As I write this, I’m sitting in my room in the Bourbon Orleans Hotel, which is pretty much at the geometric center of the French Quarter. My first impression of the French Quarter–narrow streets, dingy buildings, bags of garbage piled by the sidewalk. It’s Columbus Day, so I’m assuming that the normal garbage pick-up didn’t happen today.

My friend Dave and I had dinner at a place called Sbisa’s, if I remember the name correctly. We started with Mint Juleps, which Dave really liked; but a Mint Julep is just bourbon with mint and sugar, and unfortunately the mint and sugar don’t do enough to hide the taste of the bourbon. What can I say, it isn’t a flavor I’ve acquired. Dave had duckling and I had filet mignon, and we capped it with slices of chocolate ganache torte which were outstanding. The filet could have been dry and chewy (it was neither) and the torte would still have made up for it.

After that we walked around and window shopped, and looked at the Mississippi.

For the record, Dave and I are in New Orleans for the 11th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference. As usually, the conference consists of a couple of days of tutorials, followed by three days of papers and other technical sessions. I skipped the first day of tutorials, and was supposed to be teaching one of them tomorrow, but that fell through about a month ago; so I’m at something of a loose end tomorrow. I shall have to find something interesting to do……

I feel like an idiot writing a blog post about how blogging is going to be light for the next few days when in fact blogging has been light for some time. Nevertheless, I’m going to give it a shot.

The first thing is that Jane and I got to go out to dinner a couple of nights ago, all by ourselves, courtesy of Jane’s mom, and while we were out we found a copy of the new Terry Pratchett novel, Going Postal. So I’m going to be spending my free time reading it to Jane for the next few evenings.

The pressure to read to Jane is increased by my imminent departure; Monday morning I’m off to New Orleans to the annual Tcl/Tk programming language conference. I expect to be blogging from the conference, as I have in the past–if you can’t blog from a geek convention, where can you blog from?–but probably not much about books. But the point is, Jane’s going to want me to finish reading her the book before I leave. I’m only free to blog at the moment because Jane’s getting the kids some dessert before bedtime, after which I’ll be busy reading them stories, and any moment after that I expect her to start cracking the whip.

Of course, I couldn’t possibly be waiting impatiently for her to get the kids in bed and be done with it, so that I can start reading it to her and find out what happens next myself….

I’ve not done any work on The Perils of PDF since Sunday; it’s been that kind of week. And in between times, I’m working my way through a “Conan the Barbarian” anthology. It’s odd, to read these stories again after so many years.

You’ll note that so far this blog has been a Presidential Campaign Free Zone, and I expect that to continue. But I invite you to try a thought experiment. Assume I disagree with you on who should be the next president of the United States. And assume that I’m an intelligent, reasonable guy (which I am). Ask yourself what possible reasons I could have for disagreeing with you. You’re not allowed to decide that I’m crazy, evil, misled, misinformed, morally bankrupt, greedy, or just plain stupid. It’ll be good for you. Good luck.

This book, Hinton’s first for adult readers, has some serious flaws–but
I have to admit that it’s an interesting ride and kept me turning pages.
It’s a novel of rebellion and redemption; it’s also the most peculiar
vampire tale I’ve yet seen.

Although I usually avoid spoilers in my reviews, I find that I can’t
write about this book without going into significant detail.
If you have fond memories of The Outsiders and you’re inclined
to pick up a copy of Hawkes Harbor on the strength of them,
you should probably just go do so and skip the rest of this review.
That was my motivation for reading the book, and on the whole I’m glad I
took the time.

The rest of you can continue reading.

Continue reading →

One of the first civilizations my daughter and I are learning about while
homeschooling world history is Ancient Egypt. It’s an interesting culture,
there are lots of cool artifacts and monuments left by them to study and
it’s useful for teaching how to study a civilization in terms of government,
social issues, geography, the role of religion and mythology, etc. We came
to the conclusion that the Egyptians were a very visually-oriented people,
extremely pragmatic in their thinking and not inward-directed or concerned
about abstract concepts or philosophical questions. They developed extensive
canal irrigation and water control systems, indoor plumbing, built the
pyramids and carried on extensive trade, all with a clumsy writing system
that left most people illiterate and, compared to the Greeks, an
unsophisticated system of mathematics.

As an educational tool, historical fiction is useful for making the reality
of the times come alive in human terms. Temples that we see as fascinating
archeological artifacts were real places with sights and smells and sounds
that are hard to imagine unless you are given a story to place them in. So
we are reading some fiction as a way to make the history come alive for my
daughter.

Mara is the first of these novels. It’s set in the reign of Queen
Hatshepsut, the only female pharaoh in Egyptian history. Mara is a slave
girl, bought by one of the Queen’s advisors to use as a spy in the inner
chambers of Thutmose III, the Queen’s heir. Thutmose has been affianced to a
Syrian princess who speaks only Babylonian and since Mara has been owned by
a scribe she is fluent in that language. Her role is to translate for the
princess when she speaks with Thutmose and report back to the Queen’s
advisor on anything amiss that she may hear. The conflict comes when she
inadvertently falls in love with a young lord loyal to Thutmose who is involved in
a plot to depose the Queen and put Thutmose in his rightful place on the
throne. Her personal loyalties lie with Thutmose, but her owner will kill her if
she betrays the Queen.

It’s a good story, well told. The general background history is believable
though I went back and read a bit on the reign of the Hatshepsut and
Thutmose III and had to point out to my daughter repeatedly where the
history ended and the fiction began. McGraw played a bit fast and loose with
reality to build the tension in the story, which is ok for fiction as long
as the reader understands the difference. It did serve to bring an ancient
culture to life, particularly in the daily life of the temples and the
common people.

As anyone who has ever produced a large document knows, writing it is
just the beginning. In our last installment, I listed
some of the things left to do before I can offer bound copies of Through
Darkest Zymurgia! for sale on-line. I’ve got much of that work done
now; in particular, I’ve chosen the font and the page style, set the
pagesize to 5″ by 8″, and got the frontmatter of the book almost
completely ready to go. (You can download a preview
of the front of the book in (what else) PDF format if you’re
interested.)

But there was one big step which I had forgotten–or suppressed, I’m not
sure. And that big step is policing line-breaks or, in a word,
hyphenation.

The soul of TeX is its justification algorithm. TeX is extraordinarily
good at producing high-quality fully justified output that looks as though
it were typeset by hand by a skilled typesetter. Unfortunately, that
beautiful output comes with a cost–by TeX’s standards, not all text is
capable of being beautifully typeset. This usually results in what TeX
calls an “overful hbox”–that is, a line that it simply can’t break
without introducing “too much” whitespace into the paragraph. In such
cases TeX reports the error and allows the line to run a little long and
stick out into the margin. If desired, it will also mark the error with
a big black box, so that it will be easier to find visually.

There are several ways to solve the “overful hbox” problem. TeX is good
at hyphenation, but of course it doesn’t know anything about made up
words and names, nor is it aware of all of the possible word-breaks even
in standard English. Often it’s possible to solve the problem by
inserting an explicit hyphen here or there.

In more serious cases the appropriate words in the errant paragraph
simply do not admit of hyphenation. You can’t hyphenate the word “good”,
for example. In such cases, you can tell TeX to be “sloppy” about
formatting the paragraph; this allows it to add more interword space than
it would ordinarily do, and usually solves the problem.

Sloppy formatting has its own perils, however–once in a while it results
in the dreaded “underful hbox” error. This means that TeX has had to add
too much whitespace between one or more words, and that its poetic soul
has rebelled. One can ignore “underful hbox” errors, as TeX inserts the
space anyway, but the annoying thing is that TeX is usually right. Too
much whitespace sticks out like a sore thumb. In this case, you
generally have to modify the text in some way. Sometimes you can split
the paragraph in two; other times, you actually have to change the
wording slightly.

There’s an additional problem associated with hyphenation, which is that
people’s names shouldn’t be hyphenated if it can possibly be avoided. It’s
possible to specify that a word is not to be hyphenated, but all too often
so specifying leads to all of the problems listed above.

TeX has no idea whether a word is a person’s name or not; and sometimes
even when hyphenation can’t be avoided it will hyphenate names in the
wrong place. Consider the narrator of Zymurgia, Professor Leon
Thintwhistle. The good professor’s last name is prounounced
“Thint-whistle”, yet TeX decided that it could hyphenate it
“Thin-twhistle”. It’s possible to educate TeX about such matters, but it
requires looking through the finished PDF file for hyphenation problems.

All of this, I may say, is slow going. I’ve now spent two or three hours
at it, and I’ve made it through chapter 10 (of 41).

It’s not all bad, though. I’m taking the opportunity to added drop caps
at the beginning of each chapter, and as I read through the output
looking for bad line-breaks I’m finding a number of other small errors.

In the next installment–I’m not sure yet. We’ll see.

When I was junior high school a fire in the mountains above our house threatened to make us evacuate, and my mother sent me to my room to pack, just in case. She warned me that we couldn’t take everything. So I grabbed a brown paper grocery bag and went to my room and into it I placed that which I valued most–my Tolkien books. I had a boxed set of paperback copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (the ones with Tolkien’s own paintings on the front cover and Tolkien’s picture on the back); I might have added one or two others. I don’t remember for sure whether I included the Narnia books or not, but I don’t believe I did.

Then I placed the bag gently in the backseat of my mother’s car. That was it. I was done.

Say what you will about me, it hadn’t even occurred to me to pack clothing.

The October Issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now on-line!