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

South! by Sir Ernest Shackleton

E-book on my iPod

Amazon link

This true story of Antarctic adventure in the early years of the 20th Century starts a little slowly, as Shackleton recounts the slow and frustrating progress of the expedition on the ship Endeavour as they vainly try to find a way through pack ice to make a landing on the Antarctic coast.

But it really takes off as a story of almost superhuman endurance and struggle when the Endeavour becomes permanently frozen into the ice, and is eventually crushed and destroyed, leaving nearly 30 men stranded on the shifting ice floes, hundreds of miles from the nearest land and with no hope of communicating with the outside world to seek rescue.

They float with the ice for many long months, unable to do more than hope that they will drift far enough north that they can become free of the pack ice and launch the ship’s boats which they drag with them from floe to floe. The long, long struggle to reach land is harrowing. Finally they manage to struggle ashore on Elephant Island, a desolate crag with barely any shore – and no people. From there, Shackleton and another five men set out in the strongest boat to try to reach the nearest outpost of civilization – the whaling station on South Georgia. Amazingly, they manage to do it, only to find they are on the far side of the island from the whaling station, and so have to trek across mountains and glaciers to reach help.

Even when they do reach the station, it is many months before a ship can successfully reach the stranded men on Elephant Island. It is astonishing that despite all the privations, not one man was lost on the expedition. And grimly ironic that most of the men, once rescued, set off for home to join up with those still fighting in the trenches in World War I, where many of them are then killed.

Real – but true life – Boy’s Own material.

The Appeal by John Grisham

Audiobook

Amazon link

This is a bleak indictment of the power of corporations and their disdain for the common person, as Grisham looks at the fall-out from a courtroom success against a major chemical company. The little guy – the community devastated by pollution of their water supply by the company – has won! But has he? Not if the billionaire running the company has anything to say about it. Quite gripping reading, but ultimately pretty depressing.

All the Colors of Darkness by Peter Robinson

E-book on my iPhone

Amazon link

This is the latest in Robinson’s series about Detective Chief Inspector Banks, set in the North of England. And I think Robinson has finally jumped the shark with the series. What starts off as apparently a straightforward case of murder-suicide by a homosexual man blows out into a pointless investigation into whether the murder had been triggered by Iago-like whisperings from another party – pointless because it’s clear all through that no charges can be laid against such a person – and into fantastical stuff with the involvement of Britain’s spy agency MI6 (with apparently unlimited powers).

Definitely not the best book of the series, but possibly the last, as I can’t see where Robinson can go from here with any credibility. A great pity.

Current Reading

I’m currently part-way through:

• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Hardcover, my own library) – yes, I’m still reading this.
• Almost Perfect by W.E. Pete Peterson (Ebook)
• Harlequin by Bernard Cornwell (Audiobook)

For those of you following the problems I’ve had with my back (I’m sure there are hundreds of you out there, waiting with bated breath), a brief update.

No more attacks of absolute agony, lying on the floor stuff. And in general, things are improving, though I’m still on anti-inflammatory medication. But the story seems to be that it’s just the effects of age and a sedentary lifestyle, and the best I can do is to try to strengthen my back muscles to compensate for the ratty state of my spine.

My doctor is encouraging me to take up some exercise which will help with this on-going management, but most of the alternatives she suggested aren’t very appealing. Swimming is apparently the best exercise, but I’ve always hated swimming (very poor eyesight without my glasses means that I’m usually floundering around in the pool with no idea which way to swim). However, she did mention cycling, and many years ago I used to love cycling. So I may eventually drag the rusting old bike from under the house and give it another try.

Just thought you’d like to know….!

“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 guess things haven’t really become much worse in the 16 years since I wrote this article. But on the other hand, they haven’t improved, either, either. Nanny is still going strong.

Yes, Nanny

(First published in September 1993)

I suppose it was inevitable.

Back in the bad old days, computer software was of the “hairy-chested” variety. If you couldn’t work out how to use it, that was just too damn bad.

Computer programs had to be started up with a series of cryptic and hard-to-remember options from the “command-line prompt”. Even if you could recognise that as the set of bizarre “C:>” characters that stood blinking at you imperiously from the top left of a black computer screen — why “C” ? – why a colon? – why a funny right angle bracket? — you still had to remember and to be able to type such impossibly awkward combinations as “split -fmyfile.zip -wmyfile.000 -s720″ in order to carry out perfectly ordinary functions.

If you used the Unix operating system, it was even worse. You had to know that “cat” meant “show me the contents of”, that “grep” meant “search for this bit of text”, that “ls” meant “show me the files on the hard disk”, and that “kermit” was neither the name of Theodore Roosevelt’s son nor the name of a little green frog on television, but a modem communications program.

But as the years went by, software gradually became more “user-friendly”. Commands became less cryptic, programs started to sport “menus”.

We reached the era of the “graphical user interface”, and of control using those weird Camembert-cheese-shaped objects now known fondly as “mice”. Once you mastered the non-trivial skill of learning to move something around on the desk in order to see a little arrow moving around in sympathy on the screen, you had joined the era of “point and click”. The only trouble was, there were suddenly an awful lot of things to point and click at, and pointing at the wrong thing at the wrong time could be as embarrassing as it would be in public.

Eventually, programs started to come with “Help” systems, even — good grief — “context sensitive” help systems, which gave us advice about just what we were trying to do at that moment. Software at last became easy to use, and if only things had stopped there, all would have been well.

But now we have reached the ultimate in helpful software, and in my humble opinion we have finally gone one step too far. Now we have reached the era of what I like to call “Nanny software”.

Nanny software knows what is for your own good, and is determined to let you know about it.

Nanny software asks you “Are you sure you want to delete that file, dear?”, and when you say “Yes,” asks “Now are you really sure? You can’t get it back afterwards, you know.”.

Nanny software says “Do you really want to copy that file over there?”, and you feel like screaming “Well, why else would I ask you to do it?!”.

The ultimate point has been reached, I think, with software like Microsoft Publisher 2.0, which contains the most bossy nanny I have yet encountered. Until you find out how to shut her up (a non-trivial undertaking), the MsPub nanny will keep on interrupting you whenever you try to do something with messages like “I see you’re trying to print out this document. Now, let me just show you how to do it better, dear.” or “You’ve been working on this document for a quarter of an hour, dear, and I think it’s about time you saved it.”.

The nanny in Microsoft Word 6.0 is just as bad. This one even insists on fixing your spelling for you as you type. “Now I know you typed ‘teh’, dear, but I’m sure you really meant to type ‘the’, so I’ve just changed it for you, wasn’t that nice of me?” Or it fixes the capitalisation for you, so that you can’t work out why you can’t type names like ‘McDonald’ because Nanny keeps changing it back to ‘Mcdonald’. After all she knows, even if you don’t, that you can’t have a capital in the middle of a word, now can you?

It seems that the future holds even more of this kind of thing. People are talking about developing intelligent “agents” which do such stuff as tidying up your computer desktop for you by putting files in folders where it thinks you would like them to go. You know what the result will be, of course. It’s like when the cleaning lady clears up your real desktop. You can’t find a damn thing for weeks.

Already we have “scheduler” software which interrupts you in the middle of a perfectly entertaining computer game to remind you about something. “Don’t forget to write that article for The Age”, or “You’re supposed to be on your way to Aunt Mabel’s” or “You’ll be late for your doctor’s appointment if you don’t hurry up”.

And then there’s grammar-checking software! It’s bad enough to have spelling checkers telling us that there is no such word as “gafia” and that there are two ‘p’s in “applicable”, but now we have software to nag us about the passive and active voice, and to tell us not to make our sentences too long, like this one, because long sentences are too difficult to understand.

I tell you, things have gone too far, and it won’t be too long before we have software which tells us we ought to send a thank-you note to Aunt Jane for the lovely pair of thick socks she sent us for Christmas, or which nags us to sign up for that aerobics program to get our weight down instead of spending so much time in front of the computer screen.

Just one step further, and we’ll have robots which make us chicken soup and tuck us up in bed at the first sign of a sniffle. Shades of Jack Williamson’s horrifying story With Folded Hands.

In fact, I’m starting to realise what the word “personal” means in “personal computer”. It means “damned impudent” as in “if I may ask a personal question…”.

It’s true that I don’t want to go back to the days of “hairy-chested” computing, but I do think that we have to re-assert our dignity a little bit and get rid of software which pampers us to the point of irritation. In other words, it’s time we left the nursery for good, gave Nanny the sack and let her perambulate away into the sunset, never to be seen again.

Well, last week I was back doing some Flash programming, creating an on-line game for one of our corporate clients.

I must say that Flash’s Action Script 3 is a much better way to do this kind of work than the old days of AS2 (yeah, I know that is a long while ago now, but I’m old and I’ve been working in Flash since Flash 4, so I still think of AS3 as new).

But I do find the problem with moving between all of these C-like languages is keeping them all straight in my head, they are all so similar these days. So similar that it’s really easy to forget the differences until you are brought up short by something going wrong. With luck, this will occur at compile time. If you’re not so lucky, it will happen at run time, in certain circumstances only.

The languages I’m thinking of are:

• C#
• Action Script 3
• Javascript
• PHP
• Objective C

I program in these languages pretty much all the time (though mostly in C#, and with Objective C very much the newcomer to my experience).

You could also add:

• Java
• …and probably several other languages

They all have essentially the same structures – a switch statement, a for statement or an if-then-else is pretty much identical in them all. It’s as though the whole world had converted to speaking English – but with various regional dialects. And you have to keep straight in your head which country you are in at the moment so you get the dialect right.

So changing from C# back to AS3 requires a fair bit of concentration.

Where they don’t compare, though, is in their respective IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). I should probably be using Flex, rather than Flash, and the Eclipse IDE, which isn’t bad, as the tools inside Flash itself are absolute rubbish. I actually find myself using Dreamweaver as a better AS3 code editor than what is available inside Flash CS3.

The Objective-C IDE on the Mac (XCode) is pretty good, in comparison, but still not a patch on Microsoft’s Visual Studio, in my humble opinion.

Microsoft do a lot of things very poorly, but developer tools they still do extremely well. If only they would stop fiddling with C# and not keep issuing new versions of it, each new version requiring a yet bigger .NET Framework to be downloaded by my end-users. I have to say that I’m yet to spend much coding time using the additional features in C# version 3, such as LINQ, let alone the new features which are planned for C# version 4, out real soon now. Most of the time I still target the .NET Framework 2, which is nice and small. Well, 20 MB is small by today’s standards.