READIN

Friday, December 12th, 2003

I finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay last night -- by the time I got about halfway through I was utterly enthralled. I am sending it along to my dad (a comix collector) to read.

posted morning of December 12th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, December third, 2003

More Kavalier and Clay -- it is very absorbing and just about perfect for reading on the train. A review I read of it stated correctly that despite its substantial bulk, it seems to fly past.

posted evening of December third, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, December second, 2003

This morning I started reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, which I found in the train station. It seems so far (60 pp. in) like a fun and amusing read, not touched by genius but the work of an attentive craftsman.

posted morning of December second, 2003: Respond

Thursday, November 20th, 2003

🦋 The Book I was Looking for

Turns out to be The Evolution Man by Roy Lewis; Lewis is not French but English; and the first edition does indeed have "The Minotaur" on the cover. Thanks to Google and Prehistoric Fiction for their invaluable help. (See this post for context.)

Oh and, I was misled by memory -- the novel is not set in neolithic age but earlier, in the transition from holocene to pleistocene. It was originally titled, What we did to Father.

posted afternoon of November 20th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, November 17th, 2003

I finished The English Passengers tonight -- what a dark book it is! I was moved to think about the meaning of the word "earnest" this afternoon, when I said to myself that this book was not (pejorative sneer) earnest in the way that The Life of Pi and The Corrections were -- this thought floated through my head complete with the sneer despite the fact that I had greatly enjoyed both those books, especially the latter -- what did I mean?

Kneale does not make such a point of evincing sympathy for his characters as does Franzen -- and indeed, few of the portrayals are sympathetic -- I would say the only ones that are, were Tim Renshaw, Captain Kewley and Peevay, and all with a great deal of ambiguity. So the sympathetic characterizations which I found so compelling in The Corrections -- and which were present in The Life of Pi as well -- are not a feature here. This is probably what I meant to get at with my pejorative use of the word "earnest"; the word is not very well used then, as Kneale is certainly earnest in his scorn for his characters.

posted evening of November 17th, 2003: Respond
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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

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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