The Audrey and Eddie Show

I went to a thing at the British Library. It was an author event with Audrey Niffenegger and Eddie Campbell. They’ve made a book together. And, it turns out, they’re married. To each other, that is.

I had no idea that this was the case. Who’s in charge of telling me about things? Cos they’re falling down on the job.

Not that there’s any reason why I should know, of course. They’re both creators whose work I’ve enjoyed in the past, but that’s all.

Anyway, this was the standard sort of author talk/interview thing, led by a guy who didn’t introduce himself, but according to the event page was “international comics expert, and man at the crossroads, Paul Gravett“.1

It was all very good. I bought the book, Bizarre Romance. Looks like it’ll be fun. I didn’t stay for the signing, because I’m not that bothered about autographs. And I couldn’t think of any questions at the Q&A, which is also normal.

Interestingly (and maybe this is already common knowledge too) Niffenegger is writing a sequel to The Time Traveller’s Wife2 to be called The Other Husband.

  1. Oh, OK, he published Escape magazine. I used to get that sometimes. ↩︎

  2. I insist on spelling the title correctly. ↩︎

Tab Convert

That’s convert, with the stress on the first syllable. The noun, in other words. As in, “I am a tab convert.” A convert, that is, to using tabs for indentation of source code, instead of spaces.

A Background of Spaces

From the earliest time that I learned about the tabs vs spaces debate, I’ve been a spaces guy. This is at least partly because of the influence of my then-colleague Benjamin Geer. He has gone on to other, no doubt better, things, but he was probably the best programmer I’ve ever worked with. He introduced me to the idea that you should always use four spaces for indentation. The reason being that if you use tabs, people can have their editor’s tab size set to all sorts of different values, and it leads to source files not looking as you expect them to.

Whereas spaces are spaces: you can’t go wrong with a space (or four).

I’ve changed, though. I have become a convert, in my job, and maybe philosophically, to tabs.

Stack Overflow Survey

About a year ago there was a survey of developers on Stack Overflow. Among many questions, they asked about whether people used spaces or tabs. The detail that got most attention was that developers who use spaces were paid more on average than those who use tabs. I strongly suspect that correlation is not causation in this case, but it seemed noteworthy at the time.

More interesting to me was the fact that more people used tabs, at 42.9% against 37.8%. I was surprised: I thought spaces had won years ago. Though I often wondered (sometimes publicly, and I’m surprised to see that was only last year) why the default setting for Eclipse was tabs.

Maybe that default, and others like it, is part of the reason for the statistics. Most people don’t change defaults. On the other hand, surely developers are the kind of people who are most likely to change defaults?

Anyway, after the survey came out there were various posts about it, notably John Gruber, who said he was “a devout user of tabs”. OK, he’s not a developer these days, but there were others who are who said similar things. The one that struck me was one that I can’t locate now that said “tabs are semantic.” In other words, pressing the tab key means “indent here.” Four spaces means… four spaces? Could be an indentation, could be something else.

Everything Changes Imperially

So I was primed for the idea of switching to tabs, even though I still used spaces in my own projects. And then I started my new job at Imperial College. When I first started looking at the code, I quickly realised that it was indented with tabs throughout. I checked with my co-worker who is the main contributor. He didn’t mind, but they had always used tabs.

Obviously I didn’t want to introduce a mixture. That’s what really messes up the display of code in different editors. You have to be consistent within a project. So if I were to change the project to spaces I would have to change every file. That was an unnecessary step; and per the above, I was primed to use tabs. They’re semantic, after all.

I switched my IDE to indent using tabs, with the tab-stop value set to 4. And so we proceed, tabbing away merrily.

So far I prefer it this way.

2023: A Trilogy by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (Books 2018, 6) 📚🎵

This book could have been written for me. Seriously, during the first part it felt like it was targeted right at me.

I am, as you probably know, a fan and repeat reader of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. As clearly are Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, or the KLF, as they used to be known. This book is — what, a spoof of, a homage to? — Illuminatus. Explicitly modelled on it, referring back to it constantly.

Plus there are lots of Beatles references, and I’ve been into them for even longer. Then among the characters are Alan Moore, who (in this corner of the multiverse) is a member — along with Cauty and Drummond — of Extreme Noise Terror. Our world’s version of that band did collaborate with the KLF, but as far as I can tell they had no connection with Moore.

So don’t expect to get too much accurate information about popular culture out of this. Plenty of references, though. Other characters include Michelle O’Bama, M’Lady Gaga, Yoko Ono (two versions), Lady Penelope, and her chauffeur/hitman Aloysius Parker.

It’s a lot of fun. The downside is that it’s not very well written, at least as far as the dialogue is concerned. Most notable is the complete absence of contractions. Which is fine for an odd thing, or maybe to give one character a particular voice, but when no-one uses them, it all gets a little strange.

The story is fun, though, and I finished it and immediately started rereading Illuminatus yet again, so there’s that.

Speaking of Spring...

Blossom, of course, and… paper boats on the canal? Hmmm. I’m assuming it was a promotion for something, but I’ve no idea what, so it didn’t work very well.

How the Seasons Change

Two figures in winter clothes on a beach with low winter sun.
A beach in Norwich in the middle of February.
A snowy London Street.
A London Street at the end of February.
A bright blue sky with fluffy white clouds, through still-bare trees.
It’s looking a lot more springlike now, though

h.

This was a test of the Sunlit iOS app, though it has long since been edited from that original version.

Looks Like I Chose the Wrong Week to Start Working in Academia

What with the strike on, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of crossing a picket line, but there wasn’t really one. Nobody in the group I’m in was striking, as far as I could tell, and I’m not in the union (yet). And you know, the contract had a start date of last Monday. So one week into my new job, and I’m enjoying it tremendously.

I’ve been bashing bugs in a large and complex codebase. It was very satisfying to take the failing tests from 600 down to 490 with a single commit. That’s 600 failing tests out of 800. And looking at what’s there, it’s hard to see how some of them could ever have passed. I sort of get the impression that a whole lot might have been written but never run.

That big win involved nothing more than changing a class from being all static methods to being one that you can instantiate, and then passing in a test version of a ResourceBundle, instead of trying to read a properties file which wasn’t there in my setup.

More importantly, the people are nice. The commute is shorter than to Croydon, by a good half hour. But it’s a lot more crowded on the Circle Line than I remember from two years ago when I was at Misys.

Imperial Adventures

Just over a month ago I posted a brief note about job news, saying that more details would be forthcoming. I was, as I said then, just waiting for some paperwork.

It took longer than I expected to get that paperwork sorted out, but I received and returned the contract yesterday afternoon. On Monday I start work at the Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU), part of the School of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College.

That’s quite a mouthful, but in short I’ll be working on programming something called the The Rapid Inquiry Facility (RIF), which is an open-source tool for studying health statistics.

I’m neither a medical researcher nor a statistician, but I am a programmer (or a software engineer, if you want to be fancy). Our job is to understand the needs of someone — usually referred to as “the business,” but I’m guessing that will be different in my new job — and translate those needs into actions in software. That basic definition doesn’t change according to the problem domain. Whether it’s sending payments from one bank to another, checking a person’s right to work on a government database, or doing something with statistical data about health issues, the programmer’s job is to understand what the user needs and make things happen on a screen.

The big difference for me, I think, will be that in this new role I’ll have the chance to contribute to doing something good in the world. As I said at my interview, I’ve mainly worked in financial software, and while, sure, people need banks, it wasn’t the most socially-usefully thing. The last half-year working at the Home Office had some value, but I was a tiny cog in a huge machine.

At Imperial I’ll be able to feel that I’m actually contributing something useful to society, as well as doing what should be really interesting work.

Oh, and: I’ll be back in Paddington, which I know from my Misys days, and it’s a much shorter commute than to Croydon.

A Special Way of Being Afraid

I only know one other of Philip Larkin’s poems; it is about parents and children. This one — ‘Aubade’ — is the best poem about death I’ve ever read.

A sample:

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier by Mark Frost (Books 2018, 5)

I watched the new series of Twin Peaks in January, but haven’t got round to writing about it yet. In part, maybe, because I knew I wanted to read this. In part, because I want to watch it all again.

The series was amazing: an incredible, beautiful, challenging piece of art. But, as always with Twin Peaks,1 there was the question at the back of my mind: is he using surrealism to raise real questions, to investigate mysteries, to raise our consciousness? Or is it just weirdness for weirdness’s sake?2

In the end I lean towards the former. Maybe the whole thing is like a zen koan: if a portal opens in Ghostwood Forest and no-one is there to see it, what will come through?

Anyway, addressing the book at hand, what we have is quite a short volume which is presented as being a report from FBI Special Agent Tamara Preston to Deputy Director Gordon Cole (played by Lynch himself in the show, of course). Its ostensible purpose is for her to summarise what she and the Bureau have learned from the events that the recent series covered, and some other offscreen investigations. It follows on from, and comments on, last year’s Secret History of Twin Peaks.

Much of it repeats what was in the series, but it does add detail and help to clarify some things. For example it’s probably not a spoiler to confirm that the girl in the 1950s in the glorious nightmare of episode 8 was, indeed, Sarah Palmer, as Warren Ellis has speculated. (It was in his newsletter, which doesn’t seem to have a public archive.)

But it also follows up on what happened to most of the characters from the the original series that we didn’t hear about in the new one, giving us much-needed closure. Or at least convincing us that the creators didn’t totally forget about Donna, for example. Along the way it does what the new series failed to do, in that it answers the question raised at the end of the original series: “How’s Annie?”

It’s worth reading, but it doesn’t remove the need for me to watch the whole new series again.

  1. And maybe with all of David Lynch’s work. ↩︎

  2. “Everybody’s wild at heart and weird on top.” ↩︎

Sourdough by Robin Sloan (Books 2018, 4)

Strange one this. I think I learned about it from Warren Ellis, via his newsletter (which is well worth reading, by the way).

A woman takes a programming job in San Francisco. Chance leads her to gain possession of a sourdough starter culture with unusual properties. She learns to bake bread, and some other things happen.

It was OK. Quite fun. And if we’re comparing novels set in San Francisco tech culture, it was better than, say, Transmission, by Hari Kunzru which I’ve read and didn’t enjoy, but didn’t blog about; much, much, much better than The Circle; but probably not as good as All the Birds in Sky.