Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit…
– T.S.Elliot, The Wasteland

Mediaeval dungeons often had a cell called the “little-ease”, devilishly designed so that the prisoner was unable to find any comfortable position in which to rest.

I feel like I’m in such a place now. I’ve “done my back” – the penalty of years of sitting badly while I program, I fear. I’ve damaged something in my lower back and for the last four weeks I’ve been in some pain and often find myself in a situation where I can “neither stand nor lie nor sit”. Which makes it hard to write software or to blog, or … well, do most things. It’s a nuisance.

Anyway, my physiotherapist and doctor are both working on the problem for me. The key, it seems, is to keep moving at all costs. And regularly do targeted exercises to build up both abdominal and back muscles.

The moral of this lesson to younger programmers (I’m nearly 58) is – be very careful how you sit at the computer.

If you slouch and don’t pay attention to how straight your back is, you may not suffer now, but in years to come you may well be as broken as I am. Get a good chair and sit properly. When your teachers told you to “sit up straight” they had your best interests at heart!

My fortnightly summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.

Boy, a fortnight comes around quickly! Never mind, let’s see what’s been going on.

The Pillars of the Earth  by Ken Follett.

E-book on my iPod.

See here for my take on what it was like to read such a long book on the iPod Touch.

Setting aside how I read this book, I should say that I found this long historical novel very entertaining and enjoyable. Certainly a departure for an author formerly known as being the writer of best-selling thrillers.

It follows a small cast of characters who become involved in the building of a new cathedral in England during the 12th Century. The historical backdrop is the civil war between the supporters of the rival contenders for the throne, Stephen and Maud. Those who are familiar with the Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters will be familiar with the bones of this part of English history.

Follett succeeds in bringing out how uncertain and dangerous life was during this time. We follow the fortunes, among others, of a mason and his family; the daughter of an ousted earl; the prior of a monastery; and the sullen, violent son of a nobleman. There are terrible, violent crimes; two or more love stories; betrayals and reversals of fortune. Yet they all knit easily together in the story, which is gripping.

Follett makes no attempt to suggest the use of the language which would have been in use at the time; everyone speaks and thinks in essentially modern English. That’s all fine, and to be expected (think of it as a translation no less than would be a translation from French to English). But there are times when the reader wonders if the thinking patterns of the characters would be quite so recognizably modern as the author makes them out to be.

There’s also the occasional outright anachronism. For example, I doubt whether anyone at the time would have described the shape of a castle’s fortifications as being like ‘a figure eight’ – Arabic numerals (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) weren’t adopted in the West until well after this date. But this is mere pettifogging pendantry on my part.

Well worth reading. I plan on tackling the equally long sequel, World Without End, set two centuries later, sometime soon.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom  by Cory Doctorow.

E-book on my iPod.

This is a free e-book, made available by the author under a Creative Commons license. (Though, interestingly, you can still buy it from Fictionwise for $13.95 if you want to support the author).

It’s quite a short novel – Doctorow’s first – but fizzing with ideas, and an enjoyable read.

I read it specifically to find out about the respect-based economy he postulates, because I’m intending to research and write about such systems here in the future. I was a little disappointed in this goal, since the book really doesn’t explore much about how such a system would work in practice, or how it would evolve – it’s merely a fait accompli when the book opens.

I enjoyed much more the concept of the end of death by means of the ability to save a complete “back-up” of one’s mind at any time, and then have this backup restored into a new, cloned body, at a later time if your current body dies. It throws a whole new importance on the dictum “back up often“, since, obviously, you lose that whole part of your memories experienced since the last back-up. Fascinating idea, and used very well as part of the plot. But it’s perhaps a pity that Doctorow didn’t explore some of the same territory as Algis Budrys in Rogue Moon about whether identity would truly be preserved by such a process.

But these are quibbles. The story was engaging, the locale amusing (the historically preserved Disneyland in Florida), and the characters, though a little shallow, worth following. As a first novel, it is really very impressive, and I’ll go looking for Doctorow’s other works.

Full points to Doctorow, by the way, for campaigning against the corporate lock-up of copyright as a legal tool, and for putting his money where his mouth is and making many of his works available under Creative Commons licenses.

Current Reading

I’m currently part way through:

• The Great War – Walk in Hell by Harry Turtledove (audiobook)
• Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks (hardback, from library)
• A Sleeping Life by Ruth Rendell (e-book)

I’ve just finished reading Ken Follett’s massive historical novel, The Pillars of the Earth, and enjoyed it greatly. It’s a gripping saga of love and hate, emnity and friendship, ambition and humility surrounding the building of a cathedral in 12th Century England.

As I say, it’s a massive book: 973 pages in the hardcover version, two and a half inches thick, weighing about three pounds. Pretty hard to hold in the hand, or even to read in bed. A real pain to lug around on the train or the bus.

That’s the hardcover, of course, but the paperback isn’t much better, still weighing over two pounds, and two inches thick.

Yet the version that I read weighed only about four ounces and was so small that I could slip it into my pocket, carry it everywhere and could read it any time I had a few minutes to spare.

I read it as an e-book on my iPod Touch, of course.

I must confess that I hesitated a long while before buying The Pillars of the Earth from Fictionwise; it seemed slightly insane to attempt to read a nearly 1000-page book on the small iPod screen. But after a while, I gave in. After the “Micropay Rebate” which Fictionwise offers, it cost me less than $5. Half a cent a page seemed a pretty good deal!

After it was installed on my iPod it looked even more daunting. At the font size which I find comfortable, eReader told me that the book was some 3,332 pages (screens?) long. I was going to have to tap my iPod screen at least that many times. Wouldn’t that get exhausting?

The iPhone / iPod Touch is often denigrated as an e-book reader (particularly by Kindle fans) because of the small form factor of the screen. They certainly have a point when discussing newspapers and magazines or textbooks with formulas, illustrations and diagrams. But I think they miss the point when it comes to novels or even general non-fiction books. The fact is that for such books the form factor is close to irrelevant.

All that is needed for comfortable reading is an easily readable font size and style and enough words on the screen that you can read and grasp a typical paragraph or two at a time. Once immersed in the story, your brain stops paying attention to how the story is being delivered to it. Well, that is what I have found, anyway.

The Pillars of the Earth has been treated well in the conversion by Fictionwise. The structure of prologue, parts and chapters is all respected; and each major part has an attractive illustration which displays neatly on the iPod screen. It was, really, a delight to read. I wasn’t counting screen taps – after all, who counts the number of page turns you make when reading a hardcopy book? And I could take it with me all the time and read it whenever I had the urge and the opportunity.

Then I thought of an interesting connection in reading this particular book – much of it set in a mediaeval monastery where monks labour over their copying desks. I remembered an exhibition I went to last year at our State Library – a collection of beautiful mediaeval manuscripts. These gorgeous books came in all sizes – from the huge Bibles intended for use on a lectern, to the tiny Book of Hours which could be easily slipped into a sleeve or pocket.

While the screen of the iPod Touch in the eReader application doesn’t look as splendid as the beautifully illustrated Book of Hours, in terms of the number of words per page, it does pretty well, as the following comparison shows.

“Blasts from the Past” is a collection of re-published articles dating from wa-a-a-y back to the time when I was publishing sf fanzines (1970s), through to some more recent articles published on (and about) the early days of the web (1990s).

I hope that things have changed a little in programming circles since I wrote this 13 years ago, particularly with regard to the gender balance… but I’m not so sure!

This Rough Magic

(First published in July 1996)

From time to time as part of training for my job I attend computer programming seminars of various kinds. The most important is the annual Microsoft Tech Ed conference.

Now, whenever I go to one of these events, it immediately strikes me what a heterogenous collection of people are in attendance.

With no exaggeration at all, the audience is always 95% to 99% male. At least 30% of the attendees have beards and are bespectacled. Well over 75% are wearing jumpers, cardigans or short sleeves (depending on the weather), and look as though wearing a suit or even a tie would be absolute anathema to them. By far the majority have a distant, dreamy look.

What is very depressing to me is that I fit this stereotype perfectly.

But I’m also very puzzled. Certainly when I did my graduate diploma in computing, the students did not fit this stereotype; indeed the gender balance was almost equal, and the dress sense of both men and women was far more formal.

It seems there’s a great difference between the students of computer science and those who end up as practictioners of programming and the more technical side of things.

As I looked over the audience at the last such conference, it slowly began to dawn on me that there was a strange and compelling similarity between this group of people and that of another such group as described in history and legends.

Computer programmers are, in fact, wizards.

Think about it.

A group of almost entirely male. usually bearded, practioners of art which is highly arcane to the general public. A group of unworldly men absorbed in their books and their learning. Men who spend most of their days staring into a glowing crystal screen, muttering and cursing at it.

These people treasure special methods of doing things written in obscure languages. These methods may have been inherited from others, or found in special texts, or may have been worked out painstakingly by themselves by trial and error. Certainly they treasure their private libraries of methods and tools which they can use to alter the way things work. What is an algorithm if not a spell? What is a spell, if not an algorithm written in a difficult to understand language?

In the world of the computer, these people have real power to affect reality, and to conjure up things that were not there before.

There are some who have sold their souls to evil, and who create spells/programs which attack and destroy the work of others. Others, more pure-minded, who have dedicated themselves to the common good.

Looked at in this light, it is no wonder that there are so few women among this group. Wizards, both in Terry Pratchett’s books and in real legend, are an exclusively masculine lot. Witches operate in a different mode and gather in different groups. Not for them the lure of obscure knowledge and power, more the practical application of skills to everyday life.

For the wizard, often the more esoteric the knowledge, the more difficult the language, the more obscure the task, the better. How else to explain the popularity of cryptic programming languages such as C++ and Lisp?

The obsession that these people have is a strange one. It is certainly the lure of power, enormous power, within a particular sphere. It is the power of creation and destruction; of life and death, if you like. But the world in which this power is wielded is not the real world. It is the universe of cyberspace.

For all the increasing dominance of computers in our workplaces and our everyday lives, it is hard to imagine that these dreamy, bearded souls who are wizards or programmers depending on how you look at it, are ever likely to control the world.

Shakespeare, as always, knew the truth of it when he has his wizard-Duke, Prospero, recall wistfully:

The government I cast upon my brother,
And to my state grew stranger, being transported,
And rapt in secret studies.

– The Tempest, Act I Scene II