The weather

Being English, it seems perfectly acceptable to write a short post about the recent weather, especially as the wind is whistling outside my study, and the roof's making disturbing creaking noises.

This winter has, so far, been mild and stormy, compared to last year where there were very cold snaps in early December and early March. In fact, we have only had two and a half frosts here in Cambridge, but the garden is little more than a soggy green carpet.

And yet for what feels like a fortnight, we have been told of the massive floods that are affecting the country. Whilst some parts of the country have had it bad, I wonder if these floods are that bad from a a historical point of view, or if is due to the 24-hour media's thirst for *any* news story?

Memories

When I was a child, my parents owned an old walled garden in South Devon. They put a caravan within the walls, and we would go down every Easter and summer for a week or two to relax. It was a magical part of my childhood: we would clear the vegetation off the land using slashers (long wooden handles with a sharp metal blade at the end), and later on dad bought an old Fergie tractor to clear the many month's of vegetation that would build up between our holidays.

An old orchard lay outside the walls, and lack of care had converted the trees into a moss-covered, dark space that was a wonderland for an imaginative child. Pirates would be hiding behind that tree; treasure would be buried under another.

We would go down to Teignmouth and Shaldon to paddle in the sea, and eat rock cakes at the Clipper Cafe. Dad would collect a jar of pennies and tuppences during the year, and we would spend them in the machines on Teignmouth Pier.

Those holidays defined my childhood; I even took my first steps within the garden. Later on, during my coastal walk, I made a pilgrimage back to the place to find it even more overgrown and magical than it had been as a child.

Ornaments lay in the grounds, including two ponds (one broken by my dad to drain the water after my tomboyish sister fell in). A stone sundial with a carved lion's head on each of the column's four faces was situated just outside the wall, beside an old, overgrown driveway. Tall trees overhung the driveway, meaning the sundial sat in a shaded area with an ivy floor.

The gateway into a wonderland.

One day I watched an animated version of 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe', and immediately afterwards went down to the clearing and sat in front of the sundial, staring at the lions' faces. The column seemed tall, and the lions imposing. But they were not lions: they were Aslan.

Years later some of the surrounding land got developed, and builders cleared some of our property. So went the sundial, never to be seen again. But I still remember it with fondness, and hope it gives some other child a sense of wonder. But I doubt it: it belonged in that shaded dell.

We sold the land some time ago, and I will never be able to walk around it again. I have no pictures of that sundial, and have been able to find nothing similar on the 'net. Looking back over thirty-five years, it is one of the things I miss most from my childhood.

Book review: "The Whole World", by Emily Winslow

"The Whole World", by Emily Winslow

"The Whole World" is Ms Winslow's first book. The book is firmly based in Cambridge, with the recent building of the massive Grand Arcade development taking centre stage.

The book is written from five viewpoints, each in the first-person. The first is narrated by Polly, a young woman with a dark past who has fled the US to attend Peterhouse College. She is keen on Nick, a graduate student, but her reaction when he attempts to kiss her kicks off a chain of events that leads to his disappearance.

I have read such multiple-viewpoint books before, where each view adds a different perspective onto events. I tend to find them boring, as it is hard to create unique voices or new angles on events. Ms Winslow avoids this by having each narrator progress the story, so they not only give a fresh perspective on known events, but also add extra layers of events. This means that Nick's disappearance is a catalyst for the story rather than the main crime. The becomes obvious when the author skilfully makes him the second narrator, giving the story of his disappearance from his perspective.

Ms Winslow captures Cambridge well in her writing; she has the view of an outsider who has come to love her adopted home. In this way her writing is a little like Ian Rankin's, although Cambridge is a quiescent place that lacks Edinburgh's natural buzz. Despite this, she captures the city's atmosphere well.

The characters are also well-drawn and were, for me at least, believable, if somewhat eccentric in some cases. The story revolves around a love triangle involving Nick, his embryonic relationship with Amy, and her best friend Liv, another American student. Add in Morris, the detective investigating Nick's disappearance, and Gretchen, a blind university professor who is trying to decipher her past, and you have an interesting collection of misfits.

I would award this book three out of five stars; it is certainly a good attempt at a first novel. It would have been at least four stars, except for an issue which I describe below. Warning: this is a slight plot spoiler.

*** Plot spoiler ***
There was one area in which this book failed spectacularly for me. After Nick and Polly argue, a series of events unfold. These end with him walking to visit an old friend who lives in a ramshackle old farmhouse. She is not in, and when he lets himself in using a key, he falls down the cellar stairs, twisting or breaking his ankle and trapping him in the farm.

He manages to stay there for nearly two weeks, whilst his disappearance triggers a series of other events. Eventually his friend returns from a foreign trip and finds him. This is where suspension of disbelief flies out the window like a prize canary.

The friend makes him comfortable, but because there is no mobile phone signal in the house, nor a land line due to the renovations, they decide to drive him to hospital. However, instead of her driving, or making him comfortable at her home whilst she goes, she thinks he should drive. Despite the fact that it is night, he is weakened after two weeks in the house, has a badly-injured ankle that prevented him from escaping, and he does not know how to drive.

It was such an improbably stupid decision to make. Worse, the author than has Nick getting lost and running over another major character by accident. If his ankle was bad enough to stop him escaping the farm, it would hardly allow him to learn to drive, especially at night.

Sadly, this spoiled a large section of the book for me.

Parish notice

When I first put Google Maps onto my website a few years ago, I used version 2 of their maps API. Sadly Google now state that this version of the API is being deprecated, and that I have to move to the new version 3.

I have been rather hesitant to do this for a number of reasons, but with version 2 now out of use, I have had to bite the bullet and do the work. This involved an almost total rewrite of the code that displays the maps on the website. Hopefully this process is now complete, and you will not see any difference

Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone!

Hopefully I shall be able to get back to blogging more regularly in 2014, in a year which promises to see a great change in our lives.

We live in exciting times ...

(And no, it is not another house move)

Book review: "Saints of the Shadow Bible", by Ian Rankin

After two off-beat tomes, Ian Rankin has dragged his famous anti-hero, John Rebus, out of retirement and back into CID. Demoted from Detective-Inspector to Detective-Sergeant, his old colleague and foil Siobhan is now his boss.

The two friends are called out to the site of a late-night car crash near Edinburgh airport. No-one died, and the female driver is soon released from hospital. But Rebus thinks the woman was a passenger. So how did she get into the driver's seat, and who was the driver? When it turns out she is the girlfriend of the son of Scotland's Justice Minister, a train of events starts that might cost Rebus more than his job.

For Rebus has a past. Thirty years earlier, whilst a Detective Constable in a long-closed police station, he had joined a group of detectives who called themselves Saints of the Shadow Bible. Times were different then, corners cut, and past sins soon start impinging on the present.

This is really a return to form for Rankin. Fox, the main character in two non-Rebus books, is facing a shift in career back into CID and comes across as a much more sympathetic and well-drawn character. The Scottish Referendum debate gets more than a passing mention, with the major suspects coming from both sides of the debate. The book is of its place and of its time, fully embedded within the Edinburgh Rankin loves.

The plot is fast paced and, as ever from Rankin, the characters are well drawn. Best of all, he has kept musical references down to a minimum.

I would give this book four out of five stars.

William Lowe

William Lowe has died aged 72. You may not have heard of him, but you will have heard of the product he developed.

In 1980 Lowe was working for IBM in Florida. Seeing a gap in the market, he persuaded IBM management to let a small team of a dozen people create a personal computer. He thought it was vital for the team to be free of the rigorous controls and corporate culture the company mandated for projects.

IBM reluctantly agreed. The company had tried twice before to make a personal computer, and each project had ended in failure. Lowe's small tiger team succeeded in creating what is now known as the IBM PC.

For speed, they decide to buy an operating system, eventually settling on one from a small company run by a certain Bill Gates. For speed, they decided to use components from companies outside of IBM, such as Intel's 8088 processor. Lowe also decided that the new computer would have an open architecture, allowing the user to expand it. Again, this was contrary to IBM practice.

These decisions made it feasible for other companies to make computers that ran the same software, enabling the entire IBM PC-compatible industry. In my mind Lowe's decision to break away from IBM corporate culture was one of the defining moments in the computer industry. In this, he was far more influential than even Steve Jobs.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24725678

RIP.