Daily Life in an Ivory Basement

I read a lot of total crap, and one of my recurring crap authors has been John Ringo. He's a total nutjob politically, but he writes good battle scenes and is an enjoyable read once you cut through the nonsense. Still, I'm having a tough time getting through the opening chapters of The Last Centurion. In this book, Ringo constructs a near-future world where Hillary Clinton is president, global cooling is the problem, and the chemicals from processed food and big farming are life saving.

Let's take those one at a time.

One of Ringo's favorite tropes is that the left, and the Clintons especially, are what's wrong with America. It's hard to convey the dripping scorn with which he discusses these topics, but it involves a lot of naughty words. In this book, Hillary Clinton (or a straw woman facsimile thereof) is president through the Big Chill and the simultaneous deadly bird flu outbreak, and she makes every mistake possible. While Hillary Clinton is not my favorite politician, it's worth noting that our current president (who can do little wrong in Ringo's eyes) has actually made almost every mistake possible, and this makes Ringo's text unbearably difficult to read. If Ringo is hoping to even tell a good story, much less sway anyone's opinion, he'd be better off with less in the way of textual histrionics.

Another one of Ringo's tropes is that the global warming hypothesis is nonsense. Not only does he mention this frequently, but he literally pauses in the middle of his books to deliver four page diatribes on the subject. In this latest book, Ringo makes the next big climate change event a major solar COOLING, which has predictable effects on the food supply. Now, I'm a scientist and a lefty, and I've even worked on science relevant to climate change, so presumably (by Ringo's criteria) I am unfit to comment, being moderately knowledgeable. But when your social commentary depends entirely on fiction, it loses any relevance and becomes a distraction.

The most interesting novelty in this book (which presumably will become another abortive series, to join the ranks of his other five unfinished series?) is the device where American lives are saved by having eaten so many processed foods. As far as I can tell, the idea is that eating processed foods conveys resistance to chicken flu, and this leads to a dramatically greater survival rate in America. I'm not sure why this device is in the book, unless it's another imaginary nail in Ringo's imaginary coffin of liberalism. Whyever it's there, it's entertainingly stupid -- there's plenty of evidence that weird, random chemicals do weird, random things to your DNA, and that's one reason why cancer is so prevalent. There's no reason at all to believe that these chemicals would somehow "cancel out" bird flu. But what do I know? I'm just a molecular freakin' biologist...

Combine all that with Ringo's inimitable writing style in which no breasts are too big, no hero goes unfucked by multiple (large-breasted) women, and no terrorist goes unpunished, and these books are truly a piece of work. I do not, however, mean "of art". In fact, this last book is so outlandish that I'm actually becoming a bit suspicious of Ringo's sincerity. It's hard to read such complete and utter crap without thinking that perhaps the author is secretly making fun of the very viewpoints he is espousing. But it's been a consistent trend towards lunacy thus far, so I'm inclined to believe that he's actually somewhat sincere.

Anyway, here's my judgement: Ringo's latest book is masturbatory fodder for hard right wingers, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to enjoy his books if you're not actually lobotomized. Luckily that ensures him an 18% market.

--titus

Some books make me want to leap up out of my chair and go change the world, or die trying.

Charles Stross' Halting State is not one of them.

However, it is a darn good read, and -- for those of you who are into the Internet, Python, MMORPGs, and/or crypto -- it is chock full of hilarious inside jokes.

(Yes, that's right, I said "Python". One of the main platforms used in the book is "Zone", written in "Python". Does this mean Python has arrived? And, more importantly, does it mean that in the near future, Zope has lost their automatic trademark on Z names in Python?)

Halting State is set in the near future, and it is, ostensibly, about a bank robbery that takes place in a MMORPG, and the police (and others) who are investigating the robbery. Unlike some of Stross' other work -- the Eschaton series, for example -- the writing is disjointed and the characters are not very well worked out, but the flavor of this very realistic future seeps through nonetheless. After the humor, the next best part of the book was the well-thought-out speculation on how certain tech problems would work themselves out, from ARGs to multiple interconnected MMORPGs and even the future of policing. As with other good and great sci-fi/tech writers like Vinge, Stephenson, Sterling, and Gibson, Stross' vision of the near future is very clear and all too plausible; I wouldn't be surprised if his predictions are largely accurate. The only real problem with this book is that I feel like he didn't take the time to write the story thoroughly.

Summary judgement: Well worth a read, just don't expect the same level of brilliance as some of Stross' other work.

--titus

I'm midway through Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code, and I can unabashedly recommend it to anyone who likes a good yarn. Yes, it's about software development, and you'll need a fair bit of technical exposure -- not experience, just exposure -- to navigate the references. But anyone who is reading this, including my not-so-technical friends, should be able to understand it, enjoy it, and even learn from it.

The book covers the start of the Chandler project, and does a fantastic job of describing both the social and technical aspects of a large, (over)ambitious software development effort. Rosenberg has done an excellent job of setting up the problems inherent in software projects, and his description of the contesting software development paradigms -- cathedrals, bazaars, mosh pits, etc. -- is well written and quite comprehensible. While I haven't finished the book yet, I know where the project is today, and I know that I will be disappointed at the ending of the book -- yet after reading the first half of this book, I would be shocked were it to turn out any other way: the whiff of doom is already quite palpable.

My background in software goes back a fair bit. I started really programming in high school in the late '80s, when I learned C and roughed out a simple Nethack clone on a PC. Soon thereafter I got a UNIX account from Mark Galassi, wrote a 'talk' clone called 'ring', and participated in 'dominion' development. This led inexorably to a variety of projects, including some of the first Avida digital life software, several conference organization systems that took me through Perl/CGI/hashes, Tcl/Oracle, and ultimately got me into Python/PostgreSQL around 2001. After that I bounced around, working for a company or two, and slowly getting into better and more serious development practices. Now I develop and maintain a dismaying variety of projects: Cartwheel/FamilyRelationsII for bioinformatics, twill/scotch/figleaf for (Web) testing, and a ton of cute little one-off projects for research and testing and general open-source mayhem.

These experiences with software development are why I enthusiastically and wholeheartedly recommend this book. This world -- the world of Python, Open Source, desktop and Web programming -- is a world I visit on a regular basis. Rosenberg's descriptions of the projects, the people, the technical decisions, the thought processes, and above all the social component of software development are spot on.

Unless the book's quality takes a dramatic downturn, I'm seriously thinking of trying to use it as the cornerstone of a software testing course at MSU. The problems encountered by the developers of Chandler, and the narrative that Rosenberg builds around them, could be used to neatly demonstrate step by step just how much a "test-driven" development technique can buy you. In fact, if there's one thing that I'm puzzled by, it's just how the Chandler team could screw up so badly in 2002. These are intelligent, educated people who are up on the latest software development practices; where were the acceptance tests, for example? While I acknowledge that this could be a blind spot in the author's book, or simply blind faith in my test-infected opinions, I have a hard time understanding a process that focused on designing for abstract feature sets without any hard customer-facing tests. Why were they building prototypes without encoding the lessons learned in acceptance tests? Heck, why has the word "test" yet to be mentioned seriously?

Yes, we all see the books we read through the lens of our own biases, our own experiences, and our own inclinations. And yes, my enjoyment of this book is probably partly motivated by the belief that I could have done better -- and, honestly, that's a pretty hubristic belief. But regardless of whether you have the same reaction, it's a ripping good tale, and it's definitely one of the best books on software engineering that I've read lately.

Read it. You'll enjoy it.

--titus

p.s. Yes, Grig, you can borrow my copy.

While on travels (visiting the Computational Biology Initiative in San Antonio, Texas) I read two fiction books that were a cut above my normal sci-fi and fantasy reading material.

The Geographer's Library, by Jon Fasman was an entertaining read about alchemists. It took the same sort of pseudo-intellectual approach to fictionalizing history as The Da Vinci Code. Enjoyable puff. Well written.

The other book was Zadie Smith's book On Beauty, which was the "heavier" of the two books. It was apparently a serious contender for the Booker Prize. I personally found it a bit too entangled in academic nonsense; the writing was good, but the story was painful and annoying, and I couldn't appreciate the writing because the story got in the way.

--titus