There have always been good people doing good, and evil people doing evil; but to get good people to do evil, that takes religion.
Philip Pullman
John Gray argues in Al Qaeda And What It Means To Be Modern that the defining belief of modernity — that advances in science and technology entail corresponding advances in politics and ethics — is a secular remnant of Judaeo-Christian millenarianism; and with different interpretations, the common inheritance of French revolutionaries, Nazis, neo-cons, Maoists, Marxists and monetarists alike. We take our superior science and technology as assurances we occupy moral high ground, despite ample evidence no such link exists. (No one ever accused the Third Reich of having ‘backward’ science and technology.)
The calm confidence of a Christian with four acesInstitutions such as the World Bank and the IMF express the West’s claim to moral high ground, and dispense advice on how to join the club of rich societies. In practice, the advice is unhelpful. Poor countries that follow it become poorer. The twentieth century’s honour roll, countries that hauled themselves out of wretched poverty — China, India, Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam — have treated this advice with the kind of respect given to bubonic plague.
Mark Twain
The ‘secular religion’ of modernity has provided a wrapper of self-justification that lets us continue to enslave or imprison the weak, and nick their nickel or oil, without damage to our illusion of virtue. In the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we covered exploitation with a thin rubric of evangelism, bringing civilisation and saving souls. Now the civilisation we bring is the gospel of Democracy and Development, which licenses our re-invasion of Iraq or America’s 1980s terrorist war against Nicaraguan democracy. Who first bombed Iraqi tribes with chemical weapons — and to encourage prompt payment of taxes? We continue to offer atrocity to our poisonous gods. Weep for the weak of the world, sacrificed on the altars of modernity.
Or enjoy a grim laugh. Oren Ginzburg’s new cartoon book There You Go explains the process with pictures. You can read it online in a few minutes.
The is very much a ‘new technology’ project. Claims are represented by XML files, and accessed through a Claim class that encodes all the business logic. Refactoring the calculations of the policy value, non-trivial in the original, resulted in a compacted table accessed through a key-indexed property; the calculations then become a classic APL 'inner product': +.×.
Some of the refactoring gets scary simple. When claims are represented by XML files, managing and organising claims can be delegated to the OS file system. I’ve redesigned the GUI code to mirror the ASP.NET architecture; converting to use the application through a browser should be easy.
But the scariest so far has been redesigning document production. The RTF markup software I wrote in 2002 gave us agility with document production. That has been a critical success factor in mopping up the work our customer’s own systems people have not been able to address. Over the last month or so I’ve rewritten it from the ground up as a Document class that produces valid RTF and XML markup. It’s the neatest programming I’ve done in a long while: taut, terse and fast. I’m fiercely proud of it.
Doing this has taught me enough about XML to realise (c’mon Stephen, catch up) everyone — including Microsoft — has moved on to XML-based formats. We should produce documents in an XML format, we should use (a subset of) a public standard — almost certainly OpenDocument — and we could probably use markup functions to compose the XML direct from our application’s scripts without the help of the Document class. In other words, no sooner have I achieved my long-contemplated rewrite than I see it can be ditched entirely.
Just how little code can we use to get this application working with?
1977 was my last summer in England before the many years abroad. I used to like stopping after work at the café at the ICA in the Mall for a drink and some live music. I was enthusiastic then about Phil Ram, who sang rock, and Kit Hain. For years I used to listen to a tape I’d made from one of her sessions; I was particularly fond of her voice, especially on a cover of “City of New Orleans”.
Did I buy her debut album Spirits Walking Out from her in a pub in Shepherds Bush? After her folky sound at the ICA I was surprised by its lush pop production, and delighted by the vigour of the singing and writing. I remember playing the title track to Bonnie Shaljean just before I moved to Australia; Bonnie, who was then itching to record her own material appeared moved almost to tears — of frustration and envy, I supposed.
Kit’s voice was part of my inner landscape in Sydney in the 1980s; I remember Spirits Walking Out formed the soundtrack to a weekend spent surfing and sleeping on NSW beaches. On a visit to London I saw her second album (twice) advertised on buses, and scooped up a copy of School For Spies in an HMV store before running for my plane.
What I didn’t know was that while I was larking about in Denmark in 1978 she’d become a One-Hit Wonder when “Dancing In The City” became a disco hit. Her solo albums must have followed that success, which slipped unnoticed past my hermitage.
And then her voice resurfaced in my ear. A glance at the iPod identified Marshall Hain, which was a match on one name at least, and Google brought the story up to date. After the two solo albums, she moved to New York City and quit singing to concentrate on songwriting. The albums appear to be unobtainable, if you don’t count the boxes of vinyl I stashed with a friend before leaving Sydney. You can find her now at The Stereo Society.
Soda, lime & bitters Another Candace-led session at the Lincoln Lounge in Kings Cross reminds me to post the recipe for Soda, Lime & Bitters as modified by bartender Johnnie. In Australia, Soda, Lime & Bitters is the classic grown-up non-alcoholic drink, especially good when you’re running a beer thirst. Pour a finger of lime cordial over ice in a long glass, fill with soda water and add two dashes of Angostura bitters. Johnnie’s version: replace the lime cordial with fresh lime juice. It replaces the sweetness with a freshness that bursts in the mouth.
Ionian tales
Two new Kefalonian essays by Miki at Air BE-PAL: Retiring naturally and Original flora of Kefalonia. Her new Kefalonian gallery is posted at her site as well, and pictures from her exhibitions at The Fox Reformed, and Clare Hall, Cambridge.
Speaking fruit to power
Our winning entry for Clue 6 in Shoot London: “He designed Trafalgar Square; find his seat of power.” Charles Barry designed Trafalgar Square and also the Palace of Westminster.
We were “The Avengers”, Miki Yamanouchi took the shot, and the art director was, ahem, me.
Shoot London
To the Tate Modern yesterday with Caroline Mawer, Mappie from Montserrat, and Miki to compete in Shoot London, a photographic treasure hunt.
Standards are high these days; we needed Google to solve the clues. Fortunately we had Miki behind the camera, and scooped a ‘best picture’ prize for one of the ten clues.
We also discovered London Beach.
Cooks out of control
Last night to the LRB bookshop to hear Bill Buford enthuse about the transgressive behaviour of the larger-than-life cooks he’s been privileged to associate with. His new book Heat is a natural sequel, it seems, to his earlier tale, Among The Thugs, of consorting with football hooligans. It’s all about passion, of course. Perhaps the mysterious popularity cooking has enjoyed recently is something about it being an acceptable way to express passion.
The most interesting part of the evening was prompted by a question — why are the English uninterested in food? The thesis was that our interest — and that of the Americans too? — is in a fantasy about food, expressed in the ‘theming’ of restaurants. We are more concerned our Italian restaurants should look Italian than that the food should taste any particular way.
Buford didn’t offer an answer, but told how the English custom of cooking for friends in your own home had got him a reputation in New York as a gourmet cook, and so led him to his apprenticeships with celebrated chefs Marco Pierre White and Mario Batali. (Of course, this doesn’t distinguish us from the French or the Italians, but only the Americans. Or rather, I should hasten to say, from New Yorkers.)
In Italy Buford had learned from a Dante-quoting butcher that European fine cooking originated there in the Renaissance, but moved to Paris when Catherina dei Medici married the French king and took all the cooks to her new home.
Papia Ghoshal
To the Woburn Gallery last night to the private view of Papia Ghoshal’s new exhibition. This intense young woman, dressed at the gallery in a demure sari, is exploring (exposing?) in her painting the submerged world of male sexual fantasies, hence the faceless subjects. More disturbing than I care to hang at home, but Nicholas Battye would very much have approved — and, no doubt, pursued Ms Ghoshal.
Mad about Madeleine Journalism is its own reward. And then Miki, listings editor at UK Jack, a Japanese newspaper in London, scored last-minute comp tickets and VIP passes to last night’s Madeleine Peyroux gig at the Tower of London. Wonderful.
Software factories My thinking about writing software has led me further and further away from the industrialisation strategies of Software Engineering, towards a craft approach focused on communication and collaboration between domain experts and professional writers. Embedded Domain-Specific Notations (EDSNs) play a key rôle in this. I was encouraged to discover (courtesy of June Kim of the J Forum) that some influential writers value them:
So I was surprised to find another Martin Fowler article on language-oriented programming leading me towards www.softwarefactories.com and an article on industrialising software development.More on EDSNs
Clunk click every trip. Hear now the wise words of my brother-in-law Neil, firefighter and rescue specialist.
Had, rather unnecessarily, to attend a particularly nasty crash today involving a car and a lorry. The car driver had, as seems more and more common these days, decided not to put on his seat belt. The resultant mess was all the more disturbing/annoying/pointless as most of his injuries would have been prevented had he worn the belt (air-bag deployed but they are designed to work in conjunction with the seatbelt…) Anyway, next time you get in the car, be it just to go to the shops/down the road/whatever, please stop for a minute and put on your seatbelt and give the wonderful, expensive safety systems in your car the chance to prevent me having to see that again… Drive safe.
Neil
Three letters — three decades This summer marks the thirtieth anniversary of my becoming sjt on email. In July 1976 I started at I.P. Sharp Associates in London and became SJT on the SHARP APL email service 666 MAILBOX.
You need code We just switched the site to Unicode, as my brain slouches towards XML on the Yoda project. If all went well, you will (hardly) have noticed.
Gallivanting in Galloway
Miki & I have been up here in Kirkcudbright all week visiting friends and walking and cycling before yesterday’s wedding. Miki’s recently-acquired pink bike was fine for town, but became laborious on long country roads. We switched her to a brand new Claud Butler Urban 100 from Ken & Margaret King, in whose shop we also saw Kathryn King and her new daughter Ruby. The Gordon House Hotel and the Smugglers Inn at Auchencairn both have new owners and good cooks. Much other change in the town. The ironmonger and the grocer Willm Ross have both closed and Cranberries’ window announces a closing-down sale. Good to see David & Mary Marsden looking so well.
We’ve been scampering about: cycling down to Ross and Brighouse Bays, then across to the Carrick and almost up to Cream O’Galloway before being waylaid by a picnic emergency and then home. Over the back roads to Castle Douglas, lunch at Designs Café and a nap and a stroll in Threave Gardens before returning on the Tongland road to a swim and sauna at the town pool my mother did so much to found.
The next day over to Gatehouse of Fleet for a struggle up over the moor road almost to Creetown before returning on the old military road with its 5-mile descent into Gatehouse through the exquisite valley of the lower Fleet.
Our Thursday plans for a picnic and a swim in the tarns on the Rigg of the Jarkness were foiled by persistent soaking rain north of the A75; we returned to Kirkcudbright and spent a lazy afternoon enjoying Peggy Smith’s garden at Greengate Close, and getting a tour of Colin’s Magic Shed.
And a different kind of busy Friday with Miki photographing the wedding of Iain Maxwell & Christine Wong at Monigaff church and afterwards in the Urr Valley Hotel at Castle Douglas, where I was able to give my small talk plenty of exercise. Birmingham tonight for dinner with my mother.