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April 1st, 2008
In 1894, Leo Tolstoy wrote “The Kingdom of God is Within You”, a key book on the subject of war and pacifism, and one that had a profound effect on Ghandi when developing his principles of nonviolent resistance.
One hundred years later, Chris Hedges has written “War is a Force that Gives us Meaning“, and I’d suggest that it’s possibly one of the most important books on the subject of war ever written. If I were putting together a reading list on the subject, it would have at its core three books.
“The Art of War”, by Sun Tzu, is one the oldest and most well known, of course, and gives us the famous dictum ‘know your enemy and know yourself’‘ – advice that is relevant to all human endeavour.
“On War” by Carl von Clausewitz is perhaps the most comprehensive book on the subject, a careful study of all elements of waging war, and the interaction between warfare and politics. It is still highly relevant nearly 200 year after its composition.
Finally, “War is a Force that Gives us Meaning” takes a hard and frequently painful look at the social and cultural forces that drive humanity to war. Unlike Tolstoy, Hedges does not present himself as a pacifist. In fact, after describing the pointlessness and brutality of many of the conflicts he’s covered in his role as a war correspondant, he has few suggestions to make. However, the few rays of hope that shine through the book are his stories of encountering acts of love, kindness and hospitality, even in war zones.
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March 10th, 2008
What better way to spend a Sunday than building an igloo in the back yard! This really should be part of the citizenship test…
More pictures here.
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February 13th, 2008
As I type this on my windows XP desktop machine, I’m also logged in (via my other desktop machine running Ubuntu Linux) to an HP-UX system running on itanium, a Solaris 7 machine on a Sparc processor, two Solaris 10 machines on AMD64 , an AIX machine running on PowerPC 3 and another Linux box on intel i686.
So, that’s five operating systems, at least seven OS versions, and five processor architectures, with a nice mix of big and little endian-ness.
And the really nice thing is that I’ve just got my networking code to compile and run on all of them. (Although I’m looking at you, HP-UX, for not handling non-blocking sockets the same as the others!)
Posted in Programming | No Comments »
February 13th, 2008
Wow. I attended a Goth Eucharist last night. Held in St. Edward King and Martyr Church, Cambridge, the birthplace of the English Reformation, it was a profound experience.
Sitting next to the pulpit where the first English reformers preached from. Listening to Pink Floyd and VNV Nation. Letting the words of the Anglican liturgy roll over me in a dark, candlelit nave. Going out to the bar afterwards to debate theology, artificial intelligence and quantum mechanics with a bunch of Cambridge post-grads. I only wish I’d found out about this service earlier.
While I wouldn’t classify myself as ‘goth’, I do appreciate the goth aesthetic. And it was both intriguing to attend church as a cultural ‘outsider’, and also to experience a service that didn’t require it’s congregants to reject their own culture before attending. In fact, it was perhaps the most accessible church event I’ve been to in a long time. I met people who described themselves variously as christian, agnostic and atheist, and yet everyone seemed able to engage with the service to the level they felt comfortable.
All in all a fascinating evening.
Posted in theology, travel | No Comments »
December 4th, 2007
The book of Job is a study in theologians getting it dead wrong. Job asks the eternal question “why is their pain and suffering? How can this be the work of a just God?” and his friends try to answer. They don’t just trot out cheap aphorisms and continue on their way- they sit with Job for 7 days before speaking, if I recall correctly. And then they take a lot of chapters to construct a theodicy, a theology of suffering. But unfortunately, it basically boils down to ‘it must be your fault.’
I’m wondering if the book is basically a warning about the dangers of acting as God’s spokesman. Job’s friends are not thanked for their efforts to teach theology to Job or for defending God’s actions. God, it seems, does not need apologists.
Is it ok for Job to ask the questions, but not for his friends to answer them?
I suspect we need to be very careful in rushing to answer this type of question. Maybe it’s important for each individual to wrestle with God and the problems of pain and injustice, and in our hurry to tie up theological loose ends we truncate this process.
I suspect that God is less interested in what we think about these questions, than in how we react to them. But it’s probably easier to explain suffering than try to alleviate it.
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November 24th, 2007
Living out of a suitcase can tire after a while. Right now I’m splitting my time between Cambridge and Woking, living out of a couple of cubic feet or so of luggage space. Definitely a lesson in living simply. A few changes of clothes, a notebook, a phone and an mp3 player seem to be my entire worldly possessions. I’ve never been much of a ‘thing’ person, so I’m coping with it, but it will certainly be nice to actually have a house again. Latest news on that front is that the builders won’t finish until the end of April, but I’m not making any assumptions until I actually have the keys in my hand.
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October 27th, 2007
Had a chance to play around with some interesting software tools recently. Some that have caught my attention have been:
- Ubuntu - very nice Linux distribution, rapidly becoming the one to beat. We use it at the company I’m contracting for, and it’s been my first exposure to a Debian based system. apt-get is very nice, I’ve had very little software installation problems. But as ever I feel that Linux is lagging in the display driver department.
- lighttpd. I have a new favourite webserver. Thanks to apt-get, I went from having no webserver to having a fully functional installation of lighttpd serving up cgi pages in, oh, about three minutes. Hooray for Linuxy goodness!
- Haskell. Rapidly becoming one of my favourite languages, and I’m convinced that any decade now I’ll be able to do something useful with it, as opposed to merely alternating between being in awe of it’s elegance and banging my head against trying to understand category theory just so I can do some simple I/O. But that said, I took one step closer to this goal with the discovery of.
- Haxr. Getting it installed involved jumping through a few Cabal hoops, as it seemed to need some older packages, but once I had it running, I very quickly had a Haskell CGI program served up via Lighttpd (see above!) and talking xml-rpc over the network! Being convinced, as I am, of the importance of low coupling/high cohesion, I have a feeling that xml-rpc or json-rpc could be very nice ways of tying together complex and disparate systems. I’ve seen enough companies spend many many-years trying to put together distributed serialisation mechanisms, and I suspect that often the simplest approach is best. Being able to create a service using a language choice that is totally invisible to the client application is very handy.
Now I just need to find a nice persistance layer for Haskell, and I’ll be a happy man.
Posted in Haskell, Programming | No Comments »
September 1st, 2007
It’s been nice working at a company where everyone is a computational polyglot – you can debate the merits of LISP or the shortcomings of Smalltalk over coffee. Of course there are downsides – simply to get the build system to work requires getting Perl, C, Bash and Python to work together harmoniously.
However, working in a semantically rich language, like Python, or talking to people who know Lisp, which is probably the most versatile language in existence, really does through into sharp relief how semantically impoverished C is. One problem is that people frequently don’t make use of language abstractions, even where they exist. But it’s very nice to be able to introduce them, and benefit from the resulting simplification of the code base.
I discovered the new python ‘with’ statement, which in the absence of deterministic destructors is a pretty nice way of handling resource management. Writing lock-safe code is now as simple as this:
with Guard(lock):
threadUnsafeOperation()
where Guard is as simple as
class Guard:
def __init__(self,lock):
self.lock=lock
def __enter__(self):
self.lock.acquire()
def __exit__(self,exceptionType,exceptionValue,traceback):
self.lock.release()
I’ve really been missing the constructor/destructor pairs from C++ in other languages, and this seems to fit the bill pretty nicely, especially where the pattern you’re looking for is ‘ScopeGuard’
Posted in Programming, python | No Comments »
August 12th, 2007
So, since the last post I’ve:
- Sold our house in Mississauga, on the first day it went on the market! (Ok, Heather handled most of that one.)
- Flown to England.
- Set up a company.
- Started contracting for a client in Cambridge.
So life has been a little busy for a while. I spent a while going through the usual rigmarole of calling recruiters, editing CVs and so on, and the end result is that I’ll spend the next 30 weeks working for NCipher, a cryptographic company based in Cambridge. It’s a good working environment, lots of interesting and very bright people to work with, and Cambridge is quite a nice little town.
Heather and the girls will be flying out to the UK at the end of the month, and probably staying with my parents.
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July 15th, 2007
To satisfy the curious who have asked:
- The new house will be built here.
- The builder is Baywood Homes.
- The floor plan can be seen here, note that it’ll be Elevation B, Alternative Upper Level. (4 beds plus study)
- Closing date is March 5th, 2008. Hopefully this means that the foundation will be poured and the house framed before winter really sets in. It’s a really bad idea to get your foundation poured in Ontario in February, unless you want to spend the rest of your life dealing with cracks and leaks due to frost damage.
- If anyone wants to buy our current place before the
vultures realtors descend, then check it out here. Ideal starter home, close to all amenities, this charming example of early 80’s townhouse condo architecture will thrill and enchant you, blah blah blah….
Posted in Moving | 1 Comment »
In 1894, Leo Tolstoy wrote “The Kingdom of God is Within You”, a key book on the subject of war and pacifism, and one that had a profound effect on Ghandi when developing his principles of nonviolent resistance.