I’ve just uploaded the December Issue of Ex Libris Reviews.

If you’ve been reading this weblog all month, the only thing of note is a brief bit at the beginning–Ex Libris Reviews is now seven years old, and I’ve got a few comments on its history.

I have a couple of thriller series I keep up with if I happen to see them on
the racks at the grocery store. Patricia Cornwell’s Kay
Scarpeta series is always good for a gritty, gross read when you just
want something light and sort of entertaining. Jeffrey Deaver’s Lincoln
Ryhme series is another. The
kicker with this series is that the forensic detective, Rhyme, is a C4 quad
with movement only in the ring finger of his left hand. The premise is that
the enforced lack of movement helps him channel his razor-sharp intellect
into paths that wouldn’t be obvious to someone distracted with things like,
oh, working hands. This, of course, also forces him to have a host of
supporting players to help him solve the crimes he can no longer investigate
on him own. Prime among all of them is a working CSI, Amelia Sachs, who
walks the grid at crime scenes with Rhyme hooked into a cell phone
connection as she does it. And there is Thom, his immaculately dressed, gay
attendant, taking care of his bodily needs and making sure he doesn’t overdo
it in his desire to solve the crime. There are other beat cops and
detectives that float in and out but the main action almost always takes
place in Rhyme’s apartment/forensic lab with all sorts of cool equipment and
assistive devices. And it helps that a romance has developed between Rhyme
and Sachs which, thankfully, have the physical details of their love life
kept off stage.

In this installment, a boat full of fleeing Chinese dissidents is blown up
offshore of New York by a well-known smuggler in an effort to avoid capture.
Two families, a couple of individuals and the smuggler survive and then
mysteriously disappear into the Chinatown neighborhoods of New York. The
mystery begins with why he scuttled the boat and evolves into a desperate
chase to find the smuggler before he offs the two families. Fortunately, one
of the survivors is a Chinese cop who has a charming way with broken English
and some investigative methods that are not purely scientific.

I have to admit, I didn’t see the ending coming and was surprised. And the
Chinese cop kind of grew on me as the book progressed. I’ll probably read
the next one when it’s out in paperback. It’s a light read to curl up with
on the couch on a cold November afternoon.

Marsh’s next outing combines her knowledge of New Zealand and the theater
as Alleyn visits New Zealand to do counter-espionage work during the
early days of World War II. The action takes place at a seedy hotsprings
resort in a rural area of New Zealand, the temporary home of a diverse
cast: the vague retired colonel, owner of the resort; his foolish wife;
their mousy daughter; her uncle, an irascible doctor who sees Japanese
spies under every bush; a sharp businessman with his eye on the
hotsprings–and on the colonel’s daughter; a justly famous Shakespearean
actor, and his entourage; assorted layabouts; and an entire Maori village.

This is one of the first of Marsh’s books that I ever read, and it’s
different than I remembered it. I found the beginning exceedingly
tedious, but that might simply be because I had my head deeply into a
programming project, and found it difficult to concentrate on anything
else.

Overall, not a bad read, but not my favorite either.

My Notebook application has been getting a lot of attention lately, but it seems I’ve hit the big time; Notebook is explicitly mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for the word notebook.

If you’re not familiar with Wikipedia, it’s a collaboratively built on-line encyclopedia with quite a fantastic amount of information. It’s a fun place to surf.

Howdy!

I’ve just uploaded V0.91 of Snit, my Tcl object framework, to the Snit’s Not Incr Tcl home page. There are some important bug fixes and a couple of new features; see the README file for details, if you’re so inclined.

First, I have to say the only reason I picked this book up is because I
enjoy the Kay Scarpeta thriller series by Cornwell. It’s a closet pleasure
and one I usually don’t tell friends who know my normal reading tastes, but
there it is. So, when this one came out I browsed it a bit and decided to
wait for paperback before reading it

And I found I didn’t like it. At all. First, the book is badly written.
Really badly written. I had a hard time following her line of reasoning
because she jumps from one scenario to another with no logical path or
connecting point. She’s purporting to examine the remaining evidence and yet
she occasionally lapses into a fictional mode when describing the victim’s
thoughts. My biggest problem is with her analysis of her suspected killer,
an artist named Walter Sickert. With no real evidence, she tries to build a
profile of the adult based on some childhood operations that, again with no
evidence, traumatized him sexually and turned him into a psychopath. And she
uses his art as further proof of his mental state which seems to me to be
iffy at best. She makes glaring suppositions about his ability to fake the
various handwritings in the Ripper letters. She can’t actually put him near
the scene of any of the murders and since his body was cremated after death,
there is no possibility of using real DNA analysis of his DNA vs. what is
left on envelope flaps or licked stamps. How she could title the book “Case
Closed” is beyond me. She raises a few questions but really has no decisive
evidence one way or the other.

I also should have realized that the reason I don’t usually read true crime
novels or books is because I don’t generally care for the genre. Authors
include photos of crime scenes that are gruesome at best and Cornwell felt
it necessary to put photos taken of the Ripper victims in her book. They
were not pretty though thankfully fuzzy and in black and white. I have too
vivid an imagination to read books like this. I was expecting something a
little deeper and found instead something that is supposed to titillate in a
sick, twisted way. No thanks.

If you’ve not seen this, you should really go take a look; it’s one of the funniest bits of Internet humor I’ve seen. It’s one of the things that comes around in e-mail every once in a while, and every time it comes around I read it and chuckle.

Fair warning: I’m mostly down with a cold, so my lucidity is questionable. In particular, I’m noticing a tendency to leave out word here and there.

Last night, Jane and I were fortunate enough to hear the Los Angeles Philharmonic play Ravel, Saint-Saens, and Francesconi at the new Walt Disney Hall. This was a bit of a fluke–we were given tickets–but it means that I can now weigh in on the whole Frank Gehry-isn’t-it-a-ridculous-building debate.

I’d previously only seen pictures of it, and as it was dark I didn’t get a really good look at the outside. But what I could see looked just plain silly. This is a truly foolish-looking building, and it reminds me of my brother’s rule about buying presents–if you can’t find anything good, buy them something strange.

Inside, the most notable elements were lobbies and corridors that twined about with no particular rhyme or reason, little signs with the names of rich donors everywhere (even the stairways were named after particular individuals), and lots and lots of exposed Douglas Fir. The columns in the lobby were meant to evoke trees; I know this because there were large notices on metal stands that told me so.

It’s interesting to contrast the entry area of Disney Hall with that of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which is just about as old as I am. It’s a tall, elegant building, with massive crystal chandeliers, rich carpeting, and lots and lots of marble–symbols anyone would understand. Everything about it speaks of luxury, wealth, and the establishment. I’m not sure what the entry area of Disney Hall is trying to say, but I find it interesting that it was felt necessary to post signs to let us in on the secret.

We found our way to the Concert Hall Cafe, where we ate a couple of delightful little chocolate tortes, and then investigated the L.A. Philharmonic Store, and then went up to our seats.

Whoa.

The auditorium more than makes up for the foolishness of the rest of the ball. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen, a fascinating, curving, swooping space of Douglas Fir with banks of seats on all four sides. It’s a far more intimate space than the Dorothy Chandler, and the acoustics seemed to me (I’m no judge) to be just fine.

The seats are a little narrow, and there is no leg room whatsoever–if you had to leave in a hurry, everyone between you and the aisle would have to stand up.

But other than that, I have no complaints. As a concert hall, it was a fabulous place to sit and listen to music.

Well, mostly. The first piece on the program was a new piece called “Cobalt, Scarlet” by a contemporary Italian composer named Francesconi. This was the U.S. premiere, and the composer was in attendance. It was 24 minutes of sound that reminded me of two things: labor and delivery, in that it was long, drawn out, and painful, with occasional moments of excitement; and (sporadically) the opening moments of Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd”–you know, where all the steam pipes go off at once?

I suppose that artistically it was pretty much the equivalent of Disney Hall’s exterior–a product of great skill and attention to detail, a wonderful example of the chaos that results when all rules and standards have been swept aside.

Late in June of 2002, I began work on Notebook, my personal notebook application. I was using it daily by the second of July, but it continued to grow and evolve, and by the twelfth of August it had begun to get unmanageable–or, at least, annoyingly complex. Now, the second or third time I run into a software problem I like to find a way for the computer to solve it for me. I needed help structuring my code, and the result was Snit, an object framework for the Tcl language.

My goal, of course, was to implement Snit, and then update Notebook to use it, and then begin to clean-up and extend Notebook. Instead, Snit took most of my attention for the next month–and then in mid-August I went to the 9th annual Tcl conference, where I made a short impromptu presentation about Snit at an open “Works in Progress” session. There was a certain amount of interest, and a host of suggestions, and what with one thing and another Snit occupied my time for quite some time thereafter. Every time I thought I was done with the darn thing, someone would make another suggestion, or point out another problem to be solved. And that’s continued off and on right up until the present.

During the past year I’d managed to work on bits and pieces of Notebook, and even managed to release a new version some while back…but not until this morning did I manage to convert the largest and most complex piece of code, Notebook’s beating heart, into Snit–over fifteen months after the first line of Snit was written.

And they say men can’t commit.

But seriously, this is where the fun starts. I’ve got a long list of changes and features I’d like to do, and almost every one them involves changes to that largest and most complex piece of code–and now that that piece of code is implemented using a clean framework I can start refactoring its design and setting its house in order. All the old cruft is cleaned out of the way, and there are clear skies ahead.

Seriously, this is very cool.

(Have you looked at Notebook yet? It’s very cool too….and it’s constantly getting cooller.)

Ian Hamet has seen it, and liked it; Terry Teachout saw it as well, and had this to say:

No, Master and Commander doesn’t reproduce the essence of Patrick O’Brian’s books, which is the inner life of Stephen Maturin. It’s a completely exteriorized view of the Aubrey-Maturin novels. But what a view!

Which is exactly right, and I wish I had said it.