JetBrains website wasn’t very helpful when I looked there. In time, I found a Stack­Over­flow answer that put me on the right track (and reminded me that I had previously solved this problem about a year ago, at work). PyCharm and some of the other JetBrains IDEs require JDK 1.6, as there are …continue.

Washington state is well-known for coffee, wineries, and mi­cro­brew­eries. Dozens of small-batch craft dis­til­leries have been started in Washington state since 2008 after a change in the law. Most of them are quite good. I drink Irish and Scotch whiskies, but otherwise neither of us drink spirits often, so we’ve barely tried the local dis­til­leries.

We drank a really nice gin from Sun Liquor at a New Year’s Eve party, and we’ve been meaning to follow up. This afternoon, we stopped at the Oola Distillery on Capitol Hill and sampled all their wares. We left with a half bottle of their Rosemary Vodka. Then we stopped in at Sun Liquor and came out with a …continue.

When I buy a book, I want to be able to read it how and where I like, not where the bookseller dictates. With printed books, the very idea of the bookseller having any say is ridiculous. The book is now my property, to read where and how I like, to give away or to lend or even to sell. I’ve bought thousands of new books and thousands more secondhand books from bookstores.

Most electronic books are crippled with DRM. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, although Defective By Design prefers to expand DRM as Digital Re­stric­tions Management. DRM is technology that controls digital content after it has been sold. In particular, …continue.

As I mentioned last week, we’ve been listening to some audiobooks. We finished listening to The Beekeeper’s Apprentice last night. I read the book many years ago and I’ve read most of the subsequent books in the Mary Russell series.

Fifteen-year-old Mary Russell is walking on the Sussex Downs with her head in a book one spring day in 1915, when she literally trips over Sherlock Holmes. Although Holmes is almost four decades her senior, the two brilliant, lonely people become friends and Holmes tutors Russell in the art …continue.

I mentioned last week that a few months ago we had listened to the audiobook of The Hot Rock, the first of the Dortmunder novels. I just finished reading it as an ebook on my phone. I enjoyed it a lot but I think I found it funnier when I heard it as an audiobook. Partly, the first time around, I didn’t know what was coming next; partly, the narrator’s skillful delivery gave me time to savor the humor. I read so fast that …continue.

I sat in a deserted coffee shop this afternoon with Emma, as much of Seattle was watching the playoff game of the Seattle Seahawks against the Green Bay Packers. Idly curious, I checked the score early in the fourth quarter and found that the Packers were leading 19–7. I was quite surprised later to find that the Seahawks had won 28–22, sending themselves to the Super Bowl in Arizona in two weeks’ time. Apparently, it was a thrilling comeback late in the game.

I suppose that I’m happy for my football-loving friends, though I’m inclined to “love the sinner but hate the sin”, as I can’t stand football. I spent eleven years …continue.

Every few years, I find it necessary to wipe my computers and do a clean install of the operating system. As a developer and a power user, I install a lot of software. The cumulative effect of in­stal­la­tions and upgrades is to leave a lot of cruft on the machines. Entropy increases and the machines grow slower and perhaps less reliable. So I like to wipe the hard disk, install a new operating system, and reinstall only those apps that I know I need.

My mid-2012 MacBook Pro came with OS X 10.7. Shortly thereafer, 10.8 was released and I promptly upgraded; likewise with 10.9. Yosemite (10.10) was released in October …continue.

Jack Whyte’s Camulod Chronicles is a series of novels about King Arthur and Camelot in a post-Roman Britain. This book tells how Lancelot (Clothar the Frank) came to Camulod and met Arthur—and it takes the entire book to get to that point. Only after several hundred pages of Clothar’s childhood and early manhood and fighting a civil war in his uncle’s small kingdom in Gaul, do we proceed to Britain.

As with Uther and other books in the series, I found Whyte to be ex­tra­or­di­nar­i­ly …continue.

I’ve always been an avid—nay, avari­cious—read­er of books. But I have not been a listener of audiobooks.

I read quickly, much more quickly than anyone can speak, and I enjoy burying my head in a book. I’ve seen little reason, therefore, to listen to audiobooks. Lately, however, we’ve listened to some audiobooks on long car trips, as Emma, unlike me, has an Audible sub­scrip­tion. We enjoyed The Hot Rock, the first of the comic crime-caper Dortmunder books. Before that, I had read another Dortmunder novel, Bank Shot, aloud to Emma, while she drove us back from Portland, which both of us had enjoyed.

On our trip to Vancouver earlier this week, we started listening …continue.

Detective Inspector Tony McLean of the Edinburgh Police has multiple deaths to deal with: an elderly rich man, murdered horribly; the newly discovered corpse of a girl killed in some ghoulish ritual sixty years ago; and the death of the grand­moth­er who raised him. Then more elderly men start being murdered.

I enjoyed this police procedural and I liked the character of Tony McLean. The two cases start dove­tail­ing together (one of my pet peeves) and I was surprised when the author introduced su­per­nat­ur­al elements, since I had thought it was …continue.