Wed, 11 Mar 2009
Review: Lowboy
Lowboy, by John Wray is a novel about a schizophrenic teenager who calls himself Lowboy. There are two main threads to the story, that of Lowboy who escapes his handlers in a subway station into the tunnels themselves, and that of his mother and the police officer assigned to find him.
I enjoyed the novel a great deal. The Lowboy thread helped me to understand what having Lowboy's condition might feel like, the constant shifting of attentions and the extrasensory feelings he was having, without alienating me from him. The mother thread both grounded the novel and provided a background of normality against which the Lowboy thread was juxtaposed.
The characters in the book are vivid. Lowboy himself is neurotic but never alien. His mother, seen through the police officer's eyes, is alien but not unwelcome. The police officer, seen through the mother's eyes, is predictable but not boring. There are other, peripheral, characters. They are well-drawn and never feel like they exist to expose some facet of a main character or to move the plot along.
The only disappointments I had with the novel came within the last 5 to 10 pages. The ending is not quite as clear-cut as I was hoping, and the 'twist' doesn't have a mind-blowing effect. On the other hand, the ending fits with the rest of the book perfectly, and the lack of a 'twist' means that rereading the novel in future will remain interesting, so the disappointment was not too great.
I recommend reading this wholeheartedly. As with The Sound of Building Coffins, anyone I know should feel free to ask to borrow it.
Posted: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:00 | | Comments: 2
Tue, 10 Mar 2009
Automated Blog Posting With Pyblosxom
As some naysayers in #wuglug this (Sunday) evening suggested after three blog posts in a two hour span, I'm going to start posting to my blog once a day automatically, unless I really, really want to get around this. This should be posted Tuesday morning at 6am (famous last words).
I'm using PyBlosxom as my blogging engine, which is essentially based around dropping files into a directory. As such, it's almost trivial to write a script that will do the moving into place which can then be automated by cron. As it's only almost trivial, here's my script:
#!/bin/sh
set -e
set -u
FROMDIR=/home/daniel/pending-blogposts
TODIR=/home/daniel/test
next_post=`ls -t $FROMDIR | tail -n1`
if [ z != z$next_post ]; then
echo $TODIR/$next_post
if [ -e $TODIR/$next_post ]; then
echo "Already a post with that name."
exit 1
else
echo "Posting '$next_post'"
mv $FROMDIR/$next_post $TODIR
touch $TODIR/$next_post
fi
fi
Just change FROMDIR and TODIR to match your needs, drop the resulting script somewhere on your server and add something like
0 6 * * * /home/daniel/bin/blog-postto your crontab and you should be away.
Posted: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:21 | Comments: 2
Mon, 09 Mar 2009
PyRoom
I'm writing this blog post using a text editor called PyRoom, which bills itself as allowing 'distraction free writing'. I've also written all of my recent blog posts using it.
It's a really stripped down editor, which runs fullscreen and contains just a text area within the middle of the screen, with configurable themes to define background and text colour. It's designed for creative writing rather than text editing per se, and I really like it.
It's packaged for Debian (and so probably Ubuntu), or can be downloaded from http://pyroom.org/download.html.
Posted: Mon, 09 Mar 2009 02:22 | | Comments: 0
Review: Watchmen
On Saturday night, abandoning CompSoc to their own trip to see Watchmen, a group of friends and I went to see Watchmen at a cinema in Leamington Spa.
Overall, I considered the film to be just OK. Of the four friends I went with, two liked it and two disliked it, so I was right in the middle.
I should note now that I haven't read the graphic novel (yet). I should also note that I'm not going out of my way to avoid spoilers below.
I'll start with what I liked. I liked the action sequences, they kept me interested. Not the highest praise, but I'm not really an 'action movie' guy, so this was an achievement. I liked the world we were being immersed in. I liked the title sequence, with the live-action cells of a graphic novel, a lot.
What didn't I like? Quite a lot, sadly.
Despite that I liked the world we were in, I didn't know enough about it. Was it reasonable for the Comedian to start shooting his shotgun at the crowd in one particular scene? I don't know. It feels more like the strength of the world in the graphic novel is such that anything set within the world will be interesting but, as this film show, not necessarily satisfying. Hopefully reading the graphic novel will be satisfying.
The film was too explicit, both in terms of gore and in terms of sex. With the violence, it was obviously important that we, the audience, realise that we aren't in a standard superhero universe here. We need to know that people bleed blood here, and that facing off against a superhero doesn't just involve the word 'POW'. I get that. However, I didn't need to see bones popping through skin or entrails plastered on the ceiling to get it. I guess this was just to be expected from the director of 300 though.
We were also treated to an entirely needless sex scene or, at the very least, a needlessly lengthy sex scene. Apparently the sex scene is in the graphic novel, which I guess goes some of the way to explaining it. I just wish that the film-makers had spent more time on the interesting part of the graphic novel, the world we were in (see my above complaint), rather than a sex scene which we have seen in plenty of other films which could roughly be summarised by "these two characters love one another; people who are in love have sex".
The film became largely incoherent in the last third. Essentially from the scenes within the prison onwards. I guess this is linked into my first complaint. On the bright side, I'm told that the graphic novel has a different ending, which I'm looking forward to.
Overall, I don't think that this film isn't really worth seeing unless you have already read the graphic novel or really want some motivation to do so.
Posted: Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:55 | | Comments: 0
Review: The Sound Of Building Coffins by Louis Maistros
The Sound of Building Coffins is, in some respects, like the Mississippi river that flows through its pages. It is turbulent and muddy whilst being powerful and beautiful. It tells a number of stories, all of which flow into the novel at various points, adding to and changing those that have come before them.
I was somewhat uncomfortable with the magical realism of the book to begin with. I guess that part of this was to do with not having a firm understanding of what 'magical realism' was, and so not being sure as to what statement Louis Maistros was making regarding some issues of spirituality and faith. However, as I went through the novel, these concerns were allayed as I began to make sense the world in which I was becoming immersed. If you experience similar concerns, I urge to push on through to the end.
Overall, I recommend this novel.
N.B. If anyone I know would like to borrow this book, just ask me.
Posted: Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:01 | | Comments: 0
Sun, 08 Mar 2009
Three New Debian Django Packages
Recently my employer, credativ UK1 have been kind enough to allow me to spend some time working on Debian packaging from some Django apps we've started using internally. Chris Lamb was kind enough to sponsor the upload of these packages.
Django developers, this means that if you are running a Debian GNU/Linux machine2, you can type:
apt-get install python-django-<app name>and you will have it installed for all users on the system. You won't need to mess around with any Python packaging systems, or modify your environment to be able to use them.
So, what are the packages and why are we using them?
django-tinymce
django-tinymce is a Django app providing integration with TinyMCE, a pure JavaScript rich text editor. It provides a widget that can be used within forms, and can also easily be used within views. It integrates with django-filebrowser, which I will mention below.
django-cms integrates with django-tinymce to provide a rich text editor for pages within it. As our website content will have to be maintained by people who may have little or no experience with HTML (or Markdown or anything else that isn't Word), this is obviously desirable.
django-filebrowser
django-filebrowser is a Django app that provides a file management interface within the Django admin interface. It should essentially replace an FTP client, allowing browsing and upload/deletion/editing/renaming of files on the server.
As mentioned above, django-tinymce integrates with django-filebrowser, to allow users to upload content they will be using with the edited text. This saves us from having to teach our potentially technically-illiterate users how to either access the web server remotely or how to use the version control system we're using for the website (bzr, incidentally).
django-contact-form
django-contact-form which provides generic, extensible contact-form functionality for Django. It streamlines the process of displaying a contact form and emailing the contents of it out once the 'Submit' button is clicked.
Our website include a contact form, and django-contact-form saves me from having to worry about a number of issues involved in the implementation, as well as reducing the amount of internally maintained code I'm writing.
1 That website will soon be replaced by a very similar one using Django as the backend. Hopefully I will blog about this once the rollout is complete.
2 Currently just the unstable distribution, but soon to be testing/squeeze. Backports will also be trivially easy.
Posted: Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:52 | | Comments: 1
Mon, 24 Nov 2008
Backup Broadband
At work last week, we had some unexpected Internet downtime. As both our phone system and access to our customers' machines depends on an Internet connection, this is something we would like to avoid. As such, we're looking for a backup broadband provider, ideally from someone other than our current provider.
This list is currently:
- Virgin Media's Broadband (M) package,
- BT's Total Broadband Option 1 package,
- Be's Value package, and
- the UK Free Software Network's MAX Pay As You Go package.
Should we avoid any of these? Are there any others we should consider? What we're really looking for is low price and reliability. We're not going to be using this a great deal, so line speed and bandwidth caps are secondary concerns.
Posted: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:21 | | Comments: 0
Fri, 21 Nov 2008
Christian Focus Weekend Away
I'm going. It'll be great. Posts on Sunday.
Posted: Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:47 | | Comments: 0
About Time
As I go to work, I walk past the newspapers in the station shop. For the last week, many of them have had 'BABY P' in large letters on the front.
The Times today had, as their main headline, "Four at-risk children die from abuse every week".
Finally, someone noted that there are children other than Baby P who have suffered, and who continue to suffer.
About fucking time.
As tragic as Baby P's death undeniably is, the continuing obsession over it is disgusting. It paints a picture of a country more interested in moral outrage than morality, more interested in calling for action than action itself, more interested in dwelling on the past than trying to improve the future, of a media keen to capitalise and encourage these qualities. I try to avoid being a part of this picture. Who wouldn't?
During the course of the coverage of the Baby P story, another 4 children in the UK will have died in similar circumstances. One hundred and eighty thousand children will have died across the whole world. One hundred and eighty thousand. I haven't seen them in the headlines recently. I couldn't even name a single one of them. Could you?
Turns out I'm part of the picture after all.
Posted: Fri, 21 Nov 2008 01:26 | | Comments: 1
Wed, 19 Nov 2008
Aubrey/Maturin
As a number of people correctly ascertained, my server naming scheme is based on ships commanded by Jack Aubrey in the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin saga. I thought I'd take this opportunity to write a little bit about why I chose this naming scheme.
For those of you who don't know, Master and Commander is the first book in the series, which lent its name to Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. That film is, in fact, based mostly on the events of the 10th book in the series, from which it takes the other half of its name, The Far Side of the World, while taking memorable events from all of the books.
So, I chose these books as my naming schemes because I absolutely adore them. As with anything one loves, it's quite hard to put my finger on exactly why. Nonetheless, I will attempt to do so.
Ever since year 7 (11 years old), I've been interested in the nautical and the naval. This stems from both C.S. Forester's Hornblower books and joining my local sailing club. It's not entirely clear to me which of these motivated the other or, indeed, if they motivated one another at all, but they are very much tied together in my memory. In amongst those two things are Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons books. It is these things that really motivate everything else that makes me interested in the nautical, and so in the Aubrey-Maturin books.
Foremost amongst these motivated actions is the tall ships cruise I went on when I was 16 years old, between Corfu and Cyprus. A tall ship is a sailing ship, roughly in the style of those sailed by Hornblower and Aubrey. The vessel I was in, the Stavros S Niarchos, had two masts with square sails on each of those. Sadly, the cruise was somewhat marred by a lack of wind and by a few shipmates who, for reasons passing understanding, were expecting something more along the lines of a normal cruise ship. By and large though, and there is a nautical expression, I loved it. I haven't had the opportunity or, really, the finances to do it again, but given the chance I would certainly do so.
I had been involved in the sailing club throughout this time, and had also bought my own dinghy, along with a friend, a pea-green Mirror. This was eventually sold on, as I outgrew it, but nonetheless owning my own boat was a great pleasure.
I don't think it was until after 'Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World'; a film, incidentally and unsurprisingly, that I love; that I discovered the Aubrey/Maturin books.
Since then, I have tried a number of times to read through the 20 books that make up the full cycle, but it is only recently, having bought all of them, that I have come anywhere close. I'm currently reading The Yellow Admiral, the 18th book in the series.
Although this has been a highly personal account of why I hold these books so dear, I would definitely recommend that you check them out. The best place to start is at the beginning, with Master and Commander.
Posted: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:42 | | Comments: 1