Author: Andrew Huey

Art and Literature for Troubled Times

OK, that post title might be a little pretentious. But I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff on the internet over the last month about art and literature, with relation to “our current political/cultural situation,” and enough of it is interesting to me that I thought I’d toss together a post.

I’ve previously mentioned Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America.” And of course 1984 has gotten a lot of attention. (And, speaking of Orwell, a school in Connecticut has removed Animal Farm from their curriculum, right when we need it the most.)

WNYC this week has been asking people to post about their current reading & watching habits on Twitter, using the hashtag #CulturePack. That’s gotten some interesting responses, in the areas of relevant non-fiction, relevant fiction, and pure escapism. (One popular answer is Harry Potter books and movies, which I think falls into both the relevant and escapism categories, if you think about it.)

The New Yorker just published an article called The Books We’re Turning to Now, which I haven’t read yet, but should be interesting.

Going a little further down the road of dystopian fiction, William Gibson’s The Peripheral has been mentioned a lot lately. Gibson himself has compared the current administration to the concept of the klept from his book. The Peripheral is actually the only Gibson novel I haven’t read yet. (I should fix that soon.)

And to work a little black humor into all of this, here’s a comic strip about how 2017 is looking a lot like a 1990’s cyberpunk dystopia. Speaking as someone who read a fair amount of cyberpunk in the 90s, this is pretty accurate.

Meanwhile, on the art front, MoMA is hanging some works by Muslim artists to protest Trump’s entry ban. This seems like a pretty minor thing to do, but it’s important, in a way, and it’s appropriate, for a museum. MoMA’s exhibit Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter is relevant too, but just closed. Maybe they should have kept that going for a few more months.

As for me, I’ve been reading The New York Times and The New Yorker a lot lately. Though I’m not just reading the “current events” stuff: I’ve also been reading long-form stuff, digging into older articles on art, literature, and what-not. (And, yeah, I know that makes me sound like a typical East Coast liberal. Guilty as charged, I guess.)

For escapism, I’m still reading a lot of the DC Rebirth comics. I keep trying to talk myself into dropping one or more of the ones I’m buying regularly, but I haven’t managed to do that yet. They’re all still pretty good and worth reading.

SharePoint: plain text, rich text, AutoHyperlinking, and Markdown

I’m just about finished with the SharePoint project that I’ve been working on for the last few months. One requirement for the project was to allow arbitrary “comments” on the main documents for the project. There are some built-in ways to accommodate comments in SharePoint, but I gave up on those after experimenting a bit. Instead, I created a new list that would act as a child table to my main list, in a simple one-to-many relationship. And I decided to use plain text (rather than rich text) for the comment field itself.

I’ve had problems with SharePoint rich text fields in the past, and I wanted to put some constraints on the users, so they wouldn’t go nuts with the vast array of bad things rich text fields in SharePoint let you do. And I didn’t see any reason why plain text wouldn’t be “good enough” for this particular case. However, for this application, a lot of URLs and email addresses are going to get posted in comments, and I wanted to be able to “linkify” them. I almost wrote my own code for that, but then found the SPUtility.AutoHyperlinking method. It works pretty well, and also translates quotes, angle brackets, and other possibly confusing characters into their corresponding HTML entity codes.

I also got a little interested in the idea of supporting some limited formatting (like bold, italic, etc.) without going full-on rich text. My first thought on that was to look into the SharePoint wiki functionality. I was hoping for a function like SPUtility.AutoHyperlinking, but which would convert some simple wiki markup into HTML. But SharePoint’s wiki capabilities are limited, and really only support links.

So I then gave Markdown some thought. There’s obviously no built-in support for Markdown in SharePoint, but I figured that I could find a .NET library that would let me handle the MD to HTML conversion on the back-end. There are, indeed, several libraries available for Markdown conversion. I found two that stood out as probably the best, for my use:

  • CommonMark.NET is a pretty popular one that’s been around for a while.
  • Markdig looks like it’s probably newer and slightly less popular than CommonMark.NET, but it has some interesting extensions, including an auto-linking extension that would have been useful for me.

In the end, I decided that it was pretty unlikely that the user base for this project would embrace anything as nerdy as Markdown, so I didn’t bother adding it to the project. But I had some fun messing around with it.

And I should mention that I figured out, at some point, that SharePoint 2013 supports two levels of rich-text: one that is the “full” rich text mode, allowing pretty much anything and everything, and one that is limited to a pretty reasonable subset (bold, italic, text alignment, links, and stuff like that). In retrospect, I probably should have gone with the limited rich-text, though even that might have caused unexpected issues. (I have learned to trust SharePoint only as far as I can throw the server on which it’s running…)

Data Privacy Day

So I’ve been told that today is Data Privacy Day. In honor of that, I… got a haircut and cleaned my bathtub today. Seriously, I’ve had a lot of fairly mundane things to take care of today. But I did also want to do some computer maintenance, so I thought I’d try to continue with my effort to encrypt the hard drives on all my computers.

A few weeks ago, I turned on FileVault on my MacBook. That’s working well. It hasn’t noticeably slowed it down, nor has it gone horribly wrong and destroyed all my data.

So I thought that today, maybe I’d try to enable BitLocker on my ThinkPad. I didn’t get too far with that. Apparently, you need a TPM chip to use BitLocker, and I don’t have one of those. I did a little research, and you can enable it on a computer without TPM, but you need to store an encryption key on a flash drive, and insert it every time you boot up the computer. I don’t think I want to do that. It seems pretty risky and inconvenient. So I guess I’m going to put that idea aside until my next laptop.

I’ve also thought about enabling BitLocker on my desktop PC. That’s new enough that it probably has a TPM chip. But it also has a regular hard drive (not an SSD), and it’s a desktop PC. So there’s not as much risk of the drive being stolen, and there’s more of an issue with performance. So maybe I’ll put that idea aside too, at least until I replace the drive with an SSD (which I’m probably going to do at some point this year).

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about anti-virus software a bit more. Both of my PCs are now running with just Windows Defender. I’m a little uncomfortable with that. It’s still kind of hard for me to accept that I probably don’t need third-party anti-virus software anymore. One thing that’s made it a little easier to accept is this blog post from a former Firefox developer, and some discussion about it on Slashdot and Hacker News. It’s really sounding like the consensus is that the MS anti-virus software is not only “good enough,” but probably better in many ways than the third-party options.

How Social Isolation Is Killing Us

This is an interesting article, though the title may be a bit overblown.

I need to do more to maintain my relationships, both for my own sake and for the sake of those around me. That second part is easy to forget; it’s easy to get wrapped up in your own bubble and forget that other people around you need help and support.

A great paradox of our hyper-connected digital age is that we seem to be drifting apart. Increasingly, however, research confirms our deepest intuition: Human connection lies at the heart of human well-being. It’s up to all of us — doctors, patients, neighborhoods and communities — to maintain bonds where they’re fading, and create ones where they haven’t existed.

Source: How Social Isolation Is Killing Us

Philip Roth on Trump

Coincidentally, after reading a fairly old New Yorker article about Philip Roth over the weekend, and blogging about it, I saw today that the New Yorker reached out to Roth for comment on Trump, and any similarity between the Trump administration and the fictional Lindbergh administration from his novel “The Plot Against America.” He has a few interesting things to say, though nothing particularly unexpected.

I’m still curious about “The Plot Against America.” I’m going to have to pick it up and read it at some point.

Almost Enough Art

I was reading this article about Philip Roth this morning, and a couple of lines jumped out at me.

First, this one from a letter from Saul Bellow:

There’s almost enough art to cover the deadly griefs with. Not quite, though. There are always gaps.

And the other, from Roth’s character Zuckerman, in his novel Exit Ghost:

It’s a flexible instrument that we’ve inherited. It’s amazing how much punishment we can take.

(I found this line also quoted in a short essay by Greil Marcus from 2007, which is a good read today, for perspective.)

I’m presenting these lines without much context, but hopefully, you get the idea. (And not the wrong idea. I’m not currently experiencing any “deadly griefs.”) Anyway, It occurs to me that I should really give Philip Roth a try. I’ve never quite gotten up the energy to choose one of his novels over, say, a nice Star Trek novel or Batman comic. Maybe I should start with something like The Plot Against America. I do generally like alternate history novels, though I’d imagine there’s going to be some difference between Harry Turtledove and Philip Roth.

Inauguration Day

I took a half-day off work today. I’m going to be heading into New York City in a little bit. I don’t have any real specific plans, but I’m going to try to follow Patton Oswalt’s advice from his Facebook post yesterday. I’m probably going to go to a couple of museums. And I might check out the Science Fiction Film Festival tonight.

C# source code analysis

Something came up at work today that got me thinking about source code analysis tools. Since I’m currently working on two C# projects, both of which are close to done and working reasonably well, I decided that maybe it would be cool to try running some source code analysis tools against them and see if there was anything I could clean up.

I started with something fairly simple: StyleCop. I installed the Visual Studio extension for it, ran it and went through the results. It found a ton of stuff, much of which I didn’t entirely agree with. But it did find quite a few things that made sense to me, so I cleaned them all up. With the VS extension, StyleCop only identifies issues; it doesn’t do any automated fixes. And it’s not doing any deep analysis; it’s just finding stuff like issues with naming conventions, missing comment headers, too much or too little whitespace, and similar style issues. But I’m a sucker for that stuff, and I like my code to be consistent with accepted conventions (for the most part).

I also looked at CodeMaid, which looks like it does a lot of stuff that’s similar to StyleCop, but it also automates fixing the issues. I didn’t get around to trying it, but I’d like to play with it when I get a chance. It’s open source, so I can try it without having to worry about spending any money.

I’ve been aware of some of the fancier commercial tools for a long time. Specifically, ReSharper and CodeRush. I’m curious about them, but they’re both too expensive for me to really justify. If I ever find myself in a job where I’m doing a lot more C# work than I’m doing now, and I have a budget to work with, I’ll try one of those.

Evernote 8.0 for iOS

Evernote just released a new version of their iOS client, version 8.0. It’s a pretty big redesign. Over the last few years, I’ve generally found that any time a company does a big redesign on their iOS app, I’m disappointed with it. So I was prepared for this update to really annoy me. But it’s not that bad. It is actually a little easier to use than the old one, for some common use cases. And they haven’t taken away any key functionality.

The one thing that does bug me about it is that you can’t change the color scheme any more. The redesign uses a pretty simple black-on-white scheme (with a little green). I’d like it if they at least added a dark theme. But that’s a minor issue.

Reaction to the update has been mixed. The Verge says “Evernote’s redesign is too little, too late.” (The review is positive, regarding the update, but negative, regarding everything else Evernote has done lately.) TNW says “Evernote is still dead to me, but the iOS app looks better than ever.” (So, again, positive about the update and negative about Evernote in general.) Both of those reviewers like Bear as an alternative. If I was at all unhappy with Evernote (and also didn’t need a Windows client) I’d consider Bear.

thinking about comics again

I’ve gotten back into the habit of buying comics regularly again, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. A couple of articles I’ve read recently have gotten me thinking a bit more deeply about whether or not I want to continue picking up books weekly from my local comic shop. I thought it might be useful to list out all of my options here. (I don’t know if this will be an interesting blog post or not, but it might help me make up my mind.)

First, there’s the option of continuing to pick up books off the rack, weekly, from my local comic shop. Advantages to this approach:

  1. Convenience. (The shop is practically right across the street from my apartment.)
  2. Flexibility. (I can choose whether or not to buy a particular book right in the store.)
  3. I’m supporting my local comic shop, and that’s a nice thing to do.

Disadvantages include:

  1. I have to go the shop every week, or I risk missing a book if it sells out.
  2. My local shop doesn’t have a good selection of independent comics. They mostly just stock Marvel, DC, and Image.

So my next option would be to keep using my local shop, but switch over to a pull list. The main advantage here is that I don’t necessarily have to come in every Wednesday, and there’s less risk that I’ll miss a book if I do. But managing a pull list can be a hassle, and there’s no guarantee that the store will actually pull the books I ask them to. And I lose some flexibility; if I decide to drop a book, I really need to tell them in advance.

Another option is to switch back to Westfield, or a similar mail-order subscription service. Advantages:

  1. Convenience. (Place one monthly order. Books show up at my apartment.)
  2. Selection. (Westfield has a pretty good selection of independent comics in addition to the stuff from the bigger publishers.)

The main disadvantage is that I’d be ordering stuff a few months in advance of release. So if I realize that I don’t like a book, I’ll already have the next two or three issues on order, and I’ll be stuck with them. The other disadvantage is that I’m no longer supporting my local shop. (Oh, and another problem is that Westfield is realy only cost-effective if you’re buying a fair number of books. Right now, I am. But if I wanted to cut back, I’d probably have to quit Westfield again.)

Yet another option would be to switch to digital, and buy all my books from Comixology. That’s quite convenient, since I don’t have to order in advance, I don’t have to worry about books selling out, and I don’t have a bunch of physical comic books piling up in my apartment. The downside is, again, that I’m not supporting my local store. (Instead, I’m supporting Amazon, and honestly they’re already getting plenty of my money.) And also I’d be paying full-price for DRM-locked copies of my books.

And of course, I can just stop buying the regular monthly books altogether, and go back to what I’ve been doing for the last few years: buying stuff from Comixology when it’s on sale, and buying trade paperbacks (also when they’re on sale, usually). There are a lot of advantages to going this way:

  1. Cost. I can save a lot of money buying books only when I can get them for 99 cents on Comixology, and only buying trades when I can get a discount on them.
  2. Easier to keep things organized.
  3. A better reading experience. (I’m buying stuff in large chunks, getting a whole story at once, and generally only buying stuff that got good reviews, and that I know I’ll like.)

So I guess that writing all this down helped a bit, but I still haven’t made up my mind. I want to support my local shop, but I don’t think it’s a moral imperative that I do so. And I like the ritual of going in once a week, saying hi ot the owner, scanning the racks, and all that stuff.

It’s possible that I’ll lose interest in the DC universe, once this whole Batman/Flash/Watchmen thing kicks in. If that happens, then this whole problem sorts itself out naturally, since I’m really only buying DC books right now. So maybe I should keep to my current habits for a few more months and see what happens.