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.