My mother’s mother’s sister, known to all of us as Auntie Pat, was born on January 2nd, 1915, in London. My mother and a few other family members will join her today for her 100th birthday party. I understand that the Queen has been notified and will be sending a telegram of con­grat­u­la­tions, but can’t attend in person.

Pat is frail but her mind is still good, and she continues to live by herself in her own home in Bournemouth, England. In the last decade, Pat has twice emigrated to New Zealand, but it didn’t work out either time.

Pat married only once, in her sixties, to a Polish émigré who had served …continue.

John Buchan’s classic novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps, takes place in the summer of 1914, weeks before the Great War breaks out. Richard Hannay, who made his fortune in South Africa, is bored of London. When his neighbor is murdered after disclosing a spy plot to him, Hannay is forced to go on the run to avoid being arrested by the police or killed by the spies. He spends much of the book hiding out in rural Scotland, before returning to London.

This proto-thriller—or “shocker” as Buchan called it—is still an en­ter­tain­ing story.

In most of the world, as I write this, it’s already 2015. We in Seattle will enter the New Year in 4½ hours.

For me personally, it was a reasonably good year. My health remained good, I had a new job, we had a good summer vacation, and generally enjoyed ourselves. Emma’s health was not so great, but she’s set up an Etsy shop for her knitting and started modeling for artists.

I look forward to 2015.

My DasBlog-based blog at http://www.georgevreil­ly.com/blog/ has been out of commission for months. I’ve been meaning to replace it for a long time, but I only just got around to making a serious effort, as I realized that otherwise I would have no posts at all for 2014. I received only a handful of complaints about its absence; if there had been more, I would have fixed it sooner.

DasBlog is a fairly light­weight blogging engine that runs on ASP.NET. It doesn’t require a database, but it does require the ability to write XML blogpost entries to the local filesystem. That’s a non-standard con­fig­u­ra­tion for ASP.NET and IIS websites, which inevitably causes problems. Whenever …continue.

Tuesday December 10th was my last day at Cozi. I had recently rolled off a major project that lasted for most of a year, and the timing was good to go do something else. In my six years there, I made lasting friend­ships and I built a lot of software that makes me proud. Cozi has about 15 engineers, small enough that I worked on most of the software, notably on the web services that power everything else and on the web client ap­pli­ca­tion, though not, alas, on the iOS or Android ap­pli­ca­tions. Cozi was a great place to work and I knew I wanted to replicate what I valued …continue.

From October 1996 to May 1997, I wrote a number of sample components for the then-new Active Server Pages (Classic ASP). I worked for Mi­cro­Crafts, a consulting company in Redmond, WA; the samples were written for Microsoft’s Internet In­for­ma­tion Server (IIS) team. Most of the components used Microsoft’s new Active Template Library (ATL), a C++ library for COM.

This work had two important con­se­quences for me: Microsoft recruited me to join the IIS de­vel­op­ment team to work on improving ASP per­for­mance for IIS 3, and Wrox Press invited me to write Beginning ATL COM Pro­gram­ming I was originally supposed to be the sole author of the book, but I was a slow writer and I was caught …continue.

I’ve spent some time this evening profiling a Python ap­pli­ca­tion on Windows, trying to find out why it was so much slower than on Mac or Linux. The ap­pli­ca­tion is an in-house build tool which reads a number of config files, then writes some output files.

Using the Run­SnakeRun Python profile viewer on Windows, two things im­me­di­ate­ly leapt out at me: we were running os.stat a lot and file.close was really expensive.

A quick test convinced me that we were stat-ing the same files over and over. It was a com­bi­na­tion of explicit checks and implicit code, like os.walk calling os.path.isdir. I wrote a little cache that memoizes the results, which brought the cost …continue.

Backbone.js Testing is a short, dense in­tro­duc­tion to testing JavaScript ap­pli­ca­tions with three testing libraries, Mocha, Chai, and Sinon.JS. Although the author uses a sample ap­pli­ca­tion of a personal note manager written with Backbone.js throughout the book, much of the material would apply to any JavaScript client or server framework.

Mocha is a test framework that can be executed in the browser or by Node.js, which runs your tests. Chai is a framework-agnostic TDD/BDD assertion library. Sinon.JS provides standalone test spies, stubs and mocks for JavaScript. They complement each …continue.

Last night, I read the first third of the chapter. Tonight I will read more.

I described it as “badly punctuated.” There’s no punc­tu­a­tion at all! No apos­tro­phes, no commas, no periods. The “sen­tences” are separated by paragraph breaks.

So far, Molly Bloom has thought back to Mrs Riordan, an obnoxious elderly neighbor whom Leopold Bloom flattered; sickness; Bloom’s in­fi­deli­ties, present and past; her own seductions and con­fes­sion­s; sex and child­birth; jealousy; ag­gra­vat­ing husbands.

In the second paragraph: men are all so different; how strange Bloom is; Bloom is “mad on the subject of drawers”; their first sexual encounter; punc­tu­al­i­ty; a potential singing trip to Belfast with both Bloom and Blazes Boylan, her paramour; her last concert; hating politics; money; well-dressed men; losing weight, face lotion, and beauty …continue.

We at the Wild Geese Players of Seattle have been adapting James Joyce’s Ulysses for staged readings since 1998, and we will complete the book with the Penelope chapter (aka Molly Bloom’s soliloquy) on Bloomsday 2013.

I shall detail my dra­matur­gi­cal process over several blog posts.

The very first step is to re-read the chapter. It’s been several years since I last read it and I don’t remember it clearly. I’ve yet to look at my old friends, Gifford and Blamires, for their takes on “Penelope”.

Molly is lying in bed, day­dream­ing early on the morning of June 17th, 1904. Leopold climbed in to bed a little while ago, put his head at her …continue.