[ US | UK ]

Black Snow

by Mikhail Bulgakov

Rating: ★★★★☆

While this book is a harsh satire of his own peers, the book is certainly timeless and you can happily read without knowing anything of Communist Russia, Stanislavsky or the Moscow Arts Theatre. The characters are wonderful, funny, horrible. The conversations real. The situations usually hilarious. Very enjoyable.

[ US | UK ]

Chronicle of a Blood Merchant

by Yu Hua, Hua Yu

Rating: ★★★★★

Yes, five stars. This book is an absolute must read. Even if you know nothing about China, Mao or the Cultural Revolution, you cannot miss the absolute power of this book and make a hero of Xu Sanguan, the peasant who always does the right thing.

The book is sad, funny, happy, life affirming.

if this then that is a new service whose aim is to connect various web apps together via their APIs. The concept is very simple, each site is a channel and you can create tasks between any of them, for example:

If there is a new post on an RSS feed then email me on gmail

Each channel can be a this (something to be watched for an event) and a that (something to receive data), each channel provides slightly different data to play with and each channel has different set of ‘triggers’ (e.g. search, search by tag, new, etc…) Currently there are 33 channels, ranging from Flickr to Weather to Instapaper to Gmail. You put together these into ‘tasks’.

I was going to share how I am using ifttt.com for the St Margarets Community Website a hyperlocal site I run.

I just started tweeting on the St Margarets Community Website. I am aiming for around three tweets a day. One obvious one was the weather and since we live in England, the rain is what I was interested in. ifttt.com provides seven triggers for weather. I choose Tomorrow’s forecast calls for… and the condition rain. Then I simply have to pick the action post a new tweet and format the text the way I want it to appear.

Sadly, this has been tweeted nearly 50% of the days it has been running.

Tweeting New Posts

This task watches my rss feed and triggers when there is a new item. It then simply tweets the post title with a bit.ly url.

You might notice a hash-tag #new on the tweet. I use this for the next task.

Saving #new Tweets to Pinboard

So, the previous tasks are very useful and save me a fair bit of time. However, this task is where you can see some of the real power of ifttt.com.

The previous task posted a tweet with a specific hash-tag. This task looks for tweets on my account with that hash-tag and then posts them to “pinboard:http://pinboard.in. Not only that, it allows me to add them with the bit.ly link for more information. So now, every new post tweet saves the bit.ly short url in pinboard and allows me to see how many people click on the links.

The link with the ‘+’ at the end will show you how many hits there have been.

Conclusion

So far, the only flaw I have seen is that you can’t title the pinboard action. Not so bad. I think the guys building ifttt.com are on to something big. Granted, the audience will be fairly tech savvy people, but that is a pretty big audience. And the range of tasks could be more personally useful than for running a website. For example, I have one that emails me when my sister-in-law posts an article on her blog and one that posts a webpage into Evernote if I tag it in pinboard with the tag ‘recipe’.

[ US | UK ]

The Fifth Witness

by Michael Connelly

Rating: ★★★★☆

A more pure Mickey Haller book with no Harry Bosch. I really liked most of it, but didn’t think he built up the villan enough to really hate them enough when revealed. But great on Haller and his team. If you like Connelly, you will not be disappointed.

An error occurred:
Global symbol "$nested" requires explicit package name at (re_eval 34) line 2,  line 1.
Compilation failed in regexp at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/SelfLoader.pm line 112,  line 1.

After a minor amount of digging, I found it was either SelfLoader.pm or Textile2.

perl -MSelfLoader -e 'print 1'

returned ‘1’

I attempted to upgrade to the MT 4.X versions of textile2, but MT 3 didn’t recognise it at all.

So, I just added …

my $nested = "";

… to SelfLoader.pm and it works.

Who knows if that will cause other errors later, but it all works now.

Hope this might help someone else.

I love Google Chrome. It has just introduced a new super-fast page loading feature called Prerendering that tries to guess what you are looking for and gets it in the background. It is really fast. However, if you type a bit slow, it does have a tendency to just try and get whatever bit of the url you have typed.

For example, I was trying to go to www4.scholastic.co.uk/warehousesale and happened to be tailing the error log and found this:

[Wed Jun 22 12:41:47 2011] [error] File does not exist: /var/www/html/warehousesal
[Wed Jun 22 12:41:48 2011] [error] File does not exist: /var/www/html/warehou
[Wed Jun 22 12:41:48 2011] [error] File does not exist: /var/www/html/wareho
[Wed Jun 22 12:41:48 2011] [error] File does not exist: /var/www/html/wa

Now, this single request really didn’t take too much time or CPU, but I can imagine, with loads of people moving to Chrome, this could really start adding up to real CPU and network bandwidth.

What do other people think?

[ US | UK ]

Stet

by Diana Athill

Rating: ★★★★☆

I currently work in publishing, so perhaps this is naturally of more interest to me; however, I really think the book would appeal to any person interested in books, publishing or creative people. The book is in two halves. The first is Athill’s own career and memories of Andre Deutsch, the publishing house where she worked. The second are her memories of some authors she worked with over the years and an some insight into her relationship with them and their publishing career. While perhaps too modest about her skills as an editor, it makes for interesting reading.

Many places in the book I paused to think how amazingly relevant some of it was to today’s publishing world. The same economic and social forces that made Deutsch become less profitable are still happening now, the effects even more painful to publishers of excellent, but perhaps less commercial books.

Well worth a read.

The question was;

“How much interested do you have in the 2012 Olympics now that you didn’t get a single ticket in the lottery?”

We are furious. We spent hours carefully picking events, selecting tickets, making sure we had the money in our accounts for the big UK Olympic ticket lottery. We purposely picked more obscure events that we would have a better chance to get tickets for. It was a whole family activity. We knew we wouldn’t get them all, but thought we should get a couple.

In the end we ordered over £750 worth. For weeks we checked our Visa account to see if the money came out. Nothing… nothing… and nothing. We got nothing!

So, here we are living in London, paying for the thing and we can’t go. Instead, people from all over the world can go on first come, first serve sites, but we can’t. By the time we found out we got nothing, it was too late, these sites were sold out too.

Now we can keep paying for the games, be massively inconvenienced by it , but not see any of it. Great. Seb Coe, you have truly disappointed our family.

[ US | UK ]

Scrivener’s Moon (Mortal Engines)

by Philip Reeve

Rating: ★★★☆☆

So, this was the prequel closest to the story line of the Mortal Engines quartet. It answered many questions raised in both the prequel and the quartet such as; Where did the Scriven come from? Why were the traction cities built in the first place? As well as complete much of the arch of Fever Crumb’s life. However, I felt it casually threw away many lives of interesting characters and didn’t really complete their story arcs very well. Well done Mr. Reeve for creating these amazing people, but you really want more of each of them.

I don’t know if there is a fourth book, but I really hope so. Otherwise, I feel like Web of Air will have been a bit of a waste in the story cycle and I wish I could have more of London and Fever.

Great stories in here, just too little space for them all.

A few months ago, I was emailed by my class rep at my university, Colgate. I gave her the breifest of updates about our life and said, get in touch with Martin.

Sorry, nothing too interesting happening.

(Still) married to Angela Haswell '91.
Living outside London.  I run web team
for Scholastic in the UK and Angela works
for a small hedge fund.  We have two boys,
Owen, aged 11 and Ryan aged 9.

Did you know that Martin Sances '91 just
became a father to Sam on 25 Sept?  He is
a lawyer and lives in San Fran with wife
Betsy.  That's way more interesting!

All the best,

Peter

Well they printed it and a few days later, I got another email from someone who edits the Maroon, the school’s Alumni paper and asked me to write a travel column for them. They sent a few examples of previous columns. So I wrote them two versions. The first one got printed, with some slightly cheesy editing (e.g. ‘Lace up you Doc Martens’?). This was the second version.

Peter & Angela Mahnke ‘91 have lived in London for the past 10 years with their two sons. Here are some of their tips for visitors…
London is a big city - the largest in Europe with 8.5 million people, but the center is fairly compact with many sites within an easy walk of each other. So here are two walks that will take you past some great sites.

Walk One — Westminster

Start on Westminster Bridge; from here you can see most of the skyline of London including Parliament, Big Ben, Scotland Yard and the London Eye. Walk over the bridge and visit the Westminster Abbey with the tombstones that read like a who’s who of English literature, music and politics. Walk up Whitehall towards Trafalgar Square. You will pass Downing Street, the Churchill Museum, the Horse Guards; all in just a few blocks! The road ends at Trafalgar Square with the huge Nelson’s Column, lovely fountains and the National Gallery at the top. There is also the church, St Martin-in-the-Fields (they serve a nice lunch in the crypt!) From here, you could walk to the left, through Admiralty Arch and up The Mall to see Buckingham Palace, or to the right up to Piccadilly Circus and shop on the wonderful Regent and Oxford Streets.

Walk Two — Southbank

This walk is on the South side of the river. Start at the same place, Westminster Bridge and walk past the old County Hall to the London Eye. If you have the time and the weather, the views are amazing. Continue along the river to the Southbank Centre with the Royal Festival Hall and National Theatre where there are great concerts and plays every day. Keep walking and you will come to Gabriel’s Wharf with many restaurants. From here you can continue on past the Globe Theatre to the Tate Modern, or back track to Waterloo Bridge and walk past Sommerset House up to the Strand. Here you can go right and see the Royal Courts of Justice and wander through the Temple or straight on to see Covent Garden and Leicester Square.

Here is the full sized version

Aside from my day job where a manage a big, big website, I also run a small community website for where I live, the St Margarets Community Website. I try to do a few postings of articles or events throughout the week, but usually I reserve all of Thursday night to put up all the updates. This means, I usually just flag all the emails I get in gmail and look at it on the Thursday, when it is far too late to realise that I have a problem with anything submitted.

So, there I am Thursday and I have to either, hope google can OCR them, email the sender and hope they are online, search the related website or inevitably, retype the text. This is annoying and makes me question the worth of doing the site at all.

So here is a tip to anyone relying on anyone to repost their events or articles. Supply both the image and the raw text (as text, just pasted in the email!). Websites don’t really like anything else, google doesn’t like anything else. By all means, send the image too, but please send the plain, simple text. It means that it will take five minutes to post your event/article opposed to fifteen to twenty minutes of retyping, or worse, that I just delete your email altogether. It also means that I will like you and be willing to post your stuff more often and more quickly.

[ US | UK ]

Shit My Dad Says

by Justin Halpern

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Pretty funny book, at times I was laughing out loud, but I didn’t love it… I think it worked better on twitter.

[ US | UK ]

Pereira Maintains

by Antonio Tabucchi

Rating: ★★★★★

Just the most amazing book.

So subtle and perfect novel. So moving, so real.

Told in the past tense, as if Pereira is telling his version of events to the police, it is the story of a widowed, lost soul who edits the culture column for a weekly paper and hides for the fascist civil war in Spain that is changing his Portugal upside down. I strange relationship evolves with a young rebel and his girlfriend that slowly opens his world to the political struggle happening all around him. Pereira keeps doing the right thing, helping the underground, although he pretends it is unwittingly done.

In the end, he is fully exposed to the reality of the war and again, does the right thing. Clearly the young man is himself, his conscious. Clearly the woman is his dead wife. But you don’t have to read or see any of this on this level, the book just works.

Wonderful.

[ US | UK ]

The Passage

by Justin Cronin

Rating: ★★★★★

Ann and Paul loaned me their Kindle to read this. It didn’t sound like the kind of thing I was really interested in, but was I wrong. This book was amazing. I couldn’t put it down. Really well conceived, beautifully written and dark, so very, very dark.

I don’t really want to spoil it, so, trust me, it is a 5 out of 5!

[ US | UK ]

Heartstone

by C. J. Sansom

Rating: ★★★★☆

Well, I love all the Sharlake books and this was pretty good. At times it was a bit too far fetched for me with Richard Rich turning up again and the whole thing on the Mary Rose was a step too far; it just didn’t need to be done — that’s how good the rest of it was.