The occasional scrivener

When Google announced Wave the hype was immense, it was like everyone took Gmail and squared it and thought it would be that awesome! And basically that’s what the Wave developers thought too. Well I can’t remember what I did but I got an invite and hopped on, and right away realised that there was no-one there. The invite-only start (for performance reasons) limited the appeal and usefulness of Wave.

Because I think it was pretty useful, at least once they got the early kinks worked out. Me and some far-flung mates used it to plan some trips together, and Wave was pretty useful for that. It would have been better with a mobile interface but it was decent.

The thing is, Wave wasn’t the next coming of Gmail, it was the next coming of Microsoft Outlook. Outlook is merely the front-end to Exchange, which does all the boring and useful bits (routing email, planning calendars etc). And sure, it works, but not very well. At my current place of work we have Office Communicator Server (OCS) which is basically MS Live Messenger in a corporate suit. The nice thing about OCS is that it integrates into Exchange, so you can see whether a coworker is online, or in a meeting or whatever.

However, sometimes you want to start from the task, not the person. That’s where Wave began - you had a project, or a trip, or just a task involving some people. It could start with just you and then expand, like a lot of tasks do. However, instead of snowballing into a long mail thread, you actually had the option of keeping Waves clean and on topic.

Wave was flawed - it was before its time, it tried to solve problems that don’t often turn up in the wider world of the web, but which do turn up lots of times within organizations. Maybe Microsoft will learn from Wave and build better collaboration tools than Exchange.

This book features Sterling’s trademark rapid-fire illustrative language, but he plotting is much weaker than in his previous dystopian novels Heavy Weather and Holy Fire. The five surviving “caryatids”, results of an illegal cloning project during a massive climate crisis, are spread around the world. This gives Sterling a number of locations to basically tell a thriller story and infodump at the same time.

As idea-driven SF it’s great, as a novel, not so much. Recommended if you’re a Sterling fan though!

The Nikon lens information page is a great resource for Nikon nerds. With its help and a serial number you can check to see if the 28mm ƒ/2.8 AI-s on offer on Ebay really has a 0.2m close focus or if it’s an inferior version, just to offer one example. Another cool feature is the number of lenses made.

A few days ago I was motivated¹ to have a look at how many lenses of different types have been made through the ages. I was specifically interested in primes vs. zooms. To this end, I munged the data from the site and scrunched together some data. The entire result it up on Google docs.

Some cool facts:

• Nikon has made 56 millions F-mount lenses. Of these, 22 million (or 40%) are primes. The rest (34 million) are zooms.
• The top 3 lenses made are all DX consumer zooms: the 18-55mm II (3.3 million), 18-55 VR (2.9 million) and 18-70 (2.3 million). The most prevalent prime is the 50/1.8 Series E (1.7 milion), #4 on the list.
• Among all lenses made, 35.6 million are AF, the rest are manual focus.
• In the top 20 list of lenses made, 15 are zooms, 5 are primes (all 50mm).
• The most prevalent AF “pro” lenses are the 50/1.4D (#27), 35-70/2.8 (#34) and 70-200/2.8 VR (#42)
• Nikon makes a lot of 35/1.8 DX lenses, 180K so far!

Feel free to have a look at the stats yourself! I’ve put the text source here.

¹ read: someone posted something on a forum that made me mad.

This amazing novel deserves all the accolades heaped upon it. I can’t believe I started reading this a few months ago but abandoned it after a few chapters. It’s a great book, immersing you in past, present and near-future Brazil and a super cool sensawunda explanation to how they’re tied together.

McDonald’s trademark language sizzles and pops, creating a wonderful presence in a country most of us know through old tourist films and horrific news reports about gangs running amok. The text is liberally strewn with Portuguese slang, adding to the verisimilitude. I discovered when I finished the book that there was a glossary (Pyr edition), but you can mostly grok the words from context.

Highly recommended, and I’m looking forward to McDonald’s latest novel, The Dervish House.

This is the sequel to The Quiet War and I was worried McAuley wouldn’t wrap up all the plot threads and it would become a trilogy, a bit like Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars” trilogy, a work it resembles in theme.

However, it all wraps up in a … not very happy ending per se, too many people are dead and too much damage has been done, but injustices have been righted and the villians have had their come-uppance. What’s notable about this work though, is the complexity of the characters. They are very believable, and McAuley does a good job of presenting even less sympathetic characters in a light that makes you aware of their motivations.

The science is spot-on, even if stuff like nanotech and advanced genetic engineering are glossed over. In fact it’s interesting reading in light of Charlie Stross’ recent musings about how practical a “pioneer” approach to space exploration would be. (For the standard libertarian, Heinlein-inspired view, see the opening and closing views of John Walker here.) McAuley describes a future colonising of Jupiter and Saturn as a post-capitalist endeavour, and contrasts it against the neo-feudalism of Greater Brazil on Earth.

Highly recommended!

After my initial disappointment with an example of “steampunk” I was a bit leary of Mainspring, which depicts a world that literally runs like clockwork. But Lake is a much better writer than Priest, he reminds me of both Gene Wolfe and Ian McDonald. Highly recommended, and I hope the sequel Escapement keeps up the good work!

Stridens skönhet och sorg by Peter Englund

This book by the renowned Swedish historian (now serving as the Perpetual Secretery of the Swedish Academy) explores the First World War through the diaries, letters, and official paperwork by and about a disparate collection of people.

As Englund says, it’s history at its most atomic. Copious footnotes explain the historical and factual background.

Refreshingly, the focus is spread away from the men at the (Western) front. We get insights into the lives of civilian schoolgirls in East Prussia, English nurses in Russian service, leatherbitten adventurers in East Africa, and French politicians.

By spreading his net wide and focusing laser-like on a few individuals, Englund shows the First World War for what it was: an international catastrophe that laid the bloody foundations of the last century and changed the world forever.

Hopefully this will soon be translated into English!

The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi

A novel set in a different universe than the Old Man’s War series, but which is basically the same as ours: sure, we’ve made contact with aliens but the only thing that happens to Earth is more embassies. Refreshingly, humans are on the bottom of the scale of galactic civilisations, which is a nice change from standard SF of this type where we naturally take our place with the big guys.

It’s an enjoyable yarn, competently spun.

The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross

The third of the Laundry novels is a pastische of Ludlum novels, replete with moles, double-agents and Russians. The Laundry is preparing for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, when the stars are right and the Elder Gods will again walk the Earth. However, a crazy gang of cultists wants to accelerate the process and have their sights set on our geeky hero, Bob Howard.

Stross’ trademark blend of Lovecraftian horror and spy thriller isn’t really well-blended in this novel. There are some rough patches, and the very literal homage to 30s pulp cultists is a bit over the top - but maybe you really need to look and speak like that to invoke nameless horrors from beyond spacetime?

Another anachronism is the rampant iPhone adulation, which will age badly … but these kind of novels have a short sell-by date anyway.

Two more Laundry novels are in planning according to Stross’ FAQ and indeed the Cthulhu mythos is a very deep well with lots of ectoplasm to draw on. Let’s hope the coming novels are a bit better than this one though.

Night of Knives by Ian C. Esslemont

A novel set in the same universe as Steven Erikson’s novels about the Malazan empire, and indeed sharing a lot of the same characters. Esslemont co-created the world with Erikson but he’s not as good a writer, unfortunately. I guess you can say that he’s simply a competent one, while Erikson is great.

This novel really doesn’t add much to the Malazan mythos and can be safely skipped.

A mainstream detective thriller by McAuley, who is mostly known for his SF. Competently put together but with an artificial air.

In a future after catastrophic climate change has ravaged Earth, the conservationist ruling families based there declare war on the Outers, the humans who’ve colonised Jupiter and Saturn space with self-sufficient habitats.

More a political thriller and spy story than SF, McAuley manages to depict a deep-space future better than many others. Still, even if the story rattles along in a fair clip there’s something lacking. McAuley doesn’t have Charlie Stross’ effortless nerdic flow, nor Ian McDonald’s fluency in depicting other cultures. For all that though, it’s recommended.

This is the first part of a series, the sequel is Gardens of the Sun.

McAuley is on Twitter as http://twitter.com/UnlikelyWorlds.