READIN

Wednesday, November 12th, 2003

🦋 A book I'm looking for

I am going to throw this out into the æther and see if any help comes my way...

When I was young, I read a book that I loved and reread several times. I have forgotten the author's name (I believe he was French) and the title. Here is all I know for sure about the book:

• It was set in the Neolithic era. The characters were a family of cavemen who did things like discovering fire, inventing written language, etc.
• The narrator's uncle was named Vanya.
• On the cover of the book (a paperback) was a print of Picasso's The Minotaur.

posted afternoon of November 12th, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, November 6th, 2003

I am zipping right through The English Passengers, nearly halfway now, and enjoying it. A geographical issue is bothering me -- if the voyage begins at London and has as its ultimate destination Van Diemen's Land, why would they be going to Jamaica and then to Africa? It seems to me that the logical route would be to head directly south around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean; a side trip to Jamaica means you have to cross and recross the Atlantic.

The narrative style of the book -- each chapter is told from the point-of-view of a different character -- encourages me to go back to my reading of The Corrections, where I kept noticing how many different characters I felt sympathy for; I would expect something similar to happen here. But it does not, or not exactly -- I do sympathize with several of the characters; but the book is very broadly comic and much of it is caricature.

posted evening of November 6th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, November 4th, 2003

I got home last night to find a package had come for me in the mail -- how exciting! It is from Gary; I opened it up and found he had sent me a new book, with a note to the effect that he thinks I will enjoy it. (And a wonderfully cool bookmark, a snapshot of the Xyris crew from '94, the first year I was working there.)

The book is The English Passengers, by Matthew Kneale. I started reading it this morning on the train and got hooked into it right away -- it has all the characteristics of a book I would like. The language is playful and erudite. The setting is 19th-Century Man, England, Wales, Australia, and Tasmania and it looks like I will get an introduction to some new history that I did not know, plus a little Manx dialect.

I want to write a bit about comparisons to other books that are coming up as I read -- but I think I will wait a bit and see how these comparisons develop, before I commit them to "paper".

posted morning of November 4th, 2003: Respond

Thursday, October 16th, 2003

Patrick Farley's Electric Sheep, home of the IMO best comics on the web, celebrated its 5th birthday yesterday. Patrick marked the occasion by unveiling a new front page, the first step in his planned redesign of the site. Go check it out -- there is a poll where you can ask for the new comic you would most like to see. (Hint: vote for Apocamon 4!)

posted afternoon of October 16th, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, October 9th, 2003

🦋 IDispatch

My policy of reading COM and .NET Interoperability straight through from the beginning, rather than skipping the stuff I am familiar with, paid off yesterday when I found out something about programming the IDispatch half of dual interfaces, which had eluded me until now.

IDispatch is an interface which allows you to support method and property calls on arbitrarily named members, meaning the client does not have to load type info. A common use for it is the "dual interface", in which type info is exposed but clients are given a choice whether to call methods directly or through IDispatch::Invoke. I always have supported it (in situations where I needed it and was not using a tool like ATL for the implementation) by hand-coding a lookup table in Invoke and GetIDsOfNames, and putting no code in the other two member functions. This is a big pain, primarily because of all the parameter translation you have to do in Invoke; and not supporting GetTypeInfo is a problem too, though it never made a difference in the situations where I did this. (Also I only support GetIDsOfNames halfway.)

But it turns out COM exports three functions which you can use to implement IDispatch using the type library generated by the compiler from your IDL code. They are LoadRegTypeLib, DispGetIDsOfNames, and DispInvoke. I have never done any work really with type libraries but it is nice to know I could. Chapter 4, which I am starting today, is all about COM Type Information.

posted morning of October 9th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, October 7th, 2003

🦋 COM Memories

Reading COM and .NET Interoperability -- the initial chapters are all stuff I'm pretty familiar with but I am reading it anyway, to make sure I'm on Troelsen's wavelength when it gets interesting. A note at the beginning of Chapter 2, that the COM specification was released in '93, made me realize my programming career has progressed in lock step with Microsoft's Visual Basic API. Well I was a little late coming on board... I wasn't programming when VB was introduced... What I am thinking of when I talk about the Visual Basic API is something that really starts with COM.*

My first project when I came to Xyris was to make some improvements to their RTList VBX control. (A VBX is a DLL which specifies a custom control for VB 3.x, and maybe VB 1 and 2 as well -- I don't know anything about versions prior to 3.x. VBX is the predecessor to OCX, the OLE Custom Control, which is what COM controls used to be called.) I worked on RTList throughout my years at Xyris, moving it from VBX to OCX and then rewriting the OCX control in ATL (enough acronyms yet?)

* On rereading I see that this is quite vague. What I am trying to get at is the notion of programming windows applications with Microsoft's suite of GUI development tools, of which VB is the original one. Visual Studio .NET is the current incarnation of this suite.

posted morning of October 7th, 2003: Respond

Monday, October 6th, 2003

🦋 Apocamon III: Attack of the Locusts

Big news -- Patrick Farley has put Chapter III up on E-sheep. It costs a quarter to view (via BitPass) -- its value is many times as much. Take a look!

posted morning of October 6th, 2003: Respond
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Friday, October third, 2003

My current reading (starting today) is Andrew Troelsen's COM and .NET Interoperability -- I expect it to be dry reading material compared to The Corrections and The Life of Pi; but I have kind of high hopes for it to be more engaging and better written than any of the other API documentation I have read recently. I just read the introduction and Troelsen seems prepared to get to the point clearly and without the annoying cuteness you see in many of these books. I also like that the book has only one author; many of these books are written by two or more people and do not have a clear authorial voice.

Anyways -- COM is what I work in by and large; and .NET is where I am headed; I have written one project in .NET so far and it was a pretty enjoyable experience. So I think this will be a useful book. I don't know how much I am going to blog about it -- depends on how useful it ends up being I guess.

posted morning of October third, 2003: Respond

Thursday, October second, 2003

I saw from an interview in last week's Onion that Harvey Pekar has a blog -- Check it out! This will be short-lived; the company that produced his film is paying him to keep a journal online, he didn't sound likely to continue it after that ends. It is fun to read, and features contributions from his wife and Danielle, the girl of whom Harvey and Joyce are guardians.

posted afternoon of October second, 2003: Respond
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Friday, September 26th, 2003

🦋 Lunch

LanguageHat, with all his posting of beautiful poetry, has inspired me to copy the following poem out of "Thank You and Other Poems". It is a very fine book, one which I recommend to you very highly; in addition to "Lunch" it has "On the Great Atlantic Railway", "Fresh Air", "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams", and many other worthwile pieces. It is copyright 1962 by Kenneth Koch, published on Grove Press's Evergreen imprint.

L U N C H

The lanternslides grinding out B-flat minor
Chords to the ears of the deaf youngster who sprays in Hicksville
The sides of a car with the dream-splitting paint
Of pianos (he dreamt of one day cutting the Conservatory
In two with his talent), these lanternslides, I say,
They are -- The old woman hesitated. A lifesaver was shoved down her throat;
     then she continued:
They are some very good lanternslides in that bunch. Then she fainted
And we revived her with flowers. She smiled sleepily at the sun.
He is my own boy, she said, with her glass hand falling through the
     sparkling red America of lunch.

That old boilermaker she has in her back yard,
Olaf said, used to be her sweetheart years back.
One day, though, a train passed, and pressed her hard,
And she deserted life and love for liberty.
We carried Olaf softly into the back yard
And laid him down with his head under the steamroller.
Then Jill took the wheel and I tinkered with the engine,
Till we rolled him under, rolled him under the earth.
When people ask us what's in our back yard
Now, we don't like to tell them, Jill says, laying her
     silver bandannaed head on my greened bronze shoulder.
Then we both dazzle ourselves with the red whiteness of lunch.

That old woman named Tessie Runn
Had a tramp boyfriend who toasted a bun.
They went to Florida, but Maxine Schweitzer was hard of
Hearing and the day afterwards the judge adjourned the trial.
When it finally came for judgment to come up
Of delicious courtyards near the Pantheon,
At last we had to let them speak, the children whom flowers had made statues
For the rivers of water which came from their funnel;
And we stood there in the middle of existence
Dazzled by the white paraffin of lunch.

Music in Paris and water coming out from the flannel
Of the purist person galloping down the Madeleine
Toward a certain wafer. Hey! just a minute! the sunlight is being rifted
By the green architecture of the flowers.
    But the boulevard turned a big blue deaf ear
Of cinema placards to the detonated traveler. He had forgotten
     the blue defilade of lunch!

Genoa! a stone's throw from Acapulco
If an engine were built strong enough,
And down where the hulls and scungilli,
Glisteningly unconscious, agree,
I throw a game of shoes with Horace Sturnbul
And forget to eat lunch.

O launch, lunch, you dazzling hoary tunnel
To paradise!
Do you see that snowman tackled over there
By summer and the sea ? A boardwalk went to Istanbul
And back under his left eye. We saw the Moslems praying
In Rhodes. One had a red fez, another had a black cap.
And in the extended heat of afternoon,
As an ice-cold gradual sweat covered my whole body,
I realized, and the carpet swam like a red world at my feet
In which nothing was green, and the Moslems went on praying,
That we had missed lunch, and a perpetual torrent roared into the sea
Of my understanding. An old woman gave us bread and rolls on the street.

The dancing wagon has come! here is the dancing wagon!
Come up and get lessons -- here is lemonade and grammar!
Here is drugstore and cowboy -- all that is America --
      plus sex, perfumes, and shimmers -- all the Old World;
Come and get it -- and here is your reading matter
For twenty-nine centuries, and here finally is lunch --
To be served in the green defilade under the roaring tower
Where Portugal meets Spain inside a flowered madeleine.

My ginger dress has nothing on, but yours
Has on a picture of Queen Anne Boleyn
Surrounded by her courtiers eating lunch
And on the back a one of Henry the Eighth
Summoning all his courtiers in for lunch.

And the lunchboat has arrived
From Spain.
Everyone getting sick is on it;
The bold people and the sadists are on it;
I am glad I am not on it,
I am having a big claw of garlic for lunch --
But it plucks me up in the air,
And there, above the ship, on a cloud
I see the angels eating lunch.
One has a beard, another a moustache,
And one has some mustard smeared on his ears.
A couple of them ask me if I want to go to Honolulu,
And I accept -- it's all right --
Another time zone: we'll be able to have lunch.
They are very beautiful and transparent,
My two traveling companions,
And they will go very well with Hawaii
I realize as we land there,
That dazzling red whiteness -- it is our desire --
For whom? The angels of lunch.

Oh I sat over a glass of red wine
And you came out dressed in a paper cup.
An ant-fly was eating hay-mire in the chair-rafters
And large white birds flew in and dropped edible animals to the ground.
If they had been gulls it would have been garbage
Or fish. We have to be fair to the animal kingdom,
But if I do not wish to be fair, if I wish to eat lunch
Undisturbed --? The light of day shines down. The world continues.

We stood in the little hutment in Biarritz
Waiting for lunch, and your hand clasped mine
And I felt it was sweaty;
And then lunch was served,
Like the bouquet of an enchantress.
Oh the green whites and red yellows
And purple whites of lunch!

The bachelor eats his lunch,
The married man eats his lunch,
And old Uncle Joris belches
The seascape in which a child appears
Eating a watermelon and holding a straw hat.
He moves his lips as if to speak
But only sea air emanates from this childish beak.
It is the moment of sorrows, And in the shores of history,
Which stretch in both directions, there are no happy tomorrows.
But Uncle Joris holds his apple up and begins to speak
To the child. Red waves fan my universe with the green macaw of lunch.

This street is deserted;
I think my eyes are empty;
Let us leave
Quickly.
Day bangs on the door and is gone.

Then they picked him up and carried him away from that company.
When he awoke he was in the fire department, and sleepy but not tired.
They gave him a hoseful of blue Spain to eat for lunch,
And Portugal was waiting for him at the door,
    like a rainstorm of evening raspberries.

It is time to give lunch to my throat and not my chest.
What? either the sting ray has eaten my lunch
Or else -- and she searches the sky for something else;
But I am far away, seeming blue-eyed, empirical...

Let us give lunch to the lunch -- But how shall we do it?
The headwaiters expand and confer;
Will little pieces of cardboard box do it?
And what about silver and gold pellets?
The headwaiters expand and confer:
And what if the lunch should refuse to eat anything at all?
Why then we'd say be damned to it,
And the red doorway would open on a green railway
And the lunch would be put in a blue car
And it would go away to Whippoorwill Valley
Where it would meet and marry Samuel Dogfoot,
    and bring forth seven offspring,
All of whom would be half human, half lunch;
And when we saw them, sometimes, in the gloaming,
We would take off our mining hats and whistle Tweet twee-oo,
With watering mouths staring at the girls in pink organdy frocks,
Not realizing they really were half edible,
And we would die still without knowing it;
So to prevent anything happening that terrible
Let's give everybody we see and like a good hard bite right now,
To see what they are, because it's time for lunch!

Update: see also Pelele's poem "Breakfast".

↻...done

posted evening of September 26th, 2003: 2 responses

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