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!

To recap: I’ve written and published a novel
on-line. CafePress has a
print-on-demand system set up so that you can self-publish your books
with no upfront costs–instead, they take a cut of each book.
Consequently, I’ve resolved to try publishing my book through CafePress
while spending as little of my own money as possible.

To publish a book through CafePress, you need to provide them with two
things: a PDF file containing the text of your book, suitable for
printing on the appropriate size paper, and image files for the front
cover, back cover, and spine. I’ve chosen to work on the PDF file first,
and in the last installment I settled on LaTeX as
my tool of choice for producing it. (If you’d like to start from the
beginning, you can go here.)

So far, I’ve managed to convert the HTML text of the novel into LaTeX
format and print out the resulting PDF file on letter-sized paper. I had the
resulting manuscript (now there’s a misnomer) comb-bound at Kinko’s, and
gave it to my brother in hopes that he might read it and feel moved to
put together some cover art for me. At the very least it would be a
refreshing change from wine labels.

Here’s what I have left to do:

Persuade LaTeX to typeset my book attractively on 8″x5″ paper (standard
trade paperback size).

• Design the page headers.
• Lay out the front matter (title page, et cetera, et al).
• Possibly get an ISBN number; I don’t know what’s involved there, but
  apparently it’s doable. That would make it theoretically possible to
  list the book at various on-line bookstores.
• Design the cover.

To aid me in the first three of those items, I’ve bought a couple of
books:
LaTeX: A Document Preparation System, and The LaTeX Companion.

My approximate expenses to date:

• The LaTeX books: $100
• The bound manuscript: $5 for the comb binding at Kinko’s, plus
  half-a-ream of inkjet paper.

I know I’ve let myself in for accusations of inconsistency by spending
$100 on books when I could have gotten Adobe Acrobat for that price; but
frankly the books have a longer shelf life, and as Jane says I’d have
spent the money on some kind of books anyway.

In the next installment, I hope to share some nicely formatted front
matter. Stay tuned!

Michael Green is an Anglican priest; he was also one of the speakers at
the Plano
West conference, which is where I bought this book, a detailed study
of the Acts of the Apostles.

Acts is the fifth book of the New Testament; written by St. Luke the
Evangelist, it picks up where Luke’s gospel leaves off, with the events
in Jerusalem in the days and weeks after Christ’s resurrection. Early on
the focus is on St. Peter, but before too long the focus shifts to St.
Paul and remains with him to until the end of the book. All told, the
narrated events span thirty years, thirty years in which the Christian
faith spread from Jerusalem to the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire.

Should you ever visit the north of England, go to the city
of York and tour Yorkminster Cathedral. Don’t miss the undercroft.
Renovations there uncovered the remains of two previous churches and a
Roman camp dating back to the New Testament era–and in the Roman camp
they found Christian graffiti. It’s been conjectured that St. Paul
converted some of his Roman guards during one or another of his spells
in prison, and that the poor fellows were shipped off to England as
a result.

Now, consider the distance between Jerusalem and York. Consider that
Christianity spread purely by personal contact and individual persuasion.
Christians were the least of the least in the Roman world; they had no
political power, and no way to coerce belief. I might add, Christianity
continued to spread in this peaceful way, occasionally suffering great
persecution, for over two-and-half-centuries, until finally a Christian
sat on the Roman throne.

One might contrast this peaceful process with the history of Islam,
which was allied with political authority and spread by military force
from its inception. Constantine’s conversion was hailed as a great
deliverance by Eusebius and others, and in the short term they were
certainly correct; with him the intermitten waves of persecution finally
came to an end. But in him the Church found itself to be the partner of
the State, and that’s generally been a bad thing. I support
the separation of Church and State with my whole heart, not because of
the corrosive effect of a state religion on the state but because of the
corrosive effect of political power on my religion.

Anyway, the whole process began in those first thirty years, the thirty
years discussed by Acts. Taking the remarkably quick spread of
Christianity as his starting point, Green asks, “How did it happen? What
were these early Christians like? How did they live? What did they do,
to spread the Good News?” Rather than taking the book of Acts verse by
verse, chapter by chapter, Green takes in the whole book, scrutinizing
these early believers from many different angles, and drawing parallels
with our current practice–and largely, and fairly, to our detriment.

I found it a fascinating book, both as Church history and as a call to
action in the present day. It’s a rich source of ministry ideas and an
inspiration both. It is, however, aimed directly at a Christian
audience; if you’re looking for a general history of the early Christian
era or an introduction to the book of Acts, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

I disabled comments yesterday for the usual reason; I’ve re-enabled them again.

Remember, if you try to post a comment and are unable, you can always mail your comment directly to me.