catzooks!

Resistance, by Owen Sheers, (finished June 22, 2009). The New York Times found it plodding. The Independent thought it was moving. I thought it was wonderful.

The Normandy invasion was a failure. Germany, strengthened by it’s victory over Russia, crosses the channel to Dover and invades and occupies England. There, Wehrmacht officer Albrecht is ordered to take a small group of soldiers and go on a reconnaissance mission deep in the valleys of Wales.

There, he arrives in Olchon valley, to a group of women struggling to come to terms with the sudden departure of their husbands. Albrecht stays while he searches for his target, slowly allowing the beauty of the land to work itself into him, and for one of the women to win him over.

It’s a beautifully written book — strong imagery, wonderful descriptions. The characters are not the type to talk a lot — and so much of the story is prose, and lovely prose at that. The descriptions of the sun setting over the valley, or Sarah’s first encounter with the target of Albrecht’s mission are moving and superb. Well worth reading.

I’ve been considering diving into digital. Ok, I might miss film, but I’ve found that the Holga plus a few rolls of B&W film is something pretty wonderful. (Having the freedom to play with a “toy” and then looking at the results, I’m pretty happy with my Holga.) That said, digital is the wave and it’s time to get in.

When I first floated the idea of getting a digital camera with Tamara, her reaction was “no, unless you finance it with one of the unused cameras upstairs.” So, I dug out my Rollei 6008i, unused for 8 or 9 years, and dusted it off. Playing with it again, I’m struck by how polished and precise it is — built by the same German engineering ethos as BMWs. It’s also clearly a studio camera, in that it’s designed for waist-level use, it’s heavy, and is made to stand on a tripod (or camera stand). While I haven’t shot studio in a long time, and don’t really intend to any time soon either, it will be a disappointment to not have such a camera in my arsenal.

So, I took the 6008 plus the 90mm and 40mm lenses (should have taken off the filters first), the extra 120 back, 4 inserts and the battery and charger into Glazer’s, and did a deal. I could have gotten (substantially) more had I sold them myself on eBay or such — but then I would have had to sell them myself. The Glazer’s guy said that if I hadn’t had the charger, he wouldn’t have bought the kit — he spent six months trying to find one for a client recently. Apparently Rolleis for the past 3-4 years have been tremendously hard to service, and thus the prices have been dropping. Sigh.

That done, I went over to look at the D90’s. The D700’s are just too expensive ($3000) and giant — although the image quality is superb. D90’s are at least reasonably priced ($900), make great quality images, and are small(ish). Turns out they are in such demand that you can’t buy just the body — but Tamara decided that she wanted the kit lens, so we all came back a few days later and bought the kit.

I have to say, the D90 is a fabulous piece of machinery. I was worried about the small sensor — I know what APS-C film pictures look like (ugly, grainy) and didn’t want that as my primary body. I like to shoot wide, and getting decent wide lenses for APS-C sensors is hard. I like selective focus, and getting selective focus on small sensors is tough(er). All in all, I would have liked to have a full-frame sensor… but not at the price or size of a D700.

But all that said, I’m finding I like the D90. It’s wicked fast to take pictures — faster than my F100 was for sure. It’s light (although I bought it with a 17-55mm zoom, which isn’t light). It turns out it takes pretty good pictures after all. I can wire it up to GPS, so I always know where I am (or where I took the picture, anyway). Overall, I think it’s going to be a good camera.

So Tamara has a new lens she’s happy with, I have one less camera in the closet and one more camera I’ll actually use, and everyone’s happy.

Welcome. It turns out that I really enjoy writing. As described in Write Think Learn (a fabulous presentation, btw), I use writing as a tool to organize my thoughts, think about problems, clarify what I want to say, and persuade. Pretty much all I do at work is wrestle with ideas, and make compelling arguments about what we should do, why, and how. But writing is just plain fun. As he says in that presentation:

• People who write are powerful.
• In science, technology, or management, you influence people by writing things for them to read.
• Clear writing leads to clear thinking.
• You don’t know what you know until you try to express it.

(I will strive to write prose, rather than bullets. Bullets pollute the mind.)

Catzooks used to be a spot where I regaled the world (and my globally-scattered nuclear family) with the (incredibly!) cute adventures of my kids. Those old posts are still there, behind a password wall (you don’t all want to read about them, do you?). But now, catzooks is about whatever catches my fancy. Perhaps you’ll get stories from our travels, or maybe I’ll build another boat. Who knows.

But I’ll have a spot to write, and you’ll have something interesting (I hope!) to read and consider. A great deal!

The 6^th edition of Catzooks didn’t last very long. I unveiled v6 last September. The hosting provider I was using announced he was shutting up shop in April, and that he wanted to have all services transitioned out by the end of May.

As I said back then, I decided that if I was going to change providers, I might as well do some other overhauls to the site: make more of it public, change the character to be less focused on the kids, upgrade to the latest Movable Type.

Migration

With my hosting provider chosen, it was time to do the Movable Type migration. On twinlark, I had been running the latest 3.x (3.661?) on BerkleyDB. MT4 doesn’t support Berkley anymore, part of the reason I had never bothered to upgrade (sorting out a similar local-file DB on twinlark wasn’t worth the hassle). But with the switch to a new host, one which supported MySQL DBs right out of the box, it made sense to upgrade. Additionally, because it was a different machine, I figured the easiest way to get all the data over to the new host was to export & import.

That turned out to be pretty straightforward. I didn’t have to worry about any “historic” URLs — everything on the old catzooks was behind a password wall, so nobody had any saved URLs. Furthermore, in the exported files, I could do global search and replaces to update URLs to new version. This let me update paths to move out of the “wall” — more below.

The export and import process went very smoothly. The format is documented which meant that it was straightforward to edit the exported files and add/remove what I needed to get the right entries in place.

The only thing missing were the templates. MT stores the templates in the database, and if you don’t copy them, you’re out of luck. Fortunately, I have copies of them in RCS — but it still would have been helpful to export all the extra template pieces.

Adding in more entries

As part of the transition, I moved all the book and movie reviews from the classic location into the main blog, and gave them a book/movie category. This required a bit of Perl scriptery to take the input file I used to generate the classic pages and get it into the MT import/export format, but all that wasn’t too hard.

Removing the Wall

I’ve wanted to make catzooks more public, and less hidden behind a password wall. With the kids getting older, I want to blog about things which affect me, not just how the kids are doing. But I also didn’t want to throw open everything which was behind the current password wall — so I needed a mixed approach.

This meant moving large (but selected) portions of the site from /wall/ into the root directory. Doing this wasn’t too hard — I took and inventory of all the pages, and figured out what set would be against the root and what would be in subdirectories. Once that was complete, I updated all the paths in the source files, and it was ready to go.

The hardest parts were where I removed subdirectories. There was a /wall/kids/pascal and /wall/kids/tristan, and I removed the kids/ part — and that caused all kinds of path problems.

Updating CSS

As part of the upgrade, I also decided that I didn’t want to have completely custom styling, and would prefer to use the MT default markup as much as possible. I wanted to adjust it only when necessary for my own requirements. This meant that I had to change the catzooks CSS file to use the MT element names; this took a bit of debugging and hacking away, but results in a system which is much cleaner and easier to adjust than what it was. I even went so far as to make the catzooks styling into an MT theme (not that I would ever bother to publish it or anything).

Cleaning up

With all that movement, there was bound to be a lot of dust. Everything seemed to be working fine — until I ran a link checker. There was a ton of breakage. Given all the reorganization I shouldn’t be surprised, but cleaning it up took quite a while. Forced me to learn how to rsync between machines (I couldn’t zip & download on hostgator; it seemed to time out the zip operation and log me out), and then run LinkLint locally.

(Aside: good, free link checkers are hard to come by. I eventually settled on LinkLint, which is fast, can run against only local files and not go on the wire, and is memory efficient. I also tried checklinks, but it wasn’t as fast.)

I installed MT4 on hostgator on May 2. Getting all of the above up and running took just over a month. I’ve learned to love sed. I’ve figured out how to rsync both from hostgator to my iBook, and from the iBook to the PC.

There are still some bumps and bruises: I was just about to set up a photo blog when the twinlark news was announced, so I haven’t made much progress getting that set the way I’d like it. On catzooks, searching still doesn’t work quite the way I’d like it too, and I’m pretty sure I’ve messed up a few pages. But overall the site is back in action and ready to go. Enjoy.

A nice mix of vanilla and orange. With a kick. From pp. 222:

• 1 ½ vanilla vodka
• 1 ½ Tuaca Italian liqueur
• 1 ½ sweet vermouth
• 3 dashes orange bitters

Verdict: I made this without the bitters, and it would have been better with. But still a nice orange+vanilla martini.

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga, (finished June 4, 2009). Balram Halwai — our hero, the “White Tiger” — is born to a traditional Indian family, into a low caste, in a small town in rural India. Crushing poverty is everywhere. The world is a place of screwing others over, and being proud of each other for having done so — the town is proud of their school headmaster for so effectively embezzling the school’s stipend. Halwai’s family pays a handsome dowry for one of their daughters, but later hits another family when Halwai’s brother marries.

In this, Halwai is a cunning, entrepreneurial element. He leaves the school to take a job in a tea shop, crushing coal. He leverages his funds into learning to drive from an old master. And from there, he parries his new skill into a job, driving for a rich master.

This is the story of two Indias — one desperate, rich with tradition and family (perhaps crushingly so), but so deeply poor they have no choice but to destroy their future to eat tonight. The other rich and uncertain, still tightly tied to the ubiquitous corruption, but with enough money that they can afford to toss some of it around.

Everywhere is gritty. Halwai lives in almost-squalor to begin with, but through his intelligence manages to pull himself out and escape. But once out, what can happen next? Can you ever escape your destiny?

In some respects, it is hard to make sense of this book. As a graphic and compelling picture of the impossibility of large-scale change, this is as solid a picture as I’ve ever come across. When presented with the same problem statement as Halwai, is there really any other choice as the one he makes? And if that is the only choice, are we doomed? The ties that bind tie tightly.

Aside: this is a Man Booker Prize winner; unlike many of the other Booker Prize winners I’ve read, this one is quite conversational and easy to read (!). It is written as a series of letters to Wen Jiabao, Premier of China, who is visiting Bangalore and who Halwai wants to prepare for the actual reality of India. It’s a superb way to construct a history: talkative, but direct. Meredith tweeted about it, which is why I picked it up from the library.