The second novel of le Carré’s Karla Trilogy, following Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and preceding Smiley’s People.

The "Circus" (MI6) is in sorry shape after the mole "Gerald" was unmasked. George Smiley, now head of the Circus, must go on the offense. They find a trail of money leading to a Hong Kong busi­ness­man, Drake Ko. Jerry Westerby, a newspaper reporter and occasional agent, is sent out to Hong Kong to shake Ko’s tree.

Smiley is a secondary character here. Jerry is the honourable schoolboy of the title, a …continue.

Thraxas is an middle-aged minor sorceror and retired warrior, who is entirely too fond of the bottle, his grub, and the racetrack. He long ago fell from grace at the palace in the city of Turai and now makes ends meet by discreet private in­ves­ti­ga­tions. He is oc­ca­sion­al­ly aided by Makri, a gladiator-turned-barmaid and would-be university student, who happens to be part Orc, part Elf, and half human.

This book was published as two separate novels in Britain, Thraxas and Thraxas and the Warrior Monks. The plots are fairly for­get­table, but fun …continue.

Cozi is the PC Mag Site of the Week.

This is the col­lab­o­ra­tion ap­pli­ca­tion to have for organizing your family life. It has simple, intuitive func­tion­al­i­ty that suits its family target audience perfectly.

Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM) talks multiple protocols, including MSN and Google Talk. To configure, follow the in­struc­tions.

For Google Talk (XMPP), you may also need to set some advanced settings. At least, I have needed this at my last two jobs.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Rowling demon­strates that she really has been building up to this finale across all seven books, laying down material in earlier books to be picked up here.

After a brief, happy interlude at the wedding of Bill Weasley and Fleur Delacour, Harry goes on the run with Ron and Hermione. A coup has taken place in the Ministry of Magic. A puppet minister has been installed, with Voldemort reigning behind the scenes. Mudbloods are being rounded up. Snape is the new headmaster of Hogwarts.

They …continue.

At the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the reborn Voldemort finally revealed himself to the world. Harry is no longer being dogged by ill-founded claims that he is lying, making his sixth year at Hogwarts easier. Elsewhere in the magical world, Voldemort and the Death Eaters are wreaking havoc.

Dumbledore belatedly takes Harry somewhat into his confidence and reveals that Voldemort has split his soul into several pieces to assure his im­mor­tal­i­ty. Only if these fragments, which are hidden in horcruxes, are all destroyed, can …continue.

Last night, I un­wit­ting­ly bought some habenero peppers when I was shopping for in­gre­di­ents for Afghan Chicken. They tasted hot, but not too hot, when I nibbled a couple of small pieces. I cut them up with my bare hands. By the time that I was finished, my fingers felt as if they had been burned! As if I had burned them with steam or something. It took several hours for the pain to go away. For­tu­nate­ly, I didn’t rub my eyes or more delicate mucous membranes, while I still had the habenero oils on my skin.

The chicken itself was fine: not too spicy. The cooked-up onion marinade had a …continue.

I worked at Atlas Solutions, a subsidiary of aQuantive, from October 2005 to July 2007.

Google bought our largest competitor, Dou­bleClick, for $3 Billion in April 2007. In the following five weeks, all the other major web ad­ver­tis­ing companies were bought up, cul­mi­nat­ing in Microsoft paying the stupendous sum of $6.3 billion for aQuantive. The Microsoft-aQuantive deal closes in mid-August.

To put it mildly, I was not excited at the thought of becoming a Microsoft employee yet again. Cu­mu­la­tive­ly, between 1992 and 2005, I spent 10 years at Microsoft as an employee or contractor, including a year and a half on Cairo, seven years on IIS, and a year on FlexGo.

Nev­er­the­less, I had absolutely no desire …continue.

I had a NameVal­ueCol­lec­tion embedded inside a larger object. I needed to serialize the larger object into XML and back. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, NameVal­ueCol­lec­tion is not XML se­ri­al­iz­able. Why I do not know.

A blog comment from Tim Erwin got me started in the right direction. Implement IXmlSe­ri­al­iz­able and do the work by hand in ReadXml and WriteXml.

Tim’s im­ple­men­ta­tion turned out to be overly simple. It didn’t handle an empty collection well, nor did it leave the XmlReader in a good state.

I used SGen to examine the de­se­ri­al­iza­tion of a List<String> to figure out what else needed to be done.

The following ReadXml seems to work. If I expected to receive XML from untrusted sources, I would …continue.