No Middle Name

Small Beer Press , awesome publishers of much goodness, have been giving away some of their books as Creative Commons downloads . I 've reviewed Maureen McHugh's Mothers and Other Monsters before and now it's time for John Kessel's " Baum Plan For Financial Independence " and Kelly Link's " Stranger Things Happen ". Both are short story collections at the literary end of the fantasy/magical-realism/man-that's-some-weird-shit genre. Both are well written, evocative and interesting. Kelly Link's stories are usually fairy tale ish weird shit kind of; Kessel's are more mashups of other tales weird shit with a dollop of allusion. Both collections will repay careful reading and rereading with new interpretations of what the fudge is going on. Aw hell, go and read a couple of stories, see if they are your cup of tea. They're free.

I tried to read Irvine Welsh's "If You Liked School, You'll Love Work". I picked it up almost entirely because of the title. I've read a couple of his other books, and they'd put me off reading any more, but I thought I should give him another go. His writing is good, and he always manages to capture the voice of his characters. So why was I cautious? Welsh seems to revel in creating thoroughly unlikeable characters, people you would cross the street to avoid, perhaps even move house, assume a false name and grow a beard. They do horrible things to their friends, their pets, random strangers, and themselves. Now, I've never assumed that you need to like a protagonist in order to enjoy a book, but this book got me thinking. I was trying to come up with a story I've read where the main character is an arse, but I got nowhere. Characters are usually at least sympathetic or their motives understandable. You have to want to spend at least a few hours in the...

(Buckle up, Spanky. This is a long one.) -hey, tell him about the guy who was in here the other day. -what guy? There's lotsa guys, it's a bar. -ha, bloody ha. The end of the world guy, you know. -oh, him. Yeah, so on Thursday- -Wednesday -whatever. He comes in, sits at the end of the bar and orders- -you're gonna love this part -will ya let me tell the fucking story? -sorry -anyway, he asks for a bottle of whisky. Straight away I figure he's from the council or the cops or something, so I give him the line. -"local licensing laws prohibit the sale of alcohol in such volumes at this establishment, patrons are encouraged to drink responsibly" -you've memorised it? -I hear it often enough. -anyway, then he says "ok, give me a pint of whisky" -that's not even the funny bit -will you shut up and let me tell it? I say, sorry sir,- -"local licensing"- -yeah, he heard you the first time. Ok, says the guy, how about fifteen double whiskies....

I'm not entirely sure that "disunited" is a word. Still, Harry Turtledove is a professional author who probably owns a dictionary or two so I shall bow to his expertise. " The Disunited States Of America " is another in the seemingly unending stream of freebooks from Tor. I thought they were only doing about 10 of them as a teaser for their SF social network before they rolled it out. They must have hit a snag; never mind, more books for me to read on my phone. Disunited is a lot shorter than the last couple of fantasy (virtual) doorstops from Tor, and that is commendable. The plot is straightforward: alternative timeline travellers get stuck in an America that never stuck together, lots of little states bickering over borders. If you know your US history this might be a lot more intriguing than it was for me. It would make a great alternative textbook for kids at school. It is set in 2092 or thereabouts, but I can't quite work out why. There are no great le...

Komodo Edit is a nice, free, IDE for Python (as well as a lot of other languages). It does syntax highlighting and code completion. To get code completion to work in Mac OS X for the Google App Engine SDK, you have to know where the appengine python libs are. They are hidden away inside /Applications/GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app, so not normally accessible via the Finder's browse boxes. What I did was to symlink to the libraries inside my user directory and point Komodo there. Like this (in Terminal): cd <your user home directory> ln -s /Applications/GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app/Contents/Resources/GoogleAppEngine-default.bundle/Contents/Resources/google_appengine google_appengine Now you should be able to go to Komodo's preferences, select Languages, then Python, then Additional Python Import Directories and add your symlinked google_appengine directory. Hey presto - code completion. UPDATE: Newer versions of the app engine launcher create a symlink to the SDK in /usr/loc...

home again Originally uploaded by No Middle Name Back from Sydney.

Yes, my notes for day 2 are two days late. Blame James Squire and his damnably tasty range of ales. Day 2 started with a nice, greasy hotel fry-up, setting me up nicely for the day. First up was the keynote from Robert Martin , talking about clean code. See the slides : a very interesting and, most important for me, useful talk. A brief digest: you don't need comments, don't comment out code, and don't write code you're not proud of - do it the right way the first time. Otherwise the code just rots. Jim Webber gave a great presentation about how essentially cool the http protocol is , how bad soap is and how rpc sucks balls as a model for web services. Again, a useful and practical talk. Next up was Gregor Hohpe from Google, this time showing off a couple of Google projects : the mashup editor, which looked awesome; the gdata apis; and the app engine. Lunch (butter chicken and rice, yum). Robert Martin popped up again , this time talking about functions and how to ma...

There's a search widget as well, but I can't remember the url for that right now.

beer Originally uploaded by No Middle Name I have found the James Squires Brewhouse in Sydney. Life is good. Forward my post, I'm not leaving.

I'm in Sydney for JAOO 2008 , gettin' my geek on. Work booked and paid for it all, with the only drawback being having to get up at 3:30am to get in a taxi to the airport for a 6:15 flight. Yes, we live on the other side of Melbourne to the airport. Conesquently, I'm in my hotel room getting ready for bed when the rest of the geeks are at the social do at a nearby bar. I'm trying to stay awake long enough to phone home and say goodnight to the kids. I attended five talks today. The first was the keynote by Erik Meijer, about Functional Programming ( slides here ). At least, I think that was what he was on about. He meandered a lot, and said some strange stuff, very little of which made sense. Some of it was about Haskell though. Which he thinks is good or something. I then skipped the next slot, there was nothing much that interested me so I went shopping for presents for the kids and my wife, so that I may be allowed back in when I get home. I popped back for Rod Smit...