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Not too long ago, I decided to start tracking the books I read more closely. Though I had no particular goal in mind when I started this, I had been entertaining, for a while, the notion that I am not graced with much spare time. The quantity of books I apparently read has given the lie to that particular notion. Somewhere, I am finding time to read hundreds of pages a week. This has greatly cheered me up. On the other hand, I am faced with the sad fact that I’m reading enough sci-fi to thoroughly rot my brain. I can almost feel the amyloid plaques coagulating in real time. ...

We spent the past week near Kansas City, MO, at a wedding-cum-reunion for Shannon’s family. The sprawl around Kansas City is frightening, making Silicon Valley appear dense by comparison. It was over thirty miles from our hotel to the nearest semi-decent bookstore (a Borders, at that). The area is blighted by new McMansion developments, many built around artifical lakes that are held in by lev'ees. It is possible to buy a brand new 3,000 square foot faux-rococo mammoth on a somewhat decent plot of land for less than $300,000, a price that won’t buy you a tiny dirt lot anywhere near San Francisco. ...

In preparation for a move of house that isn’t actually likely to happen until 2007, Shannon and I have been going through some of our bookshelves. Our (admittedly unattainable) goal is to get rid of half of our books. Since we don’t know when the move will occur (we first have to get permission from the City of San Francisco to demolish a house and build another, then actually build the bugger), what I think will really happen is that we will, some time in 2007, move exactly as many books as we have now. ...

Or why I love popular scripting languages, reason number one zillion. I use Sage with Firefox to keep up with various blogs, and del.icio.us as a URL dumping ground. It took me approximately five minutes to find a Python interface to del.icio.us and write a script that turns sets of tagged URLs into an OPML file that I can either drop into Sage or post to my blog: import delicious deli = delicious.DeliciousNOTAPI() blogs = deli.get_posts_by_user('bos', 'blog') print "' del.icio.us OPML Export "' for blog in blogs: blog['description'] = blog['description'].lower() blogs.sort(lambda a, b: cmp(a['description'], b['description'])) for blog in blogs: print '' % (blog['description'], blog.get('extended', "), blog['url']) print ''

Shannon and I spent a dizzying hour at Borderlands Books in the Mission last Friday. (I know, I know, it’s been over a week.) Borderlands is the perfect geek bookstore, right down to the unnaturally friendly Sphinx cat who haunts the front counter. It houses an impressive collection of science fiction and fantasy, including used books and small-press zines, in a pleasant atmosphere. Somehow, I lived in the Bay Area for ten years without realising that Borderlands even existed, until Shannon told me about it last month. So much for being savvy about my environs. ...

I’m taking a lazy afternoon away from Shannon and Cian, who are at the beach in Aptos. Atlas is a sublime place to laze. As I’m tapping away on my laptop, the Mission Chick behind the bar yells out, “You know what, Stuart? I like you. You’re not like the other people here, in the trailer park.” Which is the beginning of a classic spoken-word piece by the Dead Milkmen. And which I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone else quote. ...

About a decade ago (!), I wrote the Usenet FAQ on multithreaded programming. In spite of the fact that I haven’t maintained the thing since 1997, it surprises me by continuing to get a few thousand hits every month. Unfortunately, much of the information in the old FAQ is so stale as to be useless. While the abstract “how do I do this?” content remains unchanged, and the state of the art has hardly budged, system specifics have evolved. I will be making some time over the coming months to bring the FAQ at least somewhat back up to speed. Post comments here, or send me email, and I’ll keep the content fresh.

I found an interesting bug this morning in Apple’s mDNSResponder daemon. This is the Mac OS X daemon responsible for managing automatic network configuration and service discovery, basically the thingy that a Mac uses to tell you “there’s a printer on the network here that you could use”. The bug is of the “malicious value injection” type: given a piece of code that expects certain inputs, what happens if you feed it something unexpected? ...

On Monday, Shannon had The Ultrasound, in which we got to observe the person who is crowding out her internal organs. The person in question is a little boy, about twelve inches long, who gets to spend the next four and a half months whiling away the time in foetal darkness. Lucky little bugger. Cian’s current preference for a name is “Sharkfin Garbage Can”. Shannon and I are trying to find a non-clich'ed Irish boy’s name that is euphonious to both Irish and American ears. This may sound difficult, and it is. ...

Total number of books I have owned: no real idea, but probably between one and two thousand. Last book I bought: Michael Shermer, The Borderlands of Science. I confess that it cost $3 in the remainder rack at Red Hill Books. Last book I read: Lynch and Livingston’s Color and Light in Nature. I am still making my way through this one. Last book I finished: Gene Wolfe, On Blue’s Waters. Complex sci-fi full of ambiguity, false starts, and unreliable narration. In short, wonderful. ...