Author Archives: wjduquette

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About wjduquette

Author, software engineer, and Lay Dominican.

Tcl/Tk 2002, Day 3

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The shower curtain won another round this morning. I thought that
maybe I had it licked. It’s one of those setups with two curtains, a
plastic inner curtain and a separate outer curtain for looks. I
thought that if I adjusted the outer curtain so that it no longer dangled
into the shower that maybe the inner curtain wouldn’t billow quite so
much. And I was right. The billowing was definitely less pronounced.

But because the outer curtain didn’t hang fully in the shower, I wasn’t
able to close the inner curtain quite all of the way. And so when I
pulled the curtain aside, I found a wet bath mat and a puddle extending
half way across the bathroom floor. I had to pull down one of the unused
bath towels to mop it all up. And then, of course, as the towel had been
used to wipe the floor and moreover was sopping wet, there was no way I
was going to hang it up on the towel bar and use it again tomorrow so I
had to leave it on the floor like a slob, well aware that the hotel staff
were going to have to waste water washing it.

Other than that, it’s been a good day. There was another Tcl/XML
tutorial in the morning and a Tcl/database tutorial in the afternoon, and
I spent a good bit of time chatting with other attendees in the hall and
wandering about the immediate vicinity of the hotel.

After the tutorials
were over, Michael Cleverly and I wandered over to the nearest decent
bookstore (The Granville Bookstore, at 850 Granville–about three blocks
from the hotel) where I found a
Sharyn
McCrumb
novel I’d not
read, and a biography of Sir Richard Burton. That’s Sir Richard Burton
the Victorian explorer and adventurer, not Sir Richard Burton the actor.
More about him when I’ve read the book.

On the way back we were accosted by a short, seedy, bearded fellow who
clearly wanted some money from us but seemed to think it was necessary to
give us value for money by explaining why he was down on his luck.
During the brief time we spoke to him, we discovered that he was a singer
and comedian, a criminal, and had boxed professionally for many
years–had trained under a famous heavyweight boxer. And he told us
about the time he visited Los Angeles, went “down town” (which could mean
any number of places), and found himself in a bar in a heavily black part
of town, where he stayed until midnight when (fortunately for him) one of
the locals escorted him to the bus stop.

At that point we gave him our change and left him to his own devices.

Tonight is the conference reception at ActiveState. ActiveState is the
company that’s currently sponsoring Tcl open source development (and this
conference); it’s about two and a half blocks from here, across the
street from the local McDonalds. Should be fun.

Tcl/Tk 2002, Day 2

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I’ve discovered that I can’t, in fact, dial in to Earthlink from
up here in Canada; the local dialup won’t accept my password. So I’ll
keep writing ’em, but they’ll all get uploaded to the server at once when
I get home.

Hanging from the towelbar in the bathroom of my hotel room is a
paper card imploring me to reuse my towels. It’s a water conservation
thing, apparently, and I can readily believe that they are serious about
it. I knew they were serious from the moment I stepped into the shower
this morning.

Don’t get me wrong–it’s an attractive shower. Green marble tiles on the
floor, white marble on the walls, and yards of plate glass, and you could
eat off of it, it’s that clean. The water pressure is no worse than
usual. No, their fiendish plot doesn’t become clear until you step into
the shower, and you realize that there’s no room to move. More than
that, it has one of those shower curtains that like to billow into the
shower and make love to you while you’re trying to wash. This is less
pleasant than it sounds.

The card ends with a fiendish twist of the knife: “Please hang up towels
if you wish to participate in the program–if not, simply leave them on
the floor.” That’s right–if I’m so abandoned as to willingly waste
water, I might as well break my poor mother’s heart by being a slob, too.
I don’t think so.

After the shower, the rest of the day went pretty well: Two tutorials on
Tcl’s XML processing libraries, and some good conversations with other
folks at the conference. I’m back in my room again this evening instead
of being social, which seems a little silly…but there’s a reception
scheduled tomorrow evening, and Wednesday and Thursday evenings there
will be “Birds-of-a-Feather” sessions until nearly midnight. I think I’m
wise to rest while I can.

Tcl/Tk 2002, Day 1

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I am currently ensconced in a nice room at the Crown Plaza Hotel
Georgia in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. It’s not very large,
but it’s got a window (that opens!) overlooking the downtown street
scene, and if I sit in the one reasonably comfortable chair and put my
feet up on the bed I can look out on the street as I type. There’s an
upscale mall next door (translation–no book stores) and an art museum
across the street with a Georgia O’Keefe/Diego Rivera/Frida Kahlo exhibit
that ran from July 15th until precisely eleven minutes ago. I guess I
won’t be seeing it. I did manage to find a bookstore on the other side
of the mall, but it was one of those remainder stores. I got a copy of
The Pickwick Papers to read during dinner.

The voyage here from Los Angeles was less unpleasant than I expected.
Except that I had to take my laptop out of its case and put it in a large
plastic bin with my wallet, keys, and so forth, the security check-in
wasn’t much different than I’d encountered pre-9/11. Of course, I was at
a small airport at 8 AM on a Sunday morning. It wasn’t conspicuously
crowded. The flight to Seattle was uncrowded, as was the hop from
Seattle to Vancouver. The Airporter bus brought me straight to this
hotel, and now here I am with nothing much to do until registration opens
for my conference tomorrow morning at 8 AM.

Update: Score one for terminal stodginess. It has started to
rain; if I were more adventurous I’d be out in it. And I’m a Southern
California kid–I didn’t bring an umbrella.

What a Dunce!

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It was undoubtedly a dimwitted thing to do, but I began posting to
this web log just half a week before leaving on a week-long business
trip. I might post some more today, and I might not; if not, see you on
the 21st!

Hard Rain, by Janwillem van de Wetering

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A couple of months ago I read van de Wetering’s Amsterdam Cops mystery
The Streetbird, and found it to be very strange indeed. My
correspondent assured me that most of the books in the series were not
quite that peculiar, so I ventured to try him again.

Hard Rain follows after The Streetbird, possibly
immediately after, and involves a crisis in the Amsterdam police
department. The old Chief Constable (equivalent to our Chief of Police)
has retired, and his successor is incompetent at best, and probably
crooked with it. His appointments and personnel transfers have been in
keeping with this.

When the bad cops come in, the good cops have to be disposed of,
naturally; in this case that means our heroes Grijpstra, de Gier,
Cardozo, and their boss the commissaris (that’s his rank; we never learn
his full name, though his wife calls him Jan). So the commissaris is
being investigated for corruption, murder cases are being closed
improperly, cops are being paid off, and behind much of it is a crook who
was once the commissaris’ boyhood friend.

Hard Rain still has much of the ethereal, philosophical, whimsical
atmosphere of The Streetbird; if you’re looking for gritty,
hardboiled police procedurals, this isn’t the place. Although, that
might be a misleading statement–I don’t want to leave the impression
that van de Wetering’s Amsterdam is a suburb of Disneyland, either. The
city is rife with drugs, prostitutes, and murder–but the writing is
somehow detached from it all.

I read the book with interest, but I’m not at all sure whether or not I
liked it.

Put In My Place

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My five-year-old just showed me a fortress he’d made out of Lego
Bricks. “It’s for killing good guys!” he said. “Good guys? I’d rather
it was for killing bad guys,” I said. In his most crushing voice: “Dad,
it’s just a Lego toy.”

Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

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Back in the days when I read rec.arts.sf.written (the USENET science
fiction news Starship Troopers would trigger a
major battle of words. One can (a little unfairly) state the political
philosophy of the book in one sentence: only those who have shown that
they are willing to put their nation’s good before their own good through
military service should be entrusted with the right to vote.

This led to endless discussion as to whether Heinlein was right or wrong,
and little of it was to the point, which is this: Heinlein wanted to
write a coming-of-age story about a spoiled rich kid who learns
discipline, maturity, and responsibility through military service. He
needed a world in which such a kid might reasonably choose to enlist
without being drafted, and without the threat of war (the war begins
after Johnny Rico enlists) and so he needed a carrot to entice Johnny and
his peers into taking the oath. In Johnny’s case he provides two:
the franchise, and a beautiful young lady of Johnny’s acquaintance who chooses
to enlist at the same time (she eventually becomes a pilot). Callow
youth that Johnny is, it’s the desire to impress the girl that really
does the trick.

All else follows from that. Having created this world, Heinlein needed
to justify it–to provide verysmellitude as Michael Cantrip would say–
and he does this through the courses in “History and Moral Philosophy”
that Johnny is made to take. Heinlein was fascinated by ethics, and he
loved to play with ideas. To find out what he really thought about these
matters, one would have to look elsewhere.

But although the ethical side is interesting (and, in some cases,
compelling), it’s not the heart of the book. This is a boot camp story;
it’s a trial by fire story; it’s an adventure story. It’s the story of a
kid getting over himself and getting on with the job–“getting shut of
doing things rather more or less”. Plus it’s got some
really cool gadgets. Powered armor has become a stock prop these days,
but I was blown away by the idea when I first read it. So what’s not
to like?

A Handy Metaphor

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Or, why they are confiscating nail clippers at
the airport:
The Chinese have a long history of building walls. The first set was
built of rammed earth by the near-legendary Emperor Qin, first emperor of
China; the last set, the Great Wall of China, was built of stone over a
thousand years later by the emperors of the Qing dynasty. In every case
the walls had the same purpose: to keep the barbarians in their place.
So prevalent has wall-building been in Chinese history that some claim
that it’s an innate tendency of the Chinese mind. In fact, nothing could
be further from the case.

Let’s start with the barbarians: the nomadic Mongol tribesman of the
northwestern steppes. We think of nomads as being rootless wanderers,
independent and fierce, needing nothing of civilization, and to some
extent that’s true. Sure they were born on horseback. Sure they
could ride all day without tiring. Sure they could use a slab of meat as
a saddle and grill it on a hot iron plate for dinner. But where did they
get that hot iron plate?

It turns out that even barbarian nomads have some use for the things of
civilization. And realistically they have just two ways of acquiring
them. They can trade for them; or they can raid for them. Despite their
reputation for fierceness, the Mongols often preferred trading to
raiding; it was less hazardous. But often they weren’t given the choice,
and therein hangs the tale.

Because of the geography of China’s northwestern frontier, the nomads
remained a permanent threat which every emperor in every dynasty had to
deal with one way or another (save possibly the Yuan–that’s when ol’
Genghis climbed onto the throne). And always his advisors were divided
into two factions: those who favored trading with the nomads, thus
creating a more stable, settled border, and those who thought that
treating with barbarians was beneath the Emperor’s dignity. These were
usually in favor of military expeditions and attempted genocide.

In some reigns, one voice predominated, and there was peace on the
border; in others the battle was carried to the nomads. And then were
the reigns in which the two factions were perfectly balanced, and in
which neither could put its policies into place. Open battle was two
expensive; trade with barbarians too demeaning. And yet the Mongol raids
continued. It was necessary that the Emperor do something. It was
necessary that the Emperor be seen doing something. And it was at times
like this, when something had to be done and nothing useful could be
done, that the Emperor ordered the building of walls.

Thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of peasants died building those
walls; and they offered little protection, for the nomads on their swift
ponies were usually quite able to ride around them. But the Emperor had
taken action, and that was the important thing.

The need for the Authorities to be seen taking action is hardly unique to the
Chinese. It happened all over this country after 9/11/2001. It’s still
happening at every airport in the land. Every time an airport screener
confiscates a pocket knife, a pair of nail clippers or (it happened!) a
baby bottle full of breast milk, it’s just another brick in that Great
Wall. It’s not good for much, and it’s not all that pretty to look
at…but at least the authorities are taking action.

Have a nice flight.

Hammerfall by C.J. Cherryh

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This is the story of an ordeal–a tale in which physical endurance
against the harsh elements and wild beasts is key. Man against his
environment. And the thing about ordeal stories is that it takes
endurance to read them. I’ve always liked Cherryh’s books, but I’ve
always had to be in the right mood.

The main character, Marak Trin Tain, is a great warrior. His world, a
desert planet settled by humans in the distant past, is but sparsely
populated. There are the tribes, nomads who live in the deep desert; the
villages, each centered around its spring; and the holy city of Oburan,
where dwells the Ila and her ministers amid riches of water. The Ila,
somehow, is immortal; she is apparently one of the “first descended” to
this planet, and she has made it and its people in her image.

Until recently, Marak Trin Tain has been leading his father’s men in
rebellion against the Ila. The rebellion failed, and to buy peace his
father has sold him to the Ila. He is taken to Oburan with one thought
in his heart: to kill the Ila. He doesn’t manage it, of course; it would
be a short book if he did. Instead, she sends him to seek out the source
of the Madness that has come upon many of the people of the Ila’s
world–a madness that has come upon Marak himself, and which draws him to
the east.

And then the ordeal begins.

Cherryh has crafted an interesting world with a unique history, and a
unique premise–at least, I’ve not encountered it before. A culture
which possesses the secrets of both nanotechnology and genetics may well
use them to make war. And the fiercest battles may not take place across
nations or continents, but instead within the confines of a single human
body.

I was in the right mood; I liked it. And it’s the beginning of a series
(though it stands alone perfectly well), so I’m looking forward to the
next book.