Willie Dunne is the innocent 18-year-old son of a senior Dublin policeman, who promptly joins the Royal Dublin Fusiliers when the First World War breaks out, along with thousands of other Irishmen. Their early optimism that the war will be over by Christmas 1914 is soon crushed as both sides get bogged down in the trench warfare of the Western Front. Four long, brutal years of stalemate in the killing fields of Flanders follow, and much of Willie’s regiment die during …continue.

I bought a 2TB external hard disk today. It’s about the size of a deck of cards, but thinner, and it cost me $95. Disk Utility says it has 2,000,397,884,928 bytes.

In 1998, I got to see more than three terabytes of disks in one system. At the time, a server with a 25GB disk was considered high capacity. The 3TB system occupied con­sid­er­ably more volume than a pack of cards. I don’t know what it cost but clearly it was tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

At that time, I was a developer on the IIS team at Microsoft. I was the lead per­for­mance engineer for Microsoft’s web server …continue.

Every so often, one of our Bamboo builds would break thus:

pkg_resources.ExtractionError: Can't extract file(s) to egg cache

The following error occurred while trying to extract file(s) to the Python egg
cache:

  [Errno 17] File exists: '/home/bamboo/.python-eggs'

The Python egg cache directory is currently set to:

  /home/bamboo/.python-eggs

Perhaps your account does not have write access to this directory?  You can
change the cache directory by setting the PYTHON_EGG_CACHE environment
variable to point to an accessible directory.

This occurred while trying to make use of PyCrypto.

After a little research, I decided that instead of installing PyCrypto as a zipped egg (as it does by default) into the build’s …continue.

When I posted a link to the new Leatherman Tread Bracelet on Facebook the other day, I mentioned that I had recently forfeited a little Swiss Army knife that I’d owned for 30 years at airport security. The Tread is a bracelet where each link has one or more mini-tools. The bracelet itself is about $150–$200, depending upon the exact tools. With a watch, it’s about $600.

While I can see the appeal, I have no intention of buying one. Jan mentioned in the comments that he carries a Utili-Key 6-in-1 Multi-Tool on his key ring, and he’s never had any problems with it at TSA check­points. Since it was …continue.

While the Northeast is being hammered with a major snowstorm, we’ve enjoyed some un­sea­son­ably warm weather in the Northwest. Yesterday, it was 63°F (17°C) in Seattle—a record high tem­per­a­ture. The flowers are blooming. I smelled some glorious blossoms yesterday and today. One friend dubbed it “sumter”.

I did a clean install of OS X 10.10 on my home laptop a week ago. I tried to launch PyCharm 4.0.4 on it today. It im­me­di­ate­ly failed. Every time.

When I looked in the System Console, I saw:

1/25/15 7:46:00.557 PM pycharm[1160]: No matching VM found.
1/25/15 7:46:00.711 PM com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.jetbrains.pycharm.58252[1160]) Service exited with abnormal code: 1

The JetBrains website wasn’t very helpful when I looked there. In time, I found a Stack­Over­flow answer that put me on the right track (and reminded me that I had previously solved this problem about a year ago, at work). PyCharm and some of the other JetBrains IDEs require JDK 1.6, as there are …continue.

Washington state is well-known for coffee, wineries, and mi­cro­brew­eries. Dozens of small-batch craft dis­til­leries have been started in Washington state since 2008 after a change in the law. Most of them are quite good. I drink Irish and Scotch whiskies, but otherwise neither of us drink spirits often, so we’ve barely tried the local dis­til­leries.

We drank a really nice gin from Sun Liquor at a New Year’s Eve party, and we’ve been meaning to follow up. This afternoon, we stopped at the Oola Distillery on Capitol Hill and sampled all their wares. We left with a half bottle of their Rosemary Vodka. Then we stopped in at Sun Liquor and came out with a …continue.

When I buy a book, I want to be able to read it how and where I like, not where the bookseller dictates. With printed books, the very idea of the bookseller having any say is ridiculous. The book is now my property, to read where and how I like, to give away or to lend or even to sell. I’ve bought thousands of new books and thousands more secondhand books from bookstores.

Most electronic books are crippled with DRM. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, although Defective By Design prefers to expand DRM as Digital Re­stric­tions Management. DRM is technology that controls digital content after it has been sold. In particular, …continue.

As I mentioned last week, we’ve been listening to some audiobooks. We finished listening to The Beekeeper’s Apprentice last night. I read the book many years ago and I’ve read most of the subsequent books in the Mary Russell series.

Fifteen-year-old Mary Russell is walking on the Sussex Downs with her head in a book one spring day in 1915, when she literally trips over Sherlock Holmes. Although Holmes is almost four decades her senior, the two brilliant, lonely people become friends and Holmes tutors Russell in the art …continue.

I mentioned last week that a few months ago we had listened to the audiobook of The Hot Rock, the first of the Dortmunder novels. I just finished reading it as an ebook on my phone. I enjoyed it a lot but I think I found it funnier when I heard it as an audiobook. Partly, the first time around, I didn’t know what was coming next; partly, the narrator’s skillful delivery gave me time to savor the humor. I read so fast that …continue.