Robinson Crusoe

I just finished reading Robinson Crusoe for the first time - another classic that I apparantly ignored during my formative years. Of course I knew the general story already - man gets stranded on a deserted island and struggles to survive.

A couple of things I didn't realize:

• He's stranded for about 30 years! Some of the things he accomplishes on the island are incredible, but when you realize the amount of time he spends there (and really what else is he going to do) it becomes more plausible.
• How religious the book is. One of the items Robinson Crusoe rescues from the shipwreck is a bible, and though he was not religious prior to his predicament he becomes 're-born' on the island and actually converts a cannibal he rescues to Christianity as well.

One idea espoused in the book is one of optimism. If you constantly compare yourself or your situation to those in a better situation, a feeling of jealousy and inadequacy is a natural (although undesirable) response. Instead, look on your situation as compared to those less fortuante and you will likely find yourself in a positive frame of mind. Furthermore, if you think about the number of people in each of those two camps (better off and worse off), you are almost guaranteed to find yourself better off than the majority.

David Gemmel's Rigante Series

I just finished reading a four book fantasy series by David Gemmell. These books were recommended to me by a friend and I really enjoyed the first two books. The last two books were OK, but not nearly as good as the first two. The series follows the Rigante clan of the Keltoi tribes. It is obvious to the reader that the Keltoi are analogous to the highlanders of Scotland. In the first two books, the focus is on the conflict between the Keltoi and the more 'civilized' people of 'Stone' - which is equally obvious as being the Roman empire. The second book follows the son of the main character from the first book. The third and fourth books happen much later in time - but are still focused on the Rigante but the new civilization they are up against are the Varlish - (based on the English). The overriding theme of all the books is that the more 'civilized' we become, the more we destroy nature and the 'magic' of the land. In the later books this theme was so obviously reinforced that I felt like I was being scolded by the author. In fact if there was another book in the series I probably wouldn't have read it.


Sword In The Storm: 3/4
Midnight Falcon: 4/4
Raven Heart: 2/4
Stormrider: 2/4

Casino Royale

Yesterday Kelly and I were actually able to go out and watch a movie. My mother-in-law came over to babysit the kids for 3 hours and the feeding schedule worked out so that we could see a matinee. We chose to see Casino Royale because we are both fans of the James Bond franchise (me a little moreso than Kelly). I had purposely avoided reading anything about the movie ahead of time, and had only peripherally heard a couple of good opinions of Daniel Craig as Bond.

The plot was typical of most bond movies - a few action sequences loosely interconnected to a general world threat that was overcome by a single British Secret Agent, some double crosses.

When the title sequence started I got really excited (pretty childish, I know). The movie started with the activities that led to James Bond getting 'promoted' to double-0 status. This led me to think that with a new Bond actor, they are trying to restart the franchise, similar to the success of 'Batman Begins'.

I thought Daniel Craig played Bond exactly as he should be played. Cocky, self-aware, rough, but not overly suave/sophisticated (my biggest complaints about Dalton and Brosnan). Similar to On Her Majesty's Secret Service they showed how a true relationship with a woman affected Bond's personality going forward and provided an explanation for how he can treat peope's lives (men and women) with such indifference.

In a departure from previous Bond movies, where Bond played a card game at a casino it was Texas Hold-Em instead of Chemin De Fer (or Baccarat). This probably makes sense with the current poker craze and the general understanding of the rules of that game as opposed to the former. This is especially true considering how integral to the script the gambling scenes were.

Other than Daniel Craig himself, the only actors I recognized were Dame Judi Dench (as M again), and Jeffrey Wright (from Ali and Syriana), who played Felix Leiter. This is something I appreciate about the classic Bond movies - they use actors that are not Hollywood 'names'. It is something they got away from in the later Bond movies that led to them being more like typical Hollywood action fare (think Vin Diesel) rather than the separate (better) class of movies. The actress that played Vesper (the Bond Girl) was pretty good, although Kelly complained that she always had "the same stupid expression". She actually reminded me of Tammy a little bit - especially her eyes.

Animals

OK - that's not a song title - but it is the title of a 1977 album by Pink Floyd - and I'm going to do a little review of it now. Animals was the first Pink Floyd CD I bought...sure I had watched The Wall, and I had probably listened to most of Dark Side of the Moon, but I wouldn't consider myself a fan by any stretch of the imagination.

I had got a Sony Discman for Christmas one year, and went boxing day shopping for some CDs with my Dad and brother. One store we went to was having a sale where they were charging $1 per song on the CD (well before iTunes came up with that pricing model). My Dad noticed a copy of Animals, he showed it to me by saying - "That's the Battersea Power Station...I used to drive past that every day". I took it from him and saw it was by Pink Floyd - but better yet it only had 5 songs - so $5! I bought that and about 10 other CDs...but for the next month Animals was all I listened to. It was the album that got me hooked on Pink Floyd.

Similar to George Orwell's Animal Farm, Pink Floyd used animals for metaphors of different classes of people. Dogs - Business leaders, Pigs - Politicians, Sheep - the working class.

Pigs on the Wing (part one)
A short, acoustic song with a catchy melody. This is the closest thing to a love song that the Floyd put on the album. Apparently Roger Waters wrote it (and part two) for his wife at the time. When I started searching for Pink Floyd stuff on the internet I found out that the 8 track version of Animals had a different version of Pigs on the Wing where the two parts were linked by a guitar solo by Snowy White. I like that version even more than the original two parts on the CD.

Dogs
When I first listened to Dogs I was blown away. It started out normally enough...the lyrics were fantastic...then half way through the 17 minutes dogs started barking. This was something I was not expecting as I had never really listened to anything like it before. When the song ended, I just had to listen to it again.

The song is obvious enough in that it is about big business and the complete lack of soul and feeling business people have about the working class on whose back they have made their fortunes.

Originally written and performed during the Dark Side of the Moon tours of 1974-5, Dogs was originally titled "You Gotta Be Crazy". The lyrics at the end of Dogs have a certain similarity to the style of lyrics in Eclipse at the end of Dark Side of the Moon:

Who was born in a house full of pain
Who was trained not to spit in the fan
Who was told what to do by the man
Who was broken by trained personnel
Who was fitted with collar and chain
Who was given a pat on the back
Who was breaking away from the pack
Who was only a stranger at home
Who was ground down in the end
Who was found dead on the phone
Who was dragged down by the stone.

The song was originally intended for the album that became "Wish You Were Here", but Roger Waters had different ideas. This may have been one of the starting points in the division between Waters and Gilmour.

Pigs (Three Different Ones)
In Pigs (Three Different Ones), Roger Waters starts by criticizing the greed and behaviour of businessmen - continuing on where Dogs left off. But in the second verse forward it targets more of the political figures of the day. Specifically it seems to me that his disdain for Maggie Thatcher so evident in 'A Final Cut' started well before the Falkland Islands 'war'. Also, the lyrics are critical of a group of politically connected parents that were advocating the censorship of music for being to sexually overt including music by Pink Floyd.

The line 'Ha Ha, Charade You Are' is now a common insult used on South Park.

Sheep
Sheep is my favourite song on the album. It's a view into the philosophy and viewpoint Roger Waters has about the working class. Like Dogs, this song started life as a song the Floyd performed on the Dark Side of the Moon tour and was originally called Raving and Drooling - one of my all time favourite titles!

Part way through the song, there is a satire of Psalm 23 which, for some bizarre reason, caused Tipper Gore and the PMRC to declare that Pink Floyd were Satanists!?

"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me down to lie. Through pastures green, He leadeth me the silent waters by. With bright knives, He releaseth my soul. He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places. He converteth me to lamb cutlets. For lo, He hath great power, and great hunger. When cometh the day we lowly ones, Through quiet reflection, and great dedication. Master the art of karate. Lo, we shall rise up. And then we'll make the bugger's eyes water."

It doesn't get much better than that...


Pigs on the Wing (part two)
The conclusion of Pigs on the Wing from the first track. These two tracks seem to have little to do with the 'meat' of the album, although Roger does refer to himself as a 'Dog' and there is a mention of the 'stone' dragging him down that features in Dogs. When I listen to this album now, I generally just listen to the middle three songs, and sometimes the 8 track version of Pigs on the Wing.

What Shall We Do Now?

Part of my role at work is ‘software architecture’ which is a somewhat nebulous term and often crosses in to software design. In an agile environment it can’t cross that boundary, however, because it is up to the teams delivering the feature to buy into and create the design for the software. So with the help of the book “Software Systems Architecture” we’re now defining the architecture as a process to find unwritten requirements, constraints, questions, and assumptions that will restrict the design space to only those designs that meet all the criteria and constraints.

The book is quite good, although it is written from a more ‘waterfall’ type mentality. The ideas it presents are geared towards how to effectively communicate an architecture. The authors present a set of six distinct 'views' of the system. Each view is targeted at a different set of stakeholders (which may include the end user, operators, developers, installers, third party developers, etc.) and the intent is to present only the information the stakeholder cares about in the view. The book describes a template for each view including examples of what one is to consider, a checklist, and a section of common mistakes and pitfalls which is quite useful.

The views they describe are:

• Functional: Describes the systems functional elements, their responsibilities, interfaces and primary interactions
• Information: Describes how the system stores, manipulates, manages and distributes data
• Concurrency: Maps functional elements to concurrency units to identify where parallelism can and will occur
• Development: Describes how the architecture supports the development process including building, testing, and maintaining the system
• Deployment: Describes the target environment into which the architecture will be deployed including processing nodes, network interconnections, bandwidth availability, and disk storage requirements
• Operational: Describes how the system will be operated, administered, upgraded and supported after initial deployment.

In addition to the viewpoints, the authors identified some common non-functional qualities of a system and recognized that meeting those qualities will affect more than one view. These qualities include things like performance, security, availability, and scalability. For each of these qualities there is an associated Perspective that the book outlines.

So I'm experimenting with this format by trying to describe a current feature (EPG Data Delivery) along with an upcoming required enhancement to that feature. We'll see how it goes...