This post was originally intended to be written just before the Hugo Awards ceremony in Japan; unfortunately I came down with Influenza at the end of August that knocked me out for two weeks, and I’m still not 100%. This also meant that I didn’t get a chance to read any of the the selections in novella and short story categories and I missed one of the “Long Form” selection as well.

Earlier in the year I decided to expand my horizons on Science Fiction. I figured that the Hugo Award would be a good barometer of new and upcoming fiction, so I decided to read and watch all of the things nominated. I started a little bit late, so didn’t quite manage to finish everything I intended. I’m considering expanding this out to other awards next year, although I’m a little bit daunted by the Man Booker Prize.

I’ve ranked them according to my opinion, with a brief blurb about them; the weblinks go on in greater detail. The 2007 Hugo winners in bold.

Best Novel

• Blindsight by Peter Watt
  This was by far my favourite out of the five. Charles Stross sums it up far better than I ever could - “Imagine a neurobiology-obsessed version of Greg Egan writing a first contact with aliens story from the point of view of a zombie posthuman crewman aboard a starship captained by a vampire, with not dying as the boobie prize.” This book kept me guessing all the way through. Highly recommended.
• Glasshouse by Charles Stross
  A war damaged veteran from a post accelerated society is forced to live in a social experiment replicating life in the 1950s, although the experiment is not quite what is seems. Cool future tech mixed in with commentary on “ancient 20th century” concepts of social roles and identity.
• Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
  2 decades into the future, a man wakes up from a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease to find a world full of always-on network augmented reality devices. This book was full of really cool fairly realistic extrapolations on modern technology. Even though I preferred Blindsight, I can see why this book won the Best Novel award.
  
• His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
  What if there were Dragons during the Napoleonic wars? A fun book - I’ve already read the next two in the series - but not as ground breaking in my opinion as the books above.
  
• Eifelheim by Michael Flynn
  I could not get into this book at all - these things happen some time. I didn’t like the style of writing, I found the shift in focus between the present and the past jarring, and the pseudo-quantum physics knowledge of the Dark Ages priest properly broke my suspension of disbelief. Oh, and I was bored, always a terrible crime in any media.

Blindsight, Eifelheim and Rainbows End were all available freely online as e-texts. This I was very grateful for, as publication dates in the UK would have otherwise made reading these books far more difficult than neccessary. There is also a tradition of putting the nominees for the short story categories online, in an attempt to boost their exposure. I did download these in an attempt to read them in a park on a nice sunny day - but being ill robbed me of my ability to read, let alone walk to a park.

Best Dramatic Presentation - Long Form

• Pan’s Labyrinth
  This is a gorgeous film juxtaposing a little girl’s fantastical quest against the horrors of the Spanish civil war. Beautifully crafted by Guillermo del Toro
• Children of Men
  A deeply depressing tale about hope in a dystopic near future world that is sterile, shaped by current events of terrorism, Iraq and Abu Ghraib. In any other year this film would have been my favourite.
  
• A Scanner Darkly
  Philip K Dicks slightly psychotic tale of a NARC officer investigating a group of drug users under cover, one of whom just happens to be himself. 
• V for Vendetta
  I didn’t like this compared to the book, and to be honest I was a little bored by it and forgot to finish it. But, I’ve added to my list of movies to watch again, just
• The Prestige
  I missed this at the cinema, bought it on DVD, but caught influenza before I could watch it. On “the List”, where it will probably stay their until I die.

Best Dramatic Presentation - Short Form

• Doctor Who: “The Girl in the Fireplace“
  My favourite episode of “Series 2″ of the new Dr Who. A love story with a bit of timeline complexity, clockwork robots and a horse. The write also wrote last years winner The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances and next years winner Blink.
• Doctor Who: “Army of Ghosts” & “Doomsday”
  A decent season finale, without too much of Russell T Davies’s trademarked Deux Ex Machina.
• Stargate SG-1: “200”
  A fun episode, sending up all sorts of science fiction shows, Thunderbirds, The Wizard of Oz, and especially Stargate SG1 itself.
• Doctor Who: “School Reunion”
  Sarah Jane Smith rejoins the cast for an episode to investigate mysterious happenings at a school. Mickey’s character really starts coming into his own here, and there’s a nicely un-Giles guest spot from Anthony Head.
• Battlestar Galactica: “Downloaded”
  All of the revamped BSG is currently on the to be watched queue - I’ve spent most of the year rewatching all of Babylon 5 instead.

I really enjoyed this mass influx of new books, movies and ideas - I’m definitely doing it again next year.

Although I really enjoyed 360:Flex (San Jose edition), I couldn’t make it to the one happening right now in Seattle for reasons mostly involving finances (starting with £700 for the flight alone - and I can’t get the conference expensed at all) and deadlines (the next version of my “intranet product” has a major deadline in 3 weeks). It’s a real shame, as this iteration looked even better than the last one.

Instead, I went on a day trip and visited the West Dean Gardens Chilli Fiesta with some friends. Although it seemed to be suffering a little from the effects of a mild summer and record floods - especially compared with what was on offer last year - there was still a cornucopia of all things chilli related - salsa, jams, ice cream, fresh chillis, chocolate, plants and seedlings, beer, massage oil, fudge, gummy bears - you name it.

This year I also discovered my limit of chilli related things - Chilli Pepper Pete’s Dragon’s Blood (which is made from the hottest chilli in the world - the Dorset Naga). Within seconds of sampling a tiny amount on a broken corn chip, my mouth was on fire. A few minutes later and my jaw started locking up in pain. About 10 minutes later, I had a sharp stabbing pain in my stomach. Then the pain went away, but everything was tainted by chillis and even plain boring bread was extremely hot. Eventually I found some chilli ice cream and the ever present chilli sensation finally went away.

To top off the evening, I took advantage of the new moon and sat on Hampstead Heath and watched the Perseids - even within the bright city lights of London we managed to see a few of the brightest meteors.

My weekend was definitely a good substitute for the best Flex conference in the world, enjoying the things that 360 Flex lacks - chillis and meteors!

It occurs to me I’ve been to three geek events recently, and not mentioned a word about them.

HackDayLondon

Over the weekend Yahoo, the BBC and a bunch of other companies ran HackDay up at Alexandra Palace. The basic principle being: get a bunch of geeks together, give them large amounts of APIs, ideas, caffeine and pizza, and then see what happens. A few unexpected problems occurred, such as Alexandra Palace getting struck by lightning early in the day, and then the fire alarms thought the building was on fire, so understandably opened the roof vents to deal with the problem. Which meant, that it was now raining on everyone’s laptops. The HackDay staff did a good job of evacuating everyone out into the conservatory before the next storm hit, and a lot of people kept right on hacking.

During the day I hit a couple of road block in my attempted hacking, apart from the obvious inspiration one: firstly a lack of crossdomain policy files meant I couldn’t access a lot of the BBC feeds I wanted to. I’m thinking of making moo cards with important info on them, just to hand out to people who don’t make it easy for Flash. Secondly my attempts to use the HTML object in Adobe Air seemed to hit security problems -aka I could only load up locally saved web pages. So in the end I spent a few hours randomly annoying Aral while he was playing with a wifi Nabaztag/tag by making it flash and waggle its ears at him. As a result of all these difficulties I spent most of my time at the event wandering around catching up with people, looking at geeky things at the O’Reilly Make stand (including a gear system built out of pasta and ginger snaps), seeing a few alpha demos of projects for HackDay, and a fair bit of evangelising Flex to a variety of different people of different geek creeds.

As I was only half an hour from home I opted for crashing out in my own bed (as opposed to the comfy beanbags that others seemed to have chosen). Unexpected house adventures involving an ethnic cleansing of moths meant I couldn’t make it back for the second day. I really enjoyed the first day though, and I’m looking forward to the next big London geeky event like this.

London .Net User Group on Silverlight

This was on Thursday, and felt a little strange - I felt very much like a spy in their midst. I turned up to hear someone from Microsoft talk about Silverlight - I didn’t go to Mix and this is the first public chance the UK has had so far; also I wanted to hear a pitch directly to the developers as they tend to be more about implementation and actualities, and less about product pitches. I’m going to write up my thoughts on Silverlight separately, but as far as comparisons on the User Group go, this one felt a little flat -I’m now even more grateful to the efforts put in by Niklas, Tink and Aral to try enliven the meetings, find the right venues and grow the respective communities.

Scotch on the Rocks

This was at the beginning of the month, up in Edinburgh. It was definitely good to catch up with people I haven’t seen in a while as well as put faces to the names on all the blogs I skim. There were a few good sessions in there too and I’m actually looking forward to some of the improvements in ColdFusion 8. The Thursday night was suitably alcoholic as well I’m surprised at the how small the UK ColdFusion community actually is, and I’m very grateful for the demonstration of Adobe love we had by their sending over of Tim Buntel to talk to us.

Future Geekery

No more geek things for a while now, although looking at my calendar there are quite a few coming up: hopefully I’ll be able to make the next London Flash Platform meeting in July (I’ve had three collisions in a row now, Whitby, Scotch and now Glastonbury); I’m still toying with 360Flex:Seattle in August, although the airfares are not cheap and work won’t pay my costs; September is BarCampBrighton, which currently is currently oversubscribed by at least 3:1; November is FlashOnTheBeach, this time around I’m planning not to have any conflicting deadlines to deal with.

This weekend, while travelling to a cheesy club night in Islington, we ran into three men who were dressed up as the Ghostbusters. Not only did they have the suits, they also had realistic inflatable packs as well. We tried to convince them to come along, promising them that likely as not get they’d free entry and everyone would think they were awesome, but they declined. And of course, 20 minutes after getting into the club, the DJ played Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr.

Sometimes life hands you opportunities, almost into your hands. I think they really missed one of them there.

Since chatting with Peter Bell at 360 Flex, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the base model for my Flex-and-ColdFusion Intranet application, “Stream”.

This application was pseudo reverse engineered from a Visual Basic application and has nearly 200 tables of inter-related data - mostly without primary or foreign keys, but that’s another story entirely. For a long while there has been no clear and overall model of the application. The tables and views were mostly responsible for driving the application but there is still a lot of business logic tied up in various peoples’ heads. This is obviously not an ideal situation, as it dramatically raises the bar of entry on this project for any other developers.

As a direct result of the planned migration from Flex 1.5, to new-and-improved Flex 2.0.1 (including the usage of Flex Data Services), I now have to rework the ColdFusion tier. This seems like a good time to rethink how the application works, apply some consistency to the application as well as build up a global model to develop from. Hopefully there will also be a page or two of documentation.

When working on “Version 1″ of Stream I spearheaded the generation of a lot of the code on for the ColdFusion and Flex tiers, which included various parts of code for usage with Cairngorm in Flex as well as unit tests for ColdFusion. However this code was fairly brittle and an increasing number of complicated edge cases meant that eventually the generation was one-time only. The result of this was that this was barely better than no generation at all.

So for the last few weeks, I’ve been playing around with ideas for the new model and how to generate code for the three effective tiers - ActionScript, ColdFusion and database (accessed via an ORM). This is resulting in an bespoke generator application that I’ve named Dynamo. But code generation is only a part of the purpose of Dynamo. The source for my model is the database, so obviously I’ll need to validate my model against this - checking usage of fields and automatically using the database as the basis for any typing information; and as the end result of the application is to display these fields in a Flex UI, I need to validate that I am using all the fields required for each part of the model. This combination of techniques should allow rapid development based on our existing data while dramatically minimise the number of errors caused by missing fields, typos or incorrect data types.

For the generation part of Dynamo, after much thought and reviewing of options I’ve fallen back on an old favourite technique - using XML for the model and XSLT for the generated files. Based on ideas from Peter, I was originally intended to put all of this model meta data into the database itself. However after some initial attempts at putting a hierarchical data model into a database, I realised that I was overly complicating things and that the “simplest thing that could possibly work” was to work with an XML file for the time being - if required later I can always rework my model code to use a database. One drawback with using XSLT is that many people find it complicated and difficult to work with; at some point I’ll replace this with a simpler templating method.

However, one big advantage of using XML and XSLT is that I can incorporate this into my ant build script so that all of the generated code is created when “Stream 2″ is compiled and deployed, and the generated files are not checked into source control. This keeps the focus of change entirely on the model and the templates, not on the generated files themselves.

Ideally I’d have a dynamic and active generator - change my model, next request all the changes are reflected. The problem is that I need my VOs for ActionScript to be generated to be compiled into my application, and ColdFusion requires physical files to automatically translate classes to ActionScript. As an aside, I was talking with one of my friends who works in the finance industry and when I told him I was using XML and XSLT he embraced my like a brother exalting the virtues of XLST programming. But when I told him I was generating my code, he became disgusted and seemed to want to pray for my eternal programming soul

These are still early days, but I’ve switched back from focusing on Dynamo to Stream -which of course was the whole point of this whole exercise. I’ve now started wiring up a number of screens, and apart from the occasional typo or missing field (which is why I need to validate), the development is proceeding rather quickly.

[Addendum: a few weeks later]

The base idea behind this modelling has worked really well - I was able to wire up a lot of screens with data, in rapid succession, with only a small amount of code required - the rest was generated. I’d like to componentise more on the Flex side, but so far the ColdFusion side is working well. However, I’m yet to need to customise the ColdFusion code - and this is where generated code tends to fall over. Dynamo at the moment is sliding away from being a separate application, and may end up being tied into the main code-base of Stream. One unfortunate and unforeseen side effect of this generation system is that I now need to generate my code for the application to work - otherwise there is no base ColdFusion components to handle data accesses. This means that my build times in CFEclipse are in the realm of 20 seconds - hardly ideal.