noctoi feel in need of learning something new and ruby looks like a it might be both fun and potentially useful. object-oriented scripting and open source to boot.
Archive for May, 2003
Stiff by Shane Maloney
[I read this for a mailing list discussion and my comments will get cut'n'pasted here when the discussion begins. Warning, these comments contain spoilers]
[on the characters and setting]
Hmm, hard to answer since I found it a hard book to read to start with though it got a lot easier by the end. I thought it was going to be a quick and easy short read but I feel like it's taken me a million years to read it.
I don't think the characterisation was great; I got to quite like Murray after a while but it took a long time to get a good picture of him and few of the other characters really came to life for me. In a way I think the characters with smaller parts (such as the Turkish cleaner Memo who thought he killed Ekram) were better drawn than characters with bigger roles (Angelo Agnelli never jumped off the page for me), though Maloney has got more books to make decent characters out of the recurring characters.
I think Red was probably the most interesting character and I look forward to seeing what he gets up to in future books (and I hope he is in the future books and doesn't get carted off permanently by Wendy).
The setting was ok, not brilliant either though. Australia did seep through the pages, mostly in the language. The political setting and the meat packing plant were both things that I felt could have been made a lot more real to me than they actually were though.
[on the plot]
The plotting is, I think, plausible "within the context of the story" rather than realistic. It wasn't fantasyland stuff but neither did it all make sense to me as something that could really happen. I confess I got lost rather a lot with why the heck Murray was investigating to start with. I gather that Agnelli needed a report on it but as to why this was Murray's job I didn't have a clue. After a while I think figuring out what had actually happened jut got to bug Murray and he needed to find out for himself and that's a good enough reason to chase up loose ends for me.
The resolution was ok, nothing brilliant and I don't think I understood it all any more than I did for the rest of the book. The scene with Murray getting caught in the freezer with Gardiner bugged me a bit, it seemed to be typical "investigator puts himself in jeopardy" fare - it's more usually "herself" but it's the same thing. Murray knew Gardiner was the culprit by that point and he was only half with it after the car crash so he shouldn't have gone over to the meat plant to put himself in more danger. I suppose being out of it after the car crash is a bit of an excuse for behaving like that though.
The entire book wasn't quite satisfactory to me but I am looking forward to seeing how the second in the series goes. Quite often a second book is an easier and more coherent read because both the author and the reader have more clue what to expect.
Purchased on 1st April 2003.
ghosts
ghost stations on the london underground. also some pictures of unused stations (and parts of stations) that can be used by film crews. between the two pages you can see the inside and outside of down street station:
between Hyde Park Corner and Green Park (then known as Dover Street). Opened March 1907 but closed in May 1932. During the war the station was used by Churchill and his War Cabinet.
there’s more on down street station around too. and more. this website on disused stations is going to keep me busy all day. i’m especially pleased to have found photos of brompton road station, i know the surface level building well and i’ve always wondered what it was like inside. wow.
new news
oooh, google news uk. i’m with john that ‘global’ too often ends up meaning ‘us-centric’. i’m glad to see a uk specific version of something that’s always looked like a useful resource but hasn’t been close enough to what i’m interested in before.
and of course a really fun thing about automated news gatherers is that they can screw up spectacularly on occassion.
pathfinding
people will take a planned design and modify it to fit their needs. In the face of this, designers have two choices — allow the modification, or throw up obstacles (God forbid you digress from the original Vision!).
i love this demonstration of how throwing up obstacles probably isn’t the right way to go.
no cat
the no cat night light: in which a tupperware bowl, a fluorescent bulb, a wireless card and some powerline ethernet become a wireless access point that runs out of a light socket. excellent.
While we have no current plans to actually produce the Night Light commercially, we certainly hope that someone will take the hint and mass-produce these things. Anything to help the cause of Infinite Bandwidth Everywhere for Free…
walking pace
digital maps that know all about walking speeds sound like a pretty good idea. i’m pleased to hear that they’ve figured out that rivers are kind of major boundaries: when i lived on the north bank of the river tyne utilities like up my street continually pointed me to amenities less than a mile away on the south bank of the tyne that were a long drive by toll tunnel and an even longer drive by free bridge.
The end result is a bubble diagram showing how far you can roam and still get to your destination in time.
“The bubble is not a perfect circle as the software is taking account of actual street patterns and the physical features of the city,” explained Mr Donovan.
a motoring version that keeps up to date with traffic jams, real traffic speed, road closures etc would be even more useful though.
grrrrr
to whoever screwed about with the tab menu between mozilla 1.3a (that i had until two hours ago) and 1.3.1 (that i installed 2 hours ago): it’s not clever putting “close tab” where “new tab” used to be. i hate you. grrrrrrrr.
i had no idea how many tabs i opened and closed in an average two hour stretch until now.
samphire
rick stein was on tv this morning cooking with samphire. we spent the whole segment trying to figure out what he was saying (sunflower? sapphire? safflower?) and what the hell the green leafy/shooty stuff was that he was chucking in his risotto like it was something you commonly find in tesco’s produce department. now we know. samphire is also known as sea fennel which makes it sound even more attractive. we still don’t know where the hell we can get any from though. answers on the back of a postcard please.
[actually if we (*I*) looked past the end of our noses we'd see the google ad for the fish society who sell it at £3.40 for 190g. not fresh though. i expect a seaside fishmongers or market would be the only likely place to find it fresh. it's a bugger being landlocked in west yorkshire sometimes.]
Theme: DePo Square by Derek Powazek, generally messed up by Kirsty Darbyshire.
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