2005-01-01: McAlphabetization
For some years now, I've had a pet peeve about the alphabetization of last
names beginning with Mc or Mac (there's a Mc name in my family). You've
got to watch out for those pet peeves; they'll get you every time.
Apparently not only did I get the rule wrong, but the rule has been
changed.
It had stuck in my mind that names beginning with Mc or Mac should be
alphabetized as if they began with MAA (putting them at the beginning of
the Ms). It turns out that the rule was actually that names beginning with
Mc, Mac, or M' should be alphabetized as if they began with Mac (on the
grounds that the other forms are alternate spellings for Mac). It also
turns out that this rule is obsolete.
Alphabetization rules for names turn up primarily in citation style guides
since they're used for ordering the bibliography. The ALA style (a more
modern but now widely used citation style in the United States) has
apparently recommended that Mc, Mac, and M' be alphabetized
letter-by-letter for some time (so Mabury comes before MacDonald, which
would come before McDaniels). Doing some web searches today, I discovered
that the 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style now also
recommends the same thing.
Chalk up another victory for computers, although alphabetization and
capitalization of multipart names such as "de Lint" or "van der Graaf"
should still follow the preference of the person named, so the computers
still can't apply stock rules.
I suppose I could cling passionately to the old alphabetization rules, or
try to find disagreement from British or Canadian sources, but it's good
for me to give up a pet peeve. It's getting harder and harder to be an
elitist about weird rules of English!
I think I'm also going to get a copy of The Chicago Manual of Style
to read; it looks rather fascinating. (Some strange part of me loves
formatting rules.)
2005-01-02: Dreamsnake
Review: Dreamsnake, by Vonda N. McIntyre
Publisher: Bantam
Copyright: 1978
ISBN: 0-553-29659-0
Pages: 312
Snake is an itinerant healer in a post-apocalyptic world punctuated by
radioactive deserts, a world where the surviving technology is primarily
biological and genetic. The tools of her trade are snakes, biochemical
laboratories that double as syringes. A cobra and a rattlesnake serve as
her workhorse factories, made to produce appropriate medicinal venom with
carefully chosen chemicals, but most valuable is Grass, a dreamsnake, whose
venom neither injures nor cures, but takes away the pain and fear of death
in terminal patients.
Dreamsnake has an oddly disjointed structure, leaving me convinced
at the conclusion that it was a fix-up novel of several short stories.
Apparently it is not, being instead the expansion of the Nebula-winning
novelette "Of Mist, and Sand, and Grass" (a better title). I'm now
wondering how much of the odd structure was already present in the original
novelette and how much was the result of the expansion.
About the only thing that carries over from the beginning to the end of the
novel is Snake herself. The concluding villain, apart from a couple of
isolated and incomprehensible incidents with little impact on events at the
time, fails to even lurk forbodingly until the last hundred pages. The
middle of the book is a charming story about beauty and perception, ending
in a well-done emotional climax, but has no connection to anything that
happened before it and no thematic connection to what follows. Revelations
about the world are hinted at and built up, and then the story takes a
right turn after only a smattering of details and they're never seen again.
It's all very odd.
That's not to say it's bad. McIntyre constructs a fascinating world that
lacks the darkness and depression of a lot of apocalyptic fiction and
avoids unbelievable disappearances of human knowledge. The infrastructure
is gone, but some sciences that could be rebuilt without infrastructure are
still present. People have not mysteriously forgotten chemistry or
biology, and the healers reasonable extrapolations of medical science that
fit the technology levels of the ruins. A liberal sprinkling of subtle
differences and hints about the world fall naturally out of the story and
are more intriguing for not being relentlessly mined by the author. If you
want loose ends wrapped up and glimpses explained, this technique will be
unsatisfying, but I appreciated the sense of atmosphere it created.
Other highlights include a matter-of-fact, comfortable, and undramatic
treatment of polyamory, a likeable ward for Snake to rescue, some nice bits
about snake behavior, and a laudatory avoidance of easy answers (somewhat
spoiled by the ending). I could have done without the instant love match,
and I thought the ending was rather too convenient and would have needed
more support and foreshadowing to be satisfying, but overall I enjoyed the
book. I will warn that the narration and dialog clunks at times, mostly
avoiding exposition but stumbling over some unfortunately flat bits of
text. (Of course, reading a book immediately after a Le Guin novel is not
the fairest thing to do to an author.)
Post-apocalyptic stories are far from my favorite sub-genre, but I ended up
liking this book more than I expected. Recommended for some strong female
characters and a nice sense of atmosphere, although don't expect too much
of it.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2005-01-10: runauth 1.14
While testing the new proxy service, I found that runauth was not exiting
with a non-zero status if it failed to obtain a Kerberos ticket. I tracked
this down to test changing $? before we were able to use it. A fairly
straightforward fix.
You can get the latest version from the
runauth distribution
page.
2005-01-11: Annoying spammers
I need to go update the templates of the comment posts to note this as well
(or I need to finally find the time to switch over to WordPress and see if
its anti-spam plugins can handle these things any better). Every MT
journal out there apparently just gets hammered with spam, including
mine, to the tune of often several hundred attempts a day. When one of
them gets through, it's a fair bit of work to clean up after it, so I've
gotten fairly aggressive about banning things that turn up in comment spam.
Unfortunately, MT sometimes only matches against portions of URLs and
sometimes matches against the full body text using an algorithm that I
don't understand, so some of my anti-spam blocks prevent legitimate
comments. If this happens to you, please know that it's nothing personal;
drop me a line and I'll fix it right away.
Hopefully this problem will largely go away with an upgrade to WordPress,
where I can use anti-spam plugins that will instead, if they're not sure
about a post, make people play the "guess the hazy letters in this image"
game rather than just blocking things outright. (I expect that these are
also available for MT now, but I can't upgrade the version of MT I'm using
without paying for it due to the license change, and after thinking about
it for a while, I've decided I'd rather use a fully free software package
instead of Six Apart's pseudo-open commercial package.)
2005-01-13: faq2html 1.23
My project to convert our internal text documentation into web pages turned
up a variety of little nits in the way that faq2html was handling some
things. This release cleans up a bunch of them.
You can get the latest version from
my web tools distribution
page.
2005-01-14: New year haul
I've been having a hard time reading as much lately as I want, in part
because I'm making my way, slowly, through Declare by Tim Powers and
struggling some with it. But some book orders did come in, and I got some
books from my parents that they didn't want, plus a gift. So here are the
current additions:
Iain M. Banks -- The State of the Art (sff)
Elizabeth Berg -- Joy School (mainstream)
Diane Duane -- The Book of Night with Moon (sff)
Eknath Easwaran (trans.) -- Classics of Indian Spirituality
(religion)
Neil Gaiman -- Neil Gaiman's Book of Days (graphic novel)
Neil Gaiman -- Sandman: Endless Nights (graphic novel)
Neil Gaiman -- Smoke and Mirrors (sff)
Neil Gaiman & Ed Kramer (ed.) -- Sandman: Book of Dreams
(sff)
Dwight Goddard (ed.) -- A Buddhist Bible (religion)
Tom Godwin -- The Cold Equations & Other Stories
(sff)
Colin Greenland -- Take Back Plenty (sff)
Laurell K. Hamilton -- Seduced by Moonlight (sff)
M. John Harrison -- The Course of the Heart (sff)
Raymond J. Healy & J. Francis McComas (ed.) -- Adventures in Time and
Space (sff)
Ellen Kushner -- Thomas the Rhymer (sff)
Larissa Lai -- When Fox is a Thousand (sff)
Louis L'Amour -- The Haunted Mesa (sff)
Ken MacLeod -- The Star Fraction (sff)
James A. Michener -- The Novel (mainstream)
L.E. Modesitt, Jr. -- The Magic of Recluse (sff)
James Morrow -- Towing Jehovah (sff)
S. Radhakrishnan -- The Principal Upanisads (religion)
Don Miguel Ruiz -- Beyond Fear (religion)
Don Miguel Ruiz -- The Four Agreements Companion Book
(religion)
Joanna Russ -- The Female Man (sff)
Dan Simmons -- Darwin's Blade (thriller)
Nicholas Sparks -- Nights in Rodanthe (mainstream)
Brian Stableford -- Inherit the Earth (sff)
Peter Straub (ed.) -- Conjunctions 39: The New Fabulists
(sff)
James Tiptree, Jr. -- Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (sff)
Lynne Truss -- Eats, Shoots and Leaves (nf)
Anne Tyler -- A Slipping-Down Life (mainstream)
University of Chicago Press -- The Chicago Manual of Style
(reference)
Jeff VanderMeer & Mark Roberts (ed.) -- The Thackery
T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases
(sff, sorta)
Tad Williams -- To Green Angel Tower, Part II (sff)
Phew. Very mixed set of things, from filling in holes in my collection to
religious reference books that I may not read for quite a while.
2005-01-20: loadmtpt 1.11
root.cell had somehow fallen out of our AFS mount point database, and so I
discovered that the script has difficulty putting it back in at present. I
went ahead and added a special case for root.cell similar to the special
case for root.afs.
You can get the current version from my
AFS mount point
tracking tools distribution page.
2005-01-20: frak 1.31
Just a cosmetic fix in the diff out when creating local mount points to use
for the comparison. Before, the ".readonly" part of the read-only path was
not being removed correctly from the paths in the diff output.
You can get the current version from the
frak distribution page.
2005-01-23: Declare
Review: Declare, by Tim Powers
Publisher: HarperTorch
Copyright: January 2001
ISBN: 0-380-79836-0
Pages: 591
This is the second World Fantasy Award winner that I've read that's a
detailed alternate history. Declare is set more recently than
The
Dragon Waiting and Powers does a better job of explaining what's going on
(helped by using a time in history I'm far more familiar with), but again I
had a hard time getting into the story.
Declare is told in two times, weaving together in the story. In
1963, Andrew Hale is a lecturer and a retired deep-cover spy, trying to
deal with the reason why he's being reactivated now so many years after the
war. In 1941, Andrew Hale is double-agent, recruited by the Soviet Union
but secretly loyal to Britain, infiltrating Nazi-occupied Paris. Mixed
deeply into both stories is the real-life double-agent Kim Philby, whose
life story Powers remains faithful to while providing different,
supernatural explanations for some events.
I found the strongest parts of this book by far to be the elements of the
supernatural. Powers introduces djinn into the world, involving them into
the history of the Soviet Union and treating them as Cold War weapons,
subject to at first a struggle between British and Soviet secret agents and
then expanding into a three-corner fight also involving the French secret
service. The djinn are strikingly described, given a sense of power,
majesty, and magnitude that is memorable and believably alien. They do not
think, behave, or live in the way that humans do, and this is used to great
effect both to impress the reader and to open the way for subtle tricks and
strategies in the ongoing secret war. I'm going to remember Powers's
concept of trance beat patterns affecting the world for quite a while.
Unfortunately, this is only a small part of the book. Most of the book is
a spy novel, owing a great deal apparently to John le Carré. I
wanted to enjoy this part as well, but I found my attention constantly
wandering. Repeatedly I had to go back and re-read a paragraph because I
couldn't remember what happened or where the characters were, and with the
intricacy of the plotting, one can lose track of the narrative threads
rather easily. By the time exciting things were happening, I'd had a hard
enough time following the plot that I'd largely lost interest.
Two factors contributed to this. One is that Powers provides a wealth of
detail in his descriptions, for me stepping over the edge into providing
too much. At the height of a climatic journey across Mount Ararat, for
example, he spends several paragraphs explaining in intimate detail how one
of the characters manages to climb across an obstacle. Yet, while the
action is painstakingly described, the larger setting and purpose seem
oddly vague; for example, not being familiar with the use of mountain
climbing equipment, I had to re-read that passage several times to get a
mental image of just what the obstacle was. This quickly becomes
frustrating, since my mind would hurry past the uninteresting detail and
then I'd find myself confused as to what had happened.
Compounding that problem, I never particularly cared what happened to the
characters in Declare. Hale, the primary viewpoint character, seems
to stumble through life unsure as to what he's doing or why he's doing it.
Even at the end when he starts making decisions for himself, it's unclear
why or whether those decisions have any more basis than anything else
that's happened to him. Few of the other characters are on stage long
enough to learn about, and Kim Philby himself is extremely unlikeable.
Elena is the best character of the lot by far, with complex and interesting
motivations, difficult personal decisions, and quite a bit of character
growth over the course of the book. Unfortunately, she isn't in nearly
enough of it, and only rarely gets a turn as a viewpoint character.
This is one of those books where I can see why it won an award but just
didn't enjoy it much personally. There are some wonderful ideas and
memorable images here, Powers wraps up a complex and intricate plot with
satisfying thoroughness, and the characters are complex and nuanced. I
just could have used less description and a bit more help from the
narrator, and quite a bit more of Elena. There are ways of reminding the
reader periodically what's going on, of keeping scenes in a larger context
and helping the reader not get lost, that I think this book would have
benefitted from.
As is, though, I can't generally recommend it. If you particularly like
John le Carré, find Kim Philby's life fascinating, or have a high
tolerance for lots of description over complex plots, you may want to give
this one a try, as it's certainly well-written. Otherwise, I fear that
you, like I, may find it somewhat frustrating.
Rating: 5 out of 10
2005-01-25: mvto 1.7
I had a chance to hammer on our script for smart AFS volume migration today
and added several features that I've been wanting plus a few things that I
need for the volume balancing project that I'm playing with now. mvto can
now move unreplicated volumes between partitions on the same server, now
checks to make sure it's not overfilling a destination partition when
moving volumes, and can take a list of volumes and destinations in a file
(before it could only take a list of volumes that should all be moved to
the same place).
You can get the latest version from the
mvto
distribution page.
2005-01-25: lsmounts 1.8
I fixed a logic bug in the safe recursion mode (-r). It was getting a list
of subdirectories of the directories given on the command line and then
using those as the recursion roots, not checking them but just diving down
inside them. That wasn't the intended behavior. I fixed it to use the
directories given on the command line as the recursion roots, which is what
I wanted.
You can get the latest version from the
lsmounts distribution page.
2005-01-28: mvto 1.11
I'm doing lots and lots of AFS work lately. This is a variety of mostly
minor bug fixes from the last release. The big one is that the -s flag was
causing the check to see if a replicated volume had unreleased changes to
be bypassed; this has now been corrected.
You can get the latest version from the
mvto
distribution page.
2005-01-29: reminder 1.2
This is a new program I just finished, my own version of the venerable Unix
calendar program. It handles reminders, both one-time and repeating, and
can list all the currently active reminders or mail them all (suitable for
running from cron). It also keeps a reminder active until it's explicitly
acknowledged, so I can use it as a reminder to do something and keep the
reminder active until it's done.
I just finished writing this a week ago, so I've not ironed out all of the
issues and used it long enough to see what else I really need to add to it.
But I figured I'd go ahead and release it in case anyone finds it useful.
You can get a copy from the
reminder distribution
page.
2005-01-31: reminder 1.3
I added a User-Agent header to the e-mail that reminder mail sends out so
that I could easily split reminders into their own group in Gnus. You can
get the latest version from
the reminder
distribution page.
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