Last night, I un­wit­ting­ly bought some habenero peppers when I was shopping for in­gre­di­ents for Afghan Chicken. They tasted hot, but not too hot, when I nibbled a couple of small pieces. I cut them up with my bare hands. By the time that I was finished, my fingers felt as if they had been burned! As if I had burned them with steam or something. It took several hours for the pain to go away. For­tu­nate­ly, I didn’t rub my eyes or more delicate mucous membranes, while I still had the habenero oils on my skin.

The chicken itself was fine: not too spicy. The cooked-up onion marinade had a …continue.

I worked at Atlas Solutions, a subsidiary of aQuantive, from October 2005 to July 2007.

Google bought our largest competitor, Dou­bleClick, for $3 Billion in April 2007. In the following five weeks, all the other major web ad­ver­tis­ing companies were bought up, cul­mi­nat­ing in Microsoft paying the stupendous sum of $6.3 billion for aQuantive. The Microsoft-aQuantive deal closes in mid-August.

To put it mildly, I was not excited at the thought of becoming a Microsoft employee yet again. Cu­mu­la­tive­ly, between 1992 and 2005, I spent 10 years at Microsoft as an employee or contractor, including a year and a half on Cairo, seven years on IIS, and a year on FlexGo.

Nev­er­the­less, I had absolutely no desire …continue.

I had a NameVal­ueCol­lec­tion embedded inside a larger object. I needed to serialize the larger object into XML and back. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, NameVal­ueCol­lec­tion is not XML se­ri­al­iz­able. Why I do not know.

A blog comment from Tim Erwin got me started in the right direction. Implement IXmlSe­ri­al­iz­able and do the work by hand in ReadXml and WriteXml.

Tim’s im­ple­men­ta­tion turned out to be overly simple. It didn’t handle an empty collection well, nor did it leave the XmlReader in a good state.

I used SGen to examine the de­se­ri­al­iza­tion of a List<String> to figure out what else needed to be done.

The following ReadXml seems to work. If I expected to receive XML from untrusted sources, I would …continue.

The Accusers is one of the more recent titles in Lindsey Davis’s long-running series about Marcus Didius Falco, an informer (private detective) in ancient Rome. Davis’s prose is slyly witty with an occasional leavening of snark.

Falco and Associates look into the death of a senator who committed suicide after being convicted of corruption. Was it really suicide? A com­pli­cat­ed courtroom drama ensues.

On a par with other books in the series. En­ter­tain­ing, amusing, and plenty of plot twists.

Having just seen the new Harry Potter movie, I decided to reread this book and the Half-Blood Prince before the release of the final book, next weekend.

The movie omits vast swathes of plot, of course, but delivers a competent retelling of the book.

Voldemort came back to life at the end of the previous book, but only Harry Potter has seen him and few, apart from Dumbledore and the re­con­sti­tut­ed Order of the Phoenix, believe him. A tinpot dictator from the Ministry of Magic, Dolores Umbridge, is sent to Hogwarts to …continue.

Michael Forsythe is an illegal immigrant from Northern Ireland, working for a crime boss in Harlem in 1992. When he sleeps with his boss’s girlfriend, he and three others are set up to take the fall for a drug bust in Mexico. He breaks out of a hellhole prison, losing a foot and his friends along the way, and makes his way back to New York to exact revenge.

McKinty writes lush, at­mos­pher­ic prose, with a good turn in dialog. Forsythe grows from a bright, feckless teenager, with a future …continue.

This is the sequel to Matriarch, one of the very first books I reviewed, back in December 2006.

As with its pre­de­ces­sor, this book does not admit of an easy summary and it too should be read in sequence.

The themes include alien contact, ecocide, genocide, the un­de­sir­able con­se­quences of im­mor­tal­i­ty, and the clash of per­son­al­i­ties. The plot is character-driven and fast-paced, with multiple twists.

After panning Prior Bad Acts and Adept, I needed to read a good book. I found it in John le Carré‘s classic cold war spy novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

George Smiley, quiet, unassuming, pudgy, and easily overlooked, is recently retired from the Service (MI6, the British in­tel­li­gence agency). He is secretly tasked with finding a mole in the highest reaches of the Service, run by Karla, a KGB spymaster. The mole can only be one of the four most senior men. Smiley begins piecing together the evidence from …continue.

Pyramid Scheme is another humorous science fiction novel from the authors of Rats, Bats, and Vats and The Rats, The Bats, & The Ugly.

An alien probe, in the shape of a pyramid, lands in Chicago and starts growing rapidly. It captures some of the people in the vicinity and sends them into an alternate universe, where most of them die within hours. A handful survive and start to thrive. The new universe contains the Greek and Egyptian gods and characters from Greek mythology, including the ever-un­trust­wor­thy Odysseus.

The plot is too silly …continue.