Last week was the second an­niver­sary of my brother Mark’s wedding to Lizzy.

Next week will be the first an­niver­sary of my sister Michelle’s wedding to David.

The day after that, my parents will be flying to Egypt to celebrate the fiftieth an­niver­sary of their first date.

And Emma and I just got back from a three-day weekend in Astoria, Oregon, to celebrate the tenth an­niver­sary of our own first date.

Sheesh!

Nabb’s recurring character, Marshal Guarnaccia, is a non-com­mis­sioned officer in the cara­binieri, the Italian military-style police, who is stationed in Florence. Guarnaccia is a slow, dogged plodder and a wallflower, who is largely overlooked by those who encounter him, but who nonethe­less gets to the bottom of mysteries.

An old case, involving a series of double murders over a twenty-year period, has been reopened for political reasons. Several police officers, including the Marshal, have been seconded to a task force. The Marshal is troubled by what is clearly an attempt by the …continue.

The first book in a trilogy that tells the fictional history of the Templars.

The Order of the Rebirth in Sion is a secret society whose roots go back to Jerusalem before the time of Christ, whose members are drawn from French noble families. When the Pope starts the First Crusade to seize Jerusalem back from the Muslims, a handful of the Order tag along in the hopes of dis­cov­er­ing their order’s secrets in the long-lost Temple of Solomon. Under the guise of warrior-monks protecting the …continue.

The third book in the Merchant Princes series.

Miriam Beckstein, is a tech journalist in Boston, who discovered in the first book that she was born in a parallel world, and that she and some of her relatives hold a rare gene that allows them to step between worlds. In her feudal home world, her relatives have become merchant princes, wielding enormous power over the local economy.

Miriam, thoroughly American, doesn’t fit in well in that other world, and resents becoming a pawn in her family’s dynastic games. Meanwhile, back on our Earth, …continue.

Walt the Wonder Boy can walk on air. Really. He was a nine-year-old orphan pulled off the streets of 1920s St. Louis by Master Yehudi and taught in a long, grueling process to levitate and walk through the air. Walt becomes a huge hit and he and Master Yehudi travel around America, pulling in the crowds. It can’t last of course and Walt loses his ability once puberty strikes. Master Yehudi dies and Walt settles into a second career as a small-time crook and club owner in 1930s Chicago. He goes …continue.

I’ve grown fond of the JavaScript || idiom:

function FrobImage(img) {
    var width  = img.width  || 400;
    var height = img.height || 300;
    // ...
}

FrobImage({height: 100, name: "example.png"});

If img.width exists and it’s truthy, then width = img.width; otherwise, width = 400. Here, it will be 400 since the img hash has no width property. More than two al­ter­na­tives may be used: x = a || b || c || ... || q;

A few weeks ago, while cleaning up the error handling in some batch files, I came across a similar idiom:

foo.exe bar 123 "some stuff"  

Picture this.

An external USB hard drive plugged in to a machine running Win64. The OS has vir­tu­al­ized the underlying transport so that it’s es­sen­tial­ly in­dis­tin­guish­able from an internal IDE, SCSi, or SATA drive. Call the machine, Boss, and the USB drive, L:.

Boss is running Virtual PC, which is hosting a 32-bit virtual machine on top of Boss’s 64-bit OS. Let’s call the 32-bit VM, Sidekick.

Sidekick is not only a VM, but a virtual network host. Boss is bridging con­nec­tions to Sidekick, and Sidekick and Boss both appear on the LAN as separate network hosts.

The USB drive has several ISO images, which Sidekick wants to use. Sidekick connects to \MasterL$ over the virtual …continue.

We saw the movie last week and I remarked that I had never read any of the Chronicles of Narnia books, so Emma dug out her copies.

The book is old-fashioned and innocent. It reminds of some of the British books that I read in my childhood, such as the Famous Five.

By way of an enchanted wardrobe, four plucky human children fall into a parallel world, where they are acclaimed as saviors, fulfilling a prophecy. They quickly fall afoul of …continue.

At End of Day is Higgins’ last novel, published after his death. McKeach and Cistaro are crime bosses who have avoided arrest for more than 30 years. Partly because they’re very smart, very competent, and quite paranoid. Partly because they have a secret deal with the local FBI office: they provide in­for­ma­tion in return for protection. All good things come to an end, of course.

Higgins’ style is odd, conducted largely in monologue. His characters jaw and jaw. Boy, do they love the sounds of their own voices. It …continue.

I’ve been meaning to play around with Grease­mon­key for a couple of years. Grease­mon­key is a Firefox extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to the look and feel of third-party websites. For example, adding price com­par­isons to Amazon or thumbnail images to Google search results. User­Scripts.org has a large repository of Grease­mon­key scripts.

I finally built my first script the other day. We’re putting together a new feature at Cozi that integrates partner websites with our site. Since the feature is not yet announced, I’ll just say that partners will add a link to Cozi on many of their database-driven pages. That link has a complex, page-dependent …continue.