Today I finished “The Girl Who Played With Fire”, translated by Reg Keeland from the swedish book of the same name by Stieg Larsson. It’s the sequel to ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” (which is called “Men Who Hate Women” in the original swedish), and I really can’t recommend the pair of them highly enough (as you might have guessed from the title of this blog post).

I picked the first book up as the combination of the titular character being described as “an expert computer hacker” and the synopsis on the back cover put me in mind of Neil Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon”, not only one of my favourite books but also an outright work of genius, in my opinion. I would describe ”Cryptonomicon” as recommended reading if you’re the sort of person who breaths oxygen and walks upright, if you work with computers I’d say it verges on being required reading. Since Stephenson lost the plot more recently (in my opinion, that is; I didn’t make it more than half way through “Quicksilver” before giving up in pained frustration) there has been a rather large cyber-fiction based hole in my world. “…Dragon Tattoo” seems as though it might be poised to fill it.

In fact it did not. It’s a different beast all together. A slow burning and wonderful one, written (and translated) with great skill and care. Both books are very powerful reads, laced with a hatred of misogyny and criticism of a system which doesn’t do nearly enough to prevent it. It’s also a ripping great yarn of a mystery, full of strong male and female characters. Nominally, the books are the first two parts of a trilogy. In fact Larsson planned ten books and left an unfinished fourth manuscript together with outlines for books five and six when he died. I’m waiting with bated breath for the release of the third book. I just hope it ties things up reasonably well and so won’t leave me too curious about the contents of book I’ll never be able to read.

Something else I can’t recommend highly enough, while I’m on the subject, is this:

I love it when an an apparently shallow and vacant pop star turns out to be really quite absurdly talented…

PS If you’re reading this via Facebook and intend to comment, please do so on the actual blog, rather than on Facebook. Thanks

It has been, by my count, at least 18 months since I last had a holiday (aside from one weekend spent in Cardiff). It’s getting to the point where I’m starting to feel that I really need a one. But what kind of holiday?

Having stopped to think about it, I’ve realised that most of the holidays I’ve taken have been of the package type. With the skiing holidays this isn’t so bad, it’s possibly even ideal. The rest of the time… not so much. It feels a little too much like being cattle, it feels very lowest common denominator (largely because it is) and you’ll tend to spend a lot of time around British Tourists (if you know what I mean). The holidays I remember enjoying most are the other kind. The ad hoc ones. Three stand out:

Something like five years ago my friend Pete was living and working in Barcelona for the summer, staying with a friend he’d met while previously living in Switzerland. My friend Ruth and I made our way out there (slightly haphazardly, in my case) and spend a fantastic week, sleeping on Pete’s floor and trying to spend as little money as possible, whilst also trying to see and drink as much as possible. Pete’s friend also had a couple of friend’s kipping on her floor, and they’d also befriended an Irish fella they’d found in the bar Pete worked in. It was a great time. When I think back on the seriously happy moments in my life, swimming in sea at 1 am on Barcelona beach while holding onto a bottle of white wine in an attempt to cool it down a little… yeah, that ranks pretty high up there.

A couple of years later I (English), together with my friends Mark (Scottish) and John (Irish) made another ad hoc trip, this time to Italy. We flew with Easy Jet, rented a cheap but very comfortable villa in the hills and drove our selves around in a rental Alpha Romeo. We ate some great food food, played some cards, looked at some very pretty cities (and some very pretty girls), and accidently drove up the off ramp of an Italian motorway. I highly recommend it (except for the last one).

Lastly, and most recently, I spent a long weekend in a hostel in Berlin with 7 friends. We saw the sites, ate lots of pig and starch based products, probably drank too much, and wrapped up very, very warm. Only one of our number actually spoke German and he had to go elsewhere for the last night, leaving us to end up in what turned out to be an awesome and Very cheap socialist bar. Though there was an tense few minutes when we were sure what kind of socialist bar it was (it was the good kind).

I would like to have more holidays like this. Now, if I could just figure out a good way of setting them up…

BUNAC appeals to me (and I only have two years left to try it, depending on the country), as does farm working my way a cross a (hot) country. Burning Man is also not without it’s a appeal…

Let’s get the preliminaries out of the way: Hello, long time no see, how have you been? Etc…

So, whilst writing up my PhD (experiments finally finished!) and working three days a week (going fully full time at the end of September!) I have a fair bit on my plate at the moment. So obviously I’ve also started cooking up a side project…

I don’t want to talk too much about what it actually is (mostly because I don’t know how “open” I want it to be yet), but it’s definitely going to require a web service. It might also require a fully fledged website (lets call this the spotify model), or it might just use a desktop application which connects to the service when it needs to (lets call this the iTunes model). Then again it might have both, with the desktop application providing some extra functionality which is hard to do over the web or in the browser. I think there’s also scope for a mobile application, so lets throw iPhone and (what the hell) Android into the pot as well.

I had a bit of a poke around with some web development frameworks first, since this is probably the bit I know least about.

One of the first solutions I came across was Django, which is based on the python language. It looks good, through I have some issues with its handling of “one to many” relationships. Python is a language I have limited experience with, but it gets a lot of love, and people are putting a lot of work into into making it better. It also has good integration with native libraries. So that’s nice. It’s also named after Monty Python, which only raises my opinion of it.

I’ll essentially skip over TurboGears and Web2Py, two other python based frameworks I did some reading about. Django seems like the best choice out the python based frameworks I’ve looked at.

Soon afterwards I discovered Grails which is based on the very cool groovy dynamic language. Groovy, as well as being fun to say, is implemented directly on top of Java, by far the language I’m most comfortable with. The are a lot of existing Java libraries, and groovy has perfect integration with them. Groovy and grails have some serious weight behind them, also.

One framework I hadn’t really considered was Ruby on Rails, which is in many ways the daddy here. This is mostly because I dismissed Ruby as a language out of hand. It looks mental. For reasons I’ll come to in a minute, I’ve re-evaluated this desision, and will be having a good long look at it. On the one hand it’s been around a good long while, so has had the oportunity to become more refined. On the other hand, it was the first of its kind, which means it might also be stuck with some bad early design desicions. It’s the original, this might not make it the best. I don’t know yet.

In order to build this… thing, I’ll need data representation, I’ll need algorithms for processing this data, and I’ll need ways of displaying it. I’d rather not have to deal with multiple implementations in different languages, particularly with the algorithms.

Problem.

If I want to make desktop applications, python is a possibility. It has good bindings to GTK and QT for linux, and Cocoa for OSX (there’s probably also something which will work on windows, and at some point I’ll probably have to care about this). Java will work anywhere, but it’s quite difficult to make a desktop application with Java which won’t look like crap. My priority in this area is going to be OSX, and Java does not measure up here. I had not considered Ruby, until I came across MacRuby, which is a very interesting idea. It’s not a bridge or a set of bindings, you see, it sits right on top of the objective-c runtime. All of a sudden, Ruby and Rails are a contender.

In the mobile space, things get shitty. iPhone requires objective-c, Android requires Java. Bugger.

So here’s where I am: I think groovy is a better language than python (and probably ruby), and I think grails is a better framework than django (I’ll get back to you regarding rails)… but I’m not sure I want Java hanging around my neck when it comes to building a desktop application. I might also need some serious grunt in the algorithm stakes, and I’m not sure I want to do that in a scripting language. Yes, I need to be able to implement it quickly, but I also need it to run quickly. I’m not sure I want to do that in either C or C++. Java would be good for this (and yes, it’s plenty fast). Objective-c is an option I haven’t discounted.

The search continues… any thoughts?

Generally speaking, I tend to find that if something look too good to be true, it probably isn’t. The “lemon meringue pie” served in the university cafateria today, for instance. Another potential for instance can be found here:

http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/terminatorsalvation/

Because the trailer for Terminator Salvation look far, far too good to be true. In fact, it looks pretty spectacular, in my opinion. It looks like some of the best, most intelligent, elements of Battlestar Galactica*, and that epic future war James Cameron mercilessly teased us with… starring Christian Bale. Who, silly voice aside, makes a damn near perfect Batman.

I ask you (yes, you): is this possible?

* Yes, that would be the new Battlestar, not the old one.

I need a tape measure.

It isn’t the first time I’ve thought this in the past couple of days, and I expect to think it at least a thousand times more in the foreseeable future. The problem in this instance is that I can’t tell by eye if the bed and the two cabinets will fit to the left of the bedroom window.

Crap. I’ve gotten ahead of myself.

A week or two ago, my flatmate Bruce told me that he and his girlfriend, my other flatmate, Sabrina were moving on a pastures anew. They wanted their own place, and so March would be their last month month in our current flat.

Shit.

But no, after speaking to my very friendly landlord, I found out that I will not be tossed out on my proverbial arse, I will in fact be able to stay on for three further months, essentially at my current rent, and with the whole flat to myself.

Pretty cool.

So, of course, my thoughts naturally turn to important matters:

Where will I move all the furniture to?

Because, of course, you have to move the furniture around. That’s just what you do.

How will I implement the ideal centralised media and file distribution system?

This, too, is just something you have to do. If you’re a bit of a nerd, that is.

But what happens at the end of the three months I previously mentioned? Well… in a slightly terrifying display of domesticity, on my good lady’s return from working on her dissertation project down south, we pick up the lease of the flat.

It’s okay. She’s a bit of a nerd, too.

While it’s a fairly common and reasonably accurate maxim that you have to spend money to make money, I find myself wondering if the same is true of energy. To reword and disentangle the metaphor: Can you save energy by using energy?

Here’s a my train of thought: You have curtains in your house. It’s possible to fit a motorised unit and automate the opening and closing of the same. This would same ostentatious, lazy and wasteful. To have a computer, sitting, always on, in your house, which decides when this should happen would seem to increase these negative factors.

But…

During winter, you try to close the curtains to keep heat in. Doing this early means you miss out on daylight and, furthermore, you have to turn on artificial lights. Doing this too late means that you loose heat through the windows. There’s is probably a converse example in hotter climates than this, in which your house gets too hot in the middle of the day if you don’t close the binds, meaning you have to turn on the air conditioning.

So then, at what point does the energy used to run the computer become a good investment? What if it has sensors inside and outside in order to measure the temperature gradient, and so it can choose the best time to close the curtains? What if it also manages your heating? What if it intelligently turns out the lights in rooms you’re not in? Reminds you that you turned the oven on but haven’t actually put anything in it… Makes damn sure that you get out of bed in the morning… and so on…

Some not work related computery bits and pieces have been percolating around my head for some time now. I think we should talk about them for a while. That is: I’ll talk. You listen.

I’m probably going to write a couple of more techy blogs, all loosely interrelated. I am going somewhere with them, but I’m not entirely certain as to how much of this journey I will share with you.

First of all, I’m going to talk about the fairly simple computer related concept of “Call by reference” versus “Call by value”. This is fairly basic computer science (though I wish they’d taught it properly earlier on in my course). It’s possible (probable, even) that this example (or variations of it) has been used a thousand times before. I’m not going to go look for one (or the absence of one), I’m just going to write down my own particular take on it. I assure you that any plagiarism I’m about to commit is in no way deliberate. So, without further ado…

Let’s say you want to send a specific piece of information to someone via email. Let’s say it’s part of today’s featured article on Wikipedia (William I of Orange, at the time of writing). In today’s connected digital world, you have too main options. First of all, you could send them the information itself, like so:

William was born in the castle of Dillenburg in Nassau, present-day Germany. He was the eldest son of William, Count of Nassau and Juliana of Stolberg-Werningerode, and was raised a Lutheran. He had four younger brothers and seven younger sisters: John, Hermanna, Louis, Mary, Anna, Elisabeth, Katharine, Juliane, Magdalene, Adolf and Henry.

There are several things your recipient can do with this. They can read it. They can edit it, but this will only edit their local copy. The original remains unchanged. If they want to request that a change be made, they can, however, edit it and send it back to you. This is “calling by value.”

Your second option is to send them a link to the information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_I_of_Orange#Early_life

This, again, allows them to read it. They have to follow the link to the information it points to first, though. This time, if they make an edit (this being wikipedia) they actually are changing the original copy. They can also see what other information is around it, and if they feel so inclined they can change that is well. You might consider this to be an undesirable consequence. This method has the aditional advantage, however, that you did not have to take the time and effort to make a copy, and the amount of information you had to actually send is significantly smaller. This is “calling by reference.”

If you deal with this sort of thing on a day to day basis, you may well be aware that when you do this sort of thing in a computer program you have another option. You can send a constant reference, which would be analagious to sending a link to a website the recipient has no write access to. For example:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/644041/William-I

Prepare to be confused, scared, and impressed by this surprisingly well made remake.

It’s well written, well acted, well mad. But I just can’t understand: why?

It’s a horrible cliché, but I’m afraid the book really is a lot better.