December 4, 2015 · 8:55 pm

Restaurant Review: Christopher’s, Covent Garden, London

Christopher's GrillChristopher’s is billed on OpenTable as an American restaurant. Whatever image that conjures up for you (American Diner/MacDonalds?!), it’s unlikely to be the grandeur that meets you when you dine at 18 Wellington Street, Covent Garden. We had the scallops/tuna tartare for starters, both of which were excellent. We chose steaks for the main course, both were beautiful, with the Scottish fillet having the meatier taste than the New York Strip. However, it was the sweet and sour carrots that stole the show!

Five Stars

1 Comment

Filed under Restaurant Review

December 2, 2015 · 8:22 am

Book Review: The Centauri Device, M. John Harrison

The Centauri DeviceThis book is part of the Science Fiction MasterWorks series, which hints at its pedigree, although the series covers a broad range of SciFi styles. This one tells of adventures in space, where we follow the trail of John Truck and his ship the My Ella Speed.

I loved reading this book: it frequently has sentences that are so well written, you have to stop to read them again. Delicious writing to be savoured, certainly not a book that you can devour in a single sitting. I didn’t particularly warm to John Truck, he seems to be a character to whom things happen and usually go wrong, he just goes with the flow that frequently gets him into trouble. Maybe it’s his habit of getting everyone around him into trouble (or killed) that’s unsympathetic! It’s the bigger picture that’s so brilliant, the imagination and audacity of the chapters about “The Interstellar Anarchist, an Aesthetic Adventure” are epic.
Five Stars

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Review

Tagged as ,

November 19, 2015 · 1:32 pm

Book Review: Reckless, Andrew Gross

Reckless by Andrew GrossThis is the second book I’ve read by Andrew Gross, the first being Judge and Jury. That book started off with children being blown up on a school bus and I found it so tasteless that I didn’t finish the book.

This book was recommended, so I gave it a good shot. It also starts with the murder of a child and her parents while her brother watches on. Later in the book, another family is kidnapped and all apparently killed, including the children.

My issue is that the plot and level of writing in the book aren’t  good enough to offset this level of violence to innocent parties, particularly children. It’s supposed to be a thriller set in the financial world, but there’s no depth to it, the author merely mentioning the names of some banks/hedge funds and a couple of exotic product types to sound informed.

TwoStars

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Review

Tagged as

November 19, 2015 · 8:15 am

How to filter in Swift using where

In F#, it”s common to pipeline a chain of commands together, perhaps filtering an input array before mapping with a function:

let xs = [| 1; 2; 3; 4; 5 |]
xs |> Array.filter (fun x -> x > 2) |> Array.map (fun x -> x*x)

Marcin Krzyzanowski wrote a neat post showing how Swift uses where in a number of cases to achieve similar filtering.

The fact is you can use where keyword in a case label of a switch statement, a catch clause of a do statement, or in the case condition of an if, while, guard, for-in statement, or to define type constraints

Leave a comment

Filed under Programming, Swift

October 23, 2015 · 4:51 pm

ACCU: Introducing Concepts for C++

Overload 129October 2015’s edition of Overload includes an excellent article by Andrew Sutton on Concepts for C++. I first heard about Concepts at the ACCU 2013 conference and it’s exciting to hear that they have reached Technical Specification stage.

There’s no doubt in my mind that concepts will play a huge role for those involved in generic programming. In F#, we already have the ability to state constraints on template arguments e.g. to ensure that ‘T satisfies the comparison constraint:

type Container<'T when 'T : comparison>( items : 'T[] ) =
    // ...

However, I wasn’t expecting the ability to use concepts for placeholders (so that, once you’ve defined a concept, you can use it where you might have used auto to gain the benefits of type deduction without the loss of information).

Leave a comment

Filed under C++, F#, Programming

Tagged as

September 27, 2015 · 3:45 pm

Book Review: The Fifth Witness, Michael Connelly

5th-witnessThis is another of Michael Connelly’s thrillers featuring Mickey Haller, a maverick defines lawyer. In this one, Haller defends a woman who is accused of murdering the banker who was in charge of foreclosing on her home. Not only is the court case fascinating, but the back story of Haller’s complicated personal life is just as compelling.
Five Stars

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Review

Tagged as ,

September 27, 2015 · 3:37 pm

IET Meetup – Only a Matter of Time

I was lucky to get a ticket to an excellent lecture by Leon Lobo of the National Physical Laboratory – ‘Only a matter of time’ – How time has infiltrated different industries and why it is important to a micro second level. This lecture was partly to celebrate 60 years since Louis Essen developed his atomic clock.

essen-book-coverAll attendees were presented with a copy of Louis Essen’s memoirs. I love reading about the history behind mathematical or scientific advances. This book includes gems such as when Albert Einstein gave a lecture at the National Physical Laboratory and someone had to lend him £5 because he had no money! Also noteworthy is that the great Alan Turing was developing a computer at NPL after the war – he just happened to cross paths with Essen, and repeated a key correction factor calculation for him, doing it far more elegantly and rigorously using waveguide theory.

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Review, Meetup, Technology

Tagged as

September 15, 2015 · 12:34 pm

ACCU: Testing Times

CVu264CoverPete Goodliffe wrote this excellent article (login to ACCU may be required) on how to test software. It’s a decent summary on types of test, who should write them, when to write them, what to test and suitable test frameworks. Anyone looking for a robust argument for why effective testing is vital should refer to this.

Leave a comment

Filed under Programming

Tagged as

September 12, 2015 · 9:50 am

Book Review: One Shot, Lee Child

One Shot by Lee ChildThis book was the first Jack Reacher thriller that I read, quite a few years ago. That copy came free with a copy of the London Evening Standard newspaper – it was probably about 50p at the time, but has since become a free paper handed out to the commuters of London every evening. I particularly wanted to re-read it because of the description of Jack Reacher that starts the book.
Jack Reacher's CV
This should be very useful for any Hollywood Producers who are looking to cast Jack Reacher in a film – particularly his height (6′ 5″), weight (220-250lbs) and chest (50″). Obviously, this is a big guy, and missing that point would be bound to annoy any diehard Reacher fans.

This is actually one of the better Reacher thrillers. The perfect case is presented to the police, James Barr is the obvious perpetrator of a horrific killing spree in Indiana. Even worse for Barr, Jack Reacher has seen it on the news and is travelling there to ensure he doesn’t get away with it. Yet there’s more to the case than first appears, calling for Reacher’s special investigative skills and his own brand of blunt justice.
Four stars

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Review

Tagged as ,

September 12, 2015 · 9:28 am

Book Review: Mistress of Justice, Jeffery Deaver

Mistress of Justice, Jeffery DeaverAccording to the author’s note, the edition that I read is his re-write of an earlier book by the same title. This is the second re-write that I’ve read recently, the other being by Nelson DeMille.

On first impressions, the book has a dull plot – a promissory note is missing, and Taylor Lockwood (the lead character) has been asked to find it somewhere in the law firm. The intrigue comes from the plotting around the firm, where competing factions are fighting over leadership. The stakes are high enough for Taylor to be at risk of physical attack – and she sees both senior figures and younger up-and-coming professionals risking everything to get ahead.
Four stars

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Review

Tagged as