Dave's Free Press

Steak tartare | Radio Dave | February 2010 in books | January 2010 in books | Negative keywords | CPANdeps upgrade | Recent kitchen adventures | Broken out of jail | December 2009 in books | Shopping

Steak tartare

For each person, 8 oz of steak, a teaspoon of capers, half an onion, an egg yolk, salt, pepper, parsley, and a splash of Worcestershire sauce. Finely chop everything that can be chopped, mix it all together, leave to moulder for half an hour or so, and serve on toast.

Radio Dave

Gentlemen and Ladies of Discriminating Taste can fuck right off this time round, cos it's time to RAWK on Radio Dave with:

• Sepultura
• Mötley Crüe
• The Clash
• Def Leppard
• Guns n Roses
• Led Zeppelin
• Motörhead
• The Ramones

If you use a Mac, then read either of these pages to get it to work properly. Playlists like this are just about the only thing that the Blessèd Steve got wrong.

February 2010 in books

Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon.

In February 2010 I read the following books:

1. Acts of Destruction, by Mat Coward

I bought this on the recommendation of Ken MacLeod, and wasn't disappointed. While the story is set in the future, it's not science fiction, it's a crime mystery. The futuristic setting acts merely to provide a whimsical - and frankly a bit silly - backdrop. That backdrop is somewhat similar to that of Morris's Dystopia, showing that a good novel can be built on such an improbable foundation. One of the ways this is far superior to Morris's book is that there's far less tedious speechifying. Sure, that means we don't learn all the details about how The Process transformed society, but we don't care anyway, The Process merely provides Coward with justification for the situations he puts his characters in and then, like in nearly all other good novels, it is their navigating their way through their troubles that entrances us. The predicaments don't bear up to scrutiny, just as the society that spawned them doesn't, but by the time you notice, you'll already be entranced by the characters and have suspended your disbelief for the duration - although the rice-free curry house was pushing it a bit.

I loved this book, and I'm sure you will too. If you're unsure despite my glowing review, you can read the first couple of chapters on the author's website.

2. Prime Number, by Harry Harrison

This collection of short stories is, I'm afraid, rather disappointing. Sure, the individual tales are entertaining, but nothing really stands out. And combined together as a single book, it all gets a bit samey. There are a couple of places where Harrison's usual genius peeks out from the clouds, but not enough to make it worth buying.

3. When It Changed, ed by Geoff Ryman

This is meant to be a short story collection that "puts authors and scientists back in touch with each other, to re-connect research ideas with literary concerns". In this it largely fails, despite the positive remarks made after each tale by a scientist working in a field tangentially related to the story.

Of the 16 stories, only one is by an author I recognise (Ken MacLeod), but 5 stories really stood out - Moss Witch, by Sara Maitland; In The Event Of, by Michael Arditti; White Skies, by Chaz Brenchley; Enigma, by Liz Williams; and Hair by Adam Roberts. That last one is the only one that does a good job of weaving actual science into the story.

That sounds like a bad review, doesn't it. Well, it's not. At least not entirely. In 276 pages there were five good short stories. Obviously I'd expect more if all the stories were by one author who I already knew was good at their craft. But five good shorts by random unknowns is unexpectedly good going. I recommend this book.

January 2010 in books

Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon.

In January 2010 I read the following books:

1. Marrow, by Robert Reed

There's definitely a fantastic story in here, and for the first three quarters of the book, that's exactly what you expect to get. It's certainly imaginative, and zips along at a fair old pace while still having time for those human moments that make the characters into people. But then we get to the last quarter of the book, and, like so many other sci-fi works that could be outstanding, that lets it down. It's confusing, both in terms of the sequence of events, but especially in terms of the characters' motivations, which seem to flip around seemingly at random.

I still liked it, but it's only a "good enough" book.

Negative keywords

Nearly three years ago I added keyword support to this 'ere journal. Well, now it supports negative keyword filtering. So if you want to see posts that are not tagged "geeky", for example, here's the linky.

CPANdeps upgrade

While you won't notice any changes, there have been biiiig upgrades at CPANdeps. Here's the diff.

Until now, it's used a SQLite database of test results that I downloaded every day and then mangled a bit to do things like add some necessary indices, figure out which reports are from dev versions of perl, and so on. That worked really well back in the summer of 2007, when there were only half a million reports in the database. I started worrying a bit at the beginning of 2009 when we hit 3 million, but the update happened overnight so I didn't care. But now that we've got over 6 million reports, the update would take anywhere between 8 and 14 hours. Not only is that not sustainable given the current growth rate, it also hurts the other users on that machine, because almost all of that time is spent waiting for disk I/O - which means that they're also waiting for the disk. On top of that, when you have big databases, a SQLite CGI ain't a great idea because indices have to be fetched from disk every time, so reads pound the disk too. Doubleplusungood!

Fun fact: SQLite is great for prototyping, but it doesn't scale :-)

So now it uses MySQL. Having a database daemon running all the time means that there's now some caching, so reads are quicker. In addition, given that I can't just simply fiddle with the structure of the database that I download to produce what I want, and instead have to import the data into MySQL, it now only imports new records, so the daily update takes only a few seconds.

I also re-jigged the structure of how it caches test results. Instead of being all in one directory with hundreds of thousands of files, they're split into a hierarchy. This probably won't have any significant effect on normal operations, but it will certainly make it faster for me to navigate around and see what's going on when people submit bug reports!

Recent kitchen adventures

I went to Wing Yip recently, cos it's the cheapest and (more importantly) most convenient place for getting kitchen stuff. I needed a sharpening stone and a sieve. Of course, I was seduced by some of their many frozen delights, and filled a drawer in my freezer full of fish balls, pre-cooked prawns, a duck, etc

I need to empty that drawer so I can fill it with bits of Edmund's pig, so as well as turning the duck into smaller more compact and easily storable pieces, I've been cooking with prawns recently.

First, a nice healthy dish. Toss your prawns (fnarrr) in lime juice and chili. Serve with a salad of warm parsnip chunk with spring onions and tomatoes.

Second, marinade your prawns in lemon juice, cider vinegar, tamarind sauce, garlic and chili for a few hours. Parboil some chunks of butternut squash and then roast 'em with a chopped chipotle chili. Chop and fry a red onion, adding several teaspoons of Pataks* curry sauce. Combine everything in the pan with coconut cream. Just before serving, add coriander leaves and chopped up baby pea pods and stir through. If you have any coconut cream left, have it in your after dinner coffee - it's OK, not as good as real cream, but worth trying at least once.

I've still got some prawns left, but the bag's now small enough to squeeze into another drawer. Success! I have room for bits of pig!

* this is not cheating. Well, it is, but it's authentic Indian-housewife-style cheating!

Broken out of jail

Today I jailbroke my phone, using the stupidly named blackra1n, and following the step-by-step guide here. There were a couple of points during the jailbreak at which iTunes tried to start - presumably something it did made the iPhone appear to have been just plugged in and so iTunes tried to start, and so I killed iTunes each time with extreme prejudice before it had a chance to communicate with the iPhone and potentially brick it. In retrospect, I should have turned that off in iTunes first before doing this.

Everything seems to have worked just fine.

So far I've found and installed the following apps:

• Backgrounder
• Categories
• some five-icon dock thing
• some five-icons-per-line launcher thing
• SBSettings
• OpenSSH

What other apps should I try out?

The quality of non-Appstore apps is definitely lower than that of officially sanctioned ones in the Apple Appstore - a few others that I've tried, in particular Winterboard and Terminal, have been quite buggy and I've removed them. Even so, it's the user's choice to install dodgy software from third parties, and Apple shouldn't make it so hard for people to shoot themselves in the foot if they want to do that. Either they should allow unvetted apps into the Appstore (and have it pop up a gigantic warning every time you try to install one, and segregate them in a ghetto so that you don't accidentally stumble across them) or they should officially support installing apps from third-party sources (again with warnings).

December 2009 in books

Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon.

In December 2009 I read the following books:

1. Gibraltar Sun, by Michael McCollum

This is the middle book in a trilogy, and is self-published. The author used to be published by a "proper" publisher but is no longer. That is of course, a terrible recipe, and his work must, of course, be rubbish. But it ain't. Sure, it's not high art. But it's engaging and entertaining. And that's what ultimately makes a novel a good one. I've actually read this book before, but it was a coupla years ago, and given that the third and final part in the series is finally out, I thought I'd better re-read it to refresh my memory before tackling the last installment. And I'm glad I did. I polished it off during a 4.5 hour train journey, without getting bored even once. Worth buying.

2. Gibraltar Stars, by Michael McCollum

I've been waiting for this for a long time, and the wait was worth it. The only real shortcoming (bearing in mind that I knew it was going to be modern pulp fiction) is that the resolution of the whole three book series is dealt with very quickly, almost skipped over. We see it beginning to take shape, but the reader is left to assume that events proceed exactly as predicted by a numerical simulation. I'm afraid that I lack the necessary faith in computers to fully accept that! The author's "Antares" series has the same simulation problem, although events are at least shown happening after the simulation in the finale of that series. Even so, good book, worth buying.

3. A Wrinkle In The Skin, by John Christopher

As was fashionable amongst British sci-fi authors of his generation (much of John Wyndham's work is fairly similar) this is a tale of a world-ending catastrophe, whose protagonist and other players are ordinary people to whom nasty things happen. There's no particularly happy ending and the author's explanation of events - and indeed the event itself that sets up the story - are laughable to a modern reader, but even so, it's a well-told, well-constructed, and well-written tale. Recommended.

4. The Death of Grass, by John Christopher

Like the previous book, the world ends and ordinary people struggle to survive. There's a nice couple of twists too which make what would otherwise be fairly predictable (especially if you've read any other of his books) into a gripping tale.

5. Evolution, by Stephen Baxter

In the afterword, the author tries to make excuses: "this is a novel. I have tried to dramatise the grand story of human evolution ... I hope my story is plausible". Well, no, it's not. That isn't a mortal sin in itself - plenty of really good stories are implausible, starting with one of the oldest stories that we have, the Iliad. But in dramatising, Baxter has made up a load of rubbish, including monkeys (and their far more primitive ancestors) giving each other names and all kinds of other silliness. I don't see why you can't tell the undeniably dramatic story of human origins factually, without introducing cuddly anthropomorphised Purgatorius, tool-using dinosaurs, and pterosaurs the size of whales.

Having laid into it like that, I do have to admit that it's a rollicking story whose silliness only made me want to scream a handful of times. I recommend it, although I aso recommend turning your brain off first, and not paying full price.

6. Matter, by Iain M. Banks

I've been waiting for a long time - it's eight years since the previous Culture novel! - for this, and thankfully it doesn't disappoint. It's rather more accessible than a couple of the previous books in the series have been, but without sacrificing Banks's usual inventiveness. It would make a good introduction to The Culture if you've not read any of the books before, and if you have it's a great continuation. Buy it.

Shopping

I, being Teh Dumb, left it too late to by Christmas pressies online, so had to visit shops. I gather that there are people who visit shops regularly throughout the year, and I wonder why. To buy three books and a toy took something like three hours. To buy three books and a toy using proper websites takes less than ten minutes. How many billions of hours are wasted in the UK alone by the continued existence of obsolete shops? And in the 21st century, there's far more choice, so I wouldn't have had to make do with buying stuff that wasn't quite what I wanted. I'd forgotten just how piss-poor normal bookshops are.

But far worse was having to deal with the sort of people who work in shops. You'd think that they'd do their best to serve you quickly, but no, they prefer to play on their computers instead of doing their fucking jobs. And when they do deign to notice you, they don't actually pay attention. I tried to buy some Bluetooth headphones. "Do you want them with wires?" was what one idiot asked me. Others, on divining that I wanted to use them with my phone, tried to sell me mono earpieces for making phone calls, and others tried to sell me those silly things that you stuff in your ears and not actually WHAT I ASKED FOR.

Fucking cretins. Why do people put up with them?