I appreciate movie reviews. I’ll read them before, after, and occasionally — never a good sign — during the show.

But I don’t find the reviewers’ quantitative ratings — stars, thumbs, reels, fruit — helpful in choosing something worthwhile.

Instead, I’ve devised my own qualitative review scheme based upon how the film deserves to be viewed:

• Theatre. This film merits nothing less than the spectacle afforded by the Big Screen. The audience demographic for the performance is such that the probability of a biker shouting “Take it off!” to an onscreen Frances McDormand thankfully approaches nil.
• Video. You’ll enjoy this, but only at home when not surrounded by cell-wielding adolescents. Visit the Colonel, snag a half-dozen of Tim’s crullers, and then tuck in with your sweetie on the couch cushions for an evening of escape.
• Broadcast. Your two hours will not have been wasted if you were otherwise planning on tuning in to televised golf. Also, thirty-two minutes of commercial interruption will not significantly diminish the art on display.
• No. There are no circumstances under which you should pollute your eyes with this gawdawful tripe. Do not be deceived into thinking “it’s so bad that it’s good.” It ain’t.

I would adopt this system, but I’m not a film critic — I lack the Pauline Kael factor. So I offer it to anyone else out there who is gripped with a burning desire to tell me what to watch.

Carole and I caught Colin James and Craig Northey at the Arts Centre last night. There’s no real point in a review of the show — you either attended last night or already have tickets for tonight — but we both enjoyed it.

The real surprise for me was this Northey fellow. I’m not party to the music scene and had never heard of the guy, yet I knew all of his songs (including, of course, the theme from Corner Gas). He’s a true song writer, and I would have liked to have heard more. He also produced a very clean tone from his amped acoustic.

James was less of a surprise; I’ve been listening to him since Voodoo Thing appeared on the Friday night video show in my high-school days. He sure has pipes though, and fingers to match. I did find his guitar playing a little more cluttered. Nimble digits aside, sometimes there are too many notes. But you can excuse a lot when you see how much fun he’s having playing — judging by his Happy Feet. I especially appreciated his deviations from standard blues riffs, veering away from dominant seventh chords at unexpected moments.

Although not advertised as an “unplugged” concert, it was more amplified than I anticipated. And, while I completely understand the rationale, I still find it amusing to see a Marshall valve amplifier with microphones stationed fore and aft.

As mentioned in the Yukon News article, James doesn’t have an outgoing stage presence; Northey was visibly more comfortable bantering between songs. That, and the occasional audio glitches — including a memorable “Whoa” — made for an intimate event.

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I briefly met Colin James in 2000 when he came up to play at the Thunder on Ice race. He was just hanging around the Westmark convention room chatting with anyone. I couldn’t muster the courage to ask him about a long-past David Letterman appearance that featured a horribly out-of-tune guitar. Poor guy soldiered on, bending every single note into pitch.

Another review of an O’Reilly-ish book that I posted elsewhere, Head First Design Patterns by Freeman et al:

Oh sure, we’ve all got the Gang-Of-Four Design Patterns books on the shelf, right up there next to Knuth. I’d yank down my dusty copy whenever I needed to look up what a fellow coder meant by Facade or Visitor. (Actually, the short description of the patterns on the inside front cover usually was enough to fake my way through the rest of the conversation.)

In contrast, I charged through Head First Design Patterns in all of about two days. It was my first exposure to the breezy diagram- and photo-laden Head First series. You could consider the non-text portions to be just so much tree-killing fluff, but I found them a pleasant respite from what is, at heart, a pretty dry subject.

There were more than a few times during my reading that I sat back, whistled, and said aloud, “so that’s how that works.” The book covers the most common patterns from GoF in an incremental order. I was disappointed that some patterns were lumped in the last “Leftover Patterns” chapter because I would’ve enjoyed the authors’ take on them, particularly the Flyweight pattern, a personal fave.

Examples are illustrated using Java. That’s definitely an improvement over the templated C++ in GoF, but it does illustrate a failing: the old-school object-oriented languages like C++ and Java needed patterns to solve common problems. The latest batch of OO/functional languages like Python and Ruby have little use for some patterns, and add new patterns all their own. For instance, what use is there for an iterator pattern in Ruby that uses closures to loop? Why bother with factory patterns in languages with first-order functions and class objects?

That opinion aside, patterns are still an everyday matter for the OO practitioner, and Head First Design Patterns is a superb introduction to them.

This really was an enjoyable read. I even did some of the exercises at the end of each chapter.

I own a lot of O’Reilly books. You know, the ones with the animals on the cover. So many, that one sunny day I sat down to count: 119. I’ll admit that some of them I only own for one or two paragraphs that were useful (Essential CVS is one example of an unusually bad O’Reilly offering); I even read whole chapters of others. But the one volume of these dozens of colour-coded tomes that I keep coming back to is Learning the bash Shell by Cameron Newham. Here’s the review I posted to a book seller’s site:

The GNU/Linux bash shell is a clunky marvel. Novices recoil at first contact; “how do I click my way out of this 70s-era greenscreen abomination?” Casual Linux admins — and I fall into this it-was-set-up-a-year-ago-and-still-works-fine-so-don’t-futz-with-it category — are reasonably adept at piping, redirection, and tab-completion. The full-bore Linux geekorati are only a couple of Emacs meta-ctrl-popbottle keystrokes from involuntary carpal retirement.

Learning the bash Shell is really intended for the second of these groups: the not-everyday Linux enthusiast. The experts will have already glommed every tip and trick, and, despite the disingenuous “Learning” in the title, the book’s too steep a road for folks still struggling to install their first RPM.

O’Reilly is known for its content-dense publications, and this book has a higher fact-per-unit-volume ratio than any other of that publisher’s titles that I could name. Like many a tech trade tome, its chapters should be read as you need them, not straight through from copyright to colophon (“Typeset with ITC Garamond, you say. Fascinating!”). I go ahead and store it right next to the server. A quick peek will tell me everything I need to know, and little I don’t care to learn, about test/[] switches, string substitution operators, special-case environment variables, file descriptor redirection, Emacs control commands, process substitution, and those darned umask settings (each an example of something I use often, yet the details of which I can never recall). And once you’ve got the book open, you’ll find it just leads you further and further down the bash rabbit hole.

In short, this is one of the best tech books I’ve ever encountered, for any OS, for any topic. If you’re of the aforementioned casual Linuxfolk, or transcending your way to the guru plane, you must add it to your library.

Yes, it’s unabashedly glowing, but the book is awfully useful.